[D66] Symptomatic Reading: An Introduction

[René Oudeweg]

risd.digication.com 
<https://risd.digication.com/msokolow/Symptomatic_Reading_An_Introduction>


  Symptomatic Reading: An Introduction

5–6 minutes
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(from the work of Pierre Machery and Louis Althusser)

In the commonsense or traditional view of reading, the reader is merely 
a consumer of what the author has already produced. According to 
postmodern and post-structuralist views, however, language and culture 
produce the author as author and the reader as reader. After the text is 
written, the text only becomes meaningful in reading. The reader 
appropriates that text into her own understanding and makes sense of the 
text according to cultural codes which shape and determine that reader's 
understanding. In this sense, the author is "dead" to the text by the 
time it is written; in reading the text, the reader "writes" the text by 
"writing" (interpreting, making sense of) her own text upon the text of 
the "dead" author. In this sense the reader (also) "writes" the text.

Readers can read the text by trying to determine only what its 
author---its initial writer---intended, but this can be a limiting (and 
self-deceptive) way to read since:

(a) the text is always more (and less) than its author intends it to be. 
Even at the time and place of the author's initial writing, cultural 
context and codes shape and determine the text as much if not much more 
than the author's intention does. Not only this, however, but the 
author's intention is also shaped and determined by cultural context, 
codes and intended audience.

(b) the text takes on different meanings and can be put to different 
uses in different times and places and within different locations in 
culture: different readers make sense of the text within different 
frames of understanding.

This is why the history of any classic text's reception will indicate 
vast differences in interpretation from time to time and from culture to 
culture, class to class, and so forth. For example, many texts initially 
considered scandalous or chic soon become tame or dated or simply 
baffling and uninteresting: /Huckleberry Finn/ 
<http://books.google.com/books?id=7bU4AAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=huckleberry+finn&ei=wHXBSLvPNYGCywTcu_mHDg> 
is in some places considered to be merely funny, and in others, racist. 
In examples from non-literary texts we might think of clothes and 
physical appearance 
<http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Visual_Rhetoric/Semiotics_of_Fashion>. At 
one time the text of a fat body 
<http://www.fineartprintsondemand.com/artists/rubens/toilet_of_venus-400.jpg> 
was usually read as an indication of wealth and high fashion, while 
today it is not usually read in such a flattering way. We might think 
also of how mainstream culture today prizes tanned white skin 
<http://imgserv.ya.com/galerias2.ya.com/img/6/6523c9d7131f4aei3.jpg>, 
while in the nineteenth and early twentieth century tanned white skin 
was regarded as a low status sign 
<http://www.americassuburb.com/wrkrs.jpg>. Many other examples are 
possible as well: think about how much has changed in the way mainstream 
opinion interprets long hair versus short hair (for both men and women), 
blue jeans, leather jackets, earrings on men, etc.

A "careful" or "close" reading attempts to provide a faithful and 
accurate account of what a text rightly or "truly" means. Such a mode of 
reading assumes that it is possible to obtain a single best 
interpretation of a text if one pays close enough attention to the text 
and the author's intended meaning, which it assumes is "in" the text. 
Symptomatic reading rejects the project of careful reading. A 
symptomatic reading does not regard meaning as self-evident, natural, or 
restricted to the author's intention. A symptomatic reading is concerned 
with understanding how a text come to mean what it does as opposed to 
simply describing what it means. Symptomatic reading regards meaning as 
cultural rather than natural and is interested in explaining how culture 
shapes and determines a reader's reading of the text. In other words, a 
symptomatic reading wants to explain /h0w/ and /why/ a text means, 
rather than describe what it means. In a sense then, a symptomatic 
reading reads "against" the text, not accepting the text's meaning as 
obvious but rather as demanding explanation.

The object of a symptomatic reading is to treat the text the same way 
that a psychoanalyst treats a patient's symptoms: it reads the text as 
symptomatic of a "problematic" (a general system or set of meanings and 
assumptions) larger than the text itself. That is, the text says 
something about the conditions under which it was written and about the 
conditions under which it is read. The object of a symptomatic reading 
is to attempt to use the text in order to say something about the 
discourses which constitute the text and the location of those 
discourses within larger social and cultural arrangements and hierarchies.

As in the case of psychoanalysis what is not said is as important as 
what is said, in other words the symptomatic reading must expose the 
"unsaid" of the text, focusing on what the text omits or excludes as 
well as includes. Following the psychoanalytic model further, the unsaid 
is the "unconscious" of the text: that which it unconsciously assumes, 
takes for granted and acts in accord with. A symptomatic reading also 
pays particular attention to what position(s) the text encourages the 
reader to assume in relation to what is said, seen, felt, or thought in 
or by the text what perspectives it invites or assumes the reader will 
take up and what perspectives it may attempt to prevent the reader from 
assuming.
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