quick response to a response

CAMELS WITH HAMMERS has an appreciative post up in response to my previous post, though I want to raise a couple of quick points of concern.

Camels sees many virtues in moving away from the glacial pace of academic publishing to a more feisty, rapid bloggish sort of intellectual dialogue. And there are certainly some obvious virtues: it’s possible to make lots of progress on issues very quickly in the blogosphere, with a speed that is foreign to academic life.

However, most of you are familiar with some of my disappointments with the medium as well. It’s not always good to be subjected to immediate feedback. This holds for positive and neutral feedback as much as for negative feedback. During the original incarnation of this blog, I was foolishly committing myself to answering every question that came in. Simply put, no one has enough time to do that, at least not with the number of questions I was getting. One virtue of the slower pace of traditional intellectual life is the time to reflect, to pick one’s moments to respond, to choose an appropriate pace for dialogue. And that’s why I have given no serious reconsideration to re-opening comments on this blog.

Second, there was my quick realization after just a few weeks in this space that much critical dialogue is not at all open, free interchange. Much of it is just rubbish– procrastinators lurking around the fringes of conversations listening for gaffes or for chances to barge in and make a rude remark, often concealed behind a false identity, that sort of thing.

More concretely, Camels With Hammers sees much good in the notion of books circulating along with critical commentary on them by readers, whereas now we get no such comments with the book at all. But I don’t see why it’s an all-or-nothing choice. The classic example usually given of an author willing to publish criticisms of books along with the books themselves is Descartes, who included and answered critical objections to the Meditations along with the book. Admirable, and quite interesting for the reader.

However, I strongly doubt that Descartes would have included an open blog comment thread along with the Meditations. The objections he printed were from a fairly elite crew of worthy critics. Personally, I’d be happy to publish objections to one of my books along with the book, but only if the critic were staking as much as I were on the exchange, and was actually taking a stand rather than just playing clever devil’s advocate games.

And no way would I allow a bunch of snot-nosed trolls to spray graffiti on my house at no risk to themselves. Authors will want and need some control over which comments to allow to be attached to their works. In case anyone fears that authors will merely choose the softball criticisms for responses, well, there’s a social control on that already– no one wants to gain a reputation for dodging hard critique. But ignoring jerks is not the same thing as dodging hard critique. If someone were rude to you in a pub, you wouldn’t keep drinking with them, and the same standard applies here. The fact that a jerkish comment might contain a couple of intellectual points does not absolve the comment from scrutiny.

One other good feature of the current publishing system, a system I otherwise generally condemn, is that the slow pace and high hurdles of the process forced people to articulate their intellectual life into significant chunks: “OK, I guess this book is Badiou’s statement of his position as of mid-decade. How has it changed from 4 years ago?” But if everything dissolves instead into a flow of real-time internet discussion, then the difference between one’s significant pieces of intellectual work and one’s fleeting remarks on the topic of the moment starts to get a bit lost.

I’ve often wondered that when posting blog entries here… Am I held to my words here as much as I am when putting them in print? Probably most of us would say no, this is a more informal medium. If you put something in print and then feel the need to retract it later, it’s an arduous mental process and may even feel embarrassing. But we all say things casually in conversation, or on blogs, that we probably feel are more modifiable than words set down in cold print on paper.

In any case, I don’t think this needs to be consciously engineered. A new ethos of intellectual exchange will start to condense from the mists once we’ve all started to figure out what the new publishing landscape means for thinking.