Offering Theory - John Mowitt

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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

      2Interviewed in the spring of 2014 by Clément Petitjean about his then recent book, The Meaning of Sarkosy, Alain Badiou takes up the vexed motif of identity in the following way:

      Since commodities are the principal motor of society, each person is called to appear before the market as a subject-consumer. In correlation with this, people fall back on identities, since to be drowned in the abstract world as an individual is a nightmare, wandering without end. So we cling to family, provincial, national, linguistic and religious identities. Identities that are available to us because they refer back to the dawn of time. It is a world opposed to the encounter, a world of defensive retreat. (Badiou 2014, n.p.)

      The concluding sentence, in picking up the thread of the encounter, strings these remarks into the preceding conversation with Petitjean, a conversation that concerns itself not simply with Althusser’s late concept of the encounter, but with the conflict between philosophy and this particular concept. As Badiou explains, this has to do with the impasse between the logic of necessity (rationalism) and the logic of experience (empiricism) that, for him, defines philosophy. For my part, I am less interested in the concept of the encounter than I am in the provocative relation between philosophy and identity active in Badiou’s formulation. In other words, if identity is what the consumer-subject appeals to so as to avoid the encounter, and if philosophy avoids thinking this concept, does this mean that philosophy and identity have

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