just read Tim’s and Levi’s posts on blogging

Both give us much to chew on.

Tim’s aphoristic post is HERE.

Levi’s essay-length meditation is HERE.

I’m not sure I have much to add to what either of them say. But in simplest form, I suppose traditional academic journals have the following selling points:

1. They force you to give semi-definitive form to your present thoughts on an issue (whereas on blogs you can shoot from the hip, try experiments, even make mistakes).

2. They are recognized by the disembodied entity known as academia. That is to say, they can enhance (or possibly detract from) one’s status in academic culture. They can also be incorporated into a list of achievements known as a c.v. This can lead to being hired by a university, attaining tenure, being promoted, transferring to a different position, etc.

Blog posts don’t do either of those things at this point. But otherwise (and #1 is important, and #2 still an inescapable fact) I tend to find that the really stimulating intellectual discussion is happening right here in this new medium.

Levi mentions the threat to hierarchies posed by blogs, and that seems to be true. It also explains why blog culture is often so violent.

Here’s an analogy. In the U.S., there was long a pattern where the “murder capital” would shift every few years to some new city. The murder capital would not necessarily be the city with the most criminals, or the most drug business. Rather, it would be the one where the drug business was most new. Namely, a city where the rules were not yet clear, where there was no established gang hierarchy or territoriality. When I was an undergraduate in Annapolis, nearby Washington D.C. went through this phase, with new Jamaican gangs just brutalizing each other: people killed by being scalded to death in bathtubs, that sort of thing. A decade or more later, though hardly a “murder capital,” I remember humble Cedar Rapids, Iowa going through a particularly vicious phase when the drug trade was being systematically organized for the first time. This previously sleepy small city went through a wave of drive-by shootings, certain neighborhoods became “do not go” areas for the first time in city history (including the previously charming area where the aviator Wright Brothers once lived and where I used to attend preschool in the early 1970’s). And then after a few years, it seemed to settle down. The turf was now carved up, and the various gangs reached a certain modus vivendi.

What I would expect to happen over time is some combination of the following things.

1. The blogosphere will calm down a bit.

2. Some way will be found to replicate the “monumental” character of academic publishing. What I mean here is that when you write a book or article, you’re creating a sort of monument to your ideas on a topic at a given moment (though unfortunately, it often takes 2-5 years for that monument to be unveiled to the public once you’ve finished it). I see this aspect of academic publishing as partly positive, incidentally. It allows for slow reflection and a discernible rhythm of movement in one’s field, whereas the blogosphere can sometimes be a sort of paranoid chaos.

On the downside, however, it is often a colossal bore to look at an issue of a journal. Not always, but often. As Tim said in his post, it can be like going into a chain record store, with a very conservative array of offerings. You were never going to find the cutting-edge music in Sam Goody unless it was no longer cutting-edge. By the same token, it’s tough to get certain unfamiliar ideas past most established editors. But there are two “tricks” here that can help, if you want to do that:

a. Publish in journals that aren’t “philosophy journals” strictly speaking. They won’t care as much about the current layout of the field, and will care only whether the ideas you have to offer shed some light on their own disciplines. This is one reason why the non-philosophy humanities are often the source of much of the innovation in philosophy itself: people in geography or archaeology simply don’t know or care if Manuel DeLanda or Bruno Latour are not yet viewed as serious established thinkers in philosophy.

b. Mask your most unusual ideas as commentaries on already established thinkers. Tool-Being is about Heidegger because I was really fascinated by Heidegger and got most of my ideas at a young age by twisting, pulling, and pressing Heidegger’s ideas in my mind. But let’s say I had written the book simply as a series of my own ideas. Obviously, it wouldn’t have had a ghost of a chance to get published. But package it as a commentary on Heidegger, and suddenly it becomes familiar enough to be marked as “not crazy.” (And to repeat, that’s not what happened in my case. The book actually did grow out of a commentary on Heidegger.)

I’d have more to say, but need to catch the bus.