The consumption reading identifies a target the novel's readers belong to

The argument

A second argument for this reading concerns where the satire lands. Its proponents hold that the novel is uncomfortable in a particular way, and that only this reading explains the discomfort. A warning about tyranny or about runaway invention places the danger elsewhere: in a government, in a laboratory, in a future. A satire of consumption places it in the reader's own ordinary conduct, which is why, on this account, the book unsettles people who are in no danger of living under any regime it describes. The argument proceeds from how satire works. Satire requires recognition; it fails when its object is too distant to be recognised. Proponents argue that the recognisable element in this novel is not its apparatus of control, which no reader has experienced, but its habits — the preference for diversion over difficulty, for comfort over argument, for the satisfaction that is available now over the one that would have to be waited for. These are available to any reader as features of their own life, and the novel's method is to extend them until they become a social order. Proponents draw the interpretive conclusion from this. A reading that locates the novel's subject in consumption makes sense of the book as satire, which is the form it takes; the alternatives make better sense of it as prophecy, which is a form it fits less well. On this view the novel is not predicting a regime so much as describing a disposition, and the disposition it describes is the one its readers already have.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics answer that the novel is plainly doing more than satire, and that the reading narrows it to the register in which it is most comfortable. A second objection is that recognition is not confined to consumption: readers recognise the wish to be managed, the appeal of a settled order and the temptation to trade difficulty for peace, all of which belong to the rival readings as readily as to this one. Others hold that the argument confuses what makes a novel effective with what it is about, since a book can land its satire through familiar habits while its subject is the political and technological order those habits are shown to make possible.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Recognition is not limited to consumption, since the wish for a settled order and the temptation to trade difficulty for peace are equally familiar to readers and belong to the rival readings. [Rejecting P3] The novel is not only satire, and classing it in a single form in order to pick an interpretation decides the question by choosing the premise. [Rejecting C] What makes a satire effective is not the same as what it is about: familiar habits can be the route into a book whose subject is the order those habits make possible.