To read a work. What does this mean? There is that sense of ’read’ that we have all learnt through our structural and poststructural touchstones that all things ‘say’ and so are ‘texts’ and therefore capable of being ‘read’. Even against the grain. In these terms we can read a database narrative, its software, and the platform itself. 

However, there is a more pragmatic sense of ‘to read’ that is perhaps where some quality of authorial voice, of a trace of a narrated presence in the work is what matters. When we ‘read’ authoring software as a text reading is an external act applied upon some other artefact, it is the expression of a particular type of hermeneutic and critical force. When I read, for example, that building over there in this manner I am not simply recognising the building as a building, or using it in the manner intended or not, but am deliberately and self consciously inserting it into a discourse of architecture, town planning, civic design, urbanity. I can read in this manner, but I don’t have to for this building to be a building. 

When I read a novel, on the other hand two things matter immediately. The first and most obvious is that this is the purpose of this thing. I can ‘read’ it differently, inserting it into other discourses and histories (of the book, design, literacy, genre), but like the building these are an application of external frames of reference and critique to the thing. Legitimate? Of course. But unlike the building the novel matters first of all as something to be read for it to be a novel. The second is that in reading I am obligated to participate in a hermeneutic dance of intentional horizons. The novel has something to say, of itself, and I have decided to listen, except in listening I also talk back. That is, there is always an interval, a zone of indetermination present when I read in this everyday manner between what the text says, what I think it says, and what it does.

This claim can be easily dismissed by misjudging its simplicity as mere naivety. Before we do so we would do well to give it the seriousness that it deserves. A novel is a thing that must be read, literally, for it to be a novel. I don’t have to do this, in this manner for the example of my building. I can interpret the latter if I wish, with whatever quality of sophistication I have available to me, but I don’t have to read it in this hermeneutic sense to use the building - beyond figuring out where the door is, how to use it, and perhaps the purpose of the building. But in the novel that is the equivalent of working out how to open the cover and find the first page. For the novel to be more than a bound sheaf of pages I must read it. Open myself and it to this zone of indetermination and interval that falls between what the work might be saying and what I think it is doing. 

This is reading. The first, the theoretical reading of things as texts identifies discourses that express and have woven themselves into the fabric of our things. In this there is no zone of indetermination, no interval between perception and action that is required. I can elect to read in this way or not. However, in the case of the novel there is always the possibility for this zone of indetermination. Always an opportunity for an interval of some scale. This is what is meant by reading in the pragmatic sense of reading. It can involve the uncovering of what is concealed, the application of theory using sophisticated language and frameworks, but underwriting this is a hermeneutic imperative where I must read where I do not yet know what will be (what will happen, how, in this particular work) from some perspective which I provide.

What is missing is that this can only happen where there is an interval. No, that the presence of a voice falls in this space that is the interval. That in the case of the building, or the street, or the garden, or the television set, they have an instrumentality that means we don’t need to read them as having a voice. This is a supplement if you like. Of course it is there, the thing is made, but it has not been spoken. Acknowledge the difficulty I’m having here. There is something intuitive that I’m trying to get to but I don’t seem to have gotten there. And so it may be wrong, it may not cohere but in talking writing around it I’m trying to find what the kernel of this intuition is. I am not wanting to rehabilitate the everyday pragmatic sense of ‘to read’ in my research, though I am returning to everyday concepts to slow them down to uncover within them sophistication that has been forgotten not because it doesn’t matter, but because we no longer give them the space for thought. To read, in this everyday sense. 

A long history is available through hermeneutics and phenomenology, where two intending discursive acts  want to say to each other and each needs to be present for reading to happen. This does not mean they want to agree, or that authorial intent is what particularly matters. To read requires some surrendering to the thing being read because they don’t and cannot read themselves.

Interactive works that are orientated to action and perception require users, not readers, interactive projects that embrace the interval, this zone of indetermination and so lie towards the affect image, such works must be listened to to be read. Such works have voice.