Reading reading

     We think of reading as an activity which is applied on a supposedly pre-existing object, as form, substance, structure, or design, from which is extracted or divined, via a mix of method and intuition, an authorial, original, inherent meaning or message. We should try, instead, to imagine that the object itself is but a function of the configuration space of reading. It is a space where the reading of the object is being made possible, as a sort of prosthesis of perception by which any act of reading is enabled via the production of binary values. In other terms, the object of reading and the reading of the object are co-terminous processes: they emerge synchronously. It is only the demand of our insertion within the physical mode of serial temporality that forces us to codify the reading event as a chain of sequential substances and identities. This same serialism distributes the ''cause-effect'' sequential rhetoric on the binaristic spatialization of the semantic values which subtend the emergent dynamism of the reading act (subject vs. object of reading, agent of action and recipient of action, and so on).

     We should imagine a poetics going beyond the notion of the delivery of a humanistic or semantic content carried by a vessel. Instead, it becomes the site of production, productivity. No longer the transfer of a putative quantity or quality but the inaugural moment of semiotic value, the regeneration of linguisticity as such, an act of reconstruction. An environment where thinking, seeing, perceiving are activated, made to discover themselves as act, event. Going beyond the form/content binary, the enabling fiction of the classic hermeneutic apparatus, alibi of authority at the moment of reading, discursive guard against the charge of the arbitrary, the rhetorical base of the relevance of ongoing speech, its affirmation of a referential anchoring. Fictions enabling the discursive legitimacy of current practice, raising it beyond the threat of the meaningless, the babble, or the errant.

     If some reading functions are merely geared toward utilitarian ends, representing the subservience of a class whose reading world has been proscribed and prescribed within a regime of semiotic transparency, another reading class, the writerly one, of scribes, critics, and poets, has as its vocation the foregrounding of the opacity or the metaphoricity of language. In the case of the first, the referential function of discourse is cast in the metaphysics of objective truth to maintain the political order of things in language. In the second mode, the reading apparatuses are laid bare, the axiomatics are identified, via self-reflexive strategies. The prosthetic support is made known so that, for a moment, the subject which knows now also understands the bias by which it says it knows the reading of experience as the experience of reading. The ideological and political leanings of reading apparatuses must also be placed in the clear to minimize the reproduction of paradigm zombies who tend to see an equivalence without metaphor between the provenance of the apparatus and the experience of the real. The real is always already the experience of metaphor in the paradoxical way in which metaphor itself is the paradoxical substance of experience.