Embracing Noise and Other Airborne Risks to the Reading Body

Spill

Spill is Lutz Bacher’s re-framing of a found photo of a person sweeping a document storage space, a photo which itself has been torn and dribbled on by some staining substance Fig. 1. She draws our focus to the work of keeping a collection safe from physical destruction and dissolution: cleaning, sweeping, organising. Here I take on that focus and celebrate the physical and emotional labour of managing risk to reading bodies in the library. The need to create comfortable space for silent reading bodies, safe from noise and spills might seem obvious and straightforward. However, feminist, queer and critical race theories trouble the idea that there might be simple or singular kinds of reading bodies. They have shown us that gestures, behaviours, and architectures invite some bodies to make themselves comfortable, but disorientate and deter others.

This essay explores what the iconography of reading bodies can tell us about risk and reward in the library. It asks how the activity of reading is choreographed, and whom this benefits. In art school libraries, artists seek inspiration, company, sparring partners as they develop creative practices which often result in social and economic precarity. It seems an obvious place to develop techniques for living with risk with your immediate contemporaries as well as negotiating a relationship with a wider imagined community of artists and with the past.

An iconography of reading bodies

If I asked you to imagine someone reading a book, there’s a strong chance that the image your imagination produces has been influenced by a long iconography of the reader in the visual arts of the Global North, as well as by your own personal experience. In this tradition there are probably two main categories of embodied readers. One is the active public reader, perhaps most easily imagined as a statue holding a book on its lap or at arm’s length. Take the statue of the philosopher David Hume on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile for example Fig. 2. I suppose technically speaking he’s not actually reading, he’s holding the book up at you, while leaning back lazily in a kind of toga, but that’s the tradition of the public reader. They are reading to you, looking at you, wielding the book as an instrument.¹ Maybe it’s a book they have written themselves, or a subject they are proselytising (think gospels, politics).² The relationship that this kind of reading body has to you is that of a teacher. Your body is framed by theirs as less learned, less enlightened, and possibly even illiterate. I’ve been guiding you towards this in a slightly overhanded way but you’ll notice that the public reader is usually coded as masculine.

Women have fairly consistently been denied the opportunity to be active public readers, and to wield books at an audience. Women’s voices have been derided as too shrill, too sharp, too animal for addressing crowds since ancient Greece.³ Women have struggled to be accepted as news anchors, as lecturers, and in many religious traditions still don’t have the opportunity to incant sacred texts to gatherings of other devotees. Contemporary audio engineering technologies continue to disfavour the typical frequencies of the female voice.⁴

But, in fact, your first conjuring of an imagined reader would more likely have been someone who was in quiet contemplation, a passive, private reader, a consumer of text. This is not so easily gender coded, but there are reasons to align it with the feminine. Images of the female reader whose attention is absorbed in her book, fall neatly in line with other iconographies in which a woman’s attention is captured by a task that leaves her ‘open’ to the male gaze.⁵ It is hard to ignore the connection between images of women reading and other images of women in their intimate lives, caught unawares as they wash or brush their hair. The secular tradition of the reading woman seems to have begun in Dutch painting in the sixteenth century, but it has never let up as a minor genre. There is no end to the kitsch images of women reading.⁶ The relationship that this kind of reading body has to yours, is that of victim to your voyeuristic gaze. The book she is holding is a pretext for a representation of her body as one that can be spied upon. She does not meet your eye, she is objectified. So, while there has been objectification of men in the iconography of the private reader (some of which I’ll address later on), I’m going to keep aligning the private reader to the feminine body.⁷

Accepting that the iconic bodies of the public reader and the private reader exist in dialogical counterpoint to you as an invisible other, prompts us to ask about the spaces in which their bodies and our bodies find themselves. It seems that masculine public readers are reading to an assembly, feminine readers are reading (almost) alone. The relationship of those reading bodies to yours, and the spaces in which these relationships unfold, is a question that is tied up in the cultural history of the binary public/private spaces. However, that binary doesn’t do all the work that embodied readers deserve, so alongside thinking about the private/public, I’m also going to invite you to consider ‘communal’ and ‘autonomous’ readers…

Communal readers

Throughout most of history, for most people, communal reading, that is to say reading aloud with others, has been the norm. Books have had audiences rather than readers. The historian Robert Darnton describes how in eighteenth-century France and Germany there were even names for the hour of the early evening when one person would read to other members of their community while they mended their tools and clothes.⁸ This collectivity meant that the labour of reading could be shared, one person directly occupied with words while others listened and continued with the material necessities of their lives. In other situations, communal reading has been a means to build solidarity, or to increase access to texts where these were scarce. Eric García-Mayer describes oratorical reading among Cuban literary exiles in the United States in the nineteenth century and Elizabeth McHenry has investigated African American reading societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁹ The South African historian Archie L. Dick describes how in 1962 Jean-Paul Sartre’s short story The Wall was read aloud to new arrivals at the training camp of the uMkhonto we Sizwe (the armed wing of the African National Congress).¹⁰ The architectural paradigm of the histories of these reading bodies is that of communal living, of shared spaces, shared goals, shared risks and shared responsibilities.

Autonomous readers

Jürgen Habermas’ influential idea suggests that the emergence of a public sphere in eighteenth-century Europe was accompanied by the parallel emergence of a private sphere: a new separation between the sphere of public activity and economic production and the sphere of private lives and domesticity.¹¹ The circulation of ideas through books, in a republic of letters, generated imagined communities of like-minded readers.¹² However, the public/private division meant that although reading was uniting the minds of a group into an imagined community, in physical terms reading became a solitary activity. The imagined community was constructed through the content of the books rather than around the communal activity of reading. The readership of a book was no longer a group gathered together, it became an archipelago of individuals. This was enabled by the increasing number of bourgeois private households in which autonomous reading might take place.

Bourgeois women struggling to be autonomous reading bodies

It is in this context of the architecture of private domestic reading that the more strongly gendered iconography of the reading body seems to emerge. Certainly, in the iconography of the passive feminine reading body mentioned above, she is mostly depicted in the bourgeois home. However, for many women in bourgeois households, occupying the private sphere didn’t lead to the possibilities that were in principle open to an autonomous reading body.¹³ This is made starkly clear in an advice manual for young women from nineteenth-century Bengal.

…when you grow up, you won’t be able to play, because you won’t have time to spare and, as a result, you won’t be able to enjoy yourself anymore. But the pleasure of your studies will remain with you your whole life… There is no one with whom it must be shared. Even mourning for a son has no effect on it.¹⁴

For most bourgeois women, reading in private was not the same as autonomous reading. It seems that although reading might have offered them a route to joining an imagined community of the mind, in many cases it was just as much an attempt to escape from the emotional and physical demands of the real community with whom they cohabited, from organising food, from organising cleaning, from breastfeeding, childbirth, multigenerational nursing and deathbeds. The kitsch portraits of bourgeois women as pseudo-autonomous readers represent a fantasy about domestic idyll, that did not map onto most women’s experiences. Aside from lacking the space and time to read, the whole principle of autonomy was out of the window for women. Historically, and around the world today, the status of women within the household has most commonly been that of property. In looking at portraits of women reading, it is important to remember that the subject’s status was (and in some places is) closer to that of her book than to that of her male cohabitants.

More pseudo-autonomous reading bodies

There are others beyond bourgeois women whose lives and experiences don’t map neatly along the division of lives into a public/private dichotomy. Those lines have been drawn along the lines of race and class as well as gender. The larger part of literate human beings haven’t been able to keep the activities of reading and study separate from their commitments to economic necessities and domestic responsibilities. Those who have no time or space set apart from money-making, dust, dirt, sleep, sickness or even from close physical contact with others. These other pseudo-autonomous readers have had to squeeze reading in and around their acts of sustenance, struggle and survival.

Returning to the iconography of the reading body, the genre of street photography has generated a slightly different kind of objectified reader: a context in which both men’s and women’s reading bodies fall under external gazes and voyeuristic compulsions. This image of readers on a train is from the series On Reading by the Hungarian photographer André Kertész. Kertész’s series spans a fifty-year period between 1915 and 1965 and covers a very wide range of reading bodies and architectures. Importantly for us, though, he offers us portraits of ‘pseudo-autonomous’ reading bodies. These train passengers number among many reading bodies who didn’t (don’t) have the benefit of a private architecture for reading that allowed for (allows for) solitude. His working-class readers are attempting to participate in an archipelagic imagined community, while sitting on trains, in parks, standing on doorsteps, between duties at work. They are working hard at imitating autonomous reading bodies by actively ignoring the sensory stimuli around them.

Pseudo-autonomous readers and the library

The library then, is an odd kind of space, an architecture designed for the coincidence of pseudo-autonomous reading bodies, the architectural paradigm of the imagined community, a place where people read not with or to but alongside each other. This doesn’t happen automatically. For one, it relies on the principle of silent reading. Silent reading doesn’t seem to have been common before the medieval period, and was still the exception rather than the norm in the nineteenth century. Even lone readers would vocalise the words that they were reading. In fact, the historical architecture of libraries offers clues about when silent reading emerged. The first side-by-side cubicles for reading in monastic libraries date from the thirteenth century testifying that the practice had taken hold—readers couldn’t sit side by side if they were mumbling and murmuring.¹⁵ We see the gradual emergence of an experience of reading where we act as if we were alone, as if we were separated from each other.

Yet, although we are, in some senses, pretending to be alone in a library, we are being encouraged to be autonomous rather than private readers. We know this because other kinds of behaviour that we would perform in the private realm (sleeping, snoring, eating, or even more bodily intimate activities) are often discouraged in libraries. This paradigm of architecture and behaviour is then enforced by the librarian. To follow Michel Foucault, the widespread emergence of public libraries in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century was part of the process of creating new and modern forms of political subject. Library design very often follows the principle of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon Fig. 8. You can see the librarian, and the librarian could be looking at you at any given moment, so you behave as if they were.¹⁶ The lines of sight in the space generate a certain auto-disciplining of behaviour. The librarian is on hand to prevent behaviours from the private realm that might disturb other readers, ensuring uniform pseudo-autonomy.¹⁷

To bring libraries into the context of Foucault’s larger arguments about the technologies of power in the nineteenth century, it is helpful also to consider technologies and techniques of hygiene, such as sewers and domestic water supplies. It was during the nineteenth century that the circulating library (a library from which books were borrowed rather than one in which valuable books were stored and carefully consulted), really took off. As a result, it was not only readers but also books as objects that passed in and out of libraries’ architectural spaces. As books entered the domestic spaces of readers they were at risk of exposure to the bodily fluids produced by the acts of feeding, sleeping, excreting, breathing and sex, all the mechanisms of sustaining life that happened behind closed doors. Circulating books came in direct contact with the domain of activities that were gendered feminine, activities of the body, animal activities, rather than those of the mind. As drains removed waste from residential areas, so library books that circulated into domestic spaces were subjected to special cleansing practices. The risks that one reader’s private practices might represent to a subsequent reader were eliminated by steam, heat, acid and beating books in ingenious combinations.¹⁸

The inherited role of the librarian can be seen, then, as a gatekeeper between the worlds of the body and those of the mind, keeping books clean and bodies quiet. The libraries were to be silent and pristine, designed to allow pseudo-autonomous reading bodies to pursue the project of enlightened self-interest without suffering from any impediments imposed upon them by their colleagues. The librarian’s invisible labour is to choreograph books and people into an orderly circulation as books and people travel between the spaces of intellectual production and those of social reproduction. The librarian carries the burden of managing the ways in which the architecture for an imagined community of pseudo-autonomous readers does (and does not) map onto behaviours in the private sphere.¹⁹

The pseudo-autonomous reader in the twenty-first century library

Access for women, for the working class, and for people of colour into library spaces does not change the socioeconomic patterns that mean that those individuals’ lives might fit only very awkwardly (if at all) into the categories of the private and public space that frame and constrain readers into pseudo-autonomy. Those who lack the resources to live autonomously (a room of one’s own) can use the library if they mimic the behaviours of those who do have those resources. Communal reading bodies, groups for whom the activity of reading is not separate from their full embodied existences, for whom reading is an activity in which risks and responsibilities are negotiated, would usually have to look elsewhere for architectures that sustained their practice.

Not all libraries have the ambition to eliminate the embodied, communal aspects of their readers’ lives from the architectural space. There are plenty of outstanding examples of city libraries, local libraries, even educational libraries, that meet the different needs of their readers by allowing discussion, eating, speaking, reading aloud and sleeping alongside their books. Generally speaking, however, the more serious a library sees itself to be, the less likely it is that these activities will be allowed, and more likely a view of the reading body as solitary and pseudo-autonomous will prevail.²⁰

Autonomous reading bodies in contemporary art

Books and archives have assumed an unprecedented importance in contemporary art practice. For a very large part, however, this interest has focused on ownership of books as an insight into an individual’s biography and cultural influences. This has produced a new kind of iconography in contemporary art—the presentation of artists’ private bookshelves. There is an eminent tradition of this kind of fetishism. Probably the most famous of these is Walter Benjamin’s essay from 1930 on unpacking his library in a new apartment, in which he is unabashed about the affective experience of private ownership of books.

The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them.²¹

In the presentation of artists’ private bookshelves, the artists’ reading bodies have often been eliminated entirely. The books stand in as a proxy for the artists’ disembodied minds. This is often, in fact, a celebration of the creative individual as an autonomous reader, a member of an imagined community, despite limitations imposed by aspects of their biography. In this vein one can think of the various displays of Martha Rosler’s books in contemporary art venues (and online) as representing an imagined feminist community.²² We could read the work of Fehras Publishing Practices reconstructing the private libraries of intellectuals such as the late Saudi novelist Abd Al-Rahman Munif in a similar way: representing an imagined community that has been destabilised by war and devalued by anglophone scholarship.²³ The display of books in the alternative panopticon of (not the library but) the art gallery, again invites us to participate as silent, autonomous readers—new members of the imagined communities of which the artists were/are part. They implicitly require us to buy into the idea (ideal?) of the autonomous reader.

Communal reading in contemporary art

Communal readers are less common in contemporary art, but they have been granted visibility, their own iconography. In the film La Lectora by Yulia Piskuliyska, we see a woman reading to a factory full of cigar-rollers in Cuba, her reading generates care, comedy, affection and aesthetic pleasure in their working lives Fig. 10.²⁴ Dora García’s film The Joycean Society documents a group who have met, every week, since 1985 to read James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake Fig. 11.²⁵ There have also been forms of relational practice in which artists have used reading to build bridges with colleagues, to build shared goals and responsibilities as a group, within, around and despite institutional infrastructures. Many of these have taken place in educational sites. Rainer Ganahl has organised collective readings of Marx across Europe and Asia, including within art schools Fig. 12.²⁶ Kristina Lee Podesva has organized a variety of collective reading practices, including colourschool, a free school within art schools, hosted by the University of British Columbia and Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2006-2008) Fig. 13.²⁷ The Women of Colour Index Reading Group have read aloud from papers held at the Women’s Art Library in London in schools and educational libraries as a way to bring attention to the absence of opportunity and memory for women of colour in British institutional spaces.²⁸

Reading bodies in art school libraries

What might happen if we reclaimed the art school library as a space for different kinds of reading bodies? Recalibrating the relationship of the library to reading bodies beyond the pseudo-autonomous requires more than reclaiming shelf space for books that represent different modes of life. It requires more than re-categorising books. It requires rethinking the architectural paradigm of the library in ways that make space for bodily beings who use the act of reading to share their vulnerability, their hopes, their germs, their fluids and their different tones of voice. It also requires reconfiguring the patterns of the physical and emotional labour that have organised the library around the autonomous reader. What might this mean? Could we imagine architectural paradigms for reading in which the library space was a forum for a living community who cared for books and read together?

The sense in which physical labour of care for books can be generative in and of itself is given by the playwright Dario Fo in The Worker Knows 300 Words, the Boss Knows 1000, That’s Why He’s the Boss. The premise of The Worker Knows is that the library at the Casa del Popolo is being put into boxes, after years of disuse as television had taken a central role in the Casa’s cultural activities. As the workers pack up the boxes, they begin to read extracts to each other, until eventually characters from the history of socialism emerge from the books and join in with the conversation. Fo’s work gives a sense of the certain charisma or potentiality that books have, a relationship that is physically cemented by contact with them, during the invisible labour that is usually carried out only by the librarian.

What of the emotional labour necessary if the positive potential for risk and social encounter in reading are to be realised? The project Read-in was founded in February 2010 in Utrecht, the Netherlands by artist Annette Krauss and theatre maker Hilde Tuinstra. They run an evolving experiment in group reading that began by testing out the process of ringing neighbours’ doorbells with a request that the neighbour host a collective reading. Read-in transformed their neighbours’ living rooms into locations for a discursive encounter with strangers and has produced new spontaneous communities drawn together by the act of reading.

The remarkable series of reading projects by this group dislocates the architecture of libraries, remaps private space into a communal one and generates an entirely new perspective on the civic role of education. It suggests that the potentiality of reading bodies and library architectures lies at an even bigger social scale. Making room for more diverse reading bodies in an art school might mean disrupting the division between the spaces of production, social reproduction and consumption that are writ large in the relationship between the library and the rest of the school’s architecture: the studio, the lunch hall, the gallery space. Even if, as Samia Malik of the WOCI Reading Group attests in this volume, the emotional work required to renegotiate identity whilst simultaneously challenging forms of institutional authority and opportunity is significant.

Germs, risk and new architectures for reading bodies

As I write, in September 2020, the prospect of walking in and out of my neighbours’ houses, and even of passing books between a group sits in a rather different dimension than it did when I first sketched these ideas out in September 2019. My life and my interactions with other human bodies are regulated by new hygiene regimes that Foucault would have a lot to say about. Layers of plastic and anti-viral chemicals mediate my physical contact with most of the other members of my multiple communities.

This situation also radically changes the way that I will teach this year. I will be using new digital architectures of pedagogy that dictate very different relationships between the body and the mind than that of the classroom or studio. Libraries, around the world, have largely been emptied of people. The digitally-carried human voice has become the basic thread binding communities who cannot share space in embodied ways. There has been a new and astounding blurring of the sites in which we work, study and live our intimate bodily lives: the long-standing division between sites of production and social reproduction.

There is much to dislike and much to fear. We are policed and monitored in new ways. But there is also some hope that this situation might bring more attention to the role of bodies in education. This situation might be an opportunity to acknowledge the practices of more diverse kinds of reading bodies, and to introduce new practices that don’t require us to mimic social and economic privileges we don’t have. Whatever kind of library architecture and behaviours emerge from a global pandemic, we should demand that while it gives space to silent pseudo-autonomous reading, it also privileges time and space for reading together, and gives space to the communal reading body.

Bibliographie