Nico Jenkins on the blogopolis

Nico has a reaction to my thoughts, HERE, and he seems to think along the same lines as I do.

He actually puts it more concisely here than I probably did:

“…rather than criticizing the proliferating philosophy blogs (mostly written by adherents and followers of SR/OOO) as being places in which philosophy can’t be done, these blogs should be looked at as the cafes and bars of post-1945 Paris, as places where thinkers gather and congregate, where ideas are exchanged, argued over, perverted and brought forward. While ‘serious’ philosophy—and frankly serious philosophy can often be very boring— is not necessarily being done on the blogs (Harman notes the ‘glowing counterexample’ here of Levi Bryant however) there is very necessary work being done in order to do serious philosophy.”

Yes, that’s exactly it. My very best work in the past 3.5 years has mostly been done in private on my word processor with no one watching. But a heck of a lot of that best work has had some connection with a discussion occurring somewhere in Blogopolis or a person first met there.

You can also experiment with ideas in Blogopolis in ways that wouldn’t really fit any existing genre of respectable written work.

And incidentally, that’s the way in which Zero Books does overlap with the blogosphere in terms of content no less than personnel. The first Zero person who contacted me said “give us the work that academic publishers probably wouldn’t touch.” And other than perhaps The Quadruple Object, it’s probably true that no mainstream publisher would have taken a risk on the others. But they’re doing well anyway. When you run a huge old press with large staff and overhead, you do have to be a lot more cautious and risk-averse, and that’s why I think a diverse ecosystem will work well for awhile. (A standard, heavily-footnoted academic monograph is still a valuable thing to produce, but it would probably look fairly stupid coming from Zero, which needs books with an air of the underground about them.)

But back to the blogosphere… It’s simply stupid to think that philosophy blogs have some sort of moral duty to replicate the content and format of publications as we know them. Welcome to the new bohemia.