keith@thememorybank.co.uk on Fri, 17 Aug 2007 02:09:26 +0200 (CEST) |
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RE: <nettime> personal life, impersonal writing (was: The banality of blogging) |
I am glad you brought the blogging issue up in this expanded way, Benjamin. It has been the main focus of my work for the last decade. I abandoned a contracted textbook after writing a draft because I could not place myself and my experience in it. The book I subsequently wrote on money which was explicitly personal and became the basis for a website which has lately been turned into a blog (www.thememorybank.co.uk). At first I thought I was exploring the repersonalization of impersonal society as a result of the digital revolution in communications, but I eventually discovered that I was talking about a historical shift in the relationship between the personal and impersonal. Later I published a short book, The Hit Man's Dilemma: or business, personal and impersonal, which took the issue you raised to be at the heart of contemporary social contradictions, in the academy and more widely. In the last year I have come to see money itself not just as an impersonal institution, but as one of the principal means of bridging the concrete particulars and abstract universals, a function it shares with religion. In my attempt to rethink anthropology as the study of world society, I have been drawn to Kant's original example of seeking to place individual subjects in history as a whole. Mauss's project in intellectual politics has been particularly inspiring in this respect. Above all, I look to Gandhi's example in developing a method for scaling up the person and scaling down the world so that they might meet on more meaningful terms. So, in relation to the specific focus of your comment here, I would say first that writing is always a process of exploring the dialectic of inner subjectivity and its objectification as text. Second, even academic work varies in the degree to which personality is excluded -- one has only to compare the tradition of the humanities with the failed experiment known as social science. Third, the need to engage practically with the personal/impersonal pair reflects the ongoing crisis of global capitalism today. So we should focus on the corporatization of the universities, if we wish to understand why the academy in some respects appears to be moving in the opposite direction to some of the currents unleashed by the internet. >Does it have to be this way?< Well, it isn't really that way to start with, only in an ideal type of limited empirical application. We do, however, have to work quite hard to emancipate ourselves from such ideas if we wish to harness the possibilities in actually existing society. Keith # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@kein.org and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org