Sign/crisis/pleasure/reading

--We think of reading as something we do, on something, or as something done with us or on us. We never see it as simply what is done or what happens. Everything must be a syntax of causes and effects. We think of it as our cognitive property, an act or event attributed to our status as perceiving agents or beings. We would never see it as an ''external'' process which produces its ''elements'' such as ''readers'' and ''readerly objects.'' Or as a field where all these elements are emergent quasi-objects. I'm looking at it as a recursive reproduction of the mirror-stage where it is its own objective to keep emerging as its own emergence.

--La liseuse, reading a reader reading a text which is also a reading of a reading, and so on. Like in Foucault’s problematization of the location of the stage of representation in his superb commentary on Velasquez’s Las Meninas, we should view reading less as a psychological event centered in a putative subject or cogito than a play of various frames of substitutions dynamically extending in time and space. That is, as a scene of the emergence of reading / writing where temporality and spatiality themselves arise, together with the Subject of reading. That is to say, the emergence of the scene itself as the scene of emergence.

--We can regard it as a materialist cognitive design environment and not a pure phenomenology of reading. We are dynamically wedded into the design, but it is not the permanent arrival of the aesthetic sign that is paramount but its variational relay toward an other. The material information design holds the marked differences between aesthetic objects, not as a fixed binary but as a dynamic radical mode of exchange. This mode involves the spiralling and nonfinal meeting between the image of the body and the body of the image, a spiralling non-terminal chiasmus where desire chases its own tail. In contrast, an essentialist planar regime of signs simplifies exchange into a closed, unilinear, and hierarchical binary circuit.

--The pleasure of speaking emanates from the radical exchange where desire is chasing its own tail, where the logic of the signifier is founded not on its terminal arrival in a final signified but in the oscillating value of its own identity or possibility. The pleasure is then in the risk taken in the leap from the unknown toward a momentary recognition of the familiar, or in the ''salvation'' felt in the moment of the crisis of reading, like in narrative situations where the lady is rescued at the last moment. Speaking or script acts save the signified for retrieval, in the reproduction of the familiar.