Notes on ‘slow reading’
“If you are reading something aloud and want to read well, you accompany the words with
vivid images. At least, is is often like that. But sometimes [“Towards Corinth from Athens ...
(Goethe, The Bride of Corinth)] what matters is the punctuation, i.e., your precise intonation
and duration of your pauses” (Wittgenstein, 1980, p.48).
“Sometimes a sentence can only be understood if it is read at the right tempo. My sentences
are all supposed to be read slowly” (Wittgenstein, 1980, p.57).
“I really want my copious punctuation marks to slow down the speed of reading. Because I
should like to be read slowly. (As I myself read.)” (Wittgenstein, 1980, p.68).
Two ways to read: for content (fast) and for feeling (slow); that is, to influence one in one’s ideas or to influence
one is one’s being
I want to show that there is in fact a very clear, but not yet fully recognized, difference between (at least some
crucial forms of dialogically-structured) qualitative research and current more quantitative forms – a difference
that is not fully captured in characterizing it as more focussed on subjective experience and as context-oriented.
The differences are stronger than that, at least, with respect to the Wittgensteinian version of qualitative inquiry
I want to outline below. The major difference, as we shall see, involves the relation between our speech (and
other expressive movements) and our actions (and hence will bear on the styles of writing and reading we
employ).
I wish to begin by suggesting two ways in which we might read written texts – we can read a text for what is left
behind for us after having read it, or, for what can happen to us during our reading of it! If it is merely a
referential-representational understanding of text we seek, we can skim over it to get the idea, to grasp the text’s
content, a something that will be left over after one has read the text. This is the aim of executive summaries, to
cut out the flim-flam. However, there is a more labourious form of reading that requires us to go much more
slowly. If we do, then we can, on some occasions at least be changed within ourselves. But for this to occur, we
must read each phrase, each word, in such a way as to allow the movement that they can arouse within us to
develop as our eyes progress along the line of print (just as a slowly enunciated utterance might arouse a similar
such movement within us): as Wittgenstein says, “Sometimes a sentence can be understood only if it is read at
the right tempo. My sentences are all supposed to be read slowly” (1980a: no123). We must also note the
tensions, the anticipations, the expectations aroused in us as the movement of reading unfolds, as well as all the
other inner activities of sensing, imagining, inter-relating, etc., that are required if we are both to make sense of
the text within itself, and also of what the words in the text are pointing to in the world beyond themselves. If
we can allow ourselves to be moved in this way, then a text can arouse new sensitivities within us, the seeing of
new relations and connections between features of the world not before noticed.
It is this latter form of slow, relationally-responsive reading – involving an “actively responsive understanding”
(Bakhtin, 1986: 69) – that, as we shall see, resonates with, and relates to, both Wittgenstein’s (1980a) ‘poetic’
style of writing and the more labourious kind of slow and close reading it requires, as well as the distinction
between difficulties of the intellect (which can be solved by thinking) and difficulties of the will (which need
resolving in a struggle of a more practical kind) that I will introduce in the next section immediately below.
The major difference between classical quantitative studies and the kind of Wittgensteinian studies I want to
discuss here, involving as I have already mentioned the relation of our speech (and other expressive movements)
with our actions, depends on this shift from representational to relationally-responsive forms of understanding,
the shift from being concerned with the extra knowledge or information that one is left with after reading a text
to a concern with what can happen during one’s reading of a text. Thus my focus below will be on the way in
which we can be changed within our very being in the course of our reading, and with how ‘striking’
expressions remembered from our reading – what Wittgenstein (1953) calls “reminders” – can come to in-form
our ways of perceiving, acting, talking, thinking, and evaluating in relation to events occurring around us. In
short, our concern will be with critiquing, correcting, elaborating, and refining our activities by attending to
small details in the course of their performance. We shall not be seeking general, theoretical forms of talk that
can, after having passed various tests for their truth or correctness, be then applied to our actions.
So what I want to do in this article, primarily, is to outline a distinctive kind of qualitative inquiry strongly
influenced by Wittgenstein’s very practical philosophical investigations, and then very briefly to show how such
qualitative, seemingly merely descriptive inquiries of the kind he advocates, can be applied in making sense of
knowledge creation and innovation in organizations (Bouwen, 2001, Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995, Tsoukas, in
press). But inevitably, in failing to provided the sufficient degree of detail required to show worked examples in
all their relevant detail, this paper promises more than it can in fact achieve.
Understanding as an embodied ‘mental movement’: being influenced in one’s being