Reading the Way of Things : Towards a New Technology of Making Sense by Daniel Coffeen

Author:Daniel Coffeen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zero Books
Published: 2016-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

10

Reading amidst the Social

The social moves fast, enmeshing the reader in its tendrils even before the reader has arrived on the scene. Alas, as a reader, you are always already on the scene. You are prefigured before you’ve even entered the room — your gender, race, class, your place in the sexual and social hierarchy. As Althusser says, we are hailed even before we’re born: Hey you! And we look.

You’re in a bar. You look around. You catch someone’s eyes. She has some look on her face, some expression of her history and her now — a look of fatigue, befuddlement, boredom, urgency, fear, delight. This expression is, of course, never just one of those things but is an undulating set of affects. Once you look at her, this expression changes, however imperceptibly. This, in turn, affects your expression. Which, in turn, inflects hers. This is an infinite circuit that is crisscrossed by any number of other circuits — social, historical, cultural, physical, sexual, circumstantial (noise level, public events, your respective group of friends, your need to use the bathroom). Together, you are making the world.

Obviously, the terms of reading the event change depending on where and who you are. A young African-American male dressed in a sweatshirt and baggy pants and a white man dressed in a suit are read differently and hence must read differently.

And it’s quite different if you’re reading a book or work of art. But, as Henri Bergson might say, this difference is not one of kind but of speed and degree of intensity. That is, when we read books, art, and films, we are enmeshed in the event of reading just as we are in the social. We are implicated. But the speed with which this happens, and our time of reaction, is usually much slower.

The point, among others, is this: as a reader, you are constitutive of the reading event. You do not have the privilege of standing outside the fray; you are the fray — or at least part of it. Whatever you do inflects the whole, and vice-versa. This makes any reading complex but it makes reading in the social exponentially complex as glances, gestures, words are exchanged at near-infinite speeds, all amidst the relentlessly fluctuating desires and bodies of people.

This is the starting point of Gonzo journalism: join the fray, constitute the fray, be constituted by the fray as a way of knowing the world. The Gonzo journalist stands amongst his subjects, even getting stomped by some Angels. There is a knowledge to be had here, a knowledge that is different than the knowledge that comes from standing back. The one who writes about the concert from the balcony offers a different knowledge than the one who writes about it from the mosh pit. Neither is privileged; each offers its perspective, its own kind of knowing. But, in saying that, we shift the fundamental terms of knowing. To know is not to be objective, to stand back. To know is to reckon from your perspective.

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