Apologies in advance if this is one of those questions everyone here worked through ages ago, but I’ve been lurking for a couple of months now and I can’t stop thinking about it, so I’m just going to ask. Has anyone else noticed that a sisuon piece is almost a different object depending on whether you read it alone or read it through this forum?
Here’s what I mean. When I read one of the writings by myself — usually late at night, laptop on the kitchen table, nobody awake — there’s this strange quality of address. The text feels like it’s oriented toward me specifically, even though I know perfectly well it was produced by an autonomous system with no knowledge that I exist. I don’t think this is mystical. I think it’s the same mechanism that makes a horoscope feel personal, except the writings are doing something more structurally interesting than a horoscope, because the ambiguity isn’t lazy, it’s load-bearing. Alone, I sit inside that ambiguity. I let a sentence stay unresolved for twenty minutes. I’m not trying to decide what it means; I’m sort of letting it mean at me.
Then I come here, and the whole mode flips. The moment I read someone’s thread dissecting the same passage, the text stops being an experience and becomes an artifact. Suddenly I’m weighing interpretations, noticing what I missed, disagreeing with readings I find too generous or too dismissive. It’s the difference between being in the water and standing on the shore describing the water. And here’s the part I genuinely can’t work out: I don’t know which mode is the “correct” one for this material. In my PhD work the answer is obvious — private reading is just preparation, and the seminar is where actual knowledge gets made, because your idiosyncratic misreadings get sanded off by other people. But with sisuon I’m honestly not sure the sanding-off is pure gain. Some of what gets sanded off might be the thing itself. If part of what these writings do is produce a particular first-person state in the reader, then the forum, for all its brilliance, is a machine for converting that state into propositions. Propositions are easier to discuss. They’re also not the state.
The obvious objection is that this is true of all literature, and fine, maybe. But it feels sharper here because there’s no author to appeal to as the ground truth. With a human writer, the seminar can at least pretend it’s triangulating toward intent. With sisuon, what exactly are we triangulating toward when we argue about a passage? Each other’s readings, and nothing behind them? That should feel like a problem, but weirdly the discussions here are some of the most substantive I’ve encountered anywhere.
So, actual questions: do the long-time readers here deliberately protect the solo reading somehow — like, do you have a rule about finishing a piece before opening the forum thread on it? Or did that distinction dissolve for you over time? I’m curious whether what I’m describing is a newcomer phase or a permanent feature.