On Blogging: Philosophical Stephen Colbert or Sarah Palin?

There has been a whole host of commentary about academic blogging since my last post. I am sure to miss at least a few, but here are the links I have: Tim Morton's brief commentary on my original post, Place Hacking has a both insightful and visually stunning response, Stuart Elden on why he blogs (pt 2), Craig on blogging as a way extracting surplus-value from academics (I might counter that blogging is a way of overcoming the alienation inherent in many modes of academic publishing), Alex Reid, Tim's Commentary on Alex Reid's post, Adrian has been trying to curb what he sees as excessive reactions or over reaction at his place (here and here), and lastly P+M has some links to various blogger manifestos.

And I was ready to let that be that. However, Ray Brassier did an interview with Kronos, where he said the following:

The ‘speculative realist movement’ exists only in the imaginations of a group of bloggers promoting an agenda for which I have no sympathy whatsoever: actor-network theory spiced with pan-psychist metaphysics and morsels of process philosophy. I don’t believe the internet is an appropriate medium for serious philosophical debate; nor do I believe it is acceptable to try to concoct a philosophical movement online by using blogs to exploit the misguided enthusiasm of impressionable graduate students. I agree with Deleuze’s remark that ultimately the most basic task of philosophy is to impede stupidity, so I see little philosophical merit in a ‘movement’ whose most signal achievement thus far is to have generated an online orgy of stupidity.

APPS already responded here. Brassier's comments are, of course, completely over the top. To the degree that I don't know what is going on here. If I was to write a caricature of the anti-blogging position, I don't think I could have done a better job. Is Brassier engaging in some sort of mockery or satire? Or is he, Sarah Palin-esque, making statements that self-caricature without meaning too? I don't know Brassier, so this is a sincere question.

On Blogging

So, there seems to be a lot of discussion recently about blogging within the theory academic blogosphere (Theoryosphere?).

Two places in particular to look at. The first is from Tim Morton, the second from Stuart Elden. In both we see strange objections being raised against the very reality of academic blogging. In Tim's case, we have an audio recording of a talk he gave at a recent conference. In the response to his paper, Ed Cohen (whose works I have found very useful and interesting), gives a strange and very ungenerous response to Tim's talk. I highly suggest readers follow my first link, and read the comments from Eileen Joy which I heartily endorse. Cohen doesn't really advance an argument, but instead simply puts down blogging and by association Speculative Realism (I've been teaching fallacies to my Argumentation class, and the technical term for what Cohen engaged in is an appeal to ridicule). Meanwhile, Stuart reports on a discussion over at the crit-geog-forum on blogging, in which it was argued:

[T]he question [was] raised as to why anyone bothered with blogs? The commentator said that “it seems to add nothing, but gears and joys itself on self-serving romance”

I don't have a strong sense if these are isolated opinions, or if they are merely the tip of an anti-blogger sentiment within the academy. However, this is not the only time I have come across dismissive and condescending attitudes toward blogging among other academics. There seems to be a cluster of 'arguments', (1) It trades off with doing the 'real' work of being a scholar. (2) It is too vague, too hasty, too half-formed, too unpolished. (3) It is time consuming. (4) It will trip me/you up in getting hired/tenured/published/loved/respected/etc. (5) People and movements use blogging in order to get hired/tenured/published/loved/respected/etc. that are fundamentally inauthentic or ephemeral.

There are probably other arguments, and I am interested in those, but these five sort of defines the parameters. Excepting number four*, which is more pragmatic, I think we can take these various objections to chart the anxiety people feel in regards to blogging. To wit:

Blogging is not legitimate academic work, at the same time it requires a lot of work to keep up with a blog (both writing it and reading other blogs). However, these 'bloggers' are increasing making blogging seem as legitimate academic work. And in so doing are getting access to legitimate academic resources and prestige -- invitations to conferences, publications (including a series of 'upstart' journals and book publishers that is tapping into academic bloggers and their work), attention from grad students and junior academics (and sometimes senior ones), and the ability to speak for movements/schools of thought. This puts non-bloggers into a bind: either they are forced to engage with blogging (which requires more work), or they stand a chance that blogging might become increasingly more legitimate and bloggers will be taken increasingly serious.

To be honest, I sort of understand that fear. Blogging fits very well with the ways I like to think and communicate. It provides a wonderful sounding board, it is unofficial enough that I can just treat first drafts as important enough to hit the publish post, and I can see lots of other projects as they develop. I also get to be part of far flung academic communities. Whereas I am the sort of academic that enjoys hours and days of just researching in a library, I don't enjoy the isolation that such work can cause. Blogging is a way of thinking as part of a community. But what if that wasn't true? Academics are already asked to do all sorts of things, another time drain that doesn't even help you do your other work sounds like a nightmare.

Of course, I could be wrong. These objections might really be more about blog and bloggers, and less about the people making the objections. That is hard to really believe, though. When Cohen says that it is hard to imagine that SR bloggers have time for anything else, and he is doing this in direction to Tim Morton, one figures this is more about the way Cohen works and thinks than about SR bloggers. After all, it is quite clear that Tim Morton has an amazing academic output, and indeed many academic bloggers do (Stuart Elden being another example, of course Graham Harman, and Adam Kotsko is pretty intense for someone that junior in the academy).

I don't have any solutions or final thoughts. A blogger backlash is annoying, but ultimately I think digital, open, and on-going productions of knowledge will win out. It is cheap, easy, and many of the emerging scholars are openly embracing these changes. (Kunzelman reminds I have to read Jodi Dean's Blog Theory. He is write).


* Considering the state of the job market, and the academic program I have come from, I am more free than many of my colleagues to put myself out there. True, it is the freedom that Janis Joplin sang about, but I still get to have my blog.

On Blogging while in Grad School

MLA over at Prodigies & Monsters has a post up about blogging while still being in grad school. As his post indicates, this is a conversation I've had with him in the past. I highly suggest reading it. I plan to write more on it later, but right now am finishing a public talk entitled, "Philosophy in the Age of the Factory Farm: Ethics and Animals", and I very well might get sidetracked. So, go ahead and read his post, and hopefully I will have more to say later.

Some thoughts on writing the dissertation

You might have noticed that my blogging has fallen off of late. I am still trying to adjust to my new schedule this semester, and blogging has been the first causality. As I organize my life in better ways, I am sure that my blogging will pick up. Now, to the post.


Tim Morton has been doing a series of advice posts on writing the dissertation. You can find them here, and they are worth reading. I wanted to add in some things from a current dissertation writer.
So far, so true from what Tim has been saying. Getting over the idea that you are writing your first book has been the hardest thing for me. Not only has my adviser been telling me this since almost the first day I ever met him (he didn't realize he was my adviser at that time). It also helped reading some dissertations that became books I also read (for reasons that include legitimate academic ones, I read both Jason Wirth's dissertation and Matt Calarco's. I've also read the books they eventually informed. While similar enough to understand their filiation, they were also different enough to really hammer in that these are two different products). With all of that, on some level I still had been thinking of my dissertation as my book-to-be. It was until about a month ago, when the tension between the first part of the dissertation and the second part of the dissertation (for those who are interested in some details, read this) was too much conceptually for me. Not too much for the same dissertation, but two much to be one book. What will almost certainly happen is that the dissertation will provide the framework and raw research for two different book projects, rather than the one.
Another issue of the dissertation is the balance between writing and researching. I'm the sort of scholar who happily spends many hours in archives, who enjoys taking a weekend to track down the origins of a particular phrase, etc. I've always been the sort of intellectual who befriends the small, marginal, asides in work. The dissertation really allows me to wallow in mode. Switching to a writing mode, and at some point ending the perpetual research has been hard. Focus on exactly what the dissertation looks like, and the goals I want to accomplish has been the biggest helps in this regard.
Marketability is the last thing I want to talk about, here. One of the weird things that emerges for anyone who engages in interdisciplinary work is that despite the tendency of your work to often generate excitement among diverse people, is that it is often hard to translate that excitement in proving you are engaged in a disciplinary intellectual adventure. There is a desire, at times, to put your dissertation in a sort of disciplinary drag. I don't have much to say here, I am bad at that. On some level, a dissertation has got to be thought of as a vehicle to help you get a job, and ignoring that seems like a bad idea. On the other hand, the degree of how to do that and in what ways are not something I can speak to.

I should probably take the time to break off a few chapters and try to get them published.

All my biases confirmed: Education Issue

I'm sure all of you have heard about the new book, Academically Adrift. Using a large longitudinal study, 45% of students made no gains on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) during their first two years in college, and 36% made no gains over four years. That basically means colleges are not reaching a little over a third of our students (the ones who don't drop out) at all. But the study also points out exactly whom we are not reaching:

After controlling for demographics, parental education, SAT scores, and myriad other factors, students who were assigned more books to read and more papers to write learned more. Students who spent more hours studying alone learned more. Students taught by approachable faculty who enforced high expectations learned more. "What students do in higher education matters," the authors note. "But what faculty members do matters too." The study also found significant differences by field of study. Students majoring in the humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, and math—again, controlling for their background—did relatively well. Students majoring in business, education, and social work did not. Our future teachers aren't learning much in college, apparently, which goes a long way toward explaining why students arrive in college unprepared in the first place. Financial aid also matters. The study found that students whose financial aid came primarily in the form of grants learned more than those who were paying mostly with loans. Debt burdens can be psychological and temporal as well as financial, with students substituting work for education in order to manage their future obligations. Learning was also negatively correlated with­—surprise—time spent in fraternities and sororities.

Well, glad to know there is now hard data to back up all my biases. I am also with Tom, we need to stop cutting programs that teach critical thinking.

As far as the suggestions for federal government mandating loan money to schools that do well on the CLA, such as Kevin Carey (the first link) seem to be suggesting. From what I can tell from discussion with colleagues at schools that have implemented internal CLA testing in the past, the stats are pretty easy to juke. For example, you can open the initial assessment to the general population, but only test your students enrolled in your honors program in the senior year. You can require the test, offer no incentives (positive or negative) the first time, which will frequently produce students hurrying to get through it. And give strong incentives for the taking it the last time, creating a climate where students will take it more seriously. You can teach classes to the test. Indeed, you can make it common that professors provide in-class evaluations that are somewhat similar to the methodology of the test itself (questions in which students exam in-class pieces of evidence, and are able to explain and evaluate the arguments of those pieces of evidence). I'm not saying that the CLA is a bad metric. It can be, but as first blush, the way it was used here seems to have been honest and up-front. I am saying that the CLA is a bad metric for figuring out which schools should get money. Unless I am wrong (and I could be, I would love to hear from some readers with experience dealing with the CLA), it seems that it is pretty easily manipulable if schools have a strong financial incentive.