The Ancient Art of Haranguing Has Moved to the Internet
Marian
The Ancient Art of Haranguing Has Moved to the Internet
August 10, 2002
By EMILY EAKIN
"The pamphlet is a one-man show," observed George Orwell
approvingly. "One has complete freedom of expression,
including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous,
abusive and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more
detailed, serious and `highbrow' than is ever possible in a
newspaper or in most kinds of periodical."
But Orwell, who pamphleteered on behalf of unpopular
leftist causes, was not optimistic about the genre's
prospects in an era dominated by newspapers devoted to what
he perceived as an increasingly narrow range of mainstream
opinion. "At any given moment there is a sort of
all-prevailing orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to
discuss some large and uncomfortable fact," he lamented in
1948.
It seems Orwell may have been underestimating contemporary
society. If he had lived to surf the Internet, for example,
he might have been cheered to discover a flourishing new
breed of pamphleteer: the blogger. Like its ink-and-paper
antecedent, blogging is quick and cheap. Anyone with access
to a Web site can post a weblog (or blog) linking readers
to other online sources and promoting all manner of
original opinion - serious, scurrilous, seditious and
otherwise.
Today, according to Cameron Marlow, a doctoral student in
electronic publishing at the Media Lab at M.I.T. and the
creator of a weblog index, Blogdex, the number of blogs -
liberally defined - has probably passed the half-million
mark. That's up from just a few dozen five years ago, a
spike that blog watchers say owes much to the events of
Sept. 11, which spawned a whole new subgenre: the war blog.
And while most online harangues presumably lack the public
profile and scathing eloquence of history's most
redoubtable pamphleteers (a typical passage from one of
Milton's famous antiprelatical tracts, for example, refers
to the Anglican church service as "the new-vomited paganism
of sensual idolatry"), some bloggers, including the
neoconservative journalist Andrew Sullivan, (Andrewsullivan
.com), and Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the
University of Tennessee (InstaPundit.com), routinely draw
more than 20,000 visitors a day and get cited by the
mainstream press.
But the surest sign that blogging is no longer just a
para-journalistic phenomenon is academic recognition: this
fall, the Graduate School of Journalism at the University
of California at Berkeley is inaugurating a course that
uses weblogs to investigate current debates over
intellectual property.
"We wanted to explore a serious issue using a novel medium,
" said Paul Grabowicz, director of new media programming at
the school and a co-teacher of the course. "When you have
journalists sitting down to write a weblog, what happens to
objectivity? Obviously, a weblog is far more interactive.
It starts to mix journalists and their sources together.
Then you have those people responding to postings on
weblogs: What do you do with those?"
The war on terrorism may be giving new life to the
old-fashioned pamphlet as well. This winter, "9-11," a
stinging indictment of American foreign policy packed into
a 125-page, pocket-size pamphlet by the M.I.T. linguist
Noam Chomsky, became a best seller in five countries,
setting a new sales record for the Open Media pamphlet
series published by Seven Stories Press. Begun during the
Persian Gulf war in 1991 by a pair of Rutgers University
graduates hawking Xeroxed copies of an antiwar tract on New
York City street corners, the Open Media pamphlets now
appear as glossy bound little books on hot-button topics -
terrorism, the Middle East, civil liberties - by scholars
like the radical historian Howard Zinn.
And now Open Media has some competition: the Prickly
Paradigm Press, a scholarly pamphlet series begun by a pair
of British anthropologists in 1993 as the Prickly Pear
Press and recently revived by the American anthropologist
Marshall Sahlins. Mr. Sahlins raised money from friends and
family to take over the series and convinced the University
of Chicago Press to act as its distributor.
To celebrate its new incarnation, the renamed Prickly
Paradigm is issuing five 50-page polemics this month on
subjects ranging from the West's relationship to war to the
unlikely affinities between left-wing cultural studies
scholars and libertarian Wall Streeters. In "War of the
Worlds: What About Peace?," Bruno Latour, a French
theorist, argues that to achieve world peace the West must
first acknowledge that it has long been at war, albeit
covertly, a war masquerading as the "peaceful extension of
Western natural Reason" to "the many Empires of Evil."
Other pamphlet writers reserve their ammunition for
particular academic disciplines. In "Waiting For Foucault,
Still," Mr. Sahlins tackles the theoretical excesses of
anthropologists. In "New Consensus for Old: Cultural
Studies From Left to Right," the critic Thomas Frank does
the same for the field of cultural studies. By the 1990's,
Mr. Frank contends, facile "cult stud" arguments about the
"subversive potential" of a television sitcom or the
"counter-hegemonic" impact of shopping malls had come to
look uncomfortably like the market populism promoted by the
pro-business right: both groups appear to equate
consumerism with democratic self-expression.
Then there is Deirdre McCloskey's "Secret Sins of
Economics." Ms. McCloskey, a professor of economics,
history and English at the University of Illinois at
Chicago, accuses her colleagues of producing endless
thoerems and statistics that have nothing to do with the
real world. "Imagine that instead of doing economic history
about English agriculture in the 13th century, you were to
do an economic history about an imaginary place," Ms.
McCloskey explained in a telephone interview. "What would
be the point of that? An economics department ought not to
be about speculation and hypothetical worlds."
Of course, in today's media-saturated environment, these
latest endeavors can hardly expect to sway opinion the way
the pamphlet did in its glory days, the 17th and 18th
centuries, when master rhetoricians like Milton, Daniel
Defoe, Jonathan Swift and Thomas Paine regularly swamped
the public sphere with two-penny treatises on burning
social issues. (Published in January 1776, Paine's "Common
Sense" sold half a million copies within a few months and
is credited with transforming untold numbers of ambivalent
colonists into ardent revolutionaries.)
Ms. McCloskey said she had jumped at the chance to write a
pamphlet for Prickly Paradigm when Mr. Sahlins, an old
poker-playing friend, asked her to contribute. "We really
need some place between the formal journal article - mainly
used for academic promotion - and the book,"she said.
But she confessed that she doubted whether her pamphlet
would have much of an impact on her discipline. "I ought to
have called myself Cassandra," she said ruefully. "I'm a
student of the rhetoric of economics. You'd think that a
student of that would realize that people aren't persuaded
just because you have the correct argument."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/10/arts/10TANK.html?ex=1030040526&ei=1&en=0
014eb1bab3497ef
Fair Dinkum
news:20020813020945...@mb-mn.aol.com:
> From the NYTimes~ Well, we certainly knew this! I enjoyed it.
> Marian
>
> The Ancient Art of Haranguing Has Moved to the Internet
>
> August 10, 2002
> By EMILY EAKIN
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/10/arts/10TANK.html?ex=1030040526&ei=1&e
> n=0 014eb1bab3497ef
>
---big snip---
>
> But she confessed that she doubted whether her pamphlet
> would have much of an impact on her discipline. "I ought to
> have called myself Cassandra," she said ruefully. "I'm a
> student of the rhetoric of economics. You'd think that a
> student of that would realize that people aren't persuaded
> just because you have the correct argument."
>
>
Ah, there's the rub. One person's correct argument is another
person's bilgewater. And just as pamphlets left at my door
are directed to the solid refuse container, publications on
the internet are oh, so easy, to ignore -- certain political
diatribes in this newsgroup included.
--
Dink
John (that Alaska guy)
--
Regards, John (tAg)
"Marian" <lust...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20020813020945...@mb-mn.aol.com...
> From the NYTimes~ Well, we certainly knew this! I enjoyed it. Marian
> http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/10/arts/10TANK.html?ex=1030040526&ei=1&en=0
> 014eb1bab3497ef
>
Marian
Marian
>Me too. The art of haranguing, eh? I didn't know that what I do had a name.
><G>
>Regards, John (tAg)
Robert M
Robert M
From the Neighborhood Review of Dimmit County....
NOTE: Any of you disfunctional idgits posting urls to New York
Papers....
Do You Ever Have An Original Thought?
Take a Minute to sit yer butt down, put yer haid twixt yer knees and ask
what that smell is..
LOL!!!!!!!!!
Robert
Robert M
Robert
Sue wrote:
>
> "Robert M" <wes...@flash.net> wrote > Take a Minute to sit yer butt down,
> put yer haid twixt yer knees and ask
> > what that smell is..
> > LOL!!!!!!!!!
> > Robert
> >
> I guess you have hit a new low! Didn't think it was possible! Should have
> known.