Reality TV, karaoke, sampling, blogs: how are these things to be interpreted? Something is not interesting unless its conditions of interpretation are fundamentally ambiguous. So let’s take blogs as an example. Blogs are, without a double, responsible for new hypomnesiac practices in the sense in which I discussed Foucault’s analyses of hupomnēmata in Disbelief and Discredit 1. They also immediately became instruments of communication, for businesses and politicians, and, especially, for people seeking elected office.

The mistake with these things is to want to interpret them unilaterally: they are always bifacial. Blogs are a sign of symbolic misery - a symptom of this misery - while, at the same time, they bear witness to the vitality that the non-domesticable character of human desire (what I will soon refer to as its savagery) always demonstrates, despite its misery and even because of it. Faced with its domestication, savage desire invents new paths, which may clearly be immediately recuperated by the domesticating apparatus: the savage may also be sheeplike, if not domesticable. And so a struggle develops.

In short, these things reveal the composition of the tendencies that traverse the processes. And it is from an analysis of these forces, which compose and decompose, that one can and must construct reading models that allow for the struggle to take place - with concepts that are decidely not oppositional. To give a unilateral interpretation of a phenomenon like a blog is to claim that it is possible to speak of its essence, that it is possible to determine this essence, and that this determination is operated by an oppositional conceptual model. It is precisely from this way of thinking that it is necessary to liberate oneself - and, without any double, this is the first objective of the struggle against symbolic misery. (SM2 29-30)