Blogs, Books and Networks
Ian Bogost has set up a lovely aggregator of speculative realism-related blogs, and I’m honoured to be included in the list. It is a wonderful idea to aid communication and strengthen the links among the blogs. My own list of ‘blogs-to-check-out-each-morning’ was getting seriously out of control. A quick one-page overview of all the latest posts will help me considerably.
Unrelated to this, but still about the blogosphere, the nominations for the 2009 edition of The Open Laboratory are now open (see the nominees so far here and the submission form for more here). Open Lab is a yearly anthology of the best science blogposts on the net (see the 2008 edition here), as nominated by the entire online science community and selected by an editor.
Now I can’t help but think: why is it that such a thing (from online publishing to real-world publishing) is still unheard of for the philosophy world, while much more common in science-related environments? For example, see also the Edge Annual Question book, by the Edge blog which promotes itself as being the gathering place of intellectuals of ‘the third culture’ (as opposed to Snow’s two cultures), and which ‘consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectuals in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are’.
Of course, as I have observed before, there is nothing like ‘the philosophical community’ (you can put a physicist and a geologist in the same room, while you cannot with a postmodernist and a logician…), and that is an impediment for initiatives like this anthology. Moreover, I think that in the humanities there still is some latent skepticism about the reliability of (excessively democratic?) blogs as a source of material and as a place for discussion.
But.
The SR network is the exception: even if with (growing) internal disagreements on several issues, this community is held together by (for philosophy) an unprecedented presence and diffusion on the web, in the form of blogs, and Ian’s aggregator is just the most evident demonstration of that. And this is not a mere coincidence, since it seems to me that the very theoretical development of the movement will be increasingly conditioned by the fragmented, real-time and open debates which can only happen within an online arena, just as the very origins of our interest in SR partially derive (this is my thesis) from the familiarity (Heideggerianly speaking) with IT and other nonhuman social prosthetics which is proper for our generation.
Now, if this is the case, what about creating an anthology of SR posts? Yes, I know that ‘The Speculative Turn‘ will be soon among us, but what I have in mind is slightly different. What I am thinking about is a publication which collects some significant posts from the SR community (including reviews which refer back to ‘real’ publications) where the significance of these is judged both on the base of the philosophical content regarding SR itself, and on the basis of how this content is carried forward by referring to a network of writers, made possible thanks to the technology that we all use. These guidelines would be exposed (and further thematized) in a meaty introduction (possibly written by more than one person, and maybe even in comment-and-reply form) capable of bringing forth this (to me at least) crucial point: a metareflection on the fact that our (online) reflections on the ontological status of nonhuman objects, and on the networked nature of a hybrid community of actants are in themselves supported by a network of actants, human (the writers) and nonhuman (the blogs themselves, the servers in some cooled rooms which are currently storing this blogpost, the computers which we use to compose them, the internet itself…). I think that, if developed carefully, this line of speculation could optimally bring together SR with technology studies and hyperlink theory, not to mention to give a theoretical support to the Open Access movement. As a matter of fact, in order for this to be in line with Open Access, the anthology should be an openly distributed publication (as in the case of re.press).
It is just a thought experiment. Any comments?
Fabio Cunctator
I like the idea.
Along those lines, I have been thinking for a while about a “community” blog that would be somewhat like Speculative Heresy, but that would be more like an “aggregator with comments”. In other words, it would be a place for a particular set of people to cross-post material from their own blogs. For people like Levi, this might be disadvantageous, because he has such an active comments section on his own blog. But for people with fewer commenters (and people like Graham, who don’t have comments at all), it might be a good way to centralize discussions that tend to become diffuse when people respond to a blog post with a blog post of their own.
Maybe the SR/OOO world isn’t really ripe for this sort of thing. But I’ve noticed that most of the SR/OOO people are amazingly equanimous about even central disagreements.
Oops, Asher, I left you out unintentionally. Do you think your blog will continue dealing with SR related topics? My goal is to be inclusive rather than clubbist, but also not to overwhelm the feed, so let me know what you think.
As for an aggregator or a collection, I’m not sure what I think. I really appreciate Graham’s point about wanting to move larger scale arguments into articles and books, and I sometimes struggle with how to do that. Collections can be good, but they can also work against more elaborate arguments. And communities can also be good, but they can sometimes work against the productive argument that we see in the SR blogosphere.
In any event, these are interesting proposals that I want to consider more.
Ian – No, no — I’m strictly an amateur. The main reason I’m impelled to blog about it is my nagging suspicion that OOO is compatible with a physicalist viewpoint. I’d like to see this viewpoint represented and worked on, but I don’t have enough time (or education, probably) to do the heavy lifting, and I don’t think there are many people who would see a physicalist approach as being fruitful. Maybe this will end up being a later development of SR/OOO, as more people from the analytic side join the party.
I see Graham’s point too. A community is attractive to me in particular because, being a layperson, I couldn’t hope to be published in a book or article (whereas I *could* hope to have an essay included in something like the Speculative Heresy/Inhumanities blog event). In other words, my opinion should definitely be considered an outlier. Fabio’s idea (if I understand it right) seems like a good one in that it combines both online and physical publishing. One could imagine an editor taking specific comments from the online discussion and “working them up” for the physical version.
Ian, Asher,
I do see the problem of the inevitable fragmentation of focus when discussions and theorizations are to be located *only* in an online, free-comment environment. Of course, a monography will always enjoy an argumentative clarity which is not possible in a blogpost, and I do like to have a nice fat book in my hands sometimes, rather than having to browse around dozens of blogposts.
Yet, the two things should co-exist. What I do not like, as the ‘open accesser’ that I am, is that the mechanism of ‘you either are published on paper or you are none’ is replicated once again. Of course, a shift in academic paradigm will take time, but I believe that the best way of acting is to, yes, publish on (possibly open access) paper (as Graham has indeed done), but to refer back from the paper to the online world, in a free two-way exchange. [Which is something that in other fields is more common (and I think of example of Ian's books, referring to games and movies)].
As I proposed in this post, I think that this idea is not only supported by an open access or internet-happy approach to philosophy, but by the very theoretical points made by SR as a philosophical current.
Yes, I see your points Fabio. I certainly think a hybrid approach has promise. One of the challenges in my mind simply involves deciding what a written entry on a blog is, or what it’s on its way to. Is it a stand-alone piece? An article-in-progress? A part of a potential book? Much of the time I don’t even know. I do think that the idea of a blog-aggregating book collection is a very nice idea, since many blog arguments disappear into the past.
There’s much more to say about this, but open-access is harder than it seems. I’m about to publish a book in the traditional way because a publisher who originally expressed interest in an open-access + print version disappeared entirely, and doesn’t return my inquiries anymore. So, even the best intentions are sometimes not enough.
Ian, should I come up with some actual concrete plan about it, would you be availlable for a written interview to serve as a sort of appendix or concluding remarks, trying to bring together the two themes of both OOP and of the specificity of the form of media through which the network of blogs has been expanding?
I like the idea of the ‘vanishing arguments’ in blogposts, and as you might have noticed I have an interest in an ontological analysis of ‘virtual’ objects. I think this could lead somewhere.
Yes, I’d be happy to talk about it further in that or any other context. I’ll be curious to hear your plan as it develops.