Reading: How Readers Beget Imagining

Abstract

We trace reading to an embodied synthetic process that drives the rapid scales of imagining. As sensorimotor engagement with written artifacts permeates experience, it sharpens the sensibility that brings forth understanding. We thus trace material engagement with written artifacts to fine control over saccadic eye movements and voicing that draws on humans or what the Greeks knew as aisthesis. In reading, we identify aisthesis in how prereflective judgments punctuate the flow of engagement with written documents. While the study of reading often begins with “texts,” we start with how written artifacts are put to use. We use cognitive ethnography to trace reading to how fine multiscalar coordination enables readers to engage with written artifacts such as books. Our ethnography of reading provides descriptions of how readers use sensorimotor activity to integrate understanding with saccading and actual or imagined vocalization in ways that show how reading connects sensorimotor schemata with highly skilled use of written artifacts. By pursuing the power of rapid multiscalar dynamics, we complement views of reading as slow-scale subjective experience. Rather than focus on interaction between a reader and an imagined author, we turn to coordinating with an affordance-rich environment. Human prereflective judgments demonstrably use collective experience with written signs. In fine-grained analysis of authentic data, we therefore track kinesthetic experience to how a child’s vocalizations beget understanding and, at once, imagining. These observations show how engagement brings life to written signs by connecting other peoples’ pasts with the use of gaze, gesture, voice, and touch. While describing saccades and bursts of vocalizing, we reach beyond analogies with interaction and, in so doing, the multiscalar approach takes enactive-ecological work beyond the slow interactional and social scales or reported experience. Imagining arises as readers use multiscalar happenings to bind the anticipated, the seen, and collective aspects of experience.