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Absent Guilt
It seems we at Long Sunday are becoming increasingly comfortable with stretching out the spaces between posts. Absence isn't quite what's going on, witness the lively debate around sometimes' and Craig's recent posts. But, I confess that it bothers me a bit, this not writing. And, I wonder how to understand it.
Political fatigue? A likely suspect, but then again this has never been a strictly political blog.
Symposium burn out? We were doing wonderfully in the heat of symposium fever. Do we need a new one? Or, did we tire of this, weary of having to find commonalities and intersections?
I hate thinking that the most boring old criticism of communism applies--when everyone is responsible for upkeep then no one is responsible. This doesn't seem to happen at other group blogs.
Have we been burned, and burned ourselves, in kerfuffles around deletion? Are we relucant to open up cans that might reek of nastiness?
Are we all, for our own specific reasons, simply too busy? I had more time when I was on sabbatic leave last year. These days, I barely keep up I Cite, rarely writing anything theoretical, challenging, or, if I'm honest, even somewhat interesting.
By Jodi | October 15, 2006 in Robust, Scalable Enterprise Solutions | Permalink
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If I can make excuses - and the lack of posts has concerned me, but not to the extent that I have attempted to contribute anything substantial (two quotes, without commentary, and a vague question are, most certainly, unsubstantial). Posts to my own blog have also dwindled to the point where I force myself to write a few short paragraphs each Friday on popular music!
Fatigue is most likely the answer. But, is it really a political fatigue? (Notwithstanding all the recent political traumas: the destruction of habeus corpus in the US, a new importance to the 'national question' in the Middle East, the gutting of Status of Women in Canada the subsequent destruction of the hope for socialized equality for women...) Could we all get tired at once? And why just us? The Valve and Crooked Timber pucker along afterall. The "procedural liberals" have a lot to say, why not the "radicals"? (Has Berube beaten us all into silence?)
Perhaps we should be optimistic an invert Foucault:
Given that we are talking about a battle - the battle knowledges are waging agaist the power-effects of scientific discourse [he is referring to, among other things, anti-psychiatry] - it is probably overoptimistic to assume that our adversary's silence proves that he is afraid of us. The silence of an adversary - and this is a methodological principle or a tactical principle that must be kept in mind - could just as easily be a sign that he is not afraid of us at all.He notes a while later,
The role of the person who is speaking is therefore not the role of the legislator or the philosopher who belongs to neither side, a figure of peace and armistices who occupies the position dreamed of by Solon and that Kant was still dreaming of. Establishing oneself between adversaries, in the center and above them, imposing one general law on all and founding a reconciliatory order: that is precisely what this is not about. It is, rather, about establishing a right marked by dissymetry, establishing a truth bound up with a relationship of force, a truth-weapon and a singular right. The subject who is speaking [or, indeed, not speaking] is - I wouldn't even say a polemical subject - a subject who is fighting a war.But, we shouldn't be too optimistic, of course.
Posted by: Craig | Oct 15, 2006 8:25:04 PM
I enjoy the symposiums quite a bit, but they're also exhausting - and probably not mostly in a physical sense. And, thinking about it, I'm reluctant to post more often here if those posts aren't surrounded by posts from others. A reluctance to be too loud in the company of others, maybe. Though, loud I can be.
I think LS's greatest difficulty, and sometimes its greatest source of tension, is navigating a group blog where there isn't agreement. Not only navigating the perceptions (and paranoias) of others, but also perhaps the disagreements that arise from being-with rather than being-in-common. Perhaps that relates your remark about the sharing of responsibility? How does responsibility get worked out, and around, in (and for) the absence of a shared line and/or centre?
And I'm often surprised at the ways in which people navigate (or just want to avoid or distract from) disagreements, cans of worms, etc.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Oct 16, 2006 1:27:15 AM
Craig, so, silence may indicate the strength of a subject fighting in war. That seems right. But are we those or that subject? I sometimes think so, particularly when I have had enough of lame discussions of the importance of capital letters, for example, T. But, like you, I wonder if political fatigue accounts for this--especially because of the 'all at once' that you add.
Sometimes--here's the weird thing, if we are not posting as much because we are trying to avoid worms in cans (etc), and if we are trying to avoid disagreement, then we--without planning or anything--go against a major theme of blogging and bloggers, namely, the more extreme and vitriolic the better or the more controversial the better. I think that's kind of interesting, especially given that 'advice to bloggers' tends to follow a talk-back radio meme.
It also isn't clear to me where all the disagreements and worms are. Differently put, I wonder if it is possible that we as a group haven't actually established where are points of convergence and divergence are. And so maybe critical remarks come not just out of left field (where we would want them to come from!) but seem more like snipers and land mines.
Posted by: Jodi | Oct 16, 2006 9:39:49 AM
True enough, bat killer. And vitriolic is better than the affably mediocre in which nothing is put at stake. But controversy is even better, and more than fine by me, though I've little patience for the reduction of what's at stake in an argument to egos. The "You're an idiot" - "No I'm not an idiot" duets.
It also isn't clear to me where all the disagreements and worms are.
Some of the disagreements are overtly political/theoretical - but they get all wormy when something else, which isn't very transparent, is at stake. Worms tend to wriggle about so.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Oct 16, 2006 11:36:11 AM
Speaking as a non-LSer, I would like to soak up more erudition from the good contributors here, free of charge of course, but I also appreciate the irregular "schedule," the flurry of posts and comments punctuated by periods of silence. I like that LS doesn't have the productive requirements that the other group blogs I know of, CT, the Valve, the Weblog, seem to have. I mean, the last of these--the only one I read anymore; the others, I realized after months of receiving their feeds, don't really write about anything that interests me--has a fixed, weekly schedule, with not-infrequent posts about said schedule and the vagaries of traffic to the site. I have a job that demands routinized production of me. I don't find such regularity all that necessary or desirable in the blogs I read.
Posted by: Eric | Oct 16, 2006 11:47:34 AM
I have not contributed much in recent months simply because of time constraints. I have children, a job, a spouse - the mundane pieces of what I call my life. That said, I do not enjoy when disagreements seem to get petty or overly personal. The most vitriolic arguments at Long Sunday are not fun but they have never discouraged me from writing on any topic. But I could see where some folks might feel differently.
Posted by: Alain | Oct 16, 2006 1:57:37 PM
Eric, I'm glad you've stuck with us despite it all.
One of the benefits of a group blog is that the number of contributers can guarantee that although any particular author isn't posting regularly, the group in aggregate keeps things steady enough to maintain an audience so that everyone's stuff actually gets read. One shudders at all the high-quality posts that have simply fallen into the memory hole without anyone knowing about them at all.
This paradigm may have been more relevant, however, two or three years ago, before RSS really took off -- now daily production isn't such a big deal. (The Weblog is unfortunately stuck in a "Web 1.0" mentality, although I've come to regard the self-reflexive nature of the blog as part of its "charm.")
Obviously there are some very frequenty contributors here (Alain) who don't have another blog, but for the others, it seems like there is a kind of ambivalent relationship between writing here and writing at one's "own" blog -- cross-posting and the like. The Weblog is different because many of the main contributors don't have another blog, and I specifically request that they not cross-post (though John Emerson is an exception, due to cantankerosity).
The questions you seem to be facing are: Why are you wanting to blog together? What purpose does it serve that a network of mutually blog-rolling and linking sites wouldn't serve? What problems does it produce that a network &c. wouldn't produce? It's pretty clear at this point that you're never going to be Crooked Timber, in terms of exposure and influence -- that slot is filled. So what are you doing?
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Oct 16, 2006 4:14:22 PM
CR and I were talking about this a week or two ago, and I meant to post something about it but didn't. If I had, I would've said something like:
Familiarity breeds familiarity. By which I mean: either we flog our dead horses deader, or we write about our current research and/or interests. And we're not prepared to write, even casually, about our current research and/or interests.
Whatever requisite thought subtends a blog post, we lack it in the moment we're acquiring it. I, personally, have run out of things to say that I've already thought deeply and read widely about. So I'm reduced to film parody.
I mean, what's Adam talking about here? I haven't a clue, but I get the impression that it has something to do with researches that don't draw from the community fount, which means that--were he inclined to write about it--he would have to do some heavy lifting in order to bring his readers up to speed. I feel the same way about my project, not to mention the majority of the thinkers I'm working on and with, most of whom don't even have a Wikipedia page misidentifying them as philosophers.
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Oct 16, 2006 4:40:32 PM
I like that LS doesn't have the productive requirements that the other group blogs I know of, CT, the Valve, the Weblog, seem to have.
Actually, the Valve doesn't have a quota. Our ship runs on guilt.
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Oct 16, 2006 4:43:06 PM
I like Eric's response very much. It reminds me not to apply a media market approach to blogs. I see Eric as suggesting that blogging time may be irregular, more thoughtful and sporadic, or even more playful and sporadic.
I don't know how to answer Adam's question: why blog together. At the same time, I like the blogging together that we do here (even when, like Alain, I don't like it when the arguments get petty or overly personal--on the flipside, though, it could be that folks have different sense of what petty and personal mean and when things get that way...despite my wariness of bat-lovers, I find the academic and political disagreements and exchanges thought-provoking and worthwhile).
Scott--I agree with what you say. And I wonder how to apply that to a group blog: is it the case that we have drawn from the community fount to such an extent that it has run dry or become stagnant and, if we don't want to just stand here pissing into it or drown in backwash, we need to drink up and replenish ourselves before returning (nothing like really torturing a metaphor, waterboarding it, we might say....)
Posted by: jdean | Oct 16, 2006 4:52:52 PM
One wonders if Craig has seen the bags under the procedural liberal's eyes lately (i.e., the entire last year)?
Have also been guilty of being away, partly self-imposed, and mostly for being busy relocating 1500 miles south, studying, adopting dogs, trying to have a social life in addition to dogs, working 50 hours a week at a carpentry job that just makes me want to drink a bottle of wine while making dinner, watch Jon Stewart and collapse. Looking forward to this changing.
Surely there are other, more interesting ways to measure blog "success" than readership size and "influence", whatever this may be. I second Eric's remarks. Indeed, LS wears and bears its untimeliness rather explicitly, I would have thought. (As well as its lack of strict cohesion, or hierarchical structure for that matter.) The unforeseeability of the potential it perhaps signals or invokes has never been far from my thoughts, in any case.
Posted by: Matt | Oct 16, 2006 6:03:11 PM
And we're not prepared to write, even casually, about our current research and/or interests.
Well, I'm not sure who the 'we' here is. But, why not?
Posted by: s0metim3s | Oct 17, 2006 4:52:05 AM
By the by, and from left fields ... I just finished reading Sjølyst-Jackson's review of a couple of Rancière's books, and (with the caveat that Rancière's attachment to democracy annoys me) this final para seemed to resonate - both with Eric's remark about 'free of charge' (and subsequent comments about markets and industry/industriousness), but also some of the other comments on untimeliness, and beyond:
[...] Balzac was always writing 'for those men and women who should not read' (FW 108-9). [...] In relation to the internet, however, we should also observe the more obvious fact that it is writing that survives, indeed disseminates, more unpredictably than ever. The tensions, contradictions and aporias of democratic disorder, and of the utopias that try to order them - traced by Rancière through the histories of philosophy, art and literature - have not gone away. They remain in the uncertain communities, where people read things they shouldn’t.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Oct 17, 2006 5:53:06 AM
Sometimes--great block quote; since I seconded Scott's remark, I'll say something. I find it hard to say much interesting about new research. I can whine about it, but don't really know enough to consolidate my remarks into blog posts. Since I'm doing conspiracy theory again (stuff I did pre 9/11), I can only chart my reading, rather than say anything interesting or interpretative; so, I do it at I Cite, rather than here. But, your point is fair, others may well have a different experience of blogging, writing, beginning.
Posted by: Jodi | Oct 17, 2006 10:48:11 AM
i know what we should do. we should make fun of theory's empire.
Posted by: Swifty | Oct 17, 2006 10:59:35 AM
I love how this thread started off from a post saying, "Wow, we've kind of been slacking" and made a smooth and seamless transition to self-congratulation.
Not to say that congratulations aren't in order!
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Oct 17, 2006 11:40:27 AM
How does relief from the pressure of industriousness strike you as self-congratulatory?
Posted by: s0metim3s | Oct 17, 2006 12:00:24 PM
What I have written, that I have written.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Oct 17, 2006 12:09:28 PM
Not to get all Heidegger on everyone, but what is wrong with the idea of a blog post being a "provocation to think" (fundamentally or otherwise). Of course, there will be much disagreement on what counts as thinking, or provocation for that matter. But that is OK, isn't it?
Posted by: Alain | Oct 17, 2006 12:16:12 PM
I just checked Alexa, and you guys are apparently higher ranked than The Weblog. It appears that industriousness belongs to the past. The new wave is for blogs to have explicitly untimely interventions (every couple of weeks or so). "The politics of failure have failed..."
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Oct 17, 2006 12:35:12 PM
Is that from the Simpsons?
Posted by: Alain | Oct 17, 2006 12:57:48 PM
Yes -- the other half is, "We must make them succeed again."
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Oct 17, 2006 1:11:06 PM
Alain--your point about provocation to think is well taken. For me, swamped in bureaucracy, thinking a provocation is more thinking that I can muster; but I am thrilled when others' such provocations, umm, provoke.
Posted by: jdean | Oct 17, 2006 1:40:03 PM
Meanwhile, outside the Capitol, the candidates are giving their last
electoral speach.
Kang: The politics of failure have failed. We need to make them work again. Tomorrow, when you are sealed in the voting cubicle, vote for me, Senator Ka... Bob Dole.
[applause]
Kodos: I am looking forward to an orderly election tomorrow, which will eliminate the need for a violent blood bath.
[applause]
-- Pre-electoral speeches, "Treehouse of Horror VII"
From the sky comes a scream, as Homer is crashing right into the Capitol. A few footsteps later, he comes running down the stairs.
Homer: America, take a good look at your beloved candidates. They're nothing but hideous space reptiles. [unmasks them] [audience gasps in terror]
Kodos: It's true, we are aliens. But what are you going to do about it? It's a two-party system; you have to vote for one of us.
[murmurs]
Man1: He's right, this is a two-party system. Man2: Well, I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate.
Kang: Go ahead, throw your vote away.
[Kang and Kodos laugh out loud]
[Ross Perot smashes his "Perot 96" hat]
-- "Treehouse of Horror VII"
The next day, Kodos announces the result: "All hail, President Kang."
The field in front of the Capitol has now become a working ground
where humans are whipped by aliens and used to carry materials.
The Simpsons family is working too, with Homer and the kids carrying
wood, and Marge pushing a wheelbarrow of cinderblocks -- with Maggie
on top.
Marge: I don't understand why we have to build a ray gun to aim at a
planet I never even heard of.
Homer: Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
-- "Treehouse of Horror VII"
[End of Act Three. Time: 21:28]
Posted by: Alain | Oct 17, 2006 3:03:22 PM
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