More About Reading Aloud

A few days ago I wrote a blog entry that is gathering some attention about why humanists read their (written) papers out loud. http://www.hastac.org/node/1204

Last night, I added a new final paragraph to that entry because I was sitting in the audience at a marvelous talk and realized (duh!) I had left out the most compelling, emotional attachment that we humanists (sometimes) have to written texts: one other reason humanists read their papers outloud is because the practice of reading iitself ispart of humanistic training. Part of humanism is the love not just the content of words butthe sound of words. Remember, we go to things like "poetry readings." We could just as easily buy the book, but hearing poetry read is a different experience. Humanists like being read to. Not always. And certainly there are dreadful papers where every minute drags by, but the kind of attention (cognitive, affective) that we give to individual words is itself an experience, one that (at its best) we enjoy. It is our version of enactment, like a lab experiment or a demo. Again, it is not always the right way to present but it is not as wrong as people not in the humanities can sometimes think it is.

Here are comments that friends of mine in engineering, political science, physics, and chemistry (to name the ones I can think of) have said to after attending a humanistic conference on new media and being utterly baffled at people standing up there and reading every single word of a written paper: "What are they doing reading to me? Isn't that insulting? I can read perfectly well. What a waste of my time!" My intention in writing the earlier blog and this elaboration on the addendum to that blog was to think about the practice of what we do when we get together. All such practices are conventional, traditional, rituals . . . and like any of those cultural forms, require explanation when viewed beyond one's own group.

That's what successful interdisciplinarity is: you have to explain to one another the most basic practices of your own discipline, including the purely conventional forms that you take for granted and assume "everyone does."  Until you can see and explain those most conventional practices (like reading a written paper outloud), you're going to miss the interdisciplinary connections because your interlocutor will think you are eccentric, daft, weird, or rude---not simply doing what, within your field, is "the way things are done."   It's like traveling to a different country.  You recognize that many things you thought were "universal" are extremely local, specific, ritualized, invisible.   It's Simmel's "defamiliarization," strange-making, where you see your own practices as particular enough that you need to explain them.  Interdisciplinary exchange only begins, in any profound sense, when you can see the shape of your own discipline well enough to explain it.

That's what I thought about last night, as I listened with relish, as a member of the audience at the opening of the stunning BarkleyHendricks exhibit at the Nasher Museum of Art.  My friend Rick Powell,the emininent art historian, introduced the conversation by reading twoor three pages about Hendricks from his forthcoming book on Blackartists and fashion. The language was as lush, rich, thick, andsoundful as a Mingus solo. The rest of the evening was a conversationbetween Hendricks and Powell inspired by a series of slides that Powelldisplayed on a very large screen. It was a wonderful, engagedconversation but it was the Mingus-like intoning of the read-words that set the tone for the subsequent spoken words.  It was the incantatoryreading of actual sounded-out full and resonant text-based words that set thestage.

I don't know about anyone else, but on those occasions when Idecide to read a paper rather than speak one, I work hard on thesequence of sounds that are part of orality, using the sound of wordsthemselves to convey meanings and also a mood. I like to carve mysentences, short ones, long ones, building ones, enumerato, lists,adjectives, cadences--the textures of languages that are not the sameas reading a written text and not the same as hearing spoken oratorybut a genre--read words--all its own. Because that small bit level ofliterateness is part of being a humanist. Again, not always, but atits best, reading aloud is what we excel at and aspire to and admire.  It sometimes even makes us soar, as it did last night when Rick read about Barkley.