Week 1: Close reading, positionality, and the problem of canonization

Why not use another spatial metaphor to talk about the “distance” (close vs. far, etc.) of reading? I’d like to meditate further on the concept of positionality that Sedgwick attributes to Melanie Klein and Silvan Tomkins. Sedgwick prefers to think about reader/text object relations through the concept of positions rather than through concepts of “order stages, stable structures” (Sedgwick 128) or established practice types because positionality encourages us to think about the flexibility of movement between reader and text object positions. She points out that the reader and text often stand in “changing and heterogeneous relational stances” (128).

In this post, I want to think more about how we might be able to frame Sedgwick, Warner, Armstrong, and Moretti within the concept of positionality in order to better understand them as offering reading practices among which we can move to-and-fro. I want to look at their reading practices not as discrete, stable programs but as different critical and relational positions—often fragmenting, contradictory, and overlapping—that offer different sets of reader/text object relations from which to read.

I realize this is pretty ambitious, so I’ll try to focus this on a problem that Moretti raises. He points out that “the trouble with close reading…is that it necessarily depends on an extremely small canon. This may have become an unconscious and invisible premiss [premise] (apparently premiss is an alternative spelling of premise. Who knew?!) by now, but it is an iron one nonetheless: you invest so much in individual texts only if you think that very few of them matter” (Moretti 57). Moretti is highlighting the problem of canonization to close reading. The very selection of a text to close read may involve invisible (or not so invisible) processes of exclusion and hierarchies of value. He argues that the advantage of his “distant reading” program is that it subverts national historiography, which often involves the selection of Important Events to the exclusion of others in creating national historical narratives. In other words, national historiography involves a process of canonization and the creation of hierarchies of importance built for and by the dominant political, cultural, and economic elite. Therefore, close reading may, in some instances, be complicit in canon-forming and national historiography. According to Moretti, “distant reading” avoids that complicity.

I’m less interested in whether or not his particular solution works to resolve this problem more in how we might move between the different reading practices to respond to his challenge. Let’s start with Moretti, why not. “Distant reading” avoids the problem of canonization by disabling the reader’s ability to select and interpret the text in the first place. The distant reader does not prioritize any one text over another. Every text has the same value in relation to another: whether or not it confirms whatever the distant reader is testing for—be it for certain metaphors, or tropes, or systemic patterns. Therefore, the distant reader’s relation to the text is one of verification rather than of interpretation (so integral to close reading). That’s certainly one way to avoid the problem of canon, but Moretti admittedly points out that it’s a “reading without freedom,” where the reader is compelled to follow her verification method (Moretti 61).

We may move positions into Warner to talk more about canon. He may identify the problem of canonization in the tendency of critical reading practices to “self-select” works that are already available to its critique. He makes use of Cavallo and Chartier’s example of the library of Alexandria to clarify this tendency (Warner 21). The library’s ambition was to collect works from all over the world and across history, and to categorize them by type, author, content, etc., reflecting the library’s values of universality and rationality in its selection criteria. However, these values limited the works that could be collected to those that could only be evaluated by universality and rationality. So, we might say that the values of the critical reading practice, in the same way, limit the works that it reads to only works that can be evaluated by critical reading practices. If these practices are as privileged as Warner argues, the canon, guided by the reader, becomes full of texts available only to these reading practices to the exclusion of other ways of reading. To avoid this problem, Warner argues that we de-familiarize or de-naturalize critical reading as the only way to read, that we understand it as a practice that has its own set of historically specific norms and text-making and assumes a specific kind of subjectivity and agency. He advocates for overturning the critical/uncritical binary that critical reading produces and for considering practices previously deemed “uncritical” as rational, with its own, perhaps competing, set of norms, text-making and subjectivity. In this way, critical reading becomes decentered as the privileged reading practice and allows for other reading practices to read and select texts.

I’ll end with a question for you all because this is already getting too long and too ambitious to really start to explore how we, as readers, might move “to-and-fro” from different reader/text object positions. Maybe you can help me out or maybe it isn’t possible to adopt the concept of positions to start building bridges and connections between these papers. Or maybe, I'm completely misunderstanding the concept and it doesn't apply at all! In that case, let's just say I'm interested in how each paper responds to and attempts to resolve the problem of canonization. I promise my next blog post will be more specific and concrete.