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.

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.