Looking for the Mute World

28 Jan, 2024

I found myself nodding along the other day to the issue Roberto Calasso was taking with a 2006 article by journalist Kevin Kelly. Said journalist was enthusing about all the possibilities that would come along with Google’s attempt to digitize every book around, including the fact that “each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before.... every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.”¹

It’s not just standard questions of copyright and revenue, which Kelly discusses extensively toward the end of his article, that irk Calasso. Rather, he sees in this digitization scheme’s attempt to meld all books into some sort of conversation with each other, in which none can really stand on its own, in which a digitized page is filled with links and annotations and readers’ commentaries instead of the blank page that frames the text, the result that “The text—any text—is a pretext. What matters is the link, the connection.”² When carried out in this way, he says, digitization “implies a certain hostility toward a way of knowledge—and only as a consequence toward the object that embodies it: the book.”³

He describes the old, tangible, cover-bound book as standing in isolation, self-contained and essentially (and literally) closed to the world around it until it’s manually opened and read. As opposed to Kelly’s apparent dismay that such a state of existence means “each book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it,” Calasso wants to hold onto that fact of physical and mental separation, as well as to a printed book’s plain “whiteness of the page, which is mute and recalls the stubborn muteness of the world that surrounds the book.”⁴ That muteness, Calasso says, is in stark opposition to the world in which Kelly’s infinitely linked words operate, in which “the role of the unknown is enormously reduced—and this is enough to change the character of knowledge itself.”⁵ Instead of “the secret, impenetrable, separate, discriminating, silent thought of the individual brain” taking in what the book has to say, in the universally digitized reading world Kelly imagines, reading is nothing more than a vast social conversation, easy opinions and commentary tossed back and forth.⁶ The world and all its unbending silence, then, “is canceled out, superfluous, in its mute, refractory extraneousness.”⁷ From what I understand here, the overly basic assertion is that, in such a chatty, distracted arena, there’s simply no room to think—whether about what the text is saying on its own, or, and especially, what it’s saying to or for you: what it could mean to you, how it could affect you. Discussing the text with others, is, of course, part of growing into a greater understanding of it and its relationship to oneself and the world—but without taking that initial time to really figure out what it all means, you’ll only dive into a conversational flood of commentary that tells you how to feel about it as you hit the textual ground running.

That chapter in Calasso’s The Art of the Publisher is related closely to the chapter I’d just read in Vilém Flusser’s Gestures, “The Gesture of Writing.” Flusser, who died in 1991, wasn’t part of the contemporary networked world; hence, his chapter largely concerns a comparison between writing by hand and via typewriter. But something like that sense of disconnection from self Calasso describes is present here, too, when Flusser starts to think about “the resistance of words”: essentially, about finding the right words to say what you mean, when there’s a whole language’s (or in his case, languages’) worth to choose from.⁸ Each word’s long and complicated history means it will come along with “a whole framework of connotations"—something like an asynchronous form of social babble Calasso describes as being typical of the networked page. "And so," Flusser goes on, "from the words in my memory, I can’t just freely choose the ones that ‘fit'.... First I must listen to them.”

The problem with typing, Flusser seems to allege, is that it allows for such quick transcription of whatever’s floating around in your brain, clamoring to get out, right or not, that that process of listening is destroyed. What follows instead sounds strangely akin to the way Kelly describes reading in a universally digitized world:

The power of words is so great that each word evokes a whole chain of other words without my knowing it. A whole mob of words can rise up against me and against the keys of the machine.... It is lovely to dive into the stream of words, to let them flow from within, through the fingers, over the keys of the machine and against the paper, so as to marvel what they have wrought, the sheer musical beauty of the words, their wealth of connotations and the wisdom of generations. But I lose myself in the flow, and the virtuality [the intended meaning] that pushes out to be typed in the machine dissolves.⁹

Before sitting down at the typewriter, Flusser says, he first has to think carefully about what it is that wants to be expressed, and what sort of logic and grammar and so on he should use in order to get it right. It’s only in going through this activity—this thinking through—that writing happens, only because the thought of how to write it has happened: “in the course of writing, I am surprised to discover what it was I wanted to write.”¹⁰

No writing without thinking, then, and thinking carefully at that. But, Flusser goes on, “It is not right to say that writing fixes thinking. Writing is a way of thinking. There is no thinking that has not been articulated through a [human] gesture. Thinking before articulation is only a virtuality, which is to say, nothing.”¹¹ A grad school professor never tired of telling us what Flusser asserts: that “Someone who says that he is unable to express his ideas is saying that he is not thinking.”

It’s not that Flusser believes writing is the only way of thinking—but he does see it as fundamental. And although he was living before email was even really a thing, he did see coming the way in which computers would affect thinking through writing. He recognized in “the programming of cybernetic data banks and computational facilities that are structured differently from the gesture of writing,” whether that meant a PC or television, a “becoming illiterate again.”¹² Flusser wasn’t entirely doom-and-gloom about these developments, though; or at least he seemed resigned to the need to understand them and maintain fluency or facility with “multidimensional codes;” he even acknowledged the fact that “Writing is no longer either effective or valuable as an expression of a way of being.”¹³ Maybe he could even have imagined ChatGPT on the horizon, and the way in which ever more people will probably choose to have their texts typed out for them, instead of thinking through what they really want to say, what it will take to say it, and what thoughts and insights could not have emerged other than through the process of figuring it out. Instead, they'll allow a conglomeration of scraped social chatter to take a shot for them, rather than getting to the point of being able to express their own ideas—which they only recognize as theirs because they've had to think about them.

For all that, though, Flusser grasped that a chunk of people, much as they understand this reality, are going to go on writing anyway, “for without it, their lives wouldn’t have much meaning.” ¹⁴ I’m not entirely sure how to take the final sentence of this chapter, but having read it so closely in time to Calasso’s, I can’t help but see Flusser’s assertion that “writing is necessary, living is not” as some way of saying that, even as it’s increasingly devalued, the thinking involved in the gesture of writing is much more essential than involvement in the efficient cybernetic babel he’s begun to see emerging.

Thinking in Front of History on the Screen

You’d probably assume that my viewing last night of The Sorrow and the Pity would have zilch to do with all this heady speculation about what or how we read or write (or don’t).¹⁵ It’s a documentary, after all, and as Flusser said about television, watching something on the screen “does not need letters to be informative.”¹⁶ But Marcel Ophuls’s four-hour-long collection of interviews of people who’d lived in or somehow been a part of life in one region of Vichy France ends up being deeply connected to the arguments both Calasso and Flusser are making.

Four hours long: how inefficient! Where was the editing? Couldn’t we just dramatize this whole thing into a clear and exciting narrative and toss in a heavy-handed soundtrack just to make sure people got the point: that life is hard and complicated, and the decisions we make are often never right, or unjustifiable, or clearly aimed above all at holding on to what you have? Maybe—but not if what you’re after is witnessing how a lack of careful consideration, free from heated declarations and demands and commentary all around you—a lack of exposure, in other words, to Calasso’s blank unknown that gets smothered with one variety of self-assured shouting or another—all too easily leads to joining up, even if passively, with something disastrous and ugly. How letting the flow of talk bombard you, without giving yourself the time and space to step aside and puzzle it all out, doesn’t provide much space to stop and think about what your in/actions could mean for self or other. Instead, wave of emotionally argumentative wave goes out over the radio or at a political rally or in the bar, without any of the careful, deliberative process of writing and thinking Flusser describes. Much like the fraught comments sections of today’s “interactive content,” invective just gets tossed around and gloms into an ever-messier snowball, and if you were to step back, you might not even be able to find the nugget of what anyone was trying to prove in the first place.

It takes every one of the documentary’s four hours to fully experience these interviewees still thinking through what had happened over twenty years before, and for that slow trickle to remind viewers that any community’s emotions, motivations, and base or noble assumptions are not things that appear out of nowhere, nor can they be switched on and off or packed up and considered taken care of. There’s no reading or writing going on during the interviews—but as each individual speaks, they’re doing so along with a questioner/s who prods them to go further, and they’re being given spaces of silence in which to consider their words, whether for good or ill. And in the case of one hip-looking Frenchman who’d served on the side of the Nazis, and had come since then to understand and reject his motivations and participation at the time, I can’t imagine his having arrived at his drastically different viewpoint other than by having spent some significant time in a quiet place free of any sort of outside input and trying to get clear, in the self-contained space of his head, about what had happened, and who he was, and what it might mean for how he goes forward.

I suppose what I’m after, in this new time of global climate disaster and new-old wars, is some way to slow down and think, when it’s become increasingly difficult, even pooh-poohed upon, to be unhurried and deliberate and necessarily inefficient in doing the tough work that entails. Some method, even as we recognize that we’re inevitably interconnected and interdependent, of making our way to that ungiving, blank space in which the mute world doesn’t react to our chatter—only forces us to take a look at our individual selves, and consider how we can jump back into the fray with something like a clear head and honorable conduct. Only then might a meaningful sort of connection, and something like beneficial action that results from it, be possible.

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^{2. Calasso, 49. Italics in original.↩}

^{3. Calasso, 45–6.↩}

^{4. Calasso, 46, 48. Italics in original.↩}

^{5. Calasso, 48–9. Witness part of Kelly's text that Calasso didn't quote: “the universal library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority. If you can truly incorporate all texts—past and present, multilingual—on a particular subject, then you can have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don't know. The white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are drawn with completeness. This degree of authority is only rarely achieved in scholarship today, but it will become routine.”↩}

^{6. Calasso, 50.↩}

^{7. Calasso, 51.↩}

^{8. Both citations in this paragraph are taken from Vilém Flusser, Gestures, translated by Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 22.↩}

^{9. Flusser, 23.↩}

^{10. Flusser, 24.↩}

^{11. Both quotations in this paragraph are taken from Flusser, 24.↩}

^{12. Flusser, 24.↩}

^{13. Flusser, 25.↩}

^{14. Both quotations in this paragraph are taken from Flusser, 25. Italics in original.↩}

^{15. The Sorrow and the Pity, directed by Marcel Ophuls, produced by Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Société suisse de radiodiffusion, 1969.↩}

^{16. Flusser, 24.↩}