Close reading: displacing the text

There are two ways to conceive of close reading. First, you become a textualist. This involves presupposing that people have no proper understanding of what they are reading until they read it again, closely. The work of close reading is then one that confronts the ignorant with the text--the text itself. Deploying the text in this way, making the reader confront it, is then what allows them to properly read. This construes the text, then, as a constituted thing, as something gathered together, however much one would like to assert that it is composed of differences or differentials. And it advantageously makes this thing equivalent to a proper understanding: upon perceiving this thing, you will have understood. This is advantageous because then you can say (perhaps even verify) that a reader had not read the text. All you have to do is make her say to you what she has read: if it does not correspond to (or at least come close to) what is now called the text, you either know or do not know whether she understood it.
Many people take I.A. Richards to be referring to this mode when he talks about the goal of reading closely being communication: something is communicated when it is understood properly and ignorance is overcome. But then there is the second way, which seems often to be more like what he means. This way presupposes that people already have an understanding of the text. The work of close reading then is not to confront someone with the object that is the text, since they already have a conception of that text. The work of close reading is, rather, to bring out that conception and actually constitute a text together with another person (or a class). A reader will say what she reads, and then this will be something that will alter the text that the rest of the class has established. In other words, she will say that a word means something to her, and this specification of meaning will alter the way the word has already been read. The word will then be taken back into the working model of the text that the class is constituting, either confirming it or forcing it to change or be displaced. So the text is not a constituted thing, but is something that is the result or effect of this work of constitution. This text then can be open to more or less displacement, depending on how much the work of constitution goes on. In the end, though, you are left with a text, and it will be equivalent to the success of a communciation or the readers' understanding. This process is also open to the textualism of the first mode of close reading we outlined. But if anything it tries to take it into account: the work of close reading is actually the work of displacing any particular constituted text, never letting it wholly confront you as a thing. This also opens up the text to research, which can help with the work of constitution along the way: in short, the work of reading is more of a detour than a work of confrontation, perception, squinting closer and closer until the thing itself is seen. For Richards, it takes over the work of the old philology, which was to construe a text and establish an authoritative version: it does this work, but with the understanding rather than material books, which again tend to make this work fall into textualism. In this sense, it also should be mentioned that the model for text for Richards was advertisements and signs, not books. Seeing a massive consumer culture up ahead (and to an extent already thoroughly established for his generation), he divined that reading would be more and more of a part of how we get around in the world, of how we relate to others--and less a thing that proceeded alone and with an old book in one's hands. The capacity or ability to displace the text together in conversation, rather than silently intuit its proper version--almost to the extent that you and others would effectively be rewriting it together (Barthes in S/Z very much stresses writing as reading in this way)--this was what he often wanted to cultivate.