Habits+Neuroses,+Talents+_pedlt3


 * Do you have more trouble articulating your frame (social theoretical questions) or object? **
 * What is often difficult for me is keeping the object in frame. I often tend to proliferate both questions and objects, which makes a coherent frame difficult to maintain.


 * • Do you tend to project-hop or to stick to a project, and what explains this? **
 * My strong preference is to stick to a project, at least for a time. When my attention is divided, it can be difficult to build the knowledge base that is needed for substantive work. This is probably due, in part, to a shoddy memory and difficulty sticking to schedule.


 * • Do you tend to be more interested in internal dynamics, or external determinations? In the terms laid out by Keller, do you tend to focus so intently on the object of your concern that context falls away (i.e. are you obsessive compulsive, rather than paranoid)? Is your desire is to name, specify and control your object? Is your desire is for figure, its ground your annoyance? Or are you paranoid, context being your focus and obsession? All is signal. Only begrudgingly will you admit that something is noise, outside the scope of your project? Figure is hard to come by. Its ground has captured your attention. **
 * I tend to focus on external determinations, and often lose the tree for the forest.


 * • What do you do with unusual or counter examples? Are you drawn to “the deviant,” or rather repulsed by it? **
 * I am usually drawn to the “deviant” or exceptional, as it can often be a site of implicit or ignored critique. Looking closely on the exceptional can also help one develop a new perspective on the norm.


 * • Do you tend to over-impose logics on the world, or to resist the construction of coherent narratives? **
 * Emerson once wrote “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds… Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.” Coherence and consistency are not the same thing, of course, but I do become very skeptical with explanations or descriptions of the world that are overly schematic, or that seem to wrap things up too neatly. I tend to the messy and flexible.


 * • Do you tend to over-generalize, or to hold back from overarching argument? **
 * It depends on the issue and on the kind of generalization considered, although I suppose that answer points to the latter option presented by the question (see quote about consistency). Perhaps the confusion has to do with the word “overarching”—I often generalize, but my generalizations do not seem to cohere around a coherent theoretical framework (it is vaguely post-structuralist).


 * • Do you like to read interpretations different than your own, or do you tend to feel scooped or intimidated by them? **
 * If they are truly different, I find it exciting and helpful. Arguing and debating was a big part of my early intellectual development. One thing that helps focus my work is having something to “write against.” Different interpretations are also extremely helpful in that they can sometimes bring one’s own blinders into view.


 * • Do you tend to change an argument as you flesh it out, or do you tend to make the argument work, no matter what? **
 * I’ve often found when writing papers that, when I am done with the conclusion, I have to completely rewrite the introduction.


 * • Do you tend to think in terms of “this is kind of like” (metaphorically)? Do you hold to examples that “say it all,” leveraging metonymic thinking? **
 * It can be very helpful to do so, although I think that it is usually important to bring the insight gained back to the “case” or “site” that is being focused on, and to be critical about how the simile does and doesn’t apply.


 * • Do you like gaming understanding in this way? Does it frustrate you that your answers often don’t fit easily on either side of the binaries set up by the questions? (Jakobson suggests that over attachment to a simple binary scheme is a “continuity disorder.”) **
 * Yes (to the first question), critical thought is impossible when one cannot think outside and beyond the question being answered.