Practices of reading (how we judge them) are deeply connected with the subject(hood) we practices, perform, or project. “Critical reading is the folk ideology of a learned profession, so close to us that we seldom feel the need to explain it,” and similarly, the subjects performing these critical readings are inherently understood (Warner, 14). They/we are level-headed thinkers, honorably apart from the text and brimming with postmodern skepticism and spot-on cultural critiques. We are professional academics. We are subjects, full of agency, and they are texts, ready and willing to be read by us to, in part, affirm our collective intelligence. But do these practices of reading, subject/text separation, and the formation of identity or agency do any of us justice? Warner questions if critical reading (and the subjects created through it) is simply “an ideological description applied to people who are properly socialized into a political culture, regardless of how (or whether) they read” (15). We want to be academics, so this is what we do. But if critical reading is falling short, the critical reader is too. If we change how we read, how we form our subjectivity in relation to the text, can’t we ameliorate the kind of scholars we become?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this as I come back to academia. There are many traits that have come to define people and practices in the profession that I find unbecoming and that promote a culture of exclusion and superiority. But how can someone who’s interested in critical theory be anti-critical? How can someone who’s studying for their PhD be the anti-academic? I don’t want to alienate myself from the ‘academy,’ from my mentors, colleagues, etc., but I also don’t want to alienate myself from myself, from my non-academic family and friends, and from people whose lives are the consequences of the policies, practices, and ideals that scholarship attempts to shape.
We said in class that if we always privilege critical reading, we are also reproducing a particular kind of self. But Warner gave us the examples of Saba Mahmood’s study of the women’s mosque movement in Egypt that provides an alternative reading, and an alternative process of self-formation and subjecthood. Mahmood sees that the standard of the critical is actually a discipline of subjectivity, and disrupts the sanctity of the relationship with alternative forms of subject-making. Traditionally, agency granted through critical reflection is the only legitimate form of subjectivity (18), but Mahmood cites Egyptian women who aspire to be “slaves of God,” that achieve their desired subjecthood through very different means. “Reflection, ritual practice, mutual correction, commentary, reasoning, habit-formation, and corporeal discipline,” (18) result in a practiced piety that substantiates their agency.
Critical reading is not just a technical method, but a technique for forming subjects “oriented to freedom and autonomous agency against the background of a modern social imaginary” (Warner, 19). So what kinds of subjects do we create when we abandon ‘critical,’ or ‘close,’ reading? Ones more actively engaged with the making of their own identities? Ones that have a hand in forming their agency, rather than inheriting the identities left for them by the previous generation? When activity and repetition are the (markedly uncritical) methodologies for subject and meaning making, do those pesky binaries (thinking/feeling, subject/object, reader/text) dissolve?
I’m not completely convinced these problems go away, but I am encouraged by a promotion of the affected, active, emotional, personal, and political reading and subject-making we’re trying to do in this course, and in grad school at large. Don’t our discussions provide the mutual corrections, commentary, and reasoning? We’re certainly forming habits and ritual practice. I have faith in doing, in the activity of subject formation, but then again, haven’t all scholars gone through these same (or similar) rigors? Where did they go wrong? Where can we go right?
I think a lot of these concerns are addressed by Sedgewick, but in my own tiny microcosm, I'm interested in looking at how it applies to our (this group's) practice of scholarship. I think recognizing positionality, embracing our identity politics, forming bonds, and striving for a localized, personal, affected reading is a start - but I'm not sure I'm convinced it's enough. It's hard to shake decades of critical practice. Where do we go from here, and how as a group, can we hold ourselves accountable?
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