What C. Wright Mills described in The Sociological Imagination as “fringe thoughts” are integral to “keeping your inner world awake.” These peripheral ideas that bubble up during our creative process are crucial to authentic intellectual work, particularly as we navigate the world of machine writing and AI assistance.
Robert Boise suggests that “writers merely needed to learn to be good observers of their ‘inner discourse’ (intermittent short sentences or disconnected groups of words, carrying a flow of images, vying for supremacy)” for automatic writing to work, describing the surrealist method as a form of “inner dictation, by listening carefully and recording faithfully.”
This means cultivating a practice of listening to yourself and recording what you find. Archer draws attention to the dominance of ocular metaphors in how we think about our inner experience. As she puts it, the “metaphor of ‘looking inwards’ implies that we have a special sense, or even a sense organ, enabling us to inspect our inner conscious states, in a way which is modelled upon visual observation.” The notion of introspection has its roots in the Latin spicere (‘to look’) and intra (‘within’) suggesting a “differentiation between the object and the spectator, since I am supposedly looking inward at myself.” It suggests an implausible picture of an inner landscape of stable objects which we can navigate as a more-or-less disinterested observer.
In contrast, listening is a more subtle and precarious enterprise, particularly when it is our stream of internal chatter which we are attempting to tune into. In my experience, what matters is remaining sensitive to resonant words or phrases which occur when you are ruminating about an intellectual topic entirely, rather than assuming there’s innate value to the conversation as a whole.
For example, in the middle stages of my current project, I noticed the phrase ‘stuckness’ kept occurring to me in relation to different aspects of the subject matter. How we could get stuck in different ways and at different stages of writing. How machine writing could help free us when we get stuck. The creative progress which can sometimes ensue from getting stuck. The potential costs if we turn to machine writing whenever we feel stuck.
To write it out like this makes it seem much more linear than it was. I realized these ideas were connected but I couldn’t quite see the connection. The recurrence of the term ‘stuck,’ the realization I was interested in the experience of being creatively and intellectually stuck, provided an axis which drew together different elements of my argument. I realized this was a book about intellectual stuckness, how we experience it as writers and what machine writing means for that experience. By the time it reaches fruition there will be a clear thread running through the text in which I outline these concerns, with stuckness linking together my two topics of academic writing and machine writing. But without attending to my internal conversation, recognizing a theme as it emerged through the patterns I could hear in the ideas which were coming up for me, I don’t think I could have achieved that clarity.
While Boise seems to suggest this is a feature of automatic writing, I suspect it’s a feature of creativity more broadly which simply becomes more directly evident when we write in quasi-automatic ways. To make something new involves taking existing elements, mixing them together in new ways through the strange biographical alchemy of our particular path through the world.
This is what might be at stake in the rush to efficiency encouraged by machine writing. If we see writing as a matter of producing an expected output as quickly and effectively as possible, we lose touch with the expressive ambition underlying what we write. The writing we’re undertaking as academics will rarely, if ever, be purely expressive. It serves practical purposes. It’s intended to be recognized by others. It’s often tacitly expected to be counted. But if we lose touch with that expressivity, then we face the risk of tipping into something else entirely: a mode of engagement in which we are doing things out of external compulsion in the absence of an internal motivation which gives meaning to what we do.
It’s certainly possible to work like this. It might be possible to sustain it over time. However, it raises the question of if and when we might find ourselves confronting the hollow void at the heart of how we spend our time. Whether that’s looking back on all the time and energy we spent writing, considering the other things which could have occupied that time. Or perhaps experiencing a single sharp moment of truth in which we suddenly recognize how empty the practice we spend great swathes of our working life engaged in now feels to us.
This hollowness might not come immediately. It might not come for a long time. But I suspect there will inevitably come a point at which a purely instrumental writing practice is recognized as self-evidently empty. It might be that the expected rewards for being prolific have never arrived. It might be that the recognition imagined to come from this series of pieces is lacking. Whatever the trigger, the cost of disconnecting from our inner world, those fringe thoughts that Mills valued, is ultimately a diminishment of not just our writing, but our intellectual life itself.
Mark Carrigan 