The Agonistics of Reading: Playing, Gambling, Committing - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Angles: French Perspectives on the Anglophone World Année : 2020

The Agonistics of Reading: Playing, Gambling, Committing

Résumé

From Michel Picard's La lecture comme jeu to Umberto Eco's model of the "game of chess", reading has very often been compared to a form of game. Indeed, games serve as a useful template of interaction, highlighting both the exterior set of rules governing an activity, and the agency that these rules leave to the individual. But this basic analogy only proposes a partial view of what games are about. Games are a constitutive human activity, with myriads of variants, from the free play of children to the gambler's thrill to the highly ritualized sets of actions and reactions seen in martial arts or chess. And like other human activities, they bear contextual meaning: many thinkers have emphasized the "seriousness" of play, the investment that such an activity commands. Therefore, going into the precise details of the metaphor of reading as a game leads us to question not only the process itself, its structures and the rules that govern it, but also what is at stake, the personal and social values attached to reading. This is why this article proposes to review classical and contemporary theories of reading based on their specific use of the metaphor of reading as a game. It will first present the structuralist and phenomenological approaches, which tend to define reading as a performance based on pre-established rules, like a dramatic performance or a game of chess. Then it will delve into theories that instead choose to highlight the incalculable aspect of every new reading, the possibility for the reader to go off the beaten path. These tend to see reading more as a game of chance than a game of chess: a gamble which, like Mallarmé's dice roll "never abolishes chance", never translates into a finalized protocol of reading. This does not mean, however, that they construe reading as licentious, a game where anything goes. Gambling requires to put something at stake. And I think theories like Jean-Jacques Lecercle's marxist pragmatics are most specific in explaining what the reader is actually committing to. Texts are like games in that both challenge us, pitting us against an exterior protocol, which is always entwined with cultural institutions, and calls upon our broader sense of identity. The stance we take, our interaction with these interpellations, are part and parcel of our lives as social and political beings. Which is why this article proposes a final perspective on reading through the notion of agonistics. Taking up the ancient Greek word "agôn", which implies that games are forms of trial, made to reveal something of the player's nature, the agonistics of reading posits that reading must not be seen as an isolated phenomenon. On the contrary, the challenge that texts pose, to confront them or to accept them, to reduce them to predetermined protocols or open them up to incalculable gambles, is fundamental in the construction of our identity as readers and as human beings. This dialectics of self-revelation and self-construction, through the interaction with texts, is the often unspoken yet decisive game that every reader plays.

Dates et versions

hal-03950812 , version 1 (23-12-2023)

Identifiants

Citer

Olivier Hercend. The Agonistics of Reading: Playing, Gambling, Committing. Angles: French Perspectives on the Anglophone World, 2020, 11, ⟨10.4000/angles.2602⟩. ⟨hal-03950812⟩
13 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More