July 16, 2022

I haven’t written much since I finished my dissertation. I don’t think it’s because I’ve exhausted what I want to say. I think it’s because I have been deliberating how to write after graduate school. Most may say I’m overthinking it, that there is really no difference or delineation to make between writing scholarship with a practical end in mind and writing for the sake of generating and communicating ideas; for both, the writing is the point. And I don’t believe it is for lack of ideas nor even motivation (the cliché is when you feel a dearth of thought, read; when you feel a surplus, write). I did at one point aspire to write in such a way that I found enjoyable, the type of writing I would myself take pleasure in reading. The source of my fear, I believe, is that, in completing my work in what were at the time and possibly in the present Necessary Letters, I have become one of Them: the media-type professional writer people; the people who believe they have a lot to say; the people who let their hyperlinks or contact list or bibliographies – a scholarly form of name-dropping – do the research and reach the conclusions for them; the people who write with a thesaurus. It is the fear that one’s thoughts and reactions must be constantly mined for professional and promotional content. If we can say that the vast majority of this content (which, of course, does not exist until it sits idly on some parasitic internet platform for the writer to point at as index of their productive capacities) is self-substantiating, that it is the finger pointing and not what the finger points to, that it is then a symbol of lack in itself and therefore may as well only exist in potential, what can we make of the expressive, artistic, scholarly content that intentionally resists substantiation, that brazenly embraces its nonexistence, its impotentials, work that – in Bartleby’s words – “prefers not to”?

This is what I consider in regards to a blog. This is what I consider as I peruse the micro-blogs (that’s what we used to call them), gazing at the near infinite punchline reviews of the latest Marvel flick on Letterboxd (a pastime my students insisted I adopt) or the desperate and pained musings on “optimizing” something or other on LinkedIn. It is this milieu that convinces me that my resistance to continue to produce is a noble and even moral act. The professional managerial class dominates the world of reaction and research, of criticism and the common opinion, and to simply refuse enlistment in their ranks is an individual triumph, a good if ineffectual start. Conveniently, the contradictions this way of being manifest provide the argument at the core of my work (at least the work that has been realized) – in order to make the grand-scale changes necessary to reduce suffering in this world, we must first stop doing a great many things. Writing a blog might be one of them. Making a TV show might be one of them. The fevered push for better, more enlightened mediation – “the issue is not what is being made but who makes it” – only accelerates the very political project for which mediation is a key tenet. To politicize in this context may mean to impotentialize, to strip bare, to contradict, to not do things “my” way nor create change from the inside but to prefer not to altogether.

This blog does not yet exist and it may stay that way. I already resent it as a potentiality. But if it must exist, let it do so in resentment of the potential. Let it discourage potential. Let its absences be joyfully uncelebrated. Instead, let it be the hope of not doing, of unproduction, of impotential.