Abstract
The tradition of anti-instrumentality, as Caroline Levine puts it, has helped defend the integrity of humanities’ disciplines, but this withdrawal from Zweckrationalität has an undesirable side effect, which is to abandon large areas of human endeavour to modelling by disciplines of science-technology, most eagerly by neo-classical economics. However, neo-classical economics is neither as rational nor as science-technology based as one might think; noted in the critical commentary of its ‘physics envy’. Key concepts to economic modelling – the sovereign individual (homo economicus) and rational choice – can be challenged, and economics does little to admit that economic decision making is saturated in race, gender, and class. But nowhere are neo-classical limitations more evident than in ideas of consumption and specifically the consumption of symbolic goods – in this paper’s case study, the consumption of ‘books’. Price and demand under conditions of scarcity clearly cannot account for the cultural, aesthetic value of symbolic goods, but neither can these parameters adequately model those same goods as purchasable items. Instead, value as an entwined market and cultural value must be thought of as something created through the symbol’s reading, and thus, for symbolic goods, reading becomes the correct term for what economics calls consumption. The proposal has potential consequences for many aspects of our branded economy and reconfigures homo economicus to who she really is, homo narrans. If economics is merely the mathematised wing of a particular cultural political way of thinking, then humanities reading studies could readily assist in a political-economic re-alignment.
Presenters
Simon FrostPrincipal Lecturer in English and Literary Media, Humanities and Law, Bournemouth University, Dorset, United Kingdom
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Book Retail, Efferent reading, Consumption, Symbolic goods, Political Economy
