on shooting oneself in the foot

In the past several months I’ve seen at least four people make the (rather snobbish) argument that real philosophy can only be done in traditional academic media, not the blogosphere.

While there are things to be said both for and against this argument (and I’ve already said them in this space), the much weirder point is that the people making this claim generally have only a tiny fraction of the academic publications of those they are criticizing for wasting their time with blogging. That makes the argument a bit deranged, doesn’t it?

This first happened a few months ago with one guy who attacked Tim Morton at a conference, sneering that people who are blogging must have little time left over for real academic work. I checked this person’s track record, and he is certainly in no position to be giving the prolific Morton any lessons about traditional academic productivity.

But since then, oddly enough, this argument has continued to be heard from stalled academics and early-stage Ph.D. students, telling me and my friends that we need to stop blogging so that we can publish real academic work.

If we published any more traditional academic work, our heads would explode. If you want to read some of it, do a simple library search.

In the meantime, our critics are doing stunningly little of it. The truly productive people in our generation are not the ones making this criticism.