A friend of mine forwarded me the following interview with his holiness, sir Newton Gingrich. It seems that he is trying to elevate the level of discussion in American politics, attempting to introduce "big ideas," and formulating a vision for "a better future that people believe is real."
But, of course, Newt being Newt, he has to take time to articulate the deficiencies of those wacky, zany democrats. You see, they have been seized by the mania of left-wing, academic bloggers.
How is it that blogs become sites of overinvestment? Rather than fora for discussion and disagreement, they all too quickly become stand ins for horrors, hopes, and disappointments of a sort clearly beyond their import. How easily we lapse into malign misreadings, or readings of another clearly in bad faith. How quickly we speed from disagreement to total disparagement.What sense can it possibly make to condense into specific exchanges on specific blogs the entirety of American first amendment jurisprudence, to speak of rights to own and to express and to own what one expresses? What is achieved by attacks masked as requests for clarification, attacks on others who offer themselves and their ideas, for nothing? Why do small exchanges come to stand for the entirety of the political situation of the world? For all of the history of philosophy? How is it that failure to agree comes to stand for the ultimate in complicity with evil? Surely we do not leap to such conclusions when we interact with others face to face, when we hear their voices.
Wampum. Update: Donald Rumsfeld, radical warmonger, or is that master of discharmingly nostalgic ceremonies, gives us "The Long War." (Makes you wonder, when they'll let the average USian finally see this, doesn't it?)
Simon Critchley is interviewed today by Mark Thwaite at the rather peerless ReadySteadyBook. An excerpt below the fold:
• You're welcome over here, LB. • They fuck you up, your mum and dad • The best drink to have with Adorno (via). • Picture the billionaires playing football. • Worst. "Song." Ever. • A Few Bad Apples (via). • Chomsky gets his apology.
• Congratulations to Pierre Joris. • Holy Maurice Blanchot!
• Long Sunday finds its niche. • Image courtesy of here. • And Michael Benton has a new project.
Is there an ethics of blogs or a blogging/bloggers' ethics? It seems to me that blogs might help us think about responsiveness and perhaps even a duty of response.
An overly quick presentation juxtaposes two ethics: discourse ethics, that is, the giving of reasons and offering of justification before a community that includes all others, and, perhaps the ethics of the Other such that one is forever indebted to the the call of the Other; one must always respond, the demand of response is absolute. Neither seems particularly useful in thinking about blogs--the former reduces exchanges to reasons, eliminating all sorts of play; the latter is too demanding, too much. We might say it turns thought over to trolls, eliminating the conditions in which thinking occurs.
In Precarious Life, Judith Butler considers the ethical significance of exposure, of the fact of exposure that conditions all our lives. It sometimes seems to me that her account of exposure leans toward embodiment, but it may be that this leaning is more an element of my poor reading. At any rate, I wonder if this condition of being exposed might shed some light on blogging ethics.
What is a public? Jodi Dean lucidly suggests that since calls for the 'public' are voiced, well, in a pre-existing public, such calls are mostly political interventions for a certain kind of public, i.e., one more amenable to one's own orientation. We might say, then, that these calls for a public are disengenuous, not actually concerned with achieving a true public. (One can obviously place in this context Republican calls for a less `liberal biased' PBS.)
What, then, is a true public? Is it the pre-existing public that allows for various factions to fight within it for their particular definition of a public? The set that exists before the battle to hegemonize its definition and practice? Does a true public only pre-exist the hegemonizing of the set through the rise of the master-signifier?
Or can we say that, only with the right master-signifier, the right political order, the true public actually comes into being?
A true public is one without pigeon-holing, where one doesn't automatically place oneself in five seconds of speech. It's one where you don't know what I am going to say next. It's where I am not merely offering pre-digested soundbites. Most of the blogosphere then has nothing to do with this true public; partisan hackery is but more TV (which is precisely why the TV networks can so easily report on this sector of the blogosphere), as are the endless ruminations on what one fed one's cat today.
The true public goes beyond your surprise at my words, my positioning. I must be surprised myself. As in the decisive act that overwhelms you, that preempts one's understanding of one's own actions, here I must myself be surprised by what comes from my `pen'. Only after the fact, upon the establishment of a new order, can I come to understand what I have done.
But then the question is: does the new order in fact get created here, in this part of the blogosphere? What could that mean? No, yes, maybe new orders are constantly being tested. We're playing at being vanishing mediators. But playing with an enormous sense of responsibility, for the Other. So maybe, then, Long Sunday is both the `true public' before the hegemonization of the very term 'public', and the Just `public' after the right hegemonization.
Having it both ways? Ah, the life of a vanishing mediator...
Zizek writes, in a sort of parallel:
The "political" dimension is... doubly inscribed: it is a moment of the social Whole, one among its sub-systems, and the very terrain in which the fate of the Whole is decided - in which the new Pact is designed and concluded. (For they know not what they do, 193)
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