Advice to a Young Blogger (2): On Establishing Your Blog as a Plane of Immanence

Gilles Deleuze attempting to keep things simple

 

 

I. 

 

In a recent post I offered some advice about blogging; stressing the need to be consistent, insistent, and persistent if one wishes to establish a plane of immanence [click here].

 

But Franz, from Austria, has written to ask what is meant by this complex concept, borrowed from Deleuzian philosophy [1], in relation to a humble theory of blogging.

 

So, let me try and answer ...

 

 

II. 

 

By establishing a plane of immanence - in relation to a theory of blogging - I mean that one must do more than merely create a space of writing in which to publish one's ideas, memories, observations, and holiday snaps [2].

 

On a blog conceived as a plane of immanence, we find an intricate network of forces, particles, connections, affects, and becomings and the writer becomes a subject-without-identity - a difference engineer - not an author who personally vouches for the truth content of the posts or guarantees the logical organisation and development of the blog. 

 

On a blog conceived as a plane of immanence, posts shouldn't be considered as empty forms awaiting for an author to fill them with content in order to give them their significance. Posts should be thought, rather, as active productions (or events) in themselves that require concrete methods of immanent evaluation rather than texts awaiting judgement with reference to a transcendent model of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.     

 

The key thing is: on a blog conceived as a plane of immanence, one can ensure the eternal return of difference; not repetition of the same. In that way, blogging is about becoming, not securing identity. 

 

And remember: Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own ... [3]  

 

Notes

 

[1] Deleuze can be a difficult philosopher to read at times, but I think it's fair to say that when he writes of a plane of immanence, he's putting forward an epistemological notion; but when he writes of the plane of immanence, he posits an ontological idea (developing Spinoza's monism). It's the former that has always most interested me; that is to say, the fact that there can be multiple planes of immanence each corresponding to an image of thought. 

 

[2] Like Deleuze, I do not think writing is an attempt to impose a coherent and conventional linguistic form on lived experience; blogging should not become a form of personal overcoding. Any writing that is reliant upon the recounting of childhood memories, foreign holidays, lost loves, or sexual fantasies, is not only frequently bad writing, but dead writing; for literature dies from an excess of emotion, imagination, and autobiography, just as it does from an overdose of reality. See the post entitled 'A Deluezean Approach to Literature' (30 August 2013): click here. 

[3] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 239.