Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus challenge the supremacy of
so-called “symptomatic reading,” which they associate with the reading
practices of Frederic Jameson and Louis Althusser. They claim that the
symptomatic reader always describes the Truth (with a capital T) in terms of a particular
spatial metaphorics that comes with a particular set of assumptions about the
epistemology of the text and the role of the interpreter. To the symptomatic
reader, “…the most interesting aspect of a text is what it represses…interpretation
should therefore seek ‘a latent meaning behind a manifest one.’ The interpreter
‘rewrite[s] the surface categories of a text in the stronger language of a more
fundamental interpretive code’ and reveals truths that ‘remain unrealized in
the surface of the text’” (Best 3). Best and Marcus argues that the spatial
metaphorics of latent/manifest, repressed/unrepressed, and presence/absence
implies that a text can become known only through the “heroic” role of the
critic who peers through the text to gaze at its underlying Truth and then
brings that Truth to the surface by translating it into a demystifying master
code.
Best and Marcus reject the epistemology implied in these
spatial metaphorics and offer “surface reading” as an alternative. Reading the
surface of a text means to read “what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in
texts; what is neither hidden nor hiding; what, in the geometrical sense, has
length and breadth but no thickness, and therefore covers no depth” (Best 9).
Although they do not reject the spatial metaphorics that they claim Jameson and
Althusser make use of—because they are still using such terms as “geometrical
sense,” “length,” “breadth,” and “thickness”—they advocate instead for using
them differently to produce a different epistemology. A text with “length and
breadth but no thickness” has knowledge and meaning immediately and easily
available to the reader, and has no need for a master code known only to the
academic critic.
Margaret Cohen further attacks Jameson’s project in The Political Unconscious, which affirms,
as Marxism does, “a primacy of theory which is at one and the same time a
recognition of the primacy of History itself” (last sentence of the Preface). In
order to denaturalize and defamiliarize Jameson’s assertion that Marxism, with
all of its attendant interpretative operations, offers the best theorizing
framework, Cohen points out that Jameson cuts the teeth of his reading practice
by applying it to only realist and modernist narrative. Cohen raises the issue
that “in the case of novels that do not confirm to the realist or modernist
paradigms, symptomatic reading loses its bearings” (Cohen 58). Best and Marcus
make the same move to denaturalize by arguing that Althusser’s (Jameson’s
stated ally in symptomatic reading) theory, one that “divulges the undivulged
event in the text it reads” (Althusser 28), can actually be traced back to the “Gnostic
concept of truth as too complex to describe” (Best 5). Cohen, Best, and Marcus
all make the move to denaturalize Jameson and Althusser in order to disarm
their call to historicize via Marxist, symptomatic reading practices.
But I want to return in particular to Best and Marcus’
peculiar use of spatial metaphorics to mount their attack against Jameson (and
Althusser). I think that Best and Marcus rely too much on spatial metaphors of “latent/manifest,
repressed/unrepressed, and presence/absence” to make their case against Jameson
and Althusser’s symptomatic reading, and then appropriate the language of space
and legibility that they use against Jameson and Althusser to advance their own
reading practice. As mentioned above, they advocate for an epistemology of the
text that is “evident, perceptible, apprehensible” to readers and associate that
epistemology to a spatial metaphorics of surface.
But Best and Marcus stretch the limits of their metaphor in
defining surface reading. Such a practice reads surfaces—not hidden depths
containing Truth—and they argue that “a surface is what insists on being looked
at rather than what we must train
ourselves to see through” (Best 9). Later,
in their description of reading surface as literal meaning, they synthesize
Foucault’s statement about his relationship to archives and employ it in
service of their surface reading practice. They claim that “Just reading sees
ghosts as presences, not absences, and lets ghosts be ghosts, instead of saying
what they are ghosts of” (Best 13).
Best and Marcus are implying that when we read a surface
(when we look at it), we must see it as opaque. However, we can all come up
with surfaces that have transparency such as glass or plastic or a lens. This
metaphor is poor and is further undermined by their use of the metaphor of the
ghost, which is at least a partially transparent spirit. How can we see a ghost
without perhaps seeing the place where a ghost haunts? How can we see a ghost
as a presence without also seeing its relations to people and places, possibly
a presence that also resolves a contradiction between the person which it is supposed
to embody and the place to which that person is indelibly attached?
I’m not necessarily saying that just because Best and Marcus
use some confusing spatial metaphorics that their entire surface reading
practice is problematic, but I do think it raises some questions about whether
they rely too heavily of “space” to conceptualize what their reading practice
does.
I think you something interesting to say about thier use of space and the aspect of transparency. It seems tat problems lies in the loss of language that is usually more concrete and able to create binaries in symptomatic reading. The ghost thing is pretty ridiculous but it allows to connect the notion that surface some how leads to more surface or in that the text itself is transparent and illustrates the same (t)ruth every time. I am not too sure how to describe it but that was my stab at it. Maybe a shift from space to the language of lacan may help?
ReplyDeleteI agree, the space thing is very confusing, especially with all this language that denotes violence etc. However, I'm wondering what this metaphor does clarify for us...why choose to talk about texts in terms of depth and surface? Although, now that I'm thinking about it, I literally cannot think of a different way to describe symptomatic vs. surface reading...
ReplyDeleteI agree, the space thing is very confusing, especially with all this language that denotes violence etc. However, I'm wondering what this metaphor does clarify for us...why choose to talk about texts in terms of depth and surface? Although, now that I'm thinking about it, I literally cannot think of a different way to describe symptomatic vs. surface reading...
ReplyDeleteAfter reading Althusser and Jameson and coming back to your blog post Jonathan, I also am curious about Best and Marcus's reading(s) of Althusser and Jameson. I guess I'm wondering about what actually "truly" constitutes the differences between a "surface reading" and a "symptomatic reading" and perhaps as you put it, the re-use of spatial metaphors is what actually limits this clarity. I've already, clearly, suggested my questions and concerns about Marcus' use of "surface reading" and "surface reading" overall, but by putting "surface reading" in relation to Althusser, I'm wondering about the usage or even the possibility of a "surface reading" as defined by Best and Marcus. On page 19, Althusser uses the example of Marx reading Smith's discourse: "What Smith did not see, through a weakness of vision, Marx sees: what Smith did not see was perfectly visible, and it was because it was visible that Smith could fail to see it while Marx could see it." In this sense then, the very act of reading is always already an act of interpretation and that interpretation is not a metaphor of the thing, it is actually the thing. By suggesting the possibility of one's failure to see what someone else sees, Althusser acknowledges this truth to already be visible--or more appropriately, tangible. Although Jameson perhaps diverts into more latent versus manifest content, he also suggests that whatever the discovery is, that discovery is actually tied to the very object itself rather than something separate from it. This logic feels really important to me in terms of how Best and Marcus set up their presentation of "surface reading" via Jameson and Althusser because I'm not actually sure that these guys would agree with the spatial metaphor Best and Marcus use: "surface reading"=ghost as a ghost and "symptomatic reading"=ghost represents something [repressed]. I think Althusser and Jameson would say whatever they cull from that "surface," be it a ghost or table, is actually right there, visible on the surface and immanent to the object...it's just that some people may not be able to "see" it. So I'm more interested in this notion of "oversight" and failure to see because is it as simple as: a Marxist looking at a text versus a psychoanalyst may cull different truths? Could we argue that Best and Marcus consider truth to be static and fixed, since you put it, they're after Truth with a capital T? Should we be more interested in truth as an a plurality and as an unfixed position?
ReplyDelete