Second Conference: Reading is a right! Viver to read
- Report on the ‘Reading is a right!’ conference in ViverAsk, affirm, exclaimViver, 21 June, twelve-four in the morning. Today, or rather yesterday, summer began. Outside, the white waters have stopped flowing. Or perhaps I have stopped listening to them. Twelve-six, twelve-seven. I feel the rough texture of the ground on the soles of my feet and realise that this is the first time all day that I have been aware of that part of my body. I have hardly walked today; all my effort has been concentrated at the other end: in my head, which has been busy taking in, assimilating, noting down and summarising what has been said here, during the second ‘Reading is a right’ conference. I realise that I only thought about my feet (which I didn't feel) once all day, just before leaving home. I checked the weather forecast before choosing my shoes; it looked like rain. Therefore, closed shoes. At the opposite extreme, my head, or mind, was open. Twelve twenty-four. Writing a report is not easy. I must confess that I didn't even know what it was until last year, when Fernando Flores asked me to do this same job at the first conference, held in Oliva, at Francisco Brines' house. The morning before the closing ceremony, I sent Fernando a draft, feeling nervous and insecure, because I had no idea if what I had written, intertwining the speakers' comments with my own intuitions and experiences, was a report or if I had invented a new journalistic-literary genre (which wouldn't have been a bad thing either). But in the end, my report turned out to be something quite similar to a real report, and I suppose proof of that is that I am here again. This year I have that experience behind me, but the challenge not only persists, I feel that it has doubled in weight and size. I wonder how to avoid repeating myself, if, as Berta Piñán suggested last night, there comes a time when those of us who write begin to suspect that we have always been mulling over the same subject, and mine, I am beginning to resign myself to it, is the stubborn and luminous ghost of doubt. I also wonder how to gauge the length of a text that, by its very nature, must be hastily constructed on paper (or on screen), even though its foundations have been forged over hours of lectures, debates, coffees, walks, brief breaks and silences, and a few hours of sleep. The foundations are there, but now, at 12:35 a.m. on the second day of summer, they need to be polished, coated, and polished; and, if possible, add an extra layer that highlights what each speaker has said and also provides the key to another door, not marked by a number but by a question mark; a door behind which there may be another, and then another, and then yet another.I am talking about questioning and challenging ourselves, but Reading is a right!, the title of this conference, is presented with exclamation marks, as a clear and assertive statement, and not with question marks, as would be appropriate for a question. I know this is the case, but I only realised it last night. Yesterday, I attended all the sessions convinced that the title of the conference was formulated as a question. So much so that when I started writing this text in the early hours of the morning (a text which, by now, you will have realised is composed in several space-times) with the programme next to me and discovered that what had been questions for me throughout the day were in fact exclamations, I had to look up the title of last year's conference on the internet, and I got another surprise. No, no one had changed one sign for another for this second conference. The exclamation marks were always there, powerfully affirmative. Over the course of these two days, we have had the opportunity to hear proposals, first-person accounts, convictions, theories, arguments, quotes, reflections; some, most of them, expressed with vehemence and conviction, because that is how, by affirming with certainty and firmness, the flow of thought is most vigorously stirred. But in reality, all these statements, some of them exclamatory, did not arise from a certainty, but from a question: is reading a right? If we had a clear answer, not so much in the philosophical realm as in the factual realm, we would not be here. Because that, I believe, is what this meeting in Viver is all about: questioning ourselves. Tirelessly, obsessively. Not with the aim of reaching individual conclusions that we can claim as our own, but of building, together, some collective conclusions and, above all, more questions that will help us to advance in the field of thought, which almost always precedes action. One o'clock in the morning. A few hours ago, Fernando drove me to the hostel in Aguas Blancas. We talked about how fortunate we were to have such a diverse panel at the conference: diverse in terms of perspectives, criteria, backgrounds and fields. During the day, emphasis was placed on the need to have access to multiple voices and literary perspectives, and that is exactly what we have had here. It is strange that this happens: whether we try to avoid it or not, we tend to end up forming endogamous clans that establish barriers at the limits of, for example, a profession, or at most a professional field in which various similar professions have generated certain connections. The equivalent space in the intimate or social sphere would be the so-called echo chambers. In them, we get used to receiving pats on the back instead of buts; in the digital world, the pats are likes and the buts don't exist, because we silence or block them (which is not to say that blocking isn't a good thing from time to time). But I think José García Añón was right in his presentation at the conference when he said that we must stop directing our thoughts and making decisions based on likes, those we give and those we receive. And for that, he concluded, the antidote is reading.In the same presentation hosted by Vicente Ferrer, mayor of Viver, María José Gálvez reminded us of the need to go beyond that somewhat outdated slogan that we have heard so many times and have not always questioned enough: “reading is good”. Let's go further then: let's question it. Is reading good? I said earlier that “affirming with certainty and firmness is how the flow of thought is most vigorously stirred”, but I must qualify this. Perhaps this is only true in appearance, or in the short term: a categorical, forceful statement, such as those that could be written on a banner, may stir sudden and direct action, but not so much sustained, mature, ramified thought. I wonder, once again, if it is not the question itself that precipitates the multifaceted analysis that I believe we are all pursuing here; a pursuit that, as we have mentioned, faces numerous obstacles related to digitalisation and the dispersion of attention. So, is reading a good thing? What to read, how to read, how much to read, who to read, under what possible restrictions or with what biased guides? The questions that have brought us together open up more possibilities in the imagination than closed slogans; they stimulate the questioning of the most established certainties, push us to generate crazy and unpredictable answers, and those answers are often the ones that bring us a few steps closer to something resembling the truth.The few truths we hold dear have been achieved through cooperation and the overlapping of questions, answers and discoveries. “When you create, you always need to feed off the gaze of others,” said Nadia Hafid in her opening speech. Libraries allowed Hafid to discover the art of comics, and she never tires of defending them as a right. “Access to reading cannot be a privilege,” said this author, who strives every day to “be alive in her reading, to seek out things that make her uncomfortable”: references, authors, works that stir her mind, but also her body. Hafid drew attention back to the great forgotten aspect of reading: the body. In recent years, narrative has placed the body back at the centre of discourse, transforming it into a subject for reflection. It seems that we are no longer disgusted by writing and reading about blood and urine and mucus and phlegm and shit. And yet, how many of us pay attention to the reading body, or the reader, if we want to call it that? What happens to it, what happens inside it when we read? Or in other words, what happens to our feet when it is our head that is working? Yesterday, 20 June, was World Refugee Day. A single day a year for the 120 million refugees in the world. We were reminded of this thanks to the speakers at the first panel of the day, entitled Saberleer (Knowing How to Read). Paula Carbonell told us No, a story that screams loud and clear, ‘fuck war.’ Begoña Lobo shook us with her experience as, we could say, a translator of micro-stories into stories. For some people, the opportunity to obtain political asylum depends on five lines: five lines of biography, fewer than any author presents on the back cover of their book; five lines that condense fear, hope, exhaustion and threat. Elisa Ferrer quoted the words of Agota Kristof, not a refugee but exiled in times and for reasons that force us to equate the two terms. “Words can also be a refuge,” said Paula Carbonell. “Stories you hear can convey a truth that, if it touches your heart, will stay with you forever”: they thus become a refuge to take shelter in when you need it most. Through examples from Mexico, Cuba and Spain's educational missions, Begoña Lobo outlined the notion of what “true patriotism” could be: that which provides citizens with the tools and means to read, that which guarantees the right to read. To read, but also to reflect on what has been read, for which time is needed. Elisa Ferrer, who played at reading before she knew how to do so, led us to question literary consumerism, which pushes us to accumulate reading material at breakneck speed. We want more of everything, including reading, but with this unbridled voracity we remain on the surface, unable to access the subtext of what we read. Do we know how to read, then? We could also ask this question as the title of the first panel. Eight-seven in the morning. I hear the white waters again, which, as I told you last night when I went to bed, had not stopped cascading: it was just that I had become accustomed to their murmur. I wonder if, just as the flow of a spring becomes an organic part of our soundscape and we begin to find it difficult to distinguish it and isolate it from other sounds, the same happens with certainties: at what point, in fact, does a suspicion or an assertion that we initially receive with suspicion acquire that designation, that of certainty? In one of his stateless prose pieces, Julio Ramón Ribeyro says: "We live in an ambiguous world, words mean nothing, ideas are bad cheques, values have no value, people are impenetrable, facts are a jumble of contradictions, truth is a chimera and reality is such a diffuse phenomenon that it is difficult to distinguish it from dreams, fantasy or hallucination. Doubt, which is the sign of intelligence, is also the most ominous flaw in my character. It has made me see and not see, act and not act, it has prevented me from forming lasting convictions, it has killed even passion and has finally given me an image of the world as a whirlpool where the ghosts of days drown, leaving nothing but fragments of crazy events and gestures without cause or purpose.Now, sometimes, questions are called prompts, and the truth is something that is delivered to you by an amalgam of algorithms called artificial intelligence. At yesterday's second round table, entitled The Ways of Reading, José Martínez Rubio wondered whether the emergence of AI is comparable to the revolution brought about by the printing press six centuries ago. Now that we can read everything, what value does knowledge acquire? I return to Ribeyro: "How easy it is to confuse culture with erudition. Culture does not really depend on the accumulation of knowledge, even in various subjects, but on the order in which this knowledge is stored in our memory and on the presence of this knowledge in our behaviour. The knowledge of an educated man may not be very extensive, but it is harmonious, coherent and, above all, interrelated. In the erudite, knowledge seems to be stored in separate compartments (...) In the first case, knowledge begets knowledge. In the second, knowledge is added to knowledge." Are the language models proposed by generative AI erudite or cultured? As Belén Gopegui reminded us, these models are not designed to understand, but to get things right based on correlations and statistics. AI does not understand us because it does not even read us. But “the right to read”, argued Gopegui, “goes hand in hand with the right to be read”. “Artificial intelligence wants to take away our right to assert, to believe in what is asserted and to commit ourselves to the consequences of that assertion”. In other words, it seeks to strip us of our certainties, however few they may be, and prevent us from freely deciding for how long we want to categorise them as such. Beatriz Gallardo Paúls introduced the concept of “technologies of the word”, presented Socrates as the first technophobe and talked about the telegraph to remind us that not everything that can be transferred has to be transcendent. But the technologies we blame for our disorientation are often mere amplifiers of the cracks that have opened up, through stubbornness or neglect, in our political and economic models. AI, of course, feeds the climate of truth, the instability of knowledge and mistrust, and anchors us in the liar's dividend: we know that that tweet or that news item may be a lie, but what does it matter, if even if they were true we wouldn't believe them either. “To guarantee the right to read, we must first guarantee the right of creators to continue creating,” argued Carmen Cuartero. Artificial intelligence forces us to rethink every aspect of our work: writers, translators, editors, illustrators, managers, lawyers, librarians... Some have already defined their position on AI. Others read about it, weighing up the effects of its rapid advance against the clock, while postponing the moment of asking ourselves the inevitable question: how will this affect me, my work? But the question does not disappear just because we do not look at it; it waits while digital content is devalued and copyright seeks a new place within all this turmoil. ‘We still have time to develop AI in an ethical and responsible way,’ said Cuartero. Let's do what we can, which may initially mean daring to face the questions that scare us the most. The know-it-alls, the smart alecks, the class nerds. The weird girls, as Carmen Martín Gaite called them, or those full of common sense, as Ausiàs March said.Women who read are, and always have been, dangerous: Puri Mascarell made this clear yesterday in her introduction to the third panel, Poder leer (The Power to Read). “Women's access to reading is, in my opinion, the most reliable indicator of social freedom,” said Mascarell. Vicky Molina Gómez exemplified this with her firm and proud account of rural and depopulated Spain, which is not empty, and of the women who live there. “Depopulation begins with the flight of women,” said Molina, and it is therefore essential to “turn villages into friendly places”, into hotbeds of culture. Filling them with books, theatre, cinema, dance and music. Decentralising and spreading cultural hubs to narrow the gaps of inequality because, as Molina said, “in order for us to be equal in all territories, we must have access to reading”, to culture and to art. In Spain, there are almost 5,000 public libraries, many of which are located in rural areas. But the library that comes to mind when we think of the word “library”, with its hundreds of shelves, updated bibliographic references and sections by literary genre or age group, is still lacking in many places, thus limiting access to reading for certain communities. Asunción Maestro reminded us that the fragility of libraries is also their strength, because in one way or another their passionate librarians always manage to take their books everywhere, even to prisons, those institutions that we relegate to invisibility and where we never really know what goes on. There, too, the right to read must be defended. And along with the right to read comes the right to understand what one reads. Víctor Vázquez wondered why students today have more difficulty than they did two decades ago in deciphering texts and accessing their deeper meaning. Echo chambers, the blockage of a button, and extremely segmented social spaces could be related to the decline in reading comprehension, which I suspect has not only taken hold among digital natives, but among all of us. Can we read, and how can we read? Are we willing to read others from a pluralistic and democratic perspective, to question our own biases both digitally and off-screen? If this faculty has become a house of dialogue, yesterday at dusk, La Floresta was a dwelling place for poetry. Berta Piñán and Mario Obrero showed us that trees and flowers also speak, of course they speak. Our murmurs accompanied verses that, in turn, accompanied or rather channelled the memory of sisters, mothers, grandmothers, lovers, the living and the dead. Last night, poetry defended linguistic rights with beautiful words in multiple languages, and we all understood them without the need for dictionaries. In creation, there should always be a right to radicalism. Radicalism is a concept that mutates over time, which is why books that were burned at the stake three hundred years ago seem prudish to us today. Radicalism also takes on different hues depending on ignorance, which is why today there are those who reserve the right to remove certain publications from libraries, justifying this with fallacious and deeply foolish reasons. Tyrannies burn books; democracies protect them, or should protect them. This morning, thanks to Ignacio Aymerich's lecture, we have been able to recognise ourselves as an extended community, one in which, thanks to reading and other artistic and cultural expressions, an infinite network of dialogue takes place. We have asked ourselves whether cultural life is or should be above political life and how democracies should relate to cultural agents, whether there should be a hierarchical relationship and who should occupy the dominant position. Aymerich has encouraged us to ask ourselves what culture is in a broad sense and how many specific meanings we can attribute to it, because this is the first step in determining which aspects of citizens' cultural life should be promoted and guaranteed by the state. In Aymerich's words, “it is the duty of the state to encourage participation in cultural life, but contemporary states do not live up to this duty”. While we continue to ask ourselves and define how we will take sides, let us do as the bookseller from Castelló and “let us not be cowards: let us read”. And those who do not read, why do they not read? Throughout the conference, lack of time was cited as the main reason for not reading. In the fourth and final panel, Figures and Letters, Luis González added another reason for not reading: the feeling of exclusion among people who think that reading is not for them. In this dialogue, the data took on volume and emotion thanks to the speakers, who interpreted it. We have understood that data on reading is necessary, first and foremost, to establish the direction of public policy in the short and long term. Also, as Carmen Amoraga said, to compare it with our own data from the past. Or with possible European data, as Laura Guindal claimed. Finally, as Alicia Sellés demanded, we must compare reading data and the money allocated to strengthening it with that invested in other cultural or pseudo-cultural policies, which is essential to understand what is valued and promoted at the government level and what we understand by development. Because perhaps it is time to rethink whether GDP is the most important indicator.During these two days, we have lived and talked together with people from the worlds of literature, law, education, management and politics. We have broken with traditional endogamy by putting our minds and bodies into it, because I am sure that we are all a little more aware of it after recovering it, thanks to the words of Nadia Hafid, as a subject of reading. We come from diverse backgrounds, between which channels of communication have been opened up that we must now keep clear so that questions and ideas can continue to circulate in as many directions as possible. This plurality of voices and perspectives is interwoven with a passion for reading and its fruits: questioning, debate, and the development of critical thinking. With so many references to questions, you may have guessed what I am getting at: like Ribeyro, I am aware that doubt is the most ominous flaw in my character. But recently my brother Nadal, a mathematician and statistician and therefore a fan of the quantifiable, as well as a student of philosophy and one of the most introspective and clear-sighted people I know, gave me a key to preventing doubt from tying me down, so that the constant succession of questions opens doors instead of closing them. Nadal told me: “It's OK to leave the final opinion open, but it's also OK to have one for the meantime. We'll never know everything, and yet we act in the present”. There is still much to ask ourselves, to answer and, of course, to act on, to apply, each from our own field of influence and with the tools at our disposal. And hopefully next year we can meet again and tell each other what has improved and where we can continue to make efforts. For now, with everything we have heard and shared here over the last few days, I believe we can put the question marks aside, even if only for a moment, and affirm, clearly and vehemently, that yes: reading is a right.
- Viver, 21 June, 4.44 p.m. Thank you very much. Irene Rodrigo Martínez
