I was asked by Johan Malmstedt after a talk about generative AI what I would do if my work was entirely automated. It immediately left me thinking about my favourite letter from C Wright Mills in which he tries to remind a struggling friend about the things in life one should be excited about:
You ask for what one should be keyed up? My god, for long weekends in the country, and snow and the feel of an idea and New York streets early in the morning and late at night and the camera eye always working whether you want or not and yes by god how the earth feels when it’s been ploughed deep and the new chartreuse wall in the study and wine before dinner and if you can afford it Irish whiskey afterwards and sawdust in your pants cuff and sometimes at evening the dusky pink sky to the northwest, and the books to read never touched and all that stuff the Greeks wrote about and have you ever read Macaulay’s speeches to hear the English language? And to revise your mode of talk and what you talk about and yes by god the world of music which we just now discover and there’s still hot jazz and getting a car out of the mud when nobody else can. That’s what the hell to get keyed up about.
What I’ve always loved about this letter is how it situates intellectual pleasures in a long list of sensory ones: “the books to read never touched”, “to revise your mode of talk” and “the feel of an idea” alongside snow, jazz and the mystical stillness of a major city as it sleeps. It highlights how intellectual satisfaction often involves sensory pleasure. Ideas feel a certain way. Giving shape to inchoate intuitions feels a certain way. Grasping a piece of work you’ve struggled with as a totality for the first time feels a certain way. Being lost in conversation with people who share your fascinations feels a certain way.
The instrumental motivations which inevitably guide our academic work can displace this lived engagement with intellectual pleasure. The reality of higher education means that, contra Rorty’s insistence that “Universities permit one to read books and report what one thinks about them, and get paid for it”, this pleasure can be the exception rather than the rule. Which is why I responded to Johan that I would almost certainly spent a lot of my time reading and writing. I would produce no articles, only blog posts and the occasional book. This aspect of how I spend my time feels in some sense necessary rather than contingent, as much as I would argue strenuously that being an academic is a job rather than a calling.
Because there is something fundamental in my experience to the ‘feel of an idea’. To feel a fuzzy sense of being on the cusp of understanding something, before trying to put it into words and inevitably being dissatisfied with the results. This means in turn trying again, grasping at an ever receding object in a process which in its own lowkey way can be as sensorily satisfying as fiction, music or cinema. Which in turn fill out a further element of my post-automation days.
In a thoughtful essay on Lacanian psychoanalysis and the postmodern condition, Mark Bracher describes Lacan’s clinical commitment to “helping people become conscious of their own particular mode of core enjoyment, recognise both its arbitrariness and its inevitably for them, and find ways of indulging in this enjoyment that do not conflict with their values and knowledge or harm other people”. The inevitability reveals itself in an honest response to the automation question: what would you choose to do if your job was automated? It’s a pleasing update to the one Alan Watts asked: what would you like to do if money was no object?
Let’s combine the two: what would you do if your job was automated and money was no object? I doubt I would spend my whole life reading and writing, but I believe I would quite gladly spend at least half of each day reading and writing (I would also have a flat in London and a summer house in Cambridge). That to me feels like my own ‘particular mode of core enjoyment’, necessary and inevitable for me, which I’m thankful to academia for facilitating in spite of its many limitations. The much more difficult question is what I would spend the other half of each doing. I suspect that I want to spend a big part of that other half talking to people who are similarly inclined about what they had been reading and writing in the first half of their day. Which again suggests what I should be prioritising in my academic life, to the extent I am able, over the coming year.
Mark Carrigan 