Quick and Dirty: On Scholarship as Manual Labor
Quick, in the sense I’m talking about it here, is not a question of who writes the fastest or about the number of words per minute you can type. Rather, it is the speed to writing I am referring to, the art of being able to put words on paper without thinking about it too much—write first, think then, edit later. To be quick to subject your arguments to the friction of the paper means that you’ll discover the flaws of your thinking faster, see where your reasoning doesn’t work, and actually save those thoughts that deserves saving.
.. separation of a specific field, such as “the economy,” by necessity leads us into a paradox. If you reduce the field to a set of functions such as production, distribution, and consumption, you will neglect phenomena that are actually needed to grasp the field, such as, the role of poetry in publishing. But if you try to adopt a more holistic, systemic view, including everything that might play a role, you will lose sight of the field of interest, and start studying “everything.” Research, in this sense, becomes a continuous balancing act between delimitation and inclusion