On the So-Called Reading Crisis as Class Warfare

“A book is a powerful weapon, it can defend you in your mind.” —Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin

French theorist Pierre Bourdieu once described photography as the art of the middle class. The wealthy know expensive paintings, the lower class comics, and the middle class photography. The point and shoot camera was produced for mass consumption and does not require much expertise. In contrast to the space, time and knowledge required to know the paintings in prestigious museums—taxonomies that are often signifiers of upper class existence.

In the US, class hierarchies have been obscured through the mythology of meritocracy, and the classification of taste as class may unnerve individuals across political spectrums. Politicizing our cultural references provokes the artifice of our consumption habits: are Spotify playlists exceptional reflections of ourselves, or an example of the kind of conditioning afforded by our upbringing? Why do we become familiar with certain cultural traditions and forms and not others?

We are attesting the makings of taste as class divisions similar to the French society Bourdieu described in the mid to late 20th century.

Recent articles have homed in on the crisis of reading without explicitly tending to the phenomena as a site of class warfare. They report that reading is now a rarefied activity: all it takes is reading two books a year to be considered an endangered species. Alongside the techification and devaluation of public arts education, and its corresponding drop in reading practices, we can also observe the growth of exclusive and luxury branded literary salons. Spanish brand Loewe has held an International Poetry Prize for over four decades, under the trust of Loewe Foundation. The Italian brand Miu Miu and French brand Chanel have hosted a recent series of literary clubs with award winning writers. There is Fondazione Prada Books, an imprint by Prada that publishes “catalogues, monographs and artists’ books, with a focus on scholarly texts,” in addition to jewelry house Chaumet’s book series, which includes stories for children.

In an interview with the Financial Times, chief executive of Chaumet Charles Leung describes how books figure into the aims of the corporation, stating, “A book provides an everlasting reference that allows us to detail history, design processes and innovations.” Books permit these corporations—many of them whose foundations are tied to European colonialism and the history of expropriation and looting—to be authors in the telling of history and culture. This catalog is not an exhaustive list.

We are attesting the makings of taste as class divisions similar to the French society Bourdieu described in the mid to late 20th century. The boundaries have shifted, but the implications remain the same. Contemporary cultural theorists remark on how the “chronically online” may become the new signposting of the underclass. Will fluency with the references at fashionable literary salons signpost upper-class membership?

The present moment is stacked with countless op-eds advocating for education to be “useful” and practical (which often then call for the humanities to be useful), and think pieces which lament the decline of student interest in reading, without an analysis into the neoliberalization of education, and who this serves. These authors might be surprised to learn that their arguments are at least 100 years old, if not older.

I’ve written about the ways the rise of US philanthropy, particularly US museum and library formations, can be traced directly with the timeline of 19th-century labor-busting. Historian Paul Krause details how Andrew Carnegie—often noted as the “father” of libraries—would break a town’s union and “gift” the town with a library, and points to how Carnegie thought the library for a town of deunionized workers should only contain useful knowledge.  In a speech given to workers in Braddock 1889, after breaking the town’s steel union, Carnegie states, “If you want to make labour what it should be, educate yourself in useful knowledge. This is the moral I would emphasize.”

After disparaging an education that teaches Greek and Latin, Carnegie described how those who read about Ulysses and Agamemnon or take in Shakespeare “have been ‘educated’ as if they were destined for life upon some other planet than this. . . . What they have obtained has served to imbue them with false ideas and to give them a distaste for practical life.” Carnegie distinguished the knowledge the workers should have from his own. Krause describes how Carnegie attempted to write literature, befriending the likes of Mark Twain and Herbert Spencer, while operating with a very specific notion of education for his “partners” at the mill.

Class analysis remains difficult in the US because its absence allows for the illusion of exceptional individuals to prevail.

Over a hundred years ago, Carnegie linked useful knowledge with practical life. Non-useful ideas, including creativity and reading literature, the development of autonomy, become the markers of an impractical life; this is the life Carnegie lives, but it is not one the workers can have. How has this line of thinking—useful knowledge, practical life—become the marrow of lower-class conditioning?

The present moment may be witnessing a form of wholesale foreclosure, where the reading of books, and the practice of deep reading, may signal one’s class distinction. And the premise of a luxury book salon is that reading is not useful or practical. Luxury objects are often impractical by design. They are not sold to be practical—they are made to be admired, cared for and showcased. Is to attend a literary salon hosted by an heritage brand a signifier of an impractical life?  The gatekeeping is explicit: these are the people who are structurally allotted time and resources to live outside of use.

Contemporary neoliberal education has succeeded in naturalizing the belief that action and movement are for the rich and powerful and surrender and dispossession are the pragmatic condition of life for the rest. The reading crisis can only be understood alongside the defunding of public education, the discourse of useful and practical throughout educational policy, the rise of tech driven distortions of literacy, and the creation of philanthropy and its corporate salons.

Class analysis remains difficult in the US because its absence allows for the illusion of exceptional individuals to prevail. The presence of exceptions, however, does not negate the structure. If we consider class analysis as descriptions of society, rather than prescriptions of how they should be, then we’ll see how better analysis of how class conditions the cultural realm does not exist to strengthen the inequities; better analysis is provided in hopes that we will be inspired one day to abolish them.

There will always be members of the upper-class that may be considered exceptional and vice versa.

Yet having access to the best education and resources and then deciding to be chronically online vastly differs from a life that has had restricted access to education.

As reports of tech free Waldorf schools in Silicon Valley continue to make headlines, we can attest to how the upper-class raise children to be culturally distinct from the rest. The making of reading as luxury and the enclosure of public arts education is how new class hierarchies may be defined. This entrenchment must be fought with the fundamental and wholescale socialization of arts and culture. Such efforts will be considered unpragamatic, expensive, and above all not-useful in this current society, but they will be required in the making of another.