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.

Some quickies: Phaedrus, craft vs. inspiration, free content

I've been in a play and am going away this weekend and haven't had time to do much of anything for a while. I managed to find the best part of an hour to finally write something, but I wound up spending the best part of the best part of that hour reading your last four posts. Sadly, your reward for your diligence is that I end up richer for having read some wonderful entries and you end up poorer for my not having time to respond in a way that's at all appropriate.

In particular, I haven't had a chance to even digest, let alone think about, what you said about Phaedrus. I'm not entirely sure I follow your point, but that could be because I don't entirely remember my own point, which you're responding to. Though I agree that it's a lot more subtle in the Phaedrus than simply a condemnation of writing in favour of speech. Surely you've read Derrida's essay on Phaedrus? I've only read the first twenty pages or so, but already there I can see the threads coming apart. One thing I've never been sure what to make of in Plato is how the suggestion that written texts are second rate is supposed to be read. Given that what we're doing is reading a written text. A soft case of the Liar Paradox?

One other little thing before I try to squeeze in a thought of my own. You defend some appeal to a distinction between craft and inspiration by comparing it to the distinction between nature and nurture, which you take to be almost analytic. I think that's a singularly bad analogy--at least to support your case--since most psychologists and biologists think the nature/nurture distinction is bogus these days. As Matt Ridley puts it in the title of a book on the topic, we're better off thinking of "nature via nurture": our environment shapes the way our genes express themselves. So there's no neat way even in principle of saying it's part nature or part nurture. And I think the same could be said for craft and inspiration: inspiration comes via craft. What kind of inspiration we have, how we express, that we're inspired at all, is shaped by the way in which we've prepared ourselves to channel our creativity. To look at inspiration and craft as two distinct entities confuses matters more than it clarifies them, I think, and that's the sense in which I called the dichotomy bogus.

I was supposed to leave the house five minutes ago, which doesn't leave me time to say what I wanted to say in a way that's all personal and spontaneous. Instead I'll do the crass thing and simply copy and paste from an e-mail I sent a friend on the same topic. Shortly after sending it, I found Leon Wieseltier had written something along similar lines in The New Republic:

It occurs to me that increasingly, it's become difficult to make a living as a producer of content. Already with music and movies, it's so easy to package into data that there's a lot of piracy and the industries have to make concessions in order to make piracy less appealing. Newspapers and magazines are suffering as people now expect their content to be available free online, and to survive as a journalist you have to do a lot of free-of-charge blogging and twittering in addition to the content you produce for money. Now that things like the Kindle and google books are taking off, books too are becoming increasingly susceptible to packaging as data and free viewing, and when people get used to that, they'll want to pay less for books too.

And I think the repercussions go beyond that. I'm keenly aware of how much worse the market is for academics than it used to be. I think part of it is a mentality that academics, as purveyors of content, should be doing more for less money, since in the age of easy access to reams of data, we expect to get more content at less cost.

What worries me is that it seems like knowledge and culture are being devalued, not just in terms of it being harder to make a living at them, but that people estimate their relative worth lower. Does any of this ring true to you or am I just talking nonsense? I worry a bit that increased access to information also risks making us crasser.

inspiration vs. craft

There are I think four separate posts I feel I now owe you. I'm not sure how many I'll get around to writing. I do have a spare hour at the moment, so we'll see how much I manage to churn out. First I want to say a couple short things in response to the two posts you've written since I last wrote. For the record, in case I don't get around to any or all of them, the other three things I wanted to write on were Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato; a paper my supervisor wrote, and in particular my objection to a certain way of reading philosophy's place in intellectual life; and some reflections on the declining prospects for anyone who wants to make a living off their wits.

But first, just two short things about your two posts. The first is that I think really this contrast between inspiration and craft is bogus to start with. As you rightly point out, there's a great deal of craft and discipline in the creative output of improvisers, and the same goes for Breton, Kerouac, Rilke, Nietzsche, Coleridge, or anyone else who's ever claimed to put pen to paper in a burst of spontaneity. I think it helps here to draw an analogy to sport. On one hand, virtuosity in any sport relies on--exemplifies, even--a spontaneity and a creativity that delights us by moving faster than the speed of thought. On the other hand, this virtuosity is only possible through intense and rigorous training. No one claims that everyone has a magnificent end-to-end run culminating in a magnificent slam dunk in them, waiting to get out if only they can shed their inhibitions. Why should we make an equivalent claim about writing?

I suppose the main difference is that you can revise writing and you can't revise your moments of sporting genius. But even revision, if it's going to make any improvements, has to be inspired. You have to be "in the zone" or else you're not going to see the changes that can turn your lacklustre prose into something beautiful.

The second thing I wanted to say was really more a question about evil as you discuss it with regard to Blanchot and Bataille and that lot. You talk about them identifying good with bourgeois values and evil with spontaneity of a sort. How would you characterize this characterization of evil? For instance, it's clearly not meant as a dictionary definition, or some description of how we use these terms (who would call a saint "evil"?). Is it meant to be prescriptive, telling us how we ought to use the word? That sounds a little odd too. Or is it a metaphysically tinged use, relying on the assumption that with the word "evil," we pick out a metaphysically real category, and that most people who use the term (in its traditional sense) are mistaken about the nature of that category, and their redescription of evil is meant to give a more accurate account of a cateogry that others are misdescribing? Or is it something else?

Response

I have done little reading or anything else this week… I always feel a little uncomfortable when you respond to things I’ve said involving Proust, because he’s often implicated in the various supplements, interpretations and tangents I’ve hung on to him before he got to you. I think intensity of thought and experience was more central to him than time – true intensity only came about in solitude. That said, time does interest me, as does a goal of perfection. I realize that live performance is all about moment and experience, that a live performance is not supposed to stand as a monument – it is moving rather than static, and it makes sense to say that in an experience like that is, in a sense, lived rather than examined ‘perfection’ seems like a less relevant concept. Still… (and I’ll digress before saying what I was about to say, with aside about perfection, and our blog which is conceived of as a conversation, where I write down ideas I would usually never write down in such a half-baked form, where amidst all sorts of nonsense come things that are headed in the right direction but still wrong because of the formulation, because they seeds of ideas and unprocessed observations that haven’t really been checked or analyzed. This blog is a rejection of perfection for the sake of exchange. If we each waited until we had something polished and convincing to send, we wouldn’t get nearly as much insight into each other’s thought development as I think and hope we will this way. The downside is that I do already often feel embarrassed about what I’ve written, am writing or even am about to write – I’ll have to stop talking about that though… and just come back to stuff like my comment on Plato which I feel have to be lifted out of the half-idiot state they’re now in)… I think in talking about time and improvisation, you are also party touching on the difference between craft and inspiration – which is not to say that there is no craft in live performance and in improvisation, quite the contrary, but when people praise immediacy, movement and unreflected creation in art, there usually is some lingering background thought of the divine breath entering the body, of some sacred space being tapped and our highest selves being released. I think of renaissance debates on the relative merits of ‘nature’, meaning talent, and ‘art’ or artifice, meaning work and carefully acquired skill. I think of surrealist automatic writing, and Breton being ashamed of his initial desire to correct or polish lines in ‘magnetic fields’, which sort of went against the point of the experiment, and I think of Jack Kerouac claiming that he taped countless sheets of paper together so that while writing ‘On the Road’ in a mad continuous fit he wouldn’t have to pause to change sheets in the typewriter (did he claim to have written it in a day or something like that?). This is linked in too many people’s minds far too often to things like altered states, drugs and so forth, and sometimes a belief that brilliance is all in the unconscious and can express itself without thought. Of course there is such a thing as talent, of course over-analyzing what you are writing often ruins it, makes it contrived and unnatural, and of course when you are in the middle of creating something worthwhile often, though not always, you do feel almost like you are on things, what you are working on starts taking form and you don’t feel that it is entirely of your own doing, it can seem necessary, natural – but still, I have an almost protestant devotion to the idea of craft, of work, of revision. I think this is in part because I put too much stock in romantic notions of genius when I was very young, and not believing that there was such a thing as craft in writing kept me from actively learning it when it would have come quickest and easiest – and when I didn’t have other responsibilities to distract me from it. In performance the hard work of the craft comes through repetition – drilling into yourself gestures, ideas and structures that you can always fall back on, and also cultivating a certain style and rhythm of thought. Repetition, like revision is a circling back, revisiting, and each revisiting leads to refinement towards impossible and unreachable perfection – which is a necessary thought even if its realization is an absurd thought, as undesirable as it is impossible. Though mystical inspiration would seem to be more closely linked to speed or the moment and humble craft to taking time and proceeding with care – an ideal of perfection is linked to them both and never attained by either. I’m not going to talk about perfection just yet – it will involve another equally long tangent and there is something else I planned to write about…

But now that I’ve already composed something so long, I don’t think I’m going to start writing about Sade just now as I planned to. I’ll do that tomorrow and then maybe perfection or Plato on the weekend.