Just a personal observation: I found it somewhat gratifying that LKS eats and sleeps like the rest of us; more, that he has a new found addiction, if his recent post is anything to go by:
I had never gone without a wink in previous parliamentary debates whether on the budget or other major issues. Blogging is the reason, for it really eats into one’s time.
Oh god, it’d be so easy to get cynical with that statement above: my itch tells me LKS is trying to portray a more humane side to his public profile, but really, the situation above is just the sort of thing I guess bloggers face everyday.
The past few days of heavy blogging has made me think about the stuff that used to go on in academia. It appears as if the acronym “KPI” had fired the imagination in my department (where I was a puny student), so much so that the sort of articles coming out from professors I truly respected were as good as crap; I had one particular prof who had a particular method to his madness: he will dream up one point, just one point of contention, and build a whole paper consisting 3,000 words around it.
It adds to a problem Foucault described, as “discourses about discourses”. I suppose post-Hegelian thought tended to move away from the predilections of the system-builders of thinkers as late as the 19th Century and such, the result of which is a tendency to ennunciate interesting themes without the burden of a structure, logical system of the kind you’d find in the Tractatus, which by itself is a scary proposition (the book and the thought of engaging in such madness), but there have been others who have deplored this lack of testicular fortitude. Much of academic discussion at the time revolved around what other people wrote. I found this strange.
My fav professor (we used to call him “God” for.. particular reasons) pointed this out to me in my first year; being an eager beaver, I used to borrow books from him, stuff on epistemology I thought I couldn’t find in our really well-equiped library. One day he hefted a thick, intimidating brick of a book and motioned me over. He looked at me from under his glasses and said, “No one has the balls to write a theory of everything anymore. This man’s got balls, although he’s dead wrong on a number of subjects. But you should read it because he’s got balls”. That book turned out to be Nozick’s “Philosophical Explanations”, and I’m ashamed to say I didn’t have the testicular fortitude to plow through its pages. I should, one day.
The phrase “but you should read it because he’s got balls” struck me, at the time, as a very strange attitude. Something I only understood much later; if you have the courage to be wrong, after long thought, you would have at least walked one step farther than many who haven’t. I remember that thought fondly.
I read LKS’s post and I almost giggled out loud. Here you have someone complaining about the time blogging takes up, and I began to wonder how soon it’d be before others started picking up on that comment and started blogging about LKS’s reaction to blogging. Kinda like a reportage on a reportage. Which is what, I suppose, we’re all in danger of doing.
It feels as if the web’s hypertextuality is both a a boon and a bane: on the one hand, the conversation, however mundane or ill-informed, about a certain subject keeps going through many iterations over and over and over again, all the while accumulating — if we’re lucky — a depth of meaning about said topic. It becomes a bane, however, when this very hypertextuality becomes merely an exercise in repetition; nothing new is added to the information, no valid/invalid analyses, no reflection on its impact or meaning.
Comparing both situations, only the former version is a discourse about discourses on a subject, I think, but I wonder if this isn’t a positive thing where views on the web are concerned.
