Writing Excess

The curse of minimalism and the free market is that so very often students deliver their homework just in time with only the most basic answers. They often write just what an assignment requires, rather than going beyond the bare bones expectations to show what additional knowledge they have. There are many reasons for this minimalist habit. and yes, of course, we can’t forget sloth and laziness. There are a great number of tasks I finish too late and just barely, but there is also a general pervasive cultural sense nowadays that when it comes to intellectual questions—too much is something to avoid. Write clearly about one idea—a simplicity that makes simple. My professor in grad school, Sander Gilman, would often point out that if you set a minimum, it quickly becomes the maximum. If you lay out a basic administrative standard, most people will perform only up to that requirement, rather than exceeding it.

When writing, why give just one explanation, when you can come up with eight?

There is a point where the drive for efficiency turns into laziness, where having completed only what is required, does not result in more high quality work in other subjects, but instead just a great empty lull.

In a different cultural moment, in a different historical period, we would strive to overwhelm a question with answers. We would layer one possible explanation on top of another, give theories that blend into each other, cite book after book rather than just the one canonical work that everyone has read. The love of the esoteric, the curiosity to explore trivial and unknown subjects has been wiped out by the demand that intellectuals produce efficiently and often.

Michel Foucault once called his relentless research into the buried manuscripts, documents, Berichte and diaries of sexuality and madness a “feverish laziness.”—an ironic phrase for such a prolific scholar. His style of baroque distraction requires loads of free research time, patience, a personal secretary (he had one), extra years where no major books appear, and a general sense that the minimal answer is unsatisfactory. It also includes an academic will to power to smother a research question, to upend the familiar by shoving forgotten and irrelevant information to the fore. It means giving far more information than anyone ever expected.

So this is the paradox: ordinary students can give back the answer on the test that comes from the textbook, extra ordinary students write much more, but to do so they have to get lost in other books--i.e. waste time doing more than the class requires. Similarly, regular academics can crank out articles for the c.v., but let's have more lunatics who waste their time reading irrelevant tomes.

Lost Theory

What a joy to find a long overlooked theory article! I know everyone writes that theory is over, but every now and then that old rush returns when I pick up an unfamiliar masterpiece written decades ago.

I had spent years reading Foucault and after relying on him to structure my dissertation turned into first book, I thought a break was in order. That first book was so thoroughly defined by my allegiance to Foucault. "The hand of the master is little too obvious," one of my writing group buddies said back then. Ok so I over compensated, avoided Foucault just as I had avoided Adorno and Benjamin after graduate school.

And then that little essay, really just a bunch of lecture notes, "Of Other Spaces," brought back all the old happiness. After nine years sitting in the wilderness, what a pleasure to read that old style intense language where every paragraph spawns a book. No more rambling current events blogs, no more unconnected contextualisations—no a short burst of closely packed ideas, strung together as assertions, almost commandments to reflect upon and critique.

Sure, I knew the essay was out there, sure lots of people give a passing footnote to his heterotopias. But those footnotes were always so pro forma, so empty of specifics, just a nod in the direction of Paris that I never felt drawn to the essay, until yesterday in the mad panic to construct a syllabus.

Boom, now I am loaded with a whole new terminology, all my geographical/spatial mutterings have a kick, that once upon a time surge of walking around the neighborhood packing, even its just my own basement study.

To read a fine essay, even as lecture notes published posthumously, brings to mind how dull things have become since the theory heads sailed away across the ocean of eternity.

BioTheory

For the last few years some of the remaining luminaries of the theory era have taken a new approach. They talk about themselves. Their lectures are accessible, filled with reminiscences about their early career.

The grandiosity, the tendency for jargon to generalize remains in the habit of these speakers to equate their own careers with “the discipline.” When Gayatri Spivak or Fred Jameson chat, they define Comparative Literature through the arc of their own professional life.

Theory has become personal in a new way, it has become identified even more intensely with the names of its protagonists, yet this latest phase of biographical theory talk, the reminiscences of what it was like back in the day, gives the strongest sense that theory ain’t what once was, maybe it just ain’t.

In the last works of Derrida and Foucault, one might feel that they are looking back, but that impression could just as easily be our projection. Do the last volumes of History of Sexuality really express Foucault’s own self-understanding? Does a work such as Who’s afraid of Philosophy? recount Derrida’s place in France’s academy?

Still there is a fundamental difference between these works and the current round of old school stories. Most members of the theory fan club, waited eagerly for personal statements from their old masters. Who did not expect Derrida to confess, American-style, what his personal feelings about the Paul de Man revelations were? It took a while for people to understand that Foucault was never going to wear the t-shirt of sexual identity.

The old guard mediated their personality through their theory. They did not break down on camera or in front of three hundred acolytes. Derrida is cagey as ever in the documentaries about him. And while this reticence to speak publicly about their personal, to say nothing of their sexual, lives may seem quaintly old fashioned, old-European, it also shows a commitment to intellectual complexity, that their writing was not just a hat worn outside the house, but a constant habit trained into their every phrase--giving us the impression that the current autobiographical inclination in theory lectures is something of a slackening.