In Defense of Reading: Or, Why Reading Still Matters in A Contextualist Age

In Defense of Reading: Or, Why Reading Still Matters in a Contextualist Age
Paul B. Armstrong
New Literary History, Volume 42, Number 1, Winter 2011, pp. 87-113 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2011.0001
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In Defense of Reading: Or, Why Reading Still Matters in a Contextualist Age

Paul B. Armstrong
eading is coming back as a legitimate topic of inquiry after a long period of neglect, but the return of reading will not be complete until it comes to terms with the contextualist consensus that consigned reading to the sidelines.1 Suspicion of the lived experience of reading is a consequence of the rhetorical success of a few key arguments that together have defined a critical landscape dominated by various forms of contextualism. Although important differences in methodology and objects of study remain, there is widespread agreement about three core contextualist doctrines:
Consciousness and subjectivity have been displaced as the home of meaning. History has driven out essentialism and universalism. The autonomous, unified subject has been replaced by a notion of the self as socially constructed, bodily situated, and riven by power and desire.
These positions are held with varying degrees of theoretical refinement, but even if they are not explicitly articulated, they constitute an environment that would seem inherently hostile to descriptions of individual experiences of reading. Attention is focused instead on various contexts (cultural, social, political, historical) that are thought to be responsible for the generation of meaning and the constitution of the self. Where the contextualist consensus prevails, reading is tacitly or explicitly regarded as an epiphenomenon, inasmuch as the real locus of meaning creation is elsewhere. This is no doubt one reason why, despite a return of interest in reading, a concern with the phenomenology of reception is still widely regarded as old-fashioned and passsomething that the reader-response theorists were interested in three decades ago, but that has since then been discredited, its fallacies and navets exposed, as the profession has moved on to other topics.2 The contextualist consensus is so strong that its force is evident even in areas like the history of the book or the turn to cognitive science where reading has become a hot topic. The burgeoning field devoted to the history of the book claims an interest in reading, for example, but
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its primary concerns are typically the history of past reading practices or the material history of texts. Disagreement exists over whether the lived experience of reading is an appropriate and worthy object of study. In a survey of the field, Leah Price explains that book history asks how past readers have made meaning (and therefore, by extension, how others have read differently from us), but it also asks where the conditions of possibility for our own reading come from.3 How to bridge the gap between past and present ways of reading is rarely addressed, however, and Price confesses less interest in the fraction of any books life cycle spent in the hands of readers than in the whole spectrum of social practices for which printed matter provides a prompt. As she dramatically puts it: Reading is no longer the name of our game.4 Happily, not all book historians would agree. In an important recent analysis of the relation between past and present modes of reception in art, architecture, and literature, the bibliographer and textual historian Paul Eggert argues for a recognition of the role of readers in the work at every stage of its life-cycle.5 Only by including the contemporary experience of viewers and readers, he argues, can the transmission of meaning across historical distance be understood. Nevertheless, despite Eggerts dissent, reception studies today are predominantly historicist in orientation, concerned with reconstructing the cultural and political contexts of past practices of reading, and are consequently more sociological than phenomenological.6 Cognitive science has also turned attention to reading, but here too the force of the contextualist consensus is evident in the division that marks this field. On the one hand, much of the most interesting work on literature and cognitive science is historical, comparing (say) how psychologists in the Romantic or Victorian periods understood consciousness with how the novelists and poets defined it.7 Again, however, context trumps lived experience, because the question is rarely asked how reading then relates to reading now. On the other hand, alongside the work of the neurohistorians, the other major subfield of cognitive literary studies draws paradigms for the reading experience from various areas of contemporary psychology, such as theory of mind (the analysis of our ability to make inferences about what other people are thinking or feeling) or cognitive processing (how patterns of textual comprehension are related to experimental findings about how the mind makes sense of the world).8 This work often has very interesting things to say about the lived experience of reading, and the leading practitioners have begun to reach out to other areas of literary and cultural studies to suggest connections to their methods of analysis, but the fact that in doing so they are calling their field cognitive cultural studies is a sign of
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the power of the contextualist consensus.9 Whether this bridge building succeeds will depend on answering the questions about consciousness, history, and subjectivity that make contextual cultural criticism skeptical about locating meaning in the lived experience of reading. An appeal to the experimental findings of cognitive psychology will not suffice. No matter how these current trends resolve themselves, reading wont go away. Its like the whack-a-mole game. Suppressed or beaten down in one place, it pops up someplace else. The return of reading is a rediscovery of something that has never really disappeared. That is not only because common readers continue to read regardless of what happens in the profession of literary studies. It is also the case that critics and theorists are readers too, and their work is invariably related to their experiences with texts, even if those relations remain unanalyzed. The American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce famously argues that what a thing means is simply what habits it involves and, further, that there is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice.10 In literary studies, these habits and practices have to do with how readers read. Whether or not a critic or theorist thematizes reading as a topic, the measure of what his or her argument signifiesnot only its validity, but its very meaningis how (or whether) a reader will read differently as a result. Even when critics or theorists do not explicitly address the experience of reading, they are trying to shape it by the pragmatic implications of the arguments they make. If a contextualist study of a literary state of affairs matters, we will read texts differentlyour habits, practices, and experiences as readers will changeand that is typically the case with the most exciting contextualist work. Reading is the elephant in the room, an unavoidable presence, no matter how we behave. Rediscovering the lived experience of reading may also have a corrective function to the extent that the contradictions caused by its neglect have thwarted an understanding of issues that can only be adequately addressed by giving reading its due. Not recognizing the experience of reading as the hidden ground of our critical and theoretical activity can create various conundrums, impasses, and dead ends that only a return to reading can remedy. For example, the current (and by now long-standing) dilemma of how to do justice to the aesthetic dimension without reverting to formalism can only be effectively engaged if the eventfulness of reading, the site of the aesthetic experience (however defined), becomes discussablethe locus where form and history, literary value and cultural contexts, artistic aims and political interests interact. 11 The purpose of examining critically the stated or implicit reasons for readings neglect is not only to show why and how it continues to matter
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even for kinds of criticism and theory that have marginalized it but also to clear the way for analyses of issues, like the status of the aesthetic, that cannot be adequately thought about if the experience of reading is left out of account. The good news is that the core assumptions and beliefs that define the contextualist consensus are not in fact inconsistent with a concern for the lived experience of reading. As the following analysis tries to show, the defining attitudes of contextualism need not delegitimate the experience of reading. Calling attention to the elephant in the room and asking the question How does that affect the way I read? intends to make the invisible visible. There is nothing in the core beliefs of contextualism that should prohibit this and much to be gained by doing so. Perhaps the most important factor in the distrust of reading has been the displacement of the subject as the origin of meaning across a wide spectrum of interpretive methodologies. A powerful consensus unites theorists who may agree on little else except that the grounds of meaning are always to be sought elsewhere from its apparent source in the consciousness of the reader or the self-understanding of the speaking or writing subject. This is a beginning assumption of various forms of cultural studies, historical criticism, and political interpretation that may differ about where to seek those grounds but that agree about the need to start the work of analysis by displacing the conscious subject as the home of meaning and seeking instead to disclose the contexts (whether of race, sex, class, power, etc.) that govern what can be said and thought. Linguistic and psychological modes of analysis may contest the privileging of social, political, or historical contexts but nevertheless also typically agree about the displacement of meaning (shifting the operative contexts to the structures of language, its contradictory aporias, or the vagaries of unconscious desire). This consensus no doubt reflects a general skepticism toward Enlightenment claims about reason and the subject that is a deep and powerful aspect of the current intellectual climate. The effect of this consensus on reading has been to discredit the significance of the moment-to-moment experiential unfolding of the text. Because the determinants of meaning are thought to be found elsewhere, the initial critical act is to distrust or disregard the experience of reading and to focus attention on contexts whose workings are assumed to be directing, controlling, or determining it even when the reader is unaware of them. The readers consciousness of meaning unfolding is regarded, either explicitly or implicitly, as a (perhaps illusory) second-order effect of other contextual determinants. A fundamental theoretical problem with this maneuver is that meaning is sensitive to context, but is not wholly and unequivocally determined
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by it. The relation between meaning and context is mutually formative and inherently circular. Attention to the actual production of meaning (as in the experience of reading) is consequently necessary to understand and explicate their interaction. The context of a particular use of a word may determine its meaning, for example, but this use in turn decides the meaning of the context, and the relation between use and context is never entirely prescripted or preordained.12 This circularity is especially evident with those notorious ambiguous sentences where a shift in the implied context radically alters the understood meaning of a word, as in these amusing headlines: Milk drinkers are turning to powder, Deaf mute gets new hearing in killing, or Dealers will hear car talk at noon. As these examples show, a word may have different, even contradictory meanings depending on how it is employed in different situations (the double meanings of powder, hearing, or talk), and which meaning is attributed to the word will in turn change ones understanding of the context (here, the situation implied by each headline). The actual event of meaning needs to be analyzed in each case in order to determine the relation of use and context. It may even be that the usage in question goes beyond what previous contexts had allowed because it has introduced a new, unprecedented meaning (for example, through a metaphorical twist). A metaphor is a category mistake (classic examples in the literature on metaphor are the chair plowed through the discussion or man is a wolf) that gains acceptance as readers realign their expectations about use and context to make an anomaly coherent. The creation of new meaning is an especially vivid demonstration of the general rule that the interaction between use and context cannot be explained by a reference to context alone. New meaning cannot come into the world without the participation of the reader, and the experience of reading needs to be analyzed to show how semantic innovation occurs.13 Semantic innovation is a particular instance of the general rule that contexts are potentialities that can be actualized in different, sometimes unpredictable ways. They have open-ended horizons that allow innovations that may contest, criticize, or otherwise exceed their limitations. The variability of the context-use relation suggests that neither controls meaning on its own. Reading, writing, and other forms of meaning making cannot be understood in isolation from the situations in which they occur, and the referral of critical attention from the event of meaning making to its enabling and constraining contexts is a necessary critical actbut it is not sufficient. Strategies that displace meaning from use to context must return from context to use in order to understand the effects (and the limits) of the contexts they are interested in. Contextual analysis is indispensable but inherently incomplete.
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Because of this variability, the return from context to its effects in action will disclose not a predetermined meaning, but rather a conflict of interpretations about how the possibilities in any context may be performed. The displacement of the cogito as the home of meaning is typically associated with a hermeneutics of suspicion.14 Disclosing the hidden effects of an operative context may indeed reveal distortions, tricks, or disguises that make the act of writing or the experience of reading mean something other than what it seems to the producer or recipient. Even if interpreters agree that this is the case, however, several areas of conflict may still divide them, and none can be decided by an appeal to context alone. Interpreters may disagree, for example, about the sources of these distortions because their hermeneutic frameworks privilege different contexts, and appealing to their preferred context will only demonstrate the disagreement, not resolve it. Further, it is never self-evident how reading should be practiced differently in light of what the displacement of attention from text to context discloses. To explore what those consequences might be and then to debate their comparative worth cannot happen without making the return loop from context to the event of meaningthat is, to the act of comprehending the text, to the experience of reading. Contesting prevailing habits and practices of reading by disclosing the fallacy of their self-certainties does not decide by itself how reading should proceed after its illusions have been exposed. The hermeneutics of suspicion complicate rather than simplify the question of how to read and compound its inherent variability. Reading is ordinarily a doubled performance of an alien world enacted in my own experience, another way of configuring meaning and relationships that is brought into being by my own acts of comprehension.15 The act of demystification adds yet another layer of duplication because ones experience of meaning creation is doubled with self-consciousness about deceptions and duplicities that need to be interrogated even as they occur. Does this doubling cripple or even paralyze the readers quest for meaning by preventing configurative patterns from stabilizing? Or can it be assimilated into the activity of reading in ways that interestingly complicate and even energize it, making it more playful, unpredictable, and open-ended? If so, how, and to what purposes? These are all questions about the practice of reading that cannot be answered without interrogating and actively experimenting with its lived possibilities. It is not necessarily the case, however, that displacing meaning requires a hermeneutics of unmasking. The cogitos hold over meaning may be shaken and dislodged not because it is self-deceived but because semantic innovations challenge, upset, and overturn preexisting habits of understanding. What Paul Ricoeur calls the hermeneutics of revela-
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tion may be as much a matter of dislocating the self-assurances and self-centeredness of the subject as is the act of unmasking. Although this notion has been largely forgotten despite the popularity of his term hermeneutics of suspicion, Ricoeur proposed it as a companion concepta related but opposed practice of meaning making. Equally a matter of doubling displacement, a revelatory hermeneutics locates meaning not behind but beyond a given state of affairs, in the future developments that retrospectively disclose its implications.16 If the meaning of a text transcends or contests the limits of the context in question (as in the case of the invention of a novel way of making sense), then the consequence of contextualization might be to reveal not the texts duplicities but its divergence and critical distance from its beginnings. The consequences for the experience of reading would then be a different kind of displacementa perhaps invigorating, perhaps upsetting, possibly disorienting shift in the interpreters horizons to accommodate unexpected attitudes and new modes of understanding. Here too, however, the displacements called for by a hermeneutics of revelation are not predetermined. They can only be decided and disclosed by acts of reading. The dominance of contextual strategies of interpretation has gone hand in hand with the establishment of historicism as the prevailing orthodoxy, and here too the reading experience has unfortunately and unnecessarily suffered. Everyone agrees with Fredric Jamesons legendary monition Always historicize! even if there is significant disagreement about how to follow it.17 One might reasonably think that part of this debate should be how to understand the historicity of the reading experience and the relation of the history of reception to other modes of historicization. One reason for the neglect of reading in current critical discussion, however, is the widespread assumption that an analysis of reading is necessarily ahistorical and universalizing. Claims about what the reader experiences are thought to be irredeemably tainted by essentialism and formalismahistorical generalizations that ignore the contingent particularities of different readers aims, interests, and situations. A crucial theoretical problem with dismissing reading, however, is that historical interpretation itself runs the risk of becoming ahistorical unless the historicity of reading is integrated into the analysis. To disregard how texts are received by readers across the horizon between past and present means to privilege textual production. The problem is not only that here too the text-context relation is variable and openended, as I have argued, with the question of which context to prefer in an explanation of a texts origination open to dispute (which is why
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there are different histories of textual production and why an appeal to authorial intention is never decisive in determining meaning).18 The further complication is that, as Marx famously argued, production is incomplete without consumption, and one of the ways the context of textual origination (however construed) is open-ended is its orientation toward a future of readers that the author may anticipate but can never fully predict or control.19 To reduce meaning to meaning then by privileging the contexts governing the moment of production is to rob the situation of writing of its historicity by suppressing its futurity. Ignoring a texts unpredictable destiny in the experiences of readers yet to come risks making the text static and ahistorical. To be in history is to be with others horizonally, not only synchronically in the present moment, but also across the shifting temporal boundaries of past and future. Contextual historical studies that take into account only two of those three horizonsthe texts relation to its contemporaneous situation and the traces of the past in its originating circumstancesbut that neglect futurity, the third horizon, are fatally incomplete. They take the historicity out of history because the indeterminacy of what is to come signals our particularity and contingency. Asking how meaning now engages meaning then across the horizon of a texts reception is necessary to understand its participation in history. The place where meaning then meets meaning now is the lived experience of reading. The history of reception is an integral part of a texts history, and it is implicitly present even when it is not acknowledged. For one thing, interpretations of historical contexts are themselves participants in the history of reception. Even when these interpretations do not thematize the experience of reading, they are responses to meaning then across the in-between space where the horizons of past and present meet.20 They then become part of the situation of future readers, to whom the meaning then of the text speaks across a past of reception that is formed by previous readers, including the contextualists (to whose interpretations a reader may respond, for example, by filling in what they lackfor example, in the future this essay imagines, by attending to the lived experience of reading). Contemporary contextual interpreters sometimes acknowledge the historicity of their assumptions, interests, and methods in order to disclaim the presentist reduction of a texts pastness to current concerns. Such an acknowledgment still leaves the text entombed in the past, however, unless the interpreter asks how his or her experiences as a reader enable it to speak across historical distance, not only making its concerns present but also challenging contemporary perspectives. A meeting of past and present is a truly historical encounter only if it is dynamic, interactive,
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and unpredictable. To dismiss reading as universalizing is to exclude the very domain where this encounter happens. The texts historicity does not of course go awayit is included in the very act of exclusionbut opportunities for historical dialogue and inquiry are missed. For all of these reasons, it is not only odd but also wrongheaded to practice historical criticism by turning away from the site where past and present meet in the lived (and for that reason contingent, particular, and fully historical) experience of reading. The suspicion that appeals to the reader are ahistorical and essentialist reflects a general and well-taken skepticism about the autonomy of the subject. Here again, however, the arguments against autonomy are not necessarily reasons to neglect reading but instead suggest why and how it matters. Across a broad theoretical spectrum, the displacement of the cogito has been accompanied by a recognition that subjectivity is not unified but is divided, split, and not identical with itself. No undergraduate leaves a theory class these days without having his or her conventional assumptions about autonomous individuality challenged by the notion that the subject is constructed by being hailed or interpellated to preexisting roles that constitute the subject positions that define permissible racial, sexual, and gender identities according to the norms of prevailing discourses, the economic structures of society, and the strictures of dominant institutions.21 One implication of this lesson is that reading is not a natural activity (whatever that could mean) and that the readers consciousness is formed by rules, norms, and roles that one needs to learn in order to become a reader.22 This is all part of the historical positionality of reading. The experience of reading may seem like a uniquely personal immersion in a world independent of the pressures and constraints of everyday life, but only by adopting assumptions, attitudes, and conventions that preexist the individual can one answer the call Dear Reader . . . and produce this illusion of autonomy. Even when one seems to be reading most freely and imaginatively, with the full Kantian engagement of ones faculties, ones subjectivity is enacting the potentialities of subject positions that one has learned to inhabit and that may vary socially, culturally, and historically. Because of the gap between role and performance, however, subject positions constrain the production of meaning but do not fully coerce or determine it.23 This is the space where the experience of reading happens, in all of its unpredictable dynamism and variability. The performance of roles brings about a splitting or doubling that differentiates subjectivity from the subject positions it enacts. The necessity of playing a role makes reading (like any other norm-governed social activity) a doubled experience of me and not me in which the self is paradoxi-
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cally present to itself only by acting as another.24 This paradoxthat one can become oneself only by playing oneself as anothermay be both alienating and enabling. The contradiction here means that the selfs illusion of autonomy is always a deception, but the doubling between ones self and the roles through and in which the self is performed makes possible variations, transformations, and innovations that would be impossible either if the self were unified and monolithic or if the roles to which one is hailed were all controlling. Because the roles one is called on to adopt in order to become a reader must be enacted to come into force, their meaning may vary according to how they are played. This is also why the experience of reading can be surprising, pleasurable, or deeply upsetting, as it could not be if it were unified and self-identical. Because reading is a doubled experience of staging oneself as another, it can move us in ways we may not anticipate and may feel we do not completely control. Reading is a contradictory, paradoxical experience through which we deploy our agency in ways that can reveal our lack of autonomy even as we may simultaneously feel a liberating, playful expansion of our meaning-making powers. This doubling means that there is room for maneuver and variation even between different players who follow the same rules and seek to stay within defined boundaries. The split between the role and its enactment also makes possible unpredictable negations, innovations, and transgressions that the norms and rules themselves cannot completely determine or control. How reading will perform the roles that constitute available possibilities of subject constitution is a question that cannot be answered in advance, without exploring, testing, and challenging the room for play that a text and its contexts leave open. Different texts, different ways of reading, and the different contexts affecting them may increase or decrease the space of doubling and negation in which meaning can move. The particular contingencies of these interactions cannot be decided before they are performed, and that is why attending to how they are staged in the experience of reading is necessary and worthwhile. The performative dimension of subject creation means that reading should not be ignored because it is where these possibilities are enacted. The metaphor of performance raises the question of power. The social, institutional construction of the embodied subject through various technologies of what has come to be called biopolitics may seem more insidious, invisible, and anonymous than the playfulness of theatrical enactments of roles can fully encompass. The theoretical problem here, however, is whether and how power can circulate and form the subject except through lived, corporeal experiences characterized by doublings,
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displacements, and splittings of a sort that introduce the possibility of resistance, evasion, and innovation into the very space of coercion and constraint.25 Only as the body is lived and experienced can it be trained and molded. Habits require enactment in order to exercise their tyranny, and a body can only be disciplined and formed through lived experiences of suffering, constraint, and cultivation. The body both is and is not the repeated patterns of behavior through which it becomes itself, and this doubleness is necessary for power to act both coercively and productively.26 Learning how to read is not always a pleasurable experience, but its joys as well as its pains are corporeal in a way that may be instructive about the splitting, doubling, and negativity of lived, embodied power. As recent work on affective aesthetics has emphasized, it is not the case that a concern with reading is purely or primarily cognitive.27 The emotions of pity and terror that Aristole invokes in his theory of catharsis are physical, embodied experiences, as is the Dionysian abandon that makes Plato fear that poets and their audiences are not in their right minds (but that Nietzsche celebrates in his genealogy of the origins of tragedy). The internal doubleness of embodied experiences opens up the possibility that they can be repeated and manipulated. Only because pity, fear, and intoxication are doubled phenomena whereby one both is and is not the corporeal experience through and in which one is livingI am and am not the emotion or sensation that overwhelms or transports mecan they be restaged in aesthetic form. The aesthetic experience reenacts the distance internal to suffering, constraint, or transport that makes them a doubling of the self as another. Aesthetic reenactment can be used for contradictory purposes, either forming and producing the body through the habitual repetition of attitudes, behaviors, or feelings, or opening a space for criticism, resistance, and even transcendence because the staging of these experiences is not identical with the immediacy of life. Repetition has two faces, either inculcating habits through reiterations that establish and fix corporeal patterns, or introducing negativity, distance, and the possibility of play into the relation between lived experience and its reenactment. Because of this doubleness, the corporeal effects of reading cannot be determined in advance. Reading can be an activity that physically trains and produces the selfor, alternatively, that stages embodied experiences in a potentially subversive or otherwise transformative manner that may exceed everyday normative constraints (as, for example, in the transports of the sublime). The staging of emotions and bodily experiences in the reception of texts may serve as a vehicle for training and constraining the subject by putting it through its paces, or it may expose
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the normative workings of biopower and provide at least momentary experiences of ways of being that transcend its limitations. It is because reading operates within rather than outside the purview of power and repetition that it allows power to be staged in particular ways, whether for coercive or emancipatory purposes. Only by examining how power is enacted in reading can the involvement of literature in the restrictive work of training and discipline be understood just as, conversely, only there can we glimpse the capacity of the aesthetic experience to stage and play with power in a way that may go beyond coercion and normative determination. The notion that reading is a political activity runs counter to the commonly held view that reader-response theory is captive to the ideology of individualism.28 To focus on the readers experience might seem to fetishize consciousness and consumption in ways that Marxist critiques have thoroughly discredited. Excluding reading on these grounds is contradictory and wrongheaded, however. As should be clear by now, the reader is not a universal structure but a social, historical construct. But then the question is not whether to analyze reading but how to do so in a manner that does justice to its political dimensions as a social, historical experience. To dismiss reading as an ideological illusion is to consign it to the realm of the universal and the essential (it is always, invariably an epiphenomenon), whereas the need is to historicize and socialize it. If it is a mistake to construe reading as the asocial, private experience of an isolated individual, it is also an error to regard reading as a phantom or to view reading theory as necessarily a symptom of consumer capitalism. There is no inherent contradiction between Marxist aesthetics and a concern for reception, as Marx himself recognized in the well-known passage where he asks why Greek art and Shakespeare still give us aesthetic pleasure and are in certain respects regarded as a standard and unattainable ideal, even though the material conditions in which they were produced no longer exist. The answer, he argues, is not to appeal to universal aesthetic standards but to analyze the historical relations between the conditions of production and the situation of reception: The difficulty lies only in the general formulation of these contradictions. As soon as they are reduced to specific questions they are already explained.29 This sweeping assertion may underestimate the difficulty of sorting out the mediating factors between base and superstructure that complicate the relations between various historical domains, but the methodological injunction to solve an aesthetic problem by examining the historical relations between production and consumption recognizes the historical variability of the reading experience as a legitimate, even
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necessary area of inquiry. Indeed, some of the most interesting and important disputes within Marxist aesthetics have to do with how to understand the history of reception and the experience of the reader.30 Marxisms complex debates about the politics of reception are not surprising because, as Marx declared in the third of his Theses on Feuerbach, a theory of social change requires that the educator must himself be educated (der Erzieher muss selbst erzogen werden). Whether and how the duplication of consciousness staged by reading might promote a transformative self-consciousness is consequently an important question. The Marxist critique of ideology is, however, a prominent exemplar of the hermeneutics of unmasking that seems suspicious on principle of descriptive accounts of reading. Across a variety of methodological domains, whether inspired by Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, or Foucault, the suspicion that truth is hidden and must be unmasked has contributed to discrediting the phenomenology of reading by making attempts to describe aesthetic experiences seem epistemologically nave and politically gullible. Here again, however, the exclusion of reading depends on and leaves a space for what it banishes. As I have already suggested, to assume that meaning lies behind the surface presented by the text or beneath the readers conscious awareness is to view meaning as a doubled phenomenon; otherwise the duplicity of disguised, displaced meaning would not be possible. This doubleness allows differential responses, some more and others less under the sway of the texts hidden designs and desires, or more or less keyed into its secrets or aware of its illusions. These very differences are what make a hermeneutics of unmasking possible in the first placeand useful insofar as the exercise of suspicion may lead the reader to construe a text otherwise than how it presents itself. A purely trusting description of experience may be nave about the powers and interests operative in the relation between text and reader, but only because reading is a doubled encounter of me and not me is there a gap that allows unmasking and critique. The doubleness of the reading experience is not only the provocation for unmasking but also its destination. Suspecting the texts duplicities would not be useful or important if the purpose were not to restructure the relation of text and reader in ways other than how it would be enacted without such interventions. The fact that readers contribute to their own manipulation in the text-reader interaction is what gives the hermeneutics of unmasking the possibility of altering the terms of the exchange. Because they themselves enact their mystification and alienation, they can change it. This kind of duplication of consciousness is what suspicious interpretation aims to bring abouta recognition of how one is producing ones own estrangement. The doubleness of false
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consciousness can then be exposed and overturned by restructuring the doubled relations between me and not me in reading. If suspicious interpretation can facilitate this transformation, that is because change itself is a phenomenon of doubling. Unmasking hidden meaning is a contest for mastery in the rhetorical power balance between text and reader. As some especially canny critics have recognized, however, the effort to unmask a texts drive for mastery can itself become what it is suspicious of. Contesting mastery can be a way of seeking and asserting mastery. Resisting dominance can be a strategy of domination.31 Guided by an anticipatory understanding of the texts likely secrets and deceptions, suspicious interpreters may know in advance the hidden meanings they will disclose. Resisting the texts structuration of the me/not me gap consequently runs the risk of collapsing it if the doubleness of reading is replaced by a single-minded insistence on the interpreters preexisting knowledge of its secrets and illusions. The danger of the drive to mastery of suspicious interpretation is that it may transform the to-and-fro exchange between text and reader into a one-way display of power and authority. How to avoid this danger without falling back into navet is not something one can learn from a rulebook. It entails a paradoxical imperativeto be suspicious of ones own suspicions without abandoning themthat cannot be reduced to a recipe but that can only be practiced, and the experience of reading is once again where this will happen (or fail to). A particular mode of suspicion often implies a correlative mode of revelation, and reading is the arena where this is played out. Marxist demystification of the class interests or economic determinants behind a particular ideological formation or cultural phenomenon operates according to a different notion of the hidden, for example, than a Nietzschean genealogy of the power relations masked by moral values or norms of behavior, and these differences in turn imply divergent visions of emancipation and transformation (the development of revolutionary class consciousness or the liberation of vital instincts and the will-topower) that are the telos of their hermeneutic archeologies.32 A purely negative mode of unmaskinga nihilistic destruction of illusions that it refuses to replace with alternative beliefsis the empty set case here. The argument of such skeptics may be that visions of emancipation themselves serve coercion (There is subversion, no end of subversion, only not for us, in the oft-quoted New Historicist line), or that the very interactions between text and reader which literature performs solidify social consent.33 Even for such extreme skepticism, however, the question is how the behind relates to the beyondthat is, whether the unmasking of a meaning behind is in the service of revealing other meanings beyond
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that the duplicities or deceptions are standing in the way of, or whether a truly radical suspicion doubts the very possibility of revelation. These disputes have important consequences in many areassocial, political, and metaphysical. But to get there, they must first be enacted in the experience of reading: how does one read differently after learning the lessons of a particular hermeneutics of suspicion? Even the most skeptical unmaskers make implicit claims about the futurity of reading that contest other modes of demystification. Not to include reading in these disputes is to obscure what is at stake in them. The question raised by demystifying reading in one way or another is not only how to reestablish reciprocity between the reader and a text after its distortions and trickery have been unmasked; it is also where such reciprocity would leadtoward what kinds of pleasure, instruction, and modes of interaction that are opened up by exercising suspicion. Even the most nihilistic unmaskers implicitly project such a future unless they would have us abandon reading altogetherbut then that too is a consequence that would affect the future of reading. Unmasking opens up a horizon of understanding that would otherwise be closed off by nave description, and the significance of suspicion is revealed by this futurity. Those consequences will themselves be cloaked in mystification if the experience of reading goes unexamined. My account of reading as a doubled performative interaction between text and reader is meant to contest a particular epistemological argument that contributed to the turn away from reading as a central topic of critical and theoretical interest. Speaking broadly, literary studies got hung up on the subject-object split in the early 1980s even as this divide was widely being discredited as a false problem and a distraction by philosophers of many different orientations.34 Disregarding the admonitions of the philosophers, however, literary critics and theorists became enchanted by the unanswerable question of whether meaning resides in the text or the reader. They consequently became disenchanted with reader-response theories that seemed disingenuously to claim the reader creates the texts meaning while nevertheless analyzing preexisting structures in the text that were supposedly responsible for this implied response.35 The trap awaiting the constructivists, however, was idealismthe notion that texts are epiphenomena residing entirely in the readers subjective acts of constitution (even if those are socialized by attributing them to various hermeneutic communities). By robbing reading of its interactive, performative dynamism, this idealism also took away anything substantive to analyze. There was no there there in the experience of readingonly subjects reproducing their own conventions, assumptions, and interests. Since reading had been emptied
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out, it was perhaps only logical to turn toward cultural and historical analyses where there were concrete, specific things to study about the social construction of meaning. Rethinking the experience of reading as a doubled performative interactiona dynamic, mutually constituting relation where the encounter is shaped by both sidesis a way of getting beyond the subject-object standoff in which the alternatives of making and finding face off across an unbridgeable divide. The return to lived experience I am advocating recognizes that reading is simultaneously both subjective and objective, and that it appears more one or the other only as a particular aspect of experience is foregrounded for examination.36 This pragmatic recognition of the duality of reading leaves open a variety of questions: What implications for reading follow from different interpretive approaches? How do different texts assert their otherness through the resistances, anomalies, and surprises by which one recognizes that the experience one is having is not purely ones own? Unlike the impossible question of whether textual meaning is made or found, these are all issues that can be investigated, analyzed, and discussed in the history of reception, the conflict of interpretations, and the experience of reading (even if agreement may not always result). What would the return to reading that I am advocating actually look like? The answer will depend on the presuppositions and interests that readers bring to the event of reading, and so a one size fits all response to this question is neither possible nor desirable. With this caveat, however, let me offer a brief example from my own critical practice that may illustrate how and why attention to the lived vicissitudes of reading may be useful. The history of the reception of Joseph Conrads novella Heart of Darkness has been notoriously divided over whether to regard it as a daring attack on imperialism or a reactionary purveyor of colonial and racial stereotypes.37 Chinua Achebe memorably calls Conrad a bloody racist, but James Clifford praises him as an exemplary ethnographer who truthfully juxtaposes different truths.38 Edward Said finds two visions at odds in Conrads novella: As a creature of his time, Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them, and this is his tragic limitation.39 If Conrad is indeed a creature of his time, however, we should not lament as tragic what may now seem like limitations by measuring him against an ahistorical, utopian standard that Saids own powerful arguments about the historical worldliness of texts would question. Rather, by focusing on the experience of reading as a scene where the horizons of past and present meet, my model suggests that readers should regard the contradictions in his text as an attempt to
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point beyond a situation it would be unreasonable to expect him to fully transcend. These contradictions can then be understood as evidence of a strategy of transforming dilemmas Conrad cannot see his way clear to resolving (no doubt because of the limitations of his historical situation) into provocations to future readers to struggle with them and perhaps do a better job than he could. In this way, the ambiguities of his text become a means of speaking across historical distance and the contradictions of the reading experience can be seen as an incitement to critical self-consciousness rather than as a problem to be lamented, ignored, or explained away. Conrads chief instrument in this strategy is his narrator Marlow, whose contradictory responses to Africa and Africans are both racist and enlightened, imperialist and anti-imperialist, reactionary and progressive, in a way that might seem hopelessly confused if it were not a strategy for challenging future readers to imagine possibilities that were inconceivable at the time of writing (in 1898, at the zenith of empire and the scramble for Africa). For example, Marlow complains about the injustice of the white imperialists disregard of the humanity of Africansonly himself to commit the stereotyping he unmasks. Seeing a chaingang of imprisoned Africans, he remarks: These men could by no stretch of imagination be called enemies. They were called criminals and the outraged law . . . had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea. . . . They passed me within six inches, without a glance, with that complete, deathlike indifference of unhappy savages (16). Marlow challenges the inhumanity of imperialisms racist labels by invoking a notion of the primitive (the death-in-life of the unhappy savage) that is just as much a Eurocentric stereotype as the labels he unmasks. When he comes upon a grove where the sick and exhausted prisoners are dying, he thinks: They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly nowbut then he says of one victim: The man seemed youngalmost a boybut you know with them its hard to tell (17). After recognizing the humanity of the dying, he commits a classic act of racist othering. Throughout Heart of Darkness, Marlow commits the very mistakes he warns the reader against, as if he can only recognize the limits and inadequacy of his categories but cannot get beyond them and so is trapped in the very circle of misunderstanding he laments. What is the reader to do with contradictions like these? One way of reducing ambiguity is to focus on only one of its two poles, to the exclusion of the other, as readers have done in lambasting Conrads racism or praising his anti-imperialism. But another, more complicated and productive way of engaging the doubled experience of reading a text that employs the very epistemological categories it rejects is to ask
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about the sources and implications of the bewilderment to which this contradiction gives rise, using Marlow against himself to point beyond limitations that Conrad could recognize but that he, given the restrictions of his particular historical position, could not imagine otherwise than he skeptically saw them to be. Marlows contradictions then become a challenge to the reader to imagine conditions of reciprocity and dialogue between Europeans and Africans that would have been inconceivable in Conrads time, as much as Marlows acknowledgment of the error of denying full human recognition to Africans (coupled with his own personal failure to do so) calls for a mutuality he cannot realize. Conrads refusal (or inability) to offer a materialized imagining of such an other world is a sign of his historical situation, even as the contradictions in Marlows encounters with Africans represent a provocation to the future of readersa future dimly but powerfully imaginable across Conrads act of writingto engage those dilemmas with whatever mixture of skepticism and hope their differing circumstances, aspirations, and frustrations might allow.40 This example suggests a couple of methodological issues raised by a return to the question of reading. To begin with, which readers does my hypothetical analysis of how to read Heart of Darkness refer to? It is clearly both a descriptive and prescriptive analysisan account of how, in the history of reception, readers have responded to this baffling text, an investigation of textual contradictions which might provoke a bewildered response, and a proposal for how to engage these complications productively by transforming the doubled experience of reading the text into an occasion for epistemological and historical self-consciousness. This contradiction between description and prescription in the analysis of reading is necessary and even useful, however, inasmuch as reading is a learned activity, and the best readers never stop learning how to read their entire lives long. One learns how to read by sharing ideas with other readers about how to respond to various problems and possibilities opened up by our experiences with texts. Describing how one has read, aligning this experience with the reports of other readers, and offering ones own prescriptions for reading better (not knowing whether other readers will accept them or not) is one way to go about this. Rather than apologizing for our status as elite academic readers, we paid professionals in the discipline of literary studies should (I think) embrace our pedagogical role as teachers of reading. The most interesting and influential critics, whether contextual or formalist (or of whatever orientation), have pragmatic value to the world of readers by virtue of the new ways of reading their descriptive and prescriptive performances open up. This need not entail a disparagement of the
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common reader. It suggests, rather, the common enterprise in which all readers participate. In the classroom, I regularly ask my students to report their experiences of bafflement, confusion, and delight and then to work together to build new and better ways of reading out of those experiences. Dont deny your experience, I tell them, or think that others have secrets you dont about what a text means, but recognize that you can only extend your capacities and options as a reader by beginning with whatever your experiences happen to be and then learning from others how to revise, complicate, and extend them. Reading is what Martin Heidegger calls jemeinigalways mine, because it is something no one can do for you.41 (Even when someone reads a text aloud to you, only you can experience its meaning for yourself.) You can learn about reading from othersindeed, you will only learn to read if you do pay attention to what others can teach youand reading is a social activity through and through, but as a lived experience of meaning derived from a particular, contingent encounter with a text, only you can do this for and to yourself. This egalitarian quality of reading is not the same, however, as making the community of common readers the standard for how to understand reading. That is sometimes the assumption of sociological surveys that are intended to disclose the truth of how readers read. The Jemeinigkeit of reading will always escape such surveys. So will the prescriptive dimension of reading as something we learn to do from readers who, for whatever reason, we think do this better than we do and so have something to teach us (who these expert readers are, and why their ways of reading are worth emulating are, however, matters open to dispute in the democratic, pluralistic universe of reading). A return to the experience of reading as a doubled performative interaction may also help resolve certain impasses that are otherwise destined to defy understanding. One of these, as I suggested earlier, is the question of form and history. For almost as long as historical and cultural studies have been the dominant modes of literary study, there has been a countervailing concern (even among socially and politically minded critics) that the formal characteristics of texts had been lost sight of.42 Can one attend to the social and historical determinants of texts without neglecting form? Does an analysis of a texts formal structures exclude attention to its historical, social, and political contexts? Are formalism and historicism mutually exclusive poles that the pendulum of literary studies is destined to swing between, or can some way be found to accommodate their seemingly conflicting claims? These are not new questions, and the fact that the form-history opposition keeps recurring may make it seem like an intractable divide.
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The odd thing, however, is that these poles are not separated in the experience of reading. The lived experience of the otherness of a literary workits challenge as well as its appealis both formal and historical in ways that are difficult if not impossible to disentangle. The past is only available through forms that transmit it, and reading form is an historical experience where the horizons of past and present meet. The challenge of understanding an intriguing, not immediately transparent text is in part a matter of how it is made (its forms), and deciphering its meanings may require a reader to learn unfamiliar, perhaps no longer current (which is to say, historically distant) conventions of various kinds. Even in its formal dimensions, this alterity is evidence of a works historicity. If the experience of reading provides access to worlds that no longer exist except in the traces they have left behind, then the formal work of deciphering those signs is an historically positioned experience of otherness speaking across historical horizons. In all of these ways, reading form is the very means by which we understand the historical evidence that a text offers of a past society and culture. Like the subject-object split, the divide between form and history is an artificial separation that arises because the experiences on which these notions are based have been suppressed, neglected, or forgotten. How to construe form and history is an open and important question, however, because both are essentially contested concepts that allow conflicting interpretations. But whether to be either formalist or historicist is not a useful or even tenable alternative because, in the experience of reading, one is necessarily both. This is one reason why debates between formalism and historicism often seem pointless and unenlightening. The genuinely debatable, potentially productive issue is how to stage the interaction of form and history in the doubled performative interaction where they meet in reading. Different conceptions of form and history can structure this interaction in different ways. But it is always an encounter that has both formal and historical dimensions, an experience where form manifests itself historically and history takes shape in particular forms. Returning to the experience of reading may be useful in bypassing fruitless standoffs and instead directing attention toward particular, debatable analyses of the consequences of staging this encounter in different ways, not in the expectation that a right answer or a consensus will emerge, but so that the reasons for disagreement and their implications for reading may become clear. The question of how to make room for the aesthetic also requires a return to reading.43 How to conceive of the aesthetic is an essentially contestable question that is not susceptible to a single, unequivocal resolution. That is one reason why the aesthetic is an historical phenom-
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enon. No matter how the aesthetic is understoodwhether as Kantian contemplative disinterestedness or disruptive Shklovskyian dehabitualization, as the still moment of New Critical organic totalization or the disquieting aporias of deconstruction, as the classical realization of ideal models or the Romantic transgression of traditional norms, and so onin every case the disputes about how to conceptualize the aesthetic are consequential because they are arguments about how to experience works of art (which is to say, how to read). The variability of the aesthetic is a product of the experiential structure of reading as a doubled performative interaction. Different attitudes of understanding make possible different aesthetic experiences, even as different texts put readers through experiences that call on them to configure the aesthetic in different ways. The to-and-fro interaction of text and reader constitutes the aesthetic in a variable, mutually determining manner, and this is why new conceptions of the aesthetic may arise either from the introduction of new methods of interpretation or from artistic innovations that confront readers with new hermeneutic challenges. The question of what the aesthetic is in itself is not answerable. To pose the question in this manner reifies and essentializes the aesthetic by divorcing it from the historical experience of reading. What can be understood about the aesthetic is its variability over the history of reception and across the conflict of interpretations, and this requires attention to the experience of readers reading, which is where these differences are enacted. A return to reading may also clarify the disciplinary purposes of the lettered humanities. One of the things that would be lost if English or Comparative Literature departments merged with history, sociology, or anthropology is a focus on reading as a matter of interest in and of itself. Social scientists read, but they typically regard reading at best as a means to other investigatory ends. For the most part they distrust it as a mode of knowledge inferior to quantitative methods. Asking what it matters how we read is not a question that others in the academy are clamoring to own. It wont get asked unless we in the lettered humanities insist on its importance. Teaching students how to be attentive to readingand why that mattersis something the experiences and training of humanities faculty have uniquely equipped them to do. Our skills as rigorous, self-conscious, creative, skeptical, inquisitive readers and our understanding of the delights and the vagaries of reading are chief among our entitlements to disciplinary authority. Whatever else we happen to know about history, culture, or society that is not understood more broadly, deeply, and precisely by the social scientists is a result of our knowledge about how to read. Our work as scholars and teachers
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matters because reading matters, and we disregard reading at the risk of jeopardizing our claim to be heard about history, culture, politics, and other issues about which we can speak with authority only because of the ways we have learned to pay attention to reading. What do we know about reading? For one thing, we know that the we quickly breaks down because readers read differently according to the presuppositions and interests that guide their interpretive activity. We also know that forms matterthat experiences we have in reading are shaped by the ways texts are made and that these elusive but tangible experiences (of irony, implication, indirection, and so on) are an important (sometimes the most important) aspect of their meaning. To rediscover reading is not to go back to a foundation on which consensus can be built about how to read or how forms mean. Rather, it directs attention to the different experiences of readers reading that give rise to conflicting interpretations and through which history speaks in forms that transmit ever-new and sometimes surprising messages. Talking about what we experience in reading would begin to describe the shape and size of the elephant in the roomand a curiously various and changeable beast it will turn out to be. Brown University
Notes 1 Important signs of readings comeback can be seen in such fields as book history, cognitive literary studies, the new affective criticism, and reception studies. I briefly discuss the first two of these fields below. A fine example of the study of affect is Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007). James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein have edited two good surveys of reception study: Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 2001), and New Directions in American Reception Study (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008). Important individual voices calling for a return to reading are Derek Attridge (see The Singularity of Literature [New York: Routledge, 2004] and J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004]) and Rita Felski (see her Uses of Literature [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008]). For an analysis of the causes of the neglect of reading, see John Maynard, Literary Intention, Literary Interpretation, and Readers (Peterborough: Broadview, 2009). 2 A crucial moment in the shift away from phenomenological study of the reading experience was Stanley Fishs attack on Wolfgang Iser for epistemological navet in assuming the stable, objective existence of an unwritten text with gaps that the reader fills in, whereas a more savvy theorist would recognize that the text itself is a variable social construction (see Why No Ones Afraid of Wolfgang Iser, Diacritics 11, no. 1 [1981]: 213, and Isers response, Talk Like Whales, Diacritics 11, no. 3 [1981]: 8287). As Brook Thomas points out in a perceptive analysis of this exchange, Fishs charges misrepresent Isers position (see his important essay Restaging the Reception of Isers Early Work, New Literary History 31, no. 1 (2000): 1343). Fishs view, though erroneous, prevailed. 3 Leah Price, Reading: The State of the Discipline, Book History 7 (2004): 318.
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4 Price, From The History of a Book to a History of the Book, Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 120, 121. 5 Paul Eggert, Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture, and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), 213. For a similar perspective on the value to editors and book historians of attending to the reading experience, see Peter Shillingsburg, Resisting Texts: Authority and Submission in Constructions of Meaning (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1997). 6 For evidence of this trend, see The History of Reading, ed. Shafquat Towheed, Rosalind Crone, and Katie Halsey (New York: Routledge, 2011). Although this interesting and useful collection of studies of reading includes seminal essays by Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, and Stanley Fish on the reading experience, its entries are otherwise devoted to historical and sociological studies of reading (its section on Individual Readers gives examples from the sixteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries). 7 For examples of the best work of this kind, see Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001); Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), and Vanessa L. Ryan, Reading the Mind: From George Eliots Fiction to James Sullys Psychology, Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 4 (2009): 61535. 8 For example, see Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2004), and Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 2006) and Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2008). Although his emphasis is still ultimately historical, Alan Richardson attempts to think across the divide between neurohistory and contemporary cognitive science in The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2010). 9 See Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2010). Perhaps because of the stigma that unfortunately still attaches to phenomenological reader-response theory, Jauss and Iser are rarely mentioned in the work of the new cognitive critics, despite many potential connections between hermeneutic phenomenology (including the work of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur) and the theories of cognitive science. Palmers notion of fictional minds, for example, recalls phenomenologys conception of reading as a paradoxical doubling of the real me of the reader and the alien me of the texts intentionality as I think the thoughts of another. Zunshines strange concepts invoke the readers expectations in order to question his or her underlying assumptions and limitations in ways that echo phenomenological analyses of how reading plays with fundamental hermeneutic and epistemological processes. Although interesting work in neurophenomenology is now making connections between Husserls analyses of consciousness and experimental neuroscience, similar dialogue in literary study has yet to begin. See Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Neuroscience, ed. Jean Petitot, Francisco J. Varela, Bernard Pachoud, and Jean-Michel Roy (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999). 10 Charles Sanders Peirce, How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878), in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 30. 11 See my essay Form and History: Reading as an Aesthetic Experience and Historical Act, Modern Language Quarterly 69 (June 2008): 195219. I will return to this problem below, along with other areas where the neglect of reading has hampered critical and theoretical inquiry. 12 These arguments about the interdependence of use and context are well-known. What is not well understood, however, is that this interdependence requires that contextualism return to the experience of reading in order to explicate the implications of its analyses of the situational determinants of meaning making. For a lucid recent analysis of the
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mutual determination of use and context and its relevance for literary studies, see Austin E. Quigley, Theoretical Inquiry: Language, Linguistics, and Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2004). Also see Jacques Derrida, Signature Event Context, Glyph 1(1977): 17297. 13 See Paul Ricoeur, Structure, Word, Event (trans. Robert Sweeney) in The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, IL.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1974), 7996, and The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto, 1979). Also see the chapter entitled The Cognitive Powers of Metaphor in my Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1990), 6788. 14 On the challenge posed to the Cartesian stronghold by the three masters of the school of suspicionMarx, Nietzsche, and Freudsee Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), especially 3236 and 41858. 15 On the kinds of doubling entailed in reading, see Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), especially 10734 and 16370; The Play of the Text in Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989), 24961; and Text Play in The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993), 24780. On the model of reading informing this essay, see also my Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2005). 16 See Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, especially 45993. Ricoeurs example is G. W. F. Hegels notion of transcendence (Aufhebung): In the Hegelian phenomenology, each form or figure receives its meaning from the subsequent one. . . . The truth of a given moment lies in the subsequent moment; meaning always proceeds retrogressively (464). For revelatory hermeneutics, meaning lies beyond the interpreters contemporary horizons, in future developments yet unknownwhich is why, in Sren Kierkegaards memorable phrase, we live forwards but understand backwards. Two important recent arguments for the importance of recovering alternatives to the hermeneutics of suspicion are Felski, Uses of Literature, 122, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, Youre so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2003), 12451. 17 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), 9. For evidence of the productive debate that this text continues to provoke, see the recent special issue of Representations 108, no. 1 (2009), edited by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, which collects essays presented at an anniversary conference in Jamesons honor. The question animating the conference, according to the editors, was whether the mode of symptomatic reading Jameson promoted had driven out practices of surface reading that deserve reconsideration (see Surface Reading: An Introduction, 121). Ricoeur is nowhere mentioned in this discussion, but the unfortunate implication of superficiality connoted by surface reading could be avoided by accepting his proposal to understand hermeneutics of suspicion and revelation as opposed but complementary alternatives tied to conflicting conceptions of meaning as behind or beyond. Whether these alternatives are mutually exclusive or (as Ricoeur hopes) can be reconciled is, of course, a central question about the conflict of interpretations. See Ricoeurs book by this title, cited above, and my Conflicting Readings. 18 See the chapter History, Epistemology, and the Example of The Turn of the Screw in Conflicting Readings, 89108. 19 See Marx, Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy (1857) in The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 12451. See also Hans-Georg Gadamers argument that not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a
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text goes beyond its author, because we understand in a different way, if we understand at all (Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall [New York: Continuum, 1993], 296, 297). 20 See Gadamers analysis of the fusion of horizons in understanding in Truth and Method, 3007. Also see Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982). 21 Judith Butler summarizes this consensus concisely: There is no I who stands behind discourse and executes its volition or will through discourse. On the contrary, the I only comes into being through being called, named, interpellated, to use the Althusserian term, and this discursive constitution takes place prior to the I (Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex [New York: Routledge, 1993], 225). 22 This truism was not always as obvious as it may seem now. See Cleanth Brookss enormously influential demonstration of the principles of the New Criticism, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1947), where he claims that reading is a natural act because poetry is a natural activity, one of the fundamental human activities, and not an esoteric one (x). 23 For an illuminating exploration of this variability and the revisions and reversals it enables, see Butlers analysis of the performativity of queer identity in Critically Queer, Bodies That Matter, 22342. See also Wolfgang Iser, Representation: A Performative Act in Prospecting, 23648, and Mimesis and Performance in The Fictive and the Imaginary, 28196. 24 See Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary, 7986 and 24780. Citing Helmuth Plessners analysis of the gap between the role and the role-player that gives human being a Doppelgnger structure, Iser argues that Being oneself therefore means being able to double oneself (81), and that reading stages an analogous duplication that has the capacity to reveal, explore, and refigure this duality. This aspect of Isers late work explicates the doubleness of the reading experience first articulated in his classic essay, The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach in The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communciation in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974), 29194. Also see Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992). 25 For example, see Michel Foucaults fascinating late interview The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom (1984) in Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 280301. 26 See Maurice Merleau-Pontys critique of Ivan Pavlovs concept of the reflex in Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (1942; Boston: Beacon, 1962). On the doubleness of embodied experience, see Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (1945; New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), especially 67199. Also see William Jamess classic chapter on Habit in Principles of Psychology (1890; rpt. New York: Dover, 1950), 1:10427. 27 For example, see Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), especially 85148, and Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: The Aesthetics of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2003), especially 136. 28 The classic, enormously influential articulation of this critique is Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983) 5490. 29 Marx,Critique of Political Economy, 150. 30 To recall only a few well-known examples: The debate between Georg Lukcs and Bertolt Brecht about the politics of modernism is a disagreement about the consequences of the disruptive, disorienting experiences induced by antimimetic forms. Walter Benjamins much-discussed claim that technological reproduction reduces the aura of original works of art is controversial, among other reasons, because of the question of the effects on the
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audience that may follow from its withering. Theodor Adornos challenge to the notion that autonomous art is necessarily conservative is based on arguments about the potential effects in the aesthetic experience (including reading) of negativity. For a convenient collection of texts relevant to these debates, see Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukcs, Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (New York: Verso, 1987). 31 See Jacques Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), and Shoshana Felman, Turning the Screw of Interpretation in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982), 94207. 32 On the teleological and archeological moments in interpretation, see Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 45993 33 See Stephen Greenblatt, Invisible Bullets in Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 2165, and Franco Moretti, The Soul and the Harpy in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (New York: Verso, 2005), 141. 34 Among many examples that could be cited, the most important is probably Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979). This consensus extends broadly over philosophical communities that are otherwise divided by fundamental disagreements, including phenomenology, pragmatism, and ordinary language philosophy. 35 In addition to Brook Thomass analysis of the Fish-Iser dispute, cited above, see Winfried Fluck, The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Isers Literary Theory, New Literary History 31, no. 1 (2000): 175210. 36 What I am proposing here is an application of a well-known pragmatist argument, classically stated by William James in Does Consciousness Exist? (1904) in Essays on Radical Empiricism, ed. Ralph Barton Perry (New York: Dutton, 1971), 3-22. 37 For a representative collection of statements on both sides of this divide, see my Norton Critical Edition of Heart of Darkness, 4th ed. (New York: Norton, 2006). Subsequent references will be given parenthetically. The proposal for how to read Heart of Darkness that I am about to describe is explained more fully in Play and the Politics of Reading, 75-80, and in my essay Reading, Race, and Representing Others in the Norton Heart of Darkness, 429-44. 38 Chinua Achebe, An Image of Africa, Massachusetts Review 18 (1977): 788; James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), 99. 39 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 25, 30. 40 For other examples of what a return to reading might look like, see two recent essays of mine that offer practical descriptions of reading experiences governed by my particular presuppositions and interests: Two Cheers for Tolerance: E. M. Forsters Ironic Liberalism and the Indirections of Style, Modernism/Modernity 16, no. 2 (2009): 28199, and Repairing Injustice: The Contradictions of Forgiveness and The Ivory Tower, Henry James Review 30 (2009): 4454. The purpose of these essays is to describe how difficult ethical dilemmas associated with contradictory states of affairs like tolerance and forgiveness can be staged in the act of reading in ways that not only give rise to thought but may also provide practical guidance in negotiating their ambiguities. These are not the only interests and goals that may guide analyses of reading, obviously, but attending to the experience of reading is especially crucial in any study of the political and moral effects of literature because that is where the behavior of readers is engaged and may be changed (to the extent that this is possible at all). See also the chapters of practical analysis in Play and the Politics of Reading.
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41 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (1927; New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 6768, 28185. Heideggers example is death. No one can die for you, he argues, and so by extension no one can choose for you how to be toward death (Sein zum Tode)how to make the choices about how to engage ones situation in projecting oneself toward a future whose ultimate horizon is the end of life. Existence consequently abounds in experiences that are irreducibly ones own, and one of the incomparable miracles of reading is that it allows us to experience for ourselves the jemeinig experiences of others. 42 For a history of this debate, see my essay Form and History, cited above. 43 For an informative collection of recent statements on this question, see Aesthetic Subjects, ed. Pamela R. Matthews and David McWhirter (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003). For a rigorous defense of the aesthetic from a theorist with a sophisticated appreciation of reading, see Winfried Fluck, Aesthetics and Cultural Studies in Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, ed. Emory Elliott et al. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 79103.

In Defense of Reading: Or, Why Reading Still Matters in A Contextualist Age

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