I am offering this short subject for PhD students who are in their first year of thesis writing. Its over three days, one day a month, two hour lecture in the morning, two hour workshop in the afternoon. I have one day titled the writing of others: how to make use of and how to critique the work of others. I expand on a few pet ideas of mine, like: - Whenever possible, say, I dont find this useful, rather than I dont agree, or, this is wrong. - Try and have a labour theory of value of the works you are reading to learn to be respectful of them as a work of labour not as something that just pops up on the market for your instant enjoyment in a commodity fetishist-mode. think how much it takes you to write an idea. do you like someone reading something you have spent twenty days writing, in two minutes, and judging it to be wrong or bad or meaningless let alone stupid or idiotic. - If you are reading a well-known sophisticated thinker and you feel they need to be given a 101-type lecture in social causality or whatever else it probably means you have not understood them and you need to read them again. Now I am trying to find readings that exemplify how people can be critical but capable of using each others writing creatively. Its not impossible but its not easy either. Indeed I would even say, it is pretty scary. just around my immediate concerns: Bourdieu treating Latour and a few others as idiots. Latour treating Bourdieu as an idiot. People thinking they need to give lectures in essentialism 101 to ontologists as if they were born yesterday. I thought Ill go to feminist and post-colonial writing where maybe people should be kinder to each other but its seriously vicious out there. In Arabic there is a word called takhween which refers to the tendency of making of anyone we disagree with a traitor of some sort or another such that the differences between us become automatically incommensurable and a matter of life and death. It strikes me that there is a lot of that in academic writing too, perhaps what Freud calls a narcissism of minor differences. Ive gone back to some of my own writings and I cant say that I am not guilty of that too sometimes. If you have examples of good respectful creative critique please send it my way. no examples of bad critique needed.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 00:47:49 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015