Towards a Metapolitics of Reading in Africa

Where is philosophy’s vital problem?

What vital problem does every philosophy seek to resolve? To answer, professional and amateur readers are commonly advised to immerse themselves directly in the work. In a preparatory book, Karl Jaspers recommends that students first read a list of ‘great philosophers’ in order to discover the secret hidden within their concepts.

For Jaspers, reading would above all mean receiving the author’s thought by extracting it directly from the work, without the distortion inevitably caused by commentary.

The supposed secret of the work

A ‘treasure’ or ‘secret’ would thus be enclosed in the work. In an African classroom, that secret is always attributed to the white man. Schematically, going to school means ‘going to discover the white man’s secret’. One would merely have to find the key and the door that provides access to it.

Is reading one-way?

Is reading essentially a one-way activity? Does it naturally travel from the author-producer to the reader-receiver while forbidding the reverse journey? Must it be reduced to the injunction ‘listen and be silent’ or ‘receive and say nothing’, which educators repeatedly impose on African students and which African ‘high politics’ reproduces in international agreements and bilateral or multilateral negotiations?

If ‘author’ is commonly associated with producer, actor, performer, expert or even ‘international community’, and therefore with work, product or ‘market’, does that not imply that at the other end there is another actor who freely performs the complementary act of acquisition in their own interest?

Two active persons around the text

There are two people present, not one: the person who writes or wrote and the person who reads. Both are active. The reader does not dissolve into the act of reading. Their personality remains real if they become aware that they do not read for reading’s sake, but because they seek an answer.

The reader cannot be a copy of the author. It is impossible to remain inside one’s own head and enter ‘the thinker’s head’; the author is unique and can be duplicated only metaphorically.

Acquiring meaning rather than receiving it

Around the text are therefore a producer of meaning and an acquirer of meaning. The latter must not be confused with a receiver whose mission is preservation: keeping the textual ‘treasure’ pure, even concealing it further so that it does not fall into the hands of outsiders.

Such a method belongs only to an initiatory text, which is not an ordinary text. The initiate is not an ordinary reader but is assigned a one-way activity of conservation: repeating the message exactly and preventing heresy.

Reading begins with a question

In the ordinary case, reading means acquiring meaning from a text. This is a voluntary, free and reasoned act, governed by reasons different from those that led the author to write.

Because it is not mere reception and is not bound to preserve an initiatory treasure, good reading is primarily determined by the satisfaction of particular needs. We do not read merely to read: we read because we seek an explanation for a question already within us.

The cycle of meaning

The text is the meeting point between an offer from the author and a demand from the reader. The reader cannot disappear, because the reader is one pole of the cycle of meaning: the unavoidable otherness facing the person who proposes rather than imposes.

Both offer and demand are motivated. Put plainly, the reader is the demander, motivated by needs that the text may satisfy. Erasing the reader as a person would endanger the entire cycle through which meaning is produced.