a quick note on acknowledgments

Incidentally, I also just wrote a brief 5-line acknowledgment for this book. There was no way to avoid it, because two people in Egypt and two in France were the ones who made this book possible, and I would be an ingrate not to mention them.

Same with Prince of Networks, where the ANTHEM people and the February 2008 event at the LSE were such a vital part of the book’s life that it all had to be mentioned at the start.

But generally speaking, as stated at the front of Tool-Being, I do not like either acknowledgments sections or dedications. I’m not saying others have to agree with me about this, but let me explain why I don’t like them as a rule.

With a book there is only one relationship that counts: that between author and reader. No one is forced to read your book, just as no one is forced to listen to your long stories in a bar. There has to be something in it for the reader or listener. This means that you cannot bore, insult, or exclude your reader. You have to address your reader as an equal in some sense. You have to care about what your readers are thinking, and you have to wonder “am I boring them on this page?” Because you have no right to bore them.

It is my opinion that dedications and acknowledgments either bore or exclude the reader, or both.

Let’s start with dedications. I don’t want to be harsh, because there have been many moving book dedications written to parents, spouses, mentors, deceased friends, and so forth. Each author has to make this decision independently; I’m just sharing my own thoughts.

There are only a few basic possibilities with dedications. They tend to be brief. Perhaps they are so brief as to be incomprehensible to outsiders, with allusions to unknown people, and in that case there is a risk of boring the reader momentarily, and I hate to do it even for a moment.

What else could you do? Dedicate the book to someone of greater authority than yourself. But this is a form of borrowed glory, and also faintly intimidates the reader, since it would imply one’s close connection with a famous author, a connection from which most readers are excluded.

You could also dedicate it to someone with whom you have a very close personal relationship. But if I were to write, say, “For Irena,” this would really just amount to dropping public hints about a love life behind the scenes, which is a form of showing off. And even if it intrigued some readers who are curious about personal lives, it would simultaneously exclude them from the privileged information. It would be a tease, basically.

If by contrast a book is dedicated to a known spouse/partner of the author, the reader is by definition shut out of that uniquely intimate relationship. Thus, a screen has been briefly set up between author and reader. (And let me repeat, I am speaking only of my own authorial preferences here, and pass no judgment on this very personal decision made by others.)

As for acknowledgments, there are two kinds: the boring and the exclusive, both of them bad in my opinion.

If it’s just a long list of 40 or 50 names without explanation, those are incredibly boring for the reader. If you want people to know they’ve helped, you can just thank them warmly or give them gifts.

But there’s another kind of acknowledgment that bullies or intimidates the reader: “I’d like to thank Harvard University, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Director of the British Library for their helpful assistance with my project. I also benefitted greatly from Jacques Derrida for lending me the use of his seaside condominium during the latter stages of writing this book.” OK, now you’re a big-time player, and most of your readers are not. A barrier has been set up.

But there are times when you do have to thank people, as in the two cases I just mentioned. In the case of L’objet quadruple I’ve tried to avoid boring the reader by being extremely brief, and tried to avoid excluding the reader from my relations with four people by adding one sentence saying “This book is dedicated to my readers, both known and unknown.” Sort of an apology for losing track of my readers for two sentences while thanking other people who really needed it.

In the case of Prince of Networks, I don’t think that opening LSE section is boring, so no problem there. The worry is that readers might feel excluded. I took care of that by inviting them to join Erdélyi’s mailing list and assuring them that he’s very welcoming.

I also had to thank Bruno and Chantal Latour, who did contribute an awful lot to the physical writing of the book. Of course, the danger is that it just becomes a form of attaching oneself to a greater celebrity while excluding the reader from that same attachment. I dealt with that by invoking the fact that Latour started helping me when I was a completely anonymous, unaccomplished fresh Ph.D. Instead of addressing the reader from Latour’s dining room, where they might not feel invited, I address them from the crushing obscurity of a Chicago apartment ten years ago. And there’s nothing in that to intimidate the reader in the least.

Anyway, that’s my own approach to the problem. Others might and do reject it, but I think it is vitally important to treat the reader like an honored guest, not like a failure excluded from a party of luminaries.