In Understanding Media (1964), that revelatory and prophetic work of cultural philosophy, Marshall McLuhan speaks of the form of human consciousness engendered by the practice of solitary reading as ‘the Gutenberg mind’, and calls – implicitly – for a recognition of its potential limits. Indeed, to follow his most celebrated maxim is to recognise that the message of the codex, as a medium, is that acquiring knowledge and its understanding are under- takings separated from the social realm, whether by the bone of our skulls or the boards of our book covers.
In the current era the dispute between those who view the technological assemblage of the internet and the web as some sort of panacea for our ills, and those who worry it might herald the end of everything from independent thought (whatever that might be), to literacy itself, has a slightly muted feel. I suspect the reason for this is also to be found in Understanding Media: as McLuhan pointed out, the supplanting of one medium by another can take a long time – and just as the practice of copying manuscripts by hand continued for centuries after the invention of printing, so solitary reading – conceived of importantly as an individual and private absorption in a unitary text of some length – persists, and will continue to endure long after the vast majority of copy being ingested is in the form of tiny digitised gobbets.
2020 was an exceptional year, and the evidence is certainly not conclusive, but nonetheless the pandemic almost certainly resulted in renewed interest in long-form prose and the reading of it. There’s a nice sort of asynchrony here, with the reviving of the Gutenberg mind being occasioned by the sort of plague with which he would’ve been all too familiar. But when we ask why should we read? The answer surely cannot be that it’s the substrate best suited for cultivating a certain type of human persona – one that sees itself as unitary, maintaining identity through space and time, and capable of accounting for itself in a linear fashion conformable to external correlates – a persona, in other words, like a book. Yet just as the pandemic has got some of us scuttling back within its covers, so the longer- term decline in what we might call purposive reading has been inversely – arguably perversely – correlated with what the philosopher Galen Strawson terms ‘strong narrativity’: that belief not only in the book-like human persona, but in a categorical imperative to convey its contents to others.
The shibboleth ‘everyone has a book in them’ has mutated into the rather more hectoring: ‘everyone has a tale to tell, and they must be able to recount it in order to be accorded full moral status.’ It might be churlish of me – an autodidact, who believes the true writer to be necessarily so – to observe that this ‘philosophy’ has itself developed in lockstep with creative writing programmes, but there it is: having paid cash-on-the-nail to become proficient tale-tellers, creative-writing alumni and their instructors alike (many of whom are themselves also alumni), move to enact a closure that cannot – given the underlying eco- nomic metric – be anything but for the most part ethical. From this righteousness proceeds the proposition: I read (and am read), therefore I am, and I am good.
But shorn of a progressive worldview based on Enlightenment values that equate technological with moral advance, and figure human being itself as a meta-narrative whereby the West writes itself into supremacy, it’s impossible to argue for mandatory reading: ‘To get up in the morning, in the fullness of youth, and open a book! Now, that’s what I call vicious’ is Nietzsche’s admonition in Ecce Homo – and it’s one I’m fond of retailing to my own students, withal that I’d like them to read a great deal more than they do. Why? Because, yes, I too have never seen anything lovelier than a tree, while some of the unloveliest things I’ve ever witnessed have been metaphors, arboreal and floral. Moreover, if the bi-directional digital medium is rendering us illiterate, it’s as much because we can no longer read a map – which necessitates basic orientation – as a text. Put bluntly, we’re becoming strangers in a strange land, moving dazedly through it, our faces wan in the up-light from our screens, as we all follow the little- blue-dot-that’s-us. Under such circumstances, nostalgia for our Gutenberg minds, while understandable, is a bit like nostalgia for hand-tooled leather satchels: a move to accessorise rather than civilise.
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