Levi on aleatory encounters

Here he gets a bit more specific than I did the other night, talking about random encounters in the blogosphere that have changed his life. Two points from his post:

“When I first conceived The Speculative Turn it was conceived as a collection that would present a set of Deleuzian rejoinders to some of the claims the speculative realists were making against Deleuze, pitching Deleuze as a realist…”

I’d never heard that before. My involvement with the project began right around the time I was attacked by that rabid dog in the Cairo desert suburbs. Some time just before or after that, I received a message from either Levi or Nick, I can’t remember which was first. My main function at that point, I believe, was to serve as a middleman to enlist Latour and the other SR people. (Of course, they also wanted an essay from me too, but Levi is already on record as having found me at that point the least interesting of the SR group, which I learned only after he had changed his position.)

But the really funny part of his post is this:

“Occasionally I’ve been accused of being a ‘careerist,’ using this medium to advance my career, but career advancement has never been the reason for my engagement in this medium.”

If there is anyone in the vicinity who cannot possibly be accused of “careerism,” it is surely Levi Bryant. He’d have to be a pretty inept careerist to spend so many years teaching a 5/5 load at a Dallas community college (nothing against Dallas, where my brother used to live, but as far as I know Levi has no personal connections drawing him to the area).

The way to be a “careerist” in this field is pretty well known. You look at what’s hot in the mainstream, you write a thesis on that topic, and you suck up a bit to powerful people. To which powerful people is Levi sucking up? Me? That was said once. But where’s this mighty academic power that I supposedly possess? Sorry, but I probably couldn’t get Levi a job even in my own department, let alone anywhere else.

The other way to be a careerist is to be very tactful and never offend anyone. Does that sound like the Larval Subjects blog we know?

Anyway, I’ve only seen the “Levi is a careerist” meme a couple of times, and it’s been well over a year since the last time. You’re definitely shooting the wrong guy with that one.

But this “throw everything against the wall and see what sticks” tactic (which hasn’t come up in awhile, but Levi mentions it) does point to one of the central features of trolling. The troll doesn’t critique what deserves critiquing, but critiques everything that one might critique. The troll pours the critical sauce equally over all positive utterances that are ever made.

In this sense, the devil’s advocate is the more palatable forerunner of the troll. But remember that the devil’s advocate had a concrete purpose: prior to granting sainthood, the Church wanted someone to research and present all things that the devil might say on behalf of the unworthiness of the candidate for sainthood. Here it was a question of being very careful before publicly recognizing the saintly features of the new saint. Trolling, by contrast, is part of a process in which no saint ever emerges, and indeed no good idea even emerges. It is an endless trial, without even the execution that occurs at the end of Kafka’s famous unfinished novel. It is critique for the sake of critique. I am quite serious that I think the Troll has replaced the Sophist (there have been others in between) as the new consummate figure of the anti-philosopher in our time.

In short, the Troll represents the decadence of the once noble era of Critique, just as vomitoria and gladiator-animal orgies marked the decadence of once golden Rome.

And one last point:

“Had I simply gone the traditional SPEP route, I would have never encountered Graham. Had I not encountered Graham, I would have never encountered Bogost.”

Nor would I have encountered Bogost so soon without the Amazon.com database. The really good thing about the new media is that you have direct channels of information about and communication with people who do share your interests in common. In the pre-internet era I probably could have met Levi at some point, but might easily never have met Bogost, who works in a different discipline and writes books on topics that might not have led me to pick them up unless I had had a good reason for doing so.

So, there are plenty of good things about this medium.