# 53: Distant Reading, Close Thinking
Story behind the Passage
First, let me clarify one thing. I am not an advocate of any particular literary theorist or cultural critic. When I write about certain approaches, my goal is mainly to share whatever thoughts come up in my mind. I never give a comprehensive account of the theory or method at large. This stuff you can read elsewhere — primarily in the respective literary source itself.
In a conversation today, someone told me about a fierce proponent of “deep reading.” Since I have not read any work from this person, I cannot say anything about it. To me, it seemed to be related to what we call “close reading” in literary studies. And that, in turn, made me think of Franco Moretti as the theoretical antagonist. I read Moretti’s book Distant Reading in my research for the latest book. I was interested in learning about new approaches to reading; also in relation to but not exclusively regarding digital approaches to reading.
Why would anybody even care about this?
Well, let me explain what I see in Moretti’s lines.
My Learnings
“Less is more. If we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing something.” That line smacked me in the face when I just grabbed the book. “Less is more” might appear like a total No Go to perfectionists or people whose brains really focus on tiny details. And there is no judgement involved. The point is: If we lose the capacity to see the big picture from the distance, i.e., from a systemic perspective, we will never be able to sort out why the hell we are doing certain things. You need this big picture perspective to locate yourself and your own actions.
I am worried that the current education system, especially in higher education, does not train people for this perspective anymore. If we are only trained in one field and have no option to explore other fields in more depth — I mean “more” in the sense of based on real teaching by scholars and experts — education becomes a jungle and people have no means to navigate properly. How is this related to reading?
“We always pay a price for theoretical knowledge: reality is infinitely rich; concepts are abstract, are poor.” Moretti is writing from the perspective of an advocate of distant reading. However, I do not even think that the distance necessarily goes along with much theory. Neither do I think that close reading is very theoretical. It is limited by theory, I would say. Most students and even scholars read theory and then they apply it to the literature. But really, this “theory” is just an ideological and, more often than not, political perspective. I am not giving examples here on purpose.
For me, theory is the only knowledge that allows you to really structure the world in your head and it is the reason why we really need university studies in certain fields. In other fields, where people produce empirical evidence based on data collection, the situation is slightly different. What I means is that theory to me is as “rich” as reality, I am not making any judgement here. And concepts as containers of theory, as means of structuring, are equally rich to me. So, I am actually disagreeing with Moretti on this one. At the same time, I do see his point that reality is the richest thing out there.
And by reality I mean every tiny detail and every big theoretical idea that human beings are capable of perceiving and developing individually from their unique perspective.
“But it’s precisely this ‘poverty’ that makes it possible to handle them, and therefore to know.” This sentence obviously is in line with my previous point . But I want to respond to the very last part, the “therefore we know.” I am thinking a lot about the definition of knowledge. I have always done so. It is the reason why I am struggling or rather struggled much with literary studies. Yes, we can think and interpret and think again and question again. All this I would label as “education” as well as “intellectual and personal development.”
Knowledge, to me, at least if we mean scholarship/science by this, involves data. In other words, I am very much shaped by my training in the social sciences in that respect. There is a reason why Enlightenment brought progress to us and ongoing breakthroughs in the sciences. There is a reason why we have sophisticated means of data collection and nowadays big data analysis. All this allows us to measure and understand “reality” in much more differentiated ways. And by differentiated I mean not in subjectivist and/or exclusively objective terms.
Yes, I know, this sounds like an either/or again but this is not what I am saying. Of course, we need both, empirical and hermeneutical approaches to the study of the world. The point is, I simply cannot identify with just the latter. I just cannot. Yes, I have tried, but I just cannot defend or even represent any field that stresses and admires its own distance to “reality” so much. It simply does not work. And I do keep trying, I can tell. Well, I make attempts, I would say.
This afternoon I looked at an open access journal in my field. I just read the three abstracts of the latest issue. And then I did not even open the full text. I have no idea what scholars in the humanities are thinking about these days. I can suspect it because, if I am really patient, I do make the effort to understand what they write. But I simply have no idea how you can move so far away from the world in your writing. Maybe they do not realize this — probably they do not. But even if this is just a matter of communication, I do not feel any relation to all this.
Hence, knowledge keeps being my personal epicenter of the world but it also forces me to keep a distance to those whose only concern is “close reading” without any willingness to create some distance to their literary concerns. I prefer close thinking. Moretti as an enfant terrible of literary studies probably shares some of this distance. What I can definitely say is that his empirical way of reading inspired me a lot — in my previous research and in my own position as a scholarly in/outsider.
Reflection Questions
1) Does theory matter to you in your daily work?
2) Based on your own idea of “close” and “distant” reading — which method do you prefer? Why?
3) In which situations of your own life did the “less is more” approach really make a difference?