“There may be some other roads to travel towards “thinking well” that rest in embodied experience, in emotion and intuition, in conversation and movement, but reading is at least one of the best structured methods for developing and focusing the ability to think.”
This part struck me particularly hard because it was just this morning that I was wondering if the renewed focus on ‘embodiment’ and ‘lived experience’ is in fact being *opposed* to more cerebral action, rather than the two being part of a continuum or a network. And I was thinking about it in this exact context, the discourse around ‘post literacy.’
I’m listening to Matt Seybold’s American Vandal to see what he means by deliteracy as well.
I’m not sure I’m making myself clear but most definitely your post is perfectly timed for me!
Yes, this is right on the money--I'm getting stuck in a well-worn Cartesian groove here that isn't warranted either by empirical evidence or wisdom--these are not opposites or antagonists, necessarily--there is a great deal of good historical and anthropological work that shows that textuality lives alongside and nestles within other ways to information and knowledge. But I do mean to say that there are people whose limited engagement with reading does not in any way inhibit their critical engagement with the world nor their accumulation of knowledge and wisdom. But this is like saying that there are in fact autodidacts that need no formal education at all. True! But also, in some sense, unusual and nothing to build a general expectation around.
Oh for sure. I was thinking about all the discussion of Postman and Ong recently in the discourse around post literacy in particular. Superficially appealing but ultimately dismissive of preliterate cultures. But true in the ways that matter for us, now.
The points you make at the end of this post are compelling and extremely useful and I will be using them in class this fall.
It’s all pretty new to me (thinking about literacy) as an art historian, but in the context of GenAI it’s good to think with. Paradigm shifter? Definitely too early to tell but I do get depressed about what I can expect from students amid all the uncertainty.
I’m fixated on embodiment myself, trying to track all the contexts where it’s showing up, seemingly all of a sudden ( although I know that’s not true). The Cartesian divide you mention above is definitely there, I’m looking at Damasio and affect theory (among others) to see how the embodiment discourse is playing out in other fields.
That reading a text helps one understand how to construct one’s own texts. What works rhetorically and affectively and even mechanically in someone else’s text might be marshaled for your own. We don’t read simply to interpret (not that interpretation is ever simple); we read to enrich our ability to communicate. You want to criticize an idea? Might be helpful to read about it from multiple perspectives first.
The facile answer from people like the guy on Reddit would be "well, just tell me about the multiple perspectives, that's why you're paid to be a teacher...compress all that sprawling text into compact information." But not only does that leave the Reddit guy or any other student in a hopelessly dependent relationship to me (they just have to trust that I'm doing an honest job of compression, it's leaving so much out. Reading makes so many perspectives, of the dead and the still living, available to think with. You can find ways to critique (or appreciate) an idea from another text that has never been used to critique or appreciate that idea before. You can create a relationship through your own reading. Which is, exactly as you say, also the way you discover how to create your own ideas, write your work, imagine something in a new way. Which surely is not only valued by employers but is a basic human desire, a fundamental need, for the time we are here.
Amen, Tim. Reddit Guy, it’s not my job to tell you what to think. It’s my job to offer you tools to help you make what you think more intelligible to yourself and to others. I thought you Redditors supposedly wanted intellectual freedom, etc. Here’s how you get it: You do the work. Peace, out.
I really liked this essay. I was a bit puzzled by the conceit of making a "case for reading". But then I saw just moments ago Rose Borowitch's cover story for the Atlantic August issue, "The End of Reading is Here". So apparently we need a case for.
“There may be some other roads to travel towards “thinking well” that rest in embodied experience, in emotion and intuition, in conversation and movement, but reading is at least one of the best structured methods for developing and focusing the ability to think.”
This part struck me particularly hard because it was just this morning that I was wondering if the renewed focus on ‘embodiment’ and ‘lived experience’ is in fact being *opposed* to more cerebral action, rather than the two being part of a continuum or a network. And I was thinking about it in this exact context, the discourse around ‘post literacy.’
I’m listening to Matt Seybold’s American Vandal to see what he means by deliteracy as well.
I’m not sure I’m making myself clear but most definitely your post is perfectly timed for me!
Yes, this is right on the money--I'm getting stuck in a well-worn Cartesian groove here that isn't warranted either by empirical evidence or wisdom--these are not opposites or antagonists, necessarily--there is a great deal of good historical and anthropological work that shows that textuality lives alongside and nestles within other ways to information and knowledge. But I do mean to say that there are people whose limited engagement with reading does not in any way inhibit their critical engagement with the world nor their accumulation of knowledge and wisdom. But this is like saying that there are in fact autodidacts that need no formal education at all. True! But also, in some sense, unusual and nothing to build a general expectation around.
Oh for sure. I was thinking about all the discussion of Postman and Ong recently in the discourse around post literacy in particular. Superficially appealing but ultimately dismissive of preliterate cultures. But true in the ways that matter for us, now.
The points you make at the end of this post are compelling and extremely useful and I will be using them in class this fall.
Yeah, I was very fixated on arguing about how Ong was wrong when I was in graduate school and I have never lost that orientation.
It’s all pretty new to me (thinking about literacy) as an art historian, but in the context of GenAI it’s good to think with. Paradigm shifter? Definitely too early to tell but I do get depressed about what I can expect from students amid all the uncertainty.
I’m fixated on embodiment myself, trying to track all the contexts where it’s showing up, seemingly all of a sudden ( although I know that’s not true). The Cartesian divide you mention above is definitely there, I’m looking at Damasio and affect theory (among others) to see how the embodiment discourse is playing out in other fields.
That reading a text helps one understand how to construct one’s own texts. What works rhetorically and affectively and even mechanically in someone else’s text might be marshaled for your own. We don’t read simply to interpret (not that interpretation is ever simple); we read to enrich our ability to communicate. You want to criticize an idea? Might be helpful to read about it from multiple perspectives first.
The facile answer from people like the guy on Reddit would be "well, just tell me about the multiple perspectives, that's why you're paid to be a teacher...compress all that sprawling text into compact information." But not only does that leave the Reddit guy or any other student in a hopelessly dependent relationship to me (they just have to trust that I'm doing an honest job of compression, it's leaving so much out. Reading makes so many perspectives, of the dead and the still living, available to think with. You can find ways to critique (or appreciate) an idea from another text that has never been used to critique or appreciate that idea before. You can create a relationship through your own reading. Which is, exactly as you say, also the way you discover how to create your own ideas, write your work, imagine something in a new way. Which surely is not only valued by employers but is a basic human desire, a fundamental need, for the time we are here.
Amen, Tim. Reddit Guy, it’s not my job to tell you what to think. It’s my job to offer you tools to help you make what you think more intelligible to yourself and to others. I thought you Redditors supposedly wanted intellectual freedom, etc. Here’s how you get it: You do the work. Peace, out.
Of course, at this point, it's entirely possible that Reddit Guy is actually an AI.
In which case it’s really not my job to help AI pretend to think at all. See ya at the Singularity, Reddit Faux-Guy.
I really liked this essay. I was a bit puzzled by the conceit of making a "case for reading". But then I saw just moments ago Rose Borowitch's cover story for the Atlantic August issue, "The End of Reading is Here". So apparently we need a case for.
Yes. And Borowitch's cover story is only the latest in a long parade of similar essays and investigations.