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We don't make 'em like that anymore
Philosophy has always been preoccupied with the content and form of the texts its discourse produces, especially since the time it first felt its existence become threatened by modern empirical sciences. The perceived threat triggered defensiveness, which — whether it came from honest worry, career envy or visceral egotism — has resulted in an academic style that now seems to itself undermine the discourse from within. Form and content are now highly successful in slowly but steadily cleansing philosophy of itself.
Hard sciences needed a discourse that supports accessibility of data and methodologies, a discourse that ensures these methodologies are founded on firm grounds, a discourse that validates itself through an enforced hierarchy of previous findings, hypotheses and freshly proven theories. Such a discourse also needs and presupposes a uniformed, pragmatically structured writing style where aesthetic qualities are not only not an objective but are undesirable, i.e. considered noise.
Eliminating this noise serves the purpose of reliability and efficiency but renders texts of the scientific discourse non-texts, and reading them non-reading. These quasi texts although at first resemble texts in their form — they are written in language, they have a title, they are composed of paragraphs, etc. — at a closer look they fail to live up to their definition once they are approached with expectations lifted from non-academic reading experience. In effect, one’s reader persona triggered by facing a linearly structured linguistic flow keeps tipping over whilst perpetually trying to manifest itself through the process of reading. Us, readers, are not present in academic texts, we are by the discourse’s and by our own design rendered pure receivers of the author’s intentions, which are in fact accordingly fully exchanged for the intentions of the data.
Content is thus limited to be expressed merely through itself, and not through form, as form-as-text by necessity gives its place to a form that cannot express content in itself and by itself. This limited form comes into being by forcing itself to make do without time and subtext; the former a tool of the reading activity, while the latter emerges through time the reader spends on constructing meaning. This new, empty, on its surface purely pragmatic form well delivers its promise, yet by intentionally not interfering with the explicit content of the text, it strangles itself into insignificance. Without time and subtext, the unfledged, limited form becomes what it had hoped to overcome; it itself becomes noise, an obstacle to understanding, negative space displacing potential meanings.
This new noise forces us to constantly suppress our reader potential and keep our reading activity in check. We are making considerable efforts not to access resources of perception, thus depleting our ability to generate the full scope of possible content. In the end, we make ourselves victims of a reader persona forced upon us by the noise, by the deaf form, a reader persona whose act is defined by inactivity. The noise disconnects us from creating the text; it is through this noise that the intended efficiency of modern philosophical writing impedes the text in becoming itself, thus demolishing reading.
Apart from criticism, the above is welcome to be perceived as worry for loss in values. The corpus of philosophical discourse is not the physical extension of data carriers, be it paper or digital drives, the corpus is equally not extended solely by addition of contingents of letter. The corpus is the constant and individual reading processes, i.e. the sum of synchronous and diachronous creation of reader personas, which act of creation is the reader persona herself. This reader persona by definition reserves full responsibility of finding content in both content and form by creating content through creating herself, which responsibility cannot be transferred to the creator of the physical text, because the creator of the text read is itself dependent on the reading process, of the reader persona. The creator — the author — is not who types, but a function exhibited by the reader to herself, a function that is continuously created and recreated by the reader throughout the reading process, as part of the reading process. This function, the author, is along with the reader and the unfolding text the essence of content, it is content itself, because content is identical with and thus inseparable from the reading process. It is this content that is lost to the deaf form and its noise, and it is this loss that is loss of virtue.
Efficiency treats the reading process undesired and a systemic error of the discourse that needs to be dealt with and eliminated, in order for the discourse to survive. The formal measures undertaken are intended to reposition philosophy towards natural sciences, but regardless whether this undertaking is successful or not, the repositioning distances the discourse from where it has originally been embedded, which position — it is deemed here — should be maintained. Philosophy is first and foremost oral and written textual communication, it is by definition a collection of reading processes, which means that the discourse is not data transfer but a part of human intellectual culture, by commitment a purely cultural activity. Thus, the individual and hence by academic standards ad hoc creation of meaning, i.e. the creation of content including reader and author is not a bug through flaw, but a feature through absolute and desired necessity.
by Zoltan Tajti
