Why Read?

   (I) "[. . .] to strengthen the self, and learn its authentic interests"

Excerpts from Harold Bloom's How to Read And Why (2000):

"You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock. Bible readers, those who search the Bible for themselves, perhaps exemplify the urgency more plainly than readers of Shakespeare, yet the quest is the same. One of the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change, and the final change alas is universal."

"Ultimately we read [. . .] in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests. We experience such augmentations as pleasure, which may be why aesthetic values have always been deprecated by social moralists, from Plato [onwards]. The pleasures of reading indeed are selfish rather than social. You cannot directly improve anyone else's life by reading better or more deeply. I remain skeptical of the traditional social hope that care for others may be stimulated by the growth of the individual imagination, and I am wary of any arguments whatsoever that connect the pleasures of solitary reading to the public good."

"We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading [. . .] is the search for a difficult pleasure. There is a reader's Sublime, and it seems the only secular transcendence we can ever attain, except for that even more precarious transcendence we call 'falling in love.' I urge you to find what truly comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and for considering. Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads."

(II) . . . because "we are allowed to think about alternatives"

Excerpts from philosopher/cultural critic Slavoj Žižek's address to Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park in the fall of 2011:

"So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom— war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are giving all of us red ink."

"They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself."

"We are allowed to think about alternatives."

(We might also consider, in this context, the Noam Chomsky quotation, from The Common Good: "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.")

What is Žižek talking about? In part, this, from the pages of The Globe and Mail Report on Business ("Generation Nixed: Why Canada’s youth are losing hope for the future"):

"Crippling debt to buy credentials no one wants. Low-paying, short-term jobs that put middle-class prosperity out of reach. And, for good measure, the prospect of a penurious retirement.

"That’s the deal on offer to many twentysomething Canadians today, a tectonic shift that could leave a permanent gouge in the national economy.

"While young people have always struggled to get established, economists and labour experts say this time is different. Those in their 20s today are facing far more hurdles than their parents’ generation, and those difficulties are likely to linger, with profound economic consequences for Canada. There is diminished job security, the growth of temp work, rising costs for food, tuition and housing and record debt levels. To top it off, young people entering the work force today are far less likely to retire with a company pension than their parents’ generation.

"'When you put it all together, there is justification for alarm bells,' says Judith Maxwell, past chair of the Economic Council of Canada and contributor to a national study released this month called #GenerationFlux.

"'People over their forties in Canada have no idea what it’s like for a young person trying to find a pathway to adulthood right now.'"

That's all pretty grim, but this isn't: please enjoy this Tumblr page of animated gif mashups of philosopher/cultural critic Slavoj Žižek and Ke$ha. 

"Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do."

Consider too, perhaps, Žižek on Kung Fu Panda, transcribed (imperfectly) below:

ZIZEK: I love doing this which is fine you mentioned it. It’s very kind of you. I also -- I’m not saying I loved the movie but in a way I admire "Kung Fu Panda". It appears just a stupid cartoon. No.

It’s what I admire in the movie is the following. Everyone noticed it. On the one sense the movie mobilizes all that, you know, let’s call it oriental military mystique: Kung Fu, faith, warrior, discipline, all that stuff. At the same time, the movie’s totally ironic; making fun of its own ideology.

What is so fascinating is that although the movie makes fun of its own ideology all the time, the ideology survives.

And this is how cynicism functions. If I’m permitted to tell my favorite story, a wonderful anecdote about Niels Bohr, the Copenhagen guy which best exemplifies --

CHARLIE ROSE: The nuclear scientist.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Yes, that one, yes. He was an extraordinary spirit. Once a friend visited him in his country house -- farmer’s house (INAUDIBLE). And he, the friend noticed there above the entrance to the house a horse shoe, which -- I don’t know how it is here -- but in Europe it is a superstitious item preventing evil spirits to enter the house.

CHARLIE ROSE: Yes. You see it on barns throughout the south.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Yes. In Europe also. So the friend asks Niels Bohr, wait a minute aren’t you scientist, do you believe in this? Of course, I’m not crazy, I don’t. So the friend asked him why do you have it there? You know what Niels Bohr answered?

CHARLIE ROSE: He wanted to find out.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Yes. Yes. He said of course I don’t believe in it. But I set it there because I was told that it works even if you don’t believe in it. That’s unfortunately our ideology to date.

CHARLIE ROSE: Or I’m hedging my bets.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Yes. Yes. Like you know you don’t have to believe in this but believe still things -- like think about the (INAUDIBLE) which always fascinated me. Things like Santa Claus. You ask the parents do you believe in Santa Claus. They will tell you, I’m not crazy, I buy that. Then you ask the child do you believe he will say no, I’m not crazy I just pretend not to hurt my parents. So a belief functions, a social category, even if no one believes in it. I think this is crucial to understand how things function today.

CHARLIE ROSE: What’s the role of philosophy you think in the 21st century?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: I don’t exaggerate it. But also I don’t under estimate it. 

(III) "We live within narrations . . ." 

Professor/poet Ken Snyder, formerly of this Department:

"Function of the novel: perhaps not so much to reflect 'reality' as to 'pierce' it (Lukacs); or to break the reification that is called 'reality' (Butor). We live within narrations, 'stories' of life within which and from which we derive 'a conduct of life.' When these stories lose their imaginative strength, their inspiring force, they collapse to cliche, to stereotype; they become 'reified,' that is we are tempted to take 'reality' as being real and final, when 'reality' is simply an imaginary/symbolic construct with tremendous ideological force. In a sense what is called reality is no less 'fictive' than what we call fiction. The difference is that the fictive of 'reality' is realized by force, is actual in the sense of its many contingent, felt acts, whereas the fictive of fiction is imaginative, allegorical, felt as an aesthetic response not a contingent force. But it is potentially 'critical,' can be the source of change."

(IV) Nobel Prize-winning chemist John Polanyi on "pattern recognition"

Robert Fulford quotes from John Polanyi when he writes:

"'Science is a branch of the humanities.'

"That quotation is from a remarkable address given [...] by one Canadian scientist who profoundly understands these issues, John Polanyi. The winner of a 1986 Nobel Prize for chemistry, Polanyi is also a writer and talker of unusual eloquence, notably on the uses of science and on science's relation to creative work in the arts. [H]e was asked to speak to faculty, parents and students at the University of Toronto Schools, an elite liberal-arts high school. There has been talk of changing the curriculum at UTS to emphasize certain practical skills, in particular computer technology.

"Polanyi did not minimize 'those vastly stupid and very patient machines, the computers,' though he did mention that they do 'tend to say very boring things.' But he did support a liberal-arts curriculum, which he said is as vital to scientists and engineers as to the rest of us. He obviously wanted to leave us thinking about one word: patterns. The study of the humanities, Polanyi argued, involves patterns, learning how to relate experiences and see patterns that are not obvious. This is also essential to science, and those who learn to find the patterns in Shakespeare are likelier to find them in science. 'In science we look for those patterns not in the language of poetry but in such languages as numbers and algebra.'"

(V) Two scenes from A Serious Man (2009) relevant to our study

"But even though you can't figure anything out, you will be
 responsible for it on the mid-term."

The Coen brothers' 2009 film A Serious Man offers a number of scenes that speak to a theme that will become familiar to us this semester. "The Goy's Teeth" is one (transcribed here); a brief lecture on The Uncertainty Principle is another (the first fifty seconds of that scene, anyway). "Even though you can't figure anything out," Professor Gopnik concludes, "you will be responsible for it on the mid-term."