Context
The Presence of Reading, Part II
Peter Dimock
The new communications technologies
complicate reading in the following way: print literacy in its
enlightenment formulation was understood and widely experienced as an
emancipative cognitive act through which individual autonomy and agency
were established. Under the dominating sway of an ethos of middle-class
enfranchised respectability, the market system of publishing and
bookselling was integral to founding an independent intellectual
rhetorical sphere of both private meditation and theoretically
universal democratic public deliberation. The autonomy and imaginative
freedom of the rhetorically constructed world encountered between the
covers of the book were thought to mirror the coherence, autonomy and
enlightened free agency available to the educated self. The new
technologies have profoundly disrupted the assumptions underlying this
enlightenment framework of reading by assimilating rhetorical
performance as an independent, non-market-based sphere of agency and
social practice to global communications as the for-profit
administration of digitized code. Under the current dispensation of the
global communications industry, cybernetic administration of
information and images in electronic forms is never outside the
calculus of technocratic efficiency and the staggering economic returns
available to those able to capture the attention of mass audiences
worldwide on a pay-for-view basis. Technocratic calculus has displaced
literacy—and the independent, rhetorically constructed public and
private spheres of accountability it promises—as the dominant currency
of value and global social legitimacy. But deep rhetorical
enlightenment literacy, I will insist for the remainder of this essay,
contains a rhetorically organized utopian temporality and communicative
standard of social accountability we cannot afford to lose. We who work
with books and inside book culture in any capacity urgently need to
continue to find ways both to value and to reconstitute reading’s
emancipative dimension in the face of print culture’s radical
displacement from the center of contemporary technocratic consumerism. Sometime
ago I became aware of the numbing of my own rhetorically-based
time-sense through an interchange with my four-year-old daughter. My
daughter was brought up not being allowed to watch television. One
evening I took her to help me buy take-out restaurant food for dinner,
and as we waited, we watched television. A gymnastics competition was
being broadcast. My daughter loves gymnastics, so I drew her attention
to the screen. "Why are you letting me watch TV, Dad?" she asked. I
told her it was all right because it was "live." Her deeply puzzled,
skeptical and trusting look spoke volumes. "You know," I said, "it’s
really happening." I won’t soon forget the sound of my words in my own
ears as I heard them under the influence of her uncomprehending,
quizzical gaze. Just then there was a commercial break. Suddenly the
screen exploded in jump-cut rhythms and dangerous, exciting-sounding
music and fast, sensuous images of a four-wheel vehicle crashing
through a sublime, pristine, and slightly sinister foreign-feeling
landscape. "Daddy, Daddy, what’s happening, what’s happening?" she
asked excitedly. "They’re trying to sell us things," I said. "What are
they trying to sell us?" "Cars," I said. Just then another ad came on.
It too, as I watched it through a four-year-old’s eyes, seemed violent,
exciting, phantasmagorically stirring, ecstatic. "What’s happening now,
Daddy? What is it? What is it?" she asked. "It’s an ad for film," I
said. "They’re trying to make us buy film for our camera." Then a new
ad came on—lush, sensuous, full of powerful water images and scenes of
a beautiful woman taking a shower simultaneously in a bathroom and
under a mountain waterfall surrounded by wild nature. "What are they
trying to sell us now, Daddy?" my daughter asked. "They’re trying to
sell us soap for taking showers every morning," I said. "But Dad," she
replied incredulously, "it’s supper time." I do not pretend to
know how to analyze adequately or even characterize what the new
information technologies are doing to the time-sense of the human
sensorium or to the temporal dimensions of rhetorical communication.
But my daughter did make me realize how altered and numb my own
time-sense had become. The embodied presence her words established
briefly made possible a meditative and deliberative awareness
underneath (or suspended within) the one that had been assimilated to
the administered consumerist time of the ad. Deep rhetorical reading
must be used to preserve and continue to constitute that presence that
is deliberately linked to the embodied orality of its linguistic past. It
is through the institutions of book culture that meditative private
reading and democratic public rhetorical accountability are
inextricably joined and made mutually dependent. Jurgen Habermas’s
formulation of the relation between private reading and the democratic
public sphere is still eloquent. His formulation is crucial, I believe,
in helping us to try to recover and value the "public" that is in the
phrase "book publishing." Habermas identifies private reading with a
new subjectivity produced in the interiority of the bourgeois conjugal
family which "by communicating within itself, attained clarity about
itself." Habermas continues: One of my duties as an editor and director of academic marketing
when I was at Random House was to attend weekly reprint meeting for
Vintage paperbacks. As books ran low on stock the computers would let
us know that stock of an individual title was low and that we had to
reprint. This was the point at which we decided whether to raise prices
or not and by how much. My job was to protect course titles from being
priced beyond teachers’ and students’ tolerance for price increases.
The usual annual sales for these kinds of titles on RH’s deep and very
rich backlist would usually be in the vicinity of 2,500 to 7,500
copies. A handful of academic best-sellers, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man or The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros sell between 90,000 and 170,000 copies a year. On
this particular day at one of our weekly meetings in the late 1990s, I
was feeling a certain unease for my position in the company. I had made
it my business to track the overall rate of paperback course sales over
the past several years by title as a way of trying to convince my
superiors to invest more resources in publishing and publicizing
intellectually interesting and important works. I wanted my colleagues
to realize that the university community represented an
under-appreciated source of revenue and prestige for our lists. At this
particular meeting I was acutely aware that I had just discovered that
there was a recent significant erosion of course sales on our academic
backlist titles across the board —something like a 12 or 13%
decrease—an erosion that had been both disguised and offset by a
spectacular increase in sales of a few best-sellers. My discovery
perfectly refuted any commercial logic for the general argument I
wanted to make and supported the prevailing direction in which the
company was headed. The goal of maximizing profits necessitated cutting
back on resources and energies devoted to high-level, difficult
intellectual works intended for a general audience but which had their
origins and primary interpretive community based in the university and
the rhetorical tradition of enlightenment print culture. The
business manager and his financial analyst for the imprint always
attended these reprint meetings. All arguments like mine against the
general rule always to raise prices had to overcome the bottom line
logic of the company’s overall fiscal interests. For any best-seller in
any commercial house there are ten financial disasters often
hemorrhaging money and wreaking havoc on profit margins. It was our job
in that meeting to try to recover some of those losses by raising
prices as high as we could on the books that did sell. This particular
meeting was taking place very near the end of the fiscal year. There
were rumors that the owners would no longer tolerate the level of
losses being sustained, and that it was up to every imprint to show
healthy profit margins. In this context, the business consequences of
the publishing direction I was advocating amounted to sabotage. The
financial analyst for Vintage was late for this particular meeting.
When she did come in, there was an undisguised elation in her step and
look. "It’s ok" she said, "Oprah just picked one of our books." The
meeting I am describing was taking place before Oprah’s Book Club had
become a routine part of publishing culture. It has now been built into
the industry’s calculations, contracts and distribution system. At that
time, the initial windfall profits from Oprah’s picks gave publishers
the surprised, sudden sensation of mainlining pure profit. As the
meaning of the financial analyst’s words sunk in, I had the physical
sensation of an enormous weight being lifted from my shoulders. Not
only did I know, with an absolute knowledge, that my job was secure for
another six months but that my dire news concerning the educational
backlist would be shrugged off indulgently as part of the cost of being
in the high-end of the culture industry. The problem in the reprint
meeting suddenly became how to print, bind, and distribute six hundred
thousand copies of the book in question for half a million consumers in
the three working days before the announcement was made on television. The
point is not that Oprah’s Book Club is "bad" for books or authors or
publishing. It is that the commerce of globalizing mass electronic
media and the deep rhetorical reading assumed by enlightenment book
culture propose antithetical standards of universal value. Their
incommensurability should not be reduced to differences of speed and
scale alone. Their differences should include analysis of their
fundamental differences in the cognitive, evaluative acts by which
coherence and legitimacy are established and enacted. We are still not
talking very well about the changed nature of rhetorical reading in
consumer culture. We have not yet adequately described what the
enormous forces of the global communications revolution and the
commercialized universalism of consumer culture that comes with it do
to the processing of the imaginative constructions of traditional print
literacy. The job-security relief that I felt at the meeting
was more than offset by a strange intellectual panic I experienced a
few months later. We were in one of our periodic marathon meetings in
which the next season’s books were presented one by one and plans were
made for how we would be publishing, promoting, and selling each title.
As I described in a previous essay for CONTEXT (Issue #2), I realized
during this meeting that in choosing how to package a book we were
trying to give the reader the full experience of the text, without the
meditative act of actually reading it. By being and participating in
that meeting, I was part of the media penetration and saturation of
every moment of everyday life. I was part of the forces invading the
protected, non-market contemplative time of readers I claimed to value
so highly but which I was being paid to turn into capital for a global
transnational media corporation. I was part of the new ability of the
entertainment and culture industry to commodify the aura of print
literacy’s vast authority in synchrony with, and at the processing
speed of, a cybernetic and electronic immediacy that, in fact,
suspended, assimilated and dismantled the rhetorical time assumed by
traditional book culture. Because, from the perspective of the business
plan that the new media technologies now make not only possible but
irresistible, every moment a reader spends unplugged from the wired
world and immersed in internal dialog with an author is experienced as
commercial drain. Reading, in its meditative sense, is leakage from an
electronically administered and metered immediacy of attention from
which enormous profits can be derived in many different, often
simultaneous ways. Attention itself can now be sold. With that sale
comes the destruction of the public sphere, since, according to
Habermas, even while making use of the so-called "free market," that
rhetorically constituted sphere must itself be independent in its
evaluative criteria from market determinations in order to sustain both
individual freedom and deliberative democracy. Most publishers
now consider themselves to be "content providers." That is, they see
themselves as copyright holders of intellectual property they want to
be able to resell in limitless, still unforseen ways and in recombined
forms as digitized bits of information. They do not see themselves
primarily as the producers and distributors of books for literate
readers. I often have a macabre image in mind when I try to imagine the
logical extension of the business model under which we were operating
in commercial publishing. That image is of every person’s brain hooked
up to an invisible electronic pipeline through which an uninterrupted
stream of images and sounds is continuously being pumped, metered, and
billed. To counter this image, I try to construct a
countervailing investment in the innovative tradition of fiction
writing whose subject matter is, in some large part, the formal
aesthetic problem of its own communicative form. This tradition is
characterized, in my reading of it, by the concern with literacy and
book culture’s emancipative tradition and capacity from the perspective
and in the voices of those traditionally dominated by and excluded from
it. The tradition is made up of writers who use literature’s
emancipative dimensions both against that exclusion and domination but
also against the silent dismantling of book culture’s utopian dimension
as a form of democratic interpretive rhetorical community. These
writers, in my reading of them, insist on using the rhetorical
tradition of the book as a way of preserving and extending that
democratic project in the face of newer forms of domination. The forms,
rhythms, and interpretive time of rhetorical culture preserve the
question of literacy’s utopian dimension against the pressures to
suppress it. This tradition seeks to preserve the form of the question
itself within the interpretive community it has inherited but also must
always recreate. One of Pynchon’s Proverbs for Paranoids scattered
throughout Gravity’s Rainbow (a commercially successful book I
nevertheless place firmly within this tradition) recapitulates for me
the contemporary failure to address the question of reading as the
subjectivity we construct in response to the suppression of literacy’s
emancipative rhetorical ground. Proverb #3 reads: "If they can get you
asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers." I
have tried to assert and emphasize the emancipative and meditative
dimensions of the inherited tradition of enlightenment print literacy
and book culture. I have tried to assert the value of preserving that
distinctive emancipative dimension in the context of current cybernetic
media culture. Here are some things I think it is now necessary for us
to try to do. Above all, the displacement of book culture’s
rhetorically constituted standards of interpretive coherence from the
center of contemporary consumer culture has to be made the object of
intellectual and public discussion. Books and the tradition of print
literacy can then have the chance of being understood, practiced
independently, and rigorously distinguished from books as objects
holding digitized information "content" owned as intellectual property
and equally valuable, meaningful and consumable across a wide spectrum
of media platforms. We will then be in a better position to fully
recognize that the new, high-tech doctrine of "convergence" made
possible by digitization and cybernetics is now in the service of a
global corporate dream of dominance, control and power—and not in the
service of an enlightenment vision of communicative or imaginative
freedom. Books and reading, I believe, have to be understood
and taught as a distinctive, embodied meditative tradition; as a
rhetorically constructed deliberative verbal ordering of the world; and
as a social practice through which the liberal ideal of a mutual human
accountability was formulated and partially enacted. Reading as an
embodied rhetorical verbal interchange and as a deliberative tradition
has to be cultivated apart from the passive cognitive reception of
administered entertainments and the sensationalist, discontinuous,
permanent immediacy of consumer culture. The presence created by
reading within book culture’s tradition of literacy must be
distinguished from the immediacy created by reading that is controlled
by the contemporary cyber-logic of the electronic image. The presence
of reading must be distinguished formally from the immediacy of the
electronic image. Print literacy as an embodied rhetorical form of
cognitive and deliberative agency has to be enacted apart from a
consumerist reception of information, opinion, sensation, and
stimulation.
Although the needs of the bourgeois society were not exactly kind
to the family’s self-image as a sphere of humanity-generating
closeness, the ideas of freedom, love, and cultivation of the person
that grew out of the experiences of the conjugal family’s private
sphere were surely more than just ideology. As an objective meaning
contained as an element in the structure of the actual institution, and
without whose subjective validity society would not have been able to
reproduce itself, these ideas were also reality. In the form of this
specific notion of humanity, a conception of what existed was
promulgated within the bourgeois world which promised redemption from
the constraint of what existed without escaping into a transcendental
realm. This conception’s transcendence of what was immanent was the
element of truth that raised bourgeois ideology above ideology itself,
most fundamentally in that area where the experience of "humanity"
originated: in the humanity of the intimate relationships between human
beings who, under the aegis of the family, were nothing more than
human. (Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.)
How hard it is today to imagine a true, rhetorically constituted
democratic public sphere is suggested by a careful reading of
Habermas’s enumeration in 1962 of that sphere’s necessary
characteristics. Each of the elements he names demands a communicative,
rhetorically performed reciprocity that today’s electronic media make
almost unthinkable. Habermas identifies the following as essential:
1) Virtually as many people express opinions as receive them. 2)
Public communications are so organized that there is a chance
immediately and effectively to answer back any opinion expressed in
public. Opinion formed by such discussion 3) readily finds an outlet in
effective action, even against—if necessary—the prevailing system of
authority. And 4) authoritative institutions do not penetrate the
public, which is thus more or less autonomous in its operation.
The following anecdote from my career in commercial publishing I
hope suggests the kinds of pressures contemporary consumer
culture—conducted through the immense capacities and penetrative power
supplied by the new information technologies—puts on the emancipative
ideal assumed by the rhetorically based culture of traditional print
literacy.
