[lit-ideas] Re: "No offence meant", "None taken": the implicature

 
Mike Geary writes, in response to Andreas's admonition to JL:
 "Why????????????   I don't understand.  Who is forced to read his posts?  Is 
there a per post charge by the list-serv?  Who is being put out by this?  I 
find almost all of JL's posts witty and enlightening and charming.  When he 
first started posting back on Phil-Lit people complained and whined about the 
length of his posts.  That was quite a while ago.  Now he's more judicious in 
the longevity of his posts.  But now people complain about his frequency.  I 
think people are just envious of his breath of scope.  I only envy his free 
time, as we all must, but why would you or anyone want to impose limits?  If he 
has the time and energy and knowledge, more power to him.  He has brought new 
life to a dying list.  I don't understand nor will I ever accept any limits on 
the freedom to post unless you can show some harm to the community of posters 
besides their envy."
I am with Mike in not endorsing Andreas's proposed imposition of limits on JL 
(if indeed Andreas was being serious...?); but I think his reasoning does a 
comparable wrong to that which he would redress by not endorsing Andreas's 
imposition of limits.
 
It seems to me Mike is saying that because the medium of an email list 
effectively eliminates any substantive cost to the sending of a written 
communication, there should be no limits on what is posted to the list.  That, 
however, ignores the idea that a reader's attention itself has any value.  The 
listserv is a vehicle for distributing communications from people who want to 
write to the people who subscribe, and to the people who want to subscribe.  I 
think it is disingenuous, and tendentiously so (if that's not redundant), to 
claim that there is no obligation of any sort on those who write to the list to 
show an awareness that the subscribers each have some desire they are 
individually meeting by subscribing and to reflect that awareness in their 
behavior somehow.
 
JL's frequent posts do consume attention, even if one does not read them.  
Whether they come to one's email box individually and one has to discard them 
individually or they come, as they do for me, bundled in the daily digest, it 
takes attention to skip over them.  I don't skip over them, but neither do I 
ponder every word in them.  I don't think the (perhaps hypothetical?) 
complainers to Andreas are raising a simply silly question, I think they are 
invoking the idea that the listserv serves a purpose, albeit an unarticulated 
purpose.
 
The fact that the purpose cannot be articulated, or at least cannot be 
formalized into administrative rules which Andreas or any other moderator can 
follow, without potentially doing violence to one or more posters whose 
contributions one or more subscribers might find congenial, does not mean that 
there is no such purpose, it just means that the purpose cannot be articulated. 
 Perhaps even to use a noun like "purpose" already does violence to whatever it 
is that makes the listserv worth having because that whatever is amorphous and 
self-contradictory and indescribable and so is not an "it" to which a noun can 
be comfortably attached.
 
Some people who subscribe to the list enjoy JL's posts; others find them 
excessive.  Some who find them excessive (still perhaps hypothetically) find 
their excess disruptive to the purposes for which they have subscribed to the 
list.  I don't think either perspective is invalid.  The only thing I think 
inevitably destructive is for the holders of either perspective to attempt to 
impose that perspective on the holders of the other.  That inevitably 
precipitates a more concrete answer to the question: why do I subscribe to 
lit-ideas? Which answer, simply by being more concrete than it was previously, 
cuts off some range of possible answers to the question -- it makes a 
"decision" in its root sense of cutting off a branch of future possibilities.  
I share what I hear as Mike's concern about the violence which Andreas's 
exercise of his administrative capacities could do; but I also share the 
concern I hear in the (hypothetical) complaints about the volume of JL's 
correspondence -- there is reason to wonder whether that volume is somehow 
disruptive, perhaps even violent to some sensibilities, as well.  
 
One way not to have a power struggle about it is for everyone to forbear a bit 
-- JL to dial back a bit, the (hypothetical) complainers to give it a chance, 
Andreas not to exercise his administrative capacities and Mike not to stir the 
pot any harder just yet.  I don't mean any of those to be prescriptions or 
attempts to control; I'm trying to describe something, to sketch a story about 
the future in which the listserv continues fulfilling the purposes for which so 
many of us have continued turning to it over many years.
 
I think that the notion that there's something to preserve in lit-ideas is the 
common thread between Mike and Andreas and the complainers he is (may be?) 
responding to.  Trying to say what that could be without doing violence to what 
it has been is extremely difficult.  I am concerned that trying to act to 
preserve it -- whether by Andreas imposing limits or by JL ignoring the concern 
expressed -- without being able to say what it is will almost inevitably be 
destructive.
 
Regards to one and all.
 
Eric Dean
Once from Chicago
Recently from Phoenix
Now firmly ensconced in Washington DC, but with a refuge still in the rolling 
hills of northwest Illinois

Other related posts: