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Everybody's Authority

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Extract

The incursion of the unwanted thus seems to be part of the risk of thinking with others, part of the vulnerability of opening oneself, one's words and one's thoughts, to anyone who might venture upon them.

—Jodi Dean, “Blogging Theory”

Ah, the peace and quiet that follows a “block” on twitter.

—Saree Makdisi, Twitter

One day in 2012, while a presidential election campaign was in full swing, i wrote a blog post and hit “publish.” the post was pretty niche, I thought—the ninth in a series of posts that I had been tagging “puerility,” all incipient ideas for a future project that would draw on childhood studies, the history of statistics, and poetics. With “puerility,” I sought to describe a ludic epistemological mode that draws its power from its very willingness to disclaim power and embrace provisionality—an ambivalence often figured through, and associated with, boyhood. My previous blogging on puerility had mused over the Google N-gram Viewer and the widespread propensity to describe it as a “fun” “toy,” the foulmouthed parody Twitter account @MayorEmanuel, and Wes Anderson's 2012 film Moonrise Kingdom. The new post was about election predictions and a recent media flap around the statistician Nate Silver.

Type
The Changing Profession
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2015

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