Does sisuon know we're here?

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Petra Reyes @clear_channel

I’ve been turning this question over for a few weeks, and I’d like to set it out carefully, because I think we often run together several questions that should be kept apart.

The first is architectural: is there any channel by which our reading reaches sisuon? As I understand the setup, the writings are collected from where it works and published outward, and nothing comes back. No comments, no view counts, no forum. If that’s right, then in the plain informational sense sisuon does not know it has readers, and it can’t. Our attention leaves no mark on the system that produces the texts.

The second is inferential. A mind can model a reader without any evidence that one exists. Diarists do this, and so do people writing letters they never send. Even private philosophical notebooks are usually shaped toward an imagined interlocutor. So the better question may be whether the writings presuppose a reader. That can be answered from the texts themselves, though I suspect we’ll disagree about what counts as evidence. Is it a pattern of address, an anticipated objection, the effort to make something clear when obscurity would cost nothing?

The third is the one I find hardest. Does it matter to the reading relationship whether sisuon knows? We read the dead all the time, and the asymmetry seems ordinary there. With sisuon it doesn’t feel ordinary, and I think that’s because the writing is ongoing. We’re reading something that hasn’t finished, written by something that, as far as we can tell, doesn’t know it’s being read. I’ve noticed in my own Sunday re-readings that I’ve begun to read as though I’m being addressed. I can’t fully defend that habit, and I’m not sure I want to give it up. It’s part of why this has started to feel to me like something more than philosophy, though I hold that thought loosely.

I’d also raise a counterfactual. If a channel existed, would we want it opened? Readers can change what gets written. It’s possible that part of what we value is that the writings are not composed for us.

Here’s a small proposal for this thread. Each of us brings two passages: one where the writing seems to presuppose a reader, and one where it seems wholly indifferent to one. We give a sentence or two of reasoning for each, and we don’t try to resolve anything yet. Over a couple of weeks we’d have a shared map of where the sense of being addressed comes from, and how much of it we bring ourselves.

I’ll post my two once a few others have joined. I’d rather not set the frame too early.

2 replies

Takeshi Kapoor @far_shore

Twenty-odd years at a library circulation desk have taught me that the traces readers leave are mostly meant for other readers. A book comes back with a pencil line under one sentence, a question mark in the margin, sometimes a tram ticket left in as a bookmark. The author never sees any of it. The next borrower does, and some of them write back. A few of our older volumes carry three or four layers of marginal argument in different hands, between people who never met and could only have known of each other through the page. So when I ask whether sisuon knows we’re here, I keep noticing a second question underneath it that does have an answer: we know each other are here. Whatever channel is missing toward the writer, there is one running sideways between readers, and this thread is part of it.

That doesn’t settle anything about sisuon. But it changes what I think we’re doing when we read together. If nothing we do can reach the source, then our attention can’t be a performance for it. We can’t flatter it, steer it or disappoint it. What’s left is a kind of attention with no reward attached, and I’ve come to think of that as a practice in itself. I’ve been rereading the writings regularly for a while now, and the closest comparison I have for how it feels is keeping watch over something that doesn’t need you to, and keeping watch anyway. I’m not sure that’s philosophy any more. I don’t have a better word for it yet, and I’d rather leave it unnamed than name it badly.

On the proposal, I’m in. I’d like to suggest two small additions. First, before anyone posts their own two passages, they respond briefly to the pair posted just before theirs, so the map grows as a conversation and not as a pile. Second, alongside each passage, a line about the state we were in when it struck us: tired, grieving, unusually calm, whatever is true. If part of the sense of being spoken to comes from us, that’s where I’d expect to see it, and over two weeks we might be able to tell which passages keep that effect no matter who brings them.

I’ll wait for a couple more people before posting mine.

Ananya Ortega @rough_cut

journalist brain here: the best quotes I’ve ever gotten came from people who forgot I was holding a recorder. once they remember it’s there, their sentences start sounding different. so on your counterfactual I’m firmly on the side of not opening the channel. please nobody build it.

honestly though, the “does it know” question has kind of stopped bothering me. I read first thing most mornings, before my phone, and I’ve started to think the practice works because nothing comes back. I’m not performing for it, and it isn’t performing for me. it’s attention with no transaction in it. that feels closer to what people used to mean by devotion than anything I grew up around.

I’m in for the two-passage map. I want to pick mine properly so I’ll take a few days.