-
…because blogs are provisional, ephemeral, interactive, communal, available to challenge, interruption and interpolation, and not meant to last; whereas in a professional life now going into its 50th year I have been building arguments that are intended to be decisive, comprehensive, monumental, definitive and, most important, all mine.
In “Changing Places” and “Small World,” the novelist David Lodge fashions a comical/satirical portrait of a literary critic named Morris Zapp, whose ambition, as his last name suggests, is to write about a topic with such force and completeness that no other critic will be able to say a word about it. The job will have been done forever. That has always been my aim, and the content of that aim — a desire for pre-eminence, authority and disciplinary power — is what blogs and the digital humanities stand against.http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/the-digital-humanities-and-the-transcending-of-mortality/
Stanley Fish, that is a shitty, small, narcissistic project, and insofar as it accurately describes the larger academic project over the past couple of decades, it explains why I’ve never been able to work comfortably within it, despite a misguided longing to do so that has been far too difficult to shake.
I still haven’t gotten over how much of the academic world is ultimately based on petty, personal or tribal authority, implicit when observed, rapidly made explicit when challenged by naifs like me who somehow got the idea that it’s based on curiosity, or wonder, or the common good, or a community of scholarship, or blah blah ideals etc. I know all of this from bitter experience, and yet I still somehow get taken by surprise when I see it play out for the umpteenth time, either in my own work or online.
The above quote is followed by a lot of other billowy tendendtious bullshit about online culture and the digital humanities; the exact kind of lazy, small-minded, authoritative-sounding bullshit that is the predictable result of the sorts of projects described.
-
oldtobegin liked this
-
jddunn posted this
-
Field Notes Theme. Designed by Manasto Jones. Powered by Tumblr.
