I Am Become Ubiquitous

So the good people of Long Sunday have decided to take the Kaufman Challenge and post my little series on Foucault over there as well.  That means the same post now appears below, on the Valve and on Londay Sunday.  (Well, almost the same post, since I tweaked it between the time I posted it here and sent it to Matt, and have  tweaked the version on the Valve a few times since.) 

This is no Brucian scheme to drive more traffic my way, however.  (What do I care for anonymous traffic when all you lovely people are already here?)  I'm interested in watching how the same ideas are considered in two different forums.  (I resisted the urge to pluralize fancifully.)  And in creating peace between our two peoples.  As CR noted in the amusing comic-book-cum-indie-rock thread last Monday:

I appreciated yr initial comment, Scott. And I’ll take it further in the hokeyness line… There’s actually a bond between those that blog… Those that take this seriously… A bond deeper than the differences that divide us on the “matters fundamental.” I think, anyway. The very fact that we’re here. That we care to discuss or even have it out. It’s the others, off-line, that are going through the motions… Ever talk blog to outsiders? Meet with that blank stare? “But why? Why do you feel the need to do that?” And it seems so obvious to those of us in this bidness of torching each other, daily… Like a restoration of something that should’ve been going on all along...

His account jives with my experience: blank stares or unsubtle hints of time wasted.  I've also received a fair amount of genuine inquiry.  One of my dissertation advisors, for example, pulled me aside after a lecture series he'd organized to ask me about both Acephalous and the Valve.  He had read over them and was intrigued by their potential as a scholarly venue.  Another faculty member (contra Bruce and Tribble) said that in his discussions about my blog with other faculty members, they had all noted that if they knew a candidate had a blog on which he or she discussed matters academic, the first two things they would think are: 1) this candidate is a committed writer, which bodes well for his or her academic career, and 2) this writer thinks about academia when he or she isn't required to, and would therefore be far less likely to coast once he or she acquired tenure. 

Dangers certainly abound.  (Some have already been hysterically catalogued by people with no insight into the hiring process.)  But many of them can be avoided if only we could stop behaving like we're on the internet and start acting more like Adam Roberts.  (Yes, this post received vital compositional assistance from an over-the-counter cold remedy.  Can't you tell?  Look at all the parentheses.)

Comments

[Luke]

between episode one and two, you might want to see the chapter on Foucault in The History of Structuralism by Francois Dosse. The ISBN for Volume one is 081662240X.

I have no idea whether this would be helpful.

[Laura]

I really liked and valued that comment of CR's too. It cheered me up no end.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Luke, you do realize I'm writing the second episode tonight? I read quickly (and poorly), but even I can't read (not even really, really poorly) an eight hundred page history of structuralism in an evening.

Laura, I like the idea of community, and will go to great lengths to impose my vision of it on everyone else. I mean, um, be polite.

[George Whorewell]

Politeness is for hypocrites and schmoozers. Your writing is lightweight. Foucault is lightweight. Long Sunday is lightweight, no matter how much padding, bogus theory, and marxism-lite is stuffed in there. The Valve is not much better, but Holbo at least makes an attempt, even if his attempts at "philosophy" would not pass muster in a community college logic class. The whole scene is rank and fraudulent and meant to put some rich kids incapable of engineering or law or medicine into some teaching jobs.