A Reader on Reading

By assuming, like Cortés, the precedence of economic values, we change our relationship to all creative activities. If financial profit is the final goal, then perfection of a kind is what we are after: the production of artifacts that are easily converted into money. That is to say, in a world in which monetary value is the measure of all things, works of art that do not carry in themselves immediate financial gratification, that require mostly long and laborious procedures, that cannot be defined by tags or sound bytes, and that may or may not result in commercial benefits through convoluted aesthetic, ethical, or philosophical byways must be discarded or, at least, given very little consideration. Failure, the acceptance of which is inherent in any creative activity, is regarded in such a light as anathema, as are the poetic creations Shelley called “nurslings of immortality,” since economic law demands that whatever is created carry within itself its own mortality, its “sell by” date, which will enable the chain of production to continue to sell its products. The artistic qualities of a work must be subjected to the taste of the majority or, in certain cases, to a supposed “elitist” taste which the majority are told they might, for a price, attain. Under the common evaluation of economic worth, all other values blur or dissolve.

This need to consume is created, not through the opening of new fields of intellectual and emotional exploration by the work of art itself, but by planned campaigns that, inspired by census taking and market research, effectively invent a prehistory of longing for something that will be later deliberately produced to satisfy it. Readers don’t know that they “need” the Alice books until they have discovered and read Carroll’s work and see how his writing lends words to their own unuttered experience. However, it is possible to produce books to appease a spiritual “need” after advertising prefabricated pseudo-mysticisms available to all, filling bookstores with apocalyptic warnings and conspiracy theories based, of course, on real collective anguish and fear. But while Carroll, even when portraying our most nightmarish experiences, does not provide consolatory solutions, only rich questions in the style of the ancient oracles, the ersatz Alice-texts shower us with tidy answers, clipped and rounded and superficially satisfying, catechisms that lend their readers the illusion of having solved immemorial riddles which, because of their very nature, must remain unresolved.

In our time, in order to create and maintain the huge and efficient machinery of financial profit, we have collectively chosen speed over deliberate slowness, intuitive responses over detailed critical reflection, the satisfaction of reaching snap conclusions rather than the pleasure of concentrating on the tension between various possibilities without demanding a conclusive end. If profit is the goal, creativity must suffer. Discussing the lack of support for scientific research outside the private industries, I once heard a scientist comment, “Electricity was not invented by attempting to produce better lamps.”

Notoriously, every age develops its own artistic genre for its own brand of fools. In the Middle Ages, the charlatan’s sermons and fortune-teller’s prophecies were two of the most popular; in Carroll’s day, it was the three-volume “silly” novel and the moral tales. In ours, the fool’s art par excellence is the art of advertising—commercial, political, or religious—the ability to create desire for the preys of moth and rust. Advertising begins with a lie, with the assertion that Brand X is more important, or more necessary, or merely better than other brands, and that its possession, like that of the magic objects in fairy tales, will make the owner wiser, more beautiful, more powerful, than his or her neighbor. The willing suspension of disbelief that Coleridge demanded from the reader is tempered in advertising by an induced and simultaneous suspension of belief: the goods or services advertised require not so much belief or disbelief as a kind of bland faith in the imaginary thing created, in which colorful, innocuous images, conventional but voided symbols, simple reassurances or commands lull the viewer into a state of vacuous longing. These images surround us now at all times and everywhere. When we speak of a modern “culture of images,” we forget that such a culture was present since the days of our prehistoric ancestors, only the images on caves, in medieval churches, or on Aztec temple walls carried profound and complex meanings, while ours are deliberately banal and shallow. It is not fortuitous that advertising companies control the contemporary art market in which that same deliberate banality and shallowness have been transformed into qualities that justify the monetary value of a work.