rob – I’ve thought about similar things in a somewhat inverse form: that people are mistaken in arguing, for example, that there is “too much information” to engage in certain kinds of analysis “these days”. The issue is never really one of quantity – the amount of relevant analytical material doesn’t necessarily increase with time – the silent weaving of history also eliminates matters from consideration… But this just means – I think you’re right here – that people mistake the source of inexhaustibility… and exhaustion…

I mention that I am relatively good with situational pieces – the context is known, and bounded. It’s developing the boundaries that is difficult for me – deciding when it’s okay to stop. LM shares this worry: “I say to myself, how can I possibly write on this, when I haven’t read…” I wince, as LM manages to list some works I also don’t know – I feel the boundaries pushing farther back.

At the risk of taking your opening remarks about the anxiety of writing too seriously, I can’t help but recall a crucial passage from Derrida’s (yes, him again!) “Structure, Sign and Play”. I think it’s worth recalling because I don’t feel that the above expression of hopelessness (as it were) in the face of so much reading really accounts for the risk of writing and for the ideal of (self)transformation that Foucault hints at in the cited passage — although I’m aware that, of course, LM’s and your remarks weren’t necessarily intended as a direct or serious or engaged elaboration of Foucault’s point. In any case, I think the passage from “SS&P” that I’m going to cite will be of interest in relation to your proposed project as well, if only because it is concerned (albeit, perhaps only tacitly) with the ways in which the discourse of the social sciences is organised (and is therefore concerned with the question of the “logic” of the social sciences).

The passage follows a citation from Levi-Strauss which characterises what L-S sees as the relationship between structuralism and empiricism, and D goes on to consider the question of totalisation in relation to the empirical field.

Totalization, therefore, is sometimes defined [i.e. by Levi-Strauss] as useless, and sometimes as impossible. This is no doubt due to the fact that there are two ways of conceiving the limit of totalization. And I assert once more that these two determinations coexist implicitly in Levi-Strauss’s discourse. Totalization can be judged impossible in the classical style: one then refers to the empirical endeavor of either a subject or a finite richness which it can never master. There is too much, more than one can say [or read, perhaps?]. But nontotalization can also be determined in another way: no longer from the standpoint of a concept of finitude as relegation to the empirical, but from a standpoint of the concept of play. If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infinite richness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance of a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field — that is, language and a finite language — excludes totalization. This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions.

You know, I remember telling someone how often I felt overwhelmed by everything I don’t know and them replying in disbelief, “Oh my god, Mr. Know-it-all is saying this?” Gah! My mind practically exploded. How could anyone think I was so knowledgeable? I think it’s because I often stand arms akimbo and gazing off into the distance, I cut such a dashing figure my competence is clearly unquestionable.