Hello! I'm currently applying to graduate programs in political theory. I've spent the last few months thinking through the concepts I'll present and questions I'll pose in my statement of purpose. Now that I'm submitting my applications, I can't understand how I thought this ensemble of concepts and questions actually formed a potentially coherent research project—I can't, e.g., restate my questions. Do you ever return to your thinking fundamentally lost? How do you move forward?
So here’s the thing with thinking: it’s all in your head.
That’s not to say that thinking isn’t real, or consequential, or meaningful. But, like, it’s all in your head. So it really does make a difference how you organize your ideas. I don’t just mean your content ideas, what you call the “ensemble of concepts and questions.” But your ideas about thinking, and about your thinking, and how you relate to it.
Let me pause here to say that there are two aspects of your question. One is theoretical, or better methodical, about thinking itself, and one is practical. You didn’t explicitly ask the practical question, but it’s clear that that is the locus of your anxiety, so let me address that first before I get to the speculative part.
OK. So, the good news is that if you get into a half-decent graduate program, you won’t be held to the ideas in your application materials. If you don’t get into a half-decent graduate program, don’t go to grad school. But if you do, you’ll probably have many opportunities to explore and refine your interests before settling on a project you and your advisors are comfortable with. So relax about that, if that’s what you’re nervous about. When you get to grad school, people will immediately start asking you what you “work on.” The answer is supposed to come in the form of a discipline and field and subfield and one-sentence project summary (”I’m in the English Department; I work on 19th century Anglophone adventure stories and I’m writing a dissertation chapter on on the relation between canoes and buffalo testicles in the colonization of the American frontier”). BUT. Keep in mind that it’s perfectly OK, at least for the first year or two, to say, “In undergrad I worked a lot on XYZ, but now that I’m reading more I think I might be more interested in the 16th rather than the 17th centuries.” If you go to grad school, go to learn, not to rehash things you were interested in when you were 20.
That’s the practical advice.
As for you questions about thinking itself…your two main questions, do I return to my thinking lost and how do I move forward, share an answer. But let me start by saying that I don’t get lost. I often get stuck. But I never get lost. This has to do with my opening remark about how you think about thinking. Thought isn’t a place. That’s what’s awesome about it. It’s multi-dimensional and infinitely flexible. So you can’t get lost. Thinking is a process, not a “thing.” It moves forward, constantly, because you’re never not thinking. You’re maybe not thinking about particular things at particular times, but the stream of consciousness only moves in one direction - forward, relentlessly forward. Be the earth as it may, in the mind, at least, panta rhei. OK I didn’t mean for that to rhyme. Gross.
Thinking about yourself as lost isn’t only a bad idea because it’s a downer, but also because it doesn’t reflect the essence of thought in its processual nature. Think of yourself rather as needing to expand. What does that mean? It means that you’ve already made the absolutely essential leap to understanding that what you’re looking for isn’t the right answer, it’s the right question. At the moment, you need more input to sift through before you can formulate the right question. That’s totally OK. That’s the expansion stage, where you add new ideas, and then later you refine and cut and contract, and questions crystalize out of the concepts that you leave on the table. That’s how it goes. Read. Learn. Listen. If you’re going to grad school, you’re going to have a lot of new input coming your way real real soon.
As for my own thinking, being long since in the cutting and refining stage? I often, as I said, get stuck. That is, a particular thing I am thinking about or writing about or talking about seems to stumble to a halt, or feel wrong, or not quite come together. In that case I simply move on to the next thing. There’s always a next thing. I find things to pick apart and reassemble constantly. The drawback of that is that I have fuck probably millions of words of unfinished writing and half-assed drafts on various laptops. I honestly don’t know how many volumes all those Word files would fill if printed out. But the big advantage, which to me far outweighs all that baggage, is that I’m constantly producing. I’m always making stuff. Which feels a lot better than getting stuck when you get stuck, if you see how I mean.
When I say I’m Deleuzian and Spinozan I don’t just mean what I like to read I mean I really believe and try to follow the maxim that the key to joy is production. Doing. And generation concepts and questions can be a very joyous form of production. Just keep, you know, doing stuff. Stuff that’s related to your interests, even if only tangentially. Go to a lot of different lectures. Try a few different professors. Find good anthologies and learn a field or two; find out what they expect you to read and then find out if you give a shit. Explore. And write. You’ll figure out where you are and where you need to be.
Sometimes I return to old fragments and drafts, to see what I was thinking. I often don’t know what I was thinking. But I clearly was thinking hard about it. I sometimes find a good paragraph or two in an old draft and crib it for something new I’m writing. Once in a long while I’ll pull one out and finish it. But mostly when I read them I’m amazed by two things: how differently I think about things now than i did even three or four years ago, and how consistent my basic interests are over many years. But it also too many years for those interests to clarify themselves, because the things you truly care about aren’t the things you know to look for, they’re the things that end up sticking around, often longer than you expected them to. So throw shit against the wall and see what sticks. That’s the beauty of thought: it constantly works to clarify itself, whether you want it to or not.
