Reading the Way of Things

Towards a New Technology of Making Sense

John Hunt Publishing Ltd

Contents

Introduction: The Technology of Sense

To consume media today is to consume an endless parade of declarations, insistent beliefs, claims to knowledge and truth, debates that go nowhere. We see it, of course, in the political realm where the same cast of characters repeats the same phrases, claiming the same old positions, as if choosing from some shared multiple- choice list. We see it in medicine and food, in history and science: Raw food is the healthiest! Cooked food is the healthiest! Kale is a superfood! Don't eat too much kale! We see it in how people talk about movies: A silly spectacle! The story was not believable! Thumbs up! Thumbs down! And, in our private conversations and even private thoughts, we agree or disagree, repeating the same canned lines: Gay marriage is a right! I have to eat more blueberries! That movie was stupid but fun! Through it all, we carry on as if these are the things that can be said about the world, as if this is the set of possible claims and it's our job to choose one or another.

Meanwhile, the way in which these opinions and claims are reached, shared, and processed is never questioned. Rarely do we hear something that operates on totally different terms. Even more rarely do we consider rejecting the terms themselves and inventing our own. We simply assume that that's how people talk about food, talk about movies and books, talk about politics. But, as Marshall McLuhan argues, we are always enacting an invisible environment of technologies — from electricity and the internet to the alphabet and the novel — that we don't notice but which is, in fact, a historical construction that distributes bodies, power, sense, knowledge, emotion, as well as the very construction of ourselves. We could say these technologic environments are ideological, which they are, but in a wide sense of ideology that entails the ways we make sense of the world, what we consider of value, what we consider true, how we stand in the world towards others and ourselves.

We are always operating with certain tools and technologies that dictate the possible outcomes of what we can say and think. Just look at what the computer did to how we work and interact with each other; then what the internet did; now what mobile computing is doing to the social as well as the private, how time, language, and relationships are redistributed. The very manner in which we conduct ourselves, construct ourselves, changes as the tools we use change. McLuhan argues that the alphabet is one such technology that privileges sight over sound and linearity over what he calls allatonceness (sight comes from there, he argues, while sound comes from all around us, all at once). Each letter in the alphabet has its place; together, they make a word; words go together in a row to make a sentence; and so on. It's a factory, an industrial enabler.

Many of these tools and technologies that surround and define us are not as slick or obvious as the iPhone or as readily recognized as the alphabet. And what makes things even trickier is that these tools and technologies vanish into the background as what we consider true, what we take for granted as the way of things. So bringing them up is difficult as it's hard to see one's own way of seeing. And it makes the person who brings them up — I suppose that's me — seem potentially insane.

I want to argue that the very manner in which we form, share, and digest information is a symptom of a technology of language. That is, we assume language to be a certain thing — a system of referents that signify meaning — and then go on with our lives using this technology. So when we, for instance, watch a movie, we look for the signs and symbols that map back to a meaning — a meaning that already exists. This meaning may be something learned in school, such as the Oedipal complex or patriarchy or capitalism. Or it may be something so close it never occurs to us that it is something we've learned — ourselves. In both cases, the architecture of making sense — the mechanics of reading — enacts the architecture and mechanics of a certain model of language that suggests meaning already exists, is stable, and it's our job to manipulate marks and signs to point to it.

Our use of a technology of reference that points backwards and elsewhere — to something bigger, broader, and more abstract such as concepts, ideas, and categories — inhibits the creation of the new, inhibits the possibility of creative, critical thinking. After all, if we're using a tool that is predicated on what already exists, how can we think something new? If we're using a tool that demands we look beyond what is right here to what is bigger, broader, and more meaningful, how can we take what is right in front of us on its own terms? This is at once a matter of creativity and ethics, of how we stand towards time and each other.

In this little book, I want to propose a different technology of sense-making — a technology of things, concepts, operations, principles, and mechanisms working together — that doesn't rely on our present conception of language. This entails considering everything from how we consider a thing to what we consider knowledge, truth, and how we access it — what a word is, what an image is, how the social operates, what our place in it is. I want to suggest that if we shift how we make sense of things, we in turn shift our very relationship to the world, to each other, and to ourselves. From this perspective, nothing is more politically fraught than the manner in which we make sense of the world, than the technology we use to engage and process: than how we read the way of the world.

I am calling this technology a form of reading — what I'm calling immanent reading. I want to extend the definition of literacy to include more than the deciphering of letters-as-code; to define literacy as a critical, creative act of making sense. Immanent reading, I propose, is a technology that fosters a radical democratization of reading, a technology that enables and empowers anyone, reading anything, to make fresh sense of it without relying on traditional sources of knowledge and expertise. With new sense-making, I like to imagine the world might become more beautiful, more interesting, more vital.

The Making of Sense, or Exemplary Reading

You look at a painting. It's one of the "great" paintings, so we're told: Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. How do you make sense of it? How do you enjoy it? And how do you think you're supposed to make sense of it? What do you think you need to know before you're allowed to enjoy, understand, and comment upon this so-called masterpiece? Is there some kind of knowledge you need to have before you're allowed to make your way through it? Or can you just begin anywhere at any time and think, feel, and say what you want? Is there a proper time for looking, some kind of origin point that marks the path towards understanding this enigmatic work of art?

The way we read things — books, films, art — and the ways we're taught to read things tells us a lot about how we construct the availability of knowledge. What do we even count as knowledge, as making sense of something? And who is granted access to this sense-making and under what conditions?

The way read things and the ways we're taught to read things tell us as well about how we construct access to delight, to pleasure, to the full array of affects and sensations that come from books, films, and art. Are these feelings different than knowledge? Who is granted access to the spectrum of sensations that literature, cinema, and art offer?

And who has the right to speak of these things, of this knowledge and these feelings?

Now, I am not asking about the so-called canon and access to what we tend to call the "great books" and "masterpieces." I am talking about something at once much simpler and more complex: the very act of taking up the world in front of us — from Ulysses and Picasso to John Cassavetes, a chair, and TV's The Office. When we engage anything, we come to that thing with certain assumptions about how to make sense of it, what right we have to consume it, enjoy it, know it. I will suggest there is continuity in how we engage — or "read" — things that runs from Joyce's Ulysses and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to The Office, the glass you drink from, and the chair you're sitting on right now. But let's focus for now on things like books, films, and art before we get to everyday things that have a way of eluding our attention precisely because they're so familiar.

A few good teachers aside, we are taught from grade school through grad school that in order to make sense of these things, we need the tools, language, and understanding of something else — usually, something equally if not more esoteric. Let's return to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. We want to understand it. But what does "understand" mean? The flurry of facts about the painting — the name of the artist, the date it was made (was it made on one day?), the art movement (who decides what's a movement and what's not? who decides what's in a movement and what's not?), the materials? To understand, do I need to know the biography of the painter? If so, which biography? What makes up a biography? Is there such a thing as a basic fact? Or are there always acts of weaving that stitch these facts together into a text(ure), an argument that makes meaning (whatever that is) of them?

Anyway, we're standing in front of this Picasso painting which is a tad odd and we want to understand it. And what is our first instinct? To turn away from the painting! We lean down and read the writing on the wall, no doubt written by an expert well-learned not just in the history of art but in the history of this painting and its elaborate pedigree — things we, as laypeople, know nothing or little of. This, to me, is a telling symptom of our technologic environment of language: to make sense of something, we turn away from it and seek something else. It's almost childlike, running to the parent to explain the weird, scary shadows on the wall.

When we actually read what's on the wall, we tend to get all kinds of information and some esoteric words. We learn some basic facts — born here, died there, painted there, also painted some other things. And we probably read about Picasso's relationship to women and, maybe, we read about how this painting confronts the male gaze in an act of either defiance or contrition, depending on who wrote it. In any case, to understand the painting we believe we have to look elsewhere, to turn away. The sense of this painting, we believe, isn't there in front of us but in our knowledge of other things — history, gender, the history of presentations of the female body, the biography of the painter, a brief overview of the times (again, according to whom?).

These might or might not all be good things to know. But are they necessary to know in order for me, standing directly in front of the painting, to make sense of that painting? The persistence of the writing on the wall, and the ubiquity of headset museum tours, tells us that looking at the painting does not suffice. If I want to appreciate it — understand it, make sense of it, even enjoy it — I have to turn away, not just to learn the facts but to read the experience of someone else who knows better or more than I do: an expert. This expert is the keeper of sense, the key to unlocking or decoding what's sitting directly in front of me.

The same goes for books. When we read Joyce's Ulysses, we believe we need to know about Joyce and his life; Dublin at the time; modernism as a movement; Homer, no doubt; the contemporary construction of gender and race; the history of literature; the way of consciousness — ego, superego, id, Oedipus, and such. If we're adventurous, we might read some feminist or gender theory from Cixous or Judith Butler; probably some Marxist theory; certainly some Freud and Lacan; some Derrida could help; other modernist literature such as Virginia Woolf; maybe other books by Joyce. In all cases, we're not reading the book in our hands. We're reading something else as a way to make sense of this book right here and now. This book, this painting, is not just what it is or how it treats us. This thing right here is an example of something else, something bigger and more important — ideas, concepts, theories, historical circumstances — things we imagine to be broader as somehow "grounding." (But does meaning need a ground? Is meaning a tree, the roots grounding the branches and leaves of texts? Or, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, is it a rhizome, sprouting here and there as opportunity yawns, with no center or ground holding it all together?)

I call this mode of making sense — this turning away and seeking explanation from something bigger, this arborescent mechanics — exemplary reading. In exemplary reading, we make sense of things as an instantiation of something else. This something can be a category such as a genre (The Maltese Falcon is classic noir), an idea (Blue Velvet is all about the Oedipal complex), ideology (Gone Girl is patriarchal), history (Cubism was radical for its time), biography (Picasso had troubled relations with the women in his life). In all cases, we make sense of what we're experiencing through things that have come before and have stood the test of time. This painting, this book, is just a moment of that bigger thing.

Here's a straightforward and common example of an exemplary reading: "The books of William Burroughs are postmodern." The thing (in this case, the vast and varied writing of Burroughs) is determined by an idea (the postmodern) that we imagine precedes Burroughs' books and, in some way, makes them possible. "Postmodernity" — whatever that is — is big and broad. It stands outside the everyday as part of the fabric of sense itself. When we read Burroughs' admittedly odd books, we discover their sense in and through the bigger, more secure sense of the postmodern. To continue Deleuze and Guattari's figure, "postmodern" is the fixed roots and Burroughs' writing is the branches or perhaps leaves.

Now, this mode of reading-by-example can take varied forms. For instance, we can suggest that Burroughs is not an obedient example as we argue how his books are not postmodern — they're part of the mystical tradition. Or we take up another example of postmodernity — Thomas Pynchon — and we talk about how Burroughs' paranoia differs from Pynchon's in that Burroughs is not paranoid at all: to him, the world is at war hence one had better keep a good lookout. We end our reading, then, with a new understanding of the category "postmodern." In this strategy, a particular thing is in a relationship with a category either as an instantiation, a rebel, or a modifier: Burroughs is postmodern; Burroughs is not postmodern; Burroughs shifts the terms of postmodernity. In all instances, we don't as much read Burroughs as we confirm the category or idea of "postmodern."

Another mode of such exemplary reading, and one that remains popular in universities, is ideology critique. We read something in light of a predefined "cultural" or "ideological" category such as gender, race, sexuality, Marxism, psychoanalysis. We then say how Burroughs challenges the dominant mode of heterosexuality or its vision of homosexuality or we pinpoint his misogyny or we invoke his revolutionary, anti-capitalist stance. In all of these cases, we are reading Burroughs as an example or counter-example — as evidence — of a given category, a category that itself is not part of the reading but is being confirmed or disconfirmed. The category stands outside both Burroughs' text and our reading like a firm ruler capable of measuring anything, even Burroughs' careening prose. Ideology critique is a common assignment in college classes, as Freudian readings of Vertigo, feminist critiques of Deep Throat, and Marxist analyses of The Wire abound.

These kinds of reading can be powerful, useful, illuminating, even revolutionary as hegemonic categories such as patriarchy and capitalism come crumbling down — or at least are shaken. This is how we take on those big ideas that dictate how we think and feel and act. Thinking of the world as categories and their children, if you will, is a common and effective way of making sense of this world. It's how we teach toddlers to see the world: Put all the blue blocks here, the red ones there. Things, we are taught, are instances of ideas, concepts, and categories that are not themselves up for grabs. Blue is blue; boys are boys; big is big.

But there are other ways of making sense, other ways of construing the relationship between this thing here and ideas, concepts, categories, biographies, and histories. Exemplary reading, as a way of making sense, is not without its ideology and historical heritage. It assumes there are certain things that are not up for grabs, that are not to be made sense of, along with the books, paintings, and art. Exemplary reading rests on the assumption of assumption, that there are certain things we can just count on. Why? Because experts have told us.