Schenectady Synecdoche

« WC | Main | "Just breathe" »

November 17, 2005

I blog, you blog, he/sheeeeit blogs

Courtesy of Brad, here's the latest in the Hit Parade of Reasons Not to Blog:

The value of academic culture is that it stands apart from the ephemeral marketplace.

I'm curious to know how long it will be until blogging ceases to be a topic that periodicals with space to fill can pick up and jabber about. (Another Schenectady Sentence whose parsing represents something on the order of the Pepsi Challenge.) But then, I've been waiting for several years for plagiarism to pass out of that category, and to date it has not. So I'm not holdin my breath. And I'm still bloggin. And yeah, my prose here is eversoslightly different from what it is in scholarly publications. Viz:

The key question is who is being raped. Is it the originary, proprietary, male author? Or is it his property, his text? Since the plagiarist has recourse not to the person of the proprietary author but to his text, it is the text that plays the feminine role of rape victim. The outrage of plagiarism, therefore, is that the text belongs to the proprietary—male—author. That proprietary author is male: in the Western tradition, women don't own the product of their labor and thus cannot, in the Lockean sense, be authors. Nor, in the terms of traditional heterosexuality, can they be rapists, and hence not plagiarists. All this prepares the ground for excluding them entirely from the category of "writer."

That little toe-tapper is from "Sexuality, Textuality" (College English 2000). The style is, yes yeah, a little lil different. It's a different medium, get it? I write my grocery lists in yet another style. And my syllabi in another. And emails to my brother in another. Why anybody would think that my blog is where they find the "real me" is a complete mystery, unless the world is populated by more utter fools than I had heretofore imagined. There's no such thing as a unified identity, folks; no "real" person to be discovered in her blogged lair. They're all me. Distributed subjectivity, get it? But then, you're reading this blog. You read blogs. So chances are, you already get it.

Posted by senioritis at November 17, 2005 09:27 PM

Comments

Posted by: the old bag at November 19, 2005 04:29 PM