maximum possible day

Looking back at my one-line-per-day journal, which I’ve kept since 1994, a year ago today I managed to write 8,000 words. It was about the third time I’d done that in a single day, but the first time it felt easy. However, that’s probably about my maximum; I can’t imagine doing more than that without utter mental/physical fatigue for many days afterward.

Also, I’m not sure if I could write 25 double-spaced pages of original philosophical material in a single day. (Others may be capable of it, but I’m pretty sure I am not. I can do maybe 14-16 pages of original material if the muses are with me that day.) The three cases in question were all review-type chapters, meaning that a fair number of the words were citations. And even more importantly, it’s generally a lot easier to comment on what others are saying than to express your own thoughts. The latter is quite a bit more painstaking, and always involves struggling for just the right words to say what you mean.

But just for fun, I was wondering what an entire year would be like if every day were like that one day a year ago (impossible, because I happened to be on sabbatical at the time and thus had no regular work duties, which is far from the case today). The total would be an absurd 9,125 double-spaced pages, which could easily amount to about 30-35 books, or one every 10 days or so (provided you had help with copyediting and indexing).

I mention this because you sometimes see c.v.’s showing that certain fanatics managed to publish 7 books in a year, and you wonder if ghostwriters were doing the work. But I think the answer is “no.” All it would take to write multiple books per year, assuming you wanted to do such a thing, would be the following factors…

1. A good and fairly consistent writing routine.

2. Plenty of time on your hands, without a lot of teaching duties or other obligations.

3. Fame.

Let me address #3 by making a point I’ve made before… Don’t compare your productivity to that of people like Derrida or Zizek. They’re not necessarily working that much harder than you are; they’re simply that much more famous than you are. And famous people get asked to write a lot. Even not-famous people with a moderate readership, like me, get commissioned to write new things pretty often. And when you’re asked, and if you’re in the habit of saying yes all the time, you don’t want to let people down. Almost nobody is independently writing 15 articles per year and sending them off to be anonymously refereed– if someone published 15 articles in a year, rest assured, they were asked to do about 12 of them.

So, just because it takes you a painful number of months or years to finish a dissertation does not mean that each future project you undertake will be equally painful or lengthy. Outside resources, and outside pressures, will tend to speed things up as you move along (obviously, this requires a better than average diligence and seriousness about your work).

To make a more general point, there is a somewhat wrongheaded tendency to assume that genuine intellectual life occurs on the interior of a private mind, and that all the outside factors entering into work are merely regrettably necessary corruptions and compromises.

By contrast, I believe (somewhat against the grain of my own ontology, and more in line with Latour’s) that we develop intellectually on the outside more than on the inside. Mental growth is not just an internal ripening, but also a series of external landmarks.

Example: the book I’ll be working on this summer would simply not be as good if it were my first one, even though I’d be the same age and thus supposedly of the same level of development as I now am. Why not? It’s not just that every book is good practice and makes you struggle to find the right words for where your thoughts currently are. It’s also because any finished piece of work brings you into dialogue and debate with others, who tell you to read different things you’ve never heard of before, and raise objections that you would never have thought of before. If Tool-Being had never been published, Brassier would obviously not have read it (why would he ever go scouring through dissertations at the University Microfilms website?) and there would have been no speculative realist gang. Thus, I would never have had to consider how to defend my position against their rather different positions. And I wouldn’t have given however many public lectures it’s been in the past four years, because there would have been no invitations. And I also wouldn’t have a reputation to protect by not making a fool of myself with a sloppy lecture, and so forth. Latour’s philosophy cured me forever of the two-world ontology of noble thoughts inside the mind and corrupt conquests outside the mind. That’s not what the map of reality looks like. We do not live inside our minds, but develop intellectually by reading new things, meeting new friends and enemies, finding new jobs, and accepting new social responsibilities.

You learn to build by building, and you learn the limits of your ideas by watching them partially fail in any given project. Never completing a project means never having to see your ideas fail, and thus the reality test is deferred. This is why perfectionism is a very poor excuse for not finishing things. You will perfect yourself far more through a series of (inevitably only partial) successful executions of projects than through the false integrity of thinking that to finish a job means to be sloppy and unconscientious.