Shaky writ­ing

It’s been a minute.

I re­cently re­ceived a kind email from a reader who asked me how things are go­ing. This was a pleas­ant re­minder that oth­ers ac­tu­ally read my writ­ing, and a less pleas­ant re­minder that it has been a while since I’ve posted on this blog.

This hia­tus has­n’t been due to a lack of in­spi­ra­tion; in fact, there’s been a lot on my mind re­cently about grad school, my re­search, and what it means to “study cul­ture” em­pir­i­cally. I have wanted to write about all of these things. So what gives?

I think, since start­ing my PhD, my re­la­tion­ship to writ­ing has changed a bit. In the past, I as­signed very lit­tle stakes to the writ­ing that I put out (in fact, this was­n’t re­ally some­thing that I thought about.) But now I feel much more own­er­ship of my words and ideas and, with that own­er­ship, a greater pres­sure to only share the good ones.

Perhaps I am plac­ing too much value on this blog, but I would like to use this plat­form to dis­cuss ideas that I find mean­ing­ful. To an ex­tent, I think this does war­rant a deeper, more crit­i­cal level of en­gage­ment with what I am writ­ing.

On the other hand, when I’ve started draft­ing posts, I’ve found my­self par­a­lyzed by in­de­ci­sion or talk­ing my­self into knots. I am com­pelled to end­lessly ex­pli­cate, con­stantly con­tex­tu­al­ize; I find my­self ex­hausted, para­graphs deep, and no closer to mak­ing my point. I need to make my peace with the fact that dis­course is am­bigu­ous, messy, and in­ter­pre­tive. I can’t ex­pect to fit an en­tire dis­course into a sin­gle turn, so I need to just put my thoughts out there and start talk­ing.

I’ve re­cently be­gun read­ing The Archaeology of Knowledge. At the end of the in­tro­duc­tion, Foucault talks about writ­ing with un­cer­tainty:

What, do you imag­ine that I would take so much trou­ble and so much plea­sure in writ­ing, do you think that I would keep so per­sis­tently to my task, if I were not prepar­ing — with a rather shaky hand — a labyrinth into which I can ven­ture, in which I can move my dis­course, open­ing up un­der­ground pas­sages, forc­ing it to go far from it­self, find­ing over­hangs that re­duce and de­form its itin­er­ary, in which I can lose my­self and ap­pear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again.

And so too shall I pro­ceed, hands shaky, into the labyrinth.