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Thursday, March 04, 2004

Blogorama

Part of the fun of blogreading, I’ve learned, is the sheer metonymic skid involved.  A system of differences with no positive term . . . hey!  this means the blogosphere is structured like a language!  I feel a Theory coming on!  Terry Eagleton, this one’s for you!  No, wait a second.  Hold that order.

Maybe I should put this another way:  blogs lead to blogs lead to blogs, and sometimes you make new friends and bump into old ones.  For instance: University of Chicago physicist Sean Carroll has a new blog, definitely worth checking out.  It’s called “Preposterous Universe,” and Sean should know, because he’s a cosmologist.  (I had a brief fling with astrophysics as an undergraduate and just loved it-- not only because it’s managed to figure out where we live and roughly how most of the neighborhood works, but also because at its bizarre theory-edges, the field is willing to entertain completely weird-ass possibilities like Dirac’s Large Numbers Hypothesis, never mind the existence of antimatter and the eleven-dimensional strings wound up in Calabi-Yau spaces . . . hey, wait a minute, there is such a thing as antimatter!  And maybe string theory really works!  Hey, it’s a preposterous universe out there.  Go ask Sean about it.) Also, the very funny and very smart Roger Ailes gave me a shout and a blogroll link on his “enemies list” (that’s irony, I think-- unless . . . unless . . . unless he really is that Roger Ailes, and wouldn’t that be terrible?).  Thanks, Roger.

Then there’s a pair of fine, fine critics and very Bad Subjects with blogs-- Charlie Bertsch and Steve Rubio.  These guys rock.  Just one thing, Charlie.  Back on February 29, apparently, you wrote

Late Night Louisville

Many of the bars here stay open until 4am.

How can Kentucky have a more civilized “beer o-clock” than California?

And what were the chances that I would be discussing Habermas’s theory of communicative action, particularly the paradoxical temporality of his “ideal speech situation,” at 3am?

I’m not sure why you’re so surprised by this.  The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was itself based on a number of Habermas’s 4am bar-conversations-- sure, when the book was published, J?şrgen claimed he was talking about “coffee houses” instead, but come on, we all know what he really meant.  The theory of communicative action, and the “paradoxical temporality” of which you speak, is built on the premise that certain kinds of potentially (mutually) transformative modes of reciprocal recognition can be realized only in public institutions that create the conditions of possibility for direct, face-to-face interaction.  And these would be?  Hello?  Maybe places with pool tables and juke boxes, hm?

So in the end, this one’s for you, J?şrgermeister, dude.  Stop by these sites and say hello to everyone-- I’ll get around to updating the blogroll when I get back from Atlanta.

Posted by Michael on 03/04 at 03:50 PM
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