Since shortform posts are, short and don’t require high epistemic confidence and seem compatible with social media style posting, I will now write shortform posts regularly so that I get at least some writing done. This will help process the torrent of data and thoughts swirling around in my head like some chaotic vortex. It’s hard to do anything with that vortex there, but writing helps quiet it and feels good, in particular, having written feels amazing even though the act of writing can be painful.
I can really relate to this. I too experience that vortex and find that writing helps with it, in addition to just helping me reason about things. I wrote about it in Writing to Think if you’re interested.
Thanks for sharing that post as well as your experiences and struggles with writing! Down with the vortex, heh :( I’m glad writing helps you wrangle it down to something more manageable as well.
I agree with everything you said in your post about writing. I believe writing has such positive efficacy regarding thinking clarity, mental health improvement, expanding “smarts”, and has power, and so on because it is a cognitive prosthetic. Writing is a tool our species developed that extends the capabilities of not only an individual’s working memory, their total information storage capacity, their scope sensitivities, and more, but does the exact same things for entire civilizations, for our entire species as a whole.
Writing seems to be “a more communicative form of communication” (see below quote), a process which results in a product that explicitly separates the act of thinking with what was thought, leaving what was thought as an object in the world one can interact with and channel the act of thinking against. On repeat!
As more gets written, more acts of thinking are channeled against what’s written and more products of thinking are generated. In a very real way, writing might be the most powerful recursive self and civilizational improvement tool that we humans have, given that it’s the most communicative form of communication and allows for such separation between the act of thinking and the product of thought.
Much of what I think about writing comes from reading different products of though targeted at writing over the years such as Umberto Eco’s “How to Write a Thesis”, hundred of blog posts about writing, A.G. Sertillanges’ “The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods”, casual discussions with friends about writing, Cyril Connolly’s “Enemies of Promise” (this book broke my ability to write for a semester in college, such was its power), and more. I should make an actual list of these influences!
More recently my thinking about writing, thinking, how things come into being, and so on are very heavily influenced by Cary Wolfe’s “What is Posthumanism” (https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/what-is-posthumanism), from page 23 of which I’ll pull a quote from and paste here, because I think it’s very relevant to what we’re all talking about here.
“In Luhmann as in Derrida, writing takes center stage as the paradigm of communication, but only because it exemplifies a deeper “trace” structure (the grammè of the program, as it were) of meaning— a paradigm whose essential logic is for Luhmann only intensified by the sorts of later technical developments, beginning with printing, in which we have already seen Derrida himself keenly interested in texts like Without Alibi and Archive Fever. In this light, the problem with “oral speech,” as Luhmann describes it, is that it threatens to collapse the difference between information and utterance, performatively subordi- nating information to utterance and presuming their simultaneity— “leaving literally no time for doubt,” as Luhmann puts it40—in precisely the manner analyzed in Derrida’s early critique of the subordination of writing to speaking. But if the value of language is that it is “the medium that increases the understandability of communication be- yond the sphere of perception” (160), then writing is its full realization. “Only writing,” Luhmann observes, “enforces the clear distinction between information and utterance,” and “only writing and printing suggest communicative processes that react, not to the unity of, but to the difference between utterance and information. . . . Writing and printing enforce an experience of the difference that constitutes com- munication: they are, in this precise sense, more communicative forms of communication” (162–63).”
I think the gist of that quote, if translated a bit into LW parlance and a bit more context added in from surrounding passages in the book, but not quoted directly here, is that:
(1) there are maps and then there is the territory
(2) maps are not the territory, they can only approximate it
Language and writing are maps of the territory, the “trace” or grammè are deeper non-language but extracted from written language “felt” or intuited maps of the territory that capture more of it than language and writing.
(3) language comprises different communication methods with oral speech, writing, the printed word, etc. as different examples focused on here in the quote.
(4) communicating involves both information and the transmission, or, utterance, of said information
(5) the difference between information and its utterance is often “collapsed on itself” or “lost” quickly via oral speech but writing is able to preserve that difference.
This is similar to what I said above about writing acting as a cognitive prosthetic because the process of writing your thoughts generates a product which is an object in the world representing thoughts you had thought, thus making said thoughts interactable by anyone who has access to that product. As more and more interactions with that product occur with others or oneself writing more thoughts about that product, more products are generated that represent improvements or refinements or additions, or differences, etc. of thought and come into being as objects in the world as well.
Thus, this is why I said above that writing is the most power recursive improvement tool we have as a species and why I think that Lumann at the end of the above quote said that writing and printing are more communicative forms of communication than oral speech or (implied) other types of language / communication mediums / methods.
I like this comment, and am happy that you linked your post in your comment because reading your post and thinking about writing prompted me to start writing this comment, and writing this comment led to all sorts of memories and remembrances about what I think / how I feel about writing, which led to me writing about that and digging up quotes from a book I really want to finish reading but have found impactful even with having read just a few chapters!
I will edit this comment for form and clarity, as well as so it makes a more cogent point, and then post the resulting product as a comment on your post.
I can really relate to this. I too experience that vortex and find that writing helps with it, in addition to just helping me reason about things. I wrote about it in Writing to Think if you’re interested.
Thanks for sharing that post as well as your experiences and struggles with writing! Down with the vortex, heh :( I’m glad writing helps you wrangle it down to something more manageable as well.
I agree with everything you said in your post about writing. I believe writing has such positive efficacy regarding thinking clarity, mental health improvement, expanding “smarts”, and has power, and so on because it is a cognitive prosthetic. Writing is a tool our species developed that extends the capabilities of not only an individual’s working memory, their total information storage capacity, their scope sensitivities, and more, but does the exact same things for entire civilizations, for our entire species as a whole.
Writing seems to be “a more communicative form of communication” (see below quote), a process which results in a product that explicitly separates the act of thinking with what was thought, leaving what was thought as an object in the world one can interact with and channel the act of thinking against. On repeat!
As more gets written, more acts of thinking are channeled against what’s written and more products of thinking are generated. In a very real way, writing might be the most powerful recursive self and civilizational improvement tool that we humans have, given that it’s the most communicative form of communication and allows for such separation between the act of thinking and the product of thought.
Much of what I think about writing comes from reading different products of though targeted at writing over the years such as Umberto Eco’s “How to Write a Thesis”, hundred of blog posts about writing, A.G. Sertillanges’ “The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods”, casual discussions with friends about writing, Cyril Connolly’s “Enemies of Promise” (this book broke my ability to write for a semester in college, such was its power), and more. I should make an actual list of these influences!
More recently my thinking about writing, thinking, how things come into being, and so on are very heavily influenced by Cary Wolfe’s “What is Posthumanism” (https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/what-is-posthumanism), from page 23 of which I’ll pull a quote from and paste here, because I think it’s very relevant to what we’re all talking about here.
“In Luhmann as in Derrida, writing takes center stage as the paradigm of communication, but only because it exemplifies a deeper “trace” structure (the grammè of the program, as it were) of meaning— a paradigm whose essential logic is for Luhmann only intensified by the sorts of later technical developments, beginning with printing, in which we have already seen Derrida himself keenly interested in texts like Without Alibi and Archive Fever. In this light, the problem with “oral speech,” as Luhmann describes it, is that it threatens to collapse the difference between information and utterance, performatively subordi- nating information to utterance and presuming their simultaneity— “leaving literally no time for doubt,” as Luhmann puts it40—in precisely the manner analyzed in Derrida’s early critique of the subordination of writing to speaking. But if the value of language is that it is “the medium that increases the understandability of communication be- yond the sphere of perception” (160), then writing is its full realization. “Only writing,” Luhmann observes, “enforces the clear distinction between information and utterance,” and “only writing and printing suggest communicative processes that react, not to the unity of, but to the difference between utterance and information. . . . Writing and printing enforce an experience of the difference that constitutes com- munication: they are, in this precise sense, more communicative forms of communication” (162–63).”
I think the gist of that quote, if translated a bit into LW parlance and a bit more context added in from surrounding passages in the book, but not quoted directly here, is that:
(1) there are maps and then there is the territory
(2) maps are not the territory, they can only approximate it
Language and writing are maps of the territory, the “trace” or grammè are deeper non-language but extracted from written language “felt” or intuited maps of the territory that capture more of it than language and writing.
(3) language comprises different communication methods with oral speech, writing, the printed word, etc. as different examples focused on here in the quote.
(4) communicating involves both information and the transmission, or, utterance, of said information
(5) the difference between information and its utterance is often “collapsed on itself” or “lost” quickly via oral speech but writing is able to preserve that difference.
This is similar to what I said above about writing acting as a cognitive prosthetic because the process of writing your thoughts generates a product which is an object in the world representing thoughts you had thought, thus making said thoughts interactable by anyone who has access to that product. As more and more interactions with that product occur with others or oneself writing more thoughts about that product, more products are generated that represent improvements or refinements or additions, or differences, etc. of thought and come into being as objects in the world as well.
Thus, this is why I said above that writing is the most power recursive improvement tool we have as a species and why I think that Lumann at the end of the above quote said that writing and printing are more communicative forms of communication than oral speech or (implied) other types of language / communication mediums / methods.
I like this comment, and am happy that you linked your post in your comment because reading your post and thinking about writing prompted me to start writing this comment, and writing this comment led to all sorts of memories and remembrances about what I think / how I feel about writing, which led to me writing about that and digging up quotes from a book I really want to finish reading but have found impactful even with having read just a few chapters!
I will edit this comment for form and clarity, as well as so it makes a more cogent point, and then post the resulting product as a comment on your post.