on the politics of [my] writing pt.1

Starting these things off is difficult. I haven’t figured it out yet, but I know I’d like this post to be about writing or about my writing. My respect for it in general and my relative abstinence from it, which is connected to a kind of responsibility that I think it involves, which is again connected to a sensitivity to its inherent politics: to the politics of writing in a general sense, these days especially, and to the politics of different types of writing–which is why starting these things off is difficult.
There’s my academic writing, anything but free, frustrated with structural restraints, with guilt related to procrastination, with the dictum that risk-taking is to be minimised, with anticipation of overly critical readership and everything this entails: the state of academia and issues around authorship and access to knowledge. Then there’s my arts-writing of sorts, related to research/curatorial projects I was involved in, mostly through Cypriot art-institutions–I do suspect that an expanded treatise on the insidious politics of this type of writing will follow shortly. Then there’s my output in the form of email: I consider this a form of art, perhaps my only truly honed skill, also deployed in sms, IRC, and the occasional forum post with their presumptions of privacy and openness. Then there’s my social media participation, not an art, not something that I can imagine transformed, another treatise that might follow in another post.
And now a shift to this. First person, blog format, striving to be reflexive about what it does, with more targeted intentions, and a greater degree of abandon. It took way too long to get here. It was a matter of deciding on a platform, and perhaps, arguably, waiting for blogging to go out of style. The why-now is mentioned in a previous post, so is the why-here: The platform and the system it belongs to are problematic, yet these problems aren’t new, and I think we can begin to understand them. The devil one knows, right?