Week 2: Stretching the limits of spatial metaphor in Best and Marcus

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.