Farah Khan

Blog Post 1

In this week’s reading, I found myself having the most difficulty with the Warner and Sedgwick pieces, “Uncritical Reading,” and “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You,” respectively.  Sedgwick’s piece particularly was the most disruptive to my typical practices of reading, especially in reference to the idea of “exposure.”  I talk about Warner and Sedgwick in combination with each other since each critic did tackle similar issues and ideas, with Sedgwick digging deeper into one particular type of critical reading practice that Warner addresses in a more general criticism of the larger practice of “critical reading” as a whole.

            I find it useful to start with the assumptions that each reader works with, as we did in class. Both Warner and Sedgwick tackle the overall idea that there is some hidden, inherent truth that exists within any given text, and the task of the close and/or critical reader is to peel back the layers of meaning and uncover or expose said truth. Warner, unlike Sedgwick, begins with charting a very broad and brief history of what exactly critical reading is; where it has happened, how it has functioned, and what its purpose has been in different time periods. He shows how the idea of critical reading has had different implications and meant different things depending on its context; thus showing how it is a much more amorphous practice than we inherently think of it as. I find it both useful but also frustrating how Warner pays so much attention to showing the various forms of what critical reading is, and the various tasks it has taken on in history- but he does not really spend adequate time or attention on what exactly he would consider to be an uncritical type of reading. He hints at some type of distance- “… historians have produced a new paradigm in which reading is understood as a highly variable practice, intimately related to the material organization of texts. They have denaturalized many of our assumptions about what it means to read. And this is essential in grasping what critical or uncritical reading could mean, since the mental image of critical reading seems to require at minimum a clear opposition between the text object and the reading subject- indeed, critical reading could be thought of as an ideal for maximizing that polarity, defining the reader’s freedom and agency as an expression of distance from a text that must be objectified as a benchmark of distanciation” (Warner 20).

I quote this because it appears to tie in with what Moretti calls for: distant reading. It seems that Warner implies a sense of distance as being a useful tool to turn toward instead of critical reading in order to really understand texts. However, Warner also uses the word distance in ways that work quite differently from Moretti’s. For example, Warner cites How to Read a Book and its short list of rules for analytical reading. He problematizes this list by pointing out that “anyone who attempts to gain critical distance on a text by means of such rules must be equipped with well-codified notions such as ‘book’ and ‘author’: an assumed realm of discourse in which things are classified ‘according to kind and subject matter…” and so on. (Warner 27).  Warner continues with different historical trends in close reading, and he consistently debunks the idea that close reading can only mean one thing. He does this by showing how focusing on a small part of a whole- such as the reading of scripture- can indeed be critical. He also uses Saba Mahmood and Politics of Piety to show how readings of religious texts and a “surrendering of agency” in a standard western secular liberal framework can actually mean various things, in different contexts, that run counter to the idea that piety and religious practice is uncritical. However, after reading all these examples, I still struggle to find a solid method for the uncritical reading that both his title and the entire essay is always alluding to.

Sedgwick, on the other hand, does propose a much more concrete alternative form of reading to the style she criticizes. She offers up the practice of reparative reading as a new way of analysis that can be more healing and growth-oriented than paranoid reading. Sedgwick critiques paranoid reading, or the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” for being destructive and working on far too many negative assumptions. This is the text that I found most difficult to internalize. Sedgwick argues that readers must move away from an obsession with exposure. She offers several examples of how an exposure-based reading (working on the paranoid assumption that, basically, there is some nasty truth that absolutely must be exposed) is not always effective for really enacting change. This is especially true in cultures that glorify and amplify the visibility of violence. “Furthermore, the force of any interpretive project of unveiling hidden violence would seem to depend on a cultural context…In the United States and internationally, while there is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure there is also, and increasingly, an ethos where forms of violence that are hypervisible form the start may be offered as an exemplary spectacle rather than remain to be unveiled as a scandalous secret” (Sedgwick 140). This helped clarify the problem for me. It seems an inherent drive in my reading practices to expose or make visible the dirt within a text, but Sedgwick effectively shows how that may not always actually be useful for changing material realities. Reparative reading, however, might be able to do just that- or at least it could make it more possible to survive in violent realities: “No less acute than a paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival, and neither less nor more delusional or fantasmatic, the reparative reading position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks. What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture- even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (Sedgwick 150-51).