Taking a break from only the second (I congratulate myself) all-nighter of this semester, I note the recent double-impingement of Dr. Johnson upon my life. First, I listened to the New York Review of Books’ podcast about the fellow, then I came across Jason Peters’ Front Porch Republic post about “Blogging and the Periodic Essay.”

While the latter contribution’s somewhat overly-satisfied, self-butt-kissing epiphany regarding the passing of batons may cause you to cringe, it has a point to make regarding the fact that when Johnson was pursuing (essentially) the same activity we bloggers are—periodically assaying to write—he was deeply more concerned both with the import and with the style of his remarks. One of the reasons Johnson is given the depressing title “moralist,” I would argue, is simply that he never wrote without a visibly rhetorical goal in mind. In other words, he wrote for reaction—in his case, the reaction of the student struck by the wisdom of the elders, which I am not sure is always the best reaction for a writer to seek. But at least he had a reaction in mind.

There’s a tendency in the blogosphere—not the best parts of it, certainly, but in the student, miscellaneous, and sometimes-useful parts of it, like this blog—to act as if our dialogic purpose removed our rhetorical responsibility. We want dialogue, we seek a community of discourse, we do not pronounce so much as solicit—all very nice. But that openness and tentativeness doesn’t make blogging worth our while. I think I’m prepared to say that we should only sit down to write if we have a responsibly rhetorical purpose in mind. In other words, even when we try to get a dialogue going, we should view that attempt as a rhetorical goal, we should measure its value, and we should match our means as perfectly to that end as possible. One of the reasons that, for example, the blogs in the Speculative Realism crowd, and the Object-Oriented Ontology crowd in particular, are so marvelously active, interesting, and worthwhile, is that they tend to have a definite program, a rhetorical thrust, even behind apparent miscellany. They are going somewhere together, not merely straggling along with aimless remarks about this or that book, or this or that idea.

I suspect that if Dr. Johnson had a blog it would be worth sticking in my RSS reader. Not necessarily because I would appreciate his “moralizing,” but because I would be willing to commit myself to think about his prose because he would have written it with customary purpose and decision. Would that I could always say the same about my prose.