#overreading

Slytherin: *winks and smirks*

In a video titled “Assume No Readership”, Kenneth Goldsmith begins by reading an article in the papers, but does so by breaking and pausing into a rhythmic metre. Suddenly, an innocuous article reporting the winning of a Nobel by a French writer is turned into a poem. What would have been typically read as the most prosaic of some time-sensitive words had turned out to be a poetry reading by Goldsmith.

I am bowled over by the gesture. For its simplicity as much as its audacity. Yet, what intrigued me was how much it revealed that the problem has been less that with writing than it is with reading. Is it something about the paper material of the newspaper (thin, cheap, disposable looking ...) that tells us how to read it? Or is it by virtue and assumption of the author/writer? What is it about our everyday assumptions that allows us to read articles in a newspaper as articles in a newspaper? Have we become habituated readers? I hesitate to use the term “lazy” of course. But there are, quite simply, more genres of reading than we’ve often cared to realise.

Even before Goldsmith, Roland Barthes was already on to the case of our reading habits. A lot has been said about Barthes’s distinction in S/Z between what he called the “readerly” and the “writerly” text. Often, these readings of Barthes’s argument typically assert that the “readerly” text is one that assumes and demands a passive reader, in which there is almost always merely one singular line of interpretation and consumption of the text. And on the other side of things, there is the “writerly” text where the reader is no longer that of a mere recipient but that of an active creator of the text. The attribution of the “writerly” to this reader stresses, to that end, a sort of co-production between the reader and the author. The “writerly” text therefore does not seek to impose a certain interpretation but allows and even facilitates the reader to go on a derive with the text.

All this is standard literary theory, summarised and rehashed in extensive volumes after volumes. Sometimes packaged as “cultural theory”, sometimes “critical theory”; but what remains consistent in each case, regardless of the label, is the unwillingness to return to the question of reading. Or to be more precise, the genres of reading. Barthes obviously favoured the potentials of the “writerly” text; he himself could be said to be a master of such a text (my personal favourite example of this is Barthes’s Empire of Signs). But more importantly, there have been so many occasions where reading commentaries on Barthes, I find the distinction between the “readerly” and “writerly” used to stress on the French notion of “ecriture” (this has allowed of course Barthes to be seen, amongst others, in similar light with what his fellow Frenchmen Jacques Derrida wrote about writing itself). Worse, Barthes is sometimes read as suggesting a way to categorise the nature of texts around us: readerly/writerly; prosaic/poetic.

In other words, what I mean to point out is that Barthes was merely alerting us to the problem of reading itself. The “readerly” and the “writerly” then are less intrinsic qualities of texts but are instead broad genres of reading.

Some weeks ago, I did an interview with T.K. Sabapathy. Recorded in the exhibition space of OPEN EXCESS, we had a conversation that aimed to traverse the terrains of his essay “Road to Nowhere”, using the essay itself as a guide for our conversation. Along the way, we happen to stop by the issue of reading; and I remember dearly Sabapathy saying: “Yes, yes, writing is begotten by reading.” I think we’ve stayed on the course of writing for too long. I’ve heard countless writers and theorists go on and on about the experience of writing, writing as a troubling supplement, writing as death; the list goes on. But perhaps it’s time we went on a drift instead, reading signs along the way.

Beginning again

Perhaps it’s no longer a novelty that students of English Literature are increasingly occupying positions within the so-called cultural industry as artists, critics, curators and writers. Given that there is, after all, a lack of art history courses here in Singapore, often, it is the departments of English Literature that we find something remotely close to classes teaching students how to read a cultural text. This is also hardly surprising since Theory (or life after post-structuralism, as it is so often taken to mean) remains largely taught in the departments of English Literature. 

But life after Theory is not one where we are already coming out of Theory and its corpus of texts and intertexts. It is, rather as Terry Eagleton proposes, one where we have to recognise that Theory has become the mainstay of intellectual life and cultural production for many around the world. The issue then, as it was with Eagleton, is that Theory isn’t as uncanny as it was when it first broke into the scene sometime in the second half of the last century. We are seeing more and more artists, critics, curators and art-writers citing their Baudrillards, their Derridas, and their Foucaults — and worse, each other. Perhaps Theory provides a sort of communal vocabulary that is important as means through which cultural production arising from vastly different contexts may find some kind of meeting points with one another. Yet, there is also a sense in which this discursive density is beginning to feel a little too “stuffy”. (At their absolute worst, the Baudrillards and the Derridas are often reduced to nothing more than furniture.) To put it differently, the metaphors with which thinkers like Barthes, Derrida and Foucault first challenged us are fast congealing; and the implication is a hardening of our thoughts. If Theory has unfortunately become the orthodoxy and “common sense” of cultural production these days, we need therefore a means through which we may “break the metaphor”, re-discover the literary qualities of these thinkers and their writings. Or better still, find the courage to over-read again.

Against this quickening (and thickening) of thought, this I think is where a student of English Literature may be able to contribute. The task therefore is not to further embellish the pool of insular citations, but rather to begin unpicking these thoughts and words: “[T]he best way to respect a text is ruthlessly and brazenly to seek out its occluded potential to signify … [with] the faith or hope that there is more to be gained than lost in pushing meaning beyond the boundaries of common sense.” To over-read, in other words; and to possibly discover in the process another way of seeing, another paradigm, and an escape velocity. 

Exhibiting Over-Reading

However, as literary scholars would be quick to remind us, there is nonetheless an ever-present danger of reading only to find what we are predisposed to see in the text — in this case, to revert as it were to the orthodoxy of Theory or to the various accounts of art histories. Over-reading, in other words, remains always haunted by the possibility of turning into yet another affirmative reading. 

That being said, perhaps it is in exhibitions that we find a form that is productive for over-readings to happen. Exhibitions have, over the years, been described as various things (e.g. a platform for the disciplining of subjects, a theatre for bourgeois culture, a site for the manufacturing of ideology). Yet despite the validity of all these different charges, what remains consistent is the fact that the exhibition is a “temporary state of affairs”; its framings and parameters are therefore fundamentally fleeting at best. And what this means potentially for over-readings is that the exhibition remains an invaluable site for the testing and incubation of certain over/readings but never permanent enough to perhaps crystallise these thoughts. The exhibition, in that sense, are not dissertations or treatises, nor do they have the weight of them in the first place. So rather than committing one thread of over-reading to the written word, what the exhibition as a form offers is a site to potentiate and tease out several over/readings, but never accruing to these over/readings the kind of force sought after in most academic writings. 

Instead of the “production of knowledge” so frequently cited in institutional statements of purpose, an exhibition might be provoke feelings of irreverence or doubt, or an experience that is at once emotional, sensual, political, and intellectual while being decidedly not predetermined, scripted, or directed by the curator or the institution.

It is the ephemerality of the exhibition format that allows over-readings the space and time not to formalise themselves as the new orthodoxy but remain a thought in process and in transit, still passing through. Moving. A long shot. 

Of Others and Authors

To return to the risk of an affirmative reading, it needs therefore to be stressed that what is needed is a respect for the otherness of a text or an artwork. While it is impossible to divorce ourselves from the texts we bring into the reading of another text or artwork, what is necessary is a following of the thoughts and processes (or at least the traces of them) of the Other, holding back the temptation to reduce the Other into the next available container of thought (in the form of labels, or sometimes even a concept). 

Drawing from the maxims that Colin Davis has sketched out for productive over-readings, the following might serve as a timely reminder for my own practice as a curator:

1) No evidence should be ruled out in principle — as anything that might offer, however marginal, a different sense or meaning to the text or artwork in question should not be neglected, and this may come in the form of biographical details or from anecdotal accounts

2) Potential of context(s) is never exhausted — but neither should contexts be used to shut down the potential to signify, hence there is a need to constantly contest each possible context with one another

3) Nothing is only what it seems — in the wake of psychoanalysis, any overlooked detail, when viewed awry, might reveal or produce fresh signifying potential   

4) Boundaries (inside/outside) of the text are never certain — as we must consider the intertexts and recognise that the text far exceeds what is supposedly intrinsic to the text

5) Embrace failure and mistakes

Bibliography