on fixing the prose

This week I’ve spoken about the virtues of writing a quick draft from a detailed outline, with fixing of the prose best left for later.

I’ve timed it, and found that I’ve needed just under 10 minutes per page to fix the prose this time. That’s the virtue of this method– it has taken under 6 hours to renovate a 33-page lecture.

What sorts of things have I found myself fixing?

*repetition of word-choice

*some sentences are too long and must be split up, while others are too short and need to be combined

*some sentences are fruitless digressions and can be deleted, while others need to be added from scratch to improve transitions between ideas

*some long stretches turn out to be boring and need a few flashes of poetry to hold the attention of the audience, while other passages are too poetical and need some steel girders of technical argumentation to give body to all the perfumes that are swirling about

But what is the general principle behind all these changes?

The general principle is that I imagine myself reading the paper aloud to an audience.

We write for humans, not for a supercomputer that will calculate the validity of our arguments. Each sentence needs to further not just the argument, but also the involvement of a human reader with that argument. The reader/listener needs to become invested in the intellectual drama underway in any piece of writing, even if they eventually reject the ideas deployed in that drama.

One way in which our academic training is insufficient is that it teaches us too little about the vices of boring other people. No musical composer, or chef, or party host, or storyteller can afford to bore people for more than a few seconds. Human attention is fragile, and we cannot blame others if their attention wanders as they read us or listen to us. It is our own responsibility to make our ideas interesting.

In retrospect, then… the initial draft of a piece of writing simply makes sure that the ideas are placed in the proper order and are given sufficient amplification as to detail. (The inevitable glitches in this category can be fixed in the later draft too.)

The “fix the prose” draft, by contrast, has less to do with logos than with rhetoric. In some quarters of philosophy there is still a speedy dismissal of rhetoric as though it meant sophistry, or at best mere ornamentation. But that’s a bad attitude. Your ideas go nowhere if you don’t draw people into them.

How do you draw people into your ideas? First, by making sure that they are well-articulated, with one step leading lucidly (even if debatably) to the next. Second, you draw them in by making your ideas dramatic. The ideas cannot be static clots of propositional content. Instead, they must be living entities whose internal tensions automatically push things on to a new stage.

You have to do this at just the right speed as well, and that’s a matter of developing rhetorical taste. There are moments in any piece of writing for pressing ruthlessly forward, and other moments meant for slow-paced summary of what has already come before. A mere string of discursive propositions does not make you a philosopher, and it is unfortunate that much philosophical method is devoted solely to the extermination of everything but discursive propositions.

To repeat: each sentence must not only advance the argument. It must also advance the degree to which readers or listeners are invested in the progress of that argument. That is the primary aim of the second, rhetorical, fix-the-prose draft. It’s quite a relaxing exercise, if the content has already been produced. Try to do the two simultaneously, and you will inevitably be frustrated by the slow pace with which the writing is getting done.

quick thoughts on the category “fan”

Fans are definitely preferable to trolls.

It has been suggested that someone is not really a fan if they are “not uncritical” about an author, but I don’t think this is the point.

Example: I’m a Latour fan. If you want proof that I’m “not uncritical,” just read the final half of Prince of Networks. But I’m still a fan. What does that mean?

It means that I think Latour’s vision of philosophy brings some badly needed ingredients to the mix. It means that I’m excited whenever a new book by him appears. It means that I think additional popularity of his works would generally further contemporary philosophy in a positive way.

I’m also a fan of Zizek. This is obviously a very different case, since unlike with Latour I disagree with all of the core features of Zizek’s philosophy. But somehow I don’t care. On a purely animal level, I like his energy, enjoy the way that he sees the world with his own eyes, and basically like his way of going about doing things and tackling problems.

Being a fan doesn’t mean being “uncritical.” There is not some sort of opposition between gullible belief on one side and critical distance on the other. The fan stands somewhere in between the devotee and the critic.

In fact, being a fan of someone most often means “cutting them some slack.” A true devotee would not need to do this, because the devotee (or “sycophant”, if you prefer) never admits that the object of worship did anything wrong in the first place.

But being a fan requires an attitude that is nowhere to be found in the crude devotion vs. critique dichotomy. Being a fan means saying things like this:

“wow, it really sort of sucks that Latour makes everything in the cosmos purely relational, because that’s the opposite of what I believe. But who cares? All of the other stuff is so important.”

Or:

“I hate it that Zizek is simply taking over German Idealism and spicing it up with a bit of Lacan. How retrograde is that? What we need right now is precisely the opposite gesture! But so what? He’s still Zizek. He still gives you passionate, emotional outbursts about philosophical issues of genuine importance. Who else is capable of that these days? I love this guy.”

In short, being a fan doesn’t mean being “uncritical”. It means saying “I hate X, Y, and Z about this author’s books, but I am still a fan. The positives vastly outweigh the negatives.”

Being a fan is a species of being in love. Love is neither “critical” nor exactly “gullible” either. It’s more like:

“There’s a certain ‘I know not what’ to this person that I can’t quite articulate, and it’s special. Yes, there are a few things about them that are absolutely intolerable according to my usual standards. But so what? There’s something real here that’s worth treasuring, and it can’t be found anywhere else.”

But a certain point, you might stop being a fan of something. At what point? I suppose it would be at the point where you decided that certain intolerable features of the person are not just accidental surface effects making only minor blemishes on a more fascinating core reality, but rather, those intolerable features are somehow a genuine part of who this person/author is, and they are indeed intolerable. And now you feel disillusioned.

In other words I think it’s really crude psychology to see all disillusion as being superficial rejection of a superficial attachment. Rather, we are all susceptible to disappointment in the people, places, things, and authors we most treasure, and there’s nothing that should be mocked about someone else undergoing that process.

larger cover shot

A larger version of the Prince of Networks cover can be found on the ANTHEM WEBSITE.

it depends

Weirdest CNN.com quiz ever:

“Would you put a curse on your boss?
Yes
No”

For most of us, it probably depends on which one of them counts as “our boss.” There are usually a number of them, and most likely there’s one reasonably bad apple somewhere in the bunch.

For the record, 67% of respondents would not put a curse on their boss.

wouldn’t it be hilarious if…

This morning I woke up extremely early with some sort of ringing in the ears and very mild fever. It’s most likely nothing, but let’s assume the worst-case scenario, and if you’ve been following my recent posts you’ll know what I’m talking about.

As big of a horrible mess as that would be with a trip coming up in a few days, just think of how hilarious it would also be, in a really sick sense. Consider the scenario… the Hostel residents infect me with H1N1 virus on the bus 9 days ago. They then get quarantined for a week as their 7 infected housemates are culled and sent to Fever Hospital (yes, that’s the real name of it).

Then after much suffering they are released from a week of quarantine yesterday morning with news cameras capturing the excited scene. And I of all people, who was free to roam the streets for the past week, happen to get invited to the party from outside and infect them all. Yes, it would be sort of funny, in a really sick sense.

reflections on the Bultmann/Heidegger page count

Though I’m naturally curious, I’ve been resisting the temptation to skip ahead in the Bultmann/Heidegger correspondence to read Bultmann’s reaction to the Rectoral Address.

Instead, I’ve decided to estimate in advance the effect that infamous Address had on Bultmann by sheer page-counting. And here’s what I come up with…

*October 1925-March 1933: 69 letters totalling 190 pages in 89 months

*June 1933-September 1975: 50 letters totalling 63 pages in 507 months

This yields the following:

pre-Rectoral Address= someone sent a 2.1-page letter every 39 days

post-Rectoral Address= someone sent a 1.3-page letter every 10 months

The preface to the collection says that one can sense a certain cooling over the years. I think one can more than sense it from these numbers alone, even if Bultmann’s reaction to the speech turns out not to be openly severe.

This is something we can all relate to from direct personal experience, I think. You might have a somewhat tense or unpleasant incident with an acquaintance, and it’s possible that both sides handle it with complete decorum and friendliness. But then you find yourself thinking, “bottom line– we used to call each other three times per week, and now it’s more like once every 6 weeks or so, and only on urgent business.” I wonder if Heidegger had a clear sense of which friends were and were not returning his letters quickly after “Die Selbstbehauptung…” was delivered.

And in fact it’s a bit broader than this, since we don’t only have shifts in our acquaintances due to unpleasant incidents. For instance, I obviously had a major shift in my circle of acquaintances after moving form Chicago to Cairo. For one thing, there were suddenly lots of people in Cairo who were friends of mine even though I had never heard of them before, simply because I had suddenly entered their world. And as for the Chicago people, there was obviously a sort of filter… Really good friends from Chicago naturally kept in touch and fringe acquaintances tended to fade away with distance. But in fact, some Chicago people who had been merely fringe acquaintances suddenly became closer acquaintances– either they were “the letter-writing type” that found it interesting to correspond with me after the move, or the type of person that is simply fascinated by dramatic shifts in the lives of others and kept up with me out of the sort of minor adrenaline rush that brings. (The latter group tended to flash and then fade quickly. A couple of them bent over backwards to send charming and touching gifts over thousands of miles, only to vanish forever within weeks.)

But that’s sort of an extreme case, since it’s not often that you’ll suddenly uproot your life to a completely different continent where you’ve never set foot before and don’t know a soul on the ground. (That’s a slight exaggeration; a grad school classmate and his wife were already here, so I knew exactly two people in Egypt.)

And there would be other dramatic cases… Obviously, if you were to be charged with bank robbery, a number of people you know would suddenly start turning the other direction if they saw you coming down the street. I’ve heard others claim that a terminal illness will do this, and that “you find out who your real friends are” if you’re in a hospital dying of cancer. If you get married you’re more likely to hang out with other couples, and with a newborn child you might end up in baby clubs and the like. If you change religions or suddenly become more religious, you’ll have a completely new circle.

Short of these cases, I wonder what the major sources of changes in circles of friends might be. I’d suspect that the major cause would be just happening to meet one well-connected person who brings you into a completely different social world. Everyone has probably had this happen– you meet one interesting person, they take you to one especially lucky party, and suddenly you find yourself in a new and interesting group.

Nietzsche used to claim that big changes in his life and thinking were foreshadowed by sudden and inexplicable changes in his preferred music. There might be other such signs as well.