All too often I find myself thinking of language, of my reading of a text, as, in itself, a “nothing”. One says that he can adopt a position for or against a text they read, as if the text can simply be thrown to the side and forgotten after being read. Or one says that he can adopt a position of liking or disliking, appreciating or not appreciating, valuing or not valuing, what has been read. In all these cases, the text is treated as an immaterial thing… As a thing without effects, as a thing that is just a “wisp”– A quasi-thing.
But I wonder, how does a physicalist think about the act of reading? What might a neurologist say about reading? If the mind is, as the neurologist contends, the brain then acts of reading and writing are not simply acts of a disembodied spirit that judges, selects, rejects, dismisses, but rather they are irreversible, physical events that transform ones neurology. To read is to create a physical trace that will irreversibly be there. Discourse with another is here no longer an innocent way of passing the time like Socrates beneath the tree with the young, charming and handsome Phaedrus, but is to transform, if only in a small way, both of those involved in a way that is irresolvable and that even has its own chemistry. Somewhere in the film Boogie Nights, Mark Wahlberg’s character speaks of wanting to pull his brain from his head so that he might scrub it clean of the things he’s seen. Isn’t that what it’s like? After we’ve read Marquis de Sade’s Justine or Levinas or Marx or Levi Strauss or Lacan or Plato or Kino Fist or Spurious an irreversible event has taken place, a material transformation has occurred. I choose such a disparate collection intentionally. I am not the same after these things, but rather the trace now clouds those information events taking place in the present, filling the present with echoes of these traces, crowding the present with these echoes, rendering the present always an absence.
In the end it is amazing that we take the act of reading and discoursing so lightly. I would like to think the texts I read are something external to me, something I can cast aside when I grow bored or horrified, thereby being done, but really if I’m a physical system this cannot be done. I am inter-penetrated by the texts I allow to enter me and I cannot be done with them even when I think that I’ve forgotten or finished with them. Perhaps this lends credence to Deleuze’s eternal return in a way that is not simply arrogance or pretension: I shall have been all the names of history in the precise sense that I shall have been the discourses that flow through me, as trace, as an anonymous murmur, where I am naught but the eccentric subject striving to grasp myself in this field of endless traces.
Larval Subjects . 
July 24, 2007 at 3:43 am
Yes and yes and yes… not everything I read effects me so. Sometimes it’s like walking in the rain with umbrella and London Fog… but can that be called, “reading?”
There are works that I know have changed me…not my ideas, not how I think, though that too–my very self. The chemistry and neurological organization of my … I was going to say, “brain,” but the brain is not up there in some sealed compartment… it is the body, the whole body.
I picked up a copy of Martin Buber’s Between Man and Man–this was in a bookstore. I was 21 years old. Before I closed that book, some 45 minutes later, I felt myself to be a different person.
I’ve long grown past the ideas and ideology that infused those essays, or imposed upon them radically revised versions of their “traces,” but my encounters with other writing was preconditioned by that earlier encounter, and still is.
There are books, poems… that I can in no way identify with, would be almost embarrassed to admit their importance in my life… but I know, deeply know, that these works changed me and conditioned everything that I later encountered.
Physically. Neurologically.
There are ideas… and there are ideas that we assimilate–that perhaps even change basic elements of our DNA, as one recent study suggest.
And there is deepest motive for writing… in response to what we know has happened to us–to give it back, to return the gift (however problematic it’s reception)…
… an insight when I was 12 years old. We are accountable even for our wonder.
July 24, 2007 at 3:49 am
I apologize for the typos in the previous post… had thought I would be able to return and edit. The errors are mine and should not reflect on this weblog.
July 24, 2007 at 8:35 am
Excellent post, this reminded me of Georges Poulet’s text “Criticism and the Experience of Interiority” in which he describes the book as a kind of consciousness in waiting. Poulet states that beyond the formal objects of the text, that ultimately the act of reading is a transcendence of mind between the reader and the artist. He states that it takes us to a subjectivity without objectivity.
July 25, 2007 at 1:54 am
Is physicalism really relevant, here? Certainly reading a book involves physical changes, including activity at the neural level; but then, so does breathing, or replacing a roll of paper towels, or anything else one might do. If reading a work involves a change in myself (which certainly isn’t wrong, at least for anything I read with attention), then it seems like the relevant sort of change has to be more than this. If the change effected by my reading something is akin to the change effected by my adjusting the thermostat, then it’s hardly odd if I regard my reading as something basically dead and foreign to me, which I can discard or take up at will; it is a minor part of my life, too minor for me to be overly concerned with.
This isn’t to disparage the post, or the sentiment behind it; I just feel that trying to give expression to the force a work has on a reader by speaking of physical alterations, even neural ones, fails to do justice to what is noteworthy about the way reading works its magic. It is not so much that works leave a trace come what may, but that one can actually feel haunted by works one had taken to have departed, even works one felt had been exorcised away, rendered inert forevermore. Or perhaps I am simply reading “trace”-talk as being less impressive than it’s meant to be. I did like the post.
July 25, 2007 at 2:09 am
There are actually studies showing that things like perceptual fluency influence how we judge texts, even in the most basic ways. For example, I’m more likely to believe that something that’s easy to read (e.g., in a large, clear font) is true than I am to believe that something in an unclear font is true. This is an extreme example, obviously, but it illustrates the point that the acts of reading, interpreting, and evaluating, interact with the medium.
July 25, 2007 at 3:06 am
Daniel, it seems to me that you have an extremely reductive and simplistic understanding of physicalism (re: your talk about thermostats). At any rate, you appear to have a conception of the subject as a sort of spiritual substance or mind in your remarks. The point here would be the change that takes place in informatic exchanges is not simply a matter of your attention (spectres of Cartesian subjectivity or perhaps the Christian soul here), but is a transformative material process. The relevant reference here, of course, would be Freud’s conception of the trace and the indestructibility of memory. Needless to say, I find this Cartesian paradigm you suggest one best left behind. The whole point is that there is something deeply disturbing in thinking of ourselves as neural networks and what it entails, something that can never be subjectivized or that effaces or sense of identity as a unified I presiding over the show and our actions. I can never identify with my brain as an electro-chemical information storing and processing machine that functions according to its own principles, yet this is precisely what I am such that my sense of autonomy and self is effectively an illusion or surface-effect.
July 25, 2007 at 5:32 am
If I understand the basic point of the post, it’s that we tend to be idealists about reading. That is, if we see reading as an act, we see it as a purely mental one, and the actual physical act of reading, which involves an interaction with something external, is either minimized or ignored altogether, resulting in the physical text itself being reduced to at most an accident, and at least, nothing (or at least a thing independent of the act of reading — it can still be something in other contexts, e.g. exchange).
There’s one strand of physicalism that provides an interesting perspective on this: distributed cognition. According to dynamic cognition views, the physical text itself is inseparable from the mental act. It is part of that act, so that the mental is extended out to the text. A simple example would involve something like underlining or writing in the margins. These allow the text to serve as a sort of external memory trace, that we can come back to later and use to activate a host of associations, much as we’d use internal memory traces to do so (I use the word “trace” for convenience only, ignoring the problems with trace theories of memory).
July 26, 2007 at 12:00 am
The profundity of an event like reading doesn’t seem very striking, in the ah-ha sort of way. I mean, of course it is profound! It is profound becayse I think this post shoots through all branches of experience the moment you realize that: there is no thing that is not arisen from conditions.
It reminds me of a class I took a couple of years ago called “Archaeology of the Book.” It was all about the material contexts of reading, though especially books.
July 26, 2007 at 1:39 am
So right on, Sinthome. I wonder how it ever happened that “text” came to be thougt of as disembodied. I think it’s the texts that most call attention to their materiality (language poetry, Joyce’s wandering letters, David Foster Wallace’s tome whose footnotes make reading physically taxing) that, strangely, are most affectively forceful. This makes me wonder, though, whether neurologists would solely be responsible for assessing the impact of reading… I’m not convinced that reading is only a capacity of mind; I’d be hard pressed to say what else I read with, but I feel like the text that changes one’s life (Joyce’s “The Dead” in my case) is read somehow with the limbic system…
July 26, 2007 at 8:42 am
Some very interesting thoughts here and an excellent post for a morning tea read.
Although I am not fared with any serious understanding of biological or cognitive sciences I do find these sorts of arguments convincing. I like the idea that we are changed in a corporeal sense after reading. In a sense it is quite romantic no? Wouldn’t this relate to the Heraclitean notion of constant flux?
July 26, 2007 at 8:39 pm
I think the physical is very important, and not necessarily reductive. I’ve written a book on music – Beethoven’s Anvil – in which I insisted that we treat music-making as a physical act, most particularly including what happens in our brains and the sound waves in the air. Doing so allowed to me frame an argument that, when people make music in a group, we have to consider the group itself as an active collective entity. We cannot reduce it to the sum of the actions of the individuals in the group.
I’ve written a long essay on literary morphology which I start out by considering literature as a physical event happening in our brains. That, I believe, has significant consequences, particularly for consideration of the formal element of texts. The article has been published online inn PSYARTS:
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2006_benzon01.shtml
July 29, 2007 at 9:34 am
[…] to follow an idea brought up by Larval Subjects, can bricks of our ontology be deposited into texts, into objects? Following the arguments in […]
August 19, 2007 at 6:02 pm
“In the end it is amazing that we take the act of reading and discoursing so lightly.”
Who takes reading and discourse lightly, anymore? As philosophers and thinkers, it is our duty, in this information age, to strictly limit our diet of text.
Time and exertive energy (and here I do quite literally mean, the chemical potential energy in our nervous systems), is limited. The damage done by “ill-judged outlays,” (qua Goethe), though extensive, always manifests itself later, usually too far down the line for our primitive cerebrums to make the connection. This damage could be caused by omission, as in the opportunity cost of reading irrelevant material, or could be caused by proliferation, by distraction, by the laying down of false trails and snares that hinder us in our own projects. (I am taking for granted, here, that we do have projects, I suppose).
I am not just talking about academic texts, either. I don’t click YouTube links, read blog entries, or turn on the television unless I have at least taken a few seconds to consider whether this is information that I really want to digest. And as with my other category of sustenance, a little junk food never hurt anyone, but it’s important to know the difference.
We should treat every friendly reading suggestion with suspicion. Not the suspicion that our friends and colleagues are trying to corrupt us, waste us, or distract us, but rather that they haven’t and couldn’t have considered their recommendations from the point of view of our chemical limitations, our indelible physical memories, which primarily remember not by words or images, but by the subtle proliferation of causes.