| Chapter 1: | What Happens? What Is to Be Done? A Paean to Bricolage |
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After all, the very source of the urge towards interpretation is the conviction that I am able to move beyond whatever meanings are permitted by those systems whose significations require my (temporary) submission to their designated contexts.
The next step is also reflexive, and brushed by the impulse to liberation. Having registered that I am contained by the language by which I comprehend, automatically I begin to conceive strategies for evading such controls, and imagining thus—so at least I dare to suppose—I put myself doubly beyond whatever limitations have been placed on my ability to interpret freely. The impulse to deny those requirements by which I begin to comprehend is spontaneously kindled. The most conservative of us is, it seems, an iconoclast of interpretation, if we permit it of ourselves.
In re-situating myself in relation to a process which had seemed a moment before to define me, I begin to re-draw the parameters of that process.2 (This is not surprising. In creating these machines and their square-edged languages, we have left reminders [perhaps unconsciously] of how we might outreach the closed systems which enable them to deliver so rapidly such a vast array of [uncoordinated] information. In this, my encounter with the double-speak language of the software somewhat resembles the relation of the author of 1984 to the world of un-freedom his novel describes.) It seems that it is not necessary to have a clearly shaped idea of what this new form of association might be. It is enough to feel that it might at some point become possible.
In this chapter and the next, I will follow the possibility of autonomy arising from such a shift in awareness, located as it emerges in a number of theatres of reading—a “theatre” being understood as a “place” in mind where the reader’s drama of self-creation is enacted in the process of interpretation.
The first theatre, to which this first chapter is devoted, is a method of reading, comprising three parts, intended as a means of identifying and limiting allegiances. Subsequent “theatres”, meditations of a sort, will be presented in chapter 2 under six headings: Delay, Evidence, Valuation, Self Interpreting, Silence, and Disinterested Enquiry: The Witness in Consciousness, the Knower in the Field.