Critical/Uncritical?

The way in which we read and interpret the text is a construct of our context. Warner points this out in his article “Uncritical Reading” and for me it was a bit of a lightbulb moment. The way in which I understand a text, I read it, respond to it and analyse it are all socially conditioned processes which I have wholly taken for granted. And it seems that these processes are on the decline.

I read The Secret History a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. I am not one to remember the details of novels. I find it difficult to sustain a conversation with someone about a book I read in the couple of months previous, let alone years before. When recalling a novel I am left with a sort of feeling about it, whether I liked it or not, but also it conjures up other emotions a result of maybe the novel itself and the time in which I read it. It’s probably why Felski’s promotion of the identification and importance of affect in reading was so resonant for me.  She says that ‘affect cannot be separated from interpretation’ (32); the way a novel works on you, the immersion you experience when you’re on a crowded bus laughing at something you’ve just read (if you’ve never done this, you need to pick up a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces) and wholly blind to your surroundings is so integral to the way in which you perceive that novel.  So recalling Tartt’s The Secret History I felt a mix of anticipation and unease. I really enjoyed the novel but it left me anxious. Julian repetition of ‘beauty is terror’ typifies the way in which The Secret History worked on me. It’s so beautifully constructed, it is mesmerising and enchanting but at the same time the characters are superficial, the world is amoral and there is no sense of prevailing order or justice, just life.

Warner’s contemporaries would class me as an uncritical reader. I read for pleasure, even within the context of university study and I choose to write my essays on the texts that I have enjoyed the most. For Warner the taught reading habits presuppose certain types of subjects in society, uncritical and critical reading should be viewed as ‘contrasting ways in which various techniques and forms can be embedded in an ethical problematic of subject formation’ (19).

The domination of the written and published word as the mass cultural form of entertainment and information is coming to a close. Perhaps the novel’s domination in the 18^th and 19^th centuries was the serendipitous result of a lack of other forms of media and information technology. There is currently a transformation with the way in which we receive and consume information instigated by the internet and other visual media. As Stallybrass suggests ‘the novel has only been a brilliantly perverse interlude in the long history of discontinuous reading’ (quoted in Warner, 28). Just as the days of oral history and folk tales gave way to the written word, the novel now moves over for the screen. Nicholas Mirzoeff describes the process by which ‘human experience is now more visual and visualised than ever before’ but that ‘these forms of visualisation [television and film] are now being challenged by interactive visual media like the internet and virtual reality applications’ (1).  He describes the visual culture as ‘contested, debated and transformed as a constantly challenging place of social interaction and definition in terms of class gender and racialised identities’ (4). Hypertext has reinstated discontinuous reading as a common practice, a practice described by Warner involving agency ‘everywhere manifested in movement between passages’ (30). So how to apply the work of Felski and Warner to the texts of the internet? I suppose the choice of clicking on a link, jumping from site to site involves affect, agency and freedom. Mirzoeff describes visual culture as ‘fractal’ precluding any grand narrative and allowing for the infinite possibilities, extensions  and interactions of different race, gender, class etc. (25). Warner asks us to look critically at what kind of subjects the habits of reading produces. We should look now at what kind of ethical subjectivities are being propagated in this network of supposedly democratised media.

Felski, R. “After Suspicion” in Profession, vol. 8, 2009, 28-35.

Warner, M. “Uncritical Reading” in Gallop, J. (ed.) Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, London and New York, Routledge, 2004, 13-38.

Mirzoeff, N., “Introduction: What is Visual Culture?” An Introduction to Visual Culture, New York and London, Routledge, 1999, pp. 1-33.