Philosophical Babble

Dan Visel wrote yes­ter­day on the if:book blog about tabs and nonlinearity.

The “tab” con­nec­tion — think­ing of tab in all of its mod­ern def­i­n­i­tions, from key­board­ing to phys­i­cal bits of things stick­ing out — had lit­tle to do with his over­all argu­ment, other than act­ing as a point of inspi­ra­tion and then an awk­ward cho­rus through­out the essay. Still, as an intro­duc­tion to non­lin­ear­ity, it served well.

Visel won­ders at the num­ber of tabs he has open in his browser at any given time, some tabs open for months at a time, wait­ing for him to come back and read and con­sider them. This isn’t unusual; I do the same thing, though my record is only about a month for keep­ing a sin­gle tab open (I even­tu­ally gave up on it).

But then he thinks about his print read­ing habits, how he has a dozen or so books “in progress” at any given time. He jumps between them, pick­ing up a shorter book while he’s already read­ing a longer one. Starting a new release when he hasn’t fin­ished the one that came before, and so on.

“If something’s changed in the world of read­ing,” he writes, “it might be defined as a loss of lin­ear­ity. Before the fall, peo­ple started read­ing books at the begin­ning, and kept on until they got to the end. Texts were read in series. Now, for bet­ter or for worse, we read things – books, texts, web pages – in parallel.”

There it is, another ref­er­ence to the Eden of read­ing before the Fall into non­lin­ear­ity, as if there was ever a cor­rect way to read a book. Sure, medieval schol­ars taught stu­dents how to read and how to anno­tate and gloss their texts, but that doesn’t mean the teach­ers’ meth­ods were the only cor­rect ones. It means that their meth­ods were the most pow­er­ful at the time, the ones that stu­dents were taught.

Disclaimer: I’m digressing.

Believing that their is a right way to read a book (as the author intended?) is to believe in some over­ar­ch­ing power or sense of orga­ni­za­tion. It is to believe that there is some­thing in the text to be discovered.

More abstractly, it is a phi­los­o­phy that holds that there is good out there, not orig­i­nal to me, that I may find if I do some­thing cor­rectly. Eternal reward awaits the pen­i­tent. Further, that good was placed wher­ever it is by some­one or some­thing else — whether it be a god, an author, or some other machination.

On the other hand, assum­ing that there is no cor­rect way to read a text, we must believe that a reader reads for a rea­son, because oth­er­wise the entire argu­ment is moot. A per­son needs a good rea­son to spend time on some­thing that has no apparent/inherent struc­ture or benefit.

Why do we read? It is too easy to say we read to find mean­ing, because that lan­guage is biased toward she who believes there is mean­ing to be found in a text. Instead, the more uni­ver­sal rea­son for read­ing is to learn. Even if the reader believes in that Eternal Reward, she is still read­ing to learn what that reward is and how to earn it.

So, we read to learn — about the world around us, about the peo­ple around us, and about our­selves, just to give three pos­si­ble lessons.

An “athe­is­tic” reader then approaches the text with­out look­ing for a hid­den mean­ing or pur­pose, instead read­ing sim­ply to learn some­thing. That reader may then feel free to read in any par­al­lel or non­lin­ear way she likes because she lacks any con­cern for a higher power or author­ity over the text. The reader will not, in other terms, offend god with her lack of reverence.

Returning to the abstract, this phi­los­o­phy of read­ing assumes that the world is there, for good or ill, to be under­stood by humans in what­ever ways pos­si­ble. There is no hid­den truth to be dis­cov­ered, no prim­rose path to fol­low; there is only the path cho­sen by the reader that he will walk as best he can toward what­ever mean­ing he can make for himself.

This phi­los­o­phy is akin to the idea of a “watch­maker” god. In this case, the author set the text into motion, devis­ing its struc­ture and then walked away, never to return. (I like to call it “fire and for­get” writing.)

(Presumably, our athe­is­tic reader does not have a spir­i­tual cri­sis won­der­ing where the book came from in the first place, pre­fer­ring to deal with the arti­fact rather than its genesis.)

Back to Visel: after long com­par­isons to cubist paint­ing and some non­lin­ear nov­els from the 1960s, Visel comes to this conclusion:

“Reading in par­al­lel doesn’t need to be a dumbed-down ver­sion of sequen­tial read­ing, as we might imag­ine it to be: there are more possibilities.”

Not poetry, and it rings a bit hol­low, like the promises so oft read in the works of hyper­text the­o­rists from the 1990s, but nev­er­the­less it is true.

Note this though, Visel does not claim that the non­lin­ear text is supe­rior, only that non­lin­ear read­ing prac­tices offer more pos­si­bil­i­ties; so don’t think we have to do away with the forms we are accus­tomed to. Instead, we should be open to non­lin­ear read­ing prac­tices and cease lament­ing for a lost Eden that was allegedly home to the soli­tary, lin­ear, “stu­dious” reader. Like Eden, that reader is a com­fort­ing myth.

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1. Intertextuality
2. Possible Copyright Problems in Hollywood
3. Annotations
4. Bradbury Claims “451″ has been Misinterpreted
5. Gibson Schmoozes in SL