I really think that philosophy’s production site is shifting more and more from the library/study and cafe and scholarly journal to the web and blogosphere. Kvond over at Frames /sing has been putting out some very interesting and detailed blogs about Bruno Latour. Larvalsubjects (philosopher and ex-Lacanian analyst Levi Bryant) is blogging about ontology, assemblages, speculative realism, Whitehead, Deleuze, and trees. Heideggerian-Latourian Graham Harman churns his stuff out at Object-Oriented Philosophy. Political theorist Jodi Dean blogs at i cite. Discussions weave themselves together between these and other blogs like The Accursed Share, Fractal Ontology, Planomenology, and some of the others you can find linked on my “Rhizosphere” (blogroll). Some of these bloggers (like Harman and Dean) are well-published academics, others appear to be grad students or just independent intellectuals, but the difference is not necessarily obvious — the mutual iterability and recursivity between them contributes to a deepening of the collective philosophizing that’s occurring, which makes for a different version of the “peer review” that academe prides itself on. (For a recent critical study of peer review processes, see Inside Higher Ed.)
And the format is affecting the philosophy. Graham Harman’s forthcoming “Orpheus: Principles of an Object-Oriented Philosophy” is “being written with an experimental structure designed for electronic reading rather than paper books, which are clearly doomed as the primary medium of our profession.” Books like Steven Shaviro‘s Connected had been trying to do that some time ago.
I’m sharing some of the more relevant (to this blog) posts on my Google blog reader – click on “Immanence Shadow Blog (Posts From Other Blogs)” in the sidebar below. I’m also trying to follow discussions in the environmental media/cultural blogosphere there, so it should make for an interesting mix. To go directly to the shadow blog, click here.
I like your round-up quite a bit here, wondering just what the undisciplined mix of opinions, objections and offered paths will do to the history of a thought. One wonders if your process becomes like one of thinking with the radio on, but then suddenly the announcer starts speaking to you, only to fade back into the program. Clearly the thoughts of others dovetail into yours, perhaps with eruptive new force, perhaps with something like a car crash or a fender bender. It is unclear just how rhizomic this intersection can be.
(A small note: I like very much your idea of a shadow blog, but for some reason I had a harder time than I thought I would locating it on the page.Perhaps mention that it is at the very bottom.)
Cheers to you.
I like your metaphor of “thinking with the radio on”. It could become paranoia-inducing, threatening to the bounded author-self (whose voice is that speaking to/through me? which one is me?), but maybe what’s called for is relaxing into the flow of mingling voices, thinking less in arguments and counter-arguments and more in hyperlinks and extended metaphors (like this one)…