Revisiting the craft of frozzles.
When my daughter was forming her first sentences, one of the combinations that frequently came out of her mouth was: “must fix the frozzle!”[1] For some reason, she considered this activity of uttermost importance. And we, we always knew what to expect.
We never did discover though, why a frozzle was called a frozzle. She was too young to explain, and growing older she simply forgot. “Fixing the frozzle” always involved cords of some sort; yarn, laces, threads or wires, sometimes several of them tangled together. She would tie them to different objects in the apartment, loose objects as well as door handles and heavy furniture. With great seriousness she went about her craft. Eventually a web had been created, connecting different spots of our home to what always ended up in a chaotic mesh. Ever since then, “fixing the frozzle” has been a recurrent joke in our home; the expression for any activity complicating things rather than solving them – the very opposite, it might seem, of “fixing”.
My daughter is now older. In school, they practice writing longer texts, fiction and non-fiction. What her teachers ask from her is not that different from what I ask from my students. Orderly texts. Neat and easy-to-follow arguments. Stringency. Structure. Beginning, middle, end. And while going on and on with these criteria, and while together with my students reading yet another article assigned by me and that follows the structure of beginning, middle, end, I get increasingly annoyed – with the article, the author, myself as a teacher, with it all. For the author, that much is clear, is quite skilled in the writing of scholarly articles. Me – which is unfortunate for my academic career – not so much.
And suddenly, I see it so clearly. My never-ending-story-monograph, my whole research, my despair in never seeming to be able to finish this book I have been working on for so many years – it is all about one single thing: it is, and has always been, a frozzle.
How do you fix a frozzle? Instead of looking for the answer, I seem to prefer nagging about this article I assigned for my students only to regret it afterwards. It is a text that suffers from all the common maladies of a typical scholarly article. Firstly, it is boring. Secondly, the author has this thing about using self-invented terms, which enables them to announce as innovations things already said quite a few times by others, only with slightly different words. You did not invent this wheel, you know, I find myself thinking while reading. We should acknowledge each other’s work, not pretend to be the first when we are not. And then, when I get really annoyed: Can you not see how you are serving the same hegemony that you are criticizing? Read your history already!
Certainly, someone else could say the same of me, for who can read everything that is to be read when so much is being written? Last time I got an automatically generated e-mail from one of those scholarly paper websites, it tried to lure me into paying for a premium subscription by telling me that 1.674.982 articles matched my specific interest.
But I guess my nagging is by now at least getting closer to the core of the problem. As scholars we are increasingly taught, and we keep teaching other young scholars, that what is really important in Academia is to publish. Participate in the publishing race! Obtain quick results so that you can publish them at as fast a pace as possible! With such demands on measurable productivity, who has the time to read one’s history, to read the classics? Or even, to think about what is or could be included in these “classics”? Who even find the time to care about the archive of texts from the not so distant past, written on similar topics just a few decades before one hatched that brilliant idea of an argument and launched it as one’s own grand innovation?
Taking the time to read the backlists do not generate bibliometric points. And anyways, when actually reading the classics, surprisingly often they prove to be quite good collections of frozzles. And who has the time for that?
*
Reading can sometimes be a little like falling in love. I remember my first encounter with the young Karl Marx precisely that way, as a falling in love. Is it not then symptomatic that it was Marx, who the editor of an anthology in which I participated in a few years ago suggested I would replace with a less “moldy” reference? I need to be fair and admit that the anthology in question was not a scholarly publication, but I still see it as a sign of the times. Who can be, at the same time, so crystal clear and so frozzling as Marx? Not many of his contemporaries match his peculiar sensitivity when following the disparate cords of modern society, trying to discern how they are meshed together in ways that might appear deeply contradictory but yet is extremely functional – that is, ideological. How much have I not learned from this love of my youth?
Paulo Freire used to say that books are like people; you do not need to agree with everything in them to keep talking to them. And it is in the conversation, in the dialogue, we learn.
What would Marx be without his frozzles?
*
When thinking of Marx, I feel an urgent need to defend the frozzles. I am biased, yes. I have just confessed how the frozzles of my own research keep eluding me, and of course I wish I could just finish that damn book already. But this nagging about the scholarly article I am currently reading that bores me so? Well, let us just say that if it was desire to write that brought me into Academia – and it really was – only on very rare occasions do I find a scholarly article that in any way resonates with that desire.[2]
My annoying scholarly article[3] is indeed a good case in point. Its argument is solid and the conclusions are valid. The author launches a concept and goes about to show why the concept is not only useful, but indispensable for understanding a specific phenomenon. They draw the argument as a neat thread throughout the text, avoiding any sidesteps that might frozzle the picture. And the resulting picture – a very clean one – is not really wrong. It is just … well, it is incredibly boring in its refined unmessiness. The scope, by the same token, is quite limited.
First and foremost, rather than a text that thinks, it is a text reporting the result of a thinking process without itself being part of this process. It is, in this sense, a closed text.
Is it wrong? I guess not. Structure is all well, stringency of argument too. We need to stress these things, and yes, I too do stress them with my students. For many, adherence to a fairly strict structure is a must if one is to communicate one’s research. But the increasing streamlining of scholarly writing, the demand on all of us to fit our research into a specific result-oriented version of the scholarly journal article, the demands on us to be “productive” according to quantifiable standards – all this is devastating for precisely that which is also said to be indispensable for research: creative thinking.
I am, of course, not the first to make the point; I did not invent this wheel. But a growing dissatisfaction with dominant scholarly genres still urges me to insist: The shrinking space for text as a form of thinking in its own right is devastating. We are destroying our most creative students. And, we are destroying ourselves.
There are, again, exceptions. But it requires a certain amount of bravery, as well as persistence, to defy the disciplining demands of Academia. Two brilliant colleagues of mine come to mind for their insistence on creating messy frozzles, although in quite different ways. Jean Halley’s work, focusing gender, human/animal relationships, race and power, takes as its point of departure the messiest of places. In Horse Crazy: Girls and the Lives of Horses, she approaches the topic of girls’ and women’s relationship with horses through a childhood memory. The opening sentence of the book reads: I do not know why my father, not very often but periodically, surprised me with unexpected kindness. By this opening into an extensive sociological research, distance between researcher and research topic collapses in a site of pain, loss, and abandonment. From this place, one that can never be clear and well-structured, the frozzels unfurl themselves and the book becomes more than just another study of a sociological phenomenon. It becomes a history of survival.[4]
My second example is philosopher Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, whose texts are poetic struggles with the world and with the word. Her texts are efforts of navigating through a language that is a making in itself, rather than a means of communication. In her recent book The Fascism of Ambiguity: A Conceptual Essay, not only does she manage to explain some of the peculiar modes of fascism in an era of social media and click economy. She manages to do this in a language that resists the deflation of meaning she diagnoses as crucial for the way contemporary fascism operates. Language, then, becomes true poetry in the ancient Greek sense of the term: a bringing into being of something that did not exist before.[5]
*
In my memory, I return to my daughter’s frozzles. I guess that what we, her parents, had to realize was this: fixing the frozzle did not mean solving the mess. What it meant was: join as many threads and ends you can gather and see what comes out of it. It might turn out quite annoying and not very useful. But you might also just discover something that will profoundly change your way of looking at the world.
[1] Or rather, since she said it in Swedish it was: måste fixa frassen! As “frass” is not a recognized word in Swedish, I choose to translate it into another non-recognized word in English. By the way, I love footnotes. Brackets are an abomination.
[2] Since this is a good excuse to include another footnote in a text that does not really require footnotes, and since it is only fair to acknowledge the existing exceptions to the rule, I will mention two such exceptions that I make my students read too, in the hope these texts will convey something about not only the power of beauty in language, but also the sometimes terrifying responsibility coming with it: Saidiya Hartman’s essay on working with archival material from the middle passage, “Venus in Two Acts”, and Kathrine McKittrick brilliant dialogue with Hartman in “Mathematics Black Life”. Both articles are as beautiful as they are painful to read, and absolutely necessary as interventions into historiography, archival methodology and the connection between knowledge and pain. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”, Small Axe vol 12, nr 2 2008; Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life”, The Black Scholar, vol 44, nr 2 2014.
[3] Here I put a footnote without a reference, for the writer of this specific article is of no importance. The article has passed peer review in a respected academic journal, its arguments are good and solid, and the conclusions are convincing. The only real flaw is the short academic memory the article is an expression of, which justifies the claims made by the author of having invented a whole new wheel. In short, there are thousands, perhaps millions, of articles out there similar to this one. You will just have to take my word on its representability. And anyways, since I am not really writing a scholarly article here I will just be content with not backing every argument with a reference.
[4] Jean O’Malley Halley, Horse Crazy: Girls and the Lives of Horses, University of Georgia Press 2019.
[5] Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, The Fascism of Ambibuity: A Conceptual Essay, Bloomsbury Academic 2022.