Reading Rämistrasse #101: AJ on Slow Reading Club @ Cabaret Voltaire

[Kunsthalle Zürich disclaimer: it’s already happened, sorry.]

There’s a passage in St. Augustine’s Confessions, written nearly four centuries after the crucifixion, in which the Saint remarks upon one of his encounters with Bishop Ambrose in Milan, a remarkable man and a great influence upon Augustine. One of his unusual characteristics was that he read scrolls rapidly without moving his lips or making sounds as he read. ‘When Ambrose read, his eyes ran over the columns of writing and his heart searched out the meaning, but his voice and his tongue were at rest.’ There were many, at the time, who could read alphabetically, squeezing out the syllables one by one, but literacy, the capacity to read silently, fluidly, as if the activity was naturally a visual, silent and private one, was enough of a novelty that St. Augustine had various speculative ideas about why Ambrose would do such a thing. Time goes in loops. I recently saw someone reading a serious novel on the tram, and they didn’t even seem to be holding the book as a prop: they looked deeply engaged, and turned a page. People who read like this are again unusual.

The Slow Reading Club is not about such reading. They are not invested in reading as literacy, as efficient comprehension, as a searching out of meaning, but rather, they are interested in reading as sculpture, dancing, and collective experience. Their reading workshops are designed to make comprehension less efficient, to break texts open in order to reveal their strangeness, or to delay the standard questions that we have been trained to ask about text. This may sound a little whack, but they now act as some of the best guides to literature since Saint Augustine first compiled a list of banned books. As they put it recently, ‘When we first started thinking together about reading, we were fixated on the idea of text having an animal or viral potential to hop from host body to host body.’

So, what is the method of the Slow Reading Club? Bryana Fritz is a choreographer and dancer and Henry Andersen studied composition. The basic process of the SRC is a choreographic one in which techniques of reading are set almost like dance moves, and appropriate texts provide the scores. And then the entire audience is brought in to participate. At the Cabaret Voltaire on November 15, we worked under carefully given instructions.

One technique is called ‘twicing.’ It consists of reading each line twice, out loud. Note that a ‘line’ is not a sentence, but rather refers to a single line of printed text, from the left hand margin to the right hand margin. So reading a paragraph whilst twicing produces a slow oscillation between sense/nonsense. This gentle oscillation opens up accidental space in which the text is constantly playing pranks. It is also surprisingly close to the condition in which one finds oneself when tired, trying to read a text that almost doesn’t make sense – Heidegger, for instance – when the eyes slip out of the groove and one finds oneself rereading the same line two or three times, with no more comprehension at the beginning than the end. The text chosen for twicing? Roger Caillois’ completely insane 1938 essay on insect camouflage called Legendary Psychasthenia. It also works well on Kathy Acker.

Some techniques involved reading texts under strobe lights, shouting out words from concrete poetry. Other methods are increasingly intimate, from silently mouthing the words spoken by others, to reading in threes (one person reads, and the other two attempt to maintain continuous eye contact), to reading against deafening white noise, while someone ‘listens’ by gently touching your neck with their fingertips. The atmosphere in Slow Reading Club events is one of unsettling proximity, as if the exchange of words from one member of the audience to the next is also a sharing of thoughts, a kind of complicity that rapidly starts to feel personal. There have been a number of groups playing with techniques of attention of late, such as the enigmatic ESTAR(SER), but Slow Reading Club provide a toolkit of attentional practices that are all their own. If you are in Belgium before December 17, there is a solo show by the Slow Reading Club at Damien & The Love Guru’s Brussels gallery called 13 Dedications.

Shared practices of attention act as an antidote to the constant centrifugal forces of alienation that are created by contemporary media, and all the other stuff that has happened to us recently ­– pandemic lockdowns and the like –that does not merit twicing. Slow Reading Club is dada in the best possible sense, a creative response within art to problems that extend into everyday life. Slow Reading Clubbrings participants to discover how marvellous reading can be as a collective activity. God, that sounds so banal, but it’s actually amazing. Solo reading is a secular activity; but collective reading has something proto-religious about it. As we read aloud in unison, so we also physically come to share in the same thought. That’s the entire point of a collective credo – as Augustine knew. The form of text is not just a kind of container of meaning, a passive vessel, it is also performative. Text-based rituals can be devices for enacting community, an observation that is so familiar that it slips into invisibility most of the time. But what happens when we enact rituals from the fragments of the avant garde, and make a credo out of a text by Blanchot or Leslie Scalapino? Slow Reading Club takes us on road trips through possible worlds, before landing us back in this actual (but also inescapably weird) one. It makes me want to rediscover how to read a book.

Slow Reading Club (SRC), Cabaret Voltaire, 15 November 2022