WHY WRITE 1

Why write? The cause of an overwhelming habit is rarely clear to those in its grip. Do plants know why they grow, do musicians truly understand why they play? These doers are, however, familiar with their habit enough to muster ample evidence that might be used to establish a reason for what they do. I turn to this evidence to understand why I write.

I would like to write for others and not just for me. There is, for my writing, no seated audience, only scraps of attention like dappled light touching the inner leaves of a tree. The responses to my writing that come from my own reading remain my largest influence; I judge my writing as I read and I write to cater to this evaluation. (This is its own separate reason to write: humming refrains for myself.)

To me, my writing is best when it is lively and precise, does not overstate or underestimate. When it feels right about what it describes or when it challenges me to change how I feel about what it describes. Would it be enough for me just to scribble, talk, and draw? Something I like especially about writing is that it, like sculptures or big paintings versus beauty I have seen with my eyes closed, goes beyond me. In this process, it also challenges me. Creative realization adds something that imagination cannot.

I hope to provoke thought. All writing demands some thought in the process of reading, but sometimes mine is very demanding of thought and it is rare that a person wants to do this thinking at the moment they happen to be reading my texts. (I do try to encourage them a bit.)

I do think it matters how you talk about things. Yet, I think it is more important what you do than what you say, how you respond to talk than the talk itself. I know I cannot control who uses my work or how.

I do think ideas are aged by poor treatment and, with success, become more a part of the problem than part of the solution. I do not think this is because the ideas were bad at the time. I do not think there is any way to prevent this.

I do think there are more people going to college in the US than ever, and that this gives academic thought entrée to common sense, or more than before. I think some examples of this are obvious: cultural relativism, the idea that gender is performed, and the sensibility (if none of the technicality) of deconstruction. The Israeli army uses Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of smooth and striated space for urban warfare, business gurus quote Virilio, union organizers think about Marx. But more importantly, policy makers presume Walter Lippmann, cashiers channel specific techniques of math, journalists appeal to justice of particular kinds, programmers implement best practices of design.

The greatest impact of writing is its echoes. I do not think that citation and quotation are the main indicators of the influence of ideas. I do think that what is acceptable or exciting or backwards is understand to be acceptable, exciting or backwards exactly because of the strength of habit of a logic. Writing can directly engage these habits.

I know the university system is one center for the incubation and refinement of thinking that does its tiny part to preserve or change the world; it changes what the world is and what we know the world must be and what we treat the world as and it does this by thousands of specific operations on things that we cannot but eventually imagine as the world. Of course, it does this most thoroughly to those closest to it.

Everyone forgets most of what they read. Students in particular. I do think graduate students (and, to a lesser extent, professors) have a large role in spreading the gospel as well as maintaining the vigor of the theology. I do think new ideas are useful precisely because they are slightly newer, and therefore responsive to the ideas that came before them (this is like fashion).

The reason to write is to produce ideas that might be useful in an environment of other ideas. This is a goal of writing as a craft and a justification for it as an activity