Four ways of Reading

It is Monday morning and I have decided to try and get back to doing what I said I would do.  It is ironic that since starting the PhD I've actually done less writing than I was doing before.  Probably as much of the other writing I was doing was writing for a purpose and the new writing, I'm not doing, is more speculative.  I am holding Quaker silence as I don't feel I have anything to say that is worth breaking the silence for.

I wanted to start with a visual metaphor.  My brain feels like a sea-side Penny Push machine. I am feeding in snippets of knowledge like coins and very little is dropping out into the pay slot.  When I was a kid I didn't really understand how these machines worked.  Common sense suggested that you would get as much out as you put in - it was just a matter of timing, watching the accumulating avalanche of coinage teeter on the edge of the void, aware of the no tilting mechanism, always on the edge of a big win.  Later I realised that most of the coins were falling into a money box at the edges of the machine. On a more personal level none of us ever left the arcade with any two-pence pieces anyway, we always spent everything we had.

This is my metaphor for reading for my PhD, what I put in does not relate to what seems to come out at the other end - something gets pushed to an unknown space at the edges. I'm aware that at some point there may be some kind of pay out.  I'm also sure I will probably push everything back in at the top in an attempt to shift everything a little further forward towards the big payout that is balanced in awkward equilibrium on the precipice of knowing.

Since I've started, I've discovered or been told about four new ways of reading.  They are helpful and have changed the way I am trying to read but it is taking time and they are not what I thought they would be.   Two were given to me by other writers, one by Kate and the fourth is my own, it's not really new but I have become more aware of it, perhaps it is a way of reading that I may need to question.

1. Inhabiting books.  At my last supervision I mentioned to Kate that I wanted to be more systematic in the way I approached reading.  I had/have made much more time for it.  People have said I should start using 'End Notes' though I haven't - it is like getting around to having a blood test to check for an inherited blood disorder, I know that this is probably the sensible thing to do but I just ignore it.  I have no idea why I have struggled to do either, I have no excuse or rationale.   Kate said I should try to inhabit a book,  I liked this idea as it reminded me of being on holiday and reading a great trashy novel.  The way part of you lives in the book and how each time you turn a page its like opening a door.  Very little none fiction does this for me - I am reluctant to enter the space of the book and the idea that I now have the time and space to inhabit a book is exciting.  I am currently trying to inhabit Erin Manning's The Minor Gesture and Massumi's  Semblance and Event.  I think these two books work well as companions, both are significant achievements and both have dropped a few pennies in the tray of my understanding.  I'm not sure how easy they are to inhabit, taken in small chunks, parts of them are comically dense - the kind of texts I could email to normal people like my brother to make fun of academic writing, the content I've been asked to read.

In fact, I did photograph and send this bit to my brother who responded with this text;

To be fair it reads like
you have written it yourself.
Basically if this meaningless
drivel is content that you have to
understand and comment on
then simply produce the same sort of
shit yourself.

Of course the very act of
comment will diametrically impact
the intermingleness of the idea or
proposition and render the very subject
of the discourse and the discourse itself
changed and no longer static.

I responded -

Yes, you are correct.
True - you have entered
the transgressive space that
is the Schizophrenia of the
Phantasm- a spacial trangression
defiantly cut into the hegemony
of your everyday.

I am not fully ready to inhabit these books and it's not because I want to make fun of them it's more that I am still coming to them as a practitioner - I want to know what they can do.  To inhabit something there needs to be a space where you can strive to dwell.  I have made a good effort though - I'm 60 pages into the Manning and about 80 into the Massumi - I reckon I'm doing 'close reading' rather than 'inhabiting' which brings us on to the second way to read a book.

2. Hypothetical Sympathy. On page 38 of A Minor Gesture Manning quotes Bertrand Russell.  I was probably ingtroduced to philosophy by Russell in my early 40's after my wife was diagnosed with cancer.  In a godless world I searched for something different to make sense of things and ended up reading a History of Western Philosophy from cover to cover.  I had stolen it from our local cemetery along with a copy of Sartre's Being and Nothingness which hadn't really offered much solace in the dark hours.  Russell says  in Manning;

"In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held."

Russell writes in a way that makes this way of reading easy.  In his introduction to western philosophy he takes the outstretched hand of someone desperate for a guide and walks you through a labyrinth. It is difficult, not in a minor way, to fall in love with him. Especially if you are looking for a guide through trauma as well as ideas.  Manning for me does not quite manage this, yet after reading her quote from Russell I am attempting to walk more closely with her for a while.

3. Fuck em up the arse and give them an immaculately concieved mutant child.  I was taken by this approach in my last blog.  It came from a discussion with Geoff about Hegel and Deleuze and Gattari and dialectics but I like its irreverance.  There are a few things going on here - one is that to read you must bring something of yourself, two - that sometimes ideas carry a level of hidden violence and thirdly that in reading you can make something new but it may not be what you expected.  I like all these things and I think Deleuze would like people to fuck him over in the same way.  I am probably struggling most at the moment to work out why there is such a problem about thinking about things as a whole rather than a set of parts.   The problem seems to be about 'feeling' and it 'feels' like many indigenous belief structures have a set of faith practices and beliefs that enable a flatter way to feel the world - an agencement or assemblage, a singularity or dialectic - the events are all presented as a place of resistance to the reduction of life to a set of parts. I believe many people outside philosophy and the Academies, whether through faith in a god or an alternative approach to the notion of communion, feel this anyway - they do not need to resist positivism or reductionism or structuralism they just feel the world as a set of relations.

4. Sit on the sofa with them. This is my way of reading the people I like to read.  They become my friends and my companions and many of them, now ghosts, sit on the sofa with me.  Kurt Vonnagut and Philip K Dick are there as my school friends and John Berger is lording it up with a glass of red wine.  Zizeck is in the kitchen on his own as its all too borgeois.  Colin Ward and John Ruskin are having a discussion about if they could of done more, if they were radical enougth.  Annie Proux is doing research for another book she has said she will not write.  Bertrand Russell is there but more as a father figure.  Deleuze is having a fist fight with Lacan in the toilet and Gattari and Foucault are both speaking fast in filthy street French.  They are all present; talking, disagreeing and shouting at each other - everyone is waiting for the big idea - the penny to drop but as in the arcade machine, much of the coinage is dropping down the sides into a secret storage box that only the owner of the arcade has the key for.