…it is difficult to express oneself. The act of writing something (which one expects or hopes will be published) is a social act; it becomes—even at its best—all but a lie. To communicate socially (as opposed to communicating personally or humanly) means that one must accept the sluggish fictions of society for at least nine-tenths of one’s expression in order to present deceptively the remaining tenth which may be new. Social communication is the doom of every truly felt thought.

(Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, p. 244)

When I first learned about “discourse” I approached it sort of like ideology. It consisted, I thought, of all the things people said, not because they’re true, but because they are somehow convenient to the powers that be. I thought of discourse as what Mailer above calls “social communication”. But I’ve grown more sophisticated (and more accurate) in my reading of Foucault since then.

It is much more constructive to think of discourse as that which makes it possible to say things that would otherwise be impossible to say, not because they would be suppressed, but because we would lack the epistemic resources to say them. The meaning of words is not defined merely by the system of language, after all. Most sentences can be understood only on the background of a great deal of shared knowledge, and the more specialized your utterances get, the more specialized the relevant body of knowledge must be. In communicating what we know, we depend crucially on the knowledge that our peers already possess. But in order to leverage that opportunity we have to grant them also a great many things that, we think, they merely believe. Things we know in our hearts are false.

This is not “the doom of every truly felt thought”, but it is a very real constraint. In the case of scholarship the trick is to begin and end our thinking inside the limits of discourse, i.e., without entertaining for too long thoughts that will not fly in discourse. Many “truly felt thoughts” after all are simply wrong. They arise in the privacy of our own minds and, when we speak of them to our friends or colleagues, we realize we are talking nonsense. They feel true at first, but they don’t survive scrutiny. While friendships and working relationships are personal, of course, they are also in another sense “social”. So already here we a get a sense of what social communication implies. Scholars, researchers, scientists devote a great deal of time to thinking about things on a socially shared basis. They do not, like novelists, nurture their own private fantasy or nightmare of the society in which they live. Rather, they use their minds to address problems that have already been acknowledged by others, and they undertake to solve those problems in terms that will be useful to the intellectual projects of those others.

A “discourse”, then, is a set of conditions that make it possible to make a particular kind of statement. For Kant, “reason” served a similar function albeit at a more abstract, even “transcendental”, level. Reason constituted the conditions of possibility of the experience of objects — the conditions under which we can experience things as objects of knowledge. Discourse, similarly, determines the particular difficulty of making a statement and this difficulty, fortunately, is positively correlated with the possibility of saying something very precisely. Discourse makes it worth the effort to be precise.

Some things are hard to see. Some things are hard to say. We are not born with the ability to see everything and say anything we want; rather, we acquire specific abilities in this regard through training, through schooling. Here, we overcome the difficulty of observation in part by learning a method and we overcome the difficulty of expression in part by learning a theory. The first gives us access to our objects through data, the second lets us discuss those objects with others through concepts. Foucault says that his studies of discourses “are very different from epistemological or ‘architectonic’ descriptions, which analyse the internal structure of a theory” (Archaeology, IV, 4). Nonetheless, what Foucault is describing is precisely that ordering of immediate experience that scientists themselves would likely call their theory, and thereby the logic of the practice they would call “theorizing”.

Once a theory is approached through discourse, however, we come to see that “mastery” does not just depend on our ability to understand difficult concepts. Heidegger tells us that what Aristotle called zoon logon, which is classically rendered “rational animal” in English, can just as well mean “discursive animal”. Building on this insight, Foucault presented the “historical a priori” of “discursive formations” as a re-interpretation of Kant’s a priori of “pure reason” such that the difficulty (as I’ve put it here) of experiencing objects becomes the difficulty of making a statement, rooted in particular social conditions. The presentation of research results within a theory, on this view, is not a merely “epistemological” matter. It is also a profoundly rhetorical affair; it is difficult and not always pleasant. Indeed, I suspect that many scholars, at least on some days, think of their intellectual community as an intellectually oppressive environment. But what sort of arrangement would they prefer? If you had the luxury of expressing yourself before an audience that held no prior beliefs about the subject and would be happy to believe whatever you tell them, then you would have to explain everything from the ground up every time. This might be good for your ego at first but not for long. You’ll quickly seek out a conversation with someone who is qualified to tell you that you are wrong.

Scholars working within a particular discipline, which is in turn embedded in a broader discourse on the subject, become aware of a range of resources and constraints when discussing their ideas with their peers. They come to understand the viability of certain metaphors, the requirements of sourcing (including the art of tasteful namedropping), and the sometimes idiosyncratic meanings of particular terms. Even in the most “scientific” of disciplines, they may learn that their peers will respond favorably or unfavorably to the expression of certain political views. Through trial and error, they will learn the meaning of “respectful” engagement with their peers. Hopefully, most of the “lies” of discourse are lies of polite omission. We talk about the things it is possible to say within the space of a journal article and, occasionally, a book. We don’t expect to “rock the century on its heels” (as the back cover of my copy of Mailer’s Advertisements brags). We try to make a useful contribution of what we know to what is known.

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*This is a reworking of two posts from 2014 at my retired blog, Research as a Second Language.

“Is a bit of white paper with black lines on it like a human body?”

Ludwig Wittgenstein
(Philosophical Investigations, §364)

I’m taking a break here at Inframethodology until mid-August. Before I do, let me draw your attention to Dominik Lukes’ reply to my last post, which you can find over at his blog. His metaphor hacking is always appreciated; everything is, after all, like everything else and unlike everything else in some sense. We have to keep both in mind when analogizing academic writing to a second language or to a musical instrument, to jogging or to drawing. I’ve always liked Wittgenstein’s reflection on whether calculating in the head is “like” calculating on paper. It does probably boil down to the sense which a marked up piece of paper “behaves” like a human body. In many ways, not very. In a few crucial ways, exactly.

I don’t want to make too big a deal of it, but I’m also once again taking a break from social media, which, in my case, is confined to blogging and tweeting. I’m going to see what happens to my thinking when I stop paying attention to my Twitter feed and, especially, when I stop engaging with it. Truthfully, I think I’m doing more to damage my social network than to build it by thinking out loud about what others are thinking out loud about. I should work on my book. In fact, I should probably recenter my writing instruction on principles worthy of being preserved in a book and presented in seminars, rather than being blogged and tweeted left and right. “Please don’t understand me too quickly,” André Gide used to say. I’ve been expecting this too much of others, and not enough of myself, perhaps.

This year, I’ve been particularly concerned with two major developments in higher education pedagogy: the anti-five-paragraph-essay campaign and the ungrading movement. I think these are well-intentioned but misguided efforts to deal with the consequences of the last thirty years of growth in the student population. Our main disagreement, I think, is about how university students should be treated and what they are capable of. My view is simple: students are not performing well enough at university these days, including in their writing, not because there’s something new that’s wrong with them, but simply because we’re not requiring it of them. We have to raise our standards and lower their grades. That’s really all that is needed. They’ll work a little harder, do a little better, and learn a little more. Of course, a few more of them well also drop out. But that’s good for everyone, since their talents are probably best used elsewhere. We were probably wasting their time (and money). We have to get away from the idea that academic success is the basis of all other kinds of success. It should be merely one of many ways to get ahead in this world. A university education should be a particular source of value, not a universal marker of worth.

In any case, much to think about. I’m looking forward to mulling it over at a slower pace. In what sense, after all, is the paperback in my hand like my body in the sun? Have a great summer!

Dominik Lukes offers some great suggestions in his comment to my last post. But before I steal them I want to note an interesting thing he also says (or insinuates) about what is “worth writing”:

I still find that no matter how well I think I know my subject, I discover new things by trying to write it down (at least with anything worth writing).

It’s that parenthetical remark that intrigues me. Can it really be true that the straightforward representation of a known fact is not “worth writing”? Is the value of writing always to be discovered (by way of discovering something new in the moment of writing)? I think Dominik is thinking of kinds of writing that are indeed very valuable because they present ideas that move our own thinking forward and, ideally, contribute positively to the thinking of our peers. But I also think there is value is writing that doesn’t do this, writing that is, for lack of a better word, boring.

In fact, I think it’s the primary of value of academic writing and one of the reasons that so many people (and even academics themselves) almost equate “academic” (adj.) with “boring”. The business of scholarship is not to bring new ideas into the world, indeed, the function of distinctively academic work (in contrast to, say, scientific or philosophical or literary work) is not to innovate or discover but to critique, to expose ideas to criticism. In order for this happen efficiently and regularly, academics must spend some of their time representing ideas that are not especially exciting to them along with their grounds for entertaining them. They must present their beliefs to their peers along with their justification for thinking they’re true. And they must do this honestly, which is to say, they must not invent new beliefs or new reasons for holding them in the moment of writing. They must write down, not what they’re thinking right now, but what they’ve been thinking all along. This includes what they’ve been telling their students and their stakeholders in the policy apparatus. It’s these ideas — the ones that are already circulating in the discourse (and in their heads) — that must exposed to criticism, lest their errors, if they exist, be perpetuated.

And here Dominik’s exercises are excellent. I’m paraphrasing:

1. Describe a picture (a photograph or drawing or painting).
2. Describe a picture as if it were part of a sequence of events.
3. Describe a comic strip as if telling a joke.

The good thing about these exercises is that we can refer back to the source on which the description is based. We can see if you got the source right. We can get a reader who has not seen the source to draw the pictures that your description evokes in their mind. You are representing something you can yourself imagine (indeed, you can see it) and your aim is to get the reader to imagine it too. These basic skills could then be used in a harder case that might be relevant in, say, a finance (or sociology of finance) class. Here we will move from description to explanation, but there will be need to do some describing too:

• Explain what is happening in the “Fire Sale” scene in the movie Margin Call. What instructions are the traders being given? What rewards are they being offered? Why is this happening?

To do this, they will of course have to watch the entire movie, and they’ll probably find it useful to draw on their knowledge of finance and trading. The assignment can be limited to a single paragraph or to an essay (of essentially any length); they can be given any number of weeks to complete it or it can be done in class. The point is that there’s a right answer — or several (countless) right answers. The scene can be misunderstood, or only superficially understood, or it can be understood at a very deep level. (In another classroom, after all, students might be asked to compare it to Harry’s St Crispin’s Day speech in Henry V.) The point of writing about it is not to discover something new in it (though many students will no doubt see things they wouldn’t have seen if they hadn’t written about it), nor is the point to demonstrate to the teacher that you know something about how finance and trading works. The point is to open yourself to criticism from your peers (your fellow classmates) so that they can correct you on points of fact and interpretation that you have gotten wrong.

I never tire of quoting John Henry Newman. “If its object were scientific and philosophical discovery,” he said, “I do not see why a University should have students” (1852). Only once we recognize why academics have students can we recognize why it is that they write for each other, the true value of that writing, the real problem it solves. The problem isn’t one of having more or better ideas. The problem is that our heads are full of bad ideas we haven’t yet written down. I’m happy to grant the point that Dominik will no doubt make: sometimes that is all it will take to show the error to ourselves. That is of course a kind of discovery.

As I said in my last post, if you want to see how well you write, you have to disentangle your writing competence from your knowledge competence. You do this by picking something to write about that you know well. Decide to define a concept, describe a fact, or tell a story that is familiar to you. Make this decision the day before in the form of a simple declarative sentence you know to be true. Then get up the next morning resolved to compose the best paragraph you can muster within 18 or 27 minutes. The time limit is important because you want to set yourself a goal within reasonable limits. The whole point is to appreciate your finitude and then set about expanding your domain of mastery.

Start on time. That is, start at exactly the time you said you would when you made the decision the day before. If you said 9:00 start at 9:00, not a few minutes early or late; then keep at it until 9:18 or 9:27, not whenever you feel you’re done. Produce the best paragraph of prose you’re capable of within the time limit you have set yourself.

Think of your reader, a knowledgeable peer. Ask yourself what difficulty the key sentence poses for them. Do they find it hard to believe, or to understand, or to agree with? Support, elaborate or defend accordingly. (You might want to consider the case of the elephant in the lobby, perhaps also the fourth difficulty.) Spend the first half of your session writing as many sentences as you can. Then spend the rest making them sharper, more precise. You want to end up with at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words. Three or four minutes from the end, read your paragraph out loud, fixing minor mistakes as you go. When the time is up, stop.

Make a little note of how you feel, but don’t evaluate the product. Take a three minute break and get on with your day. Put the paragraph out of your mind for at least a day. Then give yourself nine minutes to look at it carefully. Read it out load again. Mark any errors of style or grammar or reasoning. Ask yourself whether it supports, elaborates or defends your key sentence as well as you had hoped. Don’t overthink this. Confine the experience of self-criticism to those nine-minutes. When you’re done compare it the feeling you had when you finished writing. (It’s good to test the accuracy of that emotional response.) Then take a one minute break and, once again, get on with your day. Repeat this whole process — of deciding what to write at the end of the day, writing it the next day, and critiquing it a day after that — a few times. You are facing the difficulty of writing from the center of your strength. You will learn something about how to improve. But also remember to enjoy it.

When I talk to a group of students or scholars about writing, I sometimes begin by asking how many of them want to become better academic writers, or at least think they need to improve their writing in order to succeed. Most of them of course do. But how do we know how good we are? And why is it we’d like to get better? What is it exactly that we’d like to get better at? To answer these questions, I want to suggest a simple exercise that lets you, if not measure your competence as a writer, then at least experience it.

The first thing is to take your knowledge out of the the equation. You don’t want to experience mainly your tenuous grasp of the subject matter you’re writing about. You want to make sure that knowing isn’t the problem so that the difficulty of writing can come to the fore. You do this by choosing something you’re confident you know something about. If you’re a student, pick something from a course you did well in, preferably a course you also enjoyed and, since this is unfortunately not always the case, where you feel like you deserved the decent grade you got. If you’re a working scholar, pick a theory or a practice that you are well-versed in, something that lies near the center of your expertise. Remember that no one is forcing you write about these things for this purpose of conducting this test. You are free to choose what you will write about, and the main criterion is going to be your grasp of the subject.

Now, since you want to experience your mastery of academic writing, you have to consider a very particular kind of reader: a peer. Think of someone who knows about as much as you do about the subject you just decided to write about. You can make this person up, construct a composite of individuals you know, or think of a specific person. The important thing is that you imagine a reader who is an intellectual equal. If you’re a student, think of another student who did well in the same class. If you’re a scholar, think of the people who attend the same conference sessions and research seminars that you do. You and your reader will have read roughly the same things, understand the same theories, master the same methods. To put it as starkly as possible, your reader is qualified to tell you that you are wrong. Indeed, you respect your reader’s opinion enough to listen carefully when they suggest you’ve made an error. They are not qualified to tell what to think, however, nor are you in awe of them. You’ll consider their opinion and make up your own mind.

(If you want to reconsider your choice of subject after thinking about your reader, go ahead.)

It is now time to see how good you are at writing something down for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. First of all, relax. None of what you are about to learn about yourself is going to be very deep. (People sometimes say writing is at the core of our research, the heart of what we do, but that’s overstating it a little. It’s more like the skin of our body of knowledge, the surface of discourse.) You are going to experience your facility with words, your difficulty in putting them together. You’re going to do this under very controlled circumstances and with nothing at stake. After you’re done, you’re not even going draw any final conclusions. You’re going to do it a few more times before you know anything at all. And by then you won’t know whether you’re “good” or “bad” so much as how you’re going to get better. That said, I’m not promising that this will be an entirely pleasant experience. If you want to know how hard something is, you’re going to have to let it hit you.

Here’s how to do it. Take five minutes at the end of your working day and write down a single, simple declarative sentence that says something you know about the subject you’ve chosen. Make sure it’s a serious statement and that it’s just he tip of the iceberg of your knowledge. And make sure it’s something that demands that more be said in your discipline, something that is in need of support, elaboration or defense. In a word, make sure it’s something that’s worth writing a whole paragraph about. Resolve to write that paragraph tomorrow morning, but for now just focus on getting its key sentence down as precisely as you can. For five minutes, try to write what Hemingway called “the truest sentence that you know” about the subject. Then — and this is very important and not at all easy — stop thinking about it for the rest of the evening. (Being able to do that is part of being a good writer.) Put it out of your mind until tomorrow morning. In my next post I’ll tell you what to do then.