writing the read authorship • gary e. davis • berkeley


	Project

	writing the read authorship of a living authoriality gary e. davis	January 30, 2026

The s/p-differentiated character of genuine speech (a situational relativity of
a dramactional condition) makes communicative action like a text for the listener (reader, viewer), reflecting the authorship of apt presence, as if the reader, etc., is construing the “actual” intentionality of the silent text (or “autonomous” scene; or frameless situationality of speaking).

A literal text is linguistic phenomenality, which is the paradigmatic medium for interpretive interest, thus being paradigmatic for “reading” another person in oral interaction. At best, communicative interaction has meaningfulness which allows for significant interpretation, ideally as texts can be highly meaningful.

Reading is always implicity receiving a second-person address, where the author-
ship of the text anticipated a real audience as if being with “you,” implicitly calling to read fairly, as one is implicitly called to hear fairly or to view fairly.

In the writing, there’s authorial appropriation relative to the topic to be shared, the interaction to be evinced, which implies a topical self-withholding by the author in authentic fidelity to topical focus.

Even all perceptiveness is a receptive “reading” of phenomenal experience, paradigmatically expressed by phenomenological inquiry. Phenomenology is integrally textual such that everything about non-textual experience is windowing textuality, showing through saying by text.

So, who is the evinced author of a silent text? Openness brings with it implicit mirroring of the reader’s (listener’s, viewer’s) developmental stage of appreci-
ability, as well as implicitly mirroring invested dispositions of oneSelf about what is preferable to find (cf. clinically-relevant projection).

Is the inferred author (i.e., the meaningfulness discerned to have been conveyed by a specific authorship) some weird mirror of one’s capability, preference, self-begetting? individuation so far (capability), selfidentity (preference), aspiration (self-begetting)? Is complex reading a mirrorplay between what’s accurately perceived (real bearing) and what’s “found” to be implied (granted)?

Is not misreading a common result? But it’s not experienced as misreading. Is not misunderstanding a commonality?

In reading a complex text (or a proximally alien text), the “author” (the imputed authorship) is likely a mutual construction between (a) validly construed inten-
tions of a real authorship; and (b) “discerned” implicature which is mirrored by texted presence—but maybe not as a degree of selfidentical investment there or
as self-concealing of actual implicature belonging to the text or to the “read” presence of another person.

On the other hand, there’s often valid reading beyond the text (e.g., higher expertise reading younger engagement), which is the basis for constructive appropriation through commentary; or basis for furtherance of the other’s influ-
ence; or occasion for enlightening critique, such that a higher reader construc-
tively thinks, in effect, "good that you’ve gone that far, yet going further is better, and feasible.”

So, there may an interality of mutual engagement with the text, an intimacy of writerly reading of a writer reading a virtual audience such that explication (e.g.,
in literary criticism) is “ours,” reader writing the writer reading.