What most struck me when I returned to academia as a history editor after seventeen years working in commercial publishing was an apparent general disinterest in the subject of reading. I don’t mean a disinterest in reading as the object of specialized technical investigations into its neurophysiology or its pedagogy. I mean a disinterest in reading in the Enlightenment sense of an autonomous individual citizen’s emancipative cognitive act of self-fashioning in relation to a democratic interpretive community of political equals. Reading, in this strongly idealized liberal sense, obviously seemed to be undergoing profound transformations as a result of the new communication technologies. I was surprised that scholars in the university were not heatedly debating the implications of these technologies for the emancipative dimension of literacy in relation to our communication technologies’ capacities to reshape the productive uses of knowledge and information.

Rightly or wrongly, I sensed in the academy a residual assumption of the centrality of an unchanged commitment to a “high” literacy of a traditional middle-class book culture as the engine of progressive democratic social and cultural development. At the same time, there also seemed to be a recognition that the new economics of the digital information age had altered the emancipative dimensions of literacy in irreversible and profound—and perhaps profoundly threatening—ways. Coming back into what I still thought of as the protected, non-profit space of the university, I assumed that reading as the emancipative activity at the heart of the Enlightenment idea of individual freedom and collective democratic welfare would have become a general topic of urgent concern, both theoretical and practical.

I would like to propose for the Knowledge Rules site a discussion that focuses on the relation of contemporary scholarly knowledge to the changes in both individual reading and the interpretive communities of the traditional book occasioned by the new media technologies and the innovations they bring to the commercialization of the word. I hope this discussion will inquire into the present status and subjectivity of that Enlightenment figure of the individual reader—that autonomous individual citizen, empowered by book-literacy to participate in democratically constructed interpretive communities aspiring to enact emancipative values of universal reach. Two goals of such a discussion, I hope, would be to explore the question of how the freedom of the individual reader is related to the scholarly community working in the protected space of the university and how both are related to the construction of a vibrant democratic public sphere.

I am not a scholar of these matters, but I am an editor who professionally inhabits the intersection of commerce and written knowledge contained in books. I would like to offer what I think are three representative moments from my experience of book publishing to better convey the sources of my sense of the need for the discussion I am proposing.

Let me first give you a sketch of my job. My job, as I see it, is to publish good works of history the reading of which will make a difference in the world—and for the press to sell enough copies of these books so as not to lose money in the process. My job, in other words, is to contribute to the successful operation of a “non-profit business model” (a contradiction in terms, of course, that is important to make part of the discussion). At the most obvious level, I as a university press editor must use the production and distribution mechanisms of the market to foster and support the non-market values and practices of scholarship, individual reading and learning.

I confess to taking seriously Jürgen Habermas’s claim in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere that for all the illusoriness of bourgeois freedom, “the ideas of freedom, love, and cultivation of the person” at its center were “surely more than just ideology.” These ideas, developed and cultivated within a vibrant culture of middle-class print literacy, Habermas argues, created a general conception of humanity that “promised redemption from the constraint of what existed without escaping into a transcendental realm.” This remains, I think, a powerful articulation of the emancipative project universities and their presses should be in the business of trying to accomplish in the present.

The first moment of publishing I would like to relate comes from my days as a Random House editor. A weekly Wednesday afternoon meeting was suddenly interrupted by a marketing manager who urgently needed to call the managing editor away from our meeting. The marketing manager had just been informed that Ernest Gaines’ novel, A Gathering of Old Men, had been selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club. 600,000 copies of the paperback edition needed to be printed and shipped and distributed to bookstores across the U.S. by the following Monday afternoon, to be available for sale to consumers when the selection was announced by Oprah on the air. The actual crisis turned out not to be the availability of printers’ time or manufacturing facilities or shipping capacity. These things were available for a price. What was missing, it turned out, was a sufficient quantity of paper (literally in the world) at such short notice to print that many books by Friday afternoon. Finally sufficient paper was found in two separate allotments – one in Sweden and one in Japan, if I remember correctly – previously scheduled to be used for other printing jobs for other companies. The necessary number of Random House copies were printed and shipped in time. As soon as this bottleneck was solved, it is hard to convey the visceral rush felt by everyone who had been in that room once we realized the scale of the sudden profits that had just materialized out of thin air.

But what does it mean for the idea of private reading that a good novel—but not, finally, a masterwork—was accorded such spectacular interpretive validation in such a commercially staged and electronically mediated way? Did not this commercial context shape both the individual and the public impact of this work of literature in perhaps decisive ways?

My second anecdote is much quieter. I recently received an e-mail from an author saying that his book was the co-recipient of a prestigious academic book prize. My heart leapt. My heart leapt because this was a book I knew was very good. (I had gone out of my way to champion it.) But I had not really, fully read it. I had read enough to know that it was on a very difficult and crucial subject having to do with reconstructing a non-Western, mostly non-literate contemporary subjectivity in which, the argument was, the sensorium through which consciousness was created had to be imagined differently from that possessed by the reader reading the book. When the readers’ reports came in from scholars evaluating the manuscript, I was glad my judgment had been confirmed by their comments. Nevertheless, I still had not read the book from start to finish. This was despite the fact it concerned a topic I knew was important and would significantly change me if I could find the time and focused contemplative attention necessary for its full intellectual engagement. I still have not read it.

In the past eighteen months this book, in large part as a result of winning the prize, has now sold a respectable number of copies for an academic hardcover. Yet I fear that most readers for whom the book is written, like me, will not find and will not be able to create the contemplative time necessary to make use of the emancipative potential such a book holds. What does it mean that scholars may increasingly be writing very good books for audiences who, though possessed of interpretive competence, simply cannot meet their interpretive demands?

The third publishing moment I want to relate concerns a visit to the press by a representative of Google. This happened a few years ago now. Google’s representative announced that Google wanted to scan the entire backlist and make it available to their search engines as part of what the company claims may well be the world’s largest database. In the backlist the press possessed, the representative explained, “platinum-grade” “content” that was “locked-up” because it had no searchable electronic presence. Google, the representative said, very much wanted access to that content. Because our scholarly books were not visible on the web, they did not effectively exist in the contemporary world. Google was offering the press an affordable means of acquiring an indispensable electronic presence on the internet in return for adding all the intellectual content it had created to Google’s inventory of as much of the world’s information as it could digitize. Sales of individual copies of our books would be marginally increased in this way. But what Google was really giving the press, the representative stressed in a strikingly fervent and reverent voice, was the power to “monetize the page.”

Google states that its corporate mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Profit from selling advertising, Google’s corporate information page goes on to say, is a means to that end:

“As a business, Google generates revenue by providing advertisers with the opportunity to deliver measurable, cost-effective online advertising that is relevant to the information displayed on any given page. This makes the advertising useful to you as well as to the advertiser placing it. We believe you should know when someone has paid to put a message in front of you, so we always distinguish ads from the search results or other content on a page. We don’t sell placement in the search results themselves, or allow people to pay for a higher ranking there.”

But according to Enlightenment principles of emancipative reading, isn’t the emancipative intellectual value of what appears before a private reader’s eyes constituted by its “reading” within an interpretive frame that resists corporations’ right to disrupt and appropriate its communicative and contemplative time in order “to deliver measurable, cost-effective online advertising”? (The Google corporate information page stresses its ability to deliver targeted consumers’ attention to advertisers by keying advertising through algorithmic programming to specific words and their frequency in the text and thereby matching private reading with consumer demographic profiles and market desires. Google proudly names this activity its “Adwords” and “Adsense” programs.)

I have related these three disparate publishing anecdotes as a way to try to situate the important question of emancipative reading and the interpretive community of scholarship concretely in the quotidian landscape of contemporary media. In each of these moments I have tried to capture my own experience of a rupture in reading’s ability to realize its emancipative potential when held to the exacting ideals assumed by the print-culture we as academics have inherited from the Enlightenment. The SSRC’s Knowledge Rules blog I hope will offer a chance to use the new communicative technology of the internet to further the discussion of how the emancipative activity of individual reading and the scholarly community’s commitments to invigorating a democratic public sphere can best be brought together now.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 10:30 am and is filed under Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.