The obligation to begin

I would have preferred to be enveloped in words, borne way beyond all possible beginnings. At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon to me. There would have been no beginnings: instead, speech would proceed from me, while I stood in its path--a slender gap--the point of its possible disappearance. . . .
A good many people, I imagine, harbour a similar desire to be freed from the obligation to begin, a similar desire to find themselves, right from the outside, on the other side of discourse, without having to stand outside it, pondering its particular, fearsome, and even devilish features.

Ah, Foucault. You say it so well. Beginnings are devilish indeed.

For I have no gift for first chapters. None at all. Zero. Zip.

The main (or at least a *big*) reason my book is still in process is that the first chapter keeps eluding me.

Having read a number of other people's first chapter drafts, I know that this is a common experience: the first chapter is always the hardest to write, often the worst of the lot. But I thought at some point I would surely manage to overcome this obstacle.

For the longest time, I was trying to make my old first chapter "work." I thought I just needed to do more research, find a new way to focus it. Finally, I threw in the towel and decided, no, the problem was that the chapter just wasn't doing it. It no longer fit in the book as I had reconceptualized it after the dissertation stage. I didn't want to get rid of a whole chapter, but I did.

So, I thought, I'll just start with what used to be Chapter 2. I had already decided I needed to add a new chapter in the middle, so I would still end up with the same number of chapters.

But now I'm slowly realizing Chapter 2 also sucks as a place to start. Why start with Chapter 2? There's no particular reason to start with Chapter 2. It just appeared in the gap left by Chapter 1.

Here's the latest plan:start the new chapter. The one that was slotted to be Chapter 4. I think that chapter, or at least some version of that chapter, needs to be Chapter 1.

Sounds kinda crazy. Especially when you consider that I *thought* I was more or less writing a history, and Chapter 4 deals with a decade quite a bit later than the first three chapters. Doesn't seem too historical to put a later period first.

But what Chapter 4 (Chapter 1?) does is establish the exigence for the history I'm telling. In that chapter, which focuses on the 1970s, I'm looking at a decade that saw the emergence of a new professional organization devoted to administration, a decade that also saw the publication of a bajillion classic books on management, including Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital and Chandler's history, The Visible Hand. It's also the decade when, in the words of Geoffrey Sirc, composition became no fun. A significant decade, a significant moment: an exigence for watching the circulation of a managerial affect, both before and after that decade.