Wednesday, May 09, 2007
(5:48 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Other Scene
While I think that there are wide swaths of the blogosphere (including, often, this very blog) for which my meditations of yesterday hold true, it is nonetheless the case that my own "always right" proclamations are consistently undercut by a blog that I helped to found, namely, An und für sich. I've even posted work over there, dread notwithstanding -- though it was all finished work for which all comments were "too late," a factor which somehow made an open discussion much more possible in my mind.How it seems to be falling out is that "over there" we have our space of intellectuality, and "over here" we have mainly the goof-off shit -- the weekly quasi-rituals, the YouTube links, the Mr. Sprinkles exegeses. My gesture of threatening to "shut down The Weblog" in January has, in the long run, effectively shut down the "old" Weblog qua perfect mix of personal angst and intellectual reflection -- what we have here now is not simply a shell of a formerly great blog, but essentially a new blog entirely. And all the other blogs that were involved in my "career as a blogger" are no longer the same -- The Valve is no longer an "anti-Theory" organ, for instance. Long Sunday has now apparently shifted gears to become a venue for Heidegger exegesis. Things change.
What I've wanted out of blogging has already existed for months now -- on the one hand, the "ping pong table in Adam's basement" where people hang out (The Weblog); on the other hand, the slower-paced "intellectual" group blog where the pressure is not on me to single-handedly carry it and where the conversation is limited and, more importantly, limitable to a trusted circle (AUFS, where Anthony has largely taken the lead). The conditions are in place for me to enjoy blogging again -- all I need to do is restrain myself from getting into the stupid fights that make me question the value of human interaction in general.
But at the same time, I can't just disown what I said yesterday.
