Semiotic Investigations: Towards an Effective Semiotics
Alec McHoul
Part One
The Limits and Media of Semiosis
Chapter 5
Reading Practices
This chapter attempts to show that there is no unified, prespecifiable thing or practice which counts always and only as reading. Put another way: the word "reading" has no single meaning. Or: it is always possible to defeat the idea of a definite, distinct and universal boundary between a practice or thing called reading and its opposite, not-reading . This is a position discussed above (in chapter 4), at least as a principle of analysis. Here I want to see what this absence of a definite distinction looks like in practice. But the position I adopt does not mean that everything is reading and nothing isn't - that kind of radical relativism - a sort of "freebase semiosis" - has already been ruled out. Rather it means that, in general, in the domain of theories of reading, almost everything can be reading; and that when it is that something is (or isn't) reading depends on unprespecifiably local matters. Needless to say, then, a consequence of my position is that there cannot be a precise pedagogic science of reading which covers every possible instance.
A further and related consequence is that those who have a professional interest in teaching reading - or one of its contemporary euphemisms, "enhancing reading," "fostering reading" and so on - must face the fact that no-one can give them either precise descriptions of what it is they are teaching, or, a fortiori, exact recipes for how they should go about it. It seems to me to be the case that there can be no "programs" of reading instruction, no sets and lists of "skills" and no developmental "stages" in the acquisition of reading if. For to believe that there can be such things is to believe that reading is a universal quantity or state.
Another thing this investigation sets out to do is to take, from the extremely wide band of things and practices that might be readings, the particular things and practices that have counted as "reading-in-a-classroom." In this neck of the woods (pedagogy), the theories of reading have tended to be mentalistic in orientation. More specifically, they have tended to think of reading as a particular mental state or set of mental states belonging to already-formed and autonomous human subjects. I do not want to show this to be "wrong" - but only to show where its limits lie.
In addition, I want to show that if we are to have anything approximating a study of readings - even a study which is limited to the classroom - the approach must be wider and broader than these currently dominant mentalistic ones. In fact it should be an effective semiotic approach. However it may be formulated, those who prefer the narrow confines of psychologistic readings of readings will read my effective semiotic approach as dealing with something like "reading contexts." They will tend to read me as providing a theory of the mere situations in which the "real" (mental) process of reading takes place. But if we can see that psychologism's particular selection from the domain of readings is arbitrary, if we can problematize that particular theory, it should then be possible to see the alternative (semiotic) approach to readings as actually being a theory of readings-as-such and not one simply of an epiphenomenal "context."
After our discussion of the idea of culture (chapter 3), we ought to be duly skeptical of the term "context." It is, for many theories, the prime candidate for being "not-reading." Here the reading; there the context. Here the real mental process; there the mere material space and time "in" which it takes place. But by what criteria do we make this division? I have no idea how one could be so definite; just as contemporary physics no longer considers the universe to be composed of matter "in" a "context" of space and time but thinks instead of a space-time-matter continuum. So when I write of reading-in-a-classroom, I am referring to reading, there, as such: not to a separate "context" which happens to be a mere vehicle for a universal process. In this sense, I am asking what it is to read in a classroom; and so what it is to be produced as the kind of human subject which does this. And so, in a paradoxical way, I do seek to make a contribution to the idea of reading-as-subjectivity - but in the sense that the production of subjects and subjectivity is always through-and-through a material, social, political and historical practice. To this extent, I agree with James Donald when he says:
How the curriculum embodies a particular ordering of the symbolic, and how this then plays into the ordering of subjectivity, remain perhaps the most tantalisingly underexplored question[s] in the study of education.1
So there are three things to argue: (1) reading has no essence; (2) psychologistic approaches to reading have arbitrarily cut down the meaning of the term so that it can refer only to mental predicates; (3) we can approach particular "genres" of reading, such as reading in a classroom, an observatory, an office, a library, a tarot-reader's tent and so on, and provide alternative semiotic analyses of the readings, there, themselves, over and above questions of mere "context" and with a view to examining the work of subject-production they entail.2
Again, my initial arguments rely broadly on the work of the later Wittgenstein, particularly as he has been interpreted by Staten and other roughly poststructuralist readers.3 Between sections 156 and 171 of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein takes apart the idea that reading is a "particular process" - especially the quite popular idea that this process is a purely mental one. He asks how it could be that "one particular process takes place" when we read.4 We might read a sentence in print and then read it in Morse code, to give his example. In such a case, is the (supposedly psychological) process the same? I expect that most of us will think not. But Wittgenstein is not dogmatic about this. He wants to know, I think, why we come to think of the process as a singular one. And the tentative answer he gives is that we are perhaps fooled by the uniformity of "the experience of reading a page of print." He continues:
the mere look of a printed line is itself extremely characteristic - it presents, that is, a quite special appearance, the letters all roughly the same size, akin in shape too, and always recurring; most of the words constantly repeated and enormously familiar to us, like well-known faces.5
This is why we feel uneasy about tinkerings with these familiar faces - moves to legislate for spelling reform, for example.6
But the uniformity of a page of print, and the repetition effect we get in scanning it - for all that they point to a surface definiteness and specifiability - do not mean that reading is a single and undifferentiated process. Instead, a brief inspection throws up a whole range of differences and distinctions regarding what the concept of reading might cover. Staten speculates that one candidate for the "soul" of reading might be to specify it as being the derivation of repetitions from an original. And this, again, is one of the directions in which computer metaphors of reading have tended to take us. But then we also have to ask: what is to count as deriving? The problem simply shifts on to another terrain. Perhaps, Staten goes on, we should always refer to the "systematic" derivation of, for example, sounds from marks. But we all know that it is possible to derive the wrong sounds. If someone does that: are they reading? Again, we could say that the essence (or merkmal) of reading was the presence of a certain kind of inner experience, rather than a derivation. But we may, and do, have this experience while we are asleep or affected by drugs. Are we to say that, then, we are reading?
Instead of looking for a definite and singular characteristic of reading, Wittgenstein suggests that we look upon reading as an "assemblage of characteristics." Moreover, according to Staten, these characteristics will:
in each separate case of reading ... be variously reconstituted, and in these different reassemblings there will always be the infection of characteristics of what does not correspond to what we want to think of as really, essentially, reading.... It is as though these characteristics had dual membership in two mutually exclusive sets.7
Firstly, then, we cannot prespecify the characteristics which go to make up reading. Secondly, if we could, we would always find them in new and varied combinations, in any actual case of reading. Thirdly, we will always find, in amongst them, characteristics which we should not want to associate with reading as such but which are crucial to that actual case. Reading is like soup or slime. And so we would be mistaken if we tried to specify its essence according to a neat digital calculus: not that it has no soul as such - rather it has a multiplicity and "any one of them could at some stage take over and guide the sequence in its own direction."8 It is because of, not despite, their pleomorphism that we recognize cases of reading.
Staten's argument convinces me that there are no general rules for reading - though we might find some specific semiosic regularities operating in particular circumstances which we could easily confuse with deep-seated and general rules. This would mean that reading could not be identical with "knowing rules." Rather it is knowing, if there are any rules, what they are rules for. For instance, when a child in a classroom "goes wrong" in reading, this is like a wrong move in chess. A wrong move in chess is not usually a case of, say, moving one's pawn as if it were a bishop. Instead, it is something unstrategic, like putting one's queen in danger of being taken. Reading, then, is not a set of formal properties like the constitutive rules of chess, but is much more like knowing how to play with texts strategically. It arises not when we know the formal characteristics of reading; but rather when we enact certain differences - differences between readings and other sorts of events. And which other sorts of events these are will depend, precisely, on the scene of enactment. "Enacting" here means going through the process of inscribing a certain cultural practice, P, such that it is visibly not not-P. To read in the classroom therefore means to separate off the reading from other things, very specific and occasioned not-readings. Teachers and students do these things together. In enacting reading, they are inscribing what they are doing as a definite case of just-this-thing, for these purposes. And so on. Because this work is inscriptional, because it is left as a trace on a memory, a community, a classroom wall (for example, in the form of a timetable for reading), because it is inscribed in, for example, educational manuals and in administrative procedures, because it is historically inscribed, and because this inscription is always predicated on difference rather than identity, on its relation to what it is not rather than its relation to its own internal essence or presence-to-itself, it is not a contradiction to call reading a form of writing-in-general after Derrida.9
Having come this far, it is quite strange to look back and find this plurality of readings - this inchoate soup of tactics for delimiting the field of writing-in-general - arbitrarily reduced and confined by some theorists to a particular ghostly process, a particular mental state, activity or experience. As Coulter has pointed out, Chomsky's well-known ideas about reading are a case in point.10 Unlike Wittgenstein, Staten or Coulter, Chomsky believed that reading could be reduced to a set of specific rules; rules mapping on to particular mental states, as it were, inside readers' heads as they read. He believed as follows: if the rules can be shown to be in place, so too can the corresponding mental states, and so one can say that one has a genuine case of a reader reading; but if the rules turn out not to be in place, then neither are the mental states, and so "competent" reading is not taking place. For Chomsky, reading always and only has one form of definitional not-reading: the absence of a mental state of a particular kind. He writes that he, in his guise as the ideal-reader-cum-ideal-analyst, has:
a (no doubt in part unconscious) theory involving the postulated mental acts of humans performing certain acts such as reading, etc., which is related to my (also unconscious) system of linguistic rules in such a way that I assert that A is reading when I believe him to be in such a mental state, and my assertion is correct if my belief is correct.11
Chomsky's concept of "rule" here is an instance of what Coulter calls the "rule-regularity conflation." By this, Coulter means that even though a description of actions or behaviors can work with utter empirical reliability and predictability - for example, a grammar might account for all the well-formed utterances of (a limited set of) a language - this (of itself) nevertheless does not provide an argument for transferring such general properties "to the mind." The actional regularities do not, ipso facto, translate into mental rules. Even if the toaster always provides perfectly done slices, this does not mean that it "knows" when the toast is cooked.12
In place of this Coulter uses one of the central devices of Wittgensteinian analysis - family resemblance. He shows how the concept of reading always glosses a non-determinate, only relatively precise, family of cases. The members of this family are not held together by some defining characteristic which is "essentially" reading. Moreover, that single characteristic, even if it were analytically acceptable, could never be something like a feeling, an experience or a mental state of any kind. If reading were an inner process we could not argue with someone who simply closed his eyes, claimed to be having that experience and therefore insisted on being deemed one who could read. This would certainly not pass in a school reading lesson or in an immigration literacy test.13 In fact, it would not pass in any social formation - no matter how mystical.
In place of defining characteristics, Wittgenstein argues instead that criteria of application hold together concepts or families of practices such as reading. While we may want to argue from entailment and so be able to say "If x is in place, then y is occurring," no such definite characteristics can always be found. Criteria, for Wittgenstein, replace the logician's goal of strict entailment:
For Wittgenstein, the notion of a "criterion" replaces the notion of truth conditions in semantics. A criterial relationship between an assertion and its evidences is weaker than classical entailment but stronger than inductive evidence. If q is a criterion for p, then it is part of the meaning of p that q is a conventionally fixed evidence for the truth of p. However a criterion is not decisive evidence in itself, for additional circumstantial evidences can defeat the criterial support for an assertion. And yet, undefeated criterial evidence constitutes the correctness of an assertion.14
So the application of a concept (like reading) cannot depend on entailment of the form "If the mental state, then the reading," or vice versa. Instead it depends on a relation of "conventionally fixed evidence," the "soupy" details of Staten's argument. To understand reading is to understand the conventions and ingredients that may come to make it up, that can surround it, that can come into and out of play, in particular cases. For educators this would mean looking to the conventions and traditions of reading in the classroom; to what Anne Freadman calls its "ceremonies."15 This almost calls for a "philology" of classroom reading - a history of its texts and textual practices. Accordingly, what would the genre of reading we call "reading-in~-the-classroom" look like under such a description? What are its sub-genres, for example? And what practices lie in the fields adjacent to it? Even my sketch of an answer may be surprising to some; for it is an answer which has more to do with sewerage systems than semantic systems; more to do with issues of public health than of private experience.
If this were to indicate simply a social semiotics of reading, then the work of Halliday would surely be relevant. But is there really very much in the concepts of field, tenor and mode, for example, which is going to be to the point here?16 Isn't this, in effect, only another version of back- and foregrounding - one which ultimately begs to be read as "text and context" as soon as it is thought socio-politically? Freadman's distinction between "game and ceremony" is perhaps more to the point for our purposes; if only because, for Freadman, where one begins and the other ends is so unclear that there cannot be an analysis whose goal is to "clear up" the distinction. To put it another way: the framing of the game/ceremony distinction is not clear. Along with the playing of the game, as such (whatever "as such" may mean here) there are also:
the preparations, the choice of partners, occasion and venue. There is the warm-up, the toss, and, at the end, the declaration of the winner and the closing-down rituals - showers, presentations, or the drink at the bar.17
Who is to say that these ceremonial elements are not elements of the game of tennis? Tennis could barely even be tennis without them: and yet they are not what are commonly known as "the essential ingredients."
We can make the same mistakes about reading. We sometimes think only of the reader scanning the pages, deriving sounds from print-images, having mental experiences of a certain sort and so on. And this is equivalent to serving, lobbing at the net, scoring a point and so on, in tennis. But there are, also the ceremonies of reading without which, I want to add, it is equally just not reading. When we think of "reading" we think too much of a particular genre of it called "reading off," including sub-genres like "deriving" and "scanning." But what are these other possibilities, these ceremonies? How do they differ from games without being not-games exactly? Freadman goes on:
Ceremonies are games that situate other games: they are the rules for the setting of a game, for constituting participants as players in the game, for placing and timing it in relation to other places and times. They are the rules for the playing of a game, but they are not the rules of the game. Games, then, are rules for the production of certain acts in those "places." To the extent that the grammatical rules of my language permit me to make this distinction, I could say that, where ceremonies are rules for playing, games are rules of play. That there is "play" at both these levels is important: knowing the rules is knowing what would break the rules, but being a skilled player is knowing how much play the rules allow and how to play with them.18
In some "professional" circumstances - say, coaching tennis or teaching reading - it is very easy to teach the game (the rules of play) and not the ceremonies (the rules for that playing or playing out). Seeing how much the formal rules can be subject to free play, we think, comes later - after "the skill." One wants almost to limit the field or the court to those kinds of technical considerations. Still, of course, to be fully professional, one is necessarily interested at the same time in the individuality and uniqueness of the (perhaps young) player/s one is coaching. As we shall see, this humane interest does not rule out a purely technical limitation of reading to the mere game, the game which does not stand on ceremony. On the contrary, the two can be seen as equal parts in the tactics of the reading coach, of the model player.
My approach to reading seems to boil down to this: what would it be to turn one's attention to the ceremonies, not instead of the game but as well as the game? - ceremonies which Freadman reads as constituted by "moments, phases, stages, or 'places'" where each of these, moreover, can be called "a genre."19 For the category of "ceremonies," in effect, subsumes the game. My own preferred tactic here would be to look at precisely the place or genre of reading closest to the hearts, minds and bodies of the educator: the place or genre of reading-in-a-classroom. In particular I want to consider the sub-genre or micro-place of beginning-reading-in-a-classroom. The beginning of reading, as we shall see, is not utterly distinct from the beginning of the modern classroom in the political and historical sense; just as (as we saw in Chapter 1) the beginning of the modern personal photo-portrait is not utterly distinct from the beginning of the institutions of confinement.
The point of the speculations which follow is to show that these ceremonial places are readings. A reading is never not-framed and there is never any simple distinction, as with Möbius strips, between the "inside" and the "outside" of the frame. The distinction, in order to be made at all, needs to be an utterly fuzzy one. The fuzziness is not a fault but a prerequisite of framing, of parergonality. The indistinct picture, to quote Wittgenstein's phrase, is "often exactly what we need."20 The framing itself - always there but never specifiable without indefiniteness - consists of what a text "does to situate itself in relation to its social, formal, and material surrounding."21 This is much more of a candidate for the title "what reading is" than any ghostly internal process. Moreover, it is this reading-as-always-already-enframed that teachers and students actually orient to in deciding whether or not it takes place, as a purely practical matter.22 They simply do not have available, as part of the frame itself, inside it, or outside it, any pure mental process or experience separate from the reading with which to compare the reading. What they do have is material social practices.
Here then are my speculations about the practices of classroom reading: my minimalist descriptions of it. They ask how reading is administered, almost in a medicinal sense, and what it administers to readers. Each remark or paragraph could be read as being prefaced by a phrase like "In the classroom...." Together they constitute a quite particular and possibly "personal" version of reading-in-the-classroom.
We read together, sometimes aloud, sometimes silently. There are places and times for the aloud and for the silent. We learn these and sometimes they are marked on the wall in other texts which we must know how to read. To know the sub-genres of "aloud" and "silent" there is something we must already be able to read: a timetable, a movement of the teacher's finger, the volume of noise in the room, and so forth.
We are compared in our reading together, aloud and silently. The moments and times come around when we are to go up or sit quite still for this comparison. There are winners and losers in this, whether or not their names are spoken in public. We are separated, for example, the fast from the slow, by relative degrees. We are given our orders as to how we should proceed in our reading - the advance and the retard are sounded for us collectively and individually. These changes of routine are no more and no less than markers of the school day, like bells for recess and home-time on a smaller scale.
We are put into competition in our readings. Sometimes there are ladders and tables with names and stars on the walls of the room. These represent, they map on to such things as "where we are up to" - Book 6 or Book 7. It's no good being able to read if you can't read these.
Sometimes, we do not know whether this is a private or a public space. Sometimes the reading is in our heads, private like our thoughts and a refuge from other things in the classroom. Then we feel like autonomous souls with thoughts of our own. Sometimes, on the contrary, the reading is a matter of public rhetoric. Reading in and reading out: both of these can come into play. They can be in play at the same time. And they can commingle with reading aloud and reading silently. Sometimes it's your innermost thoughts that are up there in the space of public rhetoric. Other times it's a big and impersonal public historical voice that's playing through your own head.
There are serious consequences for either being low on the reading scale or not taking the scale seriously: playing badly or not playing seriously. The reading we do is controlled: we can't just read any way we like. Sometimes the control is word-by-word, as when the teacher points to words on the board. Sometimes it's paragraph-by-paragraph; or book-by-book, and so on. We learn to see parallels between textual levels by learning their similarity in terms of their control. We can feel that these things are "meted out" to us, like controlled doses. Someone somewhere knows how much each can take and also the techniques of feeding us by the rules of those precise quanta. The teacher is the closest someone who knows this, but there are probably others. The schemes of reading, the regimes of reading-books, must come from somewhere. There is some design to this - for it is so definitely controlled. It is within this space of control that the free play of our reading must take place - that we must show ourselves as we "really are."23
While we are to find connections and derivations on a word-by-word basis, occasionally on a sentence-by-sentence basis (at least for now), we are rarely asked to make them on a book-by-book basis. The area of our own particular mastery is delimited to specific amounts of text. We are not asked, for example, what a whole book means, what it says - at least not yet. And when enough is meted out to us for us to be able to be tested on our judgment of whole books, there will no doubt be some greater unity that is kept from our personal judgment and mastery. How far can this go?
While we are always massified in our reading, as a class, what we read is the smallest units - sometimes even individual sounds or letters of print. Somehow there is an association between our individual smallness and the smallness of the units we are allowed or required to scan or interpret. And there is an association between our massified nature as a class and the bigness of the book- and supra-book-levels that may or may not be "out there," beyond the frame of the classroom, at what we suppose is the "destination" of our learning to read. On the one hand, the tiny mind and the phoneme - on the other, history and the canon of literature. This is a model for living: a relatively hierarchized morality which learning reading in the classroom teaches - whatever else we may or may not learn, however good or bad we are at reading. In fact, we might learn the moral lesson better if we're poor readers.
There is also another set of analogic relations: between the space of the reading classroom and the space of the textual practices that occur there. And this analogic relation means we are always taught something more than reading when it is reading that we learn or fail to learn. Some examples follow.
The classroom has definite, familiar spatial arrangements. You can spot a classroom a mile away. It is designed to permit:
an internal, articulated and detailed control - to render visible those who are inside it. [That is] an architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them.24
This architecture, in the broadest sense, produces and contains specific kinds of subjects, specific social identities - student as against teacher is the primary one, but there are others too. The spaces one finds in the basal reader, to take one example only, also make up an "architecture" with equally well-sectioned boundaries and characteristic identities: the domestic space as against the public street; the city street as against the trip to the country and the obligatory farmyard; Dad vs. Mom; the pet vs. the little sister. If these boundaries were not clear (let alone if they were inverted) nothing would be possible at all - in the classroom or in the text. This is a quite definite (if not absolute) morality; it marks off the bounds of moral play. We are to strive for equality here - equality presumably with the teacher, the model. Yet we must never reach it, for if we were equal with the teacher this could not be a classroom - a classroom in which we are to strive for equality, and so forth. The same is evident in the represented spaces within the basal readers. Mom is utterly not to be Dad. The domestic space only exists because it is not the public street. Babies are not pets.
In the space of the text and the space of the classroom, no one is ever alone but is defined by a position in a grid of relations. The story of "being lost" is so popular here, perhaps, because there is always a resolution, a return to the familiar hierarchy. Outside the text, outside the classroom, outside the family: these are all spaces from which one must eventually return. To be in neither place is to be nowhere. Aloneness and other spaces always dissolve back to "here," to "now," to a dependable and familiar presence. This same presence was demanded, to mention only one case, by the charity schools in the 1870s: that the child be present at school or within the family. Hence Barnardo's photographs by means of which "children absconding from our Homes are often recovered and brought back ... [or] ... have been recognized by parents or friends and finally restored to their care."25 Under a similar kind of injunction, basal reader characters exist in certain proper places but do not think - at least they do not think very much. They say, mostly, and they act, a little. But they are always "in play," being watched.
In the class and in the early reading book there is routinely, in any given case, an authority to be appealed to or to intervene: there is no possible relativistic space of play or debate over relations of authority. They are always merely given. Over each text and each classroom hang the twin lights of truth and falsehood; on-and-off, binary, digital. Nothing goes unresolved. Nothing is left indefinite. Neither space allows "maybe" to hang around for long. In the class and in the text, the middles tend to be excluded. Representation merely happens: the question of representation itself is unasked, the problem unmentioned.
Class and text: each marks clear space and time zones. There is the school timetable; but also the cycle of the family day, week, year. That institution, the family, constitutes a main site, while its "cycle" constitutes a main technique, for the regulation of the child. As Donzelot writes, a number of mechanisms of policing have been designed since the 19th century to "shepherd ... the child back to spaces where he could be more closely watched: the school or the family dwelling."26 And each of these sites and techniques are part of a more general armature of regulation, representing historically
a decisive shift from the total power of the monarch to the infinitely small exercise of power necessary to the discipline and productive exploitation of bodies accumulated in large numbers.27
The early reading book is clearly a case in point.28 It tells us about where we are all supposed to be when we're, precisely, not in schoolspace. It is rarely self-reflexive - it rarely opens a possible space for reflection on (let alone critique of) the school or the family. School and family practices are "natural" - always were, always have been. The family home is everpresent and thoroughly normal. Not so the classroom. When it does figure in the reading book, it is very carefully treated. In comic books, in trash: these are the proper moments and spaces for the classroom to be subjected to humor and criticism. On another tack: one rarely finds the reader in the reading of early school readers - for that could open up a potentially plurivocal space, a difference. Again: the reading is paced, cycled, calendared - Series 1, Book 1, and so on. These are no more and no less than filing systems: forms of objective and external benchmarking. One is, unarguably, "up to" a certain point in the story, the Book, the Series. It is simply not open to question, reflection, difference, undecidability. The basal reader and the reading classroom exist in an utterly archaic Newtonian space. They exude more certainty than the monastery.
At school we read a very particular kind of book from the vast range of kinds of books that there are. It is a schoolbook. As much a school as a book, then. We know, all along, that no-one but schoolkids read them and that they read them in school - just like us. The books and the readings are almost unimaginable outside. They are like the materials of labor specific to a highly particularized - if widespread - kind of factory. The schoolbook is as specific to its site as the precision gasket punch is to the car factory; as the heavy-duty industrial buttonholer is to the sweatshop. We use different machines, for example, at home, or in other readings, in other sites whether for fun or for a different kind of necessity. The schoolbook tries to limit its possible uses to one and only one. It always tries to write of similitude and against difference: it is the most successful attempt at writing-against-difference we can imagine in a post-theological world. If it had only one use, then it would have only one meaning, and only one truth. It has, it strives for, one reading. It begs to be taken as the paragon of the limitation of reading to a particular essence - which, as we have seen, is a mark of the pyschologistic theories of reading which produced it. The school reader tries to be the very model of this technology: one is only supposed to read it one way. In fact, the triplet of teaching, textbook and authority asks to be read one way. That way is sometimes called "literally." And it is no coincidence that, at the same time that it limits reading to singularity, to the definite space of the classroom which is other than home, the basal reader also always speaks of "home" or some relation to home. Why is this the case? Is it to taunt, to mock or to frustrate? Is it as if the factory machines did not roar and scream but said, quite gently, "freedom, freedom, freedom"?
For many - perhaps all - of us, these "homes" that the basal reader shows are always imaginary. They speak to us as if they were actual homes, but they are always over-neat, overly well-lit, well-laid-out figures of the imaginary. They are just like advertisements in this respect and they retain something of the politics and ethics of advertising. What they advertise is a model of the modern home. They show that a certain architecture (the children's and the parents' bedrooms being separate, for example) is good; that a certain set of domestic relations is good; that it is normal and expectable for there to be TV, good sewerage, hot and cold running water, visits by doctors, good and beneficial relations with older generations, plenty of nourishment, no scarcity of basic essentials, gas and electric power, heating and warmth, a roof that doesn't leak. The basal reader advertises precisely what contemporary advertising cannot: what is taken for granted, unglamorous and yet, as we shall see, part of a very specific technology of, as Ian Hunter puts it, "morally managed 'experience'," "regulated freedom" and "supervision through self-expression."29
Psychologistic readings of reading focus on the reader in the classroom as a relatively pure consciousness and on the text as an effect of a relatively pure grammar. For them, reading is the meeting of grammar and consciousness. In order for it to be so firmly in place (in psycho-educational studies of reading and in professional pedagogy alike), this quite specific version of the subject/object double requires a pair of assumptions which are also problematic (for those studies and that pedagogy) when spelled out clearly. The first assumption is that reading is always reading as. It has to be so in order to be, for just one example, reading-as-consciousness. The second assumption is that interpreting a text always changes not only the text but the reader - it changes what counts as the reader. These are insights derived very loosely from Heidegger and they have a number of consequences, as follows.
To say reading is always reading as: this is to say that it has an "as-structure." The as-structure of reading shows a multiplicity of possible extensions of the "as." Grammar and consciousness are only a couple, and they are limited. What we read the schooltext as (qua readers) is not grammar. We do not read it as grammatical rule so much as grammatological ceremony. We read it, for example, as a world, as a moral sample or example, and so forth. Both in and after the moment of merely scanning the text - in and after the moment of consciousness of the text, which is to say: in and after the moment which psycho-educationalism calls "reading" - what we read the text as has its effects on what we become. For what we become is - among other things (often things in concert with this training in reading) - effects of just these sorts of texts. The as-structure of the reading and its subject-effects are not separable and discrete moments in the way that models of "reading and context" would prefer. What then would be the as-structure of reading, for someone beginning to read in the classroom?
To read in the classroom is to read inside a particular kind of mechanism which was produced in the 19th century in Europe - for most of us this machine is a variation on the English model. But the machine of the classroom is not just a producing machine, it too is produced. It is both a product and a producer. What it is a product of and what it produces (as effects) is a set of specific techniques related to a kind of contradictory ethics. That is, the 19th century's twin goods were culture and utilitarianism.30 The popular schools were designed to provide both (a) the romantic goal of self-enlightenment and the cultural and spiritual development of the full personal being of the child as well as (b) the citizen-worker, the useful tool of the state.31 In Donald's words, they were both "intimate" and "secure."
To read a text here, and to read it as a moral world - here - is to read oneself as the ethical-moral effect of these twin, oppositional requirements. One is invited to become a kind of double being: the model of full selfhood and the model of selfless citizenry. What does this dual being look like?32 On the one hand, it is in training. It is supposed to be travelling towards fullness of being, along the course that is often mapped into "stages" by psycho-educationalist pedagogy. And so it continually hears of its own incompleteness. The welfare techniques which constitute the space of the popular school classroom require that the reading subject aim to achieve "equality." But equality with what - with what model or exemplar? The only concrete exemplars in the class are: the teacher and the text. And so: we read the cozy scenes of the "normal" family within the text as identical with the fantasy homelife of the teacher. The teacher is "Mother" (less often, "Father") and the reader is her "son" or "daughter" - and I refer, of course, to the names of characters in books. The popular schools, as they were founded at the beginnings of mass education in the 19th century, were projected specifically at the literacy of the working class: at almost nothing other than their literacy. And so it is little wonder that the basal readers eventually came to contain fantasies of middle-class life. This - formed around the exemplary text-teacher-authority triplet - is precisely what one must imagine oneself as "equal" to in the act of reading. The text is read as exemplar in a very literal sense.
The liberal reformist education manuals of the 19th century continually represent the school as a machine - but a machine which is humane, which is anything but mechanical; one which reaches the heart and soul of the child. It is built in such a way as to normalize collectivities and to individualize persons at the same time: in fact to do each through the other. Each acts as a means to the other's end. "Utility" and "culture" - to return to the shorthand - are not opposites so much as a single technical strategy: now the "soul" will be bared and attended to; now the skills will be taught. These are double moments of a single and, only apparently, contradictory ethical armature.33 They make classroom knowledge possible. So to read the texts specifically designed for this space, in this space, is to construct oneself and be constructed as the bearer of this knowledge. One is an incomplete soul moving, if successful, to "full being" and "full consciousness" - the very consciousness, be it noted, which the psycho-educationist model of reading assumes to be already in place so that reading can take place. But one is not only incomplete in this "internal" respect, one is also an as-yet useless, incomplete member of a utilitarian citizenry. So the story goes: one will be a full member, one day, if one reads properly, but one is not that yet. The school is always a hypothetical space in the utilitarian state, a section where "training for" is separated out, taken out of the mainstream citizenry, a space of preparation. The classroom reader, in this preparatory space, reads himself or herself as someone who is "not ready yet," "not fit yet." When he or she reads or writes in school, this action is called "work." But it is also called "schoolwork," and it is made very clear to the schoolchild that this does not mean real work. The school is a space of the imaginary pre-social - of social inauthenticity, as well as the space of personal-developmental incompleteness. The real thing is always elsewhere and elsewhen. The loci of that elsewhere and that elsewhen are fictional spaces within fictional spaces. For example, it is what the character called "Daddy" does when he goes off, out of the narrative, "to work"; and it is specifically not what the character called "Mummy" does in the domestic space. It is alluded to by the arrivals of such emissaries as postmen and removal men, by interesting scenes in the street such as excavations; very occasionally it will be shown in the form of farmers (within the sub-genre called "The Trip") though these are more often character types than working farmers.
At the same time, the reading is supposed to be a means of repairing these disequalities and incompletenesses of the reader: a means of making him or her a "whole person," a unified, non-contradictory, neurosis-free, autonomous subject. In short, a fiction. The example is not confined to the primary or elementary school but migrates through the education system as far as the university. Think, for example, of how the university English department checks and balances its student readings: the poem is scanned and one offers one's reading. The reading may be, say, too personal, or else too didactic. It may be too romantic or too formalist. Eventually a reading is arrived at within the correct range of judgment and discernment - with the correct balance between personal response and scientistic over-accuracy. Then it is marked. Its producer-recipient is congratulated, or else not, and so on. But this technique, as Hunter shows, emerges out of specific social programs, first assembled in the 19th century and specifically within the space of state-administered urban welfare directed at the working class.34 This was and is an ethical practice: one of the armatures of which is the specific ethical practice of the classroom - the balanced, healthy reading. It goes along with the other aspects of urban welfare reformism: diet, health, medicine, policing, housing, domestic architecture, sanitation, and so on. The techniques of reading we have, then, are much more to do with threatened and actual outbreaks of cholera in 19th century British cities than they have to do with natural developmental proclivities or with romantic "civilizing" designs. Healthy readings are only a single manifestation of a widespread and general movement for popular-education-against-infestation. To read a beginning-reading book is to have, for example, bodily, spatial, psychological and sexual impurities written off one's life-agenda. Working-class children specifically do not read the details of their own working-class daily lives: no dirt, no drunkenness, no overflowing sexuality, no deviance or sedition of any kind, no masturbation, no incest, no sickness, no lonely old-age, no death. The reader reads himself a very specific - yet also quite uniform and widespread - personal ethics, a corrective to his own possible or actual moral defects. The classroom is where one both finds oneself and finds oneself wanting.35
At the same time, the degree to which the reader has learned this lesson, the degree to which s/he has moved somewhere along the staged and plotted road to correct morality, is measured. And it has tended to be measured by quite technicist and utilitarian matters such as the "speed of response" which a reader is able to show to a new text, to an "unseen" - or by cloze tests, by the reader's ability to translate print into correct phonemes, and vice versa. In short there is a whole array of psycho-behavioral - mostly quite blatantly physiological - observations, checks and corrections. A major site of decision-making as to the effectivity of the quite ethical techniques of training can be the reader's body - for it is the body which is a major target and recipient of welfare ethics overall. Yet there is also the culturalist-romantic form of response, the form in which the reader is (one hardly dares to say) "tested" by the aesthetic techniques of the composition and the comprehension test. In the way that the first popular schools had playgrounds built into their designs so that teachers could see their charges at play - a slice of the "real life" of the streets - in order to know their "true" and fundamental selves; so the composition or the guided writing of the comprehension exercise led out the "inner thoughts," the supposedly true psychic life of the pupils. They were asked to give their intimate preferences, their tastes, their most inner and private images at the behest of a rhetoric of self-fulfillment whose goal was to "really know" the child.
The adjacent measures to uniform basal readers in the emerging cities of the 20th century were such urban revolutions as the provision of multi-bedroom houses which prevented fathers from polluting daughters; the connection of these houses to adequate sewerage facilities so that massed bodies lured from country to city could be protected from their own wastes; the availability of minimum standards of health care on scales unknown in any other time and place, thereby protecting children not only from death and disease but also from the constant visibility of death and disease as natural sights. And one should remember here that the popular school itself was (and often still is) a crucial and focal instrument in the provision of health and health-training. In this period there also emerged the bobby on the beat, providing both supervision and superintendence of a new street-centered population: a secure and visible adult in the street as well as the school. The teaching and the policing professions have very parallel histories in this respect. All of these, and other, measures were measurable in their effects on the body of the child: it was sick less often, lived longer, did not get molested so frequently, did not masturbate so regularly and so on. These frequencies could be measured: the techniques had their exact quantities of success and failure. The techniques which the frequencies meted out, techniques for the prevention of the physical and moral degeneration of the working class, included the extension of basic literacy. Reading - of a quite specific kind - was healthy and could consequently be relied upon to have its measures of success, its assessments, in a way analogous to the other healths. These came to be measures of bodily duration, type, psycho-physiological behavior, and so on.
Overall, because reading emerges as a site of correction, its aesthetic demand is virtually identical with its ethical-corrective demand. One reads as, and one reads oneself into a particular kind of being. But the correction ethic means that I read the schoolbook in order to find what is lacking in me - and so to develop the techniques of finding self-lack more generally. There is a particular demand that I have a visibly personal relation with the text - visibly, that is, to the teacher - and that it be assessable for its lacks against some norm or grid of the standard reading subject. More often than not, this is a statistical norm, a bodily frequency and regularity. The regime of the classroom and the regime of reading are practically identical: they are regimes of regulated freedom, to reinvoke Hunter.36 The child is invited and expected to be no more and no less than himself - for now - right in front of the teacher; to make an utterly free, unconstrained and personal response to the text in the best child-centered tradition. And this is exactly so the teacher can see how the child actually is - how he is in what counts as his essentially expressed being. The child is not coercively controlled in the act of reading - not forced to scan and derive like a slave or a computer's disk-reading head - for that would only repress and constrain and so would not do what is, above all, necessary, which is to display. What is displayed is the degree to which the child's "inner being" measures against a well-calculated benchmark. Left to himself, free to express whatever it may be, exactly as he wishes: in this process emerge himself, his mental contents, his wishes and desires. They come out - into the play of scrutiny. The philosophies of "child centeredness" and "normative skill-based constructs" look like formidable opposites - motives for grand-scale debates. But while the debates go on around these apparent antinomies, what is hardly seen is that they are poles of a single educative strategy. They are "reciprocating tactics" within that single normalizing-individualizing strategy37.
From this investigation, we can begin to see that effective semiotic investigations of specific social-semiosic practices (in this case, reading-in-a-classroom) are parergonal; they need to be situated on the frames of the practices they investigate. That is, they need to be situated in the spaces between "inside" and "outside" the text, where broad historical and local community relevances meet and have their effects. They cannot be performed either purely conceptually (in terms of a general history) nor purely empirically (in terms of the ostensible surfaces of signs). While they have to attend to the local density of here-and-now matters of how signs are actually made to mean, they also have to acknowledge that this almost always sits in a broader social, political and historical space occupied by a community of sign users. The not-signs which, among other matters, are used to give signs their meanings are not fixed and (still less) universal for any given sign (or even type of sign). Rather they are locally and historically malleable: and their mobility stems from the fact that they do not arise from general theories of semiosis but rather from actual communities of users.
The locally specific (working from ostensible signs alone) and the historically relative and relevant (working from the conditions which make signs possible): two forms of discourse analysis (each of which uses the term "discourse" in quite different ways) have begun recently to move into these two analytic spaces. The first is ethnomethodology, the study of the routine grounds of everyday social practice. The second is Foucauldian genealogy, the study of the kinds of human subject it is possible to be today in terms of the historical conditions and knowledges (discourses) which ground those possibilities. Each is, so far, distinct and confined to its (nevertheless broad) specialism. What the idea of an effective semiotics opens up is that these two positions not only can but must be combined - even at the risk of jeopardizing the purity of each, even at the risk of developing a form of semiotic analysis which neither would recognize as its own. The point would be to arrive at a kind of analysis which was both answerable to specific "naturally occurring" materials (which ethnomethodology is but genealogy is not), and responsive to broad socio-historical changes in the fields of knowledge, power and subject-production (which genealogy is but ethnomethodology is not). If we have to work from the available analytic traditions, then effective semiotics might be thought of as a Foucauldian ethnomethodology, or else as an ethnomethodological genealogy. The terms matter less than the idea of a direction for semiotics as it is (necessarily) situated in its own moment of analytic history.
In the first two chapters of the next part of this book, I want to speculate on the generic contours of such an endeavor by wondering whether it might not be possible - after all - to set up some formal (indeed formalistic) ways of conceiving of an effective semiotics along these lines. For surely the idea of the frame and framing - with its double fixity/mobility of the sign and its double locality/historicality - must have at least some general terms, levels and proto-technical vocabulary. While we have seen - indeed, began with - the problems of abstract semiotic formalism, without any formal vocabulary at all, we may risk moving semiotics into a space of quite radical indeterminacy - a space where anything goes by the name of "analysis." Yet this proto-formalism would, in order to succeed, have to be responsive to the possibility of semiotic indeterminacy (as well as its opposite, and as well as the spaces between indeterminacy and its opposite) insofar as this may arise as one of the (presumably innumerable) devices and techniques actually used in practice by communities of sign-users - and this as opposed to a general (or in principle) axiomatics of signs. So our question becomes: is there a possible formalism for effective semiotics which avoids the problems of falling into fixity and thereby overdetermining sign-uses prior to any empirical encounter with them? This is the topic of chapter 6 which attempts to answer this question by mobilizing the ethnomethodological concept of reflexivity. Then, in chapter 7, I go on to take up my earlier question: how can ethnomethodological and genealogical modes of analysis be combined? In that chapter (as in the one I conclude here), there will be a further investigation of how children and young persons are actually trained in practices of sign-use: how they become subjects of, and in, semiosis.
=> Part Two
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally hosted at freotopia.org/people/alecmchoul/seminv/5.html, and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.