Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form (review)

Can reading make you a better person? Does literary study contribute to the health of society? Most of us, I expect, would answer the first question in the affirmative, and many of us the second as well, but if asked to defend our responses, we would probably have some trouble finding the words with which to do so. Go beyond the Modern Language Association membership list, and the first question is likely to meet with raised eyebrows, the second with snorts. However pleasurable and enlightening reading might be, does it really have the power to change our behavior? And can anything as private as reading, no matter its effects, make a difference to our public life?

It is to these questions, broadly speaking, that Paul B. Armstrong addresses himself in Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form. The book illuminates them in original ways by attending to the political implications of both the very act of reading itself (independent of what one reads) and—not of the content of literary works (the basis on which their political implications are usually judged)—but of their form. The book thus builds on some of the ideas Armstrong developed in earlier works, especially The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford (1987) and Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation (1990). Working primarily with concepts drawn from his late mentor, Wolfgang Iser, as well as from Jürgen Habermas, Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Edward Said, and exemplifying his ideas through readings of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, and James Joyce, Armstrong here constructs a new paradigm of what reading can accomplish for both self and society.

Armstrong begins with Habermas's notion of "communicative rationality," the idea that the just functioning of democratic society requires that no force operate within the sphere of deliberative communication other than "the unforced force of the better argument" (2). Because Habermas sees rationality as universal, not relative, reasoned exchange, in his view, is a "nonobjectifying, noncoercive practice based on the assumption of equality," one that will or at least should ultimately lead to consensus (5). It is at this point that Armstrong sides with Lyotard in his well-known debate with Habermas. For the former, rationality is not universal, and "consensus does violence to the heterogeneity of competing belief systems and frames of reference (Lyotard qtd. in Armstrong 8). The desire for consensus also ignores the dynamic value of contestation, for "invention is always born of dissension" (Lyotard qtd. in Armstrong 8). But, as Armstrong shows, Lyotard's insistence on "justice," even while he rejects consensus, leads him to reaffirm the importance of reciprocity, that is, of mutual recognition (8). Armstrong's synthesis of Habermas and Lyotard produces his key term, the name for the kind of democratic exchange he wants to pro-mote: "nonconsensual reciprocity," defined as "mutuality without the assumption of prior or ultimate agreement" (8).

It is also the name for the kind of reading he wants to promote. Indeed, the unique political value of reading, in Armstrong's conception, is precisely that "it can be practiced in such a way as to stage" interaction based on nonconsensual reciprocity (8). Reading, done correctly, becomes the laboratory of good citizenship. Following Sartre, Armstrong sees reading as involving, at least potentially, "a process of reciprocal recognition" whereby writer and reader acknowledge each other's "meaning-creating powers," even if such acknowledgment is better understood as a struggle over "the right to set the terms of the encounter" (5-6). If discursive rules are coercive, threatening the subject's meaning-making capacities, they are also creative, making those capacities possible. The value of reading is "as an arena in which this paradox of power can be staged, played with, and explored" (6-7). Not only can readers "withdraw assent from textual regimes more easily...