Reading on Reading: Ecologies of Reading

Emma Cocker

Reading on Reading is a series of experimental reading practices developed collaboratively by Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus and Lena Séraphin whilst working together in the Research Pavilion #3, Venice, 2019, for exploring what alternative modes of sense making are produced when reading is undertaken artistically, as an aesthetic activity. Reading on Reading explores three interrelated foci: How can aesthetic practices of reading: (1) Shed new light on the phenomenology (or how-ness) of reading? (2) Transform the often-solitary activity of reading into a shared or communal act — and explore what modes of sociality, solidarity and emergent ‘we’ emerge therein? (3) Operate as a disruptive process unsettling normative conventions of reading through focus on the poetic, affective and material dimensions of readerly experience? Within this artistic research collaboration, we consider the act of reading beyond the relation of the reader to a text read, as a micro-political or ethico-aesthetic practice through which to re-consider — perhaps even re-organise — the relations between self and other(s), self and world. Drawing upon Félix Guattari’s notion of ecosophy with its three ecological registers of environment, social relations and human subjectivity, in this exposition we consider how the modest practice of reading together could contribute to a wider ethico-aesthetic project: for cultivating shared poetics of attention, for the re-sensing of language through embodied vocalisation, for tending to the temporary gatherings of ‘we’ that reading together affords. The aim of this exposition is to share the reading practices tested and explored in and through the collaboration of three artist researchers, alongside reflection on the questions and concerns emerging within this enquiry. Whilst operating as a document or archive of a specifically time-bound research activity, the intention is that our reading practices have scope to be activated by other readers.

Silence makes a title stand out. As well as the sound of the turning of the page. Both are markers in the textorium:

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we can at least derive one elementary but basic certainty; the eyes do not read the letters one after the other, nor the words one after the other, nor the lines one after the other but proceed jerkily and by becoming fixed, exploring the whole reading field instantaneously with a stubborn redundancy. This unceasing perusal is punctuated by imperceptible halts as if, in order to discover what it is seeking, the eyes needed to sweep across the page in an intensely agitated manner not regularly, like a television receiver (as the term 'sweeping' might lead one to think), but in a disorderly repetitive and aleatory way; or, if you prefer, since were dealing in metaphors here, like a pigeon pecking at the ground in search of breadcrumbs. This image is a little suspect obviously, yet it seems to me characteristic, and I shan't hesitate to take from it something that might serve as the point of departure for a theory of the text.

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For my own part I have only a negative confirmation of it: the intense feeling of frustration I have long been seized by when reading Russian novels... Anna Mikhailova Troubetskoy's widower, Boris Timofeitch Ismailov, asked for the hand of Katerina Lvovna Borissitch, who preferred instead Ivan Mikhailov Vassiliev) or when, at the age of fifteen, I tried to decipher the reputedly risque passages in Diderot's Les Bijoux indiscrets ('Saepe turgentem spumantemque admovit ori priapum, simulque appressis ad labia labiis, fellatrice me lingua perfricuit...') A certain art of the text might be based on the interplay between the predictable and the unpredictable, between expectation and disappointment, connivance and surprise. To come across subtly trivial or frankly slang expressions casually strewn through what is otherwise elegantly expressed might provide one example, rather as Roland Barthes describes at the start of Writing Degree Zero: Hébert never began an issue of the Père Duchene without putting in a few ‚fucks' and ‚buggers'. These crudenesses didn’t signify but they did signal. A certain art of reading – and not mereley the reading of a text, but what is called ‚reading‘ a picture, or a town – might consist of reading askance, of casting an oblique look at the text. (But this has no longer to do with reading at the physiological level:

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".... ah this is where she is now!"

The sound of the turning of the page, like the silence inbetween the lines, is a marker for the co-readers:

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