It came to my attention this morning that there is a thing called genius.com which has, incredibly, taken up what is (or perhaps was) the job of literature scholars and political theorists everywhere: exegesis. They even use that very word to describe what they're doing. This website will interpret and annotate Machiavelli, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and even Supreme Court decisions for you, in addition to tons of rap lyrics and even Chipotle's menu. Really--their slogan is "annotate the world." And not only that, but they recently received an investment of $15 million to do more of it. Yes, that's 15,000,000 in actual money, for doing, I kid you not, exegesis. And all the humanities grad students in the world just issued a collective scream of jealousy, am I right?
Here's the catch: the website is crowdsourced. It's wikipedia for exegesis. As the website puts it: "There is no single genius who writes all the annotations—anyone can contribute. Genius is powered by the community, and that’s what makes it special." Uh, sorry, but no. Genius.com may be powered by community, but regular old genius is not. Machiavelli did not crowdsource The Prince, my friends, and Plato did not fund his Academy on kickstarter. Even the Declaration of Independence, perhaps the greatest document ever written by committee, had one principle author. Opinion is powered by a crowd; good literature is not.
Admittedly, there are many respects in which I am a bad democrat, and this is probably one of them. But I also speak from the experience of having tried to teach 18-year-olds what exegesis is and having attempted to do a lot of it myself, and I know how hard it is to do well. Providing exegesis by committee is going to leave you with a lot of really boring drivel and half-formed assertions. And as it turns out, genius.com seems to have already encountered this problem. Granted, the whole "annotate the world" project has only just gotten started in earnest, but all that's there so far seems to be...not really exegesis.
What attempts at exegesis there are, however, are pretty bad (look up some of the stuff on Nietzsche and you'll see what I mean). If my students had tried to use this stuff in their papers they wouldn't do so well. My recommendation to genius.com: rethink the use of words like "genius" and "exegesis" in your mission statement. If you really care about exegesis, you should think a bit harder about what words you use and what they mean. Humbler aspirations may be in order.
Regardless, I find it stunning that there is even a market for this kind of thing. Other than scared freshmen writing their intro to political theory papers, who is reading the annotations for The Republic? If this really does take off, though, I'm really looking forward to the day the Straussians and the Cambridge School face off on their respective interpretations of Machiavelli. That will be the political theory version of celebrity deathmatch!
Here's the catch: the website is crowdsourced. It's wikipedia for exegesis. As the website puts it: "There is no single genius who writes all the annotations—anyone can contribute. Genius is powered by the community, and that’s what makes it special." Uh, sorry, but no. Genius.com may be powered by community, but regular old genius is not. Machiavelli did not crowdsource The Prince, my friends, and Plato did not fund his Academy on kickstarter. Even the Declaration of Independence, perhaps the greatest document ever written by committee, had one principle author. Opinion is powered by a crowd; good literature is not.
Admittedly, there are many respects in which I am a bad democrat, and this is probably one of them. But I also speak from the experience of having tried to teach 18-year-olds what exegesis is and having attempted to do a lot of it myself, and I know how hard it is to do well. Providing exegesis by committee is going to leave you with a lot of really boring drivel and half-formed assertions. And as it turns out, genius.com seems to have already encountered this problem. Granted, the whole "annotate the world" project has only just gotten started in earnest, but all that's there so far seems to be...not really exegesis.
What attempts at exegesis there are, however, are pretty bad (look up some of the stuff on Nietzsche and you'll see what I mean). If my students had tried to use this stuff in their papers they wouldn't do so well. My recommendation to genius.com: rethink the use of words like "genius" and "exegesis" in your mission statement. If you really care about exegesis, you should think a bit harder about what words you use and what they mean. Humbler aspirations may be in order.
Regardless, I find it stunning that there is even a market for this kind of thing. Other than scared freshmen writing their intro to political theory papers, who is reading the annotations for The Republic? If this really does take off, though, I'm really looking forward to the day the Straussians and the Cambridge School face off on their respective interpretations of Machiavelli. That will be the political theory version of celebrity deathmatch!
1 comment:
The country music annotations are great though, and for pretty much the same reason that the rap annotations are good. Country music is intensely self-referential and the references go back to the 19th and sometimes 18th centuries, and a dilettante like me needs some help with this.
I think if this were an encyclopedia of cultural cross-references, it could be great, but I agree, I don't want to read random people's dull interpretations of texts.
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