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supposed to be independent of its readers and, in fact, possessed by its exegetes: the autonomy
of the text was the reproduction of sociocultural relationships within the institution whose
officials determined what parts of it should be read. When the institution began to weaken, the
reciprocity between the text and its readers (which the institution hid) appeared, as if by
withdrawing the Church had opened to view the indefinite plurality of the "writings"
produced by readings. The creativity of the reader grows as the institution that controlled it
declines. This process, visible from the Reformation onward, already disturbed the pastors of
the seventeenth century. Today, it is the socio-political mechanisms of the schools, the press,
or television that isolate the text controlled by the teacher or the producer from its readers. But
behind the theatrical decor of this new orthodoxy is hidden (as in earlier ages)19 the silent,
transgressive, ironic or poetic activity of readers (or television viewers) who maintain their
reserve in private and without the knowledge of the "masters."
Reading is thus situated at the point where social stratification (class relationships) and poetic
operations (the practitioner's constructions of a text) intersect: a social hierarchization seeks to
make the reader conform to the "information" distributed by an elite (or semi-elite); reading
operations manipulate the reader by insinuating their inventiveness into the cracks in a
cultural orthodoxy. One of these two stories conceals what is not in conformity with the
"masters" and makes it invisible to them; the other disseminates it in the networks of private
life. They thus both collaborate in making reading into an unknown out of which emerge, on
the one hand, only the experience of the literate readers (theatricalized and dominating), and
on the other, rare and partial, like bubbles rising from the depths of the water, the indices of a
common poetics.
((173))
An "exercise in ubiquity," that "impertinent absence"
The autonomy of the reader depends on a transformation of the social relationships that
overdetermine his relation to texts. This transformation is a necessary task. This revolution
would be no more than another totalitarianism on the part of an elite claiming for itself the
right to conceal different modes of conduct and substituting a new normative education for
the previous one, were it not that we can count on the fact that there already exists, though it
is surreptitious or even repressed, an experience other than that of passivity. A politics of
reading must thus be articulated on an analysis that, describing practices that have long been
in effect, makes them politicizable. Even pointing out a few aspects of the operation of
reading will already indicate how it eludes the law of information.
"I read and I daydream.... My reading is thus a sort of impertinent absence. Is reading an
exercise in ubiquity?s20 An initial, indeed initiatory, experience: to read is to be elsewhere,
where they are not, in another world;21 it is to constitute a secret scene, a place one can enter
and leave when one wishes; to create dark corners into which no one can see within an
existence subjected to technocratic transparency and that implacable light that, in Genet's
work, materializes the hell of social alienation. Marguerite Duras has noted: "Perhaps one
always reads in the dark. . . . Reading depends on the obscurity of the night. Even if one reads
in broad daylight, outside, darkness gathers around the book."22
The reader produces gardens that miniaturize and collate a world, like a Robinson Crusoe
discovering an island; but he, too, is "possessed" by his own fooling and jesting that
introduces plurality and difference into the written system of a society and a text. He is thus a
novelist. He deterritorializes himself, oscillating in a nowhere between what he invents and
what changes him. Sometimes, in fact, like a hunter in the forest, he spots the written quarry,
follows a trail, laughs, plays tricks, or else like a gambler, lets himself be taken in by it.
Sometimes he loses the fictive securities of reality when he reads: his escapades exile him [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]