Recent discussion surrounding trolls, minotaurs, gray vampires and the whole growing bestiary have gotten me thinking about a post I wrote my first year blogging entitled “In Praise of Irritation” later published in Reconstruction. In that post I was making a play on words, seeking to capture the resonance of both being irritated by someone and the sense of dynamic systems theory where a system requires a perturbation, stimuli, or irritant in order to produce new system states. As I wrote in that post,
I find Acephalous very irritating, and for this reason I had a very fine discussion with him that was generative of concepts for me (here and here). I suspect that Acephalous and I understood little of what the other was saying, but it was productive for me as it led me to develop thoughts I would not have otherwise developed– these days I’m becoming more and more sympathetic to his position based on my aleatory materialism –and he wrote about it further. Jodi Dean irritates the hell out of me because she seldom responds to my posts on her site, which I find terrifically rude (no doubt my tone comes off as insulting as I tend to write “dissertations” like I’m lecturing or teaching), but this irritation leads me to write even more with the vain fantasy that she’ll someday respond. As such, her silence generates ongoing communicative events. My friend Melanie irritates me to no end, as she’s always challenging psychoanalysis and attacking my latest theoretical fetish, leading me to throw up my hands in exasperation and heatedly defend what I was claiming, thereby generating ongoing autopoiesis between the two of us. My friend Noah, in graduate school, was extremely condescending, mocking, and abrasive, while brilliantly astute theoretically in a way that diverged sharply from my own views, leading me to constantly spar with him and pushing my thought to develop in ways that it never would have otherwise. My dear friend Robert irritates me to no end, as he constantly misinterprets my claims and pushes them in directions I don’t like, leading me to try to demolish him theoretically, while never really wanting to so that we might continue irritating one another. Yusef drives me up the wall with his playful writing style and rhetorical excesses, and therefore drives me to become even more rationalistic despite the fact that I sympathize with many of his positions, just to spite him.
The thesis behind this praise of irritants was as follows:
Theoretically, of course, it’s odd that I would look for an interlocutor that I could really work with. As a Lacanian I advocate the principle that “all communication is miscommunication.” In my analytic practice I see everyday how my interventions are taken in surprising directions by my analysands, and understood in ways I could have never anticipated. The systems theorist in me adopts the thesis that “all miscommunication is communication.” In some respects, I think the latter thesis is more interesting. If systems are dynamic, this entails that they must reproduce themselves from moment to moment by generating further system-forming events. Systems are composed of events, not objects or things. A social system must generate additional communication on the basis of every event of communication, so as to endure in time. Agreement and consensus tend to diminish further operations or the production of ongoing communicative events as there’s no necessity of continuing communications where there’s agreement, whereas conflict and difference tend to promote ongoing autopoiesis of communication. Irritation (in its system-theoretical sense) generates ongoing communication.
Ultimately I do think there is something to the category of the troll and the minotaur, though it should always be remembered that trolling and minotauring are verbs rather than nouns. It cannot be said that one is a troll or minotaur. Rather one behaves rhetorically as a troll or minotaur in particular communicative situations. The troll is like the protesters at the town hall meetings surrounding the healthcare debates here in the United States. They are not interested in participating in discussion, but in insuring that no discussion takes place. Of course, it’s important to recall that they might not know that they’re doing this. The minotaur is similar. Drawing again on the analogy to health care reform, the minotaur is someone that participates in such a way that that no reform takes place, but rather tries to trace everything back to the infrastructural bureaucracy and legalisms upon which the system is based. The minotaur is the person that traces everything back to some master-thinker, forgetting that there is an issue being discussed. Or they treat every discussion as an issue of misinterpretation, rather than genuine disagreement, implicitly holding that if one simply understood they would advocate the position. Rather than formulating a new, interesting, whizbang version of Kant or Heidegger, for example, they attempt to show that Kant and Heidegger have already addressed such and such an issue in some obscure text. But again, these are verbs, not nouns. They are not essences, but ways of comporting towards others.
read on!
Nonetheless, I still stand by my post written back in 2006 praising trolls. This is just part of how I’m put together. The troll makes me think, no matter how much she or he drives me up the wall. Perhaps I’m a bit of a masochist at heart. On the other hand, despite my admiration for those who have formulated the category of “grey vampires”, I think this sorting is sadly mistaken. The measure of a successful philosophy, in my view, is not whether or not it manages to earn converts. In this respect, the very thesis of the grey vampire as the subject that always seems just about ready to agree or endorse a position is deeply, in my view, mistaken. The true measure of a successful philosophy, I think, is whether or not it becomes a difference engine. As I understand it, a difference engine is an entity that is perpetually adept at producing differences. This is not an egalitarian, happy go lucky free for all. There will be antagonisms, conflicts, wars, and so on. But nonetheless differences are produced. The differences that a difference engine produces can be unexpected projects that a philosophy manages to spawn. I have been surprised as a somewhat militant atheist, for example, at the manner in which my onticology has been picked up and sent in very different directions by certain theologians. This is something that I would have never expected.
However, a difference engine is not simply the production of sympathetic projects. It is also to be found at the level of antagonistic projects. If a philosophy can generate antagonisms, alternative thoughts, opposing thoughts, and so on, it has been successful as a difference engine. This might be a painful admission or observation as none of us like existing in a state of warfare and conflict or witnessing our painstakingly developed thoughts trod upon. However, not only has a philosophy made a contribution to the symbolic world in functioning as a stimulus of creating antagonisms and therefore shifting the frame of discourse, but also I think philosophies benefit self-reflexively from the others or the antonyms they generate insofar as they’re forced to generate new concepts, lines of argument, and applications.
In this regard, I cannot agree with the sortal of “grey vampires”, no matter how much I sympathize with and admire those who are formulating it. In my view, the evangelical model of philosophy is a monstrosity. Philosophy should not seek converts, but rather should aim at the proliferation of differences. The difficult issue is how to distinguish between the verb of trollery where the aim is to shut down any and all discourse through shouting and wearing guns on ones hip, and the verb of grey vampirism where it is possible to produce some productive differences. However, in this medium, in this strange universe of the blogosphere, I think it is above all important to remember that from the perspective of the academy, we’re all cranks, trolls, and gray vampires despite any philosophical and theoretical difference we might have. Our very mode of engagement, from an institutional perspective, is illegitimate and lacking in seriousness or productivity. We are cranks, trolls, strange new minotaurs of an electronic world. There is no division here. We’re all selected in one and exactly the same way. The real question is not whether these judgments are true, but whether or not we identify with those who make those judgments. Further, it should never be forgotten that those of us who have attained some success in this medium are outsiders and marginalized figures in an entire institutionalized setting. They are folks who got sick of submitting materials to shriveled and tired dusty figures functioning as the real minotaurs at the gates of journals, conferences, and presses, submitting their work to a scrutiny by these minotaurs to decide whether or not they were worthy of their gate (to be read as worthy of being submitted to their university discourse or established habitus), and who preferred to accept their minor, marginalized status and do what they really wanted to do anyway: think, invent, and talk to other interesting cranks. The real test is whether or not one identifies with those minotaurs guarding the gate, whether one identifies with the whole SPEP and APA assemblage, or whether or not one finds a way to continue thinking and talking. I mean really, are most of the people at the APA, SPEP, and the MLA people you would want to drink with? Are their aspirations and their concerns what you envisioned when you got in to your discipline? Are their aspirations what inspired you to think? Is your highest ambition to engage in “star-fucking” as one of my former mentors described these conferences, and to rub elbows with tired old fellows who’s books will eventually be consigned to the stacks in a few years? Did you really think this misery known as academia was important, that your life was defined by the press you published with or whether you published at all? Sometimes its better simply to collect sea glass and talk about turtles and mothmen. Although we have quasi-minotaurs that appear here in the blogosphere, that’s not where the real minotaurs are to be found.
August 25, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Appertaining to a recent discussion, vampires, like zombies, are dead but undead and therefore posthuman. Like zombies, vampires feed off the living. Michael of Complete Lies noted Zizek’s observation that zombies are possessed of an uncanny excess of life. Vampires too. For the zombie it’s an excess of raw biological drive, but for the vampire it’s an excess of culture. Vampires are attractive, elegant, tasteful, well-spoken, well-to-do. They are the uncanny persistence of Bohemian artistry and Parisian sophistication embodied in a dark but pale exquisite otherness. They are disgusting, frightening, desirable. What’s not to like?
August 25, 2009 at 4:58 pm
“However, a difference engine is not simply the production of sympathetic projects. It is also to be found at the level of antagonistic projects. If a philosophy can generate antagonisms, alternative thoughts, opposing thoughts, and so on, it has been successful as a difference engine. This might be a painful admission or observation as none of us like existing in a state of warfare and conflict or witnessing our painstakingly developed thoughts trod upon. However, not only has a philosophy made a contribution to the symbolic world in functioning as a stimulus of creating antagonisms and therefore shifting the frame of discourse, but also I think philosophies benefit self-reflexively from the others or the antonyms they generate insofar as they’re forced to generate new concepts, lines of argument, and applications … In this regard, I cannot agree with the sortal of “grey vampires”, no matter how much I sympathize with and admire those who are formulating it. In my view, the evangelical model of philosophy is a monstrosity.”
Extremely well said. It shouldn’t have ever needed saying, but in this particular context it’s unfortunately all too necessary. Obviously, the fact that someone may request clarifications of your position; be genuinely puzzled about how some of your claims are supposed to follow from or sqaure with with some of your other claims; or even flat-out disagree with your claims (or deny that they have been rationally established); does not necessarily mean that that person is just tying to sap your energy or personally attack you or close down discourse, and it is more than a little paranoid to assume that to be the case. Whether or not one feels ‘energised’ by someone’s response to your claims is completely irrelevant when it comes to judging whether or not said response has any rational validity. To refuse to engage in discourse with anyone who does not fully concur with your claims; to demonise one’s critics as energy-sucking beasts (trolls, vampires, minotaurs, whatever); to only associate oneself with those whose mode of discursive engagement ‘makes you feel more energised’; and to set out to win converts for your metaphysical doctrine; all of this is fairly obviously the way one establishes a cult or proselytizes on behalf of an religious dogma, has nothing to do with philosophy properly so-called, and is ‘monstrous’ indeed.
“Ultimately I do think there is something to the category of the troll and the minotaur, though it should always be remembered that trolling and minotauring are verbs rather than nouns. It cannot be said that one is a troll or minotaur.”
Well okay, if you feel you must persist in employing such ludicrous demonising categories, I guess this is mitigates them a little; but then I think the sentences following should read “One who trolls …” and “One who minotaurs … rather than “The troll is …” and “The minotaur is …”, no?
August 25, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Hi Kerry,
I don’t think they are so much demonizing categories but categories that allow us to identify certain rhetorical persona and how they function. In this regard, there’s little difference between talk of trolling and minotauring and talk of rhetorical devices such as euphemisms, dysphemisms, innuendo, loaded questions, hyperbole, and so on. I suppose all of this comes down to the question of whether or one believes such phenomena actually exist. Even the briefest amount of time spent online indicates they do. I get a little perplexed by outrage over attempts to think concepts like trolling and minotauring. While neither the troll nor the minotaur approaches these other types in terms of their gravity, getting upset about this categorizations strikes me as similar to someone getting upset over attempts to analyze the structure of sexism and misogyny, or racism. It’s as if the person that observes that some particular behavior is racist is treated as the one at fault, rather than the racist. Yet if we don’t formulate categories for phenomena like racism and sexism, how can be begin to change our behavior and bring attention to the issue. Likewise in the case of trolling and minotauring. Simply naming them can draw attention to them and help to create norms that generate more fruitful dialogue. I suspect that in many instances, one isn’t even aware that they are trolling or minotauring. This is especially the case, I think, in the instance of the minotaur. Graduate school has a tendency to cultivate minotauring as a predominant mode of intersubjective engagement as a sort of negative side effect of its cultivation of educators and scholars.
August 25, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Back in the old days of blogging, when it still had the gleam of being interesting and new, the term “troll” seemed reserved for the craziest of crazies. At The Weblog, that vestige of old new media, this term was only applied to a man who threatened us bodily harm, to rape our partners, and had a bad habit of constantly quoting Quine in a very worshipful way. The expansion of this to include all sorts of people doesn’t really strike me as in the service of more fruitful dialogue, it just sounds weird. The D&D language really puts me off the whole thing (this affect seems obvious to me, at least when it is combined with the general “distopic darkness of zero point nihilism” language that people are engaging in). I also wonder how you differentiate someone who constantly refers to something called “SR” as not, in your verbage, a minotaur and yet are able to cast aspersions on those who are taken with a particular thinker refer to them in the same way. As it stands the whole classification is very much unlike the helpful analysis of sexism and racism and connecting this rhetoric of auto-enclosure with theoretical resistance seems, well, a bit over the top and part of an overall strategy of overstating the persecution of those outside the mainstream of American Continental philosophy.
August 25, 2009 at 7:45 pm
Levi, like your appreciation of the Parody Center earlier this is a generous and productive post. Many thanks.
I agree with Kerry about more resolutely verbing your categories and like your response about rhetorical personae. But the racism example stops short: it’s quite a different thing to note racializing dynamics and even trace them in particular interactions being enacted by particular people than to call those particular persons racists.
True to your point you’ve stimulated a couple thoughts:
“The troll is like the protesters at the town hall meetings surrounding the healthcare debates here in the United States. They are not interested in participating in discussion, but in insuring that no discussion takes place. Of course, it’s important to recall that they might not know that they’re doing this.”
This is right on. It’s also possible (and in this instance, likely) that they’ve determined that discussion is dominated by the opposition and will lead inevitably to outcomes they find repugnant. Sabotage and terrorism are the classic default strategies of interlocutors whose power to shape discussions is catastrophically disproportionate to their sense of investment in them.
“Rather than formulating a new, interesting, whizbang version of Kant or Heidegger, for example, they attempt to show that Kant and Heidegger have already addressed such and such an issue in some obscure text.”
I agree this can be frustrating, but sometimes it is simply true. It’s not always the case that newness recommends a thing, and settled knowledge is not unsettled by mere inconvenience.
“However, in this medium, in this strange universe of the blogosphere, I think it is above all important to remember that from the perspective of the academy, we’re all cranks, trolls, and gray vampires despite any philosophical and theoretical difference we might have. Our very mode of engagement, from an institutional perspective, is illegitimate and lacking in seriousness or productivity.”
Yes. It’s also worth remembering along the same copernican lines that from a very common perspective outside the academy, this describes all academics and philosophers most of all.
Cheers!
August 25, 2009 at 9:25 pm
If trolling, vampiring, minotauring are related to a struggle with names – who am I, what is my project? – and all the agonies that follow from that, I suppose the worse possible thing is to be identified (forever?!) with the failure to name yourself, for trolling to pass from being simply something you do to something you are. That might have something to do with the intensity of feeling around the names.
I seem to remember k-punk suggesting that there is a certain age after which there is no turning back – if you are without a project in your thirties, it is too late for you… That strikes me as a more than a little superstitious. The dark, moralising tone probably isn’t all that helpful either.
I’d be interested to hear a definition of a ‘project’. I wonder whether a project is sometimes imagined to be static?
August 25, 2009 at 10:31 pm
You’re wrong about the grey vampires, Levi… The problem with grey vampires is not that they fail to make the religious conversion to one’s own position (who would really want that?). The problem is that they suck energy out of all the difference-production that you admire. They turn everything into a complicated, fuzzy, time-consuming, overqualified intellectual wasteland of regurgitated references and forced “devil’s advocate” maneuvers, not into a clear duel between differences. In fact, that is precisely what they want to prevent.
Trolls are not interested in differences, either, but want to ensure that the ball never moves forward, shooting down every positive proposal in order to justify their own frustrations and delays. But it is simply not the case that all sarcastic, argumentative people are trolls. In order to be a troll, one must also pose as above any of the vulnerability that comes through commitment to an intellectual position. Trolls are never really interested in fair discussions or arguments, but always want witnesses on hand– I think it’s only partly to impress those witnesses, since it’s also partly to have people to hide behind in case of retaliation. This is why the net is the perfect troll habitat: not the anonymity of it, but the abundance of witnesses on the net.
I have to admit that I didn’t really *get* the grey vampire category when K-Punk first alerted me to it. I wasn’t sure that I knew any. But hell yes, did I ever know some! It just took me awhile to grasp the concept for some reason.
It’s also important to note that some grey vampires are very highly functional. They can get a lot done while also instinctively trying to take the wind out of your sails and sucking away everyone else’s enthusiasm for everything.
By contrast, I have never met a highly functional troll. Almost without exception, they are angry failures of one sort or another. This is merely empirical observation; I don’t have a theory about it yet, but I do know a couple of very good cases of high-achieving grey vampires.
You do seem to feed off hostility, Levi, as a stimulant to your work. I’m more inclined to accept the advice of Burroughs.
It should go without saying that not all critical people are energy-suckers, and not all positive people are energy-enhancers. There are really exciting, energizing critics; they’re usually the ones who stand for something in their own right. And not all positive and complimentary people are energy-enhancers; some of them suck you dry.
And no, it’s not about “demonizing”, it’s about knowing which people are worth arguing with and which are just trying to stop anything from happening so that they won’t have to face up to their own inability to get moving.
August 25, 2009 at 11:14 pm
“I don’t think they are so much demonizing categories but categories that allow us to identify certain rhetorical persona and how they function. In this regard, there’s little difference between talk of trolling and minotauring and talk of rhetorical devices such as euphemisms, dysphemisms, innuendo, loaded questions, hyperbole, and so on.”
“the worst kind of libidinal configuration, an appalling trap, an existential toxicity which ensures debilitation for all who come into contact with it” “sadism” “malice” “horribly cursed” “existentially blighted” “energy-suckers” “poisonous envy of others” “twisted” “once you’ve established they are a troll, sever all contact with them and – this is imperative – don’t read anything they write” “Avoid trolls and grey vampires.” “Do not squander your energy on trolls and grey vampires.” “Avoid those people.”
August 26, 2009 at 12:03 am
“And no, it’s not about “demonizing”, it’s about knowing which people are worth arguing with and which are just trying to stop anything from happening so that they won’t have to face up to their own inability to get moving.”
Right, I am all for knowing who is worth arguing with and who are not, but I don’t see how this typology is helpful for that at all. I can’t imagine it being used in any other possible way except as a kind of enclosure against criticism as well as creating an in group of people who you can call critics but without much of a bite.
August 26, 2009 at 4:53 am
A.P. Smith, If you want criticism, the best way to receive it is to do work and take the criticism that comes with it: write things, give lectures. Plenty of criticism will come your way, much of it useful, and you will learn from it. Why all this exaggerated rhetoric of “enclosure”? I’m talking about a small handful time-wasting people who are not worth dealing with.
As for Kerry’s examples (most of them not drawn from my own words) I don’t see what’s wrong with avoiding people if they habitually reduce our energy level. I’ll bet Kerry does it too. Even in social life there are certain people whose company we seek and others we do not care to see. There’s nothing demonizing about freedom of association.
August 26, 2009 at 4:58 am
Graham,
Actually it sounds like my category of the minotaur is very close to Mark’s category of the grey vampire. I think you’re right though. I do seem to feed on a certain sort of abrasion in the development of my own concepts such as they are. There are all sorts of good psychoanalytic reasons for this that I’ve told you about in the past.
August 26, 2009 at 7:55 am
Graham,
I don’t think that calling this enclosure is exaggerated at all. You may be referring to a small handful of people, but because the symptoms of these types are so vague it can be extended to nearly anyone who disagrees with you. You may also have some criteria for judging if someone is a critic or one of these mythological types. So, an example, if you have someone who constantly refers back to Heidegger or Deleuze on every issue, literally seeing their thought at work everywhere, and you have someone who constantly refers to ANT on every issue, seeing that at work everywhere, how do you decide if one is a minotaur and one is not? For instance, we have Levi telling us that ANT is at work in a particular history of capitalism (I have forgotten the book), which looks to be a minotaur-act. On the one hand, it could simply be true, but on the other hand this typology doesn’t seem to hinge on whether or not claims are true or not (and so, so it may be true that Deleuze or Heidegger really did answer some question in an obscure or largely unread paper), but on how these people affect you (or me, or him, or her). Leading to another type, the bed-wetter, or a person so weak in personality they constantly see minotaurs, trolls, vampires of whatever persuasion. Please let me be clear, I’m not accusing you or Levi of this, I just think that this type does, first of all, exist and secondly that because the symptoms you give regarding these types are so broad they can lead to this kind of hiding under the covers from monstrous critics all the while creating an in-group where their ideas are treated as nothing short of brilliant and revolutionary.
I also disagree with you about giving talks and publishing leading to good criticism, but I can only speak from my own experience. I’ve given my share of papers at conferences and even had the fortune of giving a few seminar papers. With some notable exceptions, the questions that come from the floor are almost universally useless. The same goes for reader reports on rejected articles. For one article I received three reports, one which was very positive, and two that were critical from nearly opposite positions. There was no way I could satisfy both readers, as that would merely replicate their arguments and since they were contradictory that wasn’t possible, and so after three rounds of peer review the editor rejected the article and I learned that people have different views on philosophical issues (who knew!). For another article I had to respond to one reader, who appeared to not have read the article at all, with derision to get it over the precipice. And another was lauded by both the editor and the reader as being “highly original” but they aren’t sure they want to publish it because it doesn’t meet the usual style of articles (and I am unsure what they mean by that except perhaps that the usual style is to not be original). I suppose the best criticism I have received comes from my supervisor or comes indirectly from reading literature that presents arguments contrary to my general orientation.
August 26, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Anthony,
I think I’ve been fairly clear as to just what I have in mind by minotauring. The minotaur is not someone that works within the framework of a particular philosopher, thinker, or framework such as Deleuze, Marx, Lacan, structuralism, and so on. That’s all good. The minotaur is someone who perpetually changes the topic under discussion, making it an issue of how the thinkers text is to be interpreted. So, for example, here a group of people are discussing the contemporary logic of sovereignity in politics. An offhand comment or reference to Hobbes. Along comes the minotaur who has devoted all his work to the study of Hobbes and suddenly the discussion is no longer organized around the issue of sovereignity, but it now becomes an extended discussion about Hobbes. I write about this figure here:
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/the-insufferable-figure-of-the-scholar/
The line here is fuzzy. The point is not that we should never engage in interpretive discussions. Clearly any theoretical discussion will have moments where some aspect of a figure or theory is being clarified or explicated. Nor is the point that people shouldn’t have theoretical commitments. The fuzzy dividing line between the minotaur and these perfectly acceptable forms of explication and reference is that the latter treats every issue as a matter of correct or incorrect interpretation. For the minotaur, it is impossible to have a legitimate disagreement with a philosopher’s position. If you disagree with the philosopher that means you have misinterpreted the philosopher. Thus as one person that had fallen into minotaurery said to me recently in the context of a discussion about Heidegger, I was conflating ontology with fundamental ontology. Fundamental ontology within the Heideggerian framework is Dasein or human centered, whereas ontology consists of regional ontologies about objects. If this is an example of minotaurery, then that is because I’m not conflating anything. I understand well that Heidegger holds that there is something called “fundamental ontology” that is prior to any other ontological discourse. I do not accept or share, however, Heidegger’s view that we must begin with something like fundamental ontology. Again, to emphasize, the problem here is that all philosophical dispute is treated as a matter of misinterpretation and that there can be no legitimate instances of dispute. This doesn’t rule out instance of genuine misinterpretation where it is perfectly legitimate to clarify the text. Thus, for example, if someone said “Heidegger’s conception of space is completely ridiculous, he thinks the book he’s reading is closer than the glasses on his face!” it would be appropriate to point out that the critic has misinterpreted what Heidegger is referring to under the title of “spatiality” and missing the point. Hopefully after the clarification had been made discussion would then precede again as a discussion about the issue at hand, not about the philosopher.
More recently I’ve come to think that there’s also a more baleful sort of minotaur, closer to the one of Greek mythology. This minotaur is the one that guards the gates of powerful journals and presses, strongly limiting the directions that philosophy can take. I think Leiter, for example, is an example of this kind of minotaur with his infamous Leiter Report.
August 26, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Levi,
Fair dues and I recognize what you’re talking about, just think the fuzziness of it is problematic. You may know that Heidegger actually clarifies this significantly in a letter he wrote to his mother that was found in a set of drawers around 1956 (jokes).
I’m keeping the figure of the bed-wetter though for people who abuse these types.
August 26, 2009 at 9:09 pm
The idea that only someone who produced can offer a critique of that which is produced by others is rather naive way of looking at the matter, it seems. And it is not entirely original, plenty of writers or film directors get angry at the critics because the latter do not produce anything themselves, but only evaluate the work of others. The idea that in order to evaluate someone’s argument one must earn the right to do so by presenting one’s own argument is also suspect as it clearly reveals a kind of elitist appoarch – “only after you have achieved this much (published, lectured, presented etc etc) can you be allowed to evaluate my work” – that ultimately leads to active exclusion. So by this logic only a scholar of Zizek’s status can offer a critique of his argument, and if some graduate student finds an inconsistency in the argument, she cannot really voice it because she has not yet achieved an appropriate status, published anything, got a job, presented a lecture and so on – this is a ridiculous line of thinking, if ever there was one.
As for an example of avoiding certain people in social situations, it’s one thing to avoid this or that person, it’s another thing to create a typology and seek/identify a type. In addition to being a very egotistic position – “my level of energy is all that really matters, I will avoid all people and situations that reduce my level of energy” – it is also a privileged position of someone who can afford to avoid people. In other words, most academics have the luxury of withdrawing and the luxury of having free time, the luxury of creating typologies of people that they swear to avoid to keep up their gentle creative spirits.
As Anthony pointed out above, back when the idea of “troll” first came around (that is before Graham Harman discovered blogging), it was used to designate a very specific type of very abusive comments – now everyone’s a troll, and when everyone’s a troll, then no one’s a troll. It seems to me that instead of dealing with controntational nature of online interaction (ignoring it works best, it seems), we have started rationalizing why we don’t like this or that comment and this rationalization, although self-professedly naive, should at least give us a pause.
August 26, 2009 at 10:31 pm
Jamie,
I think you’re falling into a bit of hyperbole here:
Yes, this is ridiculous thinking, which leads one to wonder why you would believe anyone is pushing it. The very absurdity of such a thesis should function as a sort of cognitive alarm bell telling you that perhaps you need to go back and revise your interpretation. The point is not that someone must be tremendously accomplished in order to interact with others. Rather, the point is that in order for dialogue to take place it is minimally necessary to have a sense of where the other person is coming from or what they advocate. Absent this, it is very difficult to address another person’s criticisms at all.
This is rather silly, no? Just look at the comment sections on this blog. All sorts of people participate. Often that participation is highly critical. Many of the people that participate are not academics. Yet they are not classified as trolls. I am also unsure where you get the idea that avoiding certain people is a privilege. All of us do it all the time. We constantly pick and choose who we do and do not engage with. Why aren’t you over at the blog Free Republic engaging with folks there? You elitist! You’re excluding the folks of Free Republic!
August 27, 2009 at 1:29 am
“The idea that in order to evaluate someone’s argument one must earn the right to do so … clearly reveals a kind of elitist approach – “only after you have achieved this much (published, lectured, presented etc etc) can you be allowed to evaluate my work” …
“Yes, this is ridiculous thinking, which leads one to wonder why you would believe anyone is pushing it. The very absurdity of such a thesis should function as a sort of cognitive alarm bell telling you that perhaps you need to go back and revise your interpretation.”
No interpretation needed in this case I’m afraid Levi. If there are alarm bells going off it’s not because it would be preposterous and absurd to assume that anyone would ever push such a line but rather because, as a matter of objective fact, such a line HAS and IS being pushed (not by yourself, admittedly, but by at least one of your cohorts in this anti-‘troll’ campaign). Perhaps you just haven’t been paying attention?
August 27, 2009 at 1:55 am
Kerry,
As far as I can tell, the particular cohort you’re referencing is pretty tireless in responding to email he receives on his blog. These emails are from a wide variety of people, some simply asking for clarifications, others leveling critiques, and others positive. At any rate, again I find myself wondering, why aren’t you spending significant time over at the blog Free Republic? After all, you are making a case for radical egalitarianism and against exclusionary practices. The posts about trolls, grey vampires, and minotaurs were all the result of a very specific set of circumstances and interactions that were extremely acrimonious and where no discussion was taking place. Those interactions were the equivalent of protesters screaming everyone else down at the town hall meetings here in the United States. They were not designed to promote discussion or engage in critical debate, but to silence any discussion and cow others into submission. Now, not being an essentialist, I believe these interactions were the result of specific circumstances and interactions that spiraled out of control because of a few ill-considered rhetorical moves on both sides. For the post part, the people with whom these interactions occurred are people that I am very fond of and who have been far from being trolls, minotaurs, or grey vampires in other communicative interactions. This post is an olive branch to them– hence the reference to olives in the title. This sort of faux acrimony and outrage you’re espousing over something that scarcely involves you and over a set of rhetorical categorizations from which you draw the most absurd and hyperbolic conclusions is not at all helpful.
August 27, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Levi,
I appreciate your change of heart here (if it is one) vis-a-vis “trolls/vampires” describing some rhetorical devices or indicating this or that trope, but I have to say that the main proponents of this bestiary (like the infamous Graham Harman) do not use them as such (and it’s of course not your fault, I understand that) – when Harman described me as not being a good example of a “subtle strategic thinker” and concluded that it is easy to ignore me and my comments based on that assumption, he did not mean it as a rhetorical gesture of some kind, he meant it quite clearly as a dismissal of me as a person/thinker, if you will, despite having never met me before. That’s his right of course, but it’s silly to suggest that his theory of “energy-sucking” individuals would not be applied to anyone who annoys us, as some commenters here suggested. You yourself only recently proclaimed that I have never produced a single philosophical thought on my blog, dismissing me as a thinker based on my online musings about this and that. Again, I don’t mean to mention these examples in order to whine about it, it’s fine with me, I don’t mind, but as a way of saying that it is of course easy to suggest that you’re only taking about excluding a few bad apples or that these stereotypes only apply to comments, not persons and they don’t identify essences, only tendencies, yet it seems that in practice all of this theorization of types leads directly to dismissing actual people. Now I have to say that I am as guilty as anyone, I have long made up my mind about a number of bloggers based on their online behavior, but I’d like to think that at least I’m not trying to justify my dislike of them in terms of some sophisticated theory of “energy-suckage” or other such new age crap. And I’d like to think that were I to meet them in person, things would be quite different indeed.
August 27, 2009 at 11:48 pm
“Now, not being an essentialist, I believe these interactions were the result of specific circumstances and interactions that spiraled out of control because of a few ill-considered rhetorical moves on both sides.”
Well, that’s very fair and upstanding of you. I would only add that what you regard as innocuous “rhetorical charactizations” of people as trolls, vampires, minotaurs etc.(a small sample of such nuanced literary devices are quoted in post 8 above) were also patently “not designed to promote discussion or engage in critical debate, but to silence any discussion and cow others into submission”, and I think that on reflection you might even agree with this (even in spite of the fact those characterisations were authored by people who you admire). But hey, I wouldn’t want to be thought “unhelpful”, so I’ll keep my beak out of it.