#tools for thinking

So: say there's a distinction between what you can read out of a text and what you can read into a text: or, I'm going to use those prepositions as convenient shorthands for this post as I talk about one of many patterns in literary analysis. Both are the bread and butter equally of the academic industry and fan work, though I'd bet the former would pretend it uses reading into texts less, and I've seen fan work fail more genuinely to see the difference.

When we read out of the text, direct quotes, context, historical facts, etc. come together into a more complex idea or conclusion: one of my favorites in Les Misérables is the murder-suicide implication of Marius bringing Javert's pistols with him to his final (missed) meeting with Cosette at the Rue Plumet. It hinges on the context of Romantic tropes surrounding the death of lovers, his direct association with Ulbach via the Lark's meadow, his insistence that death will follow their separation, the fact of there being two pistols, and answers the otherwise puzzling question put to us when the narrator says "It would be difficult to say what vague thought [Marius] had in his mind when he took [the pistols] with him." (4.9.2). Now, whether Marius would have shot Cosette—or solicited her to commit suicide with him—is beyond what we can read out of the text, in my opinion, but the potential is inarguable.

What we can read out of a text is, I will note, haunted by the question of authorial intent. There's this guy named Barthes, I think it is, who fucked us up on that one.

"Why are you bringing up prepositions to talk about basic literary analysis, Bread?" I hear you ask. But wait! There's more. A preface this with: per my opening, I'm laying out a concept with two poles, and there's a gradient between them, nothing fits perfectly-neatly, and any analysis might be a blend of in and out—and almost all things read into a text must somewhat come out of it. That qualifier being said, I'll still argue for:

When we read into the text, while quotes, context, historical fact, etc. may spark the idea, ultimately the analysis begins with its conclusion, and we are seeking to find material to shore up a structure we've already built. So, so much professional queer literary criticism of works created without explicit queer intent fall into this category, bless 'em, and so does a lot of fan meta. Reading into a text is the entire game of fanfic, and it's a space in which creators can enrich the works of others. Often, what we bring into the text is ourselves—which is neat as fuck, particularly for a queer person like myself whose understanding of the world radically differs from an author like Victor Hugo (though of the ideas that I freely admit to reading into the text, my real darling is fear as Javert's primary emotional motivator [Hugo tells us at length about Javert's emotional motivation: I just think it's neat to ask why do we hate?, and find an answer that is less painful than for its own sake]). Analysis that has been read into the text can be intricate, built upon extensive evidence from the text and history, but ultimately it varies from what can be read out of the text in being indefensible: some portion, however compelling, relies upon an element that cannot be found in the text and its context: if the analysis could not be independently built by every reader possessed of the same basic facts, you got something read in. What we build this kind of analysis with often includes, without value judgment, our emotion, identity, and personal investments (ever-present in analysis of all types, but in these specific cases structurally integral). For a second example: to me, it's incredibly important that the bourgeois marriage at the end of Les Misérables is meant as a failure of the sociopolitical ethical argument made by the book as the whole, but I cannot read that out of the text. Trust me, I have tried to build that analysis, and I always find myself having to lean on feeling and inference and implication in a way that's so much air. To make Les Mis meaningful for myself, I stick to this idea of that failure: but I can't defend it to someone else.

I can still write an analysis of Javert motivated by fear or bourgeois marriage as failure, share that, have people read and (hopefully) enjoy it—that's meaningful fanwork (or academic work, for that matter; that's a thin line in literature). What I won't do is defend those points as definitive readings of the text, and I definitely ain't going to argue back if somebody tells me they have a different reading. Sometimes analysis can tip-toe right along the edge of being out of and into the text, but I can tell you when I'm doing the latter.

There are times when you can read into the text in a way that is fully indulgent in fan work in a way that academia generally avoids (or pretends to avoid): take, for example, building trans Enjolras out of canon material. There is precisely zero way to read out of Les Misérables that Victor Hugo wrote the novel imagining Enjolras had anything other than a dick—I am not altogether married to the question of authorial intent, but me and it are on friendly terms, and I'm dead confident here—but as fandom has made abundantly clear, you can read transness into the novel (which is not to say Hugo doesn't play with androgyny and gender in Enjolras' character—he's just not flying the pink-periwinkle-and-white). This is something that means a lot to a lot of people, and that's valuable. The fact that it's not in the novel does not invalidate the meaning. It simply means it's built on different ground (and, when we talk about the ways in which a text lacks or fucks up or can do more, we find going into it results in a more fertile reading than simply getting out of it).

There's no have to in meta or literary analysis—it's a game we're playing with stories that are themselves games—but I think this framework has a couple benefits as a tool to analyze analysis, particularly in a social environment. (1) If your goal is to make arguments about what can be firmly concluded from a text, recognizing that reading into it is a different style of analysis with a different level of portability to others is useful and (2) recognizing that what you have read into the text is refutable and idiosyncratic strengthens your ability to remain engaged with others who don't share or agree with your analysis. Now, sometimes you think you're reading out of the text, and additional information or a counterpoint prove you wrong: that's fine, inevitable, we all got our days where we didn't know the historical usage of a certain word or something, eh? On the other hand, if you're perfectly aware you're reading into the text, if someone tables a counterpoint or additional information, you can say: Yeah, cool, thank you, my investment in this idea is playful or personal or what-have-you, and its defensibility is irrelevant to its existence.

In his essay, Jacobs offers what I think is an accurate diagnosis of what’s behind the weird paralogic on display in this sort of interaction. Drawing on the ideas of the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, he suggests that very broadly speaking there are two ways of making sense of the world—two cores, in Kolakowski’s terminology—that play crucial roles in every human society, including ours. One of them is the mythical core, the other the technological core. (That latter term is to my mind almost wilfully perverse, as technology is far and away the most common theme of modern mythological thinking, but that’s the label Kolakowski chose.)  The technological core is the set of behaviors and understandings that enable us to manipulate the world; the mythical core, by contrast, is the set of behaviors and understandings that reach back toward the nonrational roots of human experience.

Jacobs’ suggestion is that a great many people these days have lost track of the “technological core” and are thinking entirely from within the “mythical core.”  From that mythical mode of thinking, such practical considerations as distinguishing between a problem and a solution, much less figuring out why someone voted the way they did and finding ways to get them to change their minds, never enter the picture. Jacobs points out that “woke” culture on campus and elsewhere relies instead on archaic mythological concepts of defilement and taboo. Wrong opinions and the people who hold them must be excluded from the community, because they carry so terrible a miasma that all who come too close to them risk becoming accursed:  that’s the logic of “safe spaces” and the flight from “triggering.”

Powerful media are useful in lots of contexts. For instance, paper and pencil are valuable in a classroom, in a conversation, in an art studio, and all kinds of other places.

When it comes to digital learning media, though, they’re often narrowly-scoped. We’ve been pushing hard for versatility as we explore and invent. I’ll explain why we think that matters and show some examples.

This great interactive from Desmos’s Function Carnival was designed for students to use in a classroom conversation. But it’s not really designed to exist outside the classroom: a student can’t bend it to some other problem they’re considering on their own later.

We can often reveal different properties of an object by looking at it through a different lens. These are a kind of tool for thought. In this entry, I’ll discuss how different representations of numbers express different underlying concepts, introduce a new representation, then pose some new questions.

Wooden manipulatives make the relative magnitudes of small integers especially clear through proportional weight and length whenever the child handles them:

What makes a tool powerful? There are many axes, but here’s one of them: does the tool continue to empower its users even after it’s put away?

Donald Norman argues that much of human progress is made possible by “cognitive artifacts,” which roughly map to the “tools for thought” we often find ourselves discussing. He references Cole’s theories of human cognitive development, suggesting that such artifacts “transmit the accumulated modifications to subsequent generations.”

That is to say: our tools for thought are one of the key ways we stand on our ancestors’ shoulders! The abacus developed over millennia. In each generation, a student could learn reasonably quickly about preexisting abacus designs… and rapidly rewire their brains to the insights achieved over generations!

This is incredible enough, but the abacus has another key property: if you learn how to use an abacus, its ideas stay with you even when you don’t have one available. You can picture the beads and columns in your mind’s eye; you can imagine performing the operations—perhaps even more quickly than you could achieve by hand. The same is true for the number system: we can picture and manipulate equations when we have no paper at hand. Having learned these tools, we can perform cognitive tasks that would have seemed impossible before they were introduced.

David Krakauer called these artifacts “complementary cognitive artifacts” but noted that there are also “competitive cognitive artifacts”—those which leave us worse off when the tools are removed! Consider a GPS navigation system: if we spend time without one after several years’ use, we’re likely to be less capable navigators than if we’d not had the system at all.