In September 2007 I found myself sitting in a sociology classroom wondering if I’d made the right decision. I’d escaped from a conveyer belt which was leading me from a philosophy MA to a PhD in political philosophy, largely thanks to the intervention of Margaret Archer, in spite of the fact my relationship to political philosophy was one of intellectual frustration. But I remained anxious that my decision to instead do an MA in social research might not be the right one, as it was such a departure from my previous experience.

If I remember correctly, the first class I went to was the compulsory research methods training where the first book we covered was The Sociological Imagination by C Wright Mills. I was immediately hooked by the idea of the sociological imagination, the capacity to link private troubles and public issues, recognising how personal life is irrevocably tangled up in wider social forces. This was the sensibility that led me to find political philosophy so deeply, if productively*, alienating. I had some immediate, if inarticulate, sense of having found my intellectual home and have seen myself as a sociologist since, even if that self-definition is now starting to break down.

Oddly though, it was the appendix of Mills’s book which had a greater impact on my life. On Intellectual Craftsmanship is a practical guide to ‘keeping a file’, maintaining the notes and records through which one develops a programme of research. I suspect at the time I originally read it, the appendix meant relatively little to me as someone who had not engaged in academic writing beyond postgraduate assessment. But over the subsequent years it’s something I’ve returned to continually, as an intellectual inspiration for thinking about digital scholarship that simultaneously shapes my own reflexive practice. In fact the hyper-reflexive loop which I’ve long since accepted being stuck in is in large part the fault of this book, because I now can’t see the wider conditions of scholarship without thinking about my practice and I can’t think about my practice without seeing the wider conditions of scholarship.

But it is still nonetheless a fundamentally practical book, both in the concrete advice it gives about procedure and the more general strategies it offers. Foremost amongst the latter is the advice to capture ‘fringe-thoughts’. To keep a file, such as this research blog or the monogrammed journal I was given as a gift but only started using this morning, isn’t just a matter of having a place to take ‘notes’. To the extent that file is ready-to-hand, as something instinctively drawn upon in order to record observations and insights, it entails a relationship to the world. The file in Mills’s sense:

encourages you to capture ‘fringe-thoughts’: various ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard on the street, or, for that matter, dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking, as well as lend intellectual relevance to more directed experience […] by keeping an adequate file and thus developing self-reflective habits, you learn how to keep your inner world awake. Whenever you feel strongly about events or ideas you must try not to let them pass from your mind, but instead to formulate them for your files and in so doing draw out their implications, show yourself either how foolish these feelings or ideas are, or how they might be articulated into productive shape.

I can’t remember when I first starting doing this. But it’s been a compulsion for so long that I now can’t imagine ever not doing it. In a reassuring letter to a depressed friend Mills once positioned “the feel of an idea” alongside more quotidian pleasures like Irish whiskey, jazz and long weekends in the country as reasons to be ‘keyed up’. It’s an expression that has always stuck with me because it captures the phenomenology of a ‘fringe-thought’. It’s a feeling in my mind there is something to say here. I haz thoughts. Opinions! These are occasionally articulated in my own mind but it’s more usually a diffuse sense of connection, a feeling of mental energy coalescing around something I’ve observed, heard or read. I’ll have a vague sense that something I encounter or which occurs to me is connected to something I’ve recently encountered or which has occurred to me. Here are a few examples:

• This post started with an image I was preoccupied by when reading a philosophy book: https://markcarrigan.net/2024/04/29/the-nietzschean-midday-lacanian-thoughts-on-the-continual-moment-of-possibility/
• This was something I read in a report which immediately struck me as hugely significant, even if I wasn’t sure how it would figure in my work: https://markcarrigan.net/2024/04/29/a-growing-number-of-5-to-7-year-olds-in-the-uk-are-using-social-media/
• This series of posts on writing emerged because I was suddenly struck by the feeling I need to understand my own writing process more than I currently do https://markcarrigan.net/2024/04/30/how-to-enjoy-writing/
• This was a recognition there was something compulsive in how I’m drawn to Lacanian theory which immediately made me want to understand it, once I had formulated it https://markcarrigan.net/2024/04/28/why-i-find-the-lacanian-concept-of-desire-so-fascinating/

These are just in the last few days. It might seem a lot if you’re not familiar with this practice but I really don’t experience it as a lot. I type fast, so writing these posts took from between two minutes and forty five minutes. It wasn’t always this fast, but the longer I’ve had the habit of responding to ‘the feel ofan idea’ by writing it down while it is fresh in my mind, the easier I’ve found it to immediately pour out the idea onto the page. I tend to write these in one, as a stream of consciousness rather than something I have to work at. The fact they are just notes imbues this with an ease that it would lack if I regarded it as a more formal writing for an audience (more on this in subsequent posts).

Try noticing your ‘fringe thoughts’. If you haven’t already, carry a notebook with you or choose a journal app which is dedicated to keeping a file. When an idea or connection strikes you write it down, even if it’s an interruption to the usual flow of what you are doing. The blog is the mechanism that works best for me but I’ve also used physical notebooks (particularly when I’m struggling with a big project), yellow legal pads, knowledge-base software like Roam, conversational agents like Claude, little note cards and voice messages on ChatGPT**. What’s right for me is unlikely to be right for you. But the point is to cultivate the practice in order to, as Mills puts it, keep your inner world awake. The more you do it, the more observant you become about the world and your own responses to it. Inspiration doesn’t strike you passively, it’s something you make yourself receptive to by developing practices which cultivate observation and reflection.

At the heart of my enjoyment of writing is the fact I’m usually overflowing with ideas, to an extent that can actually be counterproductive. I would suggest the reason for this is not something special about my mind but simply that I’ve been following Mills’s advice for a long time. Furthermore, I’ve found a way of ‘keeping a file’ which works extremely well for me. Your file might not look like my file. But without a file you cannot keep your inner world awake.

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*I was disturbed to realise I’m reaching the age where I’m nostalgically curious about my own intellectual development, which is why there’s a biographical component to this series of essays. Well that and the fact I can’t not write like this. But I realised recently how much I wanted to read the essays and dissertations I wrote during that first masters degree, all of which critiqued normative political philosophy in different ways. The dissertation used Chantal Mouffe’s work to suggest there was a deficient conception of the political within Rawls, in what I suspect in retrospect to have been an attempt to do a sociological critique of analytical political philosophy as a project. But I’ve lost the work many computers ago unfortunately.

**Unfortunately the voice conversation seems to be gone from the UK which is a shame because I loved it. But you can still dictate to ChatGPT on iPhone, even if it no longer talks back.