The End of Reading

The End of Reading

(Lecture delivered at the conference “Book/Ends,”

University at Albany, October 12, 2000)

Peggy Kamuf

Professor of French and Comparative Literature

University of Southern California

In 1986, the American intellectual historian Robert Darnton wrote an essay cataloging what he called in the essay’s title “First Steps Toward a History of Reading.” It may be that this is one of the first occurrences of what has since become the name of a thriving discipline, the history of reading. The essay, in any case, is certainly one of the first attempts to define and delineate appropriate questions with which to approach its object, reading. From Darnton’s account, however, it appears to be less a matter of opening a new field of historical research than of shifting the focus historians of the book such as himself have customarily brought to their materials. In other words, it is largely a matter of going back over the ground researched by histories of writing, of the book, of printing, of libraries, and so forth with an eye toward the reading process rather than the processes of book production, distribution, collection, suppression, translation, or whatever. Darnton will quickly survey a few already amply documented areas where this shift could be effected, but he remarks first that if the history of reading he calls for is possible, it will not be easy. What is this difficulty that the would-be historian of reading must overcome? I quote:

In short, it should be possible to develop a history as well as a theory of reader response. Possible, but not easy; for the documents rarely show the readers at work, fashioning meaning from texts, and the documents are texts themselves, which also require interpretation. Few of them are rich enough to provide even indirect access to the cognitive and affective elements of reading, and a few exceptional cases may not be enough for one to reconstruct the inner dimensions of that experience. But historians of the book have already turned up a great deal of information about the external history of reading. Having studied it as a social phenomenon, they can answer many of the “who,” “what,” “where,” and “when” questions, which can be of great help in attaching the more difficult “whys” and “hows.”[1]

So if a history of reading is possible, then the so-called difficulty characterized here must not be insuperable. That is, in addition to the “external history of reading” for which there already exists ample documentation, it would also have to be possible to chart its internal history, the history of its “cognitive and affective elements,” of “the inner dimensions of that experience.” If such a history is merely difficult and not impossible, however, then the historian has to suppose some means of gaining access to the inner experience of other readers. Now, what could those means possibly be?

Darnton acknowledges that documents, texts, writings may record or report someone’s reading experience, but they cannot give access directly to its inner dimensions, only to its outer manifestations, that is, to a text that another reader in turn will have to interpret. This concession concerning the inadequacy of documentary sources for the purpose of this history is quite remarkable coming from a historian. It puts in question the ultimate viabilty of this project, although Darnton seems to count the fact of the necessary passage through interpretation as just one more difficulty to be overcome on the way to constructing what would be more than or in addition to an “external history of reading.” But again, by what means if not through textual documentation will the history of some readers’ inner experiences be made available to other readers? For the reason he himself has just conceded, Darnton cannot answer this question.

There is thus a fundamental problem with any history of reading that would be more than a history of the activity’s external manifestations. Moreover, the problem is of such a nature that even the external history of reading, which Darnton finds to have been virtually achieved already, begins to look rather hopeless. Here, however, the problem is not the lack of documents but the indeterminate limits on what counts as documentation of a reading practice. This problem as well is somewhat inadvertently indicated by Darnton when he claims unaccountably, as we have just heard, that “documents rarely show readers at work, fashioning meaning from texts.” What can this mean except that the historian discounts as not pertinent to his project all the libraries full of books written by readers of other books? There is all of literary criticism, for example, just to mention the obvious. So whatever is this historian talking about when he asserts with such authority that documents rarely show readers “at work, fashioning meaning from texts”?

Such an enormous misstatement suggests that, despite everything, the historian maintains the belief or the hope that an inner scene of reading can somehow be manifested otherwise than in an external document or text. A few pages further on, Darnton returns to the question of the “inner process” of reading, this time to acknowledge that “we have not yet” been able to understand its workings even in ourselves. After surveying research that contributes to an external history, he observes:

Thus we already know a good deal about the institutional bases of reading. We have some answers to the “who,” “what,” where,” and “when” questions. But the “why’s” and “how’s” elude us. We have not yet devised a strategy for understanding the inner process by which readers made sense of words. We do not even understand the way we read ourselves, despite the efforts of psychologists and neurologists to trace eye movements and to map the hemispheres of the brain. (170-71)

With this allusion to experimental, scientific research on reading, Darnton seems to imply that the would-be reading historian’s problem must await solution from science, even if so far psychology and neurology have in fact been of little help in the matter. But what’s interesting is the connection made to the parallel concern with the “inner process” that both historian and scientist would like somehow to lay bare. This parallel raises a further question for us: for if, as we’ve suggested, this baring of reading’s interiority remains impossible and not just difficult for the historian, what of the scientific quest to understand the same process, not through historical documentation but empirical, physical evidence? Is the science of reading’s “inner process” any more possible than its history? We will hold this question in reserve and return to it when the time comes.

Although, with these self-proclaimed “first steps,” Robert Darnton may have sought to initiate a history of reading that would ply between its external and internal faces, few have tried to follow his lead. This is not to say that the project of a history of reading has been abandoned. On the contrary, the bibliography in this field has grown rapidly since 1986, especially in Europe. Some of the best of this scholarship may be found in the collective volume edited by Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, A History of Reading in the West, first published in Italy and France in the mid-1990s and translated into English in 1999. In their introduction to this fine collection, Cavallo and Chartier do not worry the improbable distinction Darnton wants to pose; that a history of reading can deal only with external signs of changes in reading habits is taken for granted or, in any case, this fact is not cited as a constraint, limitation, or “difficulty” of the sort that led Darnton perhaps to dream of overcoming it, even if he cannot begin to imagine how that might happen. More clear-sighted, then, as concerns what might be called the irreducible phenomenon of reading, Cavallo and Chartier set out a program for its historical study that, on the face of it at least, remains precisely on the face of things, without presuming to reach the inner dimensions or inner process that eluded Darnton.[2]

The comparison of these two historical projects highlights another difference. Whereas Darnton, with his distinction between an external history and an inner process, seems to have relied on a modern and thus paradoxically unhistoricized figure of reading, the historians brought together in Cavallo and Chartier’s collective endeavor do not suppose as he does the figure of silent reading or the silent reader. For it is such a figure that, from a more thoroughly historicized perspective, is seen to emerge only very gradually as the dominant one. As one would expect, A History of Reading in the West retraces in some detail a few of the well-known transformations that produced this dominance by the late Middle Ages; but it also strengthens claims for the co-presence of silent reading alongside the standard practice of reading aloud in the ancient world. The book’s first chapter, by Jesper Svenbro, is even entitled “Archaic and Classical Greece: The Invention of Silent Reading.” The issue for these historians, however, is simply whether the documentary record allows one to affirm that silent reading was indeed practiced by the ancients, albeit only exceptionally. In other words, they worry little or not at all about the dilemma Darnton remarked in reconstructing the inner dimensions of the reading experience.

There may be a sense, however, in which Darnton’s dilemma brings one closer to this event being called the “invention of silent reading” than does the more realistic external history charted by Cavallo, Chartier, and their collaborators. By that I mean that his wish to access the inner experience of another reader lets us see an affinity with the reaction of someone who could actually have witnessed silent reading for the first time, as if indeed it had arrived one day like an unprecedented event. If there were a document recording such an event, then I venture to say we would recognize in it the very same conditions of the problem besetting today’s would-be observers of reading’s inner scene, after many centuries have worn off the strangeness of the event, even for historians.

There may be many such documents, but I have in mind arguably the most famous of them, a scene from St. Augustine’s Confessions, which oddly enough receives no mention at all in Cavallo and Chartier’s otherwise richly documented volume.[3] In the passage I will cite in a moment, Augustine describes how he reacted when he first observed someone, St. Ambrose, engaged in the practice of silent reading. It occurs toward the beginning of Book 6 and records one of the rare experiences prior to his conversion that Augustine seems to relate more because of its curiousness than for its role in that retrospective narrative. Although he does not make it explicit, there is nevertheless a connection to be made to the event of his own conversion when, some years later, Augustine hears the voice “as of a child” chanting the phrase “Take up and read,” whereupon he opened the epistle of Paul to the Romans that was the lying on a table and reads the verses that await him there. And he reads them, he notes, “in silence,” recording perhaps with these two words his conversion to the practice that, when he first observed it, had struck him enough to warrant the following description, which I will now read aloud from book Book 6:

When [Ambrose] read, his eyes moved down the pages and his heart sought out their meaning while his voice and tongue remained silent. Often when we were present—for no one was forbidden to enter, and it was not his custom to have whoever came announced to him—we saw him reading to himself, and never otherwise. After sitting for a long time in silence—who would dare to annoy a man so occupied?—we would go away. We thought that in that short time which he obtained for refreshing his mind, free from the din of other men’s problems, he did not want to be summoned to some other matter. We thought too that perhaps he was afraid, if the author he was reading had expressed things in an obscure manner, then it would be necessary to explain it for some perplexed but eager listener, or to discuss some more difficult questions, and if his time were used up in such tasks, he would be able to read fewer books than he wished to. However, need to save his voice, which easily grew hoarse, was perhaps the more correct reason why he read to himself. But with whatever intention he did it, that man did it for a good purpose (quolibet tamen animo id ageret, bono utique ille vir agebat).[4]

Augustine writes that he and his companions hesitated as to how to explain Ambrose’s behavior. Without resolving which of the possible reasons he might have had for reading in silence rather than aloud as was customary even when alone, Augustine nevertheless concludes that in such a man as the saintly Ambrose, it was for a good purpose and with good intentions. It is, however, as if assurance were needed here to dispel a contrary thought, perhaps even the first one to occur to this witness when he initially came upon the strange behavior: might not that silenced tongue be keeping to itself some secret guilt, an evil and not a good purpose? This conclusion thus ends up lending a note of excuse to the possible reasons Augustine offers to explain Ambrose’s reading habits, as if he had to forestall the idea of the fault there was in keeping to oneself what was meant to be proffered openly and viva voce.

What makes this text so extraordinary is not just its historical value as a document, one which suggests how such an important transformation might have been experienced by those who underwent it, those who like Augustine began one day to silence their own voices as they read. At the same time as it records the event or advent of this novel experience, the text also uncovers and brings clearly into focus a condition of the reading experience that is not first of all or above all historical. For 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. In effect, we see, we read Augustine who believes that he is seeing reading taking place because Ambrose’s “eyes moved down the pages” even though he cannot see to the heart of the other’s reading, to what precisely he locates here in Ambrose’s heart, which “sought out their meaning.” So, he neither sees nor hears the other’s reading taking place; he can only believe that it takes places nowhere that he can hear or see, cut off, therefore from his own understanding. So long as reading manifests itself in the openly spoken voice, then its conditioning ground of alterity can appear to disappear into that powerful figure of sameness Jacques Derrida has called “s’entendre-parler,” hearing/understanding-oneself-speak. Augustine’s experience is one in which that precise figure is thrown out of alignment with the figure of reading and with a reading figure who silences the voice without thereby suspending the reading that is apparently taking place. For Augustine sees or at least believes he can see that Ambrose is reading, there before him, openly and yet not so openly; reading also in secret because “to himself.” What has been made manifest, therefore, is reading as phenomenon of alterity, that is, as the appearance and disappearance of some otherness, alterity no sooner showing itself as phenomenon then it disappears into the belief in the reliability of appearances. It is as if Augustine’s startled and startling account had recorded a moment when alterity obtruded itself into his world as phenomenalized by the voice, and to do so it had to appear as the other reading, the other’s reading. In that moment, the reading that appears to be taking place appears also suspended from its condition, which is the other’s unfathomable secret and irreducible alterity.

Having reread even minimally this page of the Confessions, we may now return to our various latter-day histories of reading with, I hope, minds refreshed by and reminded of our reading condition. Permit me, then, to fast forward about 15 centuries, to some time during the last quarter of the 19^th century. The history of reading in the West will take a decisive turn during these final decades of a century that saw the industrialized and democratically-styled societies of Europe and North America gradually institute free, universal, primary education. The promotion of mass literacy and the mass production of cheap books provide two of the main threads that reading historians of this period follow.[5] Martyn Lyons, for example, contributes to Cavallo and Chartier’s collection a chapter titled “New Readers in the Nineteenth Century: Women, Children, Workers.” As Lyons points out, in Britain as in France, universal primary education, although on the agenda since the Enlightenment, was only finally put into effect during the last two decades of the century. But he makes no mention of another development taking place right around the same time. First in Germany, then in England physicians and neurologists began to record observations of children with a peculiar resistance to literacy education. Although normally intelligent and adequately instructed, they could not learn to read with any facility. After sufficient cases of the anomaly were recorded, the idea began to dawn on these observers that the activity of reading must be a specific capacity of the brain or the perceptual system. That is, they began to think of reading as depending on a specific set of conditions that are not precisely the same as those that obtained for speech.

The notion of the specificity of reading arose in the context of the neurological study of aphasia. By the last decades of the 19^th century, there was already a considerable literature produced by neurologists attempting to track the pathway of speech through the brain. Freud contributed to this literature in 1891 with a paper, “On Aphasia.” (This early publication, by the way, is not included in the edition of Freud’s complete psychoanalytic works, which signals that, at least for Freud’s editors, its methods are those of neurology and not yet those of psychoanalysis.) Another German neurologist whose earlier work on aphasia Freud cites several times in his essay is Adolph Kussmaul. He cites in particular a paper of Kussmaul’s from 1877, “Die Störungen der Sprache”.[6] Under the title “Disturbances of Speech,” this article appeared the same year in English translation as Kussmaul’s contribution to volume XIV of the Cyclopedia of the Practice of Medicine, published in New York. Although Freud takes no notice of the fact in 1891 or later, this essay by Kussmaul is generally credited as having first coined the term “word-blindness” to designate a disturbance not of speech, but of reading. Here is the opening paragraph, where Kussmaul introduces his new diagnostic terminology:

In medical literature we find cases recorded as aphasia which should not properly be designated by this name, since the patients were still able to express their thought by speech and writing. They had not lost the power either of speaking or of writing; they were no long able, however, although the hearing was perfect, to understand the words which they heard, or, they saw. This morbid inability we will style, in order to have the shortest possible names at our disposition, word-deafness and word-blindness (cæcitas et surditas verbalis).[7]

Although Kussmaul uses “word-blindness” here to designate only the condition of those who have lost the ability to read, as the consequence generally of some trauma, the term will be taken up later to name the new category of disorders affecting those who were never able to learn to read in the first place. Later would come other names for the same phenomenon: alexia, dyslexia, strephosymbolia and, in English, reading disorder or dysfunction, to cite only a few of the many names that have been dreamed up.

Kussmaul, then, is credited with having first identified what these various terms strive to name. His discovery or invention followed, as we’ve just seen, from the observation of reading’s apparent specificity, since it alone could be pathologically affected when other language abilities were intact. What Kussmaul had to challenge was the largely tacit assumption among his contemporary neurologists that speech and the ability to speak comprised and controlled the more specialized linguistic functions of reading and writing. He discovered, if you will, the necessity of distinguishing between phonology, a science of speech, and lexology, a science of reading. Because neurology had concerned itself to that point solely with speech disorders, aphasias, it was a phonology and inapt to unlock the secrets of lexology. In other words, he discovered that he and has fellow scientists knew nothing whatsoever about reading. It was, then, a science of reading that was called for.

The moment we have just chronicled, when the first call was issued to bring to light the principles of a science of reading, has now a familiar ring if we recall Darnton’s anticipation of a certain history of reading to come. Whereas, however, later historians of reading essentially ignored, and for very good reasons, Darnton’s call to write an internal as well as an external history, Kussmaul’s countless successors have kept alive the dream that the “inner dimensions of reading,” in Darnton’s phrase, will one day be laid bare.[8] By calling it a dream, I mean to suggest not only that there is an illusion being nourished here, but, more pointedly, that the enormous site of the sciences of reading is invested or staked out by forces of desire that seem to me both more and more risky to ignore and yet more and more ignored by all, or almost all of the discourses that, today, are concentrated on this strange object called reading. That reading ought to or must become the object of some science, that its practice can be observed and regulated, trained and corrected, disciplined and remediated, measured and tested, diagnosed and determined, that all or any of these operations will finally yield one day the desired picture from within of the other reading, the other’s reading, these assumptions have all been left to stand thoroughly unexamined in the light of what we have just recalled by rereading (for example, but we could have taken any other example as well) that little passage from the Confessions. For if reading is on the condition of some alterity, some otherness that cannot be appropriated by the same as sure and certain knowledge—thus, a possible science—then would not a science of reading, if it were one day possible, have to spell the end of reading? To be possible, this science would have somehow to overcome the unknowable, irreducible alterity that is the condition at the heart of reading. It can achieve itself as science only by appropriating to itself the heart of alterity—the other’s heart—as knowledge. No doubt the same movement toward appropriation can be discerned at work in all scientific endeavors—it is indeed the very movement of science or philosophy. But with the project of the science of reading, this general movement is not only specified; it takes henceforth as its specific object the very heart of alterity, which is the heart of the other reading, the other’s reading.

The forces that maintain, in all its intensity of investment, the search for a science of reading are considerable, of course. In the US, at present, they saturate almost every discourse about childhood, literacy, and public funding of education. Testing reading proficiency is now the principal technology of social selection. Although everyone knows full well that this technology is the bluntest of blunt instruments, this largely unacknowledged awareness works merely to reinforce the drive toward a finally scientific knowledge of reading, which is still lacking. Bad conscience is doing its work, Nietzsche might have said, which is why one should have no illusions that the would-be scientists of reading can be persuaded to give it up and still less the politicians who stake everything on raising reading test scores.

I don’t think it encourages too many illusions of this sort, however, to attempt to situate this new invention, this science of reading that still remains today just a call for such a science, one which is little more than a century old, in its modern scientific form at least. Although few of these scientists themselves show any interest in the longer history of reading, it is one in which their invention has its place, a place that was prepared for it by a long pre-history. That pre-history includes, of course, the other invention called silent reading. By going back through Augustine, for example, we might suggest how the earlier realization—fundamentally that reading does not as such depend on voice or on speech—finds its echo or even perhaps its response in the later moment, when first Kussmaul and then innumerable others began to call for a science of reading, in its specific difference and independence from speech and voice.

What, you may be wondering, would be the point of such situating or of making such improbable, incongruous countermoves to the assumptions of science given that, as I’ve just admitted, these assumptions so dominate public discourse, policy, investment, and thinking about reading as to appear, at least, altogether unmoveable? I mean, get real: what weight a passage from Augustine against two US presidential candidates running on their programs for testing child readers and meting out fiscal punishment for whoever fails the tests? As if there were not already far too many Church fathers staking out with their clubs the site of reading, which Augustine also did, let us not forget, with his divine authority. So, really, what is the point of recalling not just a certain history of reading but also the anhistorical condition of reading’s irreducible alterity?

I’m going to take the ridiculous risk, in conclusion, of throwing out an answer to that question. It’s an answer, I fear, that may end up sounding like one more call, echoing with the calls we’ve already heard first to a science and then to a history of reading. Echoing, yes, but an echo must somewhere, somehow displace the call that preceded it. Echo, to the eternal regret of every Narcissus, does not return the call without some difference that deflects every path of self-appropriation. So, I would call, if possible, for something like this echo, that is, the echo of all these self-knowledges that have been pursued in the name of sciences or histories of reading. As well as, of course, in the name of the religions of reading, also known as the religions of the book. But how, you should ask, could anyone hear such a call, which echoes all these self-knowledges, but thereby displaces them beyond the knowledge of, precisely, self, any self?

Well, I can only respond with something like a story. But since it’s not a story even I can tell, I’m going to dispense with all narrative appearances, except to take an arbitrary point of departure. So then, some months ago, I began thinking about how science, for some 125 years or so, has construed reading and how this scientific model, to use a clumsy word, supplies or maintains certain traits of the common sense and normative idea of reading. (Here, to go very, very quickly, because time presses, this model corresponds more or less to that of information-extraction.[9] Reading is or is read as technique for capturing information. Thus, according to the scientific model we are echoing and displacing here, reading is essentially information technology. We can suppose, therefore, that this model of reading will be increasingly reinforced by the general network of information technologies as they continue to replace reading’s traditional support, for now some 17 or 18 hundred years, the book. The book ends, but this model of reading, at least, will not. On the contrary, it will become the vastly dominant way in which something still called reading continues.) It is not just as an abstract moment of definition that we must deal with this scientific and dominant model of reading. That model is also getting produced and reproduced in reading practices. The common notion of reading as information-extraction sets the principles, and thus institutes the laws and the institutions through which reading practices are maintained, that is, reintroduced, reproduced, and reinforced in each new generation of readers, as we like to think of them. And we do like our dearest common notion of reading to remind us of the whole family scene. Reading is also thereby getting produced and maintained as site for the patriarchal, paternalistic family’s reproduction of itself. The practice gets passed down, most typically, in the voice of mothers, usually mothers, reading aloud to their children. There where this ancient practice of reading aloud survives, before the child’s invention of silent reading, it is the mother’s voice that has been made to echo with the letters taking shape on the page. I say “has been made to” because the scene is certainly not a natural one. It has also to be produced, reproduced, instituted. With the scene we are evoking of the child learning to read by listening to the mother’s voice, it is the institution of written signs themselves, and thus of all possible institutions that is being passed down. The institution of the family of man takes place in a scene of learning to read. But what we forget, what we have to forget or repress is that this is always also a violent scene inasmuch as it has to repeat, reinflict the violence that wrenches the human animal out of the state of sheer animality, where, as we are taught to believe once we can read, there is no such thing as reading in this common sense, the sense we all supposedly share, sharing thus the belief that only humans read or do what we call reading. Here one would begin to recognize another trait that all of these discourses attribute or contribute to our common sense of reading: that it is only human, that animals other than human animals do not read each other and do not read us, us other animals. Our common sense of reading, and the way we think we should read, the way we teach others to read, is thus also the site on which to reproduce this limit of the family of man, there where we feign to believe that other animals are not also others reading and reading us, no doubt for the most part to their great horror.

Perhaps you now can see the problem I am having with this whole topic of reading. It is the problem precisely of topic, topos, of a unified and undivided site. Wherever one picks up its thread, reading divides every site, so as to be, at once as we say so hopefully, produced and producing, reproduced and reproducing, doubling itself every time. Any other topic one can think of leads back to and away again from reading, from this strange a-topic non-place or non-site where reading would nevertheless still take place, if that were possible—it being altogether uncertain that such a thing has indeed ever happened as such. That reading as such, without taint or flaw or fault or error, uncontaminated by its contrary or its negation—call it misreading or non-reading—has most certainly, without possible doubt, taken place, this is what can never be simply verified. For who is to say, who could say such a thing has most certainly taken place, or that it is most certainly taking place right now? Reading without the possibility of misreading or non-reading? One just needs to think about it for a moment to realize that—

--but time presses. I have to break off what cannot otherwise end, since we’re speaking of nothing less than the endless scattering of the general a-topic site where reading just divides up sense, one never knows exactly how or where. No act of reading has ever yet been able to prove that it has not, somewhere, misread or been misread. There can be no proof that anyone has certainly read something correctly. And, yet are not the discourses we’ve been evoking under those very wishful names of sciences or histories of reading, are these not the discourses whose authority is based on arguments of proof? So am I missing something here? Or is it that these discourses of proof must necessarily miss the heart of reading, that atopic site always being divided by alterity?

In any case, there has been one prominent discourse of the last century that has been conspicuously missing from this immense field of reading research. One might wonder why so little of the literature on reading dysfunctions has come from anyone working with psychoanalytic concepts. Freud, to my knowledge, nowhere referred to this new area of research in neurology, no doubt because he had by then dropped neurology for psycho-analysis. And yet, like his former colleagues in neurology about the same time, Freud too was observing reading practices for signs or symptoms of distortion. He did so most famously in the section of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life devoted to misreadings.[10] That work was first published in 1901. Now, it happens that the previous year James Hinshelwood, an English ophthalmologist, saw into print his volume of essays titled Letter-, Word- and Mind-Blindness, a book that is almost always cited as the first monograph in what would become the study of dyslexia. Fortuitous coincidence, yet the proximity between these two founding texts has come to stand, at least in my own thinking about all these matters, for the division that installed the reading sciences at the outset. A nearly impenetrable barrier began at that moment to be constructed between the kinds of discourses authorized on one side and the other of this divide. As a result, whatever psychoanalysis might have had to say or show us about the form of misreading that was to be called dyslexia, would be relegated strictly to the fringes, where it has been and is still kept out of the way by the ferocious ban maintained, by so many powerful discourses, on the unprovable hypothesis Freud called the unconscious.

It is, of course, not just psychoanalytic discourses that have been reduced virtually to silence by the dominance of all this pseudo-scientific talk that goes on about reading. No less conspicuously, symptomatically marginalized by the dominant scientific model of reading are all discourses on literature. These are discourses that must somewhere allow for fiction and for its essential unprovability, for that which, in fiction, suspends the order of what counts as proof for science but not just for science. As such, these discourses are simply and as if by definition not taken seriously by sciences of reading, with the result that the so-called sciences will not have needed to pay any attention to the reasons other theories of reading, coming from literary discourses, may dispute the whole ground on which science constructs its model of reading, the model of information-extraction.

Well, let me just conclude with an obvious remark: In an age that promotes the value of interdisciplinarity, it is quite remarkable how rigid the exclusions have become between all these discourses that profess to be engaged with the same thing, which they all call reading. It ought to be easy to make the case that the study of reading, whatever we call reading, calls for radically interdisciplinary approaches. Which is why, especially given the recent fondness for all things interdisciplinary, it is more than a little surprising that these extraordinary conditions gathering so many far-flung discourses around a same object have yet to produce much that goes beyond common disciplinary assumptions, which are thus allowed to reproduce themselves unexamined.

I suppose, then, that I have ended up calling for something like a truly interdisciplinary venture in reading. Literary theorists should read cognitive scientists. And cognitive theorists, neurologists, and all the others working on the still unsolved enigma of what they call dyslexia ought to read Paul de Man’ essay on allegory in Allegories of Reading, at least there where the literary theorist has to borrow the neurologist’s term in order to speak of “this radical dyslexia.”[11] And everyone should read and be read by historians of reading. At the very least, we ought to want still to question why it sounds so preposterous to call for such a thing—or to let such a thing echo, for a moment, in our ears.

Notes