From Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human 188:
Most thinkers write badly because they tell us not only their thoughts but also the thinking of those thoughts.
I was thinking about this observation when reading Gary Hall’s thought provoking, if at times slightly frustrating, Masked Media. He observes on pg 30 that “the accepted arrangement by which most of us operate as humanities researchers is that the ideas contained in the books we write and read are more or less distinct from the material forms these volumes take as three-dimensional objects”. The codex book is a form of media sufficiently institutionalised that it’s taken for granted, what Lambros and I call ‘legacy scholarship’ in The Public and their Platforms, enabling the relationship between the ideas and their expression in media to exist without much requirement for reflexive deliberation by author. The problem, as Hall observes, comes with the change in the media and what this means for thought:
if the material nature and forms of the media with which the majority of our ideas are created and communicated undergo a transformation over time (from speech and language to alphanumeric writing and the pen, to the printed-paper codex book, to analogue sounds and images, to the voltage differentials of the digital bitstream and from networked to algorithmic and generative within it), then so do our ideas themselves. It’s not that the media-technological environment changes while our ideas do not. If that were the case, we would just need to update our skills, say, of university teaching, learning and research, so we could become ‘digi-literate’.
My approach to blogging had been to explore how platform facilitate the sharing of the thinking of those thoughts, rather than just the thoughts themselves. The same could have been true of social media but the intersection between algorithmic optimisation and the metricisation of academic life meant it was probably inevitable that academics would come to treat social platforms as a performative stage rather than a dialogical forum. These media had the capacity to foreground thinking though rather than acting like the book or journal article as a fixed form in which thoughts could be made public. In doing so they change the nature of the thinking, albeit not with the uniformity which Hall seems to imply.
Blogging at its best licenses improvisational thinking which I think by its nature will tend to be more alive and risk-taking, even as it carries a corresponding risk of vacuity. What I love about blogging is that I often literarily don’t know what I’m going to say until i sit down to write. For example in this case the extract from Hall’s book made me think of that Nietzsche aphorism and I could feel I had something to say about the connection between them. It’s a way of working with the ‘feel of an idea’, to grasp it directly and carry it immediately. Or at least it can be some of the time.
It’s interesting to consider LLMs in these terms though, in the sense that they intervene in the thinking process. This is a choice between, as I’ve put it it Generative AI for Academics, thinking with LLMs or using them as a substitute for thought. But they do so in a entirely private way, with at least at present AI labs only analysing the chats under specific and limited conditions. This means that thoughts appear but the thinking which goes into them, including the machinic contribution which might squeeze out the author’s own thinking, comes to be more of a back stage phenomenon than was ever the case previously. There’s nothing inherent in the LLM itself which determines the role it plays in our thinking, as opposed to the context of the interaction shaping what we’re trying to get from our use.
If we take Nietzsche’s observation seriously, this might improve the quality of writing. Every PhD student I’ve ever supervised has at some point heard me remarkable about Chekov’s rifle as I’ve tried to get them to slim down a chapter. It’s a principle I’m attuned to because I find it so difficult myself. My writing is littered with traces of the thinking which got me to a position rather than just stating the position itself. Where you got to is stylistically more important than how you got there and it’s pretty much impossible to write parsimoniously until you accept that. But it entails a level of responsibility in terms of thinking which I’m not sure contemporary academic culture is really adequate to unfortunately. If that’s the case I think it’s a mistake to blame the LLM, even if its emergence as the inciting incident that tipped us into confronting this depressing fact.
Mark Carrigan 