a new experiment
August 24th, 2015. Filed under: research, writing.Supervalent Thought was an attempt for me to learn how to write, which is to say to learn better ways of mediating all the things I can bring to address a problem – in particular problems of seeing the subject constituted in non-sovereignty, in relationality, in the middle of the affective event. I think the practice of it has changed my writing a lot – one way I can tell this is that when I am writing I tend not to be blogging. I work on my entries, usually, for a long time. Because they really are thought by way of writing, and not just thought in writing, not just opinion.There was a little polemicism in the beginning, because I was writing during an intensively political season: but generally I see the blog entry as a staging area for feeling out the contours of a problem that was raised in an encounter. As for readers: I am really happy to be read, and occasionally the comment section induces interesting responses, but it’s also constrained, a little monologuish. I get lots of provocative email about entries, but I don’t write hoping to induce a response. I write hoping to move a problem somewhere, and in moving to open it up to different kinds of encounter with it, which changes its resonance and consequence and thereby its very structure.
Derek Gregory, who writes nearly everyday on his blog Geographical Imaginations, similarly reflects on his experience of blogging and its impact on his writing in a 2012 entry. In a more recent post, writing for a new book titled How We Write, blogging again is mentioned as an important part of his writing process.
And so begins this experiment in form, a public research notebook, really, which will contain and connect various issues in software, geography, politics, theory, visuality, and art, alongside the occasional bicycle.
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For more discussions on academic blogging, see Sam Kinsley’s blog post “Being a Sharing Academic,” which links to a lot of good resources, including Anne Galloway’s dissertation chapter on blogging.