You get up in the morning, have a spot of breakfast, look at the paper, then get yourself together. You go online. One thing that can happen very quickly is that you see a lot of items which you don’t want to read. Seumas Milne, Simon Jenkins, Jonathan Steele, Priyamvada Gopal, Glenn Greenwald, John Pilger. Sorry about the gender imbalance there. (Whatever became of Our Lady of the Sorrows, Madeleine Bunting?) But, anyway, how to cope? Who to not-read when there are many of them jockeying for position at the same time? Easy, you will say; you just don’t read them all. But that is to confuse the logic of not reading a number of things simultaneously with the logic of not-reading something – which is more active and tending to exclusivity.
Let me offer you an analogy. Suppose that on the grounds that you are indisposed, you want to not-accept three invitations for events taking place at the same time – let us say, to a garden party, a lecture, and a piano recital. You could, of course, decline all three invitations by saying – as is true – that you are ill. But there would be an element of fraudulence involved. Should those inviting you happen to know one another and learn of the relevant facts, they would know that had you been well, you could only have accepted one of their invitations; two of them, consequently, you have declined not really because of being indisposed.
Let me offer you another analogy. Suppose you don’t want to get involved in a Royal Wedding, and you don’t want to get involved in a sporting event taking place at the same time as that Royal Wedding. Well, you could not get involved in both, just like that. They’re all over the papers and on TV and Twitter. But you just avert your gaze and get on with something else: you read a novel, watch a movie, go for a walk. That’s the logic of not getting involved. But it’s different from the logic of not-getting-involved, where what you want to do is to demonstrate your non-involvement by, for example, turning your back on the event or moaning about its taking up so much attention. In this sort of instance there are only so many events you can not-get-involved in simultaneously, since not-getting-involved involves time and effort.
Just so with not-reading as opposed to not reading. The former requires desisting from the act with a certain attitude and degree of commitment. No, I won’t be reading this latest column by Greenwald and I’ll not-read it first, before not-reading Jenkins’s latest or Gopal’s etc. You see? It takes a definite act – or non-act – blocking off other competing ones that would occupy the same time slot. More complicated still does the whole business become if you’re ever so slightly tempted not to not-read the columnist in question. What if his or her column should contain something laughable? Actually, that’s not such a big temptation; the occurrence is too common. But what if it contains a real logical or ideological gem of some kind? You never know, so you have to weigh the odds.
I hope you now understand the terrain better. You can’t just simultaneously not-read everything you don’t want to read.