As a graduate of a liberal arts university, I wound up, unsurprisingly, taking a
lot of classes in every possible academic discipline. Thinking back to the
person that I was going into university, I don’t think I would have chosen to
take them – after all, my degree was in the sciences; I’d have been stoked to
do nothing more than wall-to-wall computer science until I ran out of
coursework and filled the rest of my hours with research and independent
studies with my professors (which, I guess I did actually do, just not as
much as I would have otherwise).
Even this blog’s CSS theme (now 18 years old and starting to look it) was
something I wrote after receiving and repeatedly re-reading a tattered
third-hand copy of “The Laws of Thought” by George Boole. It was gifted to me
by a college friend majoring in philosophy while I was crashing at his rental
on the beach. He gave it to me because he knew I “liked that shit” and, while
it was definitely computer science in nature, I would not have read it
otherwise. I have vivid memories of sleeping on his la-z-boy surrounded by
towers of books he was working through. He went on to do incredible work,
getting his PhD, doing research, brilliant writing – his death in 2023 has
robbed humanity of more time with him. “The Laws of Thought” sits behind me in
my office, and is one of my most valued possessions.
My friends mean more to me than I could ever express, and I definitely don’t
show it enough. Each of my classes made me a more thoughtful person. My
professors made me a better, more well-rounded person – and a person who
attempts to live up to the oft repeated credo of being “men and women for
others”. I did the best I could, even though I was never a particularly good
student. Without liberal arts, I don’t think I would, dispositionally, have
been capable of pushing myself – to this day – to continue to learn on nights
and weekends, for no reason other than wanting to learn. I refuse to stop
expanding my perspective, and do my best to approach new problems with as much
humility and curiosity as I can muster.
Every few days for the last year or so, I have been thinking back to a reading
assignment from my junior year that, at the time, I thought was a borderline
throwaway filler assignment for the class. The reading is an essay from 1947 by
the french existentialist philosopher and libertarian marxist, Jean-Paul Sartre
(as some of the more erudite may have now already worked out given the blog’s
title), “Why Write?”. I re-read it this week. It is not filler. I remember this
essay better than some of the classwork I considered more important at the
time.
Why Write?
“Why Write?” starts off by describing the ways in which writing – trying to
communicate your thoughts, opinions, or feelings to others – is an act of
projection. The writer will only ever draw from a place of their “own
subjectivity” – writing is taking your person and putting it on display.
You’re choosing what words to use, how to use them, pulling from knowledge
you’ve accumulated (based on how you’ve chosen to spend your time). Spending
any amount of your finite existence in order to convey a thought is, itself,
announcing to the world that you believe it to be a thought worth sharing.
Meanwhile, the act of reading is not simply turning letters into words.
Reading is engaging with the work, and understanding the work in a process
that looks more like what Sartre terms “re-invention” or “discovery” – “the
literary object, though realized through language, is never given in
language”. It is not enough to read the words in a book end-to-end; you must,
as a reader, actively engage with the work to understand what is being
communicated by those words. Reading is to take the words on the page, and
“exceed” the mere words through what he calls “directed creation”. The reader
is “re-inventing”/“discovering” the writer’s thoughts by following their
“landmarks in the void”.
And this all makes pretty good sense to me – I know if someone is being
sarcastic because I know the writer; I have read their words and have read
into their words, allowing myself to be directed by the writer into
“discovering” the thought they have left me in their work. I understand that
their words are humorous, not irate. Knowing who the author of a work is
can completely change the point of a sentence. The fact I’m writing about
Sartre at all, or that this very writing has been constrained for presentation
in this blog’s CSS is only happening because of who I am, what things I’ve
experienced in life, and what has made me, me. Sartre argues that this dyadic
coupling between writer and writing means that I, as a writer, can never truly
read my own writing. I will never be capable of reading my own work and
getting something out of it – the work is already an extension of my own
person. I can discover no thought in my own works.
Of course, Sartre, as an existentialist, is honor bound to go one step further
here – the reader, by participating in reading a work, is asserting their
own freedom. Every time a writer writes “[…] the writer appeals to the
reader’s freedom to collaborate in the production of [their] work”. The
creative act may only be complete if both writer and reader have recognized one
another and made a choice to do so. No one is compelled to complete the
creative act. The things you read matter. Reading something fundamentally
alters you as a person – you can not simply un-read a thought. Everything you
read changes your universe. I have a hunch Sartre would find things like the
(original early 2010s era) “tl;dr” reply to obviously terrible writing
absolutely hilarious as a reader’s expression of freedom (not to be confused
with modern 2020s era usage as shorthand for “summary section”). Using your
freedom to choose to complete the writer’s creative act (or not) is inherently
asserting your humanity.
I’m a bit fuzzy on the specifics of this quote, but I think it was
sj who told me at one year’s
Mystery Hunt that “A puzzle is a contract between
puzzle author and puzzle solver, the author promises that the puzzle is
solvable if you’re clever enough”. The puzzle author and puzzle solver are
engaging in a collaborative production of the work that is only possible by
recognizing one another. Similarly, Sartre – “whatever connections [the
reader] may establish among the different parts of the book among the chapters
or the words [the reader] has a guarantee, namely, that they have been
expressly willed”.
Wall Drawing #123
It follows, Sartre argues, that the act of writing, as a means to convey a
thought to a reader, may only be completed through the act of reading.
Reading can only be done by others; writing, therefore, only exists to be
read – it can serve no other purpose. Writing and reading are two halves of
the same creative, collaborative act, only satisfied when both writer and
reader acknowledge one another. Combined, writing and reading are the act of
recognizing one another’s humanity, thoughts, experiences, consciousness – the
act of co-creation of thought is the critical aspect of writing and reading –
reconstructing the author’s perspective, thought, intent, point. The
co-creation is the point of both reading and writing.
Writing without anyone to read the work leaves the writer’s bid for
co-creation unsatisfied and humanity unrecognized. No thought has been conveyed
to any reader, no one has understood the reason behind the “landmarks in the
void” you’ve carefully placed, leaving you to either “[…] put down [your] pen
or despair”. Writing is an appeal to the reader’s freedom, and the nature of
that freedom is the writer can not control it – never being understood is
always a possibility any time anyone sets out to write.
Nearly 12 years ago, I attempted to read the text on the git manpage
generator for the first time –
I remember the exact feeling of my brain going into “git manpage parsing
mode” where every word was dragging git plumbing megaliths through the sand
from their far-flung homes. I can still feel the surface of my desk as I
instinctually started to trace out logical connections between git internals
referenced as I read along. It took me a good 20 seconds to realize what I was
reading made no sense. This website broke Sartre’s writer-reader agreement – I
was attempting to read this website, but there was nothing there. You can
“mechanically” “read” the git-man-page-generator, but you can never read it
– it is not possible to read it. It was funny – unsettling. Each grasp at a
real-looking image in front of me misses, my hand coming back empty. I
couldn’t get enough of it. I must have tried to read a dozen generations in a
row. I had never had something quite that broken pass that far into my
consciousness before. Although I kept trying, it never did feel quite the same
as that first time; I think fundamentally, I couldn’t forget that it was
random.
While never having anyone read your writing drives them to “put down your
pen or despair”, Sartre never had to contend with the opposite problem – being
asked to read that which was not written. Reading that which was not
written does not merely leave someone unrecognized when a reader makes a
choice; instead, it is an inherent violation of the contract between reader
and writer. Not only is no humanity being recognized through attempting to
read words which were not written, but the reader, not the writer,
is the one who bears the burden of unexpected apophenia. The reader,
while engaging in co-creation, must now contort themselves to uphold their end
of the Sartrean agreement, scrutinizing text to ascribe consciousness,
thought and intent only to come back up with pareidolia-fueled echos of
one’s own self and disfigured half-thoughts of others. The reality is, the
modern reader must now “mechanically” “read” most written work they come
across, scrutinizing text for any signs of thought before truly attempting
to read the work. Failing to do this correctly changes our person –
each time it happens, a small part of us is irrevocably altered. Choosing to
engage in this ballet because you wish to do so is one thing – this is
your right and freedom as a reader – but passing words which were not
written as your own in an attempt to wrestle a reader’s freedom of
co-creation from them is another entirely.
If you didn’t write it, I don’t want to read it (dw;dr). Send me your prompt instead.
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