Facebook, my friend, you are entering a world of pain.

I quite enjoy impromptu battle with people getting furious over Facebook's redesign on one side, and then there is the "hey, keep it cool man, like, change happens, y'know?" brigade who have set themselves up as the default voice of reason. I side more with the former than the latter, since there's a difference between acceptance and acquiescence. The posture of the latter holds that we pay nothing for these online services, and basically falls in with the pre-digital mindset of "you'll take what you're given", or "any colour as long as it's #3B5998". It is the position of the Dude, who just accepts what happens. By default, I am put in the position of Walter by those who are, like, way more chilled out about it all. Facebook abides, man.

 I told that Kraut a fuckin' thousand times, I don't roll on shabbos.

Well, fine. I am he. But think about what exactly the dissatisfaction that people feel with these changes. It's not simply a manifestation of chutzpah (as someone following in the footsteps of a convert to Judaism, I'm assuming I can say that now) for us to point out that all is not well.
The Dude: Walter...
Donny: They already posted it.
Walter Sobchak: Well they can *fucking unpost it*! 
You know what, they can change Facebook, because we are what it runs on. It is of course not the case that we have paid for a service with cash, but do we think they are providing a service to us for free? Of course not, they get our time, they get our attention, and they get the revenue from every advertiser wanting to hit exactly the target-market that we represent.


This is the new logic of open source being brought to bear on ever more realms, and we need to expand our conceptual vocabulary accordingly. We no longer pay for services with money, but with our attention, with our time. That is as valuable as money, if not moreso, because in the murky world of Facebook's revenue stream via ads, they can tell marketers that there is billions to be made in the upcoming world. In capital terms, Facebook is not worth anywhere near the numbers thrown about (such as $100bn), what is behind such fantasy figures is the concept of there being a social ecosystem which this website represents. Those billions that don't come in via direct advertising are to be found right behind our eyeballs. Too right we can complain.


Finally, of course Facebook is going to listen and make more changes, because though Bebo and Myspace etc. are dead in the water, they died because they deserved to. They were no kind of a challenge. The situation we are in now is that Facebook is in the position of AOL, a stupid monopoly of closing off information. Creating a wall to keep information out equally keeps it in, and every information technology has proved that to be a foolhardy strategy in the long term (even the guilds only kept the print press out of Paris for 20 years). The prize of openness and market-share is Google's to grab.

Der Untergang des Magnum Opus

Quite aside from the basic and dull point that is made ad vomitum regarding "master-narratives", one alternative way to regard the decline of "great works" is the fact that writers are coming to be regarded, and to regard themselves, as accidents. It is a fact of our social structures, in a two-fold manner.

Firstly, in the narrative perspective whereby our overview of history needs actors for reasons of identification, the great writer or their text can serve this function, as a cognitive anchor. It is a way to make history less autistic, less concerned with facts. That is the "history of literature" view, but it holds true in any field, whereby an -ism is deployed like a sheep dog to round up those pesky individuals with fancy notions of freedom and independence.

Speculative Realism

Evidently, a text can serve just this function, but with each repeated deployment it has become increasingly attenuated. It got to the point where Adorno's Aesthetic Theory can, in its blurb, be referred to as his magnum opus. The fact that he did not complete it during his lifetime is related to the sapping of the ideal that such a book has, as much a result of an atmosphere where the fragment is fetishized (need one give examples?), as well as one in which we can witness its reactionary rejection (but this reaction is usually political in tone, thus Badiou's elevation of the Event, which is a tellingly Maoist movement, but good god I digress...) . The point, again, is that not all great texts surpass everything by their contemporaries, and so some are chosen by default, simply as others will never be considered once this process has taken place. 

The second manner is that whereby fame accrues more fame. Like any standing reserve in a structure (money, information, etc.), there is a network effect in evidence. Fame can cycle endlessly, as in Bataille's "general economy" (which is in contrast to the "restricted economy" that we are led to understand is economics proper), and once the surplus standing reserve being left to pass down along the same well-worn channels of a text having a place in the canon, or of a thinker being a part of an -ism, until it this channel is blocked. The point is that now there are so many various opportunities, that it becomes a question as to whether there is sufficient force behind the flow to create more than a trickle of renown. We see this in the notion that there are "too many journals", but as noted in this link, often these journals are no more than tags attached to articles. 

This is not a jeremiad against change, and I find the point made by Jan Velterop in that link more helpful, as it allows us to view the old problem in a new light. People have complained about there being too many books since there were two books. What changes is the structure that governs and facilitates our access to and interactions with these works. Accordingly, we get fields (can I please call this the "sheepdog effect"?) of influence, counter-influence, rejection, interest, and all these interact with myriad others. Returning to Adorno for a moment, we can see an analogy of this where the punning title of his work gives us a Minima Moralia rather than the Magna Moralia of Aristotle, a collection of observations which can be fashioned into a constellation by our own effort to read him, as well as what we bring from our reading others. The age of the magnum opus had its dark counter-image in the dilettante, but our age needs to develop its alternative to this. 

Žižek, alone.

By writing so prodigiously, and in opposition to apparently everybody else, in terms of style Slavoj Žižek seeks to deny affiliation with any other contemporary thinkers. Writing so much is an effort against particulars, it is an attempt to ascend to the level of the universal. In short, he seeks to deny any broader context for his work by becoming his own context.