tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post4837671657509818661..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Old English, New Media: or, Friday Night Meta-BloggingCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-70347949648805275622008-07-29T20:14:00.000-04:002008-07-29T20:14:00.000-04:00Question: is that what "only connect" means? As ...Question: is that what "only connect" means? As I recall, it's more ambiguous. Certainly the interpretation you're speaking about is Margaret Schlegel's ambition, for one-on-one relationships and for community--but she fails, with disastrous consequences that she recognizes (another connection) but does not need to suffer, because other people do the suffering for her. It's possible to read <I>Howards End</I> as an indictment of Margaret's reliance on the phrase--the idea--to effect understanding, tolerance, and communication: those things require more than bringing the prose and the poetry into contact. Where they meet there is violence, and the victim is the poor man who's killed by a bookcase wielded by Margaret's son-in-law. After his death, people do change, they do connect, they do understand themselves and their world anew--but at what cost? The Schlegels' and the Wilcoxes' transformation can't bring poor Leonard Bast back. The connection produces good will and knowledge in equal measure to the suffering inflicted on those who cannot benefit from the goodness--those who are, in fact, denied any connection at all.Alisonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01264114920869378801noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-42312372033708190542008-01-20T12:19:00.000-05:002008-01-20T12:19:00.000-05:00I agree with srj--even though I often use the term...I agree with srj--even though I often use the term "conversational" to describe what happens on and across weblogs--that what happens between primary blog authors and their readers is not really a conversation, per se, in the same way a groups of friends or colleagues sitting in someone's dining room or at a restaurant might be engaging in truly immediate, give-and-take conversation. But I was also, in the quotation MKH includes in her essay on blogging, using the term conversation to invoke something that I think is often sorely lacking in the sphere of academic publishing where everything is double-blind reviewed and a kind of hostility, as well as the worst kind of gate-keeping, often creeps in to what should be a mutually productive exchange between scholars leading to the betterment of published scholarship. We do not talk enough *to* each other about our work in a manner that would afford more intellectual collaboration, as opposed to intellectual sparring.<BR/><BR/>A while back, on the British weblog, "Literature Compass" [a Blackwell site that is attached to their online journal of the same name], Deidre Lynch [an 18th-century studies scholar at Toronto] raised the issue of how we can teach our students to engage in intellectual "conversations" which would not necessarily devolve into "debates," and I will copy here some of our exchange on that subject, as I think it is very relevant, too, to MKH's essay here on what is valuable in academic blogging in terms of its more, I really believe, "human" aspects, and also point to the dangers of what happens when weblogs can become too agonistic:<BR/><BR/>[beginning of excerpt from "Literature Compass" weblog]<BR/><BR/># Eileen Joy Says:<BR/>March 17, 2007 at 6:57 pm<BR/><BR/>I think this topic of “conversation” versus “debate” [and of how “discussion” is often misconstrued as agonistic debate] is really pertinent right now, both vis-a-vis the blogosphere and the classroom. I have been blogging for almost a year now over at “In The Middle” [a medieval studies group blog founded by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen at George Washington University], which has led me to other excellent academic “group” blogs such as “The Valve,” “Long Sunday,” “Crooked Timber,” “Savage Minds,” etc. I have personally been put off by how some of the most prominent group blogs, such as “The Valve,” often quickly devolve [my description, admittedly] into what I would term intellectual fractiousness, and it is often difficult to distinguish between genuine, principled disagreement and what looks to be academic posturing, and frankly, showing off one’s knowledge and rhetorical skills. . . . I think, traditionally and historically, , academic disciplinary knowledges have, indeed, often advanced, primarily, via this method of “debate” and critique, and that the idea of something like a non-agonistic “conversation” is often foreclosed before the fact of “discussion.” This is a serious problem, in my mind, and one that we would do well to address, whether in the classroom or when reading/judging papers for publication or at conferences and in the blogosphere, etc. etc. We need to imagine a more generously-shaped and more open-ended form of critical [or, scholarly] conversation, whereby the raising of interesting questions and provisional and only-ever partial answers is somehow privileged over the idea that out of a vigorous “debate” or “clash” of strongly-held opinions, some concepts “win,” while others “lose out.”<BR/><BR/>Following the work of the political theorist Stephen White, who in his book “Sustaining Affirmation” coined the term “weak ontology,” we might imagine a forum in which we have “strong beliefs, weakly held,” and where incommensurability of opinion is privileged over consensus. William Connolly’s book ‘Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed,” is also informative in this regard, regarding the utility of a certain radical pluralism of beliefs. As Simon Weil once wrote, “When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.” As to how we could teach our students the art of true conversation [versus lapsing into debates which are usually narrowly conceived in terms of their premises and conclusions], I always start by telling my students that the raising of interesting questions leading to further inquiries is always more valuable than proposing supposedly definitive answers. Everything is provisional, I tell them, and thinking about the ways in which, say, a commonly-held assumption or opinion or idea is provisional is one way to begin. . . .<BR/><BR/># Deidre Lynch Says:<BR/>March 22, 2007 at 1:01 pm<BR/><BR/>. . . I couldn’t agree more about the propensity of academic bloggers to opt for agonistic debate over conversation. This has seemed to me to squander some of the potential of the blog as a form of communication. It is disappointing that in this form, too, as much as in published essays and monographs, writing is conceptualized as a way of scoring points, and scoring more of them than others do. (Of course, the “jeu de la conversation” that got me thinking about these questions in the first place was conceptualized in just those terms as well).<BR/><BR/>Reading recently a fascinating essay by Kathryn Sutherland, on the ways in which women writers turned Adam Smith’s political economy into a conversational matter, I encountered a distinction that Richard Rorty makes between “systemic” philosophers–this is the category in which Sutherland places Smith, obviously–and “edifying” philosophers. Rorty characterizes the latter group as “intentionally peripheral” and writes of them: “to see keeping a conversation going as a sufficient aim of philosophy, to see wisdom as consisting in the ability to sustain a conversation, is to see human beings as generators of new descriptions rather than beings one hopes to be able to describe accurately.” Maybe because we so rarely talk about what happens in the privacy of our own classrooms, academic humanists seem in their public presentation to marginalize that definition of wisdom–”the ability to sustain a conversation.” But this definition, I think chimes nicely with Bill Readings’s hopeful statement about how the postmodern university might at least serve as a place where the question of being-together can be raised.<BR/><BR/># Eileen Joy Says:<BR/>March 24, 2007 at 6:32 pm<BR/><BR/>. . . I love the idea of being “intentionally peripheral” to a conversation, with the aim of keeping that conversation sustained [and I would imagine, sustaining], as a form of “wisdom.” I couldn’t agree more. I am currently teaching a course on the figures of the monster, demon, and shape-shifter in medieval literature, and I never cease to be amazed at how much my students desire very definitive answers to questions that can never have definitive answers, and that will always be philosophical in the manner in which Rorty describes as “edifying.” Last week we read Gerald of Wales’s twelfth-century “History and Topography of Ireland,” and while I was trying to point out to my students all the ideological and moral “slippages” in the text–all the ways in which Gerald’s descriptions of Ireland’s supposed “marvels” [bearded women, ox-men, cow-stags, etc.] as well as of its supposed “native” inhabitants slide back and forth between wonder [which is a type of admiration], respectful regard, pity, disgust, and moral condemnation, what my students mainly wanted to know was: is Gerald’s text “pure propaganda,” through and through [in other words, it’s the “did he or didn’t he?” question: either he wrote every single word with Henry II’s program of conquest in mind, or he was doing something else entirely]? Is what he wrote true or false? Did anyone challenge his text, and if so, how, and when? So, while the students want definitive answers to the question of Gerald’s supposed “command” of his sources and material, I’m more interested in showing them how the text [and hence, also, Gerald’s mind] is always more slippery than that, and what we can glimpse in Gerald’s so-called “descriptions” are the operations of a consciousness that, in a sense, can’t make up *its own mind*, and that is also under the influence of past discourses that have impressed themselves in his language. So the aim, ultimately, for me, in the classroom, is to try to get students to *reflect* in a way that raises questions with only-ever-provisional answers upon texts that are themselves always reflecting, always wondering. . . .<BR/><BR/>[end of excerpt from "Literature Compass"]Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-32890705291157467722008-01-20T05:39:00.000-05:002008-01-20T05:39:00.000-05:00Mary - so good that you get the chance to do this ...Mary - so good that you get the chance to do this - and I agree that the free-ranging conversational element definitely replicates a good discussion group - and extends it. But the conversational is only an element - and it seems to me a blog is never quite as responsive as real conversation. Perhaps it is more like a medieval letter collection? There is the polished and focussed tone of so many entries coupled with a particular kind of open endedness which is both what keeps it interesting and stimulating, and what is also frustrating (the time lag - the uncertainty of reception and response (or continuation). I am sure that we have to accept the downsides with the up. But just like I don't think the book is dead, neither do I think blogs can actually replace conversation - much as they might stimulate and supplement it.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-14635679045057358442008-01-20T03:02:00.000-05:002008-01-20T03:02:00.000-05:00Mary,It is a staggering compliment to be read so p...Mary,<BR/><BR/>It is a staggering compliment to be read so perceptively and generously. Thank you. If you wouldn't mind, let me know when the full text is available, and where.Joseph Kugelmasshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18119217349621472543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-26392248233382690662008-01-19T12:45:00.000-05:002008-01-19T12:45:00.000-05:00Great thoughts. I'm looking forward to reading th...Great thoughts. I'm looking forward to reading the full article when it's published.<BR/><BR/>I think, as you've focused on, that the conversation and collaboration is indeed the greatest aspect of blogging--especially academic. It seems to open up conversations that are otherwise so difficult to begin in academics. For example, I've found that ITM fosters myriad conversations that we wouldn't necessarily approach in our normal settings--a wide array of thoughts that may not necessarily connect to medieval studies (or the academy in general) on the surface but can find extreme relevance on deeper reflection.<BR/><BR/>Thanks for sharing this!bwhawkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17909010609907741198noreply@blogger.com