My long vacation

I just read a post from a few days ago by Adam Kotsko at The Weblog on academic blogging, beginning to catch up a bit after a long period of blogospheric avoidance.  The avoidance stems from many sources, one of which is a strange (perhaps megalomaniac?) guilt over my sudden disappearance from this scene, after a couple of months of fairly intense involvement.   I stopped mostly for logistical reasons -- two kids; two jobs, one academic and one death penalty case that I don't spend nearly enough time on; an upcoming move for an academic visit next year, etc. etc. etc., which have squeezed my time down to nothing -- something had to give and blogging turned out to be it.  I've been missing it, though, both the reading and the writing, and have wanted to get back to it.  My problem has been the same logistical one -- if anything I've had even less time for this, which from the beginning involved staying up too late; now I need even the late-night hours for other stuff -- compounded by the more basic question of what I'm doing this for, which is the question touched on by Adam's post.  I agree with Jodi Dean (here, here, and here) that there's more to blogging than simple sociality or "pub talk"; like her, I found that the "conversations" generated across blogs and in the comments were valuable (at least to me) intellectual exchanges in themselves.   But given my extremely limited time for doing any kind of intellectual work, including the more traditional paper- and book-writing kinds, I've found that I haven't been able to make myself sit down to do this at all (or rather, do the kind of blogging I did before, as opposed to this kind of far less interesting meta-blogging thing (Adam Kotsko:  "Meta-blogging is the greatest vice yet developed by humankind," and who could argue with that?)). 

That's not a crass calculation about professional advancement.  It's a feeling that however good blogging about Derrida, Levinas, Agamben, etc., feels to me, and however good (or even better) it feels to have the kind of immediate, informed reactions that one gets in this medium, in the long run I'll get closer to the Truth by approaching it through the more traditional forms of scholarship.  That's a confession of a feeling that I'm trying to pin down and interrogate, I want to emphasize, and not a settled judgment about blogging.  There are lots of reasons to think that the genuine dialogs one gets in this form are a better approach to truth than those traditional, monological forms.  Part of the answer has to be, as Adam points out, that a blog is not a good medium for writing lengthy scholarly work, and I tend to write long.  But  if one looks at a blog conversation or series of conversations as a whole, they can (and did, in my earlier posts) also go on at length, in a way that's arguably more truth-productive than any single (long) monolog could be.  So I don't know.  Perhaps it really does come down to some need for ownership, full "authority" over (and credit for) the ideas that burble out of the writing, that tends to make me choose to spend my time on my own writing.  I'll have to think about that; in the meantime, even if it's taken a navel-gazing meta-post about meta-blogging to make it happen, it's nice to be posting something again . . . .