Why We Write: Or, Blogging as a Philosophical Practice

A collection of posts from this blog will be published as a book soon from Mayfly books. 

I am posting the introduction as well as the table of contents below. 

 

"…no philosopher has held any interest for me as long as I was aware only of hid ideas, and not of his practice." – Etienne Balibar 

There is too much to read. Too many hot takes, blogposts, etc. The last twenty plus years have completely transformed the attention economy of writing. The digitalization of text, combined with the dissemination of social media has led to a proliferation of texts and takes. Every moment from politics to popular culture generates more tweets, blogposts, and comments than anyone can read. There is a fundamental transformation of the attention economy in which it seems that there are more writers than readers. 

How can any justify contributing to such a deluge. Does the world really need more takes on Snowpiercer, Breaking Bad, and Trump? Why write such things, and we reprint them here and now. In short, why blog?

I started the blog Unemployed Negativity in the summer of 2006. I was in JFK airport waiting for an overdue connecting flight to Portland, Maine. I started it during a brief swell in philosophical blogging. I won’t list all of the blogs here, and someone should write the history of that period, but for a while it seemed like a new blog was forming every month, and most were being updated repeatedly. Most of those blogs are no longer updated, lingering on now as digital time capsules of a moment that has passed. The activity has shifted to other spaces, podcasts and substacks. I have kept at it for eighteen years now, a fact that might attest to the persistence of habit more than anything else. It is an important practice for me. 

I can only think of my continued engagement with the blog as a particular kind of practice of philosophy. I take this term from Louis Althusser and his students, Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar. While there are multiple different definitions and debates about the term and what it means, the fundamental underlying it is that philosophy is a kind of activity. It is something that one does, an activity, rather something that one is, an identity. I have never really liked the idea that one who studies philosophy is a philosopher, someone who has a reservoir of knowledge and wisdom. One has to do philosophy, and that activity has to be constantly enriched and transformed by an engagement with the outside world. In other words, one has to constantly think and write about the books one reads, the films one sees, the latest news from politics, culture, and society; not just to make sense of them, or to illustrate philosophical concepts, but to put those concepts to the test. In other words, philosophy needs material, without it philosophy risks becoming a dead letter of cliches and stock phrases. It needs a matter to reflect on if it is not to collapse in an endless reflection it itself. This is perhaps always true, but it becomes increasingly so as philosophical reflection comes to us as categorized and pre-digested by all of the various introductions, guides, and articles; if we know the names of different philosophers we know that Spinoza is a rationalist, Louis Althusser a structuralist, Michel Foucault a postmodernist, all of these labels save us the trouble of actually thinking. G.W.F. Hegel outlined this problem two centuries ago: 

"The manner of study in ancient times differed from that of the modern age in that the former was the proper and complete formation of natural consciousness. Putting itself to a test at every point of its existence, and philosophizing about everything that it came across it made itself into a universality that was active through and through. In modern times, however, the individual finds the abstract form ready-made; the effort to grasp and appropriate it is more the direct driving forth of what is within and the truncated generation of the universal than it is the emergence of the latter from the concrete variety of existence. Hence the task nowadays consists not so much in purging the individual of an immediate, sensuous mode of apprehension, and making him into a substance that is an object of thought and that thinks, but rather in just the opposite, in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity so as to give actuality to the universal, and impart to it spiritual life. "

 One way to free these thoughts, to remove them from their reification in so many categories, is to put them into contact with something that they could not anticipate: Snowpiercer and Althusser’s ideas on ideology and repression, Covid and Michel Foucault, Spinoza and conspiracy theories. This is the first sense of what could be called the materiality of philosophical practice: philosophy needs matter in order to matter. This matter must in some ways be alien or foreign to the philosophy at hand. It is precisely because something does not fit into established categories and concepts that it becomes something worth thinking about. At the same time, in order for thinking to have any effect, any transformative relation to not only the world, but any effect on itself it must be materialized, it must be written. Writing is always a transformation of thought, even if the written text never finds an audience beyond the person who wrote it. As anyone who has reread even their journal, or tried to revise something months later, can attest to, the person who reads their own writing is not the same person who wrote it. The text, the words, stay the same, fixed in their meaning, but the thought that created it vacillates and change; or maybe our thinking stays the same, fixed on the same point, but it is the text that seems to vacillate, meaning something else. To write is always to transform what one thinks, fixing the flux of impressions and ideas into words and sentences, and in doing so one transforms oneself. This is the second sense of materiality. The materiality of the letter, of the text, undermines and calls into question the ideality of identity. The difference that one encounters in reading their own writing is nothing compared to being confronted by someone else’s interpretation or reading. People read what was never intended, but these interpretations have an uncanny identity, they are both familiar and unrecognizable. 

 These two senses of materiality, the matter considered and the materiality of the text, create difference, or two differences, the difference between the concept and its situation and a difference between the text and its interpretation. Writing is not a pure play of difference. There is, even on a blog, an attempt to connect and reconnect the observations and ideas into something that could be called a position, or point of view, I hesitate to use the word, “a philosophy.” As Balibar writes, “philosophy constantly endeavors to untie and retie from inside the knot between conjuncture and writing, or if you will, it works from within the element of writing to untie the elements of conjuncture, but it also works under the constraint of the conjuncture to retie the conditions of writing.” In blogging the emphasis is on the untying rather than tying, of trying to see what happens when a concept confronts the cultural or political elements of the conjuncture. This collection is an attempt to see if it ties together. 

 A lot of blogging goes nowhere, become nothing more than a few thoughts that never cohere into an essay or even an idea. It is in part for this reason that I decided to call my blog unemployed negativity. I remember reading about the phrase in some of the discussions of Hegel’s end of history brought about by Alexandre Kojéve’s influential seminar on the Phenomenology of Spirit. The idea was that end of history, when the conflict and struggle for recognition that had defined most of human existence had come to end, conflict, negativity itself would be unemployed, without a use. It seemed a fitting name for a blog. It seemed to be fitting for a bunch of writings that were never conceived to be put to work. Not only were they not planned to be books or articles, they were often in areas that were outside of my official areas of expertise or training. They were posts on television shows, movies, and comic books by someone who did not study or teach on media or film. There was something of a surplus, an excess to these writings. Writing outside the boundaries of academic productive research and writing. Critical thinking, negativity, working off of the clock; thinking does not stop just because one is going to a movie or keeping up with current events. I started this blog as someone who could not imagine publishing on television or movies, leaving these thoughts unemployed, but I should mention that since I started it some of these ideas have been put to work. My book, The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on thePolitics of Work incorporates discussions of movies and television in its argument about representations of work. Blogging transformed the kind of writer that I am. 

I wrote often for my own self-clarification. It is worth noting how utterly idiosyncratic some of the posts were, posts on the political subtext of Planet of the Apes films, the economic structure of dinosaur movies. Add to this a collection of philosophical references, Marx, Spinoza, Deleuze, etc., and one has writing so idiosyncratic to almost be unreadable. Part of the appeal of blogging is in the absolute idiosyncratic nature of the writing. I wrote what I wanted. Sometimes I wrote on a film that was being discussed and debated, sometimes on some major issue like a Presidential election on an ongoing pandemic, other times I wrote a review of a book that was recently published in French and would never be translated into English. Part of the unemployed nature of the negativity is that I was not driven by revenue or clicks. I did manage to find readers, and even translators, as posts were translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, and Farsi. This brings me to another thesis that I have written about at length in my published, or employed writing, and that is the concept of transindividuality. I do not plan to go into it here except to say that one aspect of this idea is in rethinking the very relation of the individual and community. It is not a matter of engaging the community by suppressing individuality, by trying to write in a neutral voice, but that idiosyncrasy and individuation is not the opposite of some kind of community, some kind of commonality, but its necessary condition. 

 One of the clichés of writing is that one always imagines an audience. I am not sure if I ever did that, at least in any specific sense. However, part of the impetus for blogging came from my own experience as a graduate student and that shaped my idea of audience. First, in graduate school I developed the habit of writing a lot, a lot more than I would ever use in papers or classes. I was in a number of reading groups, groups on Marx’s Capital, on Althusser, on Deleuze, and many more. In these groups we constantly read and wrote small reports for each other, building collective knowledge. Many of my blogposts are modeled on that line, reviews, small book reports to a collective that does not exist, or would perhaps exist in and through reading it. I was in graduate school before the age of blogs, but we did have listservs. These listservs were sometimes the only place that I could read about some of my interests that were outside of the standard philosophy curriculum. I learned a lot about Autonomia and Operaismo from the listserv called AUT-OP-Sy (which I believe stood for Autonomia, Operaismo, and Syndicalism), even Deleuze and Guattari were discussed more on blogs than in classes or books back then—as hard as that is to believe. These listservs made it possible for me to understand things that were not taught at my school or discussed by my peers. Graduate reading groups and listservs were a huge part of my education. They allowed me to engage with ideas and perspectives outside of the expertise of the faculty at my university, setting up lateral communications of knowledge that short-circuited the hierarchies between advisor and student. Blogging was an attempt to continue and maintain the kind of community, both face to face and virtual, that I found in graduate school. All of this sounds rather self-important for a bunch of pieces written under the hold of insomnia, or while having a cup of coffee in the morning, but I firmly believe that philosophy has accepted the university as its natural environment at its peril. This has excluded a great many people who want to continue to think and reflect, but do not have access to classrooms or teachers, and more importantly this natural environment has proven to be ultimately quite hostile to thinking and reflection. Its focus is an accreditation and jobs training, tasks that often stand in the way of the practice of philosophy. Universities are cutting philosophy programs every year. If philosophy, if thinking the intersection of conjunctures and concepts, is going to continue to have a future, and I think it must, it will have to find new spaces and methods of communication. Blogging might not be all of that, but it is at least a start. 

Speaking of community, I would like to thank the editors of Mayfly books for having the idea of publishing this book, and the help of Emrah Ali Karakilic, Charles Barthold, and Jess Parker. I also would like to thank the people who took it upon themselves to translate some of these posts into French (David Buxton), Spanish (Javier Sanz Paz and Jaime Ortega), and Italian (Gigi Roggerro). They are all part of the community referred to above.

The table of contents are below: every piece has been edited and revised for publication.