Blogging Styles

Graham Harman has a piece up on how one blogs and since I’m obviously relatively new on this, I don’t have much to add. But it’s helpful to have a post up on what I think I am doing here. 1st, it’s a place to put up nascent ideas that might develop into an article. 2nd it’s a place to put up asides to break up the philosophical chunks a bit. 3rd, it’s a place to respond to other posts on the web in a more coherent way.

Notice that I did not say that this was a place in which to put finished work. What I don’t understand in the recent blog post dust-ups is the seriousness (personal seriousness) that can often quickly ramp up. I understand why one might take offense, but Levi has rightly apologized for a post responding to a claim that his work was neoliberal. Maybe growing up in New York gave me a real sense of what a good insult can be. The modus operandi of most New Yorkers is sarcasm, so being called a neoliberal is obviously not saying that Levi is morally a reprobate, though I admit the tone of some discussions has this weird moralistic tinge: your conception of objects as having an Aristotelian substance must mean you’re a brown shirted fascist. Lighten up people–you won’t live long if you take intellectual disagreements like that. (This is not about Levi, by the way, but particularly about other posts related to that quarrel.)

The example that comes to mind is a recent post by Harman about Levinas. Now, it happened that I had published in the same area and I disagreed. Actually, for now I still do. But I merely posted on it. Harman put up a reply, and then he noted how Levinas was ultimately a thinker of substance. The Levinas usually on parade is a different Levinas and so I wondered about this. But instead of looking for a quote that bolstered my case, I went in assuming that Harman was not a moron and didn’t come to that opinion because he hates Heidegger (this came up as part of a discussion on Levinas’s reading of Heidegger). And this is in turn led me to look for a quotation that actually bolstered Harman’s case, which is one from Totality and Infinity where Levinas explicitly discusses what he means by substantiality. It helped that I knew why this reading of Levinas would be important to Harman’s overall research. Of course, it also helped that I couldn’t fall asleep right away and decided to grab Totality and Infinity off the shelf for the first time in a few years, otherwise I would not have posted that. But having found that quote, I posted it, gave a blog version of a hat tip to Graham and then made a mental note to myself to check out a very provisional hypothesis for a possible article, namely that Levinas’s thinking of element/substantiality is undercut by the ethical side of his work, but for now though I had a couple of quotes that I could troll about, it’s best to give Harman the fairest reading, promise myself to look at his article and then get on with my life. In other words, that’s the best moment of doing this, since I found a good line on reading Levinas and returned to some of the best sections that I enjoy reading in his work. Ultimately, what I’m saying is that more important that agreeing with someone is actually going back and forth with people who don’t mind being surprised by texts–how else to enjoy a text if it’s dead and buried in a particular position for you? That’s not to say in the end the old Washington cliche, which is usually a way of bolstering the old boys network, that one can disagree without being disagreeable. But it should go without saying that if you picture the person you’re writing back and forth with as writing in good faith and not being arbitrary in their textual readings, then you should respond in kind. This is not about a Gademerian dialogical method. It’s just straightforward: if you don’t think the person you are engaging with is this type, then why are you bothering in the first place?