A Portrait of the Academic as a Young Blogger

This afternoon, as you can see, I have posted the first of many (one down, seventeen to go) sections of my dissertation, Pancryptics: Technological Transformations of the Subject of Privacy, onto the blog.

I’ve been promising to do this for the longest time, but I’ve really been quite reluctant to do it when all is said and done. I’ll admit that I find that I am uncharacteristically embarrassed by my academic writing, and this seems especially true of my writing in this particular scene that is called “dissertating.”

Through much of the process of composing the dissertation in particular I have felt, quite contrary to the way I feel about the writing I tend to do online or for conferences, say, as if I am struggling to impersonate some kind of smug omniscient surveying the scene from the imagined vantage of eternity, while in fact instead just endlessly belaboring the obvious. All the while I often feel as though I am painstakingly constructing fragile citadels to defend as if I really care so much about taking up “positions” (apart form the sexual ones) in this way, and as if that sort of thing ever really helps anyone, especially where conversation is concerned. Meanwhile, so much of this seems to unspool in a stiff sniffy style exemplifying what looks to me like that most painfully awkward version of myself who is the guy who can’t dance in public places without at least two cocktails in him.

While I love writing, it would seem I simply despise dissertating.

To write a dissertation is to participate in a ritual of professionalization. The protocols through which it signals its adequacy to that function, the curiously circumscribed audience to which it addresses itself, the conspicuous knowledges and competences it is expected to exhibit are all unique to writing in just this mode and many, I will add, feel altogether perpendicular to the sorts of ambitions and urgencies that normally lure me into the scene of writing otherwise.

I can’t help but think that these discomforts have been exacerbated considerably by the fact that I write so much, with such pleasure and ease, with such vigorous interplay among peers, and with such a feeling of visibility on the very same topics that preoccupy the dissertation in other places like this one as well – that much of the discussion in the dissertation is focused on precisely these online practices that otherwise feel so incomparably more useful and appealing to me in the first place – and that an important part of the lesson of those practices seems to me to be that the academy into which I am professionalizing through this awful performance of writing for print publication is undergoing definitive transformations in its substance, its culture, its role, even as we speak, and directly in response to these very same developments, and all in ways that render the discomforts of this scene itself probably perversely unnecessary anyway.

And so, here I am, hoping that writing here and now in this more improvisatory and modest conversational space I have come to love will help me work through some of these frustrations and perplexities, and above all finish on time. And in any case I do as always welcome questions, comments, criticisms, and corrections that I might get this way. I hope people find useful things here and there in all that follows.

(By the way, Mary McCarthy once famously snarked that in America at any rate a “young writer” seems to mean anybody writing under the age of forty, so, until August at least, even my poor superannuated blogging self can surely lay claim to “young blogger” if a lame literary reference seems to demand as much. So there.)