Reading is construction within a shared space—this is to say that reading is an emergent phenomenon between a reader and the read.

 “No right is absolute and with every right comes responsibilities. The First Amendment gives every New Yorker the right to speak out–but it does not give anyone the right to sleep in a park or otherwise take it over to the exclusion of others–nor does it permit anyone in our society to live outside the law. There is no ambiguity in the law here–the First Amendment protects speech–it does not protect the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over a public space.

Protestors have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags. Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments.”

–Excerpted from a press release distributed by the office of New York City Mayor, Bloomberg, <nyc.gov>

Tents speak volumes. Speech is more than text and words. Speech is present wherever it is read. Speech and reading are closely linked because both are acts of inscription¹. The folks who have occupied Zuccotti park aren’t allowed to use audio amplification systems of any sort. Their occupying of the park–of space–is their message. Their message isn’t “cogent” in a linguistic sense, per se. Their message, however, is abundantly apparent in their actions. Their message is an experience rooted in the world of experience (of piss and shit), not in a digital or Platonic space.

I am interested in learning to read, and speak with my body through experience. I have been taught to write essays that utilize a series of references to make certain points, always being careful to clarify my terms so that what I am writing and what a potential reader reads aline. Another way of saying this is that I’ve been taught to write in a way that builds off of a shared base. I’m not setting out to destabilize or distance myself form this sort of writing. I wonder, however, why anyone needs to necessarily build a “shared base” because don’t we occupy the same space? If anything has been written or said or heard or read hasn’t anything an inherently “shared base?”

It worries me that Mayor Bloomberg’s office so certainly understands speech to be only textual in nature. Words, both written and spoken, are symbolic; a tent can be used symbolically. It worries me because a side effect of ignoring the shared base we do have, which is to say the world, is that we forget about where we all live and what it is that we do inherently all share.

Reading is construction within a shared space–this is to say that reading is an emergent phenomenon between a reader and the read.

• 3 months ago

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