Perspective
It has been a long while since my last post here, and tonight, logging online and spending a moment to peruse the writings, I can certainly see plenty of useful thoughts. However I also see the familiar and biting problem of its raison d’etre. This blog is, unfortunately, not a systematic and continuous dialogue, concerned with explicating and building on issues, not the kind of pseudo-dialectic that I first envisaged it as. Time and again it seems wiser to harvest these thoughts for a few moment’s edification, and then simply to ‘move on’ and have more complex, more truthful ones somewhere else.
News and I have built a weblog that reflects our interest in seeing the world become a demonstratably better place, and this means more than the actual quality of the thoughts on offer. So, instead of not bothering to post here again the blog should be recontextualised and reunderstood from a different vantage point. It seems correct to me that systematicity is a thing of composition, and that it is for the entirely obvious reason that it hasn’t been composed that this blog isn’t at all systematic.
Advancement in thought is like mini revolutions, and it would be wrong in any case of me to shun the blog for not being constructive when I no longer think that a blog, by itself, could in any meaningful way be such. There are two reasons for this attitude. Firstly, the knowledge that to build constructively on the arguments News and myself have presented would take major philosophical explorations, which are best initiated by a truer philosophical commitment than the fantasy of internet consistency. Secondly, there seems to be a general inability of people to genuinely engage with moving dialogue, and nothing shows this more than conversation, when, in an attempt to clarify a position, a logical move is made, and eyed with suspicion. A semantic novelty!
I’m sure that the blog is, to the people we might want to engage, more a representation of News and I ‘expressing beliefs’ than ‘forcing semantics on people’, but there is really no reason for us to fight for one of these niggardly opinions over the other. Of course, this blog has always been about our own understanding rather than its ability to be viewed on the internet by an audience, but still the criticism holds of the blog as a meaningful object in its own right. Indeed, the way I now consider the blog makes it almost necessary that it is functionally worthless. This will take a further post to detail, so, onward! (but only in a sense!!)
posted by Anonymous at 10:32 PM
1 Comments:
"This blog is, unfortunately, not a systematic and continuous dialogue, concerned with explicating and building on issues, not the kind of pseudo-dialectic that I first envisaged it as. Time and again it seems wiser to harvest these thoughts for a few moment’s edification, and then simply to ‘move on’ and have more complex, more truthful ones somewhere else."
Blogs are not conversations. The dialogue between publisher and reader is most often fawning or meaningless, either "Wow that was excellent, not that I have anything to say about it", or "I have a blog too yeah! I know how you feel yeah!".
What is more likely to happen by a rather large margin is that any reader who takes much issue with any of our posts, or is spurred on by one to form their own writings, will put it on their blog. There seems to be some principle of self-ownership whereby bloggers only feel comfortable creating tidy little packages of message in a manageable space, primarily in order to please other readers. And this gains a sort of status, and you get more people reading, and you feel good.
The blog form is not for a communication in dialogue, it is to publish yourself and then recieve some pleasingly agreeable reply. It is to find other people's similarly pointless etchings and agree with their sentiment. On a personal level, the most self-baring blog posts seem to obscure the person writing it rather than show it, an exercise in misdirection! Whether the exercise is for the writer's or reader's benefit, I am never quite sure.
"News and I have built a weblog that reflects our interest in seeing the world become a demonstratably better place, and this means more than the actual quality of the thoughts on offer."
Absolutely.
"Of course, this blog has always been about our own understanding rather than its ability to be viewed on the internet by an audience, but still the criticism holds of the blog as a meaningful object in its own right. Indeed, the way I now consider the blog makes it almost necessary that it is functionally worthless."
To me, this blog has been a handy repository for our thoughts and scribblings, and a way of sharing it. It thus provides us with another way of talking to each other, and a form of memory. It fascinates me that we can be caught up in ideas and come to write them down, and months later look back and wonder why it had to be written. It is cheering to conclude that there is some sort of intellectual progression, and that more of the world is coming under inspection by us, and it is instructive to view past mistakes made.
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