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Record W2033939018 · doi:10.1353/esc.0.0034

The Hidden Labour of Reading Pleasure

2007· article· en· W2033939018 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueEnglish studies in Canada · 2007
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicUniversity Challenges and Reforms
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPleasureReading (process)AestheticsPoliticsCapitalismSociologyLiteraturePhilosophyArtPsychologyPolitical scienceLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

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 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 the recreational time of reading has been subsumed into the workings of late capitalism and of 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 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 for capital in and through the seeming leisure time of their reading. Now, on the one hand our profession acknowledges 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 can be differentiated from mere work, since work connotes wage embedded in economic relations of production. Among the myths of purity which remain normative in our profession is 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 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 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 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 to or reception not just of literary texts but visual signs, cultural artifacts, and social practices. I find it significant 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 of reading pleasure; Beller theorizes a relationship between and biopower in studying the attention economies of postindustrial capitalism. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.340
Threshold uncertainty score0.343

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.032
GPT teacher head0.297
Teacher spread0.265 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it