The notion that our guilt feelings about reading are somehow a
touchstone or way into implicit ideologies about reading in our
lives and communities is certainly a valuable suggestion.
If guilt is an internalization of shame, and a mode of social
control, then the links to the social and political dimensions of
reading should not be hard to make. There does not seem to me to
be a great distance between feeling guilty about not having read
something that _I_ think I should have read (what are the sources
of such judgments?) and feeling ashamed before my peers that I
have not read something _they/we_ think I should have/would have/
must have read. Embedded in these feelings and the evaluative
judgments they depend on are 'canons' of what should be read, by
whom, by what stage of life or career, and the social control of
opinion and belief that this canonicity grounds. We all know that
strategic use of text-sources is a mode of power, e.g. in
Latour's sense of 'recruiting allies' to our discursive cause or
in Bourdieu's of making 'symbolic profit' in the market, the
political economy of discourses in our community.
So the relevance of such matters as accountability for having
read, or for an interpretation of a text, or of relative power in
determining what the interpretation will be in the community is
also not hard to see. These are 'political' parameters of
different activity contexts for reading practices.
I recently taught a seminar on 'reading comprehension' and listed
three goals: Standard Interpretation (i.e. what passes for a
correct interpretation in the 'relevant' community), Personal
Appropriation (meaning which is useful in a project of the
reader's own), and Critical Analysis (situating the first two,
and any other imaginable interpretations, in relation to one
another and their possible wider social functions).
The first of these would correspond, I suppose, to 'surrender' to
the text, to giving the benefit of the doubt to an author, to
trying to envision the author's view of things ('Author' here as
reader's construct, of course), Lotman's "univocal", etc.. Our
positive ideology says that we gain benefit by seeing through the
eyes of another -- as we do, but we do not always have a choice.
The negative side is that Standard Interpretations, like the
canon of texts, are generally imposed on us by the community, as
an act of power by some members of that community, backed by the
economy of pain. We need, I think, to remain aware of _both_
these dimensions in any analysis. The darkside of community (i.e.
control) may also help us understand the appeal of 'leisure'
reading, as a real and symbolic escape from domination. This is
not to forget the joy of reading, but to see one possible source
of that joy.
The second desirable goal in my list seems to me to be another
sort of response in my own view of things to a similar dilemma:
work vs. leisure, public vs private, accountable to others vs
only to self, dominated vs empowered. When reading is made part
of a personal project it can be part of work, part of public and
eventually accountable activities, but still seem to be
autonomous. We can take even what we _must_ read and somehow
transmute it to our purposes, whether perversely or
constructively (or both). This is an assertion of identity
against the community, which helps the community by creating a
reservoir of adaptive potential for future change, but is still
also implicated in projects of the community as everything we can
imagine must at least partially be.
The third goal or desirable outcome of reading activity is still
another sort of compromise between Self and Society. Whatever the
community asserts or demands implies alternative views and the
possibility of _my_ comparing and evaluating these, and even
articulating such alternatives. This implied space is not
entirely outside the culture of the community; it is something
like a 'zone of proximal development' between what the community
believes now and what its discourse formations allow someone to
believe, between what many individuals typically believe and what
some individuals might propose to believe, between what can be
believed under normal conditions and what it might occur to
someone to believe under extra-normal ones. (I happen to think
that really radical cultural innovation is always the product of
'accident', of unpredictable intersections of unique rather than
typical formations.)
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU