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.