Perspective and telling your story

This is a follow-up to my previous post about writing from the heart and writing exercises, in which I argued that, while it is always important to be true to the story that you want to tell, sometimes it is a valuable exercise to try to tell that story in a way that suits a particular audience, especially an unfriendly audience.  This takes that same issue from a slightly different perspective—from the view that any story can be told in different ways. I’m not talking about there being two sides to every story, in the colloquial sense of different people viewing the same event in different lights—though that is closely related. I’m talking about how one person with one story can tell that one story in different ways and with different perspectives.

Consider, for example, this blog post and my previous one: both are telling my views on writing to varying audiences, including hostile ones, but the first focused on viewing the activity through the lens of a writing practice—a practice to develop your writing skills—and this through the lens of the variety of perspectives inherent in a given story.

Or consider, for example, a research analysis using a novel method: just from the start, one can focus on what the new method reveals about the subject or on how that particular analysis reveals insight into the method. Both of these are typically present in any research project that applies new research methodologies to old, established fields of study.

The perspective that you take in writing or telling your story can shift, even if the underlying story itself remains the same.  Now it may be that you are more interested in one perspective than the other, but that only makes it a little harder to shift to other perspectives. Because stories are complex, the other perspectives are always there.

The researcher who picks up a new method may be so fascinated with the method and learning the method that he/she tends to focus on the methodological issues despite matters of interest in the subject, or may be so focused on the research subject that he/she disregards matters of method.  And yet, in this generic situation—applying a new method of analysis to an old problem—both the perspectives are always there.  This can be most easily seen by imagining two separate audiences: one, the audience of people interested in the subject, the other, the audience of people interested in the development of the method.

The perspectives focused on theory and subject aren’t the only possible perspectives, of course. Any work that bridges disciplines will naturally have separate perspectives for each discipline. And then any study of literature or history or any social phenomenon could choose to focus on a variety of perspectives, including historical, economic, sociological, or technological concerns. A Jane Austen novel, for example, could be examined through all these lenses (and probably has been).  Or a building designed by Le Corbusier. These many lenses could be turned on almost anything related to humans.

How does this perspective (that every story can be told from multiple perspectives) affect your practice as a writer? In my previous post, I was talking about writing to a hostile audience while staying true to your own story, and I think there’s a similar opportunity there. In the previous post, I suggested using the attempt to write to a hostile audience, and to suit one’s words to the hostile audience, as an exercise to improve your skill as a writer. Now I’m suggesting a way to deepen your thinking about your work by imagining the different perspectives that different audiences are taking.  What perspective is your hostile audience taking?

By understanding the perspective of your audience, you can better craft your response so that you can reach them.  Understanding the perspective of your audience means understanding what they are going to focus on as important.  Now it is quite possible that what they want to focus on is not what you want to focus on. In the long run, of course, you do want to try to bring the discourse around to focus on what you want to focus on. But the starting place is to focus on what they want to focus on.

If you think of the different perspectives on your story as all being present in your own story, you can start to see how to tell the story you want to tell, even if the first things you need to talk about (write about) are not the things that you care about most.  Such shaping of your presentation to suit your audience is not a sell-out of your story: you can stay true to your story. It can be a very good learning experience as you try to imagine your work through someone else’s eyes. (But of course, try to imagine your work through reasonable eyes—you don’t want to get stuck asking yourself self-destructive questions about your work.) Imagining reasonable objections to your work is a good way to make it stronger—finding real weaknesses is the first step in fixing them. (But, again, be reasonable: all work has some limitations, so don’t throw your work away as soon as you see some weakness in it.)

Hostile audiences are often hostile because they see the world differently from you. Trying to understand their perspectives can help you gain some insight into your work by looking at it from angles you may not usually consider, and trying to communicate your understanding of their perspective can help reduce their hostility to your work. 

Trying to build such communicative bridges is not, in my view, an abdication of your story or any sort of selling out.  Communication need not be focused on and framed around a disagreement, even if that disagreement is central to the work being done.  The very fact that you are communicating with a given group means that there is some common ground—some place on which you stand along with your hostile audience.  That common ground is a good place place to start a discussion that will lead to a point of dispute. That shared perspective, however limited, is a tool to try to bridge the differences.

What are they thinking? Part 2: Speaking the same language

Last week, I wrote about the importance trying to understand the reasoning used by people who do things that seem inexplicable within our own reasoning schemes. I used two examples, one of a scholar struggling to communicate with her advisor, the other of the Democratic bewilderment at the behavior of GOP voters (who supposedly vote against their own best interests). That previous post wasn’t necessarily focused in reaching some point, but I suppose that I might summarize it as follows: people’s decisions are made with respect to their own sets of reasons; the fact that some decision seems unreasonable to you, implies that you do not understand the reasoning that guided the decision. Advisors want their students to graduate, and people vote for what they perceive to be their own best interests. Assuming anything else is silly.

People are sometimes wrong about their beliefs, and people sometimes draw bad conclusions from good evidence. I’m not denying that people make mistakes.  In the case of the scholar who can’t get her advisor to approve her work, I think the advisor is making a mistake. But my thinking that it is a mistake doesn’t change what the advisor believes. In the case of GOP voters, it may be that they would benefit in some ways from voting for non-GOP candidates, but that doesn’t mean that they weigh the costs and benefits of their decisions in the same way that you would.

The question of this post is on how to communicate with people who are seeing the world radically differently, and, if possible, to convince such people to consider seeing the world more as you do.  For both the scholar trying to convince her advisor, and for the politician trying to convince a potential voter, the issue is how does one sway the ideas so that the other will do as desired?
I have framed this in terms of Democrats trying convince Republicans because I don’t hear the Republicans saying “why do they vote against their best interests,” but the same dynamic is surely applicable--every single person has some desire to get others to act in ways that serve their own personal interests. I want people to act in ways that serve my interests, and you want people to act in ways that serve your interests—in a way, that’s exactly what “interests” are: the things that we want to happen.  When person A sees person B do something that A feels is not in his/her bet interest, A is motivated to get B to do otherwise.  Democrats want to get people who didn’t vote Democratic in the past to vote Democratic in the future. Republicans want to get people who didn’t vote Republican to vote Republican in the future.  And, of course, every scholar wants to convince their readers to accept their work.

The first step in getting people to see things your way is to make sure that you speak their language, and I mean “language” in a general sense to mean not only the large-scale language that determines their vocabulary and sentence structure (e.g., English vs. French), but also the more personal intellectual structures that shape their ideas. If, for example, a scholar has a deep reliance on the idea of “objective truth”, that belief will shape the language that they use and how they interpret language, too: such a scholar might not be able to hear or absorb ideas and language shaped by the assumption that there is no objective truth. Or a profoundly religious person might see the world through a lens of religious belief that makes little or no sense to a less religious person, and that difference in perspective may mean that each person views the ideas of the other as incoherent or wrong-headed.

Understanding the underlying logical structures that people are using creates an opportunity to begin to work with people and to begin to shape their reasoning.  The problem with speaking someone else’s language is that it will only make sense if you accept some of their underlying reasoning—and that can be uncomfortable.  But, if you can keep in mind that your effort is to communicate, then you can begin to build the necessary communicative bridges that will help you reach the person who understands the world very differently.

So, to summarize: 1. Remember that people are reasoning with respect to their own sets of ideas; assuming that they are incoherent or working against their best interests doesn’t provide insight into the reasoning that is guiding their decisions. 2. Understanding their reasoning, allows you to begin to speak their language, and unless you speak their language, they probably won’t understand you—and if they don’t understand you, you’re not going to have success convincing them that your work is good.

What are they thinking?

What I’m thinking about is two separate issues that have at least one point of intersection.  One of these issues is the struggle of a scholar to get her Ph.D. accepted by her committee.  This scholar does work of exceptionally high quality. I know plenty of people who did worse work and got a Ph.D., including myself. The other issue is the more general political trope common on America’s political left of asking why so many people vote for GOP candidates who propose policies that are clearly to their detriment, at least in some ways.

In both cases, we could ask ourselves: “what are they thinking?”  In the case of my scholar and her committee, she can reasonably ask “what are they thinking?” with respect to her dissertation, when by many standards her work obviously qualifies, and the reception her work receives from many scholars not on her committee confirms this. In the case of the GOP voters, we might ask “what are they thinking?” with respect to those GOP voters who have no health care, who need health care, who can’t afford health care, and who also regularly vote for candidates who are hostile to government action to provide health care for everyone.

Now, “what are they thinking?” can be asked from a point of curiosity—of wanting to know what they are thinking?  But it can also be asked from a more settled position—a position of greater belief in one’s own rightness—as a paraphrase of “how silly they are to think that!”

This post is about the importance of asking that question from the first perspective, not the second.  I don’t mean to say that you should not believe your own opinions—if you think someone is doing something silly or wrong, you may very well be right.  People do all sorts of silly things.  And if you’re just sitting back watching, thinking what they do is silly works just fine.  But if you’re involved—if you have some need to interact with or convince these people—as the scholar needs to convince her committee, and the political left wants to convince people to vote for candidates who align with the left—then that second version of the question is not going to help you get what you need.

If you need to communicate with people, and you want to get them to cooperate with you, there is great value in sincerely and openly asking “what are you thinking?” And there is great danger in the second version: “how could anyone be so silly as to think that?”

In the case of the scholar, it’s a little hard to dismiss her committee as silly, but taking them seriously is not quite enough to convince them that they should be on board with a project. It’s necessary to find out and understand what they are thinking so that you can create the necessary communicative bridges that will help them understand what you’re thinking.  (As I write that, it occurs to me that if you’re thinking “what are they thinking?” about someone, they may well be thinking the same thing as you are—certainly the political right speaks of the political left as foolish/immoral/etc., which are flavors of “how could anyone be so silly to think that?”)

To communicate, and to persuade people to accept your way of thinking, you need to present to them ideas that make sense to them—and that means understanding what they think, so that you can suit your communication to their ideas.

If, for example, the scholar of my example wants her committee to accept her work she needs to convince them of its value (and the fact that other people find it valuable doesn’t help with that), and that means understanding what they value and framing your work with respect to ideas that they are already using.  And then figuring out how to make some conceptual bridge to the ideas that you are using.

This can be particularly difficult if the ideas that you are using are radically different from the ideas that they are using. For the scholar, part of her struggle is getting her committee to accept her research methodology.  In thinking about her situation, I was thinking about Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions and his idea that different scientific paradigms are “incommensurable”—that is to say that there is no absolute, objective standard by which all paradigms can be measured—what makes sense in one paradigm doesn’t make sense in others. In the scholar’s case, one of the crucial structures of her research doesn’t really play any role in the research paradigms used by her committee—the question, then, is how to bring this structure into her dissertation in a way that her committee accepts it. Ultimately, I think that the route is through understanding and focusing on what the committee wants. Yes, it may be true that what they want doesn’t make sense from the scholar’s paradigm, but focusing on that difference in view doesn’t suggest a good strategy for moving forward. What does, is to look at what the committee thinks is important, and then use that to create as much common ground as possible—then, once the common ground has been created, it becomes easier to start to make a bridge to her own work—how can she frame her choices in terms of questions that the committee thinks important? How can the ideas that are important to the committee be used to explain the choices she made that led her work to diverge from their expected paradigm?

There’s another dynamic that can play a role, too: if you think “how can they be so silly to think that?" about someone with whom you interact, you’re likely to antagonize them.  Recently, while reading articles that brought up the “voting against their own interest” idea, I have been flashing back to a popular song from my youth: The Suicidal Tendencies’ Institutionalized.  The song relates interactions between child and parents, and near the end, the parents say “We’ve decided it’s in your best interest that…” And the song narrator cries “My best interest? How do you know what my best interest is?” Knowing what is in someone’s best interests is complicated—in the song, maybe the parents really do know their child’s interests, or maybe the parents are wrong. Regardless of what the song narrator’s best interests really are—whether the parents are right or the child—we can certainly say that most people, like the child in the song, will resent having someone else tell them what their best interests are. And that is especially true if they think that the other person/people doesn’t/don’t understand them.  Politicians are not going to win voters by saying “I know what you want better than you do.” Politicians are more likely to win voters by saying “your interests are valuable; here’s my plan to address them.” Or, if possible, to shift people fro one set of ideas to another: “your interests are valuable, but here’s something else that might be valuable to you, too.”  This second is what the scholar needs to do with her committee, certainly: she needs her dissertation to be able to say “here’s something you care about; I want to work on that problem because it’s something we both care about; But I am going to take a very different approach, so please give me a moment to explain why I’m taking this approach, even though it may not make sense to you at first glance.” If she can convince her committee that the problem she is working on is a problem that they care about, and get them to focus on that problem, then that focus on the problem can serve as the conceptual landmark that helps the committee orient themselves with respect to the unfamiliar ideas that the scholar needs them to accept in order to accept her thesis.

This is not the most focused post ever—there is more to be said than I want to write now—but I’ve already gone well over one thousand words, which is generally my target for blog posts, so I’m going to call it a wrap.

Forests and trees (once more unto the breach)

I've been writing a fair about lately, but not so much in the blog. Partly this is because I've been finding it hard to find things to write about that I haven't written before.

One thing I've been thinking about doing, is to look back at my past posts and maybe do some digests or archives or indexes--something that would help look at the past writing.

I've written about forests and trees in different ways.
Recently I was thinking about how, in a way, the written object is just another tree in a larger forest. As I write, I see that that metaphor will work in (at least) two ways, but I will focus on just one: the written object, is only part of a larger process or program ("partial fulfillment of the requirements").

I had a query from a writer: "Can you help with my dissertation?" I asked to see the dissertation and to have some explanation of the situation in the program: what was the relationship with the committee? Had anyone read the draft? What kind of work was called for?

Any written work serves an audience. We have to see and imagine the work with respect to the audience. The work is just one tree in a forest of discourse, if you will.

I have previously talked about forests and trees with respect to seeing the scope of the entire written work, and not focusing too much on any specific part, especially not without showing how that part relates to the others. For example a single chapter is very different when conceived in a vacuum as when conceived as serving a specific rhetorical purpose within a larger structure.

We can see a different level of forests and trees: just as a paragraph belongs in the context of a section of a work, and a section belongs in a chapter, and a chapter belongs in the work entire, so, too, can we see as the specific work as belonging to a larger collection of discourse. It needs to fit within that discourse.

To shape your work to suit a specific discourse or a specific audience is not the same as selling out. I'm not talking about being a Marxist and saying "I think Marx is all wrong," just for the sake of getting your necessary signatures. That's selling out. I won't rule out the possibility that selling out is a wise choice, but it's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is you having an idea, and also someone that you want to explain the idea to, so that they understand what you're talking about. Would you try to explain that idea to all people in the same way? Of course not.

Your written work is going to be placed into a context--a forest. And that context is not limited to a context of the ideas being explored. The context includes the practical considerations of filing a dissertation, of writing and revising one, of working with the committee to move towards cooperation and completion.

When you, as a writer, engage in writing, it can be very helpful to consider where in the process you are, and what the steps you are going to take will be. It can help focus effort. An obvious example is with feedback: you have a draft that you have to revise. Do you have any feedback yet? If not, then one kind of revision is appropriate. If you do have feedback, of course, the revision should be guided by the feedback you have.

The dissertation does not stand alone. To say only "I need to work on my dissertation," doesn't recognize that there is a context in which you are working: what kind of work, for whom, and to satisfy what end?

This pragmatic view--it must be noted--is characteristic of the lives of many who are considered great artists. The Van Goghs of the world, whose greatness is acknowledged despite the creator's lack of ability to promote it him/herself, are rare. More often one finds the Picassos, the Hemingways, etc. who pursued publication, who found editors to publish them, who completed work, etc. Who, in short, managed the practical aspects of the process.

The notion of a "pure" academic work that just presents the truth and is therefore universally applicable, is nice but it's naive. Whatever the "truth" in question, it would have to be presented differently to a child than to an adult, differently to an atheist than a fundamentalist, differently to a Marxist than to a post-structuralist. Different people understand the world, and words, in different ways. If you assume that all people will respond the same way to all words, then you will be surprised often. Instead, see that your writing fits into a context, and then let that context help guide the decisions you make.

Figure-ground reversal (for real)

The basic phenomenon of figure-ground reversal is one in which there are two distinct ways in which to see an image. In famous examples, the same image can be seen in two different ways. For example we might see a vase, or we might see a pair of facing profiles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cup_or_faces_paradox.svg

Whatever we see, we see it one way at a time. We may be able to see the image in both ways, but we switch between them; we don't see both at the same time. I won't attempt a neurological explanation, but I don't doubt that there is one.

George Lakoff speaks of "biconceptualism"--the ability to use two different views of the world--which is a similar concept, but not visual. We can explain situations in different ways--for example, how does one respond to an enemy or one who has wronged you? The Bible says both to take retribution (an eye for an eye, etc.) and to treat that person with love (love your enemies). We can take these as two different models on how to deal with the same problem: we don't want someone to hurt us and ours repeatedly, so what do we do? The hawks say that the answer is to go to war; the doves say the answer is to seek other means to reduce the aggression.

So working with a writing project (or any project, really) one of the questions we're faced with is how to look at the situation: what view are we going to use. The examples above, and other simple examples, use binary comparisons, e.g., is the glass half full or half empty? But as a matter of practice, there are any number of different views that one can take of a subject. Horst Rittel, late professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, argued that many problems that we face can be described in many different ways--"there is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem," he wrote--a wicked problem being what he called problems that did not suit the rationalistic problem-solving techniques of his time (I'm digressing a little here).

Think of what it means if there is no definitive formulation to a given problem. What if the problem is to get a dissertation done? Well that's one very general formulation. More specific formulations would be "to convince your professors that you're done" or "to write a great dissertation on my topic of study." These two formulations are distinct, though not mutually exclusive.

The other day Sarah asked for common flips that might occur to grad students or researchers. I mentioned one example: the flip between seeing the project as an expression of your own interests and your own wisdom, and seeing the project as an attempt to say what is necessary to please the professors.

Another flip might be between having too much research material and having too little. This, I think, afflicts a lot of people in the literature review sections, or in their work if they don't have a clearly defined research agenda, or if their project is open-ended, as a project in literature or history might be. At one moment a person can be saying "I have so much material that I have to read and organize that I'm overwhelmed." The next moment the same person might say "I need to do more research." Admittedly, these are perspectives that might reasonably co-exist--sometimes we do have too much material to handle and still have to acquire more, if, for example, a professor requested more--but from a pragmatic point of view, we can only act effectively on one of these perspectives at once: either we can try to get a better handle on the material we have, or we can try to gather more. Both courses might be productive, but vacillating between them is not.

I don't know that I can think of other specific perspective shifts that might be common to the graduate student writer, but I think that the writer who learns to deal with these shifts, and learns to manage the different perspectives is well-positioned to respond to the myriad different demands of the long-term research project.

Significance

I had a writer today ask me about finding the significance of her work.

Thinking about it, it seems like significance is context-dependent, or rather viewer-dependent. What counts as significant depends on point of view. We all, I imagine, have memories of feeling a deep significance in somethings that we just wouldn't worry about now. Those are situations where our view of significance changes; they should give us some insight into the basic truth that the significance that we place on something is not the same that others will.

That being said, I think that we can recognize a number of different levels at which we can find significance for a work, or at least these levels are levels at which we can seek to find significance.

Personal Significance. The obvious first place to seek significance is for yourself. If you don't feel that a work has any significance, then it can be mighty difficult to persevere, especially at the times that the project seems difficult. This is the sense of purpose that should drive the work. There are different types of personal significance: there is simple interest and curiosity; or, by contrast, there is also the personal significance of the crusader. There are probably other flavors of this, but I don't want to pursue that too far.

Academic Significance. As an academic writer, an obvious place to look for significance is within the academic community and the academic discourse. Are there publications that address similar issues as you hope to look at? Are there any publications that call for the kind of research that you hope to do? Are there authors whose work might be supplemented or challenged by your work?

Political Significance. An academic writer might also be concerned with the possibility that their work might shape political discourse in some way. There's some overlap here with the next type of significance.

Practical/Policy/Protocol Significance. Does the research tell us about the way we do things? If we carry out a research project, what does it show us about how we do do things--are we doing them well? And is there any way we could do them better?

Are there other types of significance I've missed? Quite possibly. In truth I'm rushing a little o get something written after missing yesterday, but I don't really feel like spending a lot of time on this right now. Hence, a short post; but better a bad post on time than a good post late.

Cheating Time

I didn't really write this on the 27th of August, but I did open the window, and so Blogger thinks that I wrote it on the 27th.
It allows me to cheat and pretend that I actually did write in my blog on the 27th. And when I look back, a few months from now, chances are that all I'll see is the fact that I did write the blog.

I didn't really have an intention when I wrote those first lines, but it does suggest to me something I like remembering: many of the imperfections of the moment fall away at the larger scale because we see the large-scale work, not the small scale work.

When we pick up someone else's work--a book, a paper, a dissertation--we are often impressed just by the mass of the thing--we look at the table of contents, the introduction, etc., and we see the work as a whole--and a completed whole is a worthy accomplishment. Have you ever read a book you thought unworthy of publication? And yet it is published--which is an accomplishment in itself. We can often criticize people who have been published as having sold out, but that doesn't mean that presenting oneself in a way that can be sold is any less difficult.

As we work on a project, we see the details of the immediate present. But when the work is completed, it will be a whole, and needs to be completed as such.