A flâneur in the city of knowledge

Since the last long post I wrote I have been having some confusion about what to write next. As often happens in those situations, I do nothing until I think I have worked out what is exactly the right thing to do next. This, for the record, is not a good strategy. There is no exactly right thing to do next.

The reason I became confused was actually rather silly. I had some good feedback from the last long post I wrote, and it was something of a departure from what I have written on this blog. It was a set of preliminary thoughts about some things I am thinking about in my academic work as well as my personal life, rather than about the writing process. After I posted it, I started feeling the pressure to write something in that vein again, and then I pondered whether that really fit with the blog, and then I started having absolutely lethal thoughts about how I am an academic and should really write a more professional blog. I left myself some room to move from the beginning by describing the blog as about ‘writing and thinking I have not yet done’, but my scholarly training in proper specialization and focus started eating away at the joy I had begun to take in writing this blog.

Although it makes sense to define the scope of your blog, as social media experts are always telling us, I realized that in mulling over these questions I was letting the same thing happen to my blog as graduate school training did to my love of intellectual work. I was participating in the process of making a neoliberal homo economicus of myself, as we are relentlessly encouraged and enabled to do. (Here, by the way, is a beautifully clear and concrete way to understand what the homo economicus is in the neoliberal age by Lucy.) I started worrying about specialization and focus, but to what end? I am not trying to make money out of this and certainly don’t have the readership, in any case, to worry about whether I am fulfilling a pact with my readers who expect to read about x, but not about y. I was also worried about the consistency of the product, but again, to what end? Consistency belongs on CVs and job applications, where you are trying to demonstrate that everything you’ve done before has naturally led to this moment when you will become a Research Assistant or Senior Policy Analyst. Here, I am trying to do quite the opposite thing, which is to write without constantly being bothered by the thought that I am a ‘professional’ academic.

My primary goal in starting this blog was to find a way back to the joy I used to take in writing and thinking. Along the way, this intention has allowed me to write about a variety of things that have become important to my thinking, such as meditation, as well as things that simply sparked my intellectual curiosity, such as the posts about the mathematician Gödel or going to see Philip Glass’ opera Satyagraha. At the moment, it seems necessary to me to carry on writing from this rather broadly defined space, perhaps paradoxically because this is the only way I can imagine being able to go on being an academic specialist for the next thirty years.

There isn’t enough space to meander anymore in academic life and that is undoubtedly one source of many scholars’ melancholy about their work in the contemporary university. I think that this works in two ways. In the first place, it means that people feel the pressure to stick to their area of expertise. It is time-consuming and risky to branch out too much into reading and thinking about other things that interest you. It is time-consuming because you only have so much time to read in addition to marking, lecturing, administering and writing, so you become very careful about reading ‘outside your field’. It is risky, because if you start writing about every little thing that you find interesting (assuming you can keep up with the literature), your ‘profile’ starts to look eccentric, even unprofessional, and hiring committees and funding reviewers don’t know what you are. At least, that’s what ‘they’ say. You confine yourself, because it seems professionally dangerous to do otherwise. But on the other hand, you thereby become, as described by Benjamin Nugent in another context, a monomaniac. All this specialization and focus starts to wear you down until you can’t think anything because you keep trying to think about the same, one thing. You start to lose your ability to connect things in unexpected ways and thereby generate new insights because you aren’t exposing your mind to any contrasts or differences that could set off that flash of thought.

If we want to preserve some time to explore, to saunter, to be flâneurs in the city of knowledge, then it is up to us to resist the urge to manage ourselves at all times as if we were an enterprise. Posts I have planned for the near future include more thoughts on the lived experience of diasporic culture, a review of Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling, Deleuze’s anti-medical view of literature and the usual assorted comments on dealing with procrastination. Maybe, hopefully, I’ll run into you along the way, out on your own explorations in the city of knowledge.

 

Being a bad writer

As the month, and this blogging exercise, draws to an end, the point becomes painfully clear. I do not want to have to take responsibility for bad writing. I want to write only ‘good’ writing and I cannot tolerate the idea that I might also produce ‘bad’ writing. Nevertheless, if I didn’t believe it before, this exercise has demonstrated to me in a live way that I only get to the better writing by tolerating the imperfection of the ten earlier attempts to formulate those words.

What does it even mean to ‘tolerate’ those imperfect attempts? Or, to take the other part of the problem, why can’t I ‘tolerate’ the idea that I might not write well all the time? I am not sure who I think might be around the corner waiting to blame me for my imperfect writing, but certainly I have the idea that such criticism is close at hand and that it matters very much.

Often, when I am teaching undergraduates to work with literary theory they are quite put off by the idea of criticism. It seems mean to them and they don’t want to be unkind or disrespectful to anyone. I always have to explain that criticism doesn’t have to be about other people being wrong, but about you having a clearer or more helpful way of thinking about something. I really believe that. I couldn’t be a literature scholar if I did not believe it. But in my own process there is a fracture in my thinking, because I certainly fear my peer reviewers. In other words, I try to do something compassionately, but I don’t seem to believe that anyone else is going to show me that same kindness.

It is not clear to me how I have formed this notion. I’ve never been seriously attacked in print or at a conference. My graduate supervisors were all demanding–they kept very high standards for their own scholarship and extended me the courtesy of applying those standards to my work too (and it is an intellectual courtesy to treat your students’ work as seriously as your own)–but also, in the end, they seemed satisfied with the work I produced.

Nevertheless, rather than saying what I want to say I have become increasingly focused on not saying something that might be criticized, but criticized under very specific conditions. I don’t mind if people don’t agree with me, but I am inordinately troubled by people who don’t understand what I am saying or who willfully misunderstand me. Indeed, I have a strong fear of not being properly or precisely understood. Unfortunately, I am all too aware of my own inability to articulate my thoughts clearly, which increasingly leads me to avoid having to articulate those difficult ideas at all. It seems very risky to try to say it exactly the way I want to say it and have people dismiss it as bad writing. I don’t want to be a bad writer and I find it difficult not to be scornful about bad writing.

I don’t know what to do with this insight. I recognize that it is not a helpful way to think about things, but for the moment I can go no further.

 

Procrastination by any other name?

One of my research interests is the history of how psychology and psychoanalysis have become dominant forms of knowledge through which we understand ourselves. Though I don’t discount them as forms of knowing, I am troubled by the ways they block and divert us from thinking about how we are formed socially, philosophically and politically. To that end, I am interested in how we can talk about things that seem essentially psychological in other terms.

Procrastination is one of those human practices that is almost unintelligible outside the language of psychology. It is an individual’s maladaptive thoughts and behaviours formed in reaction to the real world they live in and it correlates with other psychological conditions, such as perfectionism and lack of self-confidence. The solutions are often behavioural, but also consist of dealing with particular emotions and thoughts. Certainly, it has taken some time for the psychological discourse to eclipse the moral one (i.e. there are people who are lazy and weak), but how else might we think about it?

I’ve already alluded to some other possible lines of thought such as how increased professionalization and institutionalization produces procrastination, or how procrastination works as a form of ineffective resistance against the system, but it is actually very difficult to think beyond the idea that it’s an individual problem best understood and treated as such. Somewhat in the style of Nikolas Rose’s Inventing Our Selves or Ian Hacking’s wonderful essay ‘Making Up People‘, I’d like to see someone explain how procrastination has become an object of study as well as something people experience and use to explain, examine and govern their own actions.

The terms on which we understand such problems obviously determines the solutions we can find for them. If we could also think of procrastination as something other than personal pathology, or bad self-government, we might stand a better chance of changing what we do.

 

A light hand on the rudder

If you ask a keen practitioner of something–running, dancing, baking–what they enjoy about the practice in question, they’ll be able to give you a sensory account of their pleasure. Indeed, when I’ve asked an enthusiastic person ‘what do you enjoy about …’ I’ve been able to enjoy the activity vicariously. But if someone were to ask me what I enjoy about writing, I’d be hard-pressed to give them an answer that doesn’t relate to the finished product (knowing someone has read and understood or enjoyed my words, seeing my name in print, knowing that my tenure file will look ‘respectable’ if I can get something published).

I realize that this is a significant part of my procrastination problem. I am oriented too much towards what will get made and not what I am doing. Of course, as any struggling procrastinator or perfectionist will tell you, getting the thing finished is an important task. But focusing on what you are going to make all the time is counter-productive.

For someone like me who, as I wrote yesterday, already confuses doing with being, it seems frankly perilous to give up my focus on the end-goal. If I don’t drive myself to achieve a particular goal, I am quite sure nothing will happen. The fact that very little happens when I maintain an iron grip on the necessity of having the goal is quite beside the point. Having the high standards reassures me that I am a good sort of person with good sorts of writing intentions.

Thomas Sterner’s The Practising Mind offers one of the most useful ways to crack this particular myth that I have read. The whole book is a practical meditation on how to remain focused on process not product, but he has this in particular to say about goals:

When you constantly focus on the goal you are aiming for, you push it away instead of pulling it toward you. In every moment of your struggle, by looking at the goal and constantly referencing your position to it, you are affirming to yourself that you haven’t reached it.

You can have goals, they aren’t useless, but Sterner urges us not to be confused about what they are for. He says they are rudders to ‘steer your practising sessions, but not an indicator of how you are doing’. You need a rudder, but it is simply something that is at your disposal to help you get where you want to go–no more, no less.

I confess that I can’t quite see my way, yet, to keeping such a light hand on the rudder. The atmosphere in which most academics work is not conducive to this kind of thinking. When you are ranked and promoted not only by how much you publish, but also in what kinds of journals and how often you are cited, it is difficult not to be focused on the goals.But I can see that focusing more and more intently on the goals isn’t getting me anywhere either, so I am prepared to try another way.

In fact, Sterner offers the perfectionist a dream come true if you will just try it his way: ‘If your goal is to pay attention to only what you are doing right now, then as long as you are doing just that, you are reaching your goal in each and every moment.’

 

There will be no writing today

Today was a good example of my failure to recognize what I actually do with my time in comparison with what I think I ought to be able to do with my time. The first Friday of every month is always an intensive meeting day at work. We have monthly departmental meetings and other program council meetings. It can easily be the case that you are in a meeting, or attending to administrative tasks related to meetings from 10 am to 4 pm. And then, in the other hours you should squeeze in anything else you might have to do like say, preparing a new lecture for the following week, marking 35 quizzes or writing reference letters. On such days it is wise not to schedule any research writing tasks and even more importantly not to sweat the fact that you won’t write on that particular day. That is the logical way to approach the time-management of your writing work.

What frustrates this reasonable and logical view is your memory of having been a graduate student. As I was discussing with one of my colleagues today–as we rushed past each in the corridor–we still seem to think that we should be working at the same rate and with the same intensity as we did as graduate students. We know that now, in addition to our research, we have committees, teaching, marking and extra-curricular academic tasks (reviewing for journals, participating in campus events, doing administrative work for a professional organization), but somewhere in our minds we still think we ought to be able to do what we used to do. In some way our writing expectations have not caught up with the reality of our current situations.

There was no writing today. What I can’t figure out is, was I nevertheless doing my job today or am I imagining a writing life for myself that I can never have again?

 

 

History of a writer Part 2

It was only in my second year of my undergraduate degree that I became an English major and started spending my time writing once again. I don’t remember any significant bouts of procrastination during the degree. Quite the contrary I remember something that I probably use as my benchmark now–I spent hours in the library looking at what other people had to say about Margaret Cavendish, John Fowles and Bharati Mukherjee and then thinking about it. I drafted papers readily and eagerly.

It was not that I consciously gave up on my fiction writing. Whenever there was the opportunity to write a non-traditional academic assignment I always took it, including another instance in which the professor was very excited about the finished product and wanted to publish it but the proposed publication came to nothing. And yet it has to be said that I was thinking more and more about academic writing because … because? I find it difficult to answer that question. I spent time around other people who were  all on the road to graduate studies, people who didn’t have ambitions to be writers but instead were planning on becoming critics. I wasn’t part of a social group that talked about writing fiction and I didn’t seek it out either.

As I continued graduate studies, I just didn’t spend any time working on anything other than my academic writing (although, I was always, I hope, attentive to style), but I never gave up thinking that one day I was going to write fiction. That seemed confirmed for me by the fact that I found it more and more difficult to find novels I wanted to read, but instead kept saying to myself ‘I really need to write a novel that does x differently’. As my twenties went by I gave up on being the hot new thing, but I didn’t give up on the idea that I really was going to be a fiction writer.

As a doctoral student, when the professionalization really started kicking in, these two threads of writing–and all the affects and histories embedded in them–started to tangle and confront each other more directly. During one of my first academic blocks, I kept thinking about the fiction I wanted to write and sometimes even started writing. A few people around me even encouraged me to pursue that, but I always returned to the academic writing believing that I couldn’t succeed as a fiction writer anymore–that I had left it too late to work on that kind of writing, that I had left it too late to become even remotely good at it. The ideas for things I wanted to write about never ceased, but the sense that it was really possible began to fade.

It occurs to me now that I was trying to switch back to fiction as my academic writing became saturated with professional obligations and expectations. Equally, it seems that I channelled my energy into academic writing at least partly because I thought I couldn’t get published as a fiction writer. I didn’t then, or now, resolve for myself what I wanted my writing to do. I don’t think the distinction between fiction and scholarly writing is necessarily that important, but I do think it is important to know what you are personally writing for. Suddenly, it seems to me that when I said before that I wanted to write I meant it almost literally–I liked to write things rather than sing, cook or build them. I didn’t stop to think what writing does and how I wanted to participate in its action.

When I say I want to write now, in this moment, there is a considerable amount of compulsion in the desire. I have to–to have an academic career, to get promoted, to do my job properly. I can’t distinguish what is mine and what is the necessity of keeping up institutional appearance in that mix. At another level there is also the remembrance of my other writing ambition–the desire to be a great fiction writer–and the compulsion to try to realize that dream so that I don’t have to live with the knowledge that I never even tried to fulfill it. The compulsion obscures any pleasure that I once derived from writing. In fact, I don’t quite know where I am going as a writer any more. All I do is keep writing in the hope that writing itself will get me somewhere else.

 

New and old tricks

This is where things start to get sticky. Yesterday I wrote that I wasn’t procrastinating, but simply engaged in other activities around the house. It was certainly true, but even as I wrote it I realized that I wasn’t sure it was okay to have other things to do. In some strange part of my brain I seem to believe that everything I am doing that isn’t writing is wasted time, however genuinely necessary it is (sleeping, eating, shovelling snow) or genuinely life-sustaining (spending time with loved ones, meditating, walking). It isn’t as though I don’t know those things are part of a full life, but a secret, subtle part of my mind is quite sure ‘reasonable’ is a sign of inadequate dedication to writing. If I am not spending all my time thinking, breathing, eating writing, then perhaps I am not really a writer at all.

I think that anxiety expresses various kinds of misunderstandings of and adaptations to the way we live now. It has always seemed interesting to me that the increasing solidity of the concept of procrastination is at least partly a sign of resistance to capitalist modes of organizing work. To be sure, it is an unskillful form of resistance, since it mostly only affects the individual concerned (what, one wonders, would social procrastination look like?), but nevertheless it is a way of resisting the perpetual call to be productive (in the most capitalist sense of the word). Reading about Darwin’s twenty-year streak of procrastination recently, a friend remarked that we conceive rather too readily of any failure to produce continuously as procrastination. Whether we are working or not, we conceive of ourselves in some sense as being perpetually capable of producing work and work product. Procrastination may be considered a sign that we resent the force of work as it assembles us in this way, but that we don’t know what else to do except not work. My procrastination has certainly increased in proportion to the degree that my work has become professionalized and institutionalized. As I have adapted to the system, I have also become work out by it and unable to understand it sufficiently to resist it.

One of the answers regularly proposed to the problem of worker burnout and dissatisfaction is to cultivate passion and enjoyment of your work, and that is where my mind also went. Not being productive enough–not organizing yourself and managing your time adequately–is one kind of problem, but in my mind I too thought that if I was really dedicated I would pleasurably be engaged in eating, breathing and sleeping writing and then I would naturally become productive. Isn’t this yet another way of tricking myself productivity?

I do hold out hope that I don’t have to trick myself into writing, but I am not yet sure how.