Composition of Philosophy. July 14.

I’ll do one of these posts per day, discussing progress on the manuscript, as well as the problems and breakthroughs that arise.

I’ve mentioned the title and background of this project several times, but here is a brief review.

The project was supposed to be a French translation of my first book, Tool-Being. When the calculations were done, Tool-Being turned out to be far too long for a translation to be affordable.

So, we proceeded with the financial problem foremost in our mind. I could write a brand new book. An abridgment of Tool-Being doesn’t interest me in the least, and was never suggested anyway; it would probably take more time than simply writing a new book. Besides, Tool-Being was essentially in its current format on the day of my dissertation defense on March 17, 1999. Though many of the central themes of the book are still valid, I’ve learned a lot over the past decade. A new book was the right decision.

Another constraint– a translator would be needed for the new book. I can’t possibly write a good book in French. I was happy to be able to write one intelligible lecture in that language for the ENS in January.

Obtaining the grant should have been easy, but turned into a silent two-month political battle for reasons not suitable for recounting here. Projects can have human enemies, and I agree with Latour that these political battles are not different in kind from battles to shape the arguments in the book itself. The only difference is that the political part may not be appropriate for sharing on a blog, at least not until many years have passed. Otherwise, such battles are just as much a part of the book as the chapters found within its covers. They are part of the “constraints” that have a fruitful impact on any project.

Once the grant was obtained, calculations were redone. This will be a short book at 43,000 words. Actually, the French calculate translator payment by the number of characters. This is a more logical system than the number of words, but one that is not familiar to me, and I’ll have to force myself to do character-counts along with the usual word-counts.

43,000 words is one constraint. The other constraint is a limited number of days in which to do the writing. We agreed on September 1 as a submission date. Certainly, I could probably string it out a bit longer than that, since the translator is unlikely to be finished by the end of August. (For all I know, he might be on vacation and in no mood to start the project until Fall Semester.)

However, I don’t want to push it past September 1. I have to speak at the conference in Manchester in early September, and once school starts in the fall I’ll be unbelievably busy.

My summer travels only ended last night. Today and tomorrow belong to administrative duties. This means that I can’t start writing until Thursday, which is July 16. All told, that makes 47 days in which to write 43,000 words. It’s not too tough, when you think about it– around three double-spaced pages per day.

However, I’m not going to go at the pace of three double-spaced pages per day. That’s not how I work. On writing days, I generally write 7-12 double-spaced pages, and it doesn’t feel that hard, as long as I have an outline prepared for those pages in advance. 15 pages is not too much of a strain. 20-25 pages is my upper limit. I don’t think I’ve ever written more than 25 pages of philosophical work in a single day. (On certain days I write a lot more e-mail than that, but obviously one can afford to be a lot sloppier with e-mail than with philosophical writing.)

What will I do instead of slowly writing three pages per day?

Early on, I noticed that 43,000 words is roughly the same length as the first third of Tool-Being. That first third consists of nine sections. For the purely arbitrary sake of familiarity and the don’t-mess-with-success principle, I thought I’d divide this new book into nine sections as well. Let’s call them chapters.

In any book project, I think it’s important to start off with a clearer recapitulation of past results, and then move into new material. Like Foucault (I agree with so much of his practical advice despite not being a great fan of his philosophy) I think it’s important not to know in advance exactly where the book is going to end up. The sense of uncertainty adds a bit of passion to the authorial advice in the earlier chapters. Even more importantly, I find that most of my most valued breakthroughs come from addressing intellectual obstacles that arise during the writing itself.

In this particular case, initial outlines showed the following picture:

Chapters 1-4: knew exactly what I want to say

Chapters 5-8: knew sort of what I want to say

Chapter 9: knew exactly what I want to say

Now, I think it’s important to create the bulk of a manuscript as quickly as possible. The main problems I faced in writing my dissertation (otherwise known as Tool-Being) is that I continually rewrote the first five sections for several years. Life was starting to pass me by. My friends were starting to finish faster than I was. My morale was sinking. I was reading too much (granted, I was reading Heidegger Gesamtausgabe volumes, which were directly related to my project, but there was no real need to finish them all before finishing my dissertation– though in fact I did so). [ADDENDUM: I use the term “Gesamtausgabe” loosely here. There aren’t 84 individual volumes in the official Klostermann edition yet; I’m counting the volumes of correspondence put out by other publishers.]

Because of that horrible experience of continually rewriting the same sections, I changed my writing methods forever. Now, I try to reach a critical mass of pages as quickly as possible, even if they are not yet polished. You can always go back and polish them later, and usually it is far easier than you can imagine. 100 rough pages are infinitely better than 20 polished pages, in terms of keeping morale high.

For this reason, I couldn’t avoid the temptation to move chapter 9 backwards so that it immediately follows the other four chapters where I already know exactly what I want to say.

That gave me the following new picture:

Chapters 1-5: know exactly what I want to say

Chapters 6-9: know sort of what I want to say

Experience has shown that the momentum built up from writing Chapters 1-5 as quickly as possible will provide a great impetus for structuring Chapters 6-9.

There’s one other point, though. Chapters 6-9 are not a suitable close to the book. The reason is that they are all on the same level: all talk about the same problem from one of four different angles. Thus, they do not give the sort of sequential development that would lead to a proper conclusion. It would be like writing a nine-chapter book on The Beatles and having the last four chapters be individual profiles of each of the four band members. Do you see what I mean? It wouldn’t really work. You need a more overarching conclusion that isn’t limited to just one topic such as “Ringo.” What a ridiculous way that would be to end a book on The Beatles.

So, I really need a tenth chapter. This needs to be a summation of everything that has been said, and also needs to set the table for the possible doubling of the book. (A French cultural agency might give us a matching grant to double the length of it, but we can’t even apply for the grant until 20% of the translation is completed. So, I have to write the 43,000 words ambiguously in such a way that they can either be a self-contained book or the setup for a more daring second half of the book. This will be tricky, but it can be done.)

Having ten chapters has a certain pleasing simplicity to it. It means that the other nine chapters will have to be slightly shorter, but I enjoy that constraint as well, since I think I sometimes overexplain certain points in my book (it’s the teacher in me), and it probably wouldn’t hurt to become just slightly more allusive on certain points. One should never go too far with that, but a good balance is necessary.

There is also the matter of an Introduction. They are good to have, but generally go on far too long. Think of a book Introduction the way you would think of the person introducing a visiting speaker. The point is to give the audience some taste of what they are about to hear, but in the end the audience came to hear the speaker, not the introducer.

For this reason, I was delighted by the accident that the number of words is not exactly 43,000, but rather 43,388. This gives me an arbitrary reason to shoot for a nice brief Introduction of 388 words. In point of fact, I’ll have to edit the final version of the book looking at the number of characters, not words, but 388 words is an excellent target for an Introduction.

Then, 10 chapters of 4,300 words apiece.

How easy is it to write a 4,300 word chapter in a single day? Incredibly easy, if you know exactly what I want to say.

So, my new (and modifiable) plan is to write the first half of this book in just five days. If all goes well, just one week from now I will have not the current zero pages of this book written, but somewhere around 60-70 pages.

Once that’s done, the rest of the summer will feel like a breeze. Stress will fall to a minimum. I can go up to Alexandria for 3 or 4 nights and enjoy the winds off the ocean and the clang of the streetcar. I can take the 60 or 70 pages with me to edit. Or better yet, I can just take an empty notebook and brainstorm exactly how to organize the tricky Chapters 6-9. (The summarizing Chapter 10 should be no trouble whatsoever once the first nine are finished.)

I hope that sounds easy. If you’re around 25 years old and this sounds beyond your current rate of production, don’t worry, I couldn’t have done it myself until my late thirties. If you’re serious about your work and really want to do it, you will find a way to put it on paper. Just don’t give in to the waves of melancholia that can strike when you feel like a young student/slave.

In fact, you’re not a slave. It’s true that your professors aren’t listening to you very much, but that’s because they have their own concerns, and are usually more worried about the people above them them on the food chain than the ones below them. (Remember the rule: your careers are made by people older than you are, but your reputations are eventually made by people younger than you are. Your professors probably feel harassed by Chairs and Deans, and have no time to persecute you, except for a handful of well-known sadistic sickos, and the older grad students in your Department warned you about those fairly early. Why did you get near them, even though you warned not to do so? This one is your own fault! But it’s not too late to correct it. Choose an advisor you like and respect. Don’t choose a horrible person as your advisor for reasons of area, or what is far worse, because you think their famous name will help you on the job market. It’s not worth it. If you’re good, you’ll get a job eventually.)

Only in a few rare cases are you actually being persecuted or abused by your advisor. And if that’s the case, you simply need to find a new one, which is almost always possible. Most people stay with nasty advisors out of a private masochism. Ask yourself why you’re such a masochist, and figure out how to stop being one. Graduate programs want their students to finish. It makes them look stupid and feel a bit sad if they invest a lot of money in a student who never finishes. The “I got in an argument with my advisor” excuse for an unfinished dissertation is the saddest of them all, even though there’s usually a grain of truth in the complaint. Change your advisor. Or better yet, to repeat: don’t choose bad ones in the first place! Older students are a treasure trove of gossip about which professors are rotten people worth avoiding at all costs. (Don’t get your other professors involved in this. For one thing, it puts them in a tough position with their colleagues. For another, we honestly don’t always know which of our colleagues are rotten to students. I’ve been repeatedly shocked to find that students adore people I can’t stand socially, while valued friends turn out to be loathed by students, and apparently for good reasons.)

All right, away from that interlude and back to a few closing words about the book.

I’m not going to be giving detailed philosophical arguments in these posts. If you want those, read the book. But I’ll have to give some pointers as to what I’m up to, intellectually, or these posts might not even make sense.

One difficult tightrope for this book is Heidegger. The French public currently knows little to nothing about my reading of Heidegger. France remains fascinated by Heidegger. And after all, everything I do in philosophy comes out of a specific unorthodox reading of Heidegger. Tool-Being is what they wanted originally, and Tool-Being is mostly about Heidegger.

At the same time, I’m personally quite sick of Heidegger. Earlier today I finished reading the 84th volume of Heidegger in German that I have ever read, and currently there are no other volumes available. So I’ve done my Heidegger homework as well as anyone in the world, short of people like Theodore Kisiel who actually dive into the archives and read all the unpublished material years before it hits the shelves (more power to him, but it’s not who I am; I’m not an archivist by temperament, and over time you’ll learn your temperament). Many of my orthodox Heideggerian critics simply haven’t read as much Heidegger as I have. I spent my entire life from ages 19-29 thinking Heidegger was basically right about everything other than politics, so it was not the ambition of my youth to spraypaint his car with graffiti, and that’s not what I’m doing now. The point is simply this: I have fully earned my right to say that I am sick of Heidegger, admiring his genius though I do.

But “sick” is actually a little bit of an overstatement. I still like reading and rereading his books. What I’m actually sick of is beginning my own books with references to Heidegger. Partly it’s just fatigue. But partly it’s that it would be somewhat insincere of me to start this book with Heidegger. Why? Because he is no longer the actual point of approach to my own work.

In the old days, whenever I’d set myself to philosophizing, I’d always start by reawakening Heidegger’s tool-analysis in my mind, then follow to all the unorthodox conclusions to which I think it naturally leads, and then try to push it a few unpredictable steps further.

That’s no longer how it works for me. By now, Heidegger is more of a “crucially important figure,” not a current mentor. The ideas I work with now are too far removed from Heidegger’s own concerns, and hence the tool-analysis is no longer the best starting point for any book I write.

Chapter 1, therefore, will use a different starting point, the same one featured in my recent lectures in Bristol and Zagreb– the three basic options of a philosophy of objects, or their respective undermining or “overmining” by positions that don’t regard objects as of fundamental importance.

Heidegger and Husserl are going in Chapter 2. For me, unlike for Latour, Husserl, or even Heidegger, there are two kinds of objects, and only two kinds. It is in this sense that I oppose a purely “flat” ontology.

The occasionalism/scepticism pair (and I do think they are a natural pair, as expressed in my recent lectures) go in Chapter 3. The history of philosophy starts looking very different once occasionalism and scepticism are seen as a natural pair. Kant looks even more paradoxical than he has seemed in my past scattered remarks on him in published books.

The fourfold structure of objects (the book is called L’objet quadruple, after all) goes in Chapter 4.

Chapter 5 is already a bit more strange– an argument not quite for “panpsychism,” but for “polypsychism”. While I don’t think it’s incorrect to say that “inanimate” entities perceive, I do think it’s wrong to say that all things perceive. In fact, many objects at any given time are “sleeping,” or in a technical term stolen from the French– dormant. Things perceive not insofar as they exist, but insofar as they relate to other things. And readers of Prince of Networks will recall my somewhat anti-Latourian conclusion that not all things relate.

Chapters 6-9 deal with the major theme of my lectures in the past two years: the time/space/essence/eidos quartet. All four of these really do all belong on the same level, and given that time and space are rarely grouped with anything other than themselves, a number of surprising conclusions emerge.

Chapter 10 is the summation and the setup for the possible second half of the book.

If all goes well, we will walk together through the writing of the entire first half of this book over the next week.

Incidentally, the length of this post is over 2,900 words even though it took not very long to write. I’m not sure exactly how long, but it wasn’t much over an hour. Granted, blogging (at least for me) is quite a bit faster than writing a work with publication in mind, but the point should be clear– it is possible to write at surprising length as long as you know more or less exactly what you want to say. That’s why an outline is useful, as the pre-existent spine of a still-uncreated creature.