Brevity. Soul. Wit.
Thus answered (with apologies to the Bard) to my own question: what makes writing interesting?
I have spent a great portion of the past 8 years reading, but not writing. Mike recently started an email salon, whose current topic is orbiting around what Bill Readings has referred to as The University in Ruins
In my case, despite a ‘minor’ and two years of something else, 120% of the credits I was supposed to earn has left me most capable of telling you how one might prove that Kepler’s formulas describing the elliptical orbit of bodies around a gravitational centre (not quite true when there’s more than two bodies) can be derived from Newton’s simple formulas describing the scale of the force exerted by gravity (less true near the speed of light). Yet I am far less able to express even the most basic of half-truths I have been gathering about the desperation of human life or the dizziness of our relations to one another from magazines, blogs, films, books
So, here it is. The first shot over the bow of a planned 109 600 words. I have given myself three years at 100 words a day to learn how to half-express myself in digital ink. To become a writer who, at least when not travelling near the speed of light, hits somewhere near the truth. To shorten, sharpen, and swing a little more in my words, while I aim for sweet, sensible expression, out here among the multitude of bodies.
If I don’t trip up, I’ll try and stumble on something worth talking about, too.
More seriously, I don’t think the function of the university is to “educate” or socially engineer a person. If graduates are more able to socially interact with society as a result of years of taking university courses, that is a good thing.
However, the model of the university that we have is one premised on an intellectual dialectic. What the university does is present students with an opportunity to interact with scholars, and experts in a particular field of knowledge – the way capitalist market systems work, the way that human biology affects us, the different polities and histories of world culture. The level of debate, and dialogue and what meanings these new fields of knowledge hold for our understandings of the world are subjective and cannot be forced on anyone. If a women’s studies professor presents a body of history outlining the oppression of women, and interconnecting though perhaps clashing theories on the way in which gender and sex manifest themselves in society today, and students choose not to radically reconsider the way gender plays a role in their lives, the university cannot force them to.
Perhaps that is too simplistic an example. Maybe a more appropriate one would be if students learn history, or economics or political science and study what *is* today – these are the systems we have or have had, and why we have or have had them, it seems to me that by bringing that knowledge to the students, professors and the academy have completed their task. It’s really up to the student to use that knowledge to advance social change, to transform what has been and what is to what might be. So while I believe it is the role of the academy to teach students the discourses of the past, the student must uphold their side of the bargain, perform their end of the dialectic, and struggle to convince, express and create ideas and changes themselves.
Haha pretentious enough for you? Now I have contributed to the dialectic. Your turn.