The Ambivalent Read: A Case Study
Dear Reader,
Sometimes, you just can’t make up your mind about a read. There are aspects you like; there are aspects that maybe you don’t necessarily dislike but you don’t appreciate. Your feelings are truly mixed. Perhaps you shrug your shoulders.
Ambivalent reads are odd, to be honest. You don’t end up hating yourself for the experience, as it’s not a total waste, but you also aren’t thrilled about it. No ideas spring to mind; no deeper insights were found; no desire to share with others emerges.
I had one such read just this week. And I think it’s a good one as a follow-up to yesterday’s case study. Normally, one doesn’t share ambivalent reads. Just because you didn’t find a read gripping or encompassing of some deeper point doesn’t mean others won’t find it so. Appreciation is idiosyncratic. And we’d rather not experience all of your idiosyncrasies. Definitely not mine, anyway.
I’m sharing this specific experience only because I think it does two things. First, it presents a clear context within which you might think through what the experience of an ambivalent read is. Second, some of you may indeed appreciate the piece and find it a useful corrective to my bold suggestion from yesterday, that you spend a moment pondering the ed-tech devil and his allies. My ambivalent response to “Against Productivity in a Pandemic” does not mean that everyone needs to respond so. (And again, normally I would and should keep these thoughts to myself. At least, that’s how I’d handle it on my wiser days.)
Let’s start with the truly negative. I get this paragraph, I do, but I also really don’t care about it. I don’t think it captures things. The opening line too flippant. The rest of it doesn’t really ease whatever anxieties I or other readers might have. It simply reminds of them.
So life mostly sucks right now, plain and simple. And if you find yourself considering that fact, it’s just as likely that you’ll bump up against some unwelcome reminder that—in the face of historic disruption and uncertainty—you can actually get a lot done in home isolation! Did you know Shakespeare wrote King Lear while he was quarantined during the plague? Have you tried baking as a form of corona therapy? How about turning your living room into a home gym using soup cans for hand weights? INBOX: Want 19 easy tips on how to manage anxiety in the time of Covid-19?
But then later moments do reflect precisely (or at least approximately) some of the thoughts I’ve tossed about, and I know I’m not alone with these thoughts.
This is a time to sustain. To find ease where we can in a world rapidly placing us into chaos. “We do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way,” Odell wrote. But we should.
That second excerpt echoes what so many of us are thinking. Indeed, this piece has many moments of resonance. What I find monotonous is that these moments lack anything of substance, that they are echoes and not antiphonal participants.
Writers can repeat our thoughts. Often, while they may not be “original,” they provide a distinct lens, a curious angle, that expands our vision—or perhaps colors it anew—such that their lack of originality doesn’t matter. One recent example of this is Ian Corbin’s “Analog Anchors for the Online Adrift.” There’s nothing new in this piece in the slightest, and yet I found my initial read of it a delightful encounter. The bit about Moleskine notebooks is well done. I won’t rave about this piece, but I found it good.
A problem with “Against Productivity in a Pandemic” is that the register is wrong: it doesn’t quite capture where we are. I think its reflections on how we might be caring don’t say anything particularly worth sharing with my friends or family. They are basically good and all, but they’re kind of obvious and don’t escape the command to do something. (I don’t know that it should be escapable, but I do wonder about exchanging one form of productivity for another, if avoiding productivity’s clutches is your essay’s focus.)
And the moments of reflection on how-bad-things-are seem ill-fitting. An extra hour to finish an essay? The horror. And I don’t know that we are at the worst yet, and I think we need to retain a register—psychologically, if nothing else—for worse things. (I am well aware that I wrote ‘Since we are living in our own time where right now it seems like everything is “the worst”…’ just last week and should probably be careful about critiquing others on register.)
The biggest reason this essay falls flat for me is that I can find so many of the critiques better investigated elsewhere—and soon will, in fact. The week of April 5, I shall embark on a journey through The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, an absolute doorstop of a book. But I think the title alone serves our recent weeks, as concern about the metaphorical health of our economy has been trumpeted at least as loudly as concern about actual human health. We have confused that which can be reborn with that which cannot.
In parallel fashion, though less specific to “Against Productivity in a Pandemic,” if I want reflections on how specialization is ruining the world and how that intersects with present-day capitalism’s demands, The Great Endarkenment: Philosophy for an Age of Hyperspecialization seems a much better option than that essay or a book that is almost certainly an ambivalent read like Range, as much as I enjoy a good presumptive-defeasible-generalization dumpfest. (By the by, if you want to read a work I found completely lacking, try out this bland review of Range. If I were interested in exploring the themes of Range, I’d simply read my copy of Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and The Fox which sits ready on my shelf alongside Stephen Jay Gould’s The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities. And the day I want ruminations on children’s math education from a random lawyer is the day I’ll take advice from a squirrel on appropriate methods of entering my home.)
So here’s the thing: you might actually like “Against Productivity in a Pandemic.” You might disagree with me in my ambivalence. And you wouldn’t be wrong in your disagreement. Perhaps that essay captures something for you, something you hadn’t expressed yet or seen expressed yet—and darn it, it’s nice to see it in print.
Remember, one doesn’t normally share one’s ambivalence. And I certainly do not normally spend this much time reflecting on why a read was just a shoulder shrug for me. At this point in the over analysis, it almost seems like I purely dislike it, which is not the case at all. I am ambivalent.
To muddle the ambivalent-read idea a bit more, you might think the read that I said was good is at best a shoulder shrug while liking “Against Productivity in a Pandemic.” Taste and experience make for differing appreciations. And if you don’t respond ambivalently to at least one of my daily newsletters, I’ll be quite shocked. That’s all part of the reading life!
Kreigh
P.S. For those looking to read something fresh, but maybe that isn’t quite so “timely,” The Hedgehog Review decided to be sweet and opened up their entire most recent issue, “Monsters.” I haven’t read it myself yet, but I’m wicked excited to (it’s on my table, waiting). I hope that it pairs well with Clare Coffey’s absurdly entertaining—it should absolutely not be this entertaining!—book review “On the Monster Beat.”
I should note that a thing I love about The Hedgehog Review is that I’ve seen two different tables trying to place the magazine politically. The first said it was conservative; the second that it was demonstrably liberal. And that people can’t place it politically is precisely as it should be. The intellectual life is not so constrained.