MFAs etc. (24 Nov 2010)

Slate excerpted an article by Chad Harbach from the new n+1 about the academic institutionalization of MFAs. The general idea is that there are now two literary cultures, one that orbits the academic MFA world and a disappearing one in the shrinking milieu of New York publishing -- the world of book parties and Brooklyn apartments. In MFA land, you can with relative ease publish books no one reads, let alone buys, to get academic appointments, just like the other professors throughout English departments. In New York publishing, no one prints your book unless they think it will make money, which means different standards are applied and a different sort of effort is made by writers to make their work enticing. For institutional reasons MFAers tend to write short stories, whereas people trying to make it as professional writers tend to write novels and hope to sell film options.

Harbach suggests MFA programs are "an ingenious partial solution to an eminent American problem: how to extend our already protracted adolescence past 22 and toward 30, in order to cope with an oversupplied labor market." The put writers on the path of semitenured intellectualism, a "lifelong engagement with the university" as opposed with readers at large. This reminded me of Scott McLemee's Bookforum essay about Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals. Describing academics in the mid 20th century who evaded bohemian anomie and the nagging threat of poverty, McLemee writes,

If the writers and critics working in the ’50s did not serve as models for those who came after, that was because the conditions that fostered them—affordable rent, an abundance of magazines open to certain kinds of reviewing and essay writing, and the tendency of society to produce “surplus intellectuals” unable to find employment in well-established institutions— were already disappearing. Or rather, new and altogether more comfortable circumstances were emerging.

Perhaps those circumstances -- an expanded marketplace for a certain kind of credentialed intellectual labor -- have reemerged for MFAs. Writes Harbach: "There were 79 degree-granting programs in creative writing in 1975; today, there are 854! This explosion has created a huge source of financial support for working writers, not just in the form of lecture fees, adjunctships, and temporary appointments—though these abound—but honest-to-goodness jobs." I wonder if any of the MFAs would describe their prospects so optimistically. I always thought the MFA world was very dog-eat-dog, where getting ahead depended on the personal relationships one had with people in positions to help one's career, since writing talent was pretty much equalized across the board systematically by the efficacy of writing programs themselves. (I was deeply troubled when I realized it wasn't so different for literature PhDs.)

The excerpt concludes with Harbach theorizing that professional creative writers may disappear, as they will all be teachers. "The lit-lovers who used to become editors and agents will direct MFA programs instead." At that point, they should want everyone to fulfill the wildest promises of Web 2.0 and aspire to become creative writers too. This at least will keep the MFAs in paying jobs as creativity trainers. I guess this doesn't bother me much; I'm not sure what ever taught me and my generation to expect to be paid for expressing ourselves.

Swedish Crime Fiction (2 March 2010)

Via the Morning News comes this n+1 essay by Ian MacDougall about Swedish crime fiction, primarily Stieg Larsson, the author of the The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and two other similarly named books. I grabbed Dragon Tattoo out of the free pile at my old job after I was in Madrid and saw dozens of different people on the subway reading it. I started in on it after I abandoned Infinite Jest in frustration. It was the perfect antidote for me; a coherent, plot-driven novel written in sturdy, easy-to-parse sentences with not a whiff of wordplay or irony. MacDougall suggests that Larsson's books are an elaborate critique of the welfare state, and that interpretation is certainly there, though arguably Larsson's condemnations are too heavy handed to be taken all that seriously as a critique. (But then again, some people actually regard The DaVinci Code as though it was the return of Feuerbach.) It is refreshing to see Larsson deploy misogyny to increase reader outrage rather than titillation -- or is he doing both? My recollection is that there was something ultimately ghastly and Patrick Bateman-like about the novel. I wanted the female hacker character to be the sole protagonist; the heroic journalist character read at times like mawkish wish fulfillment on Larsson's part.

I subsequently began reading the police-procedural novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, which are much more nuanced and subtle in their critiques and bizarrely prurient about misogyny in a slightly different way. (The Wikipedia page on the authors offers this: "Wahlöö described their goals for the series as to 'use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideologically pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type.' ") Several of the early books in the series hinge on female nymphomaniacs and the social trouble they cause. The authors are somewhat ambiguous with regard to whether they see nymphomania as a legitimate condition or a misogynistic pathologization of women with the temerity to express sexual desire. These novels were written in the 1960s, and ideological fallout of various liberation movements were clearly on the authors' minds. Readers are not left with a ringing, overemphatic indictment of any particular institution or attitude. But, as MacDougall claims for Larsson's books, there's a comparison to be made with the best seasons of The Wire -- you get a sense of the complexity of social conflict and sympathetic rehearsals of various rationalizations.

MacDougall thinks Larsson's books offer a fantasy solution to the social problems the Wire depicts as endemic and cyclical, and he seems to suggest this makes them superior.

Although there is an obvious analogy to recent American forays into the crime genre, like the HBO series The Wire, this only points to what sets Larsson apart—a particularly Scandinavian optimism that insists it’s never too late to effect real change. Larsson, unlike David Simon, doesn’t see institutional dysfunction as a tragic wheel driven around by some essential human flaw. Larsson the idealist believes that an opposing force, if applied strongly enough, can slow that wheel, if not bring it to a grinding halt.

I haven't read them all, but Dragon Tattoo made me think that such optimism is precisely why they are inferior, escapist. Perhaps I have been working in publishing too long to believe that a crusading journalist can ever be plausibly taken as a idealistic force for change.

Infinite Flameout (28 July 2009)

I really wanted to get with the zeitgeist and read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest this summer. But at page 236, in the middle of a unparagraphed stream-of-consciousness passage about a melodramatically veiled woman smoking crack with an improvised works, I couldn't take it anymore. I may be a victim of our short-attention-span society -- and part of why I wanted to read the long, long, novel is that it seemed to run counter to our growing preference for "the short, the sweet, and the bitty," as Tyler Cowen says -- but I kept feeling I was expending a lot of effort on the book with virtually no reward.

It's not that I don't read long books -- I'll happily plod along through Trollope's triple deckers, and in graduate school I worked mainly on the novels of Samuel Richardson, whose Clarissa clocks in at 1,500 pages in the Penguin edition. I just don't have patience for long, incoherent books. Infinite Jest seemed like pointless jigsaw puzzle; unlike Pynchon's books, in which there seems to be so much interconnection between the various threads and so many resonating levels of meaning criss-crossing through the text that it's almost overwhelming but always compelling you to work at holding it together in your mind, Wallace's book just seems to dump a bunch of confusing stuff in your lap and hope that you are too disoriented to recognize that it's not interesting. I kept wishing I was reading the Cliffs Notes version of Infinite Jest that put the action in the right order and explained what all the stupid abbreviations stood for. It didn't help that the novel is preoccupied with several things I just have little interest in reading about: high-school tennis, boarding schools, the self-defeating behavior of drug addicts, the city of Boston -- it sounds dumb, I'm sure, but I would have kept reading a little longer if it was set in Philadelphia.

Maybe I needed to follow Samuel Johnson's advice regarding Richardson: "If you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment." I know the plot is sort of beside the point with Infinite Jest and that wanting to have it explained is just a way of seeking the satisfying sense of an ending when the thematic closure feels elusive, requiring far more effort and patience. Still, though immersing oneself in the texture of Infinite Jest must be the appeal, but I found it off-putting to get into the finer nuances of smart, analytical people destroying themselves.

Wallace's periphrastic style, so effective in his essays, when it helps him establish a particular attitude toward his material and drives him to uncover minutia that pays surprising dividends, was totally infuriating in a novel, when the often arbitrarily dense detailing was just more crap he was making up and more stuff I was supposed to work hard to figure out because he was tauntingly withholding the explanation from me. I found myself growing extremely resentful about that, and it seemed ridiculous to be mad at a book when I could just put it down and read something else. It reminded me, too, of Wes Anderson's later movies, overloaded with detail yet at the same time claustrophobically fastidious and self-referential, precious -- gifted people obsessing over the pressures of being recognized as gifted; all the advantages of talent reduced to morbid sensitivity.

His tendency to overwrite reminded me of when I used to write college papers on a typewriter back in the 1980s. It was hard to delete anything that didn't work out once you typed it into the body of the paper, so I would generally try to write myself out of corners I'd found I'd backed myself into. Wallace is at his worst when this seeming can't-revise/won't-revise approach is combined with pretentious and showy vocabulary, awkward sentence structures (derived perhaps from spending too much time analyzing grammar) and a stream-of-consciousness structure which meanders and turns in on itself. (Who likes stream-of-consciousness? Is there anything more tiresome than an unedited regurgitation of someone else's thoughts?) I didn't think it was especially funny either, despite trying very hard to get in the spirit of the thing. It was too much like gallows humor, and Wallace's suicide, unfortunately, hangs over the book like a pall.

Still, I wish I could find the book readable. Crammed with failed people and their failed strategies for dealing with the strain of social reality, the book succeeded in making me feel like a failure. Thanks for that.

Oh, what I want to know is are you kind? (6 Jan 2009)

Via 3QD comes a link to a Guardian article by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, lamenting the lost art of kindness. The gist is that the rise of rational self-interest under capitalism has made the inherent impulse to be kind seem suspect. Of course, this is hardly a new question; it was a dilemma that greatly exercised 18th century moral philosophers. The authors cite Hume (somewhat misleadingly) and attribute to him this rather maudlin commonsense view: "Any person foolish enough to deny the existence of human kindness had simply lost touch with emotional reality, Hume insisted: 'He has forgotten the movements of his heart.' " But the question of whether we have a moral sense that compels us to varying degrees to be benevolent stretches through much of the English philosophical tradition, most notably in Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, an influence on Adam Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments has a great deal to say about human motive and instinctual sympathy.

The moral sense was a kind of mental organ that conveyed the rightness or wrongness of a deed without our having to make recourse to logic or reasoning or upbringing. People of better quality were presumed to have a more strongly developed moral sense as a given, though it could be sharpened through exercise -- this is one of the early excuses for sentimental fiction; it trained readers when to cry as if on cue. Thanks in large part to sentimental fiction -- one of the first forms of entertainment to reach a broad audience -- the issue of the moral sense became the crux of the sensibility fad, one of the earliest examples of a commercially manufactured zeitgeist. Typically sentimental heroes and heroines are depicted as emotional sounding boards, passively responding to tragic events and modeling the reaction readers are supposed to have. Meanwhile, rational calculators pursing their interest are demonized as heartless and cruel, eradicating kindness of altruism and the rest of it. Luckily, God generally steps in to resolve the impracticalities of ignoring the realities of incipient capitalism. (Outside of fiction, we don't have that leisure.) The appeal to innate kindness was invariably a method for building up class distinction, whether to preserve aristocratic prestige from vulgar upstarts or to give the vulgar upstarts a way to compete with aristocrats on a level playing field. The moral sense, which anyone can claim, supplants the bloodline as the preferred mode of innate justification for class privilege. Sensibility also serves as a way of redeeming the cruelty of what Marx calls "primitive accumulation" -- the various methods of dispossession and immiseration and proletarianization necessary to launch capitalism in earnest. If you assert the durability of the human heart under siege, and furthermore imply that the heart's glory is revealed only under duress, you do much to justify that siege and embrace that duress as a necessary if not fortunate evil.

Also, by associating kindness with extraordinary heroism, it makes it into a kind of abnormality, as the authors of the Guardian piece point out. "Kindness is seen either as a cover story or as a failure of nerve. Popular icons of kindness - Princess Diana, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa - are either worshipped as saints or gleefully unmasked as self-serving hypocrites. Prioritising the needs of others may be praiseworthy, we think, but it is certainly not normal." But I don't think it follows that kindness is now universally regarded "with suspicion" as the authors assert -- that seems like a purely polemical proposition intended to evoke the possibility of some revolution in friendliness after which everyone will smile on everyone, no polite nicety will go unperformed, we'll all ride on unicorns, sing and dance with peace and love, and anger will be an altogether forgotten emotion, a distant memory, like racism and sexism and all those other forms of discrimination we have defeated. Maybe if we solved some of society's obvious injustices, kindness would take care of itself. The authors assert that "Most people, as they grow up now, secretly believe that kindness is a virtue of losers." That is wrong; I think that they openly know that it is the condescension of the entitled.

There's a good chance that I am precisely the curmudgeonly sort of independence-loving troll the authors would like to gulag, but I found this utterly false:

There is nothing we feel more consistently deprived of than kindness; the unkindness of others has become our contemporary complaint. Kindness consistently preoccupies us, and yet most of us are unable to live a life guided by it.

Is there really such a deficit of kindness? I live in a reputedly unkind place, New York City, but I experience quotidian kindness from strangers on a near daily basis, whether it's someone reminding me that I've dropped my scarf, or someone slowing down in a revolving door so I don't get smashed, or someone exchanging a look with me about something odd going on, or what have you. It's hardly the "forbidden pleasure" the authors make it out to be. I get the sense of humdrum human solidarity so routinely that I only realize how much I take it for granted when I experience the false pleasantry in the suburbs from salespeople, who are virtually the only strangers I have occasion to interact with. Usually I have no need to be preoccupied by it and am not afflicted with the absence of opportunities to express it. That doesn't mean there are not also routine expressions of callousness either -- every time someone stops at the top of the subway steps to continue their cell-phone conversation, I am reminded of how easy it is to slip into a private world of blithe inconsiderateness. And when I am approached for spare change and fail to break my stride, my own callousness is brought home to me. But I'm hardly preoccupied by it and rarely complain of it.

I wanted to sympathize with the authors' concern with the dearth of kindness, which seems closely related to my cardinal complaint about society, its celebration of convenience as an end in itself. But the authors' nannyish tone about the subject, I must admit, made me increasingly annoyed. Probably because I am desperately rationalizing my meanness:

Kindness - that is, the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself - has become a sign of weakness (except of course among saintly people, in whom it is a sign of their exceptionality). No one yet says parents should stop being kind to their children. None the less, we have become phobic of kindness in our societies, avoiding obvious acts of kindness and producing, as we do with phobias, endless rationalizations to justify our avoidance.

But a concern with kindness seems like a fundamental evasion of more substantial problems; kindness itself is the rationalization, the way to short-circuit arguments about the institutional change we should be seeking. Alas, I am one of those "radicals and socialists determined to replace charity with justice, elite kindness with universal rights." I should recognize that instead, we just ought to worry about being nicer and less competitive. The authors recognize the "bullying" of kindness welded to power, but seemingly fail to recognize that they are inseparable. Kindness only becomes salient, becomes worthy of note, as a dimension of power. Outside of power, it's just an expression of the species' inherent activity (as the authors' reference to Darwin supports). It's nice to be nice, but something is not nice about noticing it and advertising it. At that point, kindness is being offered as justification for something unkind we are doing elsewhere.

A theory: When kindness is performed out of social necessity by those without the privilege of inward-looking selfishness and individualist isolation, it doesn't register as "kindness." When one finds they must make a conscious effort to be kind and must trumpet their efforts to have it recognized as such, it's probably already too late for them to be worrying about kindness -- they have already become the beneficiary of an unequal society to the degree that they are conscious of being or not being kind. If you think, "how kind of me," how kind have you really been? Being kind has already become an expression of class privilege, not human fellow feeling.

The pleasure of multiple selves (2 Nov 2008)

In the Atlantic, Paul Bloom has an article about the ways in which having multiple personalities is not a disorder so much as it is a natural part of our psychological apparatus. (The disorder comes when our multiple selves grow unruly.) Bloom is interested in how this proliferation of identities relates to the sorts of questions that often come up in behavioral economics, the conflict between short-term gratification and long-term rational prudence.

We used to think that the hard part of the question “How can I be happy?” had to do with nailing down the definition of happy. But it may have more to do with the definition of I. Many researchers now believe, to varying degrees, that each of us is a community of competing selves, with the happiness of one often causing the misery of another. This theory might explain certain puzzles of everyday life, such as why addictions and compulsions are so hard to shake off, and why we insist on spending so much of our lives in worlds­—like TV shows and novels and virtual-reality experiences—that don’t actually exist.

The latter part is what caught my attention, because I've had an interest in the concept of vicarious pleasure from when I studied 18th century novels. Bloom notes the ubiquity of vicarious pleasure and it's centrality to modern life:

The population of a single head is not fixed; we can add more selves. In fact, the capacity to spawn multiple selves is central to pleasure. After all, the most common leisure activity is not sex, eating, drinking, drug use, socializing, sports, or being with the ones we love. It is, by a long shot, participating in experiences we know are not real—reading novels, watching movies and TV, daydreaming, and so forth.
Enjoying fiction requires a shift in selfhood. You give up your own identity and try on the identities of other people, adopting their perspectives so as to share their experiences. This allows us to enjoy fictional events that would shock and sadden us in real life.

I always figured the roots of that primacy of vicarious pleasure were in the development of the novel, since the novel, the printed book, was the first reified form of that elusive pleasure that comes with being able to escape into fantasy, to become another self for the sake of entertainment. For the first time, the kind of self-fashioning became a product that could sit dormant on a shelf instead of an elaborate experience that required social engagement. Typically this pleasure that novels reliably supplied on demand was condemned as "escapism" -- and it is an undeniably antisocial pleasure to withdrawal from company into a guided tour of your own imagination.

Novels were also condemned for setting bad examples, for divorcing experience from moral responsibility; as Bloom points out, fictions allow us to experience as pleasure the sadistic doings of a Tony Soprano. Lots of early novels, especially during the "age of sensibility" in the second half of the 18th century, made this their explicit subject -- they investigated our ability to sympathize with others and in a way become them, and they encouraged readers to experience vicariously such dignifying scenarios as giving alms to the poor and protecting innocent virgins and so on. Adam Smith founded his moral philosophy on this notion of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

But the special pleasure of fiction is that you can imaginatively experience both the side of the hero and the villain simultaneously and vicariously derive pleasure from both, nullifying the presumed moral edification that was supposed to be involved. Fiction doesn't yield just one new self, but multiple selves simultaneously. This proliferation is rightly recognized as a subversive form of pleasure, though early entrepreneurs quickly seized upon it, and used it as the foundation of marketing, which in turn spawned the profitable market for mass-manufactured consumer goods. In trying to sell these goods, the entrepreneurs, proto-Barnums all of them, took their cues from how novels worked on their readers; they presented the goods as opportunities for buyers to imagine new selves for themselves, not mere opportunities to simply acquire useful household items. Goods were transformed into implements of a fantasy lifestyle, less useful in and of themselves than as prompts for deeply imagined fantasies. (Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch offers an extreme illustration of this. In the novel, workers who are marooned on a inhospitable planet are supplied with miniature, doll-house versions of the comforts they have been forced to surrender and a drug that lets them project themselves into the universe of the doll house, and imagine a whole luxury-filled life based those miniatures. The drug proves irresistible and highly addictive.) The early middle class's experience with fiction, with the forced fantasy of moral sympathy and sensibility, prepared them for the pleasures of lifestyle marketing, whose efficacy helped grow the consumer goods market. From our handling of fictional narratives, perhaps, grows our facility with maintaining multiple selves in a way that is pleasurable rather than psychotic. But do we become addicted to the procuring of new selves rather than developing and integrating the ones appropriate to our situation in society?

Typically, critics of vicarious pleasure (me included) argue that it robs us of the opportunity to experience some true, authentic pleasure, that would presumably reflect our true natures. But if the research that Bloom highlights is correct, it substantiates what postmodern theorists have also suggested, namely that there is no one authentic self whose pleasures and desires need to discovered and privileged -- no master self whose integrity is threatened by the simulacrums offered through vicarious experience. Instead we are by nature a plurality of possibilities, anchoring our sense of self in contextual clues, in the exigencies of the moment, and delighting in the freedom of being whatever we can imagine in the circumstances that present themselves, whether it prompted by prepackaged entertainment or by the sort of situations we manage to blunder into in our lives.

In fact, the fantasy of a master self whose authenticity is sacrosanct and unalterable, is one of the appealing fictions that marketing most masterfully exploits. It is always promising us what we "really" want, encouraging us to find and gratify our true desires, to become who we really are, to get in touch with our nature. This "true self" may in fact be the best fictive creation of advertisers, their most pleasing fantasy on offer -- the "real" you" that knows no contradiction or insecurity or indecisiveness about what it wants. Perhaps it is no accident that shopping has become the primary forum in which we seek to discover the authentic self; that may be the only habitat in which such a creature exists.

Financial fictions (7 June 2008)

This comes from the three-part WSJ series on the last days of Bear Stearns:

At least six efforts to raise billions of dollars -- including selling a stake to leveraged-buyout titan Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. -- fizzled as either Bear Stearns or the suitors turned skittish. And repeated warnings from experienced traders, including 59-year Bear Stearns veteran Alan "Ace" Greenberg, to unload mortgages went unheeded.
Top executives resisted, in part, because they were concerned the moves would upset the delicate calculus of appearances and perceptions that is as important on Wall Street as dollars and cents. If Bear Stearns betrayed weakness, they worried, skittish customers would pull their money out of the firm, and other financial institutions would refuse to trade with it.

It's an uncontroversial point, but I'm still shocked whenever I contemplate how the world of finance runs on carefully constructed, necessary fictions. When I ignored the business world, I always assumed it was build on bottom-line numbers and empirically deduced decisions -- I thought it was far more technocratic than it actually is, and I totally overlooked such socio-psychological phenomena as the entrepreneurial "animal spirits" that Keynes posits, and the significance of inflation expectations, and consumer confidence, all of which can be ideologically sustained and manipulated. It makes me think there must ultimately be some renumerative use for the skills I learned as a literature graduate student, where we were taught precisely how to analyze carefully constructed fictions to reveal their carefully concealed presuppositions as well as their lacunae. It seems like the delicate calculus of appearances and perceptions requires a mastery of rhetorical skills required for building a believable picture of reality as well as a mastery of the tenets of risk management.

But the necessary fictions lead to problems like what Dean Baker details here.

Since the vast majority of economists failed to recognize two huge financial bubbles, the collapse of which had enormous consequences for the economy, it is reasonable to conclude that there is some inherent problem with the nature of the consensus within the economics profession. Either these economists hold views about the world that prevent them from seeing financial bubbles, or the sociology of the profession is such that they are unable to express independent opinions.

Perhaps economists are institutionally discouraged from promulgating opinions that might compromise the business built on fragile hopes.

Avant-garde marketing (5 June 2008)

In the 1960s, Alain Robbe-Grillet was a proponent of the New Novel, whose purpose seems to have been to dispense with plot and characters, forcing readers to sift through a pile of description in search of what might be the writer's guiding purpose. A collection of Robbe-Grillet's essays, For a New Novel sheds less light than you would think on what he was up to, but I found it very interesting to read in conjunction with Rob Walker's book about contemporary marketing techniques, which are avant-garde in their own way, ignoring traditional limits and taking on unexpected forms and dispensing with its expected purpose of delivering an unambiguous sales pitch. It's no accident that Robbe-Grillet's most famous film, Last Year at Marienbad, has been a continual source inspiration to luxury marketers since it was released in 1961. It is hyperstylized but sufficiently empty, so that one can invest whatever significance one wants into the unresolvable situations depicted. It's a perfect approach for marketing goods like perfume -- conjure an aura akin to that which perfume is supposed to have, but make it indeterminate and "mysterious." The film is an encyclopedia of techniques for destroying the sense of time, place, contingency, and logic -- all things that marketing seeks to undermine in order to exert its illogical, free-associational form of persuasion that relies on consumers to connect the dots. The nature of the marketing is adaptable enough to inspire and then absorb a wide variety of wishes projected by consumers. Effective marketing coaxes us into doing the work of persuading ourselves. The goods have a chance of becoming placebos, that work because we believe.

This passage from Robbe-Grillet's "Time and Description" is about avant-garde fiction and film, but it seems like it applies strikingly well to any number of the "murketing" campaigns underway, or even to the nature of contemporary advertising itself:

Now, if temporality gratifies expectation, instantaneity disappoints it; just as spacial discontinuity dissolves the trap of the anecdote. These descriptions whose movement destroys all confidence in the things described, these heroes without naturalness as without identity, this present which constantly invents itself, as though in the course of the very writing, which repeats, doubles, modifies, denies itself, without ever accumulating in order to constitute a past -- hence a "story", a "history" in the traditional sense of the word -- all this can only invite the reader (or the spectator) to another mode of participation than the one to which he was accustomed. If he is sometimes led to condemn the works of his time, that is, those which most directly address him, if he even complains of being deliberately abandoned, held off, disdained by the authors, this is solely because he persists in seeking a kind of communication which has long ceases to be the one which is proposed to him.
For far from neglecting him, the author today proclaims his absolute need of the reader's cooperation, an active, conscious, creative assistance. What he asks of him is no longer to receive ready-made a world completed, full, closed upon itself, but on the contrary to participate in a creation, to invent in his turn the work -- and the world -- and thus to learn to invent his own life.

That strikes me as marketing's broader sales mission: draw consumers in, entice them to fantasize and narrate themselves into a slightly refreshed existence through a vicarious participation in the indeterminate fragments of experience the marketers supply -- and of course through purchasing the goods associated with the whole process, which come to seem like the catalyst for all that creativity.