Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Luhmann on Learning How to Read

There are not many books or articles that purport to teach critical reading. One of the more
famous attempts is Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book of 1940, which is, perhaps too closely
bound up with the "Great Books Program." There is a short description of the book here:

Wikipedia on Adler's How to Read a Book

There is also a very short (German) essay by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann
of Zettelkasten-fame on reading. It seems to be intended as advice to beginning university
students. since it contains some interesting observations, I would like to present his advice her
in English:

Luhmann begins with the trite observation that "modern society produces very different sorts of
text that require very different kinds of reading," and then differentiates between three main
types. There are poetical, narrative, and theoretical (wissenschaftliche) texts. He is, of course,
most interested in the last sort. Excluding those, which are composed in what he calls the
"secret code" of mathematics or logical calculus, and concentrating on those written in more or
less ordinary language, he finds that even scientists and scholars
must form sentences, if they want to publish. However, the degree of randomness in the choice
of words that is necessary for this is unimaginable for most readers. The practitioners of science
also fail to realize this most of the time. The largest part of the text could have been formulated
differently. Indeed, it would have been different, if it had been formulated the next day. The
mass of words that are fillers, necessary for forming sentences, escapes any conceptual
control. Take for instance the word "escapes" in the previous sentence. This cannot be avoided
even if we take the greatest care in differentiating and recognizing words that are laden with
conceptual significance. They make up only a small part of the body of the text. And how is the
reader to identify those words, which make the difference?

This problem takes an especially drastic form in two cases: those of translators and those of
beginners. In any case, I noticed how much my writing is determined by accident when I
considered these two groups of readers - and this in spite of the care I took in sustaining and
refining theoretical connections ...

Beginners, especially beginning students, find themselves first confronted by a mass of words,
arranged in sentences, which they can read sentence by sentence and can understand at the
level of the sentences. But what is significant? How should one "learn"? What is important, what
is merely secondary? After several pages of reading, one can hardly remember what one has
read. What advice can be given here?

One possibility is to remember the names: Marx, Freud, Bourdieu, etc. Obviously most
knowledge can be ordered by names, and eventually by the names of theories, like social
phenomenology, theory of reception in literary criticism, etc. Beginnings [of texts] and
introductory textbooks are organized that way. But what you don't learn in this way are the
conceptual connections and especially the problems which the texts attempt to answer. Even
candidates in the final exams at the end of their studies wish to be tested on Max Weber, or, if
that's too much on Humberto Maturana, and they are prepared to tell you what they know of
these authors.

Another possibility is to read much in certain areas ... theory of socialization, research on risk,
etc. In this way, one develops gradually a feeling for what is already known or what is the status
questionem in a field. Something new is thus noted. But this approach leads to learning things
that will soon be obsolete and must be unlearned again. This, by the way, reveals the
advantage of learning ancient languages. They don't have to be unlearned, they only need to be
forgotten.

Luhmann then identifies long-term memory as most important problem in reading theoretical
texts and as the necessary condition of the possibility of differentiating between "the essential
and the unessential, the new and the mere repetition." Because we cannot remember
everything, we must by highly selective [hochselektiv] in our reading and extract "widely
networked references." We must take notes - not mere "excerpts, but condensed reformulations
of the reading. The re-description of what has already been described leads almost
automatically to the training of attentiveness to "frames" [English in the original], to schemata of
observation, or to the conditions, which allow the text to offer some solutions, but not others. In
doing this, it is advisable always to reflect also on what is not meant, what is excluded, when
something is asserted." All this should be written down. And in this way, we may develop our
own "system of notes" [Aufschreibsystem], which teaches us what is important to know and how
to read.

This leads to another question: What do we do with what we have written down? We will
certainly produce mostly garbage at the beginning, but since we have been trained to expect
something useful from our activities ... we should ask ourselves whether and how we transform
our notes in such a way that they will be available for later inspection ... this may at the least be
envisaged as a comforting illusion. And this requires a computer or a slip box with numbered
slips and a register of keywords. The continual "filing" [Unterbringen ] of the notes is a further
step in our work that costs time, but it is an activity that goes beyond the mere monotony of
reading, and incidentally it trains the memory.

So Luhmann's answer to the question of how we learn the reading of theoretical texts is that we
need to be able to refer back to what we are already acquainted with, that is we need a long
term memory, which of course does not spontaneously come into existence. "Perhaps, written
reformulation [of what we read] is a suitable method."

This method to establish such a long term memory may lead to a system of notes that might be
described as a secondary or external memory, something that has in other contexts been
described as a "prosthetic extension of ourselves."

Based on Niklas Luhmann (2000) Short Cuts Herausgegeben von Peter Gente, Heidi Paris,
Martin Weinmann. Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/Main, pp. 150f.

Fonte: https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmann-on-learning-how-to-read.html
Consultado em 24 jul 2019