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06/13/2004 Archived Entry: "ruins/blogs"
Once again, Collin gets me thinking about stuff. All good points as he teases out connections between Readings' University in Ruins and weblogs. And while I agree that the university is stalled, I've yet to see blogging as worth the hype, at least not as we currently use the weblog. Its potential for creating short-term collaboration (as Collin quotes Reading) is there, no doubt. But weblogs have been absorbed into academia - or at least into writing courses - in quite another manner, as yet another "text" to read and analyze. I think the university is too bogged down in its own paradigm, or more specifically in Ted Nelson's paperdigm, to figure out how to allow new technologies to create their own practices and methods. My colleague (or really slowly becoming ex-colleague, but still Florida School brother) Marcel is writing a piece for our new media collection which, at one point, highlights Jung's theory of the archetype as representative of how the university - and specifically English studies - maintains the same template-like methods for producing knowledge. To that, he throws in a nice quote from Eagleton's After Theory, "Those who can, think up feminism or structuralism; those who can’t, apply such insights to Moby-Dick or The Cat in the Hat." There's a lot of truth in both remarks, and new media (which includes the rising interest in weblogs) is no exception. The issue of invention - what do we make with this idea/thing - gets lost quickly (similar to Robert Ray's point about cultural studies and film) as the template-producing machine called academics (or English studies) fabricates copy after copy after copy of the same usage. Benjamin's art of mechanical reproduction really should be applied to the university and its failure, at times, to allow for invention to occur. The university stalls (I like that word, "stalls") on fascination with reproduction, an appreciation of digital culture, I suppose, but one which maintains the status quo in place of facilitating difference (and, of course, repetition in a more Deleuzian sense).
Replies: 2 comments
There's a good deal of interesting stuff floating around in these conversations. Your summary of the panel was helpful. One other point, of course, is that blogs themselves are template machines...
Posted by j @ 06/14/2004 08:58 AM EST
No argument from me here. One of the cool things about going to the MEA panel was that each of the presenters came out of a different discipline, and Shirky and Paquet both do most of their work outside of the academy. They were all interested in making connections outside of their disciplinary haunts.
Alot of the stuff they talked about simply didn't lend itself to classroom application--it was neither abstract nor decontextualized enough for that. And that wasn't their primary interest or motivation. As a result, all five of them were coming at issues of collaboration, organization, knowledge-building, etc., in ways that weren't getting lost in the template machine...
Posted by cgb @ 06/14/2004 01:12 AM EST