Reading Difficult Texts: The challenge of reading Althusser or better known as "Yikes."

The following discussion of “The Reading Process” comes from John Bean's Engaging Ideas. Bean identifies areas, which can cause both students and teachers problems.

1. Misunderstanding the reading process

When experts read difficult texts they read slowly and reread often. They hold confusing passages in "mental suspension," having faith that later parts will help clarify. They "nutshell" passages as they proceed, getting the gist by marking in the margins. They interact with the text by asking questions as they read.

In contrast, perhaps you may think that expert readers are speed-readers. Evelyn Wood converts. And sometimes students assume it is the teacher’s job to "explain" the text. In other words, students decide that they do not really have to engage the text because the teacher will do it for them. The result? Teachers buy you fish instead of teaching you how to fish.

2. Failure to Adjust reading strategies for different purposes

The process varies. Students facing enormous amounts of reading must learn to distinguish between different purposes (for reading) and make the adjustments to their reading speed, based on knowing these purposes. The reading polarity--between "getting the gist" and "close scrutiny." And this may vary within a single text. Good readers read for the gist of things, then at times for main ideas, and at other times for detail and then again at times for inference and application--developing critical thinking skills. Poor readers do not discriminate. They read at the same speed all the time. John Bean writes, "The lesson here is that we need [to know] when to read fast and when to read slowly. With Althusser, in my experience, I find that I have to reread slowly.

3. Difficulty in Assimilating the Unfamiliar

This is directly related to part three of the Washington State University critical thinking rubric and involves understanding the forces of "cognitive egocentrism." John Bean writes: "No matter what an author really means, students translate those meanings into ideas that they are comfortable with." It seems that the more threatening or the more uncomfortable an idea becomes, the more we tend, as humans, to transform it into what Bean calls "our own psychological neighborhoods." The deep harbors sea monsters and rather than catch such monsters, most of us transform them into "canned tuna." This has nothing to do with being stupid or being lazy. Bean is talking about what it means to be human. It is as natural as crawling before walking. And we need to deal with it.

Apply this to  Althusser and his difficult, annoying, and confusing style. What do we do? One quick and flawed way to deal with this monster, as humans, is to discount the author's perspective by attacking the author himself, saying things like he is an idiot and doesn't know what the hell he is talking about. This is the ad hominem approach and it is, in the end, a fool-proof shield, but it also prevents us from honestly and aggressively engaging the text. So first we must begin by reflecting on our habitual tendencies to discount (ad hominem) what we fear or do not understand or what simply annoys us.

Certainly this has been part of the history of reactions to Althusser. His work aroused fierce opposition in the past and crude personal attacks were frequent, especially when some readers discovered the tragic events that put an end to his career. His mental illness perhaps delights some readers, for it can be used to justify a negative response to the rigors of his difficult style, even though the mode of philosophizing makes the style not just a matter of taste.

It may seem that I am defending Althusser’s style. Yet. I am aware that important yet difficult texts exist and that for instance, reading Melville’s novella Billy Budd is equally as difficult in similar ways.  Yet I love Melville’s story and have--over the years—faced the reading challenge and therein appreciate (even adore) Melville as a writer; however, it is reality that many of my students complain about Melville’s writing; their first encounters with reading Melville’s Billy Budd create a scenario where intellectual perseverance is essential.

Althusser takes all this to even another level. Yet I have come to deeply appreciate his insights into the internal nature of ideology and I have even to some degree--regardless of his style and his abstractions--felt grateful to have read his essay. What seems essential? I want to underscore the nature of reflective judgment—the ability to think about thinking while you are thinking.  Althusser seriously confuses me at times, but that doesn’t prevent me from stepping up and doing the necessary critical engagement--with an reflective eye on how my frustrations and my biases may undermine the task of close reading.

4. Difficulty in appreciating a text's rhetorical context

Students have trouble seeing what conversation texts belong to. In particular, students might not realize that texts actually talk to one another throughout time and thus authors shape questions and problems within this ongoing conversation as part of belonging to a particular political camp or academic discipline. They have trouble seeing a real author writing for some important reason out of a real historical context.

For example, Althusser writes in the discipline of philosophy and Marxism, which does seem to embrace a meticulous, structure-based syntax rather than say a more familiar language-based style; it certainly seems like bad writing. The emperor has no clothes. I do hope however that we can look at his writing with some degree of forgiveness and tolerance based on Althusser’s prominent place in the larger realm of historical and rhetorical thinking.

5. Difficulty Seeing Yourself in Conversation with the Author

Readers must play two opposing roles: an open-minded believer who can succumb to the text's power and a skeptical doubter who can find weakness in the text. In playing these roles the reader does carry on a silent conversation with the text's author.

This means that we as readers ask questions as we read, which includes making marks in the margins. I always read with a pencil in my hand. I actively claim the reader's right to question the author's authority not for the sake of rebellion itself (which is egocentric), but for the higher purpose of achieving a more savvy understanding of the text.

6. Lack of "Cultural Literacy" assumed by the text's author

Students do not always have access to cultural codes within a text. In other words, students may not fully understand the background information, the literary allusions, or the "common knowledge" of the time that an author assumes the reading audience would know. Hirsch, Kett, and Trefil (1987) have made a national movement out of "cultural literary," the lack of which they claim is the prime source of students' reading difficulties in college.

This is in particular visible when reading a text like “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” The teaching of reading in this context puts a burden of explanation on the student. One student may have read the works of Karl Marx and understand his attitudes toward government, while another student in the same class may never of heard of Karl Marx. Consequently, many English 301 students have located and read secondary sources on Althusser to help make sense of Althusser’s essay. The expectation in this class is that the best students will critically engage the material, which usually includes self-directed research and intellectual curiosity.

We all face the challenge of generating some platform of shared knowledge (cultural literacy) in the classroom just to have a meaningful discussion. As a teacher, making assumptions about a group's level of literacy is fallacy. Consequently, developing a level of literacy by which we can (as a class) move forward intellectually into provocative readings of texts requires time.

7. Inadequate Vocabulary

An inadequate vocabulary hampers comprehension. A dictionary helps. But we also must understand that the meaning of words depends on context. And we need to tune our ears in on humor and irony.

This is where Althusser fits best for me. How we think about the definitions of words and the ideological “concepts” of words must be addressed.

I insert here a part adapted from the book, Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Learning and Your Life, by Richard Paul and Linda Elder.

Command of language makes social critique possible.

The Challenge We Face

If we are committed to helping students think well with concepts, we must teach them how to strip off surface language and consider alternative ways to talk and think about things. This includes teaching them how to closely examine the concepts they have personally formed as well as those into which they have been socially indoctrinated. It means helping students understand that, being fundamentally egocentric, humans tend to be trapped in “private” meanings. Thinking sociocentrically we are trapped in the world-view of our peer group and that of the broader society.

Both set of binders make it hard to rationally decide upon alternative ways to conceptualize situations, persons, and events. Being so trapped, most students are unable to identify or evaluate either meanings in a dictionary or the social rituals, pomp, and glitter of social authority and prestige. Students live their lives, then, on the surface of meaning. They do not know how to plumb the depths.

When we are teaching well, students go beneath the surface. They learn how to identify and evaluate concepts based in natural languages, on the one hand, and those implicit in social rituals and taboos, on the other. They become articulate about what concepts are and how they shape our experience. They can, then, identify key concepts implicit in a communication. They begin to practice taking charge of their ideas and therefore of the life-decisions that those ideas shape and control. Crazy and superficial ideas exist in our society because crazy and superficial thinking has created them. They exist for mass consumption in movies, on television, in the highly marketed “news,” and in the double speak of the ideological world of “law and order.” They do damage everyday to the lives of people.

The challenge to teaching with this end in view is a significant one. It is one we must pursue with a keen sense of the long-term nature of the project and of its importance in the lives of students. We may begin in modest ways for example, with the proper use of the dictionary or how to identify the mores and taboos of one’s peer group ---but begin we must, for the quality of the thinking of the students of today determines the quality of the world they shall create tomorrow.

8. Difficulty in Tracking Complex Syntax

Students are skilled enough at reading college textbooks that often have a simple syntax. But when we read complex sentences, like the ones Althusser constructs, students have trouble isolating the main chunks into grammatical units.

9. Difficulty in Adjusting reading Strategies to the Varieties of Academic Discourse

Althusser’s text requires a lot from students. And although it may never again come up, the true matter of Althusser is that scholars (in the quest for epistemology) deem his essay canonical and thus "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" may well outlive all of us. History will decide, but for the moment Althusser remains indispensable to a canonical and comprehensive study of what it means to be human. Regardless of how we as individuals may revolt or reprimand Althusser and his crazy writing, his ideas will live on just fine without us, undoubtedly into the vast and distant future.

In the discourse of philosophy and literary criticism (the substantial essence of how disciplines conduct scholarly excellence), Althusser’s text may not be so difficult a read, for other texts we discover alongside “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” may make Althusser’s essay, surprisingly, appear simple--innate to the discourse of philosophy and literary criticism.  And as I look around at all kinds of disciplines, “difficult texts” exist as a kind of norm these days. So I am pleased you will press on regardless, for you will develop the intellectual perseverance necessary when (and not if) you encounter other such difficult texts.