It goes without saying that the title question is a bit of a provocation. Nevertheless, the point I want to make is that reading is first and foremost an interaction between readers and the ‘text itself’ comes second. It’s not just one of those weird hear-me-out appeals. Rather, I think that this insight should have repercussions on our practice of teaching and, perhaps, of reading.

Early Beginnings

Come to think of it, before you even learned to read, you probably have been read to! Be it by your parents or by mischievous siblings. At least I remember that, before I ever set eyes on a text myself, my mother used to read fairy tales to me, hoping I’d fall asleep. So my first encounters of reading were actually interactions, not so much with the text, but with the special reading voice of my mother. A reciprocal interaction: My mother would read; I would listen. My mother would stop; I would plead. Tell me, gentle reader, is my listening already a form of reading? I’m not sure. – Anyway. Likewise, learning to read at school involved first and foremost interactions with the teacher and the class. Here, however, the reciprocity would become slightly asymmetrical: I would not just try to make sense of the letters on the blackboard; I would be judged on my performance. I don’t remember much of it, but I still feel the excitement of internally gliding along with my inner voice trying to remember the alphabet correctly: A, B, C, D, E, F, G … H? I don’t actually remember whether we also had to learn to write the letters when learning to read them, but it feels like it must have been a related process. In any case, reading is taught through an interaction between teachers and pupils (and asymmetrically so), when actual texts are still a long way away.

Tacit Agreements in Reading

Let’s slowly move on to my claim then. My thesis is that at least a crucial part of reading consists in partly tacit and partly explicit interactions between readers. Why would this be so, though? Doesn’t reading mainly consist in grabbing a text and reading it? Well, before you actually pick up a text, you’ll be fed with assumptions about the genre. So you’ll know what to expect before you set eyes on the actual page or screen. If you enter a restaurant, for instance, the items on the menu won’t come across as strange poetry. Conversely, if you picked up a book from a poetry section, you wouldn’t take the text to offer a menu, even if there was talk of pizza and pasta on the page. And if you enter a philosophy class, you’ll of course expect to be offered philosophical texts. In any case, the habitually familiar settings already stir tacit expectations about the texts in question. I consider such settings tacit agreements between the reader and the provider of texts.  If you enter a restaurant, you’ll expect a menu. If you enter a literature course, you’ll expect a literary text (or at least one dealing with literature). Questions (mostly on genre) will be raised if these expectations are frustrated. At this point, the crucial stages of interaction are about seeing whether expectations of genre are met or frustrated.

The Topic of Texts

Philosophical and certain literarary texts often thrive on a certain openness or even ambiguities. Unlike manuals or menus their understanding is not exhausted by being able to act on their content; that is, to build the shelves or order the soup successfully. This means that it’s often an open question what’s going on or what the text is actually about. Deciding on the precise topic of a passage or paper or book is thus often a matter of debate. This can even be true of your very own texts. (Agnes Callard once gave a nice example of her book as an Ugly Duckling by reporting on how she started out thinking it was on the weakness of will when it later turned out that she was really talking about aspiration.) So even if we’re clear about the genre of a text, we might remain unsure about its topic. In such situations, we might recommend all sorts of scholarly remedies: such as looking into the text in question, comparing it with other texts or some such straightforward means. However, what I think is really doing a great part of the work is the interaction with other readers. This doesn’t mean that the text plays no part in it. But the attempts at settling the topic will crucially involve an attempt to reach agreement with other readers, be they alive or part of a tradition of reading texts in a certain way.

The Triangulation Thesis

This idea has its roots in Donald Davidson’s so-called triangulation argument: Understanding linguistic utterances or the beliefs of my interlocutor involves not just understanding what object these utterances are about. Rather I need to interact with my interlocutor to fix the object in question in the first place. Jeff Malpas puts this point as follows:

“Identifying the content of attitudes is a matter of identifying the objects of those attitudes, and, in the most basic cases, the objects of attitudes are identical with the causes of those same attitudes (as the cause of my belief that there is a bird outside my window is the bird outside my window). Identifying beliefs involves a process analogous to that of ‘triangulation’ (as employed in topographical surveying and in the fixing of location) whereby the position of an object (or some location or topographical feature) is determined by taking a line from each of two already known locations to the object in question – the intersection of the lines fixes the position of the object … Similarly, the objects of propositional attitudes are fixed by looking to find objects that are the common causes, and so the common objects, of the attitudes of two or more speakers who can observe and respond to one another’s behaviour.” (Italics mine)  

So while the object or Ding an sich is elusive, it’s being fixed in the interaction with the other. Similarly, I think that the topic of a text is elusive. Determining it requires triangulation with other readers. Once we admit that, we’ll see that becoming clear about our interlocutor’s assumptions and authorities as well as their relation to our own take on the text is a crucial element in reading.

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Part of this idea has been presented at an interdisciplinary workshop on “Reziprozität” at the FernUniversität in Hagen. I’d like to thank Dorett Funcke for inviting me to present my musings at this occasion. Special thanks to Christian Grabau, Irina Gradinari, Irmtraud Hnilica, Tanja Moll, and Marija Weste for further discussions of this idea.