Are we who you say we are?

(Another shameless cross-posting from I Cite.)

Lots of different kinds of remarks don't travel; they don't circulate seamlessly from one context to another. Instead, their travels are stained with a kind of remnant or remainder. It may well be that this stain or remainder is central to their use; awareness of the stain, an irrational nugget, marks one as an appropriate user of the term. Often, becoming aware is difficult, painful; perhaps that it why it marks membership and appropriate use.

Several years ago my father gave Paul a 'personal groomer' for Christmas (read nosehair clipper, sideburn trimmer, multi-purpose hair removal apparatus for men). Because this was so traumatic, I frequently mentioned it, making fun of the gift. Yet, I was furious when I heard Paul and his sister joking about the groomer. They were making fun of my father, my family, and, by extension, me.

Continue reading “Are we who you say we are?”

Leaking pipes and slippery slopes

Cross-posted at I Cite.

This is one of those days when I find myself suffering from Kotsko envy. His sense of humor is much better suited to the blogosphere than mine. After all, he has rightly pointed out that Holbo's approach is that of the send up (see Anthony Paul Smith's brilliant extension of the idea in the comments). Yet, I find myself perpetually trapped in taking the words seriously, unable to find the joke or the wit or anything other than oddly narrow and dismissive 'readings' of what happens to fall under his gaze.

This time, Holbo has found a year or so old article of mine that appeared in Bad Subjects. Anyone familiar with Bad Subjects will know that it is a posty, cultural studies, publication explicitly oriented toward left politics run by graduate students at Berkeley. One commenter associates it with the 'wired left.' I posted an early version of the article here , where I explained that the paper was for a talk at the annual meeting of the Cultural Studies Association in Tuscon. I changed a few things and gave an updated version of the talk at the Hyperpolis meeting in New York this past fall, and pasted that version here.

So, what does Holbo say in  ‘Theory’ for me but not for thee?:

The piece drops the heavy hint that there is not just something importantly distinctive but distinctively good about theory blogging. But how could this be due to anything but the distinctive, good character of theory?

I wonder if John can read. If he could, he would recognize the point of my argument and why I discuss academic and theory blogs at all:

 

Continue reading “Leaking pipes and slippery slopes”

Nylon Research

Out of NYU, apparently.   Looks doubly promising.

Huh

Huh.  (Derrida is rolling in his grave.)   

Update:  it seems the real story about The New Republic is elsewhere.

AggAcad: Saving decentralization, fighting diffusion and common clutter, cat pictures and obscurity

I agree with Henry that Scott McLemee's latest column at Inside Higher Ed is well worth a look, and perhaps readers here–if they haven't done so yet–may have further comments or suggestions to make.  Scott makes a modest and sensitive proposal for an "aggregation hub" of "academic blogs," in part to link more visibly and usefully the publishing world with the more serious and focused (not to say ponderous) discussions or "symposia" taking place in blogland.  This seems to me as though it can only be a good thing, as Scott proposes it:

Over the past few columns, I’ve pointed to some opportunities and difficulties created by emerging forms of digital publishing. In particular, the item from last week – the one suggesting that university presses might benefit from working out a modus vivendi with academic bloggers — has generated interest and discussion. The space available online for the discussion of new books is, for all practical purposes, boundless. Meanwhile, the traditional forms of mass media place pay ever less attention to books. The avenues for making a new title known to the public get slimmer all the time. Literally slimmer, in some cases. Recently the San Francisco Chronicle cut its review section from eight pages to four, hardly an unusual development nowadays.

But will urging university presses to think more seriously about blogs (and other new media forms) really offer a solution? Or does it just compound the problem? Hearing from readers over the past week, I’ve started to wonder.

Many presses have very compact publicity departments – often enough, a single person. The work includes preparing each season’s catalog, sending out review copies, and working the display booth at conferences.

“So now,” the weary cry goes up, “we have to look at blogs too? Just how are we supposed to find the right one for a given book? There seem to be thousands of them. And that’s just counting the ones with pictures of the professors’ cats.”

Fair enough. Life is too short, and bloggers too numerous. And let’s not even get into podcasting or digital video....

The great strength of emergent media forms is also their great weakness. I mean, of course, the extreme decentralization that now characterizes “the broadband flatland.” It is now relatively easy to produce and distribute content. But it also proves a challenge to find one’s way around in a zone that is somehow expanding, crowded, and borderless, all at once.

With such difficulties in mind, then, I want to propose a kind of public-works project. The time has come to create a map. In fact, it is hard to imagine things can continue much longer without one.

At very least, we need a Web site giving users some idea what landmarks already exist in the digital space of academe. This would take time to create, of course. More than that, it would require a lot of good will.

But the benefits would be immediate — not just for university presses and academic bloggers, but for librarians, students, and researcher within academe and without.

 

As they say, read the whole thing, and the comments.

My own inititial three cents (speaking, of course, from the lowly fringe):  that ideally (to second Laura Carroll) this should strive to be a truly world-wide effort, conscious and proactively contentious of the escalating digital divide; that the blogroll at Political Theory Daily Review may be another useful starting point; and finally, albeit perhaps a bit whimsically, that until the walls of prejudice are torn down or tides begin to turn, there be either separate but equal representation (or uncomfortably assimilated groupings) of so-called "continental" and "analytic" philosophy websites.  This latter, I imagine, will take some hard collective lobbying and genuine cooperation, at least on the part of the underdogs (fortunately there are every day (and for every random blowhard) more signs of hope).  But that is a tired hobbyhorse, and needn't prove divisive.  Really.  More generally, with the dangers of merely recreating something already foreclosed either within or alongside the pedigrees of "higher learning" well in mind, I prefer like Scott to remain more optimistic, and open.  Anyway all comments, technical or otherwise, are more than welcome.

Newt vs. the Cyber Enemy

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.

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Tronti blogweave

For your quick or leisurely perusal, the compilation of Long Sunday's recent symposium on Mario Tronti's "The Strategy of the Refusal", and some remarks.  The multitudinous, but alphabetised, contributions:

»Jon Beasley-Murray, The new barbarians
»Eric Beck, Minor refusals
»George Ciccariello-Maher, Class and subalternity
»Jodi Dean, Two questions on Tronti [follow-up]
»Roger Gathman Fantasy sites and the conquistadors of the planet
»Nate Holdren, Notes on "The Strategy of the Refusal"
»John Holloway, Adorno meets Tronti
»Doug Johnson, Intellectuals, the refusal of power, office workers' unions
»Brian Lamb, I would prefer not to bore you
»Craig McFarlane, Refusing to engage
»David McInerney, Tronti and Althusser
»Angela Mitropoulos, When will this labour end?
»Brett Neilson, Five theses on Tronti
»Stephen Squibb, Strategy of refusal of strategy
»Keith Tilford, How no can you go? Part I [Part II]

The preamble to the Long Sunday symposium, which includes links to related texts.  The relevant essay by Tronti is here, and a quick link to Long Sunday's Tronti folder. 

There were also a number of related posts elsewhere:  Destructive Creation, Northanger, Going Somewhere, Philosophy.com, pas au-delà, Attitude Adjustor. (Those are the most directly related to the discussion, though I wouldn't be surprised if I've missed some.)  And, not least, there is always the ongoing reading at Leggiamo Tronti.

My immense gratitude to all those who contributed their writings, readings and questions - those who simply took the time to read along with, and specifically those, such as Matt, who spent much time coding and uploading.

Already, Jon has the ball rolling for another reading, and I'm hoping that blogweaving continues, mutates and grows.  Not only because it creates a shared conversation that cuts across various blogs without converging along the one line, but also because - in ways that have yet to be fully explored - it marks an autonomy of writing, reading and research from the university that, particularly in times such as these, becomes an imperative.  Needless to say, what we read and write is related to how we read and write, no less than it is to the diificult questions of who, how and why this 'we' might appear, in that process.

Many thanks for the adventure.

The web we're on

Tice says the technology exists to track and sort through every domestic and international phone call as they are switched through centers, such as one in New York, and to search for key words or phrases that a terrorist might use...
President Bush has admitted that he gave orders that allowed the NSA to eavesdrop on a small number of Americans without the usual requisite warrants.
But Tice [former NSA insider] disagrees. He says the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions if the full range of secret NSA programs is used.  "That would mean for most Americans that if they conducted, or you know, placed an overseas communication, more than likely they were sucked into that vacuum," Tice said.

Today via The Volokh's, who also raise a few questions about the wisdom of that whole e-annoyance law thing from 50-odd posts ago:

This potentially criminalizes any anonymous speech on a Web site that's intended to annoy at least some readers, even if it's also intended to inform other readers.  This is true whether the poster is berating a government official, a religious figure, a company that he thinks provides bad service, an academic who he thinks is doing or saying something misguided, a sports figure who he thinks is misbehaving, or what have you; so long as he's trying to annoy any recipient (whether the target, if the poster thinks the target is reading the blog, or the target's partisans or fans).

How is this different from traditional telephone harassment law? The trouble is that the change extends traditional telephone harassment law from a basically one-to-one medium (phone calls) to include a one-to-many medium (Web sites).

This is a big change. One-to-one speech that's intended to annoy the one recipient is rarely of very much First Amendment value; people are just rarely persuaded or enlightened by speech that's intended to annoy them. It has some value (see item 3 below), but to the extent that it's in some measure deterred, the loss to public debate isn't that great — speakers are still free to speak to others besides the person they're trying to annoy.

But one-to-many speech that is intended to annoy one or a few readers, but intended and likely to enlighten or persuade many other readers, is potentially much more valuable.

Update:  Then again, maybe not such a  big deal you gullible little bloggers, you.  More blog-able items of this sort beneath the fold:

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Theory's Empire: Dissenting with Dissent

Matt Christie has provided an excellent guide to debate about debate over Theory's Empire.

Public? Yes, please!

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)