Antiauthorship and Readership

Roughly speaking, readership is the inverse of authorship. It is the process whereby a creation (human or otherwise) is examined and then understood, explored and synthesised into the reader's mind. It is taking the linear structure, and then finding out what techniques were used. And then taking these sets of techniques and finally finding out the intent that was behind these techniques. Of course, that is where subjectivity will become important, as we are searching for clues of techniques and then reconstructing the techniques used, and we are searching for clues of the intent, and then reconstructing these intents. What we are doing is similar to looking at the outside of a building and guessing the supporting structures or the framework that is within.

In some way, literary theory is an attempt to bring a more orderly discussion into the ways that the interpretation of a text is created. However, it is important to notice that because we are given what is, in essence, the outside of a complex object (known by artsy fartsy people as a text), whatever we do in the interpretation will only provide distorted revaluations of text in a context that might be widely diverging from the original - reader response theory. The paradox is that in many ways the internal workings of a text are no longer relevant, and yet the surface appearance still matters in different contexts creating a metaphorical "death of the author", where the author as the absolute source of the text is replaced with the reader. In this sense, it is the fact that we can reinterpret a text that gives rise, in some ways, to the overall complexity of a text, as since it is a "three dimensional" structure, and we can take many "slice" or "angles of view" of the text.

In some other way, code reading techniques are also an attempt to bringing a more orderly process to interpreting and understanding the essential architecture underneath a software collection. Now these complex objects (known by scisy fartsy people as code/oop), are much like the texts of the literary kind. In many ways, old functions may be used for totally different things, as provided through abstraction, which allows us to reuse the same code, even in widely different contexts. The "death of the author" paradox now reflects the process of creating code libraries that provide services that might never even have been imagined by the author.