thanks, Tim, but…

Tim Morton has A VERY KIND POST UP about my lecturing style.

However, he gives me too much credit on two points, and I wanted to add caveats about those points.

“Something remarkable struck me about Harman’s presentations last week. He improvised from note cards. Like a jazz musician (I gather from his blog he plays sax). I’d assumed from hearing his polished talks that he was reading from a complete text. But no–the cards were like riffs and he put them together and elaborated on them spontaneously.”

They’re not always from notecards, though. The polished talks Tim is referring to that he says he heard possibly were the reading of written texts.

Sometimes I use prepared texts, sometimes notecards. It depends on a variety of factors. Sometimes I plan to use a prepared text, then get writer’s block for some reason and have to go to the cards. In more informal settings I use cards. When speaking about familiar topics I use cards. The less familiar the topic or audience, the more likely I am to use a prepared text.

If I’m giving a keynote/plenary sort of lecture, then I generally used prepared texts. In those situations you’re often the target of a considerable financial investment in airfare/hotel room terms, and you’ll really be letting down the conference organizers if you’re mentally off while improvising and give a rambling talk, so in those cases I always want to give them some polish for their money.

“Most impressive moment: at the end of his second talk he simply announced ‘That’s enough’ and stopped–with a stack of cards still to read. He could sense that we could feel that whatever had been said was enough.”

Again, Tim is too kind here. I had simply messed up in reading the schedule and didn’t realize that both Ian and I had to be crammed into a mere one-hour slot. As a result, I had written up way too many notecards for that second talk, and frankly it had me rattled a bit when I knew I’d have to make cuts on the fly, which I hate doing. If you watch the video closely you’ll see that I wasn’t very comfortable at the beginning of that second talk. All you can do in those cases is try to get on a roll as quickly as you can.

Ian Bogost is someone who gives even more public lectures than I do, and we’ve discussed this issue before. Some situations are ideal for prepared texts, others for informal presentations. The problem is that people are capable of moralizing about this issue, and from both directions!

That is to say, if you show up with a prepared text, some people will give you a smug or sarcastic little speech asking if you need a prepared text as a crutch. Contrariwise, if you show up with notes, some people will give you a smug or sarcastic little speech asking if you always show up unprepared to give lectures. You just have to hope you don’t run into such people before giving your lecture.

Of the best philosophy performers I’ve seen, there is Zizek who never seems to have a prepared text, and Lingis who always has one without exception. (Heck, even Lingis’s classes were prepared texts.) There are many ways to skin a cat, as they say.