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Ways of Reading
- University of Minnesota Press
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Ways of Reading 79 Common sense (known to be untrustworthy) suggests that writing precedes reading, for to be able to read, one must have something written. That is incorrect. There was reading (e.g., of peas) long before the invention of writing. Writing itself is just a way of reading : it involves selecting written signs from a heap, like peas, to be strung into lines. To read (legere, legein) means “to pick out, to peck.” This pecking activity is called “election,” the capacity to do it, “intelligence.” And the result of pecking is called “elegance” and “elite.” Writers are not the first intellectuals but only the intellectuals characteristic of a particular historical period. They peck more elegantly than before. Assuming that reading precedes writing, and pecking precedes stringing (and so calculating computing), then we are facing difficulties common sense covers up. Intelligence is the capacity to pick something out from a mass. Our prehuman ancestors were intelligent beings as they read fleas from one another’s pelts. Hens, too, are intelligent: they peck kernels of corn from heaps. There are two methods of reading: according to criteria (knowing what to pick) or unselectively. The first method is called “critical”; the second is what the English word to read means—“to guess.” Hens are critical. They peck according to the criterion edible–inedible. But such a criterion poses a problem for hens when it comes to writing. They eat the kernels instead of threading them. Our prehuman ancestors may, on the other hand, have arranged the selected fleas in rows before they ate them. The setting of stones in rows argues in favor of such a conclusion and suggests—uncomfortably—that critical thinking 80 ✴ does writing have a future? came before writing. Those who claim that writing initiates and promotes our critical faculties (an argument of this book as well) must try to adjust their position to account for the hens. Not everything can be pecked. There are illegible things. But everything can be picked apart so that it can be pecked. It depends on how sharp the picking beak is, and science hones the beak finer and finer. But one hesitates before this formulation of the theory of perception on which science is based. The beak needs to pick apart to be able to peck later. If the beak becomes finer and finer, then the kernels it can eventually peck will have to be smaller and smaller until they can’t be pecked anymore. If science has calculated everything down into kernels that it can no longer peck, then the world has become illegible again. Criticism, which precedes reading and is meant to make reading possible, can become too exact and so prevent reading. That, too, is uncomfortable. It appears to leave things illegible, mysterious—despite our having seen the capacity to be critical as the root of human dignity since Kant at the latest. To read critically (e.g., the way hens distinguish between kernels of corn and kernels of sand) is to evaluate. Corn is good; sand is not good. If interpretation has something to do with pretium (price and/or value), then hens interpret. The opposite of critical reading is puzzle solving (to read). This is not about the pecking of the proverbial blind hen, who, of course, is known to find a kernel now and then but is rather about a way of reading that categorically rejects evaluation. Science claims to read in this way. It claims that as far as it’s concerned, a kernel of sand has the same value as a kernel of corn, and both may be pecked in equal quantities. And science goes a step further, claiming that the puzzle-solving mode of reading represents an advance over the critical mode. To leave values behind and approach symptoms, a disciplined way would be the ideal way to read. Cultural sciences, in interpreting the phenomena they select, are imperfect sciences compared to natural sciences, which refuse to interpret phenomena. That, too, is uncomfortable. For it would seem that the critical faculty—far from being the basis [3.236.98.81] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:43 GMT) Ways of Reading ✴ 81 of human dignity—is more characteristic of hens than of people. The claim of natural science must be picked apart. In their natural state, people were omnivores. They read everything around them and in them interpretively: trees and dreams, stars and coffee grounds, the flight of birds and their own...