Readers, Markets and a Packet of Literary Media, please – efferent readers and their ordering of a new economics.

Abstract

The modelling of our desires as they are mediated through goods is most often done by economics: not only by that discipline but by an institutionalised version of that discipline, which operates as though it were a natural science articulating universal laws. However, with literary media and other forms of mediated symbolic goods, that economic modelling begins to break down. Because it cannot reduce cultural social values only to indices of supply, demand and equilibrium price, economics struggles to account for the creation and consumption of symbolic goods, which come to us in an entwined cultural and purchasable package. Instead, what is required is a new kind of cultural political economy that can adequately account for this movement of symbolic goods. To begin this modelling for the consumption of books, as much as for other signs, we need to rethink consumption as reading, and reconfigure self-interested homo economicus into what she really is, which is a socialised and socialising homo narrans. In short, since this modelling touches nearly all our branded economy, there is a pressing need to explain our exchange of socially configured desires that the retail of literary media so poignantly sets on edge.