final chapter, P. of N.

final chapter, P. of N.
by doctorzamalek
March 8, 2009

It’s been sent to the publisher, so the book is in the bag other than editing and indexing over the next two months.

Michael Flower of Portland, who so gently pestered me for the chapter for months, is the only one who’s read it besides me; it wasn’t distributed for the LSE event because barely any of it was written yet at that point.

I haven’t written all the books this way, but both Tool-Being and Prince of Networks were written in three chunks, and in similar fashion.

As for Prince of Networks, the whole first half on Latour’s own books was written extremely quickly in February-March 2006, the fastest I have ever written such a large amount. Then I got into a pattern of revising it and revising it.

The first two chapters of Part Two (with which the LSE version of the manuscript ends) were written in late summer 2007 just before I went off to Amsterdam. And again I kept revising all of this material repeatedly.

The final chapter, by far the longest at around 100 pages, has been with me throughout the current school year, and has also been revised many times, though not at the insane frequency that the first half has been revised. I doubt I could change another word in the first half at this point. There are always improvements that can be made, but I am no longer capable of seeing them.

Tool-Being was similar, and since it was my dissertation, this story may be of interest to those now writing dissertations.

For some reason it took me until 1995 to defend a proposal, no great speed record given that I started graduate school in 1990, though not abhorrently late I guess.

I then spent three years writing and revising the first third of the book, which is entirely a reading of Heidegger. Personal distractions, sportswriting, and massive reading projects (including the very necessary Gesamtausgabe reading but also some massive history reading projects) all lengthened this procedure. Oh yeah, I also translated a book from German in the middle of that period.

I’ve spoken about the importance of capitalizing on external triggers. A few bloggers scoffed at this, but it’s a well known phenomenon even from the great figures of the history of philosophy that their greatest books were often written under external pressure– think Being and Time, The Phenomenology of Spirit. You can always find reasons to delay and play the perfectionist game, but these are ultimately ways of withholding your ideas from public judgment, and this is ultimately a kind of arrogant gesture– “my ideas are bigger than any possible expression of them.” Though I agree with that notion in ontological terms, you can’t do it forever. You have to put your ideas on paper and circulate them and see what happens.

Well, ’round about late summer 1998, I realized that it was kind of odd to keep on rewriting 100 pages of a dissertation projected (and finalized) at 300 pages. My flatmate was about to defend, and we were supposedly at the same stage, and I realized that I was stuck in a dysfunctional pattern.

While writing the first part of Tool-Being I had read relatively little secondary literature on Heidegger. In retrospect this was a brilliant decision. I would pass this on as advice to all dissertation writers, though some of their advisors may scream at me for it: ***do not read any secondary literature until your own ideas are clear in your mind first.***

If you read secondary literature while just starting out, you will lose a sense of yourself. You will be intellectually born amidst the controversies over relatively peripheral detail that occupy most disputes in the secondary literature. You will also find it hard to orient yourself, and will instead be persuaded first by one commentator, then by another.

That’s not the way to do it. The way I did it turned out to be the right way. I had 100 pages in my own voice before turning to the stacks of commentaries that you eventually must settle accounts with in a good dissertation.

However, to my surprise, this process was both easy and fun. If you’ve thought for many years about a topic in your own way, it is absolutely wonderful to read many books on exactly the same topic by other people. It becomes extremely easy to distinguish your own views on a topic from those of others.

And here was my method… I would spend 1 or 2 days reading a specific commentator; on the next day, I would write my reaction to their views, usually 5 or 6 pages (that’s more than enough space to spend on a single commentator in most cases). The next day I would return to reading a new commentator, and 1 or 2 days later would write them up as well. In less than 2 months, following this method, I had written (and easily written) nearly 200 pages on the main Heidegger commentators. In fact, I was ordered by my advisor to cut a large chunk of that chapter; the book version of Tool-Being contains the cut version of the second part, not the gargantuan original version. It was only after writing this second part that I knew I could easily be a highly productive academic writer. It is actually quite easy to situate yourself amidst the scholarly literature, as long as you know what you’re doing first. I’ve seen too many dissertation writers think that they have to read everything written on their topic before they start to write. You don’t. Dumping additional required reading on oneself is one of the classic alibis for unfinished projects. Don’t go there. Write a lot of your own material first before you wade into the swamp of 300 articles and 40 books on your topic.

The third part of Tool-Being was written in just three weeks, a few months later. That was pretty stressful, but mostly because someone close to me was having a brush with insanity (later recovered, but still later deceased).

Come to think of it, Guerrilla Metaphysics was also written in three chunks at three separate times. Heidegger Explained was different, given that I didn’t need to learn anything new for that book; it was just a matter of writing clear summaries of things already learned in the past. So, I would do the necessary rereading for the first chapter, then write it. Then do the necessary rereading for the second chapter, then write it. And so on. I seem to recall it went pretty fast. I think I wrote half of the book in August and half in October of 2005.

The next one is going to be different, for necessary circumstantial reasons– one chunk, all summer long, this summer. This week or next week I may be able to give details about that one.