Lee Konstantinou Stuff I write.

Alan Jacobs and the Rise of the Reading Class

(Crossposted at Arcade.)

In a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education called "Why We Can't Teach Students to Love Reading," Alan Jacobs argues that "'deep attention' reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit." The inevitable minority status of deep reading "has been obscured in the past half-century, especially in the United States, by the dramatic increase in the percentage of the population attending college, and by the idea […] that modern literature in vernacular languages should be taught at the university level."

Mass higher education has artificially propped up reading, in Jacobs's view, leading many to falsely believe that engaged, long-form reading is something everyone should love. Drawing on a 2005 sociological survey of reading practices, which I discuss at greater length below, Jacobs calls the population of deep readers "the reading class." Our "anxiety about American reading habits, and those in other developed nations to a lesser degree," he concludes, "arises from frustration at not being able to sustain a permanent expansion of 'the reading class' beyond what may be its natural limits."

In fact, "the idea that many teachers hold today, that one of the purposes of education is to teach students to love reading--or at least to appreciate and enjoy whole books--is largely alien to the history of education." We are deceiving ourselves if we think we can teach students to love reading or for that matter to read more deeply than they would "naturally" do.

Because focusing on print is a cognitively alien (and alienating) activity for children, because an appreciation for long-form reading must be, in the words of Steven Pinker, "bolted on" the student, and because that bolting-on process is so very "painstaking," we should, in Jacobs's view, "extricate reading from academic expectations." Instead of teaching "[s]low and patient reading[…]"--a pursuit which "properly belongs to our leisure hours"--we would do well to teach high schoolers and undergraduates how to "skim[…] well, and read[…] carefully for information in order to upload content."

In short, mass literary culture is an artificial construction produced in part by an unnatural and inauthentic university system. The real or authentic form of reading happens--definitionally--outside academia, among autodidacts and amateurs. Though couched in a breezy and easygoing tone, Jacobs is making an extraordinarily destructive argument, not only from the perspective of someone who is invested in the flourishing of the academy but also from the perspective of someone who wants to enlarge literary culture. I count myself among both groups.

In an era where universities are seeking new ways to justify slashing and burning the humanities, Jacobs provides fresh ammunition to administrators. Real reading can't, apparently by definition, happen in the classroom. Real reading happens in the marketplace, among individuals or small private groups of enthusiasts. Why fund literature departments if they, at best, have no effect on literary appreciation or at worst actively inculcate shame and fear in potential readers by making reading a pill?¹

To support his arguments, Jacobs cites a great 2005 Annual Review of Sociology article, "Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century," by Wendy Griswold, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright. In this review of recent approaches to the sociology of reading--and investigations of multiple literacies--Griswold, McDonnell, and Wright show that reading is always the product of collective determinants and institutional mediation, and suggest that reading might indeed become a minority taste in the future.

Contra Jacobs's claims, however, their discussion of the development of a "reading class" has nothing to do with the "natural" boundaries of the reading public, but is rather about the way different institutional arrangements lead to different reading levels and practices.

They do argue that "historically the era of mass reading, which lasted from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century in northwestern Europe and North America, was the anomaly" and that "[w]e are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class."

But far from being the practice of a tribe of "natural readers," as Jacobs wants to argue, reading always happens in terms of a "social base." Whether a majority or a minority taste, there is little that is "natural" or "unnatural" about what they describe. Formal education is "the main determinant of literary proficiency," but even the isolated reader (or the autodidact Jacobs celebrates) is enmeshed in large and complex social systems of literary framing and pre-digested interpretation. Whatever their motivations or virtues, the self-perpetuating minority of the "reading class" relies as much on this "social base" as mass readers do. The anomalous nature of mass reading is not an argument against it--or for it. It is merely a social fact.

What this means is that Jacobs misunderstands the real implications of his own claims. From a social fact (the unnaturalness of mass long-form reading) he derives what seem to me to be non-sequitur conclusion (the desirability of this decline). As I have argued in a previous post, the unsuitability of our biology to a certain practice is not an argument against that practice. Likewise, the universality of a biological aspect of the human organism is no argument for it. The artificiality, difficulty, and education-dependence of deep reading is not an argument against the humanities but could well be an argument for the humanities. After all, if we value long-form reading--and long-form reading requires intensive training to perform well--we had best invest in institutions whose goal is the inculcation of this skill.

Finally, in a literary-historical register, Jacobs's arguments seem to call for the development of a research program that could empirically elaborate upon the conclusions of Griswold, McDonnell, and Wright. If, as I suspect, the demand for literature is anything but "natural," but is itself produced institutionally, literary scholars should dedicate themselves to investigating the historical, social, political, and economic production of demand. Post-WWII U.S. literature would be an especially ripe case study for anyone interested in this research program, not only because the institutional forces producing demand are so well documented but because for many of us these forces have had very powerful personal effects on who we are and our relationship to literary art.

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Notes

1. Some might argue that literature departments ought to be justified without referring to their salubrious effects on reading habits and practices. This is something like Stanley Fish's argument on the uselessness of the humanities. I won't address this argument here, but I should say that it's problematic and probably leaves the humanities on even weaker footing, even if only in the purely cynical terms of the administrative fight to secure funding.

13 Ways of Looking at “Pac-Man”

(Crossposted at Arcade.)

January was apparently Andrew Ross month over at Dissent.  Two articles, Jeffrey J. Williams's "How to be an Intellectual: The Cases of Richard Rorty and Andrew Ross" (in the Winter 2011 issue of the magazine) and Kevin Mattson's "Cult Stud Mugged" (an online original), track Ross's evolution from a so-called cult-stud into someone more akin to an academic labor reporter.

Though the tone of each of these articles differs significantly -- Mattson is by far snarkier and consquently more amusing than Williams -- the upshot of each is that Ross has matured into a serious, Dissent-approved scholar after a flashy but shallow cult-stud start.  Their larger, more trenchant point is that the casualization of acadmic labor, September 11, the various wars of the last decade, and the financial crisis have collectively "mugged" cultural studies afficionados, revealing its modes of analysis to be significantly less studly that was previously imagined.

This discussion has reminded me of my own introduction to cultural studies, way back when I was an undergraduate at Cornell.  Whatever may be true of Ross's work, past and present, I think the shift away from cultural studies isn't only about a turn toward more "serious" issues, such as grad student unionization, sweatshops, and income inequality.  I have been tracking a similar shift even in the way we analyze "merely" cultural objects.  This is where Pac-Man comes in.  I should warn my readers, that this post will only discuss two of the thirteen ways one might look at the game.

I.

As an undergrad with semotics in my eyes, I read -- and loved -- Arthur Asa Berger's Signs in Contemporary Culture: An Introduction to Semiotics.  Nothing was more exciting to me than semiotics; the very word seemed magical. A science of signs?  How cool was that? Very. I enjoyed lavishly sprinkling phrases like hermeneutics and ontology into papers I would now be forced to admit probably would have been better off without such stylistic garnishes.  To get a sense of why I was a fan, I present a long quote from Berger's analysis of Pac-Man:

We can find in "Pac Man," I believe, a sign that a rather profound change was taking place in the American psyche. Earlier video games (and the video-game phenomenon is significant in its own right) such as "Space Invaders" and so on, involved rocket ships coursing through outer space, blasting aliens and hostile forces with ray guns, laser beams, and other weapons, and represented a very different orientation from "Pac Man." The games were highly phallic and they also expressed a sense of freedom and openness. The games were played in outer space and one had a sense of infinite possibility.

"Pac Man," however, represents something quite different. The game takes place in a labyrinth which implies, metaphorically, that we are all trapped, closeted in a claustrophobic situation in which the nature of things is that we must either eat or be eaten. This oral aspect of the game suggests further that there is some kind of diffuse regression taking place and we have moved from the phallic stage (guns, rockets) to the oral stage (eating, biting).

Regression often takes place in people as a means of coping with anxiety and there is good reason to suspect that the popularity of a game like "Pac Man" indicates that our young people, who play the game, are coping with their anxieties by regressing (in the service of their egos). This may be because they are, for some reason, now afraid of taking on responsibilities and feel anxious about long-term relationships and mature interpersonal sexuality. When we regress to more child-like stages we escape from the demands of adulthood--but we pay a considerable price.

It is these aspects of "Pac Man" that disturb me. On the surface it is just a game. But the nature of the game--its design, which suggests that we are all prisoners of a system from which there is no escape, and its regressive aspects--must give all who speculate about the hidden meanings in phenomena something to think about.

"Pac Man" is important because it was the most popular video game in America for several years. In the 1990s, video games are much more sophisticated and complex and use more powerful technologies. They also may be more violent, sexist and psychologically damaging.

As badly as this passage may be dated, I can still remember the sense of liberation and fun it held, and passages like it, in its capacity to bring together two seemingly irreconcilable discursive registers: pop culture and high theory. To be fair to my younger self, there was also a sense of irony and play in reading such passages. I had no illusions that Pac-Man's aescendency spelled or was a symptom of doom, psychopathology, and sexist regression for the youth of America. Still:  "All who speculate about the hidden meanings in phenomena"! That exactly describes the group I wanted to be a part of.

II.

Sometime between the late nineties and today, something changed. To give a sense of what has changed, for me and for cultural studies as an enterprise, I'd like now to contrast Berger to a more recent approach to Pac-Man, drawn from Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost's Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, the first in a new series from The MIT Press called "Platform Studies," for which Motfort and Bogost also serve as editors.  The most important insight this book offers about Pac-Man is that gaming platforms matter: there is no Pac-Man apart from the technological frameworks within which the game is realized. The following review succinctly sums up how the Atari version of Pac-Man differed from the arcade version -- and why the home console verson sucked:

Let me now quote at length from Racing the Beam to indicate the insights Monfort and Bogost bring to Pac-Man:

Even before we get to the game’s hero and villains, Pac-Man’s method of drawing the maze demonstrates one of the major challenges in porting the game to the Atari VCS: time. In the arcade game, the programmer would load character values into video RAM once per maze, using the character tiles to create its boundaries. On the VCS, the maze is constructed from playfield graphics, each line of which has to be loaded from ROM and drawn separately for each scan line of the television display.

To be sure, mazes had already been displayed and explored in VCS games like Combat, Slot Racers, and Adventure. But these games had to construct their mazes from whole cloth, building them out of symmetrical playfields. The arcade incarnation of Pac-Mac demonstrates how the notion of the maze became more tightly coupled to the hardware affordances of tile-based video systems. In the arcade game, each thin wall, dot, or energizer is created by a single character from video memory. Though the method is somewhat arcane, the coin-op Pac-Man also allowed up to four colors per character in an eight-bit color space. (Each character defined six high bits as a “base” color--which is actually a reference to a color map of 256 unique colors stored in ROM--with two low bits added for each pixel of the bitmap.) This method allows the hollow, round-edged shapes that characterize the Pac-Man maze--a type of bitmap detail unavailable via VCS playfield graphics. The maze of the VCS game is simplified in structure as well as in appearance, consisting of rectangular paths and longer straight-line corridors and lacking the more intricate pathways of the arcade game.

What should be immediately apparent is that Monfort and Bogost have very little interest in approaching Pac-Man with a semiotic tool-kit; instead, they want to give an account of the form of the Atari VCS version of Pac-Man relative to the technical, economic, and temporal limitations constraining its development.  More than anything, their fantastic little book reads like a technically-literate guided tour or history of the game console.

More and more, I find myself drawn away from the approach to studying culture and the arts represented by Berger and toward the richly rendered historical, technical, and formal description offered by accounts such as Racing the Beam.  Those three registers -- the historical, technical, and formal -- turn out to be tightly linked together.  You simply can't discuss one without discussing the others.  Such rich descriptions must always be pressed into the service of larger arguments, of course; technical description for its own sake is of little interest apart from the claims such description serves.  Yet a close attention to technical details allows Monfort and Bogost to paint a richer picture of these early Atari games than a non-technical treatment could.  One comes away from this history with a renewed sense of how amazingly creative early game developers were.

III.

This is a longwinded way of suggesting that the shift away from the older cult-stud model -- which these Dissent essays register -- seems not only to apply to political, economic, and historical questions, but also to textual analysis and to the study of culture as such.  To my mind, this shift is almost all for the good, though it is in some ways less fun than the earlier model.

The Postironic Art of Charlie Kaufman

(Crossposted from Arcade.)

I'd like to point my loyal readers to the amazing introduction Charlie Kaufman wrote for Synecdoche, New York: The Shooting Script, which is available over at The Rumpus. I would summarize the introduction and analyze it -- I am almost unable to resist the temptation -- but to do so would ruin the pleasure and surprise of the thing itself.

Suffice it to say, I consider Kaufman's ouvre to be a species of what I call postirony; indeed, Kaufman's body of work was instrumental for me -- along with the work of David Foster Wallace and Chris Ware -- in suggesting the need for such a term in the first place.  By postirony, I mean the use of metafictional or postmodernist (usually narrative) techniques in the pursuit of what amounts to the pursuit of humanistic or traditional themes:  the desire to "really connect" to other people, the project of cultivating sincerity, the wish to move beyond systems-level analysis of the world toward an analysis of character, the new centrality of "narrative" and "storytelling" in experimental works.  It doubly suffices to say that the details get pretty complicated pretty quickly, so I won't go into those details here.

Kaufman's introduction, here, takes us in a remarkably short space from a kind of metafiction that initially seems cynical and mercenary toward self-transcendence, human connection, and the mutuality of love.  It's awesome.

Infinite Summer and New Models of Online Scholarship

(Crossposted at Arcade.)

I'd like to use my bloggy pulpit to draw your attention to a draft of Kathleen Fitzpatrick's essay, "Infinite Summer: Reading the Social Network," which discusses the origin and signifiance of an online effort to read Infinite Jest the summer after David Foster Wallace's suicide.

This essay is destined to become part of a collection of essays on David Foster Wallace, which I am co-editing with Sam Cohen, called The Legacy of David Foster Wallace: Critical and Creative Assessments. The collection is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press.

Beyond the content of the essay, I want to start a conversation about the future of scholarship and academic communities on the Internet. Along with group blogs (Arcade, The Valve, Crooked Timber, and countless group and personal blogs), there are journals that publish exclusively online (electronic book review), wiki-like resources dedicated to certain fields (Modernism Lab at Yale), and electronic "gateway" or aggregator sites (Nines).

What is new, as far as I know, about the model Fitzpatrick is using is that she is getting commentary on her drafts of written essays through an "open" peer review process. She has gone through this open review process with her new book, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Internet (which is also forthcoming from NYU Press) and she has gone so far as to put her first book, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (which Vanderbilt first published in 2006), online in full.

In a sense, Fitzpatrick is "blogging" this essay -- she is using WordPress as a framework to make her essay available -- but the open-source WordPress theme/plugin (CommentPress) she is using facilitates reading her text like a book and commenting on individual pages and paragraphs. There have been other projects that led to the development of this framework, including McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory, which was subsequently published by Harvard UP.

All of this leads me to ask a few questions: What are the advantages and disadvantages of showing work in progress online and inviting commentary? Is there any reason why, a few years after a work of scholarship has come out, and in the overwhelming majority of cases has sold most of what it will ever sell, we should not all be placing our books online? Are we too print-bound? Too locked into norms that guarantee that our work is inaccessible to vast majority of readers? Or are there good reasons for keeping our systems of scholarly dissemination more or less as they are today?

I ask these questions without much of an agenda. Rather, I'd like to spark a conversation that will help me think through these issues.

The Xtranormal Future of the Humanities

(Crossposted at Arcade.)

In the spirit of continuing the conversation we have been having on Arcade about Stanley Fish, the recent axing of French, Italian, classics, Russian, and theatre at SUNY Albany, and the future of the humanities, I'd like to present this video (h/t Mark Vega).

This is a video created using "xtranormal," a service that allows one to choreograph computer generated figurines, creating primitive animated three dimensional storyboards, based on text inputs. While painful and funny -- especially for those of us who are on the job market this year -- xtranormal raises interesting questions about possible new directions in the development of narrative art, giving us a hint of what is to come, what critics will have to give consideration to.

The tools with which this video were created are relatively primitive, but should we expect narrative art of considerable sophistication to be created using tools such as this in the near future? It seems clear to me that the answer is yes -- we will in a not-too-near future be inundated by animated narrative in huge quantities. And, as I hope this video makes plain, such videos can be incredibly intelligent and engaging. Of course, anyone who has ever watched South Park -- or, as I have, taught episodes of South Park in a course -- already knows this.

In a future where anyone, working more or less alone, can construct films of (increasing) sophistication, will the ultimate promise of being a novelist -- sole, individual control over one's artistic output, at least in theory -- give way to a world of one-person moviemakers? Will all classic literature be mediated by a new layer of animated figures acting out plots and scenarios originally written in novelistic form? If so, is this a bad thing? Are there pedagogical opportunities such systems offer teachers willing to embed new media in the classroom?

Op-Ed Preview: WikiLeaks vs. Top Secret America

My satirical political novel "Pop Apocalypse" presents a future world in which the U.S. goes on an invasion spree around the world. Among other places, I had my fictional U.S. invade Iceland. It seemed like a great gag: Why would the U.S. want to invade a tiny country of 250,000 people in the Arctic Circle whose most notable export is Bjork?

To read the rest of "WikiLeaks vs. Top Secret America," visit AOL News.

Thanks to Gina Misiroglu for connecting me to AOL.

Restoration, Rejoice!

It has taken a while, largely due to my laziness, but I've finally found a way to restore the blog postings that got lost in the shuffle when my site was hacked back around December. Their formatting's a bit wonky, but the old posts are back. Enjoy.