To Appease Our Alienation

Daniel Hartley has a nice response to Sven Birkerts’ recent essay on reading in a digital age (which I previously discussed here). I like Hartley’s analogizing of Birkerts’ dichotomy of transitive and intransitive reading to Barthes’ proairetic and hermeneutic reading in S/Z (more on that book here).

I also thought this was interesting:

So it is that every time a ruling ideology gives way, aesthetics or literature must step in to bear the brunt of those dying mechanisms of control. In England, for example, from at least Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) onwards, literature was called upon to assume the hegemonic burden which religion was no longer able to carry. When your people demand bread, educate their sensibilities through books so that they don’t shout quite so loud.

Unfortunately, Birkerts is in danger of unwittingly suggesting just such a solution to our current dilemma. He correctly deduces that certain shifts in our social and technological make-up (notice that emphasis on technological changes is almost always a way of not talking about economic changes) have altered our capacities to think and to perceive, and he understands these changes as negative or debilitating in some human sense; his solution to this is not to challenge the concrete historical situation, but to offer literature as a sort of supplement to appease our alienation, as a humanizing palliative in a world of dehumanizing machines.

. . . how do you justify getting paid to read books? The truth is that, historically, it really is unjustifiable, so any justification is likely to be pure ideology. A non-scholar (i.e. unsalaried non-professional reader) could answer the question on the point of reading thus: ‘There is no point: reading is an end in itself, a revelling in language for language’s sake, a joyous bathing in that invisible extension of our bodies in the world’. But if you said that to the Vice-Chancellor of the university (who in all likelihood is also on the board of some oil company), the very man paying your wages, it is unlikely you would achieve tenure. And so you clutch at straws: you do a Birkerts.

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2. The Din in the Head At the LA Times, Sven Birkerts gives high praise to Cynthia Ozick’s new book of criticism. In an essay on Saul Bellow’s "Ravelstein," which...
3. Literature in the Dominican Republic I don’t think I’ve ever read an author from the Dominican Republic, and I imagine not too many have been translated into English, but now...
4. Sven Birkerts Still Harping on Context In The Atlantic, Sven Birkerts argues that the Kindle (or e-reading writ large) will decimate literary context: Our rapidly evolving digital interface is affecting us...
5. Aesthetics Over at The Chronicle Review, Lindsay Waters argues for a return to an aesthetic appreciation of literature. I can only agree, agree, agree. For years...

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