On all sides we are inundated with documents. These may vary from comic strips to scientific reports. Between these two extremes one still finds documents such as office memoranda and minutes of meetings, fiction and poetry, advertisements and posters, sermons and political speeches, white papers and laws, and many other types. All those who are in some or other way concerned with documents are therefore involved in this reflection, especially those who, for whatever reason, are obliged to read or study. Academics and researchers in Public Administration have an interest in this, but it is of no less concern to practitioners, such as those in positions of leadership, or political officials, who have to make informed and considered decisions.

We must never forget that the interpretation of politics and the politics of interpretation are intimately related. This means that the arts of explanation and understanding, of interpretation and reading, have a deep and complex relation with politics, the structures of power, and social values, which organise human life. The outcome of reading is always the product of the struggle about the ideological and ethical assumptions and implications of writers and readers. Political and economic realities have a direct bearing on the practices of reading, interpretation, and scholarship.

Every reading act is born of a search for knowledge. It begins with an awareness of the indeterminate, the enigmatic, and the unfamiliar. It strives for clarity and distinctness and the expulsion of doubt. In this search for knowledge, the first three reading modalities to be discussed will concentrate on what has been written – on what we have before us. Yet, we should remember that the judgement of what we have before us does not actually come from what we have before us. Our judgements come from within us, or from other sources, despite the fact that they may be taking account of what we have before us. The last two reading modalities that will be discussed take us out of the domain of recipe-like laws and into the region or space of the adventurous, the imaginative, and even the audacious. It is a domain of uncertainty and risk but, at the same time, of renewal and inventiveness, of what has not been written.