postscript to reading one’s own books

Another thing I’ve noticed is that it is possible to read one’s own books about three times faster than books written by anyone else– and not due to skimming. No great surprise to this point, I guess, but I wonder what the exact reasons are for it.

more from the ongoing Levi concert

Few things are more pleasurable than hearing things you agree with expressed in a voice that you could never quite manage to mimic, and Levi’s been doing that a lot for me in recent months.

Looking forward to his book, and I happen to like the new title better as well.

“If there has been a great merit to object-oriented ontology, I think it is twofold: First, in my view, object-oriented ontology is the first post-non-philosophical philosophy. Laruelle argues that the central gesture of any and all philosophy is to divide the world into a factum and datum, a transcendental and a phenomenon, such that philosophy is perpetually caught in a vicious circle where it assumes the very thing it seeks to account for. In other words, philosophy, according to Laruelle, is auto-positing, and, for this reason, is unable to reach the real. By contrast, non-philosophy begins from the real according to Laruelle. From the standpoint of object-oriented ontology, non-philosophy remains too idealist in its tenor, and therefore all too metaphysical in its assumptions. Object-oriented ontology inscribes this very translation of the real into objects themselves, pluralizing it and thereby rendering it ubiquitous, rather than the exclusive domain of philosophy. In this way it is able to formulate a post-non-philosophical philosophy.”

on reading one’s own books

I’m halfway through Prince of Networks now. This being the fourth time I’ve done this, I can now safely say that there is a sort of mental routine, though it may not work the same way for everyone.

Receiving the printed version of a book one has written oneself is of course always a great pleasure. Finally, a tangible product in exchange for hundreds of hours of effort, usually stretching over a period of at least several years.

Reading the book, however, is not something I find immediately pleasurable. In part, this is because I have already reread or modified every one of these sentences dozens of times by now, and hence it all sounds like half-nonsense in my mind, or like some sort of phonetic stew. But in part it’s also because, by the time the book actually appears, you’ll have moved at least a half-step further, and there will be many possible improvements and simplifications that you can already spot.

As already stated, I usually do a quick immediate read of the book upon publication, especially looking out for the inevitable typographical errors or weird grammar or word choice that might possibly be changed in future printings. (Until you actually write a book, it’s easy to be shocked that a published book could contain any errors at all. But just wait and see. It’s impossible to eradicate all of them, no matter how many editors are helping you. I think Tool-Being contains around 45 typos.)

Once the books are a few years old, I wouldn’t say that I go back and read them cover to cover. But I do flip through them occasionally, or at least see them cited by others. And that’s when it becomes pleasurable… After you forget what it felt like to write a certain paragraph because it’s been so long ago, you can stumble across it later and smile delightedly and say “hey, that’s really good. Nice.”

My other favorite experience with older writings is following along with one of my own arguments, and thinking “but that’s weak, because I can already think of a counter-argument,” but then the counter-argument is immediately demolished in the next sentence.

However, it is generally quite a rare experience to reread any of my own work, and I don’t think that’s atypical, based on the informal queries I’ve made.

One other point… Though reading the actual book can feel a little bit stale, it is a cakewalk comparing to reading page proofs, which is really just about the most agonizing experience on earth. Most people I know have to go on a three-day vacation after correcting their own page proofs, or even treat themselves to some unusual reward, because that’s the stage at which your own words are most likely to look like sheer nonsense– and worst of all, it’s too late to change them very much.

on expansiveness

Somewhere, Zizek makes an interesting stylistic link between Fichte and Husserl, calling them both philosophers who continually rewrote the same introductory text. While this characterization could easily be nitpicked, it is basically true.

With Husserl in particular, though his stock is now grievously undervalued by the young, one gets the sense that the phenomenological method had somewhat stunted results. There aren’t all that many classic phenomenological analyses, and even those that do exist don’t lead as far as they should. If this sounds too harsh, compare Husserl with, say, Freud. Freud also worked from a basic core of central ideas and might conceivably have rewritten the same introductory text over and over again. (Though admittedly a psychologist could not have gotten away with this as easily as a philosopher could.)

A certain amount of repetition is needed in philosophy, a certain devotion to the whirlpool that circles around a small core of fundamental concepts that any philosopher aspires to identify at work amidst all the diversity of the world. But this can start to mimic a kind of mental illness unless a certain breakthrough is made into more concrete subject matter. Now that I think of it, Heidegger is at least as guilty as Husserl of failing to make such a breakthrough. For all of Heidegger’s tens of thousands of pages, most of his readings of the history of philosophy sound very much alike no matter which thinker he is discussing, and much of the supposed concrete subject matter in his texts (such as the excellent analyses of boredom) are little more than local applications of his threefold temporal structure.

The importance of repetition in philosophy (which Zizek often praises) is partly as a control on premature concreteness. Some philosophers feel the need to express opinions about topics on which they have no interesting, personally worked-out ideas to share, and are merely choosing from among the various available options. That’s what I mean about premature concreteness. If someone asks “But what do you think about X?”, I’d rather say “I have no interesting ideas about X as of yet” instead of spouting plausible dogma that is really no better than the opposite dogma.

Nonetheless, failure to push beyond this guarded repetition of two or three central insights can also become a form of procrastination, and procrastination is a horrible enemy lurking inside all of us– perhaps the very worst internal enemy shared by all humans of a certain cerebral type.

more on constraints

One of the most interesting themes of the Montfort/Bogost Atari book (and from all of Bogost’s work on videogames, more generally applicable principles emerge) is that the pitiful weakness of the Atari hardware actually turned out to be a virtue.

A more powerful Atari would not necessarily have meant better games. By working within the relatively strict limits of the machine, game designers had to invent all sorts of tricks. The scorpion and the cobra in Pitfall, the signature enemies in that game, were used solely because those animals were the most identifiably representable with the Atari technology, not because the designer had some sort of totemic obsession with scorpions and cobras in particular.

This is just another example of the value of constraints. A longer book isn’t necessarily better, and neither is a book (or lecture) whose parameters you freely chose yourself. If we choose everything freely on our own, we are likely to be drawn into deadening repetition, simply because each of us is so limited, with such a relatively small repertoire of actions and responses. But start to take some cues from your environment, or from the concrete conditions that gave rise to a particular writing assignment, and you will be forced into innovation merely by the nature of the task.

This is why I rejoice over the 43,000-word limit on L’objet quadruple. Would it be a “better” book at 120,000 words? Not really. It would just be a different sort of book. I like the obligatory concision and allusiveness that will be forced upon me by that strict upper limit.

The more absolute constraints you can identify in a project, the more energetically you will be able to get down to work. A book is not the confession of a soul, but the dialogue between that soul and the highly specific situation that compelled it to write.

the Herzog postscript

Wow, I also somehow missed that Werner Herzog narrowly missed taking the same flight and made a documentary out of it later. How out of touch can I get?

There were some other obvious gaps in the CNN story, such as… Had a funeral already been held for the girl? How did the father react to her reappearance? etc.

But here’s the really weird line from a different article on the crash: “It was later discovered that as many as 14 other passengers also survived the initial fall from the disintegrated plane but were unable to seek help and died while awaiting rescue.”

As many as 14 people survived a 2-mile fall?