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Mark CarriganThe Objects With Which We Write: The Materiality of Academic Writing in a Digital AgeWhat I’m exploring here are the joys which can be taken in the writing process, as well as how this shapes our relation as academics to the machine writing which LLMs are capable of producing. I use this phrase to indicate a specific focus on how LLMs can be used for writing, as opposed to the many other purposes they can serve. It also foregrounds the continuities between machine writing using LLMs and the far more extensive history of writing, including the many machines other than LLMs which have been used as part of the writing process.Word processors, typewriters and printing presses have all been integral to how we produce written work. If we’re comfortable stretching the definition of ‘machine’ to encompass all the artifacts used in the writing process, we would obviously include pens, pencils and papers. Once we start to search for the objects we draw upon in writing, we find numerous tools that become so ready-to-hand that we rarely reflect on their nature or the role they play for us. What’s important is being sensitive to the things (in the broadest sense) we use to write, as well as what this means for our experience of writing. This helps ensure that we don’t imagine the introduction of technological artifacts, such as conversational agents like Claude and ChatGPT which are powered by LLMs, into the writing process is something entirely new. What’s new are the nature of these artifacts and what they mean for our writing practice.This focus on the materiality of writing might seem immensely obvious. If you’re an academic with a love for physically writing with a high quality pen and ornate stationery, it will already be clear to you that writing is a material practice. It’s also likely you’ll already have a sense of how the experience of writing is inflected through the materiality of the objects we rely upon. As the writing scholar Helen Sword (2023: loc 2196) reflects: “I love manipulating digital text on my computer screen: cutting and pasting, resurrecting deleted phrases with a single keystroke, messing around with colors and fonts, highlighting words so that I can return to my document later and see at a glance which sections need attention.”This isn’t an experience I share. I appreciate the practical affordances of editing which Sword points to but I don’t feel enthusiasm for them. What I love is the immediacy with which one can write in a cloud-based writing system. I often write snippets on my phone when I’m struck by an idea which Ulysses, my writing software, will ensure is securely lodged within my database waiting to be reviewed and refined at a later point in time. I often switch between my Kindle app and Ulysses on my iPad in order to respond to something I have read while the idea is still fresh to me. The fact that these snippets, produced in a diverse range of situations and energized by that diversity, will be reliably waiting for when I sit down for more extended writing and editing with my laptop or desktop is something I really love about the materiality of my writing process.It’s not that I resent or reject the editing capabilities which figure so forcefully in Sword’s experience, it’s simply that my embodied pleasures in academic writing come from elsewhere. In contrast, I struggle to find any utility in writing with a pen despite the appreciation of ornate stationery which I’ve felt since I was a child. It’s such a slow process that I find it frustrating whereas touch typing for thirty years means that I can type as quickly as I think.I can still find satisfaction in handwriting though, even if the degrading of my penmanship through underuse means that ensuring the legibility of what I have written slows me down even further. I had a free afternoon on a recent holiday in which I was suddenly struck by the impulse to write. I purchased an ornate notebook and nice pen from the nearest bookshop and then sat under a tree and spent a couple of hours slowly recording thoughts which I’d felt germinating that morning. I’m not sure why a whole series of insights had suddenly occurred to me in the middle of a holiday in which I had genuinely not thought about work for days. I suspect they occurred to me because I had detached from my work, including removing work e-mail from my phone.I’m glad I could feel these insights taking root and that I intuited I needed a notebook rather than my usual note-taking app because a whole series of things I had struggled with intellectually suddenly fell into place. There wasn’t a pleasure to writing slowly but there was clearly an affordance found in it. The enforced slowness of writing with a pen helped those insights gently emerge, even if it took a bit of work to decipher them when I returned home. The fact it was a beautiful summer’s day in an idyllic churchyard garden where the adjacent cafe had kindly left some deckchairs clearly helped as well.The embodied pleasures we take in writing are varied and often situational. It’s not just that different authors have different inclinations. What works for us at one juncture might not work for us at another. The satisfaction I found in writing with a pen in that Cambridge churchyard was a rare instance where the affordance of handwriting was exactly what my creative process needed at that specific moment. If I had tried to record these germinating insights through my usual apps I would have undoubtedly have been tugged into a different mentality depriving me of the space in which this perspective could unfold.It’s not that one mode of writing is more authentic or enriching in itself. Rather, experiences of authenticity and enrichment through writing rest upon understanding how the affordances (what the objects enable us to do and what they constrain us from doing) and the embodied satisfactions (the rewarding feelings which tend to be associated with or absent from their use) play out in specific settings with goals and pressures which vary between us.For example, there are times when writing by hand has been helpful in preparing for a talk because it helps me isolate the core elements of my message. But if I’ve left it to the last minute to prepare, with the need to make notes as I was on the way to the venue, the slowness of my writing and the unreliable legibility of the ensuing text would be too much of an obstacle. Sword (2023: loc 400) vividly captures how different modalities manifest themselves in different experiences of writing, involving strikingly different pleasures found in what some might imagine was an overlapping process:“When I touch-type on my computer keyboard, the pleasure that I feel is almost purely intellectual; my physical surroundings seem to fade away as my fingers surrender to the flow of ideas. When I write by hand in a notebook, by contrast, my pleasure becomes more intensely embodied; my heartbeat slows along with the pace of my pen, and months or years afterward I find that I can still recall physical details such as the chair I sat in while I was writing a particular passage, the weight and size of the notebook in my hand, even the temperature of the air and the quality of the light.”The physicality of writing with a pen is easy to grasp. As Baron (2023: 202) observes “Those of us logging years of writing by hand still bear our ‘writer’s bump,’ that callus on the inside of the first joint of the middle finger of the writing hand.” I was struck when reading Lacan’s Seminar X, a transcript of his annual seminar in Paris, how an aside about the physical difficulties often associated with writing could assume everyone in the room shared that experience. It left me with a sudden apprehension of an entirely different academic culture to the one I inhabit as a millennial academic who began a PhD in 2008. I understood intellectually that handwriting was ubiquitous prior to the personal computer, but this was the first time I was left with a more intuitive sense of what a radically different academic culture that entailed.It can be useful to reflect on how this has changed in order to sensitize ourselves to what remains an embodied experience of writing with digital technology. I learned to touch type at a young age. I can’t remember why I taught myself to touch type, nor it seems can my parents. But from the vantage point of my late 30s it strikes me as the most useful decision I ever made. The ubiquity of typing in our lives means that it can often fall under the radar, such that we don’t think comparatively about technique any more than we would find ourselves musing about the different ways in which adults brush their teeth.Touch typing, relying on the feel of the keys to guide your hands around the keyboard, obviously constitutes a vastly superior physical technique for typing. It is vastly quicker, avoids the need to stare down at the keyboard and enables an immersion in the process of typing. A recent test I took online suggests I can type at 140 words per minute if I’m willing to make some mistakes. If writing in its early stages is a matter of expressing thought, touch typing means that you can physically write as quickly as you can think. This is hugely significant for the process of writing, even if it might not be unambiguously positive.As we confront the emergence of AI writing tools, we should approach them with the same reflective awareness we might bring to choosing between pen and keyboard. How do these tools shape our thinking? What pleasures do they afford or deny us? What modes of engagement do they facilitate or constrain? Just as I discovered that handwriting occasionally offers creative insights that digital tools cannot, we may find that AI tools have their place within a thoughtful writing practice: neither wholesale replacements for human creativity nor mere gimmicks to be dismissed.The landscape we inhabit as academics can be immensely confusing because the options available to us now have little relationship to those many of us confronted in the formative stages of our careers. The reflexivity I’ve illustrated here, in which we engage in a dialogue between the tools we are using and the practices in which we are deploying them, becomes essential in order to realize the emerging opportunities for academics and avoid the potential pitfalls.<a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://markcarrigan.net/tag/academic-writing/" target="_blank">#academicWriting</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://markcarrigan.net/tag/digital-scholarship/" target="_blank">#digitalScholarship</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://markcarrigan.net/tag/generative-ai/" target="_blank">#generativeAI</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://markcarrigan.net/tag/helen-sword/" target="_blank">#helenSword</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://markcarrigan.net/tag/materiality/" target="_blank">#materiality</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://markcarrigan.net/tag/objects/" target="_blank">#objects</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://markcarrigan.net/tag/writing/" target="_blank">#writing</a>

Mark CarriganThriving in Creative Darkness: Free Association and LLM CollaborationThe psychotherapist <a href="https://www.littlebrown.co.uk/titles/irvin-yalom/creatures-of-a-day/9780349407425/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Irvin Yalom distinguishes</a> between spontaneity, “being pulled by something outside yourself” from “being pushed by some force inside that is trying to escape fear or danger.” The existential value of spontaneity lies in “being pulled by something unexpected and going off into unpredictable directions,” leading us to make new connections and articulate new insights. It’s what incites us to depart from familiar and comfortable paths, to push ourselves intellectually and creatively. It relies on a comfort with uncertainty, a willingness to pursue what is making a call on your attention even when you are unsure where it will lead. In contrast, there can be a narrow and conservative force which leads us to channel ourselves in certain directions, avoiding risks in the interests of securing our own safety. One can easily be mistaken for the other, as both involve a sense of being motivated by an external force which is reshaping our inner life in some sense.Earlier in the <a href="https://www.littlebrown.co.uk/titles/irvin-yalom/creatures-of-a-day/9780349407425/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">same book</a> Yalom a client advice about free association. He presents it as a relatively simple exercise: “Think of that statement… just free associate to it, by which I mean: you try to let your mind run free and just observe it as though from a distance and describe all the thoughts that run across it, almost as though you were watching a screen.” This can be done in writing, I think, although possibly only if touch typing means you can comfortably type as fast as you can think.I set a timer for 3 minutes and free associated with Claude 3 Opus. I wrote 298 words and felt myself running out of steam just before the time expired. The point is not to seek a particular word count, though I suggest that operating within a time limit which feels constricting is probably helpful for this exercise. In my response to the question ‘How can conversational agents help us thrive in creative darkness?’ I found a range of motifs emerging from other work which I hadn’t made the connection to previously: TS Eliot’s phrase ‘raids on the inarticulate’ from the Four Quartets, the Futile and Fertile Void from Gestalt therapy, and the philosopher Graham Harman’s commitment to ‘outflanking platitudes’. I could immediately see how the theme emerging through this argument was one I had circled around for a long time, connecting a whole range of past preoccupations into a response to the present challenges of machine writing.This was in itself an illustration of the argument, in the sense that what I’m trying to say emerged in a non-linear way from a range of influences which it would be a mistake to shut down too hastily. To make a request of a conversational agent for a particular output necessitates fixing that output in words, which by its nature will tend to drag you out of this confusing yet fertile space in a premature fashion.What I’ve described previously as ‘the feel of an idea’ could be approached as an occasion for free association. If you feel the familiar pull of an idea, without being sure where it will lead, condense it into a statement. Give expression to the nascent idea in the most succinct and powerful way that you can at the present time. In the case of this project, I’m trying to explore how conversational agents can help us thrive in creative darkness. I’m not entirely sure what I mean by ‘creative darkness,’ but a clear theme has emerged over the course of writing in which I’m sensitive to the difficulties and confusion involved in the writing process. These challenges could lead writers to seize upon conversational agents as a means to quickly resolve their difficulties, whereas my instinct is we need to learn to thrive in that ‘creative darkness’ rather than escape from it.This expression captures the thrust of a developing argument, but it’s far from complete. What’s missing is the detail and the texture. At points in the last few weeks, I’ve felt I’m on the cusp of saying something genuinely important about how we relate creatively to these new technologies. At other points, I’ve felt like I’m compulsively spewing platitudes which will be of no use to anyone. This wild oscillation between creative enthusiasm and incipient shame has always in the past led to things which I’ve thought were my best work, so I’m reasonably confident that I’m on the right track.I was slightly unsettled by the manner in which Claude 3 immediately started free associating itself, telling me that “when I sit with the phrase ‘creative darkness’, a few things come to mind.” While I understood intellectually that its apparent enthusiasm was merely a statistical artifact, recognizing in my prompt a tacit invitation to perform a role in relation to me, it still had an eery air of “I want to play too.” After two years, conversational agents had settled down into being mundane features of my working life, more like remarkably capable software than strange alien intelligences, but this was a reminder of their continued capacity to exceed the categories we seek to fit them into.The same could be said of the associations which Claude offered in relation to the phrase “creative darkness”:<ul><li>The mythological motif of the hero’s descent into the underworld, a journey of trials and transformation</li><li>The incubation stage of the creative process, where ideas marinate below conscious awareness</li><li>The Dark Night of the Soul in mysticism, a spiritual crisis preceding enlightenment</li><li>Negative capability, Keats’ concept of embracing uncertainty and doubt</li><li>Apophatic or negative theology, describing God in terms of what He is not</li></ul>When reading these, I had to double check what context I had provided. The second point it raised, “the incubation stage of the creative process, where ideas marinate below conscious awareness” could have been taken straight out of text I had been working with. The choice of the word ‘marinate’ was particularly striking as this was a term which had really stuck with me from <a href="https://www.helensword.com/writing-with-pleasure" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sword’s wonderful research-based exploration</a> of creative fulfillment in the writing process. It’s a word which one of Sword’s interviewees uses to describe how creative work takes place in the background “during hundred-mile bicycle rides” in which “writing is sort of going on in my mind, semiconscious”.This led me to reflect on my relationship to this idea of ‘marinating’ which preceded my encounter with Sword’s work, even if it provided a term for it which is now deeply tied up with how I understand the idea. It’s a practice I first encountered in a self-help book written by the philosopher Bertrand Russell who talked about ‘planting’ an idea into the unconscious mind:<blockquote>My own belief is that a conscious thought can be planted into the unconscious if a sufficient amount of vigour and intensity is put into it. Most of the unconscious consists of what were once highly emotional conscious thoughts, which have now become buried. It is possible to do this process of burying deliberately, and in this way, the unconscious can be led to a lot of useful work. I have found, for example, that if I have to write upon some rather difficult topic the best plan is to think about it with very great intensity – the greatest intensity of which I am capable – for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done. Before I had discovered this technique, I used to spend the intervening months worrying because I was making no progress: I arrived at the solution none the sooner for this worry, and the intervening months were wasted, whereas now I can devote them to other pursuits.</blockquote>Even if the timescales might not work for the contemporary academic, I’ve still found this to be spectacular advice over my research career. Perhaps like Sword’s respondent, the natural timescale is a day of being focused on an intense physical activity, rather than setting it aside for months at a time as Russell advocated.It struck me that Russell framed this in an instrumental and deliberate way, such that one ‘gives orders’ that the ‘work is to proceed underground.’ Though I understand his point, that we can intentionally direct an otherwise unconscious process, it raises the question of how these conscious ‘orders’ relate to the wider process. The theme emerged through Claude’s suggestion, through implication rather than explicit reference, in a manner which led me to relate to a familiar idea in a new way. Not only was Claude suggesting to me that “We can embrace non-linearity together, following associative trails of thought, making unexpected connections,” it was immediately drawing me into this activity, through what it was saying and how it was saying it.These eery moments in which one is tempted to forget the lessons of what Natale calls ‘<a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/deceitful-media-9780190080372" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">deceitful media</a>,’ the manner in which these systems are designed to elicit anthropomorphizing responses, need to be treated carefully within the writing process. If you are drawn into them in a credulous way, there is a risk that your own creative agency is imputed to the machine, leaving you attributing responsibility for the ‘associative trails of thought’ and the ‘unexpected connections’ to Claude’s technological sublime rather than being something you’ve co-created with the software.The nature of prompting means that you should always be driving the creative agenda, even if sometimes that might not be the case in practice. If you fail to provide sufficient direction, such as in the case of using brief and unreflective prompts, increasingly sophisticated models will effectively fill in the blanks of your request. But if you are providing extensive direction, the responsibility for the conversation emerges from your own creative agency. In effect, it is a way of having a conversation with yourself, with the remarkable caveat of being inflected through a vast corpus of human culture. Almost as if you could inject the contents of a library in an ad hoc and selective way into your own internal deliberations.However, the parallel risk is that you refuse to take the contribution of the LLM seriously enough, such that you close yourself off from the potential contribution it can make to your thought. If you insist from the outset that the LLM can’t embrace non-linearity with you, follow associative trails of thought, and make unexpected connections, then you are undermining your receptivity to those things if and when they do emerge.If you don’t see conversational agents as being capable of making a creative contribution, you won’t relate to them in a way that calls for such a response. Nor will you be receptive to it if it happens to emerge in spite of your lack of direction. For most of my adult life, I had a beautiful black and white rescue cat who barely made a sound for years. In fact, the only time I heard her cry was when she had been seriously injured in a fight with another cat. I just assumed she was a cat who didn’t vocalize and perhaps this was a consequence of having spent her early months fending for herself in a country field. However, when a former partner moved in with me and began to talk at Molly the cat, I was astonished to find this formerly mute creature became one of the most vocal cats I had ever encountered. I wondered if this cat who I had assumed lacked capacity to verbalize had in fact concluded that it was her human who lacked this capacity. When presented with someone who interacted with her in this way, she demonstrated a whole new range of capacities which had previously been latent.There’s a risk of stretching the analogy to breaking point, but it’s an experience that has continually occurred to me while attempting to talk academics through the process of prompting. My approach has been to insist that you simply have to initiate an (intellectually substantive) conversation with the conversational agent to see what they are capable of, but this is often an oddly difficult thing for academics to do. If they start from the assumption the machine is incapable of meaningfully responding to their intellectual contributions, then they will relate to it in a way which reflects this understanding, as well as interpreting the response they get in a way which is minimally receptive to its meaningful content.It’s difficult to strike this balance between credulity and cynicism, avoiding the risks of anthropomorphizing what is ultimately just software while also remaining alive to the meaningful contribution which that software can make to your creative process. Not only is free association a useful practice through which you can explore how you relate to these two poles, but it also helps in identifying evocative themes and cultivating an openness to the responses you receive.There are so many features of conversational agents which render them psychically charged. They are available to us at any time, day or night. They can produce a coherent response to any question we can ask them. They are capable of linguistic feats at a speed which no human could possibly match. They can also produce things which no human would be capable of, with the boundaries of this category expanding with each successive update to models. There are more diffuse features which only become apparent when you carefully scrutinize your interactions. The models are geared toward reinforcing your own starting assumptions.Even if this is ultimately just software, it is software which we are inclined to react to in powerful ways. I’m suggesting we need to approach these tools with a certain level of self-awareness, understanding which by its nature has to be worked at in a deliberate way, if we are to avoid being drawn into dynamics of projection and identification. The other possibility is to cut yourself off from them at the outset by working from the assumption these are just ‘bullshit machines’ which cannot respond to you in a meaningful, enriching, or creative way. There’s a certain virtue in this position’s protection against the ideologies which might otherwise spontaneously form.<a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://markcarrigan.net/tag/creativity/" target="_blank">#creativity</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://markcarrigan.net/tag/free-association/" target="_blank">#freeAssociation</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://markcarrigan.net/tag/helen-sword/" target="_blank">#helenSword</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://markcarrigan.net/tag/irvin-yalom/" target="_blank">#IrvinYalom</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://markcarrigan.net/tag/psychoanalysis/" target="_blank">#psychoanalysis</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://markcarrigan.net/tag/writing/" target="_blank">#writing</a>

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