Reading, Again. Reviving Reading

This paper will examine the role of affect as a key force in the experience of reading. I argue reading is an experience rather than an instrument of cognition. The latter, I suggest, gives way to dehumanizing and violating forms of reading as instrument or nomenclature or categorization. I suggest that new relations can be made in, within and from practices of reading that conceive it as a fragile, faltering practice of knowledge production. My reconceptualization of reading derives from Derrida’s notion of deconstruction as learning to read the trace of affect unraveling the normative and/or binary procedures cohering privileged and/or prejudicial understandings of the text. Reading for affect asks researchers to engage in an analysis of the felt and non-evident of people, events and texts. Rather than comprehend in the sense of cognition, we feel the trace of meanings cathected in signs before we know what the sign might mean. My paper will expand on reading as conveying affectivity or the unheard embedded in text. Increasingly there is a demand to read the other’s words with greater attention to feeling for what they do and do not say, can and cannot speak. In studies that purport to do research with humans, it seems to be imperative to engage in a practice of reading that attends to the other meanings indicated by words. This requires the development of a critical or close research reading practice that attends to affect or the interior meanings of articulations and text that words cannot easily convey.