Assume no readership
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.
Further up ahead in the new year, I hope to organise an experimental literature class, where we will all read (all ten or so of us) J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island (1974), but do so on a weekly basis and each time reading only a chapter’s worth. We would not be concerned even to finish all 24 chapters but select merely 7 chapters to do so. And rather than all of us reading our reading(s), each in our own private time before class, I would propose that we read in the company of others. Reading therefore is not to be enacted in an enforced solitude, but in a setting that is fundamentally distracting and dispersive. Towards the end of the class, we might even publish something that aims to rewrite Ballard’s novel through a different form/medium. Maybe something along the lines of a Powerpoint book? Who knows!
