Apples

I've been reflecting this morning on the ways in which the materiality of blogs, as opposed to paper letters and diaries, effects and affects their use (for the writer, reader and archive). Investigation of this is going to be a major part of my thesis, and I've been trying to figure out how best to frame that question. I came up with the following:

materiality: the effects and affects of carrier on experience of content

I think that this distinction definitely has legs, and it'll then allow materiality to be the axis concept for discussion of how the way we write acts on what we write (and vice versa?). As is the way of things, though, I then began to think further into this content/carrier distinction, and think although its workable is problematic. I thought I'd jot down my reflections on the nature of these problems quickly, so as not to forget, viz:

If I go to the shops for a bag of apples and bring them home, I’ll likely do so in a carrier bag. What, then, is the carrier and what is the content? We would likely agree that the carrier bag, and the bag the apples were packaged in were the carriers and the apples the content. Hence, this packaging is the medium through which the apples were delivered back to my house – to say nothing for the moment of the time and space (pavement, bus, shop) I travelled through to retrieve them.

But what if I peel the apple before I eat it? Is the skin then just carrier, or is it still content? More, what if I didn’t want the apple per se, but was just collecting apple pips so I could plant a tree in my garden? I would argue that then the flesh of the apple becomes the carrier, and only the pips the content. To problematize further, what if, all along, I didn’t actually like apples at all, and only bought them so I could paint a bag of apples, then we would surely say that the bag itself becomes content.

Hence, the carrier/content distinction becomes blurred into a question of intentionality. My subjective desires in buying the apples become central to the question of what is content. The mediation (carrier) can itself become content, and the content become mediation. This, I believe, is similar to the distinction of Marshall McLuhan between figure and ground. It is not just that carrier works on content and vice versa; the two interact so inextricably that they become one another; hence the impossibility of objectification except in the dynamically constructed flow of the subjective life.

What all this means, I don't know. It maybe just muddies the water further ...