I have ruminated on and off about being an only child and being happy with my own company. I have also discussed writing on my own, the norm for me since my undergraduate days. Sitting in the corners of cafes and bars, initially with exercise book and biro and latterly with my laptop has been a pleasure not a chore. Solitary scribbling has its minuses as well as pluses I admit. Foremost among these, I suspect, is foregoing opportunities to learn from others’ inputs. My stock of knowledge has been and is largely bounded by my reading.
I have also admitted previously to bad habits, namely, my near-instantaneous loss of interest in a completed manuscript. I rarely revise anyway, but I have to force myself even to read through the ‘draft’ of a book or paper before despatching it. It’s not laziness but rather an anxiety to move on, to engage with new projects.
This fragment opens up another related issue. Has my longstanding predilection for solitude and solitary thinking affected the content of my writing, and in particular of my published work?
I don’t claim, as a secluded practitioner, that my reflexivity on this is any the less bounded than has been my openness to learning from consociates. But here are a few thoughts.
First, as intimated, my thoughts and writings have been fairly strictly circumscribed by what I happen to have read. This may be true of all of us who deal in words, but collaboration implies immediate access to texts with which one is unacquainted, and of course personal feedback. My indebtedness to (often dead, white, male) philosophers, social theorists and sociologists is probably excessive. But I hope my reflexivity extends far enough to recognise this.
Second, my tranche of publications represent a slow movement – conceivably and hopefully a ‘progression’ – along a hitherto almost deserted pathway. I feel I have edged forward over the decades and there is, I trust, a measure of intellectual coherence as well as growth. Also on the positive side, the pathway is now mapped in more detail for anyone caring to traverse the same ground.
A parenthetic aside: as I write this, in 2019, I am pondering a new book on my intellectual travels. This would trace my theorising with reference to its four most influential contributors: Marx, Wittgenstein, Habermas and Bhaskar. I should say a word or two more about it. I encountered Wittgenstein first as an undergraduate at Surrey University, so he defies chronology and should rightfully lead the way. Marx subsequently afforded a way of materially, socially and structurally grounding insights from Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty. Habermas provided further philosophical insight, emergent from his commitment to the ‘incomplete project of modernity’ (conceptualised in terms of his reconstructed Enlightenment philosophy), and sociological insight via his theories of lifeworld and system and communicative and strategic action. Bhaskar made up for a generalised falling foul of the ‘epistemic fallacy’ (ie reducing theories of what exists to theories of what we can know of what exists) by his philosophy of ontology and of natural and social science and, ultimately, of emancipation. If this book ever emerges it will absolutely not demonstrate a fidelity to, let alone a discipleship towards, the philosophies and theories of this quartet, but rather trade and build on their ‘usefulness’ towards a credible synthesis for a sociology of 21st century capitalism and for transformative change. But we’ll see.
A third thought is that substance should always trump style. I appreciate ‘good writing’ as much as anyone, but I’ve become increasingly aware that eloquence can disguise lack of content; and it can fool reviewers, even from disciplines like sociology. Sod that. I think I have generally written clearly, even though my style is typically concise (a polite way of putting it), even a tad constipated. I am perhaps an etiolated caricature of Bhaskar, for whom I have a high regard: I think he wrote with originality, depth and exemplary clarity (at least up to and including Dialectics, after which I admit his abstruseness increased exponentially), despite the trouble people seem to have following his arguments.
Fourth, I admit to a certain innocence in relation to publishing. My publications – and maybe this is a function of my babyboomer privileges as much as my inclination to solitude and detachment – are largely what they are, warts and all, independent of: (a) institutional pressures, (b) the evaluations and assesments of peers in my field, and (c) strategic sensibility. By (c) I confess that I pay very little attention to contracts, presentation (eg cover illustrations), marketing, even royalties. I am too keen to move on to the next endavour! I was struck recently when reading Evans’ biography of the Marxist historian Hobsbawm how shrewd he was in negotiating his contracts (I’m not criticising him, just recording my own unfortunate indifference).
What all this amounts to is an acknowledgement that I write what I write in the manner in which I write. As long as I feel I am edging forward I’m both okay with it and anxious to move on. The trouble, I admit, is that I lack peer confirmation that I’m ‘edging forward’ until and unless I receive the requisite feedback. But then do I even heed feedback? It’s all a bit contingent.