Promising new artifact of the blogosphere: ad hoc symposia on topics
of shared interest. The theory/politics blog Long Sunday (
http://long-sunday.typepad.com ) has recently held symposia on
Tronti's "The Strategy of the Refusal" and Gayatri Spivak's "Scattered
Speculations on the Theory of Value" (I contributed a post on "unsafe
text" to the latter). Writers from various different blogs post on the
topic, and comment on each other's posts. Mailing lists like poetryetc
have been doing similar things for quite a while, of course; but the
"blogweave" has a somewhat different ratio of "essay" to "dialogue".
I find the way these sorts of collaborations work across borders
rather encouraging: you have posts by academics and non-academics (and
academics writing about subjects that don't fall within their
discipline or specialism), activists and armchair theorists,
"politics" people and "literature" people, writing in quite a mixture
of styles. It also seems to work against the general tendency of
internet culture to devolve towards inane chatter: bloggers involved
in these kinds of exercises tend to raise their game considerably in
response to others' efforts. Everyone gives of their best, for a
certain implicit and provisional value of "best".
There are still flamewars, needless to say...
Dominic
--
Shall we be pure or impure? Today
we shall be very pure. It must always
be possible to contain
impurities in a pure way.
--Tarmo Uustalu and Varmo Vene
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