The Curious Notoriety of “Performative Reading”

Here’s a hypothetical: a man walks into a bar, buys a drink, and starts reading from a paperback copy of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” He could very well be reading “Moby-Dick” or “Gravity’s Rainbow” or “Middlemarch,” but, for the sake of this setup, let’s say it’s Wallace’s 1996 novel, with its thousand-plus pages and hundreds of endnotes and the ghosts of a million bespectacled graduate students whispering, “You know it’s got a nonlinear plot, right?” To the severely online, this guy is not simply enjoying a good book in the company of strangers but participating in the practice of “performative reading,” a concept that’s recently gained a curious notoriety. A performative reader treats books like accessories, lugging around canonical texts as a ploy to attract a romantic partner or as a way to revel in the pleasure of feeling superior to others. While everyone else is scrolling social media and silencing life with noise-cancelling headphones, the performative reader insists upon his intelligence with attention-seeking insincerity, begging to be noticed with the aid of a big, look-at-me, capital-“B” book.