Finishing Things

Yoko Ono's Cut Piece

One of the most interesting things about the emerging online forms of discourse is how they manage to tear open all our old assumptions. Even if new media hasn't yet managed to definitively change the rules, it has put them into contention. Here's one, presented as a rhetorical question: why do we bother to finish things?

The importance of process is something that's come up again and again over the past two years at the Institute. Process, that is, rather than the finished work. Can Wikipedia ever be finished? Can a blog be finished? They could, of course, but that's not interesting: what's fascinating about a blog is its emulation of conversation, it's back-and-forth nature. Even the unit of conversation -- a post on a blog, say -- may never really be finished: the author can go back and change it, so that the post you viewed at six o'clock is not the post you viewed at four o'clock. This is deeply frustrating to new readers of blogs; but in time, it becomes normal.

But before talking about new media, let's look at old media. How important is finishing things historically? If we look, there's a whole tradition of things refusing to be finished. We can go back to Tristram Shandy, of course, at the very start of the English novel: while Samuel Richardson started everything off by rigorously trapping plots in fixed arcs made of letters, Laurence Sterne's novel, ostensibly the autobiography of the narrator, gets sidetracked in cock and bull stories and disasters with windows, failing to trace his life past his first year. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, Sterne's other major work of fiction, takes the tendency even further: the narrative has barely made it into France, to say nothing of Italy, before it collapses in the middle of a sentence at a particularly ticklish point. [continue reading at If:Book]