“What I didn’t do on my summer vacation”

Abstract

IT'S ALWAYS THE SAME PATTERN. I produce a proposal for a conference, slamming out major idea and chief evidence in five to seven hundred words. Before writing paper--or as a means of putting off writing paper--I then prepare: I read, I take notes, I look at books of theory regardless of how tangential they might be, I read things I've read before (rather than re-reading notes I took on them first time). Somewhere in this process I'll also re-encounter primary text, sure I'll discover that winning quotation, that richly overdetermined moment when new insights will tumble forth, a new and strong(er) theory will emerge, a definitive problem will have been identified. Once I've convinced myself that I've drunk deeply enough of Pierian spring in question or when conference is coming so close that I'm beginning to feel hysterical, I write paper. Ten pages, double-spaced; no more, no less. Then I compare completed conference paper to original proposal to find exactly same structures of thought, same argumentative ideas keyed to same moments in text. It turns out that I had been ready to write from beginning, but that after almost twenty years in profession I cannot, will not, remember that I was ready to write. The combination of imposter syndrome (where I must read everything in order not to be caught out) and (where I must absorb without generating) has produced compulsive detour of over-researching before producing my own text. Do not hear me to speak against importance of deep reading, responsible research, or an overall resistance to commodity production machine that can sometimes be academia. Rather, it's psychological texture of all of this that I want to mediate on. For as soon as I write those words habitual, compulsive detour, subject matter of my thoughts also becomes their method: I am compulsively and habitually taken to Freud's Beyond Pleasure Principle and to Peter Brooks's argument about narrative as mandatory detour we take from inexorability of end, of death, in order to produce through death drive a finished narrative, a story or a thesis that finds completion on its own terms (Brooks). In this sense, my is my compulsive circling around terminus of my own essay, my own completed offering. I will not die until my sacrifice is mature or until my gift is ready for exchange, my symbolic debt perfectly imagined. And to do this I must ignore--or rather forget--that work of thinking has already been done. I must repeatedly and compulsively ignore that my new note-taking often replicates word for word what my earlier notes said, making me less like Wordsworth's organic poet and more like Poe's raven. In short, I must experience again and again ways in which forgetting is a crucial part of research, or writing, and of writing later--that is, of procrastination. But am I really talking about here? Don't those words habitual and compulsive, words that I said took me directly to repetition compulsion, also take me away from and into very heart of what I want to say? Isn't Freudian mechanism really a strategy for getting job done, for meeting deadline? As my colleague Matthew Rowlinson has suggested, agency of forgetting in is a strategy to replicate pleasure of reading material again, as if for first time. Procrastination is in some respects a guilty pleasure, if guilt can be said to accrue around responsible doing of one's job as researcher and thinker. Perhaps then there is no such thing as procrastination. Or, that procrastination as we use term is misleading, for if we ask what we are doing under sign of procrastination we find that we are often doing things that enable completion of primary task. For example, producing this essay in its first (oral) version shamed me into completing another piece of work that was due weeks before this one and that I had used the talk as a means of avoiding. …