I’m off for a bit. I need to clear more time for focussing on the last stages of my thesis, and enjoyable as blogging is, something has to give. At least I won’t have to read Hendo this week. Thanks very much to all those who reminded me of what the main game is, and to my fellow bloggers and commenters who make Hotel Troppo such a great place to while away the odd hour. Happy blogging and commenting til I return – I might pop in for the occasional visit – and perhaps the much mooted ‘blog the thesis’ exercise – but at this stage, as we say in Banana Blender land, in a poor strain of strine, see you round like a rissole – I love youse all…
ELSEWHERE: Rowen’s got the Shorter Hendo this week at Sailing Close to the Wind (and the shorter Janet, and the shorter Piers etc etc).
- In Place of the Shorter Hendo[↩]
*Arnie voice*
He’ll be back.
Is this a little like those ‘closing down sales’ signs you see on shops that are in the neighbourhood all year round?;)
Good luck, Mark!
Miranda is now mine. All mine.
Noooo!
You’ve been ridiculously prolific lately – you can’t get me used to that and then RUN AWAY!?!
Hopefully see you back here soon!
I’ve heard this thesis line before. I’ll give him three days. Any takers?
Mark, you are not to leave your desk until your homework is ALL finished.
THEN you can come outside and play. But only until the streetlights come on.
Good luck, now.
From a purely self-interested viewpoint, I hope Mark shows no more self-discipline in regulating his blogging than he has until now. Not only am I invariably entertained, informed and challenged by reading his posts, but his prolific output has relieved any self-imposed pressure I would otherwise feel to post more frequently myself. On the other hand, finishing the thesis is critically important for an academic, and for some weird reason blogging seems to be just as addictive as crack cocaine for personality types attracted to its flame. I suspect that it’s only by developing a degree of self-discipline that it can be incorporated sustainably into one’s life, rather than following an Icarus-like trajectory. Ideally one would manage to regulate blogging to a moderate number of weekly posts and expenditure of time. John Quiggin seems to manage that pretty well, but I never have and I suspect Mark has just tried it and also found himself unable to maintain it. It’s a bit like alcoholism: one drink is too many but nowhere near enough. For addictive personalities like me, the hiatus/cold turkey approach seems to work, although I still haven’t given up on perfecting an ability to blog in moderation. Come back soon Mark. We’ll miss you.
Good luck Mark and thanks for all the blogging. Very entertaining.
Look forward to a prompt return.
What is your thesis about anyway?…
I look forward to your return Mark.
Ignore Gaby.
Ken, you plucked the words right outta my brain.
One of the really bad aspects of this addiction is that something constructive comes from it. Video games, gambling, pornography are all just useless wastes of time.
But this? Light the pipe and then do good.
Is this a little like those ‘closing down sales’ signs you see on shops that are in the neighbourhood all year round?;)
Mark Bahnisch: carpet salesman.
Like Big Kimbo – you’ll be back.
The temptation to prolix on pollex and poleaxe the pulex will pull the proletariat’s pundit perforce to punch out pococurante pieces of post modern parish pump procrastination preventing perfect proper paper patina and penultimate polishing.
Promiscuously prolific punditry prevents perspicacious PhD profundity, prudence proposes.
Purry pack. Po pheck phat. po pood pith phat phesis pnd *phen* purry pack.
Good luck – I found my blogging accelerated as my submission date got closer. Ironically, I stopped blogging once my time commitments decreased to a sane level – I can’t really think up a good reason as to why.
We miss you Ken.
Thanks everyone for the kind comments and encouragement. I think Ken’s right – blogging is addictive and I also tend to have a bit of an addictive personality.
For anyone interested, my thesis basically looks at Fukuyama’s concept of “the end of history” in the context of what political alternatives remain now that Marxism has been discredited as an ideology. I argue that tropes like globalisation and subsequently terror have the (conscious) effect of reframing debate to reinforce the idea that (neo)liberalism is the only possible regime of governance, and to that end, examine why social democracy has had to take so many backward steps, including the morass of Third Way politics. I assess contemporary neo-liberal politics against classic critiques of liberalism. It seems to me that the shift to neo-conservatism implies a turn to politics as such, whereas neo-liberalism tends to reduce properly political questions to issues of economics or ethics. I trace all this through case studies of international political economy, post-1989 wars and the shift in governance associated with the war on terrorism. My argument is that the lack of alternatives postulated is partly from the lack of a universalist discourse to counterpose to those that are hegemonic, and argue that identity politics and “postmodernism” are symptoms of this theoretical failure on the part of the Left (which is also associated with a failure of will). I argue that it is possible to develop a phenomenological theory of politics which remains open to the conjuncture of history.
In the process, I comment on a lot of political and sociological theory, principally liberal theory (ala John Rawls), the right’s attack on liberalism (Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss) and particularly Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claude Lefort, Immanuel Wallerstein, Jacques Derrida and Cornelius Castoriadis in terms of an alternative project of revitalising the political. I also spend a fair bit of time discussing the philosophy of history.
I’ll close off comments lest I get tempted into a discussion of all this in the guise of work! So once again, thanks, and see you all when I come back!