A Change of Direction: Blogging for PopMatters
Dear readers,
Starting today, I will be putting most of my blogging energy into blogging for the cultural studies / review website PopMatters. This site will still be active; I’ll put signposts up here to what I write over there, and I’ll sometimes cross-post. I’ll also write occasional book posts for the Valve, with cross-posts here.
It is exhilarating to consider what this new project will bring. PopMatters is vastly bigger than this site (or the Valve, for that matter) could ever be, and it will enable me to write kinds of criticism that I’ve neglected for a while in order to reflect on the academic situation and fads in philosophy (or “theory”).
Criticism is alive and well; there is a burgeoning market for it, and it has been greatly bolstered by the blogging revolution, which is a source of publicity for any smart piece of analysis strong enough to spread virally. The humanities, on the other hand, are in tatters. Part of the reason for my new focus is that I don’t think there’s much value in continuing to write about teaching in the university until the situation generally improves, and I see even less value in trying to breathe life into theoretical discussions (led by people like Slavoj Zizek) that have mostly served to alienate the public, particularly since the ideas fueling these debates are not genuinely original breakthroughs.
I am also uncomfortable with the role that academic blogging seems to have assumed. As far as I can tell, academic blogging does far too much to turn the horrible realities of the job market into an amusing, academic version of Alice in Wonderland: Oh, dear me! Wherever shall I end up next? Academics unwittingly portray themselves (with the generous help of commenters) as eccentrics who are bound to suffer, rather than as knowledge workers who are being exploited. Another way of putting this might be that Marc Bousquet’s How The University Works is probably the only academic blog (mine included) that should earn our admiration rather than our contempt — and it’s already a book.
Furthermore, given the current situation, the democratic ideas behind academic blogging (of bringing conversations usually restricted to campuses to the wide world of the Internet) has perhaps only helped prop up the other, worser idea that what we in the humanities do ought to be done for free, since it’s just book hobbyism if it isn’t serious, bare-bones instruction in writing.
I like the medium of InsideHigherEd, and I may write for them again, with pointers here leading there. But until then, let’s talk about pop, and what really matters.
More soon.
-Kugelmass
I’m not sure whether to congratulate you, be offended, or feel betrayed, so I’ll just go with my gut and just congratulate you, you big lug. I’m a little surprised, mostly because your most recent experience with a larger audience was, well, it was what it was (although it paid, which almost makes IHE experience worth it). (Almost.)
I feel as if you are setting up some false (and kind of reductive) dichotomies here in your evaluation of the purposes and effects of academic blogging. Perhaps the tone of this post is a symptom of some kind of deeper disillusionment, I don’t know. But good luck with your work for PopMatters–a site I for one had never heard of or been to, “big” though it may be, until you mentioned it here! Is pop what matters? That depends on how you define it and talk about it, I suppose, and on what matters to you.
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At least you can teach writing, what’s left for me? Certainly I could claim to teach thinking, but that’s not going to be so easily verifiable, unless I do it Dead Poet Society style, which I won’t because I can’t… [Sadness settles in]
Yes, congratulations on a new forum from me also.