(a pedido de leitores, deixo aqui o texto que eu apresentei sobre blogs no colóquio organizado pela Universidade de Pittsburgh; na verdade a apresentação foi bem mais longa, mas este foi o texto base. Infelizmente, está em inglês. Se alguém tiver dificuldade de entender, pode pedir ajuda na caixa de comentários que com certeza alguma alma tradutora caridosa aparecerá...)

Cultural Studies in the Blogosphere:
Academics meet new Technologies of Online Publication

The following paper will be more a personal report than an exercise in speculative theory, but perhaps it might help us shed light on a debate that lies at the heart of the question of ethics in intellectual work: the possibility and desirability that academics write, on a regular basis, for an audience beyond the university walls. In a recent piece, American literature scholar Michael Bérubé reports on the stigma associated with academics who write for broader audiences, choose to intervene in so-called civil society, and thus break the unspoken pact of adherence to the semi-feudal structure that allows scholars to say just about anything as long as they stay within safe disciplinary boundaries. For junior faculty, of course, the act of stepping outside those boundaries into the terrain of broader cultural discourse may turn out to be deadly, no matter how brilliant, prolific, and accomplished they happen to be in their fields. It’s as if the extra work you do as a public intellectual – let us maintain that notion for the moment, however problematic it is – somehow cancels out, invalidates, or causes suspicion to be raised about your disciplinary work, regardless of how valuable that work has proven to be.

In academia, “journalism” is the name reserved for this beast. The term is used in academic discourse in at least two different senses, in a strictu sensu to designate the set of practices that emerged and consolidated themselves around the institution of the modern newspaper in the 19th century as well as its later offspring in spoken and visual media, but also a lato sensu to signify any and all discourses of knowledge, on any object, that do not conform to the boundaries proper to the modern, departmentally divided research university. “Oh, his work is kind of journalistic” we tend to say with disdain about those who dare overstep these boundaries or speak with a greater degree of clarity to an educated general readership, in an implicit equation between being readable and being superficial. This is not to deny, of course, that there is stuff that passes for scholarship but which is, in fact, journalism in the strict sense – a compilation of already produced knowledge, and that therefore should be called by its name. My point is, however, that more often than not the disqualification of journalism in academia works as a protective barrier, maintaining the separation between academia and its outside. First axiom of this paper, then: In the modern research university very seldom will you be able to put yourself in a position to act as a public intellectual without confronting the charge of being “journalistic.” Undoing the anxiety that belies that charge is itself one of the major tasks of intellectual work.

In a debate promoted by The Nation on that topic in 2001, Jean Bethke Elshtain mused that the problem with public intellectuals is that they tend to become more and more public, less and less intellectual. Not necessarily less respectful academically, but “less reflective, less inclined to question one's own judgments, less likely to embed a conviction in its appropriate context with all the nuance intact”. In finding a comfortable niche for him/herself, in a establishing a voice from which a certain public already knows what to expect, the public intellectual runs the risk, at the limit, of becoming a paid publicist, a spinner, an ideologue. That is not, of course, inevitable. Jean-Paul Sartre and Susan Sontag could be mentioned as two examples of thinkers who maintained their full critical edge and rigor even after a life-time of work in the public sphere. It was only after decades of engagement as a socialist intellectual that Sartre wrote his monumental study of Flaubert, The Idiot of the Family, a work as rigorous as anything he ever wrote. The charge that the public arena creates vices in the intellectual may, then, have some truth to it, but it’s far from being universal. However, for academics hoping to act in that arena, the combination or reconciliation of a broad public discourse with the maintenance of the rigor inherited from academic work is, indeed, a permanent challenge.

The discussion about the existence (or not) of genuine public intellectuals in the United States is itself a topic that has produced a lengthy bibliography. Books on the modern university, such as Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins or Peggy Kamuf’s The Division of Literature have studied the growing process of specialization undergone by the post-Fordist university, where an increasingly corporatized structure forces academics into ever-smaller corners of specialization. In this context, the figure of the intellectual in the European sense – or even in the New York sense in which Edmund Wilson and Irving Howe may count as examples – seem to have been on sharp decline, Susan Sontag’s death representing here a somewhat allegorical endpoint for a whole generational experience. For those of us not simply comfortable with the retreat into the safety of academic specialization, while aware that the conditions are not given for a revival of the public intellectual of the universalist, Sartrean type, what is to be done?

The figure of the politicized intellectual has always been closely connected with the space defined by Habermas as “public sphere” – Öffentlichkeit, the German term, brings with it the idea of openness and an essential relationship with the outside. This is my cue to connect ethics and intellectual work. I would contend that the ethical content of intellectual work today does not have to revolve around the question of political commitment along Sartrean lines – it doesn’t preclude it, mind you, but it should not be reduced to it. If we follow Emmanuel Lévinas on this matter, we’d have to reverse those terms: it’s not the content of the commitment that gives the ethical encounter its meaning, but on the contrary, the encounter itself, the unanticipated arrival of the Other that allows for all commitments, political and otherwise, to take place. The key, for Lévinas, is the irreducibility of the Other and its nature as the fundamentally unknowable agent of an event that cannot be anticipated, an event constitutive of the subject as such. The ethical question par excellence for Lévinas, then, is how to open oneself up to the arrival of the Other. How does one prepare and experience that encounter, however, while intervening in the public sphere in ways that enhance its unfinished nature, its openness to political action.

On the Internet, we always, by definition, speak and write to an other that we don’t really know. That is to say that the Internet radically changes our experience of the public sphere – in fact one could not speak of the public sphere today without considering, particularly, the world’s 60 million blogs have changed politics, journalism, and the practice and study of culture in recent years. I’ll devote my remaining minutes to a few reflections on it, based on my one-year experience as a blogger.

For the benefit of those who may not have run into blogs yet, here goes a short definition: a blog is a personal web page updated daily or semi-daily, or with some frequency, with entries dated and organized in reverse chronological order, so that as you open up the page you will always see the latest entry. These entries, named posts, may be accompanied by a comment thread where readers write in their responses. In the more widely visited blogs, the number and frequency of these responses may cause a true conversation to be formed. On one side of the page the blogger will usually include a blogroll, listing the blogs that s/he visits and with which she is engaged in conversation. Posts may be as short as a word and as long as an academic essay, but their essence is the hyperlink, that better-than-a-footnote resource that allows bloggers to send readers to their sources, be they a piece of news, a post in another blog or just about anything available on the Internet.

The first blogs emerged in the late 1990s, and today in several countries – the US, Brazil, France, and Iran, foremost among them – they have become an integral part of the experience of the Internet. According to Technorati, a site that tracks down links on the Internet, there are currently 60 million blogs worldwide. Every 14 seconds someone creates a blog somewhere. These, of course, can range from a teenage diaries to specialized news blogs, blogs of political or cultural commentary, blogs of or on literature, sports or what have you. In countries like Iran, the blogosphere already is the main source of news available about the country, in a context of severe censorship over traditional media. Something interesting has been happening, in fact, with the journalistic blogs: many of them started simply linking to, repeating, and commenting on news reported by the major media. Today, this movement has been reversed somewhat: using internet resources to reach information, blogs have begun to report news first and more thoroughly than major media, in such a way that major newsgroups are now often echoing pieces of news from the blogosphere. In Brazil all of the major newspapers have devoted teams of reporters to tracking down what goes on in the blogosphere. Hardly a day goes by in the United States without a major piece of news coming out through blogs. Hardly a day goes by without traditional media being forced go after or respond to a piece of news uncovered by blogs: recent cases include that of Jeff Gannon, the male prostitute that gained press passes to the White House, the unveiling of the Bush / Dan Rather forged document episode, not to mention the very candidacy of Howard Dean for the Democratic nomination last year, which was primarily catapulted and financed through blogs.

One of the recent events where this new paradigm for reporting and discussing news became clear in Brazil happened in April, during a soccer game between São Paulo and Quilmes, from Argentina. A black Brazilian player was sent off the field for reacting to a racist insult coming from an Argentine player. The unusual thing about the episode was that Grafite, the Afro-Brazilian player, pressed charges against Desábato, his Argentine colleague for racist injury, which is a federal crime in Brazil. The charges were accepted by the sheriff and a warrant for Desábato’s arrest was issued immediately after the game was over. For the first time in Brazil, and perhaps in the world, an arrest was made on a soccer field on the grounds of a racist insult. Regardless of what one thinks about the decision of the Brazilian justice, this was an absolutely novel event not picked up as such by the media. Sports journalists are not used to discussing matters such as racism, and on the other hand political journalists didn’t really know what to make of the event which had taken place, after all, within a soccer field. Dozens of blogs picked up the issue and wrote on a it with a number of perspectives. Several forums for discussion were created, with positions ranging from one extreme to the other. On the days following that episode, my own blog peaked at 18.000 daily visits. By the time the media picked up on it had become clear that they had missed the singularity of the event. If I can mention myself as an example, during the catastrophe in New Orleans it was through my blog and few others that the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking community of Tulane was able to exchange news about each other and reassure colleagues that everyone was, if not well, at least alive.

As usual, academics have been slow to respond to this phenomenon, often echoing the nervous response of journalists: since blog posts go through no editorial process, there’s no “guarantee” of the quality or the verifiability of the material you read in a blog. While a few academics have picked up the medium and created excellent blogs, my experience is that I’ve had to explain what a blog is more often when talking to academics than when talking to teenagers. Meanwhile, we continue our discussions of the possible or desirable political impact of academia largely ignoring that such impact can no longer be measured without reference to these new electronic media. In the case of blogs three things in particular are highly relevant for that discussion: first, the sheer size of that readership: more people read my blog daily than have read both of my books in three languages and six years. Second, the instantaneous response of these readers makes of the blog an arena with challenges that one does not usually face in the more secure, walled space of the university, and third, the unpredictable nature of the associations you may establish goes far beyond what we have grown used to seeing in the university. The connection with the outside of university walls should no longer then, be a matter that we discuss in oblivion of this amazingly innovative experience in first-person writing. It is up to us to make full use of it.