Object-Oriented Philosophy

A student at Cambridge just wrote to ask that I explain again how I do outlines, which I have often said here are very important in making writing easier. OK, here are a few suggestions about outlines.

*The first outline should only contain 2 or 3 points, no more. That’s to make sure that you have a good overview of your topic before you start getting into detail. Once you have the 2 or 3 basic points written down, you can start filling in each heading with sub-points, shuffling the order of things, truncating the argument, and so forth. But once you have the outline done, you have avoided the two greatest enemies of all writing– zero and infinity. You will have erased the anxiety of the zero of the blank page. And you will have erased the implicit arrogance of thinking that you will write something infinite and all-encompassing. Instead, a finite (but possibly very important) piece of work begins to take shape on your screen.

*What should the 2 or 3 basic points in the outline be? That depends on the situation. But here’s one technique I use a lot lately. Quite often, I am writing in response to an invitation, which means to a topic that is being imposed upon me. In such cases, the topic imposed on me forms the first half of the outline, and any other topic that interests me most at the present moment forms the second half. Building a bridge between the two becomes the main challenge in trying to think through the paper. Once the outline is done, you have to smooth it out more and more so that the two themes come together nicely.

Why do it this way? Because if you’re simply writing on a topic someone gave you, the needed personal passion may be missing. But if you combine such an ad hoc external task with something you’ve really been puzzled or intrigued by lately, inevitably you can put the two together with a bit of work, and you’ll learn from that exercise.

There’s more to say about this topic, but that’s a good start.

But the basic point is always this… There is nothing noble or superior about failing to finish a piece of writing. It’s simply a failure, and that’s all. Your job is to avoid that failure. Good things start happening when you get into the habit of not failing to execute on opportunities. Towards my mid-30’s I lost all patience with noble failures. They aren’t modest enough. They think they’re too good to do work and be judged for it, and they aren’t.

I don’t get to read whatever I want, whenever I want. That’s what you get to do in your 20’s, more or less. Enjoy that freedom while you have it.

It sometimes happens that you want to contact prominent people in your field– the sort of people you might feel a bit shy about approaching. As a graduate student I did this a couple of times that I can recall, sending letters at the time to both Richard Rorty and Bruno Latour. Rorty sent a wonderfully warm and respectful response for which I will always be grateful, while the letter to Latour led to a long friendship and productive collaboration.

From these interactions, here are some things I learned about dealing with people who are more prominent and perhaps more busy at a given stage than oneself.

1. They are usually extremely nice as long as you are nice to them. Such people have too many big fish to fry to make other people feel inferior or ignorant, which is something that happens more and more frequently as you deal with other sorts of people.

2. They are extremely busy, so keep the messages to them as brief as possible, and don’t expect an extended correspondence unless you are dealing with issues of central importance to them.

3. Don’t send unsolicited manuscripts. They have hundreds of things to read already and are probably behind schedule. The only exception, of course, is if you wrote something dealing directly with them, because then of course they’ll want to know what people are writing about them.

4. Don’t tell them that they’re wrong or that you disagree. Published work is where disagreements are best hashed out. But it’s rather presumptuous just to fire off a letter to someone telling them that their theories are all wrong, especially if they’ve been working on those theories for decades and you’ve just jumped into the pool. You might not get all the complexities of the issues yet, so it’s best to be a bit cautious about disagreements at first.

Also, don’t take it personally if they never respond. They might not be good emailers, the email might have been lost, or they might have meant to respond and then neglected to do so. The Latours and the Zizeks receive hundreds of emails per week, and you can’t behave like a normal correspondent when you receive that volume of mail.

I’m really not convinced that it’s the best use of our time in most cases.

*From checking citations, I’ve found that almost no one cites my anthology chapters, including some that I think could have been extremely successful as journal articles. That doesn’t mean no one’s reading them, but if they’re being cited less than other publications, it’s a fairly worrisome indication that that might be so.

*I currently have *13* (!) finished book chapters in queue for publication, a couple of them written in 2008. And that’s by no means an unlucky story. Indeed, it’s fairly typical. Anthologies always have to move at the speed of the slowest contributor, and then they take more editorial work than solo-authored projects, due to inconsistencies in style and other such problems.

*I’ve just heard from the editor of an anthology about which I am unusually enthusiastic. The essay is due this spring, and the estimated publication date is….*drum roll*… late 2014 [sic]. And again, that is probably pretty fast by this publisher’s standards.

So, why write such pieces for anthologies when you can get them in print so much more quickly as journal articles? I can think of some cases where it still might be advisable.

*If you’re an academic and still going for tenure and promotions, it’s hard to say no to any opportunity to publish. In most cases, universities won’t hold it against you if you have a half-dozen “forthcoming” book chapters. They’ll call you very productive, and they will understand that it’s probably the publisher’s fault, not yours.

*Maybe the anthology is a Festschrift for an admired mentor. Anyone who comes to me asking for an article on Lingis or Latour will receive a “yes” in response, no matter how busy I am. I’d feel too rotten about saying “no” after all that those guys, and a few others, have done to shape my thinking with their personal influence.

*Maybe the anthology is about something with which you’re directly involved. Bogost and Bryant have an OOO anthology planned, and obviously I can’t skip that. Luckily, I write on OOO constantly and it wasn’t hard to give them something.

*Maybe you owe someone a favor. Life is like that sometimes.

*Maybe the editor charms you into it by making the project seem super-exciting or making your own contribution seem super-necessary to the success of the project.

What else? There may be a few other cases where it’s advisable to chip in on an anthology. But after looking at the citation figures and making corresponding deductions about the readership of such pieces, I am skeptical. If anyone has counter-arguments, I’d love to hear them. But when looking for ways to “work smarter” and use my time more wisely, I think anthologies may be the first place where the axe falls. I’ve already said no to a few in recent months, which would have been unthinkable previously.

Most of the nice letters I get about this blog are from graduate students who like the “advice” posts. So, I ought to remember to do more of them. Here’s one that relates to my current situation.

Looking at my short list for Paris, it seems that I have 6 pieces of writing due by January 31, totalling approximately 140 pages.

10 years ago, even 5 years ago, it would have been cause for panic. But at this stage, even in my worst imaginable mood, it would be nothing but a nuisance: “Damn it, I want to go look at Cézannes, not write all these stupid essays.” That would be my lowest possible moment right now.

How different it would be if I had to write the last 140 pages of my dissertation in one month! That would be cause for panic. I think I only wrote the last 80 pages of my dissertation in one month, and even that was near=panic.

What’s the difference? Well, you build up to the difference over time. I didn’t shift from one mode to the other in one year, and neither will you. You get there through a series of successes, and shouldn’t feel guilty if you’re not there yet.

Everyone has to find their own way to get from Point A to Point B. I found personally that it pays to be superstitious about such progress. If you have a lucky café, a lucky day of the week, a lucky shirt, a lucky dinner item that enables you to get a lot done, then follow it religiously. Obviously, it’s not a question of believing in the supernatural force of some everyday fetish. It’s just a matter of realizing that we don’t fully understand all the forces that motivate and empower us, and it pays to be pragmatic about it. In Chicago I had those two cafés facing each other on Lincoln and Belden, Trevi and Equinox, which are both now out of business I believe. For some reason I was able to get tremendous amounts done in both of those places, more than anywhere else on earth. In Equinox, back when I still didn’t know German all that well, I read 70-80 pages of Heidegger in German with no dictionary, without leaving my seat once if memory serves. After that, it felt like a breeze to read the whole Gesamtausgabe, even though it took me another 6 years from that point forward. In Trevi, having really pushed my luck on a class presentation on Leibniz, I managed to reread his half-dozen or so most important short works and weave them together into a good class presentation for that very night, all in a few hours.

How? I don’t know. But after that I simply treated those cafés as something like religious shrines for the next few years, and they never failed me when I needed to get something done.

Over time, I outgrew those fetishses. Today I could write 120 pages during a cross-country Greyhound bus trip if I really needed to do so. But it’s good to have those “transitional objects” along the way as supports. It worked for me, anyway, and something similar might work for you if you’re a procrastinating graduate student.

But regardless of the steps along the way, how do I now look at having to do 6 papers by January 31?

*Obviously, you have to arrange them from most to least urgent based on deadline.

*For some of them you already know enough to write them; for others, you need to read one or more things before you’ll be ready. That helps you arrange them further.

*What really helps, I think, is to write the opening 1-3 paragraphs for each one of them. That way, none of them are at zero. Moving from page 2 to page 10 of a paper is so much easier than moving from page 0 to page 2. That’s why it’s good to have the opening written for everything you have due soon. You can always change it later if needed, or even delete the opening later. But it’s good to have a foot in the door.

*Remember, you don’t need to finish all of those papers to feel better. Even finishing 1 or 2 will lighten your burden considerably, and each one you finish will put a bit of wind in your sails. You’ll build up momentum for the next.

*If you have just one project, such as a dissertation, it can feel like a scary monolith rising in the desert. If you don’t feel like dealing with it, you’ll waste time watching TV, web-surfing, getting drunk with friends, whatever. Even in a good mood, when the Muse makes you courageous enough to approach the monolith, you’ll have a good day or two with it and then become intimidated by it again.

That’s why you need to get away from the “lonely desert monolith” conception of projects. You should have several of them simultaneously, like an ecosystem of projects. When you’re sick of one, you can turn to one of the others.

If you get in that habit, you’ll soon find yourself doing a lot every year. Do that over the course of several decades, and you’ll have had an extremely productive career. Here, for example, I found THE C.V. OF JOHN SALLIS. Whatever you think of Sallis, the guy has gotten a lot done over the years. Quantity isn’t everything, of course, but he’s built up a sort of œuvre that he can be proud of, and that represents a contribution to the profession. It’s not a bad thing to aim for.

And you don’t even have to start that young. Many people, if not all, are to some extent screw-ups in their 20’s. (New studies show that our brains aren’t even fully developed until 25: “Only the car rental companies got that right,” joked one scientist.) You can start a bit later. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself early. When you’re young, you can read a lot and change philosophical orientation very quickly with relatively little effort. You can figure out personal relationships and how they work. You can have a bit of fun. You can toy each week with possible drastic changes in life plans, which will be a lot harder to do later on when you are boxed into all sorts of flexibility-reducing personal, professional, and financial commitments.

Haven’t done a writing advice post for awhile, and a certain percentage of readers really seem to like them, so here goes. This one is an oldie but a goodie.

I have to finish something this weekend, and am not happy with any of the first 19 pages so far. By mid-afternoon I will have 26 or 27 pages that I’m not happy with.

The point is, as long as you have 26 or 27 pages, you can make yourself happy with them after no more than a few hours’ editing work. The alternative is to become obsessed with exquisite crafting paragraph by paragraph, and the problem with this (I always used to do it in my twenties) is that it casts shadows of anxiety and gloom over your entire life, because you’re moving so slowly and can’t be sure if you will finish on time. And then you can’t help extrapolating while looking ahead to your entire future and seeing decades more of the same unproductivity.

It’s better to have a certain bulk of pages, then work on those pages. As long as everything is on paper, and in roughly the right order (your unconscious tends to put things in pretty good order by itself), things will work out.

When you have that certain number of pages, there’s another benefit. You can also print them, and take them somewhere else and mark them up with red ink. You won’t be a slave to your usual work location any longer, but will have some mobility, and with mobility comes increased mental energy and an improved mood.

Maintaining high morale is always the key on projects of this sort. If you have that, you can overcome many obstacles.

Just caught this post from over 3 years ago at the blog called The Philosophy Smoker:

“For those not in the know (probably very few of you; hello old True Believers and new fellow Smokers!) we’re named after everyone’s favorite APA event. It’s during this event that job applicants, those very few lucky enough to have secured interviews at the APA, and other intrepid souls have the distinct pleasure of being able to chat up the strangers who are deciding their futures. It’s awkward, it’s shitty, it’s like you’re thirteen all over again and trying to peel yourself off the wall to talk to that hot girl/boy at your middle school’s Winter dance.”

This made me laugh out loud, even though the reality which it describes is pretty awful. I have immense pity for anyone doing job-hunting at the APA (which I did 1.5 times: one all-out search, and another time for one interview). But for some reason I enjoy the APA itself, though it’s been almost a decade since I’ve attended. Going back to the USA in late December isn’t usually a desirable trip for me.

The really awkward part is that all the rival candidates for the same job generally show up at about the same time at the same table(s). Another metaphor is that it’s like getting your first vaccinations as a kid. It’s going to make you cry, but you have to go and do it anyway, and by the time you get older it won’t hurt anymore and you won’t even notice.

The problem, of course, is that people really do need to get to know you a little bit before they hire you, and they can’t do that just by looking at pieces of paper that you’ve produced. You don’t want someone who’s going to be an absolute troublemaker or a pain to be around for 2 years, 4 years, or forever. But I’ve generally found people to be reasonably fair in what they consider to be “a pain”; there’s often an immediate group consensus about that part, and it doesn’t even happen every year by any means. The real disagreements between existing department members tend to be about things like “what direction is this department heading?” And the usual territory wars can break out at that point, and you win some and lose some as a department member, and win some and lose some as an applicant, and with luck things generally trend in the right direction.

Anyway, just make sure you’re not a pain when you talk to these people at the APA or any other job fair. You don’t have to flatter or anything– it’s not that cynical a situation, uncomfortable though it can be. You just have to relax and be reasonably socially well-adjusted and not make any sudden lurches that scare people.