Friction and the Art of Writing

(Writing is made of friction)

A wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of the road; spinning in the air it goes nowhere. Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection

One blessing/curse of what I do for a living (reading, writing, teaching) is having ample opportunity to reflect upon what I do for a living. There is no one way or best way to read, write or teach, and if you do them long enough, your understanding itself will shift over time—if it doesn’t, you’re not doing it right. That understanding will depend upon your circumstances, your shifting abilities, and the people and things you surround yourself with.

The metaphors I use to describe writing to myself change from month to month, but a few of them persist. This week, I was thinking about friction, mostly because it came up in a few different contexts, enough to catch my eye. Last post, I cited Kyle Chayka’s observation that “Friction is lower online and visibility is higher.” Kyla Scanlon had a thoughtful post about language (and trust) a week or so ago, and cited Rosie Spinks’ excellent piece on friendship where, among other things, she noted that “Friendships are, by their very nature, made of friction.” Spinks quotes at length a podcast with Esther Perel, who explains that

Everything about predictive technologies is basically giving us a form of assisted living. You get it all served in uncomplicated, lack of friction, no obstacles and you no longer know how to deal with people.

Spinks goes on to say that “Myself and people my age have been trained under the illusion that we can effectively eliminate any and all friction from our lives,” leading to what Perel calls “social atrophy.”

Is it any wonder, then, when I read LM Sacasas’ wonderful piece on “The Art of Living,” my first instinct was to notice the places where he was describing the importance of friction? Early on, he observes that “the ideal of limitlessness [in] consumption serves the modern economy quite well, but it does not serve the person well at all.” Sacasas’ essay is intended as provocation rather than prescription, but I think it urges us to come to terms with friction: “I may choose to accept this reality and respond creatively to it, or I can resist it and seek to transcend it and embrace every tool that promises to help me do so.”

Photo by Karsten Würth on Unsplash

Anna Tsing, in the book from which I pulled my epigraph, writes that “Roads are a good image for conceptualizing how friction works: Roads create pathways that make motion easier and more efficient, but in doing so they limit where we go. The ease of travel they facilitate is also a structure of confinement. Friction inflects historical trajectories, enabling, excluding, and particularizing.” I’ve written a great deal in recent months that’s touched on Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification,” which offers a perfect echo of this idea. Media platforms offer us the tools to transcend our immediate context, and in many cases they actively decompose (disrupt!) that context, only to reintroduce even more onerous friction once we’ve confined ourselves there.

The Ambivalence of Friction

I’m using friction in a couple of different ways here, and I should probably distinguish between them. At its most basic level, friction is a physical force, one that resists motion. Roll a ball and it will eventually come to a stop because of the friction acting upon it (and its momentum) through its contact with the ground. So on the one hand, friction is resistant, a limit on movement. We exist in the world surrounded by limits, some of which we choose, others which are chosen for us, to say nothing of the vast array of constraints that accompany life as human beings living in a particular place and time.

That doesn’t mean that all limits are equal. Some may be benevolent—baby-proofing one’s home to keep a child from playing with electrical sockets, drain cleaner, or Tide Pods is to introduce a certain amount of justifiable friction into their experience of the world. But as Sacasas notes, others may be unjustly imposed upon us. There’s a great deal of troublesome social friction out there, from mistaken assumptions and stereotypes to all of the -isms we struggle to dismantle. (Those social frictions are one of the reasons we tend today to speak in terms of equity rather than equality.)

However, as Tsing notes above (and in the epigraph), friction is also “enabling,” and that’s in part what I take Spinks to be saying when she notes that friendships are made of friction:

To know what is going on in someone’s day-to-day life, to make plans with them, and then reschedule those plans when someone inevitably gets sick, and then bring over Calpol or soup or an extra laptop charger. To water their plants while they’re away, to ask them to take your kids when you’re feeling sad, or for help getting rid of mice in your house. To show up for the walk you planned even when you’re a vulnerable anxious mess — this is all friction.

Obviously, we don’t tend to think of our interpersonal investments as friction in the negative sense, but that’s in part because (following Spinks) we’re conditioned to think of friction as annoying, as interference, as a constraint upon our existence. We spend less time culturally reflecting on the fact that a great deal of the meaning in our lives comes not through the transcendence of friction but through, as Sacasas puts it, “learning to draw out the fullness latent in our encounters with the world.” Our friends and families reshape “the constraints of our embodiment,” just as we alter theirs, and (ideally) we are the better for it.

To describe friction as ambivalent, as I would, is to acknowledge all of these competing—at times, contradictory—features. Friction can be physical, psychological, economic, social, and/or cultural. It can be productive and enabling, but it can also disturb, interfere, obfuscate, and vex. And it operates in a multitude of directions at once. My deteriorating eyesight has caused me to shift from physical reading to PDFs and Kindle books (where I can tweak font size), but that means that I’m now relying more heavily on Amazon (and their current unwillingness to charge me rent for my files), but it also means that I can export my notes move conveniently to include them in Substack posts, but it also means that I can’t loan out books to students as much as I used to. Friction is relational in the very mundane fashion that it requires two people, objects, or ideas to come into contact with each other. But it’s relational in a much broader, ecological sense as well, given how rare it is that we experience just a single point of contact.

Mental Friction

I included the word “ideas” above because, in the same way that friendship is made of friction, I’d argue that knowledge works the same way. I don’t want to wax too philosophical here about learning—how we move from ignorance to knowledge—but it requires us to come into contact with what we don’t know, whether it’s Vivaldi’s birthday (yesterday!), the Japanese word for fire engine (which I still remember from my 1987 coursework), or Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive critique of Plato’s attitudes towards writing (which requires a bit more friction). We learn by initiating friction (by encountering and engaging things we don’t know) and then by negotiating it, through reading, reflecting, note taking, memorization, associating it with other things we do know, etc. We have all sorts of tools—physical, emotional, intellectual—for minimizing that friction, sometimes to the point that we don’t even realize it’s there.

The problem comes when we flip that around and imagine that it’s possible, or even desirable, to achieve friction-less knowledge. Or worse yet, that any knowledge worth having shouldn’t require anything of us in the first place. I cringe every time I hear a variation of the cliché that the internet or a phone “puts all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips.” Of course, in a very limited sense, that is sort of true, in about the same way that I can describe John Hodgman as my friend because I subscribe to his podcast.

We have a great deal of information at our fingertips, it’s true, but translating it into knowledge is another matter entirely. Tsing writes that “knowledge claims emerge in relation to concrete problems and possibilities for dialogue—the productive features of friction.” I’d go one step further, and suggest that knowledge continues to generate friction. That’s the reason that I keep reading books like the ones I mentioned at the beginning of this post—even if I don’t always find a lot of value there, if nothing else, they give me perspectives alongside which I develop my own. I don’t find my own perspective(s) completely satisfying either—there’s always something more I could learn. And that’s one of the lessons of Young’s Wrong: the identity distillation model that she critiques is designed to produce certainty rather than knowledge. It’s a model that reduces friction rather than generating it.

Friction and Writing

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

I love the line “one stick alone is just a stick.” In the most basic, material sense, a pencil (or pen, or crayon) is just a stick, too. It’s not until we use it to make contact with paper that it does anything. And while our friction these days comes more often from fingers on keyboards, that’s where the energy of writing comes from. One of Plato’s criticisms of writing was that it was “dead” compared to the living voice of an interlocutor, “no true wisdom” at all.

[Written words] seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever.

And there is a sense in which a book is just a sheaf of papers covered with squiggles, but this misunderstands what it means to write (and ultimately, to read). The publication of a book, or an essay, or a Substack post is the vanishingly small pause in a process of circulation that takes the ideas from one or more people and puts them into contact with everyone else who takes them up¹. It’s not the friction that we see at play in the Socratic dialogues, true, but it generates friction all the same.

The funny thing that I noticed when I was pulling that passage from the Phaedrus was that it’s actually not a bad advertisement for generative AI, which will go on telling us different things, remixing the content confined in its language models. At least, that’s what the AI companies would have us think: pretty soon, we’ll be able to set aside all that awkward, uncomfortable, unsettling friction that writing entails, because SocraGPTes will do it for us.

If language is the medium of our intersubjectivity, each LLM prompt signals an attempt to withdraw from it, to stop negotiating the meanings of words and things with others in order to lapse into a kind of docility where words have become an instrumental, transparent code that can program us (Rob Horning).

If we leave the business of “true wisdom” to our AI overlords, we will soon find ourselves playing the corresponding role of Polus or Callicles, whose only responsibility it is to punctuate Socrates’ monologue with prompts like “It must be so, Socrates.” Horning argues, “That we can write the prompt or query is not an emblem of our freedom but of our surrender.” GenAI may get us to those “structure[s] of confinement” faster, but that’s not exactly a point in its favor.

Back when my disciplinary forebears were carving out an institutional space for the teaching of writing, one of their grounding insights was that we should “teach writing as a process, not a product.” It’s always been challenging to do that in a setting where grades are based more upon the product, but it names precisely the problem with AI, and the reason why replacing writing instruction with prompt development is a horrible idea. Learning to write is quite literally learning to think, and while I wouldn’t claim to speak on behalf of all writing teachers, perfectly punctuated “final products” are much less important than evidence of thought. Writing (my own included) is always in-process, at least until you surrender yourself to a machine designed to simulate thought for you. At the moment we remove friction from the writing process, what’s left is something, but it’s not writing anymore.

I’ve probably gone on enough for one day, so I’ll leave you with an extended passage from Sacasas’ post. It’s about an “art of living,” but it works just as well as a description of an art of writing:

It suggests not a set of methods which demand nothing of me, but a set of practices or skills which I must cultivate and whose cultivation changes me in the process. These skills enable me not only to produce something, but also to see the possibilities latent within the medium and to imaginatively draw these out—not to make a demand, but to perceive and respond to an invitation.

That set of practices doesn’t develop in a frictionless environment, any more than the wheel spinning in the air will get you to where you want to go.

1. Every time I write something like this, I recall Daniel Dennett’s line that a scholar is just a library’s way of making more libraries.