I am struggling through Victor Vitanza’s Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric, and while I am very confused and taking it very slowly, I am loving it.
Here is what he writes about reading:
As readers — for to be a reader is to be disciplined, Oedipalized — we bring our identities and, thus, our trained incapacities to what we read. We often find it the case that we do not like what we have read because what — or is it how? — we have read challenges are ever-so-fixed disciplinary identities. I ask, Why else read? For un/reasons other than being challenged or being dispersed? Writers who disperse me are writers (sky-writing flyers) who I would reread in dis/order to be prepetually dispersed. Yes I would be “desiring and capable of other.” (7)
I like this way of viewing reading. That it is in dis/order to be dispersed (perhaps we might say ambiguousized? vastness-ized? willing to be decentered and dis/ordered?). I can relate this to the violence done to oneself by reading (which Elbow discusses). Also to the willingness to leave behind system/order/structure and embrace instead ambiguity.
Let’s see if I can figure out more from Vitanza. It’d help if my understanding of Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Guattari was a bit more stable.
