Category: Reading as a Social Practice

Books, powerpoints, tabloids, and tote bags. What do we care about in reading?








Do we really let ourselves be encouraged to present our ideas with flashy powerpoint slides and then wonder why students don’t bother reading books anymore?












Last weekend, I had an inspiring seminar on Hume’s Treatise and so I was just about to write another blogpost about reading philosophy. This time I wanted to try a slightly different angle and focus on what we care about when reading. What is it that matters to us – beyond the issue of what might matter to our instructors in the context of a Hume course? Why do we pick up a book like Hume’s Treatise? What steps might we have gone through in advance of picking up such a brick? What makes us pick up big philosophy books and carry them around? Here are a couple of half-baked thoughts, not on reading philosophy but on some perhaps substantial changes in what figures in our reading practices between different generations.





Signalling readership to others. – The smooth passage from my associations about reading philosophy to ones about why we carry books around eventually transported me to a passage in Deniz Ohde’s autosociobiography Sky Glow (Streulicht) that I recently read: Here, the narrator focuses, among other things, on hopes and fears in her attempts at social climbing. One scene has her getting ready for going to evening school and decidedly picking up a canvas tote bag with the logo of a German weekly newspaper (Die Zeit), hoping she is going to make the impression of belonging to the group of … well, of what precisely? Perhaps the group of serious readers and thinkers. The scene is an acute portrait of how we signal readership to others. Of how we want to be seen as readers. We signal that we read and, even in reading, we signal to others that we read. Reading is a status symbol and indicative of a supposed lifestyle. The creators of adverts on tote bags and elsewhere have known this for a long time. What I find so heart-wrenching about this particular scene is that this person’s signalling happens in a world that doesn’t really care any longer about the status of being a reader. As readers of the novel, we might assume that the narrator, presenting flashbacks of her younger self, has learned this the hard way at some point. But the protagonist clearly doesn’t know this at the time at which the scene is set. She cares about reading and cares about being seen as a reader. But reading is no longer seen as a status symbol, at least not in the same way as it used to be.





Changing signals. – Books used to be indicators of intellectual status, wealth and time, lots of time. Being a reader could be signalled by carrying and hoarding books. I am not sure what exactly has initiated crucial changes in such indicators. (That said, I hope to find out more about changing reading cultures in due course.) But by now even the book-loving scholar in the humanities is more of a distant cliché than a reality. Today’s academics mostly pride themselves on being “busy” or even “stressed”, and many might in fact often be too busy to read or at least to read as much as they list in their bibliographies. ­– Now, I don’t want to complain about decreasing literacy or interest in reading. My point is rather that the indicators of readership may have changed. If this is correct, we’re faced with the the following question: Would we recognize new indicators for what they are? Instead of carrying a dusty book to class your students might prepare a flashy powerpoint presentation. What these students signal to their instructors is still competence (or so I think), but it is not signalling competence in the way I have learned to signal competence in my youth. But even when I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, reading had already become a mass phenomenon. Not only in the sense of many people having the necessary literacy, but also in the sense of the world being a place packed with words. Adverts and signs were populating the streets. Newspapers were everywhere. Children read their comics on the loo. Workers read newspapers for breakfast, pacing through headlines and pictures. (Of course, for most of us this is common, but if you study medieval and early modern philosophy, you’ll find that our common reading culture is markedly different.) Now if reading is happening everywhere, mere (signalling of) reading is no longer a socially distinctive marker.





Reading is not replaced, but happening differently. – This ubiquitousness of reading has simply exploded. Given the recent changes in technology and design allowing for digital reading and bullet-point presentations or summaries of one’s reading, it is plausible to assume that reading is turning into a different thing altogether. Firstly, reading does no longer signal a socially elevated status. Showing off by being a bookish person does make you look old-fashioned at best, but it doesn’t mean you’re wealthy or smart. Secondly, the practice of reading is no longer visible in books or paper alone, but basically baked into every device we see or touch. I can read my phone or in my phone. People send me texts all the time. Every pling sound is a demand to read more. If this is correct, reading doesn’t need to be signalled, simply because it’s everywhere. As my colleague Irmtraud Hnilica pointed out, we “can’t expect [our students] to be just like us.” The difference might just run much deeper than I used to think.





Where do I belong? – If reading neither needs to be signalled nor signals that I’m special, where does that leave me? Me as a member of the group of serious readers? And where does it leave you? We have to accept that reading is nothing special and we have to accept that reading is a practice somewhat different from the olden days. So what? I grew up in a different, somewhat old-fashioned world and now ended up learning to summarize books with bullet-points. Once you’ve learned that and have very little time on your hands, you might want to save time by reducing reading to reading bullet-points even more. And our students don’t do what we tell them. Rather, they imitate what they actually see us doing.





Let me close with two suggestions: Firstly, we need to learn to recognize different practices of reading. The fact that the hallmark of being an avid reader is no longer that you carry a dusty book around doesn’t change that much. Phones do not replace reading, but they affect the way we read, our reading culture. Overall, we read much more than we used to, say, in modern times. Secondly, we need to be cautious in thinking that technological designs of reading are in any way innocent. As Daniel Martin Feige has argued convincingly, especially the digitalized forms and designs of reading and talking about reading are not guided by their aptitude but by the possibilities of monetization: While it might not make a difference to the texts if I read Hegel on a kindle, the increasing transformation of our verbal or written exchanges about such texts into specific formats provided in commercial media (Apple, Microsoft, Google etc.) subscribes to their economic models (see Feige, esp. p. 43 and 55). Put plainly, the fact that our exchanges about books are often happening in the form of showing each other powerpoint presentations (at conferences or in class) might not so much be owing to the advantages of that format, but because some people earn lots of money if that format is demanded everywhere and if further (educational) expectations are driven in line with such a format. I wouldn’t put it past people that they encourage the use of powerpoint and, by extension, other digitally convenient forms of streamlining content for monetary rather than educational reasons. Having our book summaries and discussions done by ChatGPT tightens this transformation. In this sense, the new ways of reading and the new ways of indicating social status aligned with the virtues of reading are still following the money, as much as booksellers might have already done in the past. But the current changes and transformations in our practices might leave us with something of a generational gap. If all of this is correct, we might wonder whether we really have a decline of literacy – or perhaps rather a change in practices.

	


	



			
				


			

			
Does reading involve texts? Reading as a reciprocal process between readers
		
	
	

		

It goes without saying that the title question is a bit of a provocation. Nevertheless, the point I want to make is that reading is first and foremost an interaction between readers and the ‘text itself’ comes second. It’s not just one of those weird hear-me-out appeals. Rather, I think that this insight should have repercussions on our practice of teaching and, perhaps, of reading.





Early Beginnings





Come to think of it, before you even learned to read, you probably have been read to! Be it by your parents or by mischievous siblings. At least I remember that, before I ever set eyes on a text myself, my mother used to read fairy tales to me, hoping I’d fall asleep. So my first encounters of reading were actually interactions, not so much with the text, but with the special reading voice of my mother. A reciprocal interaction: My mother would read; I would listen. My mother would stop; I would plead. Tell me, gentle reader, is my listening already a form of reading? I’m not sure. – Anyway. Likewise, learning to read at school involved first and foremost interactions with the teacher and the class. Here, however, the reciprocity would become slightly asymmetrical: I would not just try to make sense of the letters on the blackboard; I would be judged on my performance. I don’t remember much of it, but I still feel the excitement of internally gliding along with my inner voice trying to remember the alphabet correctly: A, B, C, D, E, F, G … H? I don’t actually remember whether we also had to learn to write the letters when learning to read them, but it feels like it must have been a related process. In any case, reading is taught through an interaction between teachers and pupils (and asymmetrically so), when actual texts are still a long way away.





Tacit Agreements in Reading





Let’s slowly move on to my claim then. My thesis is that at least a crucial part of reading consists in partly tacit and partly explicit interactions between readers. Why would this be so, though? Doesn’t reading mainly consist in grabbing a text and reading it? Well, before you actually pick up a text, you’ll be fed with assumptions about the genre. So you’ll know what to expect before you set eyes on the actual page or screen. If you enter a restaurant, for instance, the items on the menu won’t come across as strange poetry. Conversely, if you picked up a book from a poetry section, you wouldn’t take the text to offer a menu, even if there was talk of pizza and pasta on the page. And if you enter a philosophy class, you’ll of course expect to be offered philosophical texts. In any case, the habitually familiar settings already stir tacit expectations about the texts in question. I consider such settings tacit agreements between the reader and the provider of texts.  If you enter a restaurant, you’ll expect a menu. If you enter a literature course, you’ll expect a literary text (or at least one dealing with literature). Questions (mostly on genre) will be raised if these expectations are frustrated. At this point, the crucial stages of interaction are about seeing whether expectations of genre are met or frustrated.





The Topic of Texts





Philosophical and certain literarary texts often thrive on a certain openness or even ambiguities. Unlike manuals or menus their understanding is not exhausted by being able to act on their content; that is, to build the shelves or order the soup successfully. This means that it’s often an open question what’s going on or what the text is actually about. Deciding on the precise topic of a passage or paper or book is thus often a matter of debate. This can even be true of your very own texts. (Agnes Callard once gave a nice example of her book as an Ugly Duckling by reporting on how she started out thinking it was on the weakness of will when it later turned out that she was really talking about aspiration.) So even if we’re clear about the genre of a text, we might remain unsure about its topic. In such situations, we might recommend all sorts of scholarly remedies: such as looking into the text in question, comparing it with other texts or some such straightforward means. However, what I think is really doing a great part of the work is the interaction with other readers. This doesn’t mean that the text plays no part in it. But the attempts at settling the topic will crucially involve an attempt to reach agreement with other readers, be they alive or part of a tradition of reading texts in a certain way.





The Triangulation Thesis





This idea has its roots in Donald Davidson’s so-called triangulation argument: Understanding linguistic utterances or the beliefs of my interlocutor involves not just understanding what object these utterances are about. Rather I need to interact with my interlocutor to fix the object in question in the first place. Jeff Malpas puts this point as follows: 





“Identifying the content of attitudes is a matter of identifying the objects of those attitudes, and, in the most basic cases, the objects of attitudes are identical with the causes of those same attitudes (as the cause of my belief that there is a bird outside my window is the bird outside my window). Identifying beliefs involves a process analogous to that of ‘triangulation’ (as employed in topographical surveying and in the fixing of location) whereby the position of an object (or some location or topographical feature) is determined by taking a line from each of two already known locations to the object in question – the intersection of the lines fixes the position of the object … Similarly, the objects of propositional attitudes are fixed by looking to find objects that are the common causes, and so the common objects, of the attitudes of two or more speakers who can observe and respond to one another’s behaviour.” (Italics mine)  





So while the object or Ding an sich is elusive, it’s being fixed in the interaction with the other. Similarly, I think that the topic of a text is elusive. Determining it requires triangulation with other readers. Once we admit that, we’ll see that becoming clear about our interlocutor’s assumptions and authorities as well as their relation to our own take on the text is a crucial element in reading.





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Part of this idea has been presented at an interdisciplinary workshop on “Reziprozität” at the FernUniversität in Hagen. I’d like to thank Dorett Funcke for inviting me to present my musings at this occasion. Special thanks to Christian Grabau, Irina Gradinari, Irmtraud Hnilica, Tanja Moll, and Marija Weste for further discussions of this idea.