Nonsense & Irritation

I have conceded that stupid readers exist. Indeed, yes. So, alas, obtuse misreadings abound. (Frustrating as it may be, I can take some solace that, in this case, in being so idiotically misread, I am at least in good company.)

For what it's worth, I am not a pacifist. And there is massive difference, as I mentioned explicitly in the linked post and elsewhere, between violent revolution or insurrection on the one hand, and state terror on the other. Thus, to categorize the mass volunteer effort to fight for the losing cause in the Spanish Civil War along with those cynical State operations known in the liberal press as "humanitarian interventions" is to make an error of grotesque proportions. A person capable of making such a comparison is clearly not worth taking seriously or responding to any further.

Broad Space

A friendly blog links to a page at another blog, a blog called ladypoverty; you click and a voice speaks. You read posts surrounding the linked entry. You like what you see, you like it a lot. Hey, you say, who is this?!? You look at the archives links and discover it's been around twice as long as your own sad little blog, addressing many of the same issues, in a voice lighter than air. You check back at the friendly blog, and there it sits on his blogroll, you wonder how long it's been there; it's under "new toys", but still. Where have I been? And yet there are so many blogs, so many voices worth listening to, who can keep up? You go back to this new-to-you blog and keep reading, there is so much there. There is this:

Freedom of movement happens alongside people, not apart from them. This requires obligating ourselves toward their concerns, educating ourselves about shared interests (which presupposes that we understand our own), and conditioning ourselves not to respect the boundaries proposed by power, demarcated as "differences." This means aligning oneself with one's neighbor, not one's ruler -- even if your neighbor is your political or religious opposite, and your ruler holds your "values." There is no atheist or Church-goer, Republican or revolutionary, Arab or Jew who cannot be talked to merely on the basis of these distinctions. Do the creationists need to feed their families? Do their daughters need health care? Then there is a broad space in which to stand, and move, amongst them.

Yes, you think. This is very good. You'll be coming back.

Thoughts after another year of blogging

At Blographia Literaria, Andrew Seal has been pondering the nature and purpose of litblogs. Of course, there are any number of reasons why people blog, whether about literature or not, so it might seem fruitless to make such an attempt. Even so, I was interested in where Andrew's inquiry was taking him, particularly given his admission that his own blog tends to be the kind of blog he doesn't like. But I wondered how this blog might be defined. I've never really thought of myself as a litblogger. When I began blogging, I conceived of The Existence Machine as some sort of mutant combination of The Reading Experience, Lenin's Tomb, Simon Reynolds' Blissblog, and Bitch PhD (to the extent that, as a man, this is even possible). These blogs were among my categorical models for longer-form blog writing at the time, so I imagined. Others were models for shorter, link-heavy posting. In the event, I have never been able to pull off the sort of breezy writing suitable for the latter, and I've had to narrow my focus considerably. Though I was more likely to attract readers early on with my music posts (and, bizarrely, early last year The Existence Machine was somehow ranked 45th most influential American music blog; even as of this writing, it places 75th--one really has to wonder about their algorithm), writing about music has ceased to interest me much; with rare exceptions, I've given it up. What's emerged is that I've blogged about literature and politics, as expected, but my writing on both has rarely resembled what I had anticipated. In part, I've simply lacked the time to do certain topics justice and have had to find alternatives. My concerns have evolved--narrowed and deepened. And I've found that my own difficulties writing are of interest to me, and that perhaps they are not irrelevant in an exploration of larger issues.

Unexpectedly, this post has morphed into a State of the Blog sort of entry, as I approach my third anniversary of blogging. So be it. Maybe I need a little meta-commentary to get myself moving again. Anyway, I mentioned above The Reading Experience as a sort of model. This is perhaps fitting, since yesterday Dan Green posted an entry marking the fifth anniversary of that blog. I'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate Dan and to thank him for his contribution (in addition, Dan was perhaps the first established blogger to take notice of The Existence Machine, for which I remain grateful--Helen DeWitt is right: "if a blog you like mentions your blog favourably you're walking on air"--and I am grateful for the friendships I've made as a result of the blog). But I'd also like to note that, in providing such an ongoing, consistent example, Dan has perhaps ironically helped enable me to realize how much I differ with him on literary matters, whereas I began blogging under the assumption that I agreed almost completely with his approach. More accurately, I took it for granted that his approach was the correct one, without being confident I could yet make appropriate aesthetic assessments myself (I hadn't read any literary criticism, though I had perhaps already drank too much of the old Nabokov kool-aid; I hope to have more to say about that sometime soon). It was the practice of blogging, then, of writing, and of encountering other bloggers and writers along the way, that has allowed me to better understand my own thoughts, to enable newer and better thinking and writing. I've always known this to be true--that I needed to write in order to even know what I knew, in order to facilitate further writing and understanding. I've known this, but resisted it. I resist it still, still have the tendency to think I can comprehensively pre-assemble my thoughts on a matter, prior to beginning to write. Things have improved somewhat on that front, but I still struggle, just as I struggle with those basic writing necessities, space and time. This blog is still becoming, still emerging . With all the retroactively embarrassing or pointless posts and all the frustrations and unwritten entries, there are some pieces I'm fairly happy with, either as written items of their own or as suggestive pointers to future writing and thinking, and I've never felt the urge to quit. Thanks for reading along.

Rehabilitate the notion of truth

The thrust of my recent posts has reminded me of an essay by Christina Nehring from last November, at Truthdig. In it, she discusses the state of the essay, decrying the entrenched personal essay, with its fixation on the autobiographical, the small. She argues that we need a return to the truth-seeking essay, as exemplified by Seneca, Montaigne, Emerson:

Today's essayists need to be emboldened, and to embolden one another, to move away from timid autobiographical anecdote and to embrace—as their predecessors did—big theories, useful verities, daring pronouncements. We need to destigmatize generalization, aphorism and what used to be called wisdom. We must rehabilitate the notion of truth—however provisional it might be.

I agree with her, though one could be forgiven for thinking that my unclear earlier post might imply that I do not. With respect to the focus on the personal, she writes:

. . . here lies the problem with essayists today: not that they speak of themselves, but that they do so with no effort to make their experience relevant or useful to anyone else, with no effort to extract from it any generalizeable insight into the human condition. It is as though they were unthinking stenographers—"recording secretaries," as indeed the most self-conscious 20th-century essayist, E.B. White, called them—pedantically taking down their own experience simply because it is their own.

The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it's our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Of course, everything is plural, everything is arguable, and there are limits to what we can know about other persons, other cultures, other genders. But there is also a limit to such humility; there is a point at which it becomes narcissism of a most myopic sort, a simple excuse to talk only about one’s own case, only about one’s own small area of specialization. Montaigne thought it the essayist’s duty to cross boundaries, to write not as a specialist (even in himself) but as a generalist, to speak out of turn, to assume, to presume, to provoke. "Where I have least knowledge," said the blithe Montaigne, "there do I use my judgment most readily." And how salutary the result; how enjoyable to read—and to spar with—Montaigne's by turns outrageous and incisive conclusions about humankind. That everything is arguable goes right to the heart of the matter.

I think she's quite right to observe that we have a problem with big claims. It is only through making big claims that we can get anywhere, but any such attempt is openly attacked as in itself suspect, as too ambitious (the same is true in literature and music). We want to know the writer's credentials for making any claim. Is he or she a trained expert in the field? If not, why should we listen? Certainly there is valuable training that can be brought to bear, and there are cranks eager to expound on any subject. But surely the writer's credentials should be found in the writing? Perhaps, collectively, we've lost the ability to discern. At the same time, we feel strongly that we are each entitled to our own opinion, no matter how ridiculous. What has gone into forming this opinion, mind you, is of no consequence; one's considered, informed opinion is equivalent to another's ignorant, spittle-flecked reaction.

As an aside to finish up: I quoted from Jodi Dean in my last post, and here I wanted to make reference to some of her earlier posts about this idea, that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, that all opinions are made equal, but I couldn't find the posts I had in mind. . . there was this post from last month, which engages with Guy Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. There she refers to "a decreasing ability to distinguish between truth and lies, a decline in a politics wherein truth matters" and later, where Debord says "the spectator is supposed to know nothing", she says that now "the opposite is the case: everyone has a right to her own opinion." (Jodi is always blogging about writers and thinkers with whom I have little to no contact--mostly no--but in ways that make the ideas seem accessible and relevant. And yet I am still all too often overwhelmed into silence, given my ignorance of the actual texts in question.) There was also this post from December about the stupidity of student papers, though it seems to me that her remarks are broadly applicable. Her students refuse to discern differences:

Their mindset is something like this: what is important is what any individual truly feels is important; that's all that matters, the intensity and authenticity of a certain affective attachment. This intensity means that individuals can define words, issues, concepts, etc, any way they want, as long as they "truly believe it." But, and here is the catch, the students tend to combine this intense subjectivism (or subjectivism of intensity) with an underlying universalism: if everyone truly believes in something that they affectively feel and know, then there is peace, harmony, and social justice. It's like they are committed to an underlying ontology of unity that renders all affective difference and discord into rapturous accord.

Neither of these posts are quite the ones I had in mind, but they're well worth checking out anyway. . .

(A final aside: I note that my second references above to Nehring and Debord are to their last names, yet I refer to Jodi Dean as "Jodi". In an earlier draft of the previous post, I noted that I wrote "Hitchens" and "Jodi" and I worried about seeming to "respect" the former more than the latter, especially in that case, with the gender difference. But I do not respect Christopher Hitchens at all, and I do respect Jodi Dean. This post tells me that the difference is that Jodi Dean writes a blog, and I know her primarily through that blog. For example, it's always weird for me to see myself referred to as "Crary" rather than "Richard" when others link to me. The blog implies some sort of personal relationship, perhaps, an informality of expression, certainly. So even if I had read one of Jodi Dean's books prior to having encountered the excellent I Cite, the blog nevertheless invites me to call her "Jodi", though I've never met her.)

Goodbye Sharp Side

Late yesterday, I noticed that Ellis Sharp has announced, after a few days of hinting, the end of his excellent blog, The Sharp Side. I'll miss him; The Sharp Side has long been one of my favorite stops on the web.