Date: Fri, 1 Mar 1996 19:02:05 -0500 (EST)
From: Gideon B Banner <gideon.banner-AT-yale.edu>
Subject: RE: Imaginary textualities


On the subject of the intensities created by every reader while reading, 
Michel de Certeau's _The Practice of Everyday Life_ really delves into 
the subject.  Granted, I've only gotten through about a quarter of it, 
but it's more than clear that Certeau's focusing on the consumer, the 
reader, the individual existing within machine and language, and how that 
minority effects a continual change, rereading, or forgetting of the 
text.  To quote a bit from the introduction:

"In reality, the activity of reading has on the contrary all the 
characteristics of a silent production: the drift across the page, the 
metamorphosis of the text effected by the wandering eyes of the reader, 
the improvisation and expectation of meanings inferred from a few words, 
leaps over written spaces in an ephemeral dance.  But since he is 
incapable of stockpiling (unless he writes or records), the reader cannot 
protect himself against the erosion of time (while reading, he forgets 
himself and he forgets what he has read) unless he buys the object (book, 
image) which is no more than a substitute (the spoor or promise) of 
moments 'lost' in reading.  He insinuates into another's text the ruises 
of pleasure and appropriation: he poaches on it, is transported into it, 
pluralizes himself in it like the internal rumblings of one's body."  And 
so on.

Maybe academics have been readers, effecting deterritorializations of 
disciplines all the time without knowing it.  We might want to take into 
question a return to past times of teaching and reading and writing in 
academia and rediscover these points.

Gideon Banner
having just crossed a picket line to get to class

> I know the story, and even if, as everyone has been so good as
> to point out, all the "questionable" texts do in fact exist--
> I've even got a copy of Dynamics of a parti-cle from Chip now--
> thank you Chip--the point that I was trying to make had more
> to do with the "virtuality" that attaches to any text--real
> or imaginary--than it does with the real or imaginariness of
> a particular text.  Deleuze's way of reading--the famous
> buggery passages--seems to be all about bringing such a 
> virtuality into play.  This, combined with the kind of thing
> that D does when he brings texts and terms from varying 
> disciplines into convergence seems to be a very nice way of
> thinking about the "intensities" of reading and writing that
> Bryan has pointed out.  Further, as I was maintaining in my
> library example, I don
> 't think that this is all that unusual--people do it all
> the time whenever they read.  The more interesting question
> is still why it emerges so rarely when we write and when we
> do scholarship.  This is, of course, the point where we appeal
> to institutions and disciplinary regimes: which are of course
> double-edged swords, because throwing them out the window
> would be not only silly, but would be to miss the fact that
> thier modes of practice and production have a certian enabling
> function for doing a certian kind of thing that has its value.  
> (here, we will want to appeal to foucault's reading of 
> power as creative).  
> 
> The question for nomadic academics seems to remain, how do we
> practice thinking within these regimes in such a way that 
> we don't find ourselves simply opposed to them--we'd lose, and
> we know it--but without becoming thier creatures.  
> 
> I wonder whether some of the exchange between Karen and Tsia on
> the Masochism book wouldn't be pertinant here, and whether
> it wouldn't be worth effecting a rapprochment between the 
> nomad thread and the contract-control thread.
> 
> Ed Kazarian.
> Villanova University. 
> 

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