You Do Things To Me: On E-Reading & La Voix Moyenne
(The epigraph below is an excerpt spoken by Vinciane Despret, anthropologist, author, and professor at Université de Liège, Belgium, taken from a video lecture series she delivered on her oeuvre, a production of the “Les Possédé.e.s et leurs mondes” series. More information on YouTube here. The following translation from French of Professor Despret’s lecture is mine.)
“I needed to learn to write in what Bruno Latour called la voix moyenne -- the ‘medium voice.’* La voix moyenne, it’s really beautiful, it’s a grammatical structure that the Ancient Greeks used, which is somewhere between the active voice and the passive voice. A presence intervened. Or, something is moving me. Or, I am moved -- by something larger than myself. It’s the idea of ‘it made me do it.’ ‘I was made to…’. When entities are not completely active nor completely passive, that’s when one is made to do something.
“Bruno Latour uses an example from a vignette about Little Mafalda and her father. They’re sitting together, surrounded by cigarette smoke, and Little Mafalda says to her father, “Are you smoking?” The father replies, “Why, yes, of course I’m smoking Mafalda, what else could it be?” And little Mafalda, among the clouds of smoke, says, “I thought it was the cigarette smoking you.” Bruno Latour says…that the choice between the active and passive voice doesn’t allow us to understand some situations. Of course, the cigarette is not smoking the father. But we also can’t say that the father, in the fullest autonomy and in possession of his free will, deliberately smokes the cigarette. Cigarettes are a perfect example: they make you smoke them. It turns out, things make us do things. And so, to really be able to describe some things, you must find this voix moyenne.
[…]
“I discovered [in the course of my research on birds and ornithologists], that bird scientists often wrote in la voix moyenne. And that the question of, say, birds and territoriality was one that needed to be asked in la voix moyenne. See, we have to pay careful attention to vocabulary. A bird is not a property owner. It should, according to the ornithologists, be called a resident. It’s there, in a territory, protecting and defending the place where it lives -- it is a resident. I came to understand that when scientists write in la voix moyenne to describe the relationship between a bird and its territory, we can no longer know if it’s the bird who owns its territory or if the bird is owned by its territory. And we realize that birds, too, sing in la voix moyenne -- that birds make ornithologists do things, that a territory makes a bird do things, and that a bird makes a territory do things.”
*I’ve kept la voix moyenne in French, as it is a concept in its own right and would require a greater labor of translation to rename. ‘The medium voice’ is a literal translation that does not necessarily encompass its complexities.
This is not an essay about a Kindle. The “Kindle” is the Amazon corporation’s electronic book technology, a slim piece of hardware often called a “tablet” but which reminds me of a piece of slate that has fallen from a roof. When you turn it on, you see that it has come equipped with what we are made to call “intuitive” software: that is, designed to be easy to use. Designed to make you enjoy reading, and thus to read more. To feel spontaneous and unencumbered in your reading; and also, of course, to buy more books. This is only an essay about a Kindle insomuch as my Kindle makes me do things. I’m sure of it.
There are lots of reasons why lately I’ve been reading more on my Kindle than via traditional bound, paperback books. For starters, I ditched a bunch of my paper books when I moved in May. Even though I was not the one lifting the heavy boxes out of my residence and into another, I couldn’t bear the thought of someone else schlepping all of my books just for me not to touch them. Because the truth was, despite all my romanticized notions of Umberto Eco’s “anti-library,” mine had become swollen with volumes whose presences were merely symbolic.
But moreover, I had to thin out my book collection because this move wasn’t just any move. I was departing from my teaching job of nine years, where I’d begun working after graduate school, and during which time I’d accumulated hundreds of books. (I almost just wrote thousands, but even if those numbers are right, it feels so excessive as to be an untruth.) My first apartment on the campus of the school where I taught was the largest apartment I’d ever seen, with two capacious rooms and a third adjoined space where students could visit during my office hours. The bathroom had a tub and the windows were taller than a third-grader. I remember panicking: where does one find curtains that long? It turns out, they make curtains of all lengths.
The most striking feature of this apartment, though -- the one guests would invariably comment on, after remarking on the high ceilings and enormous living-dining room -- was its built-in shelves on the far end of the apartment. Whitewashed and stretching ten or twelve feet in the air, these shelves gaped at me, and, surrounded by my boxes of books those first weeks, I gaped back. How many books did I really possess, even after an adolescence as a reader, six years of higher education, and a penchant for spending my money in used book shops? Could I fill these shelves?
Indeed, the premature answer was no, a pang of disappointment as I stepped back and cocked my head after meticulously unpacking and organizing my haul. No. My book collection was paltry, could not possibly do justice to the space designated for it.
Here, we can say that the shelves made me do things. They became, too, a symbol. For if I was to live up to the identity of “teacher,” if I was to do justice to this profession, I would have to first fill the shelves.
Four years later, emptying those shelves to move to another (smaller, though perhaps more beautiful and better located) apartment on the other end of campus, I saw that my shelves had thickened, densified -- that more books had made a home with me. That somehow I had begun to do justice to these shelves, and that in leaving them, I could see more clearly the power they’d held over me, their place in my scheme of things. I thought back, in that moment, as I do now, to a winter night, snowy, during my first year at the school. Two new colleague friends had joined me at home for champagne, for I had just been given the equivalent of “tenure” at the school, a contract that self-renewed each year and assured me a job in perpetuity. This tenure was a windfall that changed my life, a circumstance that I had dreamt of only in the abstract, and which seemed to befuddle and even begrudge many of my loved ones: Really? their surprise seemed to imply. How lucky, to be so young and have so much promised to you.
But these two friends in my apartment that night had no context for my good fortune -- no question, no envy. They had just an assuredness in the justice of my new status. As we sipped the effervescent wine, a special bottle I’d saved for a special occasion, we walked around my apartment, cracking jokes and telling stories, until we found ourselves in front of my book shelves. “Who is your favorite character on these shelves?” one of the friends asked. It’s a delightful question. I felt not delighted though -- I felt, suddenly, agape, once again acutely aware of those who were missing from the shelves. Characters I hadn’t met yet! How could I know my favorite if I had not read everything? Though the party continued in warm exchanges of literary anecdotes, I deflated. We all seemed to implicitly admire the built-in furniture for its grandeur: for its promises. But I felt, too, its menace.
*******
I read both e-books and paper books (p-books?), and I don’t know how to answer when I am asked which I prefer. The pleasures of each are quite different, and almost incomparable, like trying to compare the good qualities of your children. You could do it, but would it be appropriate? And what harm might you do to the purity of each, to put them side by side and expect them to have something to say about the other, even as they are made of the same stuff?
For a physical book is indeed made of the same stuff as a digital one. Same words on the page, same chaptering. Same seductive characters, same delectable settings, same cascading syntax. Same moments of insight.
Well, for that last one, I do wonder: would I have underlined the same quotations, had I read the book in its other format? Does format influence thought? But I try not to go too far in this line of thinking, for of course, there is no possible study (without some kind of quantum physics) that would allow me to know for sure.
What interests me more is what is different, not similar, in the two reading experiences. When I read Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House earlier this summer, I meticulously made a tiny fold, what we call a ‘dog-ear,’ at the bottoms of pages that struck me.
(Ah, I miss the idiosyncratic yet patterned way in which teenaged students in my classes play with the phrase, that struck me: I’ve heard ‘it struck out at me,’ ‘it stuck out at me,’ ‘it stuck out for me,’ and every combination therein. It used to bug me, but I’ve stopped imagining I could correct them -- what is there to correct in being ‘struck’ or ‘stuck’ by a passage of literature? Absolutely nothing.)
When, a few weeks after Candy House, I turned to Nell Zink’s Avalon, an e-book, I used my index finger to highlight the passages that struck. I struck back, dragging my finger across the screen until all of the words I loved were grayed-out.
Both of these manners of annotation are important to me; both work for me. I never fail to find the specific passage I liked when I return to my dog-ears; likewise, I often read the whole page when I go back to a highlighted section on my Kindle.
Ah, the dreaded brand name returns. I’ve held it off for over a page now, but it’s back. This is not an essay about a Kindle, but it is an essay about how a technology works on you.
See, a Kindle e-book is actually more than a book. It is a large piece of data that extends beyond just the literary work composed by the author, polished by its editor, and sent to the presses. The electronic copy, distributed by the Amazon corporation, contains other information, other flourishes, all designed to shape my reading experience.
The Dotted Line
It’s a kind of annotation that I cannot myself produce, but which appears on the text before I’ve even read it, along with small superscript reading “102 highlights.” Yes: it tells you how many other people have highlighted in this same place. I suppose I should assume they’ve highlighted with the knowledge of the previous 101 highlights. Or maybe there’s a threshold: when does the algorithm know to tell me about the passage? I’ve seen numbers as low as 32 and as high as 1,529 -- those numbers are fake, but they should give a general sense. Are these underlined sections the definitive best lines in the book? Is this some kind of popular vote, some democratic process for determining which lines struck readers most? Suddenly, I am so utterly invaded by democracy.
The Countdown
In the bottom left corner of the device, there is a timestamp reading, “1 hour, 40 minutes left in the book,” or sometimes, “25 minutes left in the chapter.” It updates in real time, it seems. Perhaps it has even grasped my personal reading speed and adapted its countdown accordingly. This is not pagination -- this is the introduction of an entirely different form of measurement into the reading process. This is the imposition of Time on a world in which Time does not rule. I read to escape Time’s tyranny. Why must I be reminded of the ever-flowing sands? To feel, or read, that I have 32% of the book left, or 120 pages, or 10 pages, or one chapter -- well, that’s different. That’s a question of space, not time. I know roughly how much story I have left to live inside of. I know to occupy that space with more urgency, more presence, more care -- maybe even a preemptive nostalgia. Certainly I know that our Time together -- the book and I -- is short. But that Time is not quantified, nor should it be. Once again, my freedom is eclipsed by some kind of definitive quantification of the book as collective experience. This book belongs to me, not to them, and I get to have it as long as I want.
The Paratext
It’s always been marketing material -- of course. There are parts of a paratext I love, and love to discuss with my students: cover art, for instance. Dedication, author’s biography, copyright information. Other works by the author, awards they’ve garnered. Reviews? I’m less inclined to appreciate them. A blurb can be many things, and indeed sometimes it is nothing more than a spoiler, an unsolicited analysis, or worst of all, an attempt to assess quality.
But of course a publisher will make use of the space around the text to profit. My concern is with the use of that space to profiteer. And where is the line? On my Kindle, I am often encouraged to read other things before I’ve had a full, deep breath leave my lungs at the end of a glorious novel. No! I am still here, still now. I am not there, not yours.
*******
When it came time for me to choose a career, I chose “English teacher” because it was the only job that seemed to primarily involve the thing I loved most in the world: reading. It was a job that seemed to be both dignified and childish, both authoritative and collaborative. It seemed to be a place where I could keep on being me, despite the demands of the marketplace, despite all that noise about money and citizenship and duty.
The fact of the matter is, when I read, I am free. No other time, no other place, is that the case. (Fine, I’ll say that when I’m singing, or playing piano, a similar though also distinct form of freedom passes over me.) Reading is, therefore, sacred. That’s a word I’m comfortable using. Part of sacrament is worship, and part of worship is submission. It’s paradoxical, isn’t it? I am freest when I am most in thrall to a higher power -- in this case, the author and their art. Of course the format of their work is making me do things, and of course I am possessed by their work as much as I possess it. But when a third party intercedes on that harmonious exchange -- when it seeks to enter into the space where I am both free and unfree and extract my resources from me, well. That is where I draw the dotted line.
