Riding without a ticket

If in a conversation you asked someone to explain a particular point they’d made, to justify some cliché, and they responded only by telling you that you obviously hadn’t read X or Y, or that you could easily do some research on this topic that would prevent you asking such questions, you’d be pretty unimpressed. To be honest, you be tempted to regard them as a posturing nitwit or merchant banker. In other contexts, however, the blogworld included, this seems to pass for valid retort. More exactly, it is one of the defences against a democratic tendency within blogging.

It implies, firstly, that the matter in hand is indeed one not of dialogue and contestation but only of Knowledge, and that the reprimanded individual does not yet occupy this place of Knowledge. The realm of Knowledge contains what has been agreed by ‘serious scholars /economists/ political analysts’ etc, it is unconcerned with mere politics and is, naturally, serenely indifferent to the squabbles of bloggers. It contains, for example, The Historical Record, which is not some contested field of representation, but (to quote those more knowledgeable than I) ‘the events of history as they appear in their correct order and final significance. It is the objective status of events, uncluttered by mere partisan interest and subjective interference.’

The totemic book for such people would be the encyclopaedia, where, seemingly sans author, a relation to knowledge without commitment or partiality inscribes itself. The encyclopaedia enshrines the myth of Canonical knowledge.

Let us call the pose affected by these people the ‘mandarin’ posture.

The mandarin posture is keen to assert that people are not competent or qualified to speak on certain subjects. (Politics is not Chomsky’s professional field etc). Usually, this asinine claim immediately rebounds in their own face unawares. But the invisible subscriptio to their remarks is: this person is speaking out of place. This kind of attitude constantly alludes to canonical and authorised knowledge (‘the historical record, ‘experts in the field’. The commenter signals that he/she occupies the place of proper and canonical knowledge. He/she would withhold your pass to the debating room, accuse you of riding the train without a ticket. But this ticket inspector is of course utterly bogus, for the whole point about blogging, and the point found threatening by some, is that it’s free to travel. No tickets required.