[Nettime-bold] Public Offering

["Mark Dery" <markdery@mindspring.com>]

Alan:

To be frank, phrases like "cultural production" and "textual practice" give
me the fantods. They reek of Prada Marxism, they're conveniently
vague---sufficiently so that they cover a multitude of intellectual
sins---and can usually be replaced by clearer words that cost less ("textual
practice" = *writing*). More often than not, they amount to intellectual
handwaving.

In any event, if you're arguing for a Nettime that makes room for a vibrant
profusion of ideas and opinions, then we're in complete agreement. If, on
the other hand, you're defending your---and my---right to be willfully
obscure, I'm afraid I can't agree. Is there room, here, for "many modes of
thinking, working through ideas"? No question. Nonetheless, I refuse to
unplug my critical faculties in the name of a faux populism that throws wide
the floodgates to any and every post. Let a billion flowers bloom, and you
have intellectual kudzu. We live in an attention economy. Time-starved and
data-glutted, most of us appreciate posts that don't have to be read with a
weed-whacker in one hand. Nettime, as its .sig file suggests, is "a
moderated mailing list for net criticism, collaborative text filtering and
cultural politics of the nets." Net criticism gets pride of place, in that
micro-mission statement, with cultural politics taking up the rear. There's
no mention of ePoetry or ASCII art or my own private turbo-blog, much as
that pains me. Whatever else it is, Nettime is a forum for public discourse.
*Public*, not private. *Discourse*, not solipsistic self-expression with one
finger on the "send" button.

It's incumbent on all of us to contextualize our remarks rather than begin
them in medias res, as if our listening audience has been privy to our
internal monologue all along, like devoted fans of the daily soaps who can
flick on in mid-show and pick up the thread without missing a stitch. It
helps to know that the prose snippet you posted has to do "with the
stereotyping of.animals whose characteristics are related primarily to those
of first-grade readers." It would have been *more* enlightening to have had
that information at hand while reading the text in question. I'm not calling
for a Stalinist purge of our Inner ePoets, for Chrissakes; I'm simply asking
for a little context. Be polemical. Be passionate. But if you believe your
thoughts matter, don't cloak them in the intellectual equivalent of a cloud
of squid ink; make them transparent to me.

A parting thought: If you "feel, like many others, outside of the nettime
mainstream," you may want to consider the possibility that Nettime *has* no
mainstream. We're *all* on the outside, Alan. Which is Nettime's greatest
strength---or one of them.

Regards,

M. Dery




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