Toward Reading as a Process
I dream of arriving, one evening, toward an avant-garde literature reading group. The dream shimmers, tossing ambiguously, until two sibling resonances are unsettled: the one, a surging doubt about my most intimate conceptions, of literature as if my bookshelves were suddenly vacant of their merit, of reading as if the poring over words was an act quite hollow; the other, a wavering certainty in arrival, in an impending finality of near-completeness. In this contradiction, the dream acts its life, spiralling, its ever-pulsating contours engulfing significant planes until its congealment into words offers some respite. Until, that is, something rises to be written.
I count occurrences when I have discovered myself emblazoned upon groups that read socially, in idyllic cafes, at sites of politically charged praxis, in classrooms that have slipped into extracurricular culture, over late-night phone calls and early-evening video conferences, in groups that collect bodies across structuring effects of caste and class and among collectives that group voices across gender and ethnicity, discussing, interpreting, arguing, sometimes translating, sometimes resisting all forms of conversion and sometimes, when things are just right, consenting. Reading never dulls its political hue, even under duress by camps that profess the validity of all views, as if by mere acknowledgement one can retract all values.
In these latter groups, a few popular assumptions proliferate: of reading as enumeration of perspectives that accumulate within us, that of the ethics of arrangement for employing these perspectives and the politics that relativizes them. Contemporary conceptions of culture drive, perhaps, this enterprise that bookends one pole of the reading spectrum, whose antithesis has to be motivated from everyday occurrence. An antithesis where reading is movement which touches its popular counterpart, but only partially, which resembles a collection of many images all different, but each only partially.
The reading group that substantiates the dream appears first as a set of negations, suggestions, allusions and might be developed, through a schema and some practice, into activity that repeats itself. And in this repetition the contradiction will finally be grasped, in the concrete actions of selecting, bounding, rearranging and when things are just right, creating.
Collecting texts, counting perspectives
I have asked some writers what they want out of reading as a social activity. A popular answer substitutes reading for collecting. A reading group, people argue, brings together in one place diverse perspectives or viewpoints. A perspective is a particular orientation toward the text or the world (depending on the particular tendency of a reader who proceeds in their interpretation either from the inside or the outside), an angle that one assumes so that the text or the world is distorted, emphasising some aspects over others. And each perspective is from a subject position, the ‘I’ that lurks behind all vigorous defence of ‘This is my view’.
Multiplicity pervades this readership: a multiplicity of perspectives, a multiplicity of subject positions. So a reading group brings forth, at least possibly if not always truly, a collection of locations and bearings in space that sit around a text, gazing at it with devices that often measure distance and distortion, depth and alignment. This measurement happens at the moment a discussion is conceived, across open tables with participants facing one another with the text, sometimes indicated by the materiality of the bound book, in the centre. Or with reference to a spotlit file over video calls, or by reference to this section and that page, a properly positivist approach where we point to the text and argue this way or that way.
The richness of a reading group is often about how many measurements are made, how many perspectives are admitted, how many positions are counted. Its value is described at times in aggregate descriptions of space: “At least this group is not too white” or “At least this group balances the otherwise sexist tendencies that I have seen in such-and-such groups” or “There is space here for all kinds of views”, or at times with situation-aware spatial measures of proximity or neighbourhood: “This group feels welcoming of my views” or “I have found people who share my perspective of the world”. And it is indeed a rich world that is heterogeneously constituted, the alternatives of homogeneous thought too threatening in their totalitarian scent, too grotesque in their mechanisms of homogenising to forbid a celebration of diversity.
Nor is this a static richness, satisfied with a world that describes orders as if they were without trajectories. People move, appearing sometimes closer, sometimes farther, the contradictions surging until a cleaving is imminent: a breaking or a joining as the case may be as charged bodies under the laws of attraction. One may be struck with the force of someone’s position, as if a physical collision has disturbed the orientation of the bodies in space turning parts of the book into shade, parts into light. Again and again, we discover the physics of positions, velocities, forces, momentum, impulses that present a model of change in the world, of the world. The calculus of our minds presents the kinematics of our enterprise, reading represented as a live-action movie seen through a cinemascope of bodies sometimes here, sometimes there and the order that binds these frames.
Sifting through notes from these groups, I find in discussions of Whitman:
“What do you think the significance of these numbers are?”
“I am not sure. I thought that these are just numbers.”
“They are a reference to the cycle of menstruation.”
“Oh! I did not see that before.”
And suddenly, the object has turned as if someone saw the poem from the other side. Or acted as if the poem had turned…
Or from discussions of Ishiguro; note the similarity of form:
“What did you think of the bull?”
“It is a minotaur reference.”
“Oh I did not think of it that way. That is interesting.”
There is then also relativity, the ascription of vision as if to a position that is not mine, as if from a distortion from another, a distortion that also offers me up as distortion, hides me, reveals me. But spontaneous relativity, shifts without shifts expressed as negations, instantaneous views of the world presented in the tempo of everyday language: “Oh I did not…” as “Oh I just did…”. This is the true art of teleportation, of space-effacing space-travel, time-effacing time-travel, of replacing place for place in staccato rhythm. The expressed world is the world of science fiction, the mundane fictions of domestic novels partaking of the breath between sounds, relegated to silence.
(And we argue that soft science fiction does not get its due, prone to the debilitating practice of hard science fiction. “Oh, he is a guy who looks down on any FTL sci-fi,” as a chiding of the very aspects of our reality we most readily practise.)
Language here is spontaneous, a field within a field within a field within a field, or the unrolling of a field pregnant with its future, the immensities of space and time travel appearing to us merely at the flick of a word. The language, no more spoken than grasped, as if the manner of its speaking provided the infinite energy for instantaneous teleportation. And there is a weight to this infinity, a moment of humility that is also a moment of glory, where I have moved by assent, where I have moved myself. I can, it has now appeared, move myself.
There are also slippages of a certain kind, a perspective-effacing perspective that seeks after the initial point. The text appears as The Text under a certain light, along a vector posed as an arrow that enters the heart of the text, that prises from it its very essence such that all other perspectives appear as vexing distortions. Here is consensus, perhaps, or the exercise of the strictures of a coerced union. And thus arise the trivial concerns of a global, formal aggregates, “Our university is a supposedly neutral place; if you want a trans* advocacy group, what if someone wants to start a neo-Nazi advocacy group?”, of a perspective-effacing perspective, “Trans* views, (and perhaps by extension trans* people) are meaningless or should not exist,” and the inversion to a perspective-enabling perspective of inclusion, “How can we say that a trans* perspective is invalid if it arises from certain subject positions? It is brute power that effaces trans* perspectives.” In all cases the argument emerges from a stasis, an arrest of perhaps the very motions that university pedagogy is supposed to evoke, a “theory of change”.
The seduction of inclusion, one way or the other, is too great at times, creating disparate arguments levelled against disparate people. Sometimes, as is often quoted in these groups, “To say that a perspective is invalid is to say that a person is invalid,” and sometimes, “This is a very sexist reading of the entire text.” Inclusion becomes a contested field of degrees of formality, with the question at each step being: is this a perspective-effacing perspective, forgetting of course that all perspectives have their inversions. The only way out is an appeal either to a prior landscape of power that has conditioned us, the local maxima and minima that determines relative equilibrium of our views that straddles the political landscape, or an appeal to the thrust per history that allows some perspectives to arrive with a genocidal force. Sexism is absolutely wrong because… because it is a historical condition that has specified its manner of operation.
Of course, in flagrant populism that allows the discussion of some power (gender, sexuality) and not all power (class, caste), and that which it allows to be discussed it allows in versions that are co-opted (within broadly neoliberal frameworks, where ‘diversity’ is an ultimate value): is not power then another name for the organising terrain of a place? The curve of a mountain mapped by roads and inroads, its solidity scaffolding vertical cities: a view from the top, a view from the bottom, and the asymmetry of the view corrected with a horizontalization, an imagined erosion. Reading groups are landscaping cliques; they address reified power by challenging it; they challenge it by correcting for it. But the landscape itself is given at the outset, such as when we look at international magazines and ask if they are “essentializing a kind of Indianness that we Indian writers cannot break out of”, if indeed to be properly Indian is to always exist with a view from the bottom that a white editor will horizontalize…
What will it be to take over the work of horizontalizing?
The normative arrangements of reading form a short, cohesive list. One enters with a partial perspective that is totalized by the group; one does claim total knowledge at the outset because that is antagonistic to growth, antagonistic to democracy. One is schooled in the mechanics of teleportation through discourse, the ability of removing oneself from here and resituating oneself there. There is a relativity of teleportation: a from-ness of an origin that has to be preserved if it has to be counted, a to-ness of a destination that has to be separate if it has to signal growth, accumulation (as against the diatribe, “He sees things his own way; he does not listen to anyone else.”) that is always dependent on individual origins. And there is always a personal knowledge of personal origins: of no, you don’t dare ask me if I am sufficiently brown. But why not, when the preserved positions are dead space, a mere perspective, the formal relationship between two former locations, a souvenir of the expense of energy that can only serve as a static reference to power? It: dead, I: alive. It. I. Alive. Dead.
A few writers recently told me that to read is to encounter new perspectives, emphasising that we read so that we may curate more and more of these perspectives so that when we write, we write from the combined knowledge of all of these ways of seeing. “If I have read seven books, I am that much more sensitive to different perspectives as someone who has read three.” Or “I do not think she has read enough to be able to write.” Not reading, then, but have-read, a complex that deserves a word of its own since it explains so much reality. The nature of our aesthetic inquiry laid bare by its measurement, its measurement exhausted by the frequency of its occurrence, its frequency enhanced by the number of bodies, meetings, texts, voices, positions, perspectives…
We are experts in counting deadspace.
The logistics of traveling readers
Grimoire Weiss jokes in Nier: Replicant that people who attempt to teleport are crushed by high-speed impact with boulders, or goats. A threat, forcing players to select that mediary of space- and time-travel that builds good metaphors: a journey, a transit. Mistakes convert journeys into positions: A to B: waypoints and lines, progress and completion, remove from actions, from particulars that describe different journeys between fixed points, across fixed intervals. A journey promises motion, action, promises an entertaining slowness working perpetually against time constraints: “How will a reading group work in a way other than this, given time constraints?” and perhaps hypothesised space constraints: “You want people to read in the session?” Difficult questions, unclear answers, though there now erupts the metaphor of reading as a journey.
Let us indulge the metaphor. In a protracted discussion on the contents of our magazine, we have struggled with Indian-ness spiralling outward into South Asian-ness. After a solid day’s worth of reading, of arguing this way or that for the worth of material read (as editors must do), do I risk discovering that I have become a white reader? Not a change in perspective, effected with clarity: “Let me be white!”, not a revelation of something essential: “Oh, I have always been so white!”, but a slow ticking into whiteness (or brownness), a modification by the very stories that appear within the slush.
Yet, this is not horror. Mine is not a faceless face that merely mirrors what it sees. This is journey proper that changes the traveller, intensifies them, deepens their view of the world. What the traveller wears, they wear to indicate their conformity to a place: inside but outside, of a land neither here nor there: not completely here, nor completely there. In Indrapramit Das’ Devourers, the werewolves are white but speak Pashto, accrue the essence of people slain and devoured yet retain a complicated selfhood that is difficult to ascertain. That is indeed the mystery of the piece: kveldulf, rakshasa, djinn do not capture in names the features of these creatures. It is this, all of these, and something more, something excess that their essence holds within itself. The reader, the devourer as if of the text who retains their essence is not a mere mimic.
Reading is beset with an initial problem: the problem of preparing for a journey, the problem of logistics. Something has to move and the science, the economics, the politics of its trajectory have to be figured out, a purely administrative task for those concerned with travels of others, like the travel agents in Exit West: faceless, nameless, opening doors for space-effacing space-travel that are perpetually west-oriented. I might as well call my group Exit West, actuating a logistics of doors toward progress, toward a shift in perspective so sudden, so radical, that the threshold all but vanishes except for a material door. The other logistics: a deeply personal task: a drawing and redrawing of itineraries, a mental prefigurement of the paths one would eventually walk down inscribed on a map here, on a schedule there, of the expedient and emergent legs of actual travel when one is forced out of the vehicle to survey the land on foot. An involved logistics: action everywhere that is focused on the near-end goal of making journey possible, travel probable. Perhaps, then, a private logistics…
This as if schism of the world from the individual, of the public from the private, of administration from involvement, of travelogues from journeys…
Am I a white reader? What sets the degree of my whiteness?
A writing group in Bangalore might have tried to present itself as a place where one may discover their natural voice. One of the first pieces of feedback that I received here, by a fellow writer of good stead, is that I have discovered my voice, an act that many writers struggle with. It was defamiliarizing: “I see through you into you,” would be more appropriate a translation, arguing that I was in semi-stasis, under an identity-arrest. “Don’t call me a feminist author,” said someone else when I pointed out that they had written mostly about gender politics progressively, as if that label had seduced them to a mousetrap and caged them by their tails. Hence, a contradiction: always two communiqués, one of an essential essence, one of a fickle fickleness, interrupting one another, intertwining with one another, playing about in pushes and pulls such that it is difficult to ascertain which side one is on. Perhaps it is the very act of careening, swishing, faltering, balancing, writing.
With each piece I became a writer of different shades, slowly evolving insofar as it is a descriptor of uncertain progress, an unstaged, unprophesised growth that cannot be measured by suggested arithmetic. “Writing comes from an individual place,” had said a teacher once, patently disproved. Quod erat demonstrandum. Writing is a group affair, the affair at least of an interaction between the scriptor and the story, the story which has turned upon the scriptor, violating a private zone of individuality. The student who turns in a well-written story is now suspiciously different: he places his limbs differently, his eye roves to different things, his breathing steals from the classroom a different gallon of air.
How far can one distinguish the twin actions of reading and writing, of listening and speaking, of words that are journeying inwards and words that are journeying outwards? How much asymmetry can we build into the processes that are, perhaps, inescapably linked?
From solitude to a world then, however fictional. Sherlock turns, kills his author, joins a troupe of women heroes in Goss’ Alchemist’s Daughter, identifiable as an edict of traditional stature but fallen, replaced, made contemporary. Not completely new but why should that desist us from discussing a society of actors? How novel is the novel character: has Delaney not faced Rydra Wong and been forced to modify the density of his own language, to twist his own narrative phraseology to suit a developing, almost impending, need? A social need in the company of characters. A different Delaney who completes the novel than one who begins to read, as with Bradbury who sampled a plethora of texts in a bid to pen Fahrenheit 451, his perusal through an entire library in what is mystified improperly as a solitary exercise. “Ah love, let us be true…” reads Montag and is driven to tears by the force of the written word and something has changed, unsettled, in the character, in the author, in the reader.
I am not a white writer at the outset, though I am often transformed by my writing to be more or less white at times. If there is something to be resisted in being too incorrigibly white, as there obviously is, then there are reasons for favouring particular logistics, reasons that emerge while sojourning. A fellow writer once said, “You write white,” and I felt once more the younger man in East End New York to whom a Puerto Rican said, “You are dressed like a New Yorker.” Until I dress Indian, until I write about immigration and its politics, of the traces of colonialism on my skin, of the myriad relationships of caste and class and gender and sexuality within which I wobble, and in that writing forge an identity forever shifting, a reclusive vagabond somewhere from the south of Surrey or Midtown New York or Jayanagar or Wasseypur. Never, though from nowhere, though sometimes from beyond all places.
The ethics of a group, with writing as exploring, discovering, travelling, appears as actions at waystations, halts and shops: replenishing, rejuvenating, offering repose. No accumulation, no countable measure of positions, not even of delimited motions or repetitions: only the intensity of engagement with a story. Of course there are still perspectives, the angles of survey but they are housed in particulars: where I am, there I see from. And the relative motion also of all perspectives as I move finitely, within ordained bounds. And then approach and dissociation, pulls and pushes, collisions, slingshots, orbits and their logistics. And from the writing group, a conversation after a presentation:
“I often get stuck with my opening line.”
“You can think of writing out the entire piece and then handling the finesse of the opening line.”
Or consider:
“The dream sequence in this piece feels a little arbitrary: it upsets the reader here.”
Features: a fixation on the particular, the available, generalisable surely but not with the force of an abstract idea, engagement with both the process and the contents of writing inseparably, nudging and interacting rather than replacing, rearranging, accumulating. The active seeking to be on a collision course, a collective shaping of stories under creation, a village that raises a piece, an author and facilitates their elopement into somewhere else.
Power too, but not as a given landscape. Power as horizontalizing, terraforming, the moulding of the landscape into terrain that allows confluences, lover’s points, the gradual erosion of a rotund escarpment by elephants ambling sideways, leg after leg after leg after leg. Writing becomes a political act — reading too — not because it covers the land like grass but because it follows feet that stomp the land and muddy its waters. Power, reified, into power, fluid. The schism between the world and the word cracks open in Freire’s autobiographical expositions. The written word touches the immediate lived cosmos through words employed as shovels and sickles and hammers. Freire does not invent this relationship; he provides, perhaps, the timely, vivid exemplars that depict a thrumming theory of the aesthetic.
The logistics of reading are inviting not because there is a radical process to be undertaken but because it is already being undertaken. The task of a reading group, not a have-read group, is to underscore this private logistics and present it to the world: here I move, with these steps and these twists, with these assumptions, these worldviews, these values and of course, with a prospective goal that is this. And this in motion, always in motion, lest we should find a matrix of countable modifiers to a reading process, lest the dominant effects of measurement should invade upon the private logistics as a GPS-map. A reading group demonstrates the logistics of reading.
Guidelines for a reading group
Over half a decade ago, we proposed a forum for gender and sexuality within a university campus, whose name was inspired from the word Freedom, whose guiding principle was that it was to be open to all, though it was also to be guided by a queer philosophy. At its core, however, was a principle offset in action: a principle of sharing experiences and shared meaning-making, of being transformed by one another, of distributing freedom and passing it around in circles. The core principle was one of presenting oneself, so far as one chose, to a community of peers considering that there is not a fixed nature to one’s own self.
Problems, of course, of representation: of a principally Savarna, male population filling slots in the group, arose. The same charges of perspective-effacing perspectives were levied, found largely true. Midway through the engagement, the vision for the forum had shifted, becoming about accumulation of engagement that was driven by harking after the most popular issues, most popular events, an accumulation driven by the goal of visibility, forgetting, perhaps, that visibility in a crude form is simply a numbers game. A shift by design to a counting paradigm. A shift by design to reified power and its effects.
The problems of a reading group may be similar, problems also realised similarly.
The guiding principles of a reading group may be summarised as:
- Reading as a revelation of an identity, a position-perspective combination complexed with an action, always a political, ethico-aesthetic action that one engages in with the world.
- Reading as presenting private logistics, logistics of the enervating kind that maintains journeys, logistics that may also be idiosyncratic, particularly as it arises from the dynamic position of the moving reader.
- Reading beyond just collection of perspectives or have-reads; reading as a process of horizontalization in time, of terraforming and not just mapping contours and projecting them on a plane. Reading as a political act, not a political state or outcome.
- Reading as shared meaning-making, a seeking after collisions, elastic and inelastic, the transfer of momenta and the feeling of impact. A realisation also of the finiteness of these collisions, and thus a set of probable zones where one might end up.
Clearly, there is a centrality accorded to the readers, a centrality not that surprising in a reading group. A centrality that represents perhaps the need to read avant-garde literature in the first place, to follow the vanguard to places hitherto unavailable, to occupy, to perch, to live in rather than talk about.
The reading group that follows may have the following tentative format:
- Presentation by a reader
- Collisions: interruptions, realisations, conflicts with other readers
- A shared survey of the landscapes thus terraformed: a shift to contour-mapping
The details of such a group have to be further spelled out.
