Powers of Reading: From Plato to Audiobooks by Peter Szendy is a historical, literary, and philosophical study that transforms our understanding of reading. The following was adapted from an interview with Juliette Cerf; originally published in the French weekly °ŐĂ©±ôĂ©°ů˛ąłľ˛ą (September 7 2022).
Juliette Cerf: How is Powers of Reading related to your previous work on listening?
Peter Szendy: I have tried to listen to what goes on inside us when we read—to turn our ears inwards, you might say. Even when it is performed for oneself, reading unfolds on an inner stage populated by different voices. I can count at least three: the voice of the text (the author, if you wish), the voice that reads the text (that lends itself to it), and the one who listens to the reading or interrupts it, whom I call the “readee,” since reading is always addressed to someone, to an addressee.
JC: As in reading aloud?
PS: I consider silent reading as an interiorized mode of reading aloud. Some degree of vocality is always involved in reading, even when it is apparently silent (silent readers “subvocalize,” as neuroscientists say). Historically, reading aloud preceded inward reading, but there is in fact no real break between the two, rather an interiorization that keeps the same vocal roles unchanged in their distribution. Interestingly, we are currently witnessing a revival of reading aloud with the success of audio books.
JC: Your examples are ancient, though: you quote Plato…
PS: I have been deeply interested in the ancient figure of the reading slave, the Greek “anagnost” (whose name comes from one of the Greek verbs for reading). In the prologue to Plato’s Theaetetus, one of the characters orders a reading slave to read while another will listen to the written notes thus being read—the very text which we ourselves are reading! This complex situation, this interweaving of voices, is what we internalize when we read silently.
It may seem surprising to us today that a reading slave lends his voice to the text of a philosophical dialogue (contrary to Ancient Greece, learning to read was forbidden and cruelly repressed on American plantations). At the heart of the Greek reading scene there was also an implicitly erotic relationship: while the author played the active role, the reader had the supposedly passive role of the one who was penetrated by the text. Power and eros are intertwined in reading.
JC: What does the reading imperative (“Read!”) tell us?
PS: Reading is always permeated by relations of power, its little vocal theater being also the site of a micropolitics involving the readerly body. There are so many prefaces and forewords where the reader is apostrophized and given explicit reading instructions to be followed. But the reading imperative can also remain implicit, presupposed in every sentence. In some cases, like the unbearable ending of Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, the imperative to read, if we obey it, is even stronger than the horror we feel while witnessing the cruel treatments inflicted upon a character. The reading imperative then acquires the nature of a categorical imperative; it says: read whatever happens, read for the sake of reading, read regardless of what you read, in spite of what you read, even if it is unreadable. . . . The purest form that the reading imperative can take is maybe when people are sentenced to read books, as it happened in a number of legal cases that I refer to (see for example the verdict reported in The Guardian, on February 7, 2017: “Vandals sentenced to read books about racism and antisemitism”).
JC: Reading is usually seen more as a liberation than as a punishment, though.
PS: If you think of it, reading is such an astounding act! It is a discipline of the body and of the inner voice. A source of immense pleasure, it is also a violent and conflicting scene. Awareness of this fact revives the idea, so hackneyed since the Enlightenment, that reading liberates. Of course, I fully subscribe to such a humanist ideal, the traces of which are to be found in campaigns like the “Literacy Decade” launched by Unesco in 2003 (its motto was “Literacy as Freedom”). But because it brings into play a polyphony of conflicting voices, relationships of domination and obedience, reading is far more complex, full of gray areas. Which makes it a powerful counterpower.
JC: In what sense?
PS: The multiplicity of voices that dialogue within the reader is precisely the resource for distancing oneself from the written word, for not fully conforming to it. Think of the reading practices of a mystic like Teresa of Avila, when she detaches her eyes from the text and lifts her gaze in order to move seamlessly from reading to prayer. Jesuit historian Michel de Certeau saw in this unmooring a gesture towards what he calls “absolute reading” and towards the possibility of “emancipating the reader-subject.” He was the first, to my knowledge, who talked about a “politics of reading.”
JC: Is this politics of reading compatible with the digital future of books?
PS: Digital media, which allow for full-text searches and include hypertext links, radically accelerate the speed of reading, constantly directing us elsewhere, interrupting the regular flow of the text and sending us into new contexts. When the speed of reading becomes almost infinite, nearing the speed of light (when we click on a link and find ourselves abruptly transported in a completely different textual environment, as if we had flown over thousands of textual acres), the vocality of reading recedes in favor of pure sight. I believe that, whatever the medium, reading is always a movement or tension towards what is to come: in that sense, reading is always anticipatory, it is literally pro-phetic, but with temporalities that vary according to the techniques at play.
Walter Benjamin has suggested that, before the invention of writing, the most ancient forms of reading (what I call “archereading”) consisted in deciphering entrails or constellations for predicting the future. But there is also a retrofuturistic history of reading: in 1657, in A Voyage to the Moon, French novelist Cyrano de Bergerac describes books that have “neither Leaves nor Letters,” the reading of which requires only ears. These audiobooks from the 17th century could even be worn as earrings, “like a pair of Pendants:” they anticipate the invention of earphones.
Peter Szendy is the David Herlihy Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His books include For an Ecology of Images; The Supermarket of the Visible: Toward a General Economy of Images; Of Stigmatology: Punctuation as Experience; and All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage.