#surface reading

"Combining the functions of detection, inspection, representation, and preservation in a single ostensibly objective image, mechanical-inscription devices could 'see' more clearly and rapidly, 'feel' more acutely and discriminatively, and 'remember' more accurately and enduringly than their corresponding human modalities or faculties."

On inscription technologies: "They were considered revolutionary at the time because, to advisedly invoke the masculinist and ocularist metaphorics of heroic science, they penetrated, peered into, and pictured nature's secret spaces in a way theretofore impossible."

The frightful reality of things

Because close reading--or reading into texts--is so bound up with the stance of empathetic witness, and because it always involves the projections of the critic, it cannot be detached from a project of rescue. Accounting for the other's interiority always involves a certain violence, whether it is by the hard way of epistemological violence or the soft way of projective identification. It is also perhaps the case that such acts of ethical witness have as their ultimate ground the affective and ethical capabilities of the witness, who bathes in the reflected warmth of the other's suffering.

"I was confident in the ability of close reading to resuscitate lost voices, to reanimate dead experience, and I believed in the value of such affective history, since I had already undertaken such work in Feeling Backwards. As it turns out, the process of researching the book shook my faith in the unique value of literature, in the availability of experience to historical recovery, and in the ethics of empathetic witness [...] Seeing Goffman as a model rather than as a cautionary figure, I have sketched a mode of reading that is descriptive rather than critical, and which positions the critic not as an ethical witness but as an observer."