The Other Side of Reading

I’ve been thinking on a reader manifesto, rules to be, numbered shorthands to come, no time soon, I’m in the thick. I’ve been reading The Undercommons (PDF) by Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, searching for analogous insights, the whole thing of university / critical academic / subversive intellectual → press / diversity editor / [and what I’m calling the “reader” in a catachrestic sense, as delineating not my position but more an orientation, an ethos, but not the ethos you’re thinking (if it’s the ethos I was thinking before the thick), so less delineating orientation than disorienting gesture, and less a gesture, the hand or its motioning, than the air above and around it during: the kind of (dis)orientation that allows for a kind of work happening in and off the work of the press].

The most immediate, mundane preoccupation is the meaning of my work (in an institution) (in a society), the meaning of my reading—is there anything in it that exceeds? that escapes the fatalism of co-option, and not by outsized claims of good intentions and agency nor by insistent appeals to art’s essential(ist) uncompliance? If there’s fugitivity in the work, something of it that escapes, that is and generates other, it does not happen through the reader, it cannot be located in their resistant act, but rather, more and most precisely, at its site—the work in and off of the work, off of the subject, “the something that produces the not visible other side of reading.”^[1]

find/replace crit, “press” replacing “university,” “reading” replacing “teaching”:

[W]hat is that work and what is its social capacity for both reproducing the [press] and producing fugitivity? If one were to say [reading], one would be performing the work of the [press]... It is not [reading] that holds this social capacity, but something that produces the not visible other side of [reading]

I love their phrasing and say it slowly, with clunks, trying it on again and again, not nearing, then right there, the precision of location without the accompanying increase in image clarity, rather, the actualization of a mass, the big something sheerly there.

something that produces    the not visible    other side    of reading
       something that produces the not visible other side of reading 
             something that         produces the not visible  other  side of reading 
     something that produces the       not            visible                 other       side                of      reading 
something                     that    produces the  not visible   other side   of reading
    something    that produces        the not visible        other side of reading
       somethingthat produces   the not      visible other           side       of     reading
   something   that produces    the not   visible     other   side       of reading

I want to close in on this space but it’s general admission only, reproachful of critical approach. I want to say what it is but it is not a reading against institutional consciousness, not merely ghost-in-the-machine/glitch-in-the-matrix-type configurations, not merely multicultural accommodation nor even more comprehensive reorientations of center, not the revaluation of predominant metrics, not the correction to aesthetic standard so that wrong and wronged writing can qualify for this realm of correctness—“But we won’t stand corrected.”—“Moreover, incorrect as we are there’s nothing wrong with us.”

I am not nearing the other side so much as distancing, from reading as resistance, reading as act. Reading as fundamental to the reproduction of the press, reading that, despite its contribution to institutional function and despite impassioned defense of some pure possibility, exceeds both its co-options and counters. Reading that, if not possessing, at least, at most, adheres some essential fugitivity, reading that provides a condition of possibility, not unrelenting impossibility, not possibility reducible to the act itself, but reading as the condition, the real thing that realizes the more real thing, more real than the reader performing reading is the something in the performance producing other.

I want to close in on the condition but I skew conditional: if this end is to be not just a people’s acquisition of the same publication, if the press is to be understood as a movement for the impossibility of the other side, if the other side can be understood as a movement against the possibility of a press, or any other; not just pages justly distributed but pages unknown…^[2]

self-incurred minority crit, “reading” replacing “teaching”:

The moment of [reading] for food is therefore often mistakenly taken to be a stage, as if eventually one should not [read] for food… if the [reading] is successfully passed on, the stage is surpassed, and [reading] is consigned to those who are known to remain in the stage… Kant interestingly calls such a stage “self-incurred minority.” He tries to contrast it with having the “determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another”... But what would it mean if [reading] or rather what we might call “the beyond of [reading]” is precisely what one is asked to get beyond… what of those minorities who refuse… who will not come back from beyond (that which is beyond “the beyond of [reading]”), as if they will not be subjects, as if they want to think as objects, as minority?

I am concerned with the break for beyond “(that which is beyond ‘the beyond of [reading]’).” I am concerned with being unconcerned with the differentiation of reading from “the beyond of [reading],” of reading’s seeming passivity from writing’s seeming activity, of the seeming debt and dependence of another’s words from the independent credit of one’s own. I am concerned with the immediacy to reading’s dependent condition, concerned not with it exactly, exactly not with it but how it most exactly elides what I’m after.

I am unconcerned with rendering the differentiation less different, countering Kant’s notion of emancipated self-possession with a relational model of “being guided” (to which many writers, readers, editors, critics already subscribe, anyone really who doesn’t go about their work as an independent imposition but in continuity, in intimate proximity with others around, before and after). I am unconcerned with relational counter, which is correction, a revaluation of the state of “being guided” to a meaningful state of subjectivity, the critical renewal of the subject still (self-)possessing that “courage and determination to use one’s intelligence” to be guided, as a subject by other subjects, to pay off the debt.

I am as unconcerned with reading as I am with the beyond of reading, if that reading already is the beyond of reading, is the subject taken to its relational extent (not end), brought into the active and co-creative network of meaning-making among text and reader, self and other, each of which becomes augmented through the other, each of which loses their rigidity with the other, each, which all the same and ultimately, retains their founding categorizations, expanded (crucially) but not undone (crucially). I am concerned with abiding extremely by what Kant refuses, what relational subjects, in resisting Kant, refuse: the dispossession of “being guided by another,” of adhering strictly to, being overwhelmingly derivative of, of “not finishing oneself, not passing, not completing,” of being “unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity" (akin to the “passive substance,” not activating subject, in Adrian Piper’s catalytic equation).^[3]

So I’m concerned with the concern of being unconcerned with forms of literary sociality and exchange that find resource in and make recourse to the subject, that are premised on being one’s own in order to be (in relation to) other in order to be more one’s own. So I’m my own and on my own here, back from beyond, and it’s concerning and time to make a break for it, since “it matters how long we have to do it,” how long we’re required to be our own enough, how long we have to read the reader in the break before we’re snagged just before it, before the nonact of the not subject, of the not visible other side, before that beyond, that which is beyond the beyond of reading, from which I won’t come back—