Tuesday, May 08, 2007
(12:00 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Tuesday Hatred: My Career as a Blogger
I hate how far I've fallen as a blogger. I hate that the University Without Condition failed. I hated the Theory Wars and the really destructive effects they had in our corner of the blogosphere, but all the same, I really did hate the cutesy long-winded anti-theory stuff, and I'm glad that's gone the way of the 8-track.I hate that the whole point of academic blogging is supposed to be the free exchange of ideas and putting your work out there for people to critique it, but I have very, very seldom ever seen anyone admit to changing their mind about anything, ever. If people want to put out their work so that their adoring fans can congratulate them on it, then that's their business. (By the way: I hate JSTOR and links thereto.) The idea that blog commenters of all people are going to provide constructive criticism is beyond my comprehension -- petty sniping, useless praise ("Great paper, thanks!"), ill-informed criticism of minor points, total missing of the point, idiotic over-basic questions.... I can't imagine that anyone has failed to regret posting a draft of a paper on their blog asking for feedback.
Indeed, when I'm working on a project, anymore I make it a point not to even mention it on the blog, and if I do mention it to friends, I ask them to make sure not to mention it on the blog. That's how much the idea of getting feedback from the blogosphere horrifies me -- the thought of having it be publicly known on the blogs that I'm working on something, even something fairly minor (note that I've never disclosed the topic of my seminar paper on Judith Butler, for instance), fills my heart with dread.
I hate the compulsory liberal niceness that is so often enforced among academic blogs -- such that someone automatically has more credibility if they're calm, even if they're calmly saying crazy or slanderous things. I hate that the rules of nice liberal conversation mean that I must either legitimate a bad-faith opponent by continuing to treat the conversation like a real exchange of ideas, or else delegitimate myself by angrily denouncing him or blocking him. I hate that even private e-mails of support in such situations invoke the poor by-stander whom my behavior alientated: "You're right, of course, but you really undercut your credibility." Why couldn't someone -- just once -- drop in and say, "Put aside Adam's tone -- he's totally in the right here"? I hate that someone probably has, but I don't remember it.
I hate that I am so often compared to fundamentalists when I use an angry tone, as though the defining negative trait of fundamentalism is primarily a rhetorical one, rather than their hatred of homosexuals, their desire to regulate women's sexuality, etc., etc. -- no, no, it's their tone that's the problem, it's that they don't follow the rules of conversation.
Relatedly, I hate online arguments about religion and how I somehow can't bring myself to walk away from them. I hate how my stubbornness causes me to waste so much time in settings where an incisive intervention would be much more effective than arguing for hours with all comers.
I hate that this level of disappointment, disillusionment, and fatigue with the academic blogosphere attest to the high hopes I once had. Once I took the more pessimistic route, I became -- basically ontologically -- always right about academic blogging, but that wasn't always the case. I thought that blogs could be a way for genuine intellectual discourse to happen outside or alongside the academy. But we all need the big Other, we all need official validation and recognition, and working without it is a huge drain.
Blogs currently provide a kind of home-made validation -- the numbers don't lie, after all -- but that kind of validation is fragile. That may change, but if it does, it's most likely to be through the (increasingly popular) route of people becoming bloggers for institutions with established symbolic capital. One can imagine a crowd scene on The Simpsons: someone says, "I'm a blogger [crowd sighs heavily]... for the Atlantic Monthly! [crowd becomes exicted]."
So that's what I hate this week, and what I've been hating pretty consistently for months now. What about you?
