Everyone who has ever become good at something has had a healthy contempt for mediocrity. But a moment’s reflection will remind us that we are all mediocre (at best) in some ways, indeed, in most ways. We don’t actually expect everyone to pursue greatness in all things. We don’t even expect them to always do their best. Sometimes we see someone “phoning it in” and we’re sympathetic, we understand their attitude. Sometimes we, too, don’t give our full attention to a task. And in more areas of life than not, even when we’re doing our very best, we aren’t doing better than the average person.

When thinking about your writing, remember that this range of commitment and competence also applies. How well you are writing on a given day doesn’t tell us anything about how good a person you are. Whether or not you are a “writer”, let alone a “good” or “great” one, is not revealed in any particular experience. You can only know this by looking at the work you’ve done over a very long period of time. Being a writer isn’t an act. It’s a habit.

This is something that Eric Hayot writes compellingly about in his book The Elements of Academic Writing. I agree with the substance of his approach but there’s something about his attitude that sits uneasily with me. I like his practice but, as I said in my last post, I’m not sure about his theory. He suggests writing every day, which is simply great advice. I’m less sure that you should sit down every day in front of your machine and try to be “great”. I don’t think you should write with any anxiety about your mediocrity.

“Do not worry,” Hemingway says. “You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” Eric disagrees:

Writing as though you already know what you have to say hinders it as a medium for research and discovery; it blocks the possibilities — the openings — that appear at the intersection of an intention and an audience, and constitute themselves, there, as a larger, complete performance. Active writing should not involve saying things you already understand and know, but instead let you think new things. And that is why, this book will argue, you cannot know what your ideas are, mean, or do until you set theme down in sentences, whether on paper or on screen. It is also why the essay or the book you write will not be, if you are open and generous and unafraid, the essay or book you started with. (P. 1)

I think you should sit down and calmly face the fact that you’re not as good a writer as you’d like to be. This means you should always (or mostly or at least very often) be writing about things you already know, things you understand well enough that knowing isn’t going to be the main problem. Let writing be the problem you are facing. Eric, by contrast, says that confining yourself to writing what you know “hinders” and even “blocks” your process. But surely writing with the intention of being “great” can be debilitating too. Indeed, we don’t have to look further that Eric’s own process to see how this might happen:

What this means is that everything that is weak in me — everything that would have me sleep another hour, avoid working out, put off cleaning the house, or delay a necessary apology to a friend — struggles to keep me from writing, fights to have me give up and be satisfied with the sentences I already have or the essays I’ve already published. (P. 18)

Instead of normalizing our anxiety about writing I propose we embrace our mediocrity. But only long enough to make progress, of course. We want to use our writing time, not to discover whether or not we are great writers and thinkers, but simply to become better writers and better thinkers. The way to do this, I want to argue, is to remember that the whole point of academic writing is to expose the weaknesses in our thinking to our peers so that they can help us to overcome them. I’ll grant that that’s mainly a euphemism for letting them tell us we are wrong. And I will also grant, as I did in my first post on this subject, that the difference between Eric’s view of writing and mine is mainly one of emphasis, of attitude. Eric writes with what is no doubt a healthy fear of everything that is weak in him and, by the sound of it, I have the same things to fear in me. Still, I try to write from the center of my strength.

To bad practice he has prefixed the bad theory which made the practice bad; he has given us a false theory in his preface, and he has exemplified the bad effects of that false theory in his translation.

Matthew Arnold (On Translating Homer, II, §58)

Last week, I promised I’d write a bit more about Eric Hayot’s views on academic writing in continuation of my last post. Once again, I want to make clear that I admire Eric’s writing, and even many of his ideas about writing. My problem is that he seems to take a dim view of mine! While he suspects that we are at bottom in agreement about the essentials, I’m having a hard time seeing the common ground. After all, I conceive of academic writing quite explicitly as “the art of writing down what you know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people.” And here’s what Eric says on the first page of his book:

Conceiving of writing as the process whereby you put down thoughts you already have will give you a bad theory of what writing does and can do. As an idea of writing’s purpose it tends to make for mediocre writers and mediocre prose.

That’s pretty strong language, and I’m going to have to defend myself against the charge. But only by half. Obviously, I can’t grant that I have a “bad theory” of writing, but I can suggest that Eric has a bad theory of mediocre writing. He may have a perfectly good theory of “great” writing, but as he surely knows, and even partly concedes in his own case, most writers aren’t that great. Indeed, most aren’t even trying to be great. In my defense, then, I want to suggest that I have a pretty good (perhaps even great) theory of mediocre writing; more precisely, I have a theory about how mediocre writers can improve.

I think my tolerance for mediocrity is really what distinguishes my approach from Eric’s. We can see it in the way he talks about his own drama of composition:

Let’s start with fear. I am terrified — seriously terrified — of academic writing. Nothing that I do confronts me as strongly with a fear of total, consuming incompetency and inadequacy. The problem is that I’m trying to be great, and I am (quite reasonably, unfortunately) afraid that I am not great. (P. 17)

Again, let me grant that this may be a good theory of great writing. This may be how great writers feel and it may describe the mood in which they do their great writing. (There’s anecdotal evidence for and against the theory, I should say.) But, as he has learned even in his own case, it doesn’t apply to more ordinary kinds of writing.

When I write for Printculture, or when I worked as a journalist at the Associated Press, I never felt the anxiety I associate with scholarly writing. I also don’t feel it when writing e-mails, annual reports, grant applications, or grocery lists. Those kinds of writing can be boring or institutionally complicated, but they don’t involve a confrontation with the fear that I am not as good as I would like to be. (p. 18)

He presents this in a self-aware and critical tone. That is, he knows that some of his readers will suggest that he just relax a little and stop trying to be so great. Perhaps you could replace the fear you feel with the calm knowledge that you’re not as good as you’d like to be and that you will naturally improve as long as you work carefully and conscientiously at your tasks? But Eric explicitly rejects this strategy.

Unfortunately, at some level the ambition to do great work — to write something that matters not just to me but also to the community of peers I care most about, the people whose work I respect and admire most — is central to the ethos of why I write scholarship at all. I cannot imagine giving up on it, since to do so would be to settle for producing mediocre essays. As a matter of career survival, it is possible to get by on work one knows is mediocre, but, for me at least, such a thing would make it impossible to go on. I don’t have to be great, but I have to be trying for greatness. (p. 18)

There it is again: that underlying contempt for mediocrity. It is here coupled with his theory of greatness: you have to be trying to be great. I will leave it there for now and let you ponder the philosophical question of whether the surest way to become great is to intentionally pursue it as a goal. Need I say Zen in the Art of … ?

More later.

Eric Hayot, who writes lucidly about Ezra Pound and many other things, has written a book called The Elements of Academic Style (2014), which is also entirely worth reading. He pitches it explicitly to scholars and students in the humanities, but I have no doubt he’s right to think that his advice generalizes beyond that context. I’m not writing this post to praise Hayot’s book, however; you can take a look at it yourself and see what you think. I want to take issue with something he says on the very first page, something I think touches a vital nerve in writing instruction and, indeed, in practical scholarly writing. It goes to the very purpose of academic writing, the question of why we write.

“Writing is not the memorialization of ideas,” Hayot begins. “Writing distills, crafts, and pressure tests ideas — it creates ideas.” This has the important consequence, which he gets to a few sentences later, that “you cannot know what your ideas are, mean, or do until you set them down in sentences, whether on paper or on screen.” Hayot doesn’t hold back here: “Conceiving of writing as putting down thoughts you already have will give you a bad theory of what writing does and can do,” which, he argues will shape your practice. “As an idea of writing’s purpose, it tends to make for mediocre writers and mediocre prose.” If you want to rise above this mediocrity, he argues, you must be “open and generous and unafraid”, working at “the intersection of an intention and an audience” where new ideas emerge in “a larger, complete performance” of writing. It’s all very heady and inspiring stuff. And who wants to be a mediocre writer with a bad theory of his practice? Not me. Still, something about this conception of writing doesn’t feel right to me.

The view he opposes sees writing as “a necessary but tedious step in the distribution and fixation of ideas”. My view is that academic writing is the art of writing down what you (yes, already) know for the purpose of discussing it with other knowledgeable people. The goal of academic writing is not to distribute your ideas — something that is arguably better done in the classroom and at conferences — and certainly not to fixate your ideas — a hope I’ve never really heard scholars express. The current publish-or-perish regime in academia does leave many people with the impression that the purpose of academic writing is to document their ideas, i.e., to demonstrate to hiring and tenure committees that they actually have ideas, and, in that sense perhaps, to “memorialize” them, but I think we all still understand this to be a secondary function of academic writing, not its primary purpose. What I reject is the notion that we write in order to discover or create ideas. The purpose of academic writing is to expose ideas to criticism. And this requires that we write down what we already think, not that we wait to see what we think after the “larger, complete performance” of academic discourse has already begun.

Hayot suggests that this performance is constituted by “the openings that appear at the intersection of an intention and an audience”. I am also happy to specify a “here” of academic writing. When we write, we step into the clearing that has been prepared by our peers in the discourse, and there we expose ourselves to the possibility that we are wrong. I’m not sure it requires generosity of us, but it does require us to trust in the kindness of strangers, i.e., to presume that we will be read charitably. It takes courage, precisely because we may not be entirely unafraid. It certainly requires us to be open — mainly about the grounds we have for holding the beliefs we do. These, after all, are what we are presenting to our peers for critique. When we write with sincerity (as Pound noted through one of his famous mistranslations of Chinese writing) we “stand by” our ideas.

It can’t be true, I want to say, that you don’t know what you think until you write it down and that, when you do begin to write, you immediately open your thinking to a process in which it becomes something else. It must be possible for your reader to gain access to your (prior) intention through your writing so that, if you are wrong about something, the reader has an occasion to correct your thinking. I think the underlying misconception here — or at least my underlying disagreement with Hayot (for there is the possibility that I’m wrong about this, of course) — is that writing is a “performance” of our ideas rather than their representation. More seriously, Hayot seems to think that our ideas are always only whatever they mean in some “larger, complete performance”, that they have no individual dignity or integrity, that they are forever “emerging” before an audience, that they can’t be tested one at a time (as Pound, by the way, also hoped they could). I believe we can write down what we think, and that we can learn how to do this well through practice.

All this may just be a difference of emphasis. (I, too, sometimes discover what I think when I write; Hayot, no doubt often, writes something down he’s known for a while.) I agree with Hayot that academic writing is not merely the memorialization of ideas and certainly not the tedious business of distributing them. In fact, I worry that by conceiving of writing as the “creation” of ideas we merely conscript it into the tedium of “knowledge production”. We think of writing as something that is supposed to add something to culture (as if we need more of it!) rather than conserve what is of value and correct what is mistaken. Scholarship is the exposure of ideas to criticism from competent peers. At the intersection of that intention with that audience a possibility does indeed emerge — the possibility of scholarly discourse. We must remember that academia traces its origins back to a garden in ancient Athens and perhaps, then, we can give the last word to Ezra Pound himself: “We live in an age of science and abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to ‘the needs of society’, or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.”

…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.

______________

*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!