Notas sobre públicos e mercados de Matthew Satdler

Na passada semana "requisitei" na biblioteca informal da cadeira o livro Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century, editado por Travis Kurowski, Wayne Miller e Kevin Prufer em 2016. Trata-se de uma compilação de ensaios escritos por vários agentes do universo da publicação de livros sobre o presente e futuro da área. O primeiro dos textos é da autoria de Matthew Stadler, autor e co-fundador do projecto Publication Studio. Originalmente uma palestra dada em 2012 na Universidade de Yale, The Ends of the Book: Reading, Economies & Publics reflecte sobre as diferenças entre públicos e mercados, sobre o acto de ler e de comprar livros. Partilho convosco um excerto que copiei para o meu caderno pessoal, por achar particularmente inspirador.
                                                                                        orientador.

"Reading can shape an economy. I call that practice "publication". (...) Publication is the creation of new publics in the culture of reading. It includes the production and circulation of books, the management of digital commons, and rich social life of gathering and conversation with books and readers. All of those activities together construct a space of conversation, a public space, which beckons a public into being. Shopping - which is the prevailing culture of our time, and which drives most of the choices now being made in the publishing industry - corrodes and evacuates publics. So real publication begins by quieting the noise of shopping.

    The culture of shopping is pervasive. What exactly does it do for you? Shopping stages the repeated performance of the self along rigorously organized lines. The purchase is its pivotal moment. (...) The act of choosing becomes a repeated affirmation of your selfhood and liberty.

Shopping positions you alone in the spotlight, center stage, performing the correct, repeated display of your taste. It atomizes it. Shopping is the opposite of reading.

(...)

    A plaza of holiday shoppers, no matter how crowded or busy, does not constitute a public. The atomized shoppers lack the crucial recognition of one another, the capacity to see each other and act in common. When we engage strangers as people, when we find ourselves partly by finding their selves, we catalyze a public. When we withdraw that recognition and categorically exclude or erase them, we retreat into something that is not public. Usually it is a market. The catalyzing or erasure of publicness is palpable. (...) In the spark of recognition, of common humanity across difference, you feel a public kindled; you feel its flame grow.

    There is no preexisting public. Publics begin in willful actions, an invitation, an event. A public can arise in any defined space that is open to strangers - a street, a meeting hall, a plaza or a park, or a book - and is best supported by small, formally clear settings where there is an obvious treshold to be crossed. An invitation to join, literal or implied, is crucial. A good example is the cover of a book, which can be opened or closed.

    We catalyze publics when we make and circulate books. The book held in a stranger's hand welcomes him into a space shared by others."

João Narciso