Posts ⁂ The Postmodern Terminal >_
A pop artist's classroom list, read as working conditions for doctoral writing: experiment, production over perfection, and keeping the maker away from the editor.
Sister Corita Kent (1918–1986) taught and eventually led the art department at Immaculate Heart College, and out of that classroom came a list called Ten Rules for Students and Teachers. The list still hangs in studios, offices, and kitchens. Her serigraphs, which pull bread wrappers, advertising slogans, popular music, and biblical language into the same frame, belong to the pop art movement even though the movement rarely says so. I will argue that the Ten Rules are better read as a scholar's rule of life than as studio decoration. I will show how three of them, rules four, six, and eight, diagnose the exact places where scholarly writing stalls.
Start with the frame. A dissertation, a journal article, a public scholarship project: each is an intellectual product, and each is also a practice. Practices have conditions. Rule one names the condition before it names the work. Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while. A durable intellectual home, separate from the desk where you answer email. A stable question. A reliable set of sources. A community of accountability. Stay long enough for the place to teach you something.
Rule four says consider everything an experiment, and in doctoral writing that rule carries weight, because the alternative is reading every draft as a verdict on your worth. Outlines, bibliographies, interview questions, chapter structures: prototypes, all of them. Ask what a paragraph or a source would teach you if you treated it as a test rather than a judgment. Biko Mandela Gray taught me to hear critique as an act of care for a research practice, which is a different thing from an assessment of a person. Disaggregate yourself from the work. Then you can let the work fail, which is the only way it improves.
Rule six pushes further: there is no win and no fail, there is only make. Perfectionism is a production problem wearing a moral costume. Every word you put on the page is a form of making, including the words you cut. When you edit, do not delete the paragraph that will not fit; move it to a file called scratch pad. A paragraph that fails as a paragraph can become a footnote, a lecture, a grant idea, or the compost out of which the next sentence grows. Nothing is wasted. The goal is not to avoid bad drafts. The goal is to keep making until the project teaches you what you need.
Rule eight is the one I return to most. Do not try to create and analyze at the same time; they are different processes, and they use different parts of you. Writing stalls when the editor interrupts the maker too early. So I draft in an app with spelling and grammar turned off, nothing highlighted, nothing yelling at me. When that fails I use a keyboard with the keys blacked out. When that fails I turn the monitor off and write in the dark. Later, in a separate session, the analyst returns for structure, citation, theory, and method. Both processes matter. They do not belong in the same hour.
Rule seven is plainer and more demanding: the only rule is work. Read, note, draft, revise, share, repeat. Breakthroughs are the visible surface of invisible habits (Will Durant, glossing Aristotle, put it as excellence being a habit rather than an act). Rule nine insists on joy, which is not decoration but stamina; grief, injustice, and rigor were present with me all day, every day of my doctorate, and the jokes in the group chat kept them from taking the rest. Rule ten breaks all the rules, including its own, by leaving room for X quantities: the unplanned encounter, the voice you did not expect, the source that changes the argument. A project that cannot be surprised is closed.
Here is the deflationary reading. The scholar's task is not to have ideas. Ideas keep their own schedule, and they arrive to people who have built conditions that can receive them. Corita's rules are those conditions, writ large. Now tear them up and write your eleventh.
The Postmodern Terminal >_