Post 2: Dissection of a surface reading

OK this looks really long, but it's not. As I took my notes, I realized that I was conducting my own, very specific type of reading that seems exceedingly surface/science based. In an attempt not only to figure out Symptomatic and Surface methods of reading, it only seems appropriate to put my own method under the microscope, so I uploaded my notes here to take a closer look. If I were you, I'd just scan over the notes portion to get an idea of what I'm outlining, and skip to the bottom :) 

While reading Marcus and Best's "Surface Reading," I highlighted, underlined, and wrote out notes that chopped up and simplified the text for easy consumption after the fact. (How Spinoza of me!) But creating categories, lists, and color coding help me do what exactly? Get to the bottom of something? Make out the surface? What kind of reading does mine resemble more? Well, let's see... 

Each time I thought I read something telling about Symptomatic Reading that might help me define it, I put added it to the list, along with notes on what I thought (in pink): 

Symptomatic reading:

• The result of psychoanalysis and Marxist ‘metalanguages’ in the 70’s and 80’s: sees meaning as hidden, repressed, deep, and in need of detection and disclosure by an interpreter (reader).
• Reader is granted power by being necessary to interpret (locate, diagnose, extract?) a text’s unconscious (perhaps the reason why it was so popular for so long? God complex!)
• A text’s truest meaning lies in what it does not say
• Textual surfaces as superfluous, and and symptomatic reading is required to unmask hidden meanings.
• Texts possess meanings that are veiled, latent, all but absent if it were not for their irrepressible and recurring symptoms (think Playing in the Dark)
• Fredrick Jameson: If everything were transparent, then no ideology would be possible, and no domination either. Interpretation could never operate on the assumption that the text means just what it says.
• The most interesting aspect of a text is what it represses, and that (according to FJ) interpretation should therefore seek a latent meaning behind the manifest one.
• What a text means lies in what it does not say, which can then be used to rewrite the text in terms of a master code. What is a master code? Ideology? Apparatuses? Structures?
• By disclosing the absent cause that structures the text’s inclusion and exclusions, the critic restores to the surface the deep history that the text represses (FJ) - I like the idea of finding the structure of the inclusion and exclusion, but am not sure that this requires finding or exposing or expunging something that's being repressed, per se
• Not only what’s left out, but WHY and HOW
• Locate absences and asks what those absences mean, what forces create them, and how they signify the questions that motivate the text, but that the text itself cannot articulate. - Again, I like the idea that there can be something that drives the text that the text itself cannot name - it's mysterious and obvious all at once
• Creates opposites of present/absent, manifest/latent, surface/depth - but these don’t all make sense together (surface can be seen as superficial and even deceptive, manifest seems clear and genuine, etc.

From Playing in the Dark:

Africanism has become both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repressions, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability (7)

[The concerns of] Autonomy, authority, newness and difference, absolute power--not only become the major themes and presumptions of American literature, but that each one is made possible by, shaped by, activated by a complex awareness and employment of a constituted Africanism. It was this Africanism, deployed as rawness and savagery, that provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of the quintessential American identity.  (45)

Recall how Morrison so deftly locates the absences within the text - the gaping holes and glaring presences that are only half the equation, or speak symbolically to what is not being named. This gives Symptomatic Reading a better review for me; seeing symptoms and latent meaning and something to be exposed so often sounds slightly arrogant and dismissive, not to mention reductive and often somehow misogynist. Seeing how this is done in a positive way is a nice reminder.

I did the same thing with Surface Reading: 

Surface reading:

• Broadens the scope of critique to include interpretations that seek to understand the complexity of literary surfaces, surfaces that have been rendered invisible (or useless) by symptomatic reading
• Identifies the truth that a text bears witness to
• What is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts
• What is neither hidden nor hiding - Because who's hiding it?
• What is looked at, rather than what we try to see ourselves through - How self-centered symptomatic reading can be! But also, how helpful when the self that needs to be identified (rather, any subject) is one that is categorically or systematically obscured from texts
• Surface reading, which strives to describe texts accurately, might easily be dismissed as politically quietest, too willing to accept things as they are.
• Attentiveness to the artwork as its own freedom
• True openness to all the potentials made available by texts is also prerequisite to an attentiveness that does not reduce them to instrumental means to an end
• Way of studying culture that neither attack nor defends it
• Use science and technology to expand what critics can do
• Registers the way constraints as well as breaking free from them, structure existence (recognize this without judging)

Anytime there was a method of reading described, I took down who thought what and how: 

Key Players:Foucault: skeptical about the possibility of radical freedom and dubious that literature or its criticism can explain our oppression or provide the keys to our liberation
FREUD / Paul Ricoeur: Freud’s model of interpretation was suited for (symbolic language, or) language where ‘another’ meaning is both given and hidden in the immediate meaning. Symbolic function is to mean something other than what is said. So to interpret is to understand the/a double meaning. Freud’s understanding of double meaning is based on the demystification of illusion (super popular) - There are so many more types of double meaning!
MARX/Althusser: method of divulging the undivulged event in the text it reads, and in the same moment relates it to a different text, present as a necessary absence in the first. For Althusser, symptomatic reading makes the lacunae (missing or unfilled portion) perceptible. Symptomatic reading assumes that texts are shaped by questions they do not themselves pose and contain symptoms that help interpreters articulate those questions, which lie outside texts as their absent causes. Gestures back to a truth too complex to describe, as history cannot be read manifestly, as it is the inaudible and illegible notation of the effects of a structure of structures.
Jameson: symptomatic reader/critic must rewrite narrative in terms of master codes (?), disclosing status is ideology, as an imaginary resolution of real contradictions. Text shaped by absence of history, and interpretation should seek a repressed, latent, mystified meaning behind a manifest one. Interpretation is unmasking; the critic restores to the surface the history that the text represses. How do they do this, exactly? The critic wrests meaning from a resisting text or inserts it into a lifeless one (god complex much?). Shows that a text’s silences, gaps, and imagery can be symptoms of something that are only apparently absent. So much talk of symptom in a way that suggests that the meaning is a disease to be eradicated, always-already negative and sickly
Mary Crane: As a cognitive reader, the unconscious consists simply of mental activities too rapid and too complex to be perceived. Sees conflicting images (of surface) pointing to underlying tensions in theory (she’s reading Jameson). And sees conflict between a reader who exposes disguised truths and a reader who produces those truths. Where Jameson would read contradictions as clues to veiled operations of history, Crane understands an author’s complex ‘spatial imaginary’ as an effect of how cognition works.
Margaret Cohen:   Canon is too restricted/too much is taken for granted. Symptomatic reading doesn’t work well on all genres. She suggests placing them in context with similar work is more enlightening; suggestion that placing a text in its discursive contexts can illuminate textual features that are obvious but which critics have overlooked. The horizon is a legible set of points one can use to navigate and understand a literary field. She uses archives to reconstruct a horizon that defines the position of texts and exists on the same plane as the text it explains. Situate texts within epistemological frames they share with other similar writing to find common themes.
Christopher Nealon:  The activist component of literature is value added by the critic. Some theorists believe that human action has priority over matter, while other believe that matter has priority over human action on it. (And it’s their job to figure out which comes first). Nealon asserts that literature and esp poetry enact the struggle between matter and human action rather than the victory of one over the other. The text is where the issues surface. Hermeneutics is not what critics do to the poem, poems contain their own hermeneutics. He asserts that you don’t need to add theory to the text or gather texts to prove a theory, it’s enough simply to register what the text is saying. This seems vague and frankly a bit reductive - but I may not be getting it
Leah Price: Price breaks completely with symptomatic methods by suggesting that we do not, and need not read books at all. It-narratives are what we need to trace histories and ideologies; by tracking how things are moved from place to place and for/by whom. Rather than teaching us simply to look at books in order to catalog material characteristics, it-narratives teach us a new way to think about classic opposition being the inert surface of things and the vibrant depth of persons. It-narratives endow books with consciousness in order to have them recount histories that divert us from their interiority toward their materiality, thus returning them to objecthood (but a vivid and significant kind). Excuse me? From her book review: Price anatomizes the meanings that were ascribed to the things people did with books other than reading them. This wide-ranging analysis is fascinating in its own right, but in making it, Price also throws down a gauntlet. Calling for more scholarly attention to "the wide range of nontextual . . . uses to which the book is put" (20), she aims to dislodge "the primacy of reading itself" (21) in current book history and literary criticism alike.
Anne Cheng: Replace suspicion and critical mastery with a susceptibility that could undo the dichotomy between subject and object. Cheng advocates for a mutual pedagogy of erotics in which the critic is inhabited by what he studies, and embraces the loss of critical certainty and the gain in intimacy that result. Sees hermeneutics of suspicion as allied with identity politics, since what motivates the reading of the surface as a symptom of hidden depths is the desire to restore and make visible the authenticity veiled by spectacle. Replace the symptom (which depends on the contrast between surface and depth) with a constellation of multiple surfaces understood as concealing nothing.

I tried to sort all the authors and their practices into the categories of Surface Reading:

Surface as materiality: Mary Crane, Leah PriceSurface as the intricate verbal structure of lit lang: Christopher Nealon, Anne ChengSurface as affective/ethical stance: Anne ChengSurface as practice of critical description: Christopher NealonSurface as patterns that exist within and across texts: Margaret CohenSurface as literal meaning: Christophen Nealon, Anne Cheng

As well as identify trends:

New Formalists: We do not need to criticize artwork, because it contains it's own critical and self-critical agency . The role of the critic is to restore the artwork to its original complexity. Reading is learned submission to the artwork, by which we come to share its freedom by embodying its powers. Materialists: The office of art is to resist through form, the course of the world. The art's claim to autonomy stems from its effort to detach itself from reality (which it cannot ever do), but also its also inseparable from a dream of freedom in which critics can participate: " As pure artifacts, works of art are instructions for the praxis they refrain from: the production of life lived as it ought to be." Mimetic relationship between literature and criticism. Symptomatics: critics who believe that the text is a mystification and that the critic must therefore distance himself from it by adopting a point of view at variance with its optic. Freedom comes from an agon with the ideological text. Critics don't produce the text, but produce any truth that can come from them Utopians striving for redemption... etc

And finally, take note of the closing points: 

1) To see more clearly does not require plumbing hidden depths2) producing accurate accounts of surfaces is not antithetical to critique. So... Surface reading might be the best way to move past the obstacles we've constructed around ideological demystification. The point was never to get away from the facts but closer to them. But we're not just looking for facts are we...

The essay rounds off by saying that the work of assembly and the desire for a more complete view of reality are shared by all whose practices are included in the survey. But to me, this comes off as a bit of a generalization. In my own reading (outdated or old fashioned as it may be) it's imperative that I embody BOTH surface and symptomatic reading to try and fully grasp a text. And to me, the most convincing of the surface reading practices presuppose a deeper ideological richness that they can then see playing out on the surface of the text.

Here's what I mean:

The process that I've laid out here is pretty cut and dry: surface reading through and through.  I read the text, divvy words or phrases into categories, make connections, and take it all for what it is. My efforts put the text into a format that my brain can comb through (consume?) more readily. I'm engaging what I've gathered from the surface and derive a lot of meaning from it. It's sort of the 'catch and release' of critical thought; take hold, observe, and then let it go. No need to mash it up, kill, or dissect it to reach any new peak of understanding or to better understand the latent symbolism, meaning, or truth. 

But this is only the first step of my reading, and the notes I can't help but leave myself are the holes in the levy, the breadcrumbs that suggest there are always-already trails leading 'down into' or 'under' or 'beyond' the surface. Looking deeper doesn't have to be a power-play, or a second-guessing of the surface. The text - consciously or unconsciously - has presented something to my brain that wants to keep exploring. Maybe this is out of habit, or out of paranoia (I don't want any truths or meanings or implications to sneak up on me), but you can't argue the fact that it's contributed to our experience of literature and our criticism of it in unfathomable ways. It seems unfinished not to pursue the ideological, latent, or undercover meanings that (whether or not they occur naturally in the text or if I place them there) I've identified. I understand the selfishness inherent in symptomatic reading; it's easy to become the savior or the sole beneficiary. But really, if we're just slaves to interpretation for clarity's sake, there seems to be very little political or social significance to be cultivated. 

After the initial surface reading, this text begs another read through. This time; with an eye to any symptoms that might have begun to peek out at me along the way. I only wish that the language of this process didn't necessarily connote an inherent sickness or malady that's causing all of those ideological interests - because there's richness, and excitement, and potential for positive change to be found as well.