In defense of bad reading

I have a problem with the customary reproaches leveled against those who, it is said, don’t read seriously and in-depthly (apologies for the adverb but I couldn’t resist). Deep reading. Such an interesting concept! One that makes me think of diving rather than desk-bound perusal. But that’s just me.

Source: Contently

We want reading to be deep. That’s not all. We want all reading to be deep. All of it, page after page, book after book. We want our minds busy in an almost professional manner. Like academics, if you get my drift. Because academics – well, they know how to read well. Their reading is perfectly tuned. It can spot an intention, the hint of a meaning, no matter how small. The reading of an academic is able to tell you, on the spot, what the author truly wanted to say. You see how this kind of reading is x-ray-like. It can pierce through a book, it can see beyond the visible. Reading of this kind blooms like a flower that’s taking itself very, very seriously.

But there’s something to be said here, before we go mad with passion. A question. How many people do read a book with all these good intentions? Academics, students, scholars. Ok, all ticked. But who else?

Behind this question stands, obviously, the generalized concern I’ve noticed (and I’m sure I’m not the only one) with the perils of new technologies.

Hands-free reading

For a long time we complained, if I remember correctly, that not enough was being read. That books were waiting in vain to be picked up from their shelves by individuals too interested in watching tv or playing video games, or simply being couch-potatoes that fried slowly in the oil of their own apathy. Then something happened. (In the way technology comes about, it always seems as thought it has appeared out of the blue.) Tablets and smart phones came about, cloud storage and online databases, and now there’s more reading taking place than ever in the history of humanity. Are we satisfied, though? No. We’ve reformulated another complaint. Those who were not reading before are now reading incorrectly, inappropriately, irreverently even.

Source: Academic Sciences

The problem with this new complaint is primarily a strategic one. It belongs in the infrastructure of learning. How is one who wasn’t reading at all supposed to have learnt, by his/her own accord, to read like a pro? How? As we have agreed before, they’ve never had the tools to be Readers. Never. They never liked it, they never had that special chemistry within their souls, they never did what was necessary. Then why are we complaining about them? I’ll leave this question here (no need for an answer) because I’ve got another one at the ready. Haven’t we somehow forgotten that most readers read for a kind of pleasure that’s more akin to movie-watching and videogame-playing than to any highbrow objective? Take a look around. There are more readers at the beach, in a train or bus, on a bench in a park, in bathtubs and on toilet seats – than in the world’s libraries. Note: there’s nothing wrong with reading like that. What I mean to say is this: most readers do it because they want to relax. Reading like a pro is painful. It requires a pen or pencil in one hand, a library in the other (to find concordances, to draw parallels, to note down peculiarities of style and intertextual similarities). That’s why reading like a pro is usually limited to the pro.

The reader who seeks relaxation wants their hands free of any prosthetics. Hands-free reading is for fun. It is for giggling when a funny passage comes about, for the heartbeats to accelerate when suspense kicks in, for pallor to settle on one’s face when he/she comes across a horror scene.

One way of reading

The complaint against new readers comes from a minority group: the careful readers, the practitioners of close reading, the examiners for whom reading is not skimming but perusal, not browsing but inspection. This minority group forgets an essential aspect of the story they tell: they’re trained to read this way. They’ve spent hours and hours educating themselves, turning their attention from the easy bits or complicating the same to the point where they’re turned into something unrecognizable. These readers deal well with difficult texts because they’ve made those texts difficult. Self-flagellation is the favourite technique of the readers with busy hands. They don’t accept ease because, for some reason, ease comports the risk of stultification. It’s like looking at a horse that’s gone through expensive dressage and not seeing that the same animal is equally capable of pulling a cart.

Source: PsyBlog

With reading, though, the problem is that its high horses are taken for granted. There are rites of passage throughout school, various forms of taming and training, all meant to educate the reader, to make them sensitive to the finely tuned and the highly pitched. But what should happen with those who haven’t (for one reason or another) acquired the techniques that guarantee their acquisition of greatness? Those who have fallen through the cracks and yet still want to read a book the best they can? The best they can!

This is where my problem lies. In applying that one-size-fits-all adage that says, ‘a book can be read in a million ways.’ If that’s the case (and it must be!) then hands-free reading is also a form of reading. So let’s accept it. I don’t care that it doesn’t add value to the ontology of reading. I don’t care that it leaves the reader speechless at the end, incapable of articulating a thought, of formulating a cogent analysis. It’s a form or reading and that’s that.

A perversity

For those who want to reach depths, there’s room enough to develop their own passion. That’s because their reading is also one form of reading. It’s not the absolute form, it’s not the only one. The democracy of intellectual matters contains, like the democracy of politics, strong binary opposites: high and low, poor and rich, adventurous and timid.

What goes unacknowledged in this story is a simple fact of personal obligation: I must not impose my pleasure upon another subject. That would amount to tyranny. To perversity. I can draw attention to the fact that other options are likely to exist – that goes without saying. I can, if I am smarter, better equipped, luckier, I can point out the richness of the world of reading. But I must not talk about reading in terms of preferences. De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum. I must not pull my nose in disgust when I hear another’s preferences. My likes cannot be another’s, unless by accident. If I belong in a community of interpreters (as Stanley Fish likes to put it), that belonging is the result of pure chance. It’s not unlike being born in a particular language.

Let’s do something wrong!

Last week I talked about garbage – the waste of writing, the stuff that’s condemned never to be encountered by the reader. But there were things that went unsaid in that post: my own garbage, of course. The part I took out was about mistakes: writing, reading, and the way mistakes intrude to mess them up. Or do they, really?

In order to arrive at these mistakes, I think I need to take the usual detour, which will prove to be of some importance later on. Critical reading: that’s what I’m thinking of. The two things go hand in hand, don’t they? Critical attitude and reading. Only a type of reading that is critical in nature can bring to light that which we take to be a mistake. Do you remember your years in high school or college, when you had to produce an argumentative essay? What was the thing that you were most likely to do? Read the original text with the intention of finding a flaw in it. A flaw serious enough to warrant the grunt in your response. A mistake that could not go untreated.

Source: JTM Games

That kind of reading, which placed critical unrest before and above everything else, was meant to develop one’s ability to judge. So they said, remember? But there was something else at work as well. Through the cultivation of this critical spirit, you were being trained into the profession of academic reading. It made sense, didn’t it? You were in school, not in a factory. You had therefore to learn how to read, write, and think the way schools read, write, and think.

But schools teach almost always through mistakes. Remember your teacher’s comments on the margins of your essay? That’s what I mean.

The critical profession

Critical reading is characteristic to the academia the way cleaning a pipe is characteristic to plumbing. What I mean by this is that it only makes sense to exercise your critical abilities if you read with an academic mind, or in order to impress (we say ‘interact with,’ or ‘find a channel of communication with,’ but it means the same thing!) another academic mind. That's like saying that you can only clean a pipe if you have the authority vested in you by the profession of plumbing. Once escaped from the confines of the academia, your reading turns into something else: something that is no longer limited by the predicaments of that profession. Once you’re outside of school, you discover that reading can take place without rules and neat margins; you discover that it can be full of garbage. And you like it, in 9 cases out of 10; the way you like not knowing what could cause a pipe to block. Ignorance is bliss, as they say, and the saying seems to be equally applicable to readers and plumbers.

All this has one major reason: being an academic is a profession, and critical reading is the major outlet of this occupation. (As for the plumbing profession, I'll let the knowledgeable ones say it in their own words.)

Let’s see if that makes sense.

When the professionals of critical reading are asked about the practicality of their profession, they spit scorn back at you. And that is precisely the response of a professional, since all professionals spit scorn when it comes to questioning the purpose of their actions. There is always a literal, fundamentalist, dogmatic reference to the letter of the profession (to what constitutes its purpose, to what warrants its lunacies, to how important it is in the context of human experience).

Based on this, one thing needs to be said: professionals are not flexible. Why? Because they are bound by their guild to defend the territory of their profession and to scorn all attempts at defamation – of which the world is full, since the world is made up of other professions too.

Mistaken?

Yet there’s another thing about professionals: they tend to have words of criticism to utter about others in their own line of duty. And this is where we get closer to what I wanted to talk about: mistakes.

I have spoken to plumbers who, instead of giving me the straight answer about what had gone wrong with the drainage in my house, spoke about the insufficient professionalism of the plumber who did the job before. To professionals, there’s always something to criticize in the past of others. Not their own past – let’s be clear about this: always the past of others. The past in general is always flawed with them. A true professional lives in a continuous present, where the only thing that’s worth the penny of everybody’s attention is their present practice: the way they perform here and now. This immediacy of professionals is due, I believe, to the fact that they are task-driven. They don’t just choose what’s next. They don’t do what they want, but what needs to be done – what the world requires of them.

Source: Boomer to Gen-Y (and Gen-X)

But what’s very, very important is that the task itself depends on something bad having happened before. Let’s admit it: without a mistake there’s no task; without something wrong there’s no need for something good to be done to right it. Without an incomplete story there cannot be a sequel. Without a wrong theory there’s no need for a scientist to test his own. Therefore, the past has to be bad. Whether they succeed or not, the actions of a ‘fixer’ are expected to lead to an improvement, to a change in the wrong course of things. That’s why the intervention of a specialist, insofar as they are fixers-of-things, takes up an almost heroic aura.

Hunting for errors

Similar to plumbing, critical reading has its own professional fief. Academics will think of their work as significant in the present, while at the same time highlighting the insufficiency of their predecessors. In an academic dissertation or peer-reviewed article worth their title, there is a very clear demand for the assessment of previous work, which is expected to appear as incomplete. It is within the gap left uncovered by the predecessor that academic readers place their own performance. In this regard, the academic reader is by definition a fixer: a plumber of texts, a professional promising to provide the actual way of doing things.

The major task, here as in the case of plumbers, is to find that mistake, that shortcoming. An academic who writes his or her article is demanded (by professional rules, by peer-reviewing eyes, by colleagues and readers) to drill a hole into their field of expertise and plant inside it the seed of their own argument. In order for that seed to catch roots, it has to enjoy the photosynthesis of a well-discovered mistake.

Source: Odd Job Nation

Not long ago, I read a seemingly innocent article with a seemingly complicated title: “Promotional(meta)discourse in research articles in language and literary studies.” To take it to its nitty-gritty, the article is about how academics pitch themselves by downgrading others. It talks about “boosterism” and “self-advocacy” – two terms that speak for themselves. These may be only self-marketing techniques, the way they’re usually employed by professionals (doesn’t Pepsi thrive on showing how different it is from Coca Cola?). But behind the whole marketing thing, behind the pretentious assertion that irreverence is necessary if what you want is progress, lies the truth of The Mistake: this unavoidable engine that stands at the roots of everything.

Everything, really – you may ask? Of course, I say. Think no further than Adam and Eve and you’ll see what I mean.