Adam--interesting, sad, and, I think, unnecessarily overly general. The experiences that you, and many of us, sometimes have in awful threads are not the sum total of academic blogging or of the use of blogs for theoretical inquiry. Yes, some threads get horribly out of control. Perhaps it is best to avoid those. But there are other blog exchanges that are remarkable, insightful, fruitful, worthy, etc. I'm thinking of almost anything at Steve Shaviro's blog--these exchanges are great. I've benefitted from comments made at I Cite. Sure, they aren't threads of 307 comments--but, there are really helpful remarks and exchanges. Same with the weblog--the discussions Old is leading on race and the state are completely serious and very, very fruitful. So, I think you shouldn't over generalize from lame ass threads.
Jodi | Homepage | 05.23.06 - 9:51 pm | #

Jodi, There are no subject areas that are inherently "academic." Yes, obviously you talk about theoretical stuff, and so does Doug, and so do I (on occasion), but it's in a conversational -- and normally a non-confrontational -- style.
Adam Kotsko | 05.23.06 - 10:09 pm | #

There seems to be a tension here, between saying nobody should *never* be too invested in blogging (which is of course true, to some extent, is well-said and needs the saying), and almost a sort of nostalgia for a realm of innocent interaction that may, though sincerely noted, be a tad unrealistic still for a medium whose participants get to know each other (and form loose alliances - a word I only ever use somewhat tongue-in-cheek - but also inevitably indulge each other, and invest time in defending and even identifying with) over the years.

And after all, some people do sincerely believe that what they say - their chosen words - are inseperable from who they are. There is something to this, I think, and it lies apart from bearing in mind the necessary abstraction from one's opinions, as you say. But perhaps blogs could stand to become a little bit more serious (which though unlikely, might amount to the same thing). Then again, some blogs already are, or were (browse the archives of In Writing, or even Pseudopodium).

One wonders if the silence in response to megalomanias, or 'conversations with no future' (where it's clear, for instance, that people are either overly-invested, or simply unwilling to be judicious readers, etc.) can ever be loud enough.

(Just a thought. That may sound a little preachy, as it's still telling instead of showing, as English teachers sometimes do say.)

Of course this post is still a meta-blog, as is this comment. With all that that implies (and nothing more?).
Matt | Homepage | 05.23.06 - 10:31 pm | #

the perhaps intuitive, protective irony of your defeatist ontologizing is nevertheless well-taken. if still a bit defeatist. the barbs against the guy everyone hates are of course well-placed. maybe i'm dense, but i don't see how the comment to Jodi follows.

(do please read that first sentence as "nobody should *ever*", if you prefer)
Matt | Homepage | 05.23.06 - 10:44 pm | #

is it possible to have conversation on blogs, really?
Matt | Homepage | 05.23.06 - 10:46 pm | #

Matt,

there is an irony in your last statement. The question, having not been responded to immediately, would imply the obvious, 'no;' yet my response would imply the obvious 'yes.'

If by conversation, you mean the long conversation with a classmate over coffee about your studies, then I would again say 'no;' yet, again, if you mean a conversation over coffee about Gnostic Gospels with the religous studies major (as I did the other day) you met because he bummed a cig from you, then the answer would be 'yes.'

All told, it seems to me the responsive question would be what makes a 'real' conversation? I have had far too many face to face interactions which one would certainly not call conversations (perhaps they could be aptly called adversations?).
Andrew Simone | Homepage | 05.24.06 - 12:05 am | #

Which is why Amish Lovelock remains/ed a commenter.
Amish Lovelock | 05.24.06 - 7:37 am | #

Adam--i agree with Matt, I don't get your response. I wasn't trying to establish a certain terrain for academic inquiry but rather point out that there are serious blog exchanges, exchanges that, if you want to call them conversations, are conversations that have a certain rigor that is not primarily or exclusively social but that advances thinking about a topic. And, my hope was to defend this level of serious exchange as proper to the blogosphere. In sum, I was taking issue with your second paragraph and trying to provide evidence for my point.
Jodi | Homepage | 05.24.06 - 8:21 am | #

Jodi, I just didn't see where I was setting up a "serious vs. blog" opposition. Nor even a "creative/constructive thought vs. blog" opposition. By my count, I used "serious" twice in this post -- once as just a synonym for "a lot" ("serious extra-blogospheric work") and once that was probably misleading -- one's intellectual project becoming involved in a serious way.

The types of conversations to which you point seem to me to have an exploratory element that is not normally shared with the final draft of the article you send off to the journal, etc. There's a tentativeness and a vulnerability -- though that doesn't translate into automatically backing down at the first objection, or the twelfth.

My problem comes when one is trying to use the blog to advance something already established in one's own mind. If the blog becomes subordinated to the agenda of one's career advancement, then it ceases to be a very good blog (or, let's say, to the extent it's subordinated).

But I still see a slippage in your comments as in Matt's, toward equating "academic" with "serious." I'm trying to resist the hegemony of the word "academic," trying to keep the university from being the sole repository of serious thought. That's why I'm trying to reduce "academia," in this post, to the bare bones of what distinguishes it from the person who picks up Judith Butler at the Barnes and Noble -- and of those things, it seems to me that the social aspects of academia are what can most profitably be pursued in blogs.

I hope that it never becomes the case that every academic is expected to have a blog, that it becomes a required line on the CV. (This is not to cast aspersions on anyone whose blog does appear on the CV -- just to say that it's a fine line. You don't write down on the CV that you went to the pub after class and had a really intense conversation.)
Adam Kotsko | 05.24.06 - 9:07 am | #

Adam, point(s) well-taken, and agreed. This is a devastating (and in my view wholly appropriate) critique, by the way.

However I don't think I was equating "serious" with "academic," or at least not in any more ways than you. I don't think of Pseudopodium or In Writing (or for that matter Young Hegelian) as "academic" blogs. But as for "a writing that takes place despite the university", I do think of them as among the best.

Adversations is a good term. (Ideally, the self-selecting audience of blogs might provide some relief from them, I suppose.)
Matt | Homepage | 05.24.06 - 9:38 am | #

Careerist hubris interferes with the best potential of this 'self-selection' (among participants lacking (over)identifications, not least of all with their blog-selves) in many ways, needless to say. As does the political hubris that dominates the outmoded "ecosystem" meme/metaphoricity and concomitant reified visions of self-worth/inane and endless apologetics that ineviitably follow (like a certain river in Uganda).
Matt | Homepage | 05.24.06 - 9:52 am | #

Of course anyone saying this risks sounding merely bitter. Such impressions would of course be mistaken.
Matt | Homepage | 05.24.06 - 9:55 am | #

This post and comment thread is performative.
Amish Lovelock | 05.24.06 - 11:36 am | #

Regarding relief from adversation: That has certainly been my experience.

Yet, the Good Lord, seems to have liberally sprinkled SoB's (read: careerists) in every avenue of life: where fools may trod, they will walk (and stomp).

Incidentally, I had to think for a moment about the Uganda reference.
Andrew Simone | Homepage | 05.24.06 - 2:36 pm | #

or Lacoue-Labarthe was the real brains behind the operation and it's all been downhill for Nancy since the breakup, etc., etc., etc

SoB's do say the darndest things, though.
Matt | Homepage | 05.24.06 - 2:49 pm | #

Too true.
Andrew Simone | Homepage | 05.24.06 - 7:25 pm | #

Matt, what is your opinion on that point? (I haven't formed one, since I didn't read much of the co-authored stuff.)
Adam Kotsko | Homepage | 05.24.06 - 7:59 pm | #

Adam: in the post you write--

"This is why I don't think that academic discourse can be very profitably pursued in the blogosphere, beyond gossipy stuff, book recommendations and capsule reviews, calls for bibliographic help, etc. -- that is, the superficial social stuff. When one's intellectual project becomes involved in any serious way, the intellectual project on which one's career depends, then conversation simply cannot profitably happen anymore."

So, it seems to me that you are saying that there is a difference between academic discourse and blog discourse. It could be that you and I understand the word "academic" as having differing connotations and that your point is criticizing a certain careerist sense of academic. I think of academic as involving thinking things through, exchange, argumentation--I admit, this is pathetically idealistic and betrays the way I remain perpetually in recovery (getting over Habermas and always, despite every best effort, lapsing in ways I neither control nor understand).

At any rate, what I am disagreeing with is the claim that blogs are best suited to the social aspects of academia. I agree that a careerist approach to blogs as cv is horrid. I also don't think blogs should ever replace articles and books or count as some kind of scholarship. But I find them remarkably useful as a vehicle for thinking things through. They have helped me express ideas more clearly. They have let me see lines of criticism that I would not have imagined. They have opened up other possibilities to my thinking. And all of this I associate with a kind of 'academic' exercise.

Maybe it would be more useful to use terms other than academic? Perhaps intellectual or something like that? My only point is to reject the notion that blogs are basically social tools that do not benefit thinking.
Jodi | Homepage | 05.24.06 - 8:52 pm | #

Adam, I'll have to think about it.
Matt | Homepage | 05.24.06 - 9:07 pm | #

Jodi, It would probably solve the problem if we used a term other than "academic" for the types of activities you describe. I never intended to depict blogs as a purely social phenomenon devoid of serious thought.
Adam Kotsko | Homepage | 05.24.06 - 9:16 pm | #

Adam--ok. Should we call it theory or intellectual. Each has drawbacks and I'm open to other terms. Thoughtful, maybe? I don't know.

But, here you suggest that you find the major benefit of blogs to be social:

"Blogging is something else, or at least it is showing itself to be something else. That something else is valuable -- a social space for people who would otherwise be dispersed in an unhelpful way. I have found those social developments to be tremendously helpful -- I can't count the number of times I have put out my questions about translation issues, for instance, and been pleasantly surprised by the volume and quality of responses. It is a rare privilege to meet someone in person for the first time and to have an instant feeling of comaraderie based on sharing the social space of blogging -- it would be good for academia, I think, if there was more of that."

To me, there is more to it than social, yet the social is what you emphasize here. Or, am I misreading you? Is there a connotation that I am not perceiving?
Jodi | Homepage | 05.24.06 - 10:46 pm | #

I could come up with some elaborate defense here, but I think you're right that I was just overemphasizing the social, to the exclusion of the intellectual -- maybe I'm unconsciously falling into the same trap of identifying "academic" with "serious." It's a good thing I have commenters to help me clarify my thoughts.

I'm thinking of some posts I've done that have gotten zero comments, but have still been helpful to me -- that might represent a kind of "zero degree" of sociality, because of the minimal assumption that there will be an audience. Otherwise, why put it on a blog instead of a notebook?

This is not to say that my original emphasis (or rather, lack of emphasis) was right, but to say that there does seem to be some justification in making sociality closer to the essence of blogging -- since, at bottom, what unites blogs materially is their use of software that was designed precisely to make publishing easy and seamless. (Well, ideally at least.)
Adam Kotsko | Homepage | 05.25.06 - 9:00 am | #

Ah yes, the Social...

said the balding humanities professor
Amish Lovelock | 05.25.06 - 11:48 am | #

Well, I'm not balding, but...

Adam, although I'm just postie enough to get a little squeamish around essentials, I like very much your zero degree of sociality. There is a difference between writing in a notebook for one's own eyes (which I still do and assume that most folks who think about the sorts of matters discussed in our little bit of the blogosphere also do). It's also different from writing in the margins of a library book--there is more of an assumption of audience and at least the potential for exchange. Perhaps this element of exchange or reciprocity is what is too often repressed or displaced in academic publishing wherein one presents something seemingly more finished. And, perhaps it is the failure of sociability as thinking together, a failure that cuts to the heart of the blogging project (essence!), that is so disagreeable--and not just to you, but to many of us, perhaps even to those whose acts and comments suggest otherwise.

This seems what you have in mind when you write:

"When one's intellectual project becomes involved in any serious way, the intellectual project on which one's career depends, then conversation simply cannot profitably happen anymore. When one is attempting to advance that project through blogospheric methods, one is asking for trouble. "
Jodi | Homepage | 05.25.06 - 1:58 pm | #

Lovely post, Adam. Your analysis of "how things go wrong" rings true to me. Like others here, I'd only like to add some ways things can go right. There are areas in which scholarship _does_ overlap with not-purely-careerist love: notes, observations, anecdotes concrete and abstract, jokes, what I think of as "the discursive lyric" -- things which might be considered trivial or "unserious" because they fall outside the currently established explicit arbitrary goals of the game -- writing whose value doesn't depend on its effectiveness as ice-breaker, debate point, or dissertation fodder. I think "serial miscellaneous other-directed self-publishing" (or "blogging") serves such writing better than any other venue, which is why I relocated here. The only alternative I ever found -- "writing in a notebook for one's own eyes" -- best suits a slightly different impulse, as Jodi indicates.

The dangerous ambiguity which tends to turn our watering spots into hotspots (by which I mean both virulence and popularity) is the ambiguity of the exasperated outburst. Taken in one sense, exemplary informal stuff -- honest, contained, sometimes amusing, implicitly harmless. Taken in another sense, a call to battle, an arrogant territorial claim, and the start of a siege which leaves the countryside bare. When I've misstepped most badly, that's what I've stepped in.
Ray Davis | Homepage | 05.26.06 - 3:14 pm | #

This will sound like a sermon but strangely analytic philosopher do not seem to have similar problems in blog debates. I've never seen a debate between analytic philosophers on a blog turn into a brawl.
T. Scrivener | 05.27.06 - 4:37 am | #

Scrivener,

Right. What with the clear-headedness and all.
Anthony Paul Smith | 05.27.06 - 9:28 am | #

FWIW, and though I agree with Adam's point about the uselessness of so many blog debates, I'm with Jodi that sometimes other things happen.

I'm thinking of the current set of comments at Posthegemony on affect. But I wonder how relevant it is that most of the commenters there (and there aren't many) are people I know from outside the blogosphere.
Jon | Homepage | 05.27.06 - 2:34 pm | #

"Right. What with the clear-headedness and all."

Actually that's not my theory. I think the reason is that analytic philosophers spend even more time arguing than other philosophers and academics, they are used to it. Whatever the case It's a definite phenomena just read Philosophy etc, logic and language and Thoughts, arguments and rants if you want to see debates that defy Kotsko's pessimistic analysis.
T. Scrivener | 05.28.06 - 2:33 am | #

Though sadly most analytic philosophers often start brawling as soon as analytic philosophy is no longer the topic under consideration like other bloggers. Oh well, brawling is fun.
T. Scrivener | 05.28.06 - 2:36 am | #

T. Scrivener,

You are naive and simplistic in teh extreme. You would propose to speak on analytic philosophers' behalf, by offering...bland truisms? What is this, a blog?!?
Matt | Homepage | 06.02.06 - 11:46 pm | #