Writing, what inspires us, and the future of print media

I've noticed that you begin each post with some remark about how scattered your thoughts are and how you're unable to say any of the things you want to say, and then reflect on how this blog is really meant as a conversation anyway and not a forum for polished thoughts. I very much sympathize, and I might add my own temptation to begin each post with an apology for how long it's taken me to write anything. But maybe we could save keystrokes by inventing a shorthand. For instance, instead of writing "my thoughts are all scattered and I haven't had time to order them, so this is all a bunch of chaotic nonsense, but I suppose this blog is supposed to me more of a conversation anyway" you could just type "§" and I would understand what you mean. Or we could even put it in degrees, so that, depending on the intensity of your feelings about your crapness, you could either write §, §§, or §§§.

This one comes very late. I'll give it a §§§.

Hopefully I'll manage to say a few things in response to you and then reflect on something I read far too long ago now in a separate post.

I'm interested that you say that this blog isn't an instance of what Plato means by writing, since it's a dialogue, and since we can quite actively defend ourselves in it. I wonder if Plato felt the same way about writing in dialogue form, that he'd somehow managed to find a literary form that doesn't have literature's weakness. I somehow doubt that. First, because "yes, Socrates"/"indeed, Socrates"/"I couldn't agree more, Socrates" hardly represents vigorous counter-argument. But also because writing is different from speech for more reasons than just that the writer isn't present to defend it. Writing also lasts, and can be read by anyone who can read at any time and place that the piece of writing is available. I can defend what I say to you in one of these posts (though even there, it's a much more distended project than a real conversation), but other people can read this blog, and you could presumably return to what I've written years later--after I'm dead, even--and continue to interrogate the text. I have much more limited control over where my words go. The text has a life that's separate from its author in that sense. I suppose that's where this notion that authors can achieve immortality comes from: their words live on long after they die. For writing to be truly like speech, it would have to be more like a sand mandala, written in an unstable medium, and deleted as soon as it's completed. It reminds me of Keats's moving epitaph: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

There's also the further set of points that Havelock among others make: that writing differs from speech not just in the ways that it can be accessed and disseminated, but also in the cognitive tools it calls for. My dad's actually done a fair amount of work on this in terms of educational development. Literate and non-literate people think differently. In particular, literate people deal far more in abstraction, are far less metaphorically fluent, and all sorts of bizarre differences (apparently non-literate people aren't taken in by optical illusions). Now, even in conversation, we think like literate people, of course, but I think it's telling that we could even consider written communication like this to be approximating a conversation.

Having re-read what you originally said about nature and nurture, I think I can be forgiven for not realizing you meant to claim that the distinction was problematic. You did say it was "logically evident" and asked rhetorically "what other option could there be" besides the two. Though you do grant from the beginning that the distinction between craft and inspiration is problematic. I'm still a bit puzzled by your approach of questioning the distinction and then insisting that we use it nonetheless. I agree that an imperfect distinction is better than no distinction at all. My concern with the craft/inspiration distinction wasn't simply that it was imperfect, but that it was potentially distorting, and that we might do better to frame the matter in a different way. Maybe I'm wrong about that--I certainly don't have some brilliant alternative paradigm--but that was what I was trying to argue.

One slightly different paradigm comes via Lewis Hyde in his book The Gift. Do you know it? He discusses cultures of gift exchange, and in particular contrasts gift economies to market economies, suggesting that creative work is much more akin to a gift economy than a market economy: there's no zero-sum interaction, the gift only has value if we share it and give it away, there's a continual cycle of giving and receiving that we cut ourselves off from if we aren't gracious in both accepting and giving gifts, it's a personal exchange rather than a business transaction, and so on. One of the questions the book struggles with is how creative work can survive in an environment where our interactions with others are so totally dominated by market exchange. (He also suggests that caring occupations like motherhood are devalued in the modern world for similar reasons: we don't recognize its value because its value isn't monetary.) He doesn't say we shouldn't try to sell our creative work at a profit, but just that we will find that the gift vanishes very quickly if we use it simply with the aim of making a profit. If we "sell out," as it were.

I think you're also right that the craft/inspiration distinction isn't really one about innate and acquired tendencies, and I agree that we're prone to wonder about the mystery of why sometimes the inspiration flows and sometimes it doesn't. I also think you're right to suggest that this mystery is just a special case of the more general problem of weakness of the will. Because it's not really just a question of why the inspiration isn't coming. It's usually--and here again, I feel the craft/inspiration distinction doesn't help us--a question of why I'm unable to do the work. Not a matter of "I have the craft, so where's the inspiration?" but more a matter of "why can't I focus?" When I suffer from writer's block, it's not a case of my being in full work mode and having the work not come. Usually when I suffer from writer's block I'm fidgety, prone to procrastination, lazy, eager to be distracted. It's not just the inspiration that's abandoned me, but the work ethic. The will is weak.

Maybe this brings us back to the Greeks. They worried a lot about weakness of the will.

Anyway, some thoughts about my worries about the devaluation of the intellect. First, I agree with you that writing can be a leisure activity, and grant that the professional writer is a relatively new phenomenon. Maybe we don't need so many professional novelists anyway (though I should add that journalism does require professionalism, which might explain why, for the moment at least, it's journalism that's suffering most from writing's going digital). My concern was a more abstract one about a culture that's used to receiving information for free, and grows to expect that. That, coupled with this culture being a consumerist culture, which tends to value things largely by their cost. This is a very different world from that of Montaigne or Margueritte de Navarre. And I don't think it's a matter of speculation but of fact that the humanities have taken a nose-dive in recent decades in terms of their general esteem in the culture and the number of jobs available to people who want to work in those fields. It's not that people care less about information--if anything, the Internet has provided us with a glut of information that we consume greedily--but that people hold that information in lower esteem.

Perhaps a corollary point is that the steady flow of information also makes us expect more quicker. I don't know how much damage that does to the patient accumulation of information required in careful research. People still care about culture as much as they always have, but we have a less patient culture in general. People still paint and go to galleries, but no one paints like the Old Masters did. People still listen to music and go to concerts, but no one makes music like Mozart or Beethoven did. We even play Mozart and Beethoven a lot faster than they were probably played back in their day. Like King Lear, I feel we need to learn patience.

Another Response Post

It's shocking how rarely I do the things I intend to - even when there really is enough time and no worldly reason not to. When you tell yourself over and over that this time you will be more disciplined and stick with your work and you always fall through - does that mean the discipline simply isn't there and no decision you make can change that? The answer would seem to be yes, but I have to live in hope that it isn't. All this to say the entries I planned to make last weekend and didn't fit in with a number of more important responsibilities I've been neglecting. There are plenty of things I hope to write here in the next few days simply because they'll naturally accompany things I"m doing otherwise (plus I would kind of like to make an extra entry as aside on Medea and maybe Aristotles poetics which I worked with a certain amount over the past week, even though those are subjects I don't really have to continue thinking about now)
I don't know what you mean when you say the dichotomy between inspiration and craft is bogus. That the dichotomy has been made and has been taken up as an important topic in various times and places, especially during the renaissance is indisputable and there is clearly plenty to be said about it. If you mean that the two things can't really be separated, that in anything worthwhile one isn't separate from the other - I agree and I think I said as much in my last post. It doesn't amount to much more than saying that behind every worthwhile product of intellectual labor is something innate and something acquired, or to be more accurate, there's part of the creative process that you do have control of and part that you don't have control of - it's as logically evident as talking about nature and nurture - clearly who we are is determined in part by biology, who we are and are programmed to be when we pop out of the womb and partly the external circumstances of our lives and who our experiences make us - what other option could there be. If by saying the distinction is bogus you mean it isn't worth talking about, either because it is so evident or because not much definite can be said about it... I don't really agree. It isn't something I would want to take as a central topic for reflection - I don't find it interesting enough for that, but sometimes stating simple things as clearly as possible can be helpful in not getting muddled when you talk about things that are less obvious - and I do think that interesting things can come out when the dichotomy is looked at more closely and breaks down into other less obvious things. Do we really have no control over inspiration? Is it entirely innate, and innate in what way? What is it that is accessed? I think it is obvious why those questions present themselves forcefully to so many people - especially artists who want to have a greater deal of control over their own inspiration - want to be able to provoke it, fuel it, make it last and increase its intensity. It IS kind of interesting to look at what makes a person a great writer/ thinker/ actor whatever, and to what extent that ties in with other aspects of a personality and the way a life is lived. For myself I think I kind of fetishize craft, because I'm lazy, and want to stop being lazy. It is a dream of being rigorous and disciplined and of having control of the things that can be learned and controlled. It's funny - growing up, I always had a thing for the figure of the scholar or the monk, cloistered away from the world and selflessly devoted to some object of study or other - the word 'archive' gives me a little thrill, though I don't actually have the patience to spend all that much time digging through archives. We are attracted by our opposites- some of us at any rate... In Yeats' little scheme of things - the opposite phase of the moon.
As to Plato and Phaedrus - after I write what I'm about to write, I'll have to go back and double check what exactly you wrote, to see that this response makes sense. When condemning sophistry, Plato writes that a sailor will speak better about sailing than a poet whose characters sail to war, that a doctor will speak better about medicine than a poet whose characters are wounded and needing mending, trying to say it is knowledge of the contents of a speech rather than the craft of making a speech that should be of preeminent concern... I'm just trying to put this together with what you said. To some extent division of labor seems to me more relevant than literacy when talking about whether or not a poem or something of the sort can be used as a repository of public knowledge. In a culture where different members of a society need to be competent in the same things, that sort of transmission seems natural enough to me - or on subjects that are of concern to everyone, such as morality, religion, politics and history. For specialized skills that sort of transmission makes no sense. Anything of sufficient length and specificity to be of use to a specialized trade would be too long and uninteresting for other members of society to want in the middle of their epic poems. Maybe cobblers had rhyming pneumonic devises that only spread among cobblers, and so forth, but would those have been heard or known by the general public. I recognize that we are talking about the fact that Plato would be living at the time when this system would have clearly outlived its usefulness and been dying off - and it is impossible to ignore how often he has Socrates quoting poets to aid him in serious discussion, and all of this argues for the idea that this was by no means unusual and that it must have been normal to consult homer on various topics - the fact that doing so no longer made much sense for most practical subjects is part of what the argument seems to me to be... and this would mean that in attacking poets as authorities, in a sense Plato's Socrates would be taking the side or reading and writing AGAINST oral transmission. Rhyme and repetition are the opposite of dialogue. Words must be fixed in their places for a rhyme to work, for meter to persist. Nothing an be changed. Authority would be harder to shake and challenged when everyone knows something by heart. Perhaps you are right in saying that a written text cannot stand up and defend itself - but it can be analyzed and altered, and opens itself up to closer scrutiny than the long-winded speeches that Plato wants to pin on Gorgias and his ilk. The question and answer practiced by Socrates seems to invite the slow examination of each line of something, which I can more easily associate with writing, than acting on general impression, on the sort of emotional signals that can be given in the performance of a speech regardless of it's contents (if you read out the dictionary as though it were an impassioned speech, people would recognize what you were doing with out having to be told - showing just how much of public speaking relies on something other than analytical thought). Can a mathematical proof stand up and defend itself? Some would say it carries its own defense around with it. These are just my first thoughts reading what you wrote...

Plato and literacy

So the only other post I think I'll find time for this evening has to do with Plato, a dear friend of yours. For a reading group, I read the Phaedrus last week, and intended to read Derrida's essay on the Phaedrus as well but then ran out of time. What I read of it made it seem to me more accessible than anything else of Derrida's I've read. I think I'll give it another go in the spring when I try to write a thesis chapter on Derrida.

So instead of having lots of deep thoughts about speech and writing from my new reading of Derrida, I wound up being reminded of other thoughts I'd come across a few years ago, in Eric A. Havelock's Preface to Plato. Do you know it? Essentially, it's a book-length argument to the effect that Plato's banishment of the poets from his Republic is the response of a literate culture trying to move beyond the confines of orality. Let me explain.

Literacy only became widespread in the Greek world toward the end of the 5th century (says Havelock--I certainly don't have the historical knowledge to question this claim), so that, even though there were written texts long before then, they played only a marginal role in what was still a predominantly oral culture. An oral culture can only preserve of itself what its members can memorize. As a result, memorization was a crucial skill in the transmission of culture (Havelock argues that the muses are better understood as spirits of memorization than of inspiration), and what was to be transmitted needed to be easily memorized. Two tricks that make for easy memorization are rhythm and emotional salience. Thus, a great deal of culture is preserved orally in the form of epic poems. Havelock calls the Homeric epics an "encyclopedia" of Greek knowledge, remarking on how Homer slips in tips about how to steer a ship, how to govern a state, how to ride a horse, and everything in between, all in the form of an engaging narrative told rhythmically, so that people would remember it easily. He also notes that it's easiest to memorize something when you don't distance yourself from it but engage with it emotionally. The mimesis of the poets that Plato disparages is their way of fully becoming the narrative that they recount in order not to forget it.

Along with widespread literacy comes a number of changes in the very nature of thought. No longer relying on emotional identification in order to memorize texts, people can step back from them and think about them, analyze them. Socrates' dialectic consists heavily of him asking his interlocutors to think about what they've just said, interrupting the flow that would be necessary for the repetition of familiar truisms. A number of other consequences follow from literacy's freeing of the mind from the act of memorization. One is that it makes possible a great deal more abstract and systematic thinking. Another is that it separates the subject from the things it thinks about, creating a notion of a self distinct from the world that it perceives.

In essence, Havelock argues, Plato's major cultural contribution is that he was the first to come squarely to grips with the fact that literacy had ushered in a new way of thinking, and that, for it to flourish, it would have to vanquish the old way. Read from our modern perspective, Plato's banishment of the poets can seem bizarre, but in the context of 4th century Athens, Havelock claims, we should see it as an attempt to establish philosophy and rational thought as the only game in town.

I don't have enough background in classical scholarship to find Havelock's argument unconvincing. For my own part, I find it fascinating. Though it does raise a couple of questions about the relationship between orality and literacy in Plato. In the context of the Phaedrus, the obvious one is how we explain the valuation of speech over writing. My best guess is that Plato's interested in establishing individual rational reflection as superior to a mythical group-think based on passing on established truths, and he thinks that kind of rational engagement requires active interlocutors. His criticism of writing is that it can't speak up for itself and defend itself: it can't engage in the dialectic necessary for rational thought. For this point to stand, it's important to note that the importance of literacy for Plato isn't based on the material importance of written texts, but rather the kind of thinking that written texts make available to us. That kind of thinking can be exhibited in oral discussion, as long as that discussion takes place between literate men.

I believe there's also some stuff in Havelock's work that I've not read about Plato's concern regarding the undifferentiated diffusion of writing and its attendant dangers, so maybe I shouldn't speculate what Havelock would say about the writing/speech thing in Phaedrus since I've not read what Havelock has said on the topic.

This, though, raised another question for me: what if Socrates never wrote anything because he himself was illiterate? Unlike Plato, he didn't come from aristocratic stock, so it seems entirely plausible that he couldn't read or write. And speaking of literacy, I wonder if calling the legendary poet Homer blind was a way of signifying his illiteracy? A blind man can't read or write, after all.

Protagoras

Protagoras

I had insomnia last night, and today I was a zombie… I read about two thirds of the Protagoras and nothing else, but I wanted to write a little all the same. You asked who Proust was writing for if not for others… there’s a Derrida text I want to revisit and use to address that question – on the nature of writing as something always addressed to posterity – something on fixity of form and an awareness of death – words coming from beyond the grave even when the writer is alive. Proust never really addressed the subject one way or another… his contentions were about how real thought functioned, and he found it incompatible with society. When you say he had no right to speak for everyone, you have to understand he wasn’t describing a personality. For him when writing, reading or thinking the outside world vanishes. The sort of interiority required for creation abolishes time and does not allow attention to be divided and turned towards people or objects. There are of course contradictions – objects of contemplation come from the outside, experience must precede thought, and I never claimed to believe or support Proust on the relative value of conversing, but his ideas are less problaematic than you make them out to be. There are lots of things I’d like to get around to talking about from the comments you made, but my eyes are heavy and my memory is foggy, so I’ll talk about Plato and be done with it.

I have said that in Platonic dialogues Socrates generally does not have a genuine back and forth with his interlocutor… h steers the conversation ably and seems to know exactly where he is heading – he gives the person he is talking to opportunities to take back things they have said, to start again and to elaborate. It does often seem that because he knows where he is going, and because he is so practiced on the subjects that interest him, a certain amount of improvisation is not difficult. The dialogues in which the second person largely just punctuates Socrates’ argument with ‘yes’ and ‘no’ are the clearest cases in which it doesn’t matter at all who Socrates is speaking to. In the Gorgias you get the sense that Socrates’ insistence that the other person keep their responses short is justified – he is obliged to guard against long-winded speeches that change the subject, give very little solid content and in no way really address the questions initially asked. In Protagorus you get the sense that insistence on short responses can be a bar to nuance – the first demand that answers be kept short comes after a straightforward claim on the part of Protagoras that good is relational – that the same thing can be good or bad depending on circumstance – Protagoras is bothered both by Socrates readiness to conflate what seem to him essentially different concepts and makes no serious attempt to seek out what distinctions could theoretically be made between, for example, temperance, justice and wisdom, or what relation could exist between the three apart from absolute identity. How would it affect the language if on e word, say ‘wise’ were kept while temperate, just and good were dismissed as synonymous and therefore superfluous? Some of this goes back to the distinction between thought and conversation – ideas being developed alone and ideas being developed socially – the pace is different in the second case. There is less room for rumination and careful consideration… it would be nice to occasionally have dialogues where Socrates’ partner came back a day after the first dialogue and said, “I’ve been thinking about it, and the problem I have with the analogy you made there is…” Also think of the passage in the Gorgias where Socrates gets his conversation partner (Callicles, maybe?) to take over asking questions for a while, and almost immediately Socrates reproaches him for not asking the right sort of questions – everything always has to be done his way, according to his rules, which clearly puts everyone else at a disadvantage, and means Socrates isn’t challenged as much as he ought to be. I realize characters resurface (soon I want to look at the Phaedrus and figure out whether Phaedrus carries something he got from Socrates in the first dialogue over into the Symposium – does he in any way respond to Socrates or show he has an inkling of what to expect later in the dialogue?), I also realize that Socrates’ little circle is constantly continuing their dialogues and ideas are getting revisited and refined, but so many of the dialogues feel a bit like chess matches – self-contained contests with a clear winner. In fact, Socrates sometimes comes across a bit like a pool shark, luring an unsuspecting partner in, pleading his ignorance and innocence, making sure that they commit to the conversation before he shows his absolutely mastery in the exchange.

Symposium

It kind of goes against the whole point of this blog to think about what to put into it. This should be impromptu notes on whatever comes to hand - nonetheless, I've been planning to start this thing for a while, and I had various ideas about what would be discussed in the first post - lately I had been assuming it would be Nietzsche, probably 'the WIll to Power' - maybe a religious book, a book on religion, Tacitus, Suetonius, or some sort of pulp fiction. It just so happens that at the moment I'm obliged to read a book of essays on Plato's 'Symposium', which couldn't be more fitting. Ideally this blog should be the next best thing to the sort of drinking parties we can no longer have, now that all the authors here live in different countries. I rarely get much out of academic conferences. I generally find it much more productive to sit at home and read for myself than to sit and listen to lectures, maybe because I'm a bad listener, maybe because I'm slow and like to be able to linger over a sentence for a while until I'm sure I understand it (not that I don't occasionally breeze through a text without understanding much of anything)... but I also think that few people speak as well as they write, that conversations don't bring much in overloud groups and with monologues as opposed to dialogues, there's no real advantage to having a speaker physically present. In the university I rarely, is ever, find myself in a situation as intellectually stimulating and fruitful as sitting in a wine bar in Berlin 'til all hours with a few people I like and respect, whose reading habits and interests overlap with while differing considerably from mine.
Proust felt that friends and the institution of friendship were thoroughly worthless for intellectual development - you never think as intensively as when you are alone with book, pen and paper, or even just thoughts. A superficial self comes forward whenever you talk to others - you are always aware of the impression you are making, you always tailor your thoughts and words to the situation. You can never be as honest with others as you are with yourself, and in order to keep a conversation going you must formulate thoughts quickly - move from one thing to the next rather than ruminating over ideas, slowly crafting ideas. A private self is a completely different person from a public self - the former comes out on a page while the latter is the only one present in conversation, even with the closest of friends. Of course Proust had plenty of friends and no doubt vastly underestimated how much he learned from them - and not just in the ways he imagined. His narrator extracts many of his rules of existence discovering the inconstancy of others, the images that come out as one illusion after another about the people he knows is shattered. He also learns watching himself - seeing his own inconstancy, seeing the illusions and dreams he builds up around friends as well as lovers, the desire to connect on an impossible level - to know and possess other people, and he discovers it isn't possible. What he doesn't write about is being surprised and contradicted - being forced to add to or amend his own thoughts - coming across stray subjects and insights that he never would have come to on his own, having facile assumptions shown up and destroyed, consciously and intentionally by an intelligent friend... being given a useful book, or having an alien topic brought to life and made interesting. We are all lazy when we think in a vacuum - and while you, hopefully, bump against things that challenge you and change the direction of your thoughts in the books you read, sometimes you won't happen across the book you ought to be reading if no one is there to suggest it to you. Proust is, oddly enough, a platonist who has no faith in dialogue and nothing but contempt for philosophers (he believes that philosophers believe in their own philosophic good will, their disinterested love of truth, while he believes that a search for truth is always interested, that it is always driven by desire and meant to serve a purpose - an idea he probably took from Nietzsche, but which has its place in the Symposium as well - at least in my reading of the Symposium). Oddly enough, Plato isn't really all that great on dialogue either... apart from Diotima, what dialogue partner ever taught Socrates anything? When is Socrates ever not in control of a conversation - when is he genuinely surprised, thrown off or forced to change his ideas? Socrates can have no true friends because he has no equals... in a way he supports Proust's ideas in arguing against generic representatives of various schools of thought - each time dealing with a set of ideas he must have encountered in the past and ruminated on before each dialogue begins - granted it would probably be an unreadable and interminable dialogue if Plato had tried to present the whole long process of reading and thinking, giving the skepticism and enthusiasm that should go along with coming to fully understand a complex set of ideas, slowly adopting and adapting the best parts of them.

But I've very much lost my way, and started talking wishy-washy nonsense. I got too general in talking about Plato and Socrates, which, I must admit, I haven't yet really read enough to do (plus I disagree with a fair amount of what I just said. I didn't want to write an encomium of Friendship amongst intellectuals - nor do I wish to suggest that the only purpose of friends is to advance you in your thinking. This is first entry is all still just on the use of drinking parties - and the need for virtual drinking parties, where, not being able to all be physically preset, we have to settle for speaking in turns, barely less constrained than the characters in Plato's symposium.
At the rate I'm going, it would take me a lifetime to deliver any proper discussion of the Symposium - not having mentioned a single character, scene, or idea from the book yet - and I imagine I will write on it off and on for quite a while. I feel I've made a bad start and would have almost done better to do nothing more than record a couple of nice lines or statements from a book I was reading or write down an interesting factoid - for instance:
in two different sixteenth century books I read that polar bears are born little balls and the mothers form the babies by licking them into shape - fashioning arms and legs and heads, etc. I wonder how that idea arose and when it disappeared.
two sentence entries are fine. As are five page responses to two sentence entries. I hope this blog will be as varied as possible and often amended.