Trying to structure my new project and align it with my research group’s new collective project. Lots of planning and strategizing. Perhaps too much? I bump into James C. Scott’s views on his own intellectual trajectory:
The very attempt to summarize some of what I have written over several decades is likely to convey a false sense of purpose and unity—a teleology even. (…) There are connections between different things I have written, and more than once, I have been both startled and convinced that a close and perceptive reader had discerned a thread of thought that was obviously there. The simple point is that these were rarely connections that I was aware of at the time. I was, instead, simply stumbling, like a crow or magpie, from one shiny object to another. Maybe the phenomenology of my journey is beside the point, but I confess that my guiding ethic was one of intellectual hedonism; I turned my attention to whatever seemed to offer the most intellectual fun. And when I had squeezed as much fun from it as I could manage, I looked around for another playground.