Two Models of Reading: Transmission vs Evocation
The Transmission Model of Reading
In the transmissionist model of reading, the reader decodes what the author encodes in a fairly one-sided exchange.
Reading, however, isn’t the passive consumption of discrete units of knowledge. It’s a much more reflective practice.
I don’t think it’s accurate to treat books as if they embody a single model at their core.
There are different kinds of books, each the product of a variety of cultural practices with their own history of development.
It’s not just writing that makes up a book, but font choices, punctuation, chapter divisions, headings, indexing, footnotes, and a whole bunch of other bits and pieces that we now take for granted but that were once careful innovations that took root in particular places at particular moments in time.
Put differently, does a scroll of scriptio continua represent the same cognitive model as a modern book?
I don’t think it does.
Let’s take the humble index. The book index wasn’t a value-neutral invention. In its recognizable European form, it evolved out of a variety of medieval innovations designed to help Christians organize, navigate, and interpret the Bible. It was a heuristic technology in the service of hermeneutics.
That word right there, hermeneutics, is important. It’s a term that roughly means the art of interpretation. I said reading is an inherently reflective act, and it all comes down to this art. The modern book is built on tons of little heuristic practices designed to make interpreting its contents easier. If books were simply tools of transmission, why would interpretation even matter?
You can’t separate heuristic tools from the hermeneutic framework in which they exist. The act of creating a book and the act of interpreting a book are part of a single messy whole, and in that whole, interpretation does most of the heavy lifting.
Books transmit symbols, but symbols must be interpreted. The act of interpretation depends on the fact of evocation. It simply isn’t accurate to say books are implicitly transmissionist.
The Evocation Model of Reading
Books consist of a tapestry of symbols that, through the act of interpretation, reflect aspects of the world around us.
Symbols evoke imperfect and partial representations of the world in us. This very partialness is at odds with the transmissionist model. Books can’t transmit a complete picture of a thing, or its full essence. They can only point to something’s shadow, and we can only understand that shadow in the light of our own personal experiences.
The word banana conjures up a ghost inside your mind, a phantasm, that represents something real to you, and something quite different to Donkey Kong. You map that word to a reality you’ve lived through. The word gobbleheimer will not conjure up the same sort of imagery. You won’t have the same experiences to map onto it. You interpret banana according to your own experiences, and you interpret gobbleheimer according to your own experiences.
Reading is the act of interpreting the shadows cast by symbolic objects against the light of our experiences of the world, of seeing the ghosts evoked by our own memories.
Every book you read, you read against the sum total of your own life story, colored by the particulars of the present moment you find yourself in.
A book can only become meaningful by finding some purchase in what you’ve already experienced. The shadows that books cast must have a wall of personal experience to land on for you to interpret them. If you don’t bring the wall, you won’t see the shadows.
Educe means to draw out. That’s education at its core: it’s not the filling of a vessel, but the drawing out of new insights shaped by past experiences. Reading shows us aspects of our present against the light of our past. It’s not the transmission of discrete units of knowledge into empty, shapeless vessels.
Books transmit symbols, and symbols evoke internally generated representations. Words and numbers do not capture the whole of reality. They can only represent a partial view of it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s poetry or math: symbols are simply shadows cast by what they represent. These shadows can evoke our memories and guide our senses, but they can’t transmit what they represent if we have no scaffolding for those representations.
We interpret symbols using whatever hermeneutic practices we have on hand. Interpretation is culturally determined. Our cultural toolkit shapes how we think about what we read and how we interact with the representations evoked by the symbols we parse.
Read Like the Medievals
The scholastics had a distinct art of interpretation that we’ve lost. They used specific heuristic tools to help them organize and remember what they read, and they had specific contemplative practices to help them interpret and investigate what they memorized.
Books are more than sequences of words in sequences of lines, just as a painting is more than the simple arrangement of pigments on a canvas. A book might be sequential in its construction, but a reader doesn’t approach it sequentially. There are waves of ongoing interpretation taking place in the act of reading, and the order of the pages encountered by a reader doesn’t determine the order in which the ideas of a book are internalized. Interpretation is nonlinear, even if a book isn’t.
Thomas Aquinas memorized entire books by heart, and he was able to revisit his memories of these books at will, scribbling notes in the mental pages of his mind, which he would then use to compose his own works. Aquinas was, in other words, able to read a memorized book in any sequence he wanted without even having the book in his hands.
You don’t need to read the dictionary in alphabetical order just because it’s written that way. There’s also nothing stopping a talented reader from mixing and matching pages mentally like Thomas Aquinas.
Books are fine, mostly. We can develop new heuristic and hermeneutic practices to help people better engage the symbols on a page, but these practices will always be rooted in specific cultural contexts, so we might as well go to the source, the cultural environments we’re embedded in, before tinkering with the objects found in these environments.
If you want to be a better reader, cultivate a culture of reading that’s closer to the one practiced by medieval thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas.
They didn’t speed through what they read. They sat with texts. They meditated on them. They investigated them. They committed some of their readings to memory, which they could then revisit at their leisure.
These practices might fall under the umbrella of metacognition, but they were much more than that: they were practices rooted in a specific time and place supported by social norms which encouraged their adoption and use.
There are real cultural dimensions to metacognition. Attempts to end-run cultural deficits with better technologies will usually fail unless those technologies are designed to create new cultural norms and practices.
Before we re-invent the book, we should start by reviving the reading habits of the scholastics.
The kind of reading the scholastics engaged in is a lot easier than you’d think. Yes, even the memorization techniques they used are somewhat trivial once you get the hang of them.
In the months ahead, I’ll share my own spin on some of these practices. But if you can’t wait, just grab Mary Carruthers’s The Book of Memory and get started.
I want to emphasize that this is easy stuff, but it does require approaching books in a way that might be unfamiliar to modern sensibilities. It may even be a little imposing at first. Unlike Aquinas and Augustine, you don’t have the cultural scaffolding they did for their reading habits, so you have to build it up from scratch.
Reading like the medievals will change what you read. If you’re a prolific reader like I am, you’ll probably switch to reading fewer books, but reading those books more intensively.
If you’re someone who barely reads at all, you’ll probably read more books, since you’ll now be able to carry what you read with you wherever you go. Books won’t seem like a waste of time, since their contents won’t just disappear once you put them down.
Once you can read the way Aquinas could read, your view of books will change.
I know mine did.
P.S: We should constantly strive to improve things! There’s no reason we can’t build a better book, I just think that these attempts need to take cultural practices into account, especially older practices that we left behind that could change our relationship to reading. In other words, let’s bring back the things that worked while also pushing the envelope of what’s possible. .
This piece was written in response to Andy Matuschak’s Why Books Don’t Work. I have a different view of how books work than he does, and thought I’d offer a rebuttal to some of his arguments. Read his essay (and check out the rest of his site!), it’s very good even I disagree with some of his ideas.