Reading Has Always Been Postmodern

Historically, as soon as many people were reading the same text, exactly the same text as replicated mechanically, they began to disagree on what that text meant. (And perhaps even before, the source of so-called heresies lay in disagreements about what texts "meant.") But with increasing numbers of people reading the same texts, their different "readings" became obvious. And it's easy to understand why. Text, as the postmoderns have vigorously pointed out, is not absolute. The words stay the same but the reader(s) change.

If you read a story, you read it from your point-of-view and that affects how you "understand" it. If you read a newspaper, your point-of-view on what has happened is shaped by who you are and what you have experienced. The same person at different ages "sees" the meaning differently. Age, gender, race, class, nationality, profession, - all these shape how textual (and visual) stories are "taken."

Both the law and science have implicitly known this since their inceptions. Language is slippery; that's the basis of rhetoric. The law tries to be absolutely clear, and lawyers and judges make their livings interpreting it. The rigidities and formulas of scientific writing are simply attempts to avoid multiple interpretations.

I remember teaching my classes that a business letter that had more than one possible interpretation was poorly written, and that a poem or story that had only one interpretation possible was poorly written. Different writing for different purposes, and in certain situations being open to interpretation is a strength not a weakness.

So readers have always and will always interpret text, and thus have always and will always have different readings. It's inevitable. The questions the postmoderns ask us to reflect on, as I understand them, are "Do I understand myself to be an interpreter and not the sole correct authority?" and "How do we decide who, and on what basis, can be an authority whose interpretation can be trusted/allowed/accepted?"

In this age of doubt, litigation, individualism, those are confounding questions.