Keith Haring, capturer of NOW

Twitter is made up of steady streams of in-between moments—the “little” times like car trips and slow escalator rides and waiting in line that connect together the supposedly “big” life events. The connector times are the perfect time to dash off a tweet or two.  This rushing river of brevities is always “in the middle”, which is to say, you can’t see the beginning or the end by looking at it-it’s like a play that you’re always logging in to media res.  This is part of why it is so difficult to explain Twitter to someone who hasn’t used it.  As the philosophers Deleuze and Guatarri pointed out in their prophetic late 20th Century Masterpiece A Thousand Plateaus, “It’s not easy to see things in the middle.”  They go on to explain:

The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed.  Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other way, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle. —TP 28

The uninterrupted FLOW(s) of Twitter form a “collective assemblage of enunciation” and an “assemblage of desire, one inside the other and both plugged into an immense outside” (TP 26)  D&G preferred the word assemblage to describe A Thousand Plateaus instead of “book” which implied a false unity of the book as an image of the world.  To them bound books represented old-fashioned closed-off, linear thought.  An assemblage was an enity that bridged the gap between nomadic writing and the writing of the state.  D&G would have been excited about open platforms like Twitter and Tumblr—the way the individual tweets are created with the awareness of the openings between them—they are collected together on a single feed but not closed off to being joined, borrowed from or added to—they’re ready to be mashed up and to go viral, like the best blog posts. Their immediate NOWness fufills the criteria that D&G layed out for the “ideal book”:

The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations. Kleist invented a writing of this type, a broken chain of affects and variable speeds, with accelerations and transformations, always in a relation with the outside. Open rings. His texts, therefore, are opposed in every way to the classical or romantic book constituted by the interiority of a substance or subject. —TP 10 

The creation of “open rings” is what social media is all about.  Had the technology been available, I wonder if D&G would have tweeted A Thousand Plateaus instead of published it as a book?  Or maybe they would have started a Tumblr blog instead—perhaps in the same spirit that I started this one—treating it like a rock n’ roll rhizome—a place in which to fit everything that doesn’t fit.