Rereading some of my earlier books...
April 2017
I have no idea if this will be of wider
interest, but I am recording what I have just experienced.
I have been thinking about What
next? in my work. Usually, I do not reread my books once they come
out, unless for another edition or some such reason. In any case, I just reread
four of my books, from 1982, 1989, 2000, and 2011. (I had a much clearer sense
of the contents of the 1992, 1996 (2), 2003, and 2013 books.) Each chapter
of each book is a distinct essay or a study of a particular example, linked
together by the Introduction and other materials.
1. I realized that most of the
themes that have concerned me over the years were there, developed in
some detail and elaboration, even though I did not now recall what I wrote
then. Much of what I might have written about in future work was already
worked out in these earlier books. (In general, to be effective in scholarship,
you have to say the same thing, in different ways or with further elaborations,
several times. So, what was said earlier might still be reimagined and
expanded.)
2.
Moreover, I was struck by my analytic descriptions of various
phenomena in planning, public policy, and design. There is a consistency in my
approach (or you might call it a lack of inventiveness) to thinking about the
world. Moreover, those analytic descriptions are not abstractions, per se.
Rather they have particular examples and situations in mind, and I am trying to
find out what is essential in those examples and situations and in related
examples and situations. Analogy characterizes how I think
about the world, and I even write about that mode of thinking (presumably using
analogy). My descriptions are
generic descriptions, using a mildly technical vocabulary, of the particular
cases, in light of other cases (the analogy) and their description.
3. I tried again and again to write
without polemic or taking advantage of positions with which I did not concur.
For me, it was a matter of providing an adequate description, borrowing from
whichever theoretical or ideological perspective that would serve my
description.
4. I had forgotten how much I had been
influenced by my reading of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, and
books about Husserl, and how useful those authors' works were for me.
When I use the term "useful," I am saying that my concern was not to
faithfully present their thought, so much as to find in their thinking and
writing what I needed to do my descriptions.
Right now, I have little idea how I
came to think in terms of analogy and analytic description, not even sure who
are my models for such work.
It is useful to write
yourself a paragraph or two about what you are up to. You are doing some sort
of research, or preparing to do such research. But that research lives in a
larger environment of others' research and the policy realm. If you can see
what you are doing in that larger perspective, you will have a better sense of
where you might be going.
Even senior scholars
benefit from such an account of what they are doing. Often, they are so productive,
the larger questions are put aside to get the work done. Perhaps they will win
an award or become a member of an honorary society, and their friends who are
trying to have them admitted will write such an account. But I believe it is
useful for the actual scholar to do so.
Over the years I have
been forced to write such an account for myself, as I apply for fellowships and
grants that are much less specific than are most of my colleagues' projects. I
have to tell a story that makes sense of the diverse materials I have worked
on, and why and how they fit into that larger context.
My initial
attempt, what I had written below in greyed italics was too
compressed to be understood more widely. Let me try to extend it a bit, so that
it will be understood in two ways--What does this have to do with planning and
public policy? and, What are the concrete instances of this work?
It totals to 174 words. Don't be concerned if you leave out some
things--rather be sure that what you include is effective and a good
description.
Over the
years, I have written about:
--the artificiality of the natural environment; the probability of
doom; how abrupt collective changes (such
as neighborhood tipping) may come about through the interaction
of individuals; the ideas built into seemingly innocent mathematical
techniques or physical models; how actors such as entrepreneurs and
special forces in the armed services make decisions and commitments; how
big decisions are made and justified (as in infrastructure investments);and, in
the last fifteen years, I have pursued systematic photographic documentation of
Los Angeles (storefront churches, people at work in industry,...) and written
about doing such documentation.
My concern is with
models or ways of thinking that might appear algebraic or quantitative,
and ways of acting and thinking that are better understood in the sacred
realm of commitment and sacrifice. Topically, I have been concerned with
mathematical and physical models in planning and cities, the environment both
natural and built, and actors and the decisions they make--each of which
cuts across the quantitative/sacred divide. [Early on, I
was quite surprised that I needed to understand religious discourse and
thinking if I was to do my work.]
I just wrote the
above, but of course I have been saying something like it for years. My point
here is that you want to see yourself in a more objective way.
I have a good idea of what is in my Doing
Physics, Constitutions
of Matter, Doing Mathematics, Entrepreneurial Vocations, Urban Tomography
(less so), and Scholar's Survival Manual. But I had no idea of what was in
Advice and Planning, Marginalism and Discontinuity, and little idea of what was
in What's Wrong With Plastic Trees.
So, in the last day or so, I have looked
over and read much of those three latter books. Marginalism and Discontinuity
has most of the ideas that are in my work. Advice and Planning is remarkably
engaged with philosophy and with its own argument. Plastic Trees has my design
stuff and when I read it, it feels familiar. I do not think that most of what I
have called my Nachlass needs to be published. I have said most of it, although
I don't think it has been appreciated.
On the other hand, of all the essays,
probably I should publish the one on Uncertainty. I should see what I can
do with my work on photography/sound either in terms of ideas (Seeing and
Hearing), or in terms of actual photographs and sound files (what I have called
The City in Gravity or Spacetime Cities). Maybe a book that combines the Seeing
and Hearing and City in Gravity with a title like Tomographic Los Angeles, or
Los Angeles as an Identity in Multiplicity or...
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