Thomas MC Laughlin - Reading and The Body - The Physical Practice of Reading (2015)

Reading and the Body
Reading and the Body

The Physical Practice of Reading
Thomas Mc Laughlin
READING AND THE BODY
Copyright © Thomas Mc Laughlin, 2015.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-54131-4
All rights reserved.
First published in 2015 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-57057-7 ISBN 978-1-137-52289-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-52289-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mc Laughlin, Thomas.
Reading and the body : the physical practice of reading /
Thomas Mc Laughlin.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Books and reading. 2. Human body. I. Title.
Z1003.M48 2015
0289.9—dc23 2015010524
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: September 2015
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
List of Figures vii

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Reading Bodies 1

1 The Reading Eye: Hexis and Hermeneutics 43
2 Reading Posture: Discipline and Adaptive Intelligence 71
3 I’m Not Here: The Reading Body in Physical and
Social Space 109
4 “Sundry Ulterior Transformations”: The Habit of
Reading and Eating 141
5 The Future of the Reading Body: Reading in Digital
Environments 163
Works Cited 195

Index 205
Figures
0.1 Photograph by Frederick Hallyer 5

1.1 Jenny Holzer, For Chicago 61
2.1 Lucio Rossi, A Young Woman Reading 76
2.2 Correct Posture 80
2.3 Girl Reading Comics 82
2.4 Woman Reading Closely 91
2.5 Maria Spartali Stillman, Love Sonnets 93
2.6 Woman Reading on the Subway 96
2.7 Monk Reading 102
2.8 Bob Dylan in the green room at Rolling Thunder
Revue, browsing through Elsa’s Housebook
(David R. Godine, Publ.) c. 1974, Elsa Dorfman 104
2.9 W. B. Yeats Reading 106
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following administrators at Appalachian

State University for their support of this project and for providing
the time necessary for research and writing: English Department
chairs James Ivory, Jim Fogelquist, and Carl Eby, and Arts and
Sciences dean Tony Calamai.
Two graduate seminars in literary theory at Appalachian were
full of excellent students who engaged in rich conversations about
reading and asked challenging questions about this project. I also
received helpful responses from graduate students and faculty at the
University of Trier.
I presented an early version of the key ideas in this book at
the Expressive Arts program at the European Graduate School.
Thanks to Paulo Knill and Sally Atkins for making that presentation
possible and to the amazing participants in that program for their
spirited responses.
Many colleagues in the English Department at Appalachian
talked with me about this project, made fruitful suggestions about
scholarly books and articles, and provided emotional support
during a rough time in the department. I’d especially like to thank
David Orvis, Susan Staub, Jill Ehnenn, Tammy Wahpeconiah,
Grace McEntee, Colin Ramsey, David Haney, Bill Brewer, Bruce
Dick, Mark Vogel, Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Joseph Bathanti, Cece
Conway, Craig Fischer, Kristina Groover, Holly Martin, Leon Lewis,
Wendy Winn, Alison Gulley, Emily Miller, and Dusty Ross. Thanks
to Leslie Sargent Jones for great conversations and intellectual
stimulation.
Thanks beyond words to Emory Maiden, Chip Arnold, Gene
Miller, Jim Winders, Marianne Adams, Melissa Barth, Ellen Arnold,
and Joan Woodworth for decades of friendship.
Thanks also to Ryan Jenkins, Brigitte Shull, Leighton Lustig and
Rachel Crawford at Palgrave, and to Marilyn Gaull, a great teacher and
mentor.
x Acknowledgments
To my family, with deep love and affection. My parents, Tom

and Eleanor. My sisters, Rita, Clare, and Joan. My daughters and
sons-in-law, Nora and Ben, Kate and Ryan, and Julia and Joe.
My grandchildren, Rebekah, Sean, Meg, TJ, Ty, and Annie. And
to my wife, Joan, the love of my life, thanks for your patience and
strength.
I n t roduc t ion
R e a di ng Bodi es
Reading appears to be a disembodied, purely mental act. The

avid reader seems lost in a textual world, cut off from the life of the
body and the real world that surrounds it. This image of the reader
is derided in adolescent popular culture in the figure of the nerd
with his nose in the book, wearing thick glasses and unfashionable
clothes, oblivious to the social and physical surround, physically
inept, and asexual. However, the assumption that reading is dis-
embodied also pervades literary and cultural theory. We routinely
define reading as an act of consciousness—a matter of cognition,
emotion, or spirituality—all traditionally and implicitly cast as the
sheer opposite of the gross physical body. But reading is undeniably
a bodily act. Eyes scan the page, hands hold the book, body pos-
tures align the entire musculoskeletal frame around the visual and
manual requirements of reading, adapting to the materiality of the
book and to the physical space the reading body inhabits. Somatic
habits develop, integrating reading into the daily life of the body.
We read as we eat, as we fall asleep, as we ride the subway, and as
we lie on the beach. These bodily procedures and habits have not
been factored into our understanding of the work of the reader.
Until recently, literary theory has tacitly framed the act of reading
within a simple body/mind dualism, ignoring the eyes and hands,
the postures and habits of reading, and denying any connection
between the transcendent life of the reading mind and the imma-
nent life of the body. The entry of cognitive and neural sciences
into the conversation of literary theory has complicated this dual-
ism, forcing theorists to recognize the physicality of the brain and
nervous system, where mind and consciousness seem embodied,
but the gross physical body still resides on the other side of the
dualism, outside our analysis of the practice of reading.
2 Reading and the B ody
This book, on the contrary, is based on the premise that read-

ing is a physical act, an astonishing achievement of the human
body. Virtually all human bodies are capable of reading, endowed
by species evolution with a brain and nervous system, with eyes
and hands that can learn the complex skills that reading requires.
Reading does demand the work of consciousness and cognition,
emotion and spirit, as literary theory has assumed, but all these
attributes of mind are achievements of the body, produced by
interaction between the body and the world, including the tex-
tual world. Bodies read. Nerves, muscles, hands, brains—flesh and
blood adapted precisely to the task of reading; in and through
that task connecting to language, society, culture, history; in and
through that connection producing mind, consciousness, textual
experience. Reading is a physical practice that requires a vast social
pedagogy. Hands and eyes and brains need to learn the proce-
dures and respect the logic of the practice. Reading socializes the
body, subjects it to a powerful discipline. Yet, all reading bodies
are unique, differently capable, and differently socialized. Reading
practices are enacted by specific, idiosyncratic bodies in concrete,
complex physical and social environments. So I begin with two
narratives that provide rich accounts of specific reading bodies at
work and that suggest the theoretical issues raised by asserting the
physicality of reading.
James Joyce’s masterful short story “A Little Cloud” culminates
in a densely narrated and emotionally powerful scene of reading.
Little Chandler, so called because of his “fragile,” “refined” body,
has just spent the evening with his old friend Ignatius Gallagher,
who has left Dublin to become a successful journalist in London.
Little Chandler is a clerk, in essence a copyist, a person who
reads and “writes” all day long within the extremely narrow and
mechanical constraints of his job. But he also cultivates a vague
ambition for poetic glory and personal liberation, dreaming that
one day he might be able to express his melancholy Celtic soul in
verse. Chandler, in other words, is a failed writer, a would-be poet,
and this evening he is confronted with a figure that embodies
everything he will never be—a successful writer, a cosmopolitan,
a man who has lived a “vagrant and triumphant life” that sharply
contrasts with Chandler’s life of quiet, ordinary desperation. Over
the course of the evening, Chandler subjects his body to sub-
stances from which he usually refrains—whiskey, cigars, the loud
Introduction 3
and vulgar life of the pub—and by the end of the outing, he is full
of visceral resentment at his own conventional life. He is married
to a “prim” and ordinary wife, who has none of the “passion” and
“voluptuous longing” that Chandler imagines in the European
women that Gallagher has encountered. Chandler comes home
from the pub to his wife, seething with just barely suppressed
anger, intoxicated, bitterly energized, dangerous.
The moment he walks in the door, his hands are full. His wife,
angry at his late arrival, goes off to the market and thrusts their
sleeping infant son into Chandler’s arms. He holds the boy in
his right hand, and with his left he takes up a volume of Byron’s
poetry, a symbol of the world he aspires to, hoping to find verses
that will suit his melancholy mood. The book, we have been told,
is one of many he purchased in his bachelor days but now ignores
in his proper domestic life. He has wanted in the past to read these
verses aloud to his wife, but he is too shy to express his romantic
longing. Now, in her absence, he reads a few lines aloud, feeling
“the rhythm of the verse about him in the room” (Joyce, 84).
But at that moment the baby wakes up, begins to cry, and shatters
the poetic mood produced by the book, dividing and incapacitat-
ing Chandler’s reading body. The crying escalates, and Chandler
quickly gives up: “It was useless. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t
do anything. The wailing of the child pierced the drum of his ear.
It was useless, useless! He was a prisoner for life” (Joyce, 84). In a
moment of parental exasperation, he leans into the child’s face
and shouts “Stop,” and of course succeeds only in increasing the
baby’s screaming. Now all thoughts of reading are destroyed, and
Chandler becomes terrified by his son’s frantic response. At this
moment his wife returns and soothes the baby, leaving Chandler
“suffused with shame,” so that “tears of remorse started to his
eyes” (Joyce, 85).
In this scene, Joyce dramatizes the complex passions of a particular
reading body. The moment is described in specific physical
detail, surrounded by a specific social context. This particular—
failed—experience of reading Byron could only have been pro-
duced by Chandler, at this moment in his personal history, in this
specific bodily state. He is under the influence of alcohol; over-
wrought with emotion; somatically divided between the book
and the baby; feeling physically and spiritually trapped in his con-
ventional home; his lifeless marriage; his boring occupation; his
dispirited, paralyzed culture; and his moment in Irish history. All

these conditions of his physical, social body conspire to undermine
his reading of Byron’s poem. The distracting, demanding cry of
the baby makes it physically impossible to produce the high levels
of visual and cognitive concentration necessary for reading. His
anger, intoxication, personal frustrations, and jealousy all produce
a body that cannot focus on the task. At this moment, he can-
not integrate reading into his daily domestic life, and his body
is not available for interpretive work. He can hold the book and
scan the print, but he cannot engage fully with its intense emo-
tional demands. The emotional body that comes to the text in this
moment cannot process the emotions of the text.
Specific moments of reading are difficult to capture. Reading is
evanescent, temporal. The moment of reading is embedded in a
specific and mutable material context, and it is gone in an instant.
It is the mortal, changeable body that reads, and it often leaves no
trace of its actions. Fortunately, literary artists like Joyce can bring
such moments to fictional life, and visual artists can capture at least
the image of the reading body at work. In fact, there is a genre of
visual art that might be called “woman reading,” in paintings from
the medieval period onward, and later in photographs from the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that attempt to represent the
reading bodies of literate women. Take as an example figure 0.1,
a photograph of Agatha Thornycroft from the late nineteenth
century. Her reading body is presented in the photograph as a
feminine ideal—beautiful, soulful, intelligent, but domesticated,
and incorporated into family life. She is at one with the space she
occupies—the ruffles of her blouse perfectly match the curtains
of the home. But though she is depicted in the domestic sphere,
she is, like any good reader, absent from the scene. Her body and
her mind are focused on the book, not on the physical and social
world. She seems to have found Woolf’s “room of one’s own,” a
personal space, which allows her total immersion in the work of
reading. If Joyce’s story gives us an example of a physical and social
situation that disallows reading, in this photo we see a perfectly
supportive environment that empowers an ideal reading experi-
ence. Agatha sits at the window, with beautiful natural light shin-
ing on her and on the pages of the book. The architecture and
interior design of the space seem to have been engineered pre-
cisely for the reading body—she benefits from the natural light,
Introduction 5
Figure 0.1 Photograph by Frederick Hallyer. Appeared in Bonham’s Auction

Catalogue, October 30, 2005.
but she is definitively indoors, protected from wind and cold and
the distractions of the outdoor world. Here, reading is presented
as the work of the civilized body, as a cultivated, educated practice
appropriate for a respectable young woman. Nineteenth-century
bourgeois culture had its worries about women reading—that they
might escape social demands in a self-indulgent world of disrepu-
table fantasy or independent thinking—but there is none of that
anxiety here. This reading is admirable, self-enhancing, and proper,
even for a woman in the domestic sphere.
Agatha’s bodily pose expresses her total absorption. Her eyes
are rapt; her lips are beautifully parted in what seems like astonish-
ment. It is as though the book is so vivid, so rich, that she cannot
quite take it all in. Her right arm seems to embrace the book, lightly
but intimately; the book seems to be an extension of her body, the
organizing principle of her life. As with Joyce, we are given a read-
ing body that is absolutely unique—a strikingly individual body in
a specific material and social world. She is a capable reader, intel-
lectually and emotionally, in a world that seems designed precisely
for her reading body. She seems to have accepted the bodily rules
and procedures of reading, yet she radiates assertion and confi-
dence. She will produce a reading entirely her own, rather than
submitting to acceptable taste or orthodox judgment. We can see in

her pose the complex relationship between the physical and social
constraints of the practice and its ability to express the personal
style, physical and interpretive, of the reader. Agatha reads with the
confidence of a social privilege that infuses her cognitive work as
well as her physical carriage. Reading feels like a natural part of her
bodily life, a task she can perform wholeheartedly. Little Chandler,
on the other hand, fails to read because of a division within him-
self that manifests in body and mind. The flesh and blood bodies
of these two readers—eyes and hands, postures and habits—make
visible the workings of their neural bodies—thoughts and feelings,
interpretations and responses—and they remind us that reading is
precisely the body at work.
In the canon of literary theory, there is little said about the read-
ing body, especially the operational, habitual body, the body that
accomplishes the task. Beginning with Aristotle and Plato, literary
theory tends to focus on the body as a site of emotional and ideo-
logical effects rather than as a productive agent. Classical theories
of catharsis explain how bodily emotions are managed by textual
strategies, and contemporary theories of identity have concentrated
on how body images are affected by the ideological formations
articulated in the text. In both contexts, the reader’s body is repre-
sented as passive or receptive, rather than engaged or purposeful.
Reader-response theorists have emphasized the active, productive
role played by the emotions of the reader in the interpretive pro-
cess, but otherwise the reading body seems to disappear from their
analysis. The movements of the eye, the gestures of the hand, the
everyday habitual life of the reading body seem too mundane, too
instrumental, to require critical attention. My contention will be
that it is precisely because these bodily practices are so mundane
and habitual that they have their almost invisible power over the
reading experience.
Even within the reader-response movement, drawing on the
phenomenological tradition, the body of the reader is curiously
absent. As Stanley Fish says in his influential article “Literature in
the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” literary theory needs to attend to
“the active and activating consciousness of the reader” (emphasis
added, 72). Fish’s essential and invaluable point was that the reader
is an active agent in the production of meaning, but his sense of
agency is purely mental. There is never a sense that consciousness
Introduction 7
is embodied, either in Fish’s early work that traces the cognitive

activity of the reader as he or she processes the unfolding text,
or in his later work that places the reader’s activity within pow-
erful interpretive communities. Consciousness is so fully engaged
in a complex interplay with unfolding meaning within a textual
universe that the body simply goes unnoticed. Similarly, David
Bleich’s Subjective Criticism (1978) gives us a reading subject
without a body, and Norman Holland’s 5 Readers Reading (1975)
presents his five readers without substantial bodies. It is remark-
able, I think, that the works of the reader-response movement, the
most thorough theoretical reflections on reading ever produced,
so conspicuously leave the body out of the equation. The reader
is the maker of linguistic meaning, and that work is presented as a
disembodied practice of cognition and emotional response.
A more recent generation of reader-oriented theorists has begun
to address this imbalance, focusing on the emotional and neural
body of the reader. Karin Littau’s Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies,
and Bibliomania (2006) argues that the image of the reader in
reader-response criticism “tends to be a disembodied mind rather
than a physiological being sitting at the edge of his or her seat,
tears welling up inside, pulse racing, spine tingling” (10). As this
quote suggests, Littau’s main interest is in the emotional body of
the reader, “the affective delights of transport” that can induce a
“reading fever,” a physical addiction that can seem at odds with
the cool rationality of the engaged, interpretive mind. My own
interest in the body of the reader is different from Littau’s, more
operational than emotional. I want to explore the micro-level,
habitual actions of the body, especially the eyes and the hands,
as they interact with the physical book. But Littau succeeds in
drawing attention to the reading body, so long neglected by most
literary theory. Nicholas Dames’s Physiology of the Novel: Reading,
Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (2007) focuses
on the neural body of the reader, the physiological basis for the
psychology of reading. Dames uncovers the work of nineteenth-
century British scientists and literary scholars who thought of read-
ing in bodily terms, attempting to explain the neurology of such
issues as the quality of readerly attention, rates of consumption and
comprehension, the ability of readers to make sense of very long
narratives, and the movements of the reader’s eyes as a determi-
nant of reading speed. Physiology of the Novel reminds us of a strain
in literary theory that was almost eradicated in the twentieth cen-

tury by the rise of New Critical practices that emphasized the role
of the reader as disembodied interpretive agent, an emphasis later
shared by the reader-response movement.
I offer this observation not so much as a critique but as a dem-
onstration of how deeply the disembodiment of the reader is
insinuated into the history of literary theory. Even Merleau-Ponty,
the most body-conscious of the phenomenologists, for whom the
body is the presence of the human in the world and the ground
of all hermeneutic activity, does not provide a sustained reflection
on the body of the reader. It is time to direct theoretical attention
to the procedural body, which accomplishes the physical tasks of
reading, and to the habitual body, which integrates the practice
into everyday life, along with other physical habits and functions.
My argument will be that these procedures and habits, performed
uniquely by each reader, contribute to and constrain the active
process by which readers produce the meaning of the text. The
reader-response theorists permanently put to rest the image of the
passive reader. We could no longer think of the reader as a blank
screen on which meaning is projected or even as a mere decoder of
a message fully present in the text. No one can now deny that the
reader is an agent who participates in the production of meaning,
creating an idiosyncratic actual meaning out of the virtual potential
of textual semiotics. My aim is to delineate the role of the peculiar
and specific body of the reader in that active production process.
Though the reader-response theorists saw reading as an activity,
they always saw it as action within constraints. Their critics sometimes
lampooned them as advocating an interpretive free play in which
readers simply made up their readings out of their own desires, but
none of the reader-response theorists took that position. They all
acknowledged that the actions of the reader are constrained by the
text, by linguistic and semiotic norms, by interpretive communities,
and by historical and social contexts. None of them would agree
with Sartre’s famous claim in “Why Write?” that the reader exists
“as a pure freedom, as an unconditioned activity” (1205). Fish has
always been clear that reading and interpretation are governed by
rules: “understanding . . . will proceed in terms of the system of rules
all speakers share. And insofar as these rules are constraints on pro-
duction . . . they will also be constraints on the range, and even the
direction, of response; that is, they will make response, to some
Introduction 9
extent, predictable and normative” (Tompkins, 84). Within these

rules and systems, readers must acquire “competence.” For Fish,
reading is a skill, a techne that must be learned within the inter-
pretive community that sets the rules. In the same vein, Jonathan
Culler’s essay “Literary Competence,” which appeared in the same
volume as Fish’s “Literature in the Reader,” speaks of the “sys-
tem of conventions which the reader has assimilated,” and which
impose “conventions” and “procedures” on the reader (Tompkins,
104–112). This theme of constraint is so strong, in fact, that it
seems puzzling now to remember that conservatives saw reader-
response as advocating interpretive anarchy. Readers engage in an
active construction of a personal and idiosyncratic meaning, but
they must first accept the interpretive constraints that make their
task possible.
But these theorists did not acknowledge that the physical inter-
action between the body of the reader and the material form of
the text is also governed by conventions that impose constraints
and require a specific bodily competence. The eyes of the reader
must learn the complicated skills of efficient movement, follow-
ing the rules set down by the graphic conventions of their literate
culture. The hands must learn how to grasp and manipulate the
book, and even more challenging, they now must learn the inflex-
ible protocols of digital reading devices. The eyes and hands must
submit to these disciplines so deeply that the procedures become
second nature, as any craft skill becomes unconscious to a master.
But just as reader-response theory teaches that constraints produce
interpretive diversity, so also does the physical constraints of read-
ing produce distinctive reading bodies. Even in the procedural tasks
of eye and hand, no two readers process the material text in exactly
the same way. Each set of eyes takes a unique path through the
text, and each set of hands grasps and manipulates the book or the
device differently, in a physical style generated by the reader’s own
bodily habits. As Norman Holland says in 5 Readers Reading, the
identity theme of each individual is expressed in the interpretive
process. And that same identity theme is also expressed in everyday
tasks, in every aspect of life: “Each of us creates at least his own way
of walking, talking, smiling, sitting, sleeping, loving, fighting, eat-
ing, and all the rest” (113). I would add to Holland’s list the physi-
cal act of reading. Each reader creates a unique regimen of reading
habits, including characteristic eye movements, ways of grasping
the book, and physical postures, all interwoven into an everyday life
in which each individual creates, as Pierre Bourdieu says, a “modus
operandi,” a personal style. We can see this style in a reader’s physi-
cal habits as well as in interpretive habits, in all the works of the
reading body.
But the physical tasks of reading tend to be forgotten in our
analysis of reading practice. This invisibility exists because reading,
as well as many other high-cognitive-demand tasks, creates what
the philosopher Drew Leder calls “the absent body.” In many fre-
quently repeated activities, Leder argues, the body recedes from
awareness as we focus attention on the goal of the activity rather
than the physical procedures it entails. Leder says, “Normally one
utilizes one’s body in this subsidiary fashion, attending from it to
an external world” (16). For Leder, reading “demands only a min-
imal though intricate use of the body,” particularly the eyes and
hands, and this “relegates most of the body to a merely supportive
role. I forget my torso, the position of my legs, the panorama of
the senses, as I concentrate here on my reading and writing” (122).
Even the work of the eyes is forgotten: “For you, the reader, the
physical appearance of the words on this page tends to recede from
focal awareness. The reader attends from these black marks to the
meanings they reveal” (16). Leder understands consciousness as a
“from-to” process in which attention is directed outward, to the
object of perception rather than to the bodily source of the percep-
tion. This forgetfulness is efficient, allowing everyday perceptions
and activities to operate smoothly, without the distraction of self-
consciousness and particularly of body-consciousness. But Leder
reminds us that if we allow ourselves to forget the “absent” body,
we cannot fully understand ourselves and our interactions with the
world, including the semiotic world of the text and the socially
constructed but deeply embodied conventions of reading.
Leder argues that the phenomenon of the absent body explains
in part the pervasive mind-body dualism of our culture. Because
the body is so frequently relegated to an operational background,
it is easy to divorce the mind from the body, especially in a task
like reading. The felt experience of many high cognitive demand
tasks is that they require exclusively mental work, and that such
work has no bodily home. Thus Leder feels that dualism, though
misguided, makes experiential sense—we can and do forget the
body. But for many feminist theorists, along with other antidualist
Introduction 11
thinkers, the mind-body split is more than an operational expedi-

ent; it is an outright betrayal of human embodiment. Elizabeth
Grosz’s Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (1994) pres-
ents traditional Western philosophy as a “disavowal of the body”
based on “a profound somatophobia” (4–5). The body is reduced
to “an instrument, a tool, or a machine at the disposal of con-
sciousness, a vessel occupied by an animating, willful subjectivity,”
and thus the body “requires careful discipline and training” (8–9).
From Plato’s conviction that the body is the prison of the soul to
Descartes’s strict division of mind from body, we have inherited a
legacy of anti-body dualism that discourages a full understanding
of embodied experience.
Feminist theory has convincingly shown that “somatophobia”
derives from a disavowal of the feminine. The body, like the femi-
nine, takes “the place of the excluded other” (Price and Shildrick, 1).
In the prevailing dualism, women are believed to be dominated by
their bodies, which are the source of their inability to reason and
self-manage, the achievements of mind. Their emotions and bodily
drives make them “out of control, beyond, and set against, the
force of reason” (Price and Shildrick, 1–3). Simone de Beauvoir
articulated the obvious absurdity of this belief in The Second Sex:
Man superbly ignores the fact that his anatomy also includes glands,
such as the testicles, and that they secrete hormones. He thinks of
his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which
he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body
of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything
peculiar to it. (Quoted in Rose, 361)
The absurdity of the belief, of course, does not diminish its

power. Defining man as mind and woman as body places women
in the place of the abject, and falsely divides reason and emotion,
mind and body, male and female. The somatophobia of our assump-
tions about reading assures that reading is associated with cogni-
tion and reason, safely defined as a patriarchal practice, immune to
the hysterical influences of the body. Reminding ourselves of the
embodiment of reading would seem to dislodge it from the purity
of consciousness, making it vulnerable to uncontrollable emotion
and gross physicality. It would force us to see reading as a physical
practice immanent in everyday life.
And yet, some feminist accounts of the body are curiously insub-
stantial, suggesting a tacit acceptance of somatophobia. In order to
counter essentialist accounts of the body, in which biology is destiny,
feminists emphasize the power of discourse to shape the body to the
point that the body becomes discursive. Elizabeth Grosz asserts the
need to “reclaim the body from the realms of immanence and biol-
ogy in order to see it as a psycho-social product” (Volatile Bodies,
270, emphasis added) and Denise Riley argues that bodies “trace
phenomena which are produced by the wheelings-about of great
technologies and politics . . . In a strong sense the body is a concept,
and so hardly intelligible unless it is read in relation to whatever else
supports it and surrounds it” (quoted in Wiley, 138). This turn to
discourse has been decisive, virtually discrediting essentialist ideolo-
gies. But the cost of this maneuver is a diminished sense of the felt
body, the lived body, in its messy peculiarity. It may be rhetorically
and strategically necessary to see the body as a psychosocial con-
cept, but “concept” hardly does justice to the everyday experience
of the body. Carol Bigwood says:
A body and nature formed solely by social and political significa-

tions, discourses, and inscriptions are cultural products, disembod-
ied of their full existential content. The post-structuralist body . . . is
so fluid it can take on almost limitless embodiments. It has no real
terrestrial weight. (Quoted in Wendell, 324)
The figure of the reader obviously lends itself to analysis as a

discursive product engaged intimately as it is with the temporal
unfolding and processing of discourse. But I want to remind us of
the “terrestrial weight” of the reader as an active, flesh and blood
body, immersed in the immanence from which Grosz wants to
“reclaim” it.
Of course, there are also feminist theorists who offer a more
active and robust image of the body. Judith Butler describes gen-
der “a sustained and repeated corporeal project” or “strategy,”
creating “a stylistics of existence” (419–420). Butler does not
want to deny the discursivity of the body, but she declares the
agency of the individual subject to resist the discourse—“bodies
never quite comply”—and to create a physical life that cannot be
fully predicted by social disciplines. Butler’s “bodily stylistics” refer
to the habitual practices of everyday life—clothing, gestures, car-
riage, interactions within physical and social contexts—practices in
Introduction 13
which identity is constructed. The reader’s body is both subject to

regulation and capable of improvisation, engaging in a sustained
and repeated corporeal project which produces a unique everyday
regimen that cannot be reduced to the regulations.
Trinh T. Minh-ha asserts that “we do not have bodies, we are
our bodies, and we are ourselves while being in the world” (258).
To explain our neglect of the body, Minh-ha invokes an almost
Blakean myth in which ego and reason defeat the body: “Ego is an
identification with the mind. When ego develops, the head takes
over and exerts a tyrannical control over the rest of the body.”
As a result, we misunderstand the very nature of thought and con-
sciousness by severing them from the body: “Thought is a much a
product of the eye, the finger, or the foot as it is of the brain,” she
says (261). Evoking the insights of martial arts and other forms
of somatic meditation, Minh-ha wants to see consciousness and
cognition as infused throughout the body, emanating from the
dantian, the energy center in the lower abdomen so vital to martial
arts and movement practices. Minh-ha points us to an embodied
consciousness which does not allow the simple dualisms that dom-
inate our general understanding of human life and our specific
understanding of reading. With this robust sense of embodiment,
I will claim that it is not that the mind of the reader is embodied,
but that the body reads—the whole body, muscle and bone, nerves
and brain—and that the operations of mind, socially constructed,
historically conditioned, in all their subtle interactions with the
complexity of texts, are the works of the body.
This embodied work of the “absent” body becomes visible if we
think of reading as a practice. Pierre Bourdieu’s explorations of this
term are the most influential in recent social and cultural theory
but there are many philosophers and theorists often deriving from
Aristotle’s ethics, who shed light on the concept of practice, which
always implicates the body. Following Bourdieu but with some res-
ervations and differences, I define a “practice” in these terms:
1. A practice is a purposeful action. Individuals involved in prac-

tices have goals and strategies aimed at fulfilling the logic of the
practice.
2. A practice is a frequently repeated action, a part of everyday life.
It is repeated so frequently that it becomes “second nature” and
eventually requires little or no conscious attention.
3. A practice operates by means of a “habitus,” a set of dispositions,

assumptions, habits and moral guidelines acquired through
repetition. These are the dispositions that lead to success at the
practice, allowing a range of improvisations that adapt the prac-
tice to changing situations.
4. The habitus of a practice becomes embodied in the practitioner.
The body learns the physical skills necessary for the practice and
develops the habitual postures and gestures that lead to mas-
tery. Bourdieu calls this embodiment of the habitus hexis.
5. Although it often operates without conscious attention, a prac-
tice must be learned and can be improved through conscious
effort. A practice can become an individual’s metier; a way of
being in the world. It can come to matter enough so that excel-
lence at the practice becomes a goal.
6. A practice can become central to an individual’s identity.
Many people cook, but some people take on the practice as a
self-defining vocation, and think of themselves as chefs, orga-
nizing their daily lives around the practice.
7. Every practice generates a community that shares the values
and beliefs, the ways of thinking and feeling and moving the
body that the habitus of the practice encourages.
I am particularly interested, of course, in the embodiment of

habitus—in hexis. But analyzing the hexis of the reading body in
turn contributes to a more general understanding of the habitus of
reading—the values, beliefs, cognitive procedures, and emotional
dispositions of the community of readers, and the social and his-
torical contexts in which they operate
To use Butler’s phrase in a different context, reading is a “sus-
tained and repeated corporeal project” (420). The practice of
reading makes procedural demands on the reading body. The eyes
must move across the page in disciplined but flexible leaps, and
the hands must grasp and manipulate the book so the eyes can do
their work. These physical tasks must be taught and learned, at
first quite consciously, so the novice reader can get physical access
to the text, but eventually they must become unconscious, so the
reader can focus on cognitive work. That is, the practice must
become embodied and thus “absent” from conscious awareness.
Like all practices, reading has a pragmatic goal—comprehension
and all that follows—and the procedures of the practice must be
Introduction 15
subordinated to the desired result. If we attend to those proce-

dures, we can see how reading bodies also put into operation inter-
nalized social directives learned in the pedagogical institutions of
literacy. To see reading as an act of the body is to see it as a social
practice.
“Practice” is a capacious term that places the act of reading in
a context with many different kinds of everyday action, includ-
ing arts and crafts, professions, sports, spiritual practices, rituals,
and social interactions. All of these practices are endlessly repeated
but unpredictable. Practitioners must submit to the logic of the
practice, but they are free to improvise within that logic. Poker
players know the rules of the game, but they make decisions in
each moment of play that react to the specific situations that pres-
ent themselves. They have played the game so frequently that they
are free to operate “instinctively” within it. Similarly, readers have
internalized the procedures of the practice, so they can adapt their
bodies to the unique demands of a particular reading challenge.
By sheer repetition, they have taken on the habitus of the practice,
defined by Bourdieu as “the durably installed generative principle
of regulated improvisations” (Outline of a Theory of Practice, 6).
The habitus is not a set of rigid rules, but rather “ a system of dis-
positions, that is of permanent manners of being, seeing, acting,
and thinking, or a system of long-lasting (rather than permanent)
schemes or schemata or structures of perception, conception and
action” (Bourdieu, “Habitus,” 43). The dispositions and habits
installed in the practitioner become “a structured principle of
invention, similar to a generative grammar able to produce an infi-
nite number of new sentences according to determinate patterns
and within determinate limits” (Bourdieu, “Habitus,” 46). In a
dialectical process, we take on the habitus of reading by engaging in
the practice of reading, and the practice of reading proceeds along
the lines made possible by the habitus. Reading becomes second
nature. Bourdieu says:
Body hexis speaks directly to the motor function, in the form of a
pattern of postures that is both individual and systematic, because
linked to a whole system of techniques involving the body and
tools, and charged with a host of social meanings and values: in
all societies, children are particularly attentive to the gestures and
postures which, in their eyes, express everything that goes to make
an accomplished adult—a way of walking, a tilt of the head, facial
expressions, ways of sitting and of using implements, always associ-

ated with a tone of voice, a style of speech, and (how could it be
otherwise?) a certain subjective experience. ( Bourdieu, Outline of
a Theory of Practice, 87)
In reading, the tool is the book, and it requires motor func-

tions so subtle, minute, and quick that they often escape attention.
And around those functions develops a style of being in the world
that is in turn visible in the postures, gestures, and daily habits of
reading, as my analysis of Little Chandler and Agatha Thornycroft
suggests. In Bourdieu’s early work especially, he is adamant that
the embodiment of the practice entails that the habitus remains
beyond the awareness and the critique of the practitioner:
The principles em-bodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp
of consciousness and hence cannot be touched by voluntary, delib-
erate transformation, cannot even be made explicit; nothing seems
more ineffable, more incommunicable, more inimitable, and, there-
fore, more precious, than the values given body, made body by the
transubstantiation achieved by the hidden persuasion of an implicit
pedagogy, capable of instilling a whole cosmology, an ethic, a meta-
physic, a political philosophy, through injunctions as insignificant
as “stand up straight” or “don’t hold your knife in your left hand.”
(Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 94)
For Bourdieu, therefore, practices allow improvisation, but they

are conservative by nature. They exert their influence without the
individual being aware of the lineaments of their power, and so
they are immune to critical attention. And since the habitus of the
practice is structured by its location in a specific society, it tends to
reinforce and reproduce the social order.
Other philosophers and social theorists have described practices
in similar ways. Hans-Georg Gadamer, from the perspective of the
hermeneutic tradition, sees practices as “normative”:
Practice . . . is always concretely motivated already, prejudiced to be

sure, but also challenged to a critique of prejudices. We are always
dominated by conventions. In every culture a series of things is
taken for granted and lies fully beyond the explicit consciousness
of anyone, and even in the greatest dissolution of traditional forms,
mores, and customs the degree to which things held in common
still determine everyone is only more concealed.” (82)
Introduction 17
These “things taken for granted” are embodied in practices, and

they determine our perspectives on all our experiences, including
our experiences of texts. They are elements in our “horizon of
interpretation,” the set of expectations and assumptions that guide
interpretive work. Insofar as the hexis of the reader structures
experience yet remains unconscious, it contributes to the cognitive
and interpretive task of reading. The discipline of the body in the
practice tends to produce a socially disciplined reading of the text.
This is not to say that all readings in a given social context will be
identical. Hexis allows for individual improvisation and adaptation.
But it does suggest that “reading against the grain” is more dif-
ficult than some theorists claim. The grain runs deep, into the very
bodies of readers and throughout the communities constructed
around their interpretive practices. Nevertheless, there are many
possible readings allowed by the habitus of the practice, because
there are many individual adaptations of hexis. Bourdieu articu-
lates this sense of freedom within constraints, citing “the countless
minute choices, perfectly improvised and perfectly necessary, that
one is able to operate instantaneously at every moment of life and
whose achieved product one discovers, at the end, almost like a
spectator” (Bourdieu, “Habitus,” 48). The habitus allows sponta-
neity and improvisation, but only within the logic of its practical
intentions.
Marcel Mauss provides an alternative terminology for Bourdieu’s
hexis with his term “techniques du corps.” Mauss uses this term to
describe “the ways in which from society to society men know how
to use their bodies” (78). He analyzes examples such as walking,
swimming, diving, marching, carrying a child, sleeping, squatting,
sitting, and resting—all done differently within different societies.
He tells the story of a British regiment that found it could not
march effectively to French drummers, whose “technique” suited
the gait of French, not British, troops. Techniques du corps is “a
gymnastic art” that requires “an apprenticeship,” “a technical edu-
cation” (78–79). The process of acquiring these techniques is social:
“they are not simply a product of some purely individual, almost
completely psychical arrangements and mechanisms.” Rather, they
are “the techniques and works of collective and individual practical
reason” (80). They are learned in a largely unconscious social pro-
cess: “the child, the adult, imitates actions which have succeeded
and which he has seen successfully performed by people in whom
he has confidence and who have authority over him. The action
is imposed from without, from above, even if it is an exclusively
biological action, involving his body” (81). On the micro-level,
this process occurs within families and in local contexts, but it
engages with macro-level social realities: Mauss says that practices
are “assembled for the individual not by himself alone but by all
his education, by the whole society to which he belongs, in the
place he occupies in it” (83). Like Bourdieu, Mauss sees practices
as conservative forces: “I call technique an action which is effective
and traditional. There is no technique and no transmission in the
absence of tradition” (82).
I take from Mauss’s techniques du corps the theme of skillful
operation. One can march poorly or well. One can see grace or
clumsiness in a diver or in the movement of a walker or even in a
body at rest. Bourdieu calls this skill “savoir faire,” an embodied
understanding of the task and of the standards of excellence hon-
ored within the community of practice (Outline of a Theory of
Practice, 10). Anyone in the community can recognize excellence
in the technique, though neither the practitioner nor the observer
may be able to articulate the grounds of that recognition. Self-
consciousness is not necessary to excel in a practice. Bourdieu, in
fact, would argue that self-consciousness gets in the way of skillful
practice, deflecting the practitioner’s attention from the moment
in which the practice unfolds, always adapting to new situations,
lacking the time or inclination to reflect. Readers also develop tech-
niques du corps in their daily practice. Over time, without much
conscious attention, they become physically as well as cognitively
skilled readers. Their eyes and hands learn to operate on their own,
allowing more and more efficient reading practice.
In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre analyzes practices in ethical
terms. The attempt to master a practice develops the moral virtues
required by the practice. MacIntyre says:
By a “practice” I am going to mean any coherent and complex form

of socially established cooperative human activity through which
goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of
trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appro-
priate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the
result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human concep-
tions of the ends and good involved, are systematically extended.
(After Virtue, 187)
Introduction 19
MacIntyre here connects practice with the pursuit of excellence.

A practice gains moral stature when the practitioner pursues it for
its own sake, for the goods inherent in the doing of the practice,
rather than for the goods that can be attained by means of the
practice. A morally purposeful practitioner is dedicated to the prac-
tice because it feels intrinsically valuable, and as such deserves to
be executed with a dedication to quality. In the process of pur-
suing excellence, the practitioner gains the virtues that a given,
particular practice demands. The chess player learns the virtue of
strategic thinking. The policeman learns loyalty. The teacher learns
patience. And the reader learns the virtues of reading: obedience
to the code, dedication to thorough comprehension, attention
to detail, openness to the message of the text, empathy with the
author’s perspective, critical distance, etc.—all the interpretive vir-
tues that the hermeneutic tradition champions. Actions create dis-
positions (hexis in Greek, habitus in Latin), especially actions that
matter enough to create a desire for excellence. MacIntyre writes
in the tradition of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, in which virtue
is gained only by doing the practice:
The way we learn the things we should do, knowing how to do them,
is by doing them. For example people become builders by building,
and cithara-players by playing the cithara; so too, then, we become just
by doing just things, moderate by doing moderate things, and coura-
geous by doing courageous things. (Quoted in After Virtue, 111)
In Imagining an English Reading Public: 1150–1400, historian

of reading Katharine Breen reminds us that in medieval culture
the everyday practice of reading was believed to be central to the
process of moral development. The acquisition of Latin literacy
and, later in the period, vernacular literacy was seen to imply the
acquisition of virtue itself. Breen says: “As he acquires the habi-
tus of grammar, the student does not merely learn rules but is
himself regulated, made regular, by the language he studies and
the discipline of the classroom in which he studies it” (2). In this
context, “habitus” is the possession of reason itself, which has a
religious function, in its ability to articulate the universal truths of
the Christian faith. Habitus begins in the effort to master gram-
mar, but it leads to “a systematic and fully internalized Christian
ethic” (5). This effort requires daily dedication to the acquisi-
tion of a skill which must become, as Bourdieu would also say,
second nature through repetition. Breen says: “Repetition implies

improvement, as in the practice of a craft, so that a habitus is at
once the culmination of a carefully designed training regimen
and almost fully automatic” (13). In medieval culture, training
requires subjection to a “normatively ordered community” (5).
The community of the practice defines the terms of excellence
and passes on those standards to new practitioners, reproducing
the structure of the community and the society that supports it.
The lines of power are clear; the habitus of reading is “a form
of physical and mental organization imposed from without and
then incorporated and perfected according to the capabilities of
each individual” (66). This dynamic of imposition and incorpora-
tion means that the values of the community become the values of
the individual practitioner, trained into the body as unconscious
presuppositions, all the more powerful because they feel natural,
inevitable, dictated by the logic of the practice itself. Breen says,
“to acquire a particular habitus is to create an infrastructure in the
soul, a set of intellectual and moral pathways that render certain
kinds of action easy and pleasant while consigning others to the
wilderness” (74). These usages of the term habitus suggest that
practices are always embodied and communal, a physical regimen
and a cognitive/ethical commitment.
A comprehensive analysis of reading as a cultural practice would
be an impossible task, well beyond the scope of a single book. In a
sense, much of the history of literary theory could be thought of in
these terms, as an ongoing analysis of the ethics, the cognitive and
emotional processes, and the interpretive practices of reading. But the
hexis of reading has not received extensive treatment. Scholars in
specialized fields like oculomotor science, human-computer inter-
action, and ergonomics have been interested in the eyes and hands,
the habits and postures of readers, but they have not attempted to
connect these operational processes to the cognitive, emotional,
and interpretive work of reading. The question that motivates my
project in this book is: How does hexis relate to hermeneutics—
how do the procedures and habits of the reading body affect our
experiences of texts?
This focus on practice foregrounds two related aspects of the
reading body—the physical procedures and the habitual life of read-
ing in everyday experience. Reading imposes complex procedural
demands—more complex than some analysts have allowed—on
Introduction 21
the eyes and hands. The reader’s eyes, for example, are subjected
to elaborate rules of movement and focus. The layout and design
of books, magazines, newspapers, advertisements, websites, blogs,
text messages, and emails are all different, and all require compli-
cated and precise eye movements. There is nothing natural about
these movements. They must be learned and practiced to the point
of unconscious mastery, but they are not often explicitly taught,
so the pedagogical process occurs tacitly, in the actions of parents
and teachers and in the intelligent adaptations of developing read-
ers. As Leder would say, the eyes of the reader are absent from
awareness, but they nevertheless operate with a strict and efficient
kinetic discipline. Similarly, the hands of the reader become adept
at the manual skills reading demands. They learn how to hold the
book, or any other reading device, in an efficient grasp, adapting
to its size and weight, finding ways to maintain the required physi-
cal relationship between the eyes and the book for long periods of
time without the inefficiencies of fatigue. They learn how to turn
the page, how to riffle through a book in search of specific loca-
tions, how to manage the book along with the coffee cup, how to
read the newspaper and hold on to the pole on the subway, and
so on. None of these tasks requires a high cognitive load, but all
are quite precise and necessary to the task of reading. And now
that readers must be adept at manipulating many reading formats,
the demand for skilled reading hands has dramatically increased.
Reading on digital devices requires very adept hand movements in
order to control cursors, activate touch screens, change screen size,
and select textual options. Human-computer interaction requires
a haptic intelligence that exceeds the demands of printed texts,
but all reading engages the hands in the production of meaning.
Philosophers and cultural critics have long noted the importance
of vision and tactile engagement in the production of knowledge—
think of Heidegger on the human hand—and reading requires
both the precise focus of the optical gaze and the forceful, direct
grasp of the hand. What seem to be merely procedural processes
are in fact an embodied set of precognitive activities that shape the
interpretive work of reading. And since the works of the hands and
eyes are trained incorporations of the habitus, they implicate the
reading body in social processes and disciplinary regimes.
As the word habitus suggests, thinking about reading as a cul-
tural practice leads to an interest in the physical habits of readers.
All experienced readers develop habitual postures and ways of occu-

pying space. These postures range from the ergonomically correct
body erect in the task chair at work to the informal, comfortable
sprawls of reading for pleasure. They involve the whole body, from
the hands that grasp the book to the arms and shoulders that bear
its weight, to the back that holds the pose (and often falls prey to
fatigue in extended reading sessions), and even to the legs and feet
that must be placed comfortably in sitting poses. These postures
contribute to the development of cognitive and emotional habits,
which in turn are visible in the reader’s comportment. Readers
also make use of physical space in characteristic, habitual ways.
They find or create spaces perfectly designed for reading, or they
adapt their practice creatively to whatever space they happen to
inhabit. Skilled readers can operate in libraries and reading rooms,
but also in restaurants and waiting rooms, subways and city parks.
Wherever they are, readers occupy space in a complex way—their
activity removes their conscious awareness from the space and the
other people who inhabit it, and yet the space subtly influences
their reading practice. These habits of the reading body integrate
reading into all the other habits and physical functions of everyday
life. People read as they eat, as they fall asleep, as they take a bath,
as they ride in a car, as they sunbathe on the beach, even as they
sit on the toilet. Habitual readers create a lifestyle centered on
reading. When you enter the home of an inveterate reader, you
know immediately: the furniture, the lighting, the reading mate-
rial carefully placed or strewn about—all speak of the ways that the
habit of reading has become central to the personal identity of the
reader. The habitual life of reading creates a somatic atmosphere
for the intellectual and emotional tasks of reading. When we speak
of interpretation as a socially constructed act, we usually have in
mind the discursive and epistemological structures of the society
in which the reader is immersed, but the homely social constraints
created by habitual practices are the daily, routine forms of that
process of construction.
Many of the daily activities associated with reading are habits
of the gross physical body, the body evoked by Bakhtin. When we
acknowledge that we read as we eat, as we fall asleep, as we shit, as
we lay ill in bed, as we masturbate, as we sit in the bathtub, reading
undergoes what Bakhtin calls “degradation.” What seems to be a
refined, intellectual exercise is revealed to be one bodily practice
Introduction 23
among others, including practices from “lower,” abject centers of

the body. Obviously this is not our commonsensical image of read-
ing as a hermeneutic practice. Reading seems highly civilized, in
Norbert Elias’s sense of the term, a practice aimed precisely at rais-
ing human beings above their bodily functions, but in a return of
the repressed, perhaps, reading is associated through daily habit
with the “pre-civilized,” animalistic, mortal human body. The brain
that comprehends the text, the neural chemistry that emotes and
empathizes with characters, the eyes that scan the page, the hands
that hold the book, the poses that readers adopt, and the habits
that reading connects with—these are all the very same body, the
idiosyncratic, flesh and blood, historically and socially constructed,
hermeneutically engaged reading body.
When the reader-response theorists described the encounter
between the reader and the text, they were thinking of a meeting
of minds—the consciousness of the reader meets the meaning of
the text and through it the mind of the author. But that encounter
is also physical. The hands of the reader encounter the paper of
the book in a touch that leaves traces on both. Paper is porous.
Fingertips are porous. Reading involves a chemical exchange. Any
substances already on the fingers will be physically transferred to
the pages of book, and the chemical composition of the book will
be transferred to the fingers. Traces of the book physically enter
the body of the reader. When we handle pages, they rub off on
us, and we rub off on them. If I am eating a tuna sandwich as I
read a novel, molecules of the tuna are absorbed by the paper. If
I am smoking, the paper of the book absorbs the smoke or for
that matter any airborne substances in its habitat. Think of the
feel of a paperback book left in a beach house, how it swells from
the humidity of the coastal air. Many readers are sensitive to this
physical-chemical history of the book. They can detect in the smell
or the texture of the pages the habits of the previous reader. They
can smell the food or the smoke or the mold that develops as books
age. Molecules of the book enter the nose as well as the fingertips.
We breathe what we read. We absorb the physical substance of the
book, just as the book absorbs the substances we take to it. To put
it directly—reading is gross. The recent development of digital
reading devices diminishes but does not eliminate this physicality.
The plastic of the device is much more antiseptic, and the experi-
ence of touch is less intimate, more purely operational. In fact, I
think it could be argued that this repudiation of tactile and chemi-

cal interaction is part of the attraction of reading devices, but even
plastic outgasses, and we leave traces of our manual handling of
the device on the surface of the plastic. The physicality of reading
cannot be escaped.
In contrast to the intimacy of touch, we think of visual experi-
ence as more distanced, more detached from the object of percep-
tion. Mark Smith, in Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling,
Tasting, and Touching in History, describes what he calls “the
great divide” in the history of human sensation: before moder-
nity, before the Gutenberg revolution, “the senses of proximity”—
touch, smell, taste—were predominant in the rich sensorium of
premodern life, while after the coming of print as well as other
modern advancements in graphic presentation, vision came into
power, connecting “sight and logic, seeing and reason, vision and
objectivity” (10). Of all the senses, vision seems least physical,
most clearly connected to cognition, analysis, and careful obser-
vation. However, Smith feels that the great divide is too simple.
Vision, of course, played an important role in premodern life, and
the proximate senses, which seem banished to abject disavowal
by modernity, continue to have a subliminal influence. Although
seeing epitomized by reading “has been the principal category by
which the modern self has been understood to frame the world
and separate it as an object of knowledge, understanding, and
manipulation” (20), books and reading have “a profoundly tactile
quality. Books were, and are, held, carried, opened, thumbed,
fingered, and stroked” (93). We may consciously process reading
as a predominantly visual experience, but the entire sensory body
is involved in the act.
And despite our cultural association of vision with reason and
detachment, based on our ability to detect distant visual targets,
vision is not disembodied or disconnected from the object of
vision for the object of vision is light, reflected off surfaces, and
light enters into the body through the eyes. In the case of reading,
light reflects off the page, setting in relief the negative space pattern
of the print against the stark brightness of the white background.
Readers position themselves so that the available light reflects off
the page into their eyes, piercing through the cornea and the pupil
and the vitreous gel of the eye to touch the retina, which then
communicates to the brain the electrical impulses created by that
Introduction 25
touch. Vision is in this sense tactile: the light reflected off objects
enters the body of the perceiver. In the act of reading, it is this
contact between the light reflected off the page and the retina of
the reader’s eye that initiates the process of comprehension. This is
to say that reading is in all ways a physical practice, from the hands
and eyes to the flesh of the brain that accomplishes cognition and
interpretation.
The cognitive power of these bodily procedures and habits
derives from the fact that they operate beneath conscious aware-
ness. Lakoff and Johnson and many others interested in embodied
cognition call this power “the cognitive unconscious,” the “hid-
den hand” that “shapes how we automatically and unconsciously
comprehend what we experience” (13). They argue that “the very
properties of concepts are created as a result of the way the brain
and body are structured and the way they function in interper-
sonal relations and in the physical world” (37). Lawrence Shapiro
in The Mind Incarnate, uses the term “subcognitive scaffold-
ing” (192). “The body,” he says, “in many ways ‘preprocesses’
the information that the brain receives and in other ways affects
how the brain manages information. The body is more than sim-
ply a shell for the mind, more than a vessel that the mind pilots.
The body is profoundly involved in mental operations” (187). And
the body as Shapiro conceptualizes it is not a generic body—it
is the body of a specific individual, in all its idiosyncrasy: “gross
morphological and anatomical features have a pervasive impact on
the kinds of concepts one develops to wrestle order and organi-
zation into the world . . . conceptualization cannot be body neu-
tral but must be understood relative to properties of particular
bodies” (213). From this perspective, as Evan Thompson says in
Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of the Mind,
we must think of “the mind as embodied dynamic system in the
world, rather than the mind as neural network in the head” (11).
Interactions with the world shape that system: “Cognitive struc-
tures and processes emerge from recurrent sensorimotor patterns
of perception and action” (13). What our bodies do, especially
what we do repeatedly and habitually, shapes the subcognitive scaf-
folding, which in turn shapes the cognitive process of a practice
like reading. Hexis is hermeneutic.
Reading as embodied cognition is the foundation of Gillian
Silverman’s book Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of
Communion in Nineteenth-Century America(2012). Writing in phenom-

enological terms Silverman says: “Even before a reader makes sense of
a book, she engages in what Heidegger calls ‘pre-understanding,’
an intuitive apprehension made possible by one’s existence in time
and space. By this reasoning, knowledge is not an act of isolated
ideation but rather a dimension of being in the world (Dasein), a
situated response to interconnected objects and our place among
them” (8). She evokes Merleau-Ponty to emphasize the embodied
nature of Dasein: “Consciousness here is not reducible to Cartesian
‘cogito’; rather, it is a lived phenomenon of the body-subject, a
consciousness of one’s incarnate subjectivity and interactions with
the life world” (9). In her study of nineteenth-century readers,
Silverman is interested in the physicality of reading for a paradoxi-
cal reason: the engagement of the body allows the reader to create
an elaborate fantasy of physical communion with the author and
with other readers of the same book. Because the author’s body
brings the physical text into existence, and because other read-
ers have physically handled the very same object, the reader has
a warrant to imagine that reading produces a bodily encounter
with those other subjects despite their manifest absence from the
current scene of reading. Silverman’s project leads her to acknowl-
edge the embodiment of reading, but it does not require her to
analyze that embodiment in operational terms. She is interested
not so much in what the hands and eyes and postures accomplish
in reading, but in the imaginary reality of physical intimacy that
the reader can construct.
The procedures of reading through endless repetition become
“motor programs” that operate efficiently in the background
of the process. At the beginning of the learning process, in the
early literacy experiences of children for example, these proce-
dures require conscious attention and work, as they do when we
struggle to master a new reading device that requires new habits.
But as learning advances, these motor programs enter procedural
memory centers in the basal ganglia of the brain, rewiring neu-
ral structures for maximum efficiency. This neural plasticity makes
high-functional literacy possible. The more we invest our prefrontal
resources in learning the procedures, the less we can invest them in
comprehension and interpretation. Even the simplest texts require
vast cognitive resources, so the creation of a procedural uncon-
scious for reading is essential. As an analogy, if a basketball player
Introduction 27
is focused on how to dribble the ball, he or she cannot focus on

the unfolding strategic situations of the game. Once the physical
skill is mastered, the brain is freed up for interpretive work. And
on a more finely tuned level, exactly how I perform those tasks and
exactly how I develop habits will exert a subtle influence on exactly
how I make meaning of texts. If I develop the habit of skimming
texts rather than encountering them word by word, or if I spend
most of my time reading in a task chair rather than on my comfort-
able sofa, or if I usually hold the book firmly in my hands rather
than rest it on the desk, I rewire my brain and my precognitive
scaffolding in subtly different ways.
The cognitive unconscious of reading develops in two of the
most powerful disciplinary institutions—the family and the school.
Parents and teachers model the physical behaviors of skilled and
experienced readers. They teach the child’s eyes to move left to
right (or right to left, depending on the pertinent graphic conven-
tions) by moving their fingers along the page. Teachers require
students to sit still and be quiet, to assume a workable reading
posture, to turn pages without tearing them, to swipe the touch
screen with just the right pressure, to hold the book or the com-
puter safely, and so on. They engage in a benign Foucauldian disci-
plinary process, creating the “docile bodies” necessary for reading.
Students must submit to the physical logic of the practice, or they
cannot succeed in the task. Their bodies must become literally
docile. Reading does not allow random or vigorous movement.
The book must be kept still, at a constant distance from the eyes,
and the head must be kept still, so the eyes can focus. Readers can
change positions subtly, they can squirm and readjust, but they
must maintain virtual stillness for long periods of time, a task that
is far from natural for young children. The simple requirement to
sit still and keep quiet is maintained by pedagogical discipline in
the service of literate skill. If the skills of reading are to be incor-
porated, if the habitus of the practice is to become hexis, if the
precognitive structures are to be installed, novice readers must
be subjected to discipline. Embodied cognition is the product of
social intervention.
The habitus is less a matter of formal and explicit rules than
of shared, often unspoken assumptions and disposition, rules of
thumb—“that’s how it’s done,”—“knowing the ropes.” Within a
community of practice there may be official rules, but the informal
rules are much more important, and they are reinforced by the
prestige of elite practitioners like parents and teachers. Beginners
recognize experts by observing their bodily behavior, how they
hold themselves, their carriage and movement styles. When we
think of habitus as hexis, as the embodiment of these dispositions
right down to the smallest physical gesture, we can see how dif-
ficult it is to bring such structures of practice into critical aware-
ness. In the process of becoming socialized into a community of
practice, the beginner must adopt the prevailing behavioral style
or risk never being accepted as a fellow practitioner. To engage
in critical reflection would be disloyal to the community. If you
wish to succeed in the practice, you must submit to its pragmatic
logic. Readers are interested in deciphering the marks on the page
in order to make sense of the writing, to get at the meaning of the
text. And that meaning is only available to those who follow the
rules of the graphic code and the community of practice. To take
a far-fetched example, you cannot hold the book upside down if
you wish to read successfully. You cannot read right to left in a left
to right print language. You cannot skip words if you wish to com-
prehend the text fully. You cannot read in the dark. You cannot
read while running. None of these ludicrous acts would even occur
to the mind of a serious reader, because they defy the logic of the
practice. The habitus of reading rules them out of play. Practices
are inexorable—either you submit to their logic, or you fail.
Yet, within those constraints, the hexis of the practice meets the
particularity of the practitioner’s body. Walking through a library
it is easy to see the variety of postures that readers adopt. Some are
models of ergonomic logic, but others curl and sprawl in poses in
which no one else would feel comfortable. As long as the eyes have
functional access to the page, as long as the weight of the book
can be managed efficiently, the pose is a matter of personal style.
It is rare that the reading pose is a matter of conscious planning;
rather, it is an unconscious expression of personal character and
mood. When Little Chandler finds himself with the baby in one
hand and the book in another, his pose embodies the exigencies
of the moment and the enduring qualities of his character. When
we look at Agatha Thornycroft reading, we see her mind at work,
her very soul, in the tilt of her head and the intensity of her gaze.
One of Foucault’s most important insights is that discipline does
not create uniformity; it creates individuality and difference—the
Introduction 29
whole range of subjectivities necessary for a functioning society.

Reader-response theory has demonstrated that readers make
meaning in ways that reflect their individual and social identities.
Similarly, the bodies of readers display individual differences within
the constraints of the practice, and these physical differences also
contribute to their characteristic ways of making meaning.
The practice of reading requires physical improvisation and
adaptation. Reading postures and habits change in response to
changing conditions. Different books must be held in different
ways. Lighting conditions change and the reading body adapts.
Even the eyes of the reader improvise as they move across the page.
When the eyes begin a saccade to the next unit of meaning, they
cannot always anticipate the graphic and linguistic terrain where
they will land, so they adjust in the midst of their leap, finding
the most efficient place to focus within the next unit. In all of
these ways the reading body demonstrates subtle know-how, a set
of skills disciplined by the practice but supple in the moment of
execution. In fact, the sign of a highly skilled practitioner, a person
with savoir-faire, is the ability to adjust and adapt within the ongo-
ing flow of the practice. The physical skills and habits of reading
are mobile and improvisatory, trained so deeply that they respond
intuitively to the changing demands of the task.
If we are to understand the work of the reading body, we cannot
do without Foucault’s concept of discipline, which helps to explain
how its skills are acquired and how the reading body is placed
within regimes of power. But we also need his thinking on regimen,
from The History of Sexuality, which emphasizes the ways that indi-
viduals create their own lifestyle of practices in the care of the self.
Foucault does not argue that this creativity is unconstrained—it
still operates within regimes of power. But the creation of a regi-
men is a subtle, personal project within the experience of everyday
life. For Foucault, the main question is how sexual practices can be
integrated into a healthy and productive life, but sexuality is not
the only practice to be managed. In the classical era that he is ana-
lyzing, the development of a regimen also involves food and drink,
exercise, social interactions—all the elements of a daily lifestyle. The
habits of reading can also be understood in these terms. Readers
learn how to integrate reading into daily life, in ways that give plea-
sure and allow effective reading experiences. For many readers, the
practice becomes the center of a lifestyle, even an obsessive need
around which the rest of life must be organized. Reading becomes

integrated into work life, home life, travel, entertainment, leisure,
and even biological functions. This reading regimen is not a rigid
routine. Rather, it is a daily improvisation in which moments and
hours for reading are found within all the other practices that com-
prise the regimen of the individual reader. This lifestyle of read-
ing provides the context within which the interpretive work of the
reader occurs. When I am reading a long novel, it accompanies me
to work, to the breakfast table, to the doctor’s office, to the sub-
way, to bed at the end of the day, and my reading bears traces of
all the places the book has traveled with me. In all these contexts,
the act of reading is subjected to the social rules and circumstances
of each moment, and my hermeneutic process is shaped by the
social worlds I inhabit. Shaped by, not rigidly determined. In every
physical aspect of reading, I will argue, a complex dynamic of dis-
cipline and improvisation takes place, a dynamic then repeated in
the hermeneutic register.
One could argue that the embodied habits of reading are merely
physical techniques that bring the book into the focal range of the
eyes, so that the text can be visually processed and made available to
the brain and thus to the work of the mind, which does the actual
task of reading. The medial position is that the mind dwells in and
is shaped by the body, which serves as its physical presence in the
world. At the other end of the spectrum is a thoroughly materialist
conception of the mind as the work of the body, conditioned by
material, social forces. The work I have done on this project has
moved me in this materialist direction. Even the word “embodi-
ment” no longer seems right to me, since it suggests that mind
is something other than body that finds itself in a material form.
Human beings are their bodies, their own peculiar bodies, and it is
the body that reads, just as it is the body that lives and breathes and
suffers and dies. This body is not an isolated entity that ends at its
physical boundaries, but a body living in a world of human bodies,
connected to them through social interactions and structures, open
to the semiotic activity to which they are so exquisitely adapted,
capable as they are of speech and writing and gesture and the abil-
ity to hear and see and make sense of the socially constructed signs
they encounter, signs that make sense only in particular languages
and cultures with their rich histories and traditions, signs that are
acquired by the body through complex pedagogical institutions
Introduction 31
that shape the body in all its sense-making activities. The sublimely
complex work of hermeneutics, the inborn human ability to make
sense of experience, honed by its participation in particular cultural
formations, is the work of the body, and in the case of reading, its
procedures and habits are the works of that same body—brain and
nerve, eye and hand—as it engages with texts. The burden of proof
for the chapters that follow is to demonstrate in fine detail how the
particular habits and procedures of particular readers make visible
and tangible the hermeneutic work they produce.
However, reading involves not just physical work but physical
pleasure. Obviously, reading involves intellectual and emotional
pleasures, but the sheer pleasure of the body must not be underes-
timated. Reading involves a physical encounter between the body
and the material text, and this encounter produces pleasure—the
feel of the book to the hand, the smell of the paper, the haptic
pleasure of manipulating the screen, the comfort of reading in the
domestic space. These pleasures reinforce and deepen the habit
of reading. Readers take the book on the subway and to the wait-
ing room and to the bedroom not just because they are eager to
read the next page but because the presence of the physical book
in itself is comforting and satisfying. The book (or the Kindle or
the iPad) becomes for many readers a transitional device, creating
a sense of identity that continues through any time and space the
reader inhabits. Reading provides a pleasurable sense of privacy, of
personal time and space, even on a crowded airplane. I know peo-
ple who will bring a book to a football game, where, in the midst
of a loud and extroverted crowd, they can alternate attention on
the public spectacle of the game and on the private experience
of the book. Reading produces a cocoon of personal space that
other people hesitate to invade. And reading at home, in a private
space, is especially comforting, associating reading with domestic-
ity and family life. In her book Amish Literacy, Andrea Fishman
describes a moment in which a father is reading the newspaper
with his children, one of whom sits next to him reading the same
pages inside the curtain created in front of them by the newspa-
per, the other companionably sitting in front of them, reading the
outer pages of the paper. Such scenes are central to developing
the habit of reading. Most readers begin their reading lives in the
embrace of their parents, gaining pleasure from the book but also
from physical intimacy. The bodily pleasure of these experiences
lingers on throughout a reader’s life, and because the book is so

portable, it can be repeated anywhere it is possible to read, even in
strange and unsettling circumstances. Reading provides a childlike
satisfaction of the desire for parental love, and the book becomes a
symbolic substitute for that lost intimacy.
The physical pleasure of reading also derives from a sense of
practical mastery. This pleasure is particularly visible in novice
readers. Young children clearly enjoy the experience of turning the
page of a picture book or moving their fingers along a line of print.
But the pleasure continues into mature reading experience. Even
the most sophisticated and intellectual scholar enjoys the physical
experience of annotating the book, often making a fetish of having
the right pen and writing with precision in the tight confines of the
margin. The routines of reading and eating or reading and bathing
also give pleasure. They require an ongoing manipulation of the
book and the food and its implements or the book and the soap
and water, creating a micro-ritual of the hand and eye that delivers
the pleasures of the productive routine. Especially now that there
are so many reading devices, each with its own protocols, the plea-
sure of gaining mastery is a routine part of the reading experience.
There is also, of course, the experience of frustration and baffle-
ment at new technologies, but overcoming those obstacles adds to
the pleasure of new reading experiences.
If you love the practice of reading, you love and take pleasure
in the ground rules, the logic, the official and unofficial codes, the
discursive disciplines, the habitus, the hexis. The skilled practitio-
ner desires and strives for the right hexis—that is the body you
want, those are the skills you admire. Accepting and enjoying the
habitus allows you to belong to the community, to be worthy of
membership, even if it means subjecting yourself to arbitrary con-
straints. The pleasure of practical skill is in this sense masochistic—
the reader takes pleasure in submitting to the rules. Certainly,
readers learn ways of evading and negotiating the rules thereby
creating personal styles, but that operational freedom is made pos-
sible only by a prior, powerful submission.
The physical practices and pleasures of reading are historically
situated, and they have changed over time in response to many
factors. For all its physicality, the reading body cannot be reduced
to pure biology. Rather, the body in everyday life is a function of
its interaction with social and cultural forces that have their own
Introduction 33
histories. The history of the reading body, for example, makes

sense only in connection with the history of the book. As the
book and the graphic conventions of printing change, the read-
ing body adapts. Manipulating the scroll is not manipulating the
codex, is not manipulating the computer. Each format requires
different procedures of the eyes and the hands. Each fosters dif-
ferent postures and habits and ways of occupying space. Similarly,
the reading body changes along with the change in reading spaces.
Reading in a cabin on the frontier by a fire is not reading in a doc-
tor’s waiting room. Furniture changes, lighting changes. Reading
by fluorescent light is not reading by candlelight. Every change in
the material culture that surrounds reading affects the daily opera-
tion of the reading body.
Bourdieu is clear about the fact that the habitus structures
the practice, but that the habitus is structured by the societies in
which it prospers. Societies encourage only the practices that shape
socially acceptable identities, and practices must adapt as the soci-
ety around them changes. Thus the hexis of reading, including the
physical habits that connect reading to the gross physical body,
is shaped not only by changes in material culture but by macro-
historical changes. For example, reading was cruelly restricted
in the slave culture of the American South. Any slave who even
attempted literacy was subject to the threat of bodily harm, so the
reading body was a secretive body engaging in the practice only in
hidden spaces and stolen moments. After emancipation, African-
American reading bodies could begin to come out into the open
and read where and when they liked. After the abolition of slavery,
reading habits changed, postures changed, the physical spaces of
reading changed. The massive historical process of emancipation
affected all of the everyday practices of African-American reading
bodies—which bodies shall have the right to read, where and when
the reading will be allowed, who shall know about the practice.
The reading body is enmeshed in history, both on the micro-level,
as lighting and domestic spaces change, and on the macro level, as
power relations and social structures change.
Historians of reading have followed closely the changes in read-
ing habits and practices, especially the development of silent, pri-
vate reading, the change from intensive to extensive and now to
hyperextensive reading, the development of mass literacy, and the
achievement of literacy by groups that had long been denied it.
Because of the availability of documents and records from librar-

ies and publishing companies, historians have learned much about
the kinds of books available to readers, the distribution networks
that delivered them, and the reading choices made by families and
individuals. But the physical practices of reading have not received
extensive, systematic attention. Though no comprehensive his-
tory of the reading body has been written, many glimpses of the
embodied reading habits of the past are available in the works of
the historians of reading. Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading,
for example, takes us into the private studies and public spaces
in which reading has been accomplished. William J. Gilmore’s
Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life explores the material conditions
that encouraged the development of near universal literacy in rural
New England in the early nineteenth century. Thomas Augst’s The
Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century
America provides a vivid portrait of the reading habits of young
businessmen who were members of the New York Mercantile
Library, following them from their lonely rooming houses where
they read in private to the comfortable public space of the library
itself, where they developed habits of literacy that helped shape
their assimilation into middle-class business life. The nineteenth
century in England and America has attracted the interest of many
historians of reading because it is the time in which mass literacy
was accomplished, a development that Gilmore calls “the first truly
new rural mass culture in two millennia” (23). Many historians of
reading are also interested in late medieval Europe, a time when
silent private reading became the norm and when the practices of
reading and prayer were tightly interwoven. D. H. Green’s Women
Readers in the Middle Ages evokes the social rituals that encour-
aged women to read aloud to one another, and the religious ritu-
als that made private reading an integral and disciplined practice
of everyday life. Katharine Breen’s Imagining an English Reading
Public, 1150–1400 analyzes the role of literacy training in medieval
pedagogy. These and many other works in the history of reading
provide interesting, specific images of the reading body, but they
do not add up to a systematic history. Such a history is outside the
scope of this project, but I have drawn on these works to provide
context for the examples of the reading bodies I evoke.
The hallmark of our particular moment in the history of the
reading body is of course the development of digital reading
Introduction 35
devices. Reading on the computer, on Kindle devices, or on cell

phones poses new physical challenges. We live at a time when seri-
ous questions have been raised about the future of reading itself.
One can now easily imagine nano devices implanted in the brain
that would obviate the need for print by delivering information
in visual form or in spoken language, without the hard cognitive
work that reading requires. More immediately, one must imag-
ine a world in which the vast majority of information and verbal
communication is delivered in digital devices rather than in codex
form. These delivery systems impose new cognitive demands and
new physical procedures. Many analysts have observed that read-
ing in digital environments is more interactive, more intertextual,
and more interconnected than codex reading, and I would add
that all of these features of digital reading change the somatic
experience along with the cognitive. The eyes move differently, the
hands engage with the material text differently, postures change,
and new physical habits develop. Readers must learn and embody
new procedures as new devices are rapidly replaced by even newer
generations of technology. The physical skills and habits of codex
reading became standard operating practice for hundreds of years.
Once they were mastered, they could be enacted without reflec-
tion. Now, new devices make new, subtle demands all the time,
and the development of a settled hexis for reading is impossible.
There are always new skills of the eye and hand to learn, and they
challenge our attempts to automatize them.
In addition to these changes in the material forms of texts,
the body itself is changing rapidly. Donna Haraway has famously
described these changes as the development of cyborg entities,
admixtures of human bodies and technologies. Prosthetic devices,
chemical enhancements, genetic engineering—this is the future
of the human body and more specifically the future of the read-
ing body. The most common of these in our time are the chemi-
cal enhancements, especially the drugs developed to counter the
epidemic of attention deficit disorder (ADD). Ritalin, Adderall,
and other drugs that enhance concentration have made sustained
reading possible for many people who were not capable of the
attention necessary for maximum comprehension. It is com-
monplace to note that we live in a time of ubiquitous distraction
created by a hyperactive media environment and the easy connec-
tivity of digital devices. One text leads so easily to another that
reading becomes hyperextensive, with immediate access to a daz-

zling variety of entertainment and information options. This easy
intertextuality works against the in-depth concentration necessary
for high-comprehension reading, which often requires paying
hours of attention to a single text. Readers with ADD working in
hyperextensive textual environments often require medication to
achieve deep, prolonged attention. Add to this the development
of computer-brain interfaces that will allow internet access with-
out the use of an external device, and you have a possible future
in which the reading body is radically altered in order to interact
more efficiently with information technology.
This book is based on the assumption that for the foreseeable
future, readers will need the skills necessary to cope with many
reading technologies. The codex and other print formats will not
disappear, though digital technologies will become more and
more available. As a result, the physical skill set of the reading
body will have to be versatile, capable of learning new techniques,
while refining those already learned. Throughout the book, there-
fore, examples of the specific operation of the reading body will
be drawn from all the available reading formats, though I would
admit to a tendency to make codex reading the default setting. I
valorize the book and print media because of their long history
and their continuing global dominance, especially outside affluent
postmodern societies. But the demands of new technologies are so
pressing and so interesting that a variety of examples for detailed
analysis is clearly necessary if we are to understand the current
situation of the reading body. In addition, the book ends with an
extensive analysis of the ways that new technologies have changed
the work and the habits of the reading body.
Because the operations of the reading body are specific to the
peculiar physical makeup and practices of individual readers, I have
included in the book many “close readings” of reading behav-
ior. And because the act of reading is so evanescent and leaves
few material traces, these examples have been drawn from three
sources:
1. Manyof my examples are photographic and painterly images

of reading bodies. The advantage of these still images is that
they allow careful analysis of bodily details. One can linger over
them, noticing the position of the hands, the angle of the neck
Introduction 37
and head, the structure of the whole body posture, as well as

the ways that readers occupy physical space. But visual images
must not be taken as unmediated accounts of behavior. They
are always shaped by genre conventions and historical context.
Thus, any image of the reading body reveals a historically situ-
ated reader framed by a historically situated style of representa-
tion. This historical complexity provides a rich documentary
density that places the reading body in multiple frames of ref-
erence. The images I have chosen include examples from the
high art tradition, suggesting the beauty and enduring visual
appeal of the reading body, and examples from vernacular photog-
raphy, suggesting that ordinary readers have such a powerful
intuitive awareness of the importance of reading practices and
postures that they want to document them in their everyday
experiences.
2. I have also derived many examples from structured observations
of the behavior of readers in natural environments. Since read-
ing so often occurs in public—in libraries, on subways, in res-
taurants, in parks, it is easy to observe reading bodies at work.
You can see how people hold the book, how they manipulate
the computer, how they occupy physical and social space, how
they pursue their reading habit in the flow of daily life. I do
not make empirical claims about the behavior of readers, in the
manner of a social scientist who devises controlled experiments.
Rather, my observations are those of a person in a practice,
making note of how others in the practice perform the task.
3. The third source of my specific observations is from careful
reflection on my own reading practices. I have attempted to
pay attention to my own absent body in the act of reading. The
procedures and habits of reading, as Leder says, usually operate
without conscious awareness for maximum efficiency. But, at
times, that awareness is unavoidable, in situations Leder calls
“dys-appearances,” times when the operations are problematic
and the practice is disturbed and “dysfunctional” (85), so the
activity of the body is brought to conscious attention—as for
example in times of illness or injury, when we become aware of
all the ways the affected body part is engaged in everyday actions.
Dys-appearance also occurs in learning moments. When we are
learning any new skill, we are hyperaware of the body, though
Leder argues that we can only achieve mastery of the skill when
it becomes so incorporated that the body again becomes absent.

My interest in the operations of the reading body is an example
of such learning, not toward the goal of acquiring a new skill,
but toward an understanding of the practice itself. My own
reading body and its habits are peculiar to me, but every reading
body is similarly idiosyncratic. For example, I face a particular
challenge in reading because I have a “lazy eye.” My right eye
drifts off to the right, so that much of my focal area is produced
by the work of my left eye. However, I still receive some visual
input from my right eye, which can cause visual distraction. As a
consequence, I tend to position myself in a reading area so that
my right eye faces in a neutral, uninteresting direction, with
the potential for minimal distraction. I don’t need to plan this
positioning—I find myself at such locations in the spaces where
I read. I offer this example because every reader has some such
particular quirk that must be factored into the habit of reading.
Perhaps the reader is farsighted and needs to hold the book at
arm’s length, or has weak hands that cannot hold a heavy book
for long, or sits in a wheelchair and must accommodate reading
postures to that bodily fact, or has insomnia and reads in bed
for hours, or suffers from chronic fatigue and cannot read for
long, or is easily distracted and must seek extremely quiet read-
ing spaces, or is blind and reads in Braille, and so endlessly on.
Despite the inexorable logic of reading practice, and despite the
social construction of the reading body, people devise their own
reading procedures and habits in the context of their own daily
needs.
The core of Reading and the Body consists of four chapters that
explore the visceral, habitual reading body:
Chapter 1 is a study of eye movement, based on recent
oculomotor research, which demonstrates the specificity of the
embodiment of reading. The muscles that move the eyes adapt to
the demands of the printed text, working on the scale of thousands
of an inch and thousands of a second, all necessarily below the
awareness of the reader, so that the intricacy of the physical task
does not distract from the hermeneutic task. Printed texts impose
strict rules on eye movement. The eyes must focus on a unit of
print, then slide to the right (in English) in a movement called a
“saccade,” then land at a strategic point in the next unit of print,
Introduction 39
repeat until the end of the line, then take a long saccade back and
down to the left, to focus on the first unit of print in the next line.
In the codex, this “Z path” is the only pattern of eye movement
that will allow the reader to encounter the entire text. The physical
capabilities of the human eye encounter the demands of the semi-
otic and graphic codes of the text. If these rules are not followed,
reading is compromised. Thus, all reading begins with an act of
obedience, a submission to the contingent rules of the graphic sys-
tem and to the culture that creates and sustains it. Even the most
“resistant” reading is a compliant reading on the oculomotor level.
Reading is one of the primal acts of physical submission, a tacit
acceptance of civilized restrictions. And yet it is possible to uncover
the arbitrariness of the code and defy its conventions. Many visual
artists interested in print have created works that do not follow
the standard rules of graphic presentation, reminding us that even
the most powerful and invisible rules can be broken. The example
I offer in this chapter is the work of Jenny Holzer, a visual artist
whose pieces require the reader’s eyes to operate outside the Z
path, in a quiet act of insurrection. The chapter also examines eye
movement in digital reading, which often follows a “desire path”
through the intertextual world, rather than submitting to the Z
path rules of the codex. This change has been subtle but funda-
mental, altering the relationship between the body and the law.
Chapter 2 is an analysis of reading postures, reflecting on the
muscular operations of the hand that grasps the book and the pos-
tures that support its work. Reading postures adapt intelligently to
the material conditions of reading: the size and weight of the book,
the size of the font, the physical strength of the reader, the available
light, the reader’s visual acuity, the furniture, the social surround-
ings, the length of the reading session. All these factors influence
the postures the reader will adopt, though most of the calcula-
tions occur unconsciously. Practiced readers tend to adopt efficient
postures. We learn through practice how to manipulate the book
and adapt our postures and movements to the reading situation.
We learn how to grasp the book, to carry its weight in our hands,
to turn the pages, to write in the margins. We make small engi-
neering decisions about how to support the hands or how to place
the book on the desk at just the right angle. These physical reading
skills operate as motor programs, synaptic and haptic connections
that eventually become part of the cognitive scaffolding of the
practice. Motor programs are produced by pedagogy—we learn

the physical skills necessary for the task within the community of
the practice. Thus, the culture of the practice becomes embodied
in the neuromuscular network, which engages in the hermeneutic
encounter with the semiotics of the text. This chapter explores the
significance of posture by examining photographs, paintings and
other visual representations of the reading body. I engage in close
readings of these images, attempting to articulate the details of the
posture, to place the representations in their historical contexts,
and to speculate on the ways that the posture embodies a reading
strategy.
Chapter 3 focuses on reading as a physical habit. One of the
most intriguing things about the reading body is that it associates
by habit the “cerebral” act of reading with daily processes of the
“gross physical body.” People read as they eat, as they fall asleep, as
they sit on the toilet, as they bathe, as they lie on the beach. Thus
reading becomes associated with physical pleasure and the habitual
life of the body. The visceral body here asserts its claim to reading,
no matter how “mental” it seems: reading is a physical habit, one
among many. This chapter takes as its example the habitual associa-
tion of reading and eating. People eating alone often read, whether
at their own breakfast table or in public at a cafe. Combining these
two habits requires a complicated dance of the hands, manipulat-
ing the book and the food, complying with the social norms of
eating behavior while accomplishing the physical tasks of reading.
Reading is subject to the social rules of any habit with which it
is connected, and eating is subject to particularly complex social
rules in which the habit of reading becomes entangled. In addi-
tion, reading and eating are associated on the symbolic level.
A long tradition in Western culture uses eating as a metaphor for
reading. Books are the food of the soul, reading is “devouring” or
“ruminating” or “digesting.” This chapter examines this symbolic
association from a psychoanalytic perspective, applying analytical
insights about eating as oral aggression to an understanding of the
relationship between the reader and the text. Reading is part of
habitual life, the daily regimen of physical practices. Reading may
be how we encounter the mind of god or how we experience the
pure pleasure of poetic language or the intricacy of philosophical
analysis, but it is also a mundane bodily habit, practiced in connec-
tion with our most intimate and private physical acts.
Introduction 41
Chapter 4 places the reading body in physical space. Readers

create spaces around their practice—domestic spaces perfectly
designed for comfort reading, professional spaces that encourage
productive and precise reading practices. But readers also operate
in physical spaces not designed for reading at all—on subways, in
restaurants, in public parks, on the beach, in the dentist’s office.
These public acts of reading produce complex social-psychological
situations. The very act of reading requires the reorientation
of awareness away from the surrounding world and toward the
demanding process of textual comprehension. In spaces designed
for reading, this textual attention is expected and supported. But in
public spaces, the preoccupied reader is absent from the physi-
cal and social situation, unavailable for interaction, off in another
world. Readers thus seem antisocial, more concerned about their
own mental experience than about the world going on around
them. That surround does not completely disappear—readers still
monitor the space at least minimally—and it often factors into
the reading experience as a distraction, as a challenge to the task.
This chapter examines this dynamic of attention and distraction as
the challenge posed by reading to the body. Can you attend to the
task as intensely and as long as necessary, creating a space for your
reading body in a world that never ceases to require your atten-
tion? The chapter also explores the physical spaces that readers
create for themselves, and their methods of adapting their reading
to whatever space they occupy.
The final chapter of Reading and the Body takes on the future of
reading, around the question of how embodiment changes when
we read in digital environments. Many scholars have pointed out
the vast differences between the codex and the hypertext. Some
see these differences as revolutionary improvement in the read-
ing experience, with improved access, reader empowerment, and
infinite connectivity. Others see it as a cultural catastrophe, with
textual specificity lost in the intertextual labyrinth, with atten-
tion deficit readers incapable of discernment and critical capacity,
and with superficial reading as the cultural norm. I argue in this
chapter that the reading body acquires new operational skills in
digital environments. The eyes no longer move only in the Z path.
The hands learn to manipulate the device that delivers the text.
Habits change, ways of occupying space change. But the new forms
of reading still require the reader’s submission to a strict protocol.
The hands must follow the rules of the device and the networks
it engages. Reading still operates as a habit among other habits in
everyday life. Reading on electronic devices is still subject to social
rules and situational pressures. Hypertext reading is not liberated
into a utopian open system. It still must submit to and incorpo-
rate operational procedures set by powerful institutions that train
readers to experience those procedures as inevitable, insuring the
sustainability of the institutions. The challenge remains for readers
to question the operations of the system, even as they enjoy the
benefits of its extension and ease of access.
1
T h e R e a di ng E y e
H e x is a n d H e r m e n eu t ics
M ost accounts of the reading process describe the relationship

between the reader and the text in mentalist terms—the mind of the
reader encounters the meaning of the text. These accounts efface
the physical book and the body of the reader, or treat them as
mere instruments of the mind of the author and the reader. Even a
phenomenologist like George Poulet asserts the pure “interiority”
of the reader’s experience, an interiority that entails “the disap-
pearance of the object” of the book. Poulet explains that the physi-
cal book “is still there, and at the same time it is there no longer,
it is nowhere. That object wholly object, that thing made of paper,
as there are things made of metal or porcelain, that object is no
more, or at least it is as if it no longer existed, as long as I read the
book. For the book is no longer a material reality.” Poulet’s “as if”
suggests that we take this description as figurative—he backs away
from asserting the literal disappearance of the book in favor of an
account of how the experience of reading feels to the reader—but
then he repeats the claim: “in order to exist as mental objects they
must relinquish their existence as real objects.” ( “Criticism and
the Experience of Interiority,” 42–43) But, when we remember
the undeniable fact that reading is a physical act, Poulet’s claim
seems nonsensical. In the act of reading, there is no question—the
book is not “nowhere,” it is right in front of my eyes. And it can
only exist as a mental object if it exists as a material object, acces-
sible to highly disciplined visual operations.
The encounter between reader and text is grounded in a visual
fact—the retina takes in the light reflecting off the page of the
book. As the eyes focus on the page, light reflects off the white
background behind and around the negative space of the black

marks, and then that intricate pattern of reflected light literally
enters the body. Reading is not detached from the material world,
despite all our feelings that it takes us away from the world around
us. Material rays of light enter into the flesh and blood of the
eyes. The brain immediately begins to make sense of the electrical
impulses created by the light, recognizing the pattern as a mean-
ingful design, drawing on its memory of similar experiences to
connect the pattern to parts of the brain that process incoming
language, store verbal memory, and activate syntactic knowledge.
The brain, trained by habit and culture, constructs meaning in
the light, and the complex process of hermeneutic work begins.
The emerging meaning of the text before us, processed by an
intelligent, trained body, evokes the chemical and neural events
of emotion, memory, and interpretation. Every brain has been
uniquely wired by its genetic inheritance and its experience of the
world, including experiences of texts. Every text it encounters—
every experience it has —rewires it again, making new neural con-
nections that will then make sense of each new text. Each brain
makes its own unique sense of the reflected light, as a function of
its experiential history.
These patterns of light are not randomly generated. The author
of the text and the producers of the book have created the precise
graphic pattern of the material text, drawing on the fact that
particular patterns of black and white are associated by conven-
tion with particular sounds and meanings within a cultural system
shared by the generator and the interpreter of the pattern, which
is acquired by the reader through a formal and informal pedagogi-
cal process. The material encounter between the eye and the light
gains meaning only if this learning has occurred. This pedagogy
is not limited to the brain. The eyes themselves must learn how
to operate, the hands that hold and manipulate the book must
learn their skills, the body must learn how to assume postures that
support the work of reading—how to hold the book so the light
strikes it and reflects efficiently into the eyes, how to support the
book for long periods of time so the eyes can process its huge
expanses of print, etc. The body of the reader must, over a lifetime
of hermeneutic experience, develop habits that integrate reading
into daily life. In all these bodily works, the rules and conven-
tions of culture never disappear. The conventions of print culture
The Reading Eye 45
determine the work of the eyes and hands. Social rules determine
the acceptable postures and everyday habits of the reading body.
The material brain in the material body reads material texts in a
material world, a world already socially structured with potential
meaning, a world available to the work of the socially structured
material body.
In the act of reading the eyes must move with great precision
because the pattern of light unfolds across the graphic page and
engages the eyes in a temporal process as they follow the emerg-
ing text. They fixate on a word or phrase until it is comprehended,
then leap to the next meaningful unit, in a movement called a sac-
cade. They leap relentlessly to the right until the end of the line,
then take a long slide back down and to the left, to the beginning
of the next line, where they leap again to the right, fixating on
each meaningful unit. Oculomotor scientists call this movement
pattern a Z path, and it is the only eye movement that guarantees
an encounter with the entire text and produces maximum com-
prehension. When the eyes come to the end of the last line on the
page, they leap high and to the right, aiming for the first meaning-
ful unit in the block of print on the facing page, or they wait in
abeyance until the hands turn the page and present them with a
new graphic display. Each leap is precisely calculated in space and
time. The eyes learn to find the right landing zone in the word,
where the core of the meaning lies, then use that spot as a launch-
ing site toward the following word. The timing is complex and
crucial. The eyes should fixate just long enough to achieve compre-
hension. Too little time and the word becomes a blur, too much,
and the word becomes a bore. The eyes have to move on quickly
so the brain can grasp the units as a meaningful sequence rather
than as isolated entities. These leaps require extreme oculomotor
control. The spatial units are thousandths of an inch. The fixa-
tions last for thousandths of a second. These physical and cogni-
tive demands require a lifetime of training and practice. What we
think of as good readers in the cognitive sense are also in fact good
micro-athletes, in subtle control of complex motor processes. Great
readers leap with great skill.
Over time, the eyes incorporate the reader’s knowledge of the
language. They leap with greater speed when they encounter units
they recognize as meaningful through repeated practice, they antic-
ipate landing zones on the basis of familiar syntactic structures, and
they adapt their movements when the anticipation proves incor-

rect. They move intelligently, fixating efficiently. They learn the
visual code and adapt to its demands. The eyes learn to negotiate
the graphic environment as a field of meaning with units that must
be comprehended, and also as a field of play, a series of physi-
cally and cognitively efficient sites for landing and leaping. In this
process, the eyes adapt on the fly, making high-frequency spatial
decisions as the unfamiliar graphic environment emerges before
them along the line of print. The eyes and the brain don’t know
what’s coming, so every leap must be improvised. This difficult
task becomes more efficient over time with increasing mastery of
the graphic code. Cognitive competence in the graphic, semiotic
system and thus in the culture in which it makes sense is impossible
without a complex, muscular competence that operates below con-
scious awareness in the graphic space of the text, and this muscular
competence is in turn impossible without code mastery.
The extreme oculomotor skill of reading requires training and
practice. The novice reader learns from parents and siblings who
model the movements of the eye and reinforce them with nods
of the head and hand gestures. The parents are not thinking of
themselves as teachers of oculomotor skill and the young readers
are not thinking about how they are moving their eyes, they are all
thinking about the textual content—the story—and yet a powerful
somatic pedagogy is enacted. Later, much of the pedagogic work
of elementary schooling will reinforce and refine those basic skills.
Teachers and reading program designers think explicitly about
how the most efficient habits of reading can be inculcated. They
take students through drills that identify meaningful units and effi-
cient movement strategies. They explicitly teach the code, so that
learners can begin to internalize it, automatize it, and work it into
their muscle memory. After this elementary schooling, we take it
for granted that the eyes know their work, but then we practice
and refine those movements for the rest of our reading lives.
In Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, Pierre
Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron make the scandalous claim
that “All pedagogic action is, objectively, symbolic violence inso-
far as it is the imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary
power” (5). The code that the eyes must master in reading is
certainly arbitrary in Bourdieu and Passeron’s terms—there are
other meaningful graphic codes, and there is nothing special or
The Reading Eye 47
natural about ours. In other print systems, the eyes must move
right to left, or down a column of print. And yet this arbitrary
code demands the total submission of the eyes and the cognitive
processes they embody. If they do not follow the directions of
the code, they cannot find meaning in it. The reader’s submis-
sion must reach down into neurons and muscles that cannot be
controlled by consciousness. Thus, an arbitrary code is imposed
by pedagogic power on the operational unconscious of cognition.
The pedagogic institutions that teach and enforce the rules of
reading shape their subjects’ ways of operating in social space.
As Katharine Breen says in Imagining an English Reading Public,
1150–1400, when the habitus of reading has become fully embod-
ied and automatic, the reader has become the teacher: “Habitus
strives to make the word flesh by serving as a physical replacement
for the teacher, giving the teacher’s words a stable meaning that
is anchored in the bodily practice”(69). Reading requires a dis-
cipline of the senses, including “training the eyes to read” (89).
Breen emphasizes that the acceptance of this bodily discipline
implies and encourages a more fundamental obedience to author-
ity: “the habitus of reading and processing authoritative language
has an ordering effect that is distinct from the propositional con-
tent of the words” (85). No matter what we read, she suggests,
the very act of reading creates “an infrastructure in the soul” (74),
a predisposition to accept the rules of the practice and the social
structures in which it operates. Coming from a Foucauldian per-
spective, Elizabeth Grosz says that practices link “the most mas-
sive cultural movements to the most minute day-by-day events in
interpersonal life” (Volatile Bodies, 147), right down to the minute
movements of the reading eye.
Oculomotor scientists understand eye movement as the outcome
of an interaction between the inherent physical capabilities of
the eyes of readers and the skills learned from prolonged reading
practice. As Francoise Vitu and Kevin O’Regan put it, “eye move-
ments in reading result both from the on-going visual and linguis-
tic processing of the encountered words and from visuo-motor
constraints” (381). The eyes, muscles, and nerves that control
them have purely physical limits as instruments of reading. They
can focus only on a given number of characters; there is a maxi-
mum saccadic speed. But, within these somato-mechanical limits,
there is a wide variety of performance, as a function of linguistic
facility and reading experience. Genetic capabilities, for the eyes of

the human species and for a given reader’s eyes, are modified by
socially acquired cultural capabilities. Mastery of language leads
to oculomotor mastery. Reading is a physical skill that can be
improved by repetition and practice.
The movement of the eye in reading involves many interrelated
factors. Individual readers have different foveal capacity—the width
of effective focus. They also have different para-foveal and periph-
eral visual areas—the width of near-focus and potential visual span.
These optical differences produce efficiency differences. A larger
foveal field allows for fewer fixations and thus faster reading.
Readers also differ in the length and speed of saccades, the num-
ber of words skipped, the frequency of regressions or refixations,
the ability to find optimum word viewing locations, and the length
of time between fixation and word recognition. And all of these
factors are influenced by familiarity with the particular visual code
that the eye habitually encounters.
Oculomotor scientist Keith Rayner explains that text difficulty
produces decreased saccade length, longer fixations, and a greater
number of regressions (5). That is, readers working with dense
and/or unfamiliar texts are more likely to take in fewer words
per fixation, linger over challenging words, and refix on words
not fully comprehended in one fixation. The size of foveal span
is “modulated” by word length and reading skill—good readers
have a wider span (7). The duration of each fixation is influenced
by syntax and semantics. Fixation time is shortest when the eyes
encounter a word frequently repeated in the text, a word that
makes immediate contextual sense, or a word that partakes in clear
semantic relationships. Duration increases when the eyes encoun-
ter a rare word, a word that does not have a clear reference, or
a word that must be disambiguated syntactically (10). Cognitive
and linguistic processes, Rayner argues, directly affect oculomotor
efficiency. The larger the semantic capabilities of the reader, the
less frequently rare words will be encountered, and the better the
reader understands the syntax, the quicker the disambiguation.
The eyes can then move more efficiently (See also Rayner and
Morris, 179–180).
Saccades are “triggered in real time by ongoing processing of
the encountered words” (Vitu and O’Regan, 382). Saccades are
not metronomic. The reader’s eyes react and adapt to the units of
The Reading Eye 49
meaning they encounter in improvised adjustments that require

microseconds. Such improvisation is characteristic of practices as
Bourdieu understands them: they do not proceed by rigid rules
but by constant monitoring of the social surround that trigger
subtle adjustments in the practice. The eyes anticipate on the basis
of syntactic projections and they know to shorten the duration of
fixations when the semantics are easy. These improvisations require
no conscious intervention, but are directly a function of discipline
and skill developed over time. In a similar vein, Vitu and O’Regan
show that refixation decreases as a function of the familiarity and
context of a word. The eyes know when they can move with maxi-
mum efficiency, and they calculate their needs in the real-time flow
of the reading experience.
The eyes also learn where to land in a word. They find the
“optimal viewing location” within the word, and that spot becomes
the landing zone they target and the place they fixate the longest
(see Everatt, Bradshaw, and Hibbard). That optimal viewing loca-
tion is the spot in the word where the meaning is marked by dis-
tinctiveness. For example, in the word “location” the “tion” gives
less information than the “loca,” and skilled readers will land on
that meaningful spot rather than waste time on a part of the word
that can be relegated to parafoveal attention. Again we see mastery
of subtle and ongoing oculomotor processes determined by mas-
tery of the graphic-linguistic code. As in any practice, experience
produces skill.
These infinitesimal adjustments and improvisations are remind-
ers of the uncanny skill that bodies can acquire, without much
awareness or intentional concentration, within the disciplines
of a practice. Just as a carpenter adjusts the angle of the saw to
compensate for the grain of the wood, or a golfer strikes the ball
with a precision produced by a largely unconscious calculation of
course conditions, or a driver steers a car subtly through constantly
changing traffic patterns, a reader develops adaptable and nimble
visual skills. Merleau-Ponty once described this embodied micro-
precision in the brushwork of Matisse:
A camera once recorded the work of Matisse in slow motion.

The impression was prodigious, so much so that Matisse himself was
moved, they say. That same brush which, seen with the naked eye,
leaped from one act to another, was seen to meditate in a solemn and
expanding time—in the imminence of a world’s creation—to try ten

possible movements, dance in front of the canvas, brush it lightly
several times, and crash down finally like a lightning stroke upon the
one line necessary. (Signs, 45)
In their more mundane and modest work, the eyes of the reader
leap from one fixation to the next, anticipating but not knowing
what graphic pattern will present itself, adjusting in the midst of
the leap as the next unit of meaning comes into peripheral vision,
finding the most efficient landing zone, focusing and moving on,
all in a fraction of a second. The result of this microscopic physical
grace is not as grand as the masterpieces produced by Matisse’s
embodied genius—its only product is an efficient reading experi-
ence. And this skill is not exceptional—it is available to almost
anyone who reads regularly. And yet the precision and speed of
this ordinary task speaks to the intelligence of the human body, its
ability to acquire astonishing skills in everyday practices.
Many cognitive scientists argue that these embodied skills con-
tribute to the operation of consciousness and rational thought.
As Lawrence Shapiro says in The Mind Incarnate:
The body in many ways “preprocesses” the information that the

brain receives and in other ways affects how the brain manages
information. The body is more than simply a shell for the mind,
more than a vessel that the mind pilots. The body is profoundly
involved in mental operations. . . . the mind depends on the partici-
pation of the body in order to execute its various tasks. (187)
It is much easier to think of reading as embodied in the brain

rather than in the eyes or the hands or the feet, but Shapiro wants
to emphasize that “mind is realized in a complex of processes
spread across brain, viscera, and other parts of the body” (218).
Even the oculomotor muscles in their skillful, microscopic leaps are
the embodied mind at work on the cognitive task of reading. That
is, the operations of the eyes in reading are part of what George
Lakoff and Mark Johnson—among many others—call “the cogni-
tive unconscious” (13). They argue that “most of our thought is
unconscious, not in the Freudian sense of being repressed, but
in the sense that it operates beneath the level of cognitive aware-
ness, inaccessible to consciousness and operating too quickly to
be focused on” (10). They call this operating system “the hidden
The Reading Eye 51
hand” that “shapes how we automatically and unconsciously

comprehend what we experience” (13). Repeated cognitive tasks
create “permanent neural connections,” which in turn facilitate the
cognitive task (57). The body provides a neural architecture that
is cognition at work. What cognitive scientists call the cognitive
unconscious or the hidden hand, Bourdieu would call the hexis of
the practice, the body trained for the habitus. The acquisition and
operation of the cognitive unconscious is a social process in which
the values and beliefs of the society become embodied through
everyday practice.
This neural architecture is different for every reader. The read-
er’s eyes are idiosyncratic, with different acuity, focal capability, and
movement patterns. Though the path through the text cannot be
altered without losing comprehension, it is negotiated differently
by every pair of eyes that moves down the line of print—different
landing zones, fixation durations, saccadic frequencies, foveal spans.
Even the same reader encountering exactly the same line of print
does not take exactly the same micro-journey the second time.
Haste might quicken the pace, fatigue might slow it. Tired eyes
take longer to comprehend even familiar words. Each reading is a
function of specific bodily, social, and textual situations and these
differences affect the cognitive unconscious. But, over time, read-
ers do develop distinctive oculomotor habits and they adapt to the
strict rules of the graphic system. They train their eyes for cognitive
and physical efficiency.
Evan Thompson in his book Mind in Life calls the result of
this training “skillful know how in situated and embodied action”
(11). “Mental life,” he argues, “is also bodily life and is situated
in the world. The roots of mental life lie not simply in the brain,
but ramify through the body and environment. Our mental lives
involve our bodies and the world beyond the surface membrane
of our organism, and therefore cannot be reduced simply to brain
processes inside the head” (ix). It is not just that the eyes make
possible the work of the reading mind, but that the operation of
the eyes is the mind at work. It is the job of this “skillful know
how” of the reading eye to move through the graphic text, which
is the “situation,” the “world” that the reading mind encounters.
Bourdieu sees all practices as involving such skillful know how, an
ability to put the habitus into play in novel situations that require
improvised action within the unquestioned rules of the practice.
The hexis of the eye must be so deep that it allows that disciplined
flexibility without losing accuracy.
Randall D. Beer calls this bodily intelligence “adaptive behavior,
the . . . ability to cope with the complex, dynamic, unpredictable
world in which we live.” This world, he says, “is full of complex,
ill-defined problems which must be solved on a regular basis sim-
ply in order to survive. Our higher cognitive functions are our own
particularly human elaborations of this more basic competence for
effectively coping with the world” (11). The reading eye must
adapt to all of the factors beyond its control in the reading experi-
ence. It must function within the cognitive abilities of the reading
subject, with the graphic realities of the text, with the available
light, with potentially distracting surroundings. Successful adapta-
tion leads to efficient reading, and success is a function of practice
within the arbitrary rules of graphic and linguistic codes.
Bourdieu and Passeron define the arbitrary in the following
terms:
The selection of meanings which objectively defines a group’s or a

class’s culture as a symbolic system is arbitrary insofar as the struc-
ture and functions of that culture cannot be deduced from any uni-
versal principle, whether physical, biological or spiritual, not being
linked by any sort of internal relation to “the nature of things” or
any “human nature. (Reproduction, 8)
There is nothing natural about the tasks required of the eye

in reading. Every element of the graphic field is organized in a
culture-specific way and the eye must learn and obey the rules of
the field. Take the “left to right” rule as an example. The very
existence of graphic systems that move the eyes from right to left
shows the arbitrariness of the convention. But the fact that it is
arbitrary does not diminish its power. If you read English from
right to left, in defiance of the code, there is absolutely no mean-
ing to be found. Readers are free to do so, but only gibberish
will result. And that is only the most obvious rule of the graphic
system. The eye must also learn that when it gets to the last word
on the line, it has to slide back to the left and down, following the
Z path, with no fixations, no focal content, until it arrives at the
first unit on the left in the next line. Graphic meaning in English is
fundamentally horizontal—the next meaningful unit is always just
The Reading Eye 53
to the right. But a page can only be so wide, so, as a concession,

the print is designed to appear again at the left on the line below,
where it again becomes horizontal. If you look at a page of print
without preconceptions, there is nothing to tell you that only the
horizontal relationships matter. But of course in a standard page
of print the vertical, like the right to left, is meaningless. Words
are not syntactically related to the words above or below them,
or at any graphic angle. All of these rules are conventions dictated
by the graphic design of the page and the industrial design of the
book, contingent practices with a history of their own, implicated
in economic and social practices that may seem irrelevant to the
cognitive work of reading. But the hermeneutic task can only be
accomplished if the eye submits to these conventions.
The work of the eyes in reading is affected by changes in material
culture. Ronald J. Zboray, for example, in his work on early nineteenth-
century reading in America, asks us to imagine what it would be like
to read by the dubious light cast by whale-oil lamps or without
corrective eye glasses (194). As changes in the physical conditions
of reading occur, the eyes of the reader must adjust. And especially,
as the format of the book changes, the ocular task changes, requir-
ing physical adaptation and neural plasticity. One of the most sig-
nificant changes in the history of reading is the shift from a culture
of oral, public reading to the practice of silent, private reading.
As Alberto Manguel reminds us in The History of Reading, this
shift occurred over centuries because of changes in the availabil-
ity of books, increasing literacy rates, the production of more and
more private spaces in public and domestic architecture, and many
other factors. Paul Saenger’s work Space between Words: The Origins
of Silent Reading emphasizes that the shift from scripta continua
to print conventions that required a space between words contrib-
uted to the rise of silent reading. Scripts that do not provide word
separation are very difficult to comprehend, requiring the reader
to slow down and articulate the words so that the continuous flow
of letters on the page can be divided by the reader into meaning-
ful units. Oculomotor scientists have shown that the eyes learn to
move confidently from one unit of meaning to the next, but what
do they do if there are no graphically delineated meaningful units?
They move more tentatively, and their work is enabled by an oral
performance that highlights distinctive words within the graphic
stream. The shift in print conventions changed the physiology
of reading: “Word separation, by altering the neurophysiological

process of reading, simplified the act of reading, enabling both
the medieval and modern reader to receive silently and simultane-
ously the text and encoded information that facilitate both com-
prehension and oral performance” (13). The eyes can learn how
to maneuver in any graphic environment and to process printed
language within the conventions of any format.
The reading eye even has to learn that it’s the black that is
meaningful, against a meaningless white background. There is no
message to be found in the space against which the black meaning
plays, creating the pattern which organizes the light reflecting off
the white. There is white within and around each mark, between
the meaningful units, between the lines of print, and around the
block of lines, but it must be processed only as a frame that orga-
nizes the print, sets off units, and frames the entire display, separat-
ing it visually from the world behind and around the book. It is
of course absurd and unthinkable to read the white, just as it is to
read vertically, or at an angle, or right to left. Unthinkable, but not
unnatural. However, although the rules are arbitrary and cultural,
if you attempt any of these nonsensical operations, you will feel
a somatic effect—the eyes will move very slowly, saccades will be
very short, the meaning of each word will be realized more slowly.
And finally, you will feel the physical pain and fatigue of eyestrain
and headache, attempting movements that years of practice have
ruled out. The body itself tells us that it cannot operate efficiently
without submission to the arbitrary rules.
Z path reading is required for maximum comprehension, but its
rules can be suspended if the reader has other intentions. A bored
reader, for example, might simply skip units of meaning, but com-
prehension is obviously compromised. In more disciplined scan-
ning methods like skimming and searching, which seek specific
information relevant to the desires of the reader, the eyes move
across and down the page, fixating only when they encounter
what the reader defines as meaningful units. They inscribe what
oculomotor scientists call a desire path, generated by the inten-
tions of the reader rather than the conventions of graphic presenta-
tion. Even in search mode, though, when the eyes encounter the
words they desire, they revert to Z path reading for full compre-
hension of the highlighted text. These maneuvers are available to
the reader of traditional books, but they are required of readers in
The Reading Eye 55
digital environments. As I will discuss more fully in the final chap-

ter, online reading creates a much more fluid and unpredictable
graphic field for the eyes to scan. They may be called on to move
in almost any direction, because of the decentered visual array of
many websites and because of the digital reader’s desire to take
advantage of the intertextuality and connectivity of the internet.
Nevertheless, even in digital environments, there are rules for the
reader’s eyes, prompts and protocols that must be followed if the
desired texts are to be found, and the eyes learn to adapt to these
constraints.
That is to say, the eyes must be disciplined in Foucault’s sense
of the term. They must acquire an oculomotor dressage, the eques-
trian term Foucault uses to describe micro-disciplines of the body.
Readers must be willing to follow the rules precisely, at every
moment, in every reading event. These are the rules, and no reader
is free to challenge them. The reader must be willing to submit—
to be docile, Foucault would say—in this tiny way, to accept the
discipline of the practice, or else the outcome cannot be achieved.
To read against these rules would be to be mad. There is no reader
so avant-garde, so eager to challenge authority, so resistant to
power, who is not willing to submit to these most arbitrary con-
ventions. Learning to read is learning obedience. “Sit still and be
quiet,” parents and teachers say to young readers. There is no read-
ing without that bodily submission. And it does not even need to
be said: “Move your eyes left to right, fixate on each unit of print,
ignore the white, pay no attention to the vertical.” Obedience
without command.
Reading is not the only behavior that requires a pattern of fixa-
tion and saccade. Oculomotor scientists are interested in any task
that requires eye movement—driving, shooting a basketball, view-
ing a film—all tasks that require the scanning of a scene for mean-
ingful events. In the act of driving, for example, we scan the visual
field and then fixate on relevant features—traffic signs, moving
vehicles, instruments and controls, cups of coffee—then scan
again, in improvised saccades, responding to visual cues, guided
by our practiced skill in the task. Or in looking at a great paint-
ing, we move the eyes, focusing on detail after detail, following,
we feel, the promptings of an artist who wants our eyes to move
in just that pattern, but retaining, we also feel, the freedom to
move our eyes as we wish, finding the features that matter. But in
reading for maximum comprehension there is almost no ocular

freedom. The rules of scanning and fixation are rigid. Always scan
to the immediate right. Stop on each meaningful unit. Move right
again. You may fixate longer or move more quickly, but you must
encounter the visual targets in exactly the prescribed order. Among
the somatic-cognitive tasks that require scan and fixation, that is
to say, reading is a highly disciplined, relentlessly linear practice.
There is improvisation, but only within the rules.
Charles Taylor’s article “To Follow a Rule . . . ” emphasizes that
Bourdieu combines a focus on “embodied agency” with a sense of
“social embedding” (32). Skillful know-how and embodied cogni-
tion do not appear spontaneously out of practices. They are incul-
cated, consciously and unconsciously, within social interactions.
The habitus of a practice is structured by the social reality in which
it develops. Thus, for example, Bourdieu explains in Distinction
that the practice of golf is shaped by an obsession with technique
and technology, which also typifies the work life of the economic
elite who dominates the game, while the practice of rugby is shaped
by an ethic of physical courage that reflects the working-class roots
of its typical players (208–225). Practices have, in Marxist terms, a
relative autonomy: because they have a complex internal dynamic,
they cannot be reduced to superstructural reflections of economic
reality, but they also cannot be understood outside a social and
economic context.
Thus Bourdieu and Passeron argue that practices like reading
are the subjects of an “implicit pedagogy,” which is “the uncon-
scious inculcation of principles which manifest themselves only in
their practical state” and an “explicit pedagogy,” which proceeds
by methodical and formalized principles. The goal of pedagogy is
reproduction, both of its own institutional power and of the society
in which it operates. This pedagogic power is “never more total
than when it is totally unconscious” (Reproduction, 13). Neither
the teacher nor the student is aware of the goal of reproduction;
they are caught up in more immediate and practical matters, like
learning how to move the eyes while reading, but in the creation
of this primal obedience, they are laying the groundwork for a
more pervasive acceptance of social disciplines. The goal of this
pedagogy is to create the cognitive unconscious of which neurosci-
entists speak. Bourdieu and Passeron argue that the more effective
the pedagogy, the better it can “conceal more and more completely
The Reading Eye 57
the objective truth of the habitus as the internalization of the prin-

ciples of a cultural arbitrary” (39). The work of pedagogy is to
create a misperception, a failure to recognize the arbitrariness of
the code by which the practice proceeds, a willingness to accept
the code as the inevitable real, as though no alternative were avail-
able. Pedagogy produces the ideological effect of representing the
social as the natural and therefore the unchangeable.
And if such a fundamental pedagogy as the training of the eye
for reading is successful, it brings about a willingness to obey, to
follow orders without those in power “resorting to external repres-
sion or, in particular, physical coercion” (36). No need for real
violence when symbolic violence will do. The training of the read-
ing body seems a perfect example of what Bourdieu and Passeron
call “pedagogic work,” which is: “a process of inculcation which
must last long enough to produce a durable training, i.e. a habitus, the
product of internalization of the principles of a cultural arbitrary
capable of perpetuating itself after pedagogic action has ceased and
thereby of perpetuating in practices the principles of the internal-
ized arbitrary” (31). Such a foundational habitus must be “dura-
ble,” “transposable” (“capable of generating practices conforming
with the principles of the inculcated arbitrary in a greater num-
ber of different fields”), and “exhaustive” (33–34). In the case
of reading, it is a truism to observe that successful reading is the
foundation for success in any and all intellectual and professional
fields. This is so because reading gives access to information neces-
sary for functioning in those fields, but also because learning to
read is a training in the acceptance of rules beyond or beneath our
comprehension, an acceptance necessary for all successful practice.
For all practices are rule-governed; the purpose of the practice
generates the logic of its accomplishment. Engaging in a practice,
then, requires respect for that logic and submission to those rules.
Accepting the rules of reading, from the physical procedures to
the conventions of linguistic comprehension to the strategies of
interpretive communities, allows the reader access to the text and
to meaningful conversation with others who share the practice.
The habitus of reading is at work in all these registers, governing
and constraining every act of the reading body, from the move-
ment of the eye to the composition of an interpretation or “read-
ing.” Accepting the pedagogy of the former makes possible the
regulated improvisation of the latter.
In Language and Symbolic Power, Bourdieu argues that “the most

rigidly rationalized law is never anything more than an act of social
magic that works” (42). Here the phrase “social magic” rearticu-
lates the idea expressed in Reproduction as “symbolic violence,”
the imposition of an arbitrary (i. e., culturally and socially pro-
duced) law as if it were a universal truth or an inherent element in
human nature. For Bourdieu, the pedagogy of language is particu-
larly important in the process of socialization because “the code, in
the sense of cipher, that governs written language, which is identi-
fied as correct language, as opposed to the implicitly inferior con-
versational language, acquires the force of law in and through the
educational system” (49). In this context, Bourdieu is discussing
the struggle between official, academic French as opposed to any
patois or spoken dialect. But is teaching the physical mechanics of
reading not an element in the same struggle, an attempt to teach
young readers that they must submit to the code if they are to suc-
ceed in the educational, economic, and social marketplace?
This teaching is effective as a social strategy because “the factors
which are most influential in the formation of the habitus are
transmitted . . . through suggestions inscribed in the most appar-
ently insignificant aspects of the things, situations and practices
of everyday life” (50–51); and what could be more insignificant,
more mundane, than saccades and fixations, what more practical
than moving the eyes left to right? Bourdieu calls such “injunc-
tions” a “secret code,” which is “silent and insidious, insistent and
insinuating” (51). The family and the educational system partner
in this endeavor, the legitimacy and benignity of which cannot be
questioned, and so the “legitimate transmission of cultural capital
between the generations” is accomplished (61). Bourdieu here uses
the word “legitimate” because the social magic succeeds precisely
in legitimizing these acts of pedagogy, and because, as Foucault says
of disciplinary systems, they are “productive,” in the sense that they
produce a practical benefit—as, for example, being able to “follow”
a text. Without such disciplines, no further learning is possible. One
of the great strengths of Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary systems
is simply that disciplines are not punishments, they are techniques
for increasing productivity so that punishment does not become
necessary. Similarly for Bourdieu, a fundamental trust in social prac-
tices produces a subject who can negotiate the social field with con-
fidence and savoir faire, a sense of how things work and how they
The Reading Eye 59
can be turned to the subject’s advantage. The social powers behind

the practices remain invisible, but the skills and knowledges avail-
able within communities of practice are undeniable. Practices and
the pedagogies that produce them are enablers, not conspiracies of
control. But nevertheless, control is what they create.
Practices are made possible by what Bourdieu calls “doxa,” the
foundations of a social order which “tends to produce . . . the natu-
ralization of its own arbitrariness” (Outline of a Theory of Practice,
164). Doxa are “principles which remain implicit and unformu-
lated, because unquestioned.” Bourdieu argues that “because the
subjective necessity and self-evidence of the commonsense world
are validated by the objective consensus on the sense of the world,
what is essential goes without saying because it comes without saying:
the tradition is silent, not least about itself as a tradition” (167).
To the individual subject, the practical world makes perfect sense
because that sense is shared by all who engage in the practice.
To the practitioner, “disenchantment,” or radical questioning of
these premises, is almost unthinkable (166–167). Bourdieu admits
that contacts with other cultures and their practices, along with
crises within the social world of the practice can allow individuals
in these extraordinary situations to bring doxa into question, but
when that happens, those who control the practice act to impose
“orthodoxy,” a pedagogy of “straight, or rather straightened opin-
ion, which aims, without ever entirely succeeding, at restoring the
primal state of innocence of doxa.” The “existence of competing
possibles” can create “heterodoxies,” which destabilize the practice
and lead to critical opposition to the norms of the social group
constructed around the practice (169). But Bourdieu’s point is
that such disruptions are rare exceptions, and that in the day-to-
day operation of the practice, no one has the time or inclination
to raise such questions. And when they do arise, it is certainly not
in the midst of the practice. Readers, that is to say, might become
aware of the existence of competing orthographic conventions.
Some scripts are read right to left, some vertical. That knowledge
renders apparent the arbitrariness of our own conventions. But it
does not lead practiced readers to attempt to follow alternative
conventions in the act of reading. No one tries to read English
right to left or vertically. The reading body, as I have argued, will
not let them. The knowledge of alternative conventions remains
academic and theoretical, rather than practical.
A complicated case study that deconstructs the arbitrary nature

of reading hexis is provided by the work of visual artist Jenny
Holzer. Many of Holzer’s works involve novel, graphic presenta-
tions of short, epigrammatic verbal statements. Some examples of
these “truisms” are “Abuse of power is no surprise,” “Children are
the most cruel of all,” “Elaboration is a form of pollution,” and
“Action causes more trouble than thought.” Holzer has written
hundreds of these statements. The visual artistry of her work is that
she presents these statements in formats and places we do not usu-
ally associate with serious reading—she projects them on buildings
and monuments, engraves them on public sculptures, prints them
on T-shirts, runs them as LCD messages on Times Square style
news tickers—thus engaging readers in everyday circumstances, as
they go about their daily routines, and at times when reading is
not their conscious project. Her works call out to reading bodies
as they pass by, presenting them with a thought provoking state-
ment in a surprising format. At times, Holzer’s graphic presenta-
tions, especially in LCD format, become so visually complex that
they pose a challenge to conventional reading protocols. These works
tend to appear in museum settings, where viewers can attend to
them for enough time to allow their effects to unfold, for these
works are temporal events: the words appear, move across the dis-
play, and disappear. In the simplest examples, the words move in
what feels like a “natural” way, from right to left, so that the eyes
encounters them in the conventional left to right order. Instead
of engaging in a saccade that moves the eyes down the line of
print, the reader waits for the words to move into the foveal span.
Her aphorisms therefore seem to come up on the reader, imposing
unconventional statements in a conventional word order. But the
presentation can also be much less reassuring. Sometimes, the
words come backwards, sometimes they fly off at angles, some-
times they are overlapped by other words moving in the opposite
direction. Sometimes, as a result, they become unreadable. The
eyes cannot adapt to the work’s graphic challenges.
Take as an example figure 1.1—For Chicago (2008)—a work
that serves as a career retrospective, presenting many of the “tru-
isms” that first appeared in Holzer’s earlier works. For Chicago is
a low rectangle, two and a half inches high, and approximately 27
feet across and 54 feet long. The length of the rectangle is com-
posed of ten tracks through which LED displays flow. Spectators
The Reading Eye 61
Figure 1.1 Jenny Holzer, For Chicago. Photo by Lily Holzer-Greer.
can view the piece either from the left end of the short side or
facing the long side from the bottom of the horizontal display.
At different times, the words face toward either or both of those
viewing locations, making the words easy to read from one loca-
tion, but slightly more difficult from the other. But as the displays
change, disorientation becomes the rule rather than the excep-
tion, no matter where you stand, subjecting even the most willing
reader to intense challenges. In fact, at times the visual fireworks
make For Chicago unreadable. If you stand at the end of the short
side of the piece, most of the time the words emerge at your feet
and then run to the far end of the display, making the words and
sentences easy to read, but sometimes the words emerge from the
far wall, in backwards order, so that it is almost impossible to keep
the syntax of the sentence in mind. The effect is the same as read-
ing a line of print right to left—the connections between the words
are extremely difficult to discern. So why subject the reader to
this misalignment? The intent seems to be to isolate each word,
to strip it of its syntagmatic logic, to turn Holzer’s own punchy,
short sentences into random collections of words that add up to
nothing, despite the clear logic of their original order. Logic itself
seems to be the target, and Holzer sacrifices her own clarity in
order to highlight the arbitrariness of grammar and sentence order.

“A sense of timing is the mark of genius” becomes “genius of mark
the is timing of sense a,” moving at a speed that ensures that the
first word encountered (the last word in the sentence) will disap-
pear under your feet long before the last word (the first in the
sentence) is shown.
And it gets worse. Sometimes the same statement is running
away from you and toward you at the same time. Sometimes the
background changes from bright to dim, or sometimes there is
no background at all, so that there is a shifting ground behind
the words as figures. Sometimes the words move at hyperspeed.
Or the words shift orientation, facing the long side of the array,
making them easy to read only if you move. Or the words move
dimly up the array, oriented to the short side and simultaneously
move brightly down the array, oriented to the long side, making
the resulting overlay unreadable from either position. In these sit-
uations, the array produces literal subtext, as the graphic messages
overlap. But both text and subtext are unreadable. The bright
text is in reverse order, while the subext is too dim and buried
underneath the unreadable bright letters. Simultaneously, you
get words you can read in sentences you can’t reconstruct and
words too ghostly to read, in sentences with a logical but indistinct
syntax. Or the words morph into unreadable font shapes. Or the
backgrounds blink, creating wave effects across the array. Or texts
overlap in confusing time delays. Or . . . whatever patterns of dis-
traction occurred to Holzer as visual programmer.
These works viscerally demonstrate the arbitrariness of linguistic
and graphic codes. Conventions of presentation are ignored, and
unreasonable demands are made on the reading body. The result
is an arresting visual experience that undercuts reading protocols.
Because the reader is forced to violate the oculomotor rules, com-
prehension is impossible and disorientation is inevitable. Viewing
For Chicago is physically uncomfortable, to the point of dizziness
and nausea. In fact, exhibits of her work sometimes include warn-
ing signs to the public that the works might result in seizures!
These physiological responses are ironic reminders of the power
of the arbitrary. It is possible to defy the rules, but there are real
cognitive and physical costs.
Reading practice dwells in the body, learned from the bodies of
others. “Body hexis,” Bourdieu says, “speaks directly to the motor
The Reading Eye 63
function, in the form of a pattern of postures that is both indi-

vidual and systematic, because [it is] linked to a whole system of
techniques involving the body and tools” (Outline of a Theory of
Practice, 87). Thus, in the complex relationship between the read-
ing body and the book, in the body’s postures and gestures, in its
daily habits, right down to its oculomotor operations, we see the
power of the social formation within which the practice of reading
makes sense. Practices have power because the habitus is embodied,
even in the most everyday and “trivial” acts.
In the context of reading, injunctions such as “sit still and
be quiet,” or—so fundamental it need not be said— “read left
to right” are capable of exerting significant influence. Bourdieu
might grudgingly admit that heterodoxy is possible, that doxa can
be brought into question, but the power of embodied practice
pushes constantly against such awareness. It is from this embodi-
ment that we get our sense of the world. In a bravura sentence,
Bourdieu catalogues the power of such sense-making:
This principle is nothing other than the socially informed body, with
its tastes and distastes, its compulsions and repulsions, with, in a
word, all its senses, that is to say, not only the traditional five senses—
which never escape the structuring action of social determinisms—
but also the sense of necessity and the sense of duty, the sense
of direction and the sense of reality, the sense of balance and the
sense of beauty, common sense and the sense of the sacred, tactical
sense and the sense of responsibility, business sense and the sense
of propriety, the sense of humour and the sense of absurdity, moral
sense and the sense of practicality, and so on. (Outline of a Theory
of Practice, 124)
And so on! As though this stunning list of what might seem to

other philosophers to be individual acquisitions or natural traits
but are, Bourdieu asserts, social constructs learned in everyday
life, were only the tip of the iceberg; as though there was noth-
ing human that is not learned in social practices. And might we
as readers add to that list “the sense of vision” and “the sense of
meaning?”
The embodiment of reading does not make it any less cognitive,
emotional, spiritual, philosophical, interpretive, critical, or theo-
retical. The question is how to rethink all these aspects of reading
in embodied terms. The minimal claim is that cognition, emotion,
spirituality, interpretation, and so on, cannot exist except in and

through the body, but such a formulation suggests that some non-
bodily essence—a soul? a ghost in the machine?— is at work in
human beings, and that the body is merely its instrument. The
stronger claim is that all these “mental” operations are the body
at work, shaped by social forces, interacting with its environment,
engaging in these highly specialized human tasks for which it is
genetically capable. In this sense, reading is the body interacting
with a specific semiotic-graphic system that gives it access to infor-
mation, opportunities for emotional experience, spiritual explora-
tion, and the interpretive work of making meaning. None of these
interactions are possible unless the body submits to the arbitrary
procedures of the semiotic code, though out of that submission
emerges the complex, unpredictable, creative process of herme-
neutic work.
The key to that interaction is the saccade. The eyes must move
across and down the page in order to encounter the unfolding of
the verbal substance and temporal logic of the text. These move-
ments are intelligent, anticipating units of meaning and adapting
when expectations are frustrated. The temporal interaction of
anticipation and adaptation recalls in a physiological register the
observations Stanley Fish made early in his career about herme-
neutics as temporal process. Fish says that a sentence is “an event,
something that happens to and with the participation of the reader.
And it is this event, this happening . . . that is, I would argue, the
meaning of the sentence” (“Literature in the Reader,” 72). In this
context, Fish is thinking of a cognitive event, “something that is
happening between the words and the reader’s mind, something
not visible to the naked eye” (74–75). What I would propose is
that saccade as event is the physical analogue and foundation of
temporal hermeneutics. Fish says that his work is “an analysis of
the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as
they succeed one another in time” (73). And words succeed one
another in time for the reader only because the eye moves across
the page. No saccade, no temporal flow. I want to locate reading
in the body, not only in what Fish calls “the active and activating
consciousness of the reader” (83), but also in the active and acti-
vating reading body, to see reading as interpretive consciousness
and reading as visual scan and fixation as the very same process, the
The Reading Eye 65
scan informed by the interpretation, the interpretation disciplined

by the scan.
What oculomotor science teaches is that every visual traversal
of the text is different. A beginning reader will encounter the text
in smaller units, usually one word at a time, because the code
is unfamiliar and must be carefully processed. A skilled reader
will encounter the text in larger units, often groups of words
clearly related by syntax. But even the most skillful reader will be
required to proceed word by word when the words are unfamiliar
or when the syntax is ambiguous. In unfamiliar territory, the eyes
cannot anticipate a landing zone as efficiently and they must lin-
ger in a given fixation until the meaning of the challenging word
becomes clear. Every reader will make these decisions differently,
and thus will encounter the temporality of the text differently—
in different units, for different durations, with different expecta-
tions of what is to come. This would suggest that every reading
is a unique event and thus that every reading produces a new
meaning.
For Fish, the event that occurs in reading is an interplay of expec-
tation, frustration, and reconsideration. One unit of meaning pre-
dicts the next, but the next does not confirm the prediction, which
requires a reconsideration of the premises embedded in the expec-
tation. Thus, texts are what Fish famously called “self-consuming
artifacts,” and thus Fish is able to generate his astonishing micro-
readings of Milton and many others, tracking the unfolding inter-
action between reading minds and textual complexity, based on the
premise that meaning changes as the reader engages in these nego-
tiations with the text (see Self-consuming Artifacts: The Experience of
Seventeenth Century Literature). As we have seen, a similar process
governs oculomotor processing. The eyes anticipate and leap for
what seems to be an efficient landing zone, and if they are correct,
they simply complete the leap, but if their expectations are incor-
rect, they are capable of alterations “in the air,” as I suggested by
citing Merleau-Ponty on Matisse, hovering and micro-correcting
before they move decisively to the next unit of meaning. That
physical adaptability and commitment to improvisation is the same
adaptability that Fish’s reader must make on the cognitive level, a
willingness to hover before committing and to rescind the commit-
ment if the new unit of meaning demands it. If consciousness is the
work of the body, then eye movements and interpretive processing

are works of the very same body.
One of the most interesting passages in Fish’s essay is his analysis
of the origins of the error of objective meaning:
Literature is a kinetic art, but the physical form it assumes prevents

us from seeing its essential nature, even though we do experience
it. The availability of a book to the hand, its presence on a shelf, its
listing in a library catalogue – all of these encourage us to think of
it as a stationary object. Somehow when we put a book down, we
forget that while we were reading, it was moving (pages turning,
lines receding into the past) and forget too that we were moving
with it. (“Literature in the Reader,” 83)
I would certainly agree that literature is a kinetic art, but com-

ing to this passage from the perspective of the reading body makes
me want to question almost every statement in it. For example,
from the visual perspective, it is essential that the book be a sta-
tionary object, at least relative to the eyes of the reader. If the book
is moving as I attempt to scan it, it cannot be read. This is why you
can’t read as you run, or as you ride in a car on a bumpy road. The
eyes must maintain a constant relationship with the book in order
to move across it successfully. The eyes cannot move with preci-
sion across a moving target. It is not the text that moves, it is the
eyes of the reader. I want to return agency to the reader’s body,
replacing the crypto-passive voice construction “pages turning,
lines receding into the past” with “the reader turns the page,” and
“the reader’s eyes move from one line to the next.” I want, that
is, to give Fish’s reader a body—an active body, a body moving
through space and time, a body that makes sense of the signs it
encounters.
The fact that every ocular traversal of the text is unique might
suggest that every “reading” of the text is equally valid. If each
reader encounters the text in a unique spacing, with different units
of meaning receiving fixations of different durations, then we
might say that each encounters a different text and thus is free to
produce a personally authentic reading that cannot be judged by
standards created by others who have produced their own unique
textual experiences. But Fish is clear that interpretive anarchy is
not the result of unique temporal reading experiences. All readers,
The Reading Eye 67
if they are following the Z path protocol, will find the text unfold-
ing in the same inexorable order. The text may be divided into
different segments, but the order of the segments is not open to
alteration. This is to say that the very act of reading produces a
strong bias toward shared interpretive outcomes. The underlying
temporal logic of the text will be available to all competent read-
ers. Also, submission to the Z path protocol signals the reader’s
membership in the community of practice, people who know how
to handle a book, how to process its signs, how to follow the rules
of the practice. Successful hexis—unconscious bodily expertise—
points to acceptance of doxa, the motor programs and uncon-
scious cognitive architecture. Fish’s version of this Bourdieuian
idea is the “interpretive community,” the set of readers who share
assumptions—about how interpretation should proceed—and
strategies for making textual meaning (see Is There a Text in This
Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities). These commu-
nities exert a similar pressure toward the acceptance of doxa. This
is not to say that all members of the community will create exactly
the same reading, but that their differences from one another will
be meaningful to the community and will remain within a predict-
able range of acceptable variation generated by shared procedures.
These communities create the constraints that always surround
the interpretive act. Fish sees these constraints in cognitive terms,
but there are also physical operations required by communities of
practice, and these also constrain the work of reading and produce
meaningful results.
The last 30 years of literary theory have succeeded in replacing
a model of reading as a passive process in which the text happens
to the reader with an active model in which meaning is produced
out of the active work of the reader in complex interaction with
the text. Different readers generate different meanings out of the
same semiotic potential. Readers, that is, engage in interpretive
work, making the text mean what they can make it mean, bring-
ing their own experiences, their own histories, to the hermeneutic
process. Meaning does not simply reside within the text, or if it
does, it is only in a potential or virtual form. Meaning becomes
actual only for readers who process that semiotic potential, in their
own idiosyncratic ways, as a function of their social and personal
identities, in the historical moment of the reading. Those identi-
ties are embodied, right down to the oculomotor level, and the
active process of reading involves not only the interpreting mind

but the moving eye, operating within its own constraints.
The work of the reader has been characterized in many different
ways in the reader-response movement and the hermeneutic tradi-
tion. The reader has been seen as filling in the gaps, actualizing
virtual meanings, bringing personal experience to bear, imposing
meaning, resisting dominant meaning, or outright creating mean-
ing. In none of these theories is the reader seen as absolutely free
from constraints: the words of the text have a public meaning, the
text was produced in a specific historical context with a “horizon
of meaning,” which limits the possible meanings a reader can legit-
imately generate, the genre of the text precludes certain readings,
the career and worldview of the author limits the range of mean-
ings, readers themselves are historically constructed and placed,
operating with specific “interpretive strategies” which generate a
limited range of meanings, they are members of interpretive com-
munities which police allowable responses, they have developed
unique personal and textual histories that limit what they can see
in a text, they have particular linguistic competences, particular
knowledge of history and culture, particular educational back-
grounds, and I would add, particular bodies. No reading exists in
an absolutely open space that allows unlimited free play.
For the eyes, there is only one way to read for full comprehen-
sion. At the basis of all the constraints within which readers oper-
ate, there is the constraint of the graphic and semiotic code, which
the eyes have no choice but to follow. Left to right, long slide back
to the left, left to right again. Find the proper landing zone, leap
to the next meaningful unit. And if we take the work of the eyes
as just one manifestation of the body at work in reading, operating
below the level of conscious awareness, we can observe a cognitive
unconscious that sets the terms in which comprehension, interpre-
tation, analysis, critical judgment, spiritual growth, philosophical
understanding, and theoretical reflection occur. No matter how
resistant the reading might be, how creative the interpretation, or
how enlightened the understanding, reading always depends on
a deep submission to an arbitrary code and to the pedagogy that
imposes it. All reading is disciplined reading. All successful read-
ers are good little boys and girls who learned to keep still and be
quiet, to do what their parents and teachers taught them, to accept
The Reading Eye 69
the rules, right down to the operation of the muscles that move
their eyes. Insofar as mental life is embodied, it is social and his-
torical. The pedagogies which shape its unconscious architecture
are themselves the product of a social structure that seeks its own
reproduction. This is not to say that there is no resistant read-
ing, no critical consciousness. But it is to say that no reading ever
breaks into absolute freedom, that no resistance escapes entangle-
ment in the system it resists, that no criticism is possible outside
a more fundamental act of acceptance. Your mind may reject the
ideology of that social structure, but your eyes will still obey its
arbitrary rules.
2
R e a di ng Post u r e
Disc i pl i n e a n d A da p t i v e I n t e l l ige nc e
W hile the eyes are busy with the micro-disciplines that reading
demands, their work must be supported by complex manual skills
and efficient whole body postures. Reading is a habitual practice,
connected in complex ways to many other physical habits of every-
day life—eating, falling asleep, taking a bath, riding in a car or on
the subway, walking on a treadmill, using the toilet, waiting in the
doctor’s office, and so on. Reading postures must adapt intelli-
gently but unconsciously to all of these circumstances, making it
possible for the eyes to do their work wherever and whenever we
read. When we are engaged in the hard, interpretive work of read-
ing, we cannot focus our attention on how we hold the book, how
we turn its pages, how we support its weight, or how we align the
body for long-term comfort. So we habitualize the physical work,
mastering the procedures to the point at which they recede below
conscious awareness. Within the optical logic of the practice, which
demands that the book be consistently available to the eyes, we are
free to create our own idiosyncratic, stylized postures and move-
ments, accomplishing the physical work with a personal accent. The
goal of this chapter is to bring those unconscious habits to light and
to speculate about the contributions that ritualized postures and
gestures make to the interpretive work of reading.
In thinking of reading as an act of the body, it is the brain and
the central nervous system that most easily come to mind. In our
era of cognitive and neural science it is clear that the work of the
mind is generated by neural networks interacting with their envi-
ronments. And no one would question the relevance of the eyes to
the act of reading, since the graphic embodiment of the text enters
as a pattern of light and dark into the eyes and thus the brain.
But, as we move into the fine and gross motor skills that reading
requires, it is less clear how they might contribute to the cogni-
tive process. They would seem to be merely instrumental, creating
and sustaining the physical relationship between the eye and the
page. The resulting visual input would seem to begin the neural
and cognitive processing, the mental work we call reading. Can
a reader’s physical posture, the work of hands and arms, muscles
and bones, affect the complex act of consciousness required by
the interpretation of written language? Neural scientists working
in the area of “embodied cognition” argue that it does, that body
alignment, especially when it is habitualized, produces a precogni-
tive environment that shapes cognition itself. Reading is an act of
the whole body, and I will therefore claim (if you will pardon the
pun) that how we grasp the book contributes in complex ways to
how we “grasp” the text, and that our physical stance expresses the
interpretive “stance” which generates meaning.
These relationships are subtle and micro-specific. Posture does
not determine interpretation—there are no simple causal mecha-
nisms. Sitting erect in a task chair does not ensure a professional,
disciplined reading of the text. But habits of posture and manipu-
lation do tend to set a tone for the interpretive work, a tone that
shifts and interacts with other influences on the reading experience.
The best way to analyze this shifting, momentary interplay is to
examine specific examples of reading bodies, examples that capture
the subtleties of the hand, the posture, the way of being in the
physical world that we can see in the reader’s body. This chapter
is based on an examination of hundreds of visual representations
of reading bodies—photographs, paintings, sculptures, clip art—as
well as on observations of real readers situated in and adapting to
physical and social circumstances. My process is to describe a selec-
tion of these images as carefully as possible, noting how the hands
grasp the book, how the body is deployed to support the grasp,
and how the reading posture adapts to its circumstances. On the
basis of this description, I then attempt to articulate the kinds of
cognitive and interpretive work that the posture would encourage,
or, as Bourdieu would say, what kinds of dispositions the hexis of
the reading body creates. This kind of articulation is not empiri-
cally verifiable. The interpretive work of the reader is not directly
available to an external observer of the reading body. My analy-
ses will be convincing only if my descriptions seem accurate and
Reading Posture 73
my interpretations seem plausible. I will include many examples

in this chapter, in order to do justice to the complexity of the
reading body and its relationship to the complexity of the reading
mind. Reading posture is highly individualized and specific to the
moment and the conditions in which it occurs, and close readings
of specific examples are the best way to get at that particularity.
In The Absent Body, Drew Leder often uses the act of reading as
an example of how we lose awareness of the body. He notes, for
example, that reading while eating forces the visceral act of eating
into the background as we attend to the high cognitive demands
of reading. And when I read, Leder says, my legs are “enveloped
in a background disappearance; awareness is simply withdrawn
from their situation” (27). In fact, any task that requires complex
visual processing will make the rest of the body disappear. “In a
distance sense like sight,” Leder says, “one has little or no experi-
ence of physical effort or forceful interaction with the perceived
object. As such, one’s corporeality recedes more thoroughly than
in touch, whose reciprocity and feeling of impact calls one back
to the copresence of the body with its object” (15). Of course,
most acts of reading require touch as well as vision, but the work-
ings of the hands and the rest of the body are precisely what feels
“absent,” even though they enable and direct vision. Leder says,
“When I gaze at a landscape I dwell most fully in my eyes. Yet this
is only possible because my back muscles hold my spine erect, my
neck muscles adjust my head into the proper position for viewing.
My feet, my legs, my arms, all lend their support. . . . My whole
body provides the background that supports and enables the point
of corporeal focus” (24). Immersion in a visual task fosters the
illusion that cognition, so closely associated in our culture with the
visual, operates independently of the rest of the body. Leder wants
to remind us that “the body always has a determinate stance—it is
that whereby we are located and defined. But, the very nature of
the body is to project outward from its place of standing” (21–22).
We forget the whole body because of our ocular fixation, and even-
tually we forget even the eyes themselves, in favor of the world we
perceive and toward which we project consciousness.
Leder’s work is an attempt to restore us to our bodies, to remind
us of the corporeality we routinely forget. For to ignore the work of
the hand and all the muscles of the body in the act of reading is to
underestimate the complexity of human cognition and experience.
The hand (the whole body) grasps the book, and in that grasp
dwells the embodied intelligence that makes reading—and all
other experiences—possible. Heidegger contrasts the human hand
with claws or pincers, which only grab, rather than moving in a
responsive and articulated way toward already recognized objects.
The hand knows the object it reaches toward and adapts itself to
the contours of the object and the project of the body that reaches
out. Heidegger therefore sees the hand as a function of a think-
ing body, a linguistic body: “Only a being who can speak, that
is, think, can have hands and can be handy in achieving works of
handicraft. . . . Every motion of the hand in every one of its works
carries through itself the element of thinking, every bearing of the
hand bears itself in that element. All the work of the hand is rooted
in thinking . . . we have called thinking the handicraft par excel-
lence” (112). “The hand,” he says, “is, together with the word, the
essential distinction of man. Only a being which, like man, ‘has’
the word, can and must ‘have’ ‘the hand’” (113).
In reading, the hand literally encounters the physical substance
of language. When we reach out for a book the hands already know
the purpose of their actions. They take on the configurations they
will need to adopt for reading even as they move through space
toward the book, configurations defined by the practice of reading
itself. They grasp the book knowingly, intelligently. Obviously, the
eyes bring human cognitive power into contact with semiotic sub-
stance, but so also do the hands as they grasp and skillfully manipu-
late the book. In reading, vision and touch work together, and as
Elizabeth Grosz says, they can do so because “they are the senses
of one and the same subject operating simultaneously, within one
and the same world” (Volatile Bodies, 99). Human cognitive power
operates simultaneously in the intelligence of the eyes as they move
across the graphic text and in the skill of the hands as they hold
the book or activate the functions of the reading device and in the
cogency of the brain as it deciphers the text. The body that reads
is always already a linguistic body, right down to the programming
of muscle functions. Reading is indeed a “handicraft,” a skillful
work of hand and eye and brain, adapted to the specific bodies and
projects of readers.
Merleau-Ponty describes the work of the hand in similar terms:
“In the action of the hand which is raised towards an object is con-
tained a reference to the object, not as an object represented, but
Reading Posture 75
as that highly specific thing towards which we project ourselves,

near which we are, in anticipation, and which we haunt” (154).
Merleau-Ponty’s comment pushes us toward a recognition of the
physical specificity of all reading acts. Every book, magazine, news-
paper, e-book, or computer presents itself to the reader as a specific
physical challenge, with a distinctive shape, weight, and texture,
requiring a precise manual operation. And the body that grasps the
book is equally specific, with a distinctive visual acuity, muscular
strength, and habitual life. Every grasp of every book is therefore
a physically unique event. No two readers grasp the book in the
same way, and no single reader grasps and manipulates the same
book in the same way at different moments of reading. Acts of the
reading body occur in the flux of time, always changing—different
books, different devices, different light, different moods, differ-
ent spaces, and different physical interactions. Analyzing these
encounters therefore requires specific examples, close readings of
physical details, and only tentative conclusions.
Here, in figure 2.1, is a first example, demonstrating the sheer
complexity of reading postures. This is A Young Woman Reading,
by Lucio Rossi, from 1875. I hold no brief for it as a great work
of art. It is a romantic melodrama, if not a piece of soft-core por-
nography. But it does depict a complex scene of reading and a
very complicated reading posture. Both the scene, with its ornate
interior design, and the posture, with its studied decadence, sug-
gest an entire physical and emotional life in which reading plays a
specific role.
This posture is the outcome of a complex life in a specific social,
cultural, and historic context. It is an unconscious though not acci-
dental performance, a physical expression of values and life deci-
sions, idiosyncratic and personal, an outward sign of character,
identity, and interpretive style.
Her pose is a provocative sprawl, languid, self-conscious, aware
of the effects it creates. The premise of the painting is that we have
caught her unaware, in a private, intimate moment, reading a love
note or a bit of amusing gossip. But despite her supposed unaware-
ness of any spectator, she seems to be posing, if only for herself.
Her self-awareness feels like a function of her theatrical personal-
ity, not the presence of the observer. For her, there is always an
observer present. She is lounging on the divan, but it is a very
carefully composed lounge. Her feet rest on a pillow on the floor,
Figure 2.1 Lucio Rossi, A Young Woman Reading. Courtesy of the Sterling
and Francine Clark Aret Institute.
which shows that she has arranged this posture, not fallen into
it. She leans to her right, with her left hip lifted off the surface,
the weight on her right side as it lies on the divan and the pillow.
She props herself up with her right arm leaning against the pillow,
arm bent and turned back to the left, forearm then turned down
at the wrist, so the hand gracefully dangles. All her weight seems
Reading Posture 77
to be on that forearm, yet she is perfectly relaxed. She carries the

weight lightly because her head and torso are turned back to the
left, facing the letter, and because her hips are torqued to the left.
Her energy is in her core, so the pressure on her extremities is
minimal.
This posture allows her to hold the letter elegantly in her left
hand, pinched between the thumb and first two fingers, delicately,
like a cup of tea in fine china. The left arm—invisible here—is
supported at the elbow on the divan, behind her left hip. There
is really not much weight to hold. The letter is easy for her to
accommodate in this pose. It’s almost impossible to imagine some-
one reading a legal tome or a bible or an economics textbook in
this pose, though it might be possible for a moment. Such books
would be too heavy for the support system, and too “heavy” for
the mental and emotional state suggested by the pose. She is not
reading for information or wisdom, she is reading for personal
amusement and satisfaction. There is no passion in her pose, only a
sultry self-satisfaction. Every detail of the scene and her appearance
suggest that she is not a deep reader, nor an exegete or a critic. She
may be pleased or amused by the message, but she is not carried
away by the reading. You can see it in the grace and easy elegance
of her pose. In terms of the conventions of this genre, she is the
loose woman, superficial and vain, more interested in her own
comfortable life than in the message she is receiving. Her read-
ing of the message will not disturb the maintenance of that life,
so she handles it lightly, keeps it at an emotional distance. She fits
into this domestic interior perfectly, as though she were designed
for it. Her reading will raise no questions about her comfortable
life, only confirm her secure identity. This scene presents an emi-
nently “readable” reading body, which simultaneously expresses
and shapes the emotions and reactions of the reading subject. The
physical pose and the interpretive stance are inextricable.
This young woman’s pose is definitely not one she would have
learned in school. It is the sheer opposite of the ergonomically
correct reading posture. Early and often in the process of learning
to read, parents and teachers deploy an explicit pedagogy of the
reading body. Very young children have the fundamentals of the
posture modeled for them in every reading moment. Sit still and
keep quiet. Maintain a consistent distance between the eye and
the page. Hold the book with both hands to keep the pages open.
Move your eyes from the page on the left to the page on the right.
Turn the pages carefully. Parents lovingly show their children the
proper stance, and reinforce it with the cuddles and fun that go
along with reading. This loving physical contact between parents
and children has long been recognized to be a key factor in devel-
oping the lifelong habit of reading. These parents and children
are not thinking about pedagogy, they are bonding emotionally,
enjoying the book, getting ready for bed. But clearly a pedagogy
occurs. There is nothing natural about reading. There is nothing
obvious about how the body should address the book. We have to
learn how to orient the book and the body, how to grasp and hold
it, how to open and turn its pages, how to bear its weight. Without
this fundamental physical training, reading could not occur. Later
on, parents will model and teach the more directly cognitive early
skills—image and word recognition, connecting print to sound—
but they begin with a pedagogy of posture and gesture.
In schools, this pedagogy becomes more explicit and detailed.
The requirement to sit still and pay attention is imposed with
authority. Reading is no longer play, in the everyday interaction of
loving parent and child. It is now a disciplined practice governed
by explicit institutional procedures. In schools, the reading body
becomes Foucault’s docile body, subject to rules that reward and
punish behavior. Those who can sit still and pay attention are
rewarded, while those who cannot abide the stillness that read-
ing demands, many of them boys, are perceived to be poor read-
ers. Physical self-discipline is demanded as a sign of cognitive skill.
A cynical analysis would suggest that what schools really want to
teach is not reading, but docility. However, Foucault is always
clear that disciplines are about efficiency and productivity, not
just repression. The task of reading, in fact, does require physical
stillness, and the disciplines that encourage it do increase reading
productivity. Children must be taught how to control and deploy
their bodies. Wherever there is print literacy, there is a pedagogy
of physical stillness—how to adopt and sustain a stable stance that
brings the eyes and the text into effective range for whatever time
the text demands. This massive and global pedagogy of the quiet
body is pervasive but almost invisible. It requires an elaborate
institutional apparatus, but it rarely enters the official curriculum.
Often, those who teach it and those who learn it are unaware of
the pedagogy. Their focus is on the content of the reading or the
Reading Posture 79
interpretive processes it demands. But wherever reading is taught,

lessons about the body and the book are reinforced. Before you
can master the text, you have to master your own body.
This pedagogy can also be explicit and extremely detailed, in an
effort to micromanage postural and gestural efficiency. In Discipline
and Punish, Foucault cites a wonderful passage from Jean Baptiste
de La Salle’s Conduct of the Christian Schools in which the proper
physical stance for writing is described in elaborate detail. Foucault
is struck by the rationality and functionalism of the discipline. The
task is analyzed in obsessive detail, in the context of a school that
wants total physical, intellectual, and moral control of its students.
Not surprisingly, there is a similar passage in La Salle’s work that
describes the reading body:
The students should always be seated during the lessons, even while
reading from the charts of the alphabets and the syllables. They
should hold their bodies erect and keep their feet on the floor in
good order. Those who are reading the alphabet and the syllables
should have their arms crossed. Those who are reading in books
should hold their books in both hands, resting them neither upon
their knees nor upon the table. They should also look straight
before them, with their faces turned slightly in the direction of the
teacher. . . . The teacher will take great care to see that all read quietly
what the teacher is reading aloud. (59)
In this scenario, the teacher controls what the students read—

all silently read exactly the same words the teacher reads aloud—
and how the students read—all are moving their eyes across
exactly the same text at exactly the same time. The teacher con-
trols their entire bodies—hands and feet aligned properly, heads
turned toward the teacher in order to facilitate surveillance. The
development of students as readers is controlled by the insti-
tution, right down to the fingers and toes. This is a pedagogy
which encourages physical docility as a means to mental docility.
If Rossi’s A Young Woman Reading reveals in her body the self-
involvement of her reading, La Salle’s students’ bodies reveal their
willingness to accept discipline, to produce readings that will make
sense within institutional goals, that will pass examinations, and
earn academic rewards. They are being trained to be what Roland
Barthes would call “readerly” readers whose goal is the humble
comprehension of the authoritative text, not a “writerly” freedom
of hermeneutic play. A disciplined reading body tends to produce

a docile reading, but there is no reading, no matter how writerly,
that can occur without the discipline of the body and its cognitive
consequences.
This pedagogy does not end in elementary school. Here, in
figure 2.2, is an artifact from a pedagogy of the reading body
aimed at adults:
This is of course a body at work. Its posture promotes digi-
tal productivity and efficiency; it adapts to the demands of the
screen and the keyboard. Feet flat on the floor, knees bent at
ninety degree, hips flush with the back of the task chair, neck only
Figure 2.2 Correct Posture. Credit: ImageZoo/Alamy

Reading Posture 81
slightly bent, elbows resting on the arm of the chair, arms reach-
ing comfortably to the keyboard—this is a disciplined, sustainable
posture. It recalls in its postmodern way the abstract rationality of
an Enlightenment figure like La Salle. The reader in this case is
precisely not a believable human body—no idiosyncrasies or flaws.
It is a rational machine, reverse engineered by the rationality of
the computer itself. Reading for this body is not about pleasure or
the achievement of wisdom, it is about information processing, the
body as a receptive instrument, decoding the message precisely as
the sender intended. No resistant reader here, no “reading against
the grain.”
But, if the ergonomically correct posture tends to promote
docile and obedient reading, it can also be put to use by even
the most subversive and playful readers, precisely because it is an
efficient stance that allows prolonged and intense concentration
without creating physical fatigue. And even the most idiosyncratic
reading poses, as we will see in later examples, must be adapted
to the inherent logic of reading as a physical task—there must be
relative stillness, a consistent relationship between the eye and
the page, a technique of grasping and supporting the book. No
matter how resistant the reading might be, and no matter how
idiosyncratic the reading pose might be, they are made possible by
submission to a socially administered pedagogy based on a logical
analysis of the reading task.
However, it is only in abstract analysis that the ergonomically
correct position seems like the norm. Readers in fact display an
infinite variety of postures, engaging the body’s ability to adapt to
changing situations.
Figure 2.3 is certainly not a pose that La Salle would approve.
It has an informality appropriate to the domestic scene. No class-
room discipline has imposed it. The child has improvised it in
the moment of reading, suiting herself, and pursuing her own
pleasure. Yet, in its own way, the pose is ergonomically efficient,
though not in the manner of the textbooks. It is an intelligent
adaptation that works in the physical context. The girl has placed
her legs and lower back in the crack between the cushions of the
couch, giving herself a comfortable perch that supports most
of her weight as she leans to her left. Her left arm, bent at the
elbow, bracing her head, actually bears little weight, providing
more comfort than structural support, while her right arm is free
Figure 2.3 Girl Reading Comics. Credit: Jack Sullivan/Alamy
to turn the page. Her head is aligned perfectly with the page,
without sharply bending the neck. Even her right foot plays a role
in the pose, with the toes bent under to prevent slippage on the
smooth surface of the leather couch. Reading poses in everyday
life are generated not only by the ergonomic rationality of La Salle
but by an adaptive intelligence that results in a wonderful array
of bodies in the work of reading. This girl has obviously given no
thought at all to the posture she creates. Her focus is entirely on
the book. But this pose will allow her to read at some length, tak-
ing her own pleasure in the reading. The pose does not suggest
intense, studious concentration, but the comfort of the posture
provides an opportunity for casual learning. People read in task
chairs in the ergonomically correct posture, but they also read
sprawled across easy chairs, on their backs in bed with the book
held above them, in fetal positions that hide the book like a secret
vice, or standing on subway platforms. They hold letters in their
fingertips, find ways to bear the weight of huge anthologies and
textbooks, grasp the book in one hand or in two hands, lay the
book across the lap, prop it up against other books so their hands
are free to write or underline, shift their weight and change their
pose minute by minute.
Reading Posture 83
If the movements of the eye in reading must submit to severe

constraints within which limited oculomotor improvisation is possible,
the reading pose is routinely improvised, from moment to moment
within a loose set of physical constraints. As long as the book is
held still, in a position that allows the work of the eye, postures
can vary widely. The “ergonomically correct” pose that so many
reading pedagogues have professed in fact accounts for only a
small percentage of the actual practices of readers, which is why
it must be professed with such vigor. Anyone who observes read-
ers in their natural habitats (almost anywhere!) will recognize that
they routinely contort themselves into postures that would out-
rage rational analysts of efficient bodily function, who must then
preach with even more vigor the gospel of feet flat on the floor,
spine erect, head held level, etc. However, though these postures
seem ungainly, they are often efficient, improvised solutions to the
physical challenges of reading. And like all improvisations, they are
generated by unique individuals who operate out of a tacit under-
standing of their own capabilities and challenges. Thus the poses
struck by readers are expressive, personal, idiosyncratic. We can
see in them specific reading bodies and minds at work, processing
the materiality of the text, creating precognitive architectures that
affect and reflect the cognitive work of textual analysis.
The elements of the reading posture that are available for this
adaptation are:
1. Thegrip, the work of the hand and the fingers, the point of
contact between the reading body and the material book. There
are two-hand grips and one-hand grips, largely dependent on
the size and weight of the book. Often the hands grasp the bot-
tom of the book, thumbs in front, fingers in support behind
it. But the grip can also come from the sides of the book or
from above, and the fingers can be arrayed across the front of
the top of the page, with the thumb as a pincer behind the
book. The reader can also manipulate the book to adapt to a
preferred grip—for example, certain books can be folded in half
so they can be gripped by one hand. Magazines, newspapers,
smart phones, tablets—all make their own very specific manual
demands. The grip can be loose and effortless or tight and pow-
erful, the degree of intensity surely a reflection of personal style
and mood as well as a practical adaptation. There is also, of
course, the zero degree of grip, the book propped on a table

so that it does not need to be touched at all, except to turn the
page. We can see in the grip, as in all the elements of the read-
ing body, a physical manifestation of the relationship between
the reader and the book. Surely a reader who never touches the
book is articulating a detachment that is not merely physical, and
a reader who always subjects the book to a death grip expresses
in that gestural intensity a will to cognitive as well as muscu-
lar power. In the examples that follow, we see distinctive and
expressive strategies for grasping reading material.
2. The support structure, primarily the work of the arms and
shoulders, along with the hands, to hold the book in the posi-
tion necessary for the eyes. One common setup places both
elbows on the table, forming a strong triangular base for the
hands that grip the book at the top of the structure. The place-
ment of the support structure responds directly to the needs of
the eyes. Does the book need to be held up close for the near-
sighted, or at arms’ length for the farsighted, or at an angle to
provide maximum light and clarity? The structure also adapts
to the size and weight of the book. The book can be embraced
close to the body so the arms are supported by the torso, or the
arms or the book itself can be rested on the legs while seated.
The reader often integrates the body and the book with struc-
tures in the environment—tables, chairs, other books—that can
bear the weight. It is very common, especially in prolonged
reading, that the support structure is the furniture, so the arms
have little work to do but to turn the page, or they are free to
write on the book or to take notes on paper. In scholarly and
professional reading especially, it is necessary to free the arms so
the text can be marked.
3. The pose, the work of the entire musculoskeletal body that
maintains the grip and the support structure over time. This
postural element is endlessly various and open to improvisation.
People read sitting down, standing up, lying down, in poses
that have as much to do with their personal postural habits as
with the book or the specific reading situation. A person who
habitually sits erect is likely to read sitting erect. A sloucher will
slouch. A person who lies on his side in bed is likely to adapt
the book, the grip, and the platform in order to accommodate
that habit. The lying down pose can also be supine, with the
Reading Posture 85
book held at arm’s length above the head, or prone, with the
book resting on the bed and the head at the top of a triangle of
arm support. People with bad backs arrange ways to read while
standing, with the book resting on a platform of braced arms
or carefully arranged furniture. The key to the successful pose
is that it must be sustainable for a long time, in the stillness
required by the eyes. For many readers this stillness is the real
challenge, and no pose will feel comfortable for long. These are
readers who will never be able to sustain cognitive attention
because they cannot sustain physical stillness. The pose involves
the entire musculoskeletal system in the reading process, sub-
jecting it to the pedagogy of the reading body.
The material factors that shape the adaptation process are the
book as object, the conditions of the reader’s body, and the envi-
ronment in which the reading occurs, specifically:
1. Thesize and weight of the book. A coffee table book creates a

different reading posture than a tabloid newspaper. The shape
and dimensions of the book determine the grips that the hands
can utilize. In the act of reaching for the book, the hands will
unconsciously position themselves for an efficient hold. They
may move around the book during the reading, but each new
position of the hands will be a negotiation with the book as a
physical object, just like any other object grasped with specific
intention. The weight of the book determines the platform the
body must provide. A heavy tome engages more of the body in
support of the gripping hands, or forces us to find an artificial
platform—a table or the arm of a chair. A lightweight book,
reading device, or a note on a piece of paper will have almost
no effect on the full-body pose, so they can easily be read while
the body is performing some other function, like walking on
a treadmill. However, a big book requires the attention of the
whole frame, including the legs, which might be asked to sup-
port the arms and back as they bear its weight. Thus, the mate-
rial history of the book in part determines the history of the
reading body. The scroll is not the codex is not the IPad, and
each device requires different grips, support structures, pos-
tures, and adaptations. Intelligent reading bodies learn to adapt
to all the physical text formats they encounter, an important
skill in our times, when formats are changing so frequently and

reading bodies are constantly learning new reading protocols.
2. Physical strength. The degree of muscular ability to support the
weight of the book dictates the reading posture. The body mon-
itors its own capabilities and will respond to the demands of the
book automatically. This response is not natural or instinctive,
it must be learned through a pedagogy of the reading body, but
once it is learned it proceeds without conscious intervention.
It is rare that someone would explicitly think, “I must cross
my legs so I can rest this book on my thigh.” Proprioceptive
monitors instantly assess the demands of a specific book on
a specific body, right now, and the intelligent body addresses
those demands. Book and body engage in a complex biome-
chanical interaction. A reader with strong hands and arms will
grasp even the heaviest book without external support, but a
physically weaker reader will rest the book on the lap or on a
table. Readers whose arms or hands do not function normally,
because of physical disabilities, must devise prosthetic adapta-
tions that allow them to manipulate the book. All readers must
take their own bodily capabilities into account as they adopt
postures in a particular reading event.
3. Available light. Reading bodies shift to take advantage of the
light. An experienced reader will find a spot where the light is
good, or create a lighting design that works for reading, and
adopt a posture that places the book in just the right position. In
some circumstances, the reader has control over the lighting but
in others he or she can only adapt. The light on a subway train
might fall from the wall behind the reader, so the book will be
angled back to catch it, or it might be ambient light from above
the book, so it will be tilted forward or even held flat. Light
becomes a real issue when the book is printed in a small font,
which can become simply invisible in inadequate light. Readers
of certain electronic reading devices, on the other hand, must
search for reading locations that are not subject to the glare of
lights that can render the screen invisible. As reading formats
and lighting systems have changed, the challenges to the read-
ing body have also changed. Imagine the strain of reading by
candlelight, by whale-oil lamps, or by firelight. Every lighting
environment poses a different challenge to the reader’s body,
subjecting the reading process to the historical contingency of
Reading Posture 87
material culture. In cooperation with the work of the eyes as

they cope with the available light, the reading pose provides
support, bringing the book to the light.
4. Visual acuity. Reading postures could be thought of as strate-
gies that coordinate the book to the exact requirements of the
specific visual capacities of the reader. With the font the size it is
and the light what it is, it becomes the job of the reading pos-
ture to place the book at the site of efficient focus, of maximum
clarity. The precise specificity of visual acuity, unique to each
person, changing over time of day and time of life, changing as
the light changes, requires reading postures to adjust endlessly,
responding to the interplay of the book, the light, and the eye.
The eye becomes deeply trained by reading pedagogy, moving
and changing focus in response to the visual field created by
the material book and the available light. And the entire body
works with it, creating a reading stance that maximizes visual
efficiency.
5. Furniture. The posture of reading is almost always a negotia-
tion with the furniture. Unless the reader is standing up or sit-
ting on the floor, reading is an activity of the chair and the
desk, the sofa, the bed, the table—the furniture of domestic
and institutional life. The shape of the furniture determines the
reading posture and thus makes its contribution to the cogni-
tive work of reading. The task chair produces the ergonomic
reading posture almost irresistibly, while the soft and comfy
couch invites almost any posture but the correct one. The very
name “task chair” suggests that its designers and users believe
that it encourages productive and serious reading, while the
sprawl across the couch suggests a more personal, even indul-
gent reading. Pragmatically, the furniture can be used as a plat-
form for the book, a way of carrying its weight and freeing the
hands. Furniture is often designed with reading in mind, but
each reader must create a specific posture that adapts his or her
body to the design of the furniture and to the requirements of
reading.
6. The social circumstances. We might think of reading as an act
that abstracts the reader’s mind away from the social circum-
stances in which it occurs, but it does in fact always occur within
socially defined circumstances. Reading in a schoolroom is not
reading in a church or on a subway or at the dinner table or in
a doctor’s waiting room. In each of these circumstances, there

are different social demands that produce different physical and
psychological responses, including a reading posture that makes
sense in the social situation. The reading body places itself stra-
tegically within public places in order to maximize concentra-
tion. For some readers, this means finding a quiet corner, while
for others it means finding a busy spot which will produce
enough white noise against which the book can stand out. In
some social circumstances, reading is expected and accepted—
say, at an airport, but in other circumstances reading is an
affront to others—say, at a funeral, and these norms will affect
the reading posture. If the reading body appears to be rude, the
reader probably feels rude, and he or she puts the reading on
display as a way of avoiding contact with others. That complex
psychological and bodily state then contributes to the reading
experience.
All of these factors and others, no doubt, enter into the calculus
of the reading body as it adopts and shifts posture. Sometimes
these calculations are quite conscious and explicit, as when a reader
seeks a quiet corner of a restaurant or sets up a light in the perfect
position, but more commonly the reader finds himself in just the
right spot, adjusts the body to take advantage of the light or shifts
weight to accommodate an ache in the hips that has not yet risen
to the level of felt pain without any conscious awareness that he
or she has done so,. In all of these cases we are observing an intel-
ligent body at work, a body engaged in a habitual practice at which
it is so expert that it can adapt in the moment to all of its needs
without even knowing it has those needs, let alone how or even
whether it is adjusting.
These adjustments are made possible by proprioception, the
body’s ability to monitor itself. In How the Body Shapes the Mind,
Shaun Gallagher defines proprioception as:
an entirely subpersonal, non-conscious function—the unconscious

registration in the central nervous system of the body’s own limb
position. In this sense, it results in information about body posture
and limb position, generated in physiological (mechanical) prop-
rioceptors located throughout the body, reaching various parts of
the brain, enabling control of movement without the subject being
consciously aware of the information. (6)
Reading Posture 89
In addition, proprioceptive awareness monitors the body’s

interaction with its environment. Gallagher says that there is:
a certain aspect that belongs to any modality of perception (vision,

touch, hearing, and so on) that delivers a corresponding sense of
body position relative to the environment, or a corresponding sense
of self, which Neisser (1988) terms the “ecological self.” Thus pro-
prioception in this wider sense depends on integrating different
modalities of sensory information concerning one’s body as a mov-
ing agent in the environment with the intracorporeal information
provided by an internally generated sense of posture and move-
ment. (6–8)
In Gallagher’s terms, then, the reading body monitors its own

states and its interactions with the environment—particularly with
the book it grasps—and makes adjustments automatically, freeing
the conscious mind to engage in the cognitive task of making sense
of the text. But, the conscious mind is not absolutely freed, because
as Gallagher says, “the body, through its motor abilities, its actual
movements, and its posture, informs and shapes cognition” (8).
Gallagher uses the term body schema to describe the body’s
sense of its “motor capacities, abilities and habits that both enable
and constrain movement and the maintenance of posture” (24–25).
Less conscious than body image, a body schema develops over
time as habits and capacities are utilized in a variety of situations.
Body schema could be thought of as proprioception over time.
The body, Gallagher says, “acquires a certain organization or style
in its relation with its environment” (32). We get a sense of how
our particular body operates, and we engage in various activi-
ties within the constraints of those capabilities. A person with
weak hands would never even think of holding a thick and heavy
anthology without support. He finds himself resting the book on
a desk or at least forming the arms into a strong support system,
without even thinking of the process, because his body schema
determines the decision for him. It is important to note that for
Gallagher, body schema include “pieces of the environment” and
“extensions of the body” that have by habit and over time become
available to proprioception. His example is the act of reaching
for a glass. I make a conscious decision to reach for the glass, but
I do not consciously shape my hand to grasp it. The glass, as a
familiar, functional object, becomes a part of the body’s schema.
My example, of course, would be the relationship between the

body and the book. I intend to hold the book and read it, but I
do not consciously intend to arrange the fingers of my hand to
hold the book efficiently and turn the page with ease. I have built
up so many experiences with books and how they must be grasped
that I can “choose” the grip that works in the situation with an
embodied intelligence that almost guarantees success. Gallagher
calls these habitual movements “motor programs.” These move-
ments, like reaching and grasping and walking, are innate to the
human species, but they are also trainable. A basketball player is
not thinking about running as he dribbles the ball down the court,
but he could consult with a stride consultant in order to improve
the efficiency of his running technique, though even then the
goal would be to practice the new stride until it becomes “second
nature,” one of the motor programs that can just be allowed to
operate. We can and need to be trained how to align the body to
the book, but, in the act of reading itself, any attention to that
process would be a distraction. Readers need to rely on their bod-
ies’ self-monitoring ability. The body will decide and adjust with
the intelligence that comes with practice.
These proprioceptive adjustments over time allow intelligent,
adaptive strategies that enhance the reader’s ability to cope with
the demands of reading. Randall Beer, in his book Intelligence as
Adaptive Behavior, contrasts the traditional definition of intelli-
gence as “deliberative reasoning” with a characterization of intel-
ligence as efficient adaptation: “the much broader ability to cope
with the complex, dynamic unpredictable world in which we live.”
Beer says, “the world is full of complex, ill-defined problems which
must be solved on a regular basis simply in order to survive. Our
higher cognitive functions are our own particularly human elabo-
rations of this more basic competence for effectively coping with
the world” (11). Can we then think of the cognitive process of
reading as an “elaboration” of the adaptive work of the reading
body? Or to put it in Gallagher’s terms, how does the reading
posture “inform and shape cognition?” The best way to answer
that question is to examine situated examples, readers who have
learned how to deploy their bodies in postures that respond in real
time to the physical and social circumstances. In the examples that
follow, I will try to identify the specific problems that these adap-
tive readers have solved.
Reading Posture 91
Figure 2.4 Woman Reading Closely. Credit: Adrian Sherratt/Alamy
This reading posture shown in figure 2.4 is clearly an adaptation

to extreme nearsightedness. This is the only way she can read. The
closeness of the book to the eye and the direct line between the eye
and the page speak to a physical need. Her exact proprioceptive
awareness of her specific visual acuity, developed over a lifetime
of reading, makes this posture automatic. Although the pose is
based on issues of visual acuity, it involves an entire biomechanical
adaptation. The whole upper body must conform to that visual
need. The head bends sharply down, into a position almost exactly
parallel to the book. The arms angle sharply in toward the upper
chest so the book can be held up close to the eyes. The hands angle
slightly down from the arms, providing a flat platform. The result
is a close physical intimacy, the book held in a tight embrace, the
face thrust into the open pages.
The metaphors of my description of this physical pose and
body language suggest how the posture expresses and conditions
her hermeneutic activity. “Sharp,” “angled,”—the pose does not
suggest emotional empathy or passionate absorption, despite the
intimate embrace. It suggests steady, punctilious, intellectual atten-
tion, an intense engagement with the text. She is working hard just
to gain access to the physical book, focusing all her attention on
the page, so that the rest of the world literally vanishes. This is not
a leisure reading; it is the pose of a woman at work. She could be
an accountant double checking her figures or a lawyer being care-
ful about a contract, hard at work with those careful hands. She is,
pardon the pun, a close reader. She misses nothing and stores it all
for possible later use. But even if the embrace is pragmatic, it still
produces physical intimacy between the material text and the vul-
nerable human face, the emblem of personal identity. Over years
of repetition, this postural adaptation brings her ever closer to
the book, probably for hours at a time, suggesting an absorption,
even an escape into the textual world. Not a dreamy escape, not
an emotional intimacy, but an intense and determined attention.
Antonio Damasio in Descartes’ Error demonstrates in great detail
how the neural networks that monitor bodily states are related to
the neural networks that perform “higher order” cognitive skills
like reading. This suggests that the relationship between the body
and the mind in reading is indissoluble. The mental acuity and
attention of this reader, processing text with such concentrated
energy, is this angled and intense body at work.
The posture represented in figure 2.5 resembles the previous
example in that the book is held close to the eyes, but everything
about the image urges us to read it in more emotional and expres-
sive rather than biomechanical terms. If the nearsighted woman
holds the book close to her face, it is because her visual acuity
dictates the pose. In this case, the pose seems generated by the
emotional and cognitive process, and it feels deeply expressive. If
the woman in the previous example seems immersed in the mate-
rial text, this reader seems immersed in her emotional relation to
the text. It is as though she sees herself in the text—the hand could
easily hold a mirror rather than a book. With her right hand she
holds the book up to her face, not because of the limits of her
vision but as an adaptation to the fullness of her emotion. She
wants this physical intimacy with the book because she feels an
emotional intimacy with the text. Her thumb holds the pages apart
at the bottom of the book, her other fingers curled behind it, hold-
ing the book at just the right angle for her leaning down face,
which seems almost on the move, on its way physically into the
text. She is turning slightly to her left, and because she is holding
the book in her right hand she must wrap her right arm around to
the middle of her torso. The left arm is tucked into the crook of
Figure 2.5 Maria Spartali Stillman, Love Sonnets. Courtesy of The Samuel and
Mary R. Bancrloft Collection of Pre-Raphaelite Art, Delaware Art Museum.
the right elbow. She is effectively giving herself (but not the book)
an embrace. We see the left hand over the inside of the right elbow,
elegantly arrayed fingers holding a few red flowers in a perfectly
romantic pose. The cognitive work of reading, the emotions gener-
ated by her interaction with the text, and the pose she is taking—
all interact in a complex dialectic. Does the emotion she feels, the
mood she is in, arise from this particular text, or from the act of
reading itself, or is the mood a preexisting physical state that will
reproduce what she already feels in the text that she reads? Does
the text produce this erotic pose, or did her erotic mood, embod-
ied in the pose, seek out this text?
Like the first example in this chapter, this painting is late nine-
teenth century. It is called Love Sonnets by Marie Spartali Stillman.
It is another example of the genre that we might call “woman
reading.” There are many splendid portraits of women reading in
photographs and in painting, often in a romantic or pre-Raphaelite
style. They serve the powerful cultural function of depicting the
bodies of women in the “private” sphere, in moments of intimacy,
engaging in a complex cultural practice—relatively new to masses
of women, the act of reading for pleasure, for emotional expres-
sion and stimulation. These portraits are voyeuristic; they give us
access to moments that no one is supposed to see and in which
personal emotions are on display. They are elements in a regime
of gender training: the beautiful young woman reading. Reading
is part of her erotic life, her feelings about love and the body. She
embodies a male ideal—sensuality and sensitivity, elegance and
intelligence. She in turn has taken pains to shape herself into the
woman depicted in these sonnets. Her beauty is a function of her
reading. It affirms her, it makes her embrace herself. Clearly these
genre and gender conventions account for the contrast with the
nearsighted woman. A similar pose “reads” as a very different
physical and cognitive strategy. The near-sighted woman’s pose
seems pragmatic and effective; this woman’s seems romantic and
affective. But despite the conventional gender stereotypes, the
two images do represent really existing operations of the reading
body—adaptability and expressivity. Reading bodies simultane-
ously react to situations and enact personalities.
University campuses provide lots of opportunities to observe
readers adapting in pragmatic and expressive ways to their physical
and social circumstances. Of course, campuses provide facilities
Reading Posture 95
designed for reading—libraries, lounges, study rooms. But stu-

dents also read while they are waiting for class or just killing time,
often in hallways or stairways, or leaning against a tree in the quad.
In the hallway outside my office, there is often a row of students
sitting on the floor, backs against the wall, reading on cell phones
or tablets, or coping with big textbooks and anthologies. They
are forced to make intelligent and improvised adaptations to the
available resources. Since there is no furniture, they manage to
make use of the floor and the wall to create a comfortable read-
ing posture, even when carrying the weight of a hefty book. They
read despite the material situation, which is certainly not designed
for reading, and they are able to read because they have solved a
complex biomechanical problem. Here is a typical solution: hips
flush against the wall, which allows a flat, fully supported back and
a comfortable alignment of the hips so the legs can be placed stra-
tegically, one leg straight out and flat on the floor, one raised at the
knee and bent across the midpoint. This is a stable pose, providing
a strong platform even for a bulky anthology. The arms are then
free to hold the book open and prop it up to the correct optical
angle, without carrying any of its considerable weight. The upright
back also gives support to the base of the neck, so the head can tilt
down slightly, without creating a burden for the upper back. It is
difficult to imagine a more intelligent adaptation to these condi-
tions of reading. Such readers present themselves as serious and
capable agents in the world. They are reading as part of their own
project. They have an air of confidence and comfort, no matter
the challenge. Theirs is a disciplined reading, a school-sponsored
reading, but they seem not so much to submit to the discipline as
to use it to further their own ends. The intelligent pose makes pos-
sible a capable and intelligent reading. Just as they have with great
facility incorporated the book into their body schemas, so they will
likely incorporate the text into their own mental lives and personal
histories. Their adaptive skill suggests that they will be in control
of this reading, just as they are in control of the space they have
created for their reading.
The next two examples present readers who adapt their bodies
to even more challenging physical or social surroundings. The pos-
ture of this first reader in figure 2.6 responds to the challenge of
reading amid the visual and aural distraction of the subway. Like
many others, this reader has counterintuitively chosen a hyperactive
Figure 2.6 Woman Reading on the Subway. Photo by Mo Riza.
environment, but she is so habituated to this place that the train,

hurtling by so fast that it becomes a blur, does not distract her
in the least from her reading. It is the function of reading in this
situation to absorb attention, so that she can be oblivious to the
tumult around her. The sights and sounds of the space become
blur and white noise, out of focus, out of mind. The act of reading
requires all her attention, and the rest of the world goes slightly
away. She can still maintain awareness of the surround—enough to
be safe, to react to high priority signals in the environment—but
she is allowed to check out, to go into the world of the text and
out of the world around her.
Her cognitive attention is a function of her bodily focus on
the text. Her left hand supports the magazine. Her left arm is
bent sharply at the elbow, from which hangs her substantial bag.
Reading Posture 97
This pose allows her to hold the bag safely in front of and tight to
her body and at the same time to hold the text close enough to her
face, in this spotty light. The placement of the magazine torques
her whole body to the left, her head, shoulders, hips, knees, and
feet all biased toward the text and subtly away from the speeding
train. This is an expert pose struck by a person who knows the
environment by sheer sensory repetition. She is acclimated to light
and noise and speed, and can adapt them to her reading practice.
And because of that embodied intelligence, she is capable of a fully
engaged reading. Her attention is so strong that she will read with
total clarity, overcompensating for the distractions, working harder
at reading because of the overwhelming sensory stimulation of the
surround. She makes an effort to hold the world out by going
deeply into her text. This may be a lightweight text of pleasure
or a demanding text, we do not know, but it will certainly be an
understood text, with all this elaborate bodywork behind it.
The depth of her engagement sends out a bodily signal—“I am
not here. I am in the world of this text, so leave me alone.” No
one would approach her or enter her personal space. The book and
her reading posture turn her into a motionless, unavailable pres-
ence. Her pose is an effective tactic for operating in the subway,
a system of self-defense. But her unavailability is not a pretense.
This body really is focused elsewhere, disengaged from the sur-
round. As I discuss in a later chapter, reading always involves a
removal of attention from the present circumstance. Or it declares
the text to be the present circumstance. But that absence from the
environment is her way of being in the environment. She operates
in it with skill and confidence. The reading is totally absorbing, but
it does not make her vulnerable or “out of it.” She is getting all the
information about the surround that she needs, and her perfor-
mance as “the reader” places her among the many familiar modes
of operating on the subway. Some people pace. Some people listen
to iPods. Some people watch people. She reads. This reading is,
ironically, integrated into her life, in the very act of removing her
from the world she lives in. Reading is, for her, a physical habit,
woven into the fabric of daily life. She does it efficiently and effec-
tively, day in and day out.
Another challenging reading environment is the busy restaurant.
Many readers have developed the habit of reading while eating,
especially if they are alone. Here the challenge is physical—there
are distracting sights and sounds—but also mainly social, creating

a space that protects the act of reading against the intrusions of
others and the demands of social interaction. This space is cre-
ated by choosing a location favorable to reading, one that takes
advantage of the light and avoids excessive noise, and by adopting
a bodily posture that enhances privacy and concentration. We have
all seen (or been) such readers, positioned so that the social scene
in the restaurant is behind us, perhaps facing a corner or a window,
so nothing in the space will attract the eye, allowing us to focus
entirely on the page. The back is often rounded and turned in, the
head lowered, half surrounding the text, creating a cocoon. These
choices of location and posture are not just optical strategies, they
are social-psychological messages. They read to others as antisocial,
if not depressive. They say, “I am unavailable, not to be disturbed.
I will not allow interaction.” The body serves as a visual and inter-
actional shield. The cast down face may simply be the outcome of
an interaction between print and light and eyes, but it seems to
others to be a gesture of withdrawal or sadness. Imagine how this
public pose would appear if there were no newspaper. We would
interpret the body language as unhappy—we might even guess this
person was crying.
So what is the relationship between the posture of the read-
ing body and the emotions of the reader? Sometimes posture and
emotion result from the message and rhetoric of the text, as when
a person reading a horror novel tenses in fear. But clearly there are
dispositional postures and emotional tones that the reader brings
to the act of reading, and these predispositions inform the interpre-
tation. A person who habitually reads in a workmanlike, produc-
tive posture is likely to read with a workmanlike, productive mind,
independent of the emotions evoked by the text. A person whose
body language as a reader habitually communicates sadness and
isolation is likely to project that emotion on to the text. Readers
who habitually adopt an antisocial posture in public places are tell-
ing us something about their emotional life, within which the act
of reading occurs. When we remove ourselves from social situa-
tions by reading, we choose the private over the public, though of
course even the feeling of “privacy” in reading is made possible by
public and social agencies. We choose to interact with text rather
than with other people and thus, confer on the reading experience
a priority, an exclusivity of consciousness. It is not other bodies and
Reading Posture 99
minds that take our attention, not even our own bodies and minds;
it is the private communion with the text that we want. For some
readers, this relationship becomes an introverted refuge, a habitual
means of escape from others. But for anyone who reads in public,
who chooses to focus on the text rather than the present surround,
reading will be experienced as private time. Private reading in pub-
lic circumstances encourages readers to conceptualize themselves
as autonomous individuals, defying social constraints. Just because
reading is considered “antisocial,” we can trick ourselves into
thinking that reading is immune to the social and historical world,
forgetting that all mental activity involves an interaction between
the body and its material and cultural environments. Reading is
always historical and social, though accomplished by flesh and
blood operating within zones of privacy.
One of the most influential arguments for the embodied mind
is George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh: The
Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. As the title
suggests, the book has a polemical edge, and it sets for itself a chal-
lenging task—the authors want to show that deliberative, analyti-
cal reason, the most “cognitive” of cognitive tasks, arises from our
embodiment, specifically from the neural networks that control
perception of the world and of the body itself. If reason is embod-
ied, the arguments suggests, so must be all cognitive processes.
Lakoff and Johnson’s claims are direct and unequivocal: reason is
made possible by bodily processes; it evolved from and makes use
of our animal nature; it is universal, available to any human body; it
is made possible by cognitive/neural processes that are below con-
scious awareness, a cognitive unconscious; it operates by means of
somatic metaphors; it is always emotionally engaged—no cognition
without emotion, in all its physicality (4–7). These principles allow
them to claim that Cartesian dualism is just wrong, as the title of
Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error also asserts. Mind cannot be
cleanly separated from body. The cognitive unconscious operates
in the body, in habits of perception and styles of environmental
interaction. “Most of our thought,” Lakoff and Johnson say, “is
unconscious, not in the Freudian sense of being repressed, but
in the sense that it operates beneath the level of cognitive aware-
ness, inaccessible to consciousness and operating too quickly to be
focused on” (10). This “hidden hand” “shapes how we automati-
cally and unconsciously comprehend what we experience” (13).
The reader’s posture and gestures are elements in this cognitive

unconscious, shaping the hermeneutic experience.
Think of our reader sitting by the window in a restaurant, read-
ing by natural light. Over time this light will change—shadows
will fall, the angle will shift. And the reader will improvise, chang-
ing the position and angle of the book in order to take advantage
of the available light. These changes will be subtle, incremental,
virtually unnoticeable. They will also almost certainly be effective
and successful, maximizing the light and allowing it to strike the
page at the appropriate angle. It would be a very poor reader,
with very little experience, who would persist in a pose that pro-
duced ineffective lighting. One of the physical dangers of extensive
reading is eyestrain, and the body learns how to adapt itself to
the light it needs. These adjustments are what Evan Thompson
calls “absorbed, skillful actions” (24), part of the “know how”
that enables cognitive work. Changes in posture create visual effi-
ciency, which leads to cognitive productivity and reading success.
Empirical studies have shown that headaches produced by eyestrain
reduce comprehension. Readers often process that cognitive diffi-
culty as an element in the text—their failure to understand seems
to be a function of the difficulty of the text rather than the diminu-
tion of their interpretive skills created by visual fatigue and postural
inefficiency. Here is Shaun Gallagher’s explanation of this logic:
As a reader in this situation, I am not at first conscious of my pos-

ture, or of my eyes as they scan the pages. Rather, totally absorbed
in my project, I begin to experience eyestrain as a series of changes
in the things and states of affairs around me. . . . The eyes that have
been reading have been anonymous eyes, doing their work without
my reflective awareness of them. I was not conscious of my eyes at
all. Now, however, my attention is directed to my eyes. They sud-
denly emerge out of prenoetic anonymity and become explicitly
owned. My pain now becomes my present concern, and my body in
general gets in the way of my reading comprehension. (34)
This projection places the cause of the physical pain and the
cognitive inefficiency in the “state of affairs” that is the text. When
in fact, a more efficient gesture, a change in posture, would have
avoided the eyestrain and the cognitive impairment that goes with
it. The posture creates a cognitive “mood,” a predisposition that
will affect the work of reading.
Reading Posture 101
Damasio uses the term “somatosensory” to describe the moni-

toring of the body necessary to its self-regulation. This monitor-
ing, he argues, is essential to the process of deliberative reason, the
explanation, in fact, of Descartes’ Error. The same brain structures
responsible for monitoring body states are also involved in the act
of reason. Damasio recounts cases of patients who have experi-
enced damage to the brain structures responsible for emotional
processing and proprioception, and as a result suffered impairment
in deliberative decision making and reasoning capacity. These
patients could not factor into their decisions their immediate feel-
ings about the situations they encountered, and so made obviously
poor choices, even though the brain structures directly responsible
for decision making and analysis were not damaged. The struc-
tures that monitor and process emotion—the hypothalamus, the
brain stem, the limbic system—are also responsible for monitoring
body states, including autonomic functions. Damasio says:
The lower levels in the neural edifice of reason are the same ones
that regulate the processing of emotions and feelings, along with the
body functions necessary for an organism’s survival. In turn, these
lower levels maintain direct and mutual relationships with virtually
every bodily organ, thus placing the body directly within the chain
of operations that generate the highest reaches of reasoning, deci-
sion making, and, by extension, social behavior and creativity. (xiii)
The brain monitors many bodily systems simultaneously and as

a result produces for itself over time a sense of how the body feels,
in its “normal” or background state. Powerful interactions with
the environment or within the body create physical responses—
hormone levels, breathing rates—that differ significantly from that
norm and thus provide inarticulate evidence that the brain cannot
ignore as it makes decisions. We learn over time how to use that
information and trust that it contributes to reasonable choices. If
one of our possible options just gives us a funny feeling or sets our
pulses racing, that fact enters into the more “rational” process by
which we generate reasons for our decision. To reason well, we
must mind the body.
But the body must also in turn mind the environment. The brain
is radically open to learning generated by the encounter between
the mind and the world. Only one-third of the brain is genetically
hardwired; the rest is open to formation by external influences.
And the body through its senses is always engaged with the world.
As Evan Thompson says:
Mental life is also bodily life and is situated in the world. The roots
of mental life lie not simply in the brain, but ramify through the
body and the environment. Our mental lives involve our bodies
in the world beyond the surface membrane of our organism, and
therefore cannot be reduced simply to brain processes inside the
head. (ix)
Mind is not only embodied, it lives in the world that the body
inhabits. Thompson says he wants to think of “the mind as embod-
ied dynamic system in the world, rather than the mind as neural
network in the head” (11). Or as Damasio says, “mental phenom-
ena can be fully understood only in the context of an organism’s
interaction in an environment” (xvii).
Here, in figure 2.7, is a reading body beautifully adapted to
its world, within a specific religious tradition, at home with the
physical text and the sacred space. This monk is reading a sacred
text as part of his religious regimen. He has assumed, loosely
and comfortably, the lotus position, and adapted it to the task of
Figure 2.7 Monk Reading. Credit: Hemis/Alamy

Reading Posture 103
balancing the book. His left arm rests on his left knee, with the
arm turned upward, allowing him to arrange the fingers under
the page at exactly the point of balance—perfect somatic utility.
The right arm, supported by the inner thigh of the right leg, tak-
ing the natural angle of the lotus pose, turns inward so the fingers
can be positioned under the page, allowing the thumb to hold
the long, thin, rectangle in balance. His posture is as sacred as
the text. He has integrated the book into the ritual pose with
effortless grace. His reading is therefore predisposed to be as
ritualized as his posture. In fact, both the posture and the read-
ing are elements in the same sacred self-discipline. It is difficult
to imagine this hermeneutic moment to be a resisting or critical
reading. The sacredness of the task requires respectful, diligent
attention. If you repeat this pose until it becomes second nature,
adapting it to the work of reading, then the text itself, through
sheer repetition, also becomes second nature, part of the process
of being in the world. In her essay “The Aikido Body,” Tamara
Kohn argues that we in the West tend to see personal transforma-
tion as the result of an encounter with novelty, with experiences
that challenge and remake us. But in Aikido and in other martial
arts, transformation is created by “the repetition of . . . lived body
practice” (148). Repetition deepens practice and eventually trans-
forms the self. The monk’s integration of physical practice and
interpretive practice can only achieve this simple beauty because
both have been repeated frequently within a profound discipline.
This repetition does not encourage a critical or questioning stance;
this is a posture of faithful acceptance, a commitment to the trans-
formational power of sustained reading.
My final examples show us the embodied minds of creative artists
in the act of reading—hermeneutics as creative process. Their pos-
tures are intelligent adaptations to the specific conditions of read-
ing that the images depict, but they also express and embody a
complex personality engaged in habitual reading practice. The first
is Bob Dylan, reading backstage before a concert; the second is
William Butler Yeats, reading in a comfortable parlor. For both of
these artists, reading is grist for the mill, raw material that they will
work over into their own original creations.
Dylan’s pose in figure 2.8 is beautiful and efficient. The book is
light and needs little support, so it’s easy for him to hold up to his
face with arms bent at the elbow. He uses both hands to provide a
Figure 2.8 Bob Dylan in the green room at Rolling Thunder Revue, browsing
through Elsa’s Housebook (David R. Godine, Publ.) c. 1974, Elsa Dorfman, all
rights reserved. By courtesy of Elsa Dorfman. With thanks to Colortek of Boston.
platform for the book, more than it seems really to need. But as a
result there is a symmetry to the pose, an almost prayerful quality,
as though he were holding a hymnbook. The position of the arms
brings the book up almost parallel to his face, so there is no break
in the line of the head, neck, and back. There is also no break at
the wrist—the hands extend directly from the forearms, bringing
the book up to the necessary height. A comfortable, sustainable
pose. The hands grip the book beautifully—the hands of a guitar
player, with fingers that seem to form a musical chord. We can
see in this grip the point of physical contact between this specific
reading body—shaped by a lifetime of music right down to the
habits of the hands—and this text, which by hand and by eye he
incorporates into his body, his world. His reading posture, after all,
is made possible by the guitar itself. He rests his right arm casu-
ally and precisely on the guitar, at just the right point of balance
and angle so his arm is supported as it lifts the book up toward his
gaze. The tool of his trade, his guitar, is integrated into the read-
ing posture, suggesting a total integration of reading into his daily
life, an adaptation of everyday objects and spaces for the needs of
the reading body.
Reading Posture 105
This is a scene of reading embedded in the flow of a particular

person’s everyday life. Dylan is dressed for the stage in full perfor-
mance regalia, including the harp on its frame in front of his face.
The book and the harp both seem to be natural extensions of his
body and mind. He seems to be in a hallway or dressing room, pre-
paring to perform. This is not a space designed for reading, but he
has no trouble turning all his attention to the book, creating a pri-
vate space for himself. There may be people bustling just outside
the frame of the picture, we do not know, but what we see here is
a man alone, focusing all of his attention on a text that matters to
him. There is no way to tell from the photo itself what he is read-
ing or why. Is it a practical matter, a set list, or travel plans, or is it
a distraction, a transition between backstage and spotlight, or is it
inspiration, poetry or prophecy? What we do know is that this is
a habitual reader. We can see that in his expert reading stance and
in his choice to read in an intersticial moment in a place that does
not invite reading. We also know that his reading is part of his art,
part of his creative process. This beautiful posture speaks to a long
term integration of reading and music, built up by daily habit. This
is an image of Dylan as literate rock star, the man of letters as pop
performer. Reading is so natural to him that it must be one of the
places where his own creative identity has developed. Without the
reading, the image tells us, there would not be the music that has
made Dylan, Dylan.
This image of Yeats’s reading pose in figure 2.9 shows him in a
complex relationship with the physical world. Even though he is
reading in a comfortable, domestic scene, he sets up a testy dia-
lectic between reading body, book, and table. The pose is angled,
almost uncomfortable. The physical challenge in this situation is
the sheer size and weight of the book. One could imagine more
straightforward solutions, with simpler, more direct ergonomics.
He could have rested the book flat on the table and turned around
to face it, or he could have placed his legs in parallel position and
rested the book on his lap, tilted up toward his eyes. But he has
chosen to angle his body off the table and use its edge to sup-
port the book and his left arm. He has solved the problem of
weight by laying the book on his crossed left leg and propping it
against the corner of the table. The hands are then free to rest on
or even caress the book, to touch it for pleasure rather than for
support. The fingers of his left hand are elegantly arrayed at the
Figure 2.9 W. B. Yeats Reading. Courtesy of the George Granthan Bain Collection,
Library of Congress.
upper corner of the book, in a position (like Dylan’s) that recalls a

musician creating a chord. This is clearly an unconscious gesture,
though the result is beautiful, graceful, almost modeled. This man
creates art as an everyday gesture, without conscious attention.
Reading Posture 107
There is also a complex, angled relationship between his eyes and

the book. The book is propped at an angle, but not far enough to
direct it squarely at the eyes. It lies slightly up but away from his
eyes, perhaps to catch the light, but the result is that he must look
down sharply and, in the long term, uncomfortably. The left hand
page of the book faces up to the left of his eyes, so he must angle
them back to his left, which still results in an angled address to the
page. No parallel lines, no direct encounters. Planes and angles,
interplays of light and vision, all of them chosen by the reading
body, even though other, simpler alternatives were available.
Yeats is a reader with an “angle.” Whatever he is reading, he
will come at it from his own, unique perspective and make it mean
what he needs it to mean, fit it into his own worldview, his own
project. He is concentrating powerfully, but he is not lost in the
text. He remains distant, detached from it—an intellectual reader,
an alert if idiosyncratic thinker. He seems hard at work here, not
in the act of comprehension or mastery, but in an effort to trans-
form what he reads into the meanings he needs. He seems to be
heeding Blake’s warning that you either create your own system
or subject yourself to someone else’s. He reads as a part of his life-
long project, the creation of a distinctive and self-satisfying per-
spective on experience. He creates his own pose, his own stance.
This reading body could be no one but Yeats, and the meanings
he works out of any text, any experience he encounters, could
belong to no one else.
And yet, his reading happens in a comfortable, conventional
environment. If you did not know this was Yeats, you would see
a handsome, bookish man reading in a well-appointed upper-
middle class home. He fits the environment perfectly, with clothes
as well-appointed as the room. How easy and natural his read-
ing seems, surrounded by an environment designed with leisurely
pursuits like reading in mind. Think of the woman reading on the
subway platform, marshalling all her powers of concentration in
the face of the everyday jangle. In this image, reading seems as
natural as breathing. It is affirmed by every cultural norm in the
society around it. Yeats’s reading body sends two opposing mes-
sages: reading is normal, conventional, docile; reading is personal,
idiosyncratic, creative. The body in reading is subject to a complex
and shifting array of physical disciplines and unspoken social rules
that govern posture and gesture. But each body improvises its own
distinctive somatic style. A similar dynamic operates on the herme-

neutic level. All interpretation is subject to a complex and shift-
ing array of unspoken rules that govern meaning and response.
But all readers improvise their own distinctive hermeneutic style.
The reading body is the site of that paradox, and it takes a lifetime
of reading to work it out.
3
I’m No t H e r e
T h e R e a di ng Body i n P h ysic a l a n d
S oc i a l Spac e
Teaching at a university in the mountains of western North

Carolina, I often meet students who are avid hikers. Some have
even hiked the entire Appalachian Trail, an experience that per-
manently transforms their lives. One such student, a thoughtful,
habitual reader, told me that his favorite moments on the trail
were the times when he spent the night sleeping in a hammock
slung between trees, alone in the vast mountain forests. Before he
went to sleep, he would read and reread a paperback novel he had
brought with him, the only light in that profound darkness pro-
vided by a caving lantern he wore on a strap around his head. His
pleasure did not come so much from the particular novel he was
reading as from the very act of reading itself, especially in an envi-
ronment which seemed actively hostile to his efforts. The memory
was precious because he had created a way to keep his mind active,
to combat the loneliness of the long-distance hiker. This method
of reading required him to adapt his gear and his body to the task,
despite all odds. I can imagine the scene—the darkness of the for-
est, one single, dim light, an unlikely perch for an unlikely act, a
reader creating a space in which the eyes could find the book and
take the mind into another world, as reading always does.
My student’s reading experience should be understood within a
rich history of adaptive reading practices, by which reading bodies
create opportunities to read in the least likely physical and social
situations. In The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes,
Jonathan Rose evokes scenes of reading integrated into the daily
lives of readers who have no leisure time, and so develop corporal
tactics that insert reading into required daily tasks. British min-
ers in the nineteenth century, for example, read Shakespeare and
Chaucer by the light of a safety lamp (262). Like my student, they
found a way to provide the light they needed to read in other-
wise total darkness. But the spaces and tactics are different, and
the differences affect the hermeneutic stance of these readers. The
miners very intelligently adapted a tool of their trade intended to
promote industrial productivity for use as an instrument of their
personal pleasures and aspirations, reading texts usually associated
with the leisured classes. My student, on the other hand, had the
privilege to engage in a spiritual adventure, and he very intelli-
gently adapted this same tool of the miners’ trade, so that he could
pursue a spiritual reading that made sense within his adventure
narrative. For the miners, reading in these dangerous spaces, sites
of disciplined labor, would feel like an escape, self-indulgence,
a moment stolen for personal improvement—what Michel de
Certeau calls “la peruque,” a tactical evasion of institutional power
(25). My student, on the other hand, had already escaped into
this wild, natural space, far from institutional control, where his
reading would feel like the comfort of home, a connection to the
social world, the best it has to offer, a private, imaginative space
that he alone controls. In each case, the reader’s bodily adaptation
to physical and social space encourages a particular interpretive
disposition.
As many historians of reading have shown, reading bodies can
adapt to almost any space where their everyday habits take them.
The introduction to The Practice and Representation of Reading
in England, provides this provocative list of reading spaces: “the
monastery cell and refectory, the pew and the pulpit, the classroom,
the private study, the private library, the institutional library, and,
later, different kinds of booksellers’ shops and circulating libraries,
debating societies, coffee houses, and—those favorite targets of
satirists—the boudoir, the billiard room and the garden grotto,
not forgetting the privy” (Raven et al., 12). And these reading
spaces matter: “The places in which reading happens, and the com-
pany the reader may keep undoubtedly change the nature of that
reading” (12). If reading is made possible by the eyes and brain,
which are embodied in distinctive and habitual postures, those
bodies are in turn situated in and adapting to the many physical
and social spaces in which they find themselves, and the embodied
I’m Not Here 111
consciousness of the reader is never immune to the influence of its

situation.
Of course, the majority of reading experiences do not require
extreme bodily ingenuity. Often we read in spaces purpose-built
for reading—in hushed libraries or offices, at ergonomically correct
desks in carefully designed task chairs, on comfortable sofas matched
with soft, focused lighting. In fact, there are giant businesses whose
function is to design and create spaces for reading, so that the body
of the reader encounters no adversity, no challenge to the work of
the eye and the hand. Think of the beautiful reading rooms of pres-
tigious libraries, where the reader is surrounded by polished oak,
plush leather, beautifully bound books, and stately reading lamps
placed perfectly next to each chair. Such spaces provide a cocoon
for reading pleasure, not the romantic pleasure of my lonely stu-
dent in his improvised nest, nor the stolen pleasure of the ingenious
miners, but a “civilized” pleasure made possible by vast economic
systems operating invisibly for the task of reading, encouraging a
proper, compliant reading appropriate to the propriety of the set-
ting. Even in this comfort, one can read against the grain, one can
deconstruct and produce radical reinterpretations, but the bour-
geois comfort of these spaces is part of the “grain” against which
such practices struggle, a material reminder of the fact that even the
most thorough deconstruction presumes a system that produces
the terms of its own critical operation. In each of these cases, sup-
portive or challenging, the space of reading contributes to pleasure
and shapes the hermeneutic experience. Later in this chapter, I will
offer a more systematic analysis of the effects of specific physical
spaces on reading practices—public and private spaces, spaces made
for reading as well as spaces that demand creative adaptation. But
first, I want to examine the complex phenomenology of the reading
body in physical space as such, divided as the body is, simultane-
ously inhabiting the physical surround of reading and attending to
the imaginative world of the text.
For the very act of reading detaches the reader’s conscious
awareness from the body’s here and now. Reading is absentminded.
When we read we attend to a message that was produced in a
different time and place and refers to a world that is not the one
that surrounds us. Reading reduces the world of present experience
to visual and cognitive background. You cannot read effectively
if the surrounding world impinges on consciousness too sharply.
And yet, the reading body always operates in some physical and
social environment, and cannot avoid the influences of that space.
Many avid readers become experts at tuning that world out—they
can read almost anywhere—but at frequencies below that intense
hermeneutic concentration, they feel the visual, aural, and kines-
thetic vibrations of the physical world they inhabit.
The reading body always also occupies a social space in which
the act of reading takes on particular meaning. The absentminded
concentration it requires can often be seen as antisocial, as a refusal
to interact with others. Parents are sometimes concerned about
children who always “have their nose in a book” because they seem
withdrawn, off in their own world. Women who read in domestic
spaces are often criticized by their families for this virtual absence.
In Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance, one of the serious con-
sumers of romance novels that she interviews says that her hus-
band resents her reading because “my body is in the room but the
rest of me is not” (87). Serious readers may scoff at these concerns
and resentments, certain of the value of the textual world and the
practices that allow access to it, but reading is a social withdrawal,
a conscious and intentional decision to interact with the text rather
than with the other objects and people in the environment, who
also become background or even distractions. Reading requires
so much cognitive work and attention that active defenses against
the intruding world must be deployed. This routine reduction of
people and their needs to background static or intrusive distraction
is a small act of interpersonal violence, a message to other people
that they matter less than this book I have in front of my eyes. In
places designed for reading, this concentration is socially acceptable
and unremarkable, but because so much reading happens in parks
and buses, in restaurants and doctor’s offices, in kitchens and liv-
ing rooms—spaces in which some social interaction is expected—it
is not surprising that reading can seem to others to be a prickly
rejection of human contact.
Interrupting a reader is also a minor act of violence. A concentrat-
ing reader has declared himself to be unavailable, and demanding
his attention is a declaration that our concerns are more impor-
tant, more pressing than his. Addressing a reader requires a quiet
approach, at least with a hint of apology. A quiet knock on the
door, a hand reaching out tentatively, a whispered “excuse me”—an
acknowledgement that the reader is not here, and that a message
I’m Not Here 113
from the surround is therefore an intrusion, a distraction. At the

same time, reading makes possible a deep encounter with an other
consciousness—that is, with the textual consciousness of the author.
As Poulet says rapturously: “I am thinking the thoughts of another!”
(“Phenomenology of Reading,” 1148). Reading puts the ego at
risk, stepping out from its own experiences into a strange textual
world generated by an other. But to do so, it must defend itself
from the embodied others present in the reader’s space, challenges
to the necessary textual concentration. The rules of public space
also require that the private, emotional experiences of the reading
event must not be displayed to others. Reading in public is therefore
a risky activity. The body must be policed, all expressivity denied.
You can read in the subway, but you cannot cry at the sad ending.
The reading body, except in isolation, is an inhibited body, emotion-
ally disciplined and masked. We make this bargain: I will withdraw
from you, you will respect my absence, and in return I will keep my
private experience to myself, not impose it on you, since you deserve
in return the respect for privacy that I ask of you. I negate you, but
I do not infringe on your attention. You can ignore me.
The reading mind may be detached from the situation, but it
still operates as a function of a material body situated in physical
and social space. Reading is the work of a specific body, a particular
DNA in an idiosyncratic history, open to every detail of the sur-
round at the moment of reading. A reader is an emergent genetic
potential living in and adapting to a historically generated physical
and social world. Its brain anatomy is in part a function of its inter-
action with the world, with history. For the reading body, the text
is held at the center of that interaction—it dominates the senses
and requires massive cognitive resources. But the body maintains
awareness of the world outside the text, open to messages from the
entire environment. Peripheral attention creates subliminal aware-
ness, the diffuse but mildly alert background state in which strong
impressions can develop. Chris Shilling, in The Body and Social
Theory, says that “bodies are unfinished entities which develop in
social contexts, are mutually interdependent and, historically speak-
ing, are in a constant state of flux and change” (132). The reading
body develops over a lifetime as a set of physical habits formed in
the physical and social contexts where it is sanctioned. Its cognitive
work depends on the other bodies that really or virtually surround
it, all with their own projects, all interacting in socially constructed
and politically charged negotiations. The reading body is radically

historical—it changes as the situation around it changes, and as
the society that defines those situations changes. As Shilling says
of Foucault: “The body for Foucault is not simply a matter of
discourse, but constitutes the link between daily practice on the
one hand and the large scale organization of power on the other”
(66). The situated body links the practice of reading to social and
cultural power. It takes on the postures dictated by powerful peda-
gogic disciplines, turns reading into a socially regulated habit, and
submits to the cultural rules in force in the surround.
The reading body extends out into the world. “Your self does
not end where your flesh ends, but suffuses and blends with
the world, including other beings” (Blakeslee and Blakeslee, 3).
The brain generates an array of complex body maps that moni-
tor somatic functions and perceptual experiences, and these maps
extend into the familiar world, mapping it as an extension of the
self. The book is included in the body maps of the reading brain,
perceived to be part of the body itself, as all familiar objects are.
The self extends to the tip of its tools, the objects with which
it is habitually associated—a pen for a writer, a baseball bat for
a practiced player, a car for a skilled driver, even something as
“immaterial” as a text (in its material form as a book) for the
habitual reader. As Lawrence Shapiro says, “What is distinctive
about the human mind resides in the props and tools (the ‘scaf-
folding’) with which human beings surround themselves in an
effort to increase their cognitive reach. . . . The notepads, calcula-
tors, charts, and so on that have been designed for the purpose
of extending cognitive abilities are in fact properly construed as a
feature of human cognitive architecture—as part of the realization
base of human cognition.” The human brain lives “in the kind of
environment that human beings have constructed—an environ-
ment cluttered with the artifacts that help make human cognitive
capacities what they are” (224). Beyond and behind the printed
text, a familiar, habitual reading space—a home office, a bed with
pillows and perfect light—is mapped not as an alien surround but
as a comfortable extension of the body itself. And even a strange
surround, hostile to reading—a subway, a crowded restaurant—
can be tamed, domesticated, monitored. The text is mapped as
an extension of the self, and even the world we withdraw from is
mapped as the background of that extension.
I’m Not Here 115
It is that domestication that allows the reading body to with-

draw attention from the familiar world around us. If the surround
is perceived as the body extended, and if, as Drew Leder argues in
The Absent Body, a demanding cognitive task like reading requires
us to ignore the perceiving body in favor of the perceived object—
in the reader’s case, the material text—then we can safely absent
ourselves from that domesticated world of objects and percep-
tions. Ideally, even the visual text is so efficiently processed that we
attend to the information in the text rather than the graphic object
before us. But Leder argues that it is more than the material object
of perception that disappears; the whole familiar world goes away:
I do not notice my body, but neither do I, for the most part, notice
the bed on which I sleep, the clothes I wear, the chair on which I sit
down to breakfast, the car I drive to work. I live in bodies beyond
bodies, clothes, furniture, room, house, city, recapitulating in ever
expanding circles aspects of my corporeality. As such, it is not sim-
ply my surface organs that disappear, but entire regions of the world
in which I dwell in intimacy. (35)
The perceiving body—the reading body—at once incorporates

the familiar world and absents itself from it, investing massive cog-
nitive resources on the selected object of perception, the material
text.
The surround is mapped as the body. Reading is a withdrawal
from the surround. Reading is a withdrawal from the body. To
focus on graphic text, the reader must suspend conscious attention
to other potential visual experiences as well as to sounds, scents,
signals, and status reports from other parts of the body. But read-
ing itself is an act of the body—the brain, the eyes, the hands, the
postures, the habits, the body in space, even if it presents itself as
pure mental operation, denying its own bodily nature. Reading
seems ascetic, detached. And yet, in spite of the attention required
by reading, the body simultaneously scans and maps the surround
and itself. The reader is not out of this world, not completely trans-
ported. Reading is the body tricking itself into thinking there is
something other than the body doing the reading. The habitual
connection of reading with functions of the gross physical body—
its eating and sleeping and excreting—is a return of the repressed,
a reminder that reading (and therefore the self, consciousness, the
mind, and spirit) is of and by the body and therefore of and in the
physical world.
Jean-Luc Nancy in Corpus insists on “the absolute sense of the
world of bodies” (109)—a world full of active human bodies, in
which the corporeal life of any individual must be understood.
The reading body operates in a common space among all those
bodies, engaged in its task, absorbed by the practice, but rubbing
up against all those others, surrounded by them, one among them.
The bodily work of reading happens in the material world, where
bodies are walking and running, loving and hating, working and
playing, laughing and crying—right over there, right next to me as
I focus not quite all my attention on the text. I am as a reader, just
one body in that teeming world, and even if my absorption in the
text suggests to me that I am not of this world, I am.
In visual terms, reading reduces the present reality to the role of
framework—periphery for the text as visual landscape. The block
of print is surrounded by the margins, which are surrounded by the
visual field behind the book. That outer framework is site-specific—
it varies as we read wherever we are. Any act of visual concentration
reduces the rest of the field to the periphery, but in the act of read-
ing, the object on which we concentrate gives us access to infor-
mation not generated in the here and now, taking us even further
away from the surround. And yet, for many people at least a little
distraction is good for reading. A demanding background would
seem to diminish attention to the textual foreground. Yet reading
does occur in environments of high distraction like subways and
crowded waiting rooms. In Books and Libraries in Camp and Battle,
David Kaser describes the reading habits of Civil War soldiers who
were able to read almost anywhere. One soldier reports on reading
the Bible on a crowded, rowdy troop train: “I read two chapters
while gambling and every kind of wickedness were being practiced
in the car” (47). The immoral distractions in these tight quarters
seem to increase his concentration on the virtuous text. He reads
in order to find a defense against the wiles and distractions of the
world around him. Some readers even seek distracting environ-
ments as preferred reading spaces. Imagine reading in a fast-food
restaurant, an environment virtually designed to be a distraction,
full of people busy at everything but reading. Yet, for some readers
this visual static does nothing but enhance the signal. Perhaps for
some readers a bland and still surround makes a dull frame for a
I’m Not Here 117
still text. Perhaps a kinetic background emphasizes the stillness of

the book, helps it pop out against the background static. On the
other hand, many readers are easily distracted, all too susceptible
to the temptation to move attention from the signal to the static,
especially since what feels like “static” to the engaged reader is the
vital activity of everyday life which usually requires our attention
and response, static only if the mind is engaged in a task of high
cognitive demand like reading.
The relationship between the individual and the environment
is always changing because of the dynamic nature of what Erving
Goffman calls the “Umwelt,” the immediate spatiotemporal world
that surrounds the perceiving subject: “The Umwelt or surround is
an egocentric area fixed around a claimant, typically an individual.
However, individuals do not stay put, so the surround moves too.
As the individual moves, some potential signs for alarm move out
of effective range (as their sources move out of relevance) while
others, which a moment ago were out of range, now come into it.
A bubble or capsule of events thus seems to follow the individuals
around, but actually, of course, what is changing is not the position
of events but their at-handedness; what looks like an envelope of
events is really something like a moving wave front of relevance”
(255). Thus, the relationship between readers and their surround
always demands adjustments and adaptations. Even in a place
as sedate as a library, people move in and out of the surround,
sounds rise and fade, light changes. And in a more hectic environ-
ment, the challenges to the reader’s concentration are much more
dynamic. In a restaurant, the waiter comes to ask how the food is,
or the people at the next table break into loud conversation; on
the subway, the crowd shifts and repositions itself at every stop,
the screeching of the brakes cuts through the air, moments of eerie
quiet come out of nowhere. Readers must always be reacting to
the “moving front of relevance” in force at any given moment.
The relevant features of the Umwelt for the reader are determined
by the social as well as physical situation of the reading—private
or public, workplace or domestic space, demanding interaction or
allowing withdrawal. Even the most private domestic spaces bring
with them a set of social definitions and expectations—the sur-
round for reading is not the same in the bedroom as in the study.
But certainly, reading in public creates an especially dynamic social
surround, one which impinges powerfully on the reading body,
which sends and receives socially defined signals in interaction with

the other bodies present.
Because of the high cognitive demands of reading, especially
in a dynamic social environment, the reader needs to create what
Goffman calls “body preserves,” spaces in which private work can
proceed without excessive interruption. Goffman offers the term
“use space” to define the area preserved around an activity of the
body, for example, “the space required to use a laptop in a coffee
shop or accomplish the standing ‘commuter fold’ of the news-
paper on a bus or subway” (Gardner and Grondfein, 86). That
use space, Goffman argues, must be defended from intrusion by
others who may desire to put it to their own purposes. In The
Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Rose describes the
body preserve created by a working class scholarship boy trying
to create a use space for the homework reading he needs to do
in the midst of his crowded home, with the book wedged onto
the kitchen table, along with “cups and mugs, a bag of sugar, like
as not Dad’s cap would be there, and perhaps a clothes peg or a
pile of roughly dried clothes, waiting for whoever would bother to
iron them.” In this chaotic and overstuffed physical space, Rose
says, the boy creates “a cone of silence” around himself (88–90).
Rose also reports on an even more determined reader who cre-
ates literal barricades around the use space: “Despising his job in a
Birmingham factory, VW Garratt surrounded his workbench with
a barricade of boxes, set up a small mirror to provide early warning
of the foreman’s approach, and studied the Everyman’s Library
Sartor Resartus when he was being paid to solder gas-oven fit-
tings” (42). Readers will often choose the location in the scene
least vulnerable to intrusion—a corner, a space apart—or use the
book or newspaper to mark the outer boundary of the body pre-
serve, or simply face away from other people. And overwhelmingly,
people respect those boundaries, asking permission to disturb the
distance that the reader creates by declaring his or her nonpresence
in the here and now.
Reading is a tactic that aims to protect privacy itself from the
social demands of others. We defend our reading spaces because
we defend our right to interiority, to an experience that cannot be
supervised. We may learn how to read in a social process, we may
read by means of socially constructed codes, we may be subject to
institutional examinations and disciplines in our literacy practices,
I’m Not Here 119
but the moment-to-moment work of reading feels like a personal

practice that can only be experienced by the reader, free from any
social authority. But the boundaries created by the reader—against
others in the surround and against the demands of the social space
itself—are permeable and finally ineffective. The reader may be off
in another world, but the ordinary processes of social interaction
do not disappear. In his classic work of social psychology, Mind,
Self and Society, George Mead argues that the human mind is cre-
ated by “the taking of the attitude of the other toward one’s self,
or toward one’s own behavior” (48). “The self,” he says, “is not so
much a substance as a process in which the conversation of gestures
has been internalized within an organic form” (178). This “con-
versation of gestures” does not stop while a person is reading.
In fact, reading is itself a social gesture, a message sent to others in
the surround, who in turn gesture to the reader. Imagine a waiting
room in which one person is reading and the other is anxious to
engage in small talk, to while away the time or work off anxiety.
The reader’s gestures, strategies for creating the preserve around
this private practice, are easy to interpret. Only the most desperate
or inept social subject can miss the averted eyes, the bodily cocoon.
But someone who needs to talk also sends out gestures—attempts
at eye contact, shifts of weight and bodily inclination—which only
the most absorbed reader would miss. In this gestural conversa-
tion, readers learn and internalize the fact that others define their
practice as anti-social, a strategy for disengagement, an escape.
Mead also argues that “The reaction of the individual in this
conversation of gestures is one that in some degree is continu-
ally modifying the social process itself” (179). Reading defines the
situation as much as the situation defines the reading. The act of
reading produces complex effects in the environment. It produces
distance and defensive boundaries, but it also sends to others in the
surround a message of peace—the reader is not a danger to others.
Readers create calm and quiet in the environment, a sense of safety.
They are highly unlikely to intrude on the social space of others.
In fact, they can become almost invisible, taken for granted in the
social scene. They attract little attention, cause little alarm. And
that sense of safety radiates outward even if the reader is unnoticed.
A subway car in which readers are present is much less likely to be
the scene of conflict or violence. Readers may be seen as antisocial,
but in fact they serve an important social function. Their reserve,
their affective withdrawal from the surround, creates safe spaces

even in chaotic environments.
In Body/Embodiment, Waskul and Vannini argue that subjectiv-
ity, consciousness, and meaning “are emergent in action and inter-
action” in a human world. “A person does not ‘inhabit’ a static
object body but is subjectively embodied in a fluid, emergent, and
negotiated process of being” (3). The reading body constantly
responds to the imagined view of the other, testimony to “the
role of social networks in constituting the meaning of the human
body” (5) within “a system of signification” (11). The reading
body always operates in this emergent social space. Despite its ges-
tures of detachment, the body always reads as though there were an
other present. Even in private spaces, the reading body conceives
of itself in the terms set by its complex and ongoing social nego-
tiations. The meaning of reading as a social act is therefore “fluid,
emergent, and negotiated.” There is always a different other, a dif-
ferent signifying situation, a different social code. Reading a novel
in a library is not reading a novel at a church in the middle of mass,
and therefore the reading experience in these situations and spaces
is different. A socially unacceptable act of reading is not going to
be or feel the same as a socially sanctioned act. The one is rebel-
lious, defiant, while the other is complacent, at home with itself.
These emotional and phenomenological states create a mood that
in turn affects the interpretive work of reading.
The reading body is what Norbert Elias would call a civilized
body. For Elias, the process of modernization and civilization has
required a severe division between the “secretive private body”
and the “embellished, disciplined” public body (Cahill, 71). The
needs of the private body are built into our architecture and inte-
rior design, which make possible, for one thing, the sequestering
of bodily functions, “the privatization of excretory conduct,” the
removal from public space of any manifestation of the gross physi-
cal body. By contrast, the public body represses its physicality. It
presents itself behind masks and poses, which maintain the dis-
tance between individuals necessary for civilized social interaction.
Public bodies must be trained not to show emotion, not to act
out drives and urges, to repress—all in order to attain civilization
and its discontents. Our education and experiences as readers take
place in both those spaces—private and public. We learn to read
from our families, and we read by habit in private, domestic spaces
I’m Not Here 121
in which inhibitions are lower, but we also learn in schools, which

encourage a more disciplined body suitable for public space. In
its daily practice, reading moves across the public/private divide.
Throughout the day, reading can happen in public places, some
designed especially for the practice, like libraries and reading
rooms, some seized opportunistically by readers, as in buses or
fast-food restaurants, all with their own specific, civilized rules.
But reading also happens in the most private, even lonely spaces,
in bedrooms and bathrooms, in hammocks in the forest. In these
spaces, where the body is less stringently supervised and regulated,
reading becomes associated with the habits of the gross physical
body, with behavior that must be repressed in public. These are
the spaces where readers can eat chips and get the grease on the
pages, or drop the magazine in the bath water, or read on the
toilet, or read “uncivilized” pornography and masturbate, or read
high on drugs or alcohol. Reading has a bipolar personality—
strictly disciplined, rule-governed, inhibited, and at the same time
indulgent, perverse, carnivalesque. But the discipline wins out.
The physical and cognitive demands of the practice require at
least a baseline discipline—a still hand, an obedient eye, an effi-
cient posture. The civilized rules of public reading, reinforced by
a powerful public pedagogy, enforce restraints on even the most
private reading. But the physicality of the reading habit lingers as
a reminder of what has been repressed by a socially constructed
superego. Elias argues that individuals create “an affective wall
between their bodies and those of others” (Shilling, 145). The
“absent minded” nature of reading is an effective strategy for cre-
ating that wall. Even in the most public places, where the others
are many and close by, the reader operates at a distance. The read-
ing body is visible but its work is radically unavailable. The read-
ing body is a crossover spot, a site of conflict between public and
private, social and individual.
The reading body also occupies and moves through a sensory,
physical space. Material bodies react to the material properties
of spaces, their shape, expanse, light, color, outline, density—all
the perceptual inputs that bodies must monitor and make sense
of. The reader’s eyes adapt to the available light. The hands hold
the book out to a visual perimeter, fending off the spatial back-
ground. The body aligns to create privacy in the space, to turn
toward the work of reading. The light fosters concentration or
causes eyestrain. The colors affect emotion and mood. The furni-
ture supports (or not) the perfect posture. The temperature puts
the reader to sleep or braces attention. These spaces may be back-
ground to the text’s foreground, but the reading body is sensitive
to the physical and social world that surrounds and conditions its
projects. From research libraries to private bedrooms, the spaces of
reading contribute to the outcome of the practice.
The examples of reading spaces that follow are drawn from my
own experience and observations as a habitual reader. I first ana-
lyze public spaces of reading, those designed for reading and those
that require the reader to adapt and improvise. These examples
are drawn from places in New York City, including the New York
Public Library, public parks, and subway cars. I then turn to private,
domestic spaces, again including rooms designed for the reading
body and other spaces where reading can be accomplished in the
midst of daily domestic practices and tasks. As readers move from
space to space throughout the day, often carrying the same text
with them, their reading responds to the Umwelts they encounter,
absorbing subtle influences from the spaces their bodies inhabit.
Reading in Public Spaces

New York is a city of readers. In libraries and bookstores, on sub-
ways, in parks and restaurants, readers take advantage of intersti-
tial moments in their everyday routine, creating an ad hoc space
for their practice. The very act of moving through the city is an
encounter with a text environment. Reading is required for efficient
navigation—street signs, subway information, public announce-
ments. And reading is constantly encouraged by ubiquitous com-
mercial texts—billboards, shop signs, posters. As Thomas Augst
has observed in The Clerk’s Tale—his study of nineteenth-century
New York reading practices, “commercial signs, printed money,
newspapers, and many other urban media for the printed word
made reading a promiscuous, inclusive activity shared by an anony-
mous and heterogeneous urban public” (164). Into the midst of
this already rich print environment, serious readers bring their own
texts—books, Kindles, magazines—placing them at the center of
their attention as the ambient texts of the city environment fade
into the background. Elizabeth Grosz says in her essay “Bodies-
Cities” that the city provides “a series of disparate flows, energies,
events, or entities, bringing together or drawing apart their more
I’m Not Here 123
or less temporary alignments” (385). Readers in the city constantly

negotiate those flows, finding alignments that suit their habit.
New York, like any major city, provides public reading spaces
as part of its civic function. The most famous is the Rose Main
Reading Room of the New York Public Library. Like any library,
the goal of its design—in addition to storing information—is to
provide functional and attractive reading spaces, with proper light-
ing and seating, opportunities for reading in relative privacy or in
a busy but quiet public area. Alberto Manguel is the poet of librar-
ies, always alert to their subtle influences. In The Library at Night
he says:
We don’t read books in the same way sitting inside a circle or inside
a square, in a room with a low ceiling or in one with high raf-
ters. And the mental atmosphere we create in the act of reading,
the imaginary space we construct when we lose ourselves in the
pages of a book, is confirmed or refuted by the physical space of the
library, and is affected by the distance of the shelves, the crowding
or paucity of books, by qualities of scent and touch and by the vary-
ing degrees of light and shade. (132–133)
Like Manguel, I love the physical spaces of libraries, the open

and airy commons, the solitary table in the midst of the stacks, the
busy reference areas—all prime reading locations depending on my
mood or my reading material. Seasoned readers have favorite kinds
of libraries, favorite places in the library, favorite times of day, and
favorite views out the window. They anticipate the physical and
social implications of the sites they choose, how busy, how quiet.
Over a lifetime, they develop habits and strategies, ways of taking
full readerly advantage of the physical space. Libraries are the natu-
ral habitat of readers, purpose-built to support the embodiment
of the practice. To read in a library is to work in an information
storage space, subject to a highly specific spatial and conceptual
logic. Libraries are places for serious reading, reading for informa-
tion, disciplined reading. It is possible to read for fun in a library,
but that is not the point of the design. The goal of the space is to
encourage efficiency and productivity. Of course there are librar-
ies, even academic libraries, with a more comfortable and informal
atmosphere, but the weight of the architecture and the institution
is far from informal. In libraries, reading is work, maybe deeply
enjoyable, but serious work.
Manguel observes that a public library is a “paradox, a building

set aside for an essentially private craft (reading) which now was to
take place communally” (31). This is the pleasure of a grand pub-
lic reading room—the opportunity for readers to engage in their
unique, interior, and incommunicable experiences, and simulta-
neously to feel the physical presence of other, equally engaged
reading bodies. Each reader can hear the breath of the other, the
rustling of bodies as they adjust and resettle, the turning of pages,
the whispering off in the distance. And every time a reader looks
up from the book, what is visible are other readers, affirming the
worth of reading itself. Manguel says: “a national library is both
a monument and a place of everyday common labors, both the
symbol of a country’s intellectual wealth and the practical space in
which ordinary readers need to pursue their craft comfortably and
efficiently” (144). Efficiency, workmanship, privacy in community
are the virtues of the library. And around the readers are the books
of the world, the heritage out of which the reading body itself
emerges, an expansive but orderly intertextuality, a grand horizon
within which the ordinary work of reading occurs. Library read-
ing has gravitas—it partakes in tradition, scholarship, intellectual
ambition, and profound understanding.
The Rose Main Reading Room has a majesty in excess of its
practical or civic function. Like the Grand Central Station, it is
testament to an aesthetic of public grandeur, a sense that the
ordinary actions of the people deserve a grand setting, an enno-
bling of the democratic. These spaces are products of the wealth
of modern, robber baron capitalism finding ironic but effective
expression in the public sphere. The Rose Main Reading Room is
actually two rooms, separated by a central facility for book delivery
and administration. Both rooms are vast, with high, coffered ceil-
ings, decorated with Fragonard clouds, heraldic devices, Blakean
human figures, nymphs, heroes, and gods. Huge, arched multi-
paned windows provide diffused natural light enhanced by two
lines of chandeliers that cast concentric circles of yellow light. The
walls surrounding the readers’ tables are lined with books, topped
by a balcony all around the space, also book-lined. Each room
holds twenty large tables, with twelve chairs per table. There are
four reading lamps on each table, so that every sitting space ben-
efits from a beautiful mix of natural light, overhead artificial light,
and warm yellow light from the table lamps. Well over half of the
I’m Not Here 125
readers are at work on laptops, so everywhere there is the dim

white light of the computer screen. The chairs are heavy oak, scroll
armed, comfortable but disciplined, difficult to fall asleep in. The
room is a bit cool, with circulating air.
The result is an extremely concentrated work environment,
and the readers present respond to the intent of the design. Total
quiet—no whispering, no consultations, no collaborative groups.
Almost no social interaction, no catching the eye of another reader;
isolated individual readers intent on their own projects. This is a
space for long-term concentration. People sit here and work for
hours. In this low-distraction environment there is no excuse for a
lack of concentration. The only sounds are chairs scraping on the
red tile floors, footsteps, coughs, computer beeps. No cell phones.
These are serious readers, taking notes, writing commentary. You
can feel the presence of the readers of the past—Norman Mailer,
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Elizabeth Bishop, E. L. Doctorow, Alfred
Kazin—all have worked in this space. So how can you waste the
opportunity? Reading is the task the space is made for, and serious,
creative, intense reading is the result.
New York and other great cities also provide attractive public
spaces for readers who like to integrate their practice into their
daily habits. Parks and restaurants, buses and subways—these are
spaces that readers must turn to their advantage; they are designed
for other purposes, other practices, but they are available to read-
ers. These spaces can tolerate absentminded activities because they
do not demand high cognitive engagement in themselves. Once
you have found the right subway train, or ordered your meal in
a restaurant, or found a bench in the park, your mind is free to
focus on the text in the foreground. The relative stability of these
environments, with their clear rules of social engagement and dis-
engagement, allows attention to turn to the text. Reading is easy
to practice especially if those spaces are native to the reader, easy
to negotiate with little conscious attention, with almost the famil-
iarity of domestic spaces. These are spaces where large numbers
of people cross paths, but they do not make high demands for
extensive interaction, so the detachment of reading is allowable. It
makes the reader socially unavailable, but also easy to identify as a
comfortable part of the scene. So, in these public places, readers
are routinely ignored, occupying a marginal but safe space in the
public sphere.
Subway reading is a complex but often productive challenge

for the reading body. Loud, kinetic, crowded, chaotic, potentially
dangerous—full of distraction, interference. And yet an environ-
ment full of readers. I have never been on a subway car on which
there were no readers. An observer of New York subways would
never think we have come to the end of the age of Gutenberg,
to a postliterate society, where reading is a relic of a past technol-
ogy. There are many Kindles and BlackBerries on the subway, but
most reading is still print-based—books, magazines, newspapers,
tabloids, low cost formats that would never tempt a thief. In fact,
reading is all but required in order to ride the subway. Subway
cars and stations are print-rich environments, full of official infor-
mation, directions, and warnings. The officials who designed the
system assume that its users are literate. Print is more reliable than
the often incomprehensible audio announcements filtered through
bad municipal speakers. People who are not used to the subway or
who are not sure of their directions and connections need to be
literate or they will be lost. But reading is more than required,
it is also encouraged. As people adapt to the demands of riding
the subway, time opens up. There are few cognitive demands, and
social demands are often minimal. There is high motivation to dis-
engage at least to some degree from the scene, and reading keeps
others at a distance, even in a densely packed car.
Subway reading encourages a wide variety of reading experi-
ences and textual choices. People read advertisements, gossip,
news, sports, and fashion. They read Bibles, Korans, self-help
books, books on philosophy. They read foreign newspapers that
keep them in touch with their homelands, they read local news
that only a New Yorker would care about. They read to pass the
time, but they also read with great intensity, often taking on very
challenging and complex material. Students read textbooks on
the subway, teachers grade papers, and executives read reports.
The subway encourages energetic concentration—its challenges
sharpen the reading mind. The efforts involved in filtering out
the inputs of the surround bring energy to the efforts of literate
comprehension. The subway is the opposite of the library—loud,
distracting, and intrusive—but it can produce levels of focus as
high as those in the library because its sensory demands are high
but its cognitive demands are low. The mind is free to focus on
the world of the text, withholding just enough to monitor the
I’m Not Here 127
environment. Subway time is cognitive free time, and in free time

you can be absentminded. But that absence from the scene is not
easy to achieve; it takes practice. Subway readers must develop a
set of postures and movements, ways of holding the device or the
book or the paper, ways of coping with changes of balance as the
car rocks or comes to a stop in a squeal of brakes, ways of claiming
and protecting space—all disciplines necessary for visual and cog-
nitive focus. Your mind is free to read if your body is disciplined.
One of the challenges that the subway poses is how to grip the
material text in a crowded and shifting environment. Are you sit-
ting or standing? Is your text light or heavy, compact or oversized?
How much space can you occupy? Do you need to hold the book
close to your eyes? Can you use two hands or is one hand occu-
pied with briefcase or umbrella, or grasping a pole? How do you
fold the newspaper? Some readers learn to array their belongings
in a structure that supports the book. A woman sitting in the car
might hold her umbrella between her feet, her bag in her lap, her
hand holding the book resting on the bag. She has created, on the
spot, a design solution, an adaptation of the reading body to the
demands of the situation. Or someone might lean into a pole, one
arm wrapped around, newspaper held in the other hand, carefully
balanced and steady. Or a heavy book might be held flat on the lap,
the reader’s head curled over the pages.
Subway readers are always challenged by the jolts and abrupt
stops, the unsteadiness of the ride. Anyone who rides the subway
develops a keen sense of balance, anticipating the challenges, shifting
weight and stance. Reading makes that balance more complex, as the
arms work to keep the page still, relative to the eye. Even when you
are sitting, you need a stance that will allow you to adjust. So the
reader is engaged in a complex physical practice, one that becomes
second nature with extended repetition but never stops making
physical and cognitive demands. To be capable enough to grapple
with a practice as demanding as reading in the midst of an ongoing
interaction with a complex physical environment is testimony to the
capabilities of the human brain. Subway readers are capable read-
ers, masters of demanding skills, trained in a craft. They are clever,
adaptable multitaskers. Attention stays on the book, unless and until
some stimulus in the surround demands it. Monitoring systems reen-
gage, the book goes out of focus. The stimulus recedes, attention
increases on the book, monitoring recedes, sometimes at an exact
balance. The reading mind is absent and present simultaneously. But

the stance is maintained, the adjustments made.
Reading on the subway must adapt not only to the physical
challenges like balance and stance but also to the social challenges
created by density and movement. It is sometimes impossible to
define any personal physical boundaries or use spaces. Contact is
total and in all directions. One of the key issues of subway riding is
how to abide in that intimate physical interaction without risking
personal dignity. Avoid eye contact, avoid unnecessary movement,
keep your hands to yourself, and do not occupy the space with too
much energy. Reading is the perfect practice for the situation. If
you can manage the physical task and create a minimal space for
the book, you can remove your focus from the surround and turn
it into background. You can be lost in the text, absentminded,
and your body will therefore occupy the space in obedience to
the social demands. Your eyes will be focused on the text, you will
remain as still as possible, your hands will be occupied with the
book, and your energy will not be directed to anyone else in the
space. But your concentration on the book can always be dialed
down so that you can monitor the surround. Reading is in fact one
way of avoiding danger on the subway. No one’s attention is drawn
to a reader, including the attention of troublemakers. Readers can
hide behind their newspapers and become virtually invisible. Since
they do not seem to be present, they are not seen. Reading on the
subway is a conscious withdrawal from the surround, an escapist
reading, and the energy of that escape contributes to the focus and
intensity that subway readers can attain.
New York is also an outdoor city, a city of parks, cafes and life
on the street, and reading survives there too. Especially in city
parks, readers find a space slightly apart, full of people but with
no required interaction. You can sit by yourself, lost in your own
thoughts, paying no attention to others, and still comply with the
social expectations. Interaction in a park is voluntary and usu-
ally pleasant, acknowledging others but not imposing on them.
Readers are ordinary residents of almost any park, along with the
dog walkers, laughing teenagers, moms and kids, people eating
lunch, strollers, commuters in a hurry, and race walkers among
others. Parks are not purpose-built for reading, like libraries, but
they do not set the kind of challenge that readers encounter in the
subway. They are reading-friendly. Natural light, open air, enough
I’m Not Here 129
private space, enough background energy. In New York, reading

in the park is an urbane pleasure, one of the cultural benefits of
living in the city.
My favorite park for reading in New York is Madison Park, at
23rd and Broadway. Madison Park is a mix—a busy commuter
path between corporate buildings and subway stops, a tourist
attraction with the Flatiron Building and an iconic view of the
Empire State Building, a dog park, a popular outdoor restaurant, a
play area for kids and families, a maze of curving paths lined with
benches. People read in every section of the park, from the busi-
est cross paths to the quietest corners. This pleasant environment
is not a surround which encourages withdrawal—it is a pleasure
to be there. But it does encourage leisure, taking in the air, eating
a snack, people-watching, appreciating the gardens and greenery,
reading a book. Parks encourage a less disciplined management
of time. They are appropriate places to devote hours to reading
for pleasure. Of course you can study or do work for the office,
but parks are for novels, for reading as indulgence, for time off
the clock. In this pleasant environment, there is no need for with-
drawal, but there is space and time for the withdrawal necessary
for reading. Despite the crowds, there is no need for interaction.
Privacy is respected and encouraged.
The postures of park reading are designed for long-term com-
fort. One leg crossed over, spine of the book resting on the raised
knee. Book resting on lap, spine curved over, looking down at
the page, as if ready to nod off. In the park, readers feel at home;
their practice suits the setting, it gives them pleasure. It may be a
public place, but it is also an extension of the domestic space, a
place to be at ease. Reading in the park is easygoing. It promotes
concentration but not productivity as there are too many pleasant
distractions. In a library, readers are surrounded by other readers,
but in a park, the others are engaged in a variety of private projects,
some of them vibrant and visually arresting—walking a dog, riding
a bike—and likely to provide arresting alternatives to the pleasure
of reading. You can get absorbed in your reading, but more likely
for pleasure than for intellectual profit. The feeling of at-homeness
contributes to the phenomenology of the reading experience. The
text feels as familiar and comfortable as the surround. A park, in
Roland Barthes terms, is for pleasure, not for ecstasy, not for a
reading that shatters the reading self, that challenges its way of
being, that questions its foundations, but a reading that confirms

and entertains, that allows the reader to maintain that sense of
effortless belonging, or, to put it negatively, that complacency.
Reading in Private Spaces

Reading is also a domestic practice, a private act pursued in spaces
designed precisely for privacy. Reading is often literally at home,
in spaces designed by readers for the idiosyncrasies of their own
bodily practices. They build around the particular needs of their
reading an architecture and design that supports it. Homes, or at
least parts of them, are purpose-built for reading—home libraries,
offices, reading rooms, comfortable chairs with perfect lights, etc.
But habitual readers will use the entire house as a reading space,
taking advantage of spaces designed for other purposes, keeping a
magazine in the laundry room or a book in the kitchen, so reading
can become integrated into the various tasks of daily life. Home is
where reading becomes a habit, not just a school subject.
Manguel sees the private library as an extension of the reader’s
mind, which in turn creates the physical and symbolic environment
for that mind. It is at once a rich sensory surround and a spatial
representation of an idiosyncratic logic. Here is Manguel on the
sensory experience of reading in his personal library:
In order for these nightly imaginations to flourish, I must allow

my other senses to awaken—to see and touch the pages, to hear
the crinkle and the rustle of the paper and the fearful crack of the
spine, to smell the wood of the shelves, the musky perfume of the
leather bindings, the acrid scent of my yellowing pocket books.”
(The Library at Night, 17)
The reading body flourishes when it is surrounded by a space

that bears the traces of its own history. The books in Manguel’s
library are an embodiment of his reading life, which is then physi-
cally present for every reading he performs in that space. His books
contribute a subtle, physical intimacy to every reading act. As new
books are welcomed and processed into his history, the reading
space becomes an extension of the reading body. Manguel’s library,
with its rare and valuable books and its affluence, is not my library
or probably yours. Each private library is unique, with a distinct
I’m Not Here 131
atmosphere, its own set of smells and sounds, colors and lights.
Serious readers construct that environment, sometimes by con-
scious design, often by sheer habit, but always with an embodied
knowledge of their own needs. In the home library surrounded by
books chosen and arranged by the reader’s own logic, the influ-
ence of personal history is marked. I read as a function of my his-
tory in reading, and especially when that history is the surround of
my reading, I read as that history.
Manguel describes the private libraries of writers in particu-
larly visceral terms: “The rooms in which writers (that subspe-
cies of readers) surround themselves with the materials they need
for their work acquire an animal quality, like that of a den or a
nest, holding the shape of their bodies and offering a container
to their thoughts” (The Library at Night, 178). The private space
designed for reading is an extension of the body, a space that is
mapped in the brain as the body itself. The book is enclosed within
the extended body and the material history of the reader. A space
so familiar that it needs no conscious attention, it surrounds the
reader as a natural environment, a habitat. In this environment,
a rich, personal reading is encouraged, a process of digestion and
incorporation. The text enters into the reader’s life, intimately
connecting to character and history. The home library is a place
where reading becomes an exploration of consciousness and an
act of self-understanding.
Reading zones in homes are often carefully designed for the
particulars of the reader’s practice—the right lighting for the eyes,
the right furniture for the posture. Interiors with attendant com-
modities can be structured around the practice of reading. You can
buy purpose-built lamps, pillows, chairs, desks, and shelves that
combine to become a reading-based domestic aesthetic. The home
of a serious reader is instantly recognizable, not just because there
are books, newspapers and magazines everywhere, but because
the furniture has been selected and placed with reading in mind:
chairs selected to please the reading body, lighting designed for
the particular reading eye and at just the right brightness and angle
for the reader’s idiosyncratic needs. All these are designed around
habitual postures, themselves adaptations to a personal history of
light, space, and visual capability. A reader can create a domestic
cocoon for the reading body, a space which minimizes distraction
and maximizes concentration on the page.
Domestic spaces that are designed for reading can take many
forms. Many readers maintain a home office or library designated
for reading. Others might set up a reading chair in the parlor,
accompanied by a table for reading materials and coffee. A bed-
room can also be arranged for reading with a comfortable chair
next to the bed, or pillows on the bed arranged perfectly for the
body of the reader. You can set up a porch, a deck, a swing, or a
hammock to read in the back yard. The serious domestic reader is
a consumer, an intelligent interior designer. There are even cata-
logues that cater to the discerning reader-consumer. The Levenger
catalogue, for example, offers “Tools for Serious Readers,” includ-
ing pens perfect for note-taking, pen and pencil holders, paper
pads and portfolios, desks and desk accessories, bookcases, reading
tables and chairs, ottomans, lap desks, bookweights, page cutters,
bookmarks, magnifying glasses, bookrests, throw pillows, floor
and table lamps, lights that attach to the book itself, and laptop
stands. Domestic reading situates the reader in the marketplace.
Reading becomes economic consumption, the choice of texts and
environments that create and express a personal history, a social
identity. Just as clothes and cars and other consumer choices create
Bourdieu’s “distinction,” so do the choice of books, the creation
of reading spaces, and the very act of reading itself position the
reader/consumer within the semiotic economy.
But an avid reader will also read all around the house, even in
places not designed for reading. Books and magazines can be left
almost anywhere in the house, available for a quick read, in the
midst of some other activity. You can read as you do the laundry,
you can read as you go to the bathroom. You can read in the living
room during commercials as you watch TV. You can read in the
kitchen as you wait for the water to boil. You can read at the dining
room table as you eat breakfast. In all these ad hoc spaces, body
placement and posture adapt to the prevailing conditions. As you
stand waiting for the water to boil, you find the light in the kitchen
and turn the uplifted page to the right angle, without conscious
thought, out of habit. You might grasp the book in one hand as
you stir the soup in the pot with the other. In a purpose-built
space, the light is provided for your reading, the posture is almost a
function of the furniture, and the reading done there is intentional,
prolonged, and focused. But these ad hoc reading spaces accom-
modate reading as a dispersed and fugitive habit connected with
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the other tasks and functions of everyday life. Reading becomes

a recurring theme of everyday existence, woven into the fabric of
daily routines. Such reading is momentary but constant, deferred
at times so that the rest of life can go on, but then easily taken up
again.
Reading in the comfortable confines of the home creates a
mood—safe, secure, “at home”—with everything you need per-
fectly placed, so you can reach out with your eyes closed and turn
on the light or place the book on the table by the sofa. This “at-
home-ness” informs the work of the reading body. If we tend to
read assiduously in a task chair at work, then we tend to read more
casually, more comfortably, in the domestic cocoon. It is hard to
take notes and underline and make comments in the margins when
the book is propped up on the counter as you wait for eggs to boil.
Certainly, you can concentrate in the domestic space—you can set
it up to minimize distractions—but it is a more relaxed concen-
tration, a hermeneutic of comfort. If being “not at home” is the
condition for anxiety, dread, angst, then being “at home,” literally
and metaphorically, is the condition for confidence, comfort—for
reading as well-being.
This proper, domestic reading practice has a rich history in
Anglo-American culture. Since the late middle ages, reading has
been integrated into the rituals of domestic life and designed into
bourgeois domestic architecture. Physical spaces for silent, private
reading— “chambers,” “closets,” sitting rooms, private libraries—
become architectural commonplaces. But domestic reading in this
tradition is also a social, familial practice, with parents reading in
the parlor to the assembled household, or women reading as they
sit in a sewing circle. Naomi Tadmor provides a vivid account of
these scenes of domestic reading in her article “‘In the even my
wife read to me’: Women, Reading and Household Life in the
Eighteenth Century.” Tadmor examines the diaries and household
accounts of two upper-middle class families in eighteenth century
England: that of Thomas and Peggy Turner, a merchant family,
and the household of the novelist Samuel Richardson. She con-
cludes that in both families, reading was integrated into a “rou-
tine of work and of religious discipline” (165). This reading is
private in the sense that it occurs in the domestic sphere, but it is
also a sociable practice in which the entire household participates.
Tadmor evokes a scene of young women performing needle-work
together while one of the party reads aloud: “They assemble at

one large table: one goes to ruffle making; one to border making,
one to muslin flowering, one to drawing . . . ” (171) and another
to reading aloud. In such a scene, the interpretive process and the
emotional reaction to the text would be carefully policed. Extreme
emotional reaction would be discouraged by the sociability of the
situation, and intellectual consensus would be encouraged by the
presence of authority figures and the interests of family accord.
Often, long novels were read in short segments over months of
familial reading, along with letters, newspapers, scriptures, and
religious tracts. Texts were not encountered in an extended, linear
unfolding, but rather as fragments mixed with other texts and
domestic practices. Even a potentially disruptive text would likely
be domesticated, integrated into familiar, conventional under-
standings. Thus, reading as a daily domestic routine encourages
habitual hermeneutic practices unlikely to question or resist social
conventions and powers.
Catherine E. Kelley in her essay “Reading and the Problem of
Accomplishment” analyzes the ways that the literacy practices of
eighteenth-century American women became elements in the for-
mation of proper young ladies. Reading aloud in a “sophisticated
and discerning” manner became an accomplishment, along with
music, dance, conversation, needlework, and other “polite prac-
tices”(125). This skill demonstrated domestic elegance but also,
Kelley argues, the “firmness of mind” required of women in a
new republic, who would become the mothers and early literacy
instructors of the young men who would be trained to take on
the responsibilities of elite citizenship. But that firmness of mind
must still be balanced with the social elegance necessary to pro-
duce a “republic of taste.” It is not the role of these elegant young
ladies to become serious scholars or critical analysts of the texts
they read. Their role is to understand the text well enough to per-
form it credibly and to integrate it into the conventional everyday
life of the domestic sphere. Domestic reading becomes a strategy
of social reproduction, assuring that texts will be processed in safe
and predictable ways.
But some domestic reading is less proper. Truly private spaces in
the home can be disinhibiting. We can indulge in activities allowed
only “in the privacy of one’s home.” The domestic space is the
most common sexual space, and it also accommodates the primal
I’m Not Here 135
physical acts of cooking, eating, and eliminating food. The body

at home is the Bakhtinian body: “The body that figures in all the
expressions of the unofficial speech of the people is the body that
fecundates and is fecundated, that gives birth and is born, devours
and is devoured, drinks, defecates, is sick and dying” (Synnott, 21).
These are all behaviors of the body at home. What’s remarkable
about what Bakhtin calls the carnivalesque, after all, is that these
ordinary, everyday behaviors are allowed at special moments in
the more inhibited public sphere. Home is a bodily space, often
designed with a refinement that would deny it, but always a space
of sex and food and birth and death. In the home, reading becomes
associated with all these bodily functions. Readers read as they eat,
as they shit, as they bathe, as they fall asleep, as they masturbate, as
they suffer fatigue and illness—all in the domestic sphere.
These truly private, domestic but disreputable acts of reading
also have a complex history. Andrew Taylor, in his article “Into His
Secret Chamber: Reading and Privacy in Late Medieval England,”
captures the moment when silent, private reading finds its proper
architectural and social setting in the “chambre de retraite” of
wealthy men of learning. The book in this era is a luxury commod-
ity which is usually an “occasion for public reading and discus-
sion,” but now becomes a private possession to be enjoyed outside
the surveillance of the community. Taylor says that the chamber
became “a realm of private solace in which dreaming and reading
intermingle,” both “a symbol and a material condition of a certain
kind of leisure reading we now take very much for granted” (42).
“In these warm and well-lit chambers one could read in bed, read
and eat or drink, read oneself asleep, read and fantasize. Retreating
from the public praelectio of the hall, one could read to oneself in
peace and quiet; one could read silently” (43). This architectural
development, and the social permission to employ it as a location
for reading created “a new intimacy in reading, linking it with
devotional practice and the development of religious individualism
and at the same time encouraging a rebirth of erotica. (43). Silent
reading, protected by private space, was less subject to direct
supervision by authority figures, more likely to produce ungovern-
able intellectual, emotional, and physical responses. Taylor links
this reading with dangerous religious meditation and with illicit
sexual feelings. Both of these reading practices can “cultivate the
habit of extensive fantasizing on short passages, and encourage
readers to visualize the events in vivid and intimate terms even

to the extent of inserting themselves into the picture” (44). The
meditative medieval reader was encouraged to imagine, for exam-
ple, a cinematic vision of the passion as he read the gospel, imagin-
ing himself as an inhabitant of the world evoked by the text. And
the erotic reader found, in the private chamber, the opportunity to
insert himself into the fictional scenario. Both practices are almost
impossible for social authorities to control, precisely because they
occur in private spaces that elude the gaze of the other and because
those spaces surround the embodied consciousness of the reader,
which engages in a response to the text that no one else can share
or observe. The private space encourages the private mind, freeing
the reader to devise personal and idiosyncratic interpretations of
the text.
This freedom was particularly dangerous when women took
advantage of it. If a woman in early modern England could
withdraw to her “closet” to read, she too could develop the
alarming interiority that private space made materially possible.
Femke Molekamp’s essay, “Early Modern Women and Affective
Devotional Reading,” traces the culture’s ambivalence to this
ungovernable private reading experience. Molekamp is interested
in “private domestic devotion,” (53) in which women seek the
Holy Spirit through “a textually inspired contemplative state of
mind” (53–54) The danger is that this contemplation will produce
an excess of emotion—“destructive perturbations of excessive
passion” (54). The occasion for this excess is not only the intensity
of the woman’s identification with the sufferings or the love of
Christ, but also the fact that this encounter occurs in enclosed, pri-
vate spaces—the lady’s closet—with an intimacy almost impossible
in the public spaces of women’s reading. In the “delicious soli-
tude” of “retirement,” the “baser passions” (56) can assert them-
selves, even though the point of devotional prayer is to govern
those passions. In early modern culture, Molekamp says, the closet
is “both a chaste and a sexualized space” (58) where erotic passion
is as likely to be stimulated as religious ecstasy. Even religious texts
subjected to private reading—bedroom reading—can be experi-
enced through an unruly hermeneutic that produces a dangerously
embodied response. Reading in the bedroom is often an opportu-
nity for that most embodied of all reading practices—masturbation.
Eye and brain and hand cooperate in a complex bodily process
I’m Not Here 137
which begins in an encounter with a printed text and ends in

sexual pleasure. The privacy, the intimacy of the bedroom as a
space of reading provides the perfect opportunity for this process.
Molekamp reminds us, though, that the closet is still a space within
a familial, patriarchal structure. The readings that occur there do
not fundamentally threaten that structure, “unruly” as they may
seem. Bedroom reading is not revolutionary reading. It is in its
way as domesticated as the reading that accompanies the sewing
circle in the parlor.
The most complex site for domestic reading in our culture is the
bathroom, the most intimate and private space in the home. People
habitually read in the bathroom. They keep magazines for them-
selves there, they provide reading materials in the guest bathroom.
There are genres of books and magazines that are recognized as
appropriate for the guest bathroom—travel books, light humor—
and you can buy magazine racks and bookshelves designed for
bathroom use. It is all very proper and refined. But the fact is that
reading happens in the bathroom because defecation happens in
the bathroom. It takes time, but it takes little cognitive engage-
ment, so the mind is free to absent itself, to focus attention on the
book. Reading takes the mind away from the work of the body,
but that very lack of attention can provide the necessary relax-
ation. At any rate, you have a couple minutes, so why not read?
In this physical space, the most demanding and civilized cognitive
task connects with the most abject act of the gross physical body.
Elias identifies the segregation of elimination as one of the mark-
ers of the civilizing process. We segregate it, of course, because it
reminds us of our animal nature, the bodily urges that civilization
exists to control. And yet, in the space provided for that segrega-
tion of the physical, reading is a common practice.
As I discuss in the next chapter, reading is associated with eating
by habit and by metaphor. Readers often read as they eat, and we
think metaphorically of reading as a kind of eating or consump-
tion. Books are the food of the soul, we “take in” and “digest”
what we read. Conversely, reading is associated with defecation
by habit but not by metaphor. I know of no metaphor of reading
as elimination, as moving something out of the mind. But the fact
of the habitual connection suggests that there is some unspoken
symbolic connection. Metaphorically, it is writing that is figured
as a kind of elimination. Writing is the body producing a textual
object out of itself, an “excorporation,” as Jean Luc Nancy says.

Even the ordinary word for writing as “self-expression” suggests
that something internal is now external. And then, as the meta-
phorical connection between reading and eating suggests, read-
ers consume that object—we incorporate the excorporation of the
other. We eat the writer’s shit, not to put too fine a point on it.
In Nancy’s words, “Existence not only requires excrement . . . a
body is also, and makes itself, its own excretion. A body spaces
itself, a body expels itself, identically. It excribes itself as body: being
spaced, it’s a dead body; being expelled, it’s a filthy body” (105).
Excription is excrement. The written is the excremental. Reading,
then, is perverse; it deserves to be hidden, to be sequestered, kept
in private away from others, sublimated into a cognitive act. This
is a refined perversity, since the “eating” is metaphorical—a matter
of light bouncing off the marks excorporated by the writer and
then entering the eyes, incorporated as neural patterns—but it is
perverse nevertheless. And the fact that we do it in public, and
that reading is socially sanctioned, even required, legitimizes the
perversion without diminishing its sheer weirdness.
Eliminating food is a casting out, an extrajection. Reading is a
taking in, an introjection. In the process of elimination, a physical
object comes into existence, as in the productive act of writing. In
reading, there is no new physical object. The book is the same even
after it has been read. But the absence of a new physical object
should not blind us to the presence of a new psychological and
bodily object—the text, the work of reading. Insofar as reading is a
practice, it is a productive act, and what it produces is the text, the
incorporated experience of the reader, the neuronal events created
in a particular act of reading, which do not exist until the reading
occurs, and which are not fully present in the book. The mate-
riality of the book—the excorporation of the other—is worked
over by the reading body into the materiality of the text. By this
logic, the text is the product of reading, the excretion of the read-
ing mind. But, in reading, there is no production of an object
outside the body. The text remains incorporated, an experience
within the reader’s body-mind. The text is new, a real readerly
accomplishment, but it is not and cannot be shared. You can write
about your experience as a reader, but you cannot fully capture or
express the text as experience. Reading involves a work of the body
and mind that is too complex and kinetic to be expressed fully in
I’m Not Here 139
words. The purpose of reading is to create that body-mind and the

world it constructs around itself, in a process at once civilized and
perverse.
The relationship between the reading body and the spaces it
inhabits is dialectical: the spaces shape the reading and the read-
ing shapes the spaces. Reading experiences happen in material and
social spaces which affect the practice, and the bodily practice of
reading creates, uses, and makes sense of the spaces. The reading
body extends out into the world, monitoring and familiarizing the
surround. It makes a home for reading, designing perfect places, or
carving out a workable, private space in a public world. The spaces
where reading occurs in turn affect the reading body. The concen-
tration necessary for reading is so intense that it is vulnerable to a
distracting place and responsive to a supportive space. All of the
spaces where reading occurs have distinctive interpersonal dynam-
ics and social and cultural meanings. Reading in any one of those
spaces takes on the dynamic and meaning of the space. Reading on
the subway is not reading in bed. Reading at home is not reading
at work (a topic in itself). And since reading occurs in such a wide
variety of spaces—public and private, formal and informal, indoors
and outdoors, familiar and strange—it takes on a variety of mean-
ings. It is civilized and perverse, disciplined and resistant, at home
and not at home. The reading body allows concentration to absent
itself from the surround, but the surround persists as determining
but almost invisible background.
4
“Su n dry Ult e r ior

T r a nsfor m at ions”
T h e H a bi t of R e a di ng a n d E at i ng
P ierre Bourdieu uses the term habitus to refer to the set of dispo-
sitions and assumptions that guide the moment to moment choices
and procedures required by a cultural practice. Habitus is a subtle
and powerful analytical tool in Bourdieu’s work, allowing him to
make sense of the tiniest gestures as manifestations of an entire
social formation. But as Katharine Breen has shown in Imagining
an English Reading Public, 1150–1400, this ancient term has a rich
intellectual history and a variety of usages from referring to the
rigorous process of learning Latin grammar and its power to instill
a regime of rational morality, to the simple clothing of monastic
life and its power to encourage virtue, and to the simple concept
of habit, the virtually unconscious, apparently trivial behaviors of
daily life and their power to shape personal identity for good or ill.
In our ordinary language, we speak of habits as potential problems
we must learn to manage or as daily virtues that enhance our physi-
cal and spiritual wellbeing. For serious readers the act of reading
is a habit, even an addiction. It is practiced repeatedly throughout
the activity of everyday life. We carry books or reading devices
with us so we can indulge our habit almost anywhere, and so read-
ing becomes, by sheer repetition, associated with other habits and
necessities of daily life. We can read as we ride the bus, as we take a
bath, as we walk on a treadmill. By virtue of this everyday engage-
ment, reading becomes second nature, so we can read with great
efficiency even while we are engaged in other activities. Thus,
reading takes on a bodily character in the life-world of the reader.
Reading is not disembodied, and it is not otherworldly. It takes

places in the everyday mix of habitual life, one habit among many.
For example, reading is often habitually associated with eating.
Readers often read as they eat, managing both practices efficiently.
This fact of everyday, habitual life locates reading within a com-
plex web of social and symbolic associations that define the habitus
of the reading body. The example of reading and eating suggests
that reading is as much a mundane habit as a rarified hermeneutic
discipline—a discipline that cannot be abstracted from the habit.
The title of this chapter is taken from Brillat-Savarin’s influ-
ential The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendental
Gastronomy (1825). Here is the entire passage:
As soon as esculent substance is introduced into the mouth, it is

confiscated, gas and juices, beyond recall. The lips cut off its retreat;
the teeth seize upon it and crush it; it is soaked with saliva; the
tongue kneads it and turns it over; an indrawing of breath forces it
toward the gullet; the tongue lifts to start it on its slippery way; its
fragrance is absorbed by the sense of smell, and down it travels to
the stomach, there to undergo sundry ulterior transformations, and
throughout the whole operation not one particle, no drop or atom,
escapes its fate of being thoroughly appreciated. (30)
Brillat-Savarin’s amusing defamiliarization of digestion reminds

us in its polite way that eating is both an act of violence—once the
food is grasped, there is no escape—and a gross physical process—
the body works over the food finally in ways that cannot be spoken
of explicitly in polite society. Those euphemistic “sundry ulterior
transformations” literally incorporate the food: what was once
bread and wine is now the eater’s body and blood. And then, even
more unspeakable, what the body cannot use, it excretes. Eating
transforms edible objects into the eating subject, in ways too “ulte-
rior” for Brillat-Savarin to articulate.
In a more contemporary but equally vivid, post-Freudian style,
Susanne Skubal characterizes eating as a primitive, animalistic act,
one that turns even the most civilized eater into a “devourer, biter,
lip-smacker, meat grinder, Pavlovian drooler, mother-sucker, eater
of things dead and dying” (Word of Mouth: Food and Fiction after
Freud, 51). Following Melanie Klein and Karl Abraham, she under-
stands eating as “the first aggressive desire,” complicated by the
“Sundry Ulterior Transformations” 143
fact that it is directed at the beloved nursing mother. “Long before

we struggle with Oedipal desire,” she says, “we encounter a terri-
fying, aggressive desire to devour mother” (113). Skubal’s rhetoric
creates a more extreme defamiliarization than Brillat-Savarin’s: not
only is eating grossly physical, it is almost unspeakably, sadistically
perverse. And Freud himself famously portrayed the bliss that goes
along with this oral aggression:
No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast
and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape
the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expres-
sion of sexual satisfaction in later life. (Three Essays on Sexuality, 48)
In discourses like these, eating is depicted as the most intimate

act of the physical body, one that reminds us that we are animal
beings with primitive urges that shape our physical and emotional
lives.
How odd, then, that eating is often associated, both by habit
and by metaphor, with the most “disembodied,” cerebral act of
human cognition—reading. Metaphorically the book has through-
out Western cultural history been described as the food of the soul,
and reading as a kind of mental eating. Books give sustenance to
the mind, and they are “digested” in the act of reading. Alberto
Manguel, in A History of Reading, catalogues some of these figura-
tive commonplaces: “We, the readers, speak of savouring a book, of
finding nourishment in it, of devouring a book at one sitting, of
regurgitating or spewing up a text, of ruminating on a passage,
of rolling a poet’s words on the tongue, of feasting on poetry, of
living on a diet of detective stories.” (170–171) The metaphor is
ancient. Here is Seneca, describing reading as eating in an elabo-
rate passage that anticipates Brillat-Savarin:
As long as the aliments of which we have partaken retain their own

nature and float as solids in our stomach, they are burdensome;
but when they have changed from their former state, then, and not
till then, they enter into our flesh and blood. Let us do the same
with the foods which nourish our minds, so that we do not suffer
the things we have taken in to remain whole and foreign. Let us
digest them! Otherwise they enter our memory but not our mind.
(Enchiridion, 4–5)
And here is Quintillian:
Just as we swallow our food masticated and nearly fluid, in order

that it may be more easily digested—so our reading should not
be delivered to the memory in its crude state, but sweetened and
worked up by frequent repetition. (Enchiridion, 5)
Reading, it seems, works its own sundry ulterior transforma-

tions, subjecting the text to a violent hermeneutic digestion, a
process by which the alien text is captured and incorporated into
personal memory and identity.
And the metaphor lives on in contemporary literary theory.
Roland Barthes, in The Pleasure of the Text habitually speaks of
reading in alimentary metaphors. He describes boring, “readerly”
texts as “unweaned language”—“these are the motions of ungrati-
fied sucking, of an undifferentiated orality, intersecting the orality
which produces the pleasure of gastrosophy and of language”
(4–5), and he yearns for a more sophisticated and demanding
textual repast, one that would force our reading “not to devour,
to gobble, but to graze, to browse scrupulously, to rediscover—in
order to read today’s writers—the leisure of bygone readings: to
be aristocratic readers” (13). These ancient and postmodern meta-
phors suggest that reading is as embodied and as selfish as eating,
that reading happens in and through the gross physical body, that,
as Barthes says, “the pleasure of the text is that moment when my
body pursues its own ideas” (17).
In their intense physicality, these figures raise the central ques-
tion of this book: What is the relationship between reading and
the body? What are the consequences of thinking about reading,
the exemplary act of the mind, as an act of the body—the brain
and the nervous system, the muscles and the digestive system, the
body as it moves and situates itself in physical and social space? I
have argued that reading is a thoroughly physical and worldly pro-
cess, a neurochemical event of cognition and emotion produced
by the brain and the nervous system, instigated by the eye that
scans the text, situated in a specific reading pose—a body engaged
in everyday, habitual practices and complex material and social
environments. This physical, habitual, social body, with its unique
neural anatomy and chemistry, is the body that reads. As Gadamer
says, we are “interpreting animals,” bodies immersed in culture
and history, trained to make sense of the world as we experience it,

including the written texts that the reading body incorporates.
How is our understanding of reading as a cognitive act, an act of
consciousness, changed by seeing it also as a mundane habit, one
that is associated in daily life with other daily habits of the body?
Much of the cognitive work of reading is ulterior, in the sense that
it occurs below the level of self-awareness. To take one small but
crucial example, reading requires a complex and precise process of
shape recognition. The brain must perceive the graphic letter as a
meaningful foreground against a neutral, white background. And it
must distinguish that letter from all the others in the repertoire—
instantly. Skillful readers also learn to recognize the shapes of words
and groups of words, increasing cognitive efficiency. The task of
reading is comprised of a complex set of such cognitive subpro-
grams, all complexly embodied in the neural anatomy. And it is
not only the brain that requires training and habituation, it is the
entire reading body, adapting to the material text and the surround.
As Sartre says, “my body always extends across the tool which it
utilizes . . . it is my adaptation to these tools” (quoted in Spicker,
232). The reading posture extends the body across the book—the
hands, the arms, the shoulders and the neck, the back, the hips,
the legs, all contribute to the act of reading. There is nothing nat-
ural about this posture—it is a matter of habit. In How Societies
Remember, Paul Connerton says that “postures and movements
which are habit memories become sedimented into bodily confor-
mation” (94). Reading, he says, “is an embodied and technologi-
cally contingent practice” (101). Without a physical posture that
gives access to the text, reading cannot occur, so in order to operate
efficiently, it must become one habit among many in everyday life,
accomplished as we eat or as we fall asleep. By habit, the reading
body, right down to its neurochemistry, is thoroughly socialized.
As Barthes says, even the body of bliss, caught up in the jouissance
of creative reading, “is also my ‘historical subject,’ for it is at the
conclusion of a very complex process of biographical, historical,
sociological, neurotic elements (education, social class, childhood
configuration, etc.)” (Pleasure of the Text, 62–63). The habit of
reading trains the body, creating neural functions perfectly adapted
to the cognitive tasks required. Or as Connerton puts it, “Habit is a
knowledge and a remembering in the hands and in the body; and in
the cultivation of habit, it is our body that understands” (94).
To think of reading as a habit is, in the context of most liter-

ary theory of the last two hundred years, to debase it, to consign
it to the realm of the ordinary—that mode of being from which
literature lifts us. For habit, in this tradition, is the great enemy of
creative and critical consciousness. For the romantics, especially
Wordsworth and Coleridge, habitual perception must be over-
come if we are to perceive the beauty of the world. “Custom,”
Wordsworth tells us in “The Intimations Ode,” finally blinds us to
the celestial light. We can have no “spots of time,” in which we see
the divine in the natural world, unless we see the world freshly, as
though for the first time. So if reading is a habit, disciplined into us
by a social process that works on an unconscious level, what hope is
there that it can allow for fresh perception, moments of imaginative
insight? For the modernists, especially the Russian formalists, habit
is “automatization,” the regimenting force of ordinary language,
which imposes on body and mind a social consensus, an acceptance
of the banal structures of meaning taught by pedagogical and cul-
tural routines. Thus, art must “defamiliarize” the world, “make
strange,” refuse to allow the reader to run the habitual programs,
revealing their arbitrary limits. And for the postmodernists, habit
is the mindless acceptance of ideology. Habit is how hegemony
works. Structures of meaning become dominant precisely because
they become habitual, invisible, operating powerfully below critical
awareness. Thus, habits of cognition and emotion must be decon-
structed, not taken as natural or inevitable. Habits encourage us to
see structures of meaning as the structures of reality itself, rather
than the structures of a particular culture, engaged in a political,
ideological struggle. If reading is a Foucauldian discipline, a habit
of the mind and body, it is an element in the circuit of power that
subjects consciousness to social control. As Bourdieu argues, the
habituation of practices works to reproduce the social system in
which they operate with such unselfconscious ease.
Insofar as reading is a physical habit, it is embedded in a his-
torical situation. The habits with which reading is associated have
changed over time. Think of contemporary readers listening to
music, watching television, texting with friends, while at the same
time they read emails, surf the web, and read a novel on their
iPad. This assemblage of habitual actions is unprecedented in the
history of reading. Such readers are caught up in communication
systems and social formations peculiar to our time. By contrast,
think of the lost art of reading in the sewing circle, which histo-
rians of reading have documented extensively in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries (see Flint, 12; Sicherman, 206–207).
As one woman read aloud while the others sewed, they engaged
in a habit that caught their reading up in a domestic formation
and a culture of manual skills peculiar to their time. Or think of the
medieval monk or nun or holy laywoman reading a Book of Hours,
developing a habit of everyday spiritual reading, caught up in a
culture of faith and disciplined devotion almost unthinkable in our
time (see Taylor 45–47). The multitasking reader of our time is
not the fervently concentrated medieval reader or the comfort-
able middle-class young lady allowing her mind to wander in the
reading as her hands accomplish a complex but practiced task. All
of these habits with which reading is connected have cognitive
consequences—different investments of attention, different emo-
tional commitments—determined by the historical contexts of the
reading. When we think of the situatedness of reading, we should
think it right down to these everyday, habitual details.
However, despite the epistemological constraints imposed by
the historical and social determinants of habitual life, the body
shaped by disciplined habit is what makes the work of reading
possible, including readings that challenge habitual, conventional
thought. Without the smooth operation of lower-order reading
functions, the higher-order functions are impossible. If reading is
only a habit, it becomes the instrument of power that this critical
tradition describes. Readers learn the protocols of the practice, put
them in operation, and produce the results that the discipline gen-
erates. The habit of reading, on the cognitive level as well as the
physical level, must be subjected to analytic self-awareness, so the
protocols can be questioned and challenged, so their cultural con-
tingency can be uncovered. Only the reading that subjects habit
to criticism can resist the discipline and read with the freshness the
romantics require. But reading cannot happen at all unless it first
becomes a habit, like any other. And every habit with which reading
becomes associated imposes its own disciplines and limits, compli-
cating the cultural constraints that govern the reading body.
Eating, which seems so natural, so physical, so much a matter of
biochemical processes, is one of the most elaborately regulated and
socialized of human activities. The “devourer, biter, lip smacker,
meat grinder” with which this essay began must be civilized by
the rules of the table. The raw hunger of the human animal must
become “a socialized and disciplined hunger,” Christian Coff says,
“hunger transformed from a natural and bestial instinct to civilized
and cultivated manners. Community is founded in the taming of
hunger, which is the civilizing process” (1–2). In this, he follows
Levi-Strauss, who sees the “culinary operation” as the archetypal
work of culture itself, and Norbert Elias, who takes the elaboration
of culinary propriety as one of the marks of the civilizing process.
Civilized manners distract our attention from the intimate, per-
verse violence we might otherwise apprehend in the act of eating.
And thus cultures develop around eating what Sarah Sceats calls
“unwritten rules and meanings, through which people communi-
cate and are categorized within particular cultural contexts” (1).
“The significances of food and eating,” she says, “are psychologi-
cally, socially and politically constructed, and symbolism, customs
and behaviors are indicators and results of cultural conditioning”
(3). These unwritten rules determine what we eat, when and
where we eat it, with whom we eat, how we speak during the meal,
and what other activities we can perform while eating. The rules
are micro-specific and local: in middle-class American culture, for
example, you can watch TV while you eat, but not during Christmas
dinner. You can listen to music, but you cannot send text messages.
You can read, but only in certain circumstances, and only by negoti-
ating the inwardness of reading with the sociality of eating.
For eating is deeply connected to social and communal life.
As Diane Ackerman says, “Humans rarely choose to dine in soli-
tude, and food has a powerful social component” (127). Eating,
she says, has a strong affective dimension which brings people
together in social interaction: “If an event is meant to matter emo-
tionally, symbolically, or mystically, food will be close at hand to
sanctify and bind it.” The communal table is a place where social
interaction seems natural. Plates must be passed, food must be
shared, and conversation flows easily as the pleasures of eating and
drinking are engaged. Skubal says that eating is “the primary way
of initiating and maintaining human relationships” (43). Because
of these elaborate social rituals, eating tends to become “an occa-
sion . . . to take on a temporal dimension, to transform itself into a
situation” (44).
In the “situation” of mealtime, reading is subject to the local
rules. Reading is most common when the eater is alone, though
even a lone diner would be unlikely to read in an elegant gourmet

restaurant. Much more common is what John Szwed calls “coffee
break and lunchtime reading” (306). Fast food restaurants and
diners often have newspapers for sale, on the assumption that a
routine percentage of their customers will read during their meal.
But even in these casual dining situations, it would be unusual to
see two people reading while eating together. The situation of the
formal meal—the holiday dinner, the business lunch—has strict
unwritten rules against reading. People might read the newspaper
at breakfast, or a couple might companionably read the Sunday
paper together over brunch, but in most formal meals, the social
interaction is part of the point, so reading is disallowed.
As we have seen, even the socially acceptable practice of read-
ing while eating alone sends a mildly antisocial message. The act
of reading says, though I might be in a public situation, sitting
next to you at a counter, I have absented myself from this time
and place, caught up in the world of the book, unavailable for
interaction, hard at work. Readers do not make eye contact and
they do not engage in idle talk, which are the social pleasures of
the table. The implications of this disengagement vary. Reading at
the table can be a rude, aggressive strategy, a way of saying that the
other is unworthy of attention, compared to my own mental work.
The newspaper raised as a cloak of invisibility at the breakfast table
can break a lover’s heart. But more frequently, the antisocial pose
of reading is a defensive strategy, an assertion of privacy. If you are
eating by yourself, and you are not reading, the whole question of
where your eyes go becomes crucial. Can you eavesdrop on those
people without them noticing you? Can you detect when others
are observing you? The situation may not call for overt social inter-
action, but the social interplay among diners not eating together
at the same restaurant is complex, especially for a person who is
eating alone and thus has no one to talk with. So, the attention
that reading requires is withdrawn from the social surround, allow-
ing the reader to be safely immersed in the world of the book.
In extreme cases this withdrawal can be almost autistic. Extreme
introverts and socially dysfunctional personalities can use reading
as a way to avoid all human contact, even in festive social occa-
sions. I have seen young kids bring a book to Thanksgiving dinner,
clearly because they cannot process the complex social situation
of a big table full of people eating and talking. Too much noise,
too many signals, too many demands. (In recent years reading has
often been replaced by gaming, which requires an equal absorp-
tion.) Reading in such highly charged, ritualistic meals is so anti-
social that an adult will usually take the book away, gently pushing
the child into the social scene. The book at the table is often a
point of conflict, requiring negotiation. Weekday breakfast, read
the paper, weekend breakfast no. We have been together all morn-
ing, chatting all the time, so we can share a newspaper when we
stop for lunch, companionably passing the sections when we are
done. Or the negotiations can fail, offense can be taken, reading
can seem like a failure of connection, a bad sign in the family or
the relationship. And all these negotiations take place without con-
scious attention but within social rules known to all the parties
involved. The reader knows the message sent by the act of reading.
The others in the scene know what the reading means. The unwrit-
ten rules code the scene with great clarity.
Reading while eating also imposes a strict, complex discipline on
the bodily mechanics of reading. Each of these activities requires
specific work of the hands. In eating, both hands are usually
involved, manipulating the utensils, transporting food and drink to
the mouth. With reading, both hands are usually involved, holding
the book and turning the pages (and if you are on serious business,
underlining and highlighting passages), or manipulating the read-
ing device. Combining the two activities, within the crowded space
of the tabletop, requires an intricate dance of the hands, taking up
and putting down utensils, taking up and putting down the book,
arranging plates and glasses to accommodate the laptop, wiping
grease off the hands before swiping the screen of the iPad. For
the practiced reader this process becomes second nature, a matter,
precisely, of habit. It is only by the automatization of this chore-
ography that the mind can be free to read attentively. If you are
thinking, how can I place my left arm so it can hold the book just
above and beyond the plate, you are not free to think: How is this
narrative structured? What is this character’s motivation? And it is
the automatized disciplines that work most deeply: to read while
eating is to adapt the reading body to the specific cultural and
physical requirements of the eating situation. The plates are thus
arranged in a certain way, in the habitual style of this particular res-
taurant. The food may require one hand or two, the book may be
small enough to hold in one hand, or may need to be placed down
on the table, requiring the rearrangement of the tabletop. The

food needs to be put down, the book picked up, the fork set down
to turn the page, the book set down to cut the meat. The func-
tional requirements of the task, if they are consciously articulated,
seem daunting. But in the act, as Bourdieu would remind us, they
are not consciously articulated. This embodied knowledge, these
micro-disciplines—they are all practiced without awareness, just
as ulterior as the cognitive work of reading, all these operations
from both practices occurring seamlessly at the same time. And of
course it is not just eating that reading is associated with. Every
habit with which reading occurs has its own set of unwritten rules
and functional disciplines. Think of trying to read in the bathtub,
the careful deployment of the body so the book does not end up in
the water, so the pages can be turned with a dry hand. The habitu-
ality of reading reminds us of the situatedness of interpretation.
No one reads outside the immediate social context of the reading.
Wherever and whenever we read there are rules in place, dictated
by the situation. And the reading process will bear traces, on the
microscopic, cellular, neurochemical level, of that situation.
But in the case of reading and eating, there is another level
of meaning to explore, as the metaphors which began this essay
suggest. Reading, symbolically, is eating, and this figurative
identity, so common in our everyday discourse, has implications
for how we think about reading. Books are the food of the soul.
To read is to consume the text. It is to take the text within the
self, within the body and mind, to incorporate it by means of
visual processing, to subject it to cognitive work, to transform
it by means of and into neural chemistry, literally making the
text part of the body, part of the self, just as alimentary digestion
transforms food into the chemical self. The word is made flesh.
The implications of the Greek “dis-gesse” remain in the modern
usage: to pull apart, to analyze, to mull over, to work what you
consume through an active process of analytical understanding, to
put the text into terms that make sense to you, that fit into your
worldview and nourish you. The metaphor suggests that reading
involves a pulling apart, an unwillingness to let the text be, a com-
mitment to self-interested interpretive work. As Sir Francis Bacon
said, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and
some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to
be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously; and
some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention”

(Enchiridion, 29). This “diligence and attention” I take to be the
hermeneutic work required of readers if any text (Bacon would
say any worthy text) is to be understood. Food is no good to us
until our own digestive enzymes begin their work, transforming
food into chemicals useful to the body. Reading turns text into
emotion, memory, speculation—all of which have a neurochem-
istry that precedes and enacts the reading, but also changes on
account of the reading, the digestion of the new text. Semiotics
produces biochemistry by means of a biochemical process. Each
text is worked over by an interpretive dis-gesse made possible by
all the other texts already embodied, along with all the social con-
texts, habitual practices, and historical horizons within which the
reading occurs. There is a digestive dialectic in which the text
alters the neurochemistry that processes it, and the neurochemis-
try processes each text it encounters.
The result of this mental digestion, as the metaphor implies,
is that the mind fed by reading thrives. As Brillat-Savarin says
about the hungry man: “A peculiar instinct warns him that he is in
need of food; he goes in search of it; he takes up objects in which
he suspects the property of supplying his wants; he eats, and is
restored, and so fulfils in life the career which is his lot” (22). So
too with reading—the text supplies what is wanted, the reader’s
life is restored. G.K. Chesterton makes the analogy: the need for
fiction, he says “is not a thing like having an appreciation of a good
wine; it is a thing like having an appetite for a square meal; it is
not a vintage but a viand” (31). If we digest the text properly, we
receive true sustenance. The great tradition tells us that in reading
we gain access to the infinite, the higher mind, the oversoul, the
best that has been thought or said. Or not. If the text is unwor-
thy, like an unhealthy food, or if the digestion lacks “diligence
and attention,” we can be poisoned by reading, by false or cheap
words, easy sentiments, common knowledge, the ideological, the
predigested. Gillian Silverman reminds us that in the nineteenth
century, the metaphor of reading as eating usually had a nega-
tive tone, referring to the kind of mindless self-indulgent reading
that polite society discouraged: “The eating metaphor was usually
deployed in conduct manuals precisely as a way of talking about
the necessity to read mindfully, that is, to read in a way that elimi-
nated the body and its associations—passion, carnality, and desire”
(32). You are, mentally, what you read, for good or ill. And so we
relentlessly police our reading habits—children must not read this,
no one should read that—for fear that the mind will encounter
false sustenance. Mental health is at stake; we can fail to thrive.
Reading, like eating, is a technology of the self, one of the ways we
shape our own histories. And the more we read, the more acute
our “digestion” becomes. We can analyze anything, deconstruct
(pull apart) whatever we consume. Without that digestive work,
we cannot benefit from the textual food. We cannot make it our
own. We have to transform something radically external—a text
that we did not create—into something radically internal—a neu-
rochemical event, an experience of embodied consciousness.
As some of the passages that begin this essay suggest, the act of
eating has a powerful psychoanalytic implication, which by means
of the metaphor are passed on to reading. Insofar as eating is
an act of incorporation, Freudian analysts argue, it is an act of
violence. Eating destroys its objects. As Karl Abraham says, “In
the biting stage of the oral phase the individual incorporates the
object in himself and in so doing destroys it . . . As soon as the child
is attracted by an object, it is liable, indeed bound, to attempt
its destruction” (quoted in Croft, 214). Food exists, before it is
eaten, as a particular anatomical structure, situated outside the self.
After it is eaten, it is there no more, and it no longer exists as the
objective, external structure it was. The objective becomes subjec-
tive. What was not me—what was over there—now is me—in here.
And why has this act of destruction occurred? Because I needed
or just desired the food—to fill my belly, to fulfill my project. For
purely selfish reasons, so that I may thrive, so that my physical
and psychic need can be met, I subject the food to my own diges-
tive chemistry, to my sundry ulterior transformations. Eating may
be motivated by a love for the food, an appreciation for its visual
beauty, its smell and taste, but it results in the disappearance of the
food, its incorporation as it enters into my chemistry and serves
my purposes.
Abraham is the analyst who describes eating and oral pleasure
with the most violent imagery. “At the earliest period of our lives,”
he says, “the contact with the outside world which is of the great-
est practical significance is made by means of the mouth” (87).
The mouth is the source of nourishment, the source of physical
pleasure and satisfaction, and in the earliest stages of development,
the primary source of knowledge. We learn about objects in the

world by mouthing them, tasting them, chewing them. Abraham
says of the young child:
The tendency to put every object into his mouth and chew it with
his teeth, with a view to completely incorporating it, becomes strik-
ingly evident from the moment that his hands have the power of
grasping. To the child at this stage the outside world consists of all
those objects which delight him and which he would like to incor-
porate in himself but has not yet so incorporated. (87)
This desire is therefore infinite. All the objects in the world

seem to be available for incorporation, for the act of making what
is not me, me. In later stages of development, the child realizes
that not literally everything can be eaten, but the incorporative
drive does not disappear, it is transformed into “the craving to
possess and master the object. ‘I want, I want!’ is the phrase with
which the child reacts to the sight of any object” (89). The child
does oral violence to the world in order to satisfy its own selfish
needs.
It is Melanie Klein who most powerfully articulates the fact
that the mother is the primal target for that violence. In Klein’s
thought, as Susanne Skubal says, “the first ambivalence, the first
civilizing denial or repression or sacrifice, is oral because the first
aggressive desire is oral. And it is addressed to mother” (113).
Klein theorizes that the mother’s breast manifests to the child in
two forms: the good and bountiful breast and the mean, grudg-
ing breast. The breast gives the child satisfaction, but not always
on demand, not with the instantaneous availability that the child
requires. Thus, the feelings directed toward the breast are divided.
Klein says: “Both oral-libidinal and oral-destructive impulses from
the beginning of life are directed towards the mother’s breast.”
The child encounters either “a perfect and inexhaustible breast,
always available, always gratifying,” or “the dangerous, devour-
ing breast,” a projection of his own dissatisfaction and hatred
when the breast is withheld. “The hated breast,” Klein says, “has
acquired the oral-destructive qualities of the infant’s own impulses
when he is in states of frustration and hatred. In his destructive
phantasies he bites and tears up the breast, devours it, annihilates
it; and he feels that the breast will attack him in the same way”
(62–64). The infant therefore creates fantasies of “omnipotent

control” over the breast, precisely because such control is beyond
the infant’s power. In the long term, “love, desires (both aggres-
sive and libidinal) and anxieties are transferred from the first and
unique object, the mother, to other objects; and new interests
develop which become substituted for the relation to the primary
object” (83).
The most obvious transference of these powerful infantile
emotions is from the mother’s breast to all food and acts of eat-
ing. Kim Chernin, in her book The Hungry Self: Women, Eating,
and Identity, argues that food is the consolation for the inevitable
split from the mother required by the maturation process. But
no matter how much we mature and escape our dependence on
the mother for food, “resonating from the very deepest layers of
meaning, the mother is always conjured up and made present by
the presence of food.” And again there is ambivalence toward the
mother figure: “If we are angry at her because of this need for
separation, we can always (biting and gobbling and devouring and
tearing) express this rage toward food. And if we are lonely for her
in these new hours of independence, we can always (sucking and
sipping, soft foods and milk foods) appease this loneliness the way
she always did” (98–99). Food is “emblematic . . . of the intense
pleasure of infantile satisfaction at the mother’s breast and for
many later stages of experience with the mother” (140).
Sarah Sceats, in Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary
Women’s Fiction, says that eating is a “deep, often unacknowl-
edged longing to be reunited with the maternal figure, a fanta-
sized return to the status of wholly fulfilled infant at the breast, or
even in utero” (5). We feel that unity because in the act of eating
we incorporate the food, turning the other into the self. Food is
“part of the world outside,” but “its status changes as it is taken
into the mouth, is chewed, swallowed, digested.” At what point,
she asks, “does it become part of us?” (2). Eating is an aggres-
sive, selfish act, imposing our desires on the world, transforming
it without permission into the chemistry we need to survive. We
experience that act as pleasure, not only in the taste of the food,
but in the very act of eating. The return to the mother through
eating requires the sacrifice of the objects that represent her. They
must be destroyed so that representation itself can be transcended.
No need for substitutes any more—the mystical union is a fact,
no need for the symbols. This at least is the longing, and the fact
that it can never be fulfilled, that we can never be at one with the
mother, means that eating will always repeat that longing.
And is reading another substitution for infantile oral pleasure?
The logic of our metaphor suggests that it is. Reading, like eating,
generates emotional ambivalence. On the one hand, reading is the
blissful reception of the text as sustenance. We gain wisdom, plea-
sure, information, whatever we need. On the other hand, reading
is the process of mastering the text, overcoming whatever degree
of difficulty it presents. It is often frustrating, difficult, requiring
hard, exegetical work. The text is at once the bountiful breast and
the grudging breast, and as readers we experience the predictable
emotional responses. The bliss that Freud describes on the face of
the satisfied infant is the bliss of the reader so absorbed in the text
that the rest of the world disappears. The biting, tearing, devour-
ing, oral aggressive eating that Klein describes is the analytical,
evaluative, deconstructive work of the reader, engaged in the dis-
gesse of the text. And readers are always both.
The goal of that hermeneutic work is the transformation of
the semiotics of the text into the biochemistry of emotion, cogni-
tion, and memory. My emotion, my cognition, my memory. That
is, reading is an act of incorporation, of literal embodiment. By
the act of reading, I transform an external object into a personal
experience—an act of consciousness, a neurochemical event—
unique to my body, responsive to my needs. My work of compre-
hension, understanding, interpretation, analysis, and evaluation is
a function of my biochemistry, my neural network, which is in turn
a function of my past reading experiences understood as neural
events. The textual object has been embodied, transformed into
the self. What creates the neurochemistry is a history of textual
experiences made possible by the socially constructed systems of
language and by the historical and social networks of writing, pub-
lishing, marketing, and education. But my social neurochemistry is
unique to me, so my incorporation of the text will also be unique.
It is, in fact, the goal of the reading process to create that unique-
ness, the subjective sense of my own identity. The goal of my read-
ing is as selfish and aggressive as the goal of my eating. It is to
transform texts into a chemistry that suits my needs, that allows
me to thrive, that sustains my life. I need to read for the sake of my
physical survival as a cognitive and emotional subject.
In this scenario, the text plays the role of the food, the role of
the mother. Will it be the bountiful mother, who gives instanta-
neously the sustenance desired, or will it be the grudging mother,
who withholds nourishment and frustrates satisfaction? To return
to Barthes’s analogy, will the text be like a Hallmark card, which
by fulfilling every cliché, meeting every expectation, gives us its
food with little effort on our part? Or will it be Finnegans Wake,
requiring the endless work of the perfect reader with the perfect
insomnia? The text is the object to be incorporated. It is what has
not as yet been read, and we are interested in it only insofar as
we can make it our own. At first the text has the power—it holds
in its semiotic body the wisdom we need. But as we read it, we
take power over it, exert hermeneutic control. But there are always
aspects of the text that we cannot embody, potentials within the
text that will escape our interpretive capture. Thus even as we exert
the power of incorporation, we recognize the greater power of the
text in its polysemy. Just as eating, despite its aggressive efforts,
does not in fact lead us back to a total union with the mother, so
also reading does not unite us unproblematically with the wisdom
of the text. We have to make do with the text as a semiotic repre-
sentation subject to hermeneutic work rather than as an unmedi-
ated source of transcendent meaning. Again, we are stuck with the
symbol, which we destroy as we consume out of revenge for our
failure.
These are some of the violent implications of the metaphor,
understood from a psychoanalytical perspective. But that is not the
only tradition in which the metaphor appears. There is an entirely
other context in which the incorporation of food and the embodi-
ment of the word has a much more benign symbolic resonance—
in the Christian language of the Incarnation and the Eucharist. In
the Eucharist, the eating of bread and wine is the incorporation of
the body and blood of Christ, who is the Word made flesh. In the
scriptures, the reader encounters the word of God, the real pres-
ence of the divine in the language of man. In sacramental eating,
we encounter the spirit made flesh; in sacred reading, we encounter
the spirit made text. Within the Christian tradition, one could say,
reading and eating are the chief human practices that give access
to the divine.
In one of his early theological writings, Hegel explicates the
analogy. Hegel argues that the ritual of the Eucharist began in
a unique but familiar social event—Jesus gathers his disciples

together at a ritual meal, a moment of love and teaching, and he
makes a request to be remembered in future moments of commu-
nion. Hegel’s Jesus is an ethical humanist who taught that human
beings must practice authentic morality and virtue rather than
blindly obey the Jewish laws and rites. Virtue and love matter more
than obedience. Hegel’s Jesus does not claim a literal transubstan-
tiation, as the Catholic Church teaches. For him the Eucharist is
human, social, a moment of remembrance. Nevertheless, his spirit
passes over to the disciples, in the very act of eating the bread and
drinking the wine: “All drink together; a like emotion is in them
all; all are permeated by the like spirit of love.” Hegel says that
“because they eat the bread and drink the wine, because his body
and his blood pass over to them, Jesus is in them all, and his essence,
as love, has divinely permeated them” (250). In this process, the
spirit becomes the external object in the physical food, but then by
the act of eating, it is transformed back into the body and thus the
spirit of the eater: “The spirit of Jesus, in which his disciples are
one, has become a present object, a reality, for external feeling. Yet
the love made objective, this subjective element become a thing,
reverts once more to its nature, becomes subjective again in the
eating” (250–251). Once the food is eaten, the spirit of divine love
lives in the disciple, and the object no longer exists. Eating in this
account is not an act of violence, it is an act of communion. And
at this point the comparison with reading occurs to Hegel, almost
as an aside: eating this food is like “the thought which in the writ-
ten word becomes a thing and which recaptures its subjectivity out
of an object, out of something lifeless, when we read” (251). The
subjective thought of the author becomes embodied and objecti-
fied in the text, and then, through the act of reading, it becomes
the subjective thought of the reader.
But in this case, Hegel notes, the object is not destroyed: “The
simile would be more striking,” he says, “if the written word were
read away, if by being understood it vanished as a thing, just as in
the enjoyment of bread and wine not only is a feeling for those
mystical objects aroused, not only is the spirit made alive, but the
objects vanish as objects. Thus the action seems purer, more appro-
priate to its end, insofar as it affords spirit only, feeling only, and
robs the intellect of its own, i.e., destroys the matter, the soulless”
(251). As David Haney says of Hegel: “In eating, the objective
element is completely assimilated into the subjective . . . but in read-

ing, works remain problematically ‘there’ even after we read them
(to be read and misread and altered by others, for example)” (52).
For Hegel, this difference makes the grossly physical act of sacred
eating paradoxically “purer” than the “disembodied” and cogni-
tive act of reading. In eating, the subjective alone remains at the
end of the process. And as Louis Marin says, this spirituality of eat-
ing is not limited to the Christian Eucharist. “One might say,” he
argues, “that every culinary sign is Eucharistic in some sense . . . all
cookery involves a theological, ideological, political, and economic
operation by the means of which a nonsignified edible foodstuff is
transformed into a sign/body that is eaten.” (121)
This difference between reading and eating is important, but
Hegel’s main point is that the eating of the Eucharist is analogous
to the act of reading, since both involve a benign transformation
of the material into the spiritual, the objective into the subjective.
Contra Hegel, it is the strong claim of the Catholic tradition that
after the transubstantiation, the bread and wine of the communion
have literally become the body and blood of Christ, what Catholics
call the “real presence.” The claim of the doctrine is radical. The
bread and wine are not a sign or symbol of the body and blood;
they are—miraculously—the body and blood. In this ritual eating,
the real presence of the Christ offers itself to be incorporated into
the body and thus the spirit of the communicant. And in turn, the
Eucharist matters because the Christ in his body and blood is the
Incarnation of the divine word. The pertinent passage is John
1:14: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and
we beheld his glory, the glory of the only begotten of the father,
full of grace and truth.” Which of course references John 1:1: “In
the beginning was the Word, and the word was with god, and
the word was god.” The logos, the divine principle of order and
understandability, the cosmic coherence, takes on a human body.
John’s Christ is the personification of that cosmic intelligibility,
the spiritual and incarnate being in whom that coherence dwells.
The eternal spirit becomes the divine but mortal man who, before
he dies on the cross, gives his disciples a new way of experienc-
ing the divine spirit, by incorporating the food of the Eucharist.
The eternal Word becomes human being, and that human being
declares that his body and his spirit enter into the sacred food,
which is then incorporated into the body and spirit of the believer
who eats the food. If in the psychoanalytical tradition, eating is a

violent and ultimately failed attempt to recover and reunite with
the mother, in the Christian tradition, eating creates a true sacred
unity with the person of Jesus and the spirit of God.
Within this tradition, reading is also a privileged means of access
to the divine. The Bible is asserted to be the inspired word of God.
The divine works through the humans who write the books and
dwells truly and fully in the word. So the reader has access through
the medium of the inspired word to the spirit and truth of the
divine. In the scriptural text, the Word is made word. And just
as we consume the food to connect with the divine, we consume
the text to know the mind of God. Both acts of consumption are
incorporative. Both the food of the Eucharist and the text of the
scripture are, in the act of eating or reading, literally incarnated
by the sundry ulterior transformations of digestion, physical or
hermeneutic. The chemistry of the food becomes the chemistry
of the eating body, and the semiology of the text becomes the
neurochemistry of the reading body and the nourishment of
the human spirit. The faith conviction of the Christian tradition is
that through these acts of incorporation, the spirit that dwells in
the food and the text enters the spirit and the consciousness of the
eater and the reader.
The symbolic connections between reading and eating remind
us that reading is an act of the body, not of a disembodied con-
sciousness. And the metaphor of the Incarnation reminds us that
the body is always already conscious, not a machine programmed
by pure cognition, not a meat puppet. It is simply impossible any
more to think about cognition or consciousness without think-
ing about their embodiment, and impossible to think about body
without thinking about consciousness, identity, culture, and his-
tory. Reading is an act of the body, but the body is what it is
because it reads, because it consumes cultural texts. Each text is
shaped in the act of reading by that embodied consciousness, and
in turn the text literally becomes part of and alters that embodi-
ment. The word made flesh makes the flesh linguistic. The body
is the texts it has consumed, and the text is the outcome of the
body’s physical and cultural work.
It is the Foucauldian training of the reading body, operating in
deeply learned habits, encountering discourses shaped by power,
which reveals the limits of the Incarnational metaphor. As a person
brought up in the Roman Catholic faith, I find the doctrines of the

Incarnation and the Eucharist very powerful, precisely because of
their irrational claims. How can the divine become human? How
can bread and wine become that human body and blood, though
still bread and wine to the eye and tongue? And when the symbolic
connections between reading and eating encourage us to think
of reading as an incarnate act, an act of embodied consciousness,
an act that makes the word flesh, it is tempting to take it all the
way, to believe that reading produces an unmediated connection
between the soul of the embodied reader and the spirit, the logos
in the text. But for me, the more convincing interpretation of the
metaphorical links between reading and eating is the aggressive
incorporation described by psychoanalysis rather than the benign
Incarnation of the Christian tradition. The Incarnational metaphor
pacifies the reader, who becomes the happy recipient of authorial/
textual revelation, rather than the hardworking practitioner of a
hermeneutic craft. Eating and reading as Eucharistic practices feel
like wish-fulfillments to me. Eaters do not encounter the mother
in the food, or the divine spirit in the food of the Eucharist.
They encounter their desire for the mother, their desire for God.
Readers do not encounter spirit in texts—sacred or secular—they
encounter writing, a historically contingent, semiotically rich prac-
tice that requires for its very existence the reader’s active interpre-
tive work.
As Ellen Spolsky says, “An individual’s body—both its physi-
ological structures and its history—have together constructed
habitual patterns of internal interaction and patterns of interac-
tion between the body and the world” (91). When we read, those
habits go to work, shaping the hermeneutic interaction between
the reader and the text. They cannot be transcended or left behind
as we lose ourselves in ecstatic textual communion. And as Susan
Bordo reminds us, with those daily habits come the power struc-
tures of the social formations in which they operate: “Not chiefly
through ideology,” she says, “but through the organization and
regulation of the time, space, and movements of our daily lives, our
bodies are trained, shaped, and impressed with the stamp of pre-
vailing historical forms of selfhood, desire, masculinity, femininity.”
(2240). Citing Bourdieu and Foucault, Bordo asserts the practical
power of the social, historical body. Culture is converted into the
“automatic, habitual activity” of the body in its everyday practices.
Is reading contingent or transcendent? Is it a habit like any

other, or a privileged spiritual communion? My answer is that the
condition of the reading body is contingent, but that its (doomed)
aspirations are transcendent. Reading operates on the conviction
that it leads to the knowledge of truth—information, fact, wisdom,
the best that has been thought or said, the Oversoul, the spirit of
the divine. But reading is in fact an operation of the body in the
world, performed by a particular, embodied consciousness, seek-
ing satisfaction of its own needs, operating within social networks
that provide the texts to be read, teach the physical posture that
reading requires, disseminate methods for reading texts, and define
rules for when and where reading can occur. It cannot transcend
its embodied historicity. And yet the desire for the transcendent,
I believe, explains why people read, even when they recognize the
real conditions in which reading happens. The embodied reader
wants to be the Incarnate reader, but the spirit dwells in the body
and in the text only as hermeneutic desire.
5
T h e F u t u r e of t h e
R e a di ng Body
R e a di ng i n D igi ta l E n v i ron m e n t s
Escape, Submit, Improvise

One of the central themes of this book is that the operations of
the reading body become “second nature” to the skillful reader.
The intelligent workings of the hand and eye proceed by means
of motor programs that run most efficiently when they need no
conscious awareness. Foucault calls these operations “the domain
of the taken for granted, the mundane . . . routines that quietly
maintain the (historically contingent) normal” (Beyond the Body
Proper, 8). One of the tasks of cultural theory is to articulate the
functions and powers of the routines in that domain, but in ordi-
nary practice, as Bourdieu observes, there is no pressing need to
question the programs—they work, so they need no critical atten-
tion. As Ellen Spolsky says, “what is widely agreed on literally
goes without saying” (92). The physical task of reading has “gone
without saying” for hundreds of years, during the long reign of
the codex. Throughout the history of print, reading bodies have
adjusted to changes in the size and weight of books, the forms
of available light, and the physical and social spaces of reading.
But, since Gutenberg, there has been no challenge to the hand
or eye, no restructuring of the postures and habits of reading
that can compare to the challenge of our time—the hypertex-
tual and interactive experience of reading in digital environments.
Suddenly the most “taken for granted” movements of the eye
and hand have changed, adapting intelligently to the new mate-
rial realities of texts. Clearly these new reading technologies have
fundamentally restructured the cognitive tasks of reading and

challenged the status of the reading subject, as many cultural ana-
lysts have described. But how exactly have the physical tasks and
habitual practices of reading changed, and how much difference
do these changes make in the experience of reading?
It goes against the grain of digital culture to raise questions about
the bodily practices of the computer user, since so many proponents
of that culture describe the online experience as a liberation from
bodily limits. Human-computer interaction engineers are of course
interested in the visual and haptic work of the body at the com-
puter, but the user of the device is supposed to transcend that body,
entering as a disembodied and anonymous avatar into the virtual
worlds of cyberspace. The user’s body may be grudgingly accepted
as an instrumental necessity, but its function is to realize the proj-
ects of the networked, dispersed self as it processes the potential
semiotic encounters available within the network. The very pur-
pose of entering the network, in this line of thought, is to deny the
material body and to perfect its pure functionality so that it can be
ignored, so that the physical limitations and social identities of the
body can disappear in the freedom of virtuality.
This attitude toward the body is captured in the old cartoon
depicting a dog sitting in front of a screen: “Online, no one knows
you’re a dog.” In cyberspace it is possible to interact with other
users anonymously, with an identity that is not defined by race or
class or gender or sexuality or disability. Thus, the virtual self, it is
often asserted, leaves behind the identity politics and inequalities
of everyday life as it transcends the visceral and historical body.
Deborah Lupton says: “The dream of cyberculture is to leave the
‘meat’ behind and to become distilled in a clean, pure, uncon-
taminated relationship with computer technology” (479). The
meat is replaced by the avatar. In Writing Machines N. Katherine
Hayles says: “To the extent the user enters the imaginative world
of the environment and is structured by her interactions with it,
she also becomes a simulation, an informational pattern circulat-
ing through the global network that counts as the computational
version of human community” (49). The simulation in the virtual
community is not determined by the bodily identity of the user.
In this passage Hayles is careful to use the phrase “to the extent,”
and she goes on to argue that this entry into the cybernetic world
is not total, saying that virtual experience “will not do away with
The Future of the Reading B ody 165
the materiality or the constraints and enablings that materiality

entails” (62), but she nevertheless articulates a widespread desire
and belief among computer users. Hayles wants to remind us that
the transition from print to computer technology encourages “a
systematic devaluation of materiality and embodiment,” in spite of
the fact that “changes in material conditions and embodied expe-
rience are precisely what give the shift its deep roots in everyday
experience” (2186).
This desire for transcendence is not just a matter of escaping
discursive categories and social hierarchies. It is a more visceral,
aversive desire. What is to be transcended is the flesh and blood,
the abject, suffering, mortal body—the meat. Vivian Sobchack,
struck by the similarities between Baudrillardian simulation and
cybernetic disembodiment, points to this visceral disgust: “The
man’s lived body (and, not coincidentally, the body of a man)—its
material facticity, its situatedness, finitude and limitations—had to
be transubstantiated through textualization into the infinite possi-
bility and irresponsibility and receptivity and legibility of the ‘pure
sign’” (206–207). Postmodern cyberculture “revile(s) the lived
body for its weakness and wish(es) to objectify its terrible mortal-
ity away” (210).
As the reader sits at the computer, engaged in the difficult
mental work it demands and in the vivid virtual worlds it affords,
awareness of the body is lowered. It becomes, even more than
in codex reading, Leder’s absent body. Its functions eventually
become autonomous and require little monitoring. During the
time I spend in cyberspace, I do not dwell on my bodily imper-
fections, my stigmatized, weird, self-despised “meat.” Each of us
with our own self-loathings, our own internalization of the other’s
judgment of our bodies, can forget about the body as it operates
the computer, and just indulge in the textual, virtual universe. We
can, as Anne Balsamo says, repress embodiment: “Repression is a
pain-management technique. The technological repression of the
material body functions to curtail pain by blocking channels of
sensory awareness” (228). Paying critical attention to the body at
the computer disrupts the desire for transcendence and reminds us
of what we are trying to forget—the painful mortality and finitude
of the body.
Of course, voices within cyberculture have been articulating this
critique and asserting the persistence of the body for as long as
the desire for transcendence has been expressed. As Sandy Stone

famously said, “No refigured virtual body, no matter how beauti-
ful, will slow the death of a cyberpunk with AIDS. Even in the age
of the technosocial subject, life is lived through bodies” (525).
Stone’s stark realism grounds the desire for transcendence in the
intolerable vulnerability of the body. The body at the computer,
the body of the postmodern reader, as it wanders virtual worlds
and takes on a cybernetic identity, nevertheless remains a weak
and mortal body. Of course, this desire for transcendence does not
begin with digital reading: as we have seen, all reading involves a
tacit rejection of the visceral. It requires so much cognitive work
that the reader reduces attention to the physical surround and to
the operations of the body. All reading feels disembodied, even
though reading is an act of the body. “Feeling disembodied” is
itself a state of the body, a neurochemical phenomenon, but it
creates pleasure precisely because it fosters the illusion that the
work of the mind is not the work of the gross physical body. The
return of the repressed body in reading is the fact that, for all its
aspirations toward angelic disembodiment, it is associated, through
habitual, everyday life experiences, with the functions of the vis-
ceral body. We read—a book or screen—as we eat, as we fall asleep,
as we suffer physical illness, and even as we evacuate our bowels.
The body repudiated by reading and especially by online experi-
ence is nevertheless the body that enables the daily, habitual prac-
tice of that cognitive work. As Sadie Plant says, “There is no escape
from the meat, the flesh, and cyberspace is nothing transcendent”
(60). Plant sees this desire for transcendence as a patriarchal rejec-
tion of the body in its feminine materiality in favor of a pure mas-
culine intellect. The promise of transcendence in technology is, as
Kevin Robins says, “the infantile experience of power and infinite
possibility” (139).
As Roger Chartier shows, this sense of transcendence was inten-
sified long ago by the development of silent, private reading. To read
aloud to your community, as in medieval monasteries, is clearly to
engage in a bodily performance in the presence of other bodies.
To read silently within a defined private space is to engage in a
“mental” performance which seems to require nothing of the
body or of others. Chartier says that private reading in the early
modern period allowed “withdrawal from the public sphere, from
civic responsibility, from the affairs of city and state” as well as
“withdrawal from the family, from the household, from the social
responsibilities of domestic intimacy” (169). The private sphere
created by the practice of silent reading, he argues, is the site of the
formation of the modern, individualist, disembodied self. Reading
becomes self-creation, the project of a unique mind encounter-
ing and mastering the text and fashioning the self in the process.
Chartier also notes that private silent reading does not require
physical isolation: “Silent reading created an air of intimacy that
separated the reader from the outside world. Thus, even in the
middle of the city, in the presence of other people, he might be
alone with his book and his thoughts” (172). Reading in public
asserts the primacy of the private self, absorbed in its own experi-
ence, defined against the social and the physical. We can see in
this solitary reader the precursor of the gameboy entranced by the
display, the nerd lost in the data. Escapism has long been seen as
an important reading experience, especially in the consumption of
trash fiction and fantasy. But all reading, even the most dry and
factual, requires a certain disengagement, at least from the sur-
round, which usually demands so much attention; and from the
gross physical body, which is for once still and quiet. That feeling
of escape requires readers to forget their reading bodies and to
ignore the procedures it has mastered.
For Hayles, the body of the reader is not a set of constraints
to be transcended, it is an active source of creative opportunity
and improvisation: “A critical practice that ignores material-
ity, or that reduces it to a narrow range of engagements, cuts
itself off from the exuberant possibilities of all the unpredict-
able things that happen when we as embodied creatures interact
with the rich physicality of the world” (Writing Machines, 107).
The physical procedures of reading are not rote and mechanistic,
they are intelligent adaptations to the rich physicality of the text
and the surround. Reading print requires an active and intelligent
body, and reading in digital environments requires an even higher
degree of procedural intelligence, a willingness to accept cogni-
tive, ocular, and manual training and to master the demands of
the technology. You simply cannot read online unless your body
has incorporated a wide range of subtle physical skills that enable
access to the hypertext and the virtual. The procedural body can-
not be ignored in the analysis of cybernetic experience, including
online reading.
Elizabeth Grosz describes this procedural body in terms derived

from Deleuze and Guattari. She is interested in “the body in its con-
nections with other bodies, both human and nonhuman, animate
and inanimate, linking organs and biological processes to material
objects and social practices” (“Intensities and Flows,” 145). In
reading codex or hypertext the procedural body interfaces with the
material technology of the text and the social practices that pro-
duce it. Grosz regards the body “as neither a locus for conscious-
ness nor an organically determined entity; it is understood more in
terms of what it can do, the things it can perform, the linkages it
establishes, the transformations and becomings it undergoes, and
the machinic connections it forms with other bodies, what it can
link with, how it can proliferate its capacities” (“Intensities and
Flows,” 145). The machinic connections of online reading take
the form of micro-specific motor programs trained by the require-
ments of the hardware and software. Of course the codex gener-
ates its own requirements, but we are now witnessing a time when
the technology of textuality is reformulating the procedures of the
reading body and creating new somatic capacities. Digital tech-
nologies require ongoing bodily learning. There are always new
procedures to perfect, new physical skills to master. Digital reading
environments simultaneously promise a utopian disembodiment
and require advanced physical skills, embodied by practice to the
point of instinctive mastery.
Take as an example the tiny but crucial physical procedures
necessary for me to access and read my email. Entry protocols, of
course, vary with every hardware and software system and with the
skills and knowledge of every reader, and each protocol makes its
own unique demands. My goal in this description is to highlight
the complex capacities required of even the most casual online
reader and the complex physical requirements of even the simplest
digital tasks. I am sitting at a desktop computer, navigating with
a mouse. My computer is on and the icons of my homepage are
displayed. I begin to access my email by moving the arrow on
the screen to the icon of my Internet service provider. I do this
by moving the mouse on its pad, unconsciously monitoring how
the movement of my hand creates an analogous movement on
the screen. Analogous, but not identical. A tiny movement of the
mouse creates a much larger movement on the screen. Efficient
movement of the mouse requires a real time mathematics of path
and scale. The tolerance for inaccurate performance is very low.

The smallest error of control by the hand will lead me to miss the
targeted icon. Accurate movement of the hand depends on precise
and well-trained visual processing. I must scan and find the correct
icon and move the arrow to it in the most efficient path. My eye
must move in what oculomotor scientists call a “ballistic saccade”
to the desired target, and all but simultaneously my hand must
move the mouse across the pad so the arrow will move efficiently
(see Jacobs, 152). This simple operation, repeated throughout
the online reading process, requires advanced eye and hand intel-
ligence, which can be gained only through uncountable task rep-
etitions. Over time, I learn where the icon will be, so my eyes and
hands anticipate the target and move in concert, with almost zero
lag time. And this is, of course, only the first micro-movement in a
long string of procedures that must be followed before I can read
the text I seek.
Next I double click the icon. The double click is another subtle
manual skill never before required of the reading body. The rep-
etition of the finger striking the left button of the mouse must
be precisely timed. Too fast and the two movements read as one
strike. Too slow and the second strike seems unrelated to the first.
The correct interval required by the device is achieved only by
practice, and even after the movement has been mastered, errors
will occur, especially on a machine new to the user, one which
requires a different interval, which can be found only by intel-
ligent improvisation. Eventually I just know how to do it, and I
never have to think about it again. The motor program engages
and the movement succeeds. The goal of the movement is set by
my desire, my cybernetic project. But my movements are always
already informed by my embodied knowledge of the options avail-
able in the system and my desire for a particular option. Extremely
small muscular movements in response to extremely precise visual
processing are made possible by an extensive and systematic knowl-
edge of the hardware and the software and the social world in
which the machine makes sense. If reading the codex requires the
manual intelligence of efficient grasp and precise manipulation of
pages, reading digital text increases the procedural requirements
and demands increased haptic skill.
Next I click on the “Favorites” button, a shortcut that allows
me to avoid time- consuming typing. Immediately, a list lowers
from the button, a virtual long term memory of my past projects

and frequently chosen alternatives. I already know which option
I will select, so I discipline myself to ignore all visual input from
the screen except the location of that option. My eyes and hands
are already moving to where I know the target will be, my hands
ready to strike again. At every step in the process, I face many
possible alternatives and I make and execute many intelligent deci-
sions. In order to get to my personal email, before I am able to
type my username and password, I need to select my university’s
website, and, within it, the icon indicating the institutional email
system, and, within that, the faculty email system,. At each of these
choice points, I execute the required visual search and manual
manipulation. I already know my choices because I have acquired
a systematic understanding of the university’s website and the
institution that produces it. I know how I fit into that institution,
and my choices are a function of my self-knowledge. My projects
will follow the procedures established by the institution, and I will
accept its legitimacy—in spite of whatever ideological critiques I
might entertain—so deeply that my hands and eyes can do their
work with the speed of thoroughly trained procedural agency.
Finally, I can gain access to my email software. I do this by
manually generating text, by inscribing my username and password
in the required locations. I must, as is often the case online, write
in order to read. This writing requires keyboarding, another highly
complex manual skill, as well as a knowledge and acceptance of the
system’s requirements for the establishment of identity. My user-
name is assigned by the institution. It allows me to be recognized
by the system, but not yet to be allowed access. That requires my
password, the institutionally authorized but personally generated
mark of my identity as the true and approved user of the system.
I keyboard those entries with the speed of habit, then move the
mouse in order to press the “enter” button and confirm my desire
to interact with the system and my willingness to submit to its
requirements.
I now have on the screen the list of my emails. I do a quick
visual scan of the list, with no need at this point for the linear sac-
cades of ordinary reading. My eyes move to keywords and sender
names, informed by my history within the program and by my
needs and projects, following a desire path. Then one fast, ballistic
saccade enables one precise manual movement, I click the subject
line of the item I desire, and the email appears before me. The
entry protocol is over and the text is available for reading. My eyes
now engage in Z path behavior, reading left to right, with a long
diagonal saccade down and left to the next line—the ocular skills
of all reading that seeks maximum comprehension, print or screen.
But if my eyes are now engaged in familiar procedures, my hands
are utilizing a skill specific to the digital environment. That is, I
have to scroll. In order to move on to text beyond the capacity of
the screen, I must manipulate the input controls of the computer.
Either I move the mouse to move my cursor to a directional arrow,
which allows new text to appear at the bottom or the top of the
frame, or I touch the arrow keys on the keyboard to move the
cursor around in the text. These procedures for accessing new text
or returning to text already read require complex eye-hand inte-
gration. Especially if I use the directional arrows at the side of the
framework, I have to monitor the speed with which the movement
of my hand affects the presentation of the text, and adjust the
relationship in delicate and improvised increments. The new text
must be made to appear to the eye at a pace that allows for efficient
Z path saccades. Different readers feel comfortable with different
visual context. Some like the new line of text to be the last in the
frame, with new information always emerging from below. Some
like to read in the middle of the frame, with future text already
peripherally visual. These preferences determine the movement of
the hand as it controls the scrolling process. As I read my email, I
integrate the Z path skills honed by readers in our culture for thou-
sands of years with hand and eye skills only recently required by
reading. The cognitive, neural, musculoskeletal capacities required
of the reading body by online reading therefore impose high access
and processing costs.
The cybernetic desire for transcendence of the body is thus
undercut by procedural embodiment. By comparison, reading
the codex seems more obviously embodied—the hands literally
grasp the book with a directness not provided by digital reading,
in which the hands grasp a multipurpose device, not the unique
material embodiment of a particular text. But the eye and hand
work I have described demonstrates that digital reading is no less
embodied than codex reading. No less embodied, but differently
embodied. There are real bodily differences between the demands
of the book and the demands of the device. As Hayles says, “To
change the material object is to transform the context and circum-

stances for interacting with the words, which inevitably changes
the meanings of the words as well” (Writing Machines, 23).
The imprint of ink on paper is not the same as the arrangement of
pixels on a screen, and the eyes process them differently. Turning
pages is not the same as scrolling. The Z path is not the same as the
desire path. Here is how Andrew Piper describes the differences
in Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times: “Whether it is the
soft graininess of the page or the resistant slickness of the screen,
the kinetic activities of swooping instead of turning, the postural
differences of sitting back versus up, tilting our heads down or
forward, grasping with our hands down or resting our hands on,
the shape of the folded sheets versus the roamable, zoomable, or
clickable surfaces of the electronic screen—all of these features
(and many more) contribute to a different relationship to reading,
and thus thinking” (x).
Digital texts are more interactive, more interconnected, more
easily available than books and other print media. Digital readers
can bring almost any book, magazine, newspaper, website, email,
or text to their screen instantly, they can navigate among them
quickly and intelligently, they can often alter the texts they are
reading, and they can create a visual montage of texts and images
that reflects their own interests and intentions. These differences
affect the physical activity of the reading body. We live at a time
when the materiality of the text is changing. Simultaneously, the
capabilities and functions of the human body are changing as they
interact with digital devices. As we approach ubiquitous comput-
ing, our bodies learn more and more system protocols, down to
the neural level, and we become, as so many cultural observers
have said, cyborgs—technologically enhanced bodies without clear
boundaries separating us from the machines we manipulate. In the
future of reading, the cyborg reads the e-book, and the reading
body is transformed.
I am particularly interested in the following characteristics of
digital reading, because they directly affect the reading body:
1. Hyperextensivity—digital readers gain access to a virtual infinity

of texts in an environment that encourages fast, selective reading.
2. Desire path—digital texts encourage nonlinear reading guided
by the desires of the reader more than the rhetorical powers of
the text. Digital readers navigate hyperspace and create unique

reading sequences driven by associative logics.
3. Interactivity—digital texts allow readers to alter text and to
navigate in and among texts at will. All reading is interactive,
but digital reading invites extensive reader agency.
4. Reading as writing—digital texts require and encourage read-
ers to write. Writing is often a necessary access procedure, and
digital texts are themselves open to and altered by the writing
of their readers.
These qualities of digital texts pose challenges to cognitive pro-

cessing, to the work of the hand and the eye, and to postures and
physical habits. They impose what Andrew Dillen calls high “cog-
nitive overhead” (181). Reading bodies go through a strenuous
process of pedagogy and adaptation in order, eventually, to make
the processing automatic, creating a “transparent technology.”
That learning process creates a digital reading body, a body that
functions as an operator of the device and maps itself as an exten-
sion of the program.
The history of reading, from the papyrus scroll to the inter-
net, is a function of the availability of texts. Alberto Manguel and
many other historians of reading have described the change from
“intensive” reading to “extensive” reading—from a deep and pro-
longed study of one, often sacred, text to a serial, relatively brief
engagement with a wide variety of texts. This change in reading
practices parallels the growth of the printing industry and the wide
distribution of many books produced for the growing market of
avid, extensive readers. Scholars of information like Zhiming Liu
now speak of “hyperextensive” reading as the mode encouraged by
digital environments (Paper to Digital, 58). We are now reading
on devices like the iPad and through access systems like Google
Books, which have the potential to present to us the contents of
all human libraries, along with newspapers, magazines, websites,
videos, films, music, email, and text messages. Featherstone and
Burrows call this hypertext “a Borgesian library of vast databases
containing all a culture’s deposited wealth, where every document
is available, every recording playable and every picture viewable”
(Cyberspace, 6). Based on his studies of library users reading in
print and online, Liu observes that the infinite availability and easy
searchability of digital texts leads to hyperextensive reading, in
which the pace of change from text to text increases and the dura-
tion of engagement with any given text decreases. Digital readers
browse, scan, search for keywords, select rapidly, read quickly and
do not often reread, and move from text to text in a nonlinear
fashion (see Liu, Paper to Digital, 58). These new reading prac-
tices in turn affect the procedures and habits of the reading body.
The textual labyrinth of the internet has been seen by some
critics as a dangerous place for readers. The hyperextensive mass
of instantly available texts, arranged in only virtual categories,
can overwhelm a reader and produce a sense of disorientation
(see Charney, 249). Digital readers often fail to find the texts they
are searching for, or they find fragments of texts out of sequence,
or they find irrelevant texts offered to them by the randomness of
keyword searches. Davida Charney argues that the hyperextensive
reading experience must be constructed by readers, without the
guidance of a rhetorically skilled author who can provide a logical
framework for information. If you are skimming many texts, creat-
ing links of your own, there is no logical framework but the one
you are creating in the moment, and there is no authoritative
guide to the process. By contrast, the experience of reading a book
seems reassuringly secure and coherent. Books can be completed, as
opposed to the open virtuality of digital environments. Christopher
Keep says the book is apprehended as “a single, bounded, and
discrete form” which provides the reader with a sense of “physi-
cal mastery,” symbolized by the gesture of closing the book after
the final page has been read. This sense of order and completion
is a hallmark of the book, and though the same experience can be
achieved within a given electronic text, one digital text links easily
to many others, with no sense of closure. The book thus “pro-
vides a comforting mirror for the unity of the reading subject,”
while digital reading opens the subject to “new combinations
and connections,” creating “dispersal, dissemination, scattering”
(166–167). Hyperextensive reading, in this critical scenario, cre-
ates attention deficiency, delivering too many texts and not enough
structure, scattering the subject, and disorienting reading.
Successful hyperextensive reading requires complex patterns
of eye movement and control. In order to navigate within and
among digital texts, the eyes must be capable of flexible movement,
not just the relatively linear and predictable left to right saccades
of high-comprehension codex reading. The eyes must be ready to
move in all directions, guided by the search interests of the reader,

then move directly to a selected target. Website and interface
designs array the information within the visual framework guided
by graphic more than semantic demands. They usually display
verbal and graphic markers that indicate the subjects that can be
accessed through various input options. The job of the eyes in such
a visual environment is to scan intelligently, to follow the leads of
the graphic design, guided by the reader’s interests, and then to
focus on the desired option so that the hands can activate the pro-
gram. Eye movement researchers have played an important role in
website and interface design, and they are interested in understand-
ing how scanning and browsing occur. Irene Stenfors, Jan Moren,
and Christain Balkenius describe scanning as “an active, efficient
search for the information that the user presently is interested in.”
This search requires “an active, ongoing process of evaluation and
discrimination of the elements of the site” (641). The eyes must
be educated so that they move efficiently across many graphic and
linguistic features arranged in a nonlinear fashion, without requir-
ing conscious monitoring. These efficient movements depend on
“previous expectations of how web pages work as well as on new
learning about the structure of the page or site” (634). That is, the
eyes must gain experience with digital texts to the point that they
always already know how to navigate a site, but the motor pro-
grams they develop must be flexible enough to adapt to the needs
of new sites encountered, each with its own idiosyncratic design.
Once again, we see the combination of training and improvisation
so common in deeply learned practices. Visual activity in hyperex-
tensive reading is driven by a cognitive strategy, “a goal-directed
behavior directed towards finding the required information,” but
that strategy must be open to modification in light of the informa-
tion gathered in the scan. This visual feedback refines the search
and guides new cognitive decisions (634–635).
It is also the task of the eyes in hyperextensive reading to ignore
the unwanted visual options, and they can be trained to perform this
task effectively. Readers can avoid being distracted by the multiple
options available on sites and interfaces, even in what Nicholas
Carr calls an “ecosystem of interruption technologies” (91). When
readers are in search mode, their eyes are “task-driven,” even in the
face of advertising that uses motion and color contrast to seduce
the eyes away from their work. This is not to say that Internet
advertising is ineffective—the ads remain in parafoveal positions,

available for the kind of subliminal perception that allows advertis-
ing to be most effective, but it does suggest how disciplined the
eyes of the hyperextensive reader must and can be if he or she is
to navigate successfully the multiple options of digital space. All
reading is vulnerable to distraction, but in print reading the dis-
traction is usually located outside the material text, in the reader’s
surround. In digital reading the distractions are inherent to the
medium, and efficient digital reading therefore requires disciplined
eyes. However, sometimes the alternatives are not distractions at
all, they are openings to further information, serendipitous possi-
bilities for unintended learning. In this mode, eye movements are
not driven so much by a preexisting search strategy as by the infor-
mation arrayed on the screen. The eyes move as they are struck by
information and display features, so they must move lightly, focus
quickly and effectively, and then move on.
The flexible intelligence of the eyes is matched by the skill
of the digital reader’s hands. Hyperextensive reading provides
virtually infinite options, and decisions are executed manually. The
hands are the point of material contact between the reader and
the device—they activate input and enable decisions. The ratio-
nalist explanation of this process would be that the mind makes
the decision and the hands are its instruments. The body passively
receives instructions from the mind and then actively engages with
the world. But in reading, much of our bodily engagement occurs
below the level of conscious awareness, without instructions. No
reader explicitly instructs the hand to move the mouse a millimeter
or to touch the screen with exactly the stroke necessary to move
to the next screen. This subtle and complex knowledge must be
put into play in the instant, open to micro-improvisation. And this
speed and intelligence, as I have argued, is possible only if the
reader submits to the protocols of the text and the device and, by
extension, to the social and cultural context in which they operate.
Thus, the skillful hands are not merely instruments of a disembod-
ied mind. They have a power independent of the will of the reader.
The hands know how to operate within the system, and they set
the conditions of the reader’s decisions. They know how to navi-
gate the physical space of the material text. There are moves they
can make, and moves they cannot. They just will not move in ways
that make no sense within the program.
The hands have three functions in hyperextensive reading: they

move physically across the device in order to enable visual scanning,
they move additional textual options into the visual framework,
and they strike the device in order to execute a decision. The hands
move the cursor around the screen in complicated patterns gener-
ated by the requirements of the display and the desires of the reader.
These are sometimes relatively long, sweeping movements, some-
times tiny and spasmodic, frequently adjusted in order to arrive
at the exact desired position. And then the hands strike the tar-
get in a percussive gesture, activating the selected program. These
movements happen frequently in complex rhythms throughout
the reading experience. This complex motor engagement stands
in strong contrast to the codex reading experience, in which the
hands are relatively still for long periods of time. The hands grasp
the book but they do not often micro-manipulate it. They turn
pages, they might annotate and engage in writing, but they do not
need the motor skills necessary for reading digital texts. For expe-
rienced hyperextensive readers, these skills become a pleasure—
the movements of the hands are instantly and perfectly integrated
with the device, bringing to life exactly the experiences the reader
wants to have. Skilled hands working with skilled eyes allow the
reader to navigate with confidence, to feel a sense of mastery over
the virtual terrain. The entire hypertextual system feels designed
for you, instantly accessible, responsive to your desires, directed
by your bodily movements—a pleasurable fantasy of centrality and
control. Without optic and haptic skills integrated at a high level,
the hypertext, the Internet, truly would be experienced as a track-
less jungle, random and meaningless.
Hyperextensive reading in digital environments changes the
function of the hands in another way—it changes what the hands
grasp. As sensory experience and as functional apparatus, the book
is not the device. The only function of a book is to be read, but
computers execute many functions, just one of which is to present
text that needs to be read. When I hold a book I hold the material
substance of the only text it can be. When I hold a device I hold a
material object that allows me access to many texts. I hold a virtual
library, an archive, a media access tool, and so the device seems
immaterial, abstractly functional. Many historians of the text have
observed that the book seems much more material—it has a dis-
tinctive weight and shape, its pages have texture, the ink is visibly
imprinted on the warp and woof of the paper. You can run your
hand across it and feel the indentations, which are the words, the
material body of the text itself. The digital device has less texture—
it is plastic, affectless, and sleek. It is designed to feel efficient and
executive in the hand, more than to give textural pleasure as a
thing unto itself. As a result, in codex reading, the relationship
between the reader and the text feels more intimate, more inviting
to intensive and concentrated reading. To hold a book feels like
holding an object in the world. Piper says, in fact, that the “ver-
tebral” nature of the codex makes it feel natural for our vertebral,
upright bodies, while “invertebrate” digital texts “elude our grasp
in some fundamental sense” (2). The material book and the physical
process of reading it become associated with the strong emotions
generated by great textual experiences. Readers develop feelings of
attachment to books. They like to be surrounded by books they
have read. They associate particular books with pivotal moments
in their lives. Because they feel that they grasp in the book the
unique text that has moved them, they are moved by the physical
books themselves. Texts encountered by use of digital devices can-
not have this doubled emotion. The device is clearly not the text,
because the device can lead us to some other text instantaneously.
The emotions of the text cannot cross over to the device. The
connection between the user and the device is a procedural one.
The device accrues to itself the emotions associated with the many
functions it allows, not the content of any given text. It becomes a
symbol of cognitive power and freedom. Kindle-type devices have
been designed to approximate the physical experience of reading,
but they cannot duplicate the feeling of identity between the mate-
rial book and the text unfolding in the reading.
In her essay “Hypertext Fiction Reading: Haptics and
Immersion,” reading researcher Anne Mangen has argued that this
ontological difference between the book and the device leads to a
decrease in the ability of digital readers to experience immersion
in fictional worlds. “When reading digital texts,” she says, “our
haptic interaction with the text is experienced as taking place at an
indeterminate distance from the actual text, whereas when read-
ing print text we are physically and phenomenologically (and liter-
ally) in touch with the material substrate of the text itself” (405).
This phenomenal intimacy with the physical book in turn allows
a deeper immersion in the textual world, whereas digital devices
direct our attention to the device itself rather than to the text.
We experience what she calls “technological immersion” rather than
“phenomenological immersion” (406). Mangen cites Merleau-
Ponty on the perception of objects—even though we see only a
specific aspect of any object we perceive, we recognize the existence
of what is currently invisible. Thus, the substantial materiality of
the text as book bespeaks an invisible dimension—we literally feel
the existence of the rest of the book and, by extension, a textual
world far greater than any given passage or page that currently
engages our attention. On the contrary, the digital device denies
access to the invisible physical reality of the text, which disappears
into the black box. As a result, the digital reader is less likely to
experience the rich material and imaginative world of the text. She
argues that “the computer, as a reading device, seems to be poorly
suited for the contemplative and deeply focused reading we associ-
ate with the book” (410).
Mangen maintains that the high haptic requirements of the
device play a role in this detachment from the text. Because we
must constantly scroll and click, especially in hypertextual environ-
ments, our attention is diverted to the work of the hands rather
than the work of interpretation. Digital reading requires a complex
and challenging “haptic capture” of visual experience, and there-
fore we get “sensory-motor dominance of the haptic and tactile
over the cognitive and perceptual,” a dominance that is “necessar-
ily incompatible with phenomenological immersion” in the text
(410). We engage with the device, rather than the text it deliv-
ers. Her concern, therefore, is that “the particular sense of being,
deeply and for an extended period of time, phenomenologically
immersed that we typically experience when reading a novel, is
related to and at least partly dependent on the very materiality
of the print pages of the book itself” (416). As a devotee of the
book, I share Mangen’s concerns. The sheer physical heft of the
book does serve as a powerful metaphor for a textual density that
demands and attracts our immersive attention. But I think she
underestimates the extent to which the haptic requirements of the
device can become second nature to the reader. As we engage in
repeated practice with a specific reading device, our movements
become motor programs that require less and less cognitive invest-
ment, freeing the reader to attend to the text. Nevertheless, dif-
ferences between the haptic experience of the book and the device
persist. Mangen and her colleagues have shown empirically that

textual comprehension decreases in digital reading, particularly
in the ability of readers to remember the order of events in a
narrative. She argues that this decrease occurs because the fixity
of the print text reinforces the linearity of the narrative, while the
virtual absence of the digital text not on screen at the moment of
reading discourages linear memory. In addition, she again argues
that haptic demands distract attention away from the details of the
text (see “Reading Linear Text on Paper versus Computer Screen:
Effects on Reading Comprehension”).
Nevertheless, readers do in fact navigate the hypertext, more or
less successfully, by making a series of decisions that are at the same
time severely system-constrained and utterly idiosyncratic. No one
else navigates the system just as you do. You create your own desire
path through it. The term “desire path” is used in the discourse
of public space design to describe the paths created by users rather
than by designers. If people walking in a park want to get to a
spot, they will take the most efficient path, even if it is not the one
created by the designer. You can see their collective footprints in
the path they eventually wear through the grass. In codex reading,
the design path is very powerful. The only way to comprehend the
text fully is to follow the Z path. The reader can scan and select,
but only at the cost of maximum functionality. In hyperextensive
reading, the creation of a desire path is encouraged. The purpose
of the medium is to move the user through many texts at the speed
of thought. The user moves from text to text, through established
links and through personally constructed searches, at a speed that
discourages Z path reading for maximum comprehension. There
is no design path. There are constraints and procedures that must
be followed, but the creation of a unique path is the point of the
practice. Hyperextensive readers often become impatient when
they are forced to follow a path designed by another—they have a
low tolerance for the Z path. They often experience codex reading
as boring. To use Christian Vandendorp’s terms, they are skilled
at “browsing”—processing many texts in a superficial way—and
at “hunting”—searching for specific information in vast databases,
but they are not skilled at “grazing”—reading a single text for
detailed comprehension (2).
This mobility on the desire path requires a retraining of the eyes
of the reader. Even in our culture of everyday computing, most
people learn to read with print materials, and the pedagogy of read-
ing is mostly dedicated to the Z path and to maximum compre-
hension. The ocular and cognitive skills necessary for desire path
reading are taught by the device and learned by sheer repetition.
The eyes must learn that meaning can be found in all directions.
They search for keywords generated by the goal of the search or
the fleeting interests of the browse, even though the keywords may
never be explicitly articulated. In many directed searches, the user
generates the keyword and the software highlights its presence in
the text, making scanning easy. The eyes move from highlight to
highlight, in saccades that cut across design paths. But in less dis-
ciplined searches and in casual browsing, the eyes must be alert to
a shifting vocabulary of interests that attract the attention of the
eye, often guided by only the vaguest cognitive directions gener-
ated by the user’s entire history, virtually present in every reading
moment. Rather than submit to the strict discipline of the Z path,
the reader must develop the flexible discipline of ocular desire. He
or she must ignore all irrelevant text, even when the definition of
relevance is unclear. Saccades become improvised leaps, often in
unpredictable directions, toward a target that cannot be defined
until the leap has begun. They learn to leap within the constraints
of the software design, but the design exists in order to facilitate
improvisation. The cognitive desire path of the computer user also
requires an oculomotor desire path.
The differences between codex reading and hypertext reading,
however, should not blind us to the continuities. Marie-Laure
Ryan puts it this way: “Traditional print texts are not considered
interactive because they impose a sequential reading protocol,
but the accessibility of all their pages at any given time offers an
illicit escape from the prescribed order: it enables the reader to
skip text, to reread earlier passages, or to take a forbidden peak at
the ending.” Ryan makes clear that it is possible to create a desire
path in print texts. The skills of scanning and searching were not
invented with the computer. Ryan sees digital texts as “the exploi-
tation, systematization and legitimation of a potential inherent in
all forms of permanent inscription” (11). Furthermore, the Z path
does not disappear from digital reading environments. The Kindle
and other reading devices, though they allow desire path read-
ing, are also designed to replicate the codex reading experience.
The Kindle especially has been designed to mimic the book very
specifically, with pages that must be “turned” and lines of print

that must be read on the Z path. Reading in digital environments
requires the eyes of the reader to be extremely versatile, to develop
the ability to code-switch. Nevertheless, new reading technologies
favor the desire path. How many university teachers have noted
their students’ ability to find information and their difficulty with
processing that information in depth?
Though it is true that the physical book is interactive, read-
ing with digital devices allows an even more interactive experi-
ence. This is, of course, one of the hallmarks of the cybernetic
experience. Gamers create their own game experience. Decisions
of readers create the structure of hypertext fiction. Internet read-
ing unfolds as the reader activates links and follows interests and
desires. Readers feel empowered by their ability to make choices
that determine their textual experience. Think of readers surfing
the Internet, creating a temporal flow that cannot be determined
by the texts themselves, creating a personal montage, a hypertext
of their own. Raffaele Simone argues that codex reading creates the
belief that the text is a “closed entity,” that the reader “is constitu-
tionally in a ROM position, except of course for his or her rights to
interpret. The reader reads the text and interprets it at great liberty.
The interpretation however is an immaterial act because the physi-
cal body of the text is untouchable” (240). In this reading situa-
tion, the power of the author is preeminent and the text presents
as a perfected, closed system. While surfing the Internet, readers
interact with the system to create their own textual experience out
of all the sites they visit, with no powerful author to determine the
outcome. And in addition, many of the texts available are far from
untouchable. They can be altered, edited, extended. In Wiki-texts,
the reader is invited to become the writer, to make a contribution
to the text that will be available to future users. In all hypertext
reading, the reader in a sense becomes a writer, making decisions
that have textual consequences. As Marie-Laure Ryan says, hyper-
text reading “enable(s) the reader to affect the ‘text’ of a text as a
visible display of signs, and to control the dynamics of its unfold-
ing” (16–17).
These decisions are realized by the skilled hands of the reader.
Digital reading devices operate by touch; they respond to the
desires of the reader when and only when the reader follows a
haptic protocol. Textual desires can be fulfilled, but only within
the confines of system requirements. As Christopher Keep puts

it: “Database structures and navigational tools largely determine
the exact nature of the degree of interaction which the reader will
be allowed, the kinds of links he or she may traverse or create,
and how he or she will do so” (173). The protocols for search
and scan require a light, horizontal movement of the hand, glid-
ing the cursor across the screen. But decisions are activated by
a subtle percussive movement. The hands must strike the com-
puter in order to affect an outcome. This movement may be the
carefully controlled twitch of the finger on the mouse, the light
but discernible contact of finger on touch screens, or the more
forceful manipulation of the keyboard. Computers are delicate
machines, so the “percussion” cannot be violent, but it must
be definite, decisive. Interactivity requires input, which requires
force.
Though, of course, highly constrained force. The vertical strike
of the finger on the mouse is a matter of thousandths of an inch.
Nevertheless, that small action provides a larger feeling of power.
The machine is made to serve the needs of the user, responding to
even the smallest action, and it responds immediately, at the speed
of a wish. This sense of power, Keep says, blinds the user to the
constraints of the system, ignoring “the ways in which its organi-
zational structure necessarily mediates between the reader and his
or her desire” (175). Within those constraints, some users become
extremely adept at these micro-movements, but computer design-
ers have moved to touch screens precisely because they require less
self-control. Touch screens have a higher tolerance for impreci-
sion and allow a less disciplined touch. The user can poke at the
touch screen, hastily and more forcefully. And when the program
requires or allows keyboard input, the tolerances are even larger.
The fingers on the keyboard can be very percussive, creating in
some users a feeling of rhythmic pleasure. Insofar as the reader
becomes a writer, the body becomes slightly less constrained, more
active and muscular.
The writing required and encouraged by computer interac-
tivity also alters the postures of reading. Because digital reading
requires more manual activity, it encourages more energetic, less
relaxed postures. The relative physical stillness of codex reading
allows readers to “curl up” more easily with the book. Reading
at the computer encourages more ergonomically correct postures,
as in the task chair of workplace reading, so that the hands can

manipulate the device. Of course these postures vary, depend-
ing on the device being used. Kindle-style devices allow the same
range of postures as the codex books they are designed to imitate.
Because the Kindle is of roughly the same size and weight as a
paperback book, it can be held comfortably in the hands, and
since it encourages Z path reading, the hands are not required
to work as frequently as they do when the reader is scanning the
Internet. Kindles allow physical interactivity but do not require it,
so they can be read in almost exactly the same array of postures
as the codex. But hyperspace reading, in which all texts are virtu-
ally available and interconnected, requires an alert, poised posture
that supports the extensive manual work required by scanning,
selecting, and interacting with the text, especially when the inter-
action involves writing.
Desktop computers tend to impose the strictest postural limi-
tations. They are designed to encourage user input, and they are
relatively inflexible. The screen is upright and difficult to move,
so readers must align their bodies with the screen, which requires
sitting upright and immobile, often in chairs designed to place the
user in the perfect posture to use the keyboard. Especially if the
computer is controlled by a mouse, the hands must be positioned
for access, so they must rest on the desk, either in front of the
keyboard or at its side in front of the mouse. Laptops are more
mobile and adjustable, and they allow a wider range of postures.
The laptop can be placed on a desk or literally on the lap, with the
screen tilted up to the eyes of the reader, allowing a comfortable
flexion of the neck. But the hand placement required by the lap-
top, either using the keyboard or manipulating the built-in mouse,
still requires the reader to be positioned directly in front of the
device. Handheld devices like the iPad, operated by touching the
screen, allow a much wider range of postures. Readers can prop
the device at an angle on the table and sit in front of it, with hands
free for manipulating the device or for holding food and drink. Or
it can be held in almost any posture that the codex allows, since
the hands interact by swiping and striking the device itself, rather
than an ancillary device like a mouse. The designers of all these
reading devices have taken the posture of the reader into account,
attempting to integrate the interactive body of the reader into the
device that delivers the text.
Human-computer interaction experts have studied the effects

of various reading devices, including the book, on the body of the
reader. Their findings suggest that all reading eventually produces
a negative effect on the body, causing neck and shoulder pain and
muscular fatigue. The desktop computer may impose an ergonom-
ically efficient posture, but it allows very little variation, and so
produces fatigue and stiffness over time (see Straker et al., 133).
The desktop device freezes the reader in a monotonous stance,
unlike the book, the laptop, or the handheld device, which allow
easy adjustments. They also allow inefficient postures—severe
spinal curvatures, harmful sprawls—but variation over time matters
more than efficiency (see Briggs et al., 815). Briggs et al. prefer the
laptop, because its angle can be so easily changed and because the
posture it encourages is closest to resting posture (811). But their
studies underestimate the versatility of the book and of handheld
devices, which can be adapted to so many postures. The readers
they observed were asked to read books lying flat on the desk,
which forced them to bend their necks severely in order to acquire
a proper angle for the eyes. But books can be propped up, just
as the screen of a laptop can be adjusted, so that the neck is not
stressed. For long periods of reading, most readers prefer books
and handheld devices over desktop computers. The book and the
reading device feel less disciplined, less task-oriented, and they can
be more easily integrated into the daily practices of the reading
lifestyle. Readers rarely choose the desktop for extended reading,
as the designers of handheld devices understood. Their goal was
to reproduce the pleasure of codex reading, its adaptability, and
comfort. But with hyperextensive reading, which requires constant
scanning and decision making executed by complex manual proce-
dures, the laptop and the desktop function efficiently, especially if
the task requires interactive writing. The writing body is typically
not casual and comfortable, it is hard at work, manipulating the
device that allows it to alter existing text or create new text. If one
of the chief benefits of hyperextensive reading is its interactivity,
including its ability to transform the reader into a writer, that ben-
efit is most efficiently achieved on laptop or desktop devices.
The move from codex to hypertext reading is also changing the
habitual life of readers in complex and subtle ways. The work of the
reading body has always been woven into everyday life through its
routine association with other daily habits. Certainly it is true that
readers often sit for long sessions of intensive reading, without dis-
traction or change of attention, but a great deal of reading is what
Martyn Lyons calls “intersticial reading,” reading that fits into the
gaps in the reader’s daily life. Lyons says that for many readers
“the regulated working day allows only short fragments of read-
ing time, which must be seized in the interstices between home
and work, between work and sleep, in lunch breaks, on commuter
trains, between the electric iron and the vacuum cleaner” (185).
The portability of digital reading devices makes them perfectly
suitable for this fragmented, opportunistic reading practice. Just
as the introduction of cheap paperback books made the portability
of codex reading possible, the introduction of handheld reading
devices makes digital reading adaptable in everyday life. Readers
of books, magazines, and newspapers have developed methods of
reading while eating, sleeping, traveling, bathing, relaxing in the
park, and lying on the beach. Digital reading technologies, espe-
cially handheld devices, can be used in many of these situations—
though not all—creating subtle shifts rather than revolutionary
changes in habitual patterns. The procedures of digital reading,
the work of the eyes and the hands, have changed the operations
of the reading body dramatically, but the habits of digital reading
suggest a continuity between codex and hypertext that bodes well
for the future of reading itself.
The portability of digital reading devices and of the hyperex-
tensive reading they encourage should still strike us as shocking.
Andrew Dillen, in Designing Usable Electronic Text, describes a
reading environment in which readers are able “from their desk-
top, laptop, or palmtop; at work, at home, or on the move—to
locate, retrieve and use easily the store of human knowledge that
lies in books, journals and associated materials in libraries the world
over” (2). Add to that the instant availability of websites, blogs,
television shows, photographs, films, music, and social networks,
all on one device the size of a paperback book, and we see an
unprecedented expansion of the texts available to readers wherever
they happen to be. One great advantage of the handheld device
is that digital versions of texts that would be unwieldy in print
are now usable in almost all daily situations. It is almost impos-
sible to read oversized law books or chemistry texts on the subway,
but it is easy to read digital versions of these same texts almost
anywhere. Handheld devices are particularly helpful for travelers,
who can conveniently bring with them leisure and work reading.
With digital devices, it is no longer necessary to adjust the grip or
the reading stance to match the size and heft of the book. To the
digital reader’s musculoskeletal body, all texts become the same.
The advantage of this physical homogeneity is that all texts are
portable and easy to hold. The disadvantage is that all books—and
all media—become physically indistinguishable. All texts arrive to
the reader in the same material form, which suggests that all texts
are leveled, reduced to the same physical experience, encourag-
ing the same cognitive-emotional experience. When Hamlet and
Gilligan’s Isle and a video of a funny cat and an email from your
boss and a text from your boyfriend arrive in the same material
device, they all become part of the same experiential flow, with
fewer markers to remind us of their real differences. Perhaps we
pay for the portability of digital texts with the loss of the physical
distinctiveness of texts.
There are, however, limits to the adaptability and portability
of digital reading devices. It turns out that the portability of the
paperback book, the newspaper, and the magazine are hard to
match. Desktop computers are of course immobile, laptops are
large and cumbersome compared to books, and handheld devices
are too expensive to be taken into high-risk environments. Once
e-books have been downloaded onto these devices, their personal
value is too precious to risk—the replacement costs are high and
the personal investment represented by the selection of texts
transforms the device into an archive of the reader’s literary tastes.
As a result, users are unlikely to risk these devices in situations
that could damage the technology. The pleasure of reading on the
beach, for example, is mitigated by the damage that sand can cause,
so even the most portable devices are rarely used in this classic
reading situation. Many people enjoy reading a book in the bath,
but water can destroy a computerized device. Some users take their
Kindle or iPad into the bath in a sealed plastic bag, which allows
them to protect the device while still being able to manipulate its
controls—ingenious, but awkward. Nevertheless, the portability
of electronic reading has been the explicit goal of designers, and
the gap between the book and the device is shrinking. The classic
dismissal of electronic reading for many years was that “no one
curls up in bed with an electronic reading device,” but Kindle-type
devices have now overcome that hurdle. They are now ubiquitous
in restaurants, on subways, and in city parks, in most of the places

where books can be read.
One of the most important adaptability issues with electronic
reading devices is lighting. The book reader seeks light, the elec-
tronic device reader shuns it. The paper page reflects light, creat-
ing the contrast of foreground print and background page. The
screen of the electronic device emits light, and so is susceptible to
ambient light, which diminishes the visual contrasts necessary for
reading. Kindle-type devices have been brilliantly designed to solve
this problem, but the use of laptops and iPads is still problematic in
bright light. My university’s new library was designed to produce
maximum ambient light, with huge windows that open to beautiful
mountain scenery and bathe the interior with indirect sunlight
mixing with soft interior light to make a perfect environment for
book readers. But for much of the day those windows are covered
with shades because the light interferes with laptop computers.
Readers of books become connoisseurs of light. They will find or
create lighting environments that maximize their reading comfort
and efficiency, usually with little or no conscious planning. They
position themselves so that light falls over their shoulders onto
the book, avoiding light that glares into the eyes and dim spaces
that make reading difficult. The challenge for laptop readers is to
avoid light that falls on the screen as well as to avoid glaring light.
They seek low-intensity light or position themselves to minimize
light interference. One of the strongest attractions of Kindle-like
devices is that they replicate the lighting specifications of the book,
so they can be read in bright environments, but with the added
advantage that they can also be used in darkness, since they emit
their own light. Intelligent readers who make use of all of these
different reading technologies learn to adapt their behavior to the
demands of print or screen. At first, this adaptation is conscious
and strategic. A new device requires a period of field-testing, but
the adaptation quickly becomes unconscious—one element in the
complex decision making process engaged by the reading body.
Laptop readers have devised complex spatial habits that take
advantage of the portability of the device. When I observe stu-
dents in the library, I see them integrate laptops into person-
ally constructed spaces that suit their own reading and studying
habits. Laptops are often placed on the table next to textbooks,
either because the reader is looking up information on the laptop
suggested by the content of the textbook, or because the laptop

provides opportunities for pleasant distractions—checking email,
playing games, irrelevant web surfing. Or, the laptop is placed
next to a notebook into which the reader is entering handwritten
notes for memory and later reference. Or, the book is placed flat,
directly in front of the reader, with the laptop placed behind it,
the horizontal print text artfully backgrounded and framed by
the vertical screen. Or, the textbook and the laptop and the note-
book change locations as projects change—a reference in a book
leads to a search on the computer and then to notes written by
hand. And then, all of these reading sources are placed carefully
within a nest of objects used in other, simultaneous habits—cell
phones, water bottles, snacks, coffee cups—all the necessities for
extended reading sessions. Since the laptop and the book are rest-
ing on the desk, both hands are left free to manipulate the device,
turn the pages of the book, pick up the coffee cup, send texts to
friends on the phone, creating a flow of activity that includes but
is not limited to reading.
But even in the comfortable environments that digital readers
create for themselves, the physical and cognitive demands of read-
ing are higher than ever. Reading has become, in Espen Aarseth’s
influential term, “ergodic.” That is, readers are now faced with
“literacy systems that require ‘non-trivial effort’ to allow the users
to traverse them” (quoted in Hayles, Writing Machines, 28).
In addition to the skills of basic literacy, readers must now master a
complex set of entry task skills that transform the material reading
body. Certainly, codex reading is ergodic as well: the physical and
cognitive demands of book reading are “non-trivial.” But there
is no question that reading in digital environments requires more
complex and extensive skills that must be learned and embodied
through explicit pedagogy and endless repetition. If we live at a time
when the materiality of the text is being transformed, we also live at
a time when the human body is being transformed by new textual
technology. The future of the human body will be determined by
the demands of the knowledge machines. Humans will learn on
the cognitive and visceral level the skills necessary for productive
manipulation of the machines. As Hayles says, “The user’s sensory-
motor apparatus is being trained to accommodate the computer’s
responses.” Readers learn to read through different “functional-
ities,” and changes in functionalities “shift the embodied responses
and expectations that different kinds of textuality evoke” (“How

We Became Posthuman,” 2186). The new skills of the reading
body in digital environments will shape the future of the human
body—a body transformed by pedagogy, technology, neurochem-
istry and genetics into an effective computer interface, the cyborg
body that has haunted and elated recent cultural critique.
For readers shaped by the demands of the codex, this trans-
formation requires conscious, intentional retraining. The skills of
hand and eye required by digital reading do not come naturally.
Readers must move from conscious intention to embodied prac-
tice. The procedures must become second nature so the “higher
level” skills of information retrieval and comprehension can call
on cognitive resources that would otherwise be directed to learn-
ing the procedures. Learning to read in digital environments
demands high cognitive investment, as Jahannes Naumann et al.
have shown in their studies of working memory capacity and read-
ing skill. Reading in any format, especially reading for maximum
comprehension, makes high short-term memory demands, includ-
ing “semantic and syntactic integration of words within sentences,
establishing coherence relations between sentences, and establish-
ing a coherent representation of comprehensive text” (199). If
short term memory resources have to be directed to the work of
the eye and the hand—how to steer the cursor, how to move the
eyes efficiently—comprehension skills will be diminished. Learning
the procedures of digital reading must be mastered quickly, or the
goal of reading itself is subverted. These learning demands are less
problematic for “digital natives” for whom digital reading feels
perfectly natural. Their learning occurred so early in their reading
lives that the procedures have always felt inevitable and therefore
demand little cognitive investment. However, the demands of the
machines are always changing, as new hardware and software are
developed, so there are always new procedures to learn. For digital
natives this learning itself becomes second nature. Learning new
procedures is a pleasurable experience; adaptation is the essen-
tial skill. The demands of the programs are not negotiable, so in
order to use the machines to accomplish one’s project, intelligent
adaptation is required. Gadamer has this disciplined adaptation in
mind when he says, “Whoever makes use of technology—and who
does not?—entrusts himself to its functioning. It is by means of a
primary renunciation of freedom in relation to one’s own overall
ability to act that one has come into the enjoyment of these aston-
ishing comforts and enlargements of wealth that modern technol-
ogy makes available to us” (71). The infinite hypertextuality of
the Internet, an astonishing enlargement of our textual wealth,
is available to us only if we adapt ourselves to the procedures of
the device, submitting our freedom to its precise requirements.
Gadamer believes that this submission makes us “functionaries,”
reducing a rich cultural practice to a predetermined technique.
Learning visual and manual procedures requires a change in
body image, a change in the way readers experience the body. The
new technologies and the procedures they require must be expe-
rienced as seamless extensions of the body, and the body must be
experienced as an efficient executive function of the technology.
Andrew Dillen has described the importance of spatial memory
in text processing. Efficient digital readers must remember where
the required icons and sites of maximum information are located
on the screen so that they can maneuver efficiently through and
among documents. Trained and experienced screen readers have
incorporated the schemata of the program more deeply; it becomes
part of their hexis, an intelligent adaptation to the new practice.
Andy Clark says: “the body image supported by a biological brain
is quite plastic and highly (and rapidly) responsive to coordinated
signals from the environment,” in this case the digital environment.
The body image is “a mental construct, open to continual renewal
and reconfiguration.” For readers in digital environments, “ [their]
continual experience of closely correlated action and feedback rou-
tines running via these non-biological peripheries allows the brain
to temporarily generate what is really a new kind of ‘body image,’
one that includes the non-biological components” (61–62). The
device is experienced as part of the body, like any familiar tool. Chris
Shilling asserts that “the successful acquisition of new skills is usu-
ally dependent on them being fully incorporated into the body at a
pre-conscious level,” and that incorporation depends on the tools
manipulated by the skill becoming “extensions of body schema”
(The Body in Culture, Technology and Society, 58). When that schema
is established, technology becomes transparent and allows readers
to pursue their projects without reflecting on process.
Experiencing the book as an extension of body schema opens
the body up to the semiotic infinity of the text. The skilled read-
ing body learns the physical and cognitive techniques, and any text
taken to hand and eye is mapped as self rather than other. The
semiotics made available to cognition may seem very foreign to
my understanding. They may be in a language I do not understand
or they may articulate ideas that I cannot comprehend or accept,
and so the text feels like an authentic encounter with an other, a
message from a mind not my own. And yet my operational body
experiences the materiality of the sign as an extension of my self, a
familiar object available to a familiar practice. Thus, I incorporate
the device and its semiotic potentials as my own, even the ones
that I find radically other in their abhorrence or indecipherability.
Experiencing the hyperextensive, cybernetic network as an exten-
sion of body schema opens the body up to an infinity of semiotic
infinities. I incorporate the network as my own, even when I
encounter radical otherness within it. Reading in digital environ-
ments extends the reading self into a virtual infinity, perhaps to the
point where the perceiving self as phenomenological center cannot
survive, and the reader becomes a node in the network.
We are here on ground first explored by Donna Haraway—the
reading body in digital environments is a cyborg body, an amalgam
of body and technology. Of course the book is a technology, and
the codex reader is a body shaped by the conventions of print,
but the digital reading body is more radically open to a universe
of signification, all virtually present and searchable online every
instant, all of it experienced physically and procedurally as self
rather than other. For the cyborg reader, to use Haraway’s terms,
“The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human,
organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men
and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologi-
cally” (22). “The machine is us,” Haraway says, “our processes, an
aspect of our embodiment” (38). Reading in digital environments
is the training ground and field of activity for the cyborg. Users
become elements in the network because they have print literacy
plus hypertext literacy, right down to the workings of the eye and
hand. The future of the body is being forged by the instruments of
hyperextensive reading and the procedures they require. As Linda
Hogle says in “Enhancement Technologies and the Body,” “The
ability exists to redesign the human body according to particular
needs and desires, altering or building in new features” ( 696).
The needs are generated by the demands of the networks, which
also provide the pedagogy necessary to acquire the new features.
But the future of the reading body will not be constructed only
by device-generated pedagogies. There will certainly be more
direct technological interventions into the reading body to make
it more efficient at hyperextensive and interactive reading. Will
there not soon be neural prostheses installed into flesh and blood,
“brain-technology interface devices” that connect the body directly
to the network, cognitive enhancement drugs designed to maxi-
mize neural activity that interfaces efficiently with digital devices,
and genetic engineering aimed at creating flesh and blood brains
that will benefit most quickly and fully from cybernetic pedagogy?
We already have drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that improve read-
ing ability in persons who are not capable of the sustained atten-
tion that reading for comprehension requires. How long will it be
before there are drugs designed to enhance reading performance,
not just rehabilitate deficiencies? And those drugs will address not
just the skills necessary for sustained high-comprehension read-
ing but also the skills of rapid scanning and navigation. By means
of pedagogy and technological interventions, the reading body
will learn to operate efficiently in codex reading and in hypertext
reading—that is, in all the cognitive and procedural skills that the
new reading technologies demand.
This process of learning and adaptation will be successful
if training and practice are experienced as pleasurable activities.
Reading the codex becomes physically pleasurable for skilled
habitual readers. They enjoy holding the book, touching its pages,
smelling print on paper, creating a comfortable posture in a com-
fortable place, integrating the habit of reading into other plea-
surable habits, creating a reading lifestyle that enhances literate
practice. Readers who do not experience these pleasures probably
read only when necessary, not as a leisure pursuit. My feeling is
that the book will survive because it produces this combination of
pleasures for a profitable number of readers. But reading hypertext
also becomes physically pleasurable for those who master its pro-
cedures. The eyes take pleasure in their newfound freedom, the
hands take pleasure in mastering the tiny manual skills required by
the program and executing the decisions required by the reader’s
project. The digital reading body assumes postures that bring the
same pleasures as the codex, and the portability of digital reading
technology allows readers to inhabit virtually all the familiar spaces
of reading, private and public. The cyborg reader takes a desire
path, improvising and creating an unpredictable flow of experi-

ence. The only cost of admission for this pleasure is submission to
the program.
The digital reading body works within the parameters set by
the device. Every movement of the eye and hand is constrained by
procedures created by system designers who work within vast cor-
porate and social networks. If you do not submit to those require-
ments, you cannot read on the device. The dream of cybernetic
transcendence just does not hold up against the reality of those
trivial but authoritative rules. When you take up the device, you
take on its directives. But this readerly submission, as I have argued
earlier, is true of codex readers as well. If you do not follow the
Z path, you cannot comprehend the text. The book has its con-
straints too. But this is not to say that readers, codex or hypertext,
have no freedom—they have freedom within constraints. Reading
bodies make intelligent adaptations, they improvise, they bend the
rules, they follow desire paths, they accomplish personally gener-
ated projects, they make texts mean what they need them to mean.
Insofar as readers are bodily subjects, they are also social subjects,
and their interpretations, like their physical actions, happen inside
vast social and cultural systems beyond their control. Readers do
not choose the language of the text, the rules of syntax and seman-
tics, the historical context of the text, or the historical context
of their own reading. And yet, they read with great interpretive
power and personal insight. The message of the reading body is
that constraint makes freedom possible. The disciplines of read-
ing, which demand our submission, set us free to improvise and
adapt, to make meaning out of semiotic potential, and to nourish
ourselves.
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Index
A Young Woman Reading, 75–7 Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme, 142,

abjection, 23, 40 152
Abraham, Karl, 142, 153–4 browsing, 144, 174–5, 181
absent body, 10, 13, 14, 21, 73, Butler, Judith, 12, 14
115, 128
adaptation, 29, 46, 49, 52, 71, 81, carnivalesque, 121, 135
90–2, 94, 127, 167, 173, 187–8, Carr, Nicholas, 175–6
193 Certeau, Michel de, 110
Aikido, 103 Chartier, Roger, 166–7
anti-social messages, 41, 98–9, 112, Chesterton, G. K., 152
149 civilizing process, 23, 39, 120–1,
Appalachian Trail, 109–10 137–9, 148
arbitrary codes, 47, 52–5, 58–9, Clark, Andy, 191
62, 68 codex reading, 33, 35–6, 39, 41,
Aristotle, 6, 19 85, 163, 171, 174, 178, 180,
attention, 96–7 182, 184–5, 189–90, 193
Augst, Thomas, 34, 122 cognitive enhancement drugs, 35,
193
Bacon, Francis, 151–2 cognitive science, 1, 51, 56, 71–2
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 22–3, 135 cognitive unconscious, 25–6,
Barthes, Roland, 79–80, 129, 39–40, 47, 50–1, 56, 67, 99–100,
144–5, 157 114, 145, 176, 191
bathroom reading, 137–9 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 146
Baudrillard, Jean, 165 community of practice, 28
Beauvoir, Simone de, 11 Connerton, Paul, 145
Beer, Randall D., 52, 90 Cyborgs, 172, 192–3
body schema, 89–90, 114–15,
191–2 Damasio, Antonio, 92, 99, 101–2
Bordo, Susan, 161 defamiliarization, 146
Bourdieu, Pierre, 13–19, 33, 51, Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari,
56, 58–9, 62–3, 67, 72, 132, 168
141, 146, 151, 161–2, 163 desire path, 54–5, 172, 180–2
Bourdieu and Passeron, 46–7, 52, desktop computers, 184–5, 187
56–7 detachment, 95–8, 111–13, 128,
Breen, Katharine, 19, 34, 47, 148–50, 167, 179
141 digestion, 151–3, 160
206 Index
digital culture, 164–8 Freud, Sigmund, 143, 156

digital reading devices, 9, 21, 32, future of reading, 41–2, 163–94
34–5, 41, 55, 85–6, 163–94
discipline, 21, 27, 29–30, 32, 39, Gadamer, Hans Georg, 16–17,
41–2, 47, 55–8, 68–9, 71, 78–9, 144–5, 190–1
95, 107, 113, 129, 146, 175–6, Gallagher, Shaun, 88–90, 100
181, 194 Goffman, Erving, 117–18
disembodiment, 1, 7–8, 12, 24, graphic codes, 52–4, 59, 60–2, 68
142–3, 159–60, 164–8, 194 grip, 83–4
distraction, 95–7, 112, 116, 126, Grosz, Elizabeth, 11–12, 47, 122–3,
139, 175–6 168
docile bodies, 27, 55, 68, 78, 107
doxa, 59, 63, 67 habit, 6, 8, 12, 15, 20–2, 37, 42,
dualism, 1, 10–13, 73, 99, 160 44, 71, 88, 141–2, 144–5, 146–7,
Dylan, Bob, 103–5 161–2, 164, 170, 185–9
habitus, 14–21, 27–8, 51, 56–7,
eating, 40, 71, 73, 97–8, 115, 135, 141
138, 141–62 hands, 2, 7, 8–9, 21, 23, 39, 73–5,
Elias, Norbert, 23, 120, 148 83, 92, 104–6, 128, 170–1,
email, 168–71 176–8, 182–4, 193
embodied cognition, 25–7, 63–4, haptics, 21, 39, 169, 177–9, 182–4,
73, 90, 97, 100–2, 145, 160, 186
169, 175, 191 Haraway, Donna, 35, 192–3
emotion, 92–4, 98, 101, 113, Hayles, N. Katherine, 164–5, 167,
156 171–2, 189–90
ergodic practices, 189–90 Hegel, Friedrich, 157–9
ergonomics, 22, 28, 77, 81–3, 87 hegemony, 146
Eucharist, 157–62 Heidegger, Martin, 74
everyday life, 8, 11, 12, 22, 29–30, hermeneutics, 20, 25, 30–1, 43, 64,
37, 42, 44, 144, 161–2, 185–8 68, 80, 108, 110–11, 142, 160
excorporation, 138–9 hexis, 14, 17, 20, 27–8, 32, 35, 43,
expressivity, 94, 107–8, 113 51, 62–3, 67, 72
eyes, 2, 7, 8–9, 14, 21, 24, 27, 38, history, 33–4, 114, 146–7, 162, 194
43–69, 71, 73–4, 83, 100, 107, history of the book, 32–3, 146–7,
170–1, 174–6, 193 178
Holzer, Jenny, 39, 60–2
family, 27, 31, 77–8, 120–1, human-computer interaction, 21,
149–50 164
feminist theory, 11–13 hyperextensive reading, 33–4, 36,
Fish, Stanley, 6–9, 64–7 42, 163, 172–3, 180, 182, 185,
fixations, 47–8, 66 191–2
For Chicago, 60–2
Foucault, Michel, 27–9, 47, 55, 58, ideology, 69, 146, 151–2, 161
78–9, 114, 146, 160–2, 163 immersion, 4, 73, 92, 144, 149,
foveal capacity, 47–8, 60 178–9
Index 207
improvisation, 14, 16–17, 29–30, motor programs, 16, 26–7, 39, 179
49–50, 57, 83, 107–8, 163, 175
incarnation, 157–62 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 116, 138
interactivity, 163, 172–3, 182–4 New York City, 122–30
interior design, 4–5, 22, 33, 75–7, New York Public Library, 123–5
84, 87, 105–8, 111, 123–5,
131–2 oculomotor science, 20, 45–6,
interpretation, 6, 8–9, 25–6, 57, 64, 47–50, 55
66–8, 72, 152, 156–7, 194 oral aggression, 40, 142–3, 153–8,
interruption, 112–13 160
interstitial reading, 105, 186
parks, 128–30
Joyce, James, 2–4, 28, 157 pedagogy, 2, 27, 40, 44, 46–7,
56–8, 69, 78–81, 86–7, 114, 121,
Kindle, 35, 126, 178, 181, 184, 145, 168, 173, 180–1, 189–91
187–8 performance enhancing drugs, 35
Klein, Melanie, 142, 154–6 personal space, 97
Plato, 6
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson, pleasure, 31–3, 145, 155, 187,
25, 99–100 193–4
landing zones, 45–6, 49, 68 posture, 10, 14, 22, 27–8, 35, 37,
laptop computers, 118, 125, 132, 39, 71–108, 127, 129, 145,
150, 184–5, 187–9 183–5
LaSalle, Jean Baptiste de, 79–82 Poulet, George, 43, 113
Leder, Drew, 10, 21, 37, 73, 115, practices, 6, 12–22, 28–30, 33, 34,
165 37, 47, 49–51, 56–9, 63, 111,
libraries, 117, 123–5, 130–1 122, 130, 134–6, 146, 152, 157,
linguistic competence, 47–9 161, 164, 173, 175, 185
light, 4, 22, 24, 33, 43–4, 53, 84, private space, 31, 34, 53, 76, 94,
86–7, 100, 121, 131, 188 99, 111, 117, 120–1, 130–9,
Liu, Zhiming, 173–4 166–7
Love Sonnets, 92–4 procedures, 8–10, 14–15, 20, 25–6,
31, 33, 35, 37–8, 42, 67, 71, 78,
MacIntyre, Alisdair, 18–19 141, 167–71, 174, 180, 186,
Madison Park, 128–30 190–2, 194
Mangen, Anne, 178–80 proprioception, 86, 88–91, 101
Manguel, Alberto, 34, 53, 123–4, public space, 34, 37, 40–1, 88,
130–1, 143 98–9, 120–1, 122–30
masturbation, 22, 121, 135
Matisse, Henri, 49–50, 65 Quintillian, 143
Mauss, Marcel, 17–18
Mead, George, 119 Radway, Janice, 112
Merleau Ponty, Maurice, 8, 26, 49, reader-response theory, 6–10, 23
65, 74–5, 179 regimen, 20, 29
mothers, 154–6 resistant reading, 17, 55, 68–9, 81
208 Index
restaurant reading, 97–8, 149 submission, 9, 15, 27–8, 32, 42,

Rose, Jonathan, 109–10, 118 53, 55, 58, 64, 83, 95, 114,
Rossi, Lucio, 75–7 163, 170, 176, 181, 191,
194
saccade, 38–9, 45–50, 55–6, 60, 64, subway reading, 95–7, 119–20,
66, 68, 169 126–8
sacred reading, 102–3, 135 surroundings, 1, 12, 39, 41, 49,
Sartre, Jean Paul, 8 52, 95–6, 99, 101, 105, 109–39,
savoir faire, 18, 56, 58 145, 149, 166–7, 176
scanning, 55–6, 175, 177, 181
searching, 21, 54, 170, 173–6, techniques du corps, 17–18
180–1 Thompson, Evan, 25, 51, 100–2
second nature, 15, 20, 46, 142, Thornycroft, Agatha, 4–6, 28
150–1, 163, 167, 169, 173, touch, 23–4, 73–4, 84, 105, 123,
175–6 130, 178, 182–3, 193
Seneca, 143
Shapiro, Lawrence, 25, 50, 114 Umwelt, 117, 122
Shilling, Chris, 113, 191
silent reading, 33, 53, 135, 166–7 vision, 24–5, 38, 43–4, 73–4, 87,
Silverman, Gillian, 25, 152 91–2, 107
skimming, 27, 54, 173, 181
slavery, 33 women reading, 4, 5, 75–7, 94
smell, 23–4, 130–1, 193 Wordsworth, William, 146
social environment, 87–8, 117–20, writing, 173, 182–3
147–50
somatophobia, 11–12 Yeats, William Butler, 103, 105–6
space, 22, 37, 41, 97, 109–39
Stillman, Marie Spartali, 92–4 Z path, 39, 41, 45–6, 52, 54, 66,
Stone, Sandy, 166 171–2, 180–2, 184, 194

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Reading and the Body

List of Figures vii

Introduction: Reading Bodies 1

Works Cited 195

0.1 Photograph by Frederick Hallyer 5

I would like to thank the following administrators at Appalachian

To my family, with deep love and affection. My parents, Tom

Reading appears to be a disembodied, purely mental act. The

This book, on the contrary, is based on the premise that read-

dispirited, paralyzed culture; and his moment in Irish history. All

Figure 0.1 Photograph by Frederick Hallyer. Appeared in Bonham’s Auction

submitting to acceptable taste or orthodox judgment. We can see in

is embodied, either in Fish’s early work that traces the cognitive

in literary theory that was almost eradicated in the twentieth cen-

extent, predictable and normative” (Tompkins, 84). Within these

thinkers, the mind-body split is more than an operational expedi-

The absurdity of the belief, of course, does not diminish its

A body and nature formed solely by social and political significa-

The figure of the reader obviously lends itself to analysis as a

which identity is constructed. The reader’s body is both subject to

1. A practice is a purposeful action. Individuals involved in prac-

3. A practice operates by means of a “habitus,” a set of dispositions,

I am particularly interested, of course, in the embodiment of

subordinated to the desired result. If we attend to those proce-

expressions, ways of sitting and of using implements, always associ-

In reading, the tool is the book, and it requires motor func-

For Bourdieu, therefore, practices allow improvisation, but they

Practice . . . is always concretely motivated already, prejudiced to be

These “things taken for granted” are embodied in practices, and

By a “practice” I am going to mean any coherent and complex form

MacIntyre here connects practice with the pursuit of excellence.

In Imagining an English Reading Public: 1150–1400, historian

second nature through repetition. Breen says: “Repetition implies

All experienced readers develop habitual postures and ways of occu-

among others, including practices from “lower,” abject centers of

think it could be argued that this repudiation of tactile and chemi-

Communion in Nineteenth-Century America(2012). Writing in phenom-

is focused on how to dribble the ball, he or she cannot focus on

whole range of subjectivities necessary for a functioning society.

around which the rest of life must be organized. Reading becomes

lingers on throughout a reader’s life, and because the book is so

histories. The history of the reading body, for example, makes

Because of the availability of documents and records from librar-

devices. Reading on the computer, on Kindle devices, or on cell

reading becomes hyperextensive, with immediate access to a daz-

1. Manyof my examples are photographic and painterly images

and head, the structure of the whole body posture, as well as

it becomes so incorporated that the body again becomes absent.

practice. Motor programs are produced by pedagogy—we learn

Chapter 4 places the reading body in physical space. Readers

M ost accounts of the reading process describe the relationship

background behind and around the negative space of the black

they adapt their movements when the anticipation proves incor-

facility and reading experience. Genetic capabilities, for the eyes of

meaning they encounter in improvised adjustments that require

A camera once recorded the work of Matisse in slow motion.

expanding time—in the imminence of a world’s creation—to try ten

The body in many ways “preprocesses” the information that the

It is much easier to think of reading as embodied in the brain

hand” that “shapes how we automatically and unconsciously

The selection of meanings which objectively defines a group’s or a

There is nothing natural about the tasks required of the eye