The emergence and popularity of short-form media, from the youngest members of society (yes, those born in 2020 are now five) to our grandparents, has bred discussion of a post-literate society: a vision once considered distant and dystopian, left in the recesses of our minds most famously by Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. However, in today’s [western] cultural milieu, no fire is required to remove books from our shelves. People simply do not want to read anymore.
Three summers ago, I walked past the New York University ‘bookstore’ only to catch sight of a display of purple sweatshirts and duck-bill caps in the storefront window. It was a strange sight to see the ‘bookstore’ window absent of books, nevermind the fact that it was the storefront of an academic institution. Why did the ‘bookstore’ seem to value merchandising more than books?
The college bookstore as a store for books is a dying institution. And now, reading outdoors is culturally ‘performative.’ Both phenomena exhibit a predominating thirst for representation over meaningful engagement with the original product (in the former case, education, and in the latter, reading for pleasure or knowledge); their emergence brings us closer to the actualisation of a post-literate culture.
The death of the college bookstore in the United States has been a silent and unceremonious affair, but one quite dear to my heart. Cambridge, Massachusetts has lost a great deal of bookstores in my lifetime, most notably the Curious George Shop (now a Starbucks), and the Harvard Coop’s basement, which used to house shelves of children’s books, young adult novels, short stories, colouring books, and comics. Today, go to the Harvard bookstore and you will find rows of cold clothing racks with branded sweaters, t-shirts, and a white, pasty linoleum floor. The children’s reading stage, little chairs, and bright shelves are gone. We underestimate the impact of these children’s series and books, since the plots and characters often only stick around in our memory through blurry vignettes. But I was quite excited to see the graphic novel editions of Percy Jackson appear on those basement shelves, and sit in the short chairs and tables with a book I had picked up. The Harvard Coop is now full of merchandise.
This is not an isolated case. The Brown University bookstore sends you up a set of stairs and into a corner, where you may find two books by Roland Barthes in a meager literary theory section. At Stanford University, the first floor of the ‘bookstore’ is now home to the university’s own merchandising, with sections for specific brands (Nike, Jansport, etc). Meanwhile, the second level philosophy and literature sections shrink – some of the shelves are even left half-full. When I went to the MIT bookstore in the Summer of 2023 (this shop is still excellent, but closed on weekends) a man walked in to ask about the hats with the MIT press publisher’s logo, and left after the man at the desk said they didn’t carry them anymore.
And let us be clear: these university bookstores are not those of dying liberal arts colleges or state institutions—these are the representative bodies of American higher education, schools often listed among the best, not only in the nation, but in the world. At the top of the ivory tower, with lofty endowments and high rankings on US News, these institutions cannot maintain their bookstores as stores for books.
At this point, we can turn to Guy Debord’s famous text The Society of the Spectacle (and, as if to piss on the poor soul’s grave, we will use his book for sterile cultural analysis rather than revolutionary ends). “Spectacle” for Debord refers to the detachment of lived experience into a series of image-objects, which generate social, political, and economic value that are treated as real. For example, the commodity is no longer valued for its use but its value as a commodity (an iPhone 17 is thinner than the last, but not much has really changed). The college t-shirt is an excellent example of how education has become reified, how education has receded into a representation. The act of reading and learning has been divided from the spectacle of reading and learning.
The representation of a good education via its name brand is the only desirable object from the ivory tower. The books produced by the university’s academic press, by the university’s own academics, novelists, and poets, are far less poignant than the association one can easily conjure through a duck-bill cap. Reading will not make yourself appear more learned, for that would take too long — put on the hat instead, and maybe get the socks too. The fruits of education are prickly, in the sense that they are difficult to obtain. Thus, through tote bags and sweatshirts, the subject can now associate even if they do not participate. The corporate logic of capital accumulation would like you to continue to switch from representation to representation, ad interim, for a lifetime.
Since representation is all that matters to our contemporary cultural logic, consumables that quench this thirst prevail. Education is consumable. Taste is consumable. For a price, one can assume a claim of association, divorced from their material reality.
Just as the college bookstore has turned to branding, the individual has turned to signalling. The modern man is a hermit crab, switching from shell to shell. While the world is in flux, the current pinnacle of this development of a culture of representation can be summed up in the “Performative Male.” The performative male is a shell, an amalgam of products placed purposefully on the form of flesh and bone, to fashion it, like a bird’s feathers attract a mate. It is a tempered masculinity, detached from its most aggressive features, principally softened by ‘refined’ tastes (matcha, Clairo, thrifted jeans). And by refined, what we mean here is uncontroversial. Palatable. Alisha Gupta and Nicole Stock define the performative male as an individual who “curates his aesthetic in a way that he thinks might render him more likable to progressive women. He is, in short, the antithesis of the toxic man.”
This “Performative Male” form is no cultural abnormality, and can be genealogically tied to the Portland-millennial stereotype of men’s Patagonia jackets, graphic t-shirts, corduroy pants, and tattoos plastered across the body like children’s stickers on a car window. In the post-Me-Too era, masculinity requires a more ‘tasteful’ display of sexuality, sublimated into hobbies and worthy causes (like feminism).
The performative male reads, yes, but he reads in coffee shops—perhaps Simone de Beauvoir, Rupi Kaur, or bell hooks. If we get risky, it may be a copy of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov flipped to the first chapter. But it is far too loud in the coffee shop to be properly read. He looks up a bit too much, the page hasn’t turned in fifteen minutes. The ice in the matcha begins to melt.
The performative male is a contribution to the post-literacy culture, insofar as his emergence has turned reading in public to be viewed as a necessarily performative act. He reveals how cultural taboos on literacy are beginning to emerge, to the point that it is assumed in all instances, reading outdoors or in public, is directed toward the outward approval of all others. In the age of short form media, the centrality of the book to the performative male’s image intimates an assumption that there is no possible way the individual can be interacting with the book in a meaningful way. It is insufferable because in the era of short-form consumable video content, it has become increasingly unimaginable to finish a formidable text, such as a novel.
And this makes sense: literature plays dirty—the reader’s mind will fight with the author’s descriptions and reel in shock from narrative developments. Older texts are rife with distant historical debates and events that often force a person to go to the endnotes. It is therefore a process to understand literature. Let us make it easier: Literature is difficult.
These two separate phenomena, the performative male and the death of the college bookstore, serve as heralds from heaven warning of a post-literate culture. This new cultural development comes down to us, and one can only feel they can wag their fist in futile despair. If someone fires back that these phenomena are largely harmless and I’ve wasted my time, we can still posit that these two cultural objects are symptoms of a society lustfully caught in the storm of representation, creating identities like a house of cards, that blows away at the feeling of a new corporate wind. So at the end of it all, we have diagnosed a problem without a cure in sight.
Is it possible to stop the oncoming post-literate society? Maybe not. But if nothing else, if you can do anything, read, and continue to read – read everything you can get your hands on. Good literature is well worth the time, even if it punches back.