| It
is a neurosis common among academics, and specialised in by philosophers,
to be reluctant, even afraid to go into print if this can possibly be avoided.
Extreme sufferers have been known to get through an entire academic career
without publishing a word. Wittgenstein narrowly missed belonging to this
category: his short Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which was indeed published
in his lifetime, has been outbulked many times over by his posthumous ‘works’,
few of which were intended for publication. Others – J. L. Austin for instance
– have occasionally had their hands forced after accepting speaking engagements
of a kind conventionally followed by publication, but have none the less
refrained in most other circumstances. To give in to this neurosis is frequently
irrational and sometimes immoral. How, since most of us like to see our work
in print, does it arise?
Principally it is simply a distortion beyond all reasonableness of a perfectly proper wish to think before speaking, to take care that any published work has been thought through with all due circumspection before it is allowed to see the light. Responsible authors rightly take exception to the spate of ill-digested, ill-expressed trivia put out by career-hungry young academics (and others), not only in America. Better, they believe, to publish too little than too much; the output of the scholarly community is quite unmanageable enough by now without standards being lowered even further. But better to publish something than nothing, if you have something worth saying. And it does often seem, tiresomely, to be those with something to say who suffer most acutely from this kind of reticence. I have recently been reading a superb work of philosophy in which some of the warmest tributes and expressions of debt are to the unpublished writings of the author’s colleagues, which so long as they remain unpublished are inaccessible to the majority of those who might profit from them. Particularly in these days of great competition for academic posts, those who choose an academic career with a research component owe it to the community they join to make generally available at least the more important fruit of their investigations or reflections. If they come up with nothing worth saying in print, they are probably in the wrong job. If they are sitting indefinitely on worthwhile material, as likely as not they are mistaking self-indulgence or cowardice for scrupulousness. But the mistake is not hard to understand, particularly since the laudable pursuit of scrupulousness is reinforced by a regrettable side-effect of the invention of printing, the authority of print. Though there are reasons, of which more later, for hoping that this authority may in due course weaken, it is still effective today. What is presented in printed form is taken to have a finality and prestige which it may neither deserve nor claim, but which, simply by being in print, it seems to possess. This is especially true of books, though it applies elsewhere too: we all know from cases in which the facts are personally known to us how inaccurate newspapers are, and yet how unthinkingly we swallow much of what they tell us. The unasked-for power of the printed word is felt by the author as committing him permanently to whatever he published: he must believe it to be incontrovertible, complete, even immune to all possible future attack; it becomes part of his oeuvre from the moment it appears, and is taken to represent his view thereafter. It is not surprising if a standard as unrealistically severe as this strikes the conscientious scholar dumb. Recognising that there is always room for refinement, not to mention second thoughts, he will wait for the impossible moment when his message is perfect rather than let something shoddy out of the bag. I say ‘impossible’ deliberately: it is precisely because the perfection he seeks is impossible that it is wrong for him to aspire to it. By waiting for the impossible to happen he neglects the possible. Obviously I am oversimplifying. No one, perhaps, would admit or claim that he is pursuing total perfection, at any rate outside the realm of formal disciplines such as mathematics or logic. But many do indeed set their sights quite sufficiently high to inhibit, sometimes totally, the growth of their bibliographies. Too much compost rots the roots: valuable time is wasted in agonising interminably to increasingly marginal effect, time which might have been devoted to new ideas. Those who suffer from a less virulent form of the neurosis may escape complete shut-down, but the work they produce is liable to be seriously disfigured. Endless obsessional redrafting and correction (often past revised page-proof stage) can soon begin to make matters worse rather than better; or, in another variant, the message is buried under a landslide of qualifications and apologies such as ‘space does not allow …’, or ‘in a short account one can hardly do justice to the infinite subtleties …’, and so forth: the limitations of brevity ought to be self-evident. Does the printed word have to have this power to transfix? Surely not. Printing after all arose primarily as an efficient way of making multiple copies, a replacement for copying by hand; and there is nothing about multiplicity that has to entail authority. No one, I assume, is as neurotically retentive as this in the matter of cyclostyled or photocopied lecture notes or committee minutes, or even typed drafts of material intended for eventual publication. The trouble with printing is that it has become enriched – or is it impoverished? – by extraneous considerations, aesthetic ones chief among them. Lines of type are justified to the right-hand as well as to the left-hand margin; designers lavish care on the layout of the page, the shapes of letters, the spacing of lines. Of course, print can be more or less legible, and it is worth taking the trouble to make the information it gives as painlessly assimilable as possible. But matters of design soon take off on their own account and take over, making possible a printed book that looks like a permanent work of art, and so naturally, is taken to have contents intended as permanent. There are indeed some books that fit this mould – principally literature, and perhaps certain works of reference; maybe even ‘coffee-table’ books have to be allowed in here. But more often than not the aura of permanence is a luxury, in danger of diverting the print-shy author from his true business. Aristotle put it well: ‘It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits.’ Today the sharp discontinuity between full-dress printing and other forms of duplication is being increasingly blurred, and one hopes that this will encourage authors to let go. (I quickly pass by the other possibility, that it will make them terrified of typewriters too.) Instead of being set up in metal type, books are now often set and stored on magnetic tapes or discs which can easily and quickly be edited for new impressions or editions, and comparatively cheaply played out afresh. Though the printed outputs of such stored material may indeed still be physically permanent their relationship to their source can surely alter out attitude towards them considerably. They can be regarded as provisional reports on work in progress, more like an interim computer print-out (which in a sense, indeed, is what they literally are) than a final report. This is a role which ought also to be played, even more than it is already, by the journal article. Some do indeed air in journals early versions of what will eventually become chapters of a book, in order to collect reactions before casting their work in its improved, final form; in this way, too, at least some reviewers’ guns are spiked; but more often than not the article is felt to be no more relaxed a medium than the book. Maybe here too the possibility of easy adjustment may have a loosening effect. I am thinking of founding a philosophy journal called Thought in Progress, specifically for provisional material. (I hasten to add that ‘provisional’ is not equivalent to ‘hastily conceived’.) It might even be helpful to allow a given piece to appear more than once before being incorporated into a book. Let me illustrate these generalisations by reference to a more specific example of what the new technology offers. A typical ‘word processor’ of a comparatively simple kind consists of a slightly extended but otherwise conventional typewriter keyboard linked to a small processing unit that ingests, amends and emits information (held on ‘floppy discs’) in accordance with instructions given on the keyboard. Current activity on the keyboard is portrayed on a small screen (a ‘marching display’) immediately above the keys. A ‘document’, which may be anything from a single character to a whole book and beyond, is entered on a disc or discs by being typed out on the keyboard, and can then be played out as elegant proportionally-spaced typescript at the touch of a button – well, two buttons actually. Once the document is on the disc, amendments can be made by keying the new material in the right place (substitutions, re-orderings, insertions and mergings are all possible), and the next time the document is played out all the amendments are automatically incorporated. The final output is quite good enough to be photographically printed without resetting. Such a device has innumerable uses. Most obviously it transforms the regular updating of lists and schedules from mindlessly repetitive chore into a satisfying technical task. But it is the drafting facility it offers that is relevant to my present argument. Crossings-out and crammings-in give way to as many fresh, clean, revised print-outs, as may be required. These can be widely spaced during the drafting, to allow alterations to be made in manuscript before they are keyed; then when the document is finished a simple instruction enables it to be played out with normal spacing. Whether he does his own typing or has to pay someone else to do it, every professional author who cannot write a final draft straight off (can anyone do this?) needs a word processor! This process of ‘clean drafting’, so to christen it, seems to me to provide a means of weakening the psychological block of print-shyness. An author drafting in this way finds it increasingly arbitrary which draft is taken as final; and by the same token the privileged draft is not invested with a misleading air of incorrigibility. Perhaps by this route authors may come to feel less threatened when they expose in print what, though they are not ready to stand by it immovably, they feel may be worth a public airing. In general, the more that printing processes come within the control of the authors of the words to be printed (as is happening on many fronts, so far as unions permit), the less likely authors are to remain shy of a medium designed to help rather than to stand in the way of their self-expression. And if printing becomes less of a forbidding master and more of an enabling servant, that will be a benefit to the academic community. At least, that’s what I think in this draft. |