EdLab just lived up to its promise of being the artsy, synergistic place-you-want-to-be to do your dissertation. The night shift arrived — Gonzalo, holing up at his graphics station to work on his dissertation and other things. I ran into him in the hall and we got talking about certification, proposals, and drafts. He just got done with certification and says he thinks he’s being asked to perform a doctoral-year-of-strife before he actually turns his proposal in, even though it’s done already.
I understand what he means by the demands for a performance, I told him. My adviser’s demands on my dissertation are increasingly stringent. Today he insisted again I should be writing in a word processor, not in a wiki, as that would give me page boundaries to think with. (I found this baffling, as I never have thought that way.)
Gonzalo paused and asked if I knew Husserl. Only by name, I said.
Gonzalo said Husserl was known for having books which were meticulously formed, detailed, long arguments. Apparently when they found Husserl’s drafts, there wasn’t a scratch on them, and every chapter was in the place where it eventually came to rest. Nothing had been moved. He just arranged all those arguments in his head, we figured.
John Stuart Mill, too, said Gonzalo. When he rewrote, he ignored his first draft.
That’s when it hit me: The wiki is not the problem. A word processor would not be the solution.
I may have to give up the cut and paste function.
It’s positively terrifying to consider. I have been cutting and pasting in digital text since I was eleven or so; it is so much a part of my writing process that writing by hand is frustrating. It is so fundamental a part of any word processor that I don’t even realize how much I rely on it.
But my dissertation, and many longer pieces I’ve written, have suffered from it. The wiki is a pile of powder. Atomized. There’s no structure to it. I might just have to go back and weave it of whole cloth.
We’re resistant to that, aren’t we, said Gonzalo. You think if you’re going to do that, you’ll forget to add something when you are rewriting. But there’s something about the greed of it — of wanting to hold on to all your ideas — which is a problem.
It’s the “murder your darlings” imperative, all over again. I was surprised I’d forgotten it, but then, this is a different litter of darlings — not a bunch of precious lines of poetry (which I’ve grown to see as weak expressions of teenaged emotions better off drowned in a bucket anyway) but the meat and sinew and bones of me! My precious professional career! The data and evidence which I, through the inevitable course of graduate school acculturation, have come to identify with so strongly, will need to rely on so heavily to get a job, that I forget it’s not actually me.
Murder those darlings. Run over them, flatten them, with a more seamless train of thought. Maybe we’ll be stronger for it, my thesis and I.
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