Against The Gift Of Interpretation

I address you all as a friend who has been burdened with the responsibility to speak above others.

I will say to you, my friends, that whoever has ambition to be heard in a crowd must press and squeeze and thrust and climb with indefatigable pains, till he has exalted himself to a certain degree of altitude above them.  To this end, the philosopher’s way, in all ages, has been by erecting certain edifices in the air.

Therefore, towards the just performance of this great work, there exist but three wooden machines for the use of those orators who desire to talk much without interruption. 

These are: the pulpit, the ladder and the stage.

After conversing with Jonathan Swift, I have chosen, in order to emphasize my minor short comings so that you will not notice my larger ones, to employ the use of all three of these wooden machines; the lectern being the secular cousin of the pulpit.  The purpose of this activity is to both elaborate and enact what I am calling a practice of reading.

[take out ladder and stand on it behind lectern]

As this must be brief, my words today will serve as the beginning of a model for what someone who calls themselves a Reader can look like, followed by a less desirable example and concluded with a proposition for the cultivation of more desirable ones.

I begin with a cursory list of readers who had an encounter with text that radically changed their capacity to engage with the social conditions in their immediate environment. 

These characters include Dorian Grey’s encounter with a certain yellow book, Augustine’s rendevouz with St. Paul under the fig tree, Alissa and Jerome’s rapture, and ultimate dissolution via philosophical texts in Straight Is The Gate, the puzzled followers of a wise Sufi in the Book of the Book, Tristram Shandy’s Tristramopaedia painstakingly recorded by his father for his future benefit, Sherlock Holmes should be mentioned at least for his voracious consumption of fictional texts, and of course, Des Esseintes in Against Nature.

I mention this to suggest that as in Against Nature, my point of departure as a reader and all the activities in the course of my social life originated in the education I received, and that the practice of reading I am searching for is one grounded in an act of rigorous un-learning; one that enables me to interrogate where I have been taught to locate the social production of value.

As a child my parents regularly took me to a Pentecostal church in Ontario, Canada.  This was my first exposure to an idea of community determined by encounters with specific texts, and I began to understand the nature of my existence as a reader when I discovered I have what is called “The Gift of Interpretation.”

Gifts of the Spirit are described in 1 Corinthians 12:8 and include wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, the working of miracles, prophecy, discernment, and the most famous (or infamous) one - speaking in tongues.  I discovered my particular gift in the following way:

One Sunday in church, I would have been 12 or 13 years old, the service was following its usual programme which involved a short sermon, singing hymns, and then an opportunity for someone to speak in tongues, ‘if the spirit moved them,’  followed by a space of silence for someone to provide an interpretation, again, ‘if the spirit moved them.’ The rest of the sermon would follow.

This particular Sunday there was a man speaking in some strange dialect, and while I was listening to the random glottal sounds being produced my heart started to beat quickly and my face flushed.  I had an increased sensation of circulation in my body, and I understood this to mean that I should look in my bible, which I opened at random to find Romans 2 looking up at me from the page. As an aside, I still get this sensation when sitting in lectures that I am particularly engaged with.

My 12 year old self stood up, and the silent congregation turned in unison at the sound of my voice reading out: “… for whatever you judge in another you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things.”  There was an audible gasp in the room.  This was followed by a pregnant silence that lasted for what felt like an hour, when suddenly I found myself swept up by my parents and carried out of the room.  We went immediately to the car where they interrogated me and asked why I had read out that particular verse.  My response seemed perfectly logical at the time; “God told me to do it.”

Before I continue, DH Lawrence would like to remind you to never trust the teller, trust the tale.

To my dismay, in my re-telling I have already allowed interpretation to infect my story - Susan Sontag would like to point out that to call my succession of affects “the voice of God” is to use language to turn something into something other than what it is, in this case, a series of sensations. According to Sontag, interpretation is a residue of the Enlightenment which acts as a translation of a text that has become unacceptable.  The text, or the image cannot be discarded, so it must be covered in allegory.

This leads me to ask what was unacceptable about my reading of a Bible verse in a space allocated for direct messages from God to be heard? Why did my parents carry me out of the congregation?

I came to learn many years later that the topic of the sermon that Sunday was regarding the management of money in a church, and that the pastor was casting judgment on other churches in the city for not handling their finances well.  He paired condemnation for other’s fiscal practices with a call for an increase in tithing, which is where church members pledge to pay a percentage of their wages to the church.

The pastor delivered his sermon unaware that he had been discovered by the board of directors to be embezzling money from the church.  There was a plan for the congregation to confront him at the end of his sermon that day, unbeknownst to me as I read from the second chapter of Romans.

Sontag argues against a separation of form and content. Whether or not my utterance was a direct message from God, we can be certain there was no separation between what was being said and the meaning of what was said - the unacceptable utterance was formed in a crucible of contingencies - the meaning was clear in an individual way to each listener.

Sontag laments that we cannot go back to a time where one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew what it did.  She argues that it is in the light of the condition of our senses and our capacities that the task of the critic must be assumed.

The gifts given on The Day of Pentecost are used largely to create an allegory of the Church as a body, each member a unit of a larger whole. From this we are given the first corporation with an absent patriarch as the source of the sovereign.  Social participation and care is thus the responsibility of each individual member which then feeds back and becomes incorporated into the body of the church.  This is not so different from socialism where all forms of labour are fed back into the State. This is not so different from Capitalism, where the sovereign is supposedly dispersed to the point of being un-locatable with corporations that are given the legal agency of bodies.

Forms of reading that come from this lineage are undesirable.  Rather, the task of a Reader is different than that of the critic, although the imperative for an increase in the capacity of our senses is shared.  The practice of reading I am pursuing requires a radical flattening of the historical and cultural hierarchies of text - all texts must be acceptable and available as material for use in thought and in argument.  I am arguing for the present-ness of any given text with no meaning outside the event of its utterance. 

The kind of reading I’m proposing in the broadest sense is an engagement with the social and political implications of a text; an acknowledgement of the entanglement of affects and subtexts with the printed word, and a commitment to finding optimal ways for individual’s voices to be heard within that entanglement.