The Act of Reading: Literacy and Alienation

Who can see the camera. Literacy, post-literacy and breaking the fourth wall in social-media-mediated life

Literacy and alienation

Literacy causes neuroticism. Literate society is neurotic. Pre-literate societies are immediate and pragmatic. In the individual as well as on a group level, learning to read fundamentally changes how people think. This is a mechanical process. We are not talking about "reading makes you smarter because you can read Plato". The act of reading, the process of it, causes a mental disconnect from the immediate world of Pre-literate society.

In our private experience of reading, we experience it as an "opening up" of the world. Aha! Now I truly see, now I see this perspective I didn't before, and add it to my own, and the convert of perspectives provide an experience of "depth". My own perspective (me vs the world) was 2d, but with this new added third dimension, my worldview is now 3d. The world opens of from being flat and immediate, and becomes "deep" and further away.

This is, however, not us discovering something about the world, but a psychological process. The act of reading at first feels like a deepening of the world, but, simultaneously, it loses its immediacy and at-hand-ness. We can now second guess the world.

In Pre-literate human society, if I am feuding with my neighbor, in my head the feud is practical, personal and immediate. The "bottom level" of my worldview is physical, the physical act of whatever slight he caused me. Killing my wife or disrespecting me in the public Square. The physical act is the crime. In literate society, if I am feuding with my neighbor over the same insult, the same historical event, that is no longer the case. Instead, I psychologize him, and I say "well he did it because he is a gay race communist, and what I am really fighting is an ideology". The bottom level of my worldview is no longer the physical act, but an idea - in my head. The “fundamental” is no longer derived from the physical world, but from inside my own head. I am attributing a causal relationship between "communism" (a category in my head) with a historical event in the physical world. I say that communism "caused" the event, it is deeper, causal, the “idea” of communism “comes first”. I am attributing a metaphysical cause before the physical manifestation of it. But this is, regardless of whether it is true or false, psychologically speaking, putting the cart before the horse. Even in the event that I am correct, I am so for the wrong reasons, by accident. The category in my head doesn't, cannot, cause events in the physical world. I can only attribute things to it retroactively.

What I am doing is neurotic, in a clinical sense. It also may or may not be true, neuroticism is often evolutionary beneficial. But that is beside the point, the point is only to illustrate a link between literacy and neuroticism. Just because you’re right, doesnt mean you’re not pathological. The game here is not about “being right” in any one particular instance, but about being rooted and holistically placed in the world - it is about your general relationship to the world, between the world and “you”.

Mass literate society is a society ruled by neurosis. This is not by accident, but is baked right in. The feeling you get from first being literate, the opening up of the world, is a mirage. What is actually physically happening is that you are taking a step further inside yourself, not one "into" the world. It opens doors to doubts: you can now second guess the world, and yourself. You don't actually get more privileged access to reality and truth, you paradoxically get less, you become aware of your lack of access. The room provided by the expansion from a flat 2d universe to a 3d one, is room for doubt. Doubt is what fills out the space and creates the sensation of depth.

Thus literate man doubts himself and questions the world. He has taken a step inside himself and is alienated from the world. His access to the world has been neuroticised. Now from here you can go on the whole Jordan Peterson Pinocchio hero's journey and "return from the underworld" of your own mind, with magical gifts and powers, and return to the immediacy of reality. But this is not an automatic process, which occurs as long as any one person can read a street sign or sign his name. It requires deliberate effort and choice, and in most practical cases, guidance. He must become post-literate: that is, gain an understanding of the literate process.

Rather than being cough up in the experience - immersed in the experience, losing oneself in an euphoric state - one must gain a wider analytical understanding of the immediate experience. You must get back out of your head, after delving into it. All of the value and depth is genuine and being literate does add to your existential capacity, it merely isn't automatic.

Back in the day, people would use the terminology slightly differently. What I just called post-literate is what for most of human history was associated with and assumed in the word "literate" - being a man of letters, someone who is "fluent" in the language of hieroglyphics, someone who can read AND write, and understand. But as with so many other things of our era, the mass scale of explosive population growth and technology radically changes things. We need a word for the new mass of people who can read street signs and basic instructions to work a factory job, but are incapable of writing (we call this passive language vocabulary vs active language vocabulary when discussing learning French or German). We could call them half-literate, but they wouldn't like it. I prefer making a further strict distinction and call literacy the raw mechanical ability to translate memorized signs, such as the alphabet, into sounds. The literal mechanical act of reading. And then work from there. I don't particularly insist on my terminology, it is all in service of illustrating a point.

A great book could be written about the similarity of literacy with mathematics. It shows you something very important about the structure of reality, but it doesn't show you reality. It shows you an important point about the structure of reality, by letting you see yourself, not it. This is where many brilliant mathematicians get lost.

But for our purposes that is outside the scope of this text.

Narcissism and immersion

There is a famous line about clinical narcissism, that the clinical narcissist "doesn't recognise other minds, and only sees other people as an extension of himself". The other person doesn't exist with its own motives and drives, but only as a reflection of his own character, what the relationship “says about him”.

In creative writing, for both novels and movies and television and video games, this distinction is often characterised between “main characters” and “non characters”. A famous writing advice one-liner goes “Every named character in the story must have a character arc”. That is, they must undergo a change and personal growth somehow, relating to the main theme or plot point of the story, or the other characters in the story. The more the named characters do that in relation to the core theme and/or plot, the more satisfying it is as a literary product. When a story includes many characters, but only the protagonist has a character arc, we call that “bad writing” or “boring”. “Shallow one dimensional characters”. Due to the nature of the different medias, it is usually a lot more difficult to achieve in the latter three categories, due to production constraints and the massive industrial cooporative effort it takes to make these things, and it is usually only achieved in writing. Bad writing, however is exactly like clinical narcissism: The characters in the story only exist as a vehicle to inform the audience about the protagonist, they are all an “extension” of the protagonist.

The act of reading is immersive. The goal of all entertainment media is “immersion” - losing yourself in the story, and entering into a dreamlike dissociative state. This is the “first step” of literacy, the opening up and deepening of experience, and it is why it is so alluring to people, despite being dissociative. On first exposure, it “feels” more real than waking life, because of the depth and width of the experience. In electronic media terminology, we call this “hyperreality”. But it is already happening at a previous technological step, at the act of reading. You are “immersed” into the story of the book - or in nonfiction, the mind of the author, and one first identifies this as a stepping out into a greater world - a hyperreality, a waking up to a greater level of experience. But it is, clinically, a delving into yourself, and a step back, out of the world - dissociative. No writing or story can ever fully replicate the complexity of waking life, even the longest and densest russian existential novel will only be a small carefully curated subset of information, a fraction of a percentage of the complexity of the experience of waking life. If the author is smarter than you, or more existentially activated, it can be an eye opening experience, that shows you your own shallowness in the way you process and compartmentalise waking life, but it is a mistake to confuse this with the book being “greater” than waking life. It is the underworld, the subconcious, the belly of the whale, that you can dip down into, and come back up wiser and better. But that is all that it is. If you stay down there, inside your own head, then you are “literate” - you can read the words on the page, and translate them into sounds. But you have not “exited” yourself and come back up, and the act of reading has turned you into a literary narcissist. What does the book say about ME?

I have in a previous essay coined the term “synthetic autism”, to explain how access to computing allows otherwise non-spectrummy people to access autistic symptums, by the computer synthetically providing mental habits and abilities that were previously cognitive to a small subset of people. This is a similar idea: The act of reading provides, mechanically, a kind of synthetic clinical narcissism, at first exposure, and it is something to be overcome.

We say today that we live in a period of mass literacy. But the “mass” part is exclusively passive language ability, the masses have no “active” literacy vocabulary. I say, this is also why existentilism happened as a literary and philosophical development. It is a direct response to mass “literacy”: because with the Act of reading comes synthetic narcissism - and narcissists don’t feel particularly good about being narcissists. They feel lonely - they only dont have the words to articulate the feeling.

The invention of the printing press and mass production of the bible and mass literacy did not cause modernity. When literate men look at history and the history of philosophy, there is a trend and a very uncomfortable problem for christians in particular, with the idea that everything seemed to go crazy when the bible become democratized, and everyone could read it. But I have a christian solution to this: The problem isnt reading the bible - the problem is reading. All the crazy downstream effects and revolutions that you can trace across history from the protestant reformation and the printing press are not caused “by” the crazy ideas in the bible infecting the masses. It is caused by mass literacy - by people taking the first step in the process of learning the skill - language - of the written word, and not “coming back up” of the waters of the subconcious, to the real world. Modernity and existentialism is the effect of mass alienation, individualisation, neurotisism. Marx says the cause of mass alienation is being detached from the means of production. That is something someone who is very neurotic would conclude about the situation.

Stepping out of the subconcious: Who can see the camera?

We call the phenomenon in literature when a character or the author directly acknowledges the medium “breaking the fourth wall”. It “breaks the spell” of immersion. This has been a very popular technique in postmodern writing, and you see it a lot in contemporary fiction writing. However, I think with a very important nuance: In postmodern writing, the character in the story will adress the reader. Contemporary “breaking the fourth wall”, in modern mass entertainment like the works of Joss Whedon and Dan Harmon, the characters don’t adress the audience, but other characters in the story. The original effect of the “break” is to shock the reader out of his immersion, but in this new modern ideation, it is rather paradoxically the opposite: the reader, or audience, today, already arrives to his entertainment and fiction pre-rattled. He arrives anxious and self concious, and he struggles to achieve immersion. He is constantly thinking “I know I am watching a tv show”. What the “quips” in marvel movies and the fourth wall breaking in Rick and Morty provides is exactly not immersion breaking - it is externalising the immersion breaking to the characters in the story. The characters “take on” the burden of self-awareness, which then in turn relieves the audience of it, and rather than becoming more self aware, it provides a venue to become immersed, by offloading the self-concious anxiety to the nervous, stuttering characters. I think this is a very important aspect of modern writing to be aware of.

The modern reader/audience arrives pre-anxious, he doesnt need literature to disturb him. Living in the contemporary electronic age, where every aspect of human life is mediated by electronic media, the average “literate” person is anxious, isolated and neurotic, and what contemporary media provides him is stimulation and mental offloading for his preexisting anxiety.

Writing is externalising cognition. You literally turn the paper into an extension of your brain to offload excessive cognitive load. A huge part of every problem we collectively have as a civilisation today is that you are constantly overstimulated and in excess cognitive load, and less than 1% of people can write, and through the democratisation of electronic media and technology, 100% of the population are in a cognitive overload that was exclusively the domain of the literate few, and they do not have access to the one ability/technology we have developed for offloading excessive cognitive load, and are thus rendered permanently "stuffed" and overloaded, with no venue for relief.

You can drag a horse to literacy, but you can’t make him write. You can teach children to memorize the alphabet, but you can’t make them write. What mass schooling and the rockefeller school system has done is induced this first step of alienation into every person in the industrialized world, and then set them loose on it.

Although even that is by now a kind of moot point, with the advent of universal computing, with ipads and smartphones, the school system is now a relic of a bygone age, and people’s first exposure to the alienating effects of literacy have become decentralized and universal.

Every aspect of contemporary life is mediated by electronic media, and people are more “in their heads” than ever before. It’s not just the ipad babies - the boomer generation has been taken by storm by all this. Boomers and zoomers have more in common in this regard than millenials, who lived through the transitionary period in the formative years of their lives, and lived through the transformaiton from pre-universal-mediation-by-smartphone-life, to post-UMBSL (2007-2016).

If you cannot tell the difference between literature and real life, if you have not made the jump back out of the induced narcissism of the Act of reading, then contemporary life is very very scary, because everything you read (which is all the time, because you look at your phone every 5 minutes) is extremely personal. When you read a news story about President Trump, whatever he is up to this week is an extension of you, because you are the main character, the reader, and everything that happens in “the book” is a reflection of your character arc in relataion to the core theme of the book. The line between reality and fiction (hyperreality) is blurred and indistinguishable.

What you can observe very readily in the people around you is the inability to acknowledge the frame, as it were. They don’t have a concious recognition that “I READ that Trump said or did X”, it’s only “Trump DID x”. The modern reader’s worldview is, unexamined and unarticulated: Only *I* have priviledged access, *I* am the reader, and only I can see the camera. Trump is a character in the story. He cannot see the camera. Whenever I read about something he said and did, I am a voyour, hidden and unseen, he doesnt realise that I can see and hear him.

The question you must ask everyone is, “who can see the camera?”

Being “post-literate”, coming back out of the induced alienation that causes the private widening of experience, back into the world, is an acknowledgement that everyone else can also see the camera. From Donald Trump to every “character” you interact with on social media - every person.

President Trump is very obviously very skilled at media performances. But at least half the world pretends he just stumbled his way to the presidency, stepping on rakes every step of the way. Does he not realise that he is on camera? Many people think not, but they don’t think very hard about it.

It relates to much of my other writing, the disconnect and alienation of modern life, mediated life.

And it scales all the way from the napoleons and celebrities of “higher television life” as we like to imagine it, all the way down to how you treat strangers in your comment section, or your extended family on facebook. “Who can see the camera?". Is your digital experience a private experience, that strangers are rudely butting into, or are you both in a public space together? Are they real people or “npcs”? Are other people people or just characters in a story in your head? Is your life a movie? It is a social media performance art piece, there is no way of avoiding that one. Because if you acknowledge the frame, and you see the camera, you can see that everyone is looking at the camera, and not at you.