Back in November I wrote about an article that appeared in Salon.Com about a paper, “The End of Reading,” presented by University of Southern California’s Peggy Kamuf at an academic conference. The article by Amy Halloran claimed that Kamuf described learning to read as a violent act that reinforces patriarchy. The article was picked up by a lot of conservative columnists who cited it as an example of how nutty academia has become.
For her part, Kamuf wrote letter to the editor of Salon.Com saying her views had been misrepresented. I bring this up because somebody sent me an e-mail message claiming my original article was “defaming” and providing a link to Kamuf’s paper (in my original article I complained that Halloran only paraphrased Kamuf rather than quoting from her paper verbatim).
Did Kamuf get a raw deal? After reading her paper I’m not sure what Kamuf is upset about. Here’s the quote I pulled from Halloran’s Salon.Com article last November,
She presented a paper (she read it aloud!) to a crowd of about 40 people, most of them academics, in which she insisted that teaching kids to read initiates them into the patriarchal construct of the family unit and society at large. This initiation is, according to her, a brutal and painful rite of passage. It is so painful, she added, that people don’t even recollect learning to read. The memory is repressed, said Kamuf, because the act is violent.
Well, here’s what Kamuf writes about learning to read,
It is not just as an abstract moment of definition that we must deal with this scientific and dominant model of reading. That model is also getting produced and reproduced in reading practices. The common notion of reading as information-extraction sets the principles, and thus institutes the laws and the institutions through which reading practices are maintained, that is, reintroduced, reproduced, and reinforced in each new generation of readers, as we like to think of them. And we do like our dearest common notion of reading to remind us of the whole family scene. Reading is also thereby getting produced and maintained as the site for the patriarchal, paternalistic family’s reproduction of itself. The practice gets passed down, most typically, in the voice of mothers, usually mothers, reading aloud to their children. There where this ancient practice of reading aloud survives, before the child’s invention of silent reading, it is the mother’s voice that has been made to echo with the letters taking shape on the page. I say “has been made to” because the scene is certainly not a natural one. It has also to be produced, reproduced, instituted. With the scene we are evoking of the child learning to read by listening to the mother’s voice, it is the institution of written signs themselves, and thus of all possible institutions that is being passed down. The institution of the family of man takes place in a scene of learning to read. But what we forget, what we have to forget or repress is that this is always also a violent scene inasmuch as it has to repeat, reinflict the violence that wrenches the human animal out of the state of sheer animality, where, as we are taught to believe once we can read, there is no such thing as reading in this common sense, the sense we all supposedly share, sharing thus the belief that only humans read or do what we call reading. Here one would begin to recognize another trait that all of these discourses attribute or contribute to our common sense of reading: that it is only human, that animals other than human animals do not read each other and do not read us, us other animals. Our common sense of reading, and the way we think we should read, the way we teach others to read, is thus also the site on which to reproduce this limit of the family of man, there where we feign to believe that other animals are not also others reading and reading us, no doubt for the most part to their great horror.
As is typical with academics, this is much more long winded and obscure than Halloran’s nice summary, but if anything the actual paper is even nuttier than Halloran’s biting paraphrase.
For example, look at what Kamuf writes about dyslexia. Dyslexia is a neurological disorder which makes it difficult for people to master written words and often other symbolic systems as well (such as musical or mathematical notation). Kamuf, however, complains that “so many powerful discourses” are obscuring psychoanalytic views of dyslexia forwarded by the likes of Paul de Man who, based on Kamuf’s footnote, viewed dyslexia as some sort of revolt by the unconscious against the violence of reading.
Kamuf’s paper ends with a plea for cognitive scientists to read literary theory, but her paper is an example of precisely why they ignore such pseudoscientific rantings.
Source:
The End of Reading. Peggy Kamuf, Paper delivered at the University at Albany, October 12, 2000.