[Special Feature: New Theory of Reading] A Future Where "Complete Reading" Disappears? / Takumi Sato

Requests for permission to use my writings in this year's university entrance exams have begun arriving from Keigakusha, the publisher of the "Red Books," and various prep schools. My book published last year, A Media History of Rumors (Iwanami Shinsho), was featured in exams at many universities. All of them include true/false multiple-choice questions asking students to select the answer that "matches the intent of the text." As an example, let's look at one from Waseda University.

A. Media rumors are one-time phenomena that occur only in specific eras or situations.

B. Facing ambiguous and troublesome information is necessary for deciphering modern media.

C. Evaluation by AI is an all-powerful selection system for society because it is performed accurately and objectively.

D. The "transformation of public opinion into popular sentiment" refers to a state where logical consensus-building is absent, and the emotional feelings and opinions of the masses become mainstream.

E. The internet as a medium can propagate information instantaneously, but it does not possess the function to control information.

A and C are likely false (X), and the others are true (O). Examinees search for corresponding sentences in the text and judge their validity. Such information processing skills are essential for university research. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that this training in entrance exam Japanese has had the negative effect of imprinting a view of "complete reading" on students. The "complete reading" view is a form of rigorism that dictates books must be read from beginning to end and their content must be understood accurately.

Even I, having mastered the methods for solving entrance exam Japanese, was a believer in "complete reading" during my student days. I believed that all the books in my collection should eventually be read in their entirety. Therefore, I was deeply moved when I first saw the collection of books reaching the ceiling in a "professor's office."

The scene I witnessed as a freshman in Professor Nobuo Noda's office at Kyoto University's College of Liberal Arts (now the Faculty of Integrated Human Studies) is still burned into my mind. Western books packed into steel shelves reaching the ceiling, the complete works of Burckhardt piled high on the table... I longed to live in such a reading space.

As an undergraduate studying modern German history, I often borrowed research books in English or German from Professor Noda's office. Every book had faint pencil marks in the margins, showing that the professor had been reading them. For me, reading books in German—my first foreign language—was a struggle where I could barely manage one or two pages a day while consulting a dictionary.

"I can only read a few pages a day. Can I really become a researcher like that?"

The professor, sitting deep in his sofa, told me this. Through the window behind him, I could see the clock tower, the symbol of Kyoto University.

"Can you say you truly understand everything in a Japanese book? Probably not. But you don't usually read while checking a Japanese dictionary. It's the same with Western books. It's natural to find things you don't understand, but there's no need to stop there. After all, the only things you can use in a paper are the things you understood well."

Since this was nearly 40 years ago, I am not confident I can reproduce that statement exactly. However, it is certain that I was saved by this conversation. Looking back, that was my exit from the illusion of "complete reading." Of course, the words were persuasive because I heard them from a man of culture like Professor Noda in a research office surrounded by books.

However, can today's students have experiences similar to mine? Faculty members' administrative chores have increased, and the "transformation of research offices into administrative offices" has progressed. I often hear the joke-like truth that "there's no time to read books in the office." Furthermore, as ICT spreads, "bookless research offices" consisting only of monitors and tablets will likely increase in the humanities, just as in the sciences. This year's COVID-19 crisis is bound to accelerate the "loss of a sense of place" in universities, along with "e-book browsing (skimming)" that is far removed from "complete reading." Is this really acceptable?

Until now, I have recommended Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (Chikuma Gakugei Bunko) to students as a guide to escaping the illusion of "complete reading." Some might frown at the playful title, but it is an excellent book that examines the effects of books as a medium.

Bayard defines the rigorism of reading through three norms: the obligation of "sacred reading," "reading through," and "accurate reproduction." He argues these norms are harmful because they create self-deception regarding reading. According to the author, a professor at the University of Paris VIII, it is not uncommon for French literature scholars to have not properly read Proust. Naturally, there are likely media theorists who have not read McLuhan.

To confess honestly, I only recently finished reading Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" in its entirety; until then, I had gotten by with "cherry-picking." Of course, I mention McLuhan in my Introduction to Media Culture course. In that sense, according to the norms of rigorism, I was practicing the lecture of "talking boldly about books I haven't read." However, my lecture content has not changed significantly between before and after reading "Understanding Media" closely. No matter how strictly one reads, one does not remember everything. Reading is essentially an incomplete act of information intake. Skimming, or even just looking at the table of contents or the title, could be called "reading."

Is this "incomplete reading" a bad thing? First, what is needed for an introductory lecture is an overview of the entire academic field, not the details written in individual documents. Culture (Kyoyo) means a good view of the whole, which cannot be reduced to an accumulation of fragmentary knowledge. Bayard quotes the following words of a librarian appearing in Musil's "The Man Without Qualities" as an "active attitude" for grasping the essence of the positional relationship between books.

"The secret to being a competent librarian is to never read anything other than the titles and tables of contents of the literature you manage."

Since media contact time is limited, reading one book means not reading another. A librarian who needs to know the entirety of a collection should not obsess over individual documents. This attitude should apply not only to libraries but also to a single book.

In fact, when we discuss books, do we always do so after finishing them? And is the act of discussing a book inseparable from the content of the book itself? That shouldn't be the case. We often cite books as a trigger to talk about our own ideas or as material to reinforce them. Bayard calls this the "book as a screen" onto which the speaker projects themselves. By repeating this self-projection onto books, individuals come to possess their own "inner library." Those who make this "inner library" the core of their identity are readers, and the collective image of this, the "shared library," is the subjective substance of culture.

Bayard names the communication space (public sphere) where readers with "inner libraries" talk about specific books and enrich the image of the "shared library" the "virtual library." The reason it is described as "virtual" is that in this space, it is forbidden to ask whether the other person has truly read the book. This social space is the polar opposite of the school space that demands "complete reading." In the first place, a situation where the same members read the same content at the same time is hard to imagine outside of a "classroom."

The public sphere where we talk about books is a "space of play" where we arbitrarily or benevolently interpret that the other person has also read it; it does not fit the logic of right/wrong or true/false found in university entrance exam questions. The creativity of reading is also guaranteed by the freedom of playful interpretation. What is important in such a public sphere is the attempt to talk about oneself through books—that is, through "the words of others"—in other words, the attempt to author one's own "inner book." A book not yet read is a "the other" present before us, and the attempt to talk about it is the starting point of dialogic communication hidden with the possibility of self-discovery.

In this regard, Bayard's stance of not questioning the truth or falsehood of reading is extremely media-theoretical. This is because the primary concern of media studies is the effect on and influence over the reader.

To begin with, the significance of a book is determined more by the reader than the author. Whether a book is a "masterpiece" or a "good book" is decided not by the author's skill but by the reader's attitude. Since a book is also a medium, Stuart Hall's "encoding/decoding" model can be applied. Just as "active audience" can be translated as "reader of television," it applies to both watching television and reading books. Depending on the decoding code the reader adopts, the same book can become either a good book or a bad book.

Needless to say, literacy is an educational concept that indicates the unity of reading and writing—that is, the possibility of the reader becoming the author. Therefore, discourse about books one hasn't read is open to the process of talking about one's own future—that is, the reader becoming a creator (author) themselves. When dialogue is established between readers equipped with such different "inner books," the "virtual library" will emerge as a creative space.

Can Bayard's arguments be applied in the same way to reading in digital space? Bayard defines the "desacralized book" as a "non-material aggregate of meaning" that exists between the physical book and the reader, and furthermore, between each reader. At first glance, this seems applicable to a future where e-books in digital space become the default. Is that really the case?

Paper books, where reading history accumulates as a collection, are a medium that is physically stocked. When I was a child, I could "boldly talk about TV programs I hadn't seen" with friends at school. This was because I could read the TV listings in the newspaper in the morning and lead the conversation. In such flow media, it is even harder than with books to prove whether one actually accessed the content. On the other hand, while the access history to e-books remains accurate, whether one truly read them is more vague than ever.

Furthermore, can physical books and e-books be considered the same for a reader's "inner library"? The significance of the physical book existing externally as a real, singular entity is likely greater than generally thought. With physical books, readers could naturally be conscious of the totality of "the other." However, with e-books, what the reader faces is always disjointed character data reflected on the same monitor. The task of reconstructing a real "other" from that fragmentary data must be more difficult than expected.

This is one reason why "careless" copy-pasting is rampant even in academic papers where citations are mandatory. Also, in e-book reading, there is a strong temptation to escape into an egocentric world that does not require dialogue with "the other." It is also known that communication on the web that bypasses the image of the other tends to induce cyber-cascades (group polarization).

If so, it cannot be denied that the image of the "shared library"—that is, culture—may become increasingly impoverished in digital space. To protect the public sphere of creative people of culture, policies to protect physical books are likely necessary after all.