Levi on dialogue

Concerning my own view that dialogue is secondary to the creation of standalone work, Levi is perfectly justified in giving the opposite side of the story. (I think this question is a matter of individual psychologies, not of rigid principle.)

“I tend to be just the opposite in many respects. Where Harman is of the sentiment that arguments should take place in written text, I find that I only come to know what I think in my interaction with others. In certain ways this has been the plague of my academic career. Where the ordinary order of things is to treat the published text as what as important and the exchange as derivative, I often experience an acute suffering when it comes to the written text. The written text, to me, feels like excrement, like a remainder, like a waste or a frozen petrification of a living object: Dialogue. My genesis as a thinker began with chat rooms, moved to email discussion lists, and finally to the medium of blogging. And in all these cases my thought has been animated by a single insistent and painful desire: The desire for dialogue. In Lacanian terms, I suppose you could characterize me as a hysteric or a subject whose desire is structured around the desire of, not for, the Other.”

I’m sure everyone’s preference can be Lacanized in some way, but what I think makes Levi’s blog fairly unique is that he’s actually doing his best work in blog posts. Probably more people view the blogosphere as I do: a place to share information, offer (solicited) advice to the suffering grad student populace, assemble miscellaneous thoughts that can’t easily be grouped together elsewhere, and maybe engage in a bit of sparring now and then when it seems interesting. Levi, by contrast, seems to treat his blog as his primary intellectual medium. I view it, instead, as an intellectual snack stand. The haute cuisine is in my books.

I don’t necessarily think that’s permanent. We could eventually reach the point where the blogosphere or its successor medium does become the primary medium. But I do think there are some features of the print medium that deserve to survive when things are finally transposed over here. One of them is that, although I despise the now comically slow speed of most journals and book publishers (after polishing off a finished piece of work, 2-3 years before printing is no longer rare), I think things ought to go a little more slowly than they do in the blogosphere. Like light, heat, and atomic orbits, I think intellectual work needs to made up of quanta. Too many exchanges in too short a time leads both sides into confusion about the true stakes in any disagreement, I find.