20 Years of In Medias Res

Remember this image? Of course you do. Everyone does. Especially those of us who had already been blogging for years (in my case, five of them) by the time it appeared in February 2008.

Like millions of other American bloggers, I'd been reading blogs--though I don't recall if I called them that--for years (all through graduate school in the late 1990s, specifically) before the Iraq War tipped me over into actually publishing one myself. It's easy to reconstruct my blogging career, such as it is, partly in reference to the content of my writing way back then; I've done it before, and the details haven't changed, though obviously my assessment of it all has. Talk about being wrong! All those posts during my first month of blogging, in March of 2003--"liberal internationalism," "the Anglosphere," Blair, Bush, blah, blah, blah. There are intellectual elements to the way I was drawn into tentative but nonetheless undeniable support of America's utterly unwarranted and overwhelmingly ruinous invasion of Iraq that I can, and sometimes still do, reconstruct into a more theoretically nuanced and therefore defensible political posture towards nationality and sovereignty and all the rest, but that doesn't excuse being wrong about the question of the moment. And it wasn't the only time, for certain; over the past two decades of blogging, I've had to eat crow over stuff as momentous as same-sex marriage, stuff as unimportant as Deathly Hallows, and lots of stuff in between. But this is getting me into talking about content, which I didn't want to do. Rather, I feel like I should say something about why I'm still typing away, however rarely these days, on this here blog--yes, still using Blogger!--because maybe that will say something that I need to hear myself say about where I stand and where I'm going, looking forward towards the last third of my life.

That sounds terribly pretentious, I suppose (also not a new thing for me). But I'm 55, and I've been wondering on and off all summer what sort of aims and intentions should shape the remaining 15 or 20--or less, or more--intellectually and professionally productive years I have left. And just as the the medium is the message, I suppose to one degree or another, the platform is the person--or the publicly thinking and writing persona, at least.

When I started that first blog in March 2003, I was less than two years out of graduate school and still had aspirations to publish my dissertation as a book; I was going to the sort of political theorist who thought and wrote heavily about the sort of issues and ideas--identity, recognition, revelation, community, language, truth--that the German Romantic and Counter-Enlightenment traditions, and the particular sort of communitarianism which I saw deeply indebted to it, put front and center. Hence the name of my first blog: "Wäldchen vom Philosophenweg," a phrase of my own invention (though heavily indebted to Johann Gottfried Herder's Kritische Wälder) that basically meant something like "the twisted, wooded path through philosophy." Yes, it was terrible. And by the summer of 2004, I knew that. By then I also knew that the way I'd leaned hard into thinking about global politics in light of all the aforementioned issues and ideas was, while not worthless by any means, part and parcel to how I'd convinced myself of something that was very, very wrong. So I had this idea: I needed to back away from my heady, grad-school-inspired approach to framing what I saw as my own intellectual contributions to online discourse, and get more humble. (My inability to follow through on my plans to turn my dissertation into a book was pretty humbling too.) I spelled out some of this in my final post on that old blog, and then 20 years ago today, on August 13, 2004, I started this baby, In Medias Res, "in the midst of things," complete with a tagline stolen from a comment my dissertation advisor once made on one of my papers, with two posts: one, a reflection about my life at the time as a visiting assistant professor at Arkansas State University (a position I'd hold for one more year, before the most stressful year of my professional life, which ended with my surprising job offer here at Friends University), and two, a celebration of Melissa's and my 11th wedding anniversary (31st this year!). And, well, here I still am.

Over the past two decades I've thought dozens of times--as the position of blogging in the media ecosystems around us radically changed, as the technology our homes and my offices upgraded, and, I think most importantly, as smart phones undermined, sucked up, and/or re-wired nearly all of the discursive habits that had made the blogsophere a thing in the first place--of dumping IMR. Or revamping it through Wordpress, or moving it to Reclaim Hosting, or any number of other strategies. After moving here to Wichita, KS, and beginning teaching at Friends, and landing on the idea of taking my intellectual interests in community and turning that towards a consideration of the urban and rural divide, and of the politics and economy and physical environment of urban communities of a middling size--like Wichita--I continued to experiment. Once I launched a different blog, then later a substack (now called Wichita and the Mittelpolitan; you can read my justification for that effort here) to replace that second blog. I moved posts from In Medias Res over to the first one and then later to the second one, all in the hopes of eventually finding, through the architecture of how I was arranging and thereby thinking about my own engagements with both my scholarly interests as well as the constant flow of information all around me, some way to make my contributions more constructive (and maybe even write a book!). It hasn't happened yet, and now I wonder if it ever will. 

And would that be so bad? In the grand scheme things--especially since I, thankfully, landed at an institution that prioritizes teaching and different types of service, both to the school and to the community, over pure research (though of course we're supposed to be doing that as well)--maybe not. And yet, I haven't taken down the substack, have I? Nor this blog. So apparently I still have some sort of aspiration to keep my thinking and writing, if not truly organized and intentional, than it least occupying a space, and possessing a direction. I may not understand myself and my own limited grasping of the world as the hacking through of philosophical thickets any longer, but I do still believe, or at least aspire to believe, that in the midst of things, some constructive pattern can be drawn out. Ideally by me! But, maybe not? I'm not sure. Melissa always says that over the past 20 years on this blog, I've written hundreds of thousands of words; a large portion of that has been about family and local politics and pop music and philosophical tributes and movies and geek culture, true, but surely at least some of it could be shaped into some kind of genuine scholarly work, right? Sometimes I can see a way to do that; other times I can't. But as long as I think there might be some value to all these ruminations, whether or not that value manifests in the form of some goal I can aim to make the final third (more more) of my professional add up to, I figure it's a good thing I never got rid of In Medias Res and all that has spun off from it. Being thrown into the midst of things means finding some kind of stability in the midst of the flow; maybe this blog, whether I use it much or not, and however my thinking about that use has changed (and will likely continue to change) over time, has been mine. And given my unwillingness to pull the trigger after two decades, presumably will remain so until Blogger goes bankrupt (knock on wood!).

My primary guide--and sometimes primary goad--throughout all of this has been the wonderfully meandering musings of Alan Jacobs, a scholar I've never met in person, but whom I've read productively and sometimes engaged with for over 15 years. He not only planted the seed which inspired my original--more than a decade old!--vision of engaging with what I later named "mittelpolitan" places, but his whole, always evolving, always self-reflecting, presence on the internet--his main blog, his micro-blog, his Buy Me a Coffee community--continually inspires (as well as intimidates) me. I've never been, and likely never will be, either disciplined enough or productive enough--or just plain write quickly enough--to make habitual any of the practices which I see his own experimentation as pointing out options for, but I love imagining finding some version of them in my own online writing nonetheless. He recently commented:

[A] blog is an ideal venue for what I want to do, which is preservation and transmission...[even though] a blog is probably the least cool way to communicate with people. It doesn’t have old-school cred or state-of-the-art shine; it falls into a kind of uncanny valley. To be a blogger is sort of like being that Japanese guy who makes paintings with Excel. But that suits me.

Suits me too. (And, if you're one of the, I suppose, 14 occasional readers of this blog, maybe you as well!)