Monday, April 19, 2004
(8:04 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
I am jumping on the academic blogging bandwagon.
And I am not ashamed.
Here's the story so far: John Holbo, one of my favorite bloggers and the holder of a tenured position over at Crooked Timber, wrote a nice little post about the uses and misuses of blogging for the academic life. A lot of people, including everyone's favorite aspirant to the title of "Visiting Assistant Adjunct Lecture at Podunk Community College," commented on that -- I mean not a lot, but the kind of numbers that would make me happy. Anyway, I'm not really all that interested in what most of the commenters had to say, because I'm not really an academic, and I think I somehow manage to do most of what John thinks "academic blogging" should do. So does à Gauche (who does actually hold a masters degree, so he's more qualified than I am).
Another of my favorite bloggers, Chun the Unavoidable (apologies to Ralph Luker), added to his voluminous comments to John's post by writing a post of his own. It is, like every Chun the Unavoidable post, a challenging and allusive work, but I believe I have reached a certain level of comprehension. I also believe that Chun's post was a letter meant for me, since he makes a remark about "an adjunct position at East Nazarene Valley State" (emphasis mine). In any event, the requisite blogospheric blockquote is coming... now:
The larger point that I’m coming to is that the blog encourages, by its very nature, resentment. It is a tool of false democratization. If you feel isolated within your department, start a blog. You attract a like-minded readership, and you feel vindicated. Note that nothing has actually happened, but you feel that it has. I don't pretend that there's anything novel about this “echo-chamber” analysis of blogs, but I do think that Holbo fails to recognize how powerful it is.The point here -- if we’re all equals in this discussion, and we’re all participating, then why exactly is it that you're the one with a guaranteed job for the rest of your life, and I'm visiting assistant adjunct lecturer at Podunk Community College (if I'm lucky)? If the university wants to save itself as an institution, it’s going to need to reinstate its elitism. Bringing “power to the people” is not an adequate way to save the institution when the majority of instructors in a university are already temp workers—in fact, I don’t know how the university could possibly restore its former stature without simultaneously returning to its former basis in economic inequality.
What would be a great thing about academic blogs is the potential for people from different disciplines to discuss ideas without the institutional anxieties and resentments that normally inhibit such discussion. With real names and affiliations, however, nothing much changes. I often find myself deeply suspicious of many blogging philosophers just because I know that's what they do.
To quote Hardt and Negri:
We might say that postmodernism is what you have when the modern theory of social constructivism is taken to the extreme and all subjectivity is recognized as artificial. How is this possible, however, when today, as nearly everyone says, the institutions in question are everywhere in crisis and continually breaking down? ... The omni-crisis of the institutions looks very different in different cases. For example, continually decreasing proportions of the U.S. population are involved in the nuclear family, while steadily increasing proportions are confined to prisons. Both institutions, however, the nuclear family and the prison, are equally in crisis, in the sense that the place of their effectivity is increasingly indeterminate.... In the general breakdown, then, the functioning of the institutions is both more intensive and more extensive. The institutions work even though they are breaking down—and perhaps they work all the better the more they break down (196-197).The university is surely one of these disintegrating institutions, and yet look at how eager people are to be a part of it! In fact, let’s do more and more university work on the internet, as a PR thing! Before long, you’ll need an MFA in blogging before you can sign up for a Blogspot site, and they’ll only let you keep your site for free if you agree to do some clerical work for them on the side, and you won’t know if you get to keep your same domain name from month to month.
Perhaps the academic left needs to renounce the idea of tenure altogether. Beyond that: perhaps the blogosphere must destroy the university in order to save it.
