The Death of the Blogger: On the Limits of the Public Intellectual in the Digital Age

“We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but it is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting form the thousand sources of culture.” — Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”

Over the weekend the twin gods of algorithm and chance saw fit to take a post I wrote for Religion in American History Blog and excerpt it over at Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish. One one level I’m stoked that the Dish found my piece on Mircea Eliade interesting and relevant to their readers. But the relevance and interest they found was not necessarily what I had in mind when I wrote the post. Here’s what they excerpted from my writing under the title “Religion on Its Own Terms” with the preface that I was paying tribute to Eliade:

Eliade refuses to explain religion. Rejecting the reductionism of psychoanalysis or sociology, Eliade demands that religion be understood “on its own terms.” We do not explain religion, rather, the historian of religion describes and categorizes religion. The historian of religions looks for symbols, myths, and archetypes through comparison. Because the sacred is sui generis, unique, irreducible, we should seek understanding, interpretation, and pattern. Explanation is anathema.

But was I paying tribute? Or just describing Eliade. Here’s the following two paragraphs of the original RiAH post:

It was this approach-comparative, descriptive, phenomoneological-that dominated the field of religious studies in the latter third of the twentieth century in America. It was this approach that as a student I was warned away from and handed a J. Z. Smith article.

And it was this approach that had a profound effect on the way Americans would imagine something called “comparative religion” and the ways Americans imagined the sacred and spirituality.

So here’s the irony. The Dish excerpted my description of Eliade’s descriptivist approach to religion that I would, in the end, critique. The real gist of the post, as I imagined it, had nothing to do with paying tribute to Eliade or celebrating “religion on its own terms.” Rather, I was pointing out how Eliade’s brand of comparative religion, a search to understand “religion on its own terms” had become a popular approach in the United States through his influence in religious studies departments in the late twentieth century. A point proven by The Dish and their interpretation of my post as a tribute to Eliade. Eliade’s approach to religion is so deeply rooted in American culture that we can’t even see it when it’s right in front of us!

But there’s a further lesson here. As the Barthes quote above reminds us, the author has not control over the meaning of the text. Neither does the blogger. And neither does the public intellectual. While academics are used to their words and quotes suffering under the edits of the media-the twenty minute interview turned into a ten second sound bite-digital technologies were thought to signal a change. Now the academic would control the microphone. The recent move of The Monkey Cage to the Washington Post is a fulfillment of that hope. Academics writing for the people to the people! No reporters necessary.

But we can’t all be The Monkey Cage. Even in the world of the blogosphere where academics hope to take their ideas and research to the masses or even just to other academics, the author has no control over his or her meaning. What is the link but one piece in “a tissue of citations?” A blog but one of the thousand sources of culture? Indeed, the blogger is dead.

As Barthes closed his essay, “the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.” But perhaps things are not so finite for the blogger. Because the blogger is both reader and author. The blogger is both murderer and midwife. On the one hand the blogger kills the author. But on the other hand the blogger gives birth to a new reading, and new meaning to the text in through their posts and links.

The blogger is a beneficent cannibal, eating its own for sustenance and offering itself up as sustenance for others.

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Michael J. Altman

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