“… interpretation is the source of texts, facts, authors, and intentions.”
Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?
Do you remember when you first committed some of your own thoughts to paper? Perhaps you kept a diary, perhaps you wrote poems or lyrics or crafted a letter to a friend. Perhaps you had worked on the aesthetics of your handwriting. Anyway, there it was. Something that you had written could now be read and, of course, misread in a distant place during your absence. This striking distance became even more evident to me when I had seen my words, not in my clumsy handwriting, but in the typeface of a word-processor. Imagining that someone would read my words not as my personal scribblings but as a text in an authoritative typeface, made me at once proud but also seemed to diminish my personal impact on the text. In any case, the absence or possible absence of the author from something written, I suppose, is what turns texts into something objective. As I see it, texts become objective when they can be read independently of the writer, of what the writer says and thinks. If this is correct, it seems that written texts are fundamentally different from spoken texts or thoughts. In turn, this makes me wonder whether it’s written texts alone that afford the interpretive openness allowing for different readings or interpretations as we know them in the humanities of our time. In what follows, I would like pursue some perhaps naïve musings on this issue.
Thinking versus speaking versus thought?
If you observe what you say in contrast to how you write, you’ll probably notice a stark difference between spoken versus written language. While academics sometimes seem to try and imitate the grammatical standards of their written language in their speech, we quickly notice that the grammatical rules, word choices and other aspects are vastly different. Pondering on this issue quickly brought me back to the ancient and medieval doctrine of “three kinds of language”, according to which thought is expressed through spoken language and spoken language is signified by written language. But once you notice how different already speaking and writing really are, it’s difficult to give much credit to said doctrine. The very idea that writing is a set of signs of what is spoken strikes me as a very impoverished understanding of the difference. This makes me wonder when written language was first considered as a set of signs independently from spoken language. Following Stephan Meier-Oeser’s work, my hunch is that William of Ockham and Pierre D’Ailly in their logical treatises are among the first to deem written signs as independent from spoken language. (Sadly, it’s not entirely clear why they hold this in contrast to many of their fellow thinkers.) Now, once you think of written language as independent from speech it seems that you acknowledge something that could be the objectivity of the written text. Of course, long before the written text is acknowledged as an independent signifier, there have been sacred texts like the Bible that were considered objective in some sense. But experiencing our very own writings as independent from our speaking must do something to the way we think about texts and their interpretability more generally, or so I think.
The written text as an objective ‘thing’
The way we encounter written texts or books (be it on paper or screens) seems to present them as distal objects, independent from how we interact about or with them. Like the table in front of you, the book on your desk or in your pdf isn’t altered when you look away. This experience is certainly at least in part responsible for the common assumption that texts and theirmeanings are stable items independently of us. Likewise, our experience of reading is commonly thought of as grasping something external to us or our interactions. But why? While I myself have begun to think that reading is in many ways a matter primarily dependent on interactions between readers, I equally wonder how written texts, non-sacred texts in particular, have earned the status of independent carriers of meaning that can be hit or missed. Our current reading practices inside and outside of academia seem to corroborate this assumption. – (What does it say? This is a question that silences classes but equally fosters the pretence that texts are stable unchanging sources of meaning that provide all the necessary constraints for possible interpretations. Yet, not knowing whether we’re reading a recipe or a a poem, we are probably unable to tell the genres apart without context. “Context” – this harmless little term obscuring all the greatly important factors allowing for recognition, and constantly underestimated as a “side issue” when it comes to competing readings!) But what does it take for a written text to be actually seen as independent in such ways?
Investigating the question of the objectivity of texts will take some time. But currently it seems that this objectivity becomes undone in quite unexpected manners: the advent of chatGPT does not only call into question the production of texts through proper authorship. Rather, it also calls into question the independence of written language as a system of signs, thriving on a supposed text-world relation having been taken for granted for a very long time. Reading a piece of text, we can no longer presume that it was produced by a person having a relation to the world, to themselves and to other people making it a rational item, interpretable by rational beings, or simply readers.
Pointing is a nonverbal gesture. Often, the index finger is used. Like an archer aiming an arrow at a target, the index finger aims at something. This gesture is meant to direct another person’s attention, to move their gaze so that they focus on the object indicated by the finger.
It is also possible to point with words: “this,” “there,” “here,” “now,” “you,” and “I” are all terms that point. “I,” “here,” and “now” are especially interesting, as they are indexical terms that refer to the person, place, and time of their use. If someone asks, “Who wants another dessert?” I can say “I,” and thereby point to myself, whatever that might mean. And if someone asks, “Where did my dessert go?” I might say “here” and point to my belly.
Texts in which one often finds the “I” are novels written in the first-person perspective, such as Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, told by its hero Oskar Matzerath; autobiographies, like Goethe’s Poetry and Truth; confessions, such as those by Augustine or Rousseau; and diaries, like those of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil. The boundaries between these genres are fluid. Autobiographies and confessions are written, like novels, for readers other than the writer and may contain some or many fictional elements. Most diaries are not fiction and are not intended for the public. Confessions are originally probably a legal genre. The term conscientia refers, according to Cicero, to an inner forum, that is the highest authority in judging about virtues and vices and stands above publicity.[1] We can relate conscientia in this context also to what is now called “guilty conscience”. A prosecutor might read out his accusations, and the defendant turns pale—he shows conscientia. After that, he might confess, show penitence, and thereby change the judge’s mind so that he is seen not just as a villain but as someone capable of shame and regret. Thus, a confession is directed against a possible accuser and judge. From the legal realm, this idea moved perhaps into religion (or was it the other way round?), where God is thought of as an almighty judge.
These complications are not unimportant to our topic, since the self is sometimes described as an inner tribunal. The accusing and praising voices of our parents may be internalized and continue “within us,” producing an inner polylogue. The metaphorical inner theater and the drama of accusation, confession, praise, and regret played out on its stage can be seen as what we call “the self”, if we follow philosophers like David Hume and George Herbert Mead.
II
Diaries are private chronological records of the diarist’s daily activities, thoughts, feelings, and reflections—perhaps also of regrets, accusations, and confessions made to oneself—a written manifestation of the play that goes on in the inner theater, perhaps constantly and sometimes observed by the author.
Writing for a public audience about oneself means projecting an image of oneself onto others, trying to get them to accept a certain narrative. This could mean that one is not perfectly honest. Neither the image one has of oneself nor the one projected to the public may be true. But projecting an image different from the one you have of yourself means you are not being truthful. Truth and truthfulness are two different things, as Bernard Williams has shown, following Nietzsche (Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness. An Essay in Genealogy, Princeton 2002). We might not be able to reach truth, but we can try to be truthful.
It seems that we expect writers of private diaries to be truthful, or even that a diary is an instrument for truthfulness. That truthfulness is not realized in public writing does not have to be a cause for moral criticism. One does not necessarily want the public to know everything about oneself and may have good reasons for that. Perhaps one wants to protect other people who might still be alive when the diaries are published. But if one writes a diary just for oneself, it is different. We seem to expect that people want to be truthful to themselves, whatever that might mean. We might even expect that private truthfulness has a therapeutic effect for the diary writer: She might become able to face facts she could not face before she opened her diary and tried to write them down. But if you look more closely, writing a diary only for oneself seems a very strange endeavor. Who exactly is one writing to? And why should one write to oneself? Anne Frank wrote “Dear diary” at the start of each entry in her book, as if addressing another person.
III
Writing a private diary seems to be a reflexive act. This is easier said than understood, because all reflexive acts are epistemically risky. Reflexivity is connected to the dangers of paradox and infinity. Think about the liar paradox: “All Cretans are liars,” says the Cretan. Or about Russell’s paradox: the barber who shaves all those who do not shave themselves. Both paradoxes result from reflexivity. Russell’s attempt to avoid them by a theory of types is as unsatisfactory as Wittgenstein’s remark to Turing that these paradoxes are just silly games. Wittgenstein underestimated reflexivity and rarely tackled its pitfalls, although his distinction between saying and pointing might be more helpful in dealing with them than Russell’s approach. Russell tried to argue the paradoxes of reflexivity away by distinguishing different levels of saying: object and meta-levels. Wittgenstein tried to ignore them.
What kind of reflexivity occurs when you write a diary? You or your self are not objects that can be studied like a stone, a vase, or a dead rabbit. Nor are you moving to a meta-level by considering what it means to study yourself. Supposedly, you are really studying yourself—or more exactly, what happened to you. You are listening to and watching the inner theater that is performed, and you write down your observations of these performances. So, are you really writing to or about yourself when you write a diary?
When you write your experiences down, it seems that you must have already known these experiences before writing them. If you did not already knew them in the way you know them when you write them down, then you are not writing about or to yourself. If writing your experiences down changes you, then they are not your experiences anymore after you have written them, but the experiences of your past self—if there is such a thing as a past self (which I doubt)? Whoever writes a diary probably has the experience of meeting the person they once were when reading entries from some time ago.
To know your own experiences, especially to know them verbally so that you can write them down, means to interpret them through the words you choose to fix them on paper. If an interpreted experience is something other than the not-yet-interpreted experience, and if you are, as a mental being, your stream of experiences, memories, thoughts, wishes, and so on, then you change yourself by interpreting your experiences. Writing a diary would then be a transformative practice.
Human minds are constantly transformed anyway—by new ideas, by memories popping up and disappearing. But they could also be transformed by reflexive acts like willfully remembering, meditating, or writing a diary, which might be a mixture of both activities: remembering and interpretative meditation. This activity of self-transformation is paradoxical because it is unclear who is doing it and who is being transformed. Who is watching your memories? Who is interpreting them? Is the past self transforming itself into a future self, or is a present self transforming a past self into a future self?
On the one hand, this process seems banal, like washing yourself. On the other hand, it is not banal, since washing yourself brings your body back to an old state—the state of cleanliness before you became dirty. Interpreting your experiences does not return you to any original state but brings about a new understanding of yourself and thus a new self or a new state in the fleeting mental process we call our self.
These observations may seem abstract, but they are very relevant for Simone Weil’s diaries, to which I will turn now, because one important topic of her diaries is the self or the soul, or the Ego, as she writes, and the necessity of its disappearance. Isn’t it strange, that somebody who wants the self or the Ego to disappear writes a diary?
IV
Simone Weil wrote diaries that were not intended for publication. Precisely for this reason, they are especially valuable—not only because they are considered truthful. Weil is a very original philosopher because she closely relates all of her thinking to her life experiences, which are described in her diaries. Contemporary academic philosophy of many different schools, analytical, phenomenological, but also of critical theory, often suffers from a lack of lived experience.
Unlike experimental sciences, philosophy is not conducted in a laboratory where new experiences are produced. Most academic philosophers shy away from connecting their thinking to their lives, as their lives are often bureaucratic, spent reading and writing in university offices. This was not the case with Simone Weil. She worked as a political activist, a school teacher, a factory worker, a member of the resistance, who wanted to fight and serve as a nurse, a religious enthusiast, who observed her ecstatic religious experiences, and she suffered severely from migraines, making this and all her other sufferings an object of philosophical reflection. Often, in her letters and diaries, she like to quote Aschylos: “to pathei mathos” – “knowledge comes through suffering” (Cf. Robert Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil. A Life in Five Ideas, Chicago 2021, 7).
Her life-experiences and their interpretation in her diaries are very relvant in two ways: politically and in their relation to religion, because Weil expierences a conflict between her political and her mystical religious experiences. In both Eastern and Western philosophical and non-philosophical literature, one can find many reports and reflections on mystical experiences and transformations. Two important more recent sources in the West are William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience from 1902 and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities from 1930. Texts about mystical transformations written for the public are not unproblematic. The realm of religious development is not immune to the all-too-human drive for fame and superiority. In competitive societies, people want to excel and be recognized as special or “higher” than others. Just as there is intellectual careerism, where people are more interested in themselves and their position in an intellectual hierarchy than in the truth, so there is also spiritual careerism. Texts about ecstatic religious experiences written for publication are therefore always under suspicion. Since Weil did not write for a public audience, her texts are immune from this suspicion.
V
In some of her diaries, such as her factory diary from 1934–35 (published in 1951), Weil uses “I” quite frequently. This does not seem different from her letters. In her famous Cahiers, however, she rarely uses “I.” She writes about the “I” or “the Ego”, but rarely about herself. Yet the Cahiers are not entirely different from her other unpublished writings; in fact, they seem to interpret her personal experiences on a more abstract level, so that we can see levels of reflexivity between her more personal notes and the Cahiers. Perhaps these levels of reflexivity are connected to levels of paradoxes, since Weil interprets her personal experiences againt a philosophical and mystical background, which suggests, that the I, the Ego should disappear.
In the following I want firstly to consider her experiences as a factory worker, the political views connected with them, and secondly her mystical theology and philosophy as manifested in the Cahiers. I want to relate these two diaries because they point in different directions regarding the self, which seem to contradict each other.
The factory diary points to the degradation of the worker’s self—the anxiety and slavery workers endure, unable to control their own time, suffering exhaustion that deprives them of the chance to reflect on their situation and articulate their problems independently of party jargon. Weil accuses those who claim to be active on behalf of workers of not making an effort to share their experiences:
“…when I think that the great Bolshevik leaders proposed to create a free working class and that doubtless none of them—certainly not Trotsky, and I don’t think Lenin either—had ever set foot inside a factory, so that they hadn’t the faintest idea of the real conditions which make servitude or freedom for the workers—well, politics appears to me a sinister farce.” (Weil, Seventy Letters, Oxford 1965, p. 15)
The way Weil writes about her factory experience points to a threatened self, one humiliated and unfree under the conditions of assembly-line work in a large factory. I believe these interpretations are correct in a sense, but they do not go far enough, because Weil as a mystic, did not believe in the reality of the self. I believe that, because of this background, she did not believe in a political solution for the dire situation of factory workers. She writes about this possibility, and especially about Marxism, as follows:
“Humanity has always placed in God its hopes of quenching its thirst for justice. Once God no longer inhabited men’s souls, that hope had either to be discarded or to be placed in matter. Man cannot bear to be alone in willing the good. He needs an all-powerful ally. If this ally is not spirit, it will be matter. It is simply a case of two different expressions of the same fundamental thought. But the second expression is defective. It is a badly constructed religion. There is, therefore, nothing surprising in the fact that Marxism has always possessed a religious character. It has a great many things in common with the forms of religious life bitterly attacked by Marx … as the opium of the people. But it is a religion devoid of mystique…” (Weil, Oppression and Liberty, London 2001, 154)
A revolution will not help workers in her eyes, because in a revlutionary fight they will be used by the powerfull just as much as in the factory. Opression does not stop by revolutions, she believes:
„The word ‘revolution’ is a word for which you kill, for which you die, for which you send the laboring masses to their death, but which does not possess any content.“ (Oppression and Liberty, 35)
VI
Her mysticism, which is at its core a Christian one—though she also studied and commented on Vedanta and Zen mysticism—is characterized by practices that attempt to dissolve the illusion of a substantial self as the center of suffering. Its ultimate goal is to end the identification of oneself with one’s own body. The central claim in this context is that:
“The whole universe should become my body.” “Tout l’univers devrait devenir mon corps.” (Œuvres complètes VI. Cahiers, Paris, 1994, 345)
The attempt of the mystical practices is to go beyond the borders of one’s own body by the observation of severe suffering as a means to free subjectivity, or the soul, from its limitations. Working with your body in this way is described by Weil as using the body as a lever:
“The body is a lever for salvation.” (Œuvres complètes VI, 234) “The body is a lever with which the soul acts upon the soul. Through the discipline imposed on the body, the wandering energy of the soul exhausts itself. … finally it is exhausted and lies down. … the wandering part of the soul, when the body is pinned down … it stirs … finally it exhausts itself and disappears.”(Œuvres complètes VI, 264)
If this work is successful, the personal “I” disappears, perception becomes impersonal, and perceptions are no longer disturbed by the survival interests of the very body with which the self was identified. Everything becomes beautiful; all threats relative to the evaluations of the body disappear:
“I have to disappear, so that the things which I see become perfectly beautiful, because they are not things anymore. The whole universe should become my body.” (Œuvres complètes VI, 345) “God created me as a non-being that appears to be … The I is nothing. But I have no right to know that.” (Œuvres complètes VI, 124.) “Our disappearing I has to become a hole, through which God and creation can look at each other.” (Œuvres complètes VI, 316)
Even hopelessness can be a lever for the mystic, Weil thought it takes one away from wanting, from being directed onto the future, so that we can see the beauty of what is present.
VII
Factory workers are not engaged in mystical practices during their work. Their self is not sacrificed for an insight into God or the absolute. Theoretically, they could take their work as a mystical practice, but in reality, their self is suppressed and damaged for profit. Their bdoies and minds have become means to serve machines. (One could also say of academics that their minds have become means, in some cases, to serve careers.) Workers do not seek to transcend the limits of their bodies in order to experience ecstatic religious states, but they may be forced to work beyond their bodily limits due to the demands of the assembly line.
The same could be said of a migraine sufferer like Weil. Such a person could, in theory, use her pains as a means of transcending her body. However, if she has no religious interests, she will just take morphine. Simone Weil, who suffered a migraine attack during a Catholic service, in fact used her pain at this event, as she reports, in the same way as a Buddhist monk uses his pains during long meditation. She tried to see her body ‘from the outside’. However, no doctor would advise a migraine patient to do so. And no political activist would advise a suffering worker to do this.
The same could be said of the strict timetables and isolation in prisons and Christian or Buddhist monasteries. In both cases, people in these institutions may be deprived of the freedom to manage their time or communicate as they wish. However, in a monastery, where people voluntarily follow a strict routine, this means something different to a prison. A person’s social and physical identity can be broken by work or torture in order to dominate them. This can happen in prison, in a military training camp or in a factory. Alternatively, a person may try to break her own social and physcial identity because she considers this identity an illusion that is bad. The social and physical identity is considered by mystics as a kind of prison or a machine that forces constant evaluations of everything and everyone, leading to fear, hatred and arrogance and ultimately suffering, but not to joy and beauty.
Thus, the different practices that break the social and physical self are tools for different aims, like the knife of a mugger is different from that of a surgeon. The mugger tries to threaten you with his weapon; the surgeon tries to heal you. However, both might attack your body.
Scientific research from both neuroscience and social science suggests that the self is a construct, an invention tightly connected to bodily functions and expierences that are mainly related to self-preservation. However, there seems to be no individual self beyond these processes that wants to preserve itself. As far as we know, our mental history is not centred around a spiritual substance. This seems to be a Cartesian myth. In this sense, modern scientific insights and mystical experiences of selflessness converge. This does not mean that suffering caused in personal relationships, working conditions or correctional facilities is justified in any way. One could argue that suffering should be avoided unless it is used by organisms in a reflective way as a means to an end.
However, here a paradox arises: What is this reflexivity that tries to transcend the body and break social identity? Can this reflexivity be thought about in a way that is different to the approaches of Descartes and Kant, who believed in a free-thinking substance (Descartes) or an individual autonomous person who can initiate chains of causality from nothing (Kant)? Simone Weil demonstrates this reflexivity in her diaries when she reflects on her suffering, points to her body states in the factory and in her migraine attacks and interprets these states as a means of overcoming the limitations imposed on her by certain social and historical conditions. Her diaries demonstrate that such reflexivity is possible. However, they do not explain what this reflexivity is, if it is not a capacity of the socially constructed Ego, of a particzular person. Perhaps Weil thinks it is not possible to say what this reflexivity is, since our talk is always objectifying. When she says, “The I is nothing. But I have no right to know that’, one could perhaps add the following statement: ‘Reflexivity is not a thing, does not belong to a thing or individual, but it is not nothing, perhaps its everything. But as finite beings, we have no way of knowing that.’ But perhaps we can experience this reflexivity.
A question for scholars. – How can we spend a lifetime on a chapter in Aristotle and think we’re done with a student essay in two hours? Both can be equally enigmatic.
Writing this little joke back in 2018, ChatGPT was still unheard of in my part of the world. My point was that our teaching practice results in our unlearning to read and encourages mindless writing and reading. Back then, people responded by emphasising that, contrary to texts of “proper” philosophers, student work is being produced and read to be judged with regard to specific skills, so it doesn’t merit further attention. With the advent of ChatGPT, the judging part of this kind of exercise went down the drain. But even back then, the thought that sparked the worry behind my joke was that we have students produce texts that no one wants to read and, basically, that we train forms of writing that no one wants to read. After all, we now know that it’s not only student papers that often get no more than a quick glace, but equally work of peers. As I see it, then, ChatGPT did not alter this situation but just made our practice of mindless reading and writing more visible. At least, we talk about it now.
If this contains at least a grain of truth, then we knew very well before the advent of ChatGPT that our exercises weren’t very promising. Why? Of course, writing is a great thing and should be practised, but grading writing is another matter altogether. Either our responses would have to be very formulaic or they would have to be so time consuming that no one could serve larger classes. So the problem is not that students now have better ways of cheating. The problem is that we don’t and didn’t act well as readers of our student work. No matter whether we act like cops to catch cheaters or just keep rushing through masses of work: we’re acting as a bad role model for good reading and writing. If we rush through student papers, we demonstrate that we only care about grading. Students learn that they should mainly care about grades, too. It’s no surprise, then, that what gets perfected is not the writing but the techniques of cheating.
But this doesn’t mean that students don’t want to write or learn writing. Rather, they probably don’t want to write for readers who spend two to five seconds on a paragraph that took two days to compose. Perhaps what we (should) really feel, now that ChatGPT makes it almost impossible to distinguish real from hallucinated work, is relief – relief that student essays can’t be graded as they used to be. It should encourage us, not to abolish this kind of exercise, but take it more seriously and stop grading it in the way we used to. While we can focus our common grading practices on other kinds of exercises, we could encourage student essays designed as longer projects for those who really want to go through the effort.
Schreiben ist schwer. Schreiben über das, was man zu schreiben beabsichtigt, ist meist noch schwerer, weil man nicht weiß, was man herausfinden wird. Dennoch ist gerade bei der Absprache einer Arbeit das Exposé eines der wichtigesten Bestandteile. Denn hierüber kann man am besten absehen, wo Schwierigkeiten entstehen, ob die Planung realistisch ist und eine interessante Arbeit verspricht. Idealerweise werden Lehrende gerade hier eingreifen, wenn sich Probleme abzeichnen, und Korrekturen am Gesamtprojekt vorschlagen. Deshalb sollte man für das Exposé und dessen Überarbeitungen (Plural!) einen Großteil der verfügbaren Zeit und Mühe einplanen. Ja, natürlich wird sich vieles erst beim Schreiben der Arbeit ergeben, aber ob die Arbeit überhaupt Hand und Fuß haben wird, zeigt sich bereits beim Exposé. Woraus also sollte es bestehen?
Ein gutes Exposé ist nichts anderes als eine vorläufige Einleitung, die im Groben aus der Formulierung eines Problems und eines Lösungsvorschlags besteht. Bevor wir uns die einzelnen Teile bzw. Unterteile ansehen, noch ein paar strategische Bemerkungen.
Grundsätzliches. – Die Arbeit an einer Arbeit und auch am Exposé zu einer Arbeit besteht aus zwei sehr unterschiedlichen Phasen: der Exploration, in der Sie ein Thema erkunden, und der Darstellung, in der Sie Ihre Gedanken zum Thema einer Leserschaft präsentieren. Die oft zufällig-assoziative Ordnung der Exploration ist von der didaktisch geleiteten Darstellung grundverschieden. Im Exposé und in der Arbeit geht es um die Darstellung, nicht um die Erschließung des Themas. Als Leserschaft stellen Sie sich am besten interessierte Erstsemester vor. Gehen Sie nicht davon aus, dass sich Ihre Leser:innen auskennen. Bedenken Sie bitte auch, dass Sie nicht all das, was Sie in der Exploration interessiert oder hilft, für die Darstellung benötigen. Deshalb ist es für die Fragestellung oder These, die Ihre Darstellung leitet, wichtig, dass Sie möglichst klar und eng eingegrenzt ist. Überhaupt ist die Fragestellung oder These, die Sie in Ihrer Arbeit entwickeln, das allerwichtigste. Laut einer trefflichen Beobachtung meiner Kollegin Charlotte Baumann legen viele Studierende Ihre Arbeiten wie Übersichtsartikel bei Wikipedia an. Das ist keine gute Idee. Fokussieren Sie sich stattdessen auf eine (und nicht mehr als eine!) These, für die Sie in Ihrer Arbeit argumentieren. Wie finden Sie aber eine These? Das ist nicht so leicht. Am besten entscheiden Sie sich im Laufe Ihrer Exploration einfach für eine bestimmte These, die Ihnen plausibel erscheint, und versuchen, diese mit eigenen Argumenten und Belegen zu untermauern. Was soll so eine These dabei eigentlich leisten? Nun, sie ist der L.ösungsvorschlag für ein Problem. Zunächst also müssen Sie ein Problem aufdecken? Wie machen Sie das? Nun, Sie nehmen sich eine konkrete Passage aus einem Primärtext oder aus einem Sekundärtext vor und schauen nach einer Reibung oder Schwierigkeit, die der Erklärung bedarf. Solche Reibungen können Sie selbst erzeugen, indem Sie sich über die Konsequenzen des Gesagten Gedanken machen. Mit der Reibung und der These haben Sie das besagte Problem und einen Lösungsvorschlag. Und damit kann es losgehen.
Ihr Exposé besteht neben dem Titel oder Arbeitstitel idealerweise aus folgenden Teilen. Das sind:
(a) das allgemeine Thema bzw. die problematische Textpassage;
(b) ein Problem, das in den wissenschaftlichen Debatten des Themas oder der Passage auftritt (oft im Einklang mit der Diskussion in der Literatur);
(c) die Motivation des Problems bzw. eine Erklärung, warum das Problem relevant ist oder welche ungelösten Schwierigkeiten es offenlässt;
(d) eine These zur Herangehensweise an das Problem;
(e) die Forschungsfrage, d. h. die Frage nach einem entscheidenden Aspekt, der untersucht werden muss, damit sich die These als wahr oder als plausibel erweist;
(f) der methodische Ansatz, der die Art der zur Beantwortung dieser Frage erforderlichen Belege oder Argumente rechtfertigt;
(g) die Gliederungsschritte (und Einschränkungen), die zur Begründung der Argumentation berücksichtigt werden müssen.
Wie Sie sehen, kann man eine Menge unterschiedliche Dinge bereits im Exposé ansprechen. Dabei geht es nicht darum, schon alle Punkte genau untersucht zu haben. Vielmehr müssen Sie sich einfach trauen, diese Punkte mal ins Blaue zu formulieren und dann – im Austausch mit anderen (z.B. der Lehrenden) – nachzujustieren, bis sich ein gangbarer Weg abzeichnet. In jedem Fall werden Sie so endlich aus der bloßen Explorationsphase rauskommen und zur Darstellung übergehen können. Wenn das Exposé abgestimmt ist, kann es dann mit der eigentlichen Arbeit weitergehen, für die ich den Hagener Leitfaden empfehlen möchte.
Currently, Irmtraud Hnilica and I are sketching guiding ideas for a project that has been in the making for some time. Below is a small blurb. Please feel free to get in touch, if you’re interested in collaborating:
According to an ever-growing consensus, there is a reading crisis today. It ranges from illiteracy and a lack of text comprehension to a reduced willingness of pupils and students to engage with complex texts. This development has been recognised as an area of action. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), for instance, has initiated measures to promote reading with significant funding for empirical educational research. By contrast, our project Reading as a Social Practice is meant as a reflexive evaluation of the reading crisis.
For starters, it is questionable what exactly this crisis consists of. Many academic disciplines are working on this question and related issues, but the expertise remains largely fragmented. Setting out from the disciplinary perspectives of philosophy and literary studies, our project aims at bringing together the fragmented expertise across disciplines and examining what reading actually is. The reading crisis, as well as the observation that a countervailing reading hype can be observed at the same time (associated, for example, with the social media phenomenon #booktok), is placed in a historical and systematic context. Considering, for instance, forms of reading aloud and quietly, various biblical interpretations, the novella tradition (where reading is presented as a social phenomenon), the salon culture and book clubs, reading is mostly a social practice. A communal bond weaves readers and books into larger contexts. Our project explores this by looking at three main areas:
1. Reading Theories and Text Types. – The project builds on theories of hermeneutics and tries to advance these further. Reading, we submit, is essentially determined by interactions between readers, which can decentre different text types, on which it nevertheless remains dependent.
2. Reading Cultures and Canon Formation. – The history of reading is examined as a history of social practices. In doing so, mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion come into focus. The social practice of reading, through its associated potential for distinction, usually swings in both directions.
3. Reading Scenes and Interventions. – Using specific reading scenes, we will examine, for instance, autosociobiographical texts from authors with a background of social climbing to explore the conditions for success and failure of reading practices as well as possible interventions. What role, for instance, does the opportunity for identifying reading play in reading socialization?
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You’ll find a number of texts under the category Reading as a Social Practice on this blog.
Her eyes are wide open, her left hand covering her mouth to suppress a scream. – Imagining this kind of scene, ideally in black and white, you know you’re probably watching a classic horror film. This kind of scene is called a reaction shot. It’s designed to show the reaction to an event rather than the event itself. This kind of shot is certainly intriguing in many ways. The reactions to events guide our empathy, letting on what it’s like to undergo a certain event, even if we’re not seeing the event as such. We know that something scary or funny or beautiful is being seen. Seeing the event, we can then make up our minds as to whether we agree with the sentiments displayed. Once you get to know someone, you might be quite interested in how they in particular react to something. Unsurprisingly, there is by now a whole genre of “reaction videos”, designed to show initial reactions to music or films or whatever. In a manner of speaking, philosophical works can be seen as reaction shots to ideas. In this case, too, you might be quite interested in how a certain philosopher reacts to certain ideas. Knowing someone fairly well, you might be able to anticipate their reactions. Still, you might be surprised or curious as to how that person will phrase their response to a particular idea. Reading Michael Hampe’s book What for? A philosophy of purposelessness (Wozu? Eine Philosophie der Zwecklosigkeit)*, which comes with a decidedly autobiographical approach, it dawned on me that this approach is perhaps the ideal form of what a philosophical reaction shot could be.
Why bother? – Although I have a strong interest in philosophers’ attempts to overcome teleology, my wish to read this book was mainly driven by what I already know about the author. There are some authors whose reactions to thoughts are just interesting to witness. And Hampe is a great writer: the way he challenges and recombines patterns of ideas is just a treat, to say nothing of his style. This book is no exception. It consists of three parts: (1) an autobiographical exploration of purposes and their conditions and boundaries; (2) a reflection on the actual approach as a sceptical stance with its ethical and political repercussions; (3) the discussion of a set of inspirational sources ranging from Aristotle and Spinoza to Weil and Wittgenstein.
Picturing the invisible. – The book is beautifully composed: Starting out by probing into thoughts about how we might experience our first conscious beginnings of getting drawn into speech, attention, and purposes, Hampe skillfully navigates through the dialectics of purposes and what its boundaries might be. One of the crucial (Wittgensteinian) ideas Hampe develops is that we live our lives by adhering to a certain picture. That is, you might have a certain picture of individual events you wish to happen, like a picture of yourself reading a book in the library tomorrow; thus, you might behave in such a way that you make the pictured event happen. At the same time, you might follow a more abstract or super-picture governing your actions as pertaining to your life or a life project. Taken in this light, the question whether you can dip into purposelessness (which is still close to impossible to imagine) amounts to the question whether you can devise a different picture to govern your life. Sometimes we seem to manage this. But how can you express what this amounts to? Trying to express this resembles the practice of negative theology. That is, eventually it seems inexpressible. However, witnessing Hampe reacting to this thought goes beyond this somewhat helpless gesture. He writes: “The relief that occurs when all purposes disappear is quite different from that which occurs when a certain purpose is achieved.” (“Die Erleichterung, die eintritt, wenn alle Zwecke verschwinden, ist eine ganz andere als die, die eintritt, wenn ein Zweck erreicht wird.”). Comparing kinds of relief is one of Hampe’s many ways to explore what purposelessness might mean.
Scepticism as a way into purposelessness. – Hampe’s kaleidoscopic autobiographical approach is embedded and recflected in a nuanced sceptical approach (with a touch of Buddhism, Montaigne, Rorty and other pragmatists). Again, the crucial merit is not to develop a theory or to “defend a position” but to react to the historically grown array of philosophical and scientific stances to the world and ourselves, as they oscillate between ascribing and denying purposes. Here, it is especially the dismissal of hierarchical thinking (ingrained in most attempts at how we see and evaluate what we see) that takes the lead in dipping into purposelessness. Taking this dismissal of hierarchy as a trait of dismissing a universe with final causes, Hampe suggests, inter alia, that Spinoza’s anti-teleological thought can be redescribed as a way of dismissing hierarchical orders in nature and second nature. Along similar lines, we can see Hampe reacting to his readings of a vast array of other philosophers, not attempting to present their thoughts in a historical reconstruction, but in a way that Jay Rosenberg has called creative reading.
Situatedness. – In keeping with the picturing approach to capture desires, life goals and projects, Hampe thinks that what makes me me and you you is not an essence but the fact that we find ourselves in certain situations. It’s not our supposed character traits but arrays of situations gone through that seem to determine our responses to the world. It’s no surprise then that Hampe, like Rorty, seems commited, not to an ethics of principles, but to an ethics of sensitivity, educated through diligent attention and literature. In like manner, Hampe suggests it’s our historical situatedness, rather than philosophical originality, that makes renewed interest in old topics worthwhile. Thus, we might say of Hampe’s treating (anti-)teleology what Hampe himself says of of others treating the topic of love: “It would be strange to claim that Shakespeare’s works represented a sort of ‘progress’ over those of Homer… One can no longer write about love today like Homer or Shakespeare … People love at different times and in different situations. It is because of these changes, and not because of any genuinely new philosophical insights, that love must be written about again and again.” (“Es wäre merkwürdig zu behaupten, dass die Arbeiten von Shakespeare einen ‘Fortschritt’ gegenüber denen von Homer … darstellten. Man kann heute nicht mehr wie Homer oder Shakespeare über die Liebe schreiben … Menschen lieben zu unterschiedlichen Zeiten in unterschiedlichen Situationen. Aufgrund dieser Wandlungen und nicht wegen irgendeiner genuin neuen philosophischen Erkenntnis muss immer wieder über die Liebe geschrieben werden.”)
Accordingly, we might say that our renewed interest in people writing on old philosophical issues is not a belief in progress but an interest in contemporary reactions, i.e. reactions situated like we are situated, to these issues. Autobiographical reactions might be most revealing about their situatedness and thus most pertinent to this purpose.
“What the philosopher establishes in their labors are not truths or theses, but rather scores, scores for thinking with.”
Alva Noë, The Entanglement, 115
If it’s true that so many people and especially ‘students these days’ fail at reading, there must be an ethics of reading. And of course, there is more than one. While many ideas in this field are revolving around the relation between reader and text (just think of the principle of charity), I’m currently more interested in the relation between readers. After all, it’s not so much between reader and text but between readers within a certain group that we try to enforce certain values.* Spinoza or his œvre will not show much offence, if you read sloppily. But your instructor, your fellow student or your colleague are already waiting for their gotcha moment. Indeed, many philosophy classes are thinly veiled occasions for blaming others of sloppy reading or, if they’re aiming higher, of missing the argument. What many philosophers or indeed other academic readers tend to overlook is that such (ethical) standards are relative to the profession or shared philosophical endeavour. If you’re reading for pleasure or reciting some passage to a friend, quite different standards might apply.** But even within philosophy, there are different sets of standards. In what follows, I want to look at these standards more closely, hoping to suggest that many common complaints about students these days etc. might be off the mark.
The ‘fake it till you make it’ reader. – I guess we all know this particular student who comes to class, is rather quiet when we ask for a summary of the text, but greatly enlivens the discussion when we turn to a particular argument. As instructors, we can sense that this student “didn’t do the reading”, but we let them get away with it – just this once – because it’s the discussion we care about most for the moment. If you haven’t been this student yourself, here is how it works: You just wait till the discussion reaches a very particular point (and it will), then you make up your mind about the point, deriving most insights from the summaries before and the heat of the moment. If you actually did bring the text, you might quickly search for the pertinent passage and even shine with terminological digressions. It’s a great skill, but it doesn’t require the kind of devoted reading that is encouraged by old dons. The skill is not based on “wrestling with the text” but on distilling crucial information and turns from what is being said. By and large, this kind of skill is greatly honoured in philosophy classes and in essay writing. We use words like “smart” to describe such behaviour, even if we might chide the student for not going all the way and reading the damn book properly. (By the way, I don’t think Jerry Fodor lied when he said that he thought he could write a book about Hume “without actually knowing anything about Hume.”)*** Hence, we might say that the ethical core value in place is not so much being a serious reader but rather being a serious discussant of pertinent ideas.
Now change just some parameters. – Instead of listening to your fellow students, you ask ChatGPT for a summary and for what’s in certain paragraphs. The same honoured skill is applied, but instead of honouring the skill we now focus on the decline of mankind as we knew it. But has anything relevant changed in what the student does? Remember, the student didn’t read the originally set text but gathers information from a likely somewhat flawed summary. Granted, the student might be better off listening to fellow students rather than feeding off tech products, but for the particular ethics applying to what happens in class or on the page, the student may still be doing what matters most, i.e. engaging in a serious discussion of a thesis or argument. In fact, many philosophers I know trust their rational reconstructions much more than poring over the ancient texts. We even have debates about whether we should really have students read an actual text by Kant, let alone the original German, rather than, say, the smart secondary texts in our ubiquitous “just the arguments” summaries. So if we don’t care all that much about teaching “the text”, let alone “the original”, why do we worry so much about students when they take this endeavour to the next level?
I’m not saying textual scholarship doesn’t matter; and you wouldn’t have much fun in my history of philosophy classes when ignoring the texts. What I’m saying is that different ethics of reading apply to different sub-disciplines in philosophy. I often tell students that, while philosophers care most about problems, historians of philosophy also care about texts. So the stakes are different. And it’s this difference that we signal to our students when we focus on, say, the structure of the argument as opposed to the frilly bits and bobs in the text.
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* I’m greatly inspired by Adam Neely’s The Ethics of Fake Guitar, who makes a similar point about adherents of different genres of music favouring different core values.
** Already in relation to an earlier post, Marija Weste convinced me that there is less of a difference between different types of texts (say, philosophical texts versus novels), but much more of a difference between professional academic reading as opposed to non-professional kinds of reading.
*** Here is the passage I have in mind from Fodor’s Hume Variations:
However, ChatGPT tells me: “Jerry Fodor’s claim that he could write a book on Hume without knowing him is not meant to be taken literally. It highlights his approach to philosophy, which is to focus on the enduring theoretical insights of philosophers like Hume, rather than necessarily adhering to historical interpretations. Fodor uses Hume’s ideas as a source of inspiration for his own work in cognitive science, particularly his theories about the mind and language.”
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 notin 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 differentthing 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.
When my dear colleague Martin Lenz sent me a link to Hilarius Bookbinder’s blog post “The average college student today”, I immediately knew this would be a lamentation about how students nowadays couldn’t care less, wouldn’t make the effort, and simply didn’t read. Not that I have psychic abilities about blog posts. But Martin and I have an ongoing discussion about the topic of literacy and the so-called reading crisis. When I clicked the link to read the post, I was slightly concerned. Martin had only commented that “things sounded quite bad”. Well, what sounded very bad to me was – for starters – the title of this blog post. Why would a professor even write about the average college student? The average college student is merely a statistical construct, not to be found in any classroom. In my fifteen years of teaching experience at six German universities spanning institutions such as the FernUniversität in Hagen, LMU München and HU Berlin, I have yet to encounter a single homogenous study group. And labelling those with whom one seeks to engage in meaningful academic work as average seems condescending to me. I find it odd to point out something so obvious, but one simply cannot expect cooperation or trust from people one does not respect. And students must trust their academic teachers that the challenging material they ask them to read really is worthwhile. I, personally, am not sure whether I would take reading suggestions from someone who comes across as condescending and uninterested in what matters to me. Would our average professor (as Martin called Bookbinder in his reply)? I absolutely don’t think so.
Hilarius Bookbinder claims to write as a concerned, even alarmed professor. And if it’s true that students read way less than a decade ago – and it very well might be – then that is a serious matter. But Bookbinder adopts a rather resentful tone and weaves students’ identities into his somewhat unclear reasoning. Suddenly, it’s not about reading skills anymore, but about students’ culinary preferences. They seem to love buffalo wings, while the professor clearly despises them. Just a fun fact? Not at all. Bookbinder repeatedly returns to it. Actually, he completely lost me at his feverish choice of a picture to illustrate his article. It features a young woman reading a menu, seemingly contemplating that the buffalo wings look good. The woman depicted has brown eyes and curly brown hair. I might not have considered her ethnicity, if Bookbinder hadn’t previously published another article, questioning why white men no longer want to go to college. And I think that’s exactly what this is all about. Add a touch of some classism – buffalo wings are often seen as working-class food – and it becomes evident that this is not truly about learners’ reading skills, but rather about the individuals themselves, who might be female, first-generation academics and come from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
I consider it part of our duty as academic teachers to stay open and curious about our learners. We can’t expect them to be just like us. Of course they have their own unique cultural references. They even listen to, god forbid, Taylor Swift! There’s by the way a chance that they actually do read a lot. And there is statistical evidence that women read more than men. Let’s stay curious about today’s students and start a new conversation about literacy, rather than becoming bitter about a generation that might not share our preferences. If we create a non-judgmental space for students’ diverse cultural references and interests, they could eventually come around for some shared reading practice and open up for the books we want to introduce them to.
„Die Luft verändert sich – fein Säure – Luft – mein Gesicht – Ausdruck – Konsistenz“ – Was war das? Zugegeben, ich war etwas müde, aber meine Augen schienen wie haltlose Flummis über die Buchseite zu hüpfen, hier und da ein Wort treffend, hin und her, vor und zurück, und lieferten diesen Wortsalat, aus dem ich keinen Sinn entnehmen konnte. Etwas beunruhigt versuchte ich, meinen Blick auf der Seite zu fixieren. Wo ist das Verb? Haben diese Sätze keine Verben? Der erste Satz hatte doch eins: „verändert sich“, aber danach? Und wie hing das zusammen? Ich richtete mich etwas auf und las den Abschnitt noch mal. Jetzt ergaben die Sätze Sinn, aber sie sagten mir nichts: Die Rede von der Luft und der feinen Säure – woran knüpfte das denn an? Na gut, es handelte sich um den Anfang des Romans. Da dürfen die ersten Sätze schon mal kryptisch sein, aber das Unbehagen wollte sich nicht ganz auflösen. “Eine ängstliche Teilnahmslosigkeit“ – das gehört nicht nur in den Roman, das gab mein Gefühl wieder, das mich beschlich, als ich merkte, dass ich mich nicht in den Text hineinfinden konnte. Meine Augen sprangen weiter hin und her. Abermals wies ich mich zurecht und zwang mich, aufmerksam, ja: aufmerksam, weiterzulesen. Nach ein paar Minuten und einige Absätze weiter rastete es ein, mein gewohnter Lesefluss kam zurück und ich tauchte ein in die Welt, die der Text mir suggerierte.
Nach vielen Jahren las ich endlich mal wieder einen Roman, jedenfalls hatte ich es mir fest vorgenommen. Deniz Ohde: Streulicht, erschienen 2020. Nach dieser anfänglichen Verunsicherung, dem Wortsalat, vergewisserte ich mich nochmal durch einen Blick auf den Klappentext:
Konsistenz ist ein Kraftakt, schoss es mir durch den Kopf. Es ist nicht so leicht, die Wörter zu sinnvollen Einheiten zu verbinden. Linearität und Interpunktion helfen natürlich. Aber dazu dürfen die Augen nicht wandern, und auch die Gedanken müssen beim Geschriebenen bleiben, oder? Oder müssen die Gedanken umherirren, um das Verständnis durch die Verknüpfung mit Gefühlen und eigenen Erfahrungen zu konturieren? Das Lesen war mir entglitten, zwar nur für ein paar müde Augenblicke, aber hinreichend verunsichernd. Ich wälzte mich hin und her. Erinnerte mich ans Gitarre-Üben: Wenn etwas nicht klappt oder blöd klingt, Metronom langsam stellen und ganz ruhig von vorn beginnen; das Tempo erst steigern, wenn es gut klingt. Beim Lesen war es jetzt genauso.
Aber die Verunsicherung war jetzt latent geblieben. War das neu? Könnte es an COVID liegen? Viele Leute hatten von kognitiven Einschränkungen erzählt. Oder lag es doch daran, dass ich seit vielen Jahren keinen Roman mehr gelesen hatte? Nur noch Fachbücher, und das meist am Schreibtisch, oft sogar nur in digitaler Form. Es mir hingegen bequem machen, ein Buch aufschlagen und für viele Stunden so verharren und lesen, das hatte ich ewig nicht getan. Warum eigentlich? An Lust mangelte es eigentlich nicht, an Lesestoff auch nicht. Natürlich hatte ich wenig Zeit, aber seien wir ehrlich: Wer hat die schon?! So recht erklären konnte ich mir das also nicht. Aber wenn der Habitus erstmal gebrochen ist, ist es schwer, neu zu beginnen. Zu Beginn dieses langen Lese-Hiatus war allerdings etwas viel einfacheres geschehen. Meine Sehkraft hatte nachgelassen. Wenn ich nicht ausreichend Licht oder Abstand zum Text hatte, war es eine große Anstrengung. Irgendwie war das leicht beängstigend und mir war gleich der Linguistikdozent aus Bochum wieder eingefallen, der seine letzte Vorlesung damit begonnen hatte, von seinem schwindenden Augenlicht zu sprechen. Das Lesen am Bildschirm brachte diese Probleme nicht mit sich. Aber erst, als ich mir nach einigen Jahren eine Lesebrille gekauft hatte, konnte ich mich zum Lesen wieder betten. Und erst vor drei Tagen war Streulicht eingetroffen, das ich dann geradezu rauschhaft verschlungen hatte.
Es fällt mir noch immer schwer zu sagen, was diesen Text so fesselnd und besonders macht. Sicher, es ist ein moderner Bildungsroman, der auch als Autosoziobiografie gehandelt wird. Doch das Poetische scheint mir das Soziologische zu übertreffen. Vor allem ist der Text voller Ambivalenzen, die für die Protagonistin ebenso offen zu bleiben scheinen wie für die Leserschaft, also zumindest für mich:
Die Rede vom „Gesicht“ ist geradezu leitmotivisch. Das Kapitel hebt an mit: „Mein Gesicht war etwas, das ich verstecken wollte.“ Was für ein Satz! Was für eine Selbstbeobachtung! Hören wir hier die spätere Reflexion der Erzählerin oder die Formulierung der beschriebenen Protagonistin? Eine Formulierung, die zwar mit dem Wunsch harmoniert, „[e]ine unverfängliche, alltägliche Geschichte“ zu erzählen, doch nicht mit der verletzlichen Exponiertheit, die die Erzählerin mit dieser biografischen Verallgemeinerung präsentiert. Und geht es denn für die Protagonistin wirklich um Unverfänglichkeit oder nicht doch oder zumindest ebenso sehr um das im Sturz beinahe verletzte Auge? Zumal auf letzteres in der Schilderung einer Narbe unterm Auge zum Ende des Romans nochmals rekurriert wird („Das schwindende Kollagen führte auch dazu, dass langsam eine Narbe sichtbar wurde unter meinem linken Auge“, heißt es 155 Seiten später). Oder war die Narbe doch von dem Hundebiss, der bereits zu Beginn erwähnt wird? (Aber der Arzt hatte doch versichert, dass „nichts zurückbleiben“ werde.) So legen sich die Möglichkeiten der verschiedenen Lesarten und auch der Selbstinterpretationen der Protagonistin und Erzählerin fortschreitend wie Schichten übereinander, ohne dass sie zwingend auf eine bestimmte Schicht reduziert würden. Von der “Sauberkeit und Sorgfalt” will ich gar nicht erst anfangen.
Wie nach Filmen bin ich immer auch bei Romanen gespannt, nachher Besprechungen zu lesen, um den inneren Dialog auszuweiten. Eine habe ich bisher gelesen. Und das barsche und meines Erachtens irrige Urteil am Ende ärgert mich so sehr, dass ich mich innerlich an eine Replik mache.
Aber während ich dies schreibe, bin ich mir sicher, dass ich dem Reichtum dieses Romans nie gerecht werden könnte. Nicht mal mit geübten Augen. Aber weiterlesen will ich. Den nächsten Roman.
Handling Ideas 