We all read. Whether it’s a newspaper column, our friends’ promises, or a piece of art, we engage with a text or object or act and make sense of it. There isn’t so much one technology of reading as there are many ways of reading and becoming aware of the dominant forms of reading and their alternatives, as well as becoming competent in switching between them, makes you more apt at reading the world in general.

For people in a science background, a reading for argument may be the most common. In this mode of argument, a given text is assumed to contain a proposition whose truth it supports with arguments. These arguments may be more or less clear but can be understood and their validity assessed.

In an identification reading, the reader tries to find themself in the text. When watching a film, they might try to imagine themself as the protagonist and wonder how they would feel, or they might read a news story and try to empathize with the people described. A reading for argument might instead look at a film and try to deduce some moral or insight it is meant to support.

In an exemplary reading, a text is understood as an example of something. A film might be considered an example of art-house cinema, or a text as a satire. This mode might also lead one to flatten a news story by reading it as “another story about refugees dying in the Mediterranean” or it can help contextualize an argument that otherwise seems impenetrable.

Having become more politically relevant, a signalling reading tries to understand what signals an author is trying to send about the political movements they feel themselves part of. This kind of reading can be useful when the argumentative content fails to make sense in an article about the climate crisis but a signalling reading shows that it should really be interpreted as a rallying cry. It can become a bad habit when a text is reduced to its cues about signals as often happens when political journalists read a statement and only read it for its indications about new political affiliations.

There are many more modes of reading and this list is only meant to open up the space for you to think about what modes are relevant in your life. We would like two propose additional modes of readings that are not as obvious.

A reading for difference tries to mentally expand the text into a whole world view and assess the differences between that view of the world and one’s own. The reader tries to imagine and build up the coherent and reasonable view of the world in which every single sentence of a text is obviously true. This style of reading is instructive for texts that one immediately rejects as it makes it possible to trace the disagreements on a sentence level to disagreements on attitudes to the world. In this way, it is a sympathetic reading that assumes the author is a reasonable person who just went wrong on some fundamental assumption, and we must find that assumption. A reading for difference is also instructive for texts that one already finds compelling. Used in this way, it’s an excessively sympathetic reading in which one takes the stance that even the smallest thing in a text must be true. So you again find a statement that strikes you as odd, maybe because it seems unnecessary or because it creates a distinction that seems superfluous to you, and try to imagine the world in which that statement is not just true, but necessary. Using this expanded world, re-read the text and adapt the view as necessary to make every sentence fit perfectly. You may find that while the text on its surface seemed compelling to you, the likely underlying worldview is in fact quite different from the one you hold.

It is possible to apply a reading for difference not only to texts that trace an argument. You may adapt it and try to imagine and inhabit the world in which every part of a text (which could be a painting or a meeting or anything else you try to understand) makes sense.

Lastly, an immanent reading fully avoids trying to make sense of a text with outside concepts like its placement in discourse or its author’s biography and instead seeks to engage with the terms entirely on its own terms. In this way, it’s like another collection of forms of reading. It’s also radically democratic in that the notion of expertise falls by the wayside. You might make a bad reading, but you’re still entitled to it.

In an immanent reading, you move with the text and let the text move you. Some helpful concepts in this might be

• the style of the text. How does it do what it does? Is it stuffy, academic? Does it joke? Does it make you cringe?
• what the text performs. What does it change in the world? What does it change in you?
• how the text moves. Is it slow and steady? Does it have a rhythm? Does it change direction?

Encountering a text like this can reveal something about it or just confuse you. What’s important is to have multiple ways of reading at one’s disposal and find the one that makes sense for any particular situation. Capitalist realism will predispose you to certain kinds of reading – one of self-interest in an economic reading, or a mechanical one in a realist reading. Recognizing these predispositions is necessary to open up new ways of reading a situation.

References

Examples in this text for various approaches to reading are drawn from Daniel Coffeen’s “Reading the Way of Things”, Terry Eagleton’s “How to Read a Poem”, and Eve Sedgwick’s work on reparative reading in “Touching Feeling”, chapter “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading”. Signalling reading in particular is also discussed in Harry Frankfurt’s “Bullshit”.