the best use of blogs

Blogs can probably still be called an experimental medium, and philosophy-by-blog is still a genre under development, and I think we’re all still learning how to do it.

What is the best use of blogs for philosophy? Some of this has much to do with temperament. There are cases like Shaviro, who likes to post infrequent but long, measured, and well-organized posts. One other extreme would be Levi, who posts detailed mini-treatises with shocking frequency and also engages in rapid-fire dialogues and disputes with his commenters. Then there’s my case: I like to do lots of posts, some fairly long but some quite short, and I also find it difficult to post central ongoing work here; it feels too much like a duplication of labor to me. So when I share philosophy thoughts here they tend to be more the hunches and quasi-connections that are found more in the early stages of a thought than later.

But one widespread assumption about blogs with which I disagree is the notion that having a blog carries with it the moral obligation to respond to all comers in rapid fashion. There are plenty of troll-types in the blogosphere who just want to initiate fights (and a few of them react to deserved counter-punches by saying “what’s a big professor like you doing picking on a little guy like me?”). But there are also lots of really good, thoughtful questions that come in, and I found in the spring that they can eat up a huge amount of your time if you try to respond to all of them. And since no one can be expected to have read your entire paper trail of publications and entire silicon trail of blog posts, some of the questions do tend to be repeats. This even happens with e-mail, of course. I get a number of questions, for instance, asking me to explain my interpretation of Heidegger’s fourfold. The interest is gratifying, but inevitably I find that I’m just re-typing what is already found in better-written form in my books. Sometimes people raise tricky variations that you hadn’t thought of before, and that can be helpful, but often you just feel like you’re repeating yourself. It’s totally worth it to do so when you’re just starting out and are extremely grateful for any contact with the public at all. But when it gets to the point of multiple queries per day, it is inevitable that you will fall behind on them.

What, then, is the proper medium in which to field philosophical critique? I’m not convinced that the blogosphere is the best medium for it, for a number of reasons. I think the internet is obviously fantastic for transmitting information quickly, for keeping everyone abreast of what’s going on, and for creating far-flung international communities. It also allows for significant interchange with people one has never even met (Levi and Nick are just two of the many people who have helped me a lot despite none of us ever having met in person; Ian Bogost was in the same category until he happened to appear in Cairo in July; I’ve never met the re.press people, and only by chance did I meet Sigi from Open Humanities Press in Paris in January; oh right, and Mark Fisher is the only person connected with zerO Books who is known to me personally– the others are just names in my email box, yet I work very closely with many of them).

Some things are probably well-suited to the internet, but it does not follow that all things are. I’m generally a rabid pro-technology person, but there was a value to the slow pace of snail mail, which I miss very much.

I think what I most miss about snail mail is that it allowed for interchange with people to be quantized. In a good paper correspondence (Lingis was my favorite one, as he was for many, and I use the past tense only because he too has drifted from paper to email against everyone’s expectations) you’d trade letters maybe 12-20 times per year, maybe a bit less. But the slow pace of doing this made each exchange more thoughtful, and the mere physical act of printing a letter, licking an envelope, and maybe walking to a post office and standing in line to mail it, made each letter an act of gratitude that was appreciated even when the contents of a given letter were unpleasant. Perhaps more importantly, it allowed for a real sense of progress that the communication occurred in chunks. Something new happened in each letter; some new piece of information was communicated.

Now, I’m the first to sing the praises of email. Many of my most important opportunities and friendships were hatched via e-mail. To take just one recent example, my planning with Peter Erdélyi for the Latour event at LSE involved some 700 or 800 emails, and that would obviously have been impossible to replicate with snail mail; the event would probably never have happened if not for the existence of email.

However, I can also say that 80% of the worst fights in my life have happened by e-mail. The medium really enhances opportunities for that. Like snail mail, there is no face-to-face contact that allows for tone and attitude to be read in more moderate fashion. But unlike snail mail, there is often little pause for thought, and hence quarrels can rapidly escalate out of control. I saw this recently with two people in the blogosphere who are both valued friends, and it would almost surely not have happened either in person or via snail mail.

So, my personal sense is that blogs are best used for information exchange. I do not believe they are well-suited to critical interchange. And as already suggested, I think there are two reasons for this:

(a) words floating in a vacuum can easily be misinterpreted, and hence intellectual disagreements can soon escalate needlessly into personal ones

(b) critique works best when it is quantized, not constant and rapid

Let’s talk about (b) a bit. “Critical feedback” is often unreservedly praised in intellectual life, but a quick consideration of our lives will show that that is clearly not true.

As a limit case, imagine that every time you had to write something, you had a “constructive critic” standing behind you, looking over your shoulder, saying “I disagree”, or “that’s ridiculous” whenever you typed a sentence they didn’t like. This would obviously be counterproductive. Critique on a sentence-by-sentence or word-by-word level, in real time, would obviously be of no value. It would just piss off the author and sap the joy out of thinking for them.

In order for work to be critiqued, it first needs to be finished. Not that it needs to be in final, polished form, but that it needs to be put into a digestible unit that can be usefully disputed.

And that’s why I think it’s best to get your critical feedback in chunks. My favorite medium for doing this is public lectures. I’m now doing this at the rate of 10 or so per year, and the questions are often tough. (Knox Peden currently gets my vote for the most intense listener and toughest questioner I know, but there are others. He’s been to 4 of my lectures by now, and has always come out swinging– but with a tone that is assertive, not demeaning or pompous. It’s a good model for tough questioning, in my opinion.) This might not work for everyone. Some people really enjoy heated conversation as a stimulus to thought. I often just find it confusing, and also find that these sorts of arguments tend to favor pre-fabricated mainstream ideas that are easily expressed in formulaic sentences, when in fact our best ideas are usually not quite at that point yet, and need a bit of time to ripen, just as new plants may have a harder time with hailstorms or frost.

I also think that the best way to make a critical response to a piece of work is to sign your own name to a piece of counter-work. It’s a profound act of good will to stick your neck out as far as that of the person you are criticizing. For instance, I’m glad Shaviro blogs only intermittently, because I felt myself too angry at one of the claims in his book, and if he had responded quickly then perhaps it would have become a quarrel. Luckily, he had no time for more than one response, and hence our disagreement took the best possible form– a written response by me to his arguments in “The Actual Volcano.” Readers will soon be able to examine that exchange and decide what they think. If it had been conducted as a real-time blog dispute (even less in keeping with Shaviro’s temperament than with my own) it might have provided a bit of entertainment, but the key 3 or 4 disagreements might have been lost in the shuffle.

My conclusion, some of which might be temperament-based rather than universal, is that blogs are good for information-sharing, but that dispute is better conducted in slower, colder media, and broken up into chunks. You have to let people go up for air now and then.

This reminds me of one proposal for the new media that I do not like… Namely, the idea that books will be continuously updated electronic documents, replete with user comments on them. Continuous update doesn’t seem like a good idea to me. It will be confusing. It will require people to dip back continually into a book to see what the latest updates are. It will mean that books are covered with the sorts of jackass remarks one finds even on a good website like fivethirtyeight.com (some of them were quite unbelievable, especially in the old days when Nate had no comment moderation on his site).

In short, one feature of the traditional paper book that I do very much like and want to preserve is the idea of books as discrete, quantized products of thought that can be digested by critics over a certain period of time, so that their remarks can be incorporated into a different discrete product a few years later.

Summary: speed is great for the purposes of dissemination, harmful for the purposes of disagreement. (Think of the 10 rudest things you’ve ever seen happen on the web, then the 10 rudest things you’ve seen happen in person, and I’ll bet the 10 in person are far less offensive. Unless terribly drunk, people just aren’t ever as rude in the flesh as they are via the present medium.)