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<h1 class="reader-title">Symptomatic Reading: An Introduction</h1>
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<p>(from the work of Pierre Machery and Louis Althusser)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>(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.</p>
<p>(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.</p>
<p>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: <a
href="http://books.google.com/books?id=7bU4AAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=huckleberry+finn&ei=wHXBSLvPNYGCywTcu_mHDg"><em>Huckleberry
Finn</em></a> is in some places considered to be
merely funny, and in others, racist. In examples from
non-literary texts we might think of <a
href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Visual_Rhetoric/Semiotics_of_Fashion">clothes
and physical appearance</a>. At one time the text of <a
href="http://www.fineartprintsondemand.com/artists/rubens/toilet_of_venus-400.jpg">a
fat body</a> 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 <a
href="http://imgserv.ya.com/galerias2.ya.com/img/6/6523c9d7131f4aei3.jpg">tanned
white skin</a>, while in the nineteenth and early
twentieth century tanned white skin was regarded as <a
href="http://www.americassuburb.com/wrkrs.jpg">a low
status sign</a>. 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.</p>
<p>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 <em>h0w</em>
and <em>why</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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