Reparative Thinking Podcast Episode 005- Reparative Thinking Extended

In this episode, I address the ideas of Peter Elbow, Barbara Schneider, and Jacqueline Royster; I address how their thoughts both connect to and expand the picture of reparative thinking the podcast has painted so far.

What better word than 'high' to connote...the elitism and snobbery that so many people at large have felt in the culture of literary studies. From on high, we can look down. Yet again I turn. I can't throw away 'high.' I want to value it and keep it--yet peel away what's noxious. Is there not something valuable that follows from revering and even trying to live with things one experiences as 'above' one--Milton? Woolf? Morrison?--from trying to get our minds around things that are miraculously good?

--from Peter Elbow's, "The Cultures of Literature and Composition: What Could Each Learn from the Other?"

Episode 005 Show Notes

Elbow

What he says:

1. “[J]ust as loving literature has gotten itself all tangled up with a noxious tradition of failing to value students and their writing and thinking, so, too, loving sophistication is all tangled up with an equally noxious tradition of condescension, snobbery, and elitism” (472).
2. “Just as rhetoric and poetic are two essential dimensions of language, so sophistication and naivete (or refusing sophistication) are two ways of being in the world: we can be complex, sophisticated, ironic, and adorn ourselves with style and artifice; or we can be naked, naive, and direct” (475).

Why it's important: 

The first statement demonstrates the reparative impulse. The second echoes Sedgwick's idea of alternating modes rather than a single mode. Taken together, they support the idea that it is not the paranoid/reparative divide that is the problem so much as the dominance of paranoia at the expense of reparation.

Schneider

What she says;

1. Current critical practices: "We...appropriate others' texts for our own ends, looking for vulnerabilities so we can use them to insert our own arguments, or mining them for ammunition for anticipated arguments" (205).
2. Rhetorical listening, on the other hand, is characterized by receptiveness, humility, and attentiveness. 
3. Even though she's contrasting rhetorical listening to narcissistic reading, she explicitly extends the discussion beyond reading practices to attitudes about knowledge.
4. The purpose of listening in this way is "so that we may receive both the gifts and challenges others' texts offer us" (206).

Why it's important:

Her discussion of empathy and rhetorical listening shifts the focus of the conversation: it is other-centered rather than self-centered.

Royster

What she says:

1. She talks about the issue of representation of African American communities and says: “Those of us who hold these communities close to our hearts, protect them, and embrace them; those who want to preserve the goodness of the minds and souls in them; those who want to preserve consciously, critically, and also lovingly the record of good work within them must take high risk and give over the exclusivity of our rights to know” (33).
2. "As community members, we must learn to have new faith in the advantage of sharing. As strangers, we must learn to treat the loved people and places of Others with care and to understand that, when we do not act respectfully and responsibly, we leave ourselves rightly open to wrath. The challenge is not to work with a fear of abuse or a fear of retaliation, however. The challenge is to teach, to engage in research, to write, and to speak with Others with the determination to operate not only with professional and personal integrity, but also with the specific knowledge that communities and their ancestors are watching. If we can set aside our rights to exclusivity in our own home cultures, if we can set aside the tendencies that we all have to think too narrowly, we actually leave open an important possibility. In our nation, we have little idea of the potential that a variety of subjectivities--operating with honor, respect, and reasonable codes of conduct--can bring to critical inquiry or critical problems. What might happen if we treated differences in subject position as critical pieces of the whole, vital to thorough understanding, and central to both problem-finding and problem-solving? This society has not, as yet, really allowed that privilege in a substantial way.” (33)

Why it's important: 

So far the question has been: how can I change my attitudes towards the way I know things? But the reality is that we live in a world full of people who know in different ways. The question is not just how do I know, but how do other people know, and how do we deal kindly and honorably with one another as we navigate those differences?

For more on Peter Elbow, see "The Cultures of Literature and Composition: What Could Each Learn from the Other?" It was published in College English (64.5) in 2002.

For more on Barbara Schneider, see "Uncommon Ground: Narcissistic Reading And Material Racism." It was published in  Pedagogy: Critical Approaches To Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, And Culture (5.2) in 2005.

For more on Jacqueline Royster, see "When The First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own." It was published in  College Composition And Communication (47.1) in 1996.

You can email me at boyteremily@gmail.com
You can follow me on Twitter @eaboyter

Reparative Thinking Podcast Episode 004- Surface Reading and Symptomatic Reading

In this episode, I talk about Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus' article about surface reading and symptomatic reading. I discuss how their ideas are related to and distinct from Sedgwick's thoughts on paranoid and reparative reading. I focus especially on how their article was crucial in moving reparation from the purely theoretical to something I could actually recognize in my day-to-day life.

"The question of where to read compels us to ask the difficult question of how to read: publicly or privately; singly or communally; serially or nonconsecutively; closely, self-consciously, comprehensively, or deeply, among other alternatives." 

--from David Faflik's "Deep Thought, Shallow Aesthetic: Reading Surface Meaning in Thoreau."

Episode 004 Show Notes

This episode explores the work of Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, who outline a paradigm of reading modes that closely parallels Sedgwick's paranoid/reparative idea. They talk about symptomatic reading and surface reading. 

Characteristics of Symptomatic Reading:

1. Symptomatic reading sees meaning as something that lies deeply hidden or repressed within a text or something that needs to be interpreted and revealed. 
2. Symptomatic reading searches for "outright absences, caps, and ellipses in texts" and revealing the truth buried beneath (Best and Marcus 3). 
3. Symptomatic reading and paranoid reading are nearly identical. Both rely pretty heavily on the notion of unconcealment, and both make direct links to the hermeneutics of suspicion, which we discussed in Episode 2.

Problems with Symptomatic Reading:

1. The attitudes that underlie it
• Invitation to 2008 conference on symptomatic reading: “what a text means lies in what it does not say, which can then be used to rewrite the text in terms of a master code. By disclosing the absent cause that structures the text’s inclusions and exclusions, the critic restores to the surface the deep history that the text represses” (3).
• Frederic Jameson (proponent of symptomatic reading)
• Connects surface reading with "weak, descriptive, empirical, ideologically complicit reader[s]" (5).
• Portrays literary critics as brave heroes who  "rewrite narrative in terms of master-codes, disclosing its status as ideology, as an imaginary resolution of real contradictions" (5).
2. The assumptions it makes. 
• David Faflik points out that  symptomatic reading actually inhibits textual interpretation by uncritically accepting the idea that depth equals complexity. 
• He makes a claim that strongly echoes Sedgwick when he says: "to suggest we read for meaning someplace other than a location named depth is to court controversy" (62). The assumptions made by symptomatic/paranoid thinking tend to obliterate the idea that any other kind of thinking is valid.

Surface Reading: 

• Surface
• What is evident in texts
• That which is able to be perceived and apprehended rather than what is hiding. 
• "A surface is what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to look through." 
• The intricacy of the language of literature 
• The patterns that emerge within texts
• Literal meaning
• Surface Reading
• Both an affective and ethical stance
• A practice of critical description
• A way of embracing and yielding to a text, rather than striving to master it and use it
• An assumption that texts are capable of self-mediation
• The idea that the things we theorize, like form, structure, and meaning, are already present in texts
• "Just reading," seeing what's in the text without striving to interpret "presence as absence or affirmation as negation" (12).

Rewards of Surface Reading: Greater Intimacy

1. Anne Cheng, a contributor to their collection advocates what she calls "a mutual pedagogy of erotics." She describes the relationship in this way: "the critic inhabits and is inhabited by what she studies, and embraces the loss of critical certainty and the gain in intimacy that result" (9).
2. They also cite Susan Sontag, who talks about the experience art as a "pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy." Sontag also describes this experience as "an erotics of art." 

One thing that's important to note is that surface reading and reparative reading are not necessarily the same thing. A discussion of modes of reading would lose a great deal by using the terms interchangeably. Best and Marcus' piece is an introduction to a collection of essays that explore numerous modes of reading: kinds of reading that evolve out of symptomatic reading, or kinds that break away from it completely. The collection is not a road map to one particular mode of reading but what they call a "road branching in multiple directions" (3). The analogy seems fitting: surface reading and reparative reading, are, at least, parallel roads with not much distance between them.

For more on Surface Reading and Symptomatic Reading, see Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus' article "Surface Reading: An Introduction." It was published in Representations (108.1) in 2009.

For more on David Faflik's work, see his article "Deep Thought, Shallow Aesthetic: Reading Surface Meaning in Thoreau." It was published in American Literature (85.1) in 2013. 

You can email me at boyteremily@gmail.com
You can follow me on Twitter @eaboyter

Reparative Thinking Podcast Episode 003- Defining Reparative Thinking

In this episode, I focus on what Sedgwick says about reparative reading in an effort to work towards a more practical understanding. I discuss the importance of Heather Love's work in helping me understand Sedgwick more fully, as well as catalyzing my inquiry into ideas about reparation, love, and criticism.

"If reparative reading is better at the level of ethics and affect--and there is really no doubt that it is--it also looks better at the level of epistemology and knowledge. Even though paranoid or, in terms borrowed from Silvan Tomkins, strong theory can organize vast amounts of territory and tell big truths, it misses the descriptive richness of weak theory. Weak theory stays local, gives up on hypervigilance for attentiveness; instead of powerful reductions, it prefers acts of noticing, being affected, taking joy, and making whole."

--from Heather Love's "Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading"

Episode 003 Show Notes

Although Sedgwick's piece does an excellent job of defining paranoia, it does much less in terms of helping the reader to really understand what reparation actually does. She makes three explicit statements that begin to build a picture of reparation. 

1. Reparative impulses are not nonexistent in the current world of critique. However, they are usually either unacknowledged or dismissed. They can be dismissed for two reasons.
• They are "merely aesthetic" (i.e. just about pleasure).
• They are "merely ameliorative" (i.e. just about reform or improvement).
• Sedgwick asks the very excellent question, "What makes pleasure and amelioration so 'mere'?" She attributes this dismissal to what she calls "paranoia's faith in demystifying exposure" (144)
2. Reparation requires a kind of yielding. She says, "to read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new; to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise" (146).
3. Reparation's deepest impulse is, unsurprisingly, to repair: "The desire of a reparative impulse, on the other hand, is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self" (149).

Taking these characteristics and adding to them the ones that I reverse-engineered from Sedgwick's qualities of paranoia (discussed in Episode 002), I came up with this list of qualities of reparation:

1. Reparation is motivated by the desire for both pleasure (positive affect) and improvement
2. Reparation requires yielding to surprises, even unpleasant ones
3. Reparation desires to piece together what is broken
4. Reparation responds rather than anticipating or mimicking
5. Reparation is a weak theory that surrenders the need for control in favor of greater freedom

I love all of these ideas, but I found myself not knowing what to do with them. Heather Love's article, Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, was incredibly important in helping me move from just loving Sedgwick's ideas to finding ways to apply them. Love's piece offered three major insights.

1. Love calls for a more careful reading of Sedgwick, acknowledging that the piece also calls readers to "acknowledge the negativity and the aggression at the heart of psychic life and to recognize that thinking is impossible without this kind of aggression. As in Klein, the schizoid position and the depressive position can't really be separated from each other: subjects vacillate between these two positions without ever coming to rest" (238). Love's insistence on reading Sedgwick herself in both paranoid and reparative ways is vital because it models the use of both of these positions.
2. Love describes paranoia and reparation as growing from the same impulse: [J]ust as allowing for good surprises means risking bad surprises, practicing reparative reading means leaving the door open to paranoid reading. There is risk in love, including the risk of antagonism, aggression, irritation, contempt, anger--love means trying to destroy the object as well as trying to repair it. Not only are these two positions--the schizoid and the depressive--inseparable, not only is oscillation between them inevitable, but they are also bound together by the glue of shared affect. Paranoia is a mode of anxiety about what might happen to you; reparation is also grounded in anxiety. The depressive position for Klein involves anxiety not only about what you may have done to others, but also about the unintended consequences of your actions in the present" (239).
3. Love's piece got me thinking further about love. Pun acknowledged. She says, "To read Sedgwick's always reparatively is to miss the energizing force of paranoia in her work; it also reduces the kinds of relations we might now cultivate with her. Recognizing that it is not only reparation but damage at work in Sedgwick's late essays will let us begin the hard work of deidealization. And that's love too" (240). 

For more, see Eve Sedgwick's  "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; Or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You." It is the fourth chapter of her book Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (published in 2003 by Duke University Press).

Also see Heather Love's article Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading. It was published in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts (52.2) in 2010. 

You can email me at boyteremily@gmail.com
You can follow me on Twitter @eaboyter