Harman on the harmfulness of blogs
In (one of) today’s posts (how does he do that??), Levi commented on a blogposts by snugglebus on SR and its impact/dependance on the blogosphere. Snugglebus argues that:
What has blogging meant to SR? First blogging has increased the speed of exchange (and therefore helps the ideas spread further faster), the breadth of exchange (bringing those ideas into dialogue with a whole range of different people from different disciplines or with different projects), and the openness of exchange (anyone can participate).
The latter has made SR quite ‘democratic
and goes on to claim that:
* SR would not have existed if it was grounded in mainstream academia, though now exists symbiotically with academia.
* The key elements of SR that have made it successful in the blogosphere have been a clear, attractive, but broad identity, around which people can rally, and the willingness of proponents to engage in dialogue with people from different disciplines, and with people who have no prior reputation, itself applying a certain genoristy in exchange.
* The blogosphere itself has added speed, and breadth, as well as contributing to this sense of openness.
Now, I could not agree more with this, and the relationship blogs-SR has been a concern of mine for quite some time. Therefore, I really enjoyed Levi’s own comments on it:
Rather than a single obsession with the relation between humans and the world, snugglebus simultaneously treats the internet or technology as an actor in this movement, a particular electronic community (the theory blogosphere), contingent or chance encounters between different humans such as those between Graham, Nick, Ben, Reid, Shaviro, Jodi, N.Pepperell, Jon Cogburn, Mel, Protevi, Mikhail, Nikki, Peter, Kvond, etc., and many others, the ideational, the amorous or libidinal, speeds of communication and exchange, the universities, and so on. None of these actors can be said to overdetermine the other. The internet, for example, did not make speculative realism or cause speculative realism, but in many respects speculative realism would not exist as it now does without the theory blogosphere or the internet. However, while it’s unlikely that speculative realism could have taken place in its current form in the halls of the academy alone, it is now feeding back into that “scape”.
This is precisely what I think it is important to recognize regarding the blog phenomenon as linked to SR/OOP. Yet, in a series of recent posts (1, 2, 3, 4) Harman elaborated a series of reflections on the use of blogs and on the future form of academic publishing.
Concerned about the use and misuse of them, and prompted by a now infamous ‘fight’ in the SR blogosphere (and let bygones be bygones), he claims that:
blogs are good for information-sharing, but that dispute is better conducted in slower, colder media, and broken up into chunks. You have to let people go up for air now and then.
[...]
I think it is often a bit too fast and a bit too hot in the blog medium, [but] it might be quite suitably paced if conducted through PDF debates conducted in chunks weeks or months apart.
[...]
Requiring somewhat lengthy response articles would also have the effect, desirable in my opinion, of slowing down the discussion somewhat. Two years for publication is obviously much too long, but the responses occurring in minutes or hours in the blogosphere merely lead to unnecessarily heated quarrels and too much tense pressure for quick responses.
[...]
And to repeat, there are two totally different kinds of problems with the medium:
1. trolls, grey vampires, etc.
2. excessive pressure to respond quickly to worthy interlocutors. In many cases it’s nice to have a bit of private time to think these through.
Now, it seems clear to me that what Harman has at heart is to shield proper philosophical discussions (including disagreements) from ‘adolescent hit-and-run stuff’ (and he seems to focus on this problem much more than the average blogger in the SR community). In order to keep the exchange safe from the incursions of trolls and grey vampires, articles and responses would better off if done via (somewhat) lengthy .pdf files via email. As someone who grew up on online forums and mIRC, I am fully aware of the fauna which populates blogs, forums and chats around the internet, and the large abundance of annoying, frustrated people who just enjoy to pick a fight. But, to condemn the blog medium because of that is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Annoying comments and trolling, can be simply ignored; however, it’s another matter to draw lines around the the proper form which a philosophical debate should take. That is, where I do not agree with Harman is when he extends his skepticism towards blogs to encompass their actual potentiality for shaping intellectual production. Let me be clear here: yes, short comments allow for a level of shielded and easy criticism which is quite annoying, but no, this is not enough to disqualify blogs as good means for philosophical exchange. Yes, ‘Descartes and Leibniz were not operating blogs’ but this is simply because blogs were not even a possible option.
Harman seems to believe that books give time for composition and a space for exposition which is impossible to replicate on blogs. That might be the case, and in fact I tend to dislike blogposts longer than 800-1000 words. But can’t this be simply another way for intellectual production? I am not only (but also) making the hypertext-theory/derridean intertextuality argument that hypermedia like blogs can break out of the closed structure of the book by indexing a new spatio-temporally flattened space by instantly linking to other resources, making endnotes and bibliographies an outdated tool, and reinforcing its own text via links with others. I surely believe in this, but my point is a bit different here.
Some time ago I wrote a blogpost on the ‘philosophy videogame’ idea that was circling around between Ian Bogost and Harman. My main point was: one thing is a videogame about philosophy, another a philosophy videogame. Now, this is not only a point that can be exported to the discussion about blogs, but the very worldview of networks formed by the encounter of ontologically real human and non-human actors which OOP proposed should be a theoretical framework which requires us to understand blogs more than mere imperfect intstruments for a dialogue between two human beings.
To welcome the inevitable evolution of academic publishing towards shorter and faster books, and to recognize its ‘democratic’ potential is good (and I applaud it), but to a large extent it means to remain within a classical paradigm: written texts (long or short they might be) are the one and only medium for philosophical content. What we should do is to take the medium itself as being an actor which in itself shapes a philosophical form which would otherwise not be the same. Emails and others non-hyperlinked electronic documents are simply a digital, faster, version of the good old book.
To sum up (because I do not like long blogposts), I do agree with Harman about the (admittedly, occasional) irritating presence of annoying commenters (even if I don’t seem to be as bothered as he is by the problem. Then again, I am a relative no one and he’s a prominent figure in the scene, so presumably more exposed and prone to trolling) and I agree with the general observation that, often, time is necessary for ruminating over ideas. What however I think is important to keep in mind as ‘emancipatory’ ideals for future (and present) philosophies can be summarized in three points:
First: let us fully appreciate the philosophical possibilities intrinsic in the open structure of hypermedia. If you want, this is the hyperlink-theory/textual deconstruction position which promotes a series of reconfigurations (in the textual and narrative structure and in the concept of authorship). [For an interesting article on the growth of authorship, see here].
Second: let us not stop there (again, this is what I meant regarding the philosophy videogame) by not simply assimilating the new media as glorified, ‘interactive books’, but let us try to envision a completely new form of fully philosophical production, which breaks away from the written structure. What do philosophers do? They write. This could change. [Yet, this is the hard bit: what could that be? Before I get accused of trolling I admit that I have no positive idea yet. Still, the philosophy videogame path is a very good way to start the exploration].
Third: the medium used for philosophical discussion is an actor which shapes the discussion itself. This is the point which Levi made as well: the blogosphere actively shapes what SR has been and is now. It is only fair for OOP to turn its eyes on itself and recognize the network out of which it arose and through which is developing. More in general, to prioritize the book/article-like form of philosophical production, on the base of its greater flexibility and transparency to the author’s intentions, is to deny the basic Latourian/OOOcal tenet that a multiplicity of silent (but active) non-human actors shape the network, or collective (in this case, SR itself, as a whole) just as the human writers do.
[To go out on a limb, I believe that the link between the first point and the third one is to be found in Ian's work on unit operations].
P.S. – I just saw the wordcount: over 1500 words. Damn!
Fabio Cunctator
I’ve sometimes wondered whether the structure of my thinking corresponds to the structure of the written medium in which I express it. As you observe, Fabio, the blogs afford short bursts of writing, often linked to other short writings on other blogs and in the comments. Blogposts are temporally short as well, with most hits and comments being registered in the first couple of days. Each post reads top to bottom as with other written media, but to follow the temporal sequence in which discrete posts were written one must read from bottom (oldest) to top (newest). It’s possible to write numbered sequences of posts to follow a particular train of thought past the 800-1000 word ADHD limit of blogreading tolerance, but I’ve found that doing so doesn’t really work very well. Each post stands by itself, its connection with the body of work on the blog as a whole being a matter of style/attitude and tenuously linked strands of interest rather than the systematic elaboration of a theme or narrative or argument. Plus the blogwriting is performative: I don’t know about you, Fabio, but as I write a post I can’t help but anticipate the kinds of reactions it might generate in the audience.
Having written quite a number of blogposts now, I find that I think about the topics differently from when I started blogging. I think in 800-1000 word segments, only tenuously connected with my thoughts from recent days, in response to and in anticipation of others’ thought blurbs. For me, writing in the longer form calls for a different sort of thinking: sustained, hierarchically structured, self-contained. I’ve found that writing like this demands a kind of hermetic isolation, a delving into the material that’s intimate and engrossing and enveloping.
Graham Harman talks about the divide within an object, between the surface interactive assemblages into which it enters and its hermetically withdrawn essence. Maybe as a human object he experiences this internal divide in writing and thinking as well. I certainly do. I wonder if internet-based philosophical writing will change the structure not only of philosophical discussion but of philosophical thinking, and consequently of philosophical ideas.
[Word count for this comment = 359.]
John, thanks for the comment. I agree with what you say, and actually you add something quite true when you speak about blog-writing being eminently performative: the consciousness of immediate readership surely affects the way we present arguments, differently than, for example, preparing a manuscript that we know will get published only several months later.
Don’t get me wrong, I do write and read long texts like everyone else. If I want to complete my PhD i will *have* to write my thesis. I do have a bookself full of books in my room and I am quite proud of them. I have nothing against this kind of philosophical products. Simply, I like to think that it might not be the *only* possible one. Take the simple example of a PhD thesis, which is a pillar the bottom of the structure of academic philosophy. Why am I not *allowed* to present anytying different than words on paper?
I also experience the ‘two ways of thinking’ that you describe, and admittedly I tend to favour the first, ‘short bursts’ one. Nonetheless, I enjoy the feeling of being involved in the translation of intimate thought into structured text. Similarly, i enjoy reading both kind of text, even if, once again, I tend to favour the first one. I do enjoy nicely structured philosophy (Meillassoux’s book is one of the few philosophical books that got me so engrossed into the progression of the argument that I read it from cover to cover without plucking anything else in the meantime, which is what I usually do) but I still have a deep attraction for flashes of ideas. I exagerate a little, but if I have to name one book which, formally, is the way of doing philosophy which I find more powerful, I would say Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
Anyway, I digress. My point was simply: if we concieve of new philosophy ‘products’ through different material media, not only our arguments will be presented differently, but the whole content of our philosophical thought will change, and I believe that this idea is supported by an OOP.
Late in your post and in your reply to my comment you discuss the possibility of different media for doing philosophy. You cite video games as an example. In my summary of Harman’s Guerrilla Metaphysics I said that it seemed to occupy space in some alternative steampunk reality, as if the book were a work of fiction. I didn’t mean this in a demeaning way. Certainly fiction writers “do” philosophy sometimes, using character and setting as a sort of laboratory for seeing how ideas might spool themselves out in certain contexts. And of course fiction too has changed, becoming much more visual in tv/film. A PhD thesis taking the form of a novel or a film or a game: sounds great to me.
I suspect you would have to think your philosophy differently if it’s to be good philosophy and good fiction/film/game at the same time. Translation is the preferred term, but I wonder if translation valorizes the original source. E.g., written in French by X, translated into English by Y; written in philosophy by A, translated into fiction by B. The translation would have to be bidirectional, with fiction/film/game being granted equal (ontological) status in the creation of this obscene hybrid monstrosity.
I agree on the ‘thinking differently’ issue. As for the different form of philosophy, I think it is a subtle matter since I do not want to argue for an ‘artistic’/poetic concretization of philosophical concepts. I am not very clear myself on this, but I think that a piece of conceptual art is not precisely what I have in mind when I refer to a differnt kind of philosophical ‘product’. Performative philosophy? Sounds a bit too active.
I guess that the issue is: if philosophy explicates itself in/through language, is it possible to find a way to disentangle it from pure and simple textuality without throwing it into the mystico-metaphorical register of the arts?
Are you accepting that philosophy is inextricable from some form of linguistic expression, whether textual or otherwise? Certainly you can disentangle it from text by talking it. Gaming it seems like a cross between the performative and the visually artistic. Extracting the philosophical from the textual without embedding it in some other medium of expression — is this the idealism of pure thought or an attempt to gain access to the philosophically real peeking out from behind the veil of language? No need to reply of course — just some thoughts that cross my mind based on your post and comments.