There is an interesting discussion available online between Jonathan Barnes, Myles Burnyeat, Raymond Geuss and Barry Stroud called 'Modes of Philosophizing'. Here's the punchline from Barry Stroud:
'I don't see much loss in trying to write philosophy in clear, connected, sharply focused prose. I wish more philosophers would try it.'
Now there's a radical thought!
I interviewed Judge Richard Posner, author of an interesting book on Plagiarism (read my review here) for the Open University's Ethics Bites podcast. Unfortunately the ISDN line to Chicago was a bit crackly...There is also a transcript available.
Google's announcement that they are setting up an online encylopedia to rival Wikipedia could be good news for writers (or at least for some writers who are prepared to compromise a bit). No doubt the word 'knol' (meaning a unit of knowledge) will find it's way into the OED very soon. Unlike Wikipedia, Knol will have a single author for each entry - so won't be a wiki. And that author will be identified and allowed to earn income from the entry via advertising (they can 'montetize' it in the ugly jargon). This is essentially a way of facilitating self-publishing by authors. Authors will also retain copyright. If there is sufficient income stream from advertising (which there could be from very popular entries) Knol could be a way forward for those authors who don't mind earning from this source. It's not clear, however, what control the authors of the articles will have over the kinds of advertising that appear on their pages. But at least someone is thinking that content providers should be recompensed. Could this be the start of something? If I were a conventional publisher I'd be worried by this development.
If I've understood it correctly, it may be a bit like a massively expanded version of the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy in structure, with the addition of a possible income stream from advertising. What will be interesting is to see how Google treats entries by different authors on the same and related topics. Presumably there will have to be a ranking system that recognises the authority of different contributors in some way.
As well as the worry about lack of control about products writers' words are used to advertise, some people are already getting worried that Google will unfairly privilege Knol entries over other Web content when people are doing a Google search (see this article in The Guardian).
Wendy Cope has written a passionate article about poetry and what happens to successful poets. As with visual artists, when their work is copied illegally, poets often find that it is the entire work that is purloined, not just a part.
Some defenders of open access talk about this sort of infringement as a victimless crime that shouldn't be thought of as anything akin to stealing (since the thing taken remains after it has been taken). This neglects the fact that for some people writing is a livelihood, and if their work is freely available from a quick Google search, this surely affects their sales, and thus their royalties.Whether we call it 'stealing' or not is probably beside the point: what is clear is that in many cases it harms creators. The irony is that many of the sites that present in-copyright poems in this way are run by people who purport to love poetry. They must have quite limited imaginations if they can't see the consequences of their actions.
If you love poetry, buy the books (ditto if you love philosophy)!
It feels as if we are on the verge of a major shift to digital books (see my earlier thoughts on this), though I'm not sure that the Amazon Kindle will be the catalyst here (from the photographs, it doesn't have the design elegance of anything that Steve Jobs produces for Apple). The digitization of millions of books by Google is clearly going to affect all readers one way or another (even those who like to read from paper - since print on demand is clearly a more efficient process than storing tons of printed books and then pulping a percentage of them). There is an interesting article by Jonathan V. Last called 'Google and Its Enemies' which summarises the main issues nicely. What usually gets left out of breathless sci-fi pieces about the digital book revolution is the effect on writers. Whilst research gets easier, getting paid for writing gets more complicated, and in most cases much tougher. Or else the future is presented as a world in which everything can be downloaded for nothing. With large players like Google prepared simply to ignore existing copyright legislation and widespread copyright infringement on the Web, long-tail writers could be in for lean times...What writers need is fair payment for use. That will keep us writing. Collective licensing of the kind administered by ALCS is probably our best bet.
Meanwhile I'm trying to train myself to read more on screen since the illiterate of the future may well be those retros who refuse to deal with anything except paper. I've found www.dailylit.com very useful in this respect.
In a recent piece for The Guardian Jonathan Wolff mentions that in Philosophy we teach students to give the game away rather than have any element of surprise. Plotting is out. He doesn't seem to be advocating more plotting, just pointing out why academic writing can be so boring. But perhaps the absence of plotting is a serious mistake. Think of Descartes' Meditations - the first classic text that most Philosophy students study. Does Descartes give the game away in the first paragraph? No. He takes us through the three waves of doubt then pulls his rabbit out of the hat with the cogito argument...and even then it's not obvious (though clearly not satisfactory) that he's going to rely on God not being a deceiver to re-build his understanding of the world...Kierkegaard doesn't begin Either/Or by spelling out the point of his pseudonymous authors with their evincing of different ways of living...
Actually, as a graduate student, I remember Hugh (a.k.a. D.H.) Mellor (my PhD supervisor at the time) talking about the value of plotting and building up to a denouement...but perhaps he is unusual amongst analytic philosophers in recognising the importance of this sort of issue.
Philosopher Denis Dutton, editor of the excellent Arts and Letters Daily website who used to run the Bad Writing competition was interviewed for Australia's Radio National station on clarity in writing. You can listen to this streamed here, or read this transcript. He has some interesting things to say about difficult philosophy and difficult writing. He also quotes this amazing piece of obfuscation from Judith Butler as an example of writing that fails to communicate anything whatsoever (except, perhaps, as Dutton suggests, a desire that listeners fall down at her feet):
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways, to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and the rearticulation, brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure, inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony, as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power".
Apparently, when this amazing sentence was held up for ridicule, defenders of Butler claimed that it did mean something, but then proceeded to argue at great length with each other about what it could possibly mean...
Dutton isn't against subjects that require difficult writing - he's spent much of his life reading Kant, Aristotle and Wittgenstein. These are thinkers who are struggling to be clear about subjects at the edge of human understanding. But what upsets him - quite rightly - are those who pretend to be deep by hiding behind obscurity.
For more examples of mangled prose read the Press Release for the Bad Writing Competition 1996-1998.
If you want to know where I stand on this subject, Stephen Law interviewed me on the topic of clarity on his weblog here.
ALCS (the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society) is celebrating its 30th year. ALCS has distributed more than £140 million to a wide range of writers in that time. Much of the money comes from fees for photocopying (through CLA licences), particularly in the education sector, and from retransmission of television and radio programmes.
ALCS is a writers’ organisation run by writers for writers. Anyone who has had a book published, or written a script that has been broadcast, or has written articles that have appeared in journals that have ISSN numbers should join. You may be surprised by how much income can flow in from this source. There are two distributions a year: read some statistics on the latest distribution here.
As a Director of ALCS, nominated by the Society of Authors, I was asked to contribute to a book 30 Years of ALCS. Other contributors include Maureen Duffy, Stephen Fry, Shirley Hughes, Alan Plater, Jilly Cooper, Will Self, Joanna Trollope, Nicholas Allan, Joan Smith, Wendy Cope and Maggie Gee.
Below are my responses to the two questions they asked each of the contributors.
1. As a writer, what is the most important thing that has happened to you in the past 30 years?
Getting my first book contract was the most important event for me. The terms were skewed in favour of the publisher and the advance was tiny. But it gave me credibility and the confidence to go on to write the book. It was far more significant to me than getting my PhD, more significant even than getting my first lectureship (not, however, anything like as important as meeting my wife or the birth of my children). It meant I was a proper writer. Sadly, even though the terms in new contracts have improved, the advances have grown a bit, and there has been a steady flow of income from the ALCS, no subsequent book contract has given me anything like the frisson of the first one.
2. What changes do you foresee for writers in your field in the years to come?
The advent of a viable e-book reader will transform everything. Once downloadable e-books catch on in the way that mp3s have caught on, we will need to write in a different way, perhaps building in hyperlinks, perhaps audio and video content too. It could be the end of linear non-fiction designed to read page by page and the beginning of a new era for writers. This could happen soon: perhaps in the next three years.
Another related development could be a large-scale trend towards self-publishing. It is already easy to self-publish content on the Internet. Unless publishers up their game and pay writers better, we might just get by without them.
Philosopher Stephen Law, author of The Philosophy Files
There is an interesting entry on Nietzsche's typewriter on the weblog excursis. It has a moving image of the type of typewriter Nietzsche used and a reproduction of a typewritten letter from him (in capitals because the machine had no lower case letters).
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