What would it mean to pause at the site before comprehension, to grapple with what we miss in knowledge, to miss it harder? The forward thrust of a sentence is doubled by the citational act of missing. Typically, reading works in that direction. The preemptive habit of reading for sense, closure and resolve is attached to the proprietorial relief and comfort of a settled clause – the orienting sensation of recognition, registration, of getting it. This automated method is also a desire, or expectation, that the reader is conscripted to latently practice as their own. If a text, at least in the first instant of the encounter, is presumed to be “the very place where meaning, and knowledge of meaning, resides”,1 the reader’s voice is dependently latched on that structure of authority. A text, along with the context of it being encountered, insists on a logic of experience – a means of moving or going. This is literally felt through the pressures of being in proportion to real and abstract employers, to whom we are bound to work, speak and live in time with. Reading encounters the industry of democracy at the point, dash, comma, exclamation mark.
Intrinsic to being a reader, then, is spectating your fated voice whilst reproducing it as a decision. Sarah Wood picks at the paradox: “You have to decide how to read, in what accent, with what emphasis, in what tone: there are so many there is no one tone. But there is no choice.”2 Choosing, but with no choice, is the bind that produces the semblance of freedom, clipping choice-making into a gesture that distorts how the text has chosen the subject to represent it. Error amplifies this lack. Unconscious drives catch onto the charged conditions of the moment. A misreading punctures “self-preserving” automations and ambitions, like getting through a sentence unscathed. Frank Ruda and Rebecca Comay advocate for sentences that prompt the reading voice to miss what it reads. They call these sentences “speculative” in that they disperse preparatory assumptions and intrude on meaning-making drives, triggering repetition and re-vision (usage of the sonically ambiguous “dash” thread both author’s thinking, further elaborations to follow). What the reader would’ve had to accept at the site of reading – the text’s assumed current and vehicularity – is suspended to expose an underside to sense and associated devotionals. A misreading is a mispronunciation of an agreement to be legible, which governs how, where, who and what can be read at all. Is it possible that a misreading could forgo sense for sensuousness?3 Like the vulnerability of unwilled confession or slip of the tongue? Ruda and Comay posit a declaration: “It’s only at moments of symbolic breakdown that history sheds its veneer as inexorable second nature. It is the experience of stuckness that forces us to reinvent the entire field.”4
To think about the speculative is to reassess the relational and review the reproductive. The pre-baked “ethics” that scaffold the latter two arrive in reading’s grip on “neutral” speech, a fiction disciplined into vocal delivery. The case for speculative reading is to engage with what is bordered off when we mark ourselves as a stable coordinate to which others orbit. To corrupt this orientation, Alexis Pauline Gumbs annotates Audre Lorde, suggesting that we “m/other ourselves”.5 Gumb’s imposition of the slash intervenes in the reading of the sign, two words appear tethered yet cannot be voiced simultaneously. How do we (or should we) parse mother from other? How does the pronunciation of either or both shield the reader from the antagonistic grammar of the slash? Is the prompt to address the givenness of “mother” – of return, reference, origin? Error looks to be the condition of the appeal, where m/othering ourselves evades a determined outcome. Here is a statement that reads the reader out of the text and into speculation.
Leslie Scalapino’s poem-play The Weatherman Turns Himself In (1995) is a parenthetical engagement with the pressures of observation and proprietorship. Scalapino,6 an American poet, experimental prose writer, playwright and essayist who was closely involved with the West Coast Language Poets,7 often crossed prose with poetry and theory to disinherit narrative and lyric formalities. In The Weatherman – a text long out of print with little in the way of coverage or record of its public stagings – Scalapino experiments with staging interior and exterior speech together, (over)amplifying both, without clearly signalling what may or may not (just) be “thought”. The characters, whose names include “The Other”, “Eyes-lowered”, “News-people”, “The Weatherman”, speak out private ruminations or fleeting daydreams in the same way that they speak in conversation with each other. Disjunctive observations and (un)related inner reflections occupy the same audible field, surrounding the barely elaborated instance of a weatherman giving up his job. Speech and thought remain unprocessed, assisted by a disjunctive temporality where various occurrences – vocal, thought and action – are staged concurrently. Private proximities emerge through a logic of besideness.
Scalapino’s frequent use of dashes and brackets bisect the written speech and stage directions, disclosing a surplus that surrounds and upends thinking, speaking and relating. The punctuation seems to score an ambiguous meantime – the duration of which is neither quotered with a discernible pitch or length. These non-directive moments prevent the text from being completely held or owned. Instead, the marks socialise the text with the living setting and histories around it.
Scalapino explains the method: “The poem-play is a form of discourse as ‘public experience,’ trying to create the communal: the designated parts are not characters but rather ‘interior’ conversation (‘seeing’ one’s own thought), speaking outside and viewing inside. Viewing text itself. As if one’s mind is at once an other limb’s physical motion”8 The “viewing” that Scalapino (dis)locates invites the audience to misread what is heard, gesturing to the il/legibile intimacies that are in excess of civic speech and the crucial, erotic pressures of erroneous address.
The recording and annotations below look to facilitate weak terms for the play’s rehearsal, particularly scene 10. Misreadings get misread again, to imminently encounter The Weatherman’s grammar of ‘hireability’ as a condition of reading.
'that a thing can name what it survives in the in and gives hell on the way out' p3, Dysgraphist, Canisia Lubrin.
‘Now you’re explaining what you’re doing.’ — but one isn’t doing anything but outside.
Activity 1
In a pair, silently annotate the vectors and pace of your inner reading voice onto a printout of Scene 10, as you read it. Notice pitch, volume, cadence, speed, pauses and other shifts/continuities. Use marks and drawings to transcribe the silent but resonant acoustic setting of comprehension. Write these marks onto and around the text, but steer from noting linguistic signs. Do this in one take, then swap your annotated scenes. Take turns in reading the exchanged scene aloud by using the drawn marks as a vocal guide.
In what ways have you formalised your inner voice to be read by another? Which references/canons/disciplines informed your approach?
Similarly, what methods of interpretation have you relied on to respond to the transcribed markings of your partner?
How would you describe the sensation/s of visualising the inner reading voice?
What disappears through the transcriptions? What is the surplus?
What was transferred between the person who notated and the person who read those notations?
How/do you process your subjectivity through your reading voice/s? How does authenticity and truth factor?
In what ways does privacy, and its aesthetics, emerge or shift in the material transformation of thought into notation into vocalisation?
