The Hidden Labour of Reading Pleasure

I take this panel's framing question as a provocation to polemicize on the disciplines and regimes of reading rather than exploring its potential resistances and rabbit holes. In what follows, I want to challenge a bourgeois image of reading as pleasure, escape from reality, or leisure and instead bring reading pleasure into focus as hidden labour, increasingly necessary to the realization of capital. Particularly in the current era, a protracted romanticization of reading inside the Academy as a subversive practice and pleasure arguably constitutes an institutional disavowal of the historical correlation of reading and relations of production, a denial of the ways that the recreational time of reading has been subsumed into the workings of late capitalism and of what might be called the political economy of reading.

Right off the bat, then, allow me to lop the "like that" off of the question and truncate it to "Why do I have to read," period. In other words, I won't try to speak to the competing orders of the day which aim to fill the institutional prescription to read with this or that particular agenda, be it to keep reading the literary in a discipline gone awry with theory or to keep reading theory in a discipline backsliding into a formalist infatuation with the literary. Rather, it is our profession's taken-for-granted and bare imperative to keep reading which I'm interested in historicizing. I want to bring it into critical view as a biopolitical pressure which produces reading subjects and populations who unwittingly labour for capital in and through the seeming leisure time of their reading.

Now, on the one hand our profession acknowledges that reading is labour—the very insistence upon reading as a discipline has historically functioned to distinguish an intellectual class of serious scholars from a popular, lax readership. But discipline is still suggestive of an aestheticized labour that can be differentiated from mere work, since work connotes wage labour embedded in economic relations of production. Among the myths of purity which remain normative in our profession is that of a disinterested discipline which labours in the service of cultural knowledges distinct from economic ends. To recognize reading as work, then, is to institutionally recognize that our discipline is now immanent to a market economy and, more specifically, to a knowledge or information economy. It is also to begin acknowledging the toll that the so-called "immaterial labour" of reading takes on subjects (Hardt and Negri 25)—how it can vampirize one's sensual and intellectual energies instead of replenishing them, as the romantic image of reading pleasure would have it.

Before continuing, let me provisionally define both reading and bio-power, since it's an intimate relationship between the two that I'm groping toward here. Biopower, Foucault tells us, is "what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations" (143). Continues Foucault, "This biopower was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes" (141). Reading, in the most diffuse sense bequeathed by cultural studies, might be defined as a form of attention to or reception not just of literary texts but visual signs, cultural artifacts, and social practices. I find it significant that at this historical moment of late capitalism, when reading is massified and refracted through nearly every social activity, an aestheticized image of reading as subversive pleasure continues to obscure its recognition as labour.

The recent work of Jonathan Beller in his book The Cinematic Mode of Production inspires my interest in excavating for the hidden labour of reading pleasure; Beller theorizes a relationship between attention and biopower in studying the "attention economies" of postindustrial capitalism. In Beller's view, bodily attention—particularly the visual attention of the "kino-eye" which processes filmic images—functions to produce value for capitalism through the organization of what he calls "attentional biopower" (4). Beller brings cinematic viewing (which, like reading, has been...