'The Social Hieroglyphic': Modernist Reading Practices and their Afterlives
Anticipating notions of modern cryptography, Marx famously observed in Capital Vol. I, that value “does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic.” Therefore, to understand the “product of [this] labour”--the commodity form–we must learn how to read (as in, decode) the “social hieroglyphic.” Reading, for Marx, thus becomes a site of significant contention as it leads to the making and unmaking of our social world. This panel seeks to examine ways in which the modernist era encountered processes of “social hieroglyph[y]” in the literary marketplace and turned the act of reading into a distinct practice with serious stakes.