he’s not abandoning ship

DOMINIC holds firm for Badiou.

a plug from Verso

It’s not just Angst-ridden grad students anymore… EVEN VERSO recommends the advice posts on this blog.

a further defection

Naught Thought is also jumping ship on Badiou.

Follow the links there, and you can find related remarks from Reza, K-Punk, and Dominic.

What I like about Badiou is precisely his systematicity, and his willingness to come right out and say things rather than hide behind the sort of have-it-both-ways jargon that was par for the course in the continental philosophy of my student years.

That said, I think he has gotten too much of a free ride on a number of points, and it especially puzzles me that some Badiouians are willing to dismiss Husserl for crimes of which Badiou is at least as guilty, without Husserl’s significant upside. (He wasn’t only an idealist, you know.)

It will be interesting to see if these mounting defections of former Badiouians turn out to mark some sort of turning-point, or if there will be a convincing backlash to the backlash.

flu fading (it seems)

The final 13 outstanding flu tests have come back negative. Those poor people in the Zamalek Hostel may well remain stuck in an endless loop if positive tests keep turning up there, but so far there is no sign that it spread to anyone outside that building. (Pretty amazing, considering the crowded bus rides we all took toegether at just the wrong time.)

So, AUC will perhaps not go down in history as the institution that kicked off an African flu pandemic.

a Badiou backlash?

SPLINTERING BONE ASHES is down on Badiou these days:

“With a heavy heart, and with very little jouissance…

‘I hate Badiou.’

Or perhaps I should qualify this, somewhat- I find the post-evental world that Badiou delineates (and perhaps more than that, everything beyond his basic, seductive, ontology) to be simply absurd. This is an unhappy conclusion to reach, for me at least, since it was Badiou who brought me to philosophy in the very beginning, his works that I read first of all, in that first flush of enthusiasm, who I chose to study and write about, to calmly explain to non-believers (let’s not kid ourselves here…) the careful meaning of ‘event’ ‘subject’ et al (in his exceptionalist conceptual bestiary).”

LEVI comments on that post, supportively:

“I confess that after having read the first 200 pages of Logics of Worlds, I simply couldn’t read it any more. The more I read the greater my feelings of frustration and disappointment. Where I was looking for a realist theory of relations, the theory Badiou develops strikes me as inevitably wedded to the human such that we never genuinely reach the domain of objects or things. In other words, Badiou strikes me as being guilty of what Roy Bhaskar calls “the epistemic fallacy” which consists in conflating questions of epistemology with questions of ontology.”

And further:

“Throughout Logics of Worlds we find Badiou pre-occupied with questions of how to measure, identify, and evaluate objects. However, these are all epistemological terms that have little or nothing to do with the ontological status of an object as real. Badiou tells us that his account of the transcendental and objects makes no reference to the subject, but with the exception of a very brief discussion of galaxies, all of his examples of worlds refer to cultural phenomena.”

But what I liked best was Levi’s “it’s better to read Zubiri than Badiou” moment. That would have been an unthinkable statement from anyone but me until recently… The readers of each of those two don’t generally read the other, and Levi and I could well be the only two humans who have read both.

too good to be true

Mark C. suggested this as the cover for Circus Philosophicus. Not sure if we can get the rights to it, but it does link up powerfully with the book’s theme (and even with the blurb).

The photographer is REMI BENALI, and the scene is the Caspian Sea. The boys are playing on the ruins of an amusement park, with drilling rigs visible in the distance.

flu dying down, I hope

The latest e-mail from the University contains all good news.

158 additional people were flu-tested at the new campus, and all tests came back negative. Still 13 results outstanding from that batch, but we’re off to a good start.

The 2 initial flu patients (both 23-year-old Americans) have recovered and are about to be released from the hospital.

Classes will not resume on Sunday (a normal teaching day here), but on Monday, since the Zamalek Hostel quarantine will not be ended until at least then, and the 110 or so students there are a sizable chunk of students taking summer classes.

Somehow, they’ll have to figure out how to make up for a week of missed classes from the short summer semester. I’m sure they’ll figure something out.

answering a question on the “style” point

Voyou Désoeuvre is perplexed by my last post:

“There have been a number of great posts recently at Object Oriented Philosophy about being a grad student and/or academic, and the writing process in particular; but this latest I find utterly incomprehensible:

‘I sat down, and simply wrote it straight through. 12 pages. How long did it take? Geez, maybe 2 hours, maybe 3 hours…. The point is…I paid no attention to style. That’s for later.’

Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve read or heard advice like this, but I’ve never understood it. What does it mean to write without paying attention to style? What is writing without style? Isn’t writing the process of taking something that doesn’t quite exist, the content of ones thoughts, and making it exist by supplying it with a form? So to write without paying attention to style would be to not write at all.

Graham Harman’s written quite a bit about the importance of style, as a matter of essence rather than mere decoration; so it’s odd to see him suggesting the virtues (indeed, the possibility) of writing without attention to style. I wonder what he means by it.”

Yes, a clarification is in order.

What I’ve tried to argue several times on this blog is that style is first a matter of organization, and only secondly a matter of linguistic flourish. What really makes you who you are as a writer is not elegant phrasing and word choice (though this is also needed) but the specific manner in which you decompose a problem into discrete chunks, and order those chunks one after the other. It is in this sense that I worship outlines as the key to all writing. Unless your arrangement of topics is both clear and interesting, and unless the transitions make sense, then your reader will be lost.

In this respect, my first 12 pages of the Croatia paper are not without style. They are tightly organized, and I doubt anything will need to be added or reordered.

What I meant when I said that I paid no attention to style last night was the other sense of style: literary elegance. The sentences in those 12 pages are currently, for the most part, flat and dull. Since I like to write well, it took me years to become willing to write 10 or more flat and dull but well-organized pages as a first draft. Now that I’m able to do it, it makes everything a lot more relaxing, because it’s nice to know that “I already have it written, I just need to go through and make some improvements.”

In the old days I would often rewrite my opening paragraph 15 or 20 times, trying to get it just right. That was a waste of time, I now believe. Because in fact:

(a) you can get it just right after only 6 or 7 tries, and

(b) why wait to get the opening just right before writing the rest? It’s a procrastination technique, telling yourself “I am so conscientious that I cannot proceed before utterly nailing this first paragraph.”

There’s more to be said about this topic some other time. But I can say something now, and some potential blog readers won’t like it… What’s bad about the style of my current draft? Well, it reads a bit too much like analytic philosophy. It is one hopefully true proposition followed by another, followed by another.

The draft is “clear”, but not vivid. And I’m afraid that’s how much analytic philosophy reads to me.

What does vividness mean? It means that the subject matter has come to life above and beyond what you the author are saying about it. This is what good writers do: they clarify, yes, but they also suggest, hint, and find numerous other oblique ways to get at the reality of what is being described. They don’t just give clear lists of attributes about the topic under discussion. That’s certainly better than a vague and confusing list of attributes about the topic, but a thing is more than its attributes.

Not to be harsh, but maybe that’s what I mean… write like an analytic philosopher on your first draft. But don’t keep it that way.

In fact, that might be a fun exercise on this blog some time… Take some classic, undeniably “well-argued” paragraph of analytic philosophy, and try to show how I’d fix the style if it were my own article. (This would be a perfect counterthrust to the usual technique of, say, taking a paragraph of Heidegger and putting it into “good plain English.” And remember, I did a whole book’s worth of that myself in Heidegger Explained, so I’m not saying there’s no value to that. I’m simply saying that good plain English ultimately won’t cut it as a medium of philosophical discourse. There is relatively little analytic philosophy that will still be read a century from now.)

another practical writing tip

This one isn’t at all original… I was told to do this by a fellow grad student in Chicago, wasn’t able to do it, and in recent years I’ve come to see how right she was. What she told me was this: “writing and editing are two separate activities.”

More specifically… I was fairly lazy today. Or at least I read and blogged too much, and wrote too little. But I have a talk to give in Croatia on the 20th, not long from now. I woke up this morning with less than a paragraph of it written, and since I can no longer tolerate panicked last-minute writing (ruins your life and diminishes the quality of the work) 10 days is almost too close for comfort.

So, I drew up an exact outline of the first third of the lecture. Then I sat down, and simply wrote it straight through. 12 pages. How long did it take? Geez, maybe 2 hours, maybe 3 hours. I lost track. (Music is of great assistance as fuel in cases like this.)

The point is… I paid no attention to style. That’s for later. What’s important at this stage is momentum and morale. If I had tried to finely craft each individual sentence, I might have 4 pages written by now. And then I’d wake up, slightly nervous, thinking I only have 4 pages written and just 9 days to go before departure from Cairo.

It’s infinitely better to have 12 pages done, no matter how rough the style. Don’t you agree? Now I will go to sleep, at 4 AM, with a sense of accomplishment, high morale, and complete relaxation. I can wake up tomorrow and have a nice, slow-paced breakfast somewhere instead of engaging in self-flagellation about how badly yesterday was wasted.

Yes, these 12 pages would be stylistically unpresentable if anyone else wanted to see them right now. But do you have any idea how quickly one can polish up 12 pages of fairly weak prose? It won’t take long. Maybe a couple of hours at most, probably less.

The important thing is, the crucial first third of the paper is written. The content is all that I want it to be. It’s all in the proper order (thanks to the meticulous outline I prepared yesterday morning). All it really needs is rhetorical and grammatical polish.

Getting from 0 pages to 12 is much harder than getting form 12 pages to 100. The biggest obstacle to all writing is the “Page 0” problem. The big problem is the intimidation factor of knowing that writing is ex nihilo. That’s why it’s important simply to get started. Just get the first paragraph on paper, then the first page, then the whole introduction, and so forth. Once you have as much as 12 pages, you can easily get to 100.

And furthermore, having 12 pages done out of 30-35 literally puts me within striking distance of the end. I could have swine flu for the next 6 days, and still rally in time to finish the whole thing before leaving town. In an emergency, I could easily get from 12 pages to 25 in one sitting, then write the last 5 pages in longhand on the plane. (I prefer not to do that, but it can be done.)

So, what I’ve done by pounding out these 12 pages is just bought myself a wonderful next week of relaxed editing and writing instead of a mildly panicked early morning tomorrow.

And here’s another tip… I did it tonight because I felt like it. It was nearly 2 AM, and normally I really try to avoid messing up my sleep schedule during vacation periods, because that can be hard to recover from. But somehow I returned from a walk in a writing mood, and when you’re in the writing mood, don’t ever kill it off for sleep or minor pleasures. Never kill it off unless social or work obligations require you to kill it off.