Every once in a while you can come across an article so extraordinary you are left wondering how it has not managed to penetrate the blogosphere- especially when it is about the blogosphere's reflexivity, or lack thereof! I feel grateful to Mark McMahon then for providing this material that can obviously expand a lot on what I have said about the blogosphere over the years in relation to academia. Indeed, one of the most innovative aspects of McMahon's piece is that he sets out the steps that can be taken to improve blogging as a form of learning. Not only bloggers, but anyone interested in pedagogy more generally, should find his suggestions highly worthwhile. Teachers of all stripes will probably recognise these patterns in their students--and yes--in their colleagues as well! Hell, anyone honest enough will recognise aspects of themselves in these categories. As for me, I can sometimes be a "worker blogger" and "a slogger blogger", but I'd like to think that I'm a "ponderer blogger" for the most part. I'm certainly not harboring any delusons about being an "uber blogger" though.
I was partially prompted to post this because I've been very disappointed by some of the stuff I've seen. One example that comes to mind--by no means atypical--is the whole flamewar about "grey vampires", insofar as its proponents are quick to label critics as having only a paralyzing effect on "digital discourse". Sadly though, in such instances, the benefits of "digital discourse" appear to be simply taken as read, rather than explained, letalone defended, in the depth they require to be substantiated. As McMahon in effect demonstrates, the risk is that such individuals are themselves falling victim to "bragger blogger" syndrome, "in which a high level of self-concept combined with a low level of metacognition meant that they were unable to critique their own work". By extension, this can result in an inability to accept criticism from others.
But ad hominem attacks are not the point of this post. I prefer to forgive and forget. Anyway, I think ad hominem attacks have already done enough damage and no doubt partly provoked the whole "grey vampire" backlash in the first place. So, it's time instead to move forward. McMahon is invaluable in this regard because he is not preoccupied with self-justification; he is making constructive criticisms which everyone can benefit from. And so now, without further ado, to a few of his key points:
Patterns of Self-Regulation in Blogging
To expose the types of thinking evident in blogs, six examples are presented that
represent the ‘typical’ blogger in terms of the elements of self-regulation discussed.
These are:
• the Slogger Blogger – demonstrating volitional control;
• the Worker Blogger – demonstrating cognitive strategy use;
• the Eager Blogger – demonstrating motivation;
• the Ponderer Blogger – demonstrating the reflection inherent in selfmonitoring
• the Bragger Blogger – demonstrating high self-concept; and
• the Über Blogger – demonstrating a high level of metacognition.
These are discussed through textual analysis of learning outputs that best exemplify the above characteristics. While it may at first appear to be a somewhat reductive approach to defining a complex process, it is hoped that it will provide a simple framework to assist future students in understanding themselves and the strategies that work best for them.
Strategy Use in Blogs – The Slogger Blogger and the Worker Blogger
The best evidence of strategy use is in the blogs within the unit on Writing for Games lay in the specific activities that students selected. Typical cognitive strategies evidenced by Worker Bloggers were:
• summarising readings;
• describing designs;
• sourcing other forms of information; and
• writing personal anecdotes.
Most students in the group were able to produce elements of the above. These varied, however, in the extent to which they demonstrated higher order thinking. Worker Bloggers could select strategies and apply them to their assignments. Summaries were the most common of those demonstrated by weaker students in that they tended to describe what the week’s reading was about. This involved some necessary selection of detail but not always an ability to effectively critique work. Similarly being able to express opinions, identifying links and articulating design ideas in an unintegrated way are all symptomatic of students who operate purely at the strategic level but without engaging in self-regulatory processes.
The best of these were also Slogger Bloggers, who showed an ability to manage effort. One ‘slogger’ provided lengthy descriptions of the reading but even then there was little that related back to the week’s topic and other materials such as the lecture notes. Failure to apply volitional control, on the other hand, resulted in little or no work contained within the blog. These Non Bloggers are typically the students that fall by the wayside over the semester. Only one student in this group could be classified as demonstrating high volitional control but weak cognitive strategy use.
This student simply reiterated the contents of that week’s lecture,with each post beginning, ‘This week was about…’. Ultimately there was little evidence of the student having done anything other than attend the class and reword the lecture material.
Non Bloggers may be amenable to a more rigorous and frequent approach to assessment to provide an external mechanism to ensure consistent effort. Slogger Bloggers, however, appear to have the opposite problem, where they cannot match their effort with a consistent level of quality. For those that do not have existing cognitive strategies, direct instruction may be helpful. The assumption that all students already have existing skills in areas such as summarising or internet research proved an inaccurate one, at least for the student in this cohort.
Motivational and Self‐Monitoring Processes in Blogs – the Eager Blogger and the
Ponderer Blogger
While most of the students in Writing for Games could submit their work and use received strategies such as summary appropriately, they did not always demonstrate a high level of motivation or self-monitoring. Ponderer Bloggers did more than apply strategy - they connected strategies together to enhance them and reflect on their value. A good example of this was one student who identified key elements of a reading on genre that were perceived as particularly relevant and then discussed in terms of how it applied in films as well as games. The student identified a contrasting perspective and sought to reconcile it with the one in the reading. As self-monitoring is a key regulatory process that assists in the formation of strategies it is important to provide students opportunities to reflect on their performance and to go beyond being purely Worker Bloggers. While it was not a component of this particular activity, one of the intrinsic benefits of blogging environments is its potential as a medium for peer review. Allowing for social remediation that is geared towards learners’ zones of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) provides a strong point from which to reflect as well as exposing learners to multiple perspectives on an issue. Such techniques may be able to support Ponderer Bloggers in developing new strategies.
Many of the students appeared to have a high level of motivation. This was evident in the stated enthusiasm for the concept within class and in their blogs, with one student in an early activity where they were required to discuss their motivations for studying the unit arguing that this was an opportunity for him to combine two of his loves –creative writing and gaming. Previous teaching evaluations have demonstrated a strong orientation towards having choice in their blogging activities and may have explained the large number of Eager Bloggers that made up this group. The level of enthusiasm inherent in the tone of some of their writing when either agreeing or disagreeing with concepts or ideas reinforced this (‘This article summed up my ideas perfectly’) as well as the strong evidence in the form of the outputs of motivation through the effort evident in their work. For the two students who could not be classified as Eager Bloggers it became clear that personal relevance was a major factor in their motivation or lack of it. The first statement of one student on her first week’s blog was that she ‘didn’t like writing’. In order to address these Slacker Bloggers, teaching strategies need to be in place that go beyond purely extrinsic motivators such as assessment to provide more intrinsic mechanisms to motivate learners. Malone (1981) for example described motivational factors such as Challenge, Control, Curiosity and Fantasy. In having a strong sense of ownership of their work, and a lot of choice in terms of activities, most students could be described as demonstrating Eager Blogger characteristics.
Self‐Awareness
The separation of self-awareness to affective and cognitive components is a necessary but somewhat arbitrary one. Corno (1986), argued for metacognition as the dominant controlling process; that ‘affect is the subjective perception of emotional states; thus associated attempts to control negative affect fall within the domain of metacognitive control’ (p. 334). While this may be true, most would argue that knowing oneself and believing in oneself are still discrete states of awareness. To have belief that is not based upon an accurate model of ones abilities suggests that on its own self-concept is a limiting state. This evidenced itself in the form of Bragger Bloggers within the unit Writing for Games. Gaming often is associated with fan-based activity where the line separating knowledge of the medium as a consumer and ability to actually design games can be a difficult one for novices to understand. Bragger Bloggers were most visible in this study where students articulated designs that tended to replicate their own favourite games without providing much originality or creativity. In this sense, their high level of self-concept combined with low level of metacognition meant that
they were unable to critique their own work. Providing a ‘reality check’ for such students to ensure that they continued to question the value of their work became an important focus of the feedback provided throughout the semester. This was done by asking students to question the originality of their ideas and provide a mini ‘exegesis’ to accompany their designs, which both placed their work in a cultural framework but separated it from other typical examples. Further evidence of Bragger Blogging could be found in a tendency of some students to critique other examples without applying the same level to their own work.
The flipside of self-concept was evident in Blamer Blogging, which in the case of this study proved to be a more damaging concept. This was evident through self-blame or the application of defense strategies such as self-handicapping, defensive pessimism or self-justification. Examples of this were where one student regularly qualified his ideas as ‘not very good’ but failed to identify specific aspects that could be improved.
Another student in class admitted that he deliberately left his work until the last minute, not because he could not regulate his effort but because he could then justify a bad mark as a result of his laziness rather than his talent. It is therefore important that blogging environments encourage supportive feedback and allow the risk taking inherent in many creative processes. Enabling students to identify a specific number of strengths and weaknesses in their work allows self-assessment to be done in a way that is not punitive, as does ensuring that peer feedback is always focused on improvement rather than identifying problems.
As the dominant controlling process there is evidence to support the contention that metacognitive blogging is the ultimate goal to be achieved. The best examples of blogs were those that provided a clear development of design and an ability to both justify design features and identify areas for improvement over coming weeks. Such students are called Über Bloggers in this paper because they have share some qualities with the Nietzschian concept the Übermensch – a transcendent individual characterised by a Will to Power, which is not necessarily a state of domination over others but more one of creativity and self-efficacy (Nietzsche, 1977). Such students may be seen as manifesting the true potential of blogging. The most metacognitive of
blogs demonstrated the best of its subordinate processes – enthusiastic and timely posts that bore witness to the application of key strategies both for design and learning within a framework of reflection and self-evaluation.
Recommendations
The profiles discussed in this paper are not designed to be a complete or fully accurate depiction of the multiple forms of discourse in blogs as they relate to self-regulation. Rather, they are provided here as a point of discussion and basis from which to explore the value of blogging for effective learning. Nevertheless the following key findings may prove useful for those attempting to use blogs as a learning tool:
• Provide extrinsic volitional rewards and controls such as frequent assessment.
• Provide direct instruction on the strategies inherent in blogging within the
academic discipline.
• Encourage intrinsic motivation by providing challenge, engaging curiosity and
promoting choice and personal relevance.
• Encourage multiple perspectives, contextualisation and recontextualisation
learning content.
• Provide opportunities for peer review.
• Provide a supportive environment for risk taking, identifying strengths as well
as weaknesses and providing opportunities for improvement.
• Have students not just reflect on their work but themselves as learners,
through self-assessment, journaling their thinking processes and developing
plans.
Read the full article here.
Showing posts with label blogosphere. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogosphere. Show all posts
Wednesday, 8 June 2011
Thursday, 17 June 2010
Envisioning Real Utopias
Erik Olin Wright has featured on this blog before. I argued that his approach makes a refreshing change from the focus on "the political", rather than "politics". In the time since, it's been confirmed repeatedly that the former is the mandate of those in the blogosphere and the academy for whom cultural studies is equal parts a literary and (Continental) philosophical practice. More often than not, this becomes a licence for theory to consciously align itself against sociology. In practical terms, this means the importance of institutionalisation as a means of situating radical imaginary significations is neglected. It's the classic vice of Zizekians and the most affirmative postmodern thinkers (as per my critical response to Steven Shaviro's trumpeting of the Ballardian Brigade, which I argued hit some very odd notes). A lamentable state of affairs to be sure, but I'm equally wary of the danger of drifting too far in the opposite direction where "politics" is reduced to the vulgar materialism of bloggers such as kenomatic (as I recall, his blog is now either moribund, or he's pulled up the drawbridge so that it is for "invited readers only", to defend himself once his targets started responding in kind).
It's not necessary though to get too hung up on personalities, as it is the conventions of particular networks that ultimately determine subject positions. This explains the linkage patterns crosscutting the blogosphere and the academy. But given their formative influence, it seems strange to me how the potential of a Cornelius Castoriadis or a Raymond Williams to mediate between these extremes gets lost. Both clearly foregrounded the importance of institutionalisation, while remaining equally attentive to the creativity of radical imaginary significations; their inherent power to realise new forms on a collective level. When I reflect on all the blogosphere theory I've seen in the past few years, the only person I know of to even mention Williams is Joshua Clover.
I'm confident though that if it is not happening in the blogosphere, political sociologists will grow more excited by the possibility of reading Wright along with Williams and Castoriadis. Until that eventuates, we have this lecture to enjoy:
It's not necessary though to get too hung up on personalities, as it is the conventions of particular networks that ultimately determine subject positions. This explains the linkage patterns crosscutting the blogosphere and the academy. But given their formative influence, it seems strange to me how the potential of a Cornelius Castoriadis or a Raymond Williams to mediate between these extremes gets lost. Both clearly foregrounded the importance of institutionalisation, while remaining equally attentive to the creativity of radical imaginary significations; their inherent power to realise new forms on a collective level. When I reflect on all the blogosphere theory I've seen in the past few years, the only person I know of to even mention Williams is Joshua Clover.
I'm confident though that if it is not happening in the blogosphere, political sociologists will grow more excited by the possibility of reading Wright along with Williams and Castoriadis. Until that eventuates, we have this lecture to enjoy:
Envisioning Real Utopias from West Coast Poverty Center on Vimeo.
Sunday, 7 February 2010
Britney is cheaper.....
Seeing this clip inspired me to dig around for some media sociology. You probably won't find anything comparable in the blogosphere though, where Kittler, McLuhan, Baudrillard, Zizek et al are the order of the day. An excellent critical response to the Canadian media theorists, McLuhan, Innis, can be found in Alan O'Connor's book on Raymond Williams, but I can't pass up this article. Here is another good overview of the contemporary relevance of Williams to television studies. I ordered a whole swag of books yesterday, including McGuigan's Cool Capitalism, so fortunately the aforementioned theoretical prejudices have been unable to completely dictate the terms of what publishers are willing to produce.
What I'm pointing to here, of course, is the publishing trend I've discussed before on this blog. I could have just as easily written that "Continental philosophy is cheaper", or Zizek is cheaper, or "Baudrillard is cheaper". The analogy holds in so far as the crisis in scholarly publishing has pushed more towards the production of textbooks or recondite, philosophically oriented cultural analysis, operating at a level of abstract generality where they are less likely to alienate readership outside of their original context of production by being too specific. An added bonus, from a publisher's point of view, is that production is both cheaper and faster, and hence more adaptable to market fluctuations, as it is not detained too much by painstaking empirical considerations. The irony therefore is that the theorists in question are prone to reading "abstraction" at face value as the dominant feature of contemporary capitalism, but don't seem prepared to countenance the fact that their networks are the beneficiaries of what they claim to deplore. So there's some compelling reasons why reflexive disclosure must be avoided by some bloggers! This common pitfall makes me more appreciative when I come across someone like kvond who can think reflexively.
Luckily I am also able to find solace with authors such as Bryan S Turner and Chris Rojek, who have attempted to mobilise sociology against the style of analysis I've been describing, which they refer to as the decorative turn. One of its chief characteristics is the penchant for oracular pronouncements, with the theorist descending upon the readership, like a god from a machine. Take Zardoz for example, who has nailed Zizek's style perfectly:
Now before anyone gets too judgemental about the justifications for this critique, it is advisable to first thoroughly study Turner and Rojek to understand the alternative they are substituting. They are offering more than the relativism associated with strong social constructionism, in their turn to "the social". But I still appreciate how social constructionism can act as a way station for later arrival at a more epistemologically robust position.
I can actually date my awareness of social constructionism to when I was about 12 years old. I was at home watching the "Punky Business" episode of The Goodies comedy series. I didn't know much about punk at the time, but I still sensed that most of the satire was hopelessly out of touch with why people wanted to become involved in such an exciting scene. The part though that did catch my attention was the program's scepticism about some of the music journalists who attached themselves to punk. The basic idea that some people were really making the news, and not just reporting [sic] it, brought home to me the opportunism that can be a feature of any scenius. To this very day, I chuckle at the memory of the satire of Caroline Coon in the form of a character called Caroline Kook (wonderfully played by Jane Asher). Kook cynically observes that the music press faces the imperative to always have a new scene to hype, or they would lose their market appeal to inform the otherwise clueless about what was hip. This can amount to much ado about nothing, which I was reminded of many times when reading Melody Maker and New Musical Express throughout the course of the 1980s (I found the Manchester scene after Joy Division, for example, boring beyond belief).
The point of this anecdote is that the novelty of change is commonly exaggerated. I say this in part because it concurs with Turner and Rojek's reference to Kierkegaard's words from 1846 to summarise the limitations of certain forms of contemporary theory. The Present Age describes a faux revolutionary age which purports to be addressing action, but which:
"transforms that expression of strength into a feat of dialectics: it leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance. Instead of culminating in a rebellion it reduces the inward reality of all relationships to a reflective tension which leaves everything standing but makes life as a whole ambiguous: so that everything continues to exist factually whilst by a dialectical deceit..it supplies a secret interpretation that it does not exist" (p. 42-3).
What I'm pointing to here, of course, is the publishing trend I've discussed before on this blog. I could have just as easily written that "Continental philosophy is cheaper", or Zizek is cheaper, or "Baudrillard is cheaper". The analogy holds in so far as the crisis in scholarly publishing has pushed more towards the production of textbooks or recondite, philosophically oriented cultural analysis, operating at a level of abstract generality where they are less likely to alienate readership outside of their original context of production by being too specific. An added bonus, from a publisher's point of view, is that production is both cheaper and faster, and hence more adaptable to market fluctuations, as it is not detained too much by painstaking empirical considerations. The irony therefore is that the theorists in question are prone to reading "abstraction" at face value as the dominant feature of contemporary capitalism, but don't seem prepared to countenance the fact that their networks are the beneficiaries of what they claim to deplore. So there's some compelling reasons why reflexive disclosure must be avoided by some bloggers! This common pitfall makes me more appreciative when I come across someone like kvond who can think reflexively.
Luckily I am also able to find solace with authors such as Bryan S Turner and Chris Rojek, who have attempted to mobilise sociology against the style of analysis I've been describing, which they refer to as the decorative turn. One of its chief characteristics is the penchant for oracular pronouncements, with the theorist descending upon the readership, like a god from a machine. Take Zardoz for example, who has nailed Zizek's style perfectly:
Now before anyone gets too judgemental about the justifications for this critique, it is advisable to first thoroughly study Turner and Rojek to understand the alternative they are substituting. They are offering more than the relativism associated with strong social constructionism, in their turn to "the social". But I still appreciate how social constructionism can act as a way station for later arrival at a more epistemologically robust position.
I can actually date my awareness of social constructionism to when I was about 12 years old. I was at home watching the "Punky Business" episode of The Goodies comedy series. I didn't know much about punk at the time, but I still sensed that most of the satire was hopelessly out of touch with why people wanted to become involved in such an exciting scene. The part though that did catch my attention was the program's scepticism about some of the music journalists who attached themselves to punk. The basic idea that some people were really making the news, and not just reporting [sic] it, brought home to me the opportunism that can be a feature of any scenius. To this very day, I chuckle at the memory of the satire of Caroline Coon in the form of a character called Caroline Kook (wonderfully played by Jane Asher). Kook cynically observes that the music press faces the imperative to always have a new scene to hype, or they would lose their market appeal to inform the otherwise clueless about what was hip. This can amount to much ado about nothing, which I was reminded of many times when reading Melody Maker and New Musical Express throughout the course of the 1980s (I found the Manchester scene after Joy Division, for example, boring beyond belief).
The point of this anecdote is that the novelty of change is commonly exaggerated. I say this in part because it concurs with Turner and Rojek's reference to Kierkegaard's words from 1846 to summarise the limitations of certain forms of contemporary theory. The Present Age describes a faux revolutionary age which purports to be addressing action, but which:
"transforms that expression of strength into a feat of dialectics: it leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance. Instead of culminating in a rebellion it reduces the inward reality of all relationships to a reflective tension which leaves everything standing but makes life as a whole ambiguous: so that everything continues to exist factually whilst by a dialectical deceit..it supplies a secret interpretation that it does not exist" (p. 42-3).
Friday, 7 August 2009
Making the university safe for intellectual life
In Twitter type mode today: only time for a brief rejoinder to my previous post. I just want to re-emphasise that the aim was to argue that there is something worth saving in the institution, something irreducible to the character types laboring under the limitations of current conditions. I've said enough in the past to make it very clear [I hope] that it would be very foolish to throw the baby out with the bathwater, which would leave only the blogosphere as a public sphere. It's not clear to me that much can be done for the blogosphere that would be capable of approximating the kind of prescription implied by the title of this post. But anything that could be done is precisely what is downgraded by certain tenured philosophers.
It's ironic that said academics can recklessly skate over the kind of argument I'm presenting here. I'm thinking, for example, of speculative realist Graham Harman, who on his blog makes some incoherent points about the kind of "mouthy punks" whom, he argues, dominate the blogosphere. Harman explains that his interest is only in democratising access to knowledge, rather than democratising knowledge production. I applaud Harman that he is willing to publish a book on Bruno Latour and make it available through open access. He is also willing to debate Latour in a public forum, thereby confirming the social epistemological imperative of having a democratic right of reply. But his distinction between access and production really makes no sense at all. Wouldn't it be the case rather that democratising access would have a "knock on" effect of collectively improving the quality of critical responses, thereby also holding the academic accountable by putting them on "trial"? It is also somewhat disingenuous of Harman to complain about bloggers flaming him behind pseudonyms, rather than standing behind their words. As an academic Harman should already be familiar with anonymous peer review, so in principle he has no grounds for taking exception to anonymous interlocutors. Harman should also understand that not everyone is employed by an organisation that values the expression of "academic freedom" to the extent to which he has grown accustomed as an academic, so it is entirely legitimate for bloggers to protect their true identities. An excellent critical entry point to get at the stakes of this argument can be found here (I recommend reading the responses to that post also, as well as following the links to Harman et al). Not coincidentally, much of that posting chimes with the reservations I've expressed many times about the continental philosophy blogosphere.
I say again: constructive criticism is indispensable, but it can only take place once some ground has been cleared by finding weaknesses in the arguments in question. Harman appears unconvincing then when he says that critics are only motivated by the resentment of not having a "project" of their own. Bullshit. I'm talking about a form of creative destruction that will clear a space for something else. I've always been consistent in this respect in the choice of alternatives I've substituted for the object of each critique. So in this spirit I will invoke again Fuller's social epistemological imperative of the integration of teaching and research in the university as a means of ensuring the continuous destruction of social capital:
It's ironic that said academics can recklessly skate over the kind of argument I'm presenting here. I'm thinking, for example, of speculative realist Graham Harman, who on his blog makes some incoherent points about the kind of "mouthy punks" whom, he argues, dominate the blogosphere. Harman explains that his interest is only in democratising access to knowledge, rather than democratising knowledge production. I applaud Harman that he is willing to publish a book on Bruno Latour and make it available through open access. He is also willing to debate Latour in a public forum, thereby confirming the social epistemological imperative of having a democratic right of reply. But his distinction between access and production really makes no sense at all. Wouldn't it be the case rather that democratising access would have a "knock on" effect of collectively improving the quality of critical responses, thereby also holding the academic accountable by putting them on "trial"? It is also somewhat disingenuous of Harman to complain about bloggers flaming him behind pseudonyms, rather than standing behind their words. As an academic Harman should already be familiar with anonymous peer review, so in principle he has no grounds for taking exception to anonymous interlocutors. Harman should also understand that not everyone is employed by an organisation that values the expression of "academic freedom" to the extent to which he has grown accustomed as an academic, so it is entirely legitimate for bloggers to protect their true identities. An excellent critical entry point to get at the stakes of this argument can be found here (I recommend reading the responses to that post also, as well as following the links to Harman et al). Not coincidentally, much of that posting chimes with the reservations I've expressed many times about the continental philosophy blogosphere.
I say again: constructive criticism is indispensable, but it can only take place once some ground has been cleared by finding weaknesses in the arguments in question. Harman appears unconvincing then when he says that critics are only motivated by the resentment of not having a "project" of their own. Bullshit. I'm talking about a form of creative destruction that will clear a space for something else. I've always been consistent in this respect in the choice of alternatives I've substituted for the object of each critique. So in this spirit I will invoke again Fuller's social epistemological imperative of the integration of teaching and research in the university as a means of ensuring the continuous destruction of social capital:
"It’s a commonplace to describe the functions of the modern university as the integration of teaching and research. The original idea was for this integration to take place in each professional academic, whose duty to push back the frontiers of knowledge was matched by an equal obligation to make that knowledge available to the widest audience possible. In The Sociology of Intellectual Life, I discuss these two phases as constituting the creative destruction of social capital. Here’s what I mean.
Research involves the accumulation of social capital, as academics, investors and clients create the networks needed to produce and maintain new knowledge. Most, if not all, of these people are motivated by the desire for competitive advantage in the economy, the intellectual field or society more generally. However, the Enlightenment norms of the university prescribe that this knowledge not be limited simply to those able to pay for it; hence, the pedagogical imperative. For its part, teaching requires the translation of knowledge claims into a language comprehensible by those who were not directly involved in its production or, for that matter, are likely to extend it in the directions intended by those so involved. In other words, teaching aims to destroy whatever initial competitive advantage the researchers had. This in turn triggers a new cycle of knowledge-based social capital creation, which will be itself overturned over time, etc. The overall result is a constant stream of innovation that ensures the dynamism of the social order".
Fuller argues that as teaching and research have become more split, this ideal of creatively destroying social capital becomes a more remote possibility. The danger then of Harman's petty style of pedagogy, which necessitates a policing of his interlocutors, is that it attests to academia becoming the victim of its own success in a manner consistent with an emphasis on greater technical specialisation in the period since WW2. Breadth is consequently sacrificed for depth (remember Harman's injunction about not democratising production) and Fuller here echoes Ben Agger's basic argument that was cited in my previous post. The net result of the breakdown each describes is an absence of dynamism in the social order and a mirroring in the blogosphere of the worst excesses of a university unsafe for intellectual life.
So why can't we try instead for something other than the self-serving protection of academic real estate? If Harman's statements demonstrate the extent of his willingness to become reflexive about his knowledge practices, and their effect on others, then he does little to encourage greater interest on my part in his work. It's the reason I've stuck with Fuller. Perhaps it would be an interesting exercise to compare Fuller's critiques of Latour with Harman's general approach in his book The Prince of Networks (just Google to find the free downloadable copy). But until such a time, I will avoid his book like the plague.....
To get a greater sense of Fuller's perspective, I recommend listening to these podcasts:
Steve Fuller (Sociology), The Sociology of Intellectual Life
Monday, 15 June 2009
Thank you Melissa Gregg for this honest, damning indictment
God help you if you're a young scholar just starting out. Why isn't it mandatory then for academic departments to hand out copies of this article to their aspiring postgraduate students? Don't be fooled that you will be pursuing your research interests wherever they take you, and answerable only to your peers, when key decisions about research impact factors are made by bureaucrats and publishers. To be sure, what Gregg says here basically echoes something I had read years ago about the "crisis of scholarly publishing" written by John B. Thompson in Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States, but I still feel her article is invaluable by offering local evidence of a more global trend.
But Gregg's testimony should also be a sobering reminder for bloggers, given how much of the research produced in universities later becomes fodder for the blogosphere. It puts paid to the thinly disguised, self aggrandising recent claim of kpunk, for example, who argues that the best work in institutions are produced by those who had faced a period of destitution "outside". The problem is that his category is simply too broad (given the continual influx of "new blood"/postgrad students, along with young academics just starting their careers) and that the kinds of authors kpunk routinely cites as his confirmatory authorities where theoretical matters are concerned are themselves among the most successful byproducts of the institution, rather than shaped by any formative experience of "destitution". Perhaps such a characterisation holds to some extent in the independent/avant garde vs "the mainstream" music circles kpunk moves in, but if it is up to the critic to "redeem" these artists by interpreting them through academic concepts, then "destitution" starts to look more unconvincing as an apriori indicator of quality in that context as well.
Here's why: if you're a "teledon" like Badiou or generally otherwise renowned as per Fred Jameson, you will have so much autonomy in your work that the vagaries of anything like the ERA need never be of any real concern: you will be a nodal point in the academic network that exerts a huge gravitational pull, meaning you will be orbited by a large number of "satellites" i.e. other academics writing second order observations of your work, thereby consolidating your centrality in the collective attention space. As highlighted by the concept of "mundane excellence", the monopoly on resources available to you and the associated high comfort level act as a feedback mechanism, in turn generating more confidence and, not least, the ideas that power your productive output. This means it's not necessarily any experience of destitution "outside" the institution that makes a qualitative difference, given how the internal networks of each institution, and the larger interpretive community of which they form a component part, are themselves internally divided. Melissa Gregg really drives home this point. Oftentimes the central figures are able to produce the best work simply because they have the biggest monopoly on the resources needed to get things done.
Here's why: if you're a "teledon" like Badiou or generally otherwise renowned as per Fred Jameson, you will have so much autonomy in your work that the vagaries of anything like the ERA need never be of any real concern: you will be a nodal point in the academic network that exerts a huge gravitational pull, meaning you will be orbited by a large number of "satellites" i.e. other academics writing second order observations of your work, thereby consolidating your centrality in the collective attention space. As highlighted by the concept of "mundane excellence", the monopoly on resources available to you and the associated high comfort level act as a feedback mechanism, in turn generating more confidence and, not least, the ideas that power your productive output. This means it's not necessarily any experience of destitution "outside" the institution that makes a qualitative difference, given how the internal networks of each institution, and the larger interpretive community of which they form a component part, are themselves internally divided. Melissa Gregg really drives home this point. Oftentimes the central figures are able to produce the best work simply because they have the biggest monopoly on the resources needed to get things done.
But for those less fortunate academics, the only major problem used to be that you had considerable latitude to work to your own standards, with the result that you were never sure if you had achieved them or not. It is a problem that has been relativised since, rather than removed, given how the government now prescribes more targets. Then as now, this working environment can lead to a lot of depression and burnout (confirmation of this plight can be found in Fred Pahl's ethnographies of his fellow sociologists, virtually anything written by my sociological hero, Ian Craib, as well as in Andrew Metcalfe and Anne Game's Passionate Sociology). The academic might find themselves in a state of constant anxiety: no matter how many or how quickly the buckets are filled, they can still potentially spring a leak as soon as a peer identifies an omission in the argument or even the cited literature. Leaky academic papers can result in leaky selfhoods, which means a leaky agency lacking the resilience needed to push on through a fallow period. If nothing is ever definitively accomplished, in the same cut and dried manner as something as mundane as, for example, winning a tennis match, one becomes more susceptible to the structure of feeling known as melancholy (cf Gershom Sholem). It too can be understood as a kind of feedback mechanism, but one that fails to indemnify those who experience it. This results in a curtailing of creative expression and sometimes even dropping out altogether. Once this occurs the dominance of the more central figures in the interpretive community becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
And then there is the feeling of powerlessness, of being fatuous, forced to live with a Cassandra complex in a world where revolutionary change is not close at hand. This is exactly the kind of dilemma that Adorno talks about in Minima Moralia. So basically the problems Melissa Gregg describes compound the earlier ones by adding a level of pressure from publishers and government alike. No doubt accountability is required to some extent, but surely not if it seriously compromises the historical function of the university as a site of free enquiry to the point where Australian academics can no longer even write about their own country!!
I don't have an institutional affiliation, so I have no vested interest in saying these things to damn bloggers and independent researchers alike tout court. To be sure, I've written before about academic "peer review" as a potentially more democratic distributive mechanism than the blogosphere, but I'm forced to concede it can be open to abuse too, in the sense that the "invisible college" can mean editorial panels can be stacked by personal acquaintances, acting under the pretence of anonymity, meaning that decisions are not always truly merit based. And of course, anonymity can make it harder to prove that someone has appropriated your ideas for their own gain if your work is rejected. But I am still confident that these reviews can be "blind" enough in most cases to ensure that abuses are not always the order of the day.
I've also previously mentioned how bloggers and independent researchers could be empowered if they could break the deadlock of publishers protecting their intellectual property rights: let's hope a greater push towards "open access" is not far away then. Academics could be held more accountable too if they were obliged to more often meet the independents "on their own turf" (i.e. journals), thereby having to respond to criticisms rather than just dismissing them as usual because of the medium in which they appear (i.e. blogs, or smaller publishers without the same standard [sic] of recognised gatekeepers). Open access would be a great way too for academic libraries to save on the hefty journal subscription costs that publishers force them to pay.....
Sadly though, this reference to libraries also leads me to think that the "Right Foucauldian technicism" that characterises theoretical research in cultural policy has come back to bite us on the arse, in the sense that the people who graduated with this mindset in the late 1980s have since gone on to staff the government departments that are now reshaping our educational policies in terms of the ERA "targets". Putting to one side, for the moment (as this mindset dictates), how education is supposed to be critical, the fact that it should also be practical has been subsumed by the understanding that it is primarily a technology for reshaping the conduct of liberal subjects. This in effect means that your subjectivity is perpetually problematised by being made aware of contingency. Capitalising on the dilemma Adorno spoke about (my "buckets" analogy), these Foucauldians then argue that culture offers a range of "solutions", that the citizen will then buy at the marketplace (I'm thinking here of Toby Miller's The Well Tempered Self, but I could also be talking about Tony Bennett, or older texts, such as Culture and Anarchy). Of course, these solutions only hold for a short time, and then new answers will be sought. It's the "society of control" described by Deleuze all over again, but the great irony is that many of those familiar with this text, be they in academia or the blogosphere, seem not to have thought too reflexively about their own information seeking habits in these terms. This is no trivial matter to consider: I certainly can't think of even one case when any of these people have explained how they found the current text they're writing about by visiting a library. Why this blindspot then? Is it because the required voracious reading habits can only be accommodated by the liberal solution of private consumption? Is this what it really means to always be on the "cutting edge"?
So Melissa's article has haunted me, as I've started to think more about how academia, and its variants in the blogosphere, can be easily co opted by the society of control. Indeed, this may well be the dark truth of Foucault's remark, "people know what they do and why they do it. Fewer of them know what they do does......" For example, this critical dimension regarding institutions is unfortunately lacking in Jodi Dean's contribution to Framing Theory's Empire. Dean contends that some people will become so disenchanted with difficult continental theory that they will turn back to simplistic empiricism. Dean compares this reactionary attitude to her own Southern Baptist upbringing, when she was told that all that was needed was the Holy Spirit contained in the Bible. I am arguing though that it is worth looking for a more reflexive, critical approach in the interest of navigating between the Charybdis of [certain strands of] continental philosophy and the Scylla of positivism. Clearly then it is not just the privatisation of research habits I'm concerned about, but how Dean writes as if the "difficulty" of her preferred texts somehow automatically exempts them from the locus of control, when in fact the opposite may be true. It hardly seems coincidental either that she also make disparaging references to "mainstream" and "conventional" theorists in a way that reminds me of the shortcomings in kpunk's piece (he's on her blogroll too, offering some proof of the continuities in their thought). In short, I was disappointed by Dean's response as Framing Theory's Empire was supposed to be focused on institutional histories, and such "social epistemologies" are in short supply nowadays. It's not clear to me that the dozen or so Zizek texts (!!!) Dean says are awaiting her attention next will offer any real assistance in this regard.
My argument therefore is that more thinking about what we do does, and its relationship to our information seeking behaviour, is a step in the right direction. Melissa Gregg offers a useful guiding light in her critique of business as usual in academia, and for this we owe her our thanks.
My argument therefore is that more thinking about what we do does, and its relationship to our information seeking behaviour, is a step in the right direction. Melissa Gregg offers a useful guiding light in her critique of business as usual in academia, and for this we owe her our thanks.
Friday, 15 May 2009
Dietrich Scheunemann
It seems I've virtually chewed up all of my allocated bandwith for this month, so my broadband speed has been virtually strangled as a result by the ISP. This makes it harder to find interesting stuff to blog about, letalone do the research I need for my other [paid] work. As a result my planned posts have had to be temporarily put on hiatus until things pick up again.
Be this as it may, I couldn't resist putting up something about one of my favourite topics: the politics of the avant garde. My reflections are spurred by noticing a lot of stuff in the blogosphere of late (i.e. in the Continental philosophy meets avant garde music blogosphere) debating the claim that capitalism has now accelerated to the point where cultural innovation has become exhausted. This occurrence is then used to explain why creative energies have [allegedly] lain fallow in popular music.
By way of a response, two central questions have arisen for me. Firstly, how can these claims be qualitatively and quantitatively differentiated from the posthistoire trope that has characterised modernity even long before Gehlen's proclamation in 1963 of a state of "cultural crystallisation"? If they can't be, then it is difficult to see that there is really anything unique about the current state of affairs. I suppose one available option is to ascribe causal primacy to an intensification of the forces of production, leading to programmatic interpretations of the relationship between base and superstructure, and even the "virtualization of the human". This approach, which is dubious because of its reliance to varying degrees on forms of technological determinism, constitutes the essence of "cybermaterialism". In these terms, the bloggers in question are in effect describing a formal correspondence with the musicians they write about, who can now more freely sample and manipulate sounds through digital means, much in the same manner as the blogger who is able to cut and paste hypertext. So culture eventually becomes recycling rather than innovation. This state of affairs is then quickly generalised to encapsulate our collective, inherited historical fate.
In the latter form reference is made to "the postmodern condition" and/or "the information age". And so to my second question: I wonder if the story would be so neat if the quantitative/qualitative issues I've raised were mapped to a cultural sociology of the avant garde? One of the major reasons I say this is that so many of these discussions in the blogosphere are framed with reference to Fred Jameson's thesis, without having acknowledged its inherent problem as pinpointed by Dietrich Scheunemann: Jameson conflates postmodernism and avant garde. So I'm forced to agree with Scheunemann that there is plenty of scope to test the heterogeneity of the avant garde's creativity, which can then be compared and contrasted with resurgent notions of "posthistoire". But it's also not sufficient to adduce evidence from one facet of the arts, as this simplifies the myriad of network relationships the avant garde (s) have attempted to involve themselves in over time, with varying degrees of success. This fact explains why Scheunemann was involved in a working group that produced around 21 books and anthologies on the subject. The extent of this activity hardly attests to an exhaustion of creative energy.
My own thought is that the avant garde will continue to perform its usual role for popular culture: a kind of weather vane offering advanced warning of impending conditions. We'll thus continue to see pioneers receiving belated recognition by their successors, who have managed to synthesise the original's creative approach into a more palatable popular form, thereby reaping the financial rewards in the process. But before leaping to the conclusion that this is only a pessimistic lesson about the taming of radical impulses, I would recommend weighing up the breaks, as well as the continuities. Reading Scheunemann as well as David Hopkins' (ed) The Neo Avant Garde is a positive first step in this direction.
The next step is to qualify the extent of "cultural exhaustion" by acknowledging how our common beliefs and interests may "constitute a res publica: a virtual public sphere that unites the critic and the criticized in a common fate in the empirical world" (S.Fuller, The Knowledge Book, p. 16). The inference that may be drawn from Fuller, with reference to the blogosphere critics I've discussed here, is that they have failed to play the social epistemologist's role of the interested non-participant. Were they to have followed Fuller's dictum, a greater sense could have been imparted of how "the relevant res publica may shift according to whom the critic is criticizing". Instead, a high degree of narcissistic identification between bloggers and musicians hypostatises the dilemma of all avant gardes with no troops left behind them. Or rather, as an exasperated Raymond Williams wondered aloud (when responding to Stuart Hall's diagnosis of "the toad in the garden"; i.e. Thatcherism), "will there be no end to petite bourgeois critics making long term adjustments to short term situations?"
Be this as it may, I couldn't resist putting up something about one of my favourite topics: the politics of the avant garde. My reflections are spurred by noticing a lot of stuff in the blogosphere of late (i.e. in the Continental philosophy meets avant garde music blogosphere) debating the claim that capitalism has now accelerated to the point where cultural innovation has become exhausted. This occurrence is then used to explain why creative energies have [allegedly] lain fallow in popular music.
By way of a response, two central questions have arisen for me. Firstly, how can these claims be qualitatively and quantitatively differentiated from the posthistoire trope that has characterised modernity even long before Gehlen's proclamation in 1963 of a state of "cultural crystallisation"? If they can't be, then it is difficult to see that there is really anything unique about the current state of affairs. I suppose one available option is to ascribe causal primacy to an intensification of the forces of production, leading to programmatic interpretations of the relationship between base and superstructure, and even the "virtualization of the human". This approach, which is dubious because of its reliance to varying degrees on forms of technological determinism, constitutes the essence of "cybermaterialism". In these terms, the bloggers in question are in effect describing a formal correspondence with the musicians they write about, who can now more freely sample and manipulate sounds through digital means, much in the same manner as the blogger who is able to cut and paste hypertext. So culture eventually becomes recycling rather than innovation. This state of affairs is then quickly generalised to encapsulate our collective, inherited historical fate.
In the latter form reference is made to "the postmodern condition" and/or "the information age". And so to my second question: I wonder if the story would be so neat if the quantitative/qualitative issues I've raised were mapped to a cultural sociology of the avant garde? One of the major reasons I say this is that so many of these discussions in the blogosphere are framed with reference to Fred Jameson's thesis, without having acknowledged its inherent problem as pinpointed by Dietrich Scheunemann: Jameson conflates postmodernism and avant garde. So I'm forced to agree with Scheunemann that there is plenty of scope to test the heterogeneity of the avant garde's creativity, which can then be compared and contrasted with resurgent notions of "posthistoire". But it's also not sufficient to adduce evidence from one facet of the arts, as this simplifies the myriad of network relationships the avant garde (s) have attempted to involve themselves in over time, with varying degrees of success. This fact explains why Scheunemann was involved in a working group that produced around 21 books and anthologies on the subject. The extent of this activity hardly attests to an exhaustion of creative energy.
My own thought is that the avant garde will continue to perform its usual role for popular culture: a kind of weather vane offering advanced warning of impending conditions. We'll thus continue to see pioneers receiving belated recognition by their successors, who have managed to synthesise the original's creative approach into a more palatable popular form, thereby reaping the financial rewards in the process. But before leaping to the conclusion that this is only a pessimistic lesson about the taming of radical impulses, I would recommend weighing up the breaks, as well as the continuities. Reading Scheunemann as well as David Hopkins' (ed) The Neo Avant Garde is a positive first step in this direction.
The next step is to qualify the extent of "cultural exhaustion" by acknowledging how our common beliefs and interests may "constitute a res publica: a virtual public sphere that unites the critic and the criticized in a common fate in the empirical world" (S.Fuller, The Knowledge Book, p. 16). The inference that may be drawn from Fuller, with reference to the blogosphere critics I've discussed here, is that they have failed to play the social epistemologist's role of the interested non-participant. Were they to have followed Fuller's dictum, a greater sense could have been imparted of how "the relevant res publica may shift according to whom the critic is criticizing". Instead, a high degree of narcissistic identification between bloggers and musicians hypostatises the dilemma of all avant gardes with no troops left behind them. Or rather, as an exasperated Raymond Williams wondered aloud (when responding to Stuart Hall's diagnosis of "the toad in the garden"; i.e. Thatcherism), "will there be no end to petite bourgeois critics making long term adjustments to short term situations?"
Wednesday, 18 March 2009
Ghosts in the academic writing machine?
I immediately suspected that Latour would have cited Gabriel Tarde as a precursor to actor network theory. So one needs to be extremely careful about where the critiques of cosmopolitanism in Schillmeier's article could end up taking you.
Derrida also wrote a slim volume on cosmopolitanism (a popular term in social theory that has been favourably mentioned previously on this blog), so I must check the bibliography of said article, and once I get hold of it, trace other elective affinities as well.
It's the sort of conversation that I believe could and, moreover, should, be taking place more generally in Continental philosophy circles as well (including the blogosphere), but it does not seem to be. From what I've seen lately on blogs, the greater focus there is on (the usual, hermetically closed off, internal conversations) regarding subjects such as whether Deleuze's philosophical system presupposes a biological metaphysics.
Fine, do a rigorous scholarly philosophical reading in such terms, but even if you disagree with the conception of philosophy as "underlabourer" for the social sciences, why not still attempt to foster as well a more expansive public debate, say along the lines of the Steve Fuller references I've also listed here? Why just address another philosopher and not the representative of another discipline or some other greater public interest/representative? By the same token, why just append some contemporary philosopher to the latest movie, dubstep album etc, as per usual in the Continental philosophy blogosphere, when you are not really logically obliged to stand behind your words by being made answerable to the subject in question? How high, really, are the stakes in those kinds of "analysis" anyway? [once they become ends in themselves]
I say this because I can remember derridata voicing some strong critiques years ago of a fellow philosophy postgrad who was deep in the throes of a doctorate: "it should be finished soon...it's practically writing itself". Precisely my point: the student becomes a mere ghost in an academic writing machine, thanks to the autonomy of the discourses in question. It's almost like a game.
I know that someone such as Geoffrey Bennington would argue that my line of reasoning presupposes "already knowing what politics is", so it can only amount to something like "journalism". But surely this pro forma response is itself nonsense? For how could a philosopher already know what form the conversations would take until they had made the leap of faith and attempted to dialogue with the other? Bennington writes commentaries (or exegesis if you prefer), but he also teaches in an institutional setting (a university), where surely he does not believe that such a formal setting, by virtue of its very existence, closes off all possibilities for dialogue? It's hard to see how he could justify his existence as a [tenured] philosopher if he believed otherwise. So why wouldn't the same principle apply in other formal (or even less formal) settings, albeit outside of the academic circuit, where Bennington could also test his philosophical propositions?
I don't mean to imply in every case this requires participating in something like a science court. It could be as simple as posting some thoughts to a blog [outside one's immediate area of expertise] that addresses important scientific debates with clear public ramifications, such as, for example, Telic Thoughts.
It's one thing then to argue that the death of the author thesis absolves the academic philosopher of personal responsibility, and that the upside of this is that your work will be taken up subsequently in all sorts of other contexts you cannot personally control (so writing is like a message in a bottle). Changing metaphors, it's another thing though to acknowledge that the apple does not usually fall very far from the tree, which becomes immediately obvious when one notes the similarities between academic practice and what goes on in the Continental philosophy noosphere. The only difference I can see is a greater willingness by the latter to apply the canon to popular culture, but with the publication of titles such as The Matrix and Philosophy, even that gap may be rapidly narrowing. How about a reflexive inquiry then to try to explain why this might be the case? I'm pretty sure though that thinkers such as Zizek would only be pleased with these developments, as he has cannily played both sides all along. Of course, I'm not claiming that none of this kind of work can be of any value, I'm simply wondering why so often it seems in some circles to be "all there is".
And so to some articles I hope to acquaint myself with before making any further attempts to try to fill in the gaps.....
The Social, Cosmopolitanism & Beyond Michael Schillmeier
- History of the Human Sciences 2009;22 87-109
http://hhs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/22/2/87?etoc - History of the Human Sciences 2009;22 87-109
http://hhs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/22/2/87?etoc - Review symposium: Steve Fuller's The New Sociological Imagination: introduction: Steve Fuller, The New Sociological Imagination. London: Sage Publications, 2006. 240 pp
- Zaheer Baber
- History of the Human Sciences 2009;22 110-114
http://hhs.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/22/2/110?etoc - Fuller's project of humanity: social sciences or sociobiology?: Steve Fuller, The New Sociological Imagination. London: Sage Publications, 2006
- Francis Remedios
- History of the Human Sciences 2009;22 115-120
http://hhs.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/22/2/115?etoc - The fabrication of man: Steve Fuller, The New Sociological Imagination. London: Sage Publications, 2006
- Peter Baehr
- History of the Human Sciences 2009;22 121-127
http://hhs.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/22/2/121?etoc - Disenchantment of the world and the devaluation of human species: Steve Fuller, The New Sociological Imagination. London: Sage Publications, 2006
- Chai Choon-Lee
- History of the Human Sciences 2009;22 128-132
http://hhs.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/22/2/128?etoc - Fuller's nostalgic imagination: Steve Fuller, The New Sociological Imagination. London: Sage Publications, 2006
- Christopher Kevill
- History of the Human Sciences 2009;22 133-137
http://hhs.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/22/2/133?etoc - In search of sociological foundations for the project of humanity: Steve Fuller, The New Sociological Imagination. London: Sage Publications, 2006
- Steve Fuller
- History of the Human Sciences 2009;22 138-145
http://hhs.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/22/2/138?etoc
Ghosts in the Machine: Publication Planning in the Medical Sciences
Sergio Sismondo
Social Studies of Science 2009;39 171-198http://sss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/39/2/171?etoc
Monday, 9 March 2009
Cold weather tourism
Before I went on holiday, I made brief reference to the topic of "extreme tourism". There I hinted at a possible rapprochement between the society as "camp" or "ballardian" and more empirically robust accounts of such zones in the academic field of tourist studies. I'm greatly impressed by what I've seen so far in the field of nissology ("Island Studies") as a possible suitable candidate. Particularly noteworthy is the series of related questions posed in relation to "extreme tourism", with a focus here on "cold weather tourists".
If these are partly methodological issues, then I see Island Studies as a vehicle for escaping the traps found in the kind of "cultural theory" that dominates the blogosphere (which I prefer to call the noosphere in this case), and, to a lesser extent, cultural studies in its more formal academic settings. I've previously mentioned how the "fish scale model of omniscience" provides a ready explanation for the ubiquity of Continental philosophy in the "noosphere". If the problem there is an inflated, abstract, grand mode of theorising, at the other end of the scale, difficulties can accrue where large scale empirical verification requires greater team project work. What this can mean in practice is that the team of researchers can more easily become beholden to the wishes of their sponsors, thereby denuding the work of critical content. In other words, it becomes a question of economies of scale.
The appeal of so-called "middle range" theorising lies in navigating between these extremes. Given my [oft stated] reservations about actor network theory, I am unhappy whenever I encounter attempts to frame it as a form of middle range theory. However, I believe there is still something good about such conversations taking place, as they at least imply a degree of reflexivity on the part of the authors about what and how they are doing something, and the kinds of problems that might arise as a result. Again, this characteristic is largely absent in the noosphere, which is why I refer to that method repeatedly in this blog in terms of its being "an avant garde formalism". While not couched in exactly these terms, a very good explanation of middle range theory, reflexivity, descriptive and normative critique, can be found here, which teases out the full implications of the issues I'm trying to raise.
An example of the kind of work that interests me is using reflexivity in conjunction with the "key questions" raised in nissology in relation to "cold weather tourism" (as per the above link). So rather than just do a typical noosphere style "mash up" of, say, Fred Jameson and Slavoj Zizek, this alternative method offers the promise of elucidating the reflexivity of authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson. For example, how may a text such as Antarctica be construed as a reflexive commentary on the "key questions" raised by nissologists when discussing "cold weather tourism"?
What may start to emerge is a sense of reflexivity where this means a fluid conversation between theory and empirical work (and one should remember that Robinson heavily researches the subject matter of all of his novels to the fullest extent possible, in addition to foregrounding how the context is mediated by particular, and often conflicting, world views). Perhaps a nissologist could justifiably apply said method to other texts as well, such as Herzog's documentary Encounters at the End of the World? To convince me otherwise, you would have to explain in detailed methodological terms why it was not possible in principle (and I would take a lot of convincing).
I also see it as an interesting way of expanding "key question" number 3 in the study of "extreme tourism". Consider then the compatibility with Fred Jameson's discussion of the connotations of "extreme cold" on page 268 of his Archaeologies of the Future, where he notes how the loss of physical autonomy in a harsh environment equates also to a loss of psychic autonomy. This makes the layers of insulation a cold environment necessitates stand in contrast to the tropics, where heat:
"...is conveyed as a kind of dissolution of the body into the outside world, a loss of that clean separation from clothes and external objects that gives you your autonomy and allows you to move about freely...."
Or so it would seem...afterall, maybe it is wrong to say something opposite is at stake here, so that the cold environment would necessarily consolidate a more autonomous, survivalist personality. In situations such as these, what could scandalize the typology is that section of Cyclonopedia, which discusses "openness" and the "outside". It is seemingly the act of resistance, the attempt at maintaining autonomy, that can make for a strange attractor for those forces that may affect a transformation into something else. Think here of that quintessential "body horror" film, John Carpenter's The Thing, and note then how Jameson's terms such as "dissolution" can be equally applicable in the "cold weather" setting. However, I don't see this as troubling the nissology paradigm, as "question 3" is posed as an open question, and must be tested and contextualized in relation to the other listed key questions. Any problem in this instance would seem to relate more to Jameson than nissology per se, which is more equally balanced [than Jameson] in terms of receptiveness to empirical, case by case studies.
Thursday, 22 January 2009
Roadkill on the information superhighway?
Once every so often I try to be a bit reflexive on this blog by talking about the nature of the blogosphere, and as alluded to by the title of this post, the place of this blog in it. I think it is already 2 years ago in "Why Bother Having Sitemeter on This Blog?" that I raised a swag of related issues. Over time I feel that my intuitions have been reinforced, to the extent that things have pretty much come full circle. I guess the initial attraction of blogging was how liberating it felt compared to both the academic thesis I'd just finished, and the academic papers I work on as a freelance editor. Indeed, one of my very first posts, "Words of advice for young people..." and later, "scholarshit", captured some of my feelings about academic gatekeeping methods. I figured, if nothing else, posting regularly would help sharpen up my writing skills.
So then I started to blog, when suddenly it hit me: the kind of theory I'd critically engaged with in my academic work had not disappeared, but simply migrated into the new medium (on this blog, this is usually taken to mean the application of Continental philosophy to popular culture). Does this mean then that everything in both spheres is just relativised (and reified) into one gigantic "will to power"? Only to a certain extent, because the importance difference is this: the blogosphere is a clusterfuck:
"A chaotic mess that might be compared to group sex, in which participants are so intertwined and intermingled that they might penetrate each other rather than their intended target. Its more precise usage describes a particular kind of Catch 22, in which multiple complicated problems mutually interfere with each other's solution."
In other words, the blogosphere is a tendentious medium bereft of the gatekeeping mechanisms of academic publishing that provide some modicum of parity and objectivity. For the advantage in the academic world is its approximation of that great Australian democratic innovation- the secret ballot. When a paper is submitted, it is subject to a double blind peer review process, whereby the author does not know who will be reviewing their work, and the reviewers don't know who the author is. This helps indemnify the piece from the more insidious characteristics of the blogosphere. Consider this contrast; even if a blogger chooses to write anonymously, they can still easily become a prisoner of their own creation, at least when posting on their own blog. Afterall, one is left open to forms of censure requiring no reasoned response, but simply the removal of any links ("trace evidence" if you like) back to the [original] critical post. Modifying Richard Dawkins' biological metaphor of the "selfish gene" somewhat, this means that the sharing of links can potentially function as nothing more than vehicles for bloggers to ensure their own reproduction. Once you realise this, the economics of attention in the blogosphere, as measured by numbers of links, hits, or even comments, appears more dubious than citation practices in academia (where at review level authors are at least assured of detailed referee reports that can help the author develop their work, even if the reports are very critical).
I had my suspicions at the outset though, which is one of the major reasons I chose for the iconography of this blog the mummified space jockey transmitting from the outermost rim of the information grid. I also knew that social theorists/sociologists were, for the most part, conspicuous only by their absence in the blogsophere. But like I also said, I am hardly one for valorising academic publishing for its own sake. I instead look forward to the day when there is a more equitable distribution of resources, thanks to the push towards open access publishing as the new model. One of the major problems therefore is the monopoly on access that academics currently enjoy, thanks to the exorbitant subscription prices publishers slap on their ejournals, which prevents independent researchers from accessing them through academic libraries. This problem is compounded by the cost of databases, which gives the independent researcher little alternative to resources such as Google Scholar.
Having said that, in the interim I like to dream of more cooperative models eventuating. Believe me, sour grapes are not, and have never been, the underlying issue here. If they were, I would need to have previously made a concerted [unsuccessful] effort to ingratiate myself into the inner circle. Neither myself, or the other team members on this blog, have ever bothered to do this. So when I question myself, all I have to do is think of the kinds of critical issues that might have arisen had, for example, another [popular] blog dedicated to one particular famous science fiction author, instituted to the letter the kind of critical methodology explicitly foregrounded in the published work of that blogger's academic supervisor (to wonder aloud though, is not necessarily to imply opportunism on the part of that blogger, I am just curious about the potentially detrimental effect on that blog's status as a nodal point in its associated interpretive community).
I can never forget the passage where said supervisor writes in his book about a popular strain of cultural theory, (mirroring in many regards, the issues I can sometimes have with Continental philosophy meets popular culture in the blogosphere type writing), introduced by Stuart Hall, who he pictures as a kind of Dr Frankenstein, laboring in his [quoting from memory here as I don't have the book here with me as I write this), "filthy workshop of creation...stitching together a theoretical Frankenstein's monster out of semiotics... [and Post-Marxist theory]...much of this is of little real value, but today it is alive, alive-o!" By extension, Hall's initiatives cleared a path for later cultural studies, and acted as enablers for his British contemporaries, such as the Lacanian strand of film studies, the house organ of which was the journal Screen. Of course, this ferment of activity also provided an entry point for Slavoj Zizek into the English speaking world, and later, into the blogosphere (where it has come to dominate avant garde cultural theory).
The later example should serve as a reminder of the real world analogue to trends in the "virtual" blogosphere, which a sociology of intellectuals might suggest can be more dependent on mundane institutional considerations/niche marketing, than [desirable] normative values per se. But there is another way forward. In a spirit more of engagement than attack, I wonder if a more dialectical approach is possible, wherein each side could, to some extent, buttress the other? I might be about to make a brief contribution along these lines in a posting on "extreme tourism". Some of the reasons this generally does not come about can be found here, and, in an even more pessimistic vein, here as well. I prefer the first piece because it seems to recognize that we write in a blogosphere that is absolutely rotten with criticism, when what we clearly need is more analysis (Raymond Williams once said the same thing about the popular press). Hence it also offers some constructive alternatives, which are worth following up in the future.
So then I started to blog, when suddenly it hit me: the kind of theory I'd critically engaged with in my academic work had not disappeared, but simply migrated into the new medium (on this blog, this is usually taken to mean the application of Continental philosophy to popular culture). Does this mean then that everything in both spheres is just relativised (and reified) into one gigantic "will to power"? Only to a certain extent, because the importance difference is this: the blogosphere is a clusterfuck:
"A chaotic mess that might be compared to group sex, in which participants are so intertwined and intermingled that they might penetrate each other rather than their intended target. Its more precise usage describes a particular kind of Catch 22, in which multiple complicated problems mutually interfere with each other's solution."
In other words, the blogosphere is a tendentious medium bereft of the gatekeeping mechanisms of academic publishing that provide some modicum of parity and objectivity. For the advantage in the academic world is its approximation of that great Australian democratic innovation- the secret ballot. When a paper is submitted, it is subject to a double blind peer review process, whereby the author does not know who will be reviewing their work, and the reviewers don't know who the author is. This helps indemnify the piece from the more insidious characteristics of the blogosphere. Consider this contrast; even if a blogger chooses to write anonymously, they can still easily become a prisoner of their own creation, at least when posting on their own blog. Afterall, one is left open to forms of censure requiring no reasoned response, but simply the removal of any links ("trace evidence" if you like) back to the [original] critical post. Modifying Richard Dawkins' biological metaphor of the "selfish gene" somewhat, this means that the sharing of links can potentially function as nothing more than vehicles for bloggers to ensure their own reproduction. Once you realise this, the economics of attention in the blogosphere, as measured by numbers of links, hits, or even comments, appears more dubious than citation practices in academia (where at review level authors are at least assured of detailed referee reports that can help the author develop their work, even if the reports are very critical).
I had my suspicions at the outset though, which is one of the major reasons I chose for the iconography of this blog the mummified space jockey transmitting from the outermost rim of the information grid. I also knew that social theorists/sociologists were, for the most part, conspicuous only by their absence in the blogsophere. But like I also said, I am hardly one for valorising academic publishing for its own sake. I instead look forward to the day when there is a more equitable distribution of resources, thanks to the push towards open access publishing as the new model. One of the major problems therefore is the monopoly on access that academics currently enjoy, thanks to the exorbitant subscription prices publishers slap on their ejournals, which prevents independent researchers from accessing them through academic libraries. This problem is compounded by the cost of databases, which gives the independent researcher little alternative to resources such as Google Scholar.
Having said that, in the interim I like to dream of more cooperative models eventuating. Believe me, sour grapes are not, and have never been, the underlying issue here. If they were, I would need to have previously made a concerted [unsuccessful] effort to ingratiate myself into the inner circle. Neither myself, or the other team members on this blog, have ever bothered to do this. So when I question myself, all I have to do is think of the kinds of critical issues that might have arisen had, for example, another [popular] blog dedicated to one particular famous science fiction author, instituted to the letter the kind of critical methodology explicitly foregrounded in the published work of that blogger's academic supervisor (to wonder aloud though, is not necessarily to imply opportunism on the part of that blogger, I am just curious about the potentially detrimental effect on that blog's status as a nodal point in its associated interpretive community).
I can never forget the passage where said supervisor writes in his book about a popular strain of cultural theory, (mirroring in many regards, the issues I can sometimes have with Continental philosophy meets popular culture in the blogosphere type writing), introduced by Stuart Hall, who he pictures as a kind of Dr Frankenstein, laboring in his [quoting from memory here as I don't have the book here with me as I write this), "filthy workshop of creation...stitching together a theoretical Frankenstein's monster out of semiotics... [and Post-Marxist theory]...much of this is of little real value, but today it is alive, alive-o!" By extension, Hall's initiatives cleared a path for later cultural studies, and acted as enablers for his British contemporaries, such as the Lacanian strand of film studies, the house organ of which was the journal Screen. Of course, this ferment of activity also provided an entry point for Slavoj Zizek into the English speaking world, and later, into the blogosphere (where it has come to dominate avant garde cultural theory).
The later example should serve as a reminder of the real world analogue to trends in the "virtual" blogosphere, which a sociology of intellectuals might suggest can be more dependent on mundane institutional considerations/niche marketing, than [desirable] normative values per se. But there is another way forward. In a spirit more of engagement than attack, I wonder if a more dialectical approach is possible, wherein each side could, to some extent, buttress the other? I might be about to make a brief contribution along these lines in a posting on "extreme tourism". Some of the reasons this generally does not come about can be found here, and, in an even more pessimistic vein, here as well. I prefer the first piece because it seems to recognize that we write in a blogosphere that is absolutely rotten with criticism, when what we clearly need is more analysis (Raymond Williams once said the same thing about the popular press). Hence it also offers some constructive alternatives, which are worth following up in the future.
Thursday, 6 November 2008
"Star Wars in Iraq": Zeus energy weapon
Incredibly this weapon uses the same name as the "Zeus Cannon" featured in the movie Final Fantasy (I keep coming back to that earlier William Gibson quote about the difficulty of writing science fiction because it is now colonising reality). For some, this might be a story to put in the Kode9 files. I was interested in not only the possible applications in theaters of war, but also as part of an Urban Pacification Program (as per the Weyland Yutani corporation in Alien, albeit not particularly "biological" in its focus).
This dystopic reading is certainly necessary, although it is equally striking how its antidote can be found in unexpected places. For example, reading last night about the making and cultural legacy of Night of the Living Dead, I discovered that the black lead actor, Duane Jones, had insisted that his character be killed, as he thought this would meet the expectations of black audiences. This was confirmed shortly thereafter when Martin Luther King was assassinated. But here I was reading this on the night that Obama was confirmed as the 44th president! I felt his speech was long on agency, and short on structural references, as might be expected given the strength of his liberal convictions and the highest voter turnout in decades. Indeed, it was this characteristic that I found made for a stark comparison with the Republican side, who more closely resembled the kind of machinic pathologies in Michael Powell's version of The Tales of Hoffmann, which had originally inspired Romero to make his film (right down to its scenes of graphic dismemberment). Hence I see Powell's film as a morality tale warning of the appearance on the historical stage of a new era of machine politics, which drives the development of weapons such as Zeus: John McCain as Spalanzani, with Sarah Palin his automaton, Olympia. Of course, the electorate are allegorically represented by Hoffmann. The beauty of the representation of violence in this context though, as described by Romero himself, is that "the most important thing about horror and sci fi is to not restore order...We don't want things the way they are or we wouldn't be trying to shock you into an alternative place." Hence the violence is really about being held accountable for one's actions. By extension, Night is not a conservative representation of the failure of revolution, with the repressed past rising up to eat the future before a progressive alternative has time to take hold; it is clearly not that.
However, some clarification is seemingly required in regard to where the traditional reading may be more suitably applied. If not to Romero's film, then where? For example, is it possible that the dystopic machine politics of the Republican party are not alone? Perhaps also in proximity to the "silent majority" reading of revolution (albeit unintentionally in many instances) would be the tendencies of the Continental philosophy blogosphere (already critiqued on this blog), at least to the extent it equates to an almost zombie like paralysis of will? Therefore I am eagerly awaiting Derridata's deconstruction of Badiou's reading of "capital"...
This dystopic reading is certainly necessary, although it is equally striking how its antidote can be found in unexpected places. For example, reading last night about the making and cultural legacy of Night of the Living Dead, I discovered that the black lead actor, Duane Jones, had insisted that his character be killed, as he thought this would meet the expectations of black audiences. This was confirmed shortly thereafter when Martin Luther King was assassinated. But here I was reading this on the night that Obama was confirmed as the 44th president! I felt his speech was long on agency, and short on structural references, as might be expected given the strength of his liberal convictions and the highest voter turnout in decades. Indeed, it was this characteristic that I found made for a stark comparison with the Republican side, who more closely resembled the kind of machinic pathologies in Michael Powell's version of The Tales of Hoffmann, which had originally inspired Romero to make his film (right down to its scenes of graphic dismemberment). Hence I see Powell's film as a morality tale warning of the appearance on the historical stage of a new era of machine politics, which drives the development of weapons such as Zeus: John McCain as Spalanzani, with Sarah Palin his automaton, Olympia. Of course, the electorate are allegorically represented by Hoffmann. The beauty of the representation of violence in this context though, as described by Romero himself, is that "the most important thing about horror and sci fi is to not restore order...We don't want things the way they are or we wouldn't be trying to shock you into an alternative place." Hence the violence is really about being held accountable for one's actions. By extension, Night is not a conservative representation of the failure of revolution, with the repressed past rising up to eat the future before a progressive alternative has time to take hold; it is clearly not that.
However, some clarification is seemingly required in regard to where the traditional reading may be more suitably applied. If not to Romero's film, then where? For example, is it possible that the dystopic machine politics of the Republican party are not alone? Perhaps also in proximity to the "silent majority" reading of revolution (albeit unintentionally in many instances) would be the tendencies of the Continental philosophy blogosphere (already critiqued on this blog), at least to the extent it equates to an almost zombie like paralysis of will? Therefore I am eagerly awaiting Derridata's deconstruction of Badiou's reading of "capital"...
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
Disco Marxism
I'm conscious of not wanting to appear as if my post on the Continental philosophy blogosphere was merely shadowboxing with any of the substantive issues such a mode of reasoning might potentially raise. Therefore I think it incumbent on me to also map out the two of the basic options it makes available. I wonder only if each eventually coalesces with my typology of the noosphere. Simon Critchley has made a case that one should ideally set out to avoid espousing what he describes as "Disco Marxism", as briefly explained in the following clip:
Critchley has elaborated on this position in the edited collection, Radical Democracy. From my initial inspection of the contents, there is some potential compatibility with the expressed preference on this blog for utilising the critical concept of the public sphere (as discussed in one chapter by Laclau). But I'm yet to discover any convergence with the emphasis in social theory on cosmopolitan public spheres as necessary in the negotiation of global cultural identities. It is not clear to me that general references to "difference" are up to the job. In this respect, Pheng Cheah's work on cosmopolitics could mark a more convincing intervention of a Continental perspective, in light of the fact that he has also considered Chinese cosmopolitanism, and finds the Habermasian vision wanting on account of its [alleged] Eurocentric view that solidarity can be evoked by entwining national and global public spheres. A long time ago I posted an audio of Gerard Delanty talking about cosmopolitanism, and I know he has done subsequent work on Europe and Asia: Beyond East and West, so I suspect he is mindful of critiques of Habermas, and notwithstanding their differences, one thing that connects them is a willingness to include empirical work, thereby moderating the tendencies that can be found in the noosphere, and by association, Disco Marxism.
However, the latter point requires some qualification, as the 2 authors which dominate the Continental blogosphere, Deleuze and Zizek, can in some sense be put to work against the presumptions of Disco Marxism. I've just referenced an article by Wark, and I do not endorse his own use of Debord and Deleuze as any great advance over the forms of cultural studies he critiques in the piece. I do, however, suggest the piece is useful in setting out the basic telling conceptual differences between Disco Marxism, lack and abundance, which I imagine would be accepted as a conventional characterisation by the Continental blogosphere.
Be this as it may, it does not dissuade me from wanting to further pursue the mapping of this blogosphere as discussed in my earlier post. Therefore I remain interested in its conditions of emergence and dissemination, and stand by my noting of the characteristic lack of empirical robustness. It can still be said that the Continental philosophy/cultural studies blogosphere functions as depicted in The Matrix, with an Agent Smith running amok through the network, converting everyone into a clone of Zizek and Deleuze.
Be this as it may, it does not dissuade me from wanting to further pursue the mapping of this blogosphere as discussed in my earlier post. Therefore I remain interested in its conditions of emergence and dissemination, and stand by my noting of the characteristic lack of empirical robustness. It can still be said that the Continental philosophy/cultural studies blogosphere functions as depicted in The Matrix, with an Agent Smith running amok through the network, converting everyone into a clone of Zizek and Deleuze.
I had no idea what Wark was talking about in his piece when he complains about the imperative to always be "resisting something", so I sought solace instead in this vivid illustration of Herbert Marcuse's vision (think Eros and Civilization particularly):
How Kevin Bacon cured cancer
This interesting program, which was clearly intended to popularise science, screened on the ABC last night. Disappointingly though, sociology was conspicuous only by its absence (and the same could be said of the graph theory of Leonard Euler). Network science was heralded as "the science of the 21st century", and Duncan J Watts provided a major focus for the program. Now I just happen to also own a copy of Watts' book, Six Degrees: the Science of a Connected Age, in which an intellectual debt to sociology is frankly acknowledged. Simmel is specifically mentioned on account of his theory of triads as the fundamental unit of group structure (p58), and this long sociological pedigree extends right through to today, as evidenced by the Journal of Mathematical Sociology and actor network theory.
Elsewhere on this blog I have referred to actor network theory in critical terms, which by extension makes me less sanguine than the makers of this documentary that network science is going to necessarily have a positive democratising effect by reminding us all that every problem is essentially a "small world" problem because of our interconnections. Indeed, the program counteracts its own intentions in these respects by demonstrating the increasing penetration of network science into the Westpoint Military Academy. Its proselytisers at Westpoint even credit it with helping them to capture Saddam Hussein.
Elsewhere on this blog I have referred to actor network theory in critical terms, which by extension makes me less sanguine than the makers of this documentary that network science is going to necessarily have a positive democratising effect by reminding us all that every problem is essentially a "small world" problem because of our interconnections. Indeed, the program counteracts its own intentions in these respects by demonstrating the increasing penetration of network science into the Westpoint Military Academy. Its proselytisers at Westpoint even credit it with helping them to capture Saddam Hussein.
Another point of interest for me was how it is particular hubs, or nodal points if preferred, that are instrumental in how a network distributes its flow of information. By extension, referencing my earlier post, one could use BlogPulse as a bibliometric tool to determine the major hubs in the Continental philosophy blogosphere, by tracking conversations to see who most consistently captures the attention space in the first instance.
But I should finish by returning to my point that the program was not reflexive enough to situate its complicity in maintaining the hegemony of science as a public discourse. Watts mentions Asimov's Foundation series in his book, Asimov's novels positively reference sociology, and another scientist mentions Asimov again [without mentioning sociology] in the film, reminding us that we are living in a world where science, and even science fiction, are afforded more public legitimacy than sociology. Although that thought is quite depressing, it is still worth watching the program as evidence of the phenomenon of homophily, where that which is similar tends to cluster in a network. I regard homophily as a heuristic relative of the term I like to bandy about, seriality.
Friday, 24 October 2008
The Continental Philosophy Blogosphere: Noosphere or Public Sphere?
I'm deep in the throes of editing a paper for an academic economics journal, so my thoughts here will have to be impressionistic and require future unpacking. But I'm in a playful mood and need to unwind for a moment. Suffice to say, I'm struck of late by the serial effect of so much of what passes for critical analysis in the blogosphere: take the latest Continental philosopher who refers to "capital", and then apply said reading method to the film, dubstep album etc of your choice. In my earlier "Crash" post I touched on a few characteristics of the kind of "interpretive community" that may have generated these tendencies, and I've wondered ever since if they could bear closer examination in terms of a sociology of knowledge, or the perspective I'm more familiar with, social epistemology.
The questions asked would need to be reflexive ones about why these people blog, which should ideally help to elucidate any commonalities between them. It would also have to be determined why this reading method has proliferated to the point where it seems to be the preferred option when it comes to sociocultural theory in the blogosphere. A cynic might argue that it has to do with Donald Campbell's infamous "fish scale model of omniscience", where those who conduct the least amount of empirical research are particularly suited to the mobile conditions of a network society. When such individuals have tenureship, one can expect to find them disproportionately represented at international conferences. When there is no tenureship, cyberspace substitutes as the preferred space for generating network connectivity. Crosscutting both situations, however, is the tendency for depth of knowledge to explode in direct proportion to interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary mobility.
What typologies could potentially be used to draw the relevant distinctions? As I see it, there are essentially 3 choices. Surprisingly, in a moment of rare lucidity, Slavoj Zizek has managed to sketch 2 of these, which could serve as heuristic devices when investigating the blogosphere of Continental philosophy. In his words:
If I understand this point of a one-mind-entity correctly, then it's a version of cyberspace I didn't mention. I first of all mentioned the deconstructionist version of cyberspace which is this post-Cartesian one: Each of us can play with his/her identities and so forth. This is the feminist, deconstructionist, Foucaultian version. But as you probably know there is another, let's call it the New Age school of cyberspace-ideology. It is this neo-Jungian idea that we live in an age of mechanistic, false individualism and that we are now on the threshold of a new mutation...
...the Noosphere...
Slavoj Zizek: Yes, that's precisely the idea. We all share one collective mind.
The questions asked would need to be reflexive ones about why these people blog, which should ideally help to elucidate any commonalities between them. It would also have to be determined why this reading method has proliferated to the point where it seems to be the preferred option when it comes to sociocultural theory in the blogosphere. A cynic might argue that it has to do with Donald Campbell's infamous "fish scale model of omniscience", where those who conduct the least amount of empirical research are particularly suited to the mobile conditions of a network society. When such individuals have tenureship, one can expect to find them disproportionately represented at international conferences. When there is no tenureship, cyberspace substitutes as the preferred space for generating network connectivity. Crosscutting both situations, however, is the tendency for depth of knowledge to explode in direct proportion to interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary mobility.
What typologies could potentially be used to draw the relevant distinctions? As I see it, there are essentially 3 choices. Surprisingly, in a moment of rare lucidity, Slavoj Zizek has managed to sketch 2 of these, which could serve as heuristic devices when investigating the blogosphere of Continental philosophy. In his words:
If I understand this point of a one-mind-entity correctly, then it's a version of cyberspace I didn't mention. I first of all mentioned the deconstructionist version of cyberspace which is this post-Cartesian one: Each of us can play with his/her identities and so forth. This is the feminist, deconstructionist, Foucaultian version. But as you probably know there is another, let's call it the New Age school of cyberspace-ideology. It is this neo-Jungian idea that we live in an age of mechanistic, false individualism and that we are now on the threshold of a new mutation...
...the Noosphere...
Slavoj Zizek: Yes, that's precisely the idea. We all share one collective mind.
The first alternative is clear enough, but I'm wondering if the second has any explanatory power when it comes to understanding the curious phenomenon in which capitalism is portrayed as increasingly emancipated from human agency, and that it is this inherent tendency that might explain its current dysfunction? I suspect the answer would be "yes", insofar as the Continental response, for all of its rhetorical appeal to complexity, merely complements the widespread disenchantment with human subjectivity as the driver of change on the contemporay scene. We are typically presented with portrayals of the "alien" nature of capital, which affords the Continental commentariat the luxury of just in effect sitting back and anticipating how the disaster will play itself out. Only at that point may the rising crescendo of voices proclaim the emergence of a "new mutation"; in Deleuzian terms, for example, something like "a non facialised individual", and/or a realisation of the promise of "the multitude" (Hardt & Negri). If these preliminary speculations are amenable to further analysis, then their provenance might also be traced back even further.
For example, here is how the social epistemologist Steve Fuller interprets the opportunism of the Continental movement [sic]:
Intellectual pathologies of our times I: Continental philosophy
Generally speaking, today’s stereotype of the intellectual is the continental philosopher – a quasi-literary, somewhat deep figure of French or German origin. The origin of this image is normally traced the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, who regarded himself as a ‘universal intellectual’, very much on the model of an Enlightenment figure like Voltaire. However, this image came under serious reconstruction after the disappointments of the student revolts in the 1960s. At this point Michel Foucault emerges as a downsized and more academicised version of the Sartrean intellectual. Here we shall explore how continental philosophy provides intellectual rationalisation for political impotence that has spread to cover a wide range of movements, including feminism.
The third alternative is one which I am more familiar and sympathetic with. What needs to be determined here is the extent to which the blogosphere can be modelled on a public sphere. Unlike the Continentals, it is a perspective less preoccupied with the complexities of "the virtual", than the development of new concepts and their practical, collective applications, such as "information war". A key figure here is Frank Webster, who is one of the most renowned, sociologically influenced, critics of the idea of "the information society". A further advantage of his work is that it spares one from the option of having to endure the crude polemicism that oftentimes features in exchanges between the Continental blogosphere and its opponents. Like Fuller then, Webster has developed a detailed system of thought which offers the promise of constructive criticism when engaging with the mediation of ICTs by capitalist interests.
I did once come across a superb Adorno quote from Minima Moralia that speaks to the sense of how the historical moment can give the tenured Continental philosopher an innate sense that they are a fraud (which I'll have to track down again). It's particularly frightening when this sense of powerlessness is compensated for by the overzealous marking of students' work. The image which came to my mind was of some of the younger dons, who are more likely to perceive students as future competition, thereby increasing a feeling of insecurity, as resembling Jack Torrance in The Shining; except in the philosopher's case the university substitutes for the Overlook Hotel. In each scenario, the place where they toil merely teases out the innate destructive capacities by giving them a space for their free reign. Word counts and body counts hence become indistinguishable as writing transmutes into a form of serial violence repeated ad infinitum (Mark Seltzer style)........
But rather than end on such a pessimistic note, I can at least report that my preliminary research on the noosphere has yielded an interesting science fiction find: the anime, intriguingly titled, in light of my last remarks, Serial Experiments Lain. I hope I can track it down some time.
Oh yes, and I can't forget about some other pertinent observations concerning the death of libertarianism at this point in our economic history. It would follow that seasteading is merely a retreat into degenerate utopia once the signs of market failure have become too obvious to ignore (and in the case of the seasteaders, too obvious to deal with).
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