Abstract
Book history is yet to have a major impact on cultural or media studies, an accident of its institutional development and ongoing intellectual divisions, and despite the work of key authors such as Simone Murray, to take an Australian example, writing on the digital literary sphere and its productive economy, or others dealing with print forms as media items or cultural objects or with questions of the creative economy. Simon Frost in Reading, Wanting, and Broken Economics is less directly engaged with debates within cultural/media studies itself than with the relation between reading as the consumption of symbolic goods, bookselling in its diverse contexts, often without book sales as the major project, and above all ‘broken’ explanatory models drawn from neoclassical to neoliberal economics. His book undoes both literary studies definitions of critical reading and readers and economics ideas of rational individuals making choices of utility. It argues ordinary reading (and the book market) not as the product of a cultural regime distinct from economic values but as a social network that ‘constitutes the market’: ‘For markets of symbolic goods, the economy does not run on the recalculation of value fixed by production costs according to specific conditions of demand, but instead runs on the individual's experience of intertextuality, its values created not from scarcity but from processes of socialization’ (p. 283).
Frost's book includes a rich account of Southampton's bookselling and book-buying world in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. However its real originality lies in its extended, persistent, quietly militant engagement with economic models for consumers’ consumption or reading. Individual readers figure, most notably in the book's unexpected middle section which projects five ‘fictional’ readers in sequence talking about books and bookstore practices. But the point of this section is to illustrate how ‘reading can only take place where difference is already at work. The sign, alone, is meaningless without signification achieved from valorized counter-distinctions to other signs and symbols, from a position that is itself created as a counter-distinction for readers, created from their socialization, and from cultural embeddedness' (p. 192).
If reading as individual practice is always thus embedded, how is this socialization to be modelled? Frost's largest point, perhaps, is that taking books as commodities (‘as all shoppers do’) ‘reveals how neoliberalism's presentation of economics conceals the political and cultural constituents of market behaviour’ (p. 12). Or in different terms, how the standoff between cultural and economic discourses is based on a ‘foolish paradox’ (p. 285), for ‘on the High Street, culture is trade’ (p. 291). These larger points depend on a careful sequence of intermediate steps and further conclusions. First, commodity culture provides the social framing ‘in which reading becomes not a matter of finding meanings “in” texts, but of obtaining gains (through the market contract) – sometimes profound ones: remedies against loneliness, new identities, comforts, and pastimes' (p. 12). This ‘commercially enabled material semiotics' must then be shown as a ‘social praxis', for which Frost draws on Bruno Latour and actor-network theory. Reading for Frost is always efferent, understood in terms of what the reader can ‘take away’. As such the chief gain of reading is identity formation – through desires and ‘entertainment’ – inevitably intertextual and socially constituted within ‘a shared, collective domain that cannot be reduced to the free market's economic individualism’ (p. 13).
The key is not the ‘masculine figure of homo economicus' but his ‘market-active sister homo narrans', through social narratives. The value of books is always framed within social networks, thus gendered, ‘constituted by symbolic (bibliographic) objects and their efferent readers, in which price and commodity exchange are important translational features helping create the network's culture and its politics. Readers, as homo narrans, create the conditions for readerly gains’ (p. 291) but in such a way that economic modelling must be transformed.
Efferent reading and gaining is simply an outcome made possible by the collective interactions that continually re-produce the network. A work of fiction, in this sense, is a networked event, a Net Work, sustained in real time for as long as there are iterations and readerly activity. As meaning is to reception studies, value in the network is not intrinsic but created as an effect of the network, in which cultural and economic value are two components of the same heterogeneous complexity. (p. 292)
Due to this recasting of symbolic goods – here books and reading but the material objects and practices could be altered – within a transformed ‘political economic’ discourse, Frost's Reading, Wanting, and Broken Economics invites interest from readers across a wide range of disciplinary interests from book history to media studies, and not least, of course, economics.