What Are You Working On?

People often ask me what I’m working on.

It’s one of those questions like, “What do you do?” You know that you’re supposed to answer it with reference to your job, what pays the bills and all that. But maybe, for a moment, before you spill out all the expected information, you let yourself think about it and realize that, hey, you do a lot of things that aren’t your job.

Maybe you grow edible plants without being a farmer. Maybe you read philosophy without being an academic. Maybe you cook delightful meals without being a chef. Maybe you give a back rub without being a massage therapist.

There are a lot of things you do that some people out there certainly do professionally but that you don’t. If you get a good eight hours of sleep each day, you are sleeping as much as you are probably working, but if you tell somebody that you are a sleeper, chances are they will turn you over to the CIA.

All of us are fascinatingly complicated creatures with facets aplenty, but when you are being introduced to someone, and they wonder out loud what you do, you know that they are asking about your job.

In like manner, when I meet certain people, and they ask me what I’m working on, they mean something specific.

(“Is your husband working on a case, Mrs. Charles?” “Yes, it’s a case of Scotch.” Still one of the best lines from The Thin Man.)

When academic-type folks ask me what I’m working on, they generally aren’t asking about my ongoing work here at the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas (EOA)—they usually want to know if I have another book project in the works. After all, I’ve written, co-written, and edited several books over the past dozen or so years, mostly on the subject of racial violence, so it would be natural to assume that, in keeping with Newton’s laws of scholarly motion, I would remain subject to the inertial imperative to keep at it, provided that some outside force does not arrest this motion.

In recent years, however, I’ve had little inclination to produce another book. Instead, outside of my work hours, I’ve been writing academic studies of different novels set in Arkansas, the odd editorial for the state newspaper, and select features for a local magazine. During my work hours, when time permits, I’ve also been cranking out a range of encyclopedia entries, primarily trying to develop material on the various Arkansas-based books and movies we have in the broader collection of the Central Arkansas Library System.

I’ve really found quite a bit of pleasure working in these shorter forms, but I’ve struggled to articulate for myself the reason for my recent aversion to tackling another book-length project, especially when I found that very thing so gratifying in the past.

I think I found the answer the other night while reading The Perils of the One, a 2019 collection of essays by Columbia University professor Stathis Gourgouris. Gourgouris undertakes to perform what Edward Said termed “secular criticism,” which Gourgouris defines “as a kind of open-ended interrogative encounter with the world that not only disdains but uncompromisingly subverts, battles, and outdoes any sort of transcendentalist resolution of social and historical problems. The task of secular criticism is to confront social-historical situations where authority is assumed to emerge from elsewhere—and to do so from within those situations.” This “elsewhere” can be anything from your basic transcendentalist morality to the imagined rationalism of market economics that somehow steers itself to the forces that will bring about a workers’ utopia in your standard Marxist eschatology.

Concepts like “Reason” and “Being,” things said to steer the course of humankind, somehow existing supra-individually, aprioristically, and elsewhere, are instead “phantasms created by the human animal as aspects of its specific mode of living/being-in-the-world.”

Gourgouris’s title, The Perils of the One, reflects his aversion to monological systems. “This one crazy factor explains the whole course of human development since the origin of consciousness!” might be the clickbait rendering of such systems. For Marx, it was class warfare—all history was the history of class. A religious person might look across the swath of human history and see the operations of some divine being or beings at play. Ian McGilchrist, in The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009), argued that the whole of recorded western history was the record of the shifting dominance of brain hemispheres throughout time. (Read more about that in the blog post “The Dark Matter of History.”)

Gourgouris, however, is attempting to steer us away from such transcendental thinking, to offer a much more provisional way of regarding our world. And, following Said, he believes that the form of scholarly production is as important in shifting our thoughts as the content, arguing for the superiority of the essay form over that of the monograph: “The essay is a form that recognizes the force of contingency and finitude in history and, hence, the importance of elaborating a kind of thinking process that does not owe itself to (or is not possessed by) any preconceived or predetermined principles, forging instead its own way through a problem on the terrain that the problem itself constitutes each time anew.”

Each essay is provisional, aimed at addressing a specific problem and then moving on. “Sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof,” we might say. When academics write books of criticism, however, they are often working to develop the sort of framework that might be applicable beyond this immediate problem.

This is where things become unwieldy. Any large framework starts collecting exceptions the moment it is unveiled to the public. And then energy must be spent explaining why that particular case you mentioned doesn’t follow the universal laws I laid down in my prize-winning work of scholarship. Enough exceptions and the framework falls apart, rather like the heliocentric model of the universe did after accruing the dozens and dozens of little “epicycles” needed explain the occasional backwards movement of the other planets. Then we start over.

There is a satisfaction in writing something short and moving on, indulging in the provisional nature of all such works. And that same satisfaction is something I find in my ongoing work for the EOA. None of these entries exist as the last word on anything. Any one of them may need to be updated on the basis of new information or new perspectives on the subject.

But more than that, there is no need to try to create some explanation for how all of the things that are the subject of EOA entries could result in or from this contingent entity we call Arkansas. Or, to put things in comic book terms, we don’t have to develop some overarching framework about Arkansas that encompasses the Battle of Pea Ridge, the romance novel Cowgirl at Heart, slime molds, the 312^th Field Signal Battalion’s Pigeon Department, Cane Creek in Clay County, tamales, the expedition of Hernando de Soto, and the Paragould Meteorite.

I mean, they all happened here, but we can’t explain all of this in accordance with any singular law that governs what happens in Arkansas. No massive, hermetic system will encompass all of this. We can only really deal with these subjects provisionally, as things in themselves, and then move on, while also revisiting as need be and drawing links to other subjects when we can.

What am I working on? Nothing. Or everything, I guess. How about you?

By Guy Lancaster, editor of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas