I’m back from my leave and looking forward to talking to scholars and students about their writing again. As always, I will be pursuing it as a “craft” that can be developed through practice. I’ve been putting the final touches on my main activities for this semester and I thought I’d share them today for those who are interested. You will notice that registration is open only to CBS students and staff, but if you would like to participate in something and are not part of the CBS community feel free to contact me to see if that might be possible. Some of these activities have an online option, and that will usually be a quite open channel. You can get an overview here.

As a new thing this year, I’ve decided to address some ordinary “pedagogical” issues. What can we do to improve ourselves as students, as learners? There’s a definite art to this, which is situated in some rather familiar conventional contexts, aptly captured in the title of Norm Friesen’s The Textbook and the Lecture, or what I sometimes simply call “the academic situation”. This situation provides a number of reliable resources for learning, and, of course, a number of dependable challenges to overcome. For example, it provides us with an orderly framework within which to think, which risks becoming a set of constraints on our creativity. We are encouraged to be precise, but there’s a risk that we’ll be bored. That tension is virtually constitutive of academia.

The “Art of Learning” series in the fall is intended as a kind of loose warmup to the more goal-oriented “Craft of Research” series in the spring. In the fall, we’ll talk about the various competences that together define what it means to be a “knowledgeable” person, what it means to have “learned” something. In the spring, we’ll bring these skills together in the work of researching and writing a year-end project or thesis. If a research paper is written “one paragraph at a time” an education proceeds through azure moments, “rooted in watching with affection the way people grow”. The talks will give me an opportunity to explain what I mean by this, not least to myself.

I don’t intend to make too much out of the distinction between “art” and “craft”, except that, to me, craftsmanship is more about the work that is produced and artistry is more about the experience that it produces. Somewhat clumsily, we might say that craft is more objective and art is more subjective. Craft is about whether the thing works, while art is about what it does to us. The reason they’re hard to keep apart, of course, is that a “work of art” works precisely when it moves us. And sometimes an encounter with plain old good craftsmanship is a transformative experience in itself. It’s a good thing I’ve a got a few weeks before I start, and many more to work though these issues one at a time!

While I was on leave, I drew a lot of hands. My artist friend helpfully reminded me to draw, not what I know, but what I see. Even more specifically, she told me to begin with the shadows, not the lines. “The lines aren’t really there,” she said; “they’re just edges, where things end.” I have tried and tried but I’m still blinded by my knowledge from seeing my hand clearly. On some days I am proud of what I have accomplished, on others I am frustrated beyond consolation. On some days, I feel both emotions about the same drawing. I am far from mastering the craft of drawing anything, let alone the complex machinery of the hand. But I am learning.

“We suffer and we learn,” said Aeschylus. For many students, that’s all there is to it. You tough it out, you suffer through it, and you move on with your life. But what I want to suggest is that this suffering isn’t just what Oscar Wilde (writing from jail) called “one very long moment”. It is a series of discrete moments during each of which we find a specific kind of composure. We learn how to read and how to write, how to listen and how to talk, how to think and how, finally, to enjoy the whole business of knowing things, one experience at a time. We have to give ourselves the time to do this. We have to find a moment, and then another, and undertake to learn something from it. Under these conditions, guided by this discipline, I would argue that Whitman’s words hold true: “Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.”

I took some time off this summer to begin work on a book. Like you, I had had a strange year, and as the spring semester drew to a close I could feel I needed some time to think things through in a new way. I was generously granted a leave of absence from my duties at the Library, and I cleared my calendar so that I had three hours a day to work on the book and the rest of the time to think and read and play and putter around. For a number of personal reasons, I have had to make some lifestyle changes (I turned fifty this year) and, since May, I’ve been running regularly, walking a lot, and taking care to derive pleasure from everyday things like cooking and listening to music. Like the book, it’s a work in progress, but I think I now know what Hemingway meant when he said, “I always live a hell of a healthy life for the first five hours of every day.”

I have written before about the idea that fell into place for me while doing the Craft of Research talks this spring. When I talk to students and scholars about their writing, I always get them to imagine an iceberg (Hemingway’s famous iceberg), with their paper above the surface of the water and their study below. The paper has a number of sections: introduction, background, theory, method, analysis, discussion, conclusion. The study has various components: documents, literature, experience, data, and a great deal of thought. I slowly began to notice the centrality of experience as the basis of our methods. Our papers are connected to our studies most intensely in our methodologies — our account of what we did to collect our data and why we did it. Writing our methods section is the closest we come to simply telling a story based on personal experience. It’s the most “literary” part of our paper, if you will. We just have to be honest, we just have to be ourselves.

This is a rather stern lesson, I know. It has become increasingly clear to me that academic writers (perhaps especially students, but certainly not only them) struggle with their papers largely because they don’t quite know what they’re talking about, who they’re talking to, or even, sometimes, who they think they are. They are using their writing to find out what they mean, to discover what they have learned from their studies. And I know that a lot of writing advice encourages this way of thinking. My book proposes a different strategy and, I must say, I’m not at all sure how it will go over when I finally find the courage to publish it. I believe you will become a better writer if you resolve to write down what you know for the purpose of exposing those ideas to criticism. So you have to begin with claims you understand and think are true. You have to write from the center of your strength, wherever it is.

Like I say, I’ve been struggling all summer with this idea, trying to find a fitting tone of voice in which to present it. I like to think I’m a pleasant and affable fellow, but there’s something hard and terse in my instructions for writers. I want to encourage writers to experiment, but I don’t want to nurture their illusions. So I imagine that my book, like my coaching, won’t be for everyone, and that’s because I don’t actually think writing is for everyone. By extension, I don’t think scholarship is for everyone either. We want to encourage our students to succeed in our classes, of course; but we must let them discover that they may not be suited for academic life. We can spare them a lot of trouble if they discover this before they enroll in graduate school. As we now return to the daily routine of teaching and learning, this is something I’ve been thinking about.

For me, it’s been a long, slow summer, with plenty of time to reflect. I have a really privileged position in the academy. Most importantly, I have the privilege to work with ambitious and intelligent people who want something out this life and want to make a contribution to their world. To this end, some have chosen (or will soon choose) to devote themselves scholarship as a career, and I wish them well in that, of course. Others will choose to go into one or another profession, or start a business, seek elected office, or pursue an art. If I have anything to do with them, it’ll probably be because they need to write something and want to learn how to do that better.

The core of my contribution will continue to be something like this:

Write what you think. Write in order to expose the ideas you actually have to the criticism of your peers. If you’re a student, always write for your fellow students — the most serious and interesting among them. If you’re a scholar, write for those one or two dozen people whose names you know and whose methods you respect. In short, write with a reader in mind who is qualified to tell you that you are wrong. Get used to that posture. It is what distinctly “academic” writing is all about. If you don’t like it, there is no shame in that. It’s not for everyone. To be frank, we probably don’t actually need more academics. But while you are here, at university, try as hard as you can to become good at it. Even outside the academy, we need people who understand what it means to be critical.

Like I say, I’m a little doubtful about the tone of this thing. I know that by writing I, too, am merely exposing my ideas to criticism. I look forward to hearing what you think. The summer is over. It’s time to go back to school. Time to discover what I’m wrong about. To learn.

“The world is the totality of facts,” said Wittgenstein, “not things.” His early philosophy is no longer as fashionable as it once was, and he himself rejected it later in his life, but I’ve never really been able to shake the hold it got on me when I first read it. “We make ourselves pictures of the facts,” he also said, and I’ve made a great deal of that through the years.

“To think is to draw logical pictures of facts,” I tweeted yesterday, for example. “Philosophy is the art of their arrangement.” That was almost a plagiary of Wittgenstein, who said that propositions are logical pictures of facts, that such pictures are thoughts, and that philosophy could confine itself entirely to the perspicuous arrangement of scientific propositions. The austere “modernism” of that project has always appealled to me.

It is my view that scholars are stewards of fact, intellectual housekeepers. They maintain the machinery we need to cultivate a “propositional attitude” — a posture of belief, if you will, in “facts of the matter”. Ezra Pound said that good writers keep the language efficient as a means of communication and I would argue that good academic writers do this mainly in regard to our ability to make factual claims and challenge them.

As Bertrand Russell put it in his introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, “The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts.” Wittgenstein himself would later recant on this point, granting that language has a lot of other business to conduct on our behalf, but I would suggest that academics can reasonably take this as their “core business”, if you will, the logical form of their “value proposition”. The job of an academic is to assert and deny facts — to maintain and discard factual propositions in accordance with their truth and falsity.

Again, I understand that this is a rather “modern” value. Many academics today, working under the banner of some variety of “postmodernism” might chafe a bit at the idea their “job” is to keep “the facts” in working order. (Indeed, they might chafe at the idea of being told what their job is!) But perhaps our collective horror of the “post-truth condition”, our indignation over “fake news” and the circulation of “alternative facts”, can bring us together in a common cause?

Yes, this metaphysics of presence — this ontology of “facts” and epistemology of “truth” — is open to deconstruction. But surely there are some things that are more reasonable to believe than others? Perhaps our scholars can help us keep track of them. Reality may be a social construction, but surely a construction can be more or less well made?

Most of the important facts cannot be known to us by direct observation. Indeed, we are consigned to believe many of them simply because we have been told that they are the case. Others we must infer on the basis of our data, and we must be open to challenge from peers with data of their own. So long as we clearly distinguish between our claims and our basis for making them, we are opening ourselves to the criticism of people who are qualified to tell us that we are wrong. In this environment, claims may be evaluated on a running basis, even if some of them are likely to be wrong. We’re not going to get all the facts right, but we’re also not going to leave the truth entirely to chance.

We can’t all be responsible for everything. My own “modernism” is predicated on a division of labor, which is itself a perfectly modern notion. Not only can a scholar not know all the facts, there are other responsibilities. Consider the politician who we hold responsible for “the acts”. Or consider the philosopher! Socrates famously claimed only to know that he didn’t know. His responsibilities lay elsewhere, and modern philosophy traced them squarely to a stewardship of our concepts, our categories of thought, our capacity for reason. Or consider the modern poet, whose job it is to refine our emotions, to keep the language of passion in working order, to keep upright our posture of desire.

Everyone has a job to do. Sometimes our fields overlap a little and that is fine, but we all have something to be good at, something to be proud of, and scholars, like I say, do well to understand themselves as stewards of factual discourse. They maintain the parts of language that we need to assert and deny statements about what is and is not the case. I think this is an important job.

Thinking about the (fading?) hopes and habits of my craft, a thought occurred to me and I pulled my long-suffering copy of Steve Fuller’s Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge off the shelf. As usual, it fell apart in my hands. I reassembled it and found that that the sentence I had remembered had been helpfully underlined by my younger self, probably twenty-five years ago. I don’t approve of that practice any longer (especially not using a pen!) but it was interesting to see how long these ideas have been with me.

“Scientists may prefer to concentrate the expression of their their knowledge claims in dense jargon rather than diffuse it through a cognitively permeable ensemble of words, pictures, artifacts, and ambience,” Steve tells us. “But that is a guild privilege that we can ill afford scientists to enjoy” (1993, p. xix). It was that last sentence I was looking for. I wanted to connect it to what turned out to be another underlined sentence in that book, which I have talked about before on this blog: “Truth and falsehood are properties of sentences in a language that has been designed to represent reality; prior to the construction of such a language, there is neither truth nor falsehood” (p. 189). Representation is difficult, and the difficulty, Steve tells us, is rhetorical. We have to “beat the logical positivists at their own game by envisaging what it would be like to implement their account of language.”

When I was 25, that’s what I thought I’d be doing when I grew up. And, in a way, that is exactly what happened. I am implementing language.

Scientists, researchers, scholars, academics … whatever we choose to call them … are using language to represent reality. Now, you might argue that everyone does this. “The essential business of language,” as Bertrand Russell put it, “is to assert and deny facts.” But a moment’s reflection should remind us that not everyone is trying so very hard to do this very well. Ordinarily, we don’t care very deeply about the facts. “In everyday life,” Steve reminds us, “an utterance is presumed to move its audience unless explicitly challenged.” We don’t usually use language to present our understanding of the facts with the intention of letting them correct us if we’re wrong. Ordinarily, we’re telling people how we feel about them and how we think they should feel about us. We’re telling them what to do, not what we’ve got on our minds. Represent reality? We pay people to do that! Scientists, researchers, scholars, academics …

“Ordinary language,” says Steve, “is ill suited to any of the usual philosophical conceptions of epistemic progress” (p. 187). But academic writers are no ordinary language users! We expect them to make progress in the usual, philosophical way, don’t we? We expect them to discover the truth and represent it. We want there to be people who know what the facts are and who can explain them. But must they be able to explain them to us? If ordinary language is “ill suited” to representation, why can we “ill afford” to let scientists use their jargons among themselves? Why must they paint us pictures too?

For Steve, it’s all about what in fact happens when a scientific claim is challenged. Scientists “will often justify it,” he says, “by invoking standards that, indeed would test the validity of the utterance if construed representationally, but which, under normal circumstances simply serve to terminate the discussion” (p. 189). Scientist who are challenged in public are likely to make hand-waving gestures at the complexity of the underlying data that supports their claims and, sometimes, even start browbeating skeptical objectors as “science deniers”. Sometimes they will invoke the intricate and expensive laboratory equipment that they use in their work, sometimes they will invoke the “vast peer-reviewed literature” that, effectively, insulates their own contributions from criticisms. “This institutional arrangement,” Steve reminds us, “is rather expensive to maintain,” but it is necessary if the the language is to afford us “representation” and “reference” (p. 188). All too often, unfortunately, this system of reference becomes a system of deference — a signal that continuing a critical line of questioning will simply cost too much.

“The search for truth is quite an artificial inquiry,” Steve admits, and “one that is directly tied to the regimentation of linguistic practices.” Those practices, in turn, are tied to “surveillance operations” that allow us to test the truth and falsity of utterances. But, to repeat, those operations, in part because they’re so expensive, are more often invoked than deployed, which brings about a slide from “the representational function of language” to the “rhetorical function of representation”; and here Steve makes a point that he couldn’t have understood the signifiance of back in 1993: “A common example of this representationalist rhetoric occurs whenever one scientist incorporates another’s results into her own research without feeling a need to reproduce the original study.” This was once a commonplace, but the replication crisis gives it scope!

These days, the problem isn’t that scientists are unwilling to abandon their “dense jargon” in favor of “a cognitively permeable ensemble of words, pictures, artifacts, and ambience.” In fact, the poster child of the replication crisis is still the second most watched TED talk of all time. Scientists are happy to make their work available for mass consumption as “ideas worth spreading”, long before they’ve let their peers approach them as theories worth testing. By the time somebody does apply a “verificationist semantics”, it’s often too late. Perhaps it is time to to return to a more “artisanal” sensibility? What we can’t afford is to let scientists circulate their representations only in the cognitively hospitable environment of the mass media, where their truth is more often presumed than challenged. We need to let them hold each other to their higher standards, their more expensive tastes. Like other guilds, we need them to regulate themselves.

F. débaucher is, according to Littré and Hatzfeld, derived from n. bauche, of which the precise sense and origin are according to the latter unknown; according to the former it = ‘a place of work, workshop’, so that desbaucher would mean orig. ‘to draw away from the workshop, from one’s work or duty’.

Oxford English Dictionary

I used to introduce my writing workshops by explaining the etymology of “debauchery”. Today, the word means “a vicious indulgence in sensual pleasures”, but it stems from “seduction from duty, integrity, or virtue; corruption.” The modern sense of “debauch” apparently emerged in the 17th century, i.e., at the beginning of the modern era, when we began to separate the pursuit of profit from the pursuit of pleasure. Today, of course, these pursuits are specialized, and localized in places like factories and brothels, office buildings and movie houses. We commute back and forth between drudgery and debauchery, meaningless toil and mindless fun.

The central message of this blog is that we must learn to “get back to work”, that in a “post-industrial” age that is becoming a little too comfortable with the idea of “knowledge production”, we must insist on research as a craft. A workshop is a place to take craftsmanship seriously and derive pleasure from the first-hand manipulation of materials. Quality in any art, I believe, depends on integrating (and in our age this means reintegrating) productivity and sensuality, industry and creativity. It is the opposite of the vicious indulgence in sensual pleasures — the pursuit of false pleasure, we might say. Quality is a true pleasure; it is the sensuality of work. We are not just ‘producers’, we are makers.

It is precisely in the development of a craft, after all, that it is important to see yourself as someone who makes something, not a merely particular kind of being. It is true that becoming a scholar will change you as a person, but it is your activities that will change you, not some act of will, and certainly not some state of mind.

I have found, for example, that many students, and even young faculty members, need to become much more assertive, much more confident about what they have to say. Some of them think they are following the example of the self-deprecating scholar who always reminds you how little they know, how new this topic is to them, how difficult it is even for them to understand. The students who witness this performance forget that it is an exercise in irony. The pose of the searching, uncertain scholar is grounded in an underlying confidence in their ability to speak intelligently on a range of subjects (those that define their field). Don’t think that if a famous scholar admits to being uncertain then your uncertainty, and your willingness to admit it, is a sure sign that you’ve got a future in scholarship. Look at what scholars do, not what they say they are, and ask yourself whether you can do it too.

And ask yourself whether you like it — indeed, whether you love it. Learn of the green world whether scholarship is the right place for you. “Pull down thy vanity,” as Ezra Pound put it, “what thou lovest well will not be reft from thee.” That passage seems to have inspired both Leonard Cohen and his mentor, Irving Layton.

Poets, especially those working in the tradition of the troubadours, have long insisted on the continuity of the art of poetry with the craft of love. They approached it as one integrated skill. “What thou lovest well remains,” says Pound, “the rest is dross.” Taking that as his title, Cohen meets an old acquaintance in a hotel room and blushes at the “hope and habits in the craft.” Ultimately, he finds himself happy that “we own our own skins”.

The “deliquesence”, as Pound might say, of both arts — of love and of poetry — can be traced to the deformations of capitalism, which Pound identified first as usury and later as simple avarice — or, more precisely, to the enticement to leave the workshop for more lucrative avenues of pleasure. The lust for easy profit inspires “the indefinite wobble” of language, the deterioration of craftsmanship, “the diffidence that falters.”

We must pull down our vanity. Pound finally attributed his “errors and wrecks” to the “mean[ness of his] hate”. “Love,” shouts Layton, “find me, spinning around in error. . . . Then strike, witless bitch, blind me.” Looking for love, he had “scooped up his hands with air”, perhaps unwittingly the same air from which Pound had “gathered a live tradition.” Cohen invokes “the perfect inflammatory word”. It’s the mot juste, I suppose, that we’re all looking for: some small sign that “it coheres all right/ even if my notes do not cohere,” as Pound puts it (Canto CXVI).

What I am searching for in this post is the sense of craftsmanship that keeps literary quality alive in the face of industry and entertainment, the obligations of the factory and the enticements of the dance hall, the equally empty threat of loveless work and promise of loveless pleasure. “If love be not in the house there is nothing,” said Pound. The workshop is where work is done with love still there. Ever imperfect in our inflammations, we try to keep it together, to find our composure, to pour our words into some stable vessel, to “make a gift of necessity”. But in the end it must cohere.

The rest is dross.

__________

*This post brings together (and gently reworks) two old posts of mine. One is from 2005, back in the early days of the “poetry blogosphere”. The other is from 2011 at my now-retired blog about academic writing. I’m pleased to note the constancy of my obsessions, and embarrassed about how long I’ve been promising to write a book.