on writing lectures/articles

I can always recreate the advice posts from the previous incarnation of the blog, so to those who profited from them– no fear, they can be revived upon request. And maybe some of you copied them anyway.

All right, here’s the situation I’m in, and I’ll tell you how I plan to handle it both easily and fruitfully. It’s not stressful at all in the present case.

Three lectures coming up next month, two in Dublin and one in Bristol. Normally what I would do, at first, is prepare outlines for all three. That way none of them would be anxiety-inducing patches of sheer nothingness. Your greatest enemy as a writer is nothingness, because nothingness is so empty that you imagine only a sudden stroke of genius can fill it.

But that’s not how it works. What you need is some tiny kernel of reality from which to build a piece of writing. Work from that kernel, expanding and modifying and translating it, and you will end up with something much larger and more significant.

The kernel of reality can be anything, and that’s why I always advise to capitalize on the quirks through which a small initial sample of reality is provided to you. This might be a word-count limit, from which you can start to organize the structure of the article and begin to fill in the wasteland of zeroes with ever-increasing detail. It might be a good paragraph that you wrote in your notes and that deserves to be the introductory paragraph of the whole article or at least of a section of it. Or if you’re really in a jam, you might do something truly arbitrary like pick a random letter of the alphabet and force yourself to begin the article with that letter. Anything to free you from the Angst/abyss of an empty page. You can always get rid of the opening later, but at least it gets you moving.

There are other reasons for normally doing all three outlines at the start. One reason is that, when you start to work seriously on one of the three, you don’t want to be panicking in the back of your mind about the nothingness of the other two. The first outlines can be weak or even bad at first– the point is simply that they are not nothing. They are a tiny kernel of reality to build upon or modify. Another reason to do all three outlines at once is to make sure that you’re not repeating yourself too much in any of the three cases. There may be situations where repetition is all right, but in other cases it feels like the wrong thing to do, and you’ll want a distinct identity for each of the three lectures.

The present case for me is artificially easy, though, since Dublin doesn’t want a formal paper in either of the two cases. They want a seminar and a workshop. The seminar needs notecards at most, and the workshop means I just need to show up with my brain in good working order, so all I need is a good night’s sleep. As for the seminar notecards, a couple of hours in a bar any time between now and late April will suffice to get me on a roll with a stack of empty notecards– thinking one thought, then the next, then the next, and there will be anywhere from 50-70 notecards to draw upon. If someone were to come up to me on the street and demand: “what is your philosophy?” I might freeze up for a few seconds, but alone with a stack of notecards, I can remember the whole thing rather quickly, and usually hit a few new areas of subject matter in the process.

That leaves Bristol. The occasion gives me the arbitrary starting point I need to escape the abyss of nothingness. Bristol is Iain Grant’s home turf, and I want to outline our agreements/disagreements. So as promised (and as strangely sneered at by a couple of arrogant bloggers who can’t even finish their own Ph.D.’s, and who therefore need my advice in the worst possible way) here’s how I’m going to do it…

*Reread Grant’s book. (Done. I did this two days ago. Actually, I didn’t even need to reread it word for word, because I marked it so efficiently the first time I read it. Mark your books in such a way that your marginal notes can allow you a fast, condensed reread at a later time if needed.) I also read his article in Skrbina’s recent anthology, because there Grant is dealing with panpsychism, a theme not developed at great length in his book. That gives me another angle from which to view his work.

*Next step, tonight, is to go through and make two lists: one of the points where Grant and I agree, and the other of points where we disagree. It’s important to do both, because disagreements are more potent when they take place against the backdrop of shared alliance.

*Pick three or four of the most important disagreements as the kernel of the article. List several other people who take Grant’s side rather than my own on these issues. This has two purposes.

First, it’s gentlemanly to concede that the other person has allies. Shouting down an interlocutor as if he/she were a lonely hermit with no friends is emptily cocky and really just a form of bullying. (Besides, Grant is a really nice guy, and you’d have to be a creep to want to haze him.) No, concede in advance that “it looks at first as though I am wrong and Grant is right, because look at all the great allies he has!” This will also make the other person more receptive to any criticisms, because it won’t seem like you’re out to isolate and humiliate them.

Second, it increases the importance of the critique. Now it’s not just a minor internal disagreement within the speculative realism circle between me and Iain Grant, but a much more fateful rupture over the status of individual entities in contemporary philosophy. And this is the right place to transition to Bruno and Simondon, and to Toscano’s nice take on the latter in relation to Deleuze. (I’ve reread a whole bunch of this additional material over the past week as well, and in Simondon’s case have actually read quite a bit of new material.)

The length limits always have to kept in mind… I’m looking at maybe 30-35 pages here, so you don’t want to throw in the kitchen sink. The focus has to be very sharp, and all the extra names have to be imported just to enrich the central conception of the article.

A few weeks from now, I should have a very interesting paper, and if I do it the right way, it will be better on certain topics than I’ve ever managed before.

Some of the snickers and chuckles over this advice the first time I gave it (none of it from people who get much done in their own right) was self-congratulation along the lines of: “Haha! I always have far too much integrity to follow arbitrary rules to create articles. I make sure I have something to say first.” etc. etc.

But this is a misunderstanding of how thinking works. The “something to say” in advance of beginning a project is almost always a sort of preconceptual intuition or hunch, still hard to put into words. And you’re never going to be able to put it into words unless you start the hard work of doing so. That’s the real point of writing lots of books and articles– forcing yourself to think more often. There seems to be this odd idea that you work everything out first in your head in clearly articulated terms, and only then do you have sufficient integrity to put it down on paper. Sorry, but that’s just arrogant procrastination. “I am much better than anything that I or others can put on paper.” No, you’re not.

There are also the secondary benefits of productivity, important mostly because they feed back into new primary benefits… The more work you do, the more your professional status increases (provided the work is good). The more your status increases, the more you gain in the form of invitations, additional research funds, and even good morale (a point of overlooked importance, since it is very hard to work when your morale is low, and everyone’s morale flags sometimes; professional success is a bulwark against morale-decreasing incidents). The more invitations you get, the more pressure is put upon you. The more success you have, the more willing you are to take risks in assuming even more pressure. And for me at least, pressure is a useful catalyst to good work.

In general, it’s important to lose the idea that real work is done in a monkish vacuum inside of your head, and that any prodding toward work from the outside world is some sort of corrupt compromise with venal intellectual Ponzi schemes.

True enough, your thoughts do have a certain reality inside your head; indeed, I’m the champion of non-relational objects, and I think each of us has a certain intellectual “style” that goes beyond any expression of it. However, that style is useless in practical terms in its raw form, however ontologically important it may be. You have to make your ideas communicable.

But, I insist, communicability is a result, not a starting point! One of the weaknesses of analytic philosophy is its assumption that any idea that can’t be put into a clear proposition is no idea at all. Nonsense. Anyone with the least familiarity with great breakthroughs in intellectual history will know better. (Analytic philosophy is overly suspicious of hunches and daydreams, and has always tended to overvalue cocky, aggressive debaters who get everything right in words the first time.) You might just need 3 or 4 months to think it over, and there may be a couple of reversals before you finally get your great thought into just the right words. But you have to be working toward it, and personally I think paper is the best place to do that, not the inside of your brain.

In short, I only trust two kinds of people: those who are getting lots of work done, and those who openly wish that they were getting lots of work done. Everyone else is a tire-puncturer or a potshot artist, and they want to suck your energy. Stay away from them.

real pictures that look fake

If you read the great decadent novel A rebours (often Against the Grain in English) by J.-K. Huysmans, you’ll remember that the central character Des Esseintes, instead of following the usual method of acquiring fake plants that look real, prefers real plants that look fake. (This is often cited as the favorite passage of the novel by readers, though personally I think it’s hard to top the tortoise loose in his house, its shell encrusted with diamonds and gold, or whatever precious materials. Al Lingis would be proud.)

In any case, some years ago I started a collection on my computer of “real news photos that look fake”. Here’s one of the best, a purportedly real photo of a train wreck a few years ago that looks like Skippy and Benji did it in their playroom.

an interesting counterfactual

The weightiest historical “what if” of the past century is surely “what if Hitler had never come to power in Germany?” So many things about today’s world map would be different, and we can only guess vaguely at how much unknown human talent vanished from the world in that war without ever being noticed.

But one specific Hitler-related “what if” interests me especially while rereading Rhodes. Namely, it seems reasonably clear to me that if Hitler had not come to power, Germany would have been the first country with an atomic bomb. With people like Teller, Szilard, Bethe, Frisch, and Meitner still in the country to work with Heisenberg and others in a non-Nazi environment (heck, even Bohr might have chipped in had Germany been a functioning democracy) it’s hard to see anyone beating the Germans in that race. Germany would have become a superpower and would surely still be one, and with a much larger territory and perhaps population than it has today. Fermi would have remained in Italy and not been directly involved in any bomb work (he was mildly reluctant about it to begin with).

What did America have? Oppenheimer, who was more an ingenious organizer than a prime mover of the bomb; Lawrence, who couldn’t have put together a bomb without the largely foreign talent base used at Los Alamos.

One would also imagine that the German university system would still dominate the world under a Hitler-free scenario. It’s hard to recover fully from firing many of your best faculty members for no good reason.

Kafka International Airport

A good video from The Onion:

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/pragues_franz_kafka_international