The big picture
I did two major fellowship applications last week, the first "major" ones for which I've done any kind of semi-serious application while in grad school. I have to say, the inertia I faced down trying to get going on them was terrible enough that at a couple of moments I contemplated literally banging my head into a wall - but, once I actually managed to get going on them, I found the process of writing up my various statements actually quite helpful and even invigorating.
I'm usually a "big picture" kind of person, always taking a step back (or "up" to a higher level of abstraction / meta considerations). My dissertation project is in some ways more concrete than many things I write, though it also has a philosophical "architecture" which I need to extrapolate and perhaps make semi-autonomous. It isn't concrete enough that a historian would see it as her or his domain, but it's concrete enough that a historian might wonder what the hell I'm doing and want me to stop. In a strange way, I think I've been resisting the big picture and resisting the ethico-political implications of my project. In that respect, it has been born out of a quasi-Gramscian stubbornness with easy commitment, a desire to analyze something about the structure of the world rigorously and let those aspects of it come out in the end. (Not that Gramsci wasn't a committed thinker, obviously, that would be a silly thing to say - and, if he was ambivalent about commitment at all, his ambivalence was much less tortured than, say, Adorno's. However, I do think there's a motion in his writing that resists boiling things down to specific political actors and projects too quickly. In the Prison Notebooks, of course this may be partly due to the fact that he was writing in a fash prison and everything he wrote would be read by the authorities first and maybe by no one else. I do think there is a broader import to Gramsci's method though, which has to do with the collapse of the particular historical project of the left he was witnessing and trying to understand. Dynamics were at play which weren't the obvious ones; to boil it down too quick to political immediacy would miss them, so his abstraction serves the purpose of trying to capture a picture of something that bears both upon political immediacy and upon contradictory or seemingly unrelated phenomena. Gramsci's argument for philosophy (or philosophizing, at least) as I understand it is that analyzing philosophical "sediments" is necessary, and utilizing a level of abstraction proper to philosophy is necessary, if we are to really grasp what is happening in our own human immediacy.
One could describe a certain type of methodology - I won't claim that this is purely Gramscian, though it may have some relation to Gramsci - as: run your fingers over the surface of phenomena; discover what sticks up and what is at stake; raise it to a level of abstraction that allows you to analyze it accurately. I think I've been following something like this method with my dissertation, and resisting my committee when they tell me, quite reasonably, that I need to have a clearer sense of my overall argument. (Another irony, since I'm incessantly telling my students they need clearer, stronger arguments, and - given my philosophical background - I think I emphasize that more than most TAs.)
Of course, a fellowship application requires a level of clarity and enthusiasm which doesn't quite fit with the form I've just described. One has to approximate a clear argument and one has to (as Chris nicely told me, again eliciting some intellectual resistance from me) pitch it, make it seem important and worthwhile. I've actually found that I've done enough research and writing about the various "parts" now that it is useful to go back and think about the argumentative whole. It is a good moment to do that, even if what I come up with now (with just a little distance and honest assessment) still feels like a bit of a boondoggle that will surely change provided I do the work I need to on this.
The other thing that I guess is positive and exciting is that I'm not tired of the project; I can *see* myself doing the work, see the argument getting more sophisticated and nuanced and adding levels of insight, and I can imagine writing a book that actually ends up being worthwhile. Of course, I'm not sure that it being worthwhile will mean that anyone actually reads it, but at least with this project, there is no imaginary group of 10 experts somewhere who will read it - this book will not be constituted by or fit comfortably within any existing "field," nor will it add in micro degrees to any existing "body of knowledge." I don't quite know why I take pride in that; I can usually take or leave all the fraught conversations about interdisciplinarity going on around me. I suppose there's just something soul-deadening to me about the notion that what I'm working on fits into some narrow category that only matters because of nerds who really, really care about that category. What I've managed to do here - which I may be proud of in the end if I can actually do it well - is to construct a philosophical genealogy of an incredibly specific relationship which is not a relationship most scholars would notice or think was anything more than a happenstance category. It still feels like an interesting and vital space, basically four years into this project, and there's something to be said for that.
I promised myself to devote today to rejunenation, but that means I need to get off the computer! Away with me, and if you see me poking around more today while there's still light in the sky, tsk tsk.
I'm usually a "big picture" kind of person, always taking a step back (or "up" to a higher level of abstraction / meta considerations). My dissertation project is in some ways more concrete than many things I write, though it also has a philosophical "architecture" which I need to extrapolate and perhaps make semi-autonomous. It isn't concrete enough that a historian would see it as her or his domain, but it's concrete enough that a historian might wonder what the hell I'm doing and want me to stop. In a strange way, I think I've been resisting the big picture and resisting the ethico-political implications of my project. In that respect, it has been born out of a quasi-Gramscian stubbornness with easy commitment, a desire to analyze something about the structure of the world rigorously and let those aspects of it come out in the end. (Not that Gramsci wasn't a committed thinker, obviously, that would be a silly thing to say - and, if he was ambivalent about commitment at all, his ambivalence was much less tortured than, say, Adorno's. However, I do think there's a motion in his writing that resists boiling things down to specific political actors and projects too quickly. In the Prison Notebooks, of course this may be partly due to the fact that he was writing in a fash prison and everything he wrote would be read by the authorities first and maybe by no one else. I do think there is a broader import to Gramsci's method though, which has to do with the collapse of the particular historical project of the left he was witnessing and trying to understand. Dynamics were at play which weren't the obvious ones; to boil it down too quick to political immediacy would miss them, so his abstraction serves the purpose of trying to capture a picture of something that bears both upon political immediacy and upon contradictory or seemingly unrelated phenomena. Gramsci's argument for philosophy (or philosophizing, at least) as I understand it is that analyzing philosophical "sediments" is necessary, and utilizing a level of abstraction proper to philosophy is necessary, if we are to really grasp what is happening in our own human immediacy.
One could describe a certain type of methodology - I won't claim that this is purely Gramscian, though it may have some relation to Gramsci - as: run your fingers over the surface of phenomena; discover what sticks up and what is at stake; raise it to a level of abstraction that allows you to analyze it accurately. I think I've been following something like this method with my dissertation, and resisting my committee when they tell me, quite reasonably, that I need to have a clearer sense of my overall argument. (Another irony, since I'm incessantly telling my students they need clearer, stronger arguments, and - given my philosophical background - I think I emphasize that more than most TAs.)
Of course, a fellowship application requires a level of clarity and enthusiasm which doesn't quite fit with the form I've just described. One has to approximate a clear argument and one has to (as Chris nicely told me, again eliciting some intellectual resistance from me) pitch it, make it seem important and worthwhile. I've actually found that I've done enough research and writing about the various "parts" now that it is useful to go back and think about the argumentative whole. It is a good moment to do that, even if what I come up with now (with just a little distance and honest assessment) still feels like a bit of a boondoggle that will surely change provided I do the work I need to on this.
The other thing that I guess is positive and exciting is that I'm not tired of the project; I can *see* myself doing the work, see the argument getting more sophisticated and nuanced and adding levels of insight, and I can imagine writing a book that actually ends up being worthwhile. Of course, I'm not sure that it being worthwhile will mean that anyone actually reads it, but at least with this project, there is no imaginary group of 10 experts somewhere who will read it - this book will not be constituted by or fit comfortably within any existing "field," nor will it add in micro degrees to any existing "body of knowledge." I don't quite know why I take pride in that; I can usually take or leave all the fraught conversations about interdisciplinarity going on around me. I suppose there's just something soul-deadening to me about the notion that what I'm working on fits into some narrow category that only matters because of nerds who really, really care about that category. What I've managed to do here - which I may be proud of in the end if I can actually do it well - is to construct a philosophical genealogy of an incredibly specific relationship which is not a relationship most scholars would notice or think was anything more than a happenstance category. It still feels like an interesting and vital space, basically four years into this project, and there's something to be said for that.
I promised myself to devote today to rejunenation, but that means I need to get off the computer! Away with me, and if you see me poking around more today while there's still light in the sky, tsk tsk.