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In her recent book, Who Is Afraid of Gender?, Judith Butler asks us to think critically about gender. Thinking critically about gender entails actually reading texts that seriously investigate and explore the (dis-)contents of gender. Butler explicitly defines what is at stake in the practice of reading, namely “democratic life”:
Reading is not just a pastime or a luxury, but a precondition of democratic life, one of the practices that keep debate and disagreement grounded, focused, and productive.
Judith Butler, Who Is Afraid of Gender? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), 18-19.
The specific point Butler is making is that when there is disagreement about a subject, like gender, reading the same texts enables community; reading the same texts enables a conversation about a shared set of terms or details. It is in that way that reading grounds and focuses conversation. Reading the same texts may not ultimately produce agreement or consensus, but the practice will likely produce space for further conversation and collaboration. Or so Butler seems to think.
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Butler argues that reading common texts makes democratic life possible, is a “precondition of democratic life.” Sharing a text, much like sharing a meal, opens us to the experiences and insights of others. Reading gets us out of ourselves and into the world. Mark Jordan, in his book, Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault, describes how reading a text, the words on a page, opens the reader to the experience of the O/other:
Some scholars, like some fans, end by substituting relics of a fetishized life for the work. Perhaps they were first impassioned by the work or by rumors of it. Then it slipped out of reach. So they began slighting the work to seize tokens of its maker. For old-school Hollywood fans, these were autographs and photo spreads. Scholarly fans of this species prefer journalistic interviews, dedicated blogs, tales of conferences sightings . . . . I skimmed the biographies [of Foucault], examined some photographs, heard or watched a few recordings, but I got little satisfaction from them . . . My pleasure in Foucault’s bodily life comes from reading what he wrote. I am lured not by his bodily life but by whatever lured him to write endlessly about the bodily production of our words for bodies.
Mark Jordan, Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 2.
Jordan contrasts two kinds of “reading” habits, two kinds of “fandoms.” The first is a fandom that values the life of/body of the author more than the author’s text. The second kind of fandom is one that values the life of/body of the author for their text. And notice: the author’s words are of immense value not because they are the words of that particular author, in Jordan’s case, the word’s of Foucault. No, they are valuable because they incarnate what is Other than the author, namely the “whatever” that “lured” Foucault to “write endlessly about the bodily production of our words for bodies.”
Jordan’s devotion to Foucault is not about Foucault at all. “[Jordan] needs [Foucault’s body] only for what it writes. If [Jordan] mourns [the loss of Foucault], [he] regret[s] especially that there will be no more of his books . . . .” (4).
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Jordan defines reading as an encounter with the “whatever” that lures an author to write. The “whatever” is related to the author; it is something the author expresses in their writing, but it is not reducible to the author. For Jordan, the shuffling between author (other) and “whatever” (Other) seems to entail another, related shuffling: shuffling between an author’s words, between, perhaps, their meaning, and the aesthetics of the “whatever” the words on the page incarnate or express:
Imagine authorship that forswears fame in order to attend only to the transient effects of it its textual surfaces. That strives only to register ripples on a skittish surface. That strives to be ripples, undoing its own propensity to become a closed object. Imagine writing that is only interested in the play of its light and shadow than in plots and personages . . . . Imagine above all writing that doesn’t secure its unity or its relations to bodies by appealing to the personage of the author.
Mark Jordan, Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 6, emphasis is Jordan’s.
Jordan asks the reader to imagine the author’s writing as a piece of art (worth collecting?). He asks us to imagine authorship that gets lost on the surface of a moving, watery cavas/text. Jordan asks us to imagine writing as a sketch or photograph, “only interested in the play of its light and shadow.” He asks us to imagine writing that doesn’t need the ordinary artist/author to have an impact on the viewer/reader. Jordan further invites us to imagine the reader “as an event yet to arrive. From that meeting, surprising effects may follow–so long as they are not precluded by discounting in advance what a text may say or do” (Convulsing, 7).
The author’s writing, an expression of the “whatever” that also lures a reader to the watery surface(s) of the text, works on the reader. The effects of that working on the reader are not (necessarily) predictable. One possibility is that the reader will write. It is possible that reading is preparation for the event of writing (Convulsing, 7).
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Reading, the encounter with the O/other, with the lure of the “whatever” the author’s writing expresses, may be the reader’s preparation for the practice of writing. Reading may harbor the event of writing. In other words, reading may disclose the connection between the reader and the author by provoking the reader to write.
Leo Bersani, in his reading of Proust, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art, describes what is at stake in the practice of writing:
The pressures of daily life necessarily reduce a personality to a more or less simplified expression; but the particular privilege of literary activity is the leisure it offers to give play to a range of feeling, of being that would never be tolerated in ordinary life. It is, then, useless to look to the writer’s life for an explanation of what is in [their] books, for the conditions in which [they write] those books allows [them] the freedom to express desires, fears, and interests that are either not at all or feebly and confusedly expressed elsewhere in [their] life. . . . [T]he writer’s work is so deeply [their] life that it is foolish to expect [their] life to illuminate it.
Leo Bersani, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 15.
We are by now familiar with the distinction between the author in “ordinary life” and the author’s work. We have already explored the idea that reading is practice in encountering the “whatever” that lures an author to write, that something at once related to and other than the extra-textual author. But now we can understand that insight from a different standpoint.
It is now possible to see that writing is preparation for reading. Writing harbors the event of reading. Writing discloses the connection between the writer and the reader, namely the “whatever” that lures the writer to create textual surfaces, the same “whatever” that lures the reader to those same surfaces. The “whatever,” the O/other, is the precondition for this textual relationship.
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We began with Judith Butler’s observation that “reading . . . .is a precondition of democratic life.” Butler does not draw out exactly what that means in practice. But it is possible to read between the blinds, to discern the light and shadow of her textual surfaces.
If we refuse to read (and reading about gender is, Butler contends, what anti-gender folks refuse to do), we are refusing to encounter a mysterious (maybe disturbing) sense of complexity and difference in the world. Likewise, and moving beyond Butler’s point, when we refuse to write (perhaps about gender), we are refusing an encounter with that same mysterious (maybe disturbing) sense of complexity and difference in ourselves.
Reading is certainly a precondition of democratic life. But we cannot live on reading texts alone. We have to write them, too.
What do you think write?
Gay Thoughts 