ABSTRACT
Among Althusser’s simplest acts, reading has a special meaning for the social scientist. But this simple act has been neglected by those who have given modern social science its classic form and outlook. A one-sided epistemology is often at work in such neglect. Defenders of this unbalanced theory of knowledge insist that all languages are freshly scrubbed windows, made of uniform glass, through which an unresisting reality may be discovered merely by looking. The systematic denial that languages-Japanese and English, for example-differ significantly conspires with naive or common-sense empiricism, which would have us believe that reality is composed entirely of ‘things’ and ‘observers of things’. Both doctrinesnominalism and classic empiricism-understate the opacity of linguistic codes and the difficulties involved in their decipherment. Where languages are judged irrelevant, reading, too, will be undervalued.
