On the subject of this blog’s last defilement of a perfectly nice blank screen, The importance of being Elvis, a friend remarked that the title bore a bit of the Elvis odour itself. She claimed that this particular critique of intellectual commentary was in and by itself just another bit of pseudo-intellectual commentary. And of course she is right!
As has already been stated on this page – it’s remarkable how long a webpage really is – bloggery is fit for the more or less cultivated or casual considerations of the works of mice and men over digital drinks and dinner, but not for laborious elaborations on the subtle workings of all things theory. Blogs are the very sanctuaries of commentary, it is where commentary goes when it is no longer wanted in respectable company, which is why blogs are usually just havens for washed up intellectual waste and futile observations of abundant banality.
So why more or less consciously commit the sin you are condemning? Why throw all personal pride and integrity overboard and just plow right through the known courteous seas? Because it feels so good! Bloggery as well as commentary are generally examples of what we might call rhetorical masturbation and rhetorical masturbation, as we have all learnt in our early years, makes you blind. Well, maybe you don’t really loose your eyesight but you do tend to lean back a bit and close your eyes with the sheer pleasure of it.
You start out wanting the real thing, actually you do all the way through, but once you’re at it you might as well enjoy that particular gratification you get by just rambling on by yourself. The curse of the well-connected computer: You can have a virtual discussion whenever you want, but it can’t really compete with actually getting off your ass to go have a decent shouting mach in real life.
Rhetorical masturbation is here both the point and the illustration. You think of a metaphor which oddly enough makes you laugh, rhetorical masturbation for instance, and see where it leads you. You may start out wanting to enlighten yourself and the world by hammering out a serious argument but then quickly get caught up in the fun of writing and just take the initial serious argument as an excuse to do a linguistic lambada. Even if you are a crappy dancer and never really got the gist of that whole latino thing…
Serious argumentation is not easily contained by this medium. But this is actually ok. For unlike the dirty deeds of professional multimedia commentators such as Hitchens and Zizek, bloggery is usually quite honest and more or less private autoeroticism. It is public to a certain degree because rhetorical masturbation needs a potential audience, if nothing else, but no one is invited or incited to actually witness the thing. At least not in our case.
What makes Hitchens and Zizek so obscene is that they so desperately cling to their show man personae. Commentary is crucial to the survival of the persona and the persona is crucial to the gratification of the person. They are not content with the shining solitude of serious work nor are they happy with the private pleasures of a potential audience. No, they incessantly need to pull out their membrum virilae in public and stick it in your ear.
So yes, the rhetorical masturbation of bloggery does make you blind to the serious argument you should be doing but at least it is done more or less in private. It doesn’t require an audience to be willingly violated by the obscene rhetorical gestures of the hardened exhibitionist. It is personal playfulness, not public gang banging.
Tags: bloggery, commentary, Hitchens, private, public, rhetorical masturbation, Zizek
This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 10:36 am and is filed under Waffle.
You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
Rhetorical masturbation makes you blind
On the subject of this blog’s last defilement of a perfectly nice blank screen, The importance of being Elvis, a friend remarked that the title bore a bit of the Elvis odour itself. She claimed that this particular critique of intellectual commentary was in and by itself just another bit of pseudo-intellectual commentary. And of course she is right!
As has already been stated on this page – it’s remarkable how long a webpage really is – bloggery is fit for the more or less cultivated or casual considerations of the works of mice and men over digital drinks and dinner, but not for laborious elaborations on the subtle workings of all things theory. Blogs are the very sanctuaries of commentary, it is where commentary goes when it is no longer wanted in respectable company, which is why blogs are usually just havens for washed up intellectual waste and futile observations of abundant banality.
So why more or less consciously commit the sin you are condemning? Why throw all personal pride and integrity overboard and just plow right through the known courteous seas? Because it feels so good! Bloggery as well as commentary are generally examples of what we might call rhetorical masturbation and rhetorical masturbation, as we have all learnt in our early years, makes you blind. Well, maybe you don’t really loose your eyesight but you do tend to lean back a bit and close your eyes with the sheer pleasure of it.
You start out wanting the real thing, actually you do all the way through, but once you’re at it you might as well enjoy that particular gratification you get by just rambling on by yourself. The curse of the well-connected computer: You can have a virtual discussion whenever you want, but it can’t really compete with actually getting off your ass to go have a decent shouting mach in real life.
Rhetorical masturbation is here both the point and the illustration. You think of a metaphor which oddly enough makes you laugh, rhetorical masturbation for instance, and see where it leads you. You may start out wanting to enlighten yourself and the world by hammering out a serious argument but then quickly get caught up in the fun of writing and just take the initial serious argument as an excuse to do a linguistic lambada. Even if you are a crappy dancer and never really got the gist of that whole latino thing…
Serious argumentation is not easily contained by this medium. But this is actually ok. For unlike the dirty deeds of professional multimedia commentators such as Hitchens and Zizek, bloggery is usually quite honest and more or less private autoeroticism. It is public to a certain degree because rhetorical masturbation needs a potential audience, if nothing else, but no one is invited or incited to actually witness the thing. At least not in our case.
What makes Hitchens and Zizek so obscene is that they so desperately cling to their show man personae. Commentary is crucial to the survival of the persona and the persona is crucial to the gratification of the person. They are not content with the shining solitude of serious work nor are they happy with the private pleasures of a potential audience. No, they incessantly need to pull out their membrum virilae in public and stick it in your ear.
So yes, the rhetorical masturbation of bloggery does make you blind to the serious argument you should be doing but at least it is done more or less in private. It doesn’t require an audience to be willingly violated by the obscene rhetorical gestures of the hardened exhibitionist. It is personal playfulness, not public gang banging.
Tags: bloggery, commentary, Hitchens, private, public, rhetorical masturbation, Zizek
This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 10:36 am and is filed under Waffle. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.