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.I needto know, for example, that these words belong to what might be called a'code of reference' - that the sign is not just a decorative piece of languagethere to entertain travellers, but is to be taken as referring to the behaviourof actual dogs and passengers on actual escalators.I must mobilize mygeneral social knowledge to recognize that the sign has been placed there bythe authorities, that these authorities have the power to penalize offenders,that I as a member of the public am being implicitly addressed, none ofwhich is evident in the words themselves.I have to rely, in other words,upon certain social codes and contexts to understand the notice properly.But I also need to bring these into interaction with certain codes or conven-tions of reading - conventions which tell me that by 'the escalator' is meantthisescalator and not one in Paraguay, that 'must be carried' means 'must becarried now', and so on.I must recognize that the 'genre' of the sign is suchas to.make it highly improbable that the ambiguity I mentioned in theIntroduction is actually 'intended'.It is not easy to distinguish between'social' and 'literary' codes here: concretizing 'the escalator' as 'this escala-tor', adopting a reading convention which eradicates ambiguity, itselfdepends upon a whole network of social knowledge.I understand the notice, then, by interpreting it in terms of certain codeswhich seem appropriate; but for Iser this is not all of what happens inreading literature.If there were a perfect 'fit' between the whichgoverned literary works and the codes we applied to interpret them, allliterature would be as uninspiring as the London Underground sign.Themost effective literary work for Iser is one which forces the reader into a newcritical awareness of his or her customary codes and expectations.The workinterrogates and transforms the implicit beliefs we bring to it, 'disconfirms'our routine habits of perception and so forces us to acknowledge them forthe first time for what they are.Rather than merely reinforce our given.perceptions, the valuable work of literature violates or transgresses thesenormative ways of seeing, and so teaches us new codes for understanding.There is a parallel here with Russian Formalism: in the act of reading, ourconventional assumptions are 'defamiliarized', objectified to the point wherewe can criticize and so revise them.If we modify the text by our readingstrategies, it simultaneously modifies us: like objects in a scientific experi-ment, it may return an unpredictable 'answer' to our 'questions'.The wholepoint of reading, for a critic like Iser, is that it brings us into deeper self-consciousness, catalyzes a more critical view of our own identities.It is asthough what we have been 'reading', in working our way through a book, isourselves. Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Reception Theory 69Iser's reception theory, in fact, is based on a liberal humanist ideology: abelief that in reading we should be flexible and open-minded, prepared toput our beliefs into question and allow them to be transformed.Behind thiscase lies the influence of Gadamerian hermeneutics, with its trust in thatenriched self-knowledge which springs from an encounter with the unfamil-iar.But Iser's liberal humanism, like most such doctrines, is less liberal thanit looks at first sight.He writes that a reader with strong ideological commit-ments is likely to be an inadequate one, since he or she is less likely to beopen to the transformative power ofliterary works.What this implies is thatin order to undergo transformation at the hands of the text, we must onlyhold our beliefs fairly provisionally in the first place.The only good readerwould already have to be a ,liberal: the act of reading produces a kind ofhuman subject which it also presupposes.This is also paradoxical in anotherway: for if we only hold our convictions rather lightly in the first place,having them interrogated and subverted by the text is not really very signifi-cant.Nothing much, in other words, will have actually happened.Thereader is not so much radically upbraided, as simply returned to himself orherself as a more thoroughly liberal subject.Everything about the readingsubject is up for question in the act of reading, except what kind of (liberal)subject it is: these ideological limits can be in no way criticized, for then thewhole model would collapse.In this sense, the plurality and open-endednessof the process of reading are permissible because they presuppose a certainkind of closed unity which always remains in place: the unity of the readingsubject, which is violated and transgressed only to be returned more fully toitself.As with Gadamer, we can foray out into foreign territory because weare always secretly at home
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