Reading Response (11.20)
Email: jp7228@nyu.edu
In the fourth week of this semester, our “Introduction to Performance” course included a reading of Chapter 4 from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling. Initially, my engagement with the text was rather cursory, and my comprehension of its content and underlying themes was somewhat limited. This week’s curriculum fortuitously revisited the same chapter, prompting me to engage more deeply with the text. Upon this re-examination, I began to explore and critically analyze the intricate relationship between Sedgwick’s arguments and the broader thematic frameworks of our course.
This reading commences with a contextual backdrop of the AIDS epidemic and conjectures regarding its origins, serving as an introduction to the main discourse. The text subsequently delves into a discussion and comparative analysis of “Paranoid Reading” and “Reparative Reading”. The chapter’s title, “Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You”, intrigued me profoundly. Upon my initial perusal of the entire chapter, I was confident that the title could not possibly pertain to me. However, as I endeavored to discern a connection between this article and the thematic focus for our week’s studies, I realized that I had inadvertently fallen into the very trap of Paranoid Reading that the text elucidates.
To conceptualize “Paranoid Reading” and “Reparative Reading” from a personal perspective, I liken these approaches to two distinct modes of engaging with films: Task-Oriented Viewing (akin to film analysis) and Pleasure-Oriented Viewing (enjoy what the movie gives us). Task-Oriented Viewing often arises from academic requirements, necessitating a professional analysis of the film. Therefore, while watching, we need to pay attention over and over again to the editing techniques in the movie, the changes in light and shadow, whether the music has an effect on the mood, the scenery, and so on. I correlate this with Paranoid Reading, where there seems to be an intense fixation on uncovering the underlying meanings of words from the articles and visuals from the videos.
Conversely, Pleasure-Oriented Viewing allows for the allocation of a couple of hours in one’s day to immerse oneself in a film. We may simply be moved by the story, we may be moved by the actors’ interpretation, or maybe we just like the soundtrack of the movie because it is melodious. We don’t have to overthink at times like these because the movie was created in the beginning just to entertain the public, and now it is just fulfilling back to its original meaning.
However, returning to the crux of my contemplation, our course section this week focuses on Personal Trauma and Reparative Memory. This prompted me to consider how to establish a connection between the text and the concept of Personal Trauma. As I read Sedgwick’s own experiences on pp. 148-149, and especially the second paragraph on p. 149, I may have come to a realization. “There’s a sense in which our life narratives will barely overlap. There’s another sense in which they slide up more intimately alongside one another than can any lives that are moving forward according to the regular schedule of the generations” (Sedgwick, pp149). Indeed, it is impossible for us to fully experience or comprehend another person’s personal trauma or experiences. In this context, I am grateful for my background as an actor, as it affords me numerous opportunities to inhabit the lives of various characters. “I” have experienced through enduring the undisclosed relationship between my mother and my half-brother from my father’s side, culminating in my own demise by lightning in an effort to save a girl I cherished; “I” have experienced through living under the oppressive control of my father and descending into disarray and failure after his death; “I” have experienced through suffering the loss of my wife who died on a journey I did not accompany her on, with my final goodbye being on a train carrying her body; and “I” have experienced through existing as an individual in a metaverse, ultimately destroyed by those living in the real world for possessing independent thoughts.
I vividly recall a conversation I had with Xiao about two weeks ago. Xiao asked me some thought-provoking questions: “How do you define objectivity? Do you believe that your way of describing an event is definitively objective? Would two people who have experienced the same event narrate it in exactly the same way?” Yet, it is precisely the absence of identical feelings that makes our personal experiences and individual traumas a uniquely valuable aspect of our existence.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You" Touch Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. 123-151. United States: Duke University Press, 2003.