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To whom is this book written? Because I’ve worked in a variety of organizations that have sought to organize and prioritize the working class, I know from experience that some will say “this book was not written with the working class in mind.” Apparently only stuff written at the level of a 5th grade comprehension counts as “to the workers.” That’s the kind of thing people frequently say when encountering writing with the technical jargon of philosophy or theory. This is based on the mostly correct assumption that working people don’t have time to learn or use big words, but there’s more to it than that.
I would add that most workers don’t have time-energy in their week for gaining the conceptual tools necessary to even begin truly thinking outside of, or beyond, the ruts (more like super highways) laid down in our minds by a media ecology set on reducing what can be thought to the lowest common denominator between antagonistic and mutually exclusive false dichotomies.
The way we are wired to identify with interests opposed to our own, or how we focus on individuals who are likewise pawns of this system instead of learning the means to change things systemically, is commonly talked about as “dumbing us down” or “living in echo chambers.” I prefer “structural stultification” and “psychological gerrymandering” because these two terms, as I’ve developed them, necessarily implicate the larger structural mechanisms in play that produce the effects pointed at by “dumbing us down” or “echo chamber” critiques. (That part of me influenced by existential phenomenology believes that when there seems to be some truth to something people frequently say, instead of pedantically over-analyzing the semantic content of the stated signifiers alone, we should inquire into the phenomenal domain being signified by such utterances.)
Our problem is not simply that there is a ruling class conspiracy to “dumb us down” through a world of instant gratification, superficial fantasy and gossip, or by fostering “tribalism” via algorithmically reified “echo chambers.” Nor is the issue merely reducible to politicians who only cater to the interests of certain types of people psychologically predisposed to be influenced by certain metaphors or frames over others (though liberal neuro-linguists like Lakeoff or Haidt are not entirely wrong on this—they just don’t go far enough). Those politicians or ruling class individuals are also ultimately pawns of the techno-capital complex. Hate the game, not its players, right? Do these “players” sometimes do things in conspiratorial or malicious ways? Sure, probably, that’s just people politicking as usual though.
I think the point worth driving home is that, beyond all the usual concerns of “manufacturing consent” or oligarchic media bias is that life in a mass society subjected to the law of value is necessarily shaped and limited by structurally imposed incentives, risks, and specific limiting disclosures of possible ways forward to the exclusion of other avenues. So what is structural stultification and psychological gerrymandering, and, more importantly, how do these concepts factor into this introduction’s leading question about who this book is written with in mind?
Structural stultification is a concept that gets better developed throughout this book than psychological gerrymandering, because it is one I’ve been working on for longer. Structural stultification is, in the sense I use it, when “timenergy” and attention (the existential conditions of creative, intellectual, and emotional life) are subjected to the law of (exchange) value—reducing its possibilities to nothing more than labor power on the market. If that does not immediately make sense, worry not my friend—chapter three does a deeper dive into the theoretical development of this concept and most of the last half of this book applies it in different ways to do cultural analysis.
Timenergy stultification ultimately aims to provide a structural analysis for something that tends to be lost on influencers and critics. For example, clinical psychotherapist, philosopher, and meme-lord Elliot Rosenstock echoes a particular progressive refrain popular these days when he says we should give up on America and move to countries that are not inherently anti-intellectual lost causes.1 Not only does his “black pill” (internet slang for cynical) analysis of the dismal prospects for change in the U.S. fail to conduct any kind of structural analysis, it also proposes “escape,” a solution as worn out as the usually debated binary between reform or revolution. I hope that the concepts developing herein will prove him wrong and, even someday, win him over to the prospect of a grassroots organic working class intellectual revolution.2 Towards that goal, then, let’s dive into what is meant by structural stultification.
When most people only have irregular bursts of energy without time with the potential to repeat, or else time without energy, because their lives are spent following through on future time-energy promises made primarily to teachers or employers, our ability to build on our talents in ways that make us meaningful participants in culture are fundamentally and, more often than not, irredeemably undermined. Commodification of social life steps in to fill the void, which it can only ever simulate aspects of while losing other fundamental conditions necessary for actually satisfying the needs generating the given market demand (e.g. need for love, recognition, belonging, etc.).
A note on “timenergy vs. time-energy”: Even if you free up relative time and energy in your own week, that is only potential time-energy, not timenergy. It was brought to my attention that Nix from Pynk Spots Podcast had been using “time-energy” with the hyphen to talk about spoon theory (a way of talking about energy in relation to disability). This helped me make a connection I had been struggling with: Whereas my thesis contends that “timenergy” is something we are structurally obstructed from having as a pre-condition for self-actualization or community, it is nevertheless true that we can, individually, secure relative time-energy in our weeks for different forms of activity. In the Afterword I elaborate on how the fusion of “time” and “energy” into “time-energy” requires other factors such as interest and sustained effort invested towards fulfilling promises to oneself or others.
So to honor the way Nix was using this term already in a relative-individual sense, which is intuitive and useful, I decided to incorporate this distinction into the theory. Henceforth, “time-energy” with the hyphen is how we speak of “relative timenergy” insofar as one has any in their week. This solved the problem I was already struggling with, where sometimes I wanted to say “my time-energy in a week.”
Now, timenergy, as a single word without hyphen, signifies the virtual communal preconditions for being able to have or partake in culture—but if it is not generally available in society as a more or less steady-state guaranteed resource we can all take for granted, then nobody can be said to “have it” because timenergy, as it has been explicitly developed, is not an individual resource.
To reiterate: “Timenergy” is a general precondition to human relationships and culture at large. Just because you have relative time-energy freed up in your week does not mean your social order has its conditions arranged so as to allow others in your life the requisite capacity to genuinely engage with you or your creative and intellectual work; nor do you get to use that time-energy free of a lived context where every political, religious, and business interest is putting billions of dollars towards refined methods of seducing the attention of everyone in your life.
When timenergy is subjected to the law of value, every person’s sustained effort invested towards activities become (re)directed by the dictates of profit, e.g. even if you are in a book reading group, poetry writing workshop, sustainable volunteer or sport related activity, ulterior motives related to profit tend to frame and undermine qualitative aspects of the endeavor, e.g. portfolio development or “networking” for the sake of “upward mobility.” This snowballs into a dismal situation indeed when considering how it empties out the possibility of genuine (non-institutionalized) recognition between accomplished peers.
In summary, here is my attempt at a short definition: Structural stultification is when our avenues to self-actualization are foreclosed because nobody has routine and regular energy plus time with the potential to repeatedly invest towards efforts not driven by profit that require sustained sacrifice and focus. This causes a lot of what gets called “dumbing down” in everyday parlance for reasons expanded on later in this book.
Psychological gerrymandering is a technical concept that, in the process of writing over the course of 2020, I realized I am still not adequately prepared to lay out in its full form. I have a lot of cybernetics, system theory, philosophy of science and technology, poststructuralism, as well as statistics and big data research to do in the next couple of years before I can truly write that chapter. With that said though, I have nevertheless used this word already online and there were people who said they are waiting for this book’s publication so they can read up more on it. For now, I will give the working definition and a couple of examples of its occurrence, as well as a couple of sentences about why it matters.
Psychological gerrymandering controls for simplicity over complexity for the sake of reliable results by reifying a false dichotomy between “two sides,” e.g. when you are associated with, spoken to as, or identifying with one or the other side based on psychological predisposition or tendency to prioritize certain values over others. For example, just because you have certain feminine characteristics or exhibit supposedly feminine behavior does not mean you are necessarily a woman or “act girly,” though you will most likely be bullied as such because others have bought into the false dichotomy between there only being two genders that are thought to each monopolize different kinds of personality traits, identity expression, or modes of value prioritization in mutually exclusive ways.
Similarly, just because you value equality and empathy over survival and order shouldn’t mean you naturally vote liberal while fearing conservatives. Though this is not necessarily natural, it has been made to seem natural (naturalized) because “liberals” and “conservatives” have been monopolized by two competing (yet mutually reliant) corporations called “Democrats” and “Republicans” (in the U.S., anyway). Thus, we find people sorting themselves into the existing political parties on the basis of feelings of in-group identification, considering themselves representatives for “real politics” and “the people” while the other approximate half of the U.S. population registers with neither party.3
“Determinate negation” kicks in, meaning that the identities of those who refuse to play along with the institutionally legitimated identity options have their own identities inversely shaped by the mold being resisted e.g. centrists, a-political normies, greens or libertarians, etc., are all shaped by the two poles of the legitimated dichotomy that is structurally reified by everyone who plays along with, or against, these scripts.
Psychological gerrymandering is how religious, political, and business propaganda (“marketing”) takes for granted and reproduces certain psychological dispositions that prioritize specific kinds of demand in the market they have tailored themselves to fulfill. This is fine for any small church, non-profit, or niche business that only needs to win one out of a thousand people in the population to stay afloat over time—they can target a certain kind of disposition or value prioritization in the population and, so long as they get to monopolize that association, they can bank on family and friends getting looped in through those true believers who make the product in question a matter of their personal identity.
While psychological gerrymandering is an opportune way for any duopoly (e.g. Pepsi vs. Coke) and its counter-ideological spinoff groups (e.g. off brand cola) to flourish, the implications of this way that reality gets molded are damning for most radical or revolutionary kinds of projects if this is not taken into account from the outset.
Nothing that claims to be for a mass-movement towards structural change can be based in only appealing to this or that niche consumer demographic. Moreover, we should resist the habitual perception of the population through the terms of the duopoly-defined framework. The people in our lives are not reducible to the frameworks used to manipulate and limit the horizon of our choices.
An early attempt at summary: Psychological gerrymandering is how religious, political, and business interests reify and focus on statistically reliable demographics of any mass-scale human population that are psychologically predisposed towards certain value prioritizations to the exclusion of others. This takes for granted that any human population on a mass scale and technologically advanced civilization will have certain statistical demographics with some more or less predictable tendencies that can be appealed to, fostered, or suppressed through monopolization of representative modes tailored for certain tendencies to the exclusion of others. If state control or corporate growth is considered the solution to unpredictable chaos, then the human population easiest to predict must be collapsed into intuitively distinct dichotomies (feminine vs. masculine, liberal vs. conservative, etc.). Egos in need of a substantial sense of self and belonging make positive or negative identifications between the “two-sides” on offer. Thus, the feedback loop of reification and identification is closed like a circuit generating little more than bad ideas, false dilemmas, and superficial and spectacular ego feuds over (comparably) nothing that will get us nowhere outside of the same old cycle.
The implications of structural stultification and psychological gerrymandering constitute a damning critique of every aspiring “broad + systemic” change-maker group or agenda today. Democrats and Republicans only represent one half of the United States population—the other half doesn’t even register to vote. How many of those Democrats and republicans are seriously invested in the two ruling-class capitalist corporations that have monopolized the spectacle of political representation? How many more are disaffected and barely holding on because they see no more suitable alternative ready to defend or uphold this or that precious value or concern? What are our possibilities for alternatives to the old prescriptions of reform or revolution that could break us out of the ways we have been gerrymandered against one another?
With all that said, though, Rosenstock’s “black pill take” concerning the anti-intellectual climate in the U.S. is based in a sober analysis of the way things are here, right now. I will not argue that things are not indeed bleak. So, to answer the question of who this book was written to: research, organizing, teaching, and theory has brought me to the weighty realization that either most workers aren’t capable/ready to understand the gravity of our situation, much less these concepts, or else I am not yet ready to write to most workers (it’s mostly the latter, though probably both).
To just blame the workers for not having the ears to hear would be the kind of confirmation-bias “theorizing” that Robin DeAngelo uses in her popular works “White Fragility” and “Nice Racism” to pre-emptively take any negative reactions to her pedagogy (teaching method) as proof of the inherent racism in the hearts of her pupils. Meaning that her concept “white fragility” is built so that any time people express feelings of frustration when being gaslit by a professional managerial elite H.R. wokescold, DeAngelo takes this as evidence of racism itself.
As much as I would love to focus on critiquing the likes of DeAngelo and her ilk, that will have to wait for the next book. For now, I am well-aware that one big reason most workers are uninterested in theory today, beyond the lack of time, energy, literacy, or resources, is the fact that it is not being taught well. More damning to theorists today is the strong possibility that their tendency to tell workers that we are “working against our own interests” is demeaning, presumptive, and hubristic. Not only might theorists be working with concepts that either never did, or at least no longer, track with fundamental realities, but it is beyond doubt that most theorists have completely lost touch with the vernacular, values, and interests of regular people. There has always been a gulf between the life of the mind and those who do society’s most essential forms of labor, but the New Left found a legitimating narrative for this and have institutionalized the abyss.
While being critical of the way universities train up each generation of professionals and managers, and the shame-blame self-congratulatory preachy modes that ensue, it is also the case that we workers will never rise to the occasion by just writing off all things intellectual as elitist or garbage. My dilemma is being caught between these worlds.
I see the monopoly on theory and philosophy by elites as a hostage crisis and utter injustice, considering the fact that philosophy has always been the primary enemy of power, church, state, and capital. This being my stance, one might ask why I don’t just stop with the big words then. First of all, what gets considered “big” or “pointless” is very relative and, because most of the professional managerial elite being bred in contemporary universities today are themselves illiterate, they too, just like right-wing populists like Thomas Sowell, push this idea that we should just speak in stunted and debilitating language.
Left to right, they all say in perfect lockstep, “You don’t really understand a concept if you can’t explain it to a fifth grader.” Perhaps not so coincidentally, fifth-grade reading comprehension was the level Donald Trump spoke to as president.4 Because I am not yet ready to explain these concepts to his target demographic, I guess I just need to accept that I have yet to fully understand the ideas with which I am grappling herein.
Sometimes I have to remind myself of the fact that I too am a worker trying to understand the world first, before I can be expected to communicate these concepts to wider audiences. What follows in this book is a combination of ideas written to an academic audience in journals5 with other thoughts written with a more popular audience in mind. All of these have been written as a way of working things out for myself in public. Although I have been told by proof readers that these chapters go well together, I am the kind of person rarely satisfied. If it’s a jumbled mess, it’s only because I just learned about the distinction between writing-for-oneself and writing-to-others.
According to Larry McEnerney, a professor at University of Chicago, most people are never trained to write to others. Writing for a teacher or professor is not the same as writing for the public, because the public is not paid to care about what you are writing. Teachers, being paid to give you the attention necessary to recognize and encourage good work, leave us instilled with this magical sense that others should care about whatever we have to write (*clutches pearls* Oh, the entitlement!). This does not prepare us very well for an attention economy where everybody is strapped for time and torn between competing interests. McEnerney thus encourages us to first write our ideas out for ourselves before taking on the task of writing to a public or professional audience.6 Well, despite the best laid plans of this pleeb, I have yet to secure the time-energy necessary to adequately do so.
Because we live in rapidly changing and always new conditions, I am always experimenting. I consider this work, as well as the others in development, as experiments to see what is possible while spending most of one’s time doing manual labor and living without any basic housing-security or reliable income. So forgive my poor grammar and spelling errors, even with amazing people in my life who have proof read this, a lot is guaranteed to slip through considering that we don’t have the traditional filters of agents, editors, or a (real) publisher involved. As self-congratulatory and convenient as this is, I suspect no aspiring working-thinker is going to have the time and energy to over-produce the kind of well-cited and spelling-error free works that carefully say so much about so little.
I am, instead, thinking these ideas through with others who may have found themselves in a similar dilemma. As Heinrich Von Kleist argues in “The Gradual Construction of Thoughts During Speech,” thinkers need others to bounce ideas off of as sounding boards while working through problems.7 If you just stay locked in your own head, you will think yourself in circles and lose touch with reality, whereas discourse with others accelerates one’s process and helps the pieces fall into place. Kleist even says that it might help if the person you are trying to explain your conceptual dilemmas to are less familiar with what it is you are struggling with—in trying to explain it to others who do not share one’s assumptions, new connections come into the opening between interlocutors.
Finally, a note to those who are relatively new to the world of philosophy or even books. Those who get pegged as “intellectuals” or thinkers tend to know they are not the sole originators of their ideas—only gurus act like their points come by divine inspiration, revealed wisdom, or from one’s authentic self-origin. Intellectual humility demands that I say clearly nothing in my work is “original” in the strict colloquial sense. For anyone who, like my pre-philosophy self, idolizes “originality” as something that comes from some vacuum, the fact is culture, language, and thought do not function the way you think it does. For me, the idolization of “originality” kept me at bay from engaging philosophy for years because I wanted to maintain the integrity of my own ideas. Thankfully, I discovered the flaws inherent to that prejudice and have thus been outgrowing the circles I was thinking myself in during those willfully ignorant and stultified years. Without elaborating on my many arguments against the idea that one’s ideas are inherently one’s own, much less original, I will for now just recommend you read the brilliant article The Ecstasy of Influence.8
My debt is to everyone I read past and present, as well as to those who will engage with this in the future. For anyone else engaged in this work, you will know that our real sources always overflow the bibliography’s attempt to totalize sources of influence, though I’ve done my best to show my influences anyway.
I take as a given the facts that minds are not isolated and ideas are not the property of any originator (though in some sense anyone who expresses ideas in their own words can be said to have some kind of authorial responsibility).9 Language is always-already communion and beyond, or outside of, oneself. Nothing comes to us by divine inspiration so much as unconscious synthesis of previously internalized notions. Or at least, this seems to be the case and is the assumption I presume from the outset.
To “the help,” construction workers, delivery drivers, and everyone who is tuning into the world of philosophy, theory, or politics by audio robot readers, services like Audible, podcasts, or listening to videos while working: I am ecstatic that you are joining us in this endeavor to understand the situation we have found ourselves in. It does not matter if you were bullied for being behind or even if you failed to graduate. Those institutions are not meant to help people like us flourish.
If you are one of the workers who, in a previous century, would have never been thought capable of understanding big ideas, much less undertaking a lifelong endeavor such as becoming literate and proficiently engaged in the life of the mind, then welcome to the adventure. This book is dedicated to you, workers of the emerging grassroots organic intellectual revolution, of which I am only a small part.
Those of us who have to work for a living while trying to acquire (“learn”) the conceptual tools necessary for understanding this world critically find ourselves in a strange position where every time we speak we are told to dumb it down “for the workers”—but we are the workers! And we are, I claim, just trying to think things through aloud for ourselves—with others. Our conceptual deprivation caused by structural stultification means we are all, more or less, on the same wave-length of negative standardization.
Insofar as you or I have made any semblance of progress in the life of the mind, it is unlikely that we have much of a shared basis with one another beyond our profound sense of alienation brought on by not having enough fellow travelers to truly flesh things out in dialogue with. If you seriously engage this text, then consider me a fellow traveler and these ideas presented herein as a first stab towards the development of some fundamental concepts necessary for establishing the conditions that will be required before the emerging grassroots organic intellectual revolution can truly gain traction or critical mass.
Most of us are not yet born. By us, I mean working-thinkers and thinking-workers. Whether you got to go to college for a short break from work, or worked your way through college, or never went but have supplemented your conceptual toolkit via video, podcast, blogs, and audiobooks online either when off of work or on the clock, you and I are only just getting started. We are not going anywhere.
A way of saying this all with theory jargon: The working class is only just beginning to acquire the conditions necessary to go from merely being an exploited class existing in-itself to one that is going to exist for-itself. In simpler terms, we exist, but we still mostly lack the means to use reality to our advantage—for now, we only exist as means towards the self-interested ends of others (profit serving capital).
When I say most of us are yet to be born, I am proposing that those of us attempting to balance the life of the mind with the work of the hands have almost always been rare and isolated. The internet and audio-access that make books, blogs, and podcasts available to some of us while working has resulted in our numbers growing and we are beginning to connect with one another. Those connections lay the basis upon which to build an organic intellectual milieu.
For those of us finding ourselves here, it is on us to lay the groundwork for those to come. To that end, I am giving myself the next five years to develop before writing a very specific book to the parents of the children who will be 25 in 30 years. I will then be writing and developing course materials for those working-thinkers and thinking-workers who will be 25 in 30 years.
Why say “25 in 30 years”? Because, since I agree with Rosenstock’s “black pill take” about the current state of the American working class, I am not writing to it “in its current state” so much as giving myself five years to write to the parents of my intended audience who will be post-graduate age by the time I am actually ready to write the books, and develop the courses, necessary for the next generational boom of organic intellectuals.
While I think the longer-term approach makes sense as a practical way of thinking about things, it also gives me a definite way of thinking forward and building my projects in a way that breaks out of the trap of perpetual immediacy that infantilizes us all in a consumer society. Long-term planning is one of the antidotes to immaturity and, I think, something to begin doing if I want to make any kind of a lasting contribution.
So, in summary, this book is not written to any public or academic niche of professionals. This book is, instead, written for those few fellow travelers ahead, beside, and behind me on this journey towards eventually being able to write to the public who has yet to come—the working public who, like us, will need a helping hand but who, if not for us paving the way will, like us, have to figure it all out on their own while trying to survive under capitalism. If we succeed in making a positive impact, it will be because of how we spend these next few years preparing for their arrival.
If you want to be in dialogue with me or others who might be using the concepts used herein, then this work might prove useful. I encourage you to take notes with the goal of providing me feedback in mind. Anyone who takes the time to write an Amazon review OR a direct email in response to this work is guaranteed to at least get my attention, but no promises that I will always see or respond in a timely manner (if at all!).
If you want to begin a dialogue with me but don’t have enough of a basis in theory yet to riff off of or critique what I am doing here, then jot down questions that come to mind when struggling with difficult passages (but also, for the particularly troubling chapters, maybe read those over once and wait a while before re-reading—note taking can be more productive after the first pass). I will also be looking forward to any editorial criticisms, seeing as this book had no editor. If you see, for instance, that I regularly break some rule of grammar, please don’t assume that I know I am doing it.
Everything I have learned about writing did not come through studying formal English. That was something I developed a huge learning-block towards. Insofar as I have any ability at all, that only comes from my sense for the language gained by reading, or because someone took the time to explain to me how what I was doing was wrong. Just know that constructive criticism is generally appreciated and literally the only way I get better at anything. (To anyone who feels compelled to lend grammar advice but has been discouraged by people who called you “a grammar Nazi,” I have added an end note at the end of this book that, I hope, will give you renewed inspiration to take your calling more seriously (endnote 1). I will leave it at that so as to get on with closing out this introduction.)
To anyone reading these words now, how should you approach the different chapters herein? Does it need to be read chronologically (from beginning to end, not out of order)? In short, read whatever is interesting or comprehensible to you. The first half is way harder than the latter—if overwhelmed, maybe skip ahead and come back later. Nothing worth reading is to be only read once, and I take for granted that the first reading of any work is merely to gain a basic sense of whether or not to come back later. Though all of the following chapters overlap and relate in important and complementary ways, these chapters are nevertheless also capable of standing alone. If the first half proves pretty difficult, the second half should be easier.
Because Waypoint gathers together my thoughts from points along this journey, each chapter shows the date that the piece was originally written. I have added sections in italics at the beginning of some chapters to help situate the reader (feel free to read these on their own or skip entirely). I have also added a lot of footnotes to help clarify jargon-heavy or confusing passages.
Finally, from the bottom of my heart, thank you Ann, my partner, for being really good at asking questions and pushing back when I say something that does not make sense. The way you encourage me to elaborate and refine my thoughts has helped so much throughout this process! Because we have spent so much time in dialogue, it can be hard to know how great your influence on my own development really has been. Also, thanks for the grammar suggestions and corrections.
Now that Ann has proof-read this work for its content, I can tell anyone who is struggling with a section that doesn’t have a clarifying footnote, to just remember that Ann understood it just fine as it stands. ;P
1 “America Is Beyond Redemption: A Blackpill Case For Exit”, by Eliot Rosenstock: https://madblackfreud.com/2020/06/14/america-isbeyond-redemption-a-blackpill-case-for-exit/
2 Inevitably someone will think “organic” in this phrase means non-GMO. The term “organic intellectual” was developed by Gramsci, a political theorist who makes the distinction between intellectuals who work in media, the university, or who are in general part of the professional managerial elite who work for the ruling class. Organic intellectuals are just people who are naturally predisposed to question, research, and articulate their developing understanding. As for “grass roots,” it’s just a common way of saying “naturally-emerging across a population” as opposed to “astro turf” (when corporations try to make something they purposefully orchestrate look grassroots).
3 According to Gallup https://news.gallup.com/poll/15370/partyaffiliation.aspx
4 Kayam, Orly. “The Readability and Simplicity of Donald Trump’s Language.” Political Studies Review 16, no. 1 (February 2018): 73–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929917706844.
5 Chapters 1, 2, and 3 were written for an audience based in academia and theory. The first two were written for the journals they were published in, whereas the third is my M.A. thesis—meaning it was written primarily with my thesis review committee in mind.
6 Leadership Lab: Writing Beyond the Academy 1.23.15 Speaker: Larry McEnerney https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=aFwVf5a3pZM&t=1041s
7 Kleist, Heinrich, and Michael Hamburger. “On The Gradual Construction Of Thoughts During Speech.” German Life and Letters 5, no. 1 (1951): 42–46. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0483.1951.tb01029.x. A link to this lovely piece that works for now: https://www.ias-research.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Kleist-and-Hamburger_-_1951_-_On-the-Gradual-Construction-of-Thoughts-During-Speech.pdf
8 Lethem, Jonathan, “The Ecstasy of Influence.” Harper’s Magazine, December 2, 2012. https://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/the-ecstasy-of-influence/.
9 If I only had the whole world’s attention for one whole minute I would just play “Copying Is Not Theft” https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4 and then recommend that those who love to read should check out “The Ecstasy of Influence.” https://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/the-ecstasy-of-influence/
