Reading, Wanting, and Broken Economics

A Twenty-First-Century Study of Readers and Bookshops in Southampton around 1900

Simon R. Frost

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781438483528, 9781438483511
• eBook ISBN: 9781438483535
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: History

Uses a historical study of bookselling and readers as a way to question and rethink our understanding of the market for symbolic goods.

Combining historical study, theorization, and experimental fiction, this book takes commodity culture and book retail around 1900 as the prime example of a market of symbolic goods. With the port of Southampton, England, as his case study, Simon R. Frost reveals how the city's bookshops, with their combinations of libraries, haberdashery, stationery, and books, sustained and were sustained by the dreams of ordinary readers, and how together they created the values powering this market. The goods in this market were symbolic and were not "consumed" but read. Their readings were created between other readers and texts, in happy disobedience to the neoliberal laws of the free market. Today such reader-created social markets comprise much of the world's branded economies, which is why Frost calls for a new understanding of both literary and market values.

PART ONE

Theory, Methods, Tactics and Politics

Chapter 1

Reading and Wanting

Commodity Culture Needs Readers

In questioning what constitutes the demand side of the book market, this study of correlations between consumption and reading will focus on readerly gains and intangible values derived from symbolic goods—in this case, books. By considering how desire-negotiating readers may have used their published fiction in commercial contexts, it should be possible to open up some of the complexities involved when consuming symbolic goods. As Rosalind Williams says in her ur-study of mass consumption, it may be obvious how material commodities satisfy physical needs, but “less evident, but of overwhelming significance in understanding modern society, is how merchandise can fill needs of the imagination.”1 Indeed, in building her exposition of goods invested genuinely with our hopes and desires, Williams adopts Hannah Arendt’s approach to consumption as something ambiguous that has the capacity not only to crudely sustain but also to give meaning to life; or, as Williams explains, based not only on consumere, to use up and destroy what has been produced, but on the more positive relationship between humans and their goods of consummare, to bring to fruition, to fulfill and to consummate.2 What is required, therefore, is a theoretical approach and method that does not interfere with a sense of readers “consuming” published texts for progressive benefits they construe for themselves. If readers are not to be reduced to either subjects at the blunt end of market indifference or sovereigns impervious to market rhetoric, then we need terms that highlight desire and readers’ choices that cover a spectrum from the most selfish to the most altruistic. The following section, then, will look at various goals of reading, suggesting “efferent” reading as a gain-oriented solution.

Current liberalist economic thinking is that we follow a path of individualized self-interest in the belief that Adam Smith’s prescription may produce in the aggregate an overall benefit for society. It is a population of Robinson Crusoes, each homo economicus pursuing self-interest, which creates the social good. Leaving aside that not every economist has agreed that aggregated self-interest produces social good—“It is not a correct deduction from the Principles of Economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest” (Keynes’s italics)3—it suffices to question how isolated is the economic model’s isolated self. According to economic prescription, with a Robinson Crusoe–like figure, we only have to think of individual preferences and not where those preferences come from. But away from Crusoe’s island, our preferences “are strongly formed by our social environment—family, neighbourhood, schooling, social class,” and our consumption is not only of different things but driven by differences that are inescapably social: “this process of socialization means we cannot really treat individuals as atoms separable from each other.”4 The individual is created by society equally as much as society is created by its individuals.

Therefore, if gain-oriented behavior is to be considered collectively, reading needs to be anchored in social praxis, as our consumption is seen to be part of wider commodity-cultural behavior. Such collectivity is not only a requirement to talk about cultural formations, but also the end-game for economics in which methodological individualism is supposedly just a stepping stone to understanding something social.

Reading for gains might be thought of as ongoing socialization and as momentary coherences in a system of social differences between any numbers of consumer readers. When radiating beyond immediate local contexts, these coherences and differences might eventually be thought of as linked, contributing to what actor network theory calls a “collective,” and to what economists perhaps might be led to call a market. To think beyond the self-interested individual to the collective, therefore, we need to find a reading goal that achives that shift, found paradoxically in identity formation, since one’s interest in Self turns out to be remarkably social.

The New Critical Idiom volume Reception provides a good outline of its tripartite “reception study,” “reception history,” and “reception theory,” which it understands as the decoding and interpretation of texts, the possible afterlives of that experience, and the modeling of those processes in a conceptualized framework. In this reorganization of the field, Ika Willis proceeds from a fundamental premise of texts only becoming meaningful when they are read, viewed, or listened to: “As the author and critic Ursula K. Le Guin puts it, ‘The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.’ ”5 Jerome McGann called those little black marks “black riders” and the print-culture precondition for literary fiction.6 From an economics perspective, one might add that they are also the precondition to the exchange from which the social system known as a book market is created.

DeNel Rehberg Sedo provides a useful summary of theories of reading in “Reading Reception in the Digital Era,” noting that they are many and without general agreement.7 Citing a history of reader theorization beginning with I.A. Richards in the 1920s and developed by Louise Rosenblatt in the 1930s,8 Sedo describes a heterogeneous twentieth-century reader-response criticism that nevertheless shares a rejection of the autonomous New Critical text in its premise that “the text cannot mean, or even exist apart from its readers.”9 In delineating the major trends, Sedo proposes the following inexhaustive sketch: theories of the reader can include, but are in no way limited to,

the implied reader, whose responses are in part determined by the text itself and solidified by the reader filling in gaps;10 the sign reader, who applies complex sign systems to interpret the text;11 the model reader, who works with the author and the text to make sense of the story;12 and, the resisting reader, who reacts to unbalanced power structures through the act of reading.13

For the twenty-first century, Sedo suggests that a number of approaches continue to see the reader and her text as complimentary, but further emphasize how reading has always been socially embedded. When analyzing a reader’s individual reading practice, she recommends taking into account the “the social structures that bring a book into the hands of a reader, such as libraries, schools, family and friendship circles, and the publishing industry. In this way alone, reading is never an individual endeavour.”14

If the social structure Sedo advises were commodity culture, the focus would need to fix on what is aimed at through exchange. Bortolussi and Dixon talk of a hierarchy of goals being relevant for any one reader at a given time, allowing for multiple goals to be held simultaneously.15 These goals will also reorder themselves over time along with the reader’s evolving history: books that were once read in the heat of adolescent challenge later on might be dismissed, revered, or affectionately satirized. Lowest in the hierarchy are basic goals of literary processing—recognizing that the text is indeed a narrative with specific plot(s), thematics and characterizations—while other goals might include appreciation of the language, evaluation of the mental states of the characters or relations between characters and institutions, evaluating the narrator, interpreting the supposed intentions of the implied author, or even (contestably) imputing an overall meaning to the text that Bortolussi and Dixon call the narrative’s “message.” In the academy, further goals might include the refinement of technical operations, cataloging textual and paratextual devices, or conducting maneuvers in sociological, aesthetic or cultural study.

Where Bortolussi and Dixon pull up, though, is at the boundary of cultural context, where processing stops and the remainder of a reader’s life begins. What do readers hope to gain from their texts? Even assuming that readers hope to obtain an insight from the author sent in coded form, they must still interpret that message in personal terms, rendering it useful to themselves. Gains are modeled by institutional economics in terms of personal utility, and at the center of consumption lies an idea of benefits for the Self. So if the aim is to reconstitute and reconfigure, rather than reject economics thinking outright, it would make sense to focus on readings that have a primary aim in the acquisition of benefits to one’s Self: no matter how erroneous the concept of an enduring homogenous self-identity might be. I shop therefore I am; I read therefore I am; I read because I hope to gain something from it.

Approaching reading from the side of economics, the renown economist Deirdre McCloskey has visited the conjunction between poetics and economics in “Metaphors Economists Live By.” Using Lakoff and Johnson’s work as a staging post, she draws attention to the foundations of economics, a mathematicized science, lying in its metaphors, such as competition and games, invisible hands, and markets.16 The often-made argument McCloskey refers to, which she wishes to rebut, is that economics “is not poetry just to the degree that a piece of economics invites what the critic Louise Rosenblatt called an ‘efferent’ reading (from Latin effero, “I take away”) as against an aesthetic reading.”17 In her rebuttal, McCloskey goes on to discuss the metaphorical structuring of much economic language, thus demonstrating the poetics of economics. But for the current purposes—of effecting a reverse maneuver to allow for a lay “economic” approach to poetry, if you will—the efferent reading should be embraced. Rather than reading as a purely aesthetic experience, exchange demands that the reader take something away. The efferre that Rosenblatt described was intended as a more emphatic counter-position to an aesthetic reading than the more accustomed term instrumental, since she suspected disinterested aesthetic experience might subsequently have an instrumental purpose.18 Fortunately, efferre well describes the relationship between the reader and her fiction when poetry is approached as a source of gain. The interesting part is in finding out precisely what those gains might be.

Readers entering a bookshop (offline or on), choosing to remain there, browsing or targeting titles, deciding to buy or delay, purchasing, or surreptitiously consuming in situ, all represent attempts to secure personal gains. They are exercises in consumer and reader choice, and those choices say something about who the reader is, both to others and reflexively to the person. Psychological studies of economic behavior have long established that patterns of consumption are linked with the consumer (re)forming their identity. Reading, too, represents choice, and certain types of reading similarly say something about the person reading the text, both to others and to themselves. The choice to interpret this or that plot structure, theme, allusion, or irony in this or that way is in itself telling.

No one would want to claim that consumption is the same as reading, especially when reading refers to complex interpretation, but there may be a correlation. The correlation is not transitive—simply because someone consumes in one way, exercising certain patterns of consumer choice, does not mean that the patterning can be transferred directly onto reading. Patterns of consumption of goods do not directly match the patterns of meaning-making from any “text.” But what if goods are symbolic goods, such as books? And what if the gaining from symbolic goods is what psychologists call identity formation? It might, instead, be helpful to think of an intransitive relationship. In gaining from symbolic goods, what identity formation can be to consumption, it can be to reading, too.

The conceptual artist Barbara Kruger, much of whose work politicizes our relationship to consumerism, articulates many of the findings of economics and cultural history. Her photographic silkscreen “I Shop Therefore I Am” ties consumption inextricably with personal identity and articulates a major feature of commodity culture—a culture stretching back at least to the last third of the nineteenth century in many parts of the industrialized West. In Modernity and Self-Identity, Anthony Giddens writes of identity as an ongoing reflexive process sustained by, among other acts, the consumption of consumer goods.19 As early as 1890, William James in his classic Principles of Psychology made the gendered observation that “a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes, his friends, his wife and children, his ancestors, his reputation and works, his lands and yacht and bank account.”20 Goods are valuable to “man” not only for their functional value. To put it more specifically, one of the functions of commodified goods is to provide the material, any material, that is necessary for the conveyance of intangible existential value. Such values are useful to individuals for processes such as identity formation. In the context of commodity culture, therefore, consumer choice is tightly linked to personal and, because cultural, collective identity.

Reading, too, and the interpretation that can result, also represents choice: the choice to read in one way and not another; to interpret in one way and not another. Simply by being context-bound, text is always available to more than one interpretation. That identity formation should be one of the functions of reading is also a matter of choice. Often, reading involves much else besides identity formation. Everything but the identity of the reader is important to forms of professional textual analysis assisted precisely through self-forgetfulness. After the hot emotive reading comes cool critical distance, with the final reading that procures judgment being a mutually informed resolution of the two. The primary goal of scholarly analysis is an understanding of, or a full cognitive “experiencing of,” the text. Only secondarily does it aim to gain something, such an insight into the human condition or, more prosaically, a further career step as a perceptive close reader. Only in these secondary cases is analysis implicated quite naturally in private gain—a condition Rosenblatt acknowledges when she says that the aesthetic reading, like the efferent, can also be transactional.21 The classroom, then, along with t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Their or, Rather, Our Books
• Part One Theory, Methods, Tactics, and Politics
• Part Two Southampton Stories
• Part Three Factual Fictions
• Part Four Theory, Methods, Tactics, and Politics, 2.0
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Biblioteca: Toward a Bibliography of Works Published by H.M. Gilbert and Sons
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover