Levi on framing the debate

LEVI IS RIGHT ABOUT THIS. For 5 or 6 months I was simply not looking at certain blogs, and when I finally took a look (I no longer remember why), it was shocking to find Speculative Realism and OOO both denounced as worthless and made the subject of literally hundreds of angry blog posts in a row. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much attention paid to a worthless movement.

Levi Bryant and I have been accused not only of all possible intellectual failings (from too much originality to insufficient originality), we have also been accused of the most grotesque character flaws. We are not just bad philosophers, but really reprehensible people as well.

Insofar as philosophy is likely to migrate online for a certain period of time, this is a new landscape for all of us, and it’s taking awhile to get oriented as to what sorts of familiar patterns and problems there might be here. But I do think the troll is the new sophist, pedant, and Inquisitor. The troll is the burden our era must bear: an era awash in the over-celebration of critique. Hence, the troll appears on the scene as the decadent emodiment of critique (which had an important reign over an entire era), just as the sophist was a decadent form of graceful rhetoric, the pedant a decadent form of the Aristotelian scholar, and the Inquisitor a decadent form of the priest.

Why “decadent”? Because a real critic will apply critique selectively. The troll, by contrast, merely says “no no no no no'” to everything, without ever taking a positive stance. If there are 100 blog posts about a topic and all of them are rants without nuance or balance, then it may as well be a blog unanimously calling for the lynching of Guantanamo inmates, or another blog (I just saw one like this) unanimously praising Mike Tyson for punching out “that scumbag paparazzo”.