I've spent some time lately thinking about my own critical habits, and the extent to which my reading habits inform the rest of my thought patterns. Put bluntly, I find myself thinking through my everyday interactions as I would a literary or cultural text. I certainly don't mean to apologize for this, if for no other reason than that I'm pretty committed to this act. The messiness of the day-to-day has a lot to tell us about a lot of stuff. I run into problems, however, when the pessimism (or, following Eve Sedgwick, the suspicion) around which my critical practice is situated starts to seep into my everyday life. I'm finding the quest to combat my fundamental pessimism provides me a moment to also reevaluate my reading habits. As part of my brief experiment in optimism, I wonder what it would mean to also infuse my textual reading habits with optimism. I want to spend a little time thinking about what optimistic reading would look like, and to examine this optimistic/pessimistic distinction alongside Eve Sedgwick's paranoid reading/reparative reading. My goal is not so much to expand her critical work, but rather to figure out what it would mean to rescue both my reading habits and interpersonal relationships from the monotony/general pessimism of suspicion.
I'm not embarrassed to admit that I find Sedgwick's reparative reading quite difficult, both in concept and in practice. What I admire most about the article though (and really, all of Touching, Feeling, the book-length project in which the essay appears), is how deliberately unmoored it is. In her introduction, Sedgwick is careful to point out that the essays of Touching, Feeling have resisted the constriction of a book-length argument, and, giving us a glimpse of the book's optimistic core, she insists that this is an enabling possibility, rather than a limitation. Eve's optimism helps us expand the practice of reading: "I think it will leave us in a vastly better position to do justice to a wealth of characteristic, culturally central practices, many of which can well be called reparative, that emerge from queer experience but become invisible or illegible under a paranoid optic" (147). Among other things, she calls into being a critical practice that bridges gaps, seizes possibility, and might resign itself to a positive affective vocabulary. Paranoia, by contrast, lives in contradiction, is a theory of negative affects, and "places faith in exposure." In my simplest misrecognition, reparative reading does something and feels good about it.
What I am wondering, alongside Sedgwick's critical optimism, is what it means for our reading practices (and our thought processes more broadly) to resist such pessimism. At what point in our lives (or really, my life) did gaps, uncertainties, eccentricities resolve into negativities rather than possibilities? Why do I find myself choosing suspicion (and the terror that comes along with suspicion) over the giddiness of possibility? Why do I find myself reading my year off/recent directionlessness as crippling, rather than wildly enabling? Queer theory tells me to enjoy incoherence, strategic illegibility, and getting lost, doesn't it?
In terms of both my reading practices and thought patterns, what if I stopped living in problematics? What if I stopped using disgusting grad student words like complicate, reexamine, and problematize, playing devil's advocate at every turn? Among other things, it'll make me a much more tolerable person (not forgetting, of course, that suspicion can be situationally useful). And who knows, maybe optimistically recalibrating my reading/thinking practices, in addition to being wildly generative, might actually be a little bit thrilling. Remember when reading and thinking were fun?
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