TITHONUS' DIARY!!
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running interference Yes, still alive. Not feeling very writerly of late. I'm reading a lot, trying to absorb some very big and complicated ideas and write about them for my thesis... it's tiring. - I'm feeling kind of ambivalent about the whole thing, to be honest. Reading people like Levinas and Hegel, it makes me think... in order to write this stuff, at some level these people have to be nuts. Because... ok, your conscious mind is a limited domain. In order to move up the ladder of abstraction, you need to assume... you need to "take as read" all kinds of stuff... I don't know quite how to express it. If someone is writing fiction, stories, see, then they're really still very much in touch with the material of their ordinary lives in the material of their writing. While there might be a division - especially if you're writing fantasy or sf - then typically the heart of what you're writing is human feelings, emotional responses to events, relationships... what matters in the writing is not radically different from what matters in life. There's a certain amount of artifice, of course, but you just learn to put that on... and in a way I feel as though academic writing ought to be the same, but it isn't. Because... I'm not sure, I guess because there's a kind of race up the ladder of abstraction in order to find fault with people below. See, suppose we start with Plato, who writes in very straightforward, descriptive terms about more or less ordinary problems that people face in their lives - how should we live, is it better to do wrong or to suffer wrong, what is love... I mean, when I say "ordinary" I don't mean insignificant because these are all really good, important questions. Right, but when someone else writes about Plato, they start by taking some abstraction of his writings and writing about that abstraction. So, instead of repeating his whole argument from the Symposium about love, you just say, "Plato believes that love is not good and beautiful itself, but is inclined toward the good and the beautiful; if it were good and beautiful itself, it would not incline toward the good and the beautiful because it would be self-sufficient in goodness and beauty". Now, that's not an unfair summary of what Socrates says in the Symposium. But it's a lot shorter. It's an abstraction - it leaves out a lot of details. Ok, and when you present your argument with this or your criticism of this, you do it at that same level of abstraction. You argue against the position you have described Plato as having, rather than interjecting in the text itself - so you move to a higher level of abstraction. And then someone else wants to criticise you, and they do the same thing to your argument - they summarise it, abstract the "essential points" from it - and argue with that. Two or three iterations into this process and you're no longer speaking a language that "the man in the street" can understand. And a few more iterations into this process and you've got Hegel: "Self-consciousness is primarily simple existence for self, self-identity by exclusion of every other from itself. It takes its essential nature and absolute object to be Ego; and in this immediacy, in this bare fact of its self-existence, it is individual. That which for it is other stands as unessential object, as object with the impress and character of negation. But the other is also a self-consciousness; an individual makes its appearance in antithesis to an individual. Appearing thus in their immediacy, they are for each other in the manner of ordinary objects. They are independent individual forms, modes of Consciousness that have not risen above the bare level of life (for the existent object here has been determined as life). They are, moreover, forms of consciousness which have not yet accomplished for one another the process of absolute abstraction, of uprooting all immediate existence, and of being merely the bare, negative fact of self-identical consciousness; or, in other words, have not yet revealed themselves to each other as existing purely for themselves, i.e., as self-consciousness. Each is indeed certain of its own self, but not of the other, and hence its own certainty of itself is still without truth." - Don't bother trying to understand that, by the way. It's just an example of how he writes. It's all like that, and there's a hell of a lot of it. - Blah, so the point I'm getting to is that basically being an academic of this sort involves speaking and thinking (and being) in a language that the vast majority of people don't speak and have no interest in speaking. And the other people who do speak it - other academics, I mean - are on the whole only interested in reading what other people have written in order to attack it in order to make a name for themselves as the first one to show why someone else was wrong about something. "The fighting is so vicious because the prizes are so small". And... see, I've made a big investment in doing this, in living this sort of life, and of course not all of academia is as abstract and impenetrable as that... but... well, I guess the question is, what am I doing here? Who am I going to be useful to? Because, well, embarrassing as I find it to say this, I think I have a lot to offer, you know? To the world, I mean. Not that I think I'm going to change the world or radically transform it for the better or any such egotistical fantasy, but I mean, I think I have the potential to be... you know, useful. To someone, to some people. And I just wonder if the academic context is the place for me to be... in a way, see, I think it must be, because I actually have gone over and over that bloody Hegel stuff until I am able to understand it, I have ventured into that territory of impossibly lofty abstractions and it's not... uncomfortable for me. I mean, I can live there, you know, I can live in the academic world. But it's just worrying how distant that world seems to be from everything else... well, I guess... I mean, every part of the world is distant from other parts. And fantasies of a "mainstream" or some central place, "where it's at"... like politics, for example... *shudder* those fantasies are founded in desire... Yeah, maybe I'm worried about nothing. I guess I just... don't know if I want to become so distant from normal discourse that I'm unable to live outside the academy, you know? I mean, I think I've already travelled quite a way along this road, but I'm still at the point where I feel like anything I might want to express is still explicable in terms of some normative set of "first principles", but the next few steps could see me drifting from that safe harbour into... well, into being the kind of person who can write great thick books in an endless stream of abstractions. I mean... argh... see, I get a feeling from some books that, in order to write this book you would have to be nuts. Like "The Phenomenology of Mind", which the above quote is taken from. I'm getting the same feeling from reading Levinas, too. On the other hand, there are some really great books that I don't get that feeling from... so, why would I expect myself to be one of the people who write mad books? And, see, the mad books aren't bad, ha ha, that rhymes, really, they're often the best and most interesting, although also difficult to get into... grr. My mind is running so much faster than I can write and then what I do write seems to so inadequately express what I'm thinking. - I guess I'm just greedy. I want all the prestige and respect and financial security that goes with academic life, and at the same time, I want all the advantages of being "just an ordinary bloke", too. I don't want to give up my ordinariness... what precious little I've got left. At one time in my life, I made an effort to be "weird" or somesuch because I wanted to set myself apart from all of the people around me... resentment and all that, I guess, resentment and vanity. But... now I don't think I need to pretend to be weird. I am weird. I'm also.. I mean, I'm not all that weird, not scary-weird, but definitely... eccentric. Anyway. I like being eccentric. I like being who I am, I don't mind if I seem a little strange. I guess I'm just scared, though, that somehow I'll cross some awful threshold and go from being eccentric to being scary-weird, and then it'll all be over for me, you know? - Yeah, I should just stop worrying. - Incidentally (this entry is getting way too long, but hey, it's the first one in a week, I guess I've been saving it all up without realising it) there was something interesting in the diary of the marvellous mephit that I wanted to respond to. About labelling... um. Actually, forget it. I'm hungry. But do read meph's diary - it's a wonderful thing. - "There's just an old sweet song Keeps Georgia on my mind" - Hoagy Carmichael |
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