Offering Theory. John Mowitt

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      Of particular pertinence to the task of sacrificing Theory properly is what I have called the chiasmus, that is, the proposition that a Theory of reading is at one and the same time a reading of Theory or, to nudge this toward the motif of offering, that Theory and reading are two words for the “same” gesture. Lest one think that this nudge is utterly without textual warrant, that there is nothing here about sacrifice, about offering, consider not only the context (an address to educators) but even more importantly the following:

      Reading, as we know, is a social object/issue; it is prey to instances of power and morality. […] For my part, I shall formulate the ethical question in the following way: there are dead readings (subject to stereotypes, mental repetitions and sloganizing) and there are living readings (producing an inner text, homogeneous with a virtual writing on the part of the reader). Now, this living reading, during which the subject believes what he reads emotionally while also realizing its unreality, is a split (clivée thus divided and shared) reading. (Barthes 2015, 160)

      Barthes goes on to associate, freely or not, this split with Freud’s account of the “splitting (Spaltung) of the subject (le moi, so the ‘self’ or ‘ego’)” and concludes: “‘living reading’ is a perverse activity and reading is always immoral” (Barthes ibid.).

      Written in 1972 this set of formulations about a Theory of reading/a reading of Theory falls directly between S/Z (1970) and The Pleasure of the Text (1973). It retrieves and complicates the distinction drawn in the former between two types of text, the writable and the readable (“writerly” and “readerly” in the Howard translation), by introducing into the latter a further distinction between the dead and living. Although the touch between the living reading that is homogeneous with a virtual writing and what in S/Z is designated as the “scriptible” is suggestive, I will settle for a more obtuse point. Namely, if reading can be either alive or dead, if it can be perverse, this is because a Theory of reading is obliged to treat it in a way that solicits, that invites, the recognition that we are no longer here talking about literacy, strictly speaking. We are talking about offering, offering as a way to think the practice of separating the living from the dead, of producing the occasion for learning how to “do” Theory by sacrificing it to the reading that Theory becomes.

      Several matters follow from this and since they will figure in the “readings” that follow they call for attention. Perhaps the most urgent of these bears on the matter of what it means to treat reading as an offering of Theory that is theoretical. Derrida has, with his usual abandon, aligned reading and mourning (see The Work of Mourning), and here Barthes, as if channeling Bataille, aligns it with perversion and ultimately immorality. Whether it is best aligned with one or the other is not as pressing as the following question: What makes such formulations seem exorbitant, or what have we misread in reading in failing to recognize the possibility of such alignments? My response has the advantage of being straightforward: We have failed to recognize what reading does, when and where it brings about what it brings about. Reading theorizes in carrying on, struggling to make sense, within the encounter between the text and a possible world. Put differently, what we offer in sacrificing reading to this encounter is Theory, and yes, at a very basic level I wish to underscore the obvious, namely, that if Theory has mattered for however long it has mattered, it is because it grips and deeply rattles the way reading takes place. In a sense, this is the insight that silently animates any list of the sort adjective (“feminist”) or surname (Butlerian) followed by the word “reading.” More than a demonstration, this then is a proposal about offering Theory that sacrifices it properly to the readings it propels and the reading it is, the reading by which Theory became what it is. In short, to offer Theory is to offer (its) reading, neither close nor distant, slow nor fast, but reading. Implacably, this pushes us toward what I take to be the opening generated by sacrificing Theory properly, namely, what Barthes sought to delimit, in another context, through the test of commutation, or in my more pedestrian jargon, the when and the where of Theory. When does the reading that theorizes start and stop? Where does this take place?

      These evocations of genealogy and geography are, I will propose, helpful ways to think through one of the more generatively enigmatic formulations in Barthes’s corpus. It derives from the section named “Interpretation” in S/Z and reads (in my translation): “To interpret a text is not to give it a (more or less grounded, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to discern of what plural it is made” (Barthes 1974, 5). Immediately dashing the hopes of my students who want to read here license for any interpretation whatever, Barthes pressures the “plural” in ways that matter to the chiasmus of reading and Theory. Specifically, the plural designates a generative potentiality in the gesture of reading that enables theories of the typological sort to emerge. Or, to retrieve a few additional formulations from “For a Theory of Reading”:

      What goes on in the total act of reading? Where does reading begin? How far does it extend? Can we assign structure or boundaries to this production? We shall have to draw on many disciplines to answer such questions. Reading is an overdetermined phenomenon, involving different levels of description. Reading is what does not stop. (Barthes 2015, 158, emphasis in original)

      The invocation here of “overdetermination,” obviously anticipates the turn to Freud, but also therefore urges us to bring the concept of a “split reading” into urgent proximity with the “plural” of which the text is made, which in turn drives one to consider how the reading that is Theory, its when and its where, is what makes it impossible to know when a reading has begun, while at the “same” time to be convinced that it does not stop.

      All such propositions underscore that at some vexed point in the reading/Theory chiasmus the Theory we offer happens when and where we least expect it. While on the one hand this reminds us that pedagogy and improvisation have much in common, it also brings back into range one of the more provocative moments in the meditation on reading that opens Reading Capital, a text also called up by Barthes’s invocation (unknowing?) of “overdetermination,” but not for that reason relevant here. Instead, attention ought to be directed to the footnote in Section 10 of Part One that reads:

      The same applies to the “reading” of those new works of Marxism which, sometimes in surprising forms, contain in them something essential to the future of socialism: what Marxism is producing in the vanguard countries of the “third world” which is struggling for its freedom from the guerillas of Vietnam to Cuba. It is vital that we be able to “read” these works before it is too late. (Althusser and Balibar 1979, 34)

      Setting aside the romance of a now jaded “Third Worldism,” what insists here is an acknowledgment that the reading that Marxist theory is offers itself to “works” that are well off the page. To be sure this resonates with the Althusserian principle of “theoretical practice,” but it channels practice more carefully into the gift, the giving, of reading, suggesting perhaps even positing that what reading reads is itself reorganized by the reading/Theory chiasmus. To put the matter bluntly, the oft-heard dismissal of Theory as a linguistic phenomenon ekphrastically isolated from things beyond language is at best nonsense and at worst sheer ideology. Whatever can be read can be theorized, and whatever can be theorized is read. So, to conclude abruptly, to sacrifice Theory properly, to offer it, is to offer reading. Not reading in the sense of literacy (however crucial it may be), that is, the competence for decoding messages structured by linguistic codes, but reading in the sense of the handling, working in, on and with the split, the plural that makes every text a text. To be continued.

      Notes

1A provocative genealogical angle on the relation between Theory and sacrifice is assiduously traced in Ian Rutherford’s study of Theōria and Theōroi. The connection between Theory and collective spectating is well established. What Rutherford adds is the connection between spectating and pilgrimage, that is, the practice carried СКАЧАТЬ