A text moves and wiggles; it prances; it speaks and it stinks. A text reveals itself in everything it does, including what it says.

The Reader never takes a text at its word; he heeds all the signs. A text performs itself, directly and indirectly; it is a bundle of symptoms all of which conspire to form the text at hand. The girl may say she’s not interested, but her eyes proclaim otherwise. The Reader must be attentive to all the signs as well as the relationship between them.

I am often asked what the difference is between Rhetoric and Philosophy. In a gesture towards pointed brevity, I say that a Philosopher reads a text for what is said. The Rhetor, on the other hand, reads the same text not only for what is said but how it is said.

Take the Platonic dialogues. A Philosopher tends to believe everything Socrates says. From the series of pronouncements Socrates makes, the Philosopher assembles a system and calls it, ‘Platonism.’ The Rhetor, meanwhile, finds it difficult to take Socrates at his word. After all, Socrates engages in dialogues; there’s no reliable or stable narrator telling us what’s going on. Plato’s dialogues are plays: they have characters, settings, and plot (the plot turns on points of argument rather than action). And in these dialogues, these plays, Socrates does all kinds of things — he makes jokes, he contradicts himself, he fondles his interlocutors, he gets drunk. He renounces lust while ogling a young man; he declares love to be the ultimate calling while he himself is in a lustful frenzy; he gives an impeccable speech denouncing speech writing. In the Platonic dialogues in general and in Socrates in particular, the Rhetor doesn’t find Platonism: he finds a way of life, gestures of living: he finds irony.

A text does not have a stable meaning because it relentlessly performs itself. A text is in motion; its meaning is not something which is but something which happens. A text is an ever-evolving thing.

And yet this evolution, this movement, is stipulated, limited, bound by its own comportment. Which is to say, a text has an infinite number of possible shapes, as many shapes as there are Readers and more. But the text remains bound by its own constitution, by its particular play of signs and symptoms.

A text is a Calder mobile: it has an infinite number of permutations depending on the environment, the nudge of the wind, the inertia of a spectator’s gaze. And yet this or that mobile is bound by its distribution of weight and balance; it cannot spin any way whatsoever. But it can spin any number of ways within the limits of its comportment.

As a kid, I wondered, mostly to myself: how can there be the same infinity between 1 and 2 as there is between 1 and one million? Surely, there’s a difference between these things, even though they bare the same name and sign, "infinity" or ¥ . Lying in my bed cloaked in tightie-whities, darkness, and curiosity, I’d think to myself, "infinity" is too broad, too inarticulate, and yet no one seemed to comment on this. I was therefore somewhat relieved to reach high school and discover the Non-Terminating Non-Repeating Decimal. Pi, for example, is a NTNRD. Here was a number that was infinite but which unfolded to infinity in a manner absolutely particular to it. And the fact that it was not just infinite but infinite in this way mattered; the trajectory of a missile depended on such differences.

I was right: infinity was too broad a concept.

Like an equation in differential calculus, a text is a bound infinity, at once infinite and limited. Infinity is not a generality but is differentiated.

There may be an infinite number of readings of this or that text but there are still good and bad readings. A good Reader assumes the weight of the text in a surprising and, at the risk of sounding fey, in a delightful way. Things once familiar become refreshingly unfamiliar -- the Reader is a progenitor of the uncanny. Few things exhilarate the way a keen reading does: a fine and fresh distinction or well-placed reversal infuses the banal with vitality, the quotidian with wonder, the dead with life.

My first exposure to a reading which left my heart palpitating and the ground beneath my feet forever and gloriously unsure came at the hands of one of the Reader’s most ready tropes: the reversal. In the reversal, expectation and assumptions are, well, reversed. Satire, for instance, thrives on reversal: rather than reading Barbie as a shining role model for young women everywhere, we reverse our terms and read her as a creepy, soulless propagator of female self-hatred. Reversal is quite different from, say, synecdoche which focuses on a different and continuous, but not opposite, moment. Focusing on her large, silicon-esque breasts, we turn Barbie into an advocate of auto-plastic surgery. Or then again, we might cop the Monty Python trope and offer something completely different: say, Barbie as a rhetor.

I was in Mr. Tucker’s 11th grade AP American History class. A fan of the revisionist Marxist historians (it was an odd school), Mr. Tucker had us read X’s essay on the creation of the USDA. X claimed that the USDA and its dispensation of approval — those assuring gradations of meat -- was not born of consumer advocacy but was in fact a foil of the meat industry, an industry suffering due to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle which exposed the grotesqueries of meat packing. The USDA, then, was not only not there to protect me and my fellow citizens — it was in fact an elaborate abuse of governmental ethos, a ploy to move product, a product which may very well be harmful to the very citizens the USDA was nominally formed to protect. Be still my heart!

My second great reading encounter came in college, in a Women’s Studies lecture with Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, an elder stateswoman of feminist history. Her lecture concerned the culture of the faint Victorian woman. Expecting to hear the tale of patriarchic oppression (which at the time seemed interesting and familiar to my decidedly uninteresting and familiar mind), my eyes scanned the room for chicks (after all, this was a Women’s Studies class). But the tale I was to hear snapped me right to attention; this was no ordinary reading. The feminine assumption of weakness, it turns out, was not solely a means by which men subjugated women. No, the faintness of Victorian women was in fact a strategy by which a woman could a) avoid the toiling duties of housekeeper and hostess; and b) if institutionalized, be with other women. (This is how I remember it; excuse me, Dr. Smith-Rosenberg, if I have mis-represented your argument.) A feminine posture of weakness and the entire medical culture surrounding it was not just another example of men keeping women down — it was in fact a feminine strategy of survival. (Reversals demand italics — they make the words themselves careen.)

Of course, not all readings fare so well. Søren Kierkegaard (the odd, hilarious, Danish theologian and unknowing father of existentialism) claims that so-called Christianity mis-reads Jesus and His Testament. The Church, Kierkegaard tells us, picks up where the Gospels leave off, after Jesus has risen. But for Kierkegaard, Christianity — and faith in particular — is a matter of reckoning with the life of Jesus. A poor, skinny Jew stands before you and claims to be the eternal God. Believe him or not: that is the struggle of faith. A historically specific person claims to be eternal; it’s absurd. And yet it is precisely on the strength of this absurdity that a true Christian finds faith. To premise one’s faith on a Jesus who has risen is, for Kierkegaard, to miss Christianity all together. It’s not that the Church is wrong per se; rather, it’s that the Church reads the Gospels badly, weakly, uninterestingly -- and for Kierkegaard, un-Christianly.

Theodore Adorno, meanwhile, reads Kierkegaard carefully, tending to every word while ever watchful of the philosophic whole. But he somehow manages to strip Kierkegaard of his humor, his joy, his rhetorical subtlety. Adorno’s Kierkegaard reifies bourgeois values by deferring our gaze from the toils of history and the horrors of capitalism. With Adorno at the realm, Kierkegaard’s fleshing out of interiority becomes an ideological remnant of bourgeois domesticity, turning the experience of reading Kierkegaard into a pedantic, cranky, joyless experience. The question then persists: if Adorno finds Kierkegaard’s philosophy so distasteful, why does he spend so much time in Kierkegaard’s world? It’s as if Kierkegaard — with his humor, his passion, and his claim to an absolute subjectivity which transcends history — taunts Adorno, threatening to make him smile with passionate contentment. But Adorno won’t smile. A masochist, he reads that which he doesn’t enjoy. Me, I read about eight pages of Adorno’s book before I had to put it down: I felt like Adorno was trying to kill me by dragging his nails across my brain.

Ted Morgan entitles his biography of William S. Burroughs, Literary Outlaw. Few would find this title surprising; indeed, it seems apropos. After all, Burroughs is the bad-boy of literature, eschewing plot, consistency of voice, character development, and perhaps every other literary convention. This reading works.

But it’s not terribly interesting. Burroughs himself takes issue with this characterization of his work: "To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of. I never had such a base" (My Education, 7). That is to say, to read Burroughs as an outlaw is to read him as reacting to the laws of literature rather than inventing them.