Joe – Thanks for the considered response (and sorry to hit you with a ginormous post on every free association I’ve been having about your own posts for the past several weeks – it was just one of those periods where I kept meaning to jump in, and was just never able to find time and brainpower at the same moment – and so here we are…).

I do actually think it’s clear enough from your posts that there was a self-critical intent – you mention it explicitly on several occasions, and you are also clearly processing your own “content” as you talk through the issues. I don’t really think you have to worry that the posts looked solely outward directed – my concern was, really, that I think the concept of an intellectual public sphere that spans academic and non-academic spaces is a very important one – and that you are absolutely right that this issue was getting lost in all the discussion (which was already problematic enough in its own right) of how to “professionalise” discourse to make blogging respectable for academic purposes. Once we orient ourselves to this kind of decentred space, though, it carries with it some structural implications, in terms of the need to operate via persuasion rather than centralised imposition, etc. – and I think your posts make it clear that you’re well aware of this (it’s one reason to talk about standards of discourse).

At the same time, I think you’re spot on to draw attention to the function often (not always) served by the rhetoric of “authenticity” – which, ironically, and in contradiction to the apparent meaning of this standard – is often wielded in a strange normative and regulatory way in discussions of blogging standards. It can also, as you note, create a strange rhetorical hostility toward responsibility to a community of interloctors. For some purposes, of course, the ideal of authenticity – and even hostility to a public sphere – might be completely appropriate. But I think that you’re right that these normative notions sit awkwardly, at best, alongside blogs that do purport to seek a broader community.

I still get a little bit leery at the three standards you list above, as I think there is a strong value in preserving multiple approaches. I’m reasonably confident, for example, that my Google allergies (which exist, and very are strong in specific areas) are different from yours – and therefore this aspect of my notion of acceptable content would also differ. This would be even more the case for those who blog anonymously. At the same time, the level of long, difficult, not terribly accessible theoretical material I put up here, and the sometimes detailed and elaborate discussions that circle around it, actually seems to violate most common conceptions of appropriate blog content (although perhaps not yours). And yet my content works quite well for what I want to achieve here – while, at the same time, I don’t have any assumptions that my arrangement would work (or wouldn’t work) for anyone else.

At the same time, I actually do “express” things here – often just garden variety frustration at the irritating sides of academic life. I tend to tuck such things below the fold, so they don’t get in the way of folks who just come for the theory, but my assumption generally is that such frustrations are often – sometimes in ways we may not fully appreciate – part and parcel of the process of production of more “serious” forms of thought. They are part of the everyday of intellectual life and, while I don’t plan for these forms of writing, I also don’t particularly withhold them when I feel the impulse… I’ve also, though, seen plenty of people draw their boundaries in different places: I don’t assume there’s any necessary generality to how expressive content combines with other forms of content on a given blog…

And universalism is also highly contingent on the nature of the community: I could actually see communities that really need to exclude particular forms of discourse, or who aren’t specifically seeking new members who aren’t prepared to go through the hard yards of learning the ropes. My own approach sits somewhere in between: I don’t personally see why I should spend as much time worrying about someone who first stumbles across the site through a Google search, as I should writing for regular readers and commenters – but I also have a strong commitment (and not just in blogging) to making theoretical content accessible, and so I don’t particularly want to cultivate a closed community of theoretical adepts… I see these things, though, as highly idiosyncratic to the purposes of an individual blog…

I suppose I feel something of a vested commitment to trying to keep blogging as undefined as we can – while also, of course, exploring the sociological or group psychological or whatever implications of specific approaches to blogging discussions. I wonder whether it makes sense to pitch at least some of the discussion, not in terms of standards we want to maintain – at least in the first instance – but in terms of what we’re trying to achieve through a blog? The discussion can then unfold somewhat immanently, asking whether a particular blog is conducting itself in ways that make sense, given what it is trying to achieve? (We can also ask, less immanently to an individual blog, whether a particular blog is allowing full expression of potentials available within the medium, and whether and to what degree it’s problematic if this doesn’t occur…) It might clarify the degree to which manifestos and such are intending to hold up a yardstick, or a mirror…

This is actually the result of coincidence, though I’ve been thinking about these things since I started blogging. I’d been planning to write the year-end posts for some time. Meanwhile, the notion of the “academic blog” was raised by the presentations at the MLA…and then shortly thereafter followed the LittleLight fight. None of this was happening in October, or I might have written one or more of these posts then.

Also, much of what I was writing assumed a critical position towards my own blogging. I considered doing a “Worst of Kugelmass 2006,” but decided that would be a little unnecessarily self-undermining…sort of the way that Belledame, in the comment you re-posted, doesn’t feel the need to apologize for her rhetoric, even while she is continually considering and revising her approach.

In any case, were I starting from scratch, my guess is that these posts would look more like a positive manifesto, focusing on several themes:

a) What “content” is, and what undermines content or mimics it.
b) My moving from an “expressive” theory of blogging, based on authenticity, to a “rhetorical” one based on communities.
c) Universalism, which means both accessibility and right of access and response.

The question of content is probably the one I’ve developed most thoroughly in these posts. I’ve been circling around the idea that since I’m now blogging under my own name, my ability to write a truly expressive blog is very much curtailed, basically because I can’t write about huge chunks of what happens to me (thanks Google!). So, my notion of my blog’s role and the blogging “community” to which it belongs has changed.

On my blog, I never want to defend a rhetorical move on the grounds that I needed to express myself in a particular way for personal reasons (like emotional release). I only want to present my ideas about my own experiences, and culture and politics (including things like theory, sociology, and so on, which I consider very much part of culture).

Similarly, on my blog, I never want to make a reader feel that that they don’t have the right to disagree with me, or can’t understand how I feel, just because they’ve had different experiences. That’s what universalism means to me, and it’s one of the primary reasons I read and write. From what I hear, Sinthome (at Larval Subjects) is a practicing psychoanalyst, but he never makes his readers feel that they either need to have his training, or simply to read more, in order to have the right to comment. All sorts of other political and cultural blogs, however, do take this position if you disagree with them: you have no right to disagree because you don’t know what walking in my shoes is like (this sentiment strongly flavored a recent exchange about MFA programs, of all things.) Some of the harsher notes in my recent posts came out of disgruntlement with blogs that simultaneously want readers, and claim to want discussion, while later resorting to identity categories or experiential differences as a way of cutting debate short.

It seems to me that there’s a lot of value in thinking these things through, and talking about them explicitly, in addition to attempting to follow model practices. Blogging has moved from a technical / personal binary to something else, which I don’t think has been well-defined yet. That “something else” doesn’t have to be one thing. For example, the blog Unfogged is an interesting, insular blog with a witty community of regulars who tend to write digressive jokes and to write off the tops of their heads. It resembles the late stages of a party full of academics on their night off. I can’t keep up with it, and I have trouble even catching up with its in-jokes…it’s really not the blog for me. Yet I have no problem with it. I respect it the way I respect anything funny.

you know, i was just thinking recently that with my obsessive little categorization for my behemoth blogroll, i maybe should consider doing one for academic ones, because actually there are a lot of ‘em, and i just added one where i didn’t quite know where else to put ‘em, and that made me all bewildered and cranky for a while.

but, then I thought: well, yeah, what -is- the difference between an academic blog and an academic who blogs (many of whom are in the personal category because they write just as often about puppies and domestic life and relationships and popcult and shit).

and then that reminded me about all the -other- blogs that they could go in so many other places and maybe they should and why do i even need to categorize anyway and i said “fuck this” and then i had to go lie down for a while.