Reading the Void

Machines can read everything. Only we can read nothing.

Ruth Asawa, Untitled (MI.153, Seven Thonet Style Bentwood Chairs), c. 1950-1959 (David Zwirner)

Machines, it seems, can read. Plug a news article or an epic poem into an LLM and it will unfurl a tightly structured gloss with bulleted takeaways and sunny suggestions for further prompting. This new technology has plenty of implications, one of the more troubling of which (at least for those of us who care about this stuff) is that, before long, people won’t need to read at all, since machines will do it for us.

Will this happen? We’ll see. But until such time, questions remain about what exactly we mean by “reading,” and whether the data-intensive churn-and-burn operation of our modern day computers truly fits that description.

For instance: we know that LLMs can process text prompts with extraordinary speed. What happens when we remove the prompt? Can there be reading in the absence of text? Machines seem to be able to read everything, but can they read nothing? Can we?

An experiment, then: What follows is a selection of blank spaces, each scanned from the margins of a different page of text. Each will be the subject of a close reading. My intent is to assay absence as a source of meaning and to understand, by extension, whether there are forms of reading not yet reproducible by machines. Perhaps these spaces — the blank ones, plus any other spaces beyond the enclosure of computation – deserve more of our attention.

In that spirit:

1.

Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Tr. Damion Searls (Liveright, 2024) pg. 181

This blank appears on page 181 of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the German philosopher’s masterwork, and the only book he published during his lifetime. The Tractatus takes the form of a series of numbered propositions (ex. “A logical image can depict the world”) that define the scope and limits of analytical logic. The blank in question is an important one; its upper edge borders text (the Tractatus’ famous and final pronouncement: “About things we cannot speak of we must keep silent”), and its bottom edge marks the end of the book.

What does this blank do? For one thing, it makes Wittgenstein’s Tractatus finite. It marks the conclusion of his thought. It permits his text to declare: I have said everything I intended to say, and now I surrender myself to you, the reader.

This is a funny maneuver for a work that seeks to be so totalizing in its precision, but it’s also appropriate: the Tractatus is about the limits of logic-in-the-form-of-language. The words on the page describe those limits, but the blanks are the limits.

Blanks, then, achieve what Wittgenstein’s language can only gesture toward. They are the silence of the “things we cannot speak.”

2.

Youn, Monica. “In the Passive Voice,” From From. (Graywolf Press, 2024) pg. 96

This blank is one of many blanks that stitch together Monica Youn’s “In the Passive Voice.” The poem, which is written in an inquisitive and uneasy first-person, threads a range of topics (sharks’ teeth, quantification, hate crimes, coins, Ovid, etc.) across forty-four pages. It’s a case study in Hannah Arendt’s observation that “Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is brought about poetically.”

Strangely, though, the paragraphs in “Passive Voice” don’t quite fit together. If a thrifty and overzealous editor were to compress the poem into a continuous essay, without breaks, Youn’s clarity of style might be enough to whisk the reader from top to bottom, but the piece would lose its perplexing unity of thought. That effect comes not from the text per se but from its discontinuities. It happens in the blank spaces.

Consider the above. The line of text above this blank is a comment on the grammatical tense of a previous line: “‘Is assumed’ is in the passive voice,” Youn writes. On the page following the blank, Youn writes about Korean Americans’ role as a demographic buffer for white-vs-black racial violence.

It’s a change of subject — sort of. But Youn’s note about passive vs. active verb tenses avoids getting lost in the transition to other matters, since the sizable blank that follows this remark gives it space and time to breathe. As a result, in the paragraphs to come (and the discussions of systemic violence therein), the reader is extra attentive to verbs and subjects and the ways that the passive voice can obscure harm and responsibility.

The use of blanks in Youn’s poem allows her ideas to hang loose at one end, which allows us (the readers) to grab them. It makes them into strands for our own weaving. The reason we don’t see Youn pulling everything together is that she isn’t the one doing the pulling. What she has done is provided the materials, and, just as importantly, enough empty space to work in. The best magicians let the audience do magic for them.

3.

Blank rotated 90º clockwise

The Economist, 15 March 2025 (pg. 36-7).

This blank from The Economist’s March 15^th issue links two articles about econometrically dubious claims to a “revolution” in Ethiopian wheat production (pg. 36) and reports of the worsening conditions for civil war in precarious South Sudan (pg. 37). These events don’t seem to have any causal relationship – at least, none that’s mentioned in the text. But their inclusion in the same section (Middle East & Africa) and issue (March 15^th) of the magazine implies that they are relevant to the same readers for the same reason: they’re world news.

The idea that “the world” encompasses Ethiopian wheat, South Sudanese guns, and readers of The Economist seems obvious. Such is the unspoken logic of world news: that there is one world (i.e., the globe), and the goings-on in any single part of it can be the concern of anybody, anywhere else.

This wasn’t always self-evident. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that the new media forms of the novel and the newspaper changed how people thought about time and space. By putting simultaneous but apparently unrelated events on the same page, novels and newspapers created a shared frame of reference in which those events (and the people involved) could be seen (and could see themselves) as participants in a common timeline. Simultaneity became a source of shared identity. This allowed the useful fiction of “the nation” to be conjured from people who, for all purposes, lived in totally different realities.

Anderson’s account suggests that national identity emerged as a sort of literary fiction. Perhaps our global frame of reference arose in similar ways. But if this impression of a linked destiny was once fictional, it is a fiction that has proven self-fulfilling. Ethiopian wheat is connected to South Sudanese conflict, and both are connected to readers of financial magazines. What links the events in these pages is the web of global capital that The Economist, liberalism’s most loyal periodical, has cheered into existence.

This universalizing work happens outside the text, in the empty spaces that join scattered reports and make them into a single story. What this blank represents is the flow of money that encircles our planet; what it asserts is that capitalism is coterminous with the world.

4.

Grocery List (May 8^th, 2026)

This blank separates the sections of my last week’s grocery list: produce and dairy are above the space, and dry/canned goods are below. I learned the technique from my fiancée. Dividing a bunch of ingredients into related categories lets me move through the grocery store and cross items off my list one bunch at a time. No need to zig-zag from bell peppers past aisles one through eight to parmesan cheese, and then back to nab the cilantro.

Not exactly rocket science. But I used to list ingredients in the order that they appeared in the week’s three or four recipes, and my trips to the store would take twice as long. Now, entries of one yellow onion and two yellow onions become a single entry of three yellow onions, right next to the kale. Separate recipes become one big, undifferentiated haul.

What does this blank do? It gives order to a mundane task and saves me time on a Sunday morning. You could even say it creates a correspondence between the structure of the list and the layout of the store.

But set aside the clever stuff. What really matters, for the purposes of this evening, is that I have forgotten the shallots, and that the blank allows my beloved to fill in this oversight with her looping script before the list goes from the refrigerator door to my back pocket. With text, as with one’s own life, it is the empty spaces that allow other people to enter, and to make it their own.

Peter Schmidt is Program Director at the Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn.