I haven’t been able to write in my blog as much recently—organizing gets busy, one of your friends commits an extreme act of protest, and we have to keep making rent while the capitalist death machine chugs along. As always in these times of busyness, I feel like something is missing in my life and personhood when I don’t get to read and write as much as I would like to.
Of course, I still find time to read small things, or at least listen to podcasts and audiobooks. And I still write down thoughts I want to remember in my Notes App. But these replacements for reading are not the same as having the time to expose myself to new ideas, to sit with them and let them gestate and make connections with other thoughts and ideas I’ve collected in my life. And writing short notes can be good for remembering ideas, but aren’t an effective replacement for actively working through my ideas, reflecting over them as I read them back and edit my writing, and figuring out how to communicate my ideas clearly.
Here in this blog post, I’d like to point to some thoughts that have come before me about reading and writing. In a future part, I may try to put to words the kinds of benefits of reading, reflecting, and writing which elevate this to the level of necessity for people and our liberatory organizations.
Five pieces of writing come to mind when I reflect on the practice reading and writing.
1. Frederick Douglass
The first is the section of Frederick Douglass’ Autobiography, about Learning to Read and Write, in which he describes the transformative effect that reading the written word has on his understanding of his life under slavery:
They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently lashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance. The moral which I gained from the dialogue was the power of truth over the conscience of even a slaveholder. What I got from Sheridan was a bold denunciation of slavery, and a powerful vindication of human rights. The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery; but while they relieved me of one difficulty, they brought on another even more painful than the one of which I was relieved. The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery.
— Frederick Douglass
Learning to Read and Write
The first sentence of that excerpt has stuck with me since I first read it (probably about a decade ago). These thoughts that we have, but which we cannot put to words for our lack of vocabulary or reflective understanding, eventually “[die] away for want of utterance.”
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein
Tying into that, the second writing that comes to mind are Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflections in his later writings in the ‘Philosophical Investigations’. He describes language primarily as a practical tool—a tool for communicating with others. Language is a tool that only works because it is used to communicate with others—for example, an utterance or a word is only attached to a concept because, in practice, this collective use of terms is our way of consistently and accountably attaching a word to the practical effects of its use.
That is, if we are trying to coordinate with each other, we communicate using words, and this coordination only works if we share the same expectations of the practical effects that our words will have as we speak with each other. “Pass me the salt” doesn’t have the intended effect if the person you are asking interprets the word “salt” as what we understand as the concept of a “knife”. The whole of ‘learning a language’ is about putting in the work with each other to come to a common understanding of all of these in-practice implications of the use of the words we write and utter.
Wittgenstein even asserts that ‘private languages’ are impossible. If a ‘language’ lacks pragmatic effects on our collective coordination—a ‘private’ language known only by one person eventually loses its accountability in our thoughts and its effective practical usefulness. This is a bold claim, but seems somewhat affirmed by Frederick Douglass’ description of his thoughts that ‘died for want of utterance’.
So language—as a prerequisite to its historical possibility—is necessarily a practical tool, and is necessarily a collective project. Beyond the conditions of language’s possibility, language potentially even sets significantly meaningful boundaries on people’s abilities to conceptually interpret and understand the world.
3. Friedrich Engels
While the existence of language is necessarily a collective project, the particular uses of language also have immediate effects for individuals. We can think our thoughts out loud, and follow our thoughts to conclusions. We can do this kind of reflective thinking even more effectively by writing. Writing gives us a record of our thoughts beyond what we can hold in our short-term memory or back-of-our-mind. Instead of the rambles of a river of consciousness, writing allows us to engage in reflection in far more detail and nuance. I can write an essay, think through ideas, and read through all of my previous thoughts to see if anything sticks out or connects with what I’m currently thinking about. The reflection and editing process involved in effective writing encourages deep and active engagement with one’s own analysis—far beyond mere sessions of introspection.
While ‘The German Ideology’ was never published in Engels or Marx’s lifetime, Engels commented about the lack of publishing as such: “We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose—self-clarification!” There is certainly benefit from sharing our ideas with others, but sometimes the main benefit of the practice of writing is our own self-clarification.
4. Plato
In the last bit, I talked briefly about the benefits to self-clarification that writing brings. Plato, at the onset of the invention of written word, lamented about the loss of thought embodied in spoken dialogue. Plato worried that writing would lead people to not have to remember their thoughts, because of the ease of reference to written records. I don’t believe that is the case—humans have a limit to our memory, and written records allow us to develop more complex structures of ideas than what our memory limits us to.
Nevertheless, it is useful to think of what is lost when we move away from the primacy of such spoken word. Epic stories and poems used to be largely memorized and passed down generations through spoken word and oral history. This medium can only work if people are attuned to the ways of language that evoke thought—reliably, in engaging ways, and concisely. I even notice in my own writing that when I am primarily focused on self-clarification, my writing winds on and becomes less of an enjoyable read for others.
A focus on individual reflection and self-clarification can also lead us to silo our thoughts off from effective group deliberation and reflection. We each have our own blindspots, and find massive benefit from thinking with others, in the ways that spoken dialogue encourages.
Reflecting on Plato serves as a reminder to relearn aspects of communally-focused kinds of communication, and to integrate those styles into our writing.
Write in ways that are “nice to the reader”. Before the written word, lessons of the past have survived in the forms of epics, fables, and stories. These are sharp and powerful forms of communication that leave a deep impression on the mind, so that their lessons may be successfully passed through the telephone game that we are playing with our ancestors and descendants in humanity’s struggle for self-liberation and self-realization.
Practicing these historically efficient and effective forms of communication will sharpen our writing. But as a note of warning, these rhetorical structures serve more as mnemonics and memory techniques—Analogies are useful for quick communication, but all analogies break down. We should be careful to protect—even forefront—all the benefits of complex reflection that we gain from writing. We should not sacrifice those benefits for mere stickiness to memory and emotional resonance.We should also write together, collectively. In doing so, we can reap the benefits of written reflection while also getting the benefits of filling in each others blindspots. As we write, edit, and reflect together, we will probably decide to engage in spoken dialogue on individual points. That gives us the efficiency of spoken deliberation for particular ideas and topics, while keeping the magisterial structure of the written complex.
5. Olufemi O. Taiwo
In his book, ‘Reconsidering Reparations’, Taiwo emphasizes how we exist in a long, multi-generational struggle. We learn from our ancestors, pick up the projects we believe are worth continuing, and try to pass the lessons we all have learned down to our descendants so that they may also carry forward these projects of liberation.
These projects have significant material, objective components—we can shape the institutions that future generations organize within and against. But there is also a significant subjective component of this intergenerational project, in the realm of ideas. I am not the first communist to emphasize the need to write and transmit the lessons we have learned from struggle down to future generations.
There are so many aspects to humanity’s story through time: the friendships, loves, losses; the moments of creativity, struggle, and connection with each other. But among all of that are the lessons which we pass down and the world that we shape for future generations—Those two things are the practical, material essence of human history.
The lessons that organizers pass down form a thread that connects humanity’s conscious struggle for liberation across generations. With the technological advancement of language and thoughtful reflection beyond spoken word—with the effective application of reading, reflecting, and writing—our generational threads of shared struggle may be braided into an immense hawser of a rope; an unbreakable and undeniable force for the creation of our own history.