The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [13]
Whatever the conscious claims of art (or literature) with respect to purposelessness, its unconscious function was always a motivation, always a kind of use. Here it might also be of interest to recall what Adorno and Max Horkheimer had to say about use and uselessness in their essay “The Culture Industry” in Dialectic of Enlightenment.
The use which men in this antagonistic society promise themselves from the work of art is itself, to a great extent, that very existence of the useless which is abolished by complete inclusion under use. The work of art, by completely assimilating itself to need, deceitfully deprives men of precisely that liberation from the principle of utility which it should inaugurate. What might be called use value in the reception of cultural commodities is replaced by exchange value; in place of enjoyment there are gallery-visiting and factual knowledge: the prestige seeker replaces the connoisseur.40
Uselessness itself becomes a commodity, and a sign of leisure, culture, and social standing.
Raymond Williams, who deftly traced the history of literature as a term, noted that even as it changed from the old sense of “literacy” toward our modern understanding of the word, literature was “a reading rather than a writing” and “a category of use and condition rather than of production.”41 Williams suggested that the emergence of literature in a modern sense was a class-based event that established “the reading public” as a bourgeois accomplishment. It was at about this time that the general term in older use, poetry or poesy, was supplemented or replaced by literature. Criticism and the development of a concept of taste and discrimination became linked to “the use or (conspicuous) consumption of works, rather than on their production.”42 Subsequent categories of value, like imaginative literature (distinguished from intellectual prose, discursive or factual writing) were also responses to “a new social order: that of capitalism, and especially industrial capitalism.” Distinctions began to be made within categories as well as between them: not all writing was classed as literature, and (“ironically,” Williams thought) where the idea of literature had developed simultaneously with the dissemination of printed books as a mark of the new reading class, now popular writing and “mass culture” were to be distinguished from “literature.” Ideas of “national literature” and of a literary “tradition” were part of this new “recognition of ‘literature’ as a specializing social and historical category.”43
Williams’s account of Marxism and literature was itself written from within a historical, social, and national context, as he readily acknowledged. But these categories of national, social, historical, political, ideological, and other motivating frameworks shaped the debate about “use” from other twentieth-century perspectives as well.
For much of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, then, the debate about the usefulness of literature was focused on social issues: moral instruction, ethical concerns, and societal and political advancement. Whether the governing ideology was liberalism, conservatism, aestheticism, Marxism, or Western democracy, the arguments for use were deployed in the service of a certain vision of a humane society. From the 1990s onward, various forces converged to completely change the nature of the question. Perhaps most significant was the advent of the Internet, with its 24/7 news cycle and its globalized, democratized mode of user participation. Every reader could be a critic, publishing reviews on sites like Amazon.com. Every poem, every quotation, and every misquotation could now be searched instead of researched. Vast quantities of literature were available online, including facsimiles of rare books once only found in libraries, museums, or monasteries.
A shift in attitudes toward