What Is Reading Anyway?

I love a good ghost story."Taking such reading-effects into consideration, we shall here undertake a reading of the text which will at the same time be articulated with a reading of its readings. This two-level reading - which also must return upon itself... What is the nature of a reading-effect as such? and by extension: what is reading? What does the text have to say about its own reading?" (102)"sexuality is rhetoric, since it essentially consists of ambiguity: it is the coexistence of dynamically antagonistic meanings. Sexuality is the division and divisiveness of meaning; it is meaning as division, meaning as conflict" (112)"is a reading of ambiguity as such really possible? Is it at all possible to read and to interpret ambiguity without reducing it in the very process of interpretation? Are reading and ambiguity in any way compatible?" (117)"Our reading of The Turn of the Screw would thus attempt not so much to capture the mystery's solution, but to follow, rather, the significant path of its flight; not so much to solve or answer the enigmatic question of the text, but to investigate its structure; not so much to name and make explicit the ambiguity of the text, but to understand the necessity and the rhetorical functioning of the textual ambiguity. The question underlying such a reading is thus not "what does the story mean?" but rather "how does the story mean?" How does the meaning of the story, whatever it may be, rhetorically take place through permanent displacement, textually take shape and take effect: take flight"" (118)I love this. I need to keep thinking with this."The story's origin is therefore not assigned to any one voice which would assume responsibility for the tale, but to the deferred action of a sort of echoing effect, produced - "after the fact" - by voices which themselves re-produce previous voices. It is as though the frame itself could only multiply itself, repeat itself: as though, in its infinite reproduction of the very act of narration, the frame could only be its own self-repetition, its own self-framing" (121)This makes me think of Bakhtin's "heteroglossia" or raznorechie, "varied-speechedness.""To read (to see letters, to see ghosts) is thus to look into the dark, to see in darkness... In order to look into the dark, to see in darkness (in order to read), should the eyes be opened or should they, on the contrary, be closed?" (153)"Just as, in the end, the detective is revealed to be the criminal, the doctor-therapist, the would-be analyst, herself turns out to be but an analysand" (176)I want to understand Feldman's reading + writing process for this piece. Can we (re)construct Feldman's reading of reading from her writing? Would this reconstruction be counterintuitive to the reading she discusses?"This sentence can be seen as the epitome, and as the verbal formulation, of the desire underlying psychoanalytical interpretation: the desire to be non-dupe, to interpret, i.e., at once uncover and avoid, the very traps of the unconscious" (187)"But isn't James's reader-trap, in fact, a trap set for suspicion?" (187)""Our manner of excluding," writes Maurice Blanchot,"is at work precisely at the very moment we are priding ourselves on our gift of universal comprehension." In their attempt to elaborate a speech of mastery, a discourse of totalitarian power, what Wilson and the governess both exclude is nothing other than the threatening power of rhetoric itself - of sexuality as division and as meaning's flight, as contradiction and as ambivalence; the very threat, in other words, of the unmastery, of the impotence, and of the unavoidable castration which inhere in language" (191-192)"In seeking to "explain" and master literature, in refusing, that is, to become a dupe of literature, in killing within literature that which makes it literature - its reserve of silence, that which, within speech, is incapable of speaking, the literary silence of a discourse ignorant of what it knows - the psychoanalytic reading, ironically enough, turns out to be a reading which represses the unconscious, which represses, paradoxically, the unconscious which it purports to be "explaining." To master, the, (to become the Master) is, here as elsewhere, to refuse to read the letters; here as elsewhere, to "see it all" is in effect to "shut one's eyes as tight as possible to the truth"; once more, "to see it all" is in reality to exclude; and to exclude, specifically, the unconscious" (193-194)"This, then, is what psychoanalytical interpretation might be doing, and indeed is doing whenever it gives in to the temptation of diagnosing literature, of indicating and of situating madness in a literary text" (195) Situating presumes knowing the location."To blind oneself: the final gesture of a master, so as to delude himself with the impression that he still is in control, if only of his self-destruction, that he still can master his own blindness (whereas his blind condition in reality preexisted his self-inflicted blindness), that he still can master his own loss of mastery, his own castration (whereas he in reality undergoes it, everywhere, from without); to blind oneself, perhaps, then less so as to punish, to humiliate oneself than so as to persist, precisely, in not seeing, so as to deny, once more, the very truth of one's castration, a castration existing outside Oedipus's gesture, by virtue of the fact that his conscious mastery , the mastery supported by his consciousness, finds itself subverted, by virtue of the fact that the person taken in by the trap of his detection is not the Other, but he himself, - by virtue of the fact that he is the Other" (106-107)I wonder what to make of this reliance on "seeing as knowing" in light of critical disability studies work on blindness."In James's tale as in Hoffmann's, madness is uncanny, unheimlich, to the precise extent that it cannot be situated, coinciding, as it does, with the very space of reading. Wilson's error is to try to situate madness and thereby situate himself outside it - as though it were possible, in language, to separate oneself from language; as though the reader, looking though the governess's madness and comprehended by it, could situate himself within it or outside it with respect to it; as though the reader could indeed know where he is, what his place is and what his position is with respect to the literary language which itself, as such, does not know what it knows" (201) This piece makes me want to return to Haraway's "Situated Knowledges" as well as the critique of "ideology as duping" according to Terry Eagleton, Stuart Hall, and Etienne Balibar.