Abstract
This paper will examine the role of affect as a key force in the experience of reading. I argue reading is an experience rather than an instrument of cognition. The latter, I suggest, gives way to dehumanizing and violating forms of reading as instrument or nomenclature or categorization. I suggest that new relations can be made in, within and from practices of reading that conceive it as a fragile, faltering practice of knowledge production. My reconceptualization of reading derives from Derrida’s notion of deconstruction as learning to read the trace of affect unraveling the normative and/or binary procedures cohering privileged and/or prejudicial understandings of the text. Reading for affect asks researchers to engage in an analysis of the felt and non-evident of people, events and texts. Rather than comprehend in the sense of cognition, we feel the trace of meanings cathected in signs before we know what the sign might mean. My paper will expand on reading as conveying affectivity or the unheard embedded in text. Increasingly there is a demand to read the other’s words with greater attention to feeling for what they do and do not say, can and cannot speak. In studies that purport to do research with humans, it seems to be imperative to engage in a practice of reading that attends to the other meanings indicated by words. This requires the development of a critical or close research reading practice that attends to affect or the interior meanings of articulations and text that words cannot easily convey.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. James Baldwin (1963).
Reading is elemental to creatures living with each other. Here, I consider reading in what Peggy Kamuf (2000) calls its “ordinary sense,” as something human and more than human creatures do. Reading is key to the “survival” of the human kind of being, Adrienne Rich (1993) writes, one that begins with wordless and radical dependence. Reading is, James Baldwin (1963) notes, key to reviving the self by engaging worlds beyond ourselves.
Blurry-eyed and immobile, the infant creature is put upon from the inside to make sense of the world around them. The infant animates and is animated by the force of reading to communicate with (m)others (Snaza, 2019). In infancy, reading is as a force honing one’s innate capacities for attention, study, feeling, hearing, and observation. Little scholarly mention is made of pre-verbal, pre-colonial, pre-symbolic reading. From antiquity on, learned philosophers, scholars, and researchers fail to acknowledge reading as grounded in feeling animated by our (m)other. Reading is instead bound to cognition despite each of us knowing better. After all, anyone who has read the patterns of birds in the sky, or a room full of unfamiliar people, falls back on reading as primarily a felt exercise.
In this paper, I rethink reading as an activity of feeling in, for, and out one’s environment whether this be relational, symbolic, or social and political. I position reading as the key force by which observation, sense, interpretation, and claims can and are made of a world of others. I echo, in a sense, Paulo Freire’s (1983) argument that “Reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world” (p. 5). I reorient one’s reading of the external world as taking place from the inside of one’s felt existence out. I make a case for why scholars and researchers might rethink the force of reading for its infinite possibilities. I read reading against its centuries-long instrumental and violating practices of wrongly naming, distorting, and misrepresenting the unique existence of human and more than human others.
My intervention, and the invitation for this special issue, comes at a time when the act, experience, event, and activities of scholarly reading are under virulent attack from those outside education: ideologues, militants, capitalists, and fascists. From the contestation of literacies in early childhood (Durán & Hikida, 2022) to the banning of books and authors in American schools (Friedman, 2022), to gross mischaracterizations of Critical Race Theory (Morgan, 2022), the academic activities of reading fuel the culture wars waged in North American public life. Long taken for granted by scholars, practices of reading, close, critical, and worldly reading, are presently the subject of heated public debate, suspicion, and condemnation.
Suzanne Nossel, chief executive of PEN America, notes attacks on the freedom to read are organized by powerful interest groups and are politically motivated: The surge in books bans is a result of a network of local political and advocacy groups targeting books with LBGTQ+ characters and storylines, and books involving characters of color… “While we think of book bans as the work of individual concerned citizens, our report demonstrates that today’s wave of bans represents a coordinated campaign to banish books being waged by sophisticated, ideological and well-resourced advocacy organizations.” (in Limbong, 2022)
In this paper, instrumentalizing and categorical practices of reading are held directly responsible for literal and closed understandings of the infinite possibilities of reading. Scholars’ failure to defend reading as first and foremost a practice generated first from feeling weakens our work as educators and scholars (Mishra Tarc, 2015a). Attacks on reading erode the responsibility of educators and scholars to steward and pass on knowledge that fosters and forms the humanity for the generations (Mishra Tarc, 2015a).
Reading is critical to one’s capacity to think beyond one’s means. In schools, the practice of reading is contained to printed text. This narrow conception of reading leads to a diminishing of vocative capacities of students. Reading as coding and decoding print sutures the minds of students to literal understandings of text. Student’s capacities to read and take in expanded vocabulary are lessened through instrumental approaches to text and language. In our present moment of memes and social texting, reading has become habituated, formulaic, and without imagination and force.
As educators we can reorient our teaching of reading to unleash its infinite power for revitalizing our relations and worlds. The power of reading is critical to subverting and countering the killing logics of capital, racism, and patriarchies needed to construct worlds in which to grow together and live. We cannot afford to let violent ideologies, social media, and artificial intelligences depress and numb our felt and relational capacities to read and reread the symbolic, social, and political conditions constructing an increasingly uncertain world. To revive reading from decades long theorizing as decoding and mastering print requires scholarly reanimation advancing a sensitizing orientation. Reading as key to the “practice of emancipation” may then free the mind of habituated, ideological, and instrumental learnings constraining what and how it is possible for a person and society to think and be (Walcott, 2021).
Rethinking Reading
My work takes a broad definition of reading, to position its animation, evolution, and practice as an area of study in its own right. Reading in this paper refers to process, form, and content critical to (more than) human, person, and societal formation. As Derrida (in Bernasconi & Wood, 1985) suggests, reading (after deconstruction 1 ) cannot be reduced to the symbolic. Reading is neither method nor instrument but given to us by others. Reading is embodied, situational, and relational. Reading is not natural and something proper to human beings but activated, conditioned and passed on from one breathing creature to another. Although I focus on human reading in this paper, trees read (Wohlleben, 2016) as do animals (Kamuf, 2000). Reading is an inherited practice, composed of frames and environments of reference one receives and accumulates from others over a lifetime. Reading is contingent on communicative, linguistic, experiential, and educated frameworks. Reading forms the capacity to think as well as what one can think.
As such, reading is deeply subjective, contingent, and contextual. Reading in French, for example, as Derrida (2001) repeatedly pointed out, does not hold the same purchase or provision as it does in English. Gender impacts on one’s reading as does race and ability. Reading is a complex and multi-faceted experience of living things, a practice that is often beyond one’s immediate comprehension and grasp. It does not refer merely to the acts of deciphering and decoding. Rather, reading refers to basic and innate felt capacities performed and enacted by all living beings. Reading is an intuitive, felt, and responsive guide toward making sense of the world filled with others (Mishra Tarc, 2015b). How we have learned to read (and from who) fundamentally forms our perception of the world and others. Reading supports the comprehension of those observations.
Reading is also conflated into a singular activity of the self-contained mind that requires no further growth once a person is found to be literate. However, reading depends on the (m)other and requires the (m)other’s thought and presence of others to be enacted. As we grow, reading continually supports us to make associations, connections, relations, and culture with others. Reading is a powerful practice as the act is repeated over and over again. It is also praxis because reading pedagogically reorients and renews basic understandings and builds in us a repertoire of language and words. Reading also teaches us that what we think we know is not always the whole picture, destabilizing and renewing our comfortable comprehension of the world and others. Although reading is often thought of as progressive it is also a regressive activity, in the sense that our so-called sophisticated forms of reading can devolve quickly into primal and self-preserving ones, particularly in times of crisis.
My long study of infantile and end of life reading posits that our first readings are of primary (m)others 2 . In my observation of people coming in and out of life, I find the process of reading is generated from and by attachment to and exchange of affective material between self and others. At birth, affect is exchanged between infant and (m)other. At death, affect circulates between self and primary attachments. Although confused and conflated with emotion, affect refers to feelings registered inside the body resisting symbolization (Green, 1973/1999). Affect is unwordable utterance allowing words to signify and cohere through residual meaning or, what Derrida (1976) calls, trace. As we grow and learn, affect is replaced by words given to us by adults to contain strong emotions or responses to others. Love and hate are words symbolizing the most powerful containers of affect. Words form the basis for reading in the literate sense. But our affective sense of coming into the other’s words will never quite leave and is traced in the adult and independent activity of self-contained reading. Making attachments to words underlies how we read the world and others (Mishra Tarc, 2015b). Detaching from words in times of distress, depression, dementia, and dying also disintegrates our ties to the world and others. Reading fosters and provides a vocabulary for our felt capacities to make selves and relations with others and as such is critical to the kind of human beings we are and can imagine ourselves to be.
Nomenclature and Naming: The Violence of Reading
Along with supporting our feeling for words and how they might mean for the people we become and belong to, reading plays a powerful legitimizing role in the naming and defining of things and people. The ongoing and official misreading of animals, children, the disabled, women, racialized, and religious minorities dehumanizes our humanity. The categorical names we give to children qualifying their unique existence often fail to express who and how they experience themselves to really be. These misreadings are normalized in names and categories designed to contain and master the unique existence of sentient things.
In her startling collection of poetry, Nomenclature for the Time Being, poet and writer Dionne Brand (2022) gathers up and rereads the normative symbols unique beings are subjected to that can and will lead to their inevitable demise. “The racial intrigues,” she finds, spinning off local narrations of stasis, the layers of inconceivability, intractable narrations unforgivable narrations, that may cause, at any moment, explosions that I suppress, but they detonate nevertheless in me in me the duration of stones (p. 29)
Scholars and researchers in the Western humanistic and social sciences disciplines have long histories of creating and constructing, documenting, and archiving the “inconceivable, intractable, and unforgivable narrations'' misreading and misrepresenting peoples foreign to them (Brand, 2022, p. 29). The nomenclature-making observations of the earliest colonialists and anthropologists were prone to gross misreading. An early example of scholarly misreading is archived in the statement of the first president of the American Anthropological Society (AAS) of 1901: “through observation of a typical Native American tribe, it was clear that ‘the savage [sic] stands strikingly close to sub-human species in every aspect’” (in Parsons, 2022, np). These prejudiced findings of Indigenous and other humans as “sub-human” implicate the work of qualitative researchers in what a current AAS president calls “participating in racist ideology and calling it science” (in Parsons, 2022, np). Although some anthropologists of the society objected to its recent apology to Native Americans for its legacy of violence and violation, others welcomed a new way to read and practice research in the human sciences (Parsons, 2022).
The practice of reading, foundational to the work of education, is often viewed as a natural, neutral and a-political process. Scholars overlook their trouble with ordinary and everyday reading in seemingly seamless productions of knowledge. Perhaps it is hard to think of reading as an object and practice worthy of study, particularly as it is assimilated into thinking. Scientists and researchers rarely scrutinize the parochial, cultural, or self-referential lenses by which one’s interpretation is messily made. They mistakenly rely on preformed or so-called objective systems of thematization, coding, rubrics, and categorization to dangerously make false reports containing absolute claims of complex human behavior, activity, and event.
Post-qualitative researchers and scholars engage reading as key to forging new forms of inquiry (Lather & St Pierre, 2013; St Pierre, 2019). Elizabeth St Pierre (2019), for example, encourages researchers to embark on “hard” readings of post-structuralist theory to inform their post-qualitative methods. Following this lead, Elliot Kuecker (2021) immerses himself in the “labor of reading” to rethink the critical importance of considering “the way texts operate” (p. 543) as theorized by literary critic Roland Barthes. Still, these scholars (St Pierre, 2019; Kuecker 2021) tend to focus on reading as an intellectual enterprise, on engaging and/or applying theory (which is only one kind of reading, and a specialized form at that) rather than consider reading as a studious process that both compels and enables us to generate theory in the first place (Mishra Tarc, 2020).
While sharing post-qualitative researchers’ commitment to hard reading, I take a different tact to suggest that we view reading itself as hard to do. Immersed in literary and post-structural theorizations of reading, writing, and text, my work returns reading to its pre-verbal, pre-colonial first inception in childhood literacy. I term our earliest agonizing labors to read others as “first reading” (Mishra Tarc, 2015a). In infancy, the world consists of primary others upon which the baby depends. A baby’s first readings of (m)other are instinctual, oriented toward parsing out their unfamiliar surroundings. This first reading is the sensory way all beings “feel out” to read the external world. First reading, Peggy Kamuf (2000) further argues, is passed down to the baby by a mother counter-reading them. Reading and counter-reading, then, initiates searching out self with and against other.
When, in infancy, we are named, “girl,” “healthy,” and “dark,” we inherit dehumanizing nomenclature carrying genealogies of social and political histories of the human and its oppressions. With the inheritance of names, we acquire demeaning and renewed meanings of ourselves. Scholars and researchers might consider the key role of formative and familial reading practices in the violent qualification of social and political nomenclature they use to categorize and read human experiences. How and what we learn to read from infancy and beyond, as persons and researchers, I further argue, sets the schooled and scholarly terms of reference (nomenclature) comprising one’s interpretive lenses. Our earliest experiences of reading others, both good and bad, shape our subsequent readings. Attending to, particularly, our first and/or felt and emotional reading might support us to understand its keynote in our understanding of people and things.
Pre-Colonial Reading: Felt Reading and the Anthropologizing Impulse
In the essay “The Animal therefore I am, (Derrida (2002) provides an example of felt reading as experienced by an adult-male. To read his cat, the other, Derrida falls back on feeling much the way the infant does when reading her (m)other. In the essay, Derrida describes his process to read his cat’s wordless gaze upon his naked body. “An animal looks at me,” he asks, “what should I think of this sentence?” (p. 369). Under the gaze of his cat, (Derrida (2002) is put upon to make sense of the encounter. He struggles to so as the force of feeling for the cat interferes with his comprehension of her. He reads this feeling as shame (the cat has caught him naked) but the feelings first present as confused, conflicted, and mixed. He soon finds that there is more than one feeling driving what he can think of the animal’s “looking at him” and much of it is unnameable: “between this relation to the self (this Self and this ipseity) and the I of the ‘I think,’”Derrida (2002) observes, “there is, it would seem, an abyss” (p. 369).
The terrifying abyss has affected the force of unsayable feeling that is felt, a breach that language cannot fully bridge between self and other. As with Derrida’s cat’s impact on his self, one is always affected by the other without knowing how or why. Feelings we think we possess are not solely are own but are on account of the other, the other in person and in mind. Feeling out the other grounds all practices of reading by animals, including the human one. What self-consumed reading in the human experience forgets is, as Peggy Kamuf (2000) notes, “that other animals are reading and reading us,” and she adds, “no doubt to their great horror” (np).
Animal reading is pre-colonial. The face-to-face encounter between the adult and the animal, between the naked Derrida and his non-verbal naked cat, resembles that of a (m)other and an infant in their animal beginning. Derrida locates this animal encounter in seeing, but his twisting and turning thoughts on the matter indicate otherwise. He feels for the cat’s response to him as he observes it. Human infancy, one’s first encounter with the other, takes place in a similar scene of stark naked reading. Blurry-eyed and wordless, the infant must feel for a (m)other. Learning to read words re-assembles this state of being put on to interpret what the other means. Reading in the educative sense ironically and sadly removes us from this felt scene of reading, on which we rely for all of our lives.
When reconceptualized as a self-other and self-world practice, the development of reading takes on existential significance. Or as (Derrida (2002) asks of his existence when (mis)reading his cat: What stakes are raised by these questions? One doesn't need to be an expert to foresee that they involve thinking about what is meant by living, speaking, dying, being and world as in being-in-the-world or being toward the world, or being-with, being-before, being-behind, being-after, being and following, being followed or being following, there where I am, in one way or another, but unimpeachably, near what they call the animal. It is too late to deny it, it will have been there before me who is (following) after it. After and near what they call the animal and with it-whether we want it or not and whatever we do about it. (p. 380)
As Derrida shows, in attending to feeling deeply as we read, we can be gripped with new and unexpected news of ourselves and others. When we read others, attentively, sensitively, and for significance, we gain a sense and formation of our own existence from the communion of feeling exchanged between us and another. Reading his cat alters Derrida’s thinking of his humanness. He is gripped with this terrifying recognition of his animal self in the animal other. The overwhelmed and oppressive feeling marks a fall back to pre-colonial reading.
When divorced from feeling, reading is merely instrumental and emptied of our primal means to survive a wordless and immobile self with the words of others. The way we learn to read in school is (intentionally?) designed to alienate, depress, and colonize the human from her original vital and affective self, one in which emotion rather than rational thought guides her uncertain and resistant way. Schooling immerses the child’s new and foreign being into categorical forms, one that may or may not cohere with her internal, personal, or communal sense of self.
An infant’s early education in language consists of being forced to learn to read and thus internalize normative names (nouns). This value-laden nomenclature of being, if deemed necessary by the adult community, begins to violently distort a child’s unique being from the inside out (Levinas, 1981). The names a child is given to recognize others similarly distort the existence of those in and beyond her midst. These names construct for the child an internal architecture of interpretation on and with which she depends, revises, and refers to across her life. Freud (1915) will refer to this internal architecture as psyche, as all parts of the mind involved in the inner formation of personhood. Reading, I argue, a self-forming mechanism, is key to building the layered and translucent palimpsest of the psyche, such that a self is not individual but compiled of multitudes of readings, misreadings, and rereadings of ourselves, others, and the external world.
Learning to read, say, and write proper names is a child’s first foray into literacy, a literacy disciplining ourselves with compulsory social categories as a child learns to delight in words and picture books. To learn to read these names a child must first take in and attach to them. Internalizing names marks one’s first foray into literacy. Reading these names systematically, playfully, and sometimes, with great resistance, forms a child’s uncertain and wondrous modes of reading into categorical certain ones. These categories act as signals and signposts guiding our lifelong observations, descriptions, and documentations of others.
Rereading Humanity: Against Categorical Existence
Categorical existence both helps and harms human and other life. On one hand, the name makes legible the tiny incomprehensible, and as such, threatening, newcomer to the world. On the other, naming takes a calculated and potentially devastating risk of misrepresenting and distorting the “uniqueness” of what Levinas (1981) terms the “singularity” of the tiny creature.
Categorical forms of reading render the incoherencies of the unique other coherent to the reader. The reader, like the researcher, sets the terms by which other people are named—mischaracterized, misrepresented, and wrongly depicted. Jacques Derrida’s (1976) reading of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological study of Nambikwara people of Brazil in Triste Tropiques illustrates this point. Derrida finds that the logic grounding Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological method depends on a metaphysics of presence fashioned from his enculturated, ethnocentric frame of reference.
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This ethnocentric frame invades the science of research without Lévi-Strauss’s having to explicitly acknowledge and/or refer to it. Reading is naturalized in the method of Lévi-Strauss rather than seen as actively framing the “objective” study of the Nambikwara people. In Lévi-Strauss’s understanding of Nambikwara girl’s play, Derrida finds Western projection of romantic and racist views of Indigenous people brought about by his use of the nomenclature “Indian.” The name “Indian,” for Derrida, depends on unconscious and/or non-evident genealogies of the category governing and shaping the anthropologist’s documentation. So, although Lévi-Strauss’s intention
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is to benevolently provide an anti-ethnographic account of the Nambikwara, his categorical reading of their way of life ironically implicates him in the violent romance of ethnography. Categorization, in its essence, initiates a “certain” dehumanizing history of the human with which social science teaches us to read, encounter, and engage others. Engaging Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological account of Indians, Derrida (1976) notes: We know a priori that the “proper names” whose interdiction and revelation Lévi-Strauss describes here are not proper names. The expression proper name is improper, for the very reasons The Savage Mind will recall. What the interdict is laid upon is the uttering of what functions as the proper name. And this function is consciousness itself. The proper name in the colloquial sense, in the sense of consciousness, is (I should say in truth were it not necessary to be wary of that phrase) only a designation of appurtenance and a lingustico-social classification…The concept of the proper name, unproblematized as Lévi-Strauss uses it in Triste Tropique, is therefore far from being simple and manageable. (p. 111)
Reading, or what Derrida (1976) calls “the function of consciousness” (p. 111), relies on habits of mind well versed in the significations of the proper name. Strauss’s account of Namibikwara people is grounded in the Western metaphysical and scientific violence of naming generated from centuries-long misreading others. This violent misreading is binary, ethnocentric and identarian for the purposes of norming, containing, and making legible the illegible difference of others. Naming, Derrida (1976) will go on to say, is the “originary violence of language which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute” (p. 112).
In an “Open Letter to Colleagues,” Sylvia Wynter (1994) demonstrates the dangers of categorical existence in our readings of others. The letter castigates the role of the category NHI (no humans involved) in the conduct of the white Los Angeles police force toward racialized, impoverished, and marginalized peoples. Wynter indicts social-scientific and Western systems of categorization as enabling while providing a legal justification for white policemen’s violent mistreatment of racialized street people. Leaning on Stephen Jay Goulding’s argument that “systems of classification order our thinking and direct behavior” (in Wynter, 1994, p. 1), Wynter (1994) interrogates “where the system comes from.” She further finds: “The central institutional mechanisms which integrate and regulate our present world system, I propose here, are the prescriptive categories of our present order of knowledge, as disseminated in our present global university system and its correlated textbook industry” (Wynter, 1994, p. 7). The textbook industry, writer J.M Coetzee (2021) further argues, is one that every child in school internalizes and experiences while learning to read. Growing up in textbooks is central to our formative and forced understandings of ourselves and our worlds (Coetzee, 2021).
In her novels and essays, Toni Morrison (2017) excavates the exemplary hierarchical construction and violating fictions of categorical existence, as is race. She determines that categorical existence is an unnatural and misleading academic exercise grounded in demeaning and violent treatment of others. It is one, I am further suggesting, wrought from centuries-long projective misreadings of self against others generating categories of existence that diminish and dehumanize us all. Worse than this, children become attached to and internalize identifications and identities produced from systems of control and domination, through the childhood experience of learning to read, and most often, by their beloved and primary (m)others (Kamuf, 2000).
Given to us by our profoundly formative others makes it nearly impossible for those harmed by systems of categorization to unlearn them. Instead, many cling on for life to the harmful names used to condemn them to sub or non-human status as a way to find kinship, recognition and belonging among those similarly mistreated and misnamed. Our critical task as qualitative researchers, as Wynter (1994) calls on her colleagues, fellow researchers, scholars, and academics, is to embark on “an undoing of the narratively condemned” status of the category “no-humans involved” in all its dehumanizing manifestations (p. 17). For this, I call for a rethinking of a practice of reading untethered to social-scientific categories and the singular existence they describe and condemn. From our intentional move to dis-identify and detach from (deconstruct) categories of existence, we might then forge attentive, sensitizing, and humane practices of qualitative reading that might further undo categorical condemnation.
Reading as Experience: Following Feeling
In her essay “Ellipses of Reading,” Peggy Kamuf (2017) remarks on her “impossible” quest to articulate aspects of reading that defy systematization as a way of resisting normative literacy practices. For this, she turns to a remarkable passage in St Augustine’s Confessions, perhaps the first documented account of another’s reading practice. Observing his contemporary Ambrose in the silent act of reading, Augustine finds he has no way of knowing how or what his friend is making of what he is taking in of the text. All he can know and see empirically is that “when [Ambrose] was reading, his eye glided over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were at rest” (in Kamuf, 2017, pp. 98–99). Augustine’s account of his friend’s reading, Kamuf (2017) notes, is “extraordinary” for what it says and cannot say about reading. She goes on to further note: “Augustine’s account reveals nothing less than the ground or rather the gulf of unfathomable, irreducible alterity across which and on the condition of which reading can take place” (Kamuf, 2017, p. 4).
Kamuf’s (2017) engagement with Augustine’s account pinpoints the interior qualities of reading that elude empirical and conscious observation. There is something about reading, Kamuf (2017) finds, that evades our scientific and/or conscious understanding of how meaning coheres in individual and collective minds. In my work I refer to this “unspeakable thing” as affect tracing, what Paulo Freire (1983) calls the “soul” in the word to be felt and registered by the reader. Freire (1983) depicts this affectivity in a childhood memory of reading “the songs of birds”: Recapturing distant childhood as far back as I can trust my memory, my act of reading the particular world in which I was moved was absolutely significant for me. Surrendering myself to this effort, I re-created and re-lived in the text I was writing, the experience I lived at a time when I did not yet read words…The texts, words, letters of that context were incarnated in the songs of the birds---Tanager, flycatcher, thrush: in the dance of the boughs blown by the strong winds announcing storms; thunder and lightning; rain waters playing with geography: creating lakes, islands, rivers, and streams. (p. 6)
I imagine in Portuguese this text is more stirring and interior than English can render. But the passage offers a sense of Freire’s understanding of reading as felt and heard inside before spoken: a kind of communion of affect, spirit, memory and feeling defended with and by words. Or as himself says to his students: “Reading is not walking over words, it is a grasping for the world in them” (p. 19).
The “experience of reading,” as Martha Nussbaum (1992) terms it, while agonizingly laboring to read Derrida, requires us to attend to aspects of reading that go beyond the text (p. 171). Derek Attridge will refer to reading as event, a shared experience between text and reader. As event, Attridge (2004) argues, “by which,” at its most profound and powerful, “our habits and assumptions are tested (if only momentarily)” (p. 61). Reading as event and experience, then, is at first felt deep inside: a destabilizing, confusing, and frustrating experience. One should never fully trust the compulsion to deliver to the world certain knowledge on a first reading. Rather we must read again, and again, to gain a critical and close sense of what the text is trying to tell us. Reading marks our effort, through description, interpretation, and analysis, to make sense of the affecting experience with attention and in relation to the other’s, often disconcerting, presence, words, and text.
In his book Animate Literacies, Nathan Snaza (2019) refers to literacies as a situation, “where intrahuman politics of race, class, gender, and geography shape the conditions of emergence for literary events that animate subjects and the political relations with which they are entangled” (p. 4). To dislodge ourselves from categorically human reading, Snaza calls for wild reading. This bewildering reading (Snaza, 2019), I argue, is our cherished first form. Bewildering readings are overcome with affect, resembling the wordless babies first foray into a world overloaded with sense and sensation. Even when we think we are competent and comprehensive readers, when we struggle to read and understand an idiom, vocabulary, theory, and esthetic work that test our learned practice of reading, we return to the state of bewilderment that characterizes pre-colonial reading.
Reading, Toward Feeling Again
Post-human and post-foundational scholars and researchers are attuned to the keynote of reading in charting new ways of thinking human and beyond human relations in precarious and uncertain times. While resonating with their call to engage in the labor of reading, to read theoretically: deeply, closely, and intertextually, I feel that it is as important for us to examine how we read as learned subjects of violent and violating categorical existence.
I bring my rethinking of academic reading practices to the work of qualitative researchers. In our training, this reading is described as attentive, close, and providing deep description. Qualitative reading can also refer to the critical and/or theoretical frames we bring to our primary reading of the data, allowing for more complex or complicated understandings of what we see. Finally, this reading can refer to reflexivity or the way the researcher reads her feelings and confusions in and apart of the phenomenon or persons studied.
Etymologically qualitative comes from its Latin root qualitas meaning “nature, state, and property.” The Miriam Dictionary (2022) describes qualitative as “of relating to or involving quality or kind” (np). Much of our reading practice as qualitative researchers involves the latter definition. As research is billed as a scientific endeavor, we are trained to focus on measuring what a thing or person is by describing or comparing qualities of its kind.
Grounding contemporary and scientific understandings of qualification are metaphysical ones as described in the ancient texts of Western philosophy. Aristotle, for example, includes quality in his philosophical construction of a system of categorization on the nature of presence. According to the Studtmann (2024), Aristotle divides quality into four species of being: 1. Habits and Dispositions 2. Natural Capacities and Incapabilities 3. Affective Qualities and Affections 4. Shape. (np)
If effaced in our contemporary understanding of how we read qualitatively, this foundational knowledge is embedded in our methods of qualification. Still, researchers tend to focus most on what is observable about the world and others. Few researchers zone in on the less evident and affective aspects of relation (Number 3). We are instead steered toward the methods of categorization through qualification. Instrumental reading such as coding, thematization, and pattern-analysis are some of the ways qualitative reading becomes de-sensitized or closed to meanings that are anything other than observable.
How to think reading apart from the impulse to qualify or measure up more than human worth requires us to think about how we read when researching others. In my engagements of deeply subjective qualitative methods with individuals affected by dementia, I pay close attention to the most immeasurable and ignored species of quality Aristotle (above) describes as affective qualities and affections. In the limit case of studying what learning remains for end of life, non-verbal individuals with dementia, reading returns the researcher back to early infancy where one uses felt resources to read the other. In the case of the non-verbal person with dementia, I observe the loss of mind through the loss of language with a painstaking attention to detail. I find the loss of one’s mind resembles one’s coming into it through gaining language. I see the backward reading of the individual relying on feeling to grasp for words. I see feeling in the non-verbal adult’s eyes calling out communications in morse code that I must read deep from my own memory and contexts to decipher. I know the participant is trying to say something, but I must dig deep down inside myself to gain a sense of what I feel that might be. I must risk misreading my participant in order to conjure up and find a language with which to speak to them.
The claims made about the other in my attempts to qualify the existence of the non-verbal dementia participant cannot be made without reading—both of the participant and myself. Without recourse to words, and as it did with the infant’s growth, reading tracks the mind’s decline. In both cases, reading mediates the mind’s decline and growth. Without qualifying my (mis)reading, no claims for the non-speaking other can be made. Without qualification of the other’s non-verbal state, though alive, he ceases to exist.
Affective qualities in our reading of people and things are both most difficult to comprehend and represent. We read and learn to read and continue to hone our capacities for reading by following the feeling. These unascertainable but deeply felt qualities of existence interfere with understanding; feeling often defies and distorts our efforts to name and word. Children are mostly immersed in wildly felt reading as they learn words and sentences. In adulthood, we re-enter “bewildering reading” (Snaza, 2019) when encountering something or someone that is hard to read: theory, novels, poems, and a person who cannot remember how to speak.
Qualitative scholars, reading educators, and researchers might consider notions of reading as experience, event, and encounter in their interpretive, hermeneutic, or critical reception of things, creatures, people, phenomenon, and worlds. They might turn to activities of reading that are hard, like reading of the lives of others in literature, so we young qualitative researchers received training in what is incomprehensible or hard to comprehend in the beings they study. Literature teaches us to reread by plunging us into our minds where we are put upon to figure out the other words with no recourse to them telling us what it all means. Expansive and literary conceptions of reading compel us to consider our ways of making sense as already marked by our learned propensity to read through instrumental, literate, categorical, and encultured processes that discriminate, dehumanize, distort the truth of the existences we seek to understand, examine, and represent. Academic constructs that are speculative, poetic, experimental, and hospitable to others can certainly support researchers to think about reading after their literate educations. Expansive readings can also expand the vocabulary we use to represent the people, processes, and phenomenon we educationally research. In my own work, I read poetry and literature, to learn how to stay close to affect, my own and those of others, in my labor to read and document what I think I am feeling, observing, and hearing. In the bewilderment of reading others, in my labor to understand all in others I cannot know, I find that learned academic training and constructs and my parochial frames of reference fall down. And like any good scholar or researcher knows, it is in the place of not knowing that one’s greatest insights, qualification, and even discoveries, arrive.
Thinking about how we read requires studying our readings of self and other. Or as Cynthia Chambers (2004) so poignantly puts it, we must read and reread our misreadings. To attend to one’s misreading requires us to go backwards and scrutinize our confused and chaotic sense of things as put into words in the moment of observation, documentation, and interpretation. Field and other jot notes painstakingly attending to our sense of what we see, hear, and then interpret of the other’s body, words, articulations, and emotions train us to read with an attention to misreading at the expense of the uniqueness of others.
We can also use affective reading practice to understand how others also lean heavily on learned, schooled, and categorical understandings of themselves to narrate a story that each might not necessarily want to inhabit. Taking others for their word is important in qualitative research but not because what our participants are saying is true or bringing us closer to the truth of their existence. Boldly stating one’s experience does not make it more true or factual even if it feels that way (Derrida, 1976). Instead, the other’s words offer insight into their own mixed-up readings of their experience and existence.
Trained and disciplinary reading continues to inform extreme and ordinary misunderstandings of what we see, hear, and think. Projection of desire for the other onto our qualification of them is a longstanding difficulty confronting ethnographic work. It is not enough to decolonize or deconstruct deeply internalized anthropocentric impulses cohering our findings when conducting this research. We need to attend to, document, critique, and contain these impulses during the act of research. Similarly, our toxic dependence on dehumanizing nomenclature, on systems of coding and categorical existence, whether these be human or artificial, are riddled with violent genocidal histories to creatures, persons, and communities.
We read ourselves and other creatures into and out of existence. Those who read for a living might be cautious, careful, and attentive to how these readings are also forming their subjects and objects while trying to understand and make claims about them. Reading affectively—attentively, carefully, slowly, speculatively, and generously—forms the felt basis for reading each other, one based in mutual respect, response, and responsibility. Attending to (dis)affected reading gives us the opportunity to pause and think again about the violence of misinterpretation and its attendant misrepresentation. Continuing to mistake our readings and misreadings for reality can and has detrimental effects for those who are vulnerable like non-speaking, babies, and voiceless and silenced others with no recourse to power and representation. Reading is our key means to redress, repair, revise, revive, and renew the mess we have made out the world. It is through reading with a thought to the other that we might begin to study the devastated world we have inherited and uneasily shared, anew.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
