The terms ‘co-creation’, ‘co-production’, and ‘prosumption’ refer to situations in which consumers collaborate with companies or with other consumers to produce things of value. These situations sometimes appear to blur the traditional roles of ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’. Building on Marx’s distinction between ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’, we argue that, when consumers perform tasks normally handled by the company, this does not necessarily represent a fundamental change in exchange roles or economic organization. We then argue that, when individuals who are traditionally defined as ‘consumers’ produce exchange value for companies, this does represent a fundamental change.

The Intersecting Roles of Consumer and Producer: A Critical Perspective on Co-production, Co-creation and Prosumption

Lifestyle and consumer culture

The hermeneutics of suspicion is a term coined by Paul Ricoeur to describe the practice of reading texts against the grain to expose their repressed or hidden meanings. This essay examines the distinctive features of such a hermeneutics as they have shaped literary theory and criticism in recent decades. Suspicious reading, it proposes, is not only an intellectual exercise in demystification, but also a critical style and scholarly sensibility that offers specific pleasures. These pleasures include the aesthetic and ethical satisfactions of fashioning detectivefictionstyle plots. The literary critic, like the detective, interprets clues, establishes causal connections, and identifies a guilty party: namely, the literary work accused of whitewashing or concealing social oppression. Deconstructionist critics like Shoshana Felman seek to expose the dangers of such a suspicious hermeneutics but remain thoroughly entangled in the very method they seek to repudiate. The goal of the essay, then, is not to critique and be suspicious of suspicion. Rather, it seeks to take the hermeneutics of suspicion seriously and to understand why it has proved so attractive to contemporary scholars. At the same time, it also suggests that the presentday ubiquity and predictability of this critical method makes its claims to intellectual novelty or political boldness ever harder to sustain. Recent discussions of affect (Radway 1997; Thrailkill 2007) have emphasized literary criticism’s distrust of emotion, but there is little acknowledgment of criticism’s own affective registers. How are method and mood, argument and attitude intertwined? The typical Introduction to Criticism and Theory course in the United States or United Kingdom classifies its content according to intellectual tenets or political convictions (deconDownloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf by guest on 14 May 2019 216 Poetics Today 32:2 struction, queer theory, psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies). Yet styles of academic reading are affective as well as cognitive, inviting us to adopt attitudes of trust, impatience, reverence, or wariness toward the texts we read. Academic criticism contains its own structures of preevaluation (Smith 1995), encouraging readers to adopt a certain disposition and to approach texts in a specific frame of mind. In presentday literary studies, this frame of mind is frequently one of wariness, vigilance, and distrust. Drawing on Suzanne Keen’s invitation to think of genre as an “affectproducing template,” I apply this idea to contemporary academic genres of suspicious reading. What are the distinctive formal devices and rhetorical strategies of a hermeneutic of suspicion? And how do these features help establish an affectladen as well as analytic relation to texts? Suspicious reading, I argue, is not just an intellectual exercise in demystification but also a distinctive style and sensibility with its own specific pleasures.1 The hermeneutics of suspicion is a phrase coined by Paul Ricoeur, who famously identified Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the founders of a “school of suspicion,” the primary architects of a distinctively modern style of interpretation that is driven by a desire to demystify, an adamant refusal to take words at face value. In spite of their many differences, Ricoeur (1970: 32) argues, these thinkers share a common commitment to reducing “the illusions and lies of consciousness.” What drives such a hermeneutic is the conviction that appearances are deceptive, that texts do not gracefully relinquish their meanings, that manifest content shrouds darker, more unpalatable truths. It is a mode of interpretation that adopts a distrustful attitude toward texts in order to draw out meanings or implications that are not intended and that remain inaccessible to their authors as well as to ordinary readers. In his argument, Ricoeur develops a key distinction between a hermeneutics of trust, which is driven by a sense of reverence and goes deeper into the text in search of revelation, and a hermeneutics of suspicion, which adopts an adversarial sensibility to probe for concealed, repressed, or disavowed meanings (ibid.: 9). The difference between these approaches, we might say, is the difference between unveiling and unmasking. Ricoeur’s model of a suspicious hermeneutics offers a valuable reference point for assessing the recent history of literary studies in the wake of several waves of literary and cultural criticism that have encouraged styles of vigilant and mistrustful reading. Here we can point to the influence of structuralist and poststructuralist modes of thought, with their builtin 1. This essay focuses on the suspicious dimensions of contemporary styles of criticism. It does not address the related issue of how works of literature encourage suspicion in readers via the use of techniques such as unreliable narrators. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf by guest on 14 May 2019 Felski • Suspicious Minds 217 wariness of commonsense or everyday meaning; the impact of an identity politics of race, gender, and sexuality that encouraged readings of canonical texts against the grain in order to expose their hidden biases; the influence of Marxism via the models of symptomatic reading developed by Macherey (1975), Jameson (1981), and others, and, finally, the takenforgranted nature of Freudian schemata, which made it easy for scholars to transfer such schemata to the study of literature and culture via analogies such as the political unconscious. The hermeneutics of suspicion, in other words, is a term applicable to a diverse range of critical frameworks. While psychoanalytical feminism, New Historicism, and postcolonial criticism, to name just a few current approaches, are characterized by obvious differences in focus and method, they share the conviction that the most rigorous reading is one that is performed against the grain, that the primary rationale for reading a text is to critique it by underscoring what it does not know and cannot understand. The influence of such approaches, moreover, reaches well beyond the confines of literature departments; when anthropologists unmask the covert imperialist convictions of their predecessors, when sociologists read the texts of Weber, Marx, or Durkheim against the grain, when legal scholars challenge the purported neutrality of the law to lay bare its hidden agendas, they all subscribe to a style of interpretation driven by a spirit of disenchantment. To be sure, not all literary theory manifests an adversarial and distrustful attitude to the literary work. Indeed, quite a few voices—often those associated with deconstruction or with recent Lévinasinspired work on the ethics of reading—extol the alterity of literary texts, testifying to their radical singularity and enigmatic strangeness. And yet suspicion is not so much dissipated in such arguments as it is displaced. We do not need to be suspicious of the text, in other words, because it is already doing the work of suspicion for us, because it is engaged in the negative work of subverting the selfevident, challenging the commonplace, relentlessly questioning idées fixes and idées recus. The literary text thus matches and exceeds the critic’s own vigilance, performing a metacommentary on the traps of interpretation, a knowing anticipation and exposure of all possible hermeneutic blunders. Critic and work are bound together in an alliance of heightened mistrust visàvis commonsensical forms of language and thought (Felski 2009). While the term hermeneutics of suspicion with its obligatory footnote to Ricoeur, is often invoked in current literary debates, the features of such a hermeneutics have, until recently, received attention mainly from scholars working in religious studies, intellectual history, legal theory, and related fields (Stewart 1989; Thiele 1991; Bermann 2001; Josselson 2004; Farmer Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf by guest on 14 May 2019 218 Poetics Today 32:2 2007). In the current climate of retrospection, however, as critics reflect on the intellectual legacy of recent decades and reassess methods of reading that have come to seem stale and unsurprising, the hermeneutics of suspicion is shifting from a mode of analysis to an object of analysis within literary studies. A style of interpretation that once seemed entirely selfevident and selfexplanatory now finds itself squirming under the spotlight (Sedgwick 1997; Latour 2004; Strowick 2005; Best and Marcus 2009; Felski 2009; Love 2010). Why do so many scholars feel impelled to unmask and demystify the works that they read? What sustains their certainty that a text is withholding some vital information, that they must authorize their commentary by highlighting what is concealed, repressed, unsaid? Such convictions owe much, as I have noted, to contemporary styles of intellectual politics that, following the reception of Althusser, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault and others, have largely relinquished affirmative or utopian projects of worldbuilding in favor of the rhetoric of subversion, estrangement, and critique. The U.S. reception of French theory, François Cusset (2008: 83) observes, helped to encourage a “suspicion without limits” in which scholars increasingly edged away from any espousal of positive values or norms, preferring to present themselves as “champions of subversion.” The pervasiveness of this mindset also testifies to the increasing pressures of professionalization and the scramble to shore up academic authority: the hermeneutics of suspicion, after all, assigns a unique depth of understanding to the trained reader or theorist, equipped to see through the illusions in which others are immersed. According to John Farrell (2006: 4), this radical 

On suspicious minds.

List of Reproductions Preface 1. Introduction: The Making of Ordinary Images 2. From the Library to the Bank: The Emergence of Stock Photography 3. Shooting for Success: Stock Photography and the Production of Culture 4. The Archive, the Stereotype and the Image-Repertoire: Classification and Stock Photography 5. The Image of Romance: Stock Images as Cultural Performances 6. Rhetorics of the Overlooked: On the Communicative Modes of Stock Images 7. And God Created Photoshop: Digital Technologies, Creative Mastery and Aesthetic Angst 8. The Realm of the Info-Pixel: From Stock Photography to the Visual Content Industry 9. Conclusion 10. Sources and Bibliography

The Image Factory: Consumer Culture, Photography and the Visual Content Industry

Multimodal media make meaning by intersecting the semiotic resources of language, visual display, sound and music, cinematic movement, material artifacts, and abstract animation. As meaning-makers, we live across institutions and media and we make meanings that no single medium or institution can control. Transmedia franchises pursue us, colonizing the chronotopes of postmodern life to array the branded content of their media products everywhere we look and go. Social semiotics provides a foundation for critical multimedia analysis that can reach beyond the internal multimodality of individual works to grasp the social meanings of transmedia franchises and trans-institutional lives. In doing so, I argue that it must reengage with the larger intellectual project of formulating a political economy of the sign.

Multimodal genres and transmedia traversals: Social semiotics and the political economy of the sign

Just as the critique of political economy set for itself the task of analyzing the commodity-form, the Critique of the political economy of the sign intends to do so of the sign-form. As the commodity is both exchange value and use value-requiring that a total analysis of this form consider both slopes of the system-so too is the sign both signifier (Sr) and signified (Sd); the analysis of the sign-form must therefore proceed at both levels. Of course, this simultaneously requires a logical and strategic analysis of the relationship between the two terms, namely; 1) Between the EV system and the UV system (or between commodity-form and object-form), which we endeavored to do in the preceding article*: 2) Between the system of the Sr and that of the Sd (or between the respective codes which define the articulation of the sign-value and of the sign-form). This relationship sets itself up in both cases as an hierarchical function between a dominant form and an alibi form, or satellite form, the latter being both the logical crowning and ideological fulfillment of the former.

Toward a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign

Interview with Michel Leiris

(. . .) Since nothing is created, nor lost, nor changed, how could an object be numbered among beings after it has been modified? (. . .) If, in fact, several distinct objects exist, I should be able to say that each is the one (the being). For if there is earth, water, air, fire, iron, life and death, white and black, and everything else, all things that are said to be real, it is necessary that each thing be as it was perceived and interpreted the first time, that it neither transform itself nor become different, but that each thing always exists exactly as it is. Yet, on the one hand, we claim to see, hear, and smell correctly, while on the other it appears to us (. . .) that everything transforms itself and that nothing that was or is remains identical to itself. ... Consequently, it follows that we neither see nor have knowledge of beings. Thus we arrive at a contradiction: having asserted that several distinct, eternal, constituted and well delimited objects exist, it seems to us (. . .) that everything becomes different and transforms itself.

Permanence and Change

The Book to Come Is a Theater

Proposing several hypotheses on the semiotics of theater these days may appear to be more a gamble than anything else. But if the gamble pays off, it may also inspire writing. And this is our purpose. In fact, whereas "literary semiotics" experiences great difficulty in accounting for long texts and whereas the analysis of narratives1-the most developed sector of literary semiotics thus far-permits the clarification of tales, myths, and sometimes short stories, it may seem altogether adventurous to undertake the analysis of a theatrical text, and even further the analysis of a theatrical production. Having already taken this step and therefore accepted the gamble, perhaps without seeing all the difficulties in it or perhaps precisely because of them,2 we will therefore pursue it...

Carl R. Lovitt

Papers

Toward a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign

Interview with Michel Leiris

Permanence and Change

The Book to Come Is a Theater

Reading and Producing Theater