The Ancient Art of Haranguing ...

[Dave Monroe]

Emily Eakin, "The Ancient Art of Haranguing Has Moved
to the Internet," NY Times, Saturday, August 10th,
2002 ...

"The pamphlet is a one-man show," observed George
Orwell approvingly. "One has complete freedom of
expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to
be scurrilous, abusive and seditious; or, on the other
hand, to be more detailed, serious and `highbrow' than
is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of
periodical."

But Orwell, who pamphleteered on behalf of unpopular
leftist causes, was not optimistic about the genre's
prospects in an era dominated by newspapers devoted to
what he perceived as an increasingly narrow range of
mainstream opinion. "At any given moment there is a
sort of all-prevailing orthodoxy, a general tacit
agreement not to discuss some large and uncomfortable
fact," he lamented in 1948. 

It seems Orwell may have been underestimating
contemporary society. If he had lived to surf the
Internet, for example, he might have been cheered to
discover a flourishing new breed of pamphleteer: the
blogger. Like its ink-and-paper antecedent, blogging
is quick and cheap. Anyone with access to a Web site
can post a weblog (or blog) linking readers to other
online sources and promoting all manner of original
opinion — serious, scurrilous, seditious and
otherwise.

Today, according to Cameron Marlow, a doctoral student
in electronic publishing at the Media Lab at M.I.T.
and the creator of a weblog index, Blogdex, the number
of blogs — liberally defined — has probably passed the
half-million mark. That's up from just a few dozen
five years ago, a spike that blog watchers say owes
much to the events of Sept. 11, which spawned a whole
new subgenre: the war blog. And while most online
harangues presumably lack the public profile and
scathing eloquence of history's most redoubtable
pamphleteers (a typical passage from one of Milton's
famous antiprelatical tracts, for example, refers to
the Anglican church service as "the new-vomited
paganism of sensual idolatry"), some bloggers,
including the neoconservative journalist Andrew
Sullivan, (Andrewsullivan .com), and Glenn Reynolds, a
law professor at the University of Tennessee
(InstaPundit.com), routinely draw more than 20,000
visitors a day and get cited by the mainstream press.

But the surest sign that blogging is no longer just a
para-journalistic phenomenon is academic recognition:
this fall, the Graduate School of Journalism at the
University of California at Berkeley is inaugurating a
course that uses weblogs to investigate current
debates over intellectual property.

"We wanted to explore a serious issue using a novel
medium, " said Paul Grabowicz, director of new media
programming at the school and a co-teacher of the
course. "When you have journalists sitting down to
write a weblog, what happens to objectivity?
Obviously, a weblog is far more interactive. It starts
to mix journalists and their sources together. Then
you have those people responding to postings on
weblogs: What do you do with those?"

The war on terrorism may be giving new life to the
old-fashioned pamphlet as well. This winter, "9-11," a
stinging indictment of American foreign policy packed
into a 125-page, pocket-size pamphlet by the M.I.T.
linguist Noam Chomsky, became a best seller in five
countries, setting a new sales record for the Open
Media pamphlet series published by Seven Stories
Press. Begun during the Persian Gulf war in 1991 by a
pair of Rutgers University graduates hawking Xeroxed
copies of an antiwar tract on New York City street
corners, the Open Media pamphlets now appear as glossy
bound little books on hot-button topics — terrorism,
the Middle East, civil liberties — by scholars like
the radical historian Howard Zinn. 

And now Open Media has some competition: the Prickly
Paradigm Press, a scholarly pamphlet series begun by a
pair of British anthropologists in 1993 as the Prickly
Pear Press and recently revived by the American
anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. Mr. Sahlins raised
money from friends and family to take over the series
and convinced the University of Chicago Press to act
as its distributor.

To celebrate its new incarnation, the renamed Prickly
Paradigm is issuing five 50-page polemics this month
on subjects ranging from the West's relationship to
war to the unlikely affinities between left-wing
cultural studies scholars and libertarian Wall
Streeters. In "War of the Worlds: What About Peace?,"
Bruno Latour, a French theorist, argues that to
achieve world peace the West must first acknowledge
that it has long been at war, albeit covertly, a war
masquerading as the "peaceful extension of Western
natural Reason" to "the many Empires of Evil." 

Other pamphlet writers reserve their ammunition for
particular academic disciplines. In "Waiting For
Foucault, Still," Mr. Sahlins tackles the theoretical
excesses of anthropologists. In "New Consensus for
Old: Cultural Studies From Left to Right," the critic
Thomas Frank does the same for the field of cultural
studies. By the 1990's, Mr. Frank contends, facile
"cult stud" arguments about the "subversive potential"
of a television sitcom or the "counter-hegemonic"
impact of shopping malls had come to look
uncomfortably like the market populism promoted by the
pro-business right: both groups appear to equate
consumerism with democratic self-expression.

Then there is Deirdre McCloskey's "Secret Sins of
Economics." Ms. McCloskey, a professor of economics,
history and English at the University of Illinois at
Chicago, accuses her colleagues of producing endless
thoerems and statistics that have nothing to do with
the real world. "Imagine that instead of doing
economic history about English agriculture in the 13th
century, you were to do an economic history about an
imaginary place," Ms. McCloskey explained in a
telephone interview. "What would be the point of that?
An economics department ought not to be about
speculation and hypothetical worlds."

Of course, in today's media-saturated environment,
these latest endeavors can hardly expect to sway
opinion the way the pamphlet did in its glory days,
the 17th and 18th centuries, when master rhetoricians
like Milton, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and Thomas
Paine regularly swamped the public sphere with
two-penny treatises on burning social issues.
(Published in January 1776, Paine's "Common Sense"
sold half a million copies within a few months and is
credited with transforming untold numbers of
ambivalent colonists into ardent revolutionaries.) 

Ms. McCloskey said she had jumped at the chance to
write a pamphlet for Prickly Paradigm when Mr.
Sahlins, an old poker-playing friend, asked her to
contribute. "We really need some place between the
formal journal article — mainly used for academic
promotion — and the book,"she said. 

But she confessed that she doubted whether her
pamphlet would have much of an impact on her
discipline. "I ought to have called myself Cassandra,"
she said ruefully. "I'm a student of the rhetoric of
economics. You'd think that a student of that would
realize that people aren't persuaded just because you
have the correct argument."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/10/arts/10TANK.html

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