Armstrong, Paul. in Defense of Reading

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In Defense of Reading: Or, Why Reading Still Matters in a ContextualistAge

Paul B. Armstrong

New Literary History, Volume 42, Number 1, Winter 2011, pp. 87-113(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/nlh.2011.0001

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New Literary History, 2011, 42: 87–113

In Defense of Reading: Or, Why Reading StillMatters in a Contextualist Age

Paul B. Armstrong

R eading is coming back as a legitimate topic of inquiry aftera long period of neglect, but the return of reading will not becomplete until it comes to terms with the contextualist consensus

that consigned reading to the sidelines. 1 Suspicion of the lived experi-ence of reading is a consequence of the rhetorical success of a few keyarguments that together have dened a critical landscape dominatedby various forms of contextualism. Although important differences inmethodology and objects of study remain, there is widespread agree-ment 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 —The “autonomous, unied subject” has been replaced by a notion of theself as socially constructed, bodily situated, and riven by power and desire.

These positions are held with varying degrees of theoretical renement,but even if they are not explicitly articulated, they constitute an environ-ment that would seem inherently hostile to descriptions of individualexperiences of reading. Attention is focused instead on various contexts

(cultural, social, political, historical) that are thought to be responsiblefor the generation of meaning and the constitution of the self. Wherethe contextualist consensus prevails, reading is tacitly or explicitly re-garded as an epiphenomenon, inasmuch as the real locus of meaningcreation is elsewhere. This is no doubt one reason why, despite a returnof interest in reading, a concern with the phenomenology of receptionis still widely regarded as old-fashioned and passé—something that the“reader-response theorists” were interested in three decades ago, butthat has since then been discredited, its fallacies and naïvetés exposed,

as the profession has moved on to other topics.2

The contextualist consensus is so strong that its force is evident evenin areas like the history of the book or the turn to cognitive science

where reading has become a hot topic. The burgeoning eld devoted tothe history of the book claims an interest in reading, for example, but



new literary history88

its primary concerns are typically the history of past reading practices orthe material history of texts. Disagreement exists over whether the livedexperience of reading is an appropriate and worthy object of study. Ina survey of the eld, Leah Price explains that book history “asks howpast readers have made meaning (and therefore, by extension, howothers have read differently from us), but it also asks where the condi-tions of possibility for our own reading come from.” 3 How to bridgethe gap between past and present ways of reading is rarely addressed,however, and Price confesses less interest in “the fraction of any book’slife cycle spent in the hands of readers” than in “the whole spectrumof 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 recentanalysis of the relation between past and present modes of reception inart, architecture, and literature, the bibliographer and textual historianPaul Eggert argues for a “recognition of the role of readers in the workat every stage of its life-cycle.” 5 Only by including the contemporaryexperience of viewers and readers, he argues, can the transmission ofmeaning across historical distance be understood. Nevertheless, despiteEggert’s dissent, reception studies today are predominantly historicist

in orientation, concerned with reconstructing the cultural and politi-cal contexts of past practices of reading, and are consequently moresociological than phenomenological. 6

Cognitive science has also turned attention to reading, but here toothe force of the contextualist consensus is evident in the division thatmarks this eld. On the one hand, much of the most interesting workon literature and cognitive science is historical, comparing (say) howpsychologists in the Romantic or Victorian periods understood con-sciousness with how the novelists and poets dened it. 7 Again, however,

context trumps lived experience, because the question is rarely askedhow reading then relates to reading now. On the other hand, alongsidethe work of the neurohistorians, the other major subeld of cognitiveliterary studies draws paradigms for the reading experience from variousareas of contemporary psychology, such as “theory of mind” (the analysisof our ability to make inferences about what other people are thinkingor feeling) or cognitive processing (how patterns of textual comprehen-sion are related to experimental ndings about how the mind makessense of the world). 8 This work often has very interesting things to sayabout the lived experience of reading, and the leading practitionershave begun to reach out to other areas of literary and cultural studiesto suggest connections to their methods of analysis, but the fact that indoing so they are calling their eld “cognitive cultural studies” is a sign of



89in defense of reading

the power of the contextualist consensus. 9 Whether this bridge buildingsucceeds will depend on answering the questions about consciousness,history, and subjectivity that make contextual cultural criticism skepticalabout locating meaning in the lived experience of reading. An appealto the experimental ndings of cognitive psychology will not sufce.

No matter how these current trends resolve themselves, reading won’t go away. It’s like the “whack-a-mole” game. Suppressed or beatendown in one place, it pops up someplace else. The return of readingis a rediscovery of something that has never really disappeared. That isnot only because common readers continue to read regardless of whathappens in the profession of literary studies. It is also the case that crit-

ics and theorists are readers too, and their work is invariably related totheir 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 ne as to consist in anything buta possible difference of practice.” 10 In literary studies, these “habits” and“practices” have to do with how readers read. Whether or not a critic ortheorist thematizes reading as a topic, the measure of what his or herargument signies—not only its validity, but its very meaning—is how

(or whether) a reader will read differently as a result. Even when criticsor theorists do not explicitly address the experience of reading, theyare trying to shape it by the pragmatic implications of the argumentsthey make. If a contextualist study of a literary state of affairs matters,

we will read texts differently—our habits, practices, and experiences asreaders will change—and that is typically the case with the most excitingcontextualist work. Reading is the elephant in the room, an unavoidablepresence, no matter how we behave.

Rediscovering the lived experience of reading may also have a correc-

tive function to the extent that the contradictions caused by its neglecthave thwarted an understanding of issues that can only be adequatelyaddressed by giving reading its due. Not recognizing the experienceof reading as the hidden ground of our critical and theoretical activitycan create various conundrums, impasses, and dead ends that only areturn to reading can remedy. For example, the current (and by nowlong-standing) dilemma of how to do justice to the aesthetic dimension

without reverting to formalism can only be effectively engaged if theeventfulness of reading, the site of the aesthetic experience (howeverdened), becomes discussable—the 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 forreading’s neglect is not only to show why and how it continues to matter




even for kinds of criticism and theory that have marginalized it but alsoto clear the way for analyses of issues, like the status of the aesthetic,that cannot be adequately thought about if the experience of readingis left out of account.

The good news is that the core assumptions and beliefs that denethe contextualist consensus are not in fact inconsistent with a concernfor the lived experience of reading. As the following analysis tries toshow, the dening attitudes of contextualism need not delegitimate theexperience of reading. Calling attention to the elephant in the roomand asking the question “How does that affect the way I read?” intendsto make the invisible visible. There is nothing in the core beliefs of con-

textualism that should prohibit this and much to be gained by doing so.Perhaps the most important factor in the distrust of reading has beenthe displacement of the subject as the origin of meaning across a widespectrum of interpretive methodologies. A powerful consensus unitestheorists who may agree on little else except that the grounds of mean-ing are always to be sought elsewhere from its apparent source in theconsciousness of the reader or the self-understanding of the speakingor writing subject. This is a beginning assumption of various forms ofcultural studies, historical criticism, and political interpretation that

may differ about where to seek those grounds but that agree about theneed to start the work of analysis by displacing the conscious subjectas the home of meaning and seeking instead to disclose the contexts(whether of race, sex, class, power, etc.) that govern what can be saidand thought. Linguistic and psychological modes of analysis may contestthe privileging of social, political, or historical contexts but neverthe-less also typically agree about the displacement of meaning (shiftingthe operative contexts to the structures of language, its contradictoryaporias, or the vagaries of unconscious desire).

This consensus no doubt reects a general skepticism toward Enlight-enment claims about reason and the subject that is a deep and powerfulaspect of the current intellectual climate. The effect of this consensus onreading has been to discredit the signicance of the moment-to-momentexperiential unfolding of the text. Because the determinants of meaningare thought to be found elsewhere, the initial critical act is to distrust ordisregard the experience of reading and to focus attention on contexts

whose workings are assumed to be directing, controlling, or determiningit even when the reader is unaware of them. The reader’s consciousnessof 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 meaningis sensitive to context, but is not wholly and unequivocally determined




by it. The relation between meaning and context is mutually formativeand inherently circular. Attention to the actual production of meaning(as in the experience of reading) is consequently necessary to under-stand and explicate their interaction. The context of a particular useof a word may determine its meaning, for example, but this use in turndecides the meaning of the context, and the relation between use andcontext is never entirely prescripted or preordained. 12 This circularityis especially evident with those notorious ambiguous sentences wherea shift in the implied context radically alters the understood meaningof a word, as in these amusing headlines: “Milk drinkers are turningto powder,” “Deaf mute gets new hearing in killing,” or “Dealers will

hear car talk at noon.” As these examples show, a word may have dif-ferent, even contradictory meanings depending on how it is employedin different situations (the double meanings of “powder,” “hearing,” or“talk”), and which meaning is attributed to the word will in turn changeone’s understanding of the context (here, the situation implied by eachheadline). The actual event of meaning needs to be analyzed in eachcase in order to determine the relation of use and context.

It may even be that the usage in question goes beyond what previouscontexts had allowed because it has introduced a new, unprecedented

meaning (for example, through a metaphorical twist). A metaphoris a category mistake (classic examples in the literature on metaphorare “the chair plowed through the discussion” or “man is a wolf”) thatgains acceptance as readers realign their expectations about use andcontext to make an anomaly coherent. The creation of new meaning isan especially vivid demonstration of the general rule that the interac-tion between use and context cannot be explained by a reference tocontext alone. New meaning cannot come into the world without theparticipation 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 thatcontexts are potentialities that can be actualized in different, sometimesunpredictable ways. They have open-ended horizons that allow innova-tions that may contest, criticize, or otherwise exceed their limitations.The variability of the context-use relation suggests that neither controlsmeaning on its own. Reading, writing, and other forms of meaning mak-ing cannot be understood in isolation from the situations in which theyoccur, and the referral of critical attention from the event of meaningmaking to its enabling and constraining contexts is a necessary criticalact—but it is not sufcient. Strategies that displace meaning from useto context must return from context to use in order to understand theeffects (and the limits) of the contexts they are interested in. Contextualanalysis is indispensable but inherently incomplete.




Because of this variability, the return from context to its effects inaction will disclose not a predetermined meaning, but rather a conictof interpretations about how the possibilities in any context may beperformed. The displacement of the cogito as the home of meaning istypically associated with a hermeneutics of suspicion. 14 Disclosing thehidden effects of an operative context may indeed reveal distortions,tricks, or disguises that make the act of writing or the experience ofreading mean something other than what it seems to the producer orrecipient. Even if interpreters agree that this is the case, however, severalareas of conict may still divide them, and none can be decided by anappeal to context alone. Interpreters may disagree, for example, about

the sources of these distortions because their hermeneutic frameworksprivilege different contexts, and appealing to their preferred context willonly demonstrate the disagreement, not resolve it. Further, it is neverself-evident how reading should be practiced differently in light of whatthe 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 tothe event of meaning—that is, to the act of comprehending the text, tothe experience of reading. Contesting prevailing habits and practices of

reading by disclosing the fallacy of their self-certainties does not decide byitself 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. Readingis ordinarily a doubled performance of an alien world enacted in myown experience, another way of conguring meaning and relationshipsthat is brought into being by my own acts of comprehension. 15 The actof demystication adds yet another layer of duplication because one’sexperience of meaning creation is doubled with self-consciousness about

deceptions and duplicities that need to be interrogated even as they oc-cur. Does this doubling cripple or even paralyze the reader’s quest formeaning by preventing congurative patterns from stabilizing? Or canit be assimilated into the activity of reading in ways that interestinglycomplicate and even energize it, making it more playful, unpredictable,and open-ended? If so, how, and to what purposes? These are all ques-tions about the practice of reading that cannot be answered withoutinterrogating and actively experimenting with its lived possibilities.

It is not necessarily the case, however, that displacing meaning re-quires a hermeneutics of unmasking. The cogito’s hold over meaningmay be shaken and dislodged not because it is self-deceived but becausesemantic innovations challenge, upset, and overturn preexisting habitsof understanding. What Paul Ricoeur calls the “hermeneutics of revela-




tion” may be as much a matter of dislocating the self-assurances andself-centeredness of the subject as is the act of unmasking. Althoughthis notion has been largely forgotten despite the popularity of histerm “hermeneutics of suspicion,” Ricoeur proposed it as a companionconcept—a related but opposed practice of meaning making. Equallya matter of doubling displacement, a “revelatory” hermeneutics locatesmeaning not “behind” but “beyond” a given state of affairs, in thefuture developments that retrospectively disclose its implications. 16 Ifthe meaning of a text transcends or contests the limits of the contextin question (as in the case of the invention of a novel way of makingsense), then the consequence of contextualization might be to reveal

not the text’s duplicities but its divergence and critical distance fromits beginnings. The consequences for the experience of reading wouldthen be a different kind of displacement—a perhaps invigorating, per-haps upsetting, possibly disorienting shift in the interpreter’s horizonsto accommodate unexpected attitudes and new modes of understand-ing. Here too, however, the displacements called for by a hermeneuticsof revelation are not predetermined. They can only be decided anddisclosed by acts of reading.

The dominance of contextual strategies of interpretation has gone

hand in hand with the establishment of historicism as the prevailingorthodoxy, and here too the reading experience has unfortunately andunnecessarily suffered. Everyone agrees with Fredric Jameson’s legend-ary monition “Always historicize!” even if there is signicant disagree-ment about how to follow it. 17 One might reasonably think that part ofthis debate should be how to understand the historicity of the readingexperience and the relation of the history of reception to other modesof historicization. One reason for the neglect of reading in current criti-cal 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 taintedby essentialism and formalism—ahistorical generalizations that ignorethe contingent particularities of different readers’ aims, interests, andsituations.

A crucial theoretical problem with dismissing reading, however, isthat historical interpretation itself runs the risk of becoming ahistori-cal unless the historicity of reading is integrated into the analysis. Todisregard how texts are received by readers across the horizon betweenpast and present means to privilege textual production. The problemis not only that here too the text-context relation is variable and open-ended, as I have argued, with the question of which context to preferin an explanation of a text’s origination open to dispute (which is why




there are different histories of textual production and why an appealto authorial intention is never decisive in determining meaning). 18 Thefurther complication is that, as Marx famously argued, production isincomplete without consumption, and one of the ways the context oftextual origination (however construed) is open-ended is its orienta-tion toward a future of readers that the author may anticipate but cannever fully predict or control. 19 To reduce meaning to “meaning then”by privileging the contexts governing the moment of production is torob the situation of writing of its historicity by suppressing its futurity.Ignoring a text’s 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 presentmoment, but also across the shifting temporal boundaries of past andfuture. Contextual historical studies that take into account only two ofthose three horizons—the text’s relation to its contemporaneous situ-ation and the traces of the past in its originating circumstances—butthat neglect futurity, the third horizon, are fatally incomplete. They takethe historicity out of history because the indeterminacy of what is tocome signals our particularity and contingency. Asking how “meaningnow” engages “meaning then” across the horizon of a text’s 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 text’s history, and it

is implicitly present even when it is not acknowledged. For one thing,interpretations of historical contexts are themselves participants in thehistory of reception. Even when these interpretations do not thematizethe experience of reading, they are responses to “meaning then” acrossthe “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 thatis formed by previous readers, including the contextualists (to whoseinterpretations a reader may respond, for example, by lling in whatthey lack—for example, in the future this essay imagines, by attendingto the lived experience of reading).

Contemporary contextual interpreters sometimes acknowledge the his-toricity of their assumptions, interests, and methods in order to disclaimthe “presentist” reduction of a text’s pastness to current concerns. Suchan acknowledgment still leaves the text entombed in the past, however,unless the interpreter asks how his or her experiences as a reader enableit to speak across historical distance, not only making its concerns presentbut also challenging contemporary perspectives. A meeting of past andpresent is a truly historical encounter only if it is dynamic, interactive,




and unpredictable. To dismiss reading as universalizing is to exclude the very domain where this encounter happens. The text’s historicity doesnot of course go away—it is included in the very act of exclusion—butopportunities for historical dialogue and inquiry are missed. For all ofthese reasons, it is not only odd but also wrongheaded to practice his-torical criticism by turning away from the site where past and presentmeet in the lived (and for that reason contingent, particular, and fullyhistorical) experience of reading.

The suspicion that appeals to “the reader” are ahistorical and essential-ist reects a general and well-taken skepticism about the autonomy ofthe subject. Here again, however, the arguments against autonomy are

not necessarily reasons to neglect reading but instead suggest why andhow it matters. Across a broad theoretical spectrum, the displacementof the cogito has been accompanied by a recognition that subjectivityis not “unied” but is divided, split, and not identical with itself. Noundergraduate leaves a theory class these days without having his or herconventional assumptions about “autonomous individuality” challengedby the notion that the subject is constructed by being “hailed” or “inter-pellated” to preexisting roles that constitute the “subject positions” thatdene permissible racial, sexual, and gender identities according to the

norms of prevailing discourses, the economic structures of society, andthe strictures of dominant institutions. 21 One implication of this lessonis that reading is not a natural activity (whatever that could mean) andthat the reader’s consciousness is formed by rules, norms, and roles thatone needs to learn in order to become a reader. 22 This is all part of thehistorical positionality of reading. The experience of reading may seemlike a uniquely personal immersion in a world independent of the pres-sures 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 thefull Kantian engagement of one’s faculties, one’s subjectivity is enactingthe potentialities of subject positions that one has learned to inhabitand that may vary socially, culturally, and historically.

Because of the gap between role and performance, however, subjectpositions constrain the production of meaning but do not fully coerceor determine it. 23 This is the space where the experience of readinghappens, in all of its unpredictable dynamism and variability. The per-formance of roles brings about a splitting or doubling that differentiatessubjectivity from the subject positions it enacts. The necessity of playing a role makes reading (like any other norm-governed social activity) adoubled experience of “me” and “not me” in which the self is paradoxi-




cally present to itself only by acting as another. 24 This paradox—that onecan become oneself only by playing oneself as another—may be bothalienating and enabling. The contradiction here means that the self’sillusion of autonomy is always a deception, but the doubling betweenone’s self and the roles through and in which the self is performed makespossible variations, transformations, and innovations that would be im-possible either if the self were unied and monolithic or if the roles to

which one is hailed were all controlling. Because the roles one is calledon to adopt in order to become a reader must be enacted to come intoforce, their meaning may vary according to how they are played. Thisis also why the experience of reading can be surprising, pleasurable, or

deeply upsetting, as it could not be if it were unied 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 notcompletely control. Reading is a contradictory, paradoxical experiencethrough which we deploy our agency in ways that can reveal our lackof autonomy even as we may simultaneously feel a liberating, playfulexpansion of our meaning-making powers.

This doubling means that there is room for maneuver and variationeven between different players who follow the same rules and seek to

stay within dened boundaries. The split between the role and its en-actment also makes possible unpredictable negations, innovations, andtransgressions that the norms and rules themselves cannot completelydetermine or control. How reading will perform the roles that constituteavailable possibilities of subject constitution is a question that cannot beanswered in advance, without exploring, testing, and challenging theroom for play that a text and its contexts leave open. Different texts,different ways of reading, and the different contexts affecting themmay increase or decrease the space of doubling and negation in which

meaning can move. The particular contingencies of these interactionscannot be decided before they are performed, and that is why attendingto how they are staged in the experience of reading is necessary and

worthwhile. The performative dimension of subject creation means thatreading should not be ignored because it is where these possibilitiesare enacted.

The metaphor of performance raises the question of power. The so-cial, institutional construction of the embodied subject through varioustechnologies of what has come to be called “biopolitics” may seem moreinsidious, invisible, and anonymous than the playfulness of theatricalenactments of roles can fully encompass. The theoretical problem here,however, is whether and how power can circulate and form the subjectexcept through lived, corporeal experiences characterized by doublings,




displacements, and splittings of a sort that introduce the possibilityof resistance, evasion, and innovation into the very space of coercionand constraint. 25 Only as the body is lived and experienced can it betrained and molded. Habits require enactment in order to exercise theirtyranny, and a body can only be disciplined and formed through livedexperiences of suffering, constraint, and cultivation. The body both isand is not the repeated patterns of behavior through which it becomesitself, and this doubleness is necessary for power to act both coercivelyand 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 casethat a concern with reading is purely or primarily cognitive. 27 The emo-tions of “pity” and “terror” that Aristole invokes in his theory of catharsisare physical, embodied experiences, as is the Dionysian abandon thatmakes Plato fear that poets and their audiences are not in their rightminds (but that Nietzsche celebrates in his genealogy of the origins oftragedy). The internal doubleness of embodied experiences opens upthe possibility that they can be repeated and manipulated. Only because

pity, fear, and intoxication are doubled phenomena whereby one bothis and is not the corporeal experience through and in which one isliving—I “am” and “am not” the emotion or sensation that overwhelmsor transports me—can they be restaged in aesthetic form. The aestheticexperience reenacts the distance internal to suffering, constraint, ortransport that makes them a doubling of the self as another.

Aesthetic reenactment can be used for contradictory purposes, eitherforming and producing the body through the habitual repetition ofattitudes, behaviors, or feelings, or opening a space for criticism, resis-

tance, and even transcendence because the staging of these experiencesis not identical with the immediacy of life. Repetition has two faces,either inculcating habits through reiterations that establish and x cor-poreal patterns, or introducing negativity, distance, and the possibilityof play into the relation between lived experience and its reenactment.Because of this doubleness, the corporeal effects of reading cannot bedetermined in advance. Reading can be an activity that physically trainsand produces the self—or, alternatively, that stages embodied experi-ences in a potentially subversive or otherwise transformative mannerthat may exceed everyday normative constraints (as, for example, in thetransports of the sublime). The staging of emotions and bodily experi-ences in the reception of texts may serve as a vehicle for training andconstraining the subject by putting it through its paces, or it may expose




the normative workings of “biopower” and provide at least momentaryexperiences of ways of being that transcend its limitations. It is becausereading operates within rather than outside the purview of power andrepetition that it allows power to be staged in particular ways, whetherfor coercive or emancipatory purposes. Only by examining how poweris enacted in reading can the involvement of literature in the restrictive

work of training and discipline be understood just as, conversely, onlythere can we glimpse the capacity of the aesthetic experience to stageand play with power in a way that may go beyond coercion and norma-tive determination.

The notion that reading is a political activity runs counter to the com-

monly held view that reader-response theory is captive to the ideologyof individualism. 28 To focus on the reader’s experience might seem tofetishize consciousness and consumption in ways that Marxist critiqueshave thoroughly discredited. Excluding reading on these grounds iscontradictory 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 doso 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 andsocialize it. If it is a mistake to construe reading as the asocial, privateexperience of an isolated individual, it is also an error to regard read-ing as a phantom or to view reading theory as necessarily a symptom ofconsumer capitalism.

There is no inherent contradiction between Marxist aesthetics and aconcern for reception, as Marx himself recognized in the well-knownpassage where he asks why Greek art and Shakespeare “still give us aes-

thetic pleasure and are in certain respects regarded as a standard andunattainable ideal,” even though the material conditions in which they

were produced no longer exist. The answer, he argues, is not to appealto universal aesthetic standards but to analyze the historical relationsbetween the conditions of production and the situation of reception:“The difculty lies only in the general formulation of these contradic-tions. As soon as they are reduced to specic questions they are alreadyexplained.” 29 This sweeping assertion may underestimate the difcultyof sorting out the mediating factors between base and superstructurethat complicate the relations between various historical domains, but themethodological injunction to solve an aesthetic problem by examiningthe historical relations between production and consumption recognizesthe historical variability of the reading experience as a legitimate, even




necessary area of inquiry. Indeed, some of the most interesting andimportant disputes within Marxist aesthetics have to do with how tounderstand the history of reception and the experience of the reader. 30 Marxism’s complex debates about the politics of reception are not surpris-ing because, as Marx declared in the third of his “Theses on Feuerbach,”a theory of social change requires that “the educator must himself beeducated” (“ der Erzieher muss selbst erzogen werden ”). Whether and howthe duplication of consciousness staged by reading might promote atransformative self-consciousness is consequently an important question.

The Marxist critique of ideology is, however, a prominent exemplarof the hermeneutics of unmasking that seems suspicious on principle

of descriptive accounts of reading. Across a variety of methodologicaldomains, whether inspired by Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, or Foucault, thesuspicion that truth is hidden and must be unmasked has contributedto discrediting the phenomenology of reading by making attempts todescribe aesthetic experiences seem epistemologically naïve and politi-cally gullible. Here again, however, the exclusion of reading dependson and leaves a space for what it banishes. As I have already suggested,to assume that meaning lies behind the surface presented by the textor beneath the reader’s conscious awareness is to view meaning as a

doubled phenomenon; otherwise the duplicity of disguised, displacedmeaning would not be possible. This doubleness allows differentialresponses, some more and others less under the sway of the text’s hid-den designs and desires, or more or less keyed into its secrets or awareof its illusions. These very differences are what make a hermeneutics ofunmasking possible in the rst place—and useful insofar as the exerciseof suspicion may lead the reader to construe a text otherwise than howit presents itself. A purely trusting description of experience may benaïve 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 provocationfor unmasking but also its destination. Suspecting the text’s duplicities

would not be useful or important if the purpose were not to restruc-ture the relation of text and reader in ways other than how it would beenacted without such interventions. The fact that readers contribute totheir own manipulation in the text-reader interaction is what gives thehermeneutics of unmasking the possibility of altering the terms of theexchange. Because they themselves enact their mystication and alien-ation, they can change it. This kind of duplication of consciousness is

what suspicious interpretation aims to bring about—a recognition ofhow one is producing one’s own estrangement. The doubleness of false




consciousness can then be exposed and overturned by restructuring thedoubled relations between “me” and “not me” in reading. If suspiciousinterpretation can facilitate this transformation, that is because changeitself is a phenomenon of doubling.

Unmasking hidden meaning is a contest for mastery in the rhetoricalpower balance between text and reader. As some especially canny criticshave recognized, however, the effort to unmask a text’s drive for masterycan itself become what it is suspicious of. Contesting mastery can bea way of seeking and asserting mastery. Resisting dominance can be astrategy of domination. 31 Guided by an anticipatory understanding ofthe text’s likely secrets and deceptions, suspicious interpreters may know

in advance the hidden meanings they will disclose. Resisting the text’sstructuration of the “me”/“not me” gap consequently runs the risk ofcollapsing it if the doubleness of reading is replaced by a single-mindedinsistence on the interpreter’s preexisting knowledge of its secrets andillusions. The danger of the drive to mastery of suspicious interpretationis that it may transform the to-and-fro exchange between text and readerinto a one-way display of power and authority. How to avoid this danger

without falling back into naïveté is not something one can learn from arulebook. It entails a paradoxical imperative—to be suspicious of one’s

own suspicions without abandoning them—that cannot be reduced toa recipe but that can only be practiced, and the experience of readingis once again where this will happen (or fail to).

A particular mode of suspicion often implies a correlative mode ofrevelation, and reading is the arena where this is played out. Marxistdemystication of the class interests or economic determinants behinda particular ideological formation or cultural phenomenon operatesaccording to a different notion of the hidden, for example, than a Nie-tzschean genealogy of the power relations masked by moral values or

norms of behavior, and these differences in turn imply divergent visionsof emancipation and transformation (the development of revolutionaryclass consciousness or the liberation of “vital instincts” and the will-to-power) that are the telos of their hermeneutic archeologies. 32 A purelynegative mode of unmasking—a nihilistic destruction of illusions that itrefuses to replace with alternative beliefs—is the “empty set” case here.The argument of such skeptics may be that visions of emancipationthemselves serve coercion (“There is subversion, no end of subversion,only not for us,” in the oft-quoted New Historicist line), or that the veryinteractions between text and reader which literature performs solidifysocial consent. 33 Even for such extreme skepticism, however, the questionis how the behind relates to the beyond —that is, whether the unmaskingof a meaning behind is in the service of revealing other meanings beyond






out, it was perhaps only logical to turn toward cultural and historicalanalyses where there were concrete, specic things to study about thesocial construction of meaning.

Rethinking the experience of reading as a doubled performative inter-action—a dynamic, mutually constituting relation where the encounteris shaped by both sides—is a way of getting beyond the “subject-object”standoff in which the alternatives of “making” and “nding” face off acrossan unbridgeable divide. The return to lived experience I am advocatingrecognizes that reading is simultaneously both subjective and objective,and that it appears more one or the other only as a particular aspect ofexperience is foregrounded for examination. 36 This pragmatic recogni-

tion of the duality of reading leaves open a variety of questions: Whatimplications 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 experienceone is having is not purely one’s own? Unlike the impossible question of

whether textual meaning is “made” or “found,” these are all issues thatcan be investigated, analyzed, and discussed in the history of reception,the conict of interpretations, and the experience of reading (even ifagreement may not always result).

What would the return to reading that I am advocating actually looklike? The answer will depend on the presuppositions and interests thatreaders bring to the event of reading, and so a “one size ts all” responseto this question is neither possible nor desirable. With this caveat, how-ever, let me offer a brief example from my own critical practice thatmay illustrate how and why attention to the lived vicissitudes of readingmay be useful. The history of the reception of Joseph Conrad’s novellaHeart of Darkness has been notoriously divided over whether to regard itas a daring attack on imperialism or a reactionary purveyor of colonial

and racial stereotypes. 37 Chinua Achebe memorably calls Conrad “abloody racist,” but James Clifford praises him as an exemplary ethnog-rapher who “truthfully juxtaposes different truths.” 38 Edward Said nds“two visions” at odds in Conrad’s novella: “As a creature of his time,Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom, despite his severecritique of the imperialism that enslaved them,” and this is his “tragiclimitation.” 39 If Conrad is indeed “a creature of his time,” however, weshould not lament as “tragic” what may now seem like “limitations” bymeasuring him against an ahistorical, utopian standard that Said’s ownpowerful arguments about the historical worldliness of texts wouldquestion. Rather, by focusing on the experience of reading as a scene

where the horizons of past and present meet, my model suggests thatreaders should regard the contradictions in his text as an attempt to




point beyond a situation it would be unreasonable to expect him to fullytranscend. These contradictions can then be understood as evidence ofa strategy of transforming dilemmas Conrad cannot see his way clearto resolving (no doubt because of the limitations of his historical situ-ation) into provocations to future readers to struggle with them andperhaps do a better job than he could. In this way, the ambiguities ofhis text become a means of speaking across historical distance and thecontradictions of the reading experience can be seen as an incitementto critical self-consciousness rather than as a problem to be lamented,ignored, or explained away.

Conrad’s chief instrument in this strategy is his narrator Marlow,

whose contradictory responses to Africa and Africans are both racistand enlightened, imperialist and anti-imperialist, reactionary and pro-gressive, in a way that might seem hopelessly confused if it were not astrategy for challenging future readers to imagine possibilities that wereinconceivable at the time of writing (in 1898, at the zenith of empireand the “scramble for Africa”). For example, Marlow complains aboutthe injustice of the white imperialist’s disregard of the humanity of

Africans—only himself to commit the stereotyping he unmasks. Seeinga chaingang of imprisoned Africans, he remarks: “These men could by

no stretch of imagination be called enemies. They were called criminalsand the outraged law . . . had come to them, an insoluble mystery fromthe sea. . . . They passed me within six inches, without a glance, withthat complete, deathlike indifference of unhappy savages” (16). Marlowchallenges the inhumanity of imperialism’s racist labels by invoking anotion of the “primitive” (the death-in-life of the “unhappy savage”) thatis just as much a Eurocentric stereotype as the labels he unmasks. Whenhe comes upon a grove where the sick and exhausted prisoners are dy-ing, he thinks: “They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they

were nothing earthly now”—but then he says of one victim: “The manseemed young—almost a boy—but you know with them it’s hard to tell”(17). After recognizing the humanity of the dying, he commits a classicact of racist othering. Throughout Heart of Darkness , Marlow commits the

very mistakes he warns the reader against, as if he can only recognizethe limits and inadequacy of his categories but cannot get beyond themand so is trapped in the very circle of misunderstanding he laments.

What is the reader to do with contradictions like these? One wayof reducing ambiguity is to focus on only one of its two poles, to theexclusion of the other, as readers have done in lambasting Conrad’sracism or praising his anti-imperialism. But another, more complicatedand productive way of engaging the doubled experience of reading atext that employs the very epistemological categories it rejects is to ask




about the sources and implications of the bewilderment to which thiscontradiction gives rise, using Marlow against himself to point beyondlimitations that Conrad could recognize but that he, given the restrictionsof his particular historical position, could not imagine otherwise thanhe skeptically saw them to be. Marlow’s contradictions then become achallenge to the reader to imagine conditions of reciprocity and dialoguebetween Europeans and Africans that would have been inconceivablein Conrad’s time, as much as Marlow’s acknowledgment of the error ofdenying full human recognition to Africans (coupled with his own per-sonal failure to do so) calls for a mutuality he cannot realize. Conrad’srefusal (or inability) to offer a materialized imagining of such an other

world is a sign of his historical situation, even as the contradictions inMarlow’s encounters with Africans represent a provocation to the futureof readers—a future dimly but powerfully imaginable across Conrad’sact of writing—to engage those dilemmas with whatever mixture ofskepticism and hope their differing circumstances, aspirations, andfrustrations might allow. 40

This example suggests a couple of methodological issues raised by areturn to the question of reading. To begin with, which “readers” doesmy hypothetical analysis of how to read Heart of Darkness refer to? It is

clearly both a descriptive and prescriptive analysis—an account of how,in the history of reception, readers have responded to this bafing text,an investigation of textual contradictions which might provoke a bewil-dered response, and a proposal for how to engage these complicationsproductively by transforming the doubled experience of reading the textinto an occasion for epistemological and historical self-consciousness.This contradiction between description and prescription in the analysisof reading is necessary and even useful, however, inasmuch as reading isa learned activity, and the best readers never stop learning how to read

their entire lives long. One learns how to read by sharing ideas withother readers about how to respond to various problems and possibilitiesopened up by our experiences with texts. Describing how one has read,aligning this experience with the reports of other readers, and offeringone’s own prescriptions for reading better (not knowing whether otherreaders will accept them or not) is one way to go about this.

Rather than apologizing for our status as elite academic readers, wepaid professionals in the discipline of literary studies should (I think)embrace our pedagogical role as teachers of reading. The most inter-esting and inuential critics, whether contextual or formalist (or of

whatever orientation), have pragmatic value to the world of readersby virtue of the new ways of reading their descriptive and prescriptiveperformances open up. This need not entail a disparagement of the




“common reader.” It suggests, rather, the common enterprise in whichall readers participate. In the classroom, I regularly ask my students toreport their experiences of bafement, confusion, and delight and thento work together to build new and better ways of reading out of thoseexperiences. Don’t deny your experience, I tell them, or think that othershave secrets you don’t about what a text means, but recognize that youcan only extend your capacities and options as a reader by beginning

with whatever your experiences happen to be and then learning fromothers how to revise, complicate, and extend them.

Reading is what Martin Heidegger calls “ jemeinig ”—“always 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 others—indeed, you willonly learn to read if you do pay attention to what others can teach

you—and reading is a social activity through and through, but as a livedexperience of meaning derived from a particular, contingent encounter

with a text, only you can do this for and to yourself. This egalitarianquality of reading is not the same, however, as making the communityof common readers the standard for how to understand reading. Thatis sometimes the assumption of sociological surveys that are intended

to disclose the “truth” of how readers read. The “ Jemeinigkeit ” of read-ing will always escape such surveys. So will the prescriptive dimensionof reading as something we learn to do from readers who, for whateverreason, we think do this better than we do and so have something toteach us (who these expert readers are, and why their ways of readingare worth emulating are, however, matters open to dispute in the demo-cratic, pluralistic universe of reading).

A return to the experience of reading as a doubled performativeinteraction may also help resolve certain impasses that are otherwise

destined to defy understanding. One of these, as I suggested earlier, isthe question of form and history. For almost as long as historical andcultural studies have been the dominant modes of literary study, therehas been a countervailing concern (even among socially and politicallyminded critics) that the formal characteristics of texts had been lost sightof.42 Can one attend to the social and historical determinants of texts

without neglecting form? Does an analysis of a text’s formal structuresexclude attention to its historical, social, and political contexts? Are for-malism and historicism mutually exclusive poles that the pendulum ofliterary studies is destined to swing between, or can some way be foundto accommodate their seemingly conicting claims?

These are not new questions, and the fact that the form-history op-position keeps recurring may make it seem like an intractable divide.




The odd thing, however, is that these poles are not separated in the ex-perience of reading. The lived experience of the otherness of a literary

work—its challenge as well as its appeal—is both formal and historicalin ways that are difcult if not impossible to disentangle. The past isonly available through forms that transmit it, and reading form is anhistorical experience where the horizons of past and present meet. Thechallenge of understanding an intriguing, not immediately transparenttext is in part a matter of how it is made (its forms), and decipheringits meanings may require a reader to learn unfamiliar, perhaps no lon-ger current (which is to say, historically distant) conventions of variouskinds. Even in its formal dimensions, this alterity is evidence of a work’s

historicity. If the experience of reading provides access to worlds that nolonger exist except in the traces they have left behind, then the formal work of deciphering those signs is an historically positioned experienceof otherness speaking across historical horizons. In all of these ways,reading form is the very means by which we understand the historicalevidence that a text offers of a past society and culture.

Like the subject-object split, the divide between form and history isan articial separation that arises because the experiences on whichthese 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 allowconicting interpretations. But whether to be either “formalist” or“historicist” is not a useful or even tenable alternative because, in theexperience of reading, one is necessarily both. This is one reason whydebates between formalism and historicism often seem pointless andunenlightening. The genuinely debatable, potentially productive issue ishow to stage the interaction of form and history in the doubled perfor-mative interaction where they meet in reading. Different conceptions of

form and history can structure this interaction in different ways. But itis always an encounter that has both formal and historical dimensions,an experience where form manifests itself historically and history takesshape in particular forms. Returning to the experience of reading maybe useful in bypassing fruitless standoffs and instead directing attentiontoward particular, debatable analyses of the consequences of staging thisencounter in different ways, not in the expectation that a right answeror a consensus will emerge, but so that the reasons for disagreementand their implications for reading may become clear.

The question of how to make room for the “aesthetic” also requiresa return to reading. 43 How to conceive of the aesthetic is an essentiallycontestable question that is not susceptible to a single, unequivocalresolution. That is one reason why the aesthetic is an historical phenom-




enon. No matter how the aesthetic is understood—whether as Kantiancontemplative disinterestedness or disruptive Shklovskyian dehabitu-alization, as the “still moment” of New Critical organic totalization orthe disquieting aporias of deconstruction, as the classical realization ofideal models or the Romantic transgression of traditional norms, and soon—in every case the disputes about how to conceptualize the aestheticare 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 attitudesof understanding make possible different aesthetic experiences, even

as different texts put readers through experiences that call on them tocongure the “aesthetic” in different ways. The to-and-fro interaction oftext and reader constitutes the aesthetic in a variable, mutually deter-mining manner, and this is why new conceptions of the aesthetic mayarise either from the introduction of new methods of interpretation orfrom artistic innovations that confront readers with new hermeneuticchallenges. The question of what the aesthetic is in itself is not answer-able. To pose the question in this manner reies and essentializes theaesthetic by divorcing it from the historical experience of reading. What

can be understood about the aesthetic is its variability over the historyof reception and across the conict of interpretations, and this requiresattention to the experience of readers reading, which is where thesedifferences are enacted.

A return to reading may also clarify the disciplinary purposes of thelettered humanities. One of the things that would be lost if English orComparative Literature departments merged with history, sociology,or anthropology is a focus on reading as a matter of interest in and ofitself. Social scientists read, but they typically regard reading at best as

a means to other investigatory ends. For the most part they distrust itas a mode of knowledge inferior to quantitative methods. Asking whatit matters how we read is not a question that others in the academy areclamoring to own. It won’t get asked unless we in the lettered humani-ties insist on its importance. Teaching students how to be attentive toreading—and why that matters—is something the experiences andtraining of humanities faculty have uniquely equipped them to do. Ourskills as rigorous, self-conscious, creative, skeptical, inquisitive readersand our understanding of the delights and the vagaries of reading arechief among our entitlements to disciplinary authority. Whatever else wehappen to know about history, culture, or society that is not understoodmore broadly, deeply, and precisely by the social scientists is a result ofour knowledge about how to read. Our work as scholars and teachers




matters because reading matters, and we disregard reading at the riskof jeopardizing our claim to be heard about history, culture, politics,and other issues about which we can speak with authority only becauseof 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 tothe presuppositions and interests that guide their interpretive activity.

We also know that forms matter—that experiences we have in readingare shaped by the ways texts are made and that these elusive but tan-gible experiences (of irony, implication, indirection, and so on) are animportant (sometimes the most important) aspect of their meaning. To

rediscover reading is not to go back to a foundation on which consensuscan be built about how to read or how forms mean. Rather, it directsattention to the different experiences of readers reading that give riseto conicting interpretations and through which history speaks in formsthat transmit ever-new and sometimes surprising messages. Talking about

what we experience in reading would begin to describe the shape andsize of the elephant in the room—and a curiously various and change-able beast it will turn out to be.

Brown University

NOTES

1 Important signs of reading’s comeback can be seen in such elds as book history,cognitive literary studies, the new affective criticism, and reception studies. I briey discussthe rst two of these elds below. A ne example of the study of affect is Suzanne Keen,

Empathy and the Novel (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007). James L. Machor and PhilipGoldstein have edited two good surveys of reception study: Reception Study: From LiteraryTheory to Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 2001), and New Directions in American Recep- tion Study (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008). Important individual voices calling for areturn 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. ofChicago 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, LiteraryIntention, Literary Interpretation, and Readers (Peterborough: Broadview, 2009).2 A crucial moment in the shift away from phenomenological study of the readingexperience was Stanley Fish’s attack on Wolfgang Iser for epistemological naïveté in as-suming the stable, objective existence of an “unwritten text” with “gaps” that the readerlls in, whereas a more savvy theorist would recognize that the “text itself” is a variablesocial construction (see “Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser,” Diacritics 11, no. 1 [1981]:

2–13, and Iser’s response, “Talk Like Whales,” Diacritics 11, no. 3 [1981]: 82–87). As BrookThomas points out in a perceptive analysis of this exchange, Fish’s charges misrepresentIser’s position (see his important essay “Restaging the Reception of Iser’s Early Work,”New Literary History 31, no. 1 (2000): 13–43). Fish’s view, though erroneous, prevailed.3 Leah Price, “Reading: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 7 (2004): 318.




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 andbook historians of attending to the reading experience, see Peter Shillingsburg, ResistingTexts: Authority and Submission in Constructions of Meaning (Ann Arbor: Univ. of MichiganPress, 1997).6 For evidence of this trend, see The History of Reading , ed. Shafquat Towheed, RosalindCrone, and Katie Halsey (New York: Routledge, 2011). Although this interesting and usefulcollection of studies of reading includes seminal essays by Hans Robert Jauss, WolfgangIser, and Stanley Fish on the reading experience, its entries are otherwise devoted tohistorical and sociological studies of reading (its section on “Individual Readers” givesexamples from the sixteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries).7 For examples of the best work of this kind, see Alan Richardson, British Romanticismand 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 Eliot’sFiction to James Sully’s Psychology,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 4 (2009): 615–35.8 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: OhioState Univ. Press, 2006) and Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition,Culture, Narrative (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2008). Although his emphasisis still ultimately historical, Alan Richardson attempts to think across the divide betweenneurohistory 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 Hop-kins Univ. Press, 2010). Perhaps because of the stigma that unfortunately still attachesto phenomenological reader-response theory, Jauss and Iser are rarely mentioned in the

work of the new cognitive critics, despite many potential connections between hermeneu-tic phenomenology (including the work of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur) and thetheories of cognitive science. Palmer’s notion of “ctional minds,” for example, recallsphenomenology’s conception of reading as a paradoxical doubling of the “real me” of thereader and the “alien me” of the text’s intentionality as I think the thoughts of another.Zunshine’s “strange concepts” invoke the reader’s expectations in order to question his orher underlying assumptions and limitations in ways that echo phenomenological analyses ofhow reading plays with fundamental hermeneutic and epistemological processes. Althoughinteresting work in “neurophenomenology” is now making connections between Husserl’sanalyses of consciousness and experimental neuroscience, similar dialogue in literary studyhas yet to begin. See Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology andNeuroscience , 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 Writ- ings 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): 195–219. I will return to this problembelow, along with other areas where the neglect of reading has hampered critical andtheoretical inquiry.12 These arguments about the interdependence of use and context are well-known. Whatis not well understood, however, is that this interdependence requires that contextualismreturn to the experience of reading in order to explicate the implications of its analysesof the situational determinants of meaning making. For a lucid recent analysis of the




mutual determination of use and context and its relevance for literary studies, see AustinE. Quigley, Theoretical Inquiry: Language, Linguistics, and Literature (New Haven, CT: YaleUniv. Press, 2004). Also see Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” Glyph 1(1977):

172–97.13 See Paul Ricoeur, “Structure, Word, Event” (trans. Robert Sweeney) in The Conict ofInterpretations , ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, IL.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1974), 79–96, andThe Rule of Metaphor , trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto, 1979). Also see thechapter entitled “The Cognitive Powers of Metaphor” in my Conicting Readings: Varietyand Validity in Interpretation (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1990), 67–88.14 On the challenge posed to “the Cartesian stronghold” by the “three masters” of “theschool of suspicion”—Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—see Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy:An Essay on Interpretation , trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1970),especially 32–36 and 418–58.15 On the kinds of “doubling” entailed in reading, see Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Read- ing: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), especially107–34 and 163–70; “The Play of the Text” in Prospecting: From Reader Response to LiteraryAnthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989), 249–61; and “Text Play” in The

Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ.Press, 1993), 247–80. On the model of reading informing this essay, see also my Play andthe Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press,2005).16 See Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy , especially 459–93. Ricoeur’s example is G. W. F.Hegel’s notion of transcendence ( Aufhebung ): “In the Hegelian phenomenology, eachform or gure 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 interpreter’s contemporary horizons,in future developments yet unknown—which is why, in Søren Kierkegaard’s memorablephrase, “we live forwards but understand backwards.” Two important recent arguments forthe importance of recovering alternatives to the “hermeneutics of suspicion” are Felski,Uses of Literature , 1–22, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and ReparativeReading, or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You,” in Touching

Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2003), 124–51. 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 textcontinues to provoke, see the recent special issue of Representations 108, no. 1 (2009), editedby Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, which collects essays presented at an anniversaryconference in Jameson’s honor. The question animating the conference, according to theeditors, was whether the mode of “symptomatic reading” Jameson promoted had drivenout practices of “surface reading” that deserve reconsideration (see “Surface Reading: AnIntroduction,” 1–21). Ricoeur is nowhere mentioned in this discussion, but the unfortunateimplication of superciality connoted by “surface reading” could be avoided by acceptinghis proposal to understand hermeneutics of “suspicion” and “revelation” as opposed butcomplementary alternatives tied to conicting conceptions of meaning as “behind” or“beyond.” Whether these alternatives are mutually exclusive or (as Ricoeur hopes) canbe reconciled is, of course, a central question about the conict of interpretations. SeeRicoeur’s book by this title, cited above, and my Conicting Readings .18 See the chapter “History, Epistemology, and the Example of The Turn of the Screw ” inConicting Readings , 89–108.19 See Marx, “Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy” (1857) in The GermanIdeology , ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 124–51. See alsoHans-Georg Gadamer’s argument that “not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a




text goes beyond its author,” because “we understand in a different way, if we understandat all” ( Truth and Method , 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall[New York: Continuum, 1993], 296, 297).

20 See Gadamer’s analysis of the “fusion of horizons” in understanding in Truth andMethod , 300–7. Also see Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception , trans. TimothyBahti (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’ onlycomes into being through being called, named, interpellated, to use the Althusserianterm, and this discursive constitution takes place prior to the ‘I’” ( Bodies that Matter: Onthe Discursive Limits of “Sex” [New York: Routledge, 1993], 225).22 This truism was not always as obvious as it may seem now. See Cleanth Brooks’s enor-mously inuential demonstration of the principles of the New Criticism, The Well WroughtUrn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1947), wherehe claims that reading is a “natural” act because “poetry is a ‘natural’ activity, one of thefundamental human activities, and not an esoteric one” (x).23 For an illuminating exploration of this variability and the revisions and reversals itenables, see Butler’s analysis of the performativity of “queer” identity in “Critically Queer,”Bodies That Matter , 223–42. See also Wolfgang Iser, “Representation: A Performative Act”in Prospecting , 236–48, and “Mimesis and Performance” in The Fictive and the Imaginary ,281–96.24 See Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary , 79–86 and 247–80. Citing Helmuth Plessner’sanalysis of the “gap” between the role and the role-player that gives human being a “ Dop-

pelgänger ” structure, Iser argues that “Being oneself therefore means being able to double

oneself” (81), and that reading “stages” an analogous duplication that has the capacityto reveal, explore, and regure this duality. This aspect of Iser’s late work explicates thedoubleness of the reading experience rst articulated in his classic essay, “The ReadingProcess: A Phenomenological Approach” in The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communciationin Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974), 291–94.

Also see Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another , trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: Univ. of ChicagoPress, 1992).25 For example, see Michel Foucault’s fascinating late interview “The Ethics of theConcern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom” (1984) in Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity andTruth , ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 280–301.26 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Ivan Pavlov’s concept of the “reex” in Structure

of Behavior , trans. Alden L. Fisher (1942; Boston: Beacon, 1962). On the doubleness ofembodied experience, see Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception , trans. Colin Smith(1945; New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), especially 67–199. Also see William

James’s classic chapter on “Habit” in Principles of Psychology (1890; rpt. New York: Dover,1950), 1:104–27.27 For example, see Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000),especially 85–148, and Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: The Aesthetics of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2003), especially 1–36.28 The classic, enormously inuential articulation of this critique is Terry Eagleton,Literary Theory (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983) 54–90.29 Marx,“Critique of Political Economy,” 150.30 To recall only a few well-known examples: The debate between Georg Lukács andBertolt Brecht about the politics of modernism is a disagreement about the consequencesof the disruptive, disorienting experiences induced by antimimetic forms. Walter Benjamin’smuch-discussed claim that technological reproduction reduces the “aura” of original worksof art is controversial, among other reasons, because of the question of the effects on the




audience that may follow from its “withering.” Theodor Adorno’s challenge to the notionthat autonomous art is necessarily conservative is based on arguments about the potentialeffects in the aesthetic experience (including reading) of “negativity.” For a convenient

collection of texts relevant to these debates, see Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, ErnstBloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukács, Aesthetics and Politics , ed. Ronald Taylor (New York: Verso, 1987).31 See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics , trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Con-tinuum, 2004), and Shoshana Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” in Literatureand Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise , ed. Felman (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniv. Press, 1982), 94–207.32 On the “teleological” and “archeological” moments in interpretation, see Ricoeur,

Freud and Philosophy , 459–9333 See Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets” in Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley andLos Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 21–65, and Franco Moretti, “The Soul andthe Harpy” in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (New York:

Verso, 2005), 1–41.34 Among many examples that could be cited, the most important is probably RichardRorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979). Thisconsensus extends broadly over philosophical communities that are otherwise dividedby fundamental disagreements, including phenomenology, pragmatism, and ordinarylanguage philosophy.35 In addition to Brook Thomas’s analysis of the Fish-Iser dispute, cited above, see Win-fried Fluck, “The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s LiteraryTheory,” New Literary History 31, no. 1 (2000): 175–210.

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 onRadical 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 NortonCritical Edition of Heart of Darkness , 4th ed. (New York: Norton, 2006). Subsequent refer-ences will be given parenthetically. The proposal for how to read Heart of Darkness that Iam about to describe is explained more fully in Play and the Politics of Reading , 75-80, andin 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 Clif-ford, 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 essaysof mine that offer practical descriptions of reading experiences governed by my particularpresuppositions and interests: “Two Cheers for Tolerance: E. M. Forster’s Ironic Liberal-ism and the Indirections of Style,” Modernism/Modernity 16, no. 2 (2009): 281–99, and“Repairing Injustice: The Contradictions of Forgiveness and The Ivory Tower ,” Henry JamesReview 30 (2009): 44–54. The purpose of these essays is to describe how difcult ethicaldilemmas 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 mayalso provide practical guidance in negotiating their ambiguities. These are not the onlyinterests and goals that may guide analyses of reading, obviously, but attending to theexperience of reading is especially crucial in any study of the political and moral effects ofliterature 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 Playand the Politics of Reading .




41 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson(1927; New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 67–68, 281–85. Heidegger’s 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 one’ssituation in projecting oneself toward a future whose ultimate horizon is the end of life.Existence consequently abounds in experiences that are irreducibly “one’s own,” and oneof the incomparable miracles of reading is that it allows us to experience for ourselvesthe “ 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 AestheticSubjects , ed. Pamela R. Matthews and David McWhirter (Minneapolis: Univ. of MinnesotaPress, 2003). For a rigorous defense of the aesthetic from a theorist with a sophisticatedappreciation of reading, see Winfried Fluck, “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” in Aestheticsin a Multicultural Age , ed. Emory Elliott et al. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 79–103.

Documents

Armstrong, Paul. in Defense of Reading