The literary scholar Steven Connor (2019) talks about our relationship to knowledge in terms of the feelings and meanings that it holds for us. He suggests we rarely, if ever, relate to it in a disinterested or neutral way. Instead it moves us certain ways, fills us with visions of what it might bring about and produces enthusiasm for how we might be changed by it. He’s drawing attention to the epistemopathic texture involved in how we write and think, “the feelings we build and sustain about knowledge” and what they mean for these processes (Connor 2019: loc 142). This slightly awkward neologism is his attempt to choose a word for a pervasive but neglected phenomenon, the fact that our knowledge matters to us in way that is motivating as well as simply meaningful. He includes within this “memory, intelligence, reason, understanding, belief, expertise, wisdom, cognition or just plain thinking” with knowledge as a catch all term which soaks up these various associations (Connor 2019: loc 76).
Implicit in all these activities is a sense of why we are undertaking them, vague intimations of where we might find ourselves by going down this path. In writing this book I’m drawn to the prospect of a readership who might be changed by it, leading them to reflect on machine writing in a different way. I’m drawn to the sense of myself as a writer, my investment in the idea that I’m someone who produces these books which (hopefully) leads people to think. Even when I don’t articulate them in language, there’s a sense of why I’m spending my time doing this rather than the other things that I could be doing.
However Connor’s notion goes deeper than these motivations, whether they are stated or remain inarticulate. He highlights the “rapturous attempt of knowledge to feel, fuel and feed its own powers of self-generation” as well as the “inquisitive twitch within every feeling we have of knowledge, an impulse to get to know the feeling we have of knowing”. This is the ‘inner or subjective life of knowing – the rapture and rue we may feel about it and its accessory and executive actions of learning, thinking, arguing, doubting, wondering and forgetting” (Connor 2019: loc 95-126). In other words, there is a continual flow of affective experience underpinning our relationship with knowledge, as well as the activities through which we seek to engage with it. There are the motivations we might articulate to ourselves or to others but there are also the more diffuse feelings out of which those motivations take shape. To the extent we reflect on knowledge explicitly, as academics are often prone to doing, we drawn upon an often unacknowledged layer of feelings and motivations which give a psychological force to our abstract ideas. As he puts its, “there is an epistemopathic payload within every epistemology, an excited yearning, for instance, to strive for a kind of self-realization and self-government in knowledge” (Conner 2019: loc 85).
What excited yearnings are present within academics who are writing? What inquisitive twitches animate the writing process? Where is the rapture and where is the despair? If we take these as empirical questions, the answer would be a straight forward one: it varies between individuals, fields and disciplines. However I suggest that we should take these questions as self-interrogative ones, through which we can better understand our own relationship to the writing process.
The novelist Anne Mallot describes how “unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, a thought or image arrives” which will “float into your head like a goldfish, lovely, bright orange, and weightless, and you follow them like a child looking at an aquarium that was thought to be without fish.” These unbidden thoughts are part of the epistemopathic experience of writing: the delight of discovery, the unexpected connection that emerges through the struggle with words. If we feel our writing is a struggle to find the right words, sometimes rewarding yet often not, what matters is whether the successes outweigh the failures. It could leave us looking to machine writing as a way to tip the balance, to subtly support our practice in a way that leaves us better able to find a way through it.
Mark Carrigan 