…am not much moved by current events… almost everything I’ve written over the last few weeks has had no particular peg to “what’s happening in the world” beyond the fact that it happened to be what I happened to be writing… so I haven’t been posting it…I’m not sure I believe much these days in the importance of being current… It may be at least as important not to be current… from time to time… I think that, and that’s where I’ve been finding myself going. Sometimes, if there’s much of a “now” to an (intended) blog inspiration at all, by the time I’m through with it, it’s the longer and vaguer now…at nowest..
I had the idea ferinstance that the WikiLeaks story fit nicely into a Theory of the Internet that I’ve been thinking about… this invention whose origins were in military research 40-some years ago now represents and actively facilitates the undermining of that same order of things that gave birth to it… how that fact has something to do with this double nature of the American idea that I’ve also been thinking about all year… which in turn relates to phases of world history, and brought to mind a to me very striking passage from The Philosophy of Right that we’ve discussed before, at the time in relation to military service, but that also spoke to the gun as an expression, and objectification, or an alteration in human relations… implicitly how the gun (musket, cannon) was a weapon of the nation-state, not just in the sense that it was employed by the armies of nation-states and determined how they fought, but that its uses, its possibilities, both typified and enforced the particular social structures of the “modern” European way of life, and also shaped the most significant and important experiences of the human beings who lived and died and killed and were most highly honored within nation-states…
…and, well, the internet is only one invention among others, but only a handful of others, that I argue typify the transition from national to global history… … and by the time I’m done with the essay, WikiLeaks is just the unnamed inspiration for a phrase in a series of phrases… and you know there were a lot of other things I could have been doing with the time and thought I was pouring into this unpublishable and determinedly uninterested essay…
In Russian there are two “nows”… I don’t recall the exact transliteration rules, but I seem to recall that there are “sey-tchas,” right now, and “tepyer,” generally now. In Spanish there’s “ahora” and little “ahorita.” In English we can say “right now” or “now” or we can say “these days” or we can say “in these times,” but by the time we’ve reached “in these times,” are we still in blog time?
To make matters worse, I’ve been writing on the kind of subjects that academics normally work on, except that it’s my impression that academics don’t write on them the way that I’m writing on them. Extremely useless stuff!
Now I could write about what’s going on in my life – canine and human difficulties, a writing project, an editing project, an Xmas season I’m not participating in, yard work and other housework I’m not doing… exciting stuff… too damn exciting for a blog…
I think I’m going to have to get the useless and untimely pieces out of my system, though in the back of my mind there’s still an idea of somehow moving from the untimely, or through the untimely, to the present time again, to something that bears on right now or will bear on later right nows… or at least on some future tepyer. If I can somehow think my way to useful perspectives… lay an intellectual groundwork or finish moving some debris out of the way…
I’ve created a category called “philosophy” and another category called “writing” – the latter was mainly for bob, but I invite you all to use it. I think I’ll change the default category on the blog to “writing,” since you lazy so-and-so’s often don’t pick any category at all, and so we get bob’s beaver pond under “Politics.” For all I know, that amuses bob, or maybe bob thinks his beaver pond is pretty darn political… But I changed it, as I usually do… (Also created a “Yoga” category for Scott. Betcha his posts end up in “Writing” though, even when they’re all about yoga.)
I still think a blog has to be current, but I’m thinking we’ve already started widening the definition of “current,” while letting the RecBrow handled a big part of the “current” load. So maybe I’m just catching on to how y’all want things to be…
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Just geting the post up takes a lot of focus, so I forget about the category and tags until after it’s up and then yes laziness kicks in altho the politics category does amuse me and yes I do see the pond as political too.
The political part apart from global warming ecology et al has to do with the Obect Oriented Ontology sites I’ve linked to a couple of times. That’s what the Flat refers to.
Anyway, timely/untimely. I’ve found myself in a similar place minus the gobal history thing. But I find Rec Bro pretty unsatisfying for the current part.