The Right to Read

Written By Architecture Writing Workshop .

Matthew Allen
January 2023

Consider that the Bill of Rights is a written document. “Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble...” There’s a tempo to reading. Do you find yourself absorbed in quiet contemplation? On a lazy afternoon it might go unnoticed, but cramped on a crowded commute, the active effort required to focus attention and sustain an inner dialog is inescapable. These moments of hard-won private reverie are crucial to public life. It’s not only that abstractions like democracy and freedom depend on concrete practices carried out in a chaotic public sphere—the practices create the public realm. Just as locally negotiated systems of shared cattle grazing created “the commons” as it was traditionally manifest, our ways of carving out space for reading set up contemplation as a public good, a shared resource.

The value of a thriving attentional commons (to use Matthew Crawford’s term) has been recognized by progressive reformers since the advent of modernity. Take, for example, a proto-modernist slogan neatly lettered above the bed in a relatively minimalist Arts and Crafts bedroom designed in 1897: “Seven hours to work, to soothing slumber seven, ten to the world allot and all to heaven.” What is “the world” in this scenario? Through a process of elimination, we can infer that it’s not work, not sleep, and not spiritual transcendence. The philosopher Hannah Arendt often spoke of “the world” as the realm of highest human achievement, populated first of all by works of art and literature, which she distinguished sharply from entertainment. I find it hard even to imagine having ten hours a day to devote to “the life of the mind” (the title of Arendt’s last book) or “arts and letters” (a thoroughly anachronistic concept), and so it’s difficult for me to gauge the contours of a thriving attentional landscape. It’s not simply that there’s not enough time to ingest information. A feeling of information overload already percolated in medieval monastic libraries, and a technological solution—encyclopedias—developed during the same period. The problem seems to be elsewhere: in the habits and habitats that provide us with the mental and physical resources to read and make use of that reading. Even if the quality of information and access to it has grown, the quality of attention at our disposal has been actively undermined. Social media is an obvious culprit, with legions of programmers tapping the techniques of behavioral psychology to capture every micron of attention. The attention economy is among the wildest frontiers of capitalist development.

Photograph of a bedroom by Liberty’s, 1897 in Interior Design of the 20th Century by Anne Massey
(Thames and Hudson, 1990), 16.

Thus the question of who can read—who has the time and attentional resources—has become one of the most consequential conundrums of our present era. The complexity only mounts in specialized disciplines like architecture. Following revolutions in linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy, architecture since, say, 1960 spent several decades as a highly erudite field—a field premised on reading and writing. The creation of PhD programs established a class of academic architects as professional readers, and, at the same time, the intrigues of French intellectual life in its poststructuralist heyday rendered difficult concepts as popular spectacle. Reading was edgy. All this was directly correlated with how design was conceptualized. Buildings could be subject to “close reading,” and a good project would have a tight “logic” and present a clear “argument.” On the insights of deconstruction a whole theoretical edifice was built featuring the slippery mechanics of language. Its focus on openness and indeterminacy encouraged the average architect to play along. (There’s no wrong answer in the absence of Truth and Authority.) If, since then, architects are reading less and bringing to it a different quality of attention, this also means that the foundation has shifted beneath a broad swath of basic disciplinary concepts. Maybe architectural theory as it was once understood has already collapsed.

Media theory can help us sort through the wreckage and rebuild. Marshall McLuhan wrote about hot media and cool media: the former provide lots of information but offer low participation (like reading a book or watching a film) while the latter have low information bandwidth but demand high levels of participation (like a group chat or a discussion seminar). McLuhan’s contemporary, Walter Ong, followed with an extensive comparison of literary cultures versus oral cultures. Perhaps humanity has gone from orality (in archaic cultures) to literacy (for the past few thousand years) to secondary orality (with the cool media of the electronic age) and most recently to secondary literacy (how we read text on our phones). Something of the return of certain features of oral culture—which is premised on communal, participatory sociality—was vividly prefigured by Superstudio’s collages of “nomads” (really: disaffected western youth) lounging on the Supersurface. The next step is to jettison the romantic yearning for a simpler form of life and try instead to learn from contemporary oral cultures. How do you organize a fruitful discussion? What are the parts of a good story? What guides the listener (or reader) along the way? Storytelling encompasses all sorts of practices: chatting things over to make sense of the world around us, project presentations and jury discussions, but also oration and demagoguery. (As with any other technology, the potentials of storytelling can be used to good or bad effect. Just think of the impact of the microphone on politics in the twentieth century.) The realm of the live-and-in-person has affordances and techniques that can counter trends toward exclusive expertise with an imaginary of public abundance.

Which brings us back to the attentional commons. Attention is usually seen as a resource to be extracted or a means of extracting some resource. Advertisers are vying for your eyeballs; reading is a means of gaining some proprietary knowledge. A Gestalt shift is required. Conceptualizing a right to read is not about reading more, but imagining a world in which reading thrives—and the most important result might be that space is made for collective life of a more deliberate, open, and satisfying variety.

Matthew Allen teaches theory and history at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Flowcharting: From Abstractionism to Algorithmics in Art and Architecture.

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