on philosophical movements that develop on the internet

There haven’t been many, but we’re in the middle of one here. I’m not sure I can improve on Levi’s fresh post on the topic, so I’ll simply link to it, HERE.

Every medium requires different rules. As Levi mentions in his post, the print era of philosophy possessed many buffers: buffers of time between a thought and its appearance in print, personal buffers between the author and the reader. The blogosphere eliminates those buffers, and we’re all still figuring out what the rules are for that new situation. (Or rather, I suspect we’ve already figured them out but haven’t quite finished conceptualizing them in verbalizable form.)

Bottom line: the intellectual world is a better place with SR/OOO added to the mix, and I’m delighted to have been associated with everything that’s happened in the past few years.

I would agree that the internet may not be the best place to do rigorous philosophy (but then again, you have Levi as a counter-example, doing much of his best work on his blog). But I think it’s foolish not to use this medium in some fashion, and very foolish for people who do less traditional academic work than the OOO authors do to make pompous statements about how we’re wasting time in the blogosphere and ought to do traditional academic work instead. If you’re going to make that critique of OOO, then you’d better make sure you can trump the amount of work that’s already been done by, say, Tim Morton.

I’d never heard the “macho chest-thumping” critique before, and chuckled a bit about that, because none of us are like that in person, and so that will disappear with a bit more time. That’s an artifact of the medium. Political blogs are like that. Sports blogs are like that. In this medium you face sudden ridiculous sallies of the sort that didn’t exist in academic writing in the past, and often you want to punch back.

And yes, I deliberately include things on this blog like “where I ate breakfast this morning” and “the latest stories about the cat I saved from the alley.” I think much of the criticism of such posts is sheer affectation by posers. People criticize that sort of thing because one might criticize that sort of thing, and it’s easy to look wise by pretending to be an appalled critic of this or that topic as unworthy of a philosophy blog.

The unifying principle of this blog is clear enough, I think: anything that interests me is eligible to go in this blog. That may be philosophy books, or revolution in Egypt, or a cat, or a concert I attended. If’s a kind of “flat biography” in the image of flat ontology.

I think we’re adapting to the conditions of this new medium fairly well, and we’re also getting plenty of traditional work done. It’s the best of both worlds. And as Colonel John Boyd (sometimes called the Sun-Tzu of the 20th century) said, what made Mao such a great commander was not guerrilla war, but his ability to mix conventional and guerrilla tactics. I happen to think that’s the best way to spread an idea.

Anyway, leaving Tallinn soon, and hope to see some of you at Documenta, both old friends and new.