In praise of blogging

Edward Berge Says: April 26th, 2007 at 6:25 pm Thanks for the feedback Chris. I might be making a mistake, I might be wrong. I am not an expert on this topic. Or on anything for that matter. I’m just a student struggling to understand this stuff. I am not in Ken’s or Derrida’s or Nagarjuna’s league in the least. I posit hypotheses and then try to take argue them out for the sake of my own learning. I’m not making pronouncements from on high. And I hope that in this process of collaborative inquiry that I will indeed learn.

Plus this blog format allow me to admit such personal “weakness,” if you will. It seems in the world of academy we must write in the third person, from a sense of authority, from confidence in defending our position. Well fuck that. That’s not what I am and I really don’t want to write from that place anymore. I like being able to be me in this format, to be all those things I am, from smart to stupid, from articulate to a blathering fool, from here to eternity.

Oh, a personal tangent. That’s not allowed. We were talking about x, y, z. We have to focus, be academic, impersonal. Bollocks. It is allowed.
“I’m not aware of too many things

I know what I know, you know what I mean?” Open Integral

Excerpts re-posted from The Kugelmass Episodes

I’m ashamed to have cried wolf. I’ll be honest and say that the kindnesses that were left in the comments section here, as well as in a few posts written by friends, did a lot to convince me to keep blogging under any name, after the vitriolic nature of a few exchanges shocked me into wanting to abandon my authorship...

Second, I realized that it wasn’t so much writing under my own name that was flattening out my style, as it was the expectations that I brought to writing for the academic blogosphere. As soon as I started writing at Coffee & Critique, I realized that I was doing exactly the same sorts of entries I’d been posting here. I’ll keep trying to figure out ways of taking intellectual risks at this site. Furthermore, I think the kind of frank responses that I wanted to write pseudonymously can and should be posted under my own name...Well, actually, I don’t know what Adam Kotsko or Anthony Paul Smith want, but then again I’m not religious.

It continues to be true that named bloggers can be mercilessly attacked by people with pseudonyms. Such attacks are inevitable nowadays, and inevitable for me since I’m going to keep posting over at The Valve. I suppose such things can be safely ignored... - Kugelmass Published in: The Valve Ethics & Morality Blogroll Meta Personal on April 27, 2007 at 4:43 pm