“response article”

Michael Austin sent the following email in response to my earlier post, and I know he won’t mind my posting this here:

“I really liked your recent entry about electronic publishing and the speed and style of responses. One of the innovations that Sean and I have developed with Analecta Hermeneutica is the response essay; rather than waiting for the next volume or worrying about responding to an essay years later, when someone responds to an essay in AH, it is added to that issue. This means that no issue is ever closed but is always open to discussion. There’s an essay in our first volume for example to which I am responding, and although I probably won’t be done my response until our second volume is published in January, it will appear as part of volume one. I think this is one of the great things about publishing anything online, it promotes dialogue rather than monologue. It reminds me of back when modern philosophers would write treatises, but then also exchange letters back and forth discussing them (I’m thinking here of Descartes or Leibniz for example).”

This seems like a good idea to me, and I suspect this can be made to work, as long as the responses are articles. Allow me to explain.

It is common to praise Descartes and Leibniz for engaging so regularly with objectors. But what needs to be emphasized is that Descartes and Leibniz were not operating blogs. They were dealing with reputable opponents whose reputations were at stake in their criticisms no less than Descartes’s and Leibniz’s own reputations in their responses.

Go to any website where comments are allowed on an article, and you’ll find all sorts of comments that say nothing but: “This author is an idiot. This is the stupidest article I’ve ever read. This magazine needs real authors, not ones that are full of sh*t.” etc. etc. You know the sort of thing I mean. Completely useless, and no one even really pays attention to such remarks.

But there is a higher grade of critic who still isn’t that helpful. Never venturing much on their own, they linger in the vicinity of production, taking potshots at all positive proposals by others while never really risking anything. This method might be valuable for those who believe that mistakes are the biggest problem in intellectual work, but that’s not what I believe. Mistakes tend to get caught, they are often trivial, and when not trivial there is generally a much bigger problem at work that needs to be discussed in greater depth.

So, I would hope that Michael and Sean’s site requires the responses to be articles. If it were my journal, I’d even propose a rule: every response must be at least half as long as the original article. That way you wouldn’t just have adolescent hit-and-run stuff. Instead, you’d have legitimate contrary positions being set forth. Everyone would be equally adventurous, and equally exposed.

Even if someone were to put up 10 pages of parody or snark in response to a 20-page article, the atmosphere would be much healthier. To write 10 pages of that stuff, you’d have to really know what you were doing. If not, you’d simply look like an embittered fool trying to score points (whereas in principle it’s easier to hide that fact in a mere three-sentence dig).

Requiring somewhat lengthy response articles would also have the effect, desirable in my opinion, of slowing down the discussion somewhat. Two years for publication is obviously much too long, but the responses occurring in minutes or hours in the blogosphere merely lead to unnecessarily heated quarrels and too much tense pressure for quick responses. But if you had, say, 3 or 4 weeks to respond to a response article as a matter of usage, that ought to be just about the right speed. It would be fast enough to keep the public interested, slow enough to filter out the potential bad blood and the sloppy variety of from-the-hip responses. It would also help create a bit of a temporal shield behind which private thinking and writing time could flourish, without stretching it out too much.

I’ve learned a lot in just 9 months of using this medium. And my general conclusion is that the ability to interact with others in the electronic cosmos is potentially quite valuable, but in its actual form is still too often a morass of pointless pseudo-debate. But I suspect, developing what I take to be Michael’s suggestion, that requiring longer and more developed responses would solve most of the problems found in this medium while retaining most of its virtues.

And to repeat, there are two totally different kinds of problems with the medium:

1. trolls, grey vampires, etc.

2. excessive pressure to respond quickly to worthy interlocutors. In many cases it’s nice to have a bit of private time to think these through. I would be horrified right now, if I still had a comments section, to open up this site and find the 5 or 6 letters each evening that deserved a response. It’s better to slow these things down slightly, as the snail mail medium always did through sheer physical inconvenience. We can’t all just be responding to other people all the time (unless you’re Levi Bryant, and I still don’t get how he can do it).