Philosophy.Com

bloggers as the new public intellectuals

Tim Dunlop has an article on bloggers as the new public intellectuals. It is listed at the Evatt Foundation. The article has been noted but not substantively commented on in Australia. A one liner can be found here and some comments on bloggers and punk rock by James Russell here

Tim's article deserves more than a cursory glance.

I will outline Tim's argument then move to introduce some quibbles. I support the argument for the democratic forum and the role Tim allocates to bloggers to support and foster that forum in civil society. My quibbles are designed to strengthen the argument--to get him to think more deeply about some bits and pieces that he skated over--and to open up the discussion about what bloggers are doing.

Tim's core argument is that bloggers are situated and biased public intellectuals who engage in intellectual practice. This practice he says is:

"...the practice of engaging in public debates about matters of social and political importance that is theoretically open to anyone. By doing this, we move beyond constructing the citizen as a passive recipient of vetted knowledge and recognise them as creators of such knowledge in their own right."

He then argues that this engaging in public debate as citizens involves making arguments, which he then connects to democracy. He uses the work of Christopher Lasch to make his case:

'Lash says "our search for reliable information is itself guided by the questions that arise during arguments about a given course of action. It is only by subjecting our preferences and projects to the test of debate that we come to understand what we know and what we still need to learn. Until we have to defend our opinions in public, they remain opinions in Lippmann's pejorative sense - half-formed convictions based on random impressions and unexamined assumptions. It is the act of articulating and defending our views that lifts them out of the category of 'opinions,' gives them shape and definition, and makes it possible for others to recognize them as a description of their own experience as well. In short, we come to know our own minds only by explaining ourselves to others."'

And further that:

"....democracy requires argument and that public argument involving ordinary citizens has been usurped by an elite, a group of insiders who either because of political connections, expertise or other institutional reasons have easier access to the media and are therefore able to dominate public discourse. Such debate then tends to happen within pre-defined parameters that reflect the education, specialisation and norms of that elite. Thus, not only do they dominate public argument by virtue of their elite access and knowledge, they also tend to define the topics, terms and presentation of such debate and are liable to judge any lay contribution as illegitimate."

So blogging is more than empty flag waving. It challenges the closure tendency in the public sphere, whereby alternative opinions are not really sought or welcomed and where open frank discussion is actively discouraged. Blogging has a democratic ethos and it challenges the anti-democratic tendencies whereby political power is used to manage public opinion through spin by publicity hacks.

Tim does acknowledge that bloggers engage in public argument in a rough and tumble way, which involves a lot of shouting and point scoring. But he says that that blogging also helps to create an environment [what Bernard Williams once called rational civility] where citizens can use arguments to increase their knowledge in a topic.

I'm quite happy with this line of argument. All I would add to it is to say that it gives us deliberative democracy.

So what sort of knowledge is achieved by allowing our opinions and assumptions to be tested by vigorous debates with other bloggers? Is knowledge reliable information as Christopher Lasch, and Tim following him, imply? Or is something else. That, I think, is the area Tim skates over. So what are my quibbles?

There are two.

The first quibble has to do with the truth bit in relation to knowledge and power. In no way does blogging resurrect the idea of capital-T truth. If bloggers are situated and biased public intellectuals (as they are), then you kiss that idea of truth (Truth) to one side, as it implies Absolute Truth or being on a sky hook or a God's-eye view. Debates amongst bloggers is more like the blowtorch-to-the-belly polemics in the House of Representatives and no one engaged in them reckon they are standing outside language to to find some test for truth. We are all operating within the concepts of language. (My interpretation of Tim's appeal to Kant. I exchange mind for langauge).

This blowtorch-to-the-belly polemics does not mean that there is no rational civility that increases our knowledge of events, or deepens our understanding of what is happening to us. A good example of the process of increasing our knowledge through argument is provided by Invisible Adjunct, which explores the impact of corporatisation on the liberal university, on academic labor and the humanities. Our knowledge is deepened by this weblog. And this particular post on unemployed PhD's is a great example of the rational civility of conversation in civil society, where by people sort out what is going on in the liberal university through a dialogic.

What I gained from this discussion was a deeper understanding of my history as an academic. I knew that things were bad in academia with the corporatisation of the university. I got out because there was no job market. But my understanding of the two labor system was deepened through reading and participating in Invisible Adjunct'sweblog. What the shocking way the senior faculty treated PhD students meant in terms of the university as an institution was disclosed.

If public reason is a dialogic reason then we need to rethink what is meant by truth in this dialogue. I would suggest that, since blogging is intertextual (the raw material is texts linked to other texts that are layered by multiple interpretations), so it is more a process of understanding and interpretation to make sense of, or grasp the significance, of an issue for us rather than uncovering facts or getting reliable information. Blogger is much more than the poor women's journalism.

So what is it that bloggers are doing? At this point we need to highlight the political nature of blogging. We can take this political turn by considering the issue regulation of the media. In the political forum of the Australian Senate we have a dialogical exchange between different groups of Senators that aims to change a bill with introducing, amending and correcting amendments. This is done within various conventions that say there is a right and wrong way to go about engaging in debate and changing legislation.

As the recent debate on cross media ownership indicates there is a lot of give and take in the Senate. This reweaving can, and does, result in agreement or an overlapping consensus on some amendments---a common ground---is established; whilst on other occasions there is an agreement to disagree on specific amendments. What has been agreed to in this social practice of reweaving and recontextualising? It is a process of reweaving the web of beliefs about media ownership.

Is this reweaving idea whacky? Well no one stood up in Parliament during this media debate and asked: "Are you representing accurately?" "Are you getting at the way the object really is"? And rightly so, because they understand that they were not doing realist physics or economics in Parliament. Theirs is a different kind of social practice; one in which they come to agreements that are reached through some sort of political consensus. No one claims that the agreement is objective truth given by the correspondence of theory of truth. It is a temporary compromise in an ongoing political struggle.

The senators understood that their social practice in the Senate was about re-desiging a regulatory regime for the media industry in changed conditions. In the words of Senator Harradine, one of the 4 independents in the Senate, it is designing a regulatory regime:

"...which would prevent further media concentration but allow the media industry to expand for the benefit of the general community...It is our job as elected legislators to ensure not only that there are reasonable parameters set for the running of successful media businesses but, much more importantly, that these parameters serve the Australian people."

In trying to achieve this goal they said things like:"the amendment does this job"; "you misrepresent what I said"; "you have not included this in your considerations"; or "the point you are making is not what the issue is about"; "we need to consider this"; "what is meant by localism" etc. No one said that "I reject this amendment on the grounds of the 'facts of the matter.'" In doing so they deployed various rhetorical devices to persuade one another to adopt a particular course of action---more market less regulation, more regulation less market.

My second quibble with Tim has to do with the kind of knowledge that is achieved by rhetorical debate in civil society. Tim seems to imply that using argument to increase our knowledge on a topic is a form of theoretical knowledge based on removing our prejudices and ignorance. I interpret the tacit conception of knowledge to be less the theoretical knowledge of the social sciences, such as economics, and more the knowledge provided by investigative journalism. It is one of chasing down the facts or correcting errors----as illustrated by Tim's Guardian example.

This scenario of knowledge as reliable information is misleading. True, what Tim is saying is partially right. Representational knowledge does happen, since many bloggers see themselves as proto-journalists or are journalists and they are very good at both kinds of writing. But that is not the fully story. The knowledge that is implied is an ethical knowledge, because we are making judgements about what is right and wrong based on our lived experience. This is quite different to knowledge as reliable information.

Let me illustrate through the great issue in Australian public life--the economic reforms (in the form of deregulation, privatisation, user pays etc), which opened up the Australian economy to the processes of the global market and which have radically transformed our everyday life. Though Positivist economists try to talk about reform in a neutral way (without expresssing their approval or disapproval), the reality is that citizen's understand these reforms in terms of the impact they have on their life. And they do so from their lived experience.

Citizens make their judgments from their experience of economic processes--unemployment for the industrial working class, declining living standards for the middle class). We understand the meaning of these reforms in terms of how they enable or hinder us in our attempts to fashion our lives so we can live well. In engaging in public debate we give voice to these experiences of being caught up in radical change that we understand is trying to establish a new market order for Australia.

It is a normative view based on our tacit knowledge that there are winners and losers from the radical change. It is a not neutral description because the judgement is saying that the income distribution from the economic reforms is unequal. It is unequal because the big corporations and top income earners have disproportionately increased their share of the national income. And that is wrong. It is unfair, even though Australia is living in a boom time.

That is an ethical judgement about the relations of power hidden in the invisible hand of the free market. And ethical judgements are made about the crude utilitarian economics that is deployed to justify the inequality in terms of a % increase in Australia's GDP. The market ethos is judged to be one of 'stuff you Joan, I'm doing okay, so get out my way.'

The theoretical knowledge of economics is then used to deflect these ethical judgements from the public sphere, or if that doesn't work, then to keep them at bay. It pushes quality of life issues to one side by turning its back on wellbeing of citizens as the goal of public policy, and making money (wealth creation) the central goal. For the utilitarian calculators the % increase in GDP from national competition policy is all that matters.

Those are my quibbles. What they signify is the distinctive voice of bloggers and differentiates them from the reportage journalists who rarely write their articles in an ethical language. That different language is scrubbed out by the corporate media. This why I have turned to the intellectual practices in the political institutions. You may not agree with the tight connection I have made between blogging and politics, but it does highlight the way that blogging is distinctive from journalism. That difference makes blogging even more significant for democracy.

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Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 24, 2003 09:30 PM | TrackBack