Metaphors of Economy

Metaphors of Economy

Critical Studies Vol. 25

General Editor

Myriam Diocaretz

European Centre for Digital Communication/Infonomics Editorial Board

Anne E. Berger, Cornell University Stefan Herbrechter, Trinity and All Saints, University of Leeds

Marta Segarra, Universitat de Barcelona Assistant Editor

Esther von der Osten, Freie Universität Berlin

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005

Metaphors of Economy

Edited by

Nicole Bracker and Stefan Herbrechter

Acknowledgements We would like to thank the Department of English and American Studies at the University of East Anglia – especially Vic Sage and Jon Cook – for their support in organising the Conference.

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1568-3 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005 Printed in the Netherlands

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Accounting for the Economy of Metaphors and Metaphors of Economy Nicole Bracker

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Destitution Steven Connor

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Part I: Economy — Between Science and Literature Money, Modernity and Melancholia in the Writings of Georg Simmel Dorothy Rowe

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Exploring an Economy of Exegetical Structures through Cassirer and Bourdieu Philip Tew

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From Classical Dichotomy to Differantial Contract: The Derridean Integration of Monetary Theory Nadja Gernalzick

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Invisible Hands and Visionary Narrators: Why the Free Market is like a Novel Eleanor Courtemanche

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Part II: Excessive Economies The Tropological Economy of Catachresis Gerald Posselt

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Desire as Capital: Getting a Return on the Repressed in Libidinal Economy David Bennett

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Part III: Narrative Economies Lolita — A Region in Flames Matthew Pateman

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Dire Straits: Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance and the Economic Loss Joyce Goggin

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Revolutionist Consumers: The Application of Sacrifice in Ruskin, Bataille and Henry James Jessica Maynard

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“Money, for the Night is Coming:” Gendered Economies of Aging in the Novels of Jean Rhys and James Joyce Cynthia Port

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The Quest for Values: Traditional Sources in Two Late Nineteenth-Century Novels of Adventure Elio di Piazza

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Contributors

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ACCOUNTING FOR THE ECONOMY OF METAPHORS AND METAPHORS OF ECONOMY NICOLE BRACKER Today a stage has been reached when one could express all sorts of relations — from love to pure logic — in the language of supply and demand, of security and discount. (Musil 1978: 432)

In recent years the metaphor of economy has proved to have an immense explanatory power in literary and cultural criticism. Everything can be expressed and analysed in terms borrowed from political economy. Language, texts, social structures, and cultural relationships can be construed in the dynamic terms made available by the metaphor of economy, and, more specifically, the economy of the metaphor. Metaphors carry within themselves the concept of exchange, as Marc Shell writes, “‘exchange’ not only expresses the relation between the terms of each metaphor but also names the metaphorization itself” (1978: 52). The recent move in literary criticism away from the domination of the concept of structure towards economy has made it possible to construe languages, texts and discursive practices in the dynamic terms made available by the metaphor of economy. What kind of analytic advantage does this move toward economic metaphors create? One answer could, in Steven Connor’s words, be: that an economy is a dynamic structure, which allows and obliges the critic not only to order and distribute the elements of his field of study in inert relationships of equivalencies and distinctions, but also to show the processes of exchange, circulation and interested negotiation which bring these relationships dynamically into being. The metaphor of economy may allow one, therefore, to escape some of the closure or seductiveness of the metaphor of structure. (1992: 57-58) The dynamic moment described here can be discerned in the long run as arising from a new exploration of value, implicating the very notions of meaning, origin, circulation, and production of meaning. The contributions to this volume display approaches to cultural and discursive practices derived from the methods and texts of economics. The

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selection of essays generates critical exchanges aimed at enriching both literature and economics. The first part of this collection explores developments in the economic structure. These discussions describe the emergence of the notion of political economy as theory or science, in other words, the economic traditions of neo-classical economics. However, they also address the use of literary and rhetorical methods in economics, and provide studies of the parallels between economic and linguistic theories, revealing that money and language are structurally homologous equivalents. Language is built of economies and vice versa economics is also a language. The structural homology between money and language is not a mere juxtaposition, but is made possible and operative by processes at work simultaneously in both economies. The second part takes the metaphor of economy to a meta-theoretical level. Starting from Hegel’s “restricted economy” of the dialectical process, these essays try to account for the remaining excess and negativity through a critique of conventional bourgeois economics in a more generous way of looking at exchange. Part three provides separate, though related, approaches to the economics of literary texts. Fundamental to these essays is an understanding of texts as “economies,” which involves a reconfiguration of the economy of reading. The contributions provide a body of literary and cultural criticism founded upon economic paradigms. What becomes apparent is then the genealogy of our economic thought and a suggestion of how looking at human exchange can enrich our understanding of culture. The metaphor of economy enables us to show the dynamic processes of exchange, circulation and interested negotiation. This book provides a critical exchange which hopes to enrich “both economics and literature” (Woodmansee & Osteen 1999: 41). Works Cited Connor, Steven. 1992. Theory and Cultural Value. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Musil, Robert. 1978. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Reinbek: Rowohlt Verlag. Shell, Marc. 1978. The Economy of Literature. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP. Woodmansee, Martha and Mark Osteen. Eds. 1999. The New Economic Criticism. Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. London: Routledge.

DESTITUTION STEVEN CONNOR This essay investigates the tradition and possibilities of deliberated “doing without,” in philosophical and cultural thinking. Although it maybe inevitably becomes entangled with the old and unlosable conundrum of negative value theory, namely, how it is that experiences of loss, impoverishment, depletion, indigence, or negativity, can avoid forming themselves into new forms of undesirably positive resource, its principal aim is to find a way of moving aside from, or doing without, this paradox. It proposes to use the energies of the will-to-destitution to begin instancing a newly stripped and unhoused condition in thinking about objects, the body, self and culture.

Just where did the metaphor of economy come from? What sustains it, and what does it sustain? What work does it do for us today, and what other kinds of work might it be doing? There are always, in any society, in order for there to be a society, relations: similarities and differences. The more complex and differentiated the society, the more complex its structures of similarity and difference. For a non-economic vision of the world ― the pre-Classical order dreamed of by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things ― the deep and exceptionless relatedness of the world is such that everything is penetrated in advance by its similitudes: as above, so below. For an economic apprehension, relations come to be seen not in the light of similitudes, but of exchanges, which is to say, potential equivalences. An economic apprehension begins when time enters the picture, which is to say when the picture dissolves into an abstract field of potentials and possibilities. Such a field lacks the immemorial, always-already unity of the Paracelsian view of the world. Its unity is rather always to-be-achieved, to-be-apprehended. A new kind of work comes into being with the coming of an economic apprehension. The work of tabulating, witnessing and interpreting (that is to say redoubling) the signatures and similitudes of the world which fell to the theologian, the poet, the natural scientist or the lawyer, is now supplemented by the work of the system itself. For, when it becomes an economy, the

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system of similitudes is put to work, the work of bringing its similitudes into being. Or, to put it another way: the system develops an appetite for itself. It wants to come to be; it comes to want to be. This work is from now on never to be completable, and will never rest. Anything can exchange with anything else, though no longer because of the direct or unmediated analogies between high and low, microcosm and macrocosm, inner and outer, man and God. What guarantees the fact of exchange is rather the existence of the possibility of mediation, such as language or the money form, or libido (that currency of the psyche) as the universal forms of equivalence. As has often been noted, the existence of mediators such as language, or money, or libido, makes everything in principle exchangeable for everything else; and this draws language and money and libido themselves into the exchanges and transactions they allow. You can not only exchange things with the medium of exchange, you can submit the medium of exchange, the currency, to exchange. You can buy and sell money, you can transact with language, you can libidinously hoard and squander and gamble on libido itself. Time, which seems to provide the possibility of a move from inert structures into economic transactions, is also eminently negotiable. Because anything can exchange with anything else, no final or steady state is imaginable. Economies are allcomprehending because they are partial, because they are always at work in part. What has been called the “general economy” ― the totality of all economic transactions ― is never actualisable in its generality. During the Pokémon craze of the late nineties, there were about 151 cards to collect, though that number was enlarged by the fact that each of the Pokémon came in different versions ― the regular, the “fossil” and the “jungle” versions, as well as in different “evolutions,” or stages of being. The cards were collected in order to be able to play the Pokémon card game with success, but most children simply collected and exchanged the cards in order to have the best, which is to say the fullest collection. Pokémon cards signify creatures which the owners were to be imagined as catching and training for combat with other creatures. The combats and their outcomes were the product of the encounter of complex variables, involving different powers and intensity of attack ― such as fire attack or sleep attack, as well as powers of defence, all measured numerically in values between 10 and 100. These cards were qualified or potentiated by energy cards, of different kinds (fire energy, psychic energy, for example), which boosted or depleted their power. Pokémon cards were both deeply implicated in adult economy (the average 910 year old probably had about two hundred pounds worth of cards in their collection), and an entire economy in themselves. The cards were both desirable objects and a value-form, like money. They were a measure of value, a world of desire and delight and need and torment. Children aged

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between 5 and 12 learned some of their hardest and most intricate lessons about value ― and loss ― through Pokémon cards. They invested huge amounts of libido in what were, after all, nothing more than rather attractively coloured little cards, though they did rather tellingly have the appearance of magic screens. To explicate all their powers one would need an account of the values and powers of the “card” in human life and history. Suffice it here to say that cards ― playing cards, postcards, greeting cards, credit cards and “smart cards” of every description ― form a secret, alternative currency in human history, a currency that bridges magic and economics (they are a magical economy, an economy of magic). The Freudian phrase just used ― “investing libido” ― implies a world of fixed, disposable quantities of energy. But Pokémon cards tell us something more, or tell us of a different, more paradoxical economy. For the cards were not merely the repositories of pleasure and possibility, a promise to pay the bearer a certain reliable quantum of pleasure. Theirs is the power of the as-if, or the what-if. They represent the power of the symbol, to conserve and carry, and multiply affect. Pokémon cards embody the power of objects to embody feeling. It is as if the power of the Pokemon card, or the personalised collection, were the very power of divisibility, numerability and permutability themselves: the power to put your libido into little packets, into your pocket. Economic thinking is often opposed to other forms of thinking in terms of the difference between quantitative and qualitative; but Pokémon cards exhibit plainly the quality of quantity; the magic of number. It was no use complaining, as parents did, that these little bits of gaily-coloured card were not worth the attention lavished on them, for that is the point. What children met and managed through them was their desire itself, a desire which is always, as Baudrillard has brilliantly suggested, a desire for the system that blocks and mediates desire, a “passion for the code” as much as for what it encodes. A deck of cards is one thing; a deck of cards the number and distribution of which is known is a different, more valuable thing altogether. Entropy, disorder, a scrambled deck, has value in the same way that an untidy room or an overgrown garden has value, as the promise of the order to which they may be brought. In the case of the untidy room or overgrown garden, however, it is plain that considerable amounts of effort will need to be expended in order to bring them out of their state of nature: one’s muscles groan and strain proleptically. In the case of a shuffled deck, the forms of its subsequent organisation are already in it. All I have to do is to deal them out in order for the organisation to take effect as if by itself. To shuffle a deck of cards is to fill it full of power, the power to be reassembled, for time to flow backwards, into order and pattern rather than away from them, like charging a

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battery. The very investability of libido, the power for libido to be thus invested, or, even more abstractly, the power so that there is investment, is the power of the libido. I have been using the word libido as though we knew what it was, as though we had some apprehension of this reservoir of imaginative energy. But if we go to Freud for an explanation of this qualia, for an account of exactly what it is that is invested in the investment of libido, we will be given no satisfactory answer. For example: libido is “the energy, regarded as a quantitative magnitude (though not at present actually measurable) of those instincts which have to do with all that may be comprised under the word ‘love’” (Freud 2001: 90). The quality of the libido is its capacity to alter levels or quantities of investment, its capacity to provide a measure, which then itself comes to constitute in large part the nature of the power or quality of the libido as such. If you ask what a quantity of libido is a quantity of, the answer must be that it is a certain quantity of the power of quantification. The libido will be simply the quality of quantity, the investable, that-which-isinvested, the ultimate fictitious capital. Libido is, of course, a metaphor; but not just Freud’s. The living out of libido is itself already metaphorical, it is living as if there were quantities of some substance of which it were possible to dispose, as if love were something of which one had a variable reservoir, capable of being tapped and given out replenished. Libido is like magic: you do not need to believe in magic for it to work. Indeed, you have positively not to believe in magic in order for it to work. Magic is the power to look at the world and say “what if there were such a thing as magic?” Almost the whole of what we call aesthetic discourse is this kind of magical thinking, by which I mean, not the mistaking of fiction for truth, or figure for actuality, but the entertainment of the possibility that there might be those (not necessarily us) for whom art might have a magic, redemptive power. The power to say “let’s pretend” is not a pretend power. Libido is the name for the subjunctive idea that there might be such a thing as libido. Magic is the name for the power of the idea that there might be such a thing as magical power. Economics is the name for the power of the idea of the economic. Pokémon actualises this virtuality. What if it were possible for me to take my desire and divide it up, keep it safe, tally it off, end up with more than I started with? The mere fact that pretending the cards have power is the measure of their power, means that even entertaining the possibility that the cards might have power, has produced a measurable gain, the gain of measurability. This is exactly the kind of gain we hope to reap from an event such as this, the gain in apprehension and understanding. I know, I have been talking all this time not about this race of Japlish mutants, but about Maxwell’s demon, the imaginary creature who creates

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energy impossibly and paradoxically in a closed field by the mere act of sorting information, separating out fast-moving from slow-moving particles. How much physical energy did it take to think up the paradox of Maxwell’s demon? Perhaps a hundred kilojoules or so, a Mars bar’s worth? And yet the metaphor has done fantastic amounts of work, far in excess of the effort required to produce it. Where has this energy come from? The energy of the idea of economy comes from itself, from its own operations. Whenever we think economically, we are thinking in terms of this as-if logic, the same logic which Freud applied to the idea of libido, the fundamental and transferable material in the complex three-personed engine of the self (I am not sure if Freud ever remarked on the relation between his trinitarian psychic entity, with its id, ego and super-ego and the Christian “economy” of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but he might have done so). There cannot be an economy without the variation of quantity, and therefore without the idea of some neutral stuff or substance, or neutral measure of variable amount; but this neutral stuff can itself be an imaginary precipitate of the economic hypothesis. Thus, there is in fact no barter economy. As soon as it is possible to exchange one thing for another, the two comparable things have brought into being a third thing, the measure that lies between them and measures this transaction against actual and possible other transactions. If I barter my sheep for your pig, the exchange will be a good or a bad one depending on this abstract measure. Whenever and wherever money seems to have come at length to light, it has always been there already, if only because of the currency of the soul that is libido, though it may need to wait for money to be able to know itself, and put itself into the reckoning. Libidinal and magical systems are economic in that they obey the principle of immanence. The general idea of libido and the idea of magic are not separate from the systems they seem to govern: in fact, they are put to work at every point in the system. The idea of economy is not merely an abstract idea, or explanatory hypothesis, produced on the outside of the system, or as an after-effect of it. The hypothesis of an economy, the idea of what an economy is and how it works, is itself put to work within any economy. (If I sell you my house, both of us work with an awareness of prevailing market conditions, and of prevailing, or possibly prevailing conditions in the economy of which the house market forms a part. The idea that we, each of us, have of what kind of economy this is, will form part of that exchange.) The notion of the bagel is folded into the dough. The metaphor of economy does not provide a simple, neutral frame or equivalent for the workings of economy: it is itself employed, or deployed economically. Because economies do not exist in themselves, they can only be figured forth metaphorically: and the metaphors we use to figure forth economies

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themselves will invariably function economically, which is to say in terms of exchange, equivalence and variable quality. If one wanted to characterise the condition of economics today, it would not need to be in terms of a progressive extension of economic relations into areas previously held to be noneconomic or immune to exchange relations. In my view, there has always been as much economy, as much exchange, in as many areas of life, as there is now. This is to say that there has always been as much economy as there can possibly be. What may be new is the intensity of the investment in the idea of the economic ― the rapidly iterative feedback of notions of the economic into systems of exchange. During the eighteenth century, it became clear that it was not just human societies that could enter into economic relations. It became clear that the physical world too was comprehensible in terms of systems and broadly economic relations between movements and forces. The making out of the principles of thermodynamics established and substantiated the possibility not only of the balance and reciprocity of different elements, but also the convertibility of different forces. The regime of thermodynamics, which depended upon the extraction of huge amounts of work from processes of heating, cooling and the circulation of heat, with the consequent expansion and contraction of materials, lasted for a century from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. Already, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the discovery of electromagnetic induction had opened up the possibility of other kinds of natural economy, and technologies that created conversions and exchanges between the physical world and the body’s senses as well as its kinetic powers. Not surprisingly, human pathology mimicked the economic circulation of energies between the human and the nonhuman world. Hysteria is a disease of conversion, which comes about as a dramatisation of the blockage of circulation ― the ideal but abstract conversion of impulse and desire into warrantable speech ― but dramatically figures the new economic relations of convertibility and exchange between the mind and the body. Hysteria, as a conversion syndrome, already acts out the kinds of bodily economy which were to suggest to Freud the importance of the economic metaphor of the self. The next century, the electric age, from 1850 onwards, was dominated by electrodynamic economy and its correlatives. Electricity was the new value form that allowed human endeavour and aspiration not just to act on the world of matter but to transact with it, to be represented in terms of it, to enter into exchanges with it. In the soft mechanics of the telegraph, the camera, the phonograph, the electric light, the patterning of tiny fluctuations in electric charge replaced the large and highly-visible calorific exchanges governing the power-loom and the steam-piston. People not only desired electricity,

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ungovernably: electricity was the form of desire, a bodily force that matched the subtlety and sensibility of a lived human body. The result was a discernible expansion and complexification of the idea of work. If the nineteenth century moralised matter, focussing on energy and idleness, the drawing of the senses into the mechanical model of work was essential for the development of a consumer economy in which the work of sensory attention ― looking, listening, feeling ― will become part of the economy. The period following the Second World War established the possibility of economic exchange between two more areas of thought which had previously been thought to be related only metaphorically; theory of information as it was developed in the cybernetics of Shannon and others, and theory of energy and chaos in physical systems. If energy was a kind of information, then information too could be a kind of energy. Knowledge, language, codes, could be thought of in terms of circulating quanta of energy. Central to both information and energy was the principle of entropy, the notion that the amount of usable energy in a closed system will inevitably decline over time without the introduction of energy differentials from other sources. Not only is death the assured outcome of any system, it may be its orientating and motivating force — an economic principle. The economic metaphors which bound together information theory and chaos theory gradually began to become literal, substantial. The commutability of energy and information, as actualised in electronic as opposed to electrodynamic forms of organisation, is the most amazing contemporary extension of the powers of the economic metaphor. So the thermodynamic expands into the electromagnetic, which then expands into the ergoinformatic. This era of generalised interconvertibility makes available the most extreme and unexpected kinds of economic exchange. Postmodern theory has been enlivened, for example, by Lyotard’s principle of incommensurables, and the injustice of submitting incommensurable standards of judgement or experience to intermediary modes of judgement. But Lyotard’s claim for the existence of incommensurables can do nothing but demonstrate that there are in fact no true incommensurables, no systems of value between which no relations of equivalence or exchange can exist, no differences that are not exchangeable differences, differences measured by their equivalence. What Lyotard did was invent, or name (here, naming is in part inventing) a new measure of equivalence: the incommensurability index. So much for a swift review of the mythology of the economic: the ofttold story of the emergence of a world of universal exchange value from a world of given and steady equivalences. Jean Baudrillard has suggested that, rather than reverting to a pre-economic situation, the acceleration of

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simulational activities has produced a situation in which there is no time left and therefore no value left. Exchange has gobbled up even the medium which drives it, namely, time. The odds are gone and there is nothing left remarkable. Everything has already happened, every transaction has already taken place. It is a situation in which an entropic death has been reached, or might as well have been, the cancellation of all tensions or differences. If economic thinking brought the unpredictability of time into social life, the forms of social life have redigested time so thoroughly into themselves as to have rendered the whole system timeless, without affect. Against this account of the ever-expanding sphere of economic thinking, a counter-story has been told of the attempt to escape or resist economy, to reestablish a world of selfsufficiency, or use-value. Two broadly economic ideals drive the resistance to economy in philosophy. One attempts to analyse economy in order to move beyond or back from it, to invent or rescue areas or instances of the non-economic: art, virtue, love, morality, truth. The other works by means of multiplication and intensification, by the extension of the economic metaphor to areas ― like the body ― to which it would seem to have little application, as in Lyotard’s notion of the libidinal economy. This inflation or hypercapitalisation of the idea of economy can encompass both its major mode, in the Bataillean interest in forms of excessiveness, “pure” expenditure and waste, and its minor mode, the interest in the minimal, in impoverishment, negativity and death, in that which falls short of economy rather than intensifying it, that which economy must transform and overcome to assert itself. The first thing to be noted is that there is nothing, no depletion, no loss, no lack, that can in principle avoid the recursion of economy, nothing that cannot furnish some kind of symbolic capital, nothing that cannot be some good to somebody, precisely on the grounds of what Beckett calls its “lessness.” Were I to be recommending to you here the extremest form of ablation of the economic I would be recommending it on the grounds of its differential value, I would have put it to work for my own purposes, and have wagered that your time was better spent in hearing about it, or at least as well spent, as in doing any of the other things that you might have been doing. This is what, in an earlier attempt to get the measure of this kind of thing, I called the principle of generalised positivity in economic thinking. Just as, according to Freud, there is no negation in the unconscious or in dreaming life, so there is no negativity which can be counted on to stay put as negativity in economic life. For anything to have economic meaning or function is for it to have entered into relations with other elements in an economy, relations which give it a positive measure, which make it some good, where, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith has argued, “‘good’ operates within the discourse

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of value as does money in a cash economy: good is the universal value-form of value and its standard ‘measure;’ it is that ‘in terms of which’ all forms of value must be ‘expressed’ for their commensurability to be calculated; and good is that for which and into which any other name or form of value can ― ‘on demand,’ we might say ― be exchanged” (Smith 1988: 146). But there are similarly two styles or orientations in the thinking of economy which, following Bataille’s terms, we can call restricted or generalised. One style looks and renders everything in terms of the different areas of human life and organisation, mistrusting every transcendence and showing the human, all too human basis of every apparently extrahuman source of value. This style of thinking extends from Nietzsche and Freud through Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, Habermas, Derrida and Levinas. The master-measure for all these thinkers is that of discourse. Everything is reducible to, renderable in terms of and recoverable as, discourse. For all their emphasis on the decentring of the human, the idea of discourse retains human society, and its particular ways of decentring itself, as the measure of all things for all these thinkers. There is another style or current of modern philosophical reflection on the economic, which is inaugurated in the work of Bataille and tracks erratically through the work of such as Baudrillard, Deleuze, Lyotard, Serres and Latour. This accepts and embraces the opening of the human out on to the nonhuman, reading the economies of human life and organisation in terms of their relations with the economies and energetics of physical systems, and accepting that language is not the final or governing measure of these exchanges. Even more striking, this way of thinking of economy offers a way out of, or aside from, the sterile circuit of aspiration, whereby one dreams of an escape from economy, in religious transcendence, in aesthetic disinterestedness, in the immediacy or gratuity of the gift, in use-value, only to find oneself reaffirming the economic. The work of these thinkers takes seriously the idea of a principle opposed to economy which nevertheless works on the inside of economy, is immanent to economy itself; of economies opened to their outside on their inside. The root for this is Freud’s deathdrive, which he found himself in Beyond the Pleasure Principle having to characterise as a principle opposed to the getting of pleasure and maintaining of pleasurable life, which nevertheless could never appear except in the form of intricate economic exchanges with life and the pleasure principle. With his attempts to characterise the death-drive, Freud opens the possibility of thinking an aneconomic principle that is no kind of simple opponent of economy (nothing could be more economic than the death drive, which is all economy from start to finish and never expresses itself more authentically than in its hijacking of the forms and energies of tallying and mensuration,

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counting out and counting off). There are those who have wondered whether there is not a perspective from which the death drive might not appear negative. This might not be because it had escaped economy, or transcended it, or even slipped beneath it, but because it had slipped into all economy, became identical with it. What Freud called the death-drive, with his characteristic mixture of brazenness and timidity, has been given different names: Bataille calls it expenditure or interior experience; Baudrillard calls it ambivalence or symbolic exchange; Serres calls it the parasite; Lyotard calls it the inhuman. I propose today to call it ― though it is by now the slitheriest sort of it one could imagine ― destitution. Freud wonders whether what he calls the life instincts and the death instincts might not better be designated as the powers of Eros and Thanatos. Eros, or life, signifies the desire for concentration and aggregation or more and more complex unity. Thanatos expresses itself in the desire for attenuation and disaggregation (though in this case it is a source of deep and exquisite puzzlement to Freud what kind of entity could possibly have such a desire). The two cannot be finally distinguished (and if they were, would that act of distinguishing fall under the sign of Eros or of Thanatos?) For without distinction, there can be no connection, and with distinction, there is always the possibility of connection. This paradox recurs in some of the writing of Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion on the splittings of the self in the paranoidschizophrenic stage. Unable to tolerate or hold together violent ambivalence, the child or psychotic mounts what Bion calls an “attack on links,” in the attempt to separate everything out, to pulverise every aggregate into its component functions and disperse them to the four winds, creating a peaceful world of first or last things in which nothing has anything at all to do with anything else. The purpose of this is to prevent combination, with the consequent anxiety of ambivalence. This attempt to evade or to explode economy by getting oneself on to the side of entropy can always result in an increase of information, of significance, of vital tension. Things start to hold together in the very forms of their falling apart. The vitalism of Deleuze and Guattari depends upon the intermingling of the two principles of Eros and Thanatos; of assemblage and blockage, territories and deterritorialisation, organs and the body without organs. Machines, they write, only start to work when it breaks down, when a flow is blocked or diverted into a new channel. Michel Serres’ notion of the parasite follows through the forms of a similar commutability of signal and noise, of information and the degradations against which it must strive (Serres 1982). There is no exchange, of goods, or messages, without some spillage, some ratio sequestered by “the parasite.” Serres does not name him, but his whole book about the parasite might have been written under the sign of the demon

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Tutivullus, who was believed to frequent churches, in order to capture and carry off to Hell the stammers and stumbles of the priest preaching the sermon. As soon as one collects and conserves such detritus, of course, one begins to reintegrate the unintegrated. Eros and Thanatos have their correlates in the two sides or moments of economic thinking. One side holds everything together, in larger and more comprehensive assemblages and equivalences. The other side breaks things apart, by holding the idea of the total system at bay. To think economically may mean to subject one’s entire system of thinking to the idea of economy, which is to say to the possibility of equivalence as such; or it may mean to think locally, in terms of an “immediate mediation” of two factors or qualities without reference ― yet ― to a total system of equivalence. Destitution has two meanings or forms. In its earlier meaning, destitution meant the privation of a particular good or quality or attribute: the destitution of a member, or a form of property. The term has now acquired a more generalised meaning: one is “destitute” as such, in a condition of abject and helpless poverty that is in a sense beyond the measurement of less and more. In certain legal and bureaucratic contexts, destitution means a condition ― usually precisely defined ― in which the individual can no longer be assumed to have self-ownership, or economic responsibility for himself or herself at all. Destitution encodes a play between measurability and immeasurability, between the economic and the uneconomic. It is destitution to which Beckett is referring when he says that “There is more than a difference of degree between being short, short of the world, short of self, and being without those esteemed commodities. The one is a predicament, the other not” (1983: 143). He perhaps means that falling short is a predicament for those for whom degrees are what count, but an opportunity for those for whom they do not count, or do not count absolutely. I would like destitution to stand for the idea of the economy of death within economy. Destitution is the economy that does without the idea of economy while going on within it. What I mean by destitution is not something taken away: an organ removed, some funding reduced, something of which the lack may be measured according to some invariant notion of the good, something that leaves a reckonable deficit, a measurable vacancy, a specifiable loss. Destitution is not castration, which reliably puts back the name of your loss in place of the loss, castration as the ultimate restitution. I mean a loss which loses the dimension of loss itself, the impossibility of being summed up in loss, as loss. Destitution is therefore not a state of mind, a mystical plenitude, and certainly not an all-encompassing principle, a value or regulable ideal. But it is something that occurs to one, on and off.

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What Could It Mean to Think Destitutively? Everything is full of itself. There are no forms of life that are exhausted by the minus sign that hovers over them: every kind of deficit, powerlessness, homelessness, friendlessness, voicelessness, lifelessness, has a reality in excess of that of which it is deficient, a reality in excess of the mere condition of being short of some or other good or desirable condition. Homelessness is not the condition of not having a home, even if it arises from it; it is an utterly new condition that blisters or propagates out of the initial condition of having no home. Poverty is not just the absence of wealth nor suffering a shortfall of well-being. Hunger is dissipated by food, but it is not wholly defined by it. In 2000, I finished writing a book about the history of ventriloquism and the disembodied voice in which I spend 450 pages demonstrating to myself the central axiom that there is no disembodied voice (Connor 2000). Separate the voice from the visible body, and what you get is not a disembodied voice: not a voice-minus-body. What you get is a differently embodied voice, a different kind of voice-body: a machine that has found a new way to work by breaking down. Similarly, the metaphorical loss or appropriation of voice which is so feared in contemporary cultural-political writing, is not a simple depletion. These forms of depleted life are not made glorious or sublime, or desirable, or any other kind of alternative good, by being noticed, being described. But they are made into, or retained as, a something, a form of life. I am not asserting the need to assert the dignity of the dispossessed, the dignity of being poor, maimed, repulsive or merely one of the legion underneath. I am merely saying that these forms of life themselves are in fact forms of life. They are something other than the non-appearance of what they lack, and more than merely what is missing in them. Hunger, disappointment, depression, indignity, panic, fatigue, being crippled, despised, blamed, ugly, aged and unloved; there are kinds of life in all of these, which are not merely the life breaking through in them despite everything. Deleuze and Guattari have spoken of the writers and artists who dig out their underdevelopment by digging into it, who find the life in lifelessness. But it is not just life that is to be glimpsed in these conditions, but an other than life in their less than life. Deleuze and Guattari stand out against the domination of the idea of lack, but they themselves tolerate nothing short of teeming, multitudinous, alternative life in everything: but I marshall Bernie Taupin against them. Life, as Elton John sang, is not everything. We need not mistake being for well-being, nor well-being for life. Not everyone can get a life, but everybody and everything will have to have ended up making a living. It seems to me that there might be here and there those who would notice such things.

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I think we can tell that these forms of life exist by the degree of superstitious aversion they inspire. Why should the gypsies ― these “incomparably weak people” as they have been called by Isabel Fonseca (2000: 3) ― who have been feared and despised and shunned and moved on and wiped out for so many centuries in Europe, be the subject of so much hatred? What is it about propertyless and abased people which makes us so want to smash them? It is not defensive fear at the thought that we might one day become like them, nor even dread that the seven yellow gypsies will steal the hearts of our ladies. It is the fact that they have a form of life which declines to belong to our ways of belonging, though without ever being exactly opposed to it. It is the recognition they force upon us that there is no simple lack ― the lack of education, home, or means ― the abolition of which would put paid to the kind of life they have and have had. It is the recognition that we may not be recognised by this form of life, might not count. You will tell me that this is the wearying and contemptible romanticising of the wretched that has done so much harm, the violent translation of raw disadvantage into exotic difference. This is not cultural difference, which is always in and of economy: it is destitution. The lessons taught by this are not wholly political, though not in principle not so. There is always politics, and there are a million political struggles to be fought to reduce suffering and deprivation and hunger, and abate arrogance and stupidity and cruelty and selfishness. But there is another struggle, a politically meaningless struggle, to forestall the denial of the fact that suffering and deprived people have in fact lived lives, a struggle to corrugate our assurance that our success is the measure of their failure to have added up to being men, or women, at all, a dogmatic affirmation of the fact that, though they may have been something short of being, their being has been a something, and a something that is still some considerable way short of being nothing at all. I do not want destitution to be a keynote: but a gracenote. Something else, something gratuitous ― though not indemnified as always and under all conceivable circumstances being something reliably other or gratuitous. When I see so much striving for guaranteed triumph, for assured outcomes, for abundance, I feel more and more on the side of the gloom, the shame, the minority that is dispensed with for all that ubiquitous prosperity to be, for that quite unlosable game to continue. Economy is not an invention of capitalism or patriarchy or Protestantism or Judaism or anything else. Humanity is the economic species. Economy and economics are what we do, from the word go, and forever and ever amen. Nor are we economic creatures because we are linguistic creatures, despite the tight intertwining of language and economics, indeed

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the unthinkability of economics without language. Language is necessary to economics, or at least highly useful for it, but it is not sufficient to guarantee it. Perhaps we are the linguistic species because we are the economic species. We may even be mathematical beings because we are economic beings, rather than the other way round. Human beings feel and comprehend economics very deeply and closely. We have an instinct for economics partly because ― and does Freud ever have a more brilliant apprehension? ― our instincts themselves take economic forms. We desire mathematics, we manufacture more and more ways of coinciding with mathematics, because our desire is mathematical. What does this mean? It means that we can think outside or beyond “the economic” ― indeed that we can scarcely help doing so. What we are good at doing is knowing not only what the going rate (wonderful phrase) of something currently is, but also imagining what it might be. We are good at imagining economies, at imaginary economics (all economics are imaginary economics). Think of ecological cost-benefit analyses, which imagine ways of measuring the hurt and gain of any particular enterprise in ways that would have seemed unthinkable a dozen years ago: the cost of the loss of a species, a lake, a wood, measured against the measurable benefits of travelling from one point to another more quickly: measured, so to speak, against measurability itself. Economic thinking is not something to be transcended, for it transcends itself. It transcends itself because economic thinking is anyway not one thing. This is because it is thought economically. There is always calculation and wager, because deciding not to calculate is so clearly itself only another kind of calculation. But what kind? There is also always more than one way to do the calculation, more than one way of estimating the value of the results of the calculation. What economy or economics is, is always in question: always to be decided in practice, because that is what economy means, that holding in abeyance, that waiting to see. The wisest sort of economist is always a radical pragmatist, of the kind that there may yet be time for me to learn how to turn out to be, because they know that the one thing you can know for sure about markets is that you can never know. What is more, you also never know whether not knowing is going to turn out to be an advantage or an impediment, something you can count on, or not. As the geneticist Eric Lander has remarked: “I’m a big fan of [...] ignorance-based techniques because humans have a lot of ignorance, and we want to play to our strong suit” (quoted in Knight et. al. 2000: 16). We are never going to be able to be sure what will count as, or turn out to be, economic kinds of behaviour or consideration.

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Destitution is related to this not-yet economics. So my interest (though not, of course, for all time, not even for whatever remains of mine) is not in destitution as such, as a principle of life and thought. It is not any kind of primitivism. It is in particular kinds and forms of destitution, particular subtractions, shortfalls, or ways of being without. These forms of being without look like their meaning and being are wholly exhausted in what they are not or that in which they are deficient; but they have other kinds of meaning than their negativity. We need, by which I mean I would like more of us, more of me, to feel the need, to undertake a willed destitution (doing without, putting aside, forswearing) of the generalised economic thinking that cannot see that everything is full of itself, cannot see that everything is a world. What is left when judgements of value and advantage and necessity and profit are subtracted? Multitudes. Depending on your understanding of what economy means, this is either a partial renunciation of economic thinking, or a plunging into it up to our necks and even over our heads. Ask not, then, what does all this add up to? Rather wonder, what a destitutive thought, might, in time, from time to time, come down to. Works Cited: Beckett, Samuel. 1983. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. London: John Calder. Connor, Steven. 2000. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford UP. Fonseca Isabel. 2000. “The Truth About Gypsies.” The Guardian G2 (March 24): 3. Freud, Sigmund. 2001. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey et. al. Vol. XVIII. London: Hogarth/Vintage. 67-143. Knight, Jonathan, et. al. 2000. “Creation and the Fall.” New Scientist. 2234 (15 April). Keystone Millennium Meeting Conference Supplement. Serres, Michel. 1982. The Parasite. Trans. Lawrence R. Schehr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. 1988. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives For Critical Theory. Cambridge: Harvard UP.

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Part I: Economy — Between Science and Literature

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MONEY, MODERNITY AND MELANCHOLIA IN THE WRITINGS OF GEORG SIMMEL DOROTHY ROWE This essay focuses on Georg Simmel’s analysis of prostitution as outlined in chapter five of Simmel’s celebrated volume, The Philosophy of Money (first published in 1900). It explores how Simmel’s analysis of prostitution differed from the more public debates concerning commodified female sexuality prevalent in Germany during this era and how it becomes a useful indicator of the way in which female prostitution figured within a melancholic discursive framework for German modernity at this time. Simmel’s analysis of urban modernity, and its effects on the life of the individual city dweller, was consistently structured through the web of the money economy. Within discourses of German modernity, the most potent signifier for the concerns with the effects of money upon the life of modern individual was focused on the ubiquitous figure of the urban female prostitute. This essay explores Simmel’s analysis of prostitution within the concept of Wergeld as well within the historical context of public debate on prostitution in Imperial Germany.

One of the earliest commentators to articulate the effects of the modern capitalist metropolis on the life of the gendered individual was Georg Simmel, in a series of works published between 1889 and his death in 1918. Simmel’s analysis of urban modernity, and its effects on the life of the individual city dweller, was consistently structured through the web of the money economy. Within discourses of German modernity, the most potent signifier for the concerns with the effects of money upon the life of modern individual was focused on the ubiquitous figure of the urban female prostitute. Within Imperial Berlin, the rights of the prostitute were subject to the stringent rules of the Sittenpolizei or “Morals Police,” yet as various studies have shown, the numbers of prostitutes in Berlin far exceeded the available numbers of Sittenpolizei to regulate them (cf. Abrams 1988). Fear of prostitution, the inability to always recognise it or effectively regulate it led to an increase in vociferous public debate about the issue. Within this context, Simmel’s analysis of prostitution, which comes as part of Chapter

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Five in The Philosophy of Money (first published in 1900), differs from this more public debate and becomes a useful indicator of the way in which female prostitution figured within a melancholic discursive framework for German modernity at this time. For Simmel, “the nature of money resembles the nature of prostitution [because of] its complete objectification that excludes any attachment and makes it suitable as a pure means” (Simmel 1971b: 122). This essay seeks to explore the nature of Simmel’s analysis of prostitution within the context of both the wider public debates on prostitution and within Simmel’s own analysis of Wergeld, or the monetary penalty for a crime committed against another person, usually murder. 1 While Imperial Berlin was developing as a major European capital city faster than many of its critics were able to comprehend, the urban discourse that it produced ran parallel and often collided with an equally powerful discourse of sexuality that was also emerging in Germany during this period. Both factors were integral to and dependent upon the development of consumer capitalism and industrial modernity. The issue of sexuality in Imperial Germany was foregrounded particularly after 1871 both by the emerging research into psychoanalysis and the “science of sexology,” as well as by the increasingly public profile of the German Women’s Movement. Thus, for example, kleptomania was said to be on the increase amongst middle-class women — diagnosed as a symptom of their uncontrolled and uncontrollable sexuality — while prostitution was most commonly associated with the threatening aspects of working-class female sexuality as the carrier of disease and death.2 Women who campaigned for equal rights on all social levels were increasingly seen as a direct threat to bourgeois male cultural authority and were thus blamed for the breakdown of traditional family values or else were equated with the general threat of social democracy and communism. The Women’s Movement in Germany was also affected by the trenchant class divisions within Imperial society which had been heightened 1

In Bottomore & Frisby’s 1990 translation of the 1907 second edition of The Philosophy of Money, they refer to the monetary penalty as Wergild while Donald Levine in his earlier 1971 translation of selected writings by Simmel uses the term Wergeld. I decided to use Levine’s translation, Wergeld. For further details see Simmel (1990 and 1971b: 121-127). 2 For an analysis of the connections between consumerism and the medicalisation of shop-lifting during the late nineteenth century after the rise of the modern department store, see Abelson (1989). For an analysis of the class structure of prostitution in Imperial Berlin, see Evans (1998). For more general details and further specific references to the equation of female sexuality and death see Bronfen (1992) and Tatar (1995).

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as a result of the regulations outlawing the left-wing Social Democratic Party (the SPD), between 1878-1890. By the mid-1890s the German Women’s Movement was divided by differences of class and social status into two main distinct groups: the bourgeois movement called the Bund Deutscher Frauen (BDF, the Association of German Women), led by Helene Lange, and the proletarian socialist movement led by Clara Zetkin and under the aegis of the SPD. The main issues that concerned the bourgeois women’s movement were the legal status of women in marriage and divorce, better education for women, the improvement of professional career opportunities, improved working conditions for women and new regulations concerning sexual hygiene, which also incorporated notions of health and moral reform. In 1902 they also added the demand for female suffrage to their list of priorities. They differed from the left-wing movement in terms of their lack of affiliation with any one political party and also in their emphasis upon women “as objects of social policy and welfare” rather than as “subjects representing their own independent interests” (see Frevert 1989). The left wing movement, on the other hand, operated under very different circumstances. Up until 1908 all socialist activity was subject to the 1850 Prussian Law on Associations, which had arisen as a result of the 1848 workers’ revolutions in which proletarian women had played a major part. Section 8 of the law was directed specifically at women and young people and prohibited them from attending political gatherings or belonging to any political organisations. Section 8, coupled with the more wide-ranging anti-socialist laws in force between 1878-1890, severely restricted all socialist activities and in particular, those that concerned the rights of women. As Patrice Petro has commented, “even after women were granted the right to assemble, the very act of a woman attending a public gathering was considered scandalous, even immoral” (1989: 69-70). However, despite the repressive legislation, many people still continued to hold covert socialist affiliations which were reinforced by publications such as August Bebel’s enormously influential 1879 text, Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Women and Socialism). Bebel’s work became the cornerstone of socialist thinking on women in Germany and it is worth repeating some of the main arguments of the text here since they serve to highlight the differences between the bourgeois and the proletarian approach to the issue quite distinctly. According to Bebel, women were subject to a double burden under capitalism; not only were they socially and economically dependent upon men in a male-dominated society but together with proletarian men especially, they were also in thrall to the mechanisms and superstructures of bourgeois capitalism. Bebel therefore maintained after Marx, that political, legal and professional equality within existing social structures was merely a short-term solution. He believed that only via the

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complete transformation of the social order would all men and women achieve social equality (Bebel 1917). In his analysis of the 1896 Berlin Women’s Congress, in which representatives from both the BDF and the SPD branches of the women’s movement participated in heated debate, Simmel observed that the fundamental problem of differentiation between the two groups was driven primarily by their relation to the same socio-economic formation and that both groups should seek a form of amelioration to their oppression not from perpetuating their class differences but rather from identifying the “common denominator” of their situation, the socio-economic formation of modernity. For Simmel, in common with popular discourse of the nineteenth century that prescribed women’s “natural” role to be in the home: “The present-day industrial mode of production, on the one hand has torn the proletarian woman away from the household activity and on the other, impoverished the domain of the bourgeois woman which is limited to that same sphere…” (1997: 273). Thus for Simmel, it is the recurring trope of the money economy that drives the differentiation between all spheres and at all levels of social life within existing formations of western modernity. As David Frisby notes, for Simmel, “the ‘atrophy’ of personal development in the one case and the ‘misery’ of personal circumstances in the other, are two outcomes of the same socio-economic formation” which Simmel subjects to his analysis and which forms part of his larger project that was to resurface in The Philosophy of Money in 1900 (Frisby 1997: 21). Simmel’s article on the Berlin Women’s Congress was largely a sociological speculation that found no concrete support and indeed, the trenchant class divisions between the bourgeois and the proletarian branches of the Women’s Movement in Germany continued to be a root cause of increasing discontent amongst both a male and female bourgeoisie who felt threatened by the double attack upon traditional family values and upon a politically stable sense of social order. However, a clear double standard was operative amongst the male bourgeoisie who blamed the various women’s movements for the decline in moral values and the break up of the family (a factor also recognised by Simmel in his 1896 analysis of the Berlin Women’s Congress). In Wilhelmine Germany, one of the major social and political debates at the turn of the century which engaged both men and women and which became one of the rallying cries of the bourgeois women’s movements, was concerned with the legal status of prostitution. Prostitution in Germany remained illegal until 1927, yet its widespread occurrence, particularly within cities, was an accepted fact and as such it was subject to a variety of laws, which attempted

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to regulate it rather than suppress it entirely.3 As a profession during the nineteenth century in particular, it became subject to a host of very specific and often extremely stringent rules and regulations that seemed most often to contribute to its recurrence as a problem. Indeed, the medico-legal discourse that accompanied the institutionalisation of prostitution during the nineteenth century can be regarded as being at least partly responsible for creating it as a discursive formation in the first instance.4 In some states, notably Bavaria, the inefficacy of the system of registration whereby Kontrollmädchen (police-registered prostitutes) had to submit to weekly health checks and other regular demands led to the decriminalisation measures as early as 1813. As Annette Jolin notes: “The Bavarian Penal Code decriminalised any offences that rested solely on religious or moral considerations; sexual behaviours were of concern only when they violated the rights of a third person. Thus prostitution itself was decriminalised” (Jolin 1993:134-135). It was precisely such national divisions in attitude towards the criminal status of prostitution throughout the nineteenth century that led to the ferocity of the debate that characterised much of the political language of the time. Within Imperial Berlin, the rights of the prostitute were subject to the stringent rules of the Sittenpolizei (“Morals Police”), yet as various studies have shown, the numbers of prostitutes in Berlin far exceeded the available numbers of Sittenpolizei to regulate them (cf. Abrams 1988). Indeed, as Lynn Abrams has clearly demonstrated: The position and status of prostitution in German society was far more complex than the law and the police’s interpretation of the law implied. Few prostitutes severed all links from which they had “fallen”... and the majority returned to it just as soon as they were able. Prostitutes frequently failed to conform to the law’s definition of their role, and as a result, their social status was by no means as clearly defined as the law prescribed... (189)

If the social status of women who also practised prostitution was not clearly defined then their categorisation as full-time prostitutes was also difficult to accurately determine. It was precisely the indeterminate nature of the profession and the vast numbers of women who engaged in casual prostitution in order to supplement other forms of income that problematised any attempts at regulation, which in turn caused moral panic in the pages of 3

For further details regarding the legal status of prostitution in Germany, see Jolin (1993). For a history of prostitution see Schulte (1979). 4 For further details regarding the institutionalisation and regulation of prostitution as a particularly nineteenth century phenomenon which served to systematise it within regulated boundaries, see Corbin (1986 and 1990).

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the “respectable” middle-class press. Prostitutes were acceptable to the male bourgeoisie only in certain urban spaces, but when they crossed defined boundaries they aroused moral indignation and outrage and at the worst extreme, murder. They were welcomed at festivals, fairs and popular bourgeois entertainment establishments but abhorred during daylight hours if they appeared in public civic contexts. It is within such contexts that Simmel’s delineation of the significance of boundaries for the maintenance of social order within his writings on “The Sociology of Space” (first published in 1903) becomes particularly pertinent (cf. Simmel 1997). Simmel’s interest in space forms part of his wider investigations into the forms of sociation that structure social relations, in which the sharing or indeed the “exclusivity” of space becomes a crucial element within human social interaction. Simmel’s study of the psychological effects of boundaries, boundary breaking, surveillance and policing within a city under the cover of “darkness” are particularly pertinent within the context of an analysis of the trade in prostitution within Imperial Berlin (Simmel 1997: 145). Indeed, he notes within the context of individuals’ experience in the darkness of the city, that “fantasy expands the darkness into exaggerated possibilities.”5 It was both the fear and the allure of darkness that helped to fuel anxieties and fascination about “ladies of the night” within the discourses of prostitution in Berlin during this period. Simmel’s analysis of social space and the significance of boundaries is situated, within the wider context of his work, on the economically determined structure of metropolitan existence and its effects upon individual social interaction. In keeping with the same general theme, Simmel also contributed to the existing debate on female prostitution. However, as I have already indicated, Simmel’s contribution to this subject differs from the existing public debates and becomes a useful indicator of the way in which female prostitution figured within a theoretical discourse of modernity in Germany at this time. In order to elaborate further then, it is worth contextualising Simmel’s work within a brief history of the status of prostitution during the Wilhelmine period. In 1913 an American doctor, William Sanger published a report entitled The History of Prostitution. In this prolific text, Sanger investigates the history of prostitution up to and including the contemporary situation in most countries, continents or cities around the globe. His report on Germany includes a specific chapter devoted to Prussia in which Berlin features prominently. The chapter itself is divided into subsections which include a consideration of the legal statutes governing the treatment of prostitutes by 5

Ibid. For further details about the history and perceptions of darkness within the big city see Schlör (1998).

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the police beginning in 1700, the history of the law on the existence of brothels, a consideration of public life in Berlin and the spaces of the city in which prostitution was most apparent, the increase of syphilis and the more recent regulations concerning prostitutes in Berlin. It would seem, according to Sanger’s account, that the Imperial legislation regarding prostitution had its origins in a royal edict and police ordinance of 1792 both of which were “founded upon the principle that prostitution is a necessary evil, which, if unregulated, tends to demoralise all society and inflict physical suffering on its votaries.” Sanger also observes that “as it can never be suppressed, it is tolerated in order that those who practise it may be brought under supervision and control” (Sanger 1913: 232). He outlines the historical changes regarding the regulation of prostitution including the opening up and subsequent closing down of “houses of tolerance,” or brothels. According to Sanger, the criminalisation of brothels in the mid 1840s in Berlin proved to be a disastrous measure that led to the subsequent loss of control over prostitution in the city and to the rapid increase in the spread of syphilis.6 In order to support his argument he cites the work of a number of different commentators on the subject of brothel closure and its corrupting effects upon public and private life in Berlin. The reports of many of these commentators are said to contain a “truly horrid picture of the immorality of the city.” He also notes that “in reading these descriptions [of dancing saloons and public bars], it must be remembered that under the toleration system, the police would not permit prostitutes to visit places of public amusement, nor would they allow music and dancing in the brothels” (Sanger 1913: 247). After citing numerous other reports and statistics regarding the detrimental effect that the criminalisation of brothels had upon the health of the city, he reports that:

6

Indeed, many newspaper reports at the time severely castigated the move to criminalize brothels, even right-wing newspapers such as the Vossische Zeitung were vehemently against it. In a report in the paper in 1847 a journalist comments, with the benefit of hindsight, that, “well meant but altogether erroneous is the proposition that brothels can be dispensed with in times of general intelligence and education, and that now this relic of barbarism can be done away with. Already, only two years after the closing down of brothels, this deception has been exploded, and we have bought experience at public cost. The illicit prostitutes, who well know how to escape the hands of the police, have spread their nets of demoralisation over the whole city; and against them, the old prostitution houses, which were under a purifying police control in sanitary and general maters, afforded safety and protection” (Vossische Zeitung, July 1847; cited in Sanger 1913: 244).

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Dorothy Rowe The increased evils of illicit prostitution, and the total inability of the police to counteract them; the spread of venereal disease, and its augmented virulence; the palpable and growing licentiousness of the city; the complaints of public journals; the investigations of scientific men; and the memorials of citizens generally, reached the royal ear, and induced an ordinance in 1851, restoring the toleration system… (250)

Thus, the stringent regulations of the Sittenpolizei that came into force in the latter half of the nineteenth century were an attempt to reintroduce control over women’s sexualised bodies. However, Sanger’s concluding remarks clearly indicate that he believed that such measures had come too late to stem the flow of illicit prostitutional activity in Berlin. He concludes by observing that: Berlin will have to suffer for years from the consequences of this misdirected step, for it is an easy matter to abandon all control, but an exceedingly difficult one to regain it. Now that the police are reinvested with their former authority, they strive, by every possible means, to repair the evils of the interregnum… (250-251)

During the Imperial era, the legislative control over women’s bodies was extremely severe yet at the same time seemingly ineffective. However, the idea that female sexuality in the public realm had to be regulated and the consequences of boundary breaking for the individual female in the city, became integral to the modernist representation of women in urban contexts. In such images, women in the city were more often than not confined to the roles of prostitutes, sex-murder victims, widows (a significant post-war signal of a sexually available woman), or anonymous bourgeois shoppers whose identities were fixed in terms of their roles as wives and mothers.7 It is within this context, then, that Simmel’s analysis of prostitution differs from many of his contemporaries. Simmel’s concern was not to castigate the activity of prostitution in terms of the moral values of those who participated but rather to adumbrate a sociological analysis of prostitution in terms of the signifying value of money within the structuring of modern metropolitan society. Simmel’s analysis of prostitution was indicative of his wide-ranging interest in contemporary urban phenomena, which distinguished his work from that of his contemporaries, much of whose sociological scholarship remained more abstract. Simmel’s main contribution to an analysis of prostitution was included as part of the fifth chapter of The Philosophy of 7

For further examples of the typical roles assigned to the female city dweller in many modernist representations of women in the public realm, see Wilson (1991).

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Money (1900). As mentioned above, the chapter as a whole is a consideration of the nature of Wergeld, or the monetary penalty for a crime against another person, in particular for murder. For Simmel, commodified sexuality in the form of prostitution as practised in the contemporary West, symbolised the levelling effects of money upon human relationships in one of its most severe forms. The main reason for this is cited by Simmel as being because “money establishes no ties” (Simmel 1971b: 121). He observes that: Money serves most matter-of-factly and completely for venal pleasure, which rejects any continuation of the relationship beyond sensual satisfaction: money is completely detached from the person and puts an end to any further ramifications. When one pays money one is completely quits, just as one is through with the prostitute after satisfaction is attained. (Simmel 1971b: 121)

For Simmel, prostitution becomes like money because anyone can take part in it and it recognises no differences between individuals. It is this that he pinpoints as being the “terrible humiliation inherent in prostitution” (122). Thus for Simmel, it is not so much the activity of prostitution per se that is debasing for women (he only considers the sellers of sex to be female within this analysis), but rather, he comments that: The debasement of prostitution lies in the fact that the most personal possession of woman, her greatest area of reserve, is considered equivalent to the most neutral value of all [money], one which is most remote from anything that is personal. (121)

For Simmel then, although commodified sexuality should theoretically remain neutralised by the levelling effects of money, the overriding differences between what he identifies as “objective” and “subjective” culture militate against such balancing out.8 The melancholy nature of contemporary metropolitan existence in the West is caused by the differentiation between objective (male) and subjective (female) culture in which the sexual act, although “identical for all classes of humanity” is for 8

A recurrent trope of Simmel’s writing is concerned with the increasing fragmentation and differentiation of the individual within the structures of global capitalism. For Simmel, the modern individual becomes increasingly alienated from the object of production and from the expanding objective culture in the mature money economy of the metropolis. Simmel’s texts become an attempt to try and explore ways in which subjective and objective culture can be re-integrated. In addition to this, these concepts are also explicitly gendered within Simmel’s writing between “objective male” and “subjective female” culture. For further details see the “Introduction” and various essays in Oakes (1984).

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women, according to Simmel, actually “supremely personal” and “involving the innermost self” (1971b: 123). He elaborates on this fact further by commenting upon the consequences that this differentiation has upon the social status of women who engage in polyandrous sexual activity. He observes that: The meaning and consequences which society ascribes to the sexual contact of men and women are also based on the assumption that the woman contributes her entire self, with all of its worth, whereas the man contributes only part of his personality. Therefore the girl who has gone astray only once, loses her reputation entirely… a woman’s infidelity is more harshly judged than a man’s… and prostitutes become irredeemably déclassé. (124)

Simmel’s observations on the social treatment of unchaste women remains an interesting indictment of contemporary commodified culture. However, while recognising that their position within Imperial society was unequal, the rationale behind his arguments hinged upon the problematic identification of women as subjective, undifferentiated and as being “closer to the dark primitive forces of nature” than men (123). This is a fundamental problem with many of Simmel’s analyses of gendered culture in much of his writing. However, despite the problematic status of Simmel’s analysis of prostitution, his attitude towards it differed from many of his contemporaries in the perspective from which it was considered. For Simmel, prostitution was a social problem only in so far as it was symptomatic of the levelling effects that global capitalism had upon modern life in the metropolis and in so far as it debased what he regarded as being women’s essential nature. However, for many other commentators, prostitution was considered to be a far more pernicious and threatening problem which, as already indicated, produced an intensity of regulation of women’s bodies, especially within the modern metropolis of Berlin. While many commentators sought practical solutions to the problems they identified, Simmel’s analyses remained largely detached from practical details. His analysis of prostitution became just one more symptom of the much larger ailment of money in metropolitan culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I would conclude then by suggesting that for Simmel, female prostitution stood as a metonym, rather than a metaphor for a Western capitalist economy at is most melancholic in the modern era.

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Works Cited Abelson, Elaine. 1989. When Ladies Go A’Thieving. Oxford: Oxford UP. Abrams, Lynn. 1988. “Prostitutes in Imperial Germany 1870-1918: Working Girls or Social Outcasts.” In The German Underworld: Deviants and Outcasts in German History. Ed. Richard Evans. London: Routledge. 189-209. Bebel, August. 1917. Die Frau und der Sozialismus. Ed. Daniel De Leon. New York: New York Labor News Company. Bronfen, Elizabeth. 1992. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester UP. Corbin, Alain. 1990. Women for Hire. Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850. Cambridge Massachusetts and London: Harvard UP. . 1986. “Commercial Sexuality in Nineteenth Century France: A System of Images and Regulations.” Representations (Special Issue on the body). 14: 153-78. Evans, Richard. 1998. “The Life and Death of a Lost Woman.” In Tales from the German Underworld. Ed. R. Evans. New Haven and London: Yale UP. Frevert, Ute. 1989. Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation. Oxford: Berg. Frisby, D. and M.Featherstone. Eds. 1997. Simmel on Culture. London: Sage. Jolin, Annette. 1993. “Germany.” In Prostitution: An International Handbook on Trends, Problems and Policies. Ed. Nanette Davis. Connecticut: Greenwood Press. Levine, Donald. Ed. 1971. Georg Simmel On Individuality and Social Forms. Selected Writings. Chicago: Chicago UP. Oakes, Guy. Ed. 1984. Georg Simmel, On Women, Sexuality and Love. New Haven and London: Yale UP. Petro, Patrice. 1989. Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany. New Jersey: Princeton UP. Sanger, William. 1913. The History of Prostitution: its Extent, Causes and Effects throughout the World. New York: The Medical Publishing Company. Schlör, Joachim. 1998. Nights in the Big City. London: Reaktion Books. Schulte, Regina. 1979. Sperrbezirke. Tugendghaftigkeit und Prostitution in der bürgerlichen Welt. Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat. Simmel, Georg 1997a. “Der Frauenkongress und die Sozialdemokratie.” Die Zukunft. 17 (1896): 80-84. Reprinted in translation in Simmel on Culture. Eds. D. Frisby and M. Featherstone. London: Sage. Simmel, Georg. 1997b. “The Sociology of Space.” In Simmel on Culture. Eds. D. Frisby and M. Featherstone. London: Sage. Simmel, Georg. 1990. The Philosophy of Money. Ed. David Frisby. Trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. London: Routledge. Simmel, Georg. 1971a. On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago: Chicago UP. Simmel, Georg, 1971b. “Prostitution.” In Georg Simmel On Individuality and Social Forms. Selected Writings. Ed., trans and intro. Donald Levine. Chicago: Chicago UP. 121-127.

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Tatar, Maria. 1995. Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany. New Jersey: Princeton UP.

EXPLORING AN ECONOMY OF EXEGETICAL STRUCTURES THROUGH CASSIRER AND BOURDIEU PHILIP TEW This essay challenges the critical orthodoxy in literary studies that assumes that the ideological conformity and the transformative effect of global exegetical structures capitalise culture as a social possession. Such exchange and reification raise an epistemic veil, processing metaphoric production and its critical representation as formal practices, producing ultimately conventional and deradicalised structures. This essay reassesses the nature of such critical interventions. It charts and analyses the “irrealist” tendency of the most recent phase of critical practice, its theoretical assumptions and the idea of the value within this “exegetical economy.” The “formal aspects” of the written narrative, of structure (and form), have been prioritised over “content.” The co-ordinates of a radicalised realism that counters such elitist and anti-realist tendencies are various; Edward Pols’ “metaphor of a commonplace epiphany;” Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of social agency; and generally Theodor Adorno, Ernst Cassirer and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Such theorists allow an interrogation of whether recent hegemonic tendencies in formalised literary critique could ever offer anything radically fluid or emancipatory. The present critique offers dialectical interrelationships of a renewed critical practice reaching toward objective elements outside of language and within the social context from which language derives its referentiality.

This essay seeks to identify and interrogate some of the consistent and dominant features of contemporary literary critical acts. As a whole, such readings have constituted their practice by what can be described as an “exegetical economy” with very recognisable features. To undertake such a recovery requires an analysis and foregrounding of the central presuppositions of the dominant criticism. A starting point is that overall, the methodological approach of both literary and cultural criticism has been directed towards both structure and form and away from a third element, “content.” All three are crucial features of the literary text. Together they contribute to what is recognised as literature’s subject matter; “content” is

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understood in terms of the very public co-ordinates of such writing, what the texts are about. However, in using this latter term I do not refer to objects, characters and events in a text as offering any unmediated equivalent of the “given” facts of the world. Nor is it understood to relate to any reductive objective presence of such reference within the plot of a book. Literary things and events do not simply stand for their counterparts in reality. Nevertheless, in applying this term I do seek to distinguish the substance of the literary world from its “formal aspects,” the latter being a priority and arguably an obsession of many critics engaged in their sphere or “economy.” “Content” does not represent simply a metaphorical extension of the term’s emergence from some implied container (that of the text as a form) giving shape to its disparate qualities. My usage refers to an expression of those facets of narrative that are constituents directly and indirectly, of language reference. The world of reality permeates the inner substance of the text. Additionally such literary texts possess an internal ontology. These two areas intersect. Such intrinsic and extrinsic interfusions are to be found both in narrative generally and metaphor specifically, and are not expressive primarily of the structure of the text. They relate more directly to its dialectical interrelationship with those objective elements outside of language. They refer to or gesture towards the social context from which language itself derives its referentiality. These relations rather than any description of form or structure represent the co-ordinates of placement that substantiate the reader’s notions of understanding and verification undertaken in any reading, including exegetical ones, principally of fictional or literary texts. This is not an appeal to a return to any reductive common sense method of evaluation and understanding, although this perception will always have its part to play (as it does in practice in a residual sense, in most theorists and particularly literary critics). For, as Virginia Woolf concludes towards the end of her life writing in, “A Sketch of the Past,” in the posthumously published Moments of Being (1985), such relations are not the rationally evident ones, and are often literally surprising. “It is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole” (Woolf 1985: 71). “Content” as a term has almost acquired a pejorative connotation. In recuperating its critical effectiveness as a general point of reference, my intention is to distinguish between such textual elements as a synthesis of life-world and linguistic referentiality, and the abstract and epistemological description of the act of textuality as a formal procedure. The latter represents understanding literature as a systemic mode of language form, an epistemically-closed system. The linguistic or hermeneutic mode of critique

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of many literary critics persists in treating literariness and its use of language as if it were part of a “closed” critical field. This depends upon a view that assumes such textual interventions are capable of both being regarded as separable from life-world contexts. Implicitly this identifies a quality in language as if it possesses a distinct status with regulatory procedures apart from a reality of verifiability. I add a further reservation. Any such strategy of elevating and refining structure as a rationale of dealing with language may be illuminating. However, there is a paradox involved since this critical mode is underpinned by a procedure that understands the logos quite apart from its constant matrix of relationality. Such extrusions of language from the realm of the particular do not thematise fully any sense of the critical ability involved in understanding a framework. Such structuration is a piecing together of elements, incorporating a schematic sense. An elitism and anti-realism enter the relationship. Quotidian verification is diminished. As Bourdieu explains in Language and Symbolic Power (1999) of “academic logocentricism” and its aristocratism, such formalising “verbal fetishism” resists “any kind of ‘reductionism,” that is against any destruction of form aimed at restoring discourse to its simplest expression, and, in so doing, to the social conditions of its production” (Bourdieu 1991: 51). In this sense, “content” is plural and expresses the dialectical stuff of life. To cite Bourdieu again: “The imposition of form which keeps the lay person at a respectful distance protects the text from ‘trivialisation’ ... by reserving it for an internal reading, in both senses: that of a reading confined within the limits of the text itself, and concomitantly, that of a reading reserved for the closed group of professional readers who accept as self-evident an ‘internalist’ definition of reading” (1999: 153). Every reader perceives content and from these features one’s own ontological analysis may variously be referenced, adapted and partially verified. All verification is incomplete, but so too is the very nature of language use. Language narrows our perception and recollection; it focuses the communicative context. At the same time it can indicate an intellectually embedded mystification of the word’s ability to suggest an adjacency with objects and even an integration of more disparate elements. If in language reference there is involved an intuitive ― or to use Edward Pols’ term, in Radical Realism: Direct Knowing in Science and Philosophy (1992)  an epiphanic  leap that remains untheorisable, then, firstly formal criticism cannot resolve that by an appeal to structure since underpinning its epistemological assumptions would be an absent referent, and secondly that absence does not negate all potential relationships, it merely diminishes the certainty of verification. Form, as an abstracted priority, deceives by attempting to efface and replace both the elements

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within what is properly the constant dialectic of incompletion and by neglecting the importance of any residual specificity. Moving to the phrase that is the focus of this collection, “Metaphors of Economy,” I found this suggesting a range of ideas. First, it is worth noting that the phrase’s suggestive incompletion yokes together two nouns that when so placed, in this particular adjacency, appear to generate an overlapping systemic inference. In simple terms they affect each other. They are implicated in notions of content and reference, not merely an epistemological structure, for they appeal to various fields. In this analysis, I work within the notion of a literary-aesthetic field (with an extension into that of the critical field) drawing from Pierre Bourdieu’s account of the concept in terms of “social agents” in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1996): “The field is a network of objective relations (of domination or subordination, of complementarity or antagonism, etc.) between positions” (Bourdieu 1996: 231). Any union of “metaphor” and “economy” and its interpretative model cannot avoid a taking of position. With the phrase itself, initially we might be drawn to creating a modification of the latter term, “economy,” by the plurality and suggestiveness of the former term, but a reversal immediately reinforces the notion that literaryaesthetic relations form a subset of a greater range of relations. Given that the inference of each term is distinct when used alone, it appears even on an initial understanding, that neither is undisturbed on any level, so a variability of content is indicated. Their unified phrasal positioning (and meaning) is affected by an interfusion. The overall phrase, it is worth stressing, manages furthermore to imply a notion of an interconnection of literary and rhetorical discourse with concepts of exchange and value that cannot be sustained in any equilibrium. The first term is subsumed into the second term, or generates a counterpoint that extends the second, but in a sense given their different apparent spheres, the one negates and ironises the other in a very specific manner. Either economy appears as a subset of the primordial category of rhetorical discourse, or it subsumes metaphor within an overarching determinism of exchange from which it cannot extricate itself. Two worlds confront each other in any topographical reading. The apparent imbalance remains. Nevertheless, despite this sense of deferred closure, somehow in this context the preposition “of” is both powerful and its precise relation remains fundamentally elusive. At an underlying level, there is more to the phrase since it bridges two modes of structuration (via two very different explanatory methods each foregrounding codes of behaviour) of the world, of language and of eventfulness. The juxtaposition suggests a breaking and dissolution of any boundaries of the terms, but also encourages a kind of analytical trajectory or intervention. Both strategies, thus evoked, conjoin the

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dissimilar in an epistemological union. Such a unification of difference suggests ontological possibilities and an effacement of the inherent abnormality of the qualities or substances to which one refers. There surfaces a feeling of appropriateness about the conjoinment. Very specifically, the synthesis of terms does accord with Adorno’s comment in Prisms that “culture sprang up in the marketplace, in the traffic of trade, in communication and negotiation” (Adorno 1992: 25), if only for its criticism in marking predatory from productive capital denying the appropriation of culture to the entanglement in commerce and thereby resisting the underlying logic that “all culture shares the guilt of society” (26). Culture is full of content, much of which is transformed, crucially, by the market into “capital,” a capitalised content of social possessions and control of an ideological conformity by the processes of exchange, value, reification and so forth each of which has an economy of its own, so that the exchange itself subsumes the exactitude of the process of production and its representation. Once naturalised in human socio-critical practice, although an abstraction, nevertheless an economy itself appears to suggest something of a systemic coherence at certain levels in terms of exchange, practicability, mutual values and social workability, and as a term is fragmentarily suggestive of what Bourdieu terms “habitus.” More specifically when I came to consider my intervention into this complex of ideas, I realised I was not only drawn both to explore literariness (with its specifically metaphoric component or dimension) not solely in a direct manner as text or as exchange value in itself, but also because of its central cultural position in positing textuality as both a process and cultural paradigm. My critique was thus engaged in terms of a fuller economy of exchange of both the critical and/or exegetical acts themselves. The latter meant that I am engaged by reflections upon, and a requirement in terms of that thinking that I should investigate the modes and methods of activity that are created in the literary-critical field by the resulting structures and concepts. Criticism possesses a logical and sociological outcome inscribed within its manner of approach and its fashion of defining itself. Hence essentially in understanding this relationship one should acknowledge that it is possible to sketch or map sociologically the meaning inherent in such critical acts. Formal priority has its own ideological significance. A random sample of the practice and trajectory of the body of contemporary critical acts cannot be achieved entirely by focusing on any particular exemplary paragraphs. This would be a partial exercise in a critical sense, prone to methodological doubts and questioning. Perhaps the simple fact of the overall preference for structure (and form) over content may be mapped (or even established) by observing simply that the well-known internal pattern of various exegetical structures (popular in the literary field)

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themselves  the transitions and interplay between Russian Formalism, New Criticism, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Postmodernism and so forth  have tended to militate against the sociological facts of texts. Literature has been denied much of its truth-content and in this way much criticism has resisted both narrative and “content” information being primary for any appropriate critique. The underlying paradigm of such readings is a system of linguistic or meta-linguistic forms of textualisation, and the making of these into a methodological priority. Even New Historicism re-thematises a fragment with historical eventfulness as a deconstructive, linguistic, hybrid form of intervention. It is true that sociological or factual qualities may emerge in any one of these procedures, but they acquire a secondary (or even tertiary) status within the critical procedure. This deferment (or its implicit hierarchy) must be of significance. However one might accept, naturalise or prefer the bias of these methodologies, the trajectory of each of the various particular procedural and formal orthodoxies as an epistemological assertion cannot simply be ignored or passed over. In terms of these factors, investigating this ultimately rational schema that conjoins these disparate schools of exegetical procedure, in such manner I am very tentatively attempting to illustrate and thematise the tendency of current literary exegesis to make structure and schema paradigmatic. Futhermore, I note its tendency to elevate the coherence of this classificatory mode over and above content or downgrade the specific relations of a text, diminishing to its fuller objective and ideological implications, and so disenfranchising any schema of the concrete or material aspects of reality. There must be a theoretical rather than simply accidental density in such a general conformity (and not to be too arcane, possesses a chartable sociological and ideological significance). Pols perceives clearly a covert “irrealist” tendency in much of contemporary critical and theoretical assumptions. If I am correct and it is possible to chart in literary criticism and its favoured schools a logocentricism, often an underlying irrealism of the kind Pols describes, and furthermore a diminution of content as a basis of most contemporary critical thought, then there exists in the various methods a manner of ersatz conformity. This formal insistence by its very practice might well be concluded to counter the very claims in contemporary circles for plurality and diversity that have provided a subvention for this critical transition from Post-Structuralism into Postmodernism, and the splitting off into New Historicist paradigms, with all of the process’ underlying ethical presumptions and schema clearly not extended to the praxis of criticism itself. Not only would that be contradictory, almost paradoxical, but one is necessarily led to the question of whether such a hegemonic tendency could itself ever be capable of being fluid or emancipatory? Might this pattern help

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to explain the contradictory social exclusion that is the generality in literary and critical fields? There has been exegetically a narrowing of any interest expressed culturally in recent years in terms of class, a shift of emphasis from the post-war rhetoric of solidarity. Some argue that there has been a narrowing of the range of participants in terms of educational antecedents, and perhaps more significantly a reduction of any perception of interests by critical commentators outside of their own sphere, particularly in the AngloAmerican context. This is what has led black American writer James Alan McPherson to both theorise his ethnic presence, but moreover to reflect on the overall power of the market (the economy at large). In A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile (2000) McPherson comments that “[p]erhaps it is this commercially driven reinforcement of group-specific demographics that has encouraged the reappearance of phratric communities  blacks, gays, feminists, white males, senior citizens  of which groups, like the citizens of Corinth, Athens, and Sparta, were uncomfortable with each other” (McPherson 2000: 307-308). The drive for freedom has produced a fragmentation that has its only coherence in its procedural attitudes, a general exegetical notion, that in its own critical and defining presence is overriding. This is an ambition for a universality of epistemic representation and yet remains divisive because of the content of people’s lives and narratives. These hegemonic social ideas appear to have an intimate relationship with exegetical concepts, and to have imposed their own socialised narrative. In both cases, that of social analysis and that of the literary, specificity is channeled, secondary to an apparently “liberal” or “ethical” mode, a diffusion of content as evidential and exemplary rather than experiential in any less epistemological (and conformist) manner. In terms of literary production itself McPherson opines “the current culture’s devotion to technique over meaning” (300). Furthermore, he perceives an ethical dilemma as well as a practical one in such cultural mores and attitudes that reject universality of any kind. “Issues of multiculturalism and relativism aside, there seems to be under way a steady retreat from engagement with these core values. Instead there is a proud celebration of image, the polished surface, that is offered without irony of hesitation, as a substitute for the core value” (302). If I am correct in relating the bias of approach of contemporary criticism where form supplies a conceptual vocabulary as a mediatory force, and that this displaces any concept of universal content, one must remember this tends to negate Adorno’s concept that a dialectical freedom is essential to allowing a spontaneous and immanent criticism since, “the spontaneous movement of the object can be followed only by someone who is not entirely engulfed by

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it” (Adrono 1992: 29). Adorno says that social science has plundered the notion of ideology where, the danger involved in overlooking the function of ideologies has become less than that of judging intellectual phenomena in a subsumptive, uninformed and administrative manner and assimilating them in the prevailing constellations of power which the intellect ought to expose. As with many other elements of dialectical materialism, the notion of ideology has changed from an instrument of knowledge into its strait-jacket. (Adorno 1992: 30)

My conjecture is that in the privileging of form and structure over content (the latter can more specifically offer a factuality and model of a dialectic of formational elements of concept, genre and understanding), contemporary criticism has engaged in this narrowing in opposition to the radical enterprise that it claims. The accession to such critical structuration may represent an entry-point, a sort of “rites of critical passage,” for as Macpherson says, “most especially an unwavering and fixed loyalty, must be the price of admission to almost all elite groups” (McPherson 2000: 69). As payment for its own admission price and as part of its exegetical economy, the critical field has extracted the subordination of particularity and sociological relevance. There is a further toll to be paid. In so doing critics demand the interpretative act and structure both become pivotally conjoined, without which interconnection the exegetical intervention loses its value and creditability. Rather than accede to this practice and naturalise this strategy of reading that is in fact both a critical intervention and self-asserting ploy, I insist on thematising its signification as an economy of exegesis, following its inherent logic which is a propensity towards models and the veering away from res (the world of things) as substantive, evidential content (and thus abandoning the primary strategy of literary discourse itself). Moreover, one might usefully mediate any notion of aesthetic concepts or a distinctiveness of economic exchange as separable realms by evoking G. V. Plekhanov’s conclusion to a seminal work, The Materialist Conception of History (1897), that “men do not make several distinct histories  the history of law, the history of morals, the history of philosophy, etc.  but only one history, the history of their own social relations, which are determined by the state of productive forces in each particular period” (Plekhanov 1940: 60). In a recent critical reader Michael Riffatterre in an essay “Describing Poetic Structures: Two Approaches to Baudelaire’s ‘Les Chats’” says that poetry in general is essentially defined by the relations of parallelism and must be considered in structural terms where, “a structure is a system made of several elements, none of which can undergo a change without effecting changes in all other

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elements; thus the system is what mathematicians call an invariant; transformations within it produce a group of models of the same type (that is, mechanically interconvertible shapes), or invariants” (Riffaterre 1999: 1950). His particular critique of Baudelaire at present does not concern me (suffice to comment that it neither presents nor possesses any sociological or dialectical commentary), but what does draw my attention is his notion that some feature beyond grammar (which for him is an incompletion) constitutes the abstraction of the invariant that in poetic discourse remains intact so, “therefore we are able to observe a structure only in the shape of one or other variant” (150). The containment or self-referential bias of this species of critique precludes a viable socio-critical position, and whatever its other claims, on one level certain features of the way in which the paper’s critique foregrounds its own internal logic (that is its own critical and intellectual presence) suggest a non-aesthetic, overriding logic of this formalisation. This is not to suggest its particular commentary is incorrect, or incoherent, merely to suggest that its overall propensity as part of its field is very marked. Whatever their structural dynamics, texts are sociological, both in their creation and production. As Virginia Woolf, not by any means a noted sociologist, realises in A Room of One’s Own in attempting to recover the essential reasons for the absence of women as writers during large parts of modern British literary history, she inquires as to the condition of production and the nature of textual reflection. What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. [... ] One remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things. (Woolf 1981: 42)

This tentative attachment to material things is both a quality and a characteristic of “content” and the overall text, not expressing any logic of “solids,” in a Bergsonian sense of his critique of reductive objectifications, but a logic of non-textuality. Exchange relates intimately with concepts of value. The sense then, of an ideological intervention into variously the real, the concrete, the social and the personal context, to name but a few modes or classificatory schema creates the capacity for the intersubjective acts. In texts these contradictory relations mark out the events where man plays out his mediations of being; in an unmediated world no such extrusions or separations exist. There is a doubling in the critical exchange or evaluation of texts and their

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interpretative economy in this realm (to use a spatial metaphor), since literary (and other) texts are units of prior exchange concerning these modes or classificatory schema. So what are these critical/exegetical interventions? Firstly, it would seem unproblematic to posit them generally  following Bourdieu’s example in various works  as ideological and social acts that cannot be finally in themselves contacted to their textualisations. Criticism is played out within a field that is dynamic, is never neutral and has an intimate relationship with aspects of the economic and social power to create economic spaces such as teaching posts, research funding, publication and tangential effects in other forms of exchange (television, media and so forth) in a manner too obvious to be itemised in detail here. These are not entirely self-sustaining or purely epistemological in nature. As Plekhanov says “the artificial environment very powerfully modifies the influence of nature on social man. From a direct influence, it becomes an indirect influence. But it does not cease to exist for that” (Plekhanov 1940: 30-31). Nevertheless, it is evident that as historical forces with the power of value within the economy of texts and as expressions of ideological positions (the space of possibles to contract Bourdieu’s complexity) such exegetical critique shapes and effects those forces and relations into whose contact they come. Clearly that would include future and existing critical texts and fictional ones (which given Plekhanov’s timely reservation are not rendered immune from the force of things and less mediated events). Therefore, at a number of levels, in all textual exchange there remains at least a residual phenomenological presence of a shaping force as well as that of the sign itself. As Cassirer states: “It lies in the very concept of language that it can never be purely sensuous, but represents a characteristic interpenetration and interaction of sensuous and conceptual factors; in language it is always presupposed that individual sensory signs be filled with intellectual meaning content. The same is true of every other kind of ‘representation’ — that is, of every instance where one element of consciousness is represented in and through another” (Cassirer 1955: 100). Hence not only criticism as an exchange possesses intellectual value, but also in the nature of linguistic acts in Cassirer’s sense, the texts and field from which this activity derives its content and form. Furthermore, it may be regarded that the nature of the “goods” in which criticism trades is itself to be transformed by this economy. Any priority of a less mediated and more fluid concept of content would be a challenge to the contemporary critical modes like hypertextualisation that serve to take the interpretative models (and acts) beyond any specific, available meaning, but not into any ontological thematic. Formal obsessions in terms of critique increase and reinforce the separation of understanding and normative existence by an insistence on a critical “currency” within the field. The meaning, popularity,

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continued commercial existence and so forth, of existing texts are all affected by critical acts in their widest sense; and are important among a range of other often more commercial factors and forms that create a coherence of influence that works upon the social and economic factors that influence the production of emergent literary and critical texts. Even though we are perhaps over-familiar with the broad transitions of schools and fads of exegetical engagement already cited  New Criticism, Structuralism, PostStructuralism, Postmodernism, New Historicism and so forth  we allow them a discrete quality. Despite this plethora of methods, it might be more useful to posit as a possibility that there exists a common core, as I have outlined, to the trajectory of late twentieth century criticism. Whether one accepts this or not, the dynamics of the field must be considered rather than naturalised and elided. There is some central quality or operating principle somewhere within such an economy and its particular notions of value, given its patterning of both the nature of the text in general and its own relationship with its explanatory model of such texts. Critics speak less of meaning in lifeworld contexts, and where they do it may be noted that reality itself has been textualised. Increasingly notions of history are variously textual, matters of sign systems or indistinguishable from illusion (and imagery). At least in these contexts, it seems evident that the critical tendency, the trading strategy of this market, has been towards a structuration of the exchange, and its coinage and commodities have been the literary methods and the linguistic models to be derived from such texts. Criticism has both capitalised and mystified itself. The critics as traders conceive of a field where language, as a hermeneutic concept, has guided interpretative acts away from the content of literature towards its general interpretation as a linguistic model defined by a series of relativistic, plural exchanges. As Pols says The metaphor of a commonplace epiphany applies as adequately to our awareness of a sentence in a justificatory argument as it does to our awareness of a tree or of another person. And this conclusion cannot be evaded by transposing the discussion into the key of today’s linguistic obsession, for the grasp of language as such, or for that matter the technical attention to the structure of language, rests also on our power of rational awareness. It is irrelevant that the philosophers I imagine would not dream of using the expression “rational awareness;” it is what they take for granted that I am concerned with just now. (Pols 1992: 43)

Nevertheless, in spite of this self-evident necessity underpinning any linguistic act of attention, the linguistic nature of texts and the apparent separation of conceptual and objective fields are appealed to as justifications for various strategies in support of a bias towards structure, form and a

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logocentric context. Objections remain. As Cassirer explains, in their originary forms signs in themselves, as essential factors towards and elements of language formation, reach beyond the individual to lay claim to universal validity (Cassirer 1955: 87-88) and, moreover, The name of a thing and the thing in itself are inseparably fused; the mere word or image contains a magic force through which the essence of the thing gives itself to us. And we need only transfer this notion from the real to the ideal, from the material to the functional, to find that it contains a kernel of justification Through the sign that is associated with the content, the content itself acquires a new permanence. (89)

If specific meaning is elusive, it is paradoxically so since constitutive of the sign as of its very nature is a kernel and residuum of that very subject-object permanence from which it appears. Language systems retain this aspiration however arbitrary their formation may appear, of such relations, and texts capitalise upon this constitutive base. As when one looks at the monetary economy as a succession of places, acts and goods, not necessarily identifying perpetually capital, exploitation and commodification, so one diminishes the content of language and its objective core in order to theorise other modes and elements that superimpose themselves upon this base in aesthetic texts in particular for they foreground an apparent and yet quite spurious removedness from their originary forms. Even the most advanced forms of language are inseparable from physical and social influences, contexts and consequences that the economy of critical interventions commodifies and capitalises, but from which it distances itself. Even in the secondary critique of literary exegesis, the interconnection of narrative and a life-world cannot be dismissed because of the limitations of simple relational (sign-object) and comparative concepts of expression. One must involve a critical relationship of reflection, cultural production and the originary objective desire as constitutive of aesthetic commentary (implicitly or explicitly). As Adorno reflects “[n]o theory, not even that which is true, is safe from perversion into delusion once it has renounced a spontaneous relation to the object. Dialectics must guard against this no less than against enthrallment in the cultural object” (Adorno 1992: 33). One might add the dangers of a cultural negativity and relativism that effectively effaces any objective, efficacious reality. Moreover in criticism there remains a doubling of the separation of language and life-world, from the quality of content and its immediate mediations; Bourdieu among others makes clear the implicit capitalisation of ideas, aesthetic presence and ideological positions from concrete elements of the social world of exchange. Value attaches itself somewhere and in a very specific series of relations

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divorced from the objective. This complex of shifting positions counters the exegetical account of the text, the image and such a formal co-ordination of what remains a series of life-world events with ideological extensions or incorporations. Could the academy be seen as modelled on an elaborate form of double-entry where on one level the sign is expressed as a literal capital, a transformation in Cassirer’s sense of language emerging from myth into new forms of representation? Yet, the text is both an aesthetic structure and product once it is accounted for in the aesthetic entry system, allowing access to what as being invested in it by the producer and its renewed presence is traded by its critical authorisation. The most economically marginalised producers become a re-appropriated source of dead and living labour that have only residual value as part of a market economy for most of those involved (author, critic, student). A critical mass or energy is unleashed by the creation of a conformity of formal devices and procedures: variously critical schools, published works, university faculties and a few critical stars. Twentieth century thought had tended, rather than seeing a trade-off of textual modes and elements, to create a priority of both understanding a structure and the structuration of formal elements over content. Why? Bourdieu reminds us in Language and Symbolic Power that, “[i]deological production is all the more successful when it is able to put in the wrong anyone who attempts to reduce it to its objective truth” (Bourdieu 1991: 153). In the exegetical process, content (as a theoretical and ontological factor) becomes secondary and obscured. Process predominates over substance. In so-called “Post-Modernity” in particular, the concrete and the real have diminished. The phenomenological particularity that so interested Maurice Merleau-Ponty has receded. The epistemological form of exchange becomes formalised and established like a money-system: form, structure, ideological presence all account for an overriding supercession of the specific, of the factual, of the truthful and of the eventful. Although content may be seen as the exchange value of textualisation, a currency of form obscures the underlying acts of value and their exchanges. The labour/capitalisation process is erased and the critical function is foregrounded as a natural element rather than as an ideological intervention adding critical value and investment. This can be achieved within the economy of signs with Poststructuralist and Postmodernist interventions that claim to oppose such formal centring whilst accomplishing an exegetical centre of structural determination over content. Using notions of ideological permeations and interchange as a varied economy with roots in a factual and eventful universe, this essay suggests that form and structure have been separated and in these acts a commodified account appears that displaces a notion of recovering value. Analysis becomes a capitalisation, a globalisation of

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critique as a formal practice, but this investment, masking its portfolio strategies, is so widespread that it normalises its own economy of form. Can it be argued finally that Post-Modernity has accelerated this process of separating the systemic from the actual so that epistemology itself is reified and has contributed to globalisation by defusing a dynamic cultural and literary critique that may engage with ideological factualities such as dispossession, class, first world bias and so forth as if they were qualities of a universal truthfulness rather than a ludic interplay of contending ideological forces? To conclude my contribution (while not suggesting closure of these issues, or even an adequate initiation), I reflect that Bourdieu in Language and Symbolic Power (1991) charts that structure and formality are emergent from a bourgeois predisposition to advance censoring of one’s intellectual and ideological interventions (84-85) and within this “economy of communication” with its demand of surrendering to an apparent objectivity via a mode of self-negation towards form is telling. Such a mode of expression, which is produced by and for markets requiring “axiological neutrality” (and not only in language use), is also adjusted in advance to markets which require that other form of neutralisation and distancing of reality (and distancing of the other classes which are immersed in it) which compromises the stylisation of life: that forming of practices which gives priority in all things to manner, style and form, to the detriment of function. (85)

Thus a “performative logic of symbolic domination” permeates exegetical recovery and thus the act of critique becomes ideologically implicated in what are ultimately conventional and deradicalised structures. Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. 1992. Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Bourdieu, Pierre 1996. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Cambridge: Polity. ——. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Polity. Cassirer, Ernst. 1955. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms — Volume One: Language. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven and London: Yale UP. McPherson, James Alan. 2000. Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile. New York and London: Simon & Schuster. Plekhanov, G. V. 1940. The Materialist Conception of History. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

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Pols, Edward. 1992. Radical Realism: Direct Knowing in Science and Philosophy. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP. Riffaterre, Michael. 1999. “Describing Poetic Structures: Two Approaches to Baudelaire’s ‘Les Chats.’” In Literary Theories: A Reader and Guide. Ed. Julian Wolfreys. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. 149-161. Woolf, Virginia. 1981. A Room of One’s Own. New York and London: Harcourt, Brace & Company. ——. 1985. Moments of Being. New York and London: Harcourt, Brace & Company. I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Sean Darmody (University of Debrecen, Hungary) for the personal and professional courtesy extended to me with helpful commentary and generally good company.

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FROM CLASSICAL DICHOTOMY TO DIFFERANTIAL CONTRACT: THE DERRIDEAN INTEGRATION OF MONETARY THEORY1 NADJA GERNALZICK In the 1930s and 1940s, John Maynard Keynes’ “disequilibrium” theory, Georges Bataille’s notion of “systemic expenditure,” and Joseph A. Schumpeter’s term “creative destruction” prefigured and demanded the concepts of différance and deconstruction as they were developed and applied by Jacques Derrida from 1967 onwards. Common denominator of the four theories is the attempt to conceptualise effects of temporality in relation to concepts of money and economy. Derrida’s principle of différance seems to offer the tool for integrating monetary theory  soemthing economics has attempted to achieve throughout the 20th century.

“Auratic Borrowing (Spivak 1993)” of the Term Economy The following discussion continues from a position reached earlier in an extended investigation of the term economy and its correlates such as money, value, price, exchange, production, and labour in the works of Jacques Derrida. Such a specific investigation into Derridean deconstruction was suggested by the auratic power the term economy had acquired in American and anglophone cultural theory and criticism during the past 25 years. Consider these examples: “economies of debt and gift,” “providential economy,” “economic form” (Rieder 1988: 75, 67, 67), “economy of reappropriation,” “economy of sacrifice,” “conjugal economy,” “transcendental economy” (Nouvet 1990: 766, 750, 766, 772), “economy of abundance,” “economy of scarcity” (Trotter 1992: 27), “economy of excess,” “economy of expenditure,” “comic economy,” “revolutionary economy,” “Irish economy,” “economy of composition,” “artistic economy,” “verbal economy,” “linguistic and material 1

Reprinted by permission and with slight revision from Kultur  Sprache  Ökonomie, ed. Wolfgang Weitlaner, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach Sonderband 54 (2001): 363-373.

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Nadja Gernalzick economies,” “economy of reading” (Osteen 1990: 162, 163, 163, 163, 171, 185, 189, 189, 162, 195), “moral economy” (Dimock 1991: 67; Knight 1993: 161; Zheng 1996: passim), “economy of happiness,” “economic mode of thinking” (Cope 1987: 181), “erotic economy” (Warner 1991: 157), “climacteric economy” (Walsh 1993: 73), “economy of being” (Dolis 1987: 185), “American economy of the self” (Coltharp 1992: 280), “textual economy,” “general economy,” “libidinal economy” (McCaffery 1986: x, 201),2 “economy of explanation” (Hayles 1987: 119), “economy of pain” (Dimock 1991: 67).

The term economy in these examples is often employed without any critical explanation; frequently, the term is simply used synonymously with “order,” “system,” or “context.” Derrida described différance, his contribution to philosophical terminology, as an economic principle as early as 1967 (cf. below and e.g. Derrida 1997) and his work had an impact in the U.S. considered a “revolution” (Davis & Schleifer 1985: vii; Harvey 1986: ix) of the American critical scene: The aura of the term economy and its correlates, and also the rise of what has by now been called New Economic Criticism (cf. Osteen & Woodmansee 1999), can be traced to the influence and prestige of Derridean deconstruction and of its use of economy first in France, and then in the United States and in anglophone literary and cultural theory worldwide. Derrida’s Economy of différance and Its American Reception The textual locations of Derrida’s use of the term economy and of his theoretical economics are too manifold to list here. A few references may suffice: in his essay of 1966 on Claude Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist anthropology, Derrida already indicated that the problem of the structurality of structure, that is, the problem of a centered, a-historical, and static structure, might be “[a] problem of economy” (Derrida 1978b: 282). In De la grammatologie of 1967, Derrida held that “[t]he critical description of money is the faithful reflection of the discourse on writing” (Derrida 1997: 300). Also in 1967, Derrida answered Jean Houdebine’s and Guy Scarpetta’s question whether différance was an economic concept by stating that 2

Libidinal economy is of course also Jean-François Lyotard’s term, derived from Sigmund Freud. General economy refers to Georges Bataille’s use of the term. The term textual economy is frequently applied in poststructuralist theory and, less frequently and contextualised differently, in Derrida’s work on deconstruction. For these and other traditions of the use of the term economy in e.g. rhetorics, poetics, and theology, cf. Gernalzick (2000: 18-19 and Appendix I).

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différance “is the economical concept, and since there is no economy without différance, it is the most general structure of economy” (Derrida 1981b: 8). In the first American reception of Derrida’s work, beginning in 1966, the Yale Critics largely ignored its references to economy, arguably because of an undesirable importation of a Marxist context into American academe, while Fredric Jameson, on the contrary, in his Marxism and Form (1971) and his The Prison-House of Language (1972), aligned Derrida’s work and economics with the Marxist work of Jean-Joseph Goux and others of the Tel Quel-group in France. However, the early American ways of reception did not provide for an understanding of Derridean economics. And while from the late 1970s onwards, many critics of schools as diverse as New Historicism, axiological criticism, New Pragmatism, and what is today the New Economic Criticism related their interest in economy to French poststructuralist authors and to Derrida, they nevertheless mostly reduced Derridean economics to exchangist and productionist classical economics,3 with — as far as I could trace — the single exception of Walter Benn Michaels in his The Gold Standard and the Logics of Naturalism (1987). The economy of différance is incompatible with exchangist and productionist classical economics because of its advanced monetary theory. This advanced monetary theory, however, has usually been simplified in the American reception. Derridean economics are concerned with materiality, temporality, fictionality, and conventionality in a critique of idealist essentialism, so that the classical and Marxist labour theories of value as well as the metallist or bullion theory of money are made redundant. In order not to repeat the well-known Derridean tenets here implicated, let me abbreviate: if we followed Derrida’s economics, we would rather have to think chrematistics.4 As he has undertaken to show with regard to the secondariness of writing to speech in idealist philosophy, so Derrida has criticised the view of the derivativeness of a monetary economy in the Aristotelian tradition. This tradition opposes a demonised monetary economy to an idealised and 3

The distance of Derridean deconstruction to a theoretical paradigm of exchange and production is indicated e.g. by Derrida’s critique of Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist arguments as “échangistes” (Derrida 1991), and by his reservations about production: “[T]he concept and the word ‘production’ pose enormous problems” (Derrida 1988: 148). 4 Since Aristotle’s application of the term in contrast to the term economics in his Politics, chrematistics denotes the technique of trading in a monetary economy (chrema denoting thing, piece, commodity, money), whereas economics denotes the technique of proper guidance of a  feudal and agrarian  household and estate (oikos denoting house and nomos rule, thus, the rule of the house).

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theoretically privileged natural barter economy. In Given Time (1991), which draws on lectures of 1977, Derrida holds that the Aristotelian distinction between economics and chrematistics is “unlivable” (161). Derridean economics perform an integration of Aristotelian economics and chrematistics. For Derrida, money primarily does not represent a good, nor does it substitute a value in an exchange; instead, as Benjamin Franklin knew, “TIME is Money” (Franklin 1961: 306): Derrida turns this proposition around to “l’argent, c’est du temps” (Derrida 1992: 395). Money is time. By his concepts of différance, of deconstruction, and of a general and material textuality, Derrida has supplied the tools to think temporality, conventionality, and fictionality as necessary attributes of all material markers. These material markers include writing and money, as well as people with their bodies, machines, things, sounds, “all possible referents” (Derrida 1988: 148). Textuality — the ensemble of marks — in Derridean deconstruction does not exclusively refer to printed matter or writing in the alphabet or in letters, but replaces what we are used to calling reality. The material mark or marker is differantial, or shifting — and it is not identical or motivated — because of the effect of différance, which is the principle of “temporization-temporalization” (Derrida 1981b: 107n42). Derrida’s Economics and the Development of Monetary Theory So how do Derrida’s economy of différance and its integration of economics and chrematistics relate to contemporary economic theory? Such an integration is what economic theory has been after since John Maynard Keynes criticised the so-called classical dichotomy of value theory and monetary theory, or of real analysis and monetary analysis in economics. So long as economists are concerned with what is called the theory of value, they have been accustomed to teach that prices are governed by the conditions of supply and demand [...] . But when they pass in volume II, or more often in a separate treatise, to the theory of money and prices, we hear no more of these homely but intelligible concepts and move into a world where prices are governed by the quantity of money, by its income-velocity, by the velocity of circulation relatively to the volume of transactions, by hoarding, by forced saving, by inflation and deflation et hoc genus omne; and little or no attempt is made to relate these vaguer phrases to our former notions of the elasticities of supply and demand. [...] The division of economics between the theory of value and distribution on the one hand and the theory of money on the other hand is, I think, a false division. (Keynes 1973: 292-293)

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Classical value theory had to be integrated with the theory of prices and monetary theory if one wanted a comprehensive understanding of money and a monetary economy. A satisfying explanation for prices could not be reached while economics continued to assume the privilege of an ideal, static, timeless natural barter economy before a monetary economy of long-term and international trade, of credit, interest, and speculation. So Keynes tried to integrate the classical dichotomy of a value theory and a monetary theory into a general theory which explained the formation of prices for goods as well as the formation of prices for money. His object was to find a method which is useful in describing, not merely the characteristics of static equilibrium, but also those of disequilibrium, and to discover the dynamical laws governing the passage of a monetary system from one position of equilibrium to another. (Keynes 1971: xvii).

As an alternative to the classical dichotomy, Keynes therefore suggested a dynamical systems theory which accounts for effects of temporality: [W]e might make our line of division between the theory of stationary equilibrium and the theory of shifting equilibrium  meaning by the latter the theory of a system in which changing views about the future are capable of influencing the present situation. (1973: 293).

Such a new theoretical dichotomy between stationary equilibrium and disequilibrium was deemed necessary because of the re-definition of money Keynes had also supplied: For the importance of money essentially flows from its being a link between the present and the future. [...] Money, in its significant attributes is, above all, a subtle device for linking the present to the future; and we cannot even begin to discuss the effect of changing expectations on current activities except in monetary terms. We cannot get rid of money even by abolishing gold and silver and legal tender instruments. So long as there exists any durable asset, it is capable of possessing monetary attributes, and, therefore, of giving rise to the characteristic problems of a monetary economy. (1973: 293-294). As for Derrida, money for Keynes also primarily does not represent a good or value in an instantaneous exchange, but derives from credit obligations and contracts over time. The Keynesian “money of account” is that in which debts and prices and general purchasing power are expressed [...]. A money of account comes into existence along with debts, which are contracts

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Nadja Gernalzick for deferred payment, and price lists, which are offers of contracts for sale or purchase. [...] Money itself, namely that by delivery of which debt contracts and price contracts are discharged, and in the shape of which a store of general purchasing power is held, derives its character from its relationship to the money of account... (1971: 3)

Thus, for Keynes, money primarily becomes a technology of time and functions as information or contract. Money relates us to temporality, to conventionality or the law, and to conventionality and fictionality of value. It does not represent an authentic or essential, previous or superior, unit of value. The classical theories of money, including Marx’s monetary theory, do not explain the genesis of money from contracts over time between creditor and debtor or seller and buyer, and instead insist on a representative, or metaphorical, quality of money. Limits to Integration But as Hajo Riese reminded us in 1995, Keynes’ project was only partly successful since he merely changed from one theoretical dichotomy to another, or, effected merely a shift of the bounds which separated value theory from monetary theory: even though followers of Keynes like Don Patinkin in his Money, Interest, and Prices: An Integration of Monetary and Value Theory (1956) distinguish between microeconomics and macroeconomics, or individual and market monetary systems, an integral explanation of the shifting equilibrium as an effect of money has not yet been achieved; economics still relegates the formation of values to a microeconomics in which money and its effects are not satisfactorily integrated, according to Riese. In its 200 years’ history as theory of value, political economy has not succeeded in tracing money — like goods or products — to decisions of individuals and to the interplay of these decisions in a general market scenario. Yet only such a theory could clarify the function of money or define what money is. Since such a differentiated and complex theory apparently does not yet exist in economics, Riese writes of money as the last secret of political economy. Others also grant that in the 1980s the microeconomic foundations of money became important, and the macroeconomic view of money and its control faded. As a result, a much larger set of phenomena and issues appeared than probably in any previous decade. (MacDonald & Milbourne 1991: 310).

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Nevertheless, the general equilibrium models of the 1980s “which have as their foundation a representative agent solving a[n]... optimization problem” seem vague in respect of the fact that such optimisation problems are “generally intertemporal” (291): A standard way of introducing money into such models is to embed them into an overlapping generations framework [...]. This exogenously imposes money on the model, as does the cash-in-advance model. This is not important for some questions, but it does not address the fundamental question of why money exists. (309)

Whether a complete integration be possible or not — deconstruction always defers such a possibility — it seems clear that monetary analysis may only advance in explaining money if the definition of money as primarily a means of exchange is thoroughly overcome. The definition of money as the means of exchange rests on the traditional and metallist hypothesis of an equivalent, instantaneous natural exchange, or barter, in which money takes on a representative role as a substitute. Since this model is static, it cannot explain a monetary economy including credit economy and interest, that is, it cannot explain temporal effects; for the explanation of such an economy, the definition of money as nominal, conventional, and contractual over time is necessary. Derrida’s Deconstruction and Keynes’ Disequilibrium Theory It follows that the Keynesian or post-Keynesian and Derridean theories of money are very close. In fact, the plan for Derrida’s critique of an ahistorical structuralism and for his concept of deconstruction could have been supplied by Keynes’ theory of the shifting equilibrium. Derrida’s concept of deconstruction as the effect of différance answers Keynes’ demand for a disequilibrium theory: deconstruction, the ongoing destruction and construction of systematicity as the effect of temporality, shifts relations between material markers and changes contracts, conventions, or rules. Deconstruction, just as Keynes’ shifting equilibrium, at the same time depends on the temporalising as well as contractual and stabilising effects of writing, which consists of material markers like money. So Derrida might have been inspired by Keynes, just as the structuralist Ferdinand de Saussure, whose linguistics Derrida extends, was most likely inspired by Leon Walras’ and Vilfredo Pareto’s marginalist economics and value theory (cf. Gernalzick 2000: chapter 3).

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Bataille’s Systemic Expenditure and Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction There are other connections between Derrida and Keynes: Derrida’s concept of deconstruction is comparable to Georges Bataille’s notion of systemic expenditure — or wasteful activity beyond restorative consumption — as a necessary correlative to production; Bataille, in turn, in his work refers to Keynes (cf. e.g. Bataille 1976b: preface). In Bataille’s work, notions of disequilibrium or deconstruction are rendered by his theory of expenditure. Expenditure is a necessary correlative of production since in Bataille’s “économie à la mesure de l’univers” (Bataille 1976a: 7; which Richardson translates as “The Economy to the Proportion of the Universe,” 1998: 74) there is a superadequacy of energy supplied by the sun and transformed in production; this superfluous energy needs to be used, or else the solar system itself would collapse, or rather, explode. In Bataille’s general economy, socalled unproductive activities — luxury, mourning rites, wars, cults, the building of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, the arts, perverse sexual activity (that is, what is turned away from genital finality) (Richardson 1998: 70, quoted from Bataille 1970a: 305)

— are necessary because of what economics call over-production and a saturated market. In the general economy, “a human sacrifice, the building of a church, or a gift of jewelry are not of less interest than the selling of wheat” (Bataille 1976b: 19; my translation).5 Bataille describes a general economy as Keynes attempted a general theory and as Derrida writes a general textuality. However, because Bataille holds on to a humanist Marxist perspective which places sovereign man, or, the worker, in the position of saving the universe through expenditure (cf. Bataille 1976b: 43; 1970a: 318; 1970b: 341; 1976c: 383), Bataille is but a forerunner of a Derridean textual economy, as Derrida has pointed out in his essay on Bataille’s general economy (cf. Derrida, 1978a). There is also a nexus between deconstruction and Joseph A. Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction” of 1942 (Schumpeter 1950: chapter VII); Schumpeter, as an economist and historian of economic theory, was influenced by Keynes’ critique of the classical dichotomy and by his 5

Bataille and Derrida have also engaged, to different ends, the anthropological theory of wasteful tribal economies or economies of the gift, that is, economies of deferred or non-equated exchanges as proferred by Marcel Mauss in “Essai sur le don” (1923-24). For a discussion of Mauss’ monetary and credit theory in this context, cf. Gernalzick (2000: chapter 2).

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monetary theory (cf. Schumpeter 1954: part V, chapter 5 “Keynes and Modern Macroeconomics”, and passim). Schumpeter, also rewriting Marx, describes “creative destruction” as inherent to capitalism since it is never stationary, but an evolutionary process deriving its impetus from “new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates” (1950: 83); the process incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. (1950)

Schumpeter’s description of structures evolving into different structures is similar to Keynes’ description of 1936 of the shifting equilibrium, to Bataille’s systemic expenditure, and to Derrida’s description of deconstruction. It appears that all the four thinkers have been theorising a temporally open system; notions such as expenditure vs. production, disequilibrium, creative destruction, and deconstruction support the view that only such critical works which integrate temporality can offer coherent narrations on money and a monetary economy. At present, it seems that with the concept of différance as the principle of “temporization-temporalization,” Derrida’s work offers the most advanced theory of temporality and of money as a technology of time. Consequently, Derridean deconstruction profers the most advanced correlation of economics as monetary theory with language theory, literary theory, semiotics, or cultural theory presently available. Possibly, différance might even serve as a tool for monetary theory in economics. Deconstruction Aggregation

vs.

Poststructuralism:

Structural

Integration

vs.

By comparison, poststructuralist theories — such as Jean Baudrillard’s theory of symbolic exchange and Jean-Joseph Goux’s theory of the materialist reversal from a fiduciary money perceived as threatening to an authentic symbol — do not seem sufficient for a contemporary approximation to the monetary economy. Both Baudrillard’s and Goux’ theories are nostalgic in the sense that they desire or demand a return to an imagined authentic and pre-monetary society. Since these poststructuralist theories do not apply the concept of différance, they do not succeed in integrating temporality into their descriptions of structure. Instead, they rely on an additive structural pluralism or on structural aggregation: The shifting

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equilibrium, or, the deconstructive movement — not structures in identifiable states of stability, but what happens in between — does not find consideration. Moreover, poststructuralist accounts do not develop an ethics answering questions necessarily posed by an advanced monetary economics: These are questions of contractual and social responsibility, of the workings of legal institutions, and of a theory of justice as regards conventions of distribution. In part, Derrida has brought forth such an ethics, and its development follows consistently from even his more radical investigations. To conclude: for the New Economic Criticism, an answer to the money riddle necessitates a move beyond classical economics, productionism, consumerism, labour theory or utility theory of value, metallist or bullionist monetary theory, and exchangism; this again implies a move beyond Marx and even Keynes. With D. McCloskey, Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen propose such a project in their introduction to The New Economic Criticism of 1999, while most of the contributions in their volume do not attempt it. In Derrida’s work, by contrast, such a project for quite some time now has been effectively pursued. Works Cited Bataille, Georges. 1976a. “L’économie à la mesure de l’univers (1946).” Œuvres complètes. Vol. 7. Paris: Gallimard. 7-16. ——. 1976b. “La part maudite (1949).” Œuvres complètes. Vol. 7. Paris: Gallimard. 17-179. ——. 1976c. “La souveraineté (1956).” Œuvres complètes. Vol. 8. Paris: Gallimard. 243-456. ——. 1970a. “La notion de dépense (1933).” Œuvres complètes. Vol. 1. Paris Gallimard. 302-320. ——. 1970b. “La structure psychologique du fascisme (1933-34).” Œuvres complètes. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard. 339-371. Baudrillard, Jean. 1976. L’échange symbolique et la mort. Paris: Gallimard. Coltharp, Duane. 1992. “Landscapes of Commodity: Nature as Economy in Emerson’s Poems.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 38.4: 265291. Cope, Kevin. 1987. “Rational Hope, Rational Benevolence, and Ethical Accounting.” In The Age of Johnson. Ed. Paul J. Korshin. New York: AMS Press, 1987. 181-213. Davis, Robert Con and Ronald Schleifer. Eds. 1985. Rhetoric and Form: Deconstruction at Yale. Norman: Oklahoma UP. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of Grammatology (1967). Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Corrected Edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.

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——. 1992. “Du ‘sans-prix’, ou le ‘juste prix’ de la transaction.” In Comment penser l’argent? Ed. Roger-Pol Droit. Paris: Le Monde Éditions, 386-401. ——. 1991. Given Time I: Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: U. of Chicago P. ——. 1988. “Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion.” Trans. Samuel Weber. In Limited Inc. Evanston: Northwestern UP. 111-160. ——. 1981a. “Implications: Interview with Henri Ronse (1967).” In Positions: Jacques Derrida. Trans. Alan Bass. London: The Athlone Press. 1-14. ——. 1981b. “Positions: Interview with Jean Louis-Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta (1971).” In Positions: Jacques Derrida. Trans. Alan Bass. London: The Athlone Press. 37-96. ——. 1978a. “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve (1967).” In Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 251-277. ——. 1978b. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences (1966).” In Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 278-293. Dimock, Wai-Chee. 1991. “The Economy of Pain: Capitalism, Humanitarianism, and the Realistic Novel.” In New Essays on Silas Lapham. Ed. Donald E. Pease. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 67-90. Dolis, John. 1987. “Thoreau’s Walden: Intimate Space and the Economy of Being.” In Consumable Goods. Ed. David K. Vaughan. Orono: National Poetry Foundation. 185-193. Franklin, Benjamin. 1961. “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One (1748).” In The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. Ed. Leonard W. Labaree. Vol. 3. New Haven: Yale UP. 304-308. Gernalzick, Nadja. 2000. Kredit und Kultur: Ökonomie- und Geldbegriff bei Jacques Derrida und in der amerikanischen Literaturtheorie der Postmoderne. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter. Goux, Jean-Joseph. 1984. Les monnayeurs du langage. Paris: Galilée. ——. 1973a. “Dialectique et Histoire.” In Freud, Marx: économie et symbolique. Paris: Seuil. 9-52. ——. 1973b. “Numismatiques (1968-1969).” In Freud, Marx: économie et symbolique. Paris: Seuil. 53-113. Harvey, Irene E. 1986. Derrida and the Economy of Différance. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1987. “Information or Noise? Economy of Explanation in Barthes’s S/Z and Shannon’s Information Theory.” In One Culture. Ed. George Levine. Madison: U. of Wisconsin P. 119-142. Jameson, Fredric. 1972. The Prison-House of Language. Princeton: Princeton UP. . 1971. Marxism and Form. Princeton: Princeton UP. Keynes, John Maynard. 1973. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). In The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Vol. 7. London: Macmillan.

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. 1971. A Treatise on Money. Vol. 2. The Applied Theory of Money (1930). In The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Vol. 6. London: Macmillan. Knight, Charles A. 1993. “The Spectator’s Moral Economy.” Modern Philology 91.2: 161-179. MacDonald, Ronald and Ross Milbourne. 1991. “Recent Developments in Monetary Theory.” In Companion to Contemporary Economic Thought. Eds. David Greenaway, Michael Bleaney, and Ian M.T. Stewart. London: Routledge. 291315. Mauss, Marcel. 1993. “Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques (1923-24 ).” Sociologie et Anthropologie: Précédé d'une Introduction à l'œuvre de Marcel Mauss par Claude Lévy-Strauss. 5th ed. Paris: Quadrige. 143-279. McCaffery, Steve. 1986. North of Intention: Critical Writings 1973-1986. New York: Roof Books. Michaels, Walter Benn. 1987. The Gold Standard and the Logics of Naturalism. Berkeley: U. of California P. Nouvet, Claire. 1990. “The Discourse of the ‘Whore:’ An Economy of Sacrifice.” Modern Language Notes 105: 750-773. Osteen, Mark. 1990. “Narrative Gifts: ‘Cyclops’ and the Economy of Excess.” Joyce Studies Annual 1: 162-196. Osteen, Mark and Martha Woodmansee. Eds. 1999. The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. London: Routledge. Patinkin, Don. 1962. Money, Interest, and Prices: An Integration of Monetary and Value Theory. 1956. Evanston: Row, Peterson, and Co. Richardson, Michael. Ed. 1998. Georges Bataille: Essential Writings. Trans. Robert Hurley, Michael Richardson, Austryn Wainhouse et al. London: Sage Publications. Rieder, John. 1988. “Wordsworth’s ‘Indolence:’ Providential Economy and Poetic Vocation.” Pacific Coast Philology 23.1-2: 67-76. Riese, Hajo. 1995. “Geld  das letzte Rätsel der Nationalökonomie.” In Rätsel Geld: Annäherungen aus ökonomischer, soziologischer und historischer Sicht. Eds. Waltraud Schelkle and Manfred Nitsch. Marburg: Metropolis. 45-62. Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1954. History of Economic Analysis. Ed. Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter. New York: Oxford UP. . 1950. Kapitalismus, Sozialismus und Demokratie (1942). Trans. Susanne Preiswerk. 2nd ed. Bern: Francke. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993. “Limits and Openings of Marx in Derrida (1980).” Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York/London: Routledge. 97119. Trotter, David. 1992. “Too Much of a Good Thing: Fiction and the ‘Economy of Abundance.’” Critical Quarterly 34.4: 27-41. Walsh, Susan. 1993. “Bodies of Capital: Great Expectations and the Climacteric Economy.” Victorian Studies 37.1: 73-98.

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Warner, Michael. 1991. “Walden’s Erotic Economy.” In Comparative American Identities. Ed. Hortense J. Spillers. New York: Routledge. 157-174. Zheng, Da. 1996. Moral Economy and American Realistic Novels. New York: Lang.

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INVISIBLE HANDS AND VISIONARY NARRATORS: WHY THE FREE MARKET IS LIKE A NOVEL ELEANOR COURTEMANCHE

This essay draws an analogy between the ideological workings of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” metaphor, which creates an image of capitalism in which moral and aesthetic orders are reconciled, and certain moments in the 19th-century British novel that invoke moral and aesthetic order by dramatising the distance between narrator and characters. The invisible hand metaphor is able to function as a substitute for divine Providence through the construction of an omniscient “theorist’s” point of view, composed of the sovereign’s and the merchant’s mutually exclusive perspectives of the whole economic system. In novels by Dickens and Eliot, dramatic irony and omniscient narratorial voices are used to emphasise the difference between the characters’ sense of their own free agency and the reader’s knowledge of their embeddedness in a larger narrative. Finally, I suggest that the ambiguity about agency that allows the invisible hand metaphor to create a persuasively optimistic view of economic holism can also be expressed as uncertainty and paranoia about the nature of the forces that control the system.

This essay is inspired by a single question: why is the metaphor of the “invisible hand,” which gives us a way of imagining capitalism as a spontaneous moral order, as attractive and powerful today as it was 200 years ago? It is a question that has become all the more pressing since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the subsequent triumph of global capitalism, newly energised by internet technology. The 1990s might have been a decade of identity crisis for capitalism: after all, the word was used with such conviction by its socialist foes that the collapse of Soviet Communism might have re-opened long-closed questions about whether capitalism is really natural, whether it is generally beneficent, or even whether it really exists. But if anything the last ten years have seen a consolidation of the widely-held Western belief in capitalism’s validity, especially in America where it was reinforced by startling prosperity and continued military pre-eminence. The power of the capitalist model is such that it is rapidly undermining the

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alternative ideal of non-profit social and civic welfare in rhetoric about education — encouraging corporate subsidy or ownership of basic research, the elimination of unprofitable sub-fields, and the tailoring of graduates to fit the perceived needs of the business world. This is all the more surprising if one considers the difficulties capitalism has encountered in Eastern Europe and Russia — for there, capitalism was revealed to be less a natural law which would spontaneously spring back into place the moment “artificial” bureaucratic constrictions were removed, than a carefully engineered cultural artifact, learned in a hundred habits of public behaviour, and requiring massive intervention from abroad. It is quite striking that, given all the changes the capitalist order has undergone over the last two centuries, from late mercantilism to the factory system to monopoly capital to imperialism to the current, consumer-focused hegemony of “late” capitalism, and given all the internal contradictions of current political arrangements, capitalism has remained an identifiable concept at all — unless we find some way of accounting for the fact that all these incarnations claim to have descended from Adam Smith and his metaphor of the invisible hand. According to Smith, the “invisible hand” is the force that promotes the good of society as a whole, by transforming the destructive energies of self-interest into economic prosperity. It creates order and beneficence without directly interfering with economic or political choice of any kind — and it can only do so if the economic agent’s motivation is properly self-interested. The success and longevity of this metaphor — which is, after all, only mentioned once in Smith’s 1776 The Wealth of Nations — testifies to the important ideological work that it accomplishes. It functions, I will argue, as the intersection between moral and aesthetic visions of capitalist social order, containing within itself the image of a morally efficacious and interconnected social system without which no capitalist behaviour patterns make any sense in the long run. Some economic historians, like Emma Rothschild, argue that the term is merely a slip on Smith’s part, “an ironic but useful joke” (1994: 319), which makes capitalism sound more superstitious and less rational than he really meant it to be. But I think that this metaphor itself, with its complex allusions to ghostly agency, to the divine hand of God, to self-creating systems, and to free will, is more important to the workings of capitalism than one might think. What all forms of capitalism have in common is a fundamental trust in the morality of the system as a whole — that is, they license economically self-interested (or greedy) actions by individuals in the name of a greater social welfare. The metaphor’s success points, I think, to two things — one is the fact that capitalism is not a science, but a social ideology constructed and

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maintained by a myriad of cultural determinants, with a built-in resistance to economic, political, and ethical observations which contradict its model. Ideology functions by disguising particular cultural formations, which have histories and serve political purposes, as eternal truths. If we unpack the often self-contradictory meanings of the invisible hand metaphor, we are reminded that its persuasiveness depends on half-concealed class interest, lingering religious faith, and a belief in the value of social order — not to mention a healthy dose of wish-fulfilment. The second reason this metaphor is important is because of its moral function. Simply put, without the metaphor, capitalism loses all semblance of social justice and collapses into anarchy and greed. The invisible hand papers over a logical flaw in Smith’s system through which the illusion of capitalism’s being a whole self-integrated system is created through the combination of several different points of view. In effect the morality of capitalism is created by a perspectival illusion, which only a belief in the invisible hand can make visible. As I will go on to argue in the second part of this essay, this perspectival illusion operates in much the same manner as the artfully structured illusion in many realist fictions that our chaotic social order would be revealed to be morally organised if only imagined from the point of view of an omniscient narrator. Before beginning my discussion of the metaphor, I think it is important to pause for a moment and separate the Adam Smith of the Wealth of Nations from his disciples, who inevitably have slightly different agendas. Rather than reading the Wealth of Nations as a simple factual exposition of economic reality, we should recognise it as a work of imagination — not so much a description of capitalism as a prescription for its creation, with a strong flavour of the ideal. Smith is then in a fundamentally different discursive position from his later conservative followers, who did a more thorough job of defending laissez-faire. The economic historian Rajani Kanth writes that “[Smith] was arguing for an epoch yet unborn; [his followers], perhaps not unmindful of the same lofty ends, but by virtue of circumstance, found themselves defending already well defined class interests and entering the political fray directly. It is in this regard that we might term Adam Smith the first — and last — Utopian capitalist” (1986: 123). In a way, we can say that Smith’s text helped create the capitalist system that he envisioned — though not by arguing that all capitalist activity is good, for he actually argues at one point that factory labour creates moral cripples. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations… has no occasion to exert his understanding, …[and] naturally loses… the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. (1981: 782)

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Instead, his text contains a teleological moment, in the form of the invisible hand, which makes capitalism seem aesthetically as well as morally appealing. This moment of ideological fantasy is more important to the functioning of the capitalist economic system than it is to other systems like mercantilism or slavery because, unlike these, this system depends on the willing participation of all its members, down to the factory labourers themselves. There may of course be elements of coercion and unfreedom in this supposed contract between labour and capital, but the important thing is that each side can, at least, appeal to the foundational ideology. Every person in a capitalist system must be convinced that he or she can benefit by vigorously following their own self-interest — and without harming others around them, though that may seem in the short term to be the case. Thus, the engines of the system are individual habits such as hard work, seizing the initiative, the acceptance of personal responsibility, and lack of envy toward the wealthy. The early years of capitalism saw a wave of popular didactic materials by such figures as Benjamin Franklin and Harriet Martineau, aimed at convincing the public that social harmony and personal wealth would follow if they only understood the system correctly. To argue for the importance of ideology to capitalism is not to say that there were not also other factors in its development, such as the growth of technology, or a social system which did not overly stigmatise trade. But the invisible-hand rationalisation did help make the new economy morally acceptable to the middle classes who were required to put the most energy into creating and running it. It did not overtly contradict Christianity, but instead evoked it in deist imagery of a higher power, progress toward social harmony, salvation through works, free will, and even, ironically, concern for poverty. If we look closely, however, the “invisible hand” dissolves away into contradictory assertions. Here’s Smith’s quote in context — the passage concerns a merchant who generally… neither intends to promote the publick interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. …[He] intends only his own gain, …[but] is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who effected to trade for the publick good. (1981: 456)

Note the canny phrasing: the merchant is not “forced” or “pushed around” by the invisible hand, nor does he simply follow a pre-determined plan, but rather “is led by” the hand to do something very much the opposite of what

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he intended. His free will is left intact, yet subverted. The passive voice here complicates the issue further, because the invisible hand does not seem to take an active part in arranging the social order, but rather shapes it more subtly, perhaps even without “intending” it itself. So what does the invisible hand actually do? By describing it as a “hand,” Smith evokes the idea of a pre-established will, in a way that he would not have if he had called it an “invisible force.” At the same time, he cancels out the instrumental image by implying that: a) the hand does not act directly, but only manifests itself by means of the free choice of economic agents, and b) it does not even influence those choices, because the agents cannot perceive it. We are left with two possible descriptions of the invisible hand’s mode of operation. One is that the invisible hand is something built into the natural human tendency to “truck, barter, and exchange one item for another” (Smith 1981: 25). This would be consistent with a “Watchmaker” theory of creation, which argues that God does nothing more than wind up the cosmos as if he were winding a giant watch, and then leaves it alone so that it may run without interference. The drawback of this explanation is that it reduces humans to automatons animated by the single force of self-interest — which conforms neither to Smith’s hypothesis nor his observations. The other possibility is that the invisible hand is not a real influence at all, either on men’s actions or their effects, but merely a pattern which emerges when those actions are regarded in the mass, from a distance. This view has the advantage of both harmonising with the religious idea of a divine plan — since practically speaking there is nothing to distinguish the capitalist order from the divinely planned one — and entirely dispensing with the need for divine intervention. Smith’s economic order is a formal mimicry of divine Providence which is fully compatible with secular materialism. The problem is that it is not clear who, exactly, can occupy this privileged subject position from which capitalism can be seen to be a moral system. It is not the individual, remember, because he is necessarily in ignorance of the long-term benefits of his selfish actions. But the sovereign’s (or the government’s) position is also defined by ignorance. The government’s role is to restrain its regulatory powers because it cannot detect what is best for every individual. Smith argues that: the sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people… (1981: 87)

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We might call these two positions, of the sovereign and the individual, the “bird’s eye” view and the “worm’s eye” view. Upon closer examination, it becomes clear that the two positions are not merely different but incompatible, for while they each explicitly exclude knowledge the other possesses, their actions are also predicated on elements of the other’s point of view. For the individual cannot know what is best for the whole, and yet (as we mentioned above) he will not believe this system is moral unless he is persuaded that his self-interested actions will result in a beneficent outcome. The sovereign for his part has the view of the whole system which proves that capitalism is moral, and yet he must be persuaded of the limitations of his own knowledge if he is to be kept from interfering in the system’s workings. The only way to harmonise this contradiction is by positing a third point of view — call it the “theorist’s” — which all of these agents have in some way incorporated into their own. The invisible hand is only “visible” to the parties concerned, then, if they have all read The Wealth of Nations, or something like it, which explains to them the system as a whole and their role in it. Capitalism thus resembles a narrative, written by Smith, in which both governments and merchants play the roles of characters — but characters who have also read the story in which they are taking part, and perhaps on some level know that it is just a story. It is thus an inherently ironic system, a kind of noble lie, created for the purpose of fooling society into high levels of economic production. Hence the perpetual fetishisation of the invisible hand, for without it, the illusion of utopian moral order must be reinterpreted as mere anarchy and greed. In many ways, then, being a subject of capitalism is a lot like being a character in a novel. One feels that something or other is in control — the mysterious “they” of market forces — but also that its authorial location is hard to pin down. At the same time, the message of the free market is that we have our own destiny in our hands, and can write our story ourselves. Moreover, we are often encouraged to view our situation as if from a distance, as merely one element in a vast market, which encourages us to make sense of our experiences in terms of the greater system. There are many kinds of novels which reproduce various elements of this relationship, but the kind that most closely mimics the optimism of the Smithian system is, I think, the 19th-century realist novel, especially those which are most selfconsciously realistic, such as those by George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens. This may seem a strange argument, for these authors would not have considered themselves apologists for capitalism. In fact, they were often very critical of its excesses. Yet, like Smith, they ultimately believed in the possibility that a moral social order could be reached through consensus and an imagined extension of personal perspective, and used aesthetic illusion as a framework through which this moral order might become

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visible. The realists addressed themselves to a sophisticated audience familiar with fictional genres and techniques, and also considered fiction as a viable form of social intervention, especially in a state as sensitive to middle-class public opinion as theirs. Britain, in the first half of the 19th-century, was in a state of economic and political crisis, driven by years of famine and industrial unrest, to the point that in 1832 and again in 1848 the country seemed close to revolution. The realist writers were driven by a sense of urgency, a feeling that the social compact between rich and poor was unravelling, and that the classes no longer even spoke the same language. So their insistence that they were merely presenting reality “as it really was” comes across as slightly disingenuous: these narratives are outlined for the purpose of facilitating communication and understanding between the warring classes. Their redefinition of the middle class in terms of a superior epistemological synthesis between the remote aristocracy and the humble peasantry echoes Smith’s strategy of composite perspectivalism. And like Smith, they encouraged a particular moral reading of their stories by framing its actions within a larger overview, which was often presented to the reader by an omniscient or interventionist narrator. For the rest of this essay, I will focus on two of the many moments in works by Charles Dickens and George Eliot, which dramatise the distance between narrator and characters to call our attention to the role of fiction in envisioning society as an interconnected moral whole. Here for example, is a famous passage from Dickens’s 1848 novel Dombey and Son, in which the narrator laments the cultural blindness which keeps us from helping the distressed, a blindness which the novel-writer is particularly well-positioned to remedy. Oh for a good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a more potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a Christian people what dark shapes issue from their homes…! For only one night’s view of the pale phantoms rising from the scenes of our too-long neglect…! Bright and blest the morning that should rise on such a night: for men, delayed no more by stumbling-blocks of their own making, …would then apply themselves, like creatures of one common origin… to make the world a better place! (1848: 540)

In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams identifies the “potent and benignant hand” in this passage as the hand of the novelist, uniquely positioned to help us see behind closed doors. Dickens, he says, is helping clear “the obscurity, the darkness, the fog that keep us from seeing each other clearly and from seeing the relation between ourselves and our actions, ourselves and others” (1973: 156). Williams argues that “most novels are in

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some sense knowable communities” (1973: 165), to which I would add that imagining this community of knowledge is, for Dickens, a viable form of political action. The characteristic multi-focal plotlines of Dickens novels, with their kaleidoscope of characters and sweeping changes in locale, both dramatise the complexity of modern society in which various parts of society are hidden from each other, and make clear the relationships which link these remote classes and individuals together. Insofar as Dickens’ work is realist, it promises an organising overview of society which should not only make visible its hidden moral imperatives, but also stir the reader to a political response. If we could just see what was going on in the apartment next door, he implies, we would be “delayed no more by stumbling-blocks of [our] own making,” but would apply ourselves to “mak[ing] the world a better place.” The fact that this knowledge never does come to the Dombeys (see Jaffe 1991: 71-111) only emphasises the distance between the limited fictional characters and the reader/narrator. At the same time, it asks us to imagine the world as a work of fiction, in which we can see (metaphorically) into our neighbours’ houses and hearts, that we might be moved to sympathy and outraged action. My second example is from Eliot’s 1861 Silas Marner, in which almost all the narrative tension derives from the contrast between the omniscient narrator and the reader on the one hand, and the ignorant fictional characters on the other. First of all, the characters are presented as superstitious small-town dwellers who have vague and murky ideas of “Fate.” Moreover, the narrator has already informed the readers of the answers to many of the questions that plague the townsfolk. We know, for example, why the weaver Silas Marner was wrongly cast out of his Dissenting chapel, who stole his hoard of gold, and the secret parentage of Eppie, the abandoned girl he raises — all matters kept hidden from the main characters, who suffer as a result. The narrator increases this atmosphere of superstitious ignorance by referring frequently to the villagers’ primitive fearfulness. In that far-off time superstition clung easily round every person or thing that was at all [unusual]. …A shadowy conception of power that by much persuasion can be induced to refrain from inflicting harm, is the shape most easily taken by the sense of the Invisible in the minds of men who have always been pressed close by primitive wants… (Eliot 1967: 51, 53)

Now we as readers have two responses to this. One is that we are quite superior and enlightened to the villagers, and would never fear the unknown as they do. But the other is an uneasy feeling that the villagers are right to suspect that a greater power is manipulating them — for they are, in fact,

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merely characters in a story written by an omnipotent author. The ending’s poetic justice increases our awareness that there is a moral pattern, and that if you should find yourself in a George Eliot novel it would be best not to do anything too egotistical or self-confident, lest you draw upon yourself the Author’s punitive wrath. And this reminds us of the differences, after all, between Smith’s perspectival system and that of the realist novel, for Silas Marner does not smooth over the gap between characters and their author by creating a scientific law which hides its origins, but expresses that distinction poignantly in terms of myth, fate, and fiction. The atmosphere of dark superstition and fearsome automatism which surrounds the characters in Silas Marner reminds us that the metaphor of the invisible hand, which Smith presents as a matter of cheerful scientific rationalism, might also, in other circumstances, be rather frightening. For while the moral order it creates might be an effect without a cause, it is impossible to say for sure that there is not really a providential Someone, or a group of people, a “they,” who are secretly organising the whole system, just as George Eliot orders the world of Silas Marner. The space for this paranoia is opened up in the perspectival leap from self-interest to moral capitalism, in which we are enjoined to take up a subject position which then looks back upon ourselves as individual agents, and justifies our selfish actions in the name of Smith’s “system of natural liberty” (687). In another guise, it becomes the Foucauldian claim that power is fragmented into a form of omnipresent surveillance, in which agency continually passes between established authority and subtler forms of control. In general, this anxiety is strenuously combatted by the realist novel, which wants to use public surveillance for moral reformist ends — though as D. A. Miller points out in The Novel and the Police, this strategy of social control is founded on the notion of a liberal subject who can survey others without being surveyed himself. There are other kinds of fiction, of course, which draw much of their interest explicitly from this kind of paranoia, and the terrifying subversion of the boundary between watcher and watched — we might mention the works of Wilkie Collins, whose sensational novel preys upon hystericised bourgeois nerves, and Franz Kafka, in which large, clumsy, and malevolent systems return the gaze of the protagonist only to annihilate him. Yet despite the dystopian fears of movies like The Matrix, the utopia of capitalism is still alive and well in the contemporary popular imagination. We might even assert that the novels of Victorian high realism speak more to our anxieties today, because of our renewed confidence in the viability of the social order. The fascination of the invisible hand is perhaps only increased by its central ambiguity — that the deferral of agency which creates the space for fatalism

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and paranoia also permits capitalism to function as a non-blasphemous substitute for divine Providence. Works Cited Dickens, Charles. 1982. Dombey and Son. Ed. Alan Horsman. Oxford: Oxford UP. Eliot, George. 1967. Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe. Ed. Q. D. Leavis. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jaffe, Audrey. 1991. Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience. Berkeley, U. of California P. Kanth, Rajani Kannepalli. N.d. Political Economy and Laissez-Faire: Economics and Ideology in the Ricardian Era. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. Miller, D. A. 1988. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley, CA: U. of California P. Rothschild, Emma. 1994. “Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand.” The American Economic Review. 84: 319-322. Smith, Adam. 1981. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Eds. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. (Reprint of 1976 Oxford Edition). Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP.

Part II: Excessive Economies

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THE TROPOLOGICAL ECONOMY OF CATACHRESIS GERALD POSSELT

In “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” Derrida relates the concept of usure – which in French denotes both usury and using up – with the traditional problematic of metaphor and the history of metaphysics. In “The Retrait of Metaphor” Derrida abbreviates under the title of “us” a semantic system in which the values of use, usage, utility, utilization, etc. are inscribed. Now these very terms signify in Greek the name of a trope that is uncannily related to metaphor. This improper, forced or necessary metaphor is called catachresis by the rhetorical tradition. Catachresis marks a lexical gap or lacuna; it is defined by Quintilian as the transference of a word to a place where no proper term exists. But at the same time catachresis seems to be able to produce a new kind of proper sense by the positional power of language. Thus, what can be described as the tropological economy of catachresis points to a performative theory of tropes and resignification where the name constitutes the identity of what is named, but only and always provisionally.

What is interesting to us here, thus, is the production of a proper sense, a new kind of proper sense, by means of the violence of a catachresis whose intermediary status tends to escape the opposition of the primitive and the figurative, standing between them as a “middle.” When the middle of an opposition is not the passageway of a mediation, there is every chance that the opposition is not pertinent. The consequences are boundless. (Derrida 1982b: 256)

Metaphors of economy play a significant role in literary, philosophical and linguistic texts. Probably the most interesting cases are those when economic metaphors are used in order to describe linguistic entities and phenomena. Metaphors of money, banking, usury, inflation, circulation, exchange, counterfeiting, etc. are regularly used to illuminate linguistic practices and the functions of language. Moreover, there seems to be good reason to suppose that the “analogy between money and language in particular, and between the realms of economics and linguistics in general” (Gray 1996: 1) is

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more than a “mere” metaphor, but deeply rooted in the historico-conceptual field of Western philosophy. But if we concede that metaphors of economy are widely employed to illuminate and to describe the functioning of language, for example, the arbitrary nature of words, the production of knowledge, the exchange of ideas (i.e., that metaphors of economy are present — implicitly or explicitly — in almost every discourse about language, and that the discourse on language is structured — willingly or unwillingly — by metaphors of economy), then this must be true for the concept of metaphor itself. In other words, in speaking of metaphors of economy do we not foreclose the possibility that the notion of economy already structures the discourse on language in general and our discourse on metaphor in particular? Moreover, it is likely that there is no single economy of metaphor, but rather different discursive formations which stipulate each other mutually. Tentatively and provisionally, one might circumscribe three tropological economies. In the rhetoric of classical antiquity (in the tradition of Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian) we are confronted with an economy of moderation, restraint and propriety. In all cases, as Harald Weinrich argues, the theorists of rhetoric “recommend a discreet moderation in the use of metaphors. Attic style proves itself in the maintenance of propriety” (1183: my trans.). In the 17th and 18th centuries — the so-called classical age according to Michel Foucaults classification — the tropological economy is governed by a system of representation and a logic of the supplement as well as by narrations on the origin of language and society. One crucial moment within this epistemic formation is certainly, as Richard Gray points out, “the emergence of the discipline of semiotics as fundamental to the science of knowledge, a proposition first advanced by Locke” (1996: 3). Finally, in the 19th century, we encounter an economy of usage and surplus value, an economy — following Karl Marx — of a “self-expanding, self-multiplying value” in which the production of signs is considered as a value-producing process. Of course, this typology is neither clear-cut nor exclusive, though it might be helpful in delineating the different paradigms that structure and underlie the discourse of language and economy. I want to suggest that language and economy, insofar they are both semiotic and social systems, must be conceived as rhetorical systems that are governed by tropological relations and constraints. The most prominent case in question is probably the traditional analogy between money and language which has been employed throughout the entire history of philosophy in different variations. Famous examples are certainly Quintilians recommendation to use language in the same manner as a coin (Book I: 6,3), Nietzsches metaphors “that have been used up and have lost their imprint and that now operate as mere metal, no longer as coins”

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(KSA 1 1988: 880), or Saussures already metaphorical comparison of the economic and linguistic value, thus as when he claims that all values are always composed: “1) of a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing of which the value is to be determined; and 2) of similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value is to be determined” (1985: 159, see also Derrida 1982b: 218). The central issues which seem to be always at stake as soon as the relation between money and language is brought up can be summarised under the following headings: a) the arbitrary and conventional nature of the sign; b) money and words as means of exchange; c) language and economy as systems of values; and d) the wear and tear of words and coins by circulation, i.e., the wearing away of their inscription or figurative character by usage. Remarkably, the last point leads back again to the first question, since it makes it possible to read the arbitrariness of the sign not as a consequence of a voluntary agreement and imposition, but as the effect of a temporal process of conventionalisation and lexicalisation. It is especially this problem that attracts Jacques Derridas attention in his “treatment” of metaphor. In his essay “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” Derrida relates the concept of usure — which in French means both usury, the acquisition of too much interest, and using up, deterioration through usage — with the traditional problematic of metaphor and the history of metaphysical language (1982b: 209, see also Translators note). Derrida claims that the concept of usure has “a systematic tie to the metaphorical perspective;” moreover, it “belongs not to a narrow historicotheoretical configuration, but more surely to the concept of metaphor itself, and to the long metaphysical sequence that it determines or that determines it” (1982b: 215-16). This metaphysical sequence has often been described as the passage from myth to logos or as a continuous progress that leads from the figurative expressions of the first poets to the abstract concepts of the philosophers. Understood in this way, metaphor seems to have a life of its own: it is created by the speaking subject and is put into circulation where it produces a linguistic surplus value, an excess of meaning; but after it has been widely accepted within the common usage, it becomes more and more worn, loses its figurative power and is finally lexicalised. In his second essay on metaphor, “The Retrait of Metaphor,” Derrida returns to the problem of economy and the concept of usure. Metaphor itself appears to be a worn, exhausted subject. Derrida abbreviates under the title of “us” a semantic system in which the values of use, usage, utility, utilisation, etc. are inscribed. This system, as Derrida specifies, “will have played a determinant role in the traditional problematic of metaphor. Metaphor is perhaps not only a subject worn to the bone, it is a subject which will be kept

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in an essential relation to us, or to usance” (1978: 9). In the rhetorical tradition the name for such a worn and almost dead metaphor is catachresis or abusio. Abuse, or improper use, is the apparent “literal” translation of the Greek term katachrêsis — derived from the prefix kata (against) and chrêsis which can be rendered as employment, use, usage, but also as lending and loan. The Liddell/Scott translates catachresis as “excessive use or consumption” and as “analogical application of a word.”1 Thus — following the connotations of the Greek term — it seems that catachresis signifies less the wrong or false use of a word than any use that does not keep within the limits of the common usage, i.e., any immoderate, excessive use or using up. This interpretation corresponds to the view — held both by Paul Ricœur (1991: 30) and Jacques Derrida — that the rhetorical system of classical antiquity does not recur to a simple and clear opposition of what will be later called literal/figurative meaning. Every figurative use of an expression, even metaphor and catachresis, can be proper, that is, “appropriate (prepon), suitable, decent, proportionate, becoming, in relation to the subject, situation, things” (1991: 246). It is therefore in this sense, that we can speak of an economy of propriety and moderation. Thus, catachresis — defined as excessive use or consumption — is closely connected to the concept of usure by which Derrida comprehends the semantic double-play of metaphysical language, i.e., erasure by rubbing, exhaustion by usage; but at the same time also production of an additional interest and of a surplus value (1991: 210). Derrida alludes here to the apparent paradoxical process by which Western philosophy has coined and produced its metaphysical concepts — permitting, for example, “to be called sense that which should be foreign to the senses” (1991: 228). Conceived from the perspective of dialectical idealism, the process of metaphorisation can be understood as the very production of signification, or, to be exact, as the production of a new kind of proper spiritual sense. In every metaphorical process, there is at first, according to Hegel (1992: 516-23), an original sensuous expression which is carried over into the spiritual sphere, whereby a metaphorical or rather catachrestic expression is created, which must be understood both in its proper sensuous meaning and its improper spiritual meaning. Finally, after the metaphorical element is gradually reduced by usage to a proper expression and the memory of the first sensuous meaning is lost, the metaphor is raised — in the sense of Aufhebung — to its new proper 1

The Greek counterpart to Derrida’s Latin root term “us” would be “chrê:” chrêsis signifies not only use, usefulness, usage but also loan, lending; chreia means need, want; chrêma signifies goods, property, money; chrêstês is the creditor and usurer, but also the one who gives or expounds oracles; chrêsmos is the oracle and the oracular response.

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spiritual meaning. Hence, according to Derrida, “the movement of metaphorization… is nothing other than a movement of idealization” (1991: 226), and he concludes: “the primitive meaning, the original, and always sensory and material figure… becomes a metaphor when philosophical discourse puts it into circulation. Simultaneously the first meaning and the first displacement are forgotten. The metaphor is no longer noticed, and it is taken for the proper meaning. A double effacement” (1991: 211). At the same time, Derrida explicitly warns us against embarking on a project which aims at the reconstruction of the apparent lost or effaced value of the sign — a project that Derrida places under the title of etymologism. In “The Retrait of Metaphor” Derrida emphasises that the production of surplus value must not be conceived according to laws “of a continuous and linearly accumulative capitalization” (1978: 13). It is clearly not a question of “accrediting the schema of the us but of deconstructing a philosophical concept, a philosophical construction erected on this schema of worn-out metaphor or privileging, for significant reasons, the trope named metaphor” (1978: 14). But this endeavor is, as Derrida concedes, all the more complicated by the problem that the very concept of usure implies and encourages a continuist presupposition. The seemingly unavoidable consequence is that “the history of a metaphor appears essentially not as a displacement with breaks, as reinscriptions in a heterogeneous system, mutations, separations without origin, but rather as a progressive erosion, a regular semantic loss, an uninterrupted exhausting of the primitive meaning” (1982b: 215; my italics). One must not forget that metaphor is and remains a metaphysical concept, a concept which is deeply rooted in the oppositions of Western philosophy and which, by the very value of usure, inevitably produces the illusion and the false promise of a restorable origin. Nevertheless Derrida rejects the position that the signifier is a “conventional and arbitrary X.” Rather, we must acknowledge a “historical or genealogical (let us not say etymological) tie of the signified concept to its signifier” (1982b: 253). This tie is not at all a reducible contingency, rather it points to the traditional burden and the historicity of the name. It is therefore necessary, as Derrida specifies, to deconstruct both the metaphysical and rhetorical schemata, “not in order to reject and discard them, but to reinscribe them otherwise” (215). Yet, the fundamental concepts of philosophy, “these defining tropes that are prior to all philosophical rhetoric” (255), are, following Derridas train of thought, not even “true” metaphors, but catachreses, i.e., metaphors which are not employed deliberately and consciously but out of constraint and necessity. Traditionally — at least in the tradition of the Stoa and Quintilian (cf. Barwick 1957) — the distinction of metaphor and catachresis is based on

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the presence or absence of an original proper term which has been lost or never existed. Catachresis is marked by a lack or a lexical lacuna, but at the same time it opens up new possibilities of usage, resignifications and speaking otherwise. According to Patricia Parker, “catachresis is a transfer of terms from one place to another employed when no proper word exists, while metaphor is a transfer or substitution employed when a proper term does already exist and is displaced by a term transferred from another place to a place not its own” (1990: 60). Whereas metaphor is fundamentally related to substitution, in the case of catachresis no substitution takes place. Thus, catachresis is neither truly proper or literal, nor metaphorical or figurative; and yet it has something of both. It is neither a proper denomination, because it signifies by a metaphorical transference of a word, nor is it a figurative expression, because it merely signifies by the extension of a given term. Consequently, catachresis “is every trope of forced and necessary usage;” it is, in the words of Pierre Fontanier, a French rhetorician of the 19th century, a “new kind of proper sense,” namely, “a literal, proper sense of secondary origin, intermediate between the primitive proper sense and the figurative sense” (213; see also 1982b: 255). But if there is always the possibility of a new kind of proper sense, one might suspect that there has never been an original proper sense at all. In other words, catachresis suspends the quest for an origin and an original. Since every language is — as Ferdinand de Saussure convincingly demonstrates — always the continuation of that which was spoken before (1985: 296), the question of the origin of language itself becomes meaningless. Indeed, it now turns out, that Quintilians distinction of metaphor and catachresis, mentioned above, is more tricky than his interpreters usually realise; for he does not state that catachresis is at issue where a name is lacking, metaphor where another name is, but rather that “it is a question of catachresis where a name was absent, metaphor where another name was” (Book VIII 6,34; my italics). By formulating the definition in the past tense, Quintilian implicitly points out that the distinction between metaphor and catachresis is always a belated one. The absence or presence of a proper term always already belongs to the past. The lexical gap, the lack of an own, proper or original term turns out to be the effect of a retroactive positing.2 Thus, catachresis might be conceived both as a figurative and performative act of resignification which — in applying (abusively) a familiar term with a somewhat different signification — does not signify a pre-discursive object, but rather constitutes the identity of what is named. 2

The structure of catachresis itself is, so to speak, metaleptical, i.e., the reversal of cause and effect.

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In “White Mythology” Derrida draws the conclusion that catachresis must be understood as “the violent, forced, abusive inscription of a sign, the imposition of a sign upon a meaning which did not yet have its own proper sign in language. So much so, that there is no substitution here, no transport of proper signs, but rather the irruptive extension of a sign” (1982b: 255). Andrzej Warminski argues along the same line when he suggests that catachresis is “less a matter of the relation between literal and figurative, proper and transferred, senses than it is a question of naming, marking, putting a word and imposing a sense where there is neither word nor sense” (1987: lv). Yet, at the same time, the inscription is most often, as Derrida argues, “the intersection, the scene of the exchange between the linguistic and the economic” (1982b: 216). The inscription on coinage is that which endows the precious metal with a name and invests it with the political authority of the state. “Inscription gives,” as Allan Hoey puts it, “a coin its value as money; inscription, as a mark of denomination, allows money to function as a medium of exchange regardless of the commodity value of the material composing it” (1988: 28). However, according to the assumptions of ancient and classic economics, the inscription on coinage is, above all, its declaration of weight. Thus, while at first the value of the precious metal was measured simply by size and weight, as Aristotle outlines in the Politics, later a public stamp was placed upon it in order “to save the trouble of weighing and to mark the value” (1967: 1257a). In any case, the stamp on the coin seems to be the “embodiment of convention: it is, quite literally, the coin’s nominalist aspect” (Gray 1996: 10). In his analysis of the money-form, which he outlines in Contributions to the Critique of Political Economy and in the first volume of Capital, Karl Marx describes in detail the process that any coin undergoes as soon as it is put into circulation and functions as a medium of exchange. As soon as the coin “is used, it gets used” (vol. I: 88) and its former identity of intrinsic and extrinsic value is split: “During their currency, coins wear away, some more, others less. Name and substance, nominal weight and real weight, begin their process of separation. Coins of the same denomination become different in value, because they are different in weight” (vol. I: 139). Thus it turns out, that the very possibility for a coin to function as a sign of value is due to the very fact of usage, the friction involved in every exchange which effects the effacement of the imprint and effigy. Hence, if “the currency of coins itself effects a separation between their nominal and their real weight,” between their material and functional existence, then the possibility of replacing metallic coins by mere tokens or symbols is always already implied. With the separation of nominal and real-value, the gold coin turns into a symbol and sign of itself; and only insofar as it is a sign of itself, can it be replaced by

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other signs. Circulation and abrasion of the coin are not only inseparable from each other, moreover, they are the condition of possibility that the coin can function as a conventional signifier. According to Saussure, it follows for all conventional values that they do not confound themselves with the material substance which serves as their support. It is not the metal of a coin that determines its value; rather the coin is more or less valuable with this or that effigy, more or less on this or that side of a political border. This is all the more true of the linguistic signifier; in its essence it is not constituted by its material substance, but solely by the differences that separate its image acoustique from all the others (Saussure 1985: 164). Thus, the crucial property of the coin as a conventional signifier is that its figural and differential character is inseparable from its arbitrary nature. The coin functions as a conventional signifier only to the extent that its effigy is recognisable and its inscription readable. But if this account is correct, how are we to interpret Nietzsches assertion, mentioned above, that “truths are illusions whose illusionary nature has been forgotten, metaphors that have been used up and have lost their imprint and that now operate as mere metal, no longer as coins?” How are we to read the relation between the illusory truths, the used up metaphors, the inscription on coinage and the metal? According to Gray, the traditional analogy or homology runs “on the one hand, between species as a manifestation of intrinsic value and ‘ancient’ truth as the reiteration of the already known or believed, and, on the other hand, between symbolic money as a mere placeholder of absent value in the calculus of economic circulation and ‘modern’ truth as a speculative form of knowledge that employs arbitrary signs to generate new ‘truths’’’ (1996: 5). At first sight it appears that Nietzsche reverses the classical analogy between words and coins, truth and species. For Nietzsche does not relate — as one would expect — the imprint of the coin with its conventional and nominal value; rather, he relates the original metaphor to the nominal value of a newly minted coin on the one hand, and the worn metaphor to the mere material value of the metal. Nietzsche already seems to presuppose that there is no signification without an arbitrary imposition: the nominal weight of the coin is not its real weight, the newly minted coin is not worth what its inscription promises. By relating metaphor to the nominal value of the coin and the abstract concept to its material value, Nietzsche not only subverts the traditional analogy between the “ancient” truth and the full-weighted gold coin on the one hand, and between the truths of modern sciences and conventional signifiers on the other hand; rather he questions both the conception of truth as correspondence between sign and signified as well as the conception of truth as the proper, i.e., the accepted and agreed, usage of conventional signifiers.

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Thus Nietzsche eludes the mistaken nostalgia of those who bemoan the lost origin in which words — far from being mere signs of exchange — possessed an intrinsic value for those who used them. We have to keep in mind that the apparent “degradation of metaphor into literal meaning,” as de Man emphasises, is not condemned by Nietzsche “because it is the forgetting of a truth, but much rather because it forgets the un-truth, the lie,” i.e., the violent imposition “that the metaphor was in the first place” (De Man 1979: 111). In short, what is condemned by Nietzsche is not the forgetting of the “truth” or the (use-)value that words possessed in the first place, but rather the forgetting of the figurative function and positional power which are inherent in every usage of language and which manifest themselves in the trope of catachresis. Yet, one question remains: How can we account for the view that metaphor and/or catachresis are able to produce a surplus of meaning which exceeds the meaning of the linguistic elements and their structural components? Is there such a thing as a linguistic surplus value, or is this notion mistaken and misleading? Marx says about the economic surplusvalue that it “cannot be created by circulation,” but must originate “in the use-value, as such, of the commodity, i.e., in its consumption” (1983: vol. I: 179). Therefore one must be so lucky as to find a commodity “whose usevalue possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption… is itself… a creation of value” (1983: 43). According to Marx, the possessor of money finds such a special commodity in the labourpower of the wage worker. Yet, if Marx’ analysis is right, where does the possessor of linguistic signs find such a correlate “whose actual consumption is itself a creation of value?” One might think of metaphor or catachresis, where the latter itself signifies excessive use or consumption. If we agree with the description of the process of metaphorisation given above, the possibility of catachrestic resignifications seems to point to a signifying productivity that inheres in the consumption of the use-value of the sign. Indeed, Jean-Joseph Goux postulates in correlation to Marx’ labour-power a “force of signifying elaboration” (which he relates to Derridas concept of archi-writing). Goux argues that there is a close correlation between the two sides of the sign, signifier and signified, and the opposition of use- and exchange-value. In the history of Western thought, according to Goux, language has been predominantly understood as a system of signs of exchange in which the linguistic signs are solely considered in their function as values of exchange but not of use. But signs are also always the means for the production of other signs. The failure to recognise the use-value of signs is, according to

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Goux, the obstruction of their productive value: obstruction either of labourpower or of the play of signs with other signs (Goux 1990: 130).3 However, according to Marx, money possesses not only exchangevalue, but also — in the form of interest-bearing capital (which refers us back again to the concept of usure) — use-value. While the ordinary commodity is sold and disposed of once and for ever, the interest-bearing capital is lent out for a certain period of time and transferred from the possessor of money to the industrial capitalist. As in the case of labour-power, the interest-bearing capital has the particular property “that its value and its use-value is not only conserved by the consumption of its use-value, but even increased” (1983: vol. III: 363-64). At the end of the process of reproduction, the full amount of money plus interest returns back to its legitimate owner. Money, in the form of interest and usury, assumes its most developed and most productive form: money bearing money. In the case of interest-bearing capital, the process of production is, according to Marx, reduced to a mere play of signs, “money exchanged for more money,” while the entire process of elaboration is effaced. Now, as far as metaphor is concerned, the metaphorical process is traditionally defined as the borrowing and transfer of a word from one place to another (where it is more suitable). However, in the case of catachresis no return takes place; since catachresis is based on the lack of an original proper term, the transfer is irreversible. In this sense, catachresis implies the interruption of the process of circulation and, hence, forestalls the return of the sign to its former place. One might even say, as Gayatri Spivak suggests, that catachresis is a kind of “originary ‘abuse’ constitutive of languageproduction, where both concept and metaphor are ‘wrested from their proper meaning’” (1983: 242). I cannot go into details concerning the role of metaphor and catachresis in Marx’ analysis of the money-form and of interest-bearing capital. This would require a much more elaborate reading of Marx’ text. In sum, however, I do not claim that Marx’ analysis of capital provides us with a means to describe the production of knowledge and meaning, the production of linguistic and epistemological value. Rather, I want to suggest, that the rhetorical movement of his text, is as much determined by the tropes of rhetoric as it determines them. At the end of his analysis, Marx draws the paradoxical conclusion that interest-bearing capital, although a derivative and the most developed form of capital, is at the same time its historically earliest

3

According to a functional theory of value (as opposed to a commodity theory of value), money and language, as Coulmas argues, “[b]oth lack value in use but have value in exchange, which is called ‘purchasing power’ by economists and ‘meaning’ by linguists” (1992: 5).

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form. Indeed, the capital of the money-lender existed long before the forms of capitalist production (see Aristotle 1258b). That is why the popular mind, according to Marx, considers the interest-bearing capital “as capital as such, as capital par excellence” (1983: vol. III: 389).4 Significantly, a similar structure could be asserted for catachresis: considered from a synchronic perspective catachresis as abuse and improper usage of the (proper) name appears to be a derivative form; but considered from a diachronic perspective catachresis, which endows the unnamed with a name, appears as the historically earliest form of language. On the other side, catachresis is not only the source of this “historical” process, but at the same time its very end, namely as so-called worn, dead, or lexicalised metaphor, which is also another name for catachresis. Thus the distinction of metaphor and catachresis, which by definition was based on the presence or absence of a primitive proper term, seems to be always already superimposed by relations of temporality. At least since the 19th century the classical opposition between the proper and improper, the literal and figurative meaning is explicitly supplanted by the opposition between effective and extinct, living and dead, absolute and lexicalised metaphors. These considerations concerning the paradoxical status of catachresis lead us back again to the “metaphysical” account, outlined above by Derrida, of the metaphorical process as a progressive exhausting of a supposed primitive proper meaning. However, we are now able to conceive the temporality or historicity of the metaphorical process no longer as a continuous process of abrasion and capitalisation, but rather as a rhetorical strategy of resignification, as “reinscriptions without origin” (Derrida), by which philosophical discourse resignifies, reworks and reframes its crucial terms, and, consequently, opens up the possibility of history. Indeed, the wearing capacity of the sign, i.e. the view that metaphors and (iconic) signs get worn-out and used up by usage and circulation, refers to the very iterability of the sign, to the very fact that something can function as a sign, only insofar as, and as long as, it can be reiterated, i.e., can be actualised in a concrete speech act situation. Language — understood as a differential system of arbitrary signs and as a social institution which relies on necessary conventions — exerts, according to Allan Hoey, “historical pressure, 4

Note that Gayatri Spivak refers to the crucial role of metalepsis within the genealogical critique of both Marx and Nietzsche: “It is along this line that Marx develops that analysis of money that Nietzsche’s analysis of the language of truth so uncannily resembles (in reverse): two things can be pronounced equal, identical, or substitutible by, first, a making equal of different things, next, a forgetting of that move, and, finally, a metaleptically created memory that conceals this genealogy” (1987: 35).

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determining each separate speech act, while each utterance also completely embodies and alters the whole language system… Thus value alters with usage, for each utterance is dually diachronic: grounded in a particular moment, it is nonetheless influenced, even determined, by all prior usage and at the same time exerting pressure on future usage” (1988: 28-29).5 Moreover, we have seen that catachresis can be described as a performative act of positing in which the name, as Judith Butler writes in Bodies That Matter, “retroactively constitutes that to which it appears to refer” (1991: 210). Yet every performative relies on a citational practice that inevitably evokes the historical weight of the name. The performative act only “succeeds” insofar as it reinvokes the historicity of a citational chain, a “continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations,” as Nietzsche argues in the Genealogy of Morals, “whose causes do not even have to be related to one another” (1989: II, sec. 12). Thus, performativity must not be understood as a singular or deliberate “act,” but, rather, as Judith Butler suggests, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names — and, inevitably, reproduces the risk of catachresis, the improper usage of the proper name (1991: 213). We can therefore speak of a double movement of catachresis: to the extent that catachresis is always the product of prior usage (just as every language is the continuation of that which was spoken before, as Saussure argues), it produces as its belated effect the historico-genealogical tie between signifier and signified; but since every improper or catachrestic usage of a name always enables the divergence from the normative usage (Butler 1991: 213), catachresis at the same time, opens up the possibility of “future uses” and enables the “strategic provisionality” of the sign (Butler 1991: 19). Hence it is not by chance that Derrida in “Signature Event Context,” after having pointed out the fundamental reiterative and citational character of the performative, concludes his essay with the claim that for deconstruction — as the “reversal of the classical opposition” and the “general displacement of the system” — it appears necessary, “provisionally and strategically, to conserve the old name” (1982a: 329). What this means, then, is that the double gesture of deconstruction relies implicitly on the tropological movement of catachresis: catachrestic acts of resignification appear to be the “condition of possibility” of any deconstructive critique. Thus, catachresis turns out to be much more unsettling, even for theory, than one might be inclined to admit

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Note that Saussure does not conceive the arbitrary nature of the sign as the product of an historical process, but rather asserts that the arbitrariness of the sign is the condition of possibility both for the stability and alterability of the linguistic system and, hence, for the historicity of language (1985: 108).

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— a problem which I only want to indicate and which would certainly require further investigations. However, having taken the question of the interdependence of language, rhetoric and economy as my point of departure, the analysis of the trope and the concept of catachresis has revealed not only a complex rhetorical and economic structure, but also a crucial subversive potential. Whether we prefer to speak of a signifying productivity of catachresis or of performative acts of catachrestic resignification, in any case it appears that the relation between language and economy, between the metaphors of economy and economies of metaphor, is neither singly directed nor simply analogical. Rather, insofar as both language and economy are rhetorically constituted, they are always already linked by the disruptive tropological economy of catachresis: “The consequences are boundless” (Derrida). Works Cited Aristotle. 1967. Politics. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Barwick, Karl. 1957. Probleme der stoischen Sprachlehre und Rhetorik. Abhandlungen der sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig. Philologisch-historische Klasse, Bd. 49, Heft 3. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. ——. 1991. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In Inside/Out, Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. London: Routledge. 13-31. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York/London: Routledge. Coulmas, Florian. 1992. Language and Economy. Oxford/Cambridge: Blackwell. de Man, Paul. 1979. Allegories of Reading. Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven/London: Yale UP. Derrida, Jacques. 1982a. “Signature Event Context.” Margins of Philosophy. Translated, with additional notes, by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 307-330. ——. 1982b. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.” Margins of Philosophy. Trans., with additional notes, Alan Bass. Chicago: U. of Chicago P. 207-272. ——. 1978. “The Retrait of Metaphor.” Enclitic 2.2: 5-33. Fontanier, Pierre. 1977. Les figures du discours. Introduction par Gérard Genette. Paris: Flammarion. Goux, Jean-Joseph. 1990. Symbolic Economies. After Marx and Freud. Translated by Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP. Gray, Richard T. 1996. “Buying into Signs: Money and Semiosis in EighteenthCentury German Language Theory.” German Quarterly. 69.1: 1-14. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1992. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I. Werke Bd. 13. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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Hoey, Allen. 1988. “The Name on the Coin: Metaphor, Metonymy, and Money.” Diacritics 18.2: 26-37. Liddell, Henry G. and Robert Scott. Eds. 1968. A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Oxford UP. Marx, Karl. 1983. Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Werke, Bd. 23-25. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1988. (KSA). Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbänden. Hrsg. von Giorgio Colli u. Mazzino Montinari. München/Berlin/New York: dtv/de Gruyter. ——. 1989. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. by W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hoolingdale. Ed., with Commentary, Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. Oxford English Dictionary. 1989. Second Edition. Prepared by J. A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Parker, Patricia. 1990. “Metaphor and Catachresis.” In The Ends of Rhetoric. History, Theory, Practice. Eds. J. Bender and D. Wellbery. Stanford: Stanford UP. 60-76. Puttenham, George. 1970. The Arte of English Poesie. Introduction by Baxter Hathaway. Facsimile reproduction of the 1906 reprint. Kent State UP. Quintilianus, Marcus Fabius. 1972/1975. Ausbildung des Redners / Institutionis Oratoriae. Zwölf Bücher. Hrsg. und übers. von Helmut Rahn in zwei Teilbänden. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft. Ricœur, Paul. 1991. La métaphore vive. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1985. Cours de linguistique générale. Publié par Charles Bally et Albert Séchehaye avec la collaboration de Albert Riedlinger. Édition critique préparée par Tullio de Mauro. Postface de Louis-Jean Calvet. Paris: Éditions Payot. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1987. “Speculation on Reading Marx: After Reading Derrida.” In Post-Structuralism and the Question of History. Eds. D. Attridge, R. Young, and G. Bennington. Cambridge UP. 30-62. ——. 1990. “Poststructuralism, Marginality, Post-coloniality and Value.” In Literary Theory Today. Eds. Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP. 219-244. Warminski, Andrzej. 1987. Readings in Interpretation. Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger. Introduction by Rodolphe Gasché. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P.

DESIRE AS CAPITAL: GETTING A RETURN ON THE REPRESSED IN LIBIDINAL ECONOMY DAVID BENNETT Claiming that his “economic” model of the mind was “the consummation of psychoanalytic research,” Freud figured repressed sexual desire as a form of “capital” that required an “entrepreneur” to invest it productively. This essay examines the tension between the producer and consumer ethics, or the imperatives of saving and spending libidinal energy, in the work of early twentieth-century sexual psychologists such as Freud, D. H. Lawrence and Bataille, who participated in theorising a new kind of psycho-economic subject: the “sovereign spender” of consumer society, a subject of desire rather than of labour. It investigates the linkage of “unproductive” libidinal spending with pornography and crime since the eighteenth century, and how the pervasive use of economic metaphors in sexual psychology has shaped the modern rhetoric of “liberation.”

The literalising of metaphor, otherwise known as the resurrection of dead metaphors, is one of the covert plot devices of fairy-tale narratives and a common source of their enigmatic “magic.” It is this device that provides the dramatic climax of D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” the story of a pubescent boy who acquires the habit of rocking himself to auto-erotic climax as he conjures the names of race-horses that will win him the money his mother desires, and thus the maternal love that the boy himself desires, and whose final nocturnal “race” on his bedroom rocking-horse climaxes in an ecstatic death by exhaustion.1 In this psychoanalytic fairy-tale, which didactically links dreams of unearned wealth with self-wasting autoerotism, the son’s ambition to acquire spending-power and make an oedipal gift of it to his mother ends in a death that ironically “resurrects,” by literalising, the all-but-dead metaphor for orgasm known in French as “la petite mort” and in English poetic vernacular as “dying.”

1

For commentary on the interlinked themes of money and masturbation in “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” see Turner (1982).

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The resurrection of dead metaphors is a special case of the pun, and the multilingual archive of puns that forge links between sex and money has generated a wealth of Freudian psychoanalytic enquiry. Rather than try to add to that wealth here, I want to investigate something of the history occulted in such puns: the history of the intercourse or exchange between the discourses of sexuality and economics in modern conceptions of the self. Georges Bataille offers one entry into that distinctively modern hybrid, the “libidinal economy,” in his essay on “De Sade’s Sovereign Man,” when he tells us that “[e]rotic conduct is the opposite of normal conduct as spending is the opposite of getting.” Glossing the rigorous anti-rationalism of Sade’s libertine doctrine, Bataille goes on: If we follow the dictates of reason we try to acquire all kinds of goods, we work in order to increase the sum of our possessions... to get richer and to possess more. But when the fever of sex seizes us we behave in the opposite way. We recklessly draw on our strength and sometimes in the violence of passion we squander considerable resources to no real purpose. Pleasure is so close to ruinous waste that we refer to the moment of climax as a “little death” ...we always want to be sure of the uselessness or ruinousness of our extravagance. We want to feel as remote from the world where thrift is the rule as we can. (1986: 170)

Whereas the “producer ethic” preaches the virtues of frugality, sobriety and the self-repressing postponement of pleasure in the interests of productive labour, the “consumer ethic” stimulates the economy by promulgating the values of spending not saving, self-gratification not self-denial, the pleasures of consumption rather than the dignity of labour. The consolidation of consumer culture in the West has been variously dated from the “decadent” 1890s, the modernist 1920s, and the “countercultural” 1960s — the decade when Heffner’s Playboy and Penguin’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover helped to turn countercultural recreational sex into the so-called dominant “pornographic culture” of contemporary transatlantic consumerism. By identifying the “decisive discovery” of “what spending can really mean” with a Sade pictured as being struck by this “violent truth” in the loneliness of the Bastille as he watched the guillotine at work from his cell window, Bataille dates the emergence of the consumer ethic — and of the spender as “sovereign” — from the very moment of the Bourgeois Revolution itself (1986: 171). It is with the figure of the “sovereign” spender that this essay will be concerned: a figure ambiguously positioned on the dividing-line between law and the underworld, between “white” and “black” economies, in the writings of early-twentieth-century sexual psychologists like Freud and Lawrence,

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whose inconclusive efforts to separate a discourse of desire from the discourse of economics reveal (I shall argue) the profound complicity of the consumer and producer ethics in the early twentieth-century moment of that other “long revolution,” the sexual revolution, which is coterminous with modernity itself. Like Lawrence, Freud prided himself on plainspeaking. In 1913, he warned his colleagues that there were two subjects that “civilised people” will always treat “with the same inconsistency, prudishness and hypocrisy,” and about which psychoanalysts must insist on speaking with “the same matter-of-fact frankness:” “money matters” and “sexual matters” (19531975: 131). An ironic warning, one may think, since it was psychoanalysis that taught the twentieth century the impossibility of speaking plainly about money: taught it that speech about money is invariably metaphoric and to be decoded into speech about sex — taught it, in other words, a cardinal principle of the consumer ethic: the imperative of eroticising money, never economising on sex. Freud’s case histories continually “dematerialise” economic relationships — decoding monetary transactions as disguised expressions or repressions of erotic desire, secondary transcriptions of a truth anterior to money, the originary truth of sex. This, at least, is the familiar Freud; but in some of his writings, he practices the reverse translation, decoding desire as capital. In his paper “On Beginning the Treatment,” Freud explained why the bourgeois patrons of his new therapy were making a sound investment in purchasing a daily hour of the doctor’s time. Laying down what he called the “rules of the game” for psychotherapy — including the charging of high fees, the refusal of credit to patients, and the denial of gratis treatment however deserving or desperate the case — Freud acknowledged that by his rules “analytic therapy is almost inaccessible to poor people” (1953-1975: 127, 132); but he settled his conscience on this point by arguing that neurosis in the poor typically functions as a screen for indolence, excusing them from the obligation to work (132-33). For the bourgeois client, meanwhile, the expense of psychoanalysis was “excessive only in appearance” — and not because health is priceless but, on the contrary, because health is synonymous with “efficiency,” and “efficiency” with “earning capacity.” Proving himself as canny a salesman of his services as any insurance broker, Freud pointed out that the relatively “modest financial outlay” involved in an analytic cure compares favourably with “the unceasing costs of nursing homes and medical treatment,” and if we “contrast them with the increase of efficiency and earning capacity which results from a successfully completed analysis, we are entitled to say that the patients have made a good bargain” (133). For those who can afford it, in other words, psychoanalysis is not a

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sacrifice of wealth for health, but a pragmatic investment in increased earning-power, a hedge against depreciation of one’s human capital. And as for the role of high fees, Freud argued that “the absence of the regulating effect offered by the payment of a fee to the doctor” would mean that “the whole relationship is removed from the real world...” (131-32). Like the “normal conduct” Bataille identifies with accumulation rather than the unproductive expenditure of pleasure, Freud’s “real world” is governed by the producer ethic: it is the world of homo oeconomicus, the citizen as property-owner and worker, a world constituted in the division of labour between fee-paying clients, for example, and wage-labouring analysts. And this world of the producer ethic, whose “reality principle” checks and defers the “pleasure principle” of consumption, no more begins, for Freud and his patients, outside the consulting-room door than it begins with the employer-employee relationship into which doctor and patient enter in the business of psychoanalysis. The “real world” of the market economy, the world that Hegel called “civil society,” inhabits our very dreams, governs the productive mechanisms of what Freud tellingly termed “the dream-work” and what he would come to call “the economics of the libido” (1979: 17) and “the domestic economy of the mind” itself (1977: 76).2 In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud developed an extended analogy between unconscious desire and unused capital to explain how the day’s residue of conscious wishes triggers deep-seated unconscious desires in dreams: A daytime thought may very well play the part of entrepreneur for a dream; but the entrepreneur, who, as people say, has the idea and the initiative to carry it out, can do nothing without capital; he needs a capitalist who can afford the outlay, and the capitalist who provides the psychical outlay for the dream is invariably and indisputably, whatever may be the thoughts of the previous day, a wish from the unconscious. Sometimes the capitalist is himself the entrepreneur, and indeed in the case of dreams this is the commoner event: an unconscious wish is stirred up by the daytime activity and proceeds to construct a dream. So, too, the other possible variations in the economic situation that I have taken as an analogy have their parallel in dream-processes. The entrepreneur may himself make a small contribution to the capital; several entrepreneurs may apply to the same capitalist; several capitalists may combine to put up what is necessary for the entrepreneur. In the same way, we come across dreams that are supported by more than one dream-wish; and so too with other similar variations, which could easily be run through... (1953: 561) 2

Freud claimed that his discovery of “the economic point of view” on the psyche was “the consummation of psychoanalytic research” (1984: 184).

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Freud’s life-long preoccupation with money-making is well-known, even infamous.3 He once described himself as “a mere money-acquisition machine” (Gay 1989: 160), reported that his moods depended on his earnings and that “money is laughing gas for me” (1985: 374), and he likened psychoanalysis variously to goldmining, alchemy and safe-breaking. Read in the light of these telling tropes, his manifest analogy between repressed desire and unused capital — censored wishes and sleeping assets — can be seen as screening a latent one between the analyst and the entrepreneur: the role of the day’s residue in exploiting the “capital” or “capitalist” of unconscious desire bears an uncanny resemblance to the role of the enterprising analyst who knows how to profit from the repressed desires encoded in his bourgeois patients’ dreams and symptoms. In his case history of “Dora” — a case he claimed to have cracked by discovering what he called the “key” to the jewelbox of “Dora’s” dreams — Freud claimed that it was by means of his analytic technique alone that “the pure metal of valuable unconscious thoughts [can] be extracted from the raw material of the patient’s associations” (1977: 153). If the analyst can be pictured as an industrious miner of the rich vein of his patient’s unconscious desire (or “capital”), however, his technique can also be pictured as an “underworld” one in another sense: the criminal sense. Writing about “Dora” (Ida Bauer) to Fliess, Freud likened psychoanalysis to the technique of burglary: “I have a new patient,” he reported, “a girl of eighteen: the case has opened smoothly to my collection of picklocks” (1954: 325). In the popular view of Freudianism as a reductionist hermeneutic, which decodes socio-economic relationships into disguised repetitions of archetypal erotic ones, the “other” of Freud’s “real world” of homo oeconomicus is the so-called “private” world of the family — an economy of love, not money, which intellectuals from Hobbes to Marx contrasted with the competitive domain of the social. But in an era when marriage was still predominantly conceived as an economic contract — when, as Lawrence put it, “marriage has been found the best method of conserving property and stimulating production” (1993: 319) — the “other” of Freud’s “real world” of the market economy was not so much the “private” world of family-life, but the underworld, the burglar’s world. It is in the underworld, according to 3

The economist Peter Drucker, who knew the Freud family personally, describes Freud as having the then common bourgeois Viennese affliction of the “poorhouse or money neurosis,” misrepresenting himself constantly as underpaid and in financial anxiety. His refusal to perform the pro bono work expected of physicians at the time by accepting non-paying or “charity” patients attracted the ethical scorn of the Viennese medical profession (Drucker 1979: 84-85).

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Bataille, that the producer ethic has no purchase. Bataille prefaces his commentary on Sade in Erotism with an essay on “Kinsey, the Underworld and Work,” in which he argues that the most significant finding of the Kinsey Reports was that America’s criminal population enjoyed, on average, five times as many orgasms per week as its working population (1986: 156-57). In showing that class background, age and religion were relatively insignificant influences on the quantity of an individual’s sexual spending compared with the overriding factor of work, the Kinsey reports confirmed Bataille’s intuition of a deep affinity between eroticism, crime, and Nature, linked as they are by their marginality to what Freud called the “real world” of productive labour. “[G]enuine pornography is almost always underworld,” Lawrence explained in “Obscenity and Pornography,” his broadside against the forces of law and order that had confiscated his paintings of nudes from a London gallery and publicly burned The Rainbow for “indecency” in the name of the English war effort (1936: 175; Haste 1992: 50-57). Like Bataille, but with very different sympathies, Lawrence propounded the intrinsic links between crime, pornography and unproductive expenditure. Mocking the confusion of legal definitions of obscenity and pornography, he narrowed down his own definition of the “genuine pornography” that circulates in the black economy of the underworld to material intended as “a direct provocative of masturbation:” “an invariable stimulant to the vice of self-abuse, onanism, masturbation, call it what you will” (1936: 178). Describing masturbation as “the one thoroughly secret act of the human being, more secret even than excrementation,” he went on to characterise it as “the deepest and most dangerous cancer of our civilization […] certainly the most dangerous sexual vice that a society can be afflicted with, in the long run.” Why? Because: The great danger of masturbation lies in its merely exhaustive nature. In sexual intercourse, there is give and take. A new stimulus enters as the native stimulus departs. ...And this is so in all sexual intercourse where two creatures are concerned, even in the homosexual intercourse. But in masturbation there is nothing but loss. There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending away of a certain force, and no return. ...There is what we call dead loss. ...the self becomes emptier and emptier, till it is almost a nullus, a nothingness. (1936: 179-180)

If there is a criminal aspect to masturbation — that vice most injurious to the social body — it is the crime of spending without receiving a return on one’s outlay. As for the bourgeois investor in Freud’s economical therapy, so for Lawrence’s “healthy” individual, desire as capital is that form of personal property which should create more capital. Few terms in Lawrence’s lexicon

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of invective were more damning than “masturbation,” understood as the epitome of the unproductive or uncreative; by metaphoric extension, the term could be applied to all of Lawrence’s bêtes noires, not least to Freudian “science” itself.4 The question of when the social “cancer” of masturbation first began to attack European civilisation was one that vexed his historical imagination; in his “Introduction to These Paintings” he traced its emergence to a pervasive fear of sexual intercourse consequent on the arrival of syphilis from the New World in the late sixteenth century (1936: 551-52); but in “Obscenity and Pornography,” Lawrence proposed that “the real masturbation of Englishmen began only in the nineteenth century” and “has continued with an increasing emptying of the real vitality and the real being of men, till now people are little more than shells of people. ...incapable of either giving or taking. And this is masturbation result” (1936: 180). If the “masturbation result” can be traced to the nineteenth century, so, too, can Lawrence’s own thinking on the exchange-value of sexual intercourse, which is not altogether remote from the popular sexual wisdom of the 1850s studiously documented by “Walter” in My Secret Life — that pornographic epic of prodigious, underworld spending, as much by the countless prostitutes Walter patronises as by the near-bankrupted autobiographer himself. As Walter understood it, productive sexual exchange depended on simultaneous spending by both partners. In his words: “If the man alone spends in the woman’s cunt, it will not do it. — If the woman spends alone, it will not do it. — If they spend some time after each other, it may or may not do it” (1966: 367). Only if both parties to the transaction spend together can they be sure that — as the work-shy Walter put it — “the job is done” (1966: 367). Bataille suggests that “if one calculates the ratio between energy consumed and the usefulness of the results, the pursuit of pleasure even if reckoned as useful is essentially extravagant; the more so in that usually pleasure has no end product...” (1986: 168). Indifferent though the spendthrift, libertine Walter was to end-products, his bourgeois mind was fascinated by the precise quantities of expenditure involved in erotic pleasure. His onanistic researches revealed that a man’s average outlay of élan vital was a large teaspoonful (a finding that suggests a new meaning for J. Alfred Prufrock’s melancholy reflection: “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons”); and as for the amount of expenditure that could be received by a woman, Walter found that it amounted to exactly four guineas-worth. A 4

In his “Introduction to These Paintings” Lawrence attaches the stigma of “masturbation” to physics, astronomy, Christianity, and most of post-Renaissance European visual art (567—75). The “niggling analysis, often self-analysis,” that he deplores as a cultural “manifestation of masturbation” implicates psychoanalysis as well as literary modernism of the Joycean and Proustian kinds (1936: 180).

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financial-cum-erotic compact with a favourite prostitute revealed that her vagina could hold no less, but no more, than eighty-four silver shillings — an achievement that entitled her to keep the money on condition that she provides her services gratis to Walter on two future visits (1966: 526). The “sovereign” spender of the underworld libidinal economy measured his outlay in shillings. The fetishistic equation of sexual with fiscal expenditure, so insistently foregrounded in the underworld libidinal economy of My Secret Life, was mediated for Victorians by a third term, that of “energy,” typically figured as a liquid currency, which is the manifest content of the economic models of the libido that both Freud and Lawrence inherited from early nineteenth-century sexual “science.” Lawrence was both right and wrong in arguing that the real masturbation of Englishman began in the nineteenth century. The so-called “disease” of onanism had been invented a century earlier, in the 1700s, when medical men and moralists began pathologising masturbation, in both sexes, as a dangerous wastage of vital bodily fluids and capital reserves of energy, leading to anything from arrested growth, epilepsy and sterility to consumption and death. (The seminal study, as it were, of the pandemic of masturbation-phobia which swept Europe and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is René Spitz’s essay, “Masturbation and Authority,” published in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 1952.) But it was around the mid-nineteenth century that masturbation-phobia entered a distinctive new phase, when remedies for the so-called “secret vice” became severe punishment and surgical measures like clitoridectomy and circumcision, and when the economic costs of onanism became an insistent literal, as much as metaphoric, theme of anti-masturbation literature. The 1830s saw a proliferation of self-help manuals written by assorted clergymen and doctors, providing young people, especially males, with systems of selfdiscipline to prepare them for success in the competitive world of the modern business economy, and warning against the dangerous effects of masturbation, which they figured as a debilitating drain on the economy of the working body. A typical example of the genre was the Reverend John Todd’s The Student’s Manual, which went through scores of editions in America and Europe following its publication in 1835. Todd’s theme was the need to maximise the vital personal resources — of energy, time, money and information — indispensable to the self-made male in a modern, democratic, business-driven society. Bodily energies in general and sperm in particular were like time and money: to be “save[d] with the utmost care, and spen[t] with the greatest caution” (1835: 135). Todd figured energy and semen, like time and useful knowledge, as liquid, mutually exchangeable currencies, convertible into profit or pleasure, success or failure. In his model of the

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body, business competition was internalised: the self was an economy of energy in which personified interests like Ambition, Sloth and Fantasy competed for limited reserves of the vital currency, and it was as a prodigal wastage of these reserves that Todd indicted what he called “the practice of pouring out by the hand (the vicious act of Onan)” (1835: 146). As another manual on Mental Hygiene advised of the “fundamental law of the animal economy:” the body’s resources are valuable assets that should be “managed” “so as to ensure the greatest possible return” (Ray 1968: 68, 89). It is no accident that the decade in which such advice manuals began to proliferate — the 1830s — also saw the establishment of classical thermodynamics as a science of energy defined as capacity for work. The pseudo-scientific conception of sexuality that prevails in self-help literature of Todd’s kind is an amalgam of the economic and the thermodynamic: an application of the laws of the conservation and transformation of energy (and of the entropy which Lawrence called “dead loss”) to the monadic, psychosomatic economy of the self. The correlation of sexual desire with energy and capital, and the stigmatising of their “wastage” in “unproductive” pleasure as vice and disease, underwrites the history of masturbation-phobia from its emergence at the start of the Industrial Revolution through to its waning in the late nineteenth century, when the new disciplines of neo-classical economics and sexology undertook to put the study of the desire to spend on a “scientific” footing, and, in doing so, overhauled the productivist ethos of classical political economy and moralistic sexual psychology. In ways that I do not have space to show here, these two movements can be seen as institutionalising the consumer ethic in their respective theories of desire, at a time when the mass-production made possible by the Industrial Revolution seemed to be outstripping demand and a crucial concern for economists and entrepreneurs had become the kinds and quantities of desire that could be stimulated and directed toward consumption of any particular commodity (for an elaboration of these arguments see Bennett 1999). Whereas Enlightenment thinkers such as Smith and Hume had tended to view consumer desires, or the urge to spend, as an inexhaustible motor of market growth, neo-classical economists like Alfred Marshall, Leon Walras and Carl Menger stressed the essentially ephemeral, capricious and unreliable nature of the desire to spend. As Marshall explained in his Principles of Economics in 1890: It is an almost universal law that each several want is limited, and that with every increase in the amount of a thing which a man has, the eagerness of his desire to obtain more of it diminishes; until it yields place to the desire for

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When desire for any given object is perceived as limited and exhaustible, capable of burning itself out at any moment, what is in demand in an economy of scarcity is not so much commodities, or potential objects of desire, but desire itself — the desire that Freud figured as “capital” in The Interpretation of Dreams or as “the pure metal” to be “extracted” by psychoanalysis from its bourgeois clients’ unconscious. In neo-classical economics, homo oeconomicus, or the citizen-producer, was redefined as homo desiderans, the citizen-consumer, the capricious subject of a desire to spend. Channelling this potentially scarce and unreliable desire into profitable exchange in the legitimate market of “civil society” — preventing its “wastage,” or what Lawrence called its “dead loss,” in the underworld economy of pornographers and prostitutes, masturbators and fornicators — was clearly one of the motives for the intensified campaign against “unproductive” expenditure mounted during the increasingly consumerist eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dr. Kay-Shuttleworth, the celebrated Manchester sanitary reformer, explicitly made the link between unregulated sexual spending in the “black” economy and diminished consumer desire in the legitimate economy when he argued in the 1830s that a population given to sexual licentiousness becomes “politically worthless as having few desires to satisfy, and noxious as dissipators of capital accumulated” (1953: 81). If neo-classical economics was an attempt to investigate the desire of the “sovereign” spender scientifically, so, too, was the new “science” of sexology which developed in tandem with it in the 1880s and 1890s. Like the economists, the sexologists treated desire as a universal, but its manifestations as essentially capricious and idiosyncratic, to be studied “scientifically” across a spectrum of polymorphous perversity. For the sexologists, as for the economists, the number of potential objects of desire is unlimited, but desire directed toward any one object soon falls off, because desire itself is scarce. Sexologists like Havelock Ellis equated erotic pleasure with the discharge of nervous energy, and they distinguished sexual practices “scientifically” according to the speed with which this expenditure occurred: masturbation was equated with instant discharge or “impulse-spending;” homosexuality with less immediate but still rapid spending; and what Ellis termed “normal,” “civilised,” heterogenital love with long-delayed expenditure, or protracted courtship rituals in which capital reserves of spending-power keep accumulating, like interest on a deposit account, increasing the investment-value of the ultimate “discharge” (Ellis 1908). Freud, who acknowledged his debt to the sexologists, also viewed object-love as a series of displacements of a single libidinal energy, which he

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figured not as inexhaustible or endlessly expendable, but as a potentially scarce resource that could be variously channelled, diverted, dammed up, or discharged. The law of the pleasure principle was that this libidinal energy tended to spend itself via the shortest possible path; hence the conservationist principle of diverting it along “the defiles of the signifier” (Lacan), or the symbolic displacements (“sublimations”) that Freud identified with civilisation. When sexual energy was so dammed that spending was permanently delayed, it appeared to Freud to transform itself into pathological symptoms — civilisation’s discontents. Uninvested capital, so to speak, burns a hole in one’s trouser pocket. Sexology and neo-classical economics were complementary, “scientific” moments in a broader redefinition of the citizen since the eighteenth century as, above all, a subject of desire rather than of labour — a unit of spending-power rather than work-power. Freud and Lawrence were among the early twentieth-century sexual psychologists whose writings participated in this centring of desire — understood as the urge to spend (more or less “recklessly”) rather than to produce — in the definition of the social subject, which is to say in “civil” society. Outspoken critics of the industrial work ethic and advocates of libidinal release as a way of alleviating its discontents, they represented the impulse to spend as a biological or natural imperative, anterior to the social, and hence irreducible to economic or cultural determinations. Castigating what he saw as a new class-less society of hedonistic consumers — the onanistic “money-boys and money-girls” of the 1920s — Lawrence insisted that sex was an originary psychical truth, irreducible to either the profit or the pleasure principles. “Sex,” he wrote, “is the one thing you cannot really swindle […] Once come down to sex, and the emotional swindle must collapse […]. Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is devastating against false love” (1993: 96). Putting this truth “back” into “civil” circulation meant bringing it up from the underworld, stripping away the screens of Latin, blue book covers and the stigma of “obscenity” from a plain-speaking sex — just as, for Freud, it meant freeing polymorphous desires, in the name of scientific reason, from the medical and moral stigmas of “perversion” which had pathologised masturbation as an unnatural and immoral wastage of potentially profitable energies. But even as they construct sex as the truth of the self, Freud and Lawrence irresistibly translate it into the currency of other truths. Sexology and psychoanalysis borrowed much of their aura of scientificity from the putatively “objective” discourses of thermodynamics and economics: the one, however, a theory of energy defined as capacity for work, the other a theory of desire defined as the motor of industrial growth. The repressed voice of the producer-ethic thus returns in

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the putatively “neutral” discourse of science. Lawrence famously repudiated the scientism of psychoanalysis, insisting on the “untranslatable otherness” of unconscious desire (Fernihough 1993: 67-68), but even as he stresses the unfakeable, unexchangeable truth of sex, his terms threaten to convert it into the very monetary interests from which he wanted it freed: sex is that which cannot be “swindled;” it drives the “counterfeit” off the market, “collapses” the “false” economy — as if it were the only authentic currency, the one true coin, Freud’s “pure metal of valuable... associations.” In my reading of Freud’s analogy between repressed desire and capital, psychoanalysis undertakes to put the sleeping asset of blocked libido to work, to bring it up from the unconscious, out of the closet of the symptom, into the open market of profitable exchange — profitable alike to analyst and analysand as investors in the economy of desire, the desire to be economical. This is one way of reading psychoanalysis’ contribution to that “putting-into-discourse” of sex which the nineteenth century defined as a scientific imperative and which Lawrence helped to establish as a modernist literary imperative. Lawrence’s tropes, like Freud’s, can be read against their grain and interpreted as latently literal. Of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he wrote: “I want men and women to be able to think sex, fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly. Even if we can’t act sexually to our complete satisfaction, let us at least think sexually […]. Now our business is to realize sex” (1993: 308; my emphasis):5 as if the conversion of sex into words, the legitimate currency of social exchange, were a matter of realising hidden assets — which indeed is how Lawrence represented his efforts to reclaim what he called “the evocative power of the so-called obscene words” from the underworld and put them back into honest circulation in serious literature and middle-class conversation. In pointing to the stubborn traces of economism and productivism in Freud’s and Lawrence’s discourses on desire, I do not mean to imply either that a non-metaphoric language of desire might be possible nor that Freud and Lawrence were closet opponents of the deregulation of the desire to spend — the libertarian or “consumerist” revolution in sexuality. Establishing erotic desire as an untranslatable ground of the psyche — turning what Foucault called “the secret” of the self into an open secret — meant participating in the redefinition of the citizen as primarily a subject of desire rather than of labour. But putting this secret into circulation in “civil” society meant sacrificing its “untranslatable otherness,” opening it to 5

Developing his case against the “repressive hypothesis” in The History of Sexuality, Foucault cites this passage from Lawrence in evidence of a “centuries-long rise of a complex deployment for compelling sex to speak” which has been misinterpreted as “a long period of harsh repression” (1981: 157-58).

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exchange. Freud was the first to admit the unavoidability of this exchange, or what he described as the necessarily “figurative language peculiar to psychology;”6 any attempt to give the unconscious a voice, to know the unknowable, cannot but substitute a metaphor for the original. But if unconscious desire is always already metaphoric, money is no less inherently metaphoric: to be “realised” it must be translated or exchanged — as Marx, for one, illustrated when in order to speak plainly about economic relationships he translated them into erotic ones. In the first volume of Capital (1867) Marx tells us that “[c]ommodities are in love with money,” they ogle it with their price, “casting wooing glances” at consumers’ pockets (121, 124). Describing capital as “the eunuch of industry” in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, he argued: “no eunuch flatters his despot more basely or uses more infamous means to revive his flagging capacity for pleasure, in order to win a surreptitious pleasure for himself, than does the eunuch of industry […] in order to […] coax the gold from the pocket of his dearly beloved neighbour” (1974: 359). Here, Freud’s economic metaphor (repressed sexual desire as capital) is Marx’s sexual metaphor (capital as frustrated, or castrated, sexual desire). The economising of sex and the eroticising of money, it seems, are two sides of the same metaphoric coin. On the face of it, the pervasive use of economic metaphors by sexual psychologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has the effect of extending market logic to the psychic domain, incorporating the most intimately “private” and “personal” in the public sphere of the market economy. But the discourse of erotic expenditure is inherently ambiguous and duplicitous: what appears from one side to be an economising of sexual desire appears from the other to be an eroticising of money. The recourse by political economists to the language of sexual attractions, courtship and seduction to explain the logic of money and the “fetishism of commodities” is the other side of the metaphoric coin I have been describing; and if, as I am suggesting, the discourses of money and sex became inseparable at a certain historical moment, then neither discourse can ultimately claim to trump or “demystify” the other, or explain the other historically — neither discourse, in other words, can securely establish itself as the literal, rather than the metaphoric, voice of history, as the language of historical facts, not rhetorical figures. Writing to Bertrand Russell in 1915, Lawrence insisted:

6

In observing that psychologists are “obliged to operate with the scientific terms, that is to say with the figurative language, peculiar to psychology,” Freud describes the discourses of physiology, chemistry and biology as themselves “figurative” languages (1979: 334).

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We must provide another standard than the pecuniary standard, to measure all daily life by. We must be free of the economic question. […]. All our ideals are cant and hypocrisy till we have burst the fetters of this money […] So there must be an actual revolution, to set free our bodies. (1981: 282-83)

The only way to achieve this liberation, he argued, was by “a revolution in the state” that would “begin by the nationalising of all... industries and means of communication, and of the land — in one fell blow” (1981: 282). The paradox that the rhetoric of sexual liberation — the liberation of desire from the logic of money — should have so often depended, from Lawrence through Wilhelm Reich to the countercultural 1960s, on equating sexual revolution and economic revolution and investing the idea of economic revolution, or “nationalisation,” with a libidinal charge is testimony that it would indeed require a revolution in the “means of communication” to disarticulate the supposedly competing truths of the discourses of money and sex. Works Cited Bataille, Georges. 1986. Erotism: Death and Sensuality. Trans. M. Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights. Bennett, David. 1999. “Burghers, Burglars, and Masturbators: The Sovereign Spender in the Age of Consumerism.” New Literary History 30. 2: 269-294. Drucker, Peter F. 1979. “Freudian Myths and Freudian Realities.” Adventures of a Bystander. London: Heinemann. 83—99. Ellis, Havelock. 1908. “Analysis of the Sexual Impulse.” Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Philadelphia: Davis: 1—55. Fernihough, Anne. 1993. D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology. Oxford: Clarendon. Foucault, Michel. 1981. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund. 1985. Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 18871904. Ed. Jeffrey Masson. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard UP. ——. 1984. “The Unconscious (1915).” On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. Ed. A. Richards. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——. 1979. Civilization and Its Discontents. Ed. James Strachey. Trans. Joan Riviere. London: Hogarth. ——. 1977. Case Histories 1: Dora and Little Hans. Ed. A. Richards. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——. 1954. The Origins of Psychoanalysis, Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes: 1887—1902. Eds. Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, Ernst Kris. New York: Basic Books.

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1953-1975. “On Beginning the Treatment.” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. 12. London: Hogarth. —— 1953. The Interpretation of Dreams. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. Vol. 5. London: Hogarth. Gay, Peter. 1989. Freud: A Life for Our Time. London: Macmillan. Griffin, Susan. 1982. Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature. New York: Harper and Row. Haste, Cate. 1992. Rules of Desire — Sex in Britain: World War I to the Present. London: Chatto & Windus. Hegel, G. W. F. 1952. “Civil Society.” Part 3, Section 2 of The Philosophy of Right. The Philosophy of Right, The Philosophy of History. Trans. T. M. Knox and J. Sibree. Chicago, London, Toronto: Encyclopaedia Britannica. 64-80. Kay-Shuttleworth, James Phillips. 1969. The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (1832). Rpt. Manchester: E. J. Morten. Lawrence, D. H. 1995. “The Rocking-Horse Winner.” In The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories. Eds. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 230-43. ——. 1993. “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” Lady Chatterley’s Lover and A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Ed. Michael Squires. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ——. 1981. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II. Ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ——. 1936a. “Introduction to These Paintings.” Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Edward D. McDonald. London: Heinemann. 551-84. ——. 1936b. “Obscenity and Pornography.” Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Edward D. McDonald. London: Heinemann. Marshall, Alfred. 1890. Principles of Economics. London: Macmillan. Marx, Karl. 1974. “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.” Early Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——. 1966. My Secret Life. Abr. ed. with an introduction by G. Legman. New York: Grove. ——. 1919. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867). Ed. F. Engels. 3rd ed. Vol. 1. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. Ray, Isaac. 1968. Mental Hygiene (1863). New York: Hafner. Spitz, René A. 1952. “Authority and Masturbation: Some Remarks on a Bibliographical Investigation.” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 21: 490—526. Todd, John. 1835. The Student’s Manual. Northampton: Hopkins, Bridgman. Turner, John F. 1982. “The Perversion of Play in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The RockingHorse Winner.’” The D. H Lawrence Review 15.3 (Fall): 249—70.

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Part III: Narrative Economies

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LOLITA – A REGION IN FLAMES MATTHEW PATEMAN This essay reads Nabokov’s Lolita alongside a section of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy. The effort is to suggest ways in which Lyotard’s text might open up Lolita to a reading strategy that allows the excessive quality of the novel to be articulated. This excess is located in the name “Lolita.” Using Lyotard’s engagement with Marx and Freud as a starting point for a discussion of the sign as a unit of economic and libidinal investment, this essay claims that “Lolita” the sign is in excess of the investments placed into it. In Lyotard’s terms it becomes a “tensor sign.” The essay suggests some of the ways in which this excess is both determined and controlled by Humbert Humbert, but also escapes his determination. The argument here is not to encapsulate the novel, rather it seeks simply to affirm its energetic possibilities.

This essay is an attempt to place together in the same discursive space two books. Both of them will be known to you, at least by reputation, and both have had their share of scorn and controversy. One is an “evil book, the book of evilness that everyone writing and thinking is tempted to do” (Lyotard 1988: 13). The other is “dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion” and is “repulsive” (Prescott 1995: xxxv). My hope is that the semi-opportunistic juxtaposition will enable new intensities in both books to be allowed movement. There might be an argument, even a claim about what I might pompously call “the politics of the name,” but these will be effects of this hoped-for movement, not its cause. Iain Hamilton Grant’s 1993 translation into English of Libidinal Economy helped re-invigorate this text and its reception in the Englishspeaking world. For many, Libidinal Economy had only been available via inference and commentary, and much of this was highly critical, in the narrowest sense. Bill Readings’ Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics wrote it off as more-or-less an apologia for late capitalism.1 Geoff Bennington, 1

The most explicit concern is demonstrated here, where Readings states: “The disruption of the restricted or bound energy of logic, system and economy by the work of desire under the principle of pleasure rather than reality is developed in Economie

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although giving it a lot of space, eschewed it in favour of Discours figure, suggesting that the book would work as well or better without all its libidinal baggage.2 In an early review of The Postmodern Condition, Seyla Benhabib attacks what she sees as Libidinal Economy’s “total lack of historical perspective” (Benhabib 1984: 121). Anne Tomiche, in her essay “Rephrasing the Freudian Unconscious: Lyotard’s Affect-Phrase,” gives surprisingly little space to the evil book, despite mentioning Freud’s use of Schreber that Lyotard takes so much trouble to extend (1994). And most other commentators ignored it entirely except for agreeing with Lyotard’s own damning estimation of the book found in Just Gaming and Peregrinations, and perhaps most poignantly in his interview with Willem van Reijen and Dick Veerman where Lyotard responds to one of the questions by saying: “It cannot be understood, or supported, except from the basis of the crisis I was going through at the time, and I was not at all alone” (otherwise the book would have had no public interest at all; Van Reijen & Veerman 1988: 300). The recent work by James Williams, Lyotard and the Political, is an attempt to rescue Libidinal Economy from the backwaters of Lyotard studies. His eventual claim that a libidinal economics offers a more democratic and purposeful politics than the politics of the later Lyotard, inscribed as it is in a re-assessment of the sublime, seems to me flawed. While Libidinal Economy is certainly both more than and different from an apology for capitalism, it is still not what Williams claims. This essay is not intended as an argument detailing the subtleties of Williams’ book, but at a general level, Williams allows Lyotard’s Freudian analysis too much credence. This amounts to my saying, along with Bennington and Readings in their different ways, that Libidinal Economy whatever its strengths, is stymied by its acceptance of Freudian postulates. Doubtless there is a drift, but the drift is both away from and still with Freud, and it is not easy to base a politics on a theory that is itself just a theoretical fiction. However much Lyotard may re-cast many of the tenets of Freudian thought, his libidinal economy cannot exist without them.

libidinale to something perilously close to an affirmation of capitalist socio-economic mobility applied to the discursive order of the organic body” (Readings & Norris 1991: 47). 2 Towards the end of his chapter on Libidinal Economy in Lyotard: Writing the Event, Bennington approves of the “linguistic turn.” In French thought (which in Lyotard’s work both precedes and then supersedes this awkward text). The insistence on language rather than the libidinal allows a move “towards a notion of parody which is very close to the ‘theatrics’ extolled in the earlier book, but without the troublesome language of the libido [...]” (Bennington 1988: 5).

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However, there is still much that is fascinating, provoking and important. I would argue that the elements of Libidinal Economy that are most resilient to criticism are those that posit the idea of energy (or as Lyotard prefers, “energetics”) in a fashion that is worked through in later texts as “event,” and here is covered by terms such as dissimulation, intensity, tensor sign, and so on. (I appreciate that this is to aestheticise a text which is already highly aestheticised). For the purposes of this essay, I am going to concentrate, as may already have become evident, on the section sub-titled “Intensity, the Name,” and on a very specific part of that. Here the writer of Libidinal Economy poses a common problem which is that the name refers in principle to a single reference and does not appear to be exchangeable against other terms in the logico-linguistic structure: there is no intra-systemic equivalent of the proper name, it points towards the outside like a deictic, it has no connotations, or it is interminable. (Lyotard 1993: 55)

Arguing against logicians, as he is wont to do, and whom he unfairly unifies under the proper names Frege and Russell as if there were no problem with this, Lyotard insists that the predicate of existence postulated by these philosophers cannot be the “anchoring” (55) that he claims they claim it is. Using the example of Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of my Nervous Illness, also, of course, used by Freud (and mentioned but ignored in its Lyotardian context by Tomiche), Lyotard asks questions of the proper name Fleschig, who was Schreber’s analyst. For Lyotard, the name Fleschig, under the influence of Schreber’s delirium is subject to a “dividuation” (55). This means that propositions that ought to be incompossible in relation to the “subject” Fleschig are rendered compatible. This, in turn, means that one name can refer to a number of different possibilities for the same “subject.” Lyotard is keen to assert that this is not simply polysemia, as this would amount to saying only that there were a multiple number of exchanges available within the structure of language. For Lyotard, this would keep the name safely within the semiotic structure or set-up, the primacy of which would then be asserted and maintained. Rather, he wishes to insist that in the proper name (here of Klossowski’s “Roberte”) there are two incompossible “orders” that meet and that are no longer two but, rather, “indiscernible” (56). This incompossible admixture is the site of a shock to the system, to the setup. It cannot, within its own rules, allow for this to happen, yet it is also a necessary condition of the set-up in the first place. The libidinal energy disrupts the supposed conformity of the system. Put differently, the name “Roberte” becomes an event that disrupts the discourse, that moves in excess of the discourse: it is a testament to singularity, a rejection of homogeneity. It

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is clear that Lyotard valorises the libidinal influx over the calm of the set-up (however much he might try and claim otherwise). Lyotard asserts that names are not a privileged category of the tensorial sign, but are a good example because a name, as tensorial sign, “covers a region of libidinal space open to the undefinability of energetic influxes, a region in flames” (56). A tensorial sign, by which is meant in principle any sign, refuses to be subordinated to a lack and, therefore, blocks its insertion into a system of replacements / equivalences whether these be in terms of absent signified or adjacent signifier. Importantly, there is no decision to be made between sign as semiotic unit and sign as tensor. The sign is both of these. The extent to which it acts as one or the other is an effect of the intensities that flow through it at any given instance. The name is a good example because it is already caught between singular designation and systemic signification. This avoids polysemia (the excess of meaning or exchangeability within signification) because in specific instances of the name (“Roberte” and “Fleschig” for Lyotard) there are “influxes which do not belong to [them], or to anyone else” and these “are disposed of and drain away” (56). For Lyotard’s analysis, these influxes tend to include mutually incompatible elements inhabiting the same region. So, for “Roberte” these incompatible presences, which are incompossible, are “prudery” and “sensuality,” and their presence is “beyond reason’s capacity to explain” (56). Lyotard’s claim is that it is the co-existence without primacy of two opposed “orders” in the sign that produces the tension that overreaches the sign’s capacity to signify. Instead, the sign can no longer operate solely on the flat level of exchangeability within a given system. It still endeavours to do this, but it also points to the outside, or the depth, beyond the system. (The inevitable re-invocation of the inside/outside of the theatrics of representation that Lyotard is so keen to disturb is one of the reasons why Libidinal Economy fails at the level of theory — even the anti-theory it postulates, precisely because it cannot not be “theoretical” in the narrow and derogatory sense implied by the book). What this insistence on the need for opposed orders (prudery / sensuality, for example) ignores is the co-existence of incompatible orders, or genres, that are incompossible but not opposed. To this extent, the later work on genres of discourse, and phrase regimes found in the Differend and after is perhaps useful to bear in mind during the remainder of this essay. “Lolita” (to turn, finally, to the other book under discussion) is simply one instance of naming attributed to the subject (character) supposedly designated by it. Other cognomens operate within two different regimes. The first of these regimes is the legal-discursive. Here, the two most important are

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“Dolores Haze” and “Mrs Richard Schiller.” Both of these contain the name within a legal structure that situates the person as part of a system of relations (linguistic, familial, cultural and legal). The other main regime is a version of this, and its names derived from these legal-discursive ones. These can be seen as attempts by both Dolores’ mother and Humbert to distort the legal discourse, where the names appear “flat” because of their inevitable position within a system of exchange and equivalence, and to prompt the name to act tensorially, as a moment of individual designation. These names include “Dolly” and “Lola,” from Dolores, and “Lo” and “Lolita” from Lola. Each of these designations points towards a different subject, or, less dramatically, a different manifestation of that subject: “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.” (Nabokov 1995: 9)

Apart from names related to her legal status, Humbert also ascribes Lolita the characteristics of (and occasionally the names of) mythological and folktale animals and beings, especially “elf.”3 In addition to this, there is also the important aspect of Humbert’s narration that places all of these variations, and their proper hosts, in an intraand inter-textual attachment to other names which then invoke further affiliations and bonds. The remainder of this essay is going to explore some of the ways in which the name “Lolita” acts as a tensor sign, such that the final usage by Humbert is in excess both of its first usage, and indeed in excess of the narrative that is attempting to control and define her. “Lolita” in the final moment of her utterance, it will be suggested, is the site of a radical dissimulation of discourses that overwhelm her signifying capacity, opening the sign to its tensorial intensity. “Lolita […] Lolita.” Between the two designations is the rest of the whole of Humbert Humbert’s narration. Is this, then, a comfortable circularity, the safe return to the same, a motion that arrives at pure equivalence? For this to be so, the two designators, “Lolita” would have to have attached to them the same value with regard to the thing designated, which is to say that the character of Lolita would be the same in each case. And this is patently not so. The opening designation, “Lolita” designates an abstraction unfilled by any concept except the one that further designates the need for a character who is not yet present. 3

For a truly staggering enumeration and discussion of the different ways in which the names of “Lolita” are used in the novel, see the annotated notes in The Annotated Lolita (Nabokov 1995).

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(I am here following the “Lyotard” of Discours, figure in distinguishing between the flat space of signification (discourse), and the deep space of designation (figure). The dichotomy is crudely used here, for purposes of economy.) The last designation, “Lolita,” suffers from a superabundance of concepts, an overwhelming affluence of regimes. She is massively overinvested with character. Does this then allow us to imagine the second “Lolita” as full signifier, as the completion of the earlier “Lolita,” as the eschatological promised land that will bring to Humbert the remission of evil? (Lyotard 1997: 96). This redemptive scenario is also not the case. First, “Lolita” as signifier has not fullness, but a shocking surplus which is unrecuperable within the system, and is, therefore, in excess of the system of signification. It does not complete it. Second, as designation, the supposedly unmotivated sign “Lolita” discovers motivation, indeed, a multiplicity of incompossible motivations, thereby staging its event at this point in the text as a figure that is disruptive of the possibility of the full signifier. So, there is for Humbert neither the comforting return to the same nor the freedom promised by eschatological relief. What he has, what he has written, is a closed narrative that is neither circular in the sense of ending at its beginning, nor is it linear in the sense of miming the salvation story of the West. What has Humbert written, then? The answers to this are, of course, multiple, but one of the things he has written is a paean to the productive eroticism of naming. He has written a text whose name is “Lolita:” not the novel which also bears the same name, but the object to which his whole aching body is directed. Before encountering these moments of Humbert’s nominalising largesse, it will be prudent to spend some time before the first naming, to avoid rushing over the text’s skin without a proper introduction. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. (1995: 9)

We shall have cause to extend our greeting later, but for now let us pay. The name, in tact, inviolable (it seems) impregnable (we thought). The name greets us in its totality (which is to say, in its designation of total abstraction), and is then added to. The proper name needs its object, desires (perhaps) its object. Where is she? Who is she? She is, whatever else may happen, the predicate of a sweet symmetry, of a genitive illumination and heating-up, of an assertion of life-giving and libidinal prowess: she is light and fire of life

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and loins. And she is, so far, perfectly proportioned. She is the possessorcreator of damnation and salvation. And then she falls apart. The name is not inviolable at all. “Lolita” is, if nothing else, easily spread. “Lolita” is the sum of her parts, or maybe she is in excess of them, or maybe they constitute her before she can be dissolved back into them. “Lolee-ta.” Our palatal journey, our physical introduction, our tonguely tour of her body in all its divisibility, takes us to her complete sundering: the phonemes have become, as indeed they ought to be as the true bearers of signification, whole in themselves. They no longer need her. Lo. Lee. Ta. Each mention of her, of Lolita, takes us further and further away from any idea of her as a character. Instead, she becomes a lexical object to be used and re-arranged in the frenetic linguistic excess, the wordy violence, of Humbert’s desire. Of course, Humbert’s narrative is already overdrawn, already in excess of his own attempts at meaning (whatever that attempt may mean). He is pre-figured, annotated, interpreted by John Ray Jr. PhD. John Ray has performed a critique of Humbert. Humbert has been interpreted, explained, made safe. And JR Jr. has pre-empted Humbert’s verbal violation by killing Lolita before she is even born. Here, of course, Lolita is Mrs “Richard F. Schilling” and she has died in childbirth. “Lolita” never had a chance, even before she was stretched and sundered by Humbert’s opening paragraph. But what a spectacular, extraordinary demise; what a proliferation of possibility. Rarely, if ever, has a name been so contorted, so mutated, so stretched and torn as that of “Lolita.” Across the skin of Lolita, the novel, so smooth and clean, are the irruptions of “Lolita” in all her tensorial strength and pain. She bruises and ruptures the skin of the text with her sudden mutations, her excess of naming. “Lolita,” the fire, the light, occurs throughout the text, and wherever she is, she is a region in flames, burning with the intensity and passion of a sign that will not be reduced. Above Humbert Humbert, however, there is Nabokov, and he makes it abundantly clear throughout the novel Lolita that it is he, and not H.H., who is writing the story. Or rather, he makes it clear that the narrator and the author are discrete entities who occasionally occupy the same textual space, oscillating wildly like the butterfly wings that show this disturbance. Nabokov reportedly said, about the preponderance of butterflies in Lolita that, “H. H. knows nothing about Lepidoptera. In fact, I went out of my way to indicate [p.110 and p.157] that he confuses the hawkmoths visiting the flowers at dusk with ‘gray hummingbirds’”(1995: 327). It is equally well known (and obvious, for that matter) that the naming of Humbert and Lolita was Nabokov’s doing, and that he purposefully introduced into both names significations beyond their more usual designatory requirements. In the space

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available, I will do no more than to direct the reader to the excellent annotations by Alfred Appel Jr. in the Annotated Lolita, and provide a general declaration of debt to his work in providing me with such a fecund source. The final naming of Lolita is the last word of the book, and is part of the small adjectival phrase “my Lolita” (309). The possessive pronoun also acts as a descriptor, which is important here as it demonstrates the very real way in which Humbert has attempted to construct Lolita for himself, through the array of different discursive intersections. While Humbert tries to assuage his own tremors of unease at his treatment of the girl, he cannot avoid certain moments of recognition: “What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another fanciful Lolita — perhaps more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness — indeed, no life of her own.” (62)

The empty designation of the first Lolita is rapidly filled in by Humbert, and it begins to overflow. Dolores grows and leaves him, has an affair with Quilty, marries Richard and dies in Childbirth. Lolita simply exceeds his own creation. He invests so much in her in his libidinal-lexical desire that his discourse of her is constantly blocked by the irruption of her name. Her name, the name “Lolita,” has already been stretched, sundered, torn apart; and in its tearing other names inhabit it, dissimulating each other, bursting its signifying potential and even destabilising its already unstable designatory power. Most immediate, both in terms of its location in the narrative, and in terms of Humbert’s own pre-history is the “Lee” of Lo.Lee.Ta. This, as is well known, is an echo of Annabel Lee, the eponymous character in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem of childhood love, desire and death. This instigates a subset of intensities that swirl around Lolita’s name and Humbert’s creation of it. Poe’s childbride, the thirteen-year-old Virginia, has obvious resonance for Humbert, and it is as Dr. Edgar H. Humbert that he registers in one of the motels where he stays with Lolita (118), and as Mr Edgar H. Humbert when he eats with her (ibid, 189). Already Lolita is inhabited by the immediate discourse of the poem, and the additional one of Poe’s sexual biography. Lee, however, is also homonymic with Annabel Leigh, Humbert’s first love whom he invokes, via the Poe allusion, in the first short chapter: “Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain girl-child. In a princedom by the sea” (9). Lolita then is inhabited by Poe, by and the two Annabels, and is seen by Humbert here as a sort of metaphor for the initial, the “real” signifier which is his first

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Annabel. Later, the dissimulation of signs is made graphically evident when Humbert mutates and stretches the names into “Annabel Haze, alias Dolores Lee, alias Loleeta” (167) where each mutation stands as metaphor for the other mutated sign in an endless deferral of non-signifying terms, but ones which nevertheless designate. What they designate, however, is not a “subject” but an intensity, the intensity of Humbert’s lexical-libidinal desire. This intensity is marked by the libidinal investments in the name from the four different discourses: the libidinal investment of the narrator of the poem for his Annabel; Humbert’s investment in his Annabel; Poe’s investment in his child bride Virginia; and Humbert’s investment in his Lolita. None of these can be seen to be truer or worth more than the others, but their incompossibility means that the name “Lolita” dissimulates each of them at the same time. Humbert’s invention, the name that designates his libidinal, his literary and his linguistic delirium, is subjected to a frantic, promiscuous eclecticism. The design of Humbert’s narrative, its seemingly constraining symmetry, suggests that the careful interweaving of allusive antecedents and apologies is an effort to constrain the name, to keep it within discursive bondage. But Humbert’s own initial desires and later revulsion make this impossible at the level of character, and, more importantly for present purposes, the diversity of discourses he employs means that any interstitial securing hoped for is immediately disrupted or blocked by the very conjoining that was supposed to produce it. The name “Lolita” is penetrated and passed through by, in no special order, the discourses attached to the (predominantly masculine) names Joyce, Mérimée, Shakespeare, Doyle, Christie, Leblanc, Blake, Beardsley, Eliot, Marat, Sade and many others. Each of these names is used differently and their resultant intensities, likewise, can be read in a variety of ways. The use of Sade is interesting because it brings together a number of elements in the novel to provide a certain narrative consistency while imbuing “Lolita” with an even greater sense of energetic influxes that push her further beyond the restrictions of that discourse. Lolita is telling Humbert of the time she spent with Quilty (Humbert’s doppelgänger and nemesis with whom she had an affair). Quilty, like Humbert, is a pederast, but his is a general desire — any young child being equivalent to any other young child so long as they will perform acts for him to film. Humbert’s desire is so specific that it exempts him from the economics of desire in this way: Quilty’s desired objects are transferable and exchangeable within a closed system; Humbert’s system is so closed that there can be no exchange. Lolita tells Humbert that she was kicked out by Quilty when she refused to be filmed having oral sex with another child. This is not so much out of repulsion at the act, but because (in a bizarre inversion

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of Humbert) she only wants Quilty, and refuses to exchange him for someone or be exchanged by him for someone. When hearing of the “weird, filthy, fancy things” demanded of Lolita by Quilty which included “to tangle in the nude while an old woman took movie pictures,” Humbert parenthetically exclaims “(Sade’s Justine was twelve at the start)” (267). Here there is an equivalence postulated. The young Lolita is in a similar position to Justine. Humbert’s invocation of Justine is reprised a little later, in the scene where he murders Quilty. In a row of extraordinary and grotesque comic proportions, Quilty boasts about having made several films of eighteenth century “sexcapades,” including Justine (298). The circulation of names (Lolita and Justine) operates as a struggle for ownership, not of Lolita but of the moral right to express and feel indignation and shame. If Humbert can equate Lolita with Justine he can also equate Quilty with Sade. If successful, this transaction might provide Humbert with some degree of relief, some exculpation of his sin, some redemption for his soul. Humbert recites a poem for Quilty, a parody of Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday.” A couple of salient lines will demonstrate the point: “Because you took advantage of a sinner […] Because you took advantage of a sin […] Because you cheated me of my redemption” (300). While the murder is successful, the redemption does not come. The attempt to trade signifiers for peace of mind does not work for Humbert. By contrast, “Lolita” has another name to dissimulate, another intensive moment, another energetic influx with which to work. Humbert, like Nabokov, would, of course, have no truck with this sort of reading. Remembering a dream he has had, Humbert ironically intones, “I am sure Dr Blanch Schwarzmann would have paid me a sack of schillings for adding such a libidream to her files” (54). The White Blackman name suggests the criticism of a too-easy, too stark response by psychoanalysis to the unconscious from Humbert, which his creator would certainly share. Nabokov’s famous antipathy for Freudian methods is perhaps most delightfully expressed here: “Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care” (325). Humbert, however, does care; if not for the psychoanalysing of his actions, then for the actions themselves and their libidinal intensity. An earlier reference to “my Lolita” is followed by a description of a desirememory and a present realisation of his status. Here, the intensities in the name “Lolita” are compounded by the intensities that surround that name in retrospect: […] for you never deigned to believe that I could, without any specific designs, ever crave to bury my face in your plaid skirt, my darling! The fragility of those bare arms of yours — how I longed to enfold them, all your

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four limpid lovely limbs, a folded colt, and take your head between my unworthy hands, and pull the temple-skin back on both sides, and kiss your chinesed eyes, and — “Pulease, leave me alone, will you,” you would say, “for Christ’s sake leave me alone.” And I would get up from the floor while you looked on, your face deliberately twitching in imitation of my tic nerveux. But never mind, never mind, I am only a brute, never mind, let us go on with my miserable story. (192)

The attempt to control the energies of her name via literary and linguistic allusion (which in fact has the reverse effect of placing the name in excess of Humbert’s narration) cannot control the intense investment in the name that he retrospectively exhibits: that of his self-revulsion, which is, of course, the reason for the confession. The act of the narration itself is a source of the dissimulation of at least two genres: the confession and the eulogy. Lolita, the novel itself becomes a tensorial sign. However much Nabokov and Humbert might deride psychoanalysis, the narrative offered is a case study, however parodic. Humbert is a pederast and is in the sway of an immense delirium — as character, if not always as narrator. Lolita is his creation, his perverse construct. That she exceeds his efforts at control is evidence of the extreme intensities he invests in her. She is his “phantasm” by which is not meant “the little mise en scène, the daydream or the Traum” which are there “to replace satisfaction of a forbidden desire, to be a vicarious stand-in for an impossible libidinal meaning, and like any semiological sign, [would be] built from a lack” (Lyotard 1993: 71-72). The phantasm (to engage in long quotation and paraphrase) is better conceived “as an object fabricated out of pulsional forces turned away from its ‘normal’ use, as a generator […]” (72). The position of the phantasm which makes of it something like a manufactured object, a product of the “consumption” of which would be the voluptuous emotion itself, is in this regard at least, fully affirmative: the pieces of the postured body which produce pulsional force and which are vainly consumed as intensities of jouissance, are then conceived as substitutes for nothing, they are those very things engendered by the impulsion by means of its intensification and circulation, are pieces ‘invented’ and added as a patchwork to the libidinal band […] so we will conclude that there are no more objects or subjects in the perpetual transformation of libidinal energies than there are in that of all possible energies in the heart of the so-called production process in the wider sense […] The phantasm here is not an unreality or a dereality, it is ‘something’ which grips the crazy turbulence of the libido, something it invents as an incandescent object, and which instantaneously adds to the band by its trajectory. Just like a product, all things being equal. And under these circumstances, there is no justification […] in searching for a truth of this “object”-phantasm (sic) outside it, instantiating its signification on a great Signifier. Strictly speaking its signification is quite simply not in question.

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(But we know that one cannot sustain this, we know…). (Lyotard 1993: 7273)

Lolita is Humbert’s phantasm. She is his product and she is the excess of that production. While he hopes to control the means of his production, the product escapes his grip, renders him passive to its incompossibility, and its dissimulatory power. The narrative can offer neither the calming succour of return to the same (equivalence), nor redemption through eschatological mimicry (full signification). The story of Lolita cannot be Humbert’s manifesto. But the name, the name “Lolita,” has been set off into the world. She is a good intensity-conducting body. Through her, however unknowingly, Humbert has “set dissimulation to work on behalf of intensities” (Lyotard 1993: 262). The Lolita that Humbert thinks he has invented is the signifying Lolita. The libidinal Lolita veers off wildly, unconstrained and unchecked, headless, homeless. Humbert has invented nothing, that’s it, yes, yes, yes, yes. Works Cited Bennington, G. 1988. Lyotard: Writing the Event. Manchester: Manchester UP. Benhabib, S. 1984. “Epistemologies of Postmodernism.” New German Critique 33: 103-126. Lyotard, J-F. 1997. “A Postmodern Fable.” In Postmodern Fables Trans. G. van den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 96-104. —. 1993. Libidinal Economy. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. London: The Athlone Press. —. 1988. Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event. New York: Columbia UP. Nabokov, V. 1995. The Annotated Lolita. Ed. Alfred Appel Jr. London: Penguin Books. Prescott, O. 1995. “Review of the Lolita (1958).” New York Times August 18. In Nabokov (1995). Readings, B. and C. Norris. 1991. Introducing Lyotard. Art and Politics. London: Routledge. Tomiche, A. 1994. “Rephrasing the Freudian Unconscious: Lyotard’s Affect-Phrase.” Diacritics 24. 1: 43-62. Van Reijen, W. and D. Veerman. 1988. “An Interview with Jean-François Lyotard.” Theory, Culture and Society 5: 277-309.

DIRE STRAITS: PAUL AUSTER’S THE MUSIC OF CHANCE AND THE ECONOMIC LOSS JOYCE GOGGIN This essay focuses on the relationship of writing to economy as it has been elaborated by Derrida, Bataille and others. It discusses Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance in light of these theories of expenditure and discourse, that is, as a text which thematically and “structurally” foregrounds gambling. It also shows how economic risk is represented in the novel as a subversive mode of exchange against the dominant economy, both in discursive as well as in monetary terms.

Introduction In his essay on the gift, Marcel Mauss brought the potlatch and the broader notion of gift exchange economics to the attention of Western scholars (Mauss 1950). This form of exchange is one aspect of “premodern” economics, and constitutes a mode of expenditure that is radically different from what is often referred to as modern economics. According to Mauss, the potlatch typifies the gift-exchange economy and it is the oldest economic system of which we have knowledge. The potlatch, writes Mauss, is based on the lavish expenditure of surplus wealth “often at pure loss with tremendous extravagance and without a trace of mercenariness” (Mauss 1950: 70). And because gift or premodern economic systems are based on unrestricted and seemingly open expenditure they fail to conform to the “so-called natural economy of utilitarianism” (ibid., my italics). In a perfectly contained utilitarian economic system as opposed to a “premodern” one, surplus wealth would be continuously recuperated as a product and reabsorbed back into a balanced system without waste or loss. Importantly, this form of economic rationalism reflects the principle of individual interest, so that circulation writ large becomes a catachresis for the circulation of material wealth through the “body politick.” This said, however, Mauss points out that such a perfectly balanced system has never existed, and that lavish expenditure is always there as a disruptive presence in the form of activities such as gaming. The sort of utilitarian economic theory and practice to which Mauss reacts in The Essay on the Gift, was probably most systematically and

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expansively set down in the work of Jeremy Bentham. The basic tenet of Bentham’s utilitarianism is that pleasure and pain exist in direct economic relation to one another and must be regulated by the principle of utility. In this way the utility of human actions, most importantly expenditure, is measured in terms of the augmentation or diminution of the happiness of the party whose interest is in question. Of course, the notion of individual interest in Bentham’s writing has its constant counterpart in monetary interest. This is very much Bentham’s concern in The True Alarm: A View of Paper Money, and more particularly “money given for evanescent services” such as singing, dancing, prostitution and gaming (Bentham 1805: 14). Understandably, while the above activities may augment human pleasure and diminish pain they have no intrinsic utility and they therefore, elude systems bent on the control and recirculation of capital. This is why gaming adventures fall within Bentham’s “Division of Offences,” while lotteries are condoned as a less “burthensome” mode of taxation, provided that “personal expenditure amounts to no more than a percentage of the yield” (ibid.: 536). In the utilitarian scheme of things, it is hoped that lotteries can be regulated by the state to channel money back into the system, thus preventing individuals who are wont to gamble from losing large sums of money in unauthorised activities such as card playing. According to Mauss however, unrestricted (and often illegal) gambling is a modern manifestation of the potlatch and, therefore, a distinct form of expenditure. It is the distinct character of the wager that Bataille takes up in “La notion de dépense,” and which further constitutes the grounding concept of expenditure in La part maudite. Bataille’s principle of loss and unproductive expenditure is typified by games, arts, and perverse sexual activities, that is to say, those aspects of life for which we are not compensated by directly proportional acquisition. Hence, because gambling has no apparent utility, it is a luxury similar to art, literature, and forms of debauchery and play that are of little or no value to the utilitarian. Importantly, in the case of gamblers, the orgiastic release of loss is often highly disproportionate to their means, and is frequently linked to an unconscious attraction to death. This Bataille refers to as the “delirium of ritual poker,” or the loss of agency experienced by the addicted gambler (ibid.: 367). Finally, Derrida takes Mauss and Bataille one step further in the direction of writing in his Writing and Difference. In the chapter entitled “From Restricted to General Economy,” Derrida picks up the link between “potlatch” activities, and arts and literature, focussing on poetic writing as the negative expenditure of signs, a celebration of transgression and excess. “It is the poetic or ecstatic element in every discourse which opens itself up to the absolute loss of sense, the un-knowledge of playfulness, the swoon of the throw of the dice” (Derrida 1978: 261). In fact, the very stock-in-trade of poetic writing in this view is

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indeterminacy, and unproductive expenditure, hence it is impossible to subsume literature or ludic writing in a restricted economy of discourses, where it is wrongly assumed that the free play of the signifier has been halted and little is left to chance. The Music of Chance In light of these provisional theoretical comments, I would now like to turn to Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance, a novel about poker playing, accountancy, and extravagant losses of fortune. Interestingly enough however, it is also a novel about restrained expenditure and careful book-keeping. In what follows I will argue that, because this narrative is haunted by death and loss, it functions, to quote Derrida once again, as “a potlatch of signs that consumes and wastes words in the gay affirmation of death” (1978: 274). This is a fitting description The Music of Chance, an open ended and undecidable novel that produces a surplus of sense, which cannot be accounted for if one attempts to understand it as a restrictive discursive economy. To briefly recount the plot of The Music of Chance: Jim Nashe, the novel’s protagonist unexpectedly inherits a large sum of money from his father whom he has not seen for thirty years. Nashe buys a new car, and for the next year drives back and forth across America waiting for his money to run out. When he has spent all but his last fifteen thousand dollars, he chances to pick up Jack Pozzi, a professional poker player who is down on his luck but knows about a sure-thing game with Flower and Stone, supposedly a “couple of simpletons” who are also multimillionaires. Flower and Stone, a former accountant and optometrist, became millionaires in the state lottery, and have been thoroughly infantalised by their winnings, which it is hoped will make them an easy mark. Hearing this, Jim decides to put up ten thousand dollars as a “business expense,” banking on the chance that he will win enough money to enable him to keep travelling. When Pozzi and Jim meet up with the millionaires they discover that Flower and Stone have eccentric hobbies which involve the building of model utopias. While Stone’s utopia, which he calls the City of the World, is a tiny synchronic model of a world where Good has triumphed over Evil, Flower’s is a sort of museum, a random collection of items such as Woodrow Wilson’s telephone, Sir Walter Raleigh’s pearl earring, Voltaire’s spectacles, and Babe Ruth’s sweatshirt. What is more, Flower and Stone have a project they are waiting to begin which will satisfy both their shared need to build models and to conserve the past: they have bought the ruin of a 15th-century Irish castle and intend to build a wall with the ten thousand remaining stones of the ruined castle

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which they have imported to the United States. Unfortunately, however, Flower and Stone are not quite the ludicrous Laurel and Hardy pair they appear to be. Since their first meeting with Pozzi at which he fleeced them, they have prepared for this poker game by taking lessons from a professional poker player named Sid Zeno. The outcome is that Flower and Stone’s lessons pay off substantially: Jim and Pozzi lose the initial 10 thousand, plus an additional ten thousand, including Jim’s car. They agree to stay on the estate and build Flower and Stone’s wall from the ruin in order to pay off their debt, however, in the process Pozzi is beaten to death for trying to escape, and Jim kills himself by driving headlong into an oncoming vehicle. At the outset, The Music of Chance appears to be a novel about symmetry and balance or the “economy of exchange” as Nashe calls it (Auster, 1990, 11). To give just one example, Jim observes that the inheritance money buys him freedom and disappears in direct proportion to how much freedom he has. In other words, the money is the rigid signifier of Nashe’s inner state with which, in the terms of Bentham’s restrictive economics, he purchases pleasure and avoids pain. This would indeed be a perfect model of the circulation of wealth in a closed economic system if Nashe could somehow recuperate the money he spends as a source of income. But given Jim’s somewhat odd relation to money, it is not surprising that he decides to back a professional poker player as a business investment, nor that he would refer to the proper business attire which he buys Pozzi for the game as “a normal business expense” (57). Pozzi is, after all, a professional card player and poker is his career, or as he explains it to Jim: “No that’s it, I just play poker.” “So you do all right for yourself.” “Yeah, I do all right... there’s never been anything I couldn’t handle. The main thing is I do what I want. If I lose it’s my ass that loses. If I win the money’s mine to keep. I don’t have to take shit from anyone. I’m my own boss.” (32)

In other words, Pozzi is in business for himself and his profession is no more risky than any other that involves investment and speculation. Or as he explains in another passage, “[s]ure there’s a risk. We’re talking poker here... but there’s no way I could [lose]” (30). And this seems to be standard poker logic since, according to Herbert O. Yardley, one of the great poker authorities and the man who cracked the Japanese Diplomatic Code, “[a] sound poker player can win in any poker game” (51). Yet if the notion of a ‘professional poker player’ seems like something of an oxymoron, that’s because it is one of sorts. Recall that Derrida, Bataille and Mauss whom I cited in the introduction, all refer to gambling and card playing as prime examples of potlatch or premodern economics. And three writers forward the notion that premodern economics and

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various other forms artistic expenditure, persistently resurface like something that has been forgotten, and refuses to be re-absorbed into a restrictive economic system. Hence, the kind of exuberant loss and spending that accompanies card playing cannot be government regulated and does not simply behave. In fact all of the taxes and interdictions that have been levied against playing cards over the centuries, have not prevented people from loosing their shirts, nor have they ultimately provided governments with an additional source of revenue.1 In other words, Pozzi and Jim wrongly assume that poker playing belongs to a larger restrictive economic system like state-run lotteries, that the poker game is a calculated risk for the professional poker player and his backer, and that they will indeed come out ahead. The result of the game however, is that Jim and Pozzi are left with absolutely nothing, and then become further indebted to the tune of ten thousand dollars. Or as Stone says “We’ve hit that magic number again” (104). And this is no minor detail: along with their other charming eccentricities Flower and Stone lay great stock by the “magic power of numbers,” insisting as they do that “numbers have a soul” or that prime numbers “refuse to co-operate” (73). So given their preoccupation with numbers it is interesting that, when Flower tells the story of their choosing the winning number in the lottery that made them millionaires, a good deal of attention is given to the holes which were punched out on their winning ticket, the holes in fact that turn the numbers on the card into zeros. And there’s that magic number again; in fact The Music of Chance is riddled with zeros and holes, gaping mouths and empty eye sockets, or as Pozzi says “[y]our mouth will drop open and I’ll make your eyes fall out of your fucking head” (35). Certainly, as the arguments around zero and the annotation of the millennium year made evident, zero is no simple matter. The concept of zero has bewildered and fascinated Western minds since Al-Khowarazmi’s treatise on the cipher was translated from the Arabic into Latin circa 1320.2 And the power of nothing, of zero, to increase ten fold rather than to make other numbers disappear, still amazed and mystified Shakespeare three centuries later, as numerous mentions of the cipher in plays such as King Lear and The Winter’s Tale would attest (recall the riddle of the egg and of nothing told to King Lear by his Fool). And another three centuries later, in the Weimar Republic, German doctors coined the name “zero stroke” or “cipher stroke” for people who could not cope with fantastic currency figures, and who were perfectly normal save for their maniacal compulsion to “write endless rows of ciphers” (Rotman 1987: 23; see also Galbraith 1975: 159). More recently in “The Father of Logos” Derrida 1 2

For extensive records of taxes on cards, see Benham. Cf. also Crespi (1956). On this point, see Menninger (1958: 410-413).

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mentions the cipher in connection with an ibis’ egg in an Egyptian myth about Theuth (or Thoth) the divinity of Naucratis “who first invented numbers and calculation... not to mention draughts and dice, and above all writing” (1981: 75). Here, while the egg is the origin it is also hidden, and it is the hidden egg which stands for nothing, yet at the same time opens up the system of writing to the possibility of signification.3 Importantly, in The Music of Chance zeros congregate around Pozzi. For Nashe, Pozzi is “a hole in the wall that would get him from one side to the other... a card-playing spectre” (36). When they first meet, Pozzi jokingly tells Jim that his identification number in the International Brotherhood of Lost Dogs is “zero, zero, zero, zero” (62). And elsewhere throughout the text Pozzi is described as a cipher and a nothing but more specifically it is observed more than once that, like Hamlet’s ghost, Pozzi could disappear before one could count to one hundred (170, 176). Moreover, just before Pozzi is beaten to death he and Jim dig a hole under the fence that encloses the field where they are building the wall. Jim tells him “[...] crawl through that hole and be on your way,” to which Pozzi replies “You afraid of holes or something?” (165, 166).4 And of course Pozzi is responsible for their initial encounter with zero in the poker game and the rest of the debt, he being the professional poker player who lost all of Jim’s money. But in spite of the zeros, Pozzi is also the source of all possibility and activity in The Music of Chance. He creates the debt, but then the debt is translated into the wall, which is ultimately the story line of the novel. This is why Pozzi is also significantly called a wild card, a jester, and a joker. In an actual deck of fifty-two, the joker is the one card that holds the potential to take on the value of any other card by mimicking it. More importantly, the joker in the deck opens up the system of signification to infinite possibility precisely because this card also represents nothing. I noted earlier that the cipher was introduced into Europe from Egypt around 1320, not long before playing cards, known in folk wisdom as the Book of Thoth, also found their way into Europe.5 3

“If we add that this egg is also a ‘hidden egg,’ then we shall have constituted but also opened up the system of these significations” (Derrida 1981: 88). 4 In this regard, it is probably not entirely without significance that Pozzi is the plural of the word for pit or well in Italian. 5 Some claim that the first reference to cards in European history occurs in a Catalan epistle from 1331 or 1332, however this is difficult to ascertain since the “Golden Epistles” of Guevara are extant only in translations, the first of which is dated 1539 (Chatto Facts and Speculations on the Origin of Playing Cards (London: John Russell Smith) 1848: 66). There is a record of an ordinance decreed in 1387 by Juan I of Castile against the use of playing cards and in the Istoria della Citta di Viterbo of 1379 the following entry occurs which makes specific reference to card games: “Non

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Coincidentally, the fool or the joker on the earliest 14th-century playing cards bore the mark of the cipher and carried the value of zero. It then came to be customary that in the closed system of four suits of thirteen cards bearing fixed values, the inclusion of a wild card whose value is variably determined, has the potential to throw open the gates of possibility. Or, as Derrida writes “a joker is a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play... [a]lways taking a place not his own, a place one could call that of the dead or the dummy (le mort)” (1981: 93). Another important feature of both zeros and jokers is that they mysteriously multiply, making more something out of nothing. So while Pozzi represents an increase in possibilities, he also signifies a state of complete loss and debt. It is the wild card, the fool, the cipher, who opens up the text, the game, and Jim’s life to possibility and signification, but he is also that which produces a state of absolute loss and death. This is poetically expressed in The Winter’s Tale as Polixenes asserts that “standing in rich place, [he] multipl[ies], with one we thank-you many thousands more” (I, 2: 345). But that said, there appears to be a delightful symmetry between the gambling debt and the wall: Jim and Pozzi are paid ten dollars per hour to work ten hours a day building a wall of ten rows of a thousand stones until they pay off a debt of ten thousand dollars. The wall then, amounts to a sort of primitive balance sheet in stone, a daily lesson in double ledger accountancy arranged for by Flower and Stone. And because the scheme is the invention of an accountant, it fits the crime most aptly: “it’s a fair punishment that [has] some educational value to it” (105). Logically then, Jim and Pozzi should be able to free themselves of indenture in fifty days, and walk away from the wall, having learned a valuable lesson about fiscal responsibility and personal debt. However, as is the case with all the other plus and minus relationships in the text which are assumed to be perfectly balanced, there is always something that cannot be accounted for, something written in the margins of the ledger. For just when Jim and Pozzi assume that they have cleared their debt, they discover that the terms of their agreement did not cover celebratory expenditure, monies paid for the ephemeral services of a prostitute and the costs of a lavish party. They are now re-indentured for the sum of 3,000.00 and are forced to realise that they are stuck in a Sisyphus story: the most Jim and Pozzi can hope for is to be “back to zero,” because the longer they work at the wall the more personal debt they will accumulate (149).

giuocare a zara, nè ad altor giuoco di dadi, fa de’ giuochi che usano i fanciuli; agli aliossi, alla trottola, n’ferri, a’naibi, a’coderone, e simili” (“Cronica di Giovan Morelli,” in Malespini. 1728. Istoria Fiorentina. 4 vols. Florence. 270. Cited in Chatto. 1848: 73. See also Parlett 1992: 36).

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Of course this hardly seems fair, but then one must not forget that Flower and Stone prepared for the big game by taking poker lessons from a man named Sid Zeno. This name, given Paul Auster’s penchant for intertextual puns and his predilection for play on proper names, is perhaps Auster’s way of dealing the reader another card. Zeno, for example, is removed from zero by only the phoneme “n,” a letter which in mathematical expressions stands in for other numbers, like a joker. And the name Zeno instantly brings to mind the two famous paradoxes. First there is the one about Parmenides never being able to catch the tortoise, because by the time he reaches the tortoise it will have advanced, however little. This paradox is of course analogous to Jim and Pozzi’s debt and the impossibility of clearing it or finishing the wall. The second is the “Cretan Liar: all Cretans are liars and I am from Crete,” or in this case “all poker players are cheaters and I’m a poker player.” Coincidentally, the realisation that Flower and Stone have cheated comes to Jim and Pozzi at just about the same time they realise that they have become part of Stone’s model utopia, The City of the World. Pozzi and Nashe are ostensibly being reformed in the city because here everything is controlled by a single impulse for Good. So, to borrow briefly from Lyotard’s Just Gaming, Flower and Stone control both metastatements and first order statements, therefore judgement is no longer a process, it is predetermined and the resulting order, rather than good is violence and totalitarianism.6 In other words, if you could have Zeno’s paradox both ways, all poker players would be cheaters as a general and a specific rule and they would already be cheating by telling you this, but then who cares if you are the one calling all the shots? Or, as Pozzi puts it so succinctly “[t]he whole world is run by assholes,” and that is cheating (135). Significantly, it is precisely cheating that informs the narrative economy of the novel, throughout which Auster makes self-conscious and devious use of intertexts as a dangerous supplement. The bits and pieces of Faulkner, Nashe, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Dickens, Blake, Joyce, and Coleridge that persistently surface recall Flower’s museum where Voltaire’s spectacles and Hawthorne’s cane are displayed side by side. This method of random citation gives the impression that the text, as well as the events recounted in it, depend on “the single blind turn of a card,” to quote Auster quoting Faulkner (202). Moreover, when Auster tells the episode of the tree from Rousseau’s Confessions, where Rousseau cheats himself in his own wager by picking the biggest tree he can find, Auster in turn cheats by altering Rousseau’s text and getting the story wrong. But as Derrida points out in “The Father of Logos” it is falsification, trickery, and deception, that cheat the system of discourse and open it up to the play of possibilities. 6

Cf. the chapter entitled “Politics and Ethics” in Readings (1991).

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Conclusion By way of a conclusion, I would argue that The Music of Chance ends in absolute negativity and loss as Nashe accelerates into an oncoming vehicle, at once celebrating death and turning it into spectacle. As Bataille wrote “for man finally to be revealed to himself he would have to die... death itself would become self-conscious” and this is what Nashe’s suicide accomplishes, it is the final recognition of the total expenditure of the self, the orgiastic enjoyment of absolute loss or negativity (cited in Derrida 1978: 257). I have pointed out as well that this is a novel obsessed with numbers, and balanced accounts, but in spite of this obsession with conservation and the symmetrical recoverability of wealth, Nashe observes that the whole thing functions as an “engine of loss” (17). This would concur with the Derridian notion that there is always a hole in any text, through which a surplus of meaning will escape no matter how carefully one attempts to control the discursive economy. To further illustrate my point, I would like to conclude with an example from Bentham’s The True Alarm, a treatise on the importance of restrictive economic measures in the face of public debt and the inflation of zeros caused by the overproduction of paper currency which has been liberated from gold bullion. Bentham writes: “It is easier to make something out of nothing,” which his editor insists is obviously a “slip of the pen,” and adds in a footnote that “it is easier to use little to make more... is sure to express Bentham’s thoughts” (III: 156). Hence, even a text whose entire purpose is to discuss controlled economic measures and which assumes itself a closed system is also haunted by zeros and nothing. It would appear then, following Derrida’s “From Restrictive to General Economy,” that a potlatch of signs is at work in any discursive economy, so that in the recounting of the tale one always comes up with a little spare change. Works Cited Paul Auster. 1990. The Music of Chance. New York: Viking Press. Bataille, Georges. 1967. La part maudite. Paris: Éditions de minuit. Benham, W. Gurney. N. d. Playing Cards: The History and Secrets of the Pack. London: Spring Books. Bentham, Jeremy. 1805. “The True Alarm: A View of Paper Money.” In The Economic Writings. Ed. Étienne Dumont. Chatto, William Andrew. 1848. Facts and Speculations on the Origin of Playing Cards. London: John Russell Smith.

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Crespi, Irving. 1956. “The Social Significance of Card Playing as a Leisure Time Activity.” The American Sociological Review. 21: 717-721. Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U. of Chicago P. —. 1978. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U. of Chicago P. —. 1967. L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Galbraith, J.K. 1975. Money, Whence it Came, Where it Went. Boston: Houghton. Kaplan, Robert. 2000. The Nothing that is: A Natural History of Zero. Oxford: Oxford UP. Lyotard, Jean-François and Thébaud, Jean-Loup. 1979. Au juste. Paris: Christian Bourgois. Mauss, Marcel. 1950. “Essai sur le don, forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques.” In Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris: PUF. Menninger, Karl. 1958. Number Words and Number Symbols [Zahlwort und Ziffer]. Trans. Paul Broneer. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press. 410-413. Parlett, David. 1992. A Dictionary of Card Games. Oxford: Oxford UP. —. 1991. A History of Card Games. Oxford: Oxford UP. Readings, Bill. 1991. Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics. New York and London: Routledge. Rotman, Brian. 1987. Signify Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero. Stanford: Stanford UP. Seife, Charles. 2000. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. New York: Viking. Shakespeare, William. N. d. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. New York, London and Glasgow: Collins. Yeardly, Herbert O. 1957. The Education of a Poker Player Including Where and How One Learns to Win. New York: Simon and Schuster.

REVOLUTIONIST CONSUMERS: THE APPLICATION OF SACRIFICE IN RUSKIN, BATAILLE AND HENRY JAMES JESSICA MAYNARD In The Stones of Venice, Ruskin saw nobility in the redundancy and imperfection of gothic architecture. In The Accursed Share, Bataille identifies “intimacy” in the surplus, supererogatory aspect of a medieval cathedral. Both see a resistance to values of economic utility in aesthetic productions that have no use, that bring no tangible profit, and that seem to absorb effort and labour unproductively. With reference to Henry James’s novel The Princess Casamassima, this essay examines the relationship between Victorian and twentiethcentury, as well as continental and Anglo-American, accounts of the role of sacrifice and consumption in challenging capitalist modernity. Using the perspectives provided by Ruskin and Bataille, seemingly very distinct thinkers, but drawing attention to Bataille’s often ignored background in medievalist scholarship, this essay argues that James’s novel blurs a distinction between political and aesthetic experience. Ultimately, it identifies gratuitous expenditure as the only effective riposte to a culture which even threatens to commodify and “consume” political revolution itself.

In March 1886, Henry James took up residence in new rooms in Kensington, West London, describing the place in a letter to his brother as “excellent in every respect... and, in particular, flooded with light like a photographer’s studio.” He went on to praise the panoramic views of the city that the location afforded — “I commune with the unobstructed sky and have an immense bird’s-eye view of housetops and streets” — and to remark that these natural advantages would be improved upon when “little by little I have got more things” (James 1980: 120).1 On the other hand, writing of Edward Burne-Jones later that year, James confessed to some difficulty in understanding the painter’s way of life, “that is the manner and tenor of his production — a complete studio existence, with doors and windows closed, and no search for impressions outside — no open air, no real daylight and no looking out for it.” Whilst James, in his lofty position, seemed to court the 1

Letter to William James, 14 February 1886.

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world outside, enjoying the removal of protective limits and at least aiming for a total view, Burne-Jones seemed to renounce the real and opt for the enclosure and conservation of the artistic self. His work, James noted, seemed correspondingly “colder and colder — pictured abstractions, less and less observed” (ibid.: 126).2 These two letters, it might be said, present opposing forms of artistic economy: the first characterised by an act of forfeiture (giving oneself up, as James might himself have put it, to life itself), the second, by an attitude of reserve or inhibition (refusing to yield up the self, render it vulnerable to external interference); the first spendthrift, the second parsimonious in its attentions. For James, who would reinforce this concern with the nature of artistic receptivity in the Prefaces written for the New York edition of his work (1908/9), there might well be positive gains to be made in the seemingly aimless activity of communing with unobstructed sky or street: “Strangely fertilizing... does a wasted effort of attention often prove. It all depends on how the attention has been cheated, has been squandered.”3 The acquisition of understanding or truth or reality could be said to rely on this same attitude of uninhibited perceptual generosity which James associated with his outlook over London rooftops in Kensington in 1886. This, then, is the first form of economy to be dealt with in this essay — a kind of writerly housekeeping, as outlined by James. Abundance of resources and a non-discriminating openness to their influence are the conditions for the emergence of successful art. Overproduction (the impressions, stimuli and experience that threaten to consume the observer) is met not by resistance to but by indulgence in consumption. A distinction immediately needs to be made, however, between this sacrificial form of consumption, associated with an attitude of selfless dedication, and that secondary order of consumption already alluded to in that letter when James looks forward to filling his room with “things.” James will, in fact, investigate both modes of consumption in his novel The Princess Casamassima, published between 1885 and 1886, setting socialist revolutionary idealism against a kind of cultural Midas touch which threatens to commodify everything: human relationships, love, and even revolution itself: “Don’t you understand that I’m always looking?” asks Captain Sholto, the man who might best be described as the Princess Casamassima’s procurer: There was a time when I went in immensely for illuminated missals, and another when I collected horrible ghost-stories (she wanted to cultivate a 2 3

Letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 6 December 1886. Preface to The Portrait of a Lady (1908), in James (1986: 42).

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belief in ghosts), all for her. The day I saw she was turning her attention to the rising democracy I began to collect little democrats. That’s how I collected you. (James, 346)

This second order of consumption is, by contrast, characterised by a progressive, acquisitive impulse: the desire to build on the existing collection (of belongings, knowledge, territories), to strive for an imagined ideal that will be realised at some point in the future. This, of course, is destined never to happen since, the keener the pursuit of newness, the more remorseless its dissipation. But, however they may differ from one another, both forms of consumption exist in order to compensate for what Georges Bataille has called lost “intimacy;” they embody a recognition of the inadequacy of society’s rewards and an impulse to replace “banality” and repetition with “quality” and singularity. It will be contended here that James, Bataille and Ruskin all share a valuation of the first principle (as redemptive and restorative) over the second (as corrupting, repressive and always assimilated into the dominant system of productive relations). “Sacrifice,” says Bataille, “restores to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane” (Bataille 1991: 55). In the mid-nineteenth century Ruskin’s commitment to what he casts as the sacrificial aesthetic of medieval architecture represents a critique of utilitarian values comparable to Bataille’s, as well as a comparable effort at an integrative mode of analysis combining aesthetic, economic, political and spiritual perspectives. It seems likely that Proust’s French translations of Ruskin provide an even more direct line of descent.4 In any event, architecture, explains Ruskin, seems particularly to lend itself to this analysis since, by its very nature, it testifies to human labour that is excess to requirement. It is to be distinguished from mere building in its readiness to indulge in useless features, embellishments that have no function and therefore resist absorption into any means-end calculations. For Ruskin, this realm of aesthetic expression turns out to be charged with a spirit of revolt. Identifying the “Lamp of Sacrifice” as the first illuminating property of architecture, he welcomes, for example, the irrationality of a cable moulding added to the stone facing of a bastion (“that is Architecture”) because it is so very unnecessary (Ruskin 1903a: 29). His aestheticism must be understood with this ethical valuation in mind; not as a retreat into art for art’s sake but always inseparable from a moral — and, of course, for Ruskin, a Christian — position. 4

See Proust (1987). The gothic elements in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, and their relation to Proust’s treatment of involuntary memory as an incomplete or fragmented recovery of the past, would be of particular relevance here.

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Architecture, then, implies a sacrificial aesthetic, but none more so than gothic architecture. It needs to be conceded, of course, that Ruskin’s account of the building of medieval cathedrals is romanticised, selective and unconcerned with inconvenient historical actualities (see e.g. Unrau 1981: 33-50), because — and these are Bataille’s words — “the romantic longing for the Middle Ages is in fact only an abandonment” with “the meaning of a protest against the rise of industry, versus the nonproductive use of resources” (Bataille 1991: 133). The significance of the idiosyncratic ornament that Ruskin so minutely observes at the cathedral at Amiens, for example, lies in its resistance to the economies of scale of mass manufacture; under this kind of scrutiny, even — and perhaps especially — stupidity and futility of endeavour are endorsed and validated — hence what may be objected to as Ruskin’s frequently condescending tone when speaking of the hypothetical gothic craftsman. The gothic worker must be understood as a polemical device for asserting a state of naive resistance to instruction, regularisation and cost efficiency. By contrast, irregularity, variation, mutability, crudeness, incompletion and unreasonableness are all identified by Ruskin as components of the gothic because they are expressive of an authenticating naïveté, a freedom from self-consciousness and, always, a generosity of spirit. Imagining (rather acerbically) a retrospective view of Amiens cathedral from a passing railway carriage, for example, Ruskin contrasts the background of smoking factory chimneys with the single “flèche” or arrow of the cathedral spire, placing the “profitable” works of manufacturing industry against an architecture “wrought by the hands of foolish men of long ago, for the purpose of enclosing or producing no manner of profitable work whatsoever.” He invites his reader “to consider what the workless — shall we say also worthless? — building, and its unshadowed minaret, may perhaps further mean” (Ruskin 1908: 28; emphasis mine) This meaning bears close attention since it leads Ruskin to posit a fundamental resistance to interpretation as integral to any “meaning” a cathedral may have. His understanding of it could be described as performative rather than representational, since it enacts rather than signifies any spiritual value. Consecration is to be found in the will to construct the building, in a dynamic making rather than reactive reading of a fixed symbolic system: “It is not the church we want, but the sacrifice; not the emotion of admiration, but the act of adoration; not the gift, but the giving” (1903a: 89-90). Again it is not the representational power of Amiens that strikes Ruskin, but its self-subsisting nature: “We talk foolishly and feebly of symbols and types: in old Christian architecture, every part is literal: the cathedral is for its builders the House of God” (1908: 123). In other words, Ruskin’s account of the gothic demonstrates the point at which the extreme

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implications of a realist frame of mind shade into aestheticism. Object and art converge, process takes priority over product: “the Gothic inventor does not leave the sign in need of interpretation. He makes the fire as like real fire as he can” (1903a: 194). In attempting to describe the gothic in The Stones of Venice Ruskin is honest enough to recognise the limits of his project. By its very mercurial nature, the gothic is incapable of definition, an indivisible union of “savageness,” “changefulness,” “naturalism,” “grotesqueness,” “rigidity” and “redundance” (1903a: 152). “I feel the same kind of difficulty” in encapsulating “gothicness,” says Ruskin, as would “any one who undertook to explain... the Nature of Redness, without any actually red thing to point to” (1903a: 150). His method could be said to be one of empirical juxtaposing, a heaping up of examples from which extrapolation is then possible. And gothic itself, in Ruskin’s account, shares an almost homely preference for real things over idealised abstraction. Fluid and malleable in its dimensions, it shows an infinite metamorphic potential: “it can shrink into a turret, expand into a hall, coil into a staircase, or spring into a spire, with undegraded grace and unexhausted energy” (1903a: 176). Susceptible to endless vagaries, Ruskin’s gothic is spiky, perverse, irrational, difficult. The redundancies and extravagances of Ruskin’s own prose style only serve to reinforce this impression, along with the difficulty of coherently communicating an impossible definition. Just as gothic is always capable of springing new surprises — “never for an instant languid, always quickset: erring, if at all, ever on the side of brusquerie” (1903a: 201) — , so it seems that Ruskin’s attempt at definition must, in turn, exhibit gothic qualities, must remain on the move in order to snatch at some semblance of understanding. Gothic production is always aligned for Ruskin with natural production and, in this evasion of self-consciousness, cannot strictly speaking be designated a style. Rather, Ruskin would have the reader view the gothic as anti-style, as chaotic and prodigal as nature in the expenditure of its efforts, as unbegrudging in its labour, “a magnificent enthusiasm, which feels as if it could never do enough to reach the fulness of its ideal: an unselfishness of sacrifice, which would rather cast fruitless labour before the altar than stand idle in the market” (1903a: 204). Just as Darwin in 1859 will valorise the “insensible” squandering of nature (1985: 133) as a condition for the selection of the advantageous variation, so Ruskin applauds the nobility of wasted detail. The function of the fortuitous variation is, as it were, activated retrospectively in Darwin’s account of natural selection; it is wisdom — the highest, spontaneous wisdom (Nature’s) — after the event. Darwin sees the survival and continuation of a species as the consequence of this natural permissiveness — the readiness to allow production to proceed to

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its limits and thereby curtail itself. Ruskin admittedly sees the possibility of a rather less materialist survival in such a toleration of excess: the means by which humanity’s relationship to the divine, under threat from all those factory chimneys, may be preserved. Both positions, however, can be termed sacrificial in that they recognise the role of squandered energy: “we do not see, or we forget,” warns Darwin, “that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life” (1985: 116). Indeed, Bataille will later define the consumption of one organism by another as life’s “greatest luxury” (Bataille 1991: 33). By this point, it should be possible to assert a conceptual association of sorts between ornament, luxury, destruction and waste, an association to be explored in the twentieth century by Marcel Mauss in The Gift and, as already established, by Bataille. However, this association — which I would like to define as essentially aesthetic in its emphasis — can be traced at least as far back as Ruskin and the 1850s. It should also be possible to identify those characteristics which contribute to this association. These might be summarised as a resistance to utility and reference, or a failure of application. Ruskin’s argument led him to claim that if any meaning at all could be attached to a cathedral, then it lay in its quality of pure gesture, its status as devotional offering. The ornament distinctive of the medieval cathedral, in turn, approximated to the living rather than the dead, could never rest in complacent completion of its labours: like a “dreaming mind” it “frets and fades in labyrinthine knots and shadows along wall and roof” (1903a: 178). It was crucial to Ruskin’s argument that such ornament be understood as literally and metaphorically imperfect: unfinished, rough, fragmented in the execution. It was only by an acceptance of this state of incapacity that redemption could occur. Ruskin’s reversal of the meanings of “perfect” and “imperfect,” then, emerges as a highly sacrificial rhetorical manoeuvre. To renounce the possibility of an ending, where all has been achieved, or collected, or represented, is the only way out of human fallibility, or, in Ruskin’s words, “no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure... Of human work none but what is bad can be perfect, in its own way” (1903a: 168). He rehearses this same dialectical manoeuvre in terms of nature too: “Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom, — a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom, — is a type of the life of this world” (1903a: 169). Gothic ornament as “fretwork” refuses to settle down, but Ruskin’s play on words here needs closer attention. It alludes to both the decorative traceries, the trellising of gothic carving, and a process of emotional attrition too. To “fret” is also to wear away; to eat, devour, gnaw, consume. Hence, it is in the very material nature of this kind of ornament to

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attempt to use itself up, to spend itself, to sacrifice itself. Unfortunately for Ruskin, however, cathedrals in the nineteenth century seemed to have become the scene for that second order of consumption, a stopping-off point on the grand tour. The “one conception of pleasure” of the bourgeois consumer was “to drive in railroad carriages round their aisles, and eat off their altars” (1905: 89). Leisure, of course, is still a form of squander, conspicuous inactivity constituting the expenditure of surplus wealth but, in Ruskin’s terms, it remains a misguided form of sacrifice. This kind of devotion to superfluous activity entails the sacrifice of the worker in that he becomes an instrument, a means to an end (the pleasure of others). So “sacrifice,” like “work,” carries contradictory meanings for Ruskin, combining sacred and profane, true and false — to the extent that he even imagines collecting the “tenth part of the expense which is sacrificed in domestic vanities, if not meaninglessly lost in domestic discomforts and incumbrances” and exchanging this for the authentic sacrifice of a marble church in every English town built upon the proceeds (1903a: 39). Turning to The Accursed Share, it may be possible to explore this important distinction between the conspicuous waste5 of bourgeois leisure — what James objected to (in the same letter in which he took Burne-Jones to task) as the “gilded bondage of the country house... the waste of time in vain sitting and strolling about” (1980: 125) — and the catastrophic waste that is Bataille’s preeminent concern. But firstly, in order further to justify this perhaps uncharacteristic setting of Bataille’s thought in a Victorian rather than postmodern continental context, I would like to quote the passage in which he, like Ruskin, turns to the interdependence of medieval religious, economic and aesthetic orders of experience. Like Ruskin homing in on the “minaret” at Amiens, he invites his reader to approach the medieval church “shunning those vacant lots, those suburbs and factories, whose appearance expresses the nature of industrial societies, and making our way toward some dead city, bristling with gothic spires” (1991: 131). He goes on: A church is perhaps a thing: It is little different from a barn, which is clearly a thing. A thing is what we know from without, what is given to us as a physical reality... We cannot penetrate a thing, and it has no meaning other than its material qualities, adapted or not to some useful purpose... But the church expresses an intimate feeling and addresses itself to intimate feeling... The expression of intimacy in the church corresponds rather to the needless consumption of labour: From the start the purpose of the edifice withdraws it 5

See Veblen (1899) for the terms “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous waste.” It is worth noting, too, in this context, that Veblen’s early doctoral work focused in part on Kantian aesthetics.

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Given Bataille’s original academic training as a medievalist, it is very tempting to identify a Ruskinian legacy here: in the opposition between ornament and utility, in the interpretation of labour as sacrificial expenditure, in replacing a signifying economy of equivalence and substitution with one of gesturality. The object — the church — becomes that which it represents; it is thereby redeemed from any exchange value. Bataille’s account of the objectivity of the church may depart in some degree from Ruskin’s (Ruskin arrives at the same conclusions by fully embracing the implications of such objectivity), but the correspondences outnumber the differences. Such correspondences would not appear merely incidental either. At some point after the First World War (an estimated date of 1918 is given), Bataille wrote a short pamphlet entitled “Notre-Dame de Rheims,” a nostalgic meditation on a ruin, essentially. Lamenting the desecrated condition of the cathedral destroyed by German shelling, Bataille calls for its resurrection: “we thirst for consolation [nous sommes assoiffés de consolation],” he says (1970: 612). Both Bataille and Ruskin respond enthusiastically to the renovating power of the cathedral, Ruskin naming Rheims as one of the greatest of all in its “majesty of conception... wealth of imaginative detail” (1904: 436), and, like Bataille, distinguishing Rheims in The Bible of Amiens as the scene of the coronation of Clovis, King of the Franks (1908: 34). Proust translates The Bible of Amiens into French in 1910; Bataille, in turn, admires Proust for his own sacrificial aesthetic.6 This may be a convenient point to return to James’s novel. The Princess Casamassima questions the possibility of authentic sacrifice with real social meaning and effect. Instead, we see the revolutionary devotee, who would seem to represent one way of recuperating “glory,” become subject to the wrong kind of consumption: “Certainly he will have to be sacrificed,” admits Captain Sholto, the man who originally procured him, 6

See “Digression on Poetry and Marcel Proust” (in Bataille 1988) where sacrifice is opposed to project, immorality to morality, poetry to prose. The poetic severing of words from referents Bataille would associate with a mode of recognition that is distinct from knowledge. Like the operation of involuntary memory, poetry can be seen as presenting a rupture of linear time “consisting in the union of past and present,” a pure instant (137, 141).

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recognising the short-lived appeal of “little democrats” (1987: 350). Then again, when the question arises of whether the Princess will be ready to “give up” her aristocratic privileges, a sceptic reinforces the ironic double meaning of giving up: “I have no doubt there are things she will bring herself to sacrifice” (1987: 364). The “thing” of course is Hyacinth himself. “Do not give up anything,” he is warned, to which he responds: “What can I give up?,” and to which the retort comes: “Do not give up yourself” (1987: 243). Far from being redeemed from the economic “phantasmagoria... the mechanical, passive part of experience” (1987: 164) that is his everyday working life, Hyacinth becomes more deeply implicated in these reified relations. Towards the conclusion of the novel, he realises “[t]hat the Princess had done with him, done with him for ever” (1987: 582). Even the glorious expenditure of revolutionary outrage, then, is vulnerable to absorption within the system that it seeks to disrupt. Hyacinth fails to assassinate the Duke; instead he turns the revolver on himself — an act of self-abasement that Bataille sees as the “true luxury and potlatch of our times.” This, he says, falls to the “poverty-stricken, that is, to the individual who lies down and scoffs” (1991: 76), who really does give up. James’s novel contains within in it this same perception. It gives us a hero who passes from a state of reformist idealism in which he is familiar with “the Ruskinian theories of Venice” (1987: 427), to an alienated condition in which he confronts, not the splendours of the Venetian Ducal Palace, but seemingly a parasitical, nineteenth-century gothic. As he wanders across Westminster Bridge, watching “black barges drift on the great brown river,” he also looks up at the Houses of Parliament, “the huge fretted palace that rose there as a fortress of the social order that he, like the young David, had been commissioned to attack with a sling and a pebble” (1987: 583). In fact, as James records in a letter to Grace Norton, a real attempt had been made on the Palace of Westminster by Fenian dynamiters in January 1885, the year he began writing The Princess Casamassima. This Ruskin would no doubt have applauded on aesthetic grounds. Of the architect of the Houses of Parliament,7 Pugin, he commented, “Employ him by all means, but on small work. Expect no cathedrals of him” (1903-4: I: 439). Ruskin’s theories may be an explicit presence in the novel. But it might also be claimed that the novel rehearses the tension between those

7

For Ruskin’s deprecation of the popularisation of gothic revival forms of architecture, see his letter to the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, 16 March 1872 (Ruskin 1903-1904). There is “scarcely a public house near the Crystal Palace but sells its gin and bitter under pseudo-Venetian capitals copied from the Church of the Madonna of Health or of Miracles” (459).

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economies of hoarding and waste addressed in Bataille’s theory.8 On the one hand, lies an economy of total relations that is exactly that: economic, frugal, discreet, reserved, always providing for the future, loath to spend now, and — the emotional corollary of this — undemonstrative, impersonal; characterised by retention and containment rather than by intemperance, absurdity, incontinence. This is most clearly seen in the section of the novel in which the Princess theatrically renounces her wealth and elects to live, not so much in penury, as in shabby petit bourgeois respectability. Attempting to substitute the “real London” (1987, 201) for Park Lane and surrounding herself with the paraphernalia of “lower middle class” pretension (1987: 418) — “stuffed birds... an alabaster Cupid” (1987: 417) — the Princess derives “extreme diversion from the idea that she now belonged to that aggrieved body” (1987: 418). In other words, any sacrifice of her aesthetically legitimised Park Lane “bibelots” is merely simulated, a form of kitsch in which the refusal of luxury becomes a luxury in itself.9 This renunciation of taste becomes symptomatic of the point at which sacrifice becomes assimilated to project (the opposite to sacrifice in Bataille’s account), and therefore a decadent form of sacrifice (IE: 136). It masquerades as “giving up” while remaining a more sophisticated form of hoarding, a strategy in fact identified by the Princess’s companion Madame Grandoni, who notes that “some of Christina’s economies were very costly” (1987: 423). This Bataille might regard as resembling the closet expenditure typical of the hypocrisy of the industrial bourgeoisie, who, no longer subscribing to a paternalistic ethic of noblesse oblige, now conceal their wealth “behind closed doors.” Meanwhile, the lower orders can only feebly emulate this discreet display: “gilded clocks, dining room buffets, and artificial flowers,” says Bataille, “render equally shameful service to a grocer and his wife” (1994: 124). On the other hand, released from the requirement that plans be made for the future, that things be saved up inside, released in other words from the bonds of financial interest and self-interest, the individual enjoys a selfrevelatory freedom of expression: “if I thus consume immoderately, I reveal to my fellow beings that which I am intimately” (1991: 58). This mode of 8

This, of course, could also be said to be true of the novel in a broader generic or narratological sense; it is founded both on a need to maintain secrets and privacy and, at the same time, on a need to invade privacy and betray secrets; it has to consume what it tries to hold back. 9 On this point, see Bourdieu (1984: 372-6). In voluntarily simulating a form of taste determined by reduced circumstances, the Princess cannot be said to act out of necessity. She still enjoys the luxury of choice and can never truly feel the puritanical disapproval of art for art’s sake that Bourdieu ascribes to those who can only afford to value the useful, and have no opportunity to indulge the “needlessness” of art.

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behaviour is to be sharply differentiated from the vanities of styleconsciousness still evident when the Princess plays “the thrifty housewife” (1987: 423). Rather, it is the same dispensation to play the fool, to find dignity in indignity, that Ruskin prized in the gothic temperament. This spirit of abandonment may also be found, argues Bataille, in the form of popular expression reported by James when he writes in his letters of civic disturbances in Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly in March 1886 and his sense of “immense destitution” (1980: 121). James can only imagine a catastrophic culmination to the social crisis of the 1880s: “In England the Huns and Vandals will have to come up — from the black depths of the (in the people) enormous misery... much of English life is grossly materialistic and wants blood-letting” (1980: 125). Bataille equally defines the class struggle that “threatens the very existence of the masters” as a form of bloodletting, “the grandest form of social expenditure” (1994: 126). It may well be viewed as destructive, futile, even stupid, it may not refer to anything or be “useful” and it may therefore even seem “aesthetic” in withdrawing from these possibilities. On the contrary, however, this very failure would, for Ruskin, James and Bataille, also constitute its usefulness, suggesting that the word “aesthetic” — far from having little to do with the real — has much to do with a desire for its recovery. Works Cited Bataille, Georges 1994. “The Notion of Expenditure.” In Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P. 116-129. —. 1991. “Consumption.” In The Accursed Share. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books. —. 1988. Inner Experience. Trans. Leslie Ann Boldt. Albany: SUNY Press. —. 1970. “Notre Dame de Rheims.” In Oeuvres Complètes. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard. 611-616. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Cook, E. T. and Alexander Wedderburn. Eds. 1903-12. The Works of John Ruskin. London: George Allen. Darwin, Charles. 1985. The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection. Ed. and intro. J. W. Burrow. Harmondsworth: Penguin. James, Henry. 1987. The Princess Casamassima. Ed. and intro. Derek Brewer. Harmondsworth: Penguin. —. 1986. The Portrait of a Lady. Ed. and intro. Geoffrey Moore. Harmondsworth: Penguin. —. 1980. Henry James: Letters. Vol. III. Ed. Leon Edel. London: Macmillan.

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—. 1920. The Letters of Henry James. Vol. 1. Ed. Percy Lubbock. London: Macmillan. Mauss, Marcel. 1990. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Trans. W. D. Halls. London: Routledge. Proust, Marcel. 1987. On Reading Ruskin: Prefaces to La Bible d’Amiens and Sésame et les Lys. Ed. and trans. Jean Autret, William Burford and Phillip J. Wolfe. New Haven and London: Yale UP. Ruskin, John. 1908. The Bible of Amiens (1880-1885). In The Works of John Ruskin. Vol. XXXIII. Eds. Cook & Wedderburn. —. 1905. Sesame and Lilies (1871). Vol. XVIII. Cook & Wedderburn. —. 1904. Modern Painters (1843-61). Vol. VI. Cook & Wedderburn. —. 1903-1904. The Stones of Venice (1851-1853). Vols. IX-XI. Cook & Wedderburn. —. 1903a. “The Nature of the Gothic.” In The Stones of Venice. Vol. II. London: George Allen. —. 1903b. The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849). Vol. VIII. Cook & Wedderburn. Unrau, John. 1981. “Ruskin, the Workman and the Savageness of the Gothic.” In New Approaches to Ruskin. Ed. Robert Hewison. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Veblen, Thorstein. 1899. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Macmillan.

“MONEY, FOR THE NIGHT IS COMING:” GENDERED ECONOMIES OF AGING IN THE NOVELS OF JEAN RHYS AND JAMES JOYCE1 CYNTHIA PORT Jean Rhys’s four early novels each center on a woman who trades on her body and must maintain her beauty to sustain herself economically. The dread of female aging is marked throughout Rhys’s fiction as not only an economy of loss, but one which requires ongoing investment in a speculation that will inevitably lose value. These novels reframe what Freud calls the “unchangeability” of women over thirty by exposing the frenzied energies their central characters expend in the effort to appear static and unchanging. This essay demonstrates that Rhys’s characters supplement the “masquerade of femininity” with one of youth and that this doublemasquerade is also evident in the narrative form in which they tell their stories. Sasha Jensen’s stream-of-consciousness narrative in Good Morning Midnight — like that of Molly Bloom in the “Penelope” episode of Ulysses — is a gendered response to the economic and social consequences of aging for women; characters must weave a narrative that keeps the past and present contemporaneous in an attempt to appear unchanging and maintain value in the sexual marketplace.

The published collection of Jean Rhys’s correspondence opens with two undated photographs of Rhys on facing pages. The author’s pose is nearly identical in the two images: her head rests on her hands and her large, dark eyes, rimmed with black liner, look directly out at the viewer. In both pictures, Rhys’s hairstyle is exactly the same — though the colour and texture have changed — and the vivid pattern on her clothing is similar as well. Both are portraits of a strikingly beautiful woman, and together they suggest a narrative embodying several concerns central to Rhys’s early fiction: the exhibition of feminine beauty, the passing of time, and the social, 1

Reprinted with permission from Women: a cultural review 12 (2001): 204-217. http://www.tandf.co.uk

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biological, and economic consequences of aging for women. The strong continuities between the two photos, along with their striking differences, serve as a visual representation of the need for women to appear unchanging, to weave a narrative or create an image of the self that keeps the past and present contemporaneous in order to maintain value in the sexual marketplace. This essay considers the interrelations among gender, value, age, and expenditure, and explores their effects on modernist narrative form. In the early novels of Jean Rhys and in the “Penelope” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, I see the attempt to recreate in prose the simultaneous experience of past and present not simply as an example of modernist experimentation with narrative continuity, but also as a specifically gendered response to the economic and social consequences of aging for women. At the conclusion to his essay entitled “Femininity” (1933), Freud makes a rather startling assertion. He writes: I cannot help mentioning an impression that we are constantly receiving during analytic practice. A man of about thirty strikes us as a youthful, somewhat unformed individual, whom we expect to make powerful use of the possibilities for development opened up to him by analysis. A woman of the same age, however, often frightens us by her psychical rigidity and unchangeability. Her libido has taken up final positions and seems incapable of exchanging them for others. There are no paths open to further development; it is as though the whole process had already run its course and remains thenceforward insusceptible to influence — as though, indeed, the difficult development to femininity had exhausted the possibilities of the person concerned. (Freud 1965: 135)

Freud’s claim that women over thirty are “rigid,” “unchanging,” and “incapable of exchange” is particularly striking when read against modernist narratives like Jean Rhys’s early novels and the final chapter of Ulysses. These texts demonstrate, I will argue, that women’s energy after the age of thirty is often invested in strenuous efforts to achieve precisely the effects of “unchangeability” in order to keep themselves from being considered obsolete waste products. While advancing age is often figured as an accumulation (of years or experience) or, more frequently, as a loss (of youth and vitality), it is often marked — especially for women — by the sociallyimposed dangers and difficulty of libidinal, psychological, and financial exchange. Of course, literary modernism as a movement has long been identified by its concern with the perception and narration of time. I argue, however, that the experiments in literary form and voice in the novels I discuss, can be read as specifically gendered attempts to keep the past, present, and future of female characters contemporaneous in order to reveal

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and recoup the consequences of aging for women. Indeed, Rhys’s novels reframe what Freud calls the “rigidity and unchangeability” of women over thirty by revealing the vast energies her characters devote to the purposeful effort to appear static and unchanging. It is not the “difficult development to femininity” that Freud cites that exhausts the women he discusses, but rather the difficult attempt to retain the marks of socially-endorsed, youthful femininity. “Keeping up Appearances” in the Novels of Jean Rhys Jean Rhys published four novels between 1928 and 1939: Postures (1928, published the following year as Quartet in the United States), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning Midnight (1939). Each of these novels centers on a woman who — alienated from her family, without a husband, and financially desperate — trades on her body, and must maintain her beauty in order to remain in sexual circulation and sustain herself economically. Of course, “keeping up appearances” requires that a woman already be in circulation,2 with enough money to invest in the necessary clothes, ornaments, and beauty aids. Each of Rhys’s early novels reflects the strained and highly pressured relations between women and the market, not only revealing the shifting and unstable equation between their roles as consumers and as objects of consumption, but also showing that the interdependency of these two roles — that is, the increasing need to consume goods in order to position themselves as objects of consumption — becomes more and more insistent over time. The necessary efforts to project beauty and desirability are threatened not only by the women’s poverty (on the contrary, their poverty and shabbiness mark them as vulnerable and sexually available), but also by the exhaustion and depletion — indeed, the wasting — of their bodies over time and through the effects of experience. Even Rhys’s youngest characters fret anxiously about their looks and recognise the inexorable social and physical effects of age. Anna Morgan, the central character of Voyage in the Dark, had only just begun to menstruate when she first begins to fear “all the things you get — old and sad and everything” (Rhys 1982: 72). In Quartet we are told that “at twenty-four … [Marya] imagined with dread that she was growing old” (Rhys 1992: 72), and Julia Martin, of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, is in her 2

The phrase “keeping up appearances” occurs several times in Quartet, where Rhys plays on its suggestion of hypocritical social propriety as well as patriarchal demands for youthful attractiveness in women (1992: 113).

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mid-thirties when she is described by her lover as “a clockwork toy that has nearly run down” (1972: 148). Both internalised by her central characters and expressed by those around them, the dread of female aging is marked throughout Rhys’s fiction as not simply an economy of loss, but one that requires ongoing investment in a speculation that will inevitably lose value over time. While the highest value tends to be reserved for women who do not circulate, that is, for young virgins and (perhaps less so) for married women, part of the problem Rhys’s heroines face is that they must circulate, and like coins or stamps that enter circulation, their value decreases accordingly. Yet they continue to invest in their clothes and appearance in order to sustain the opportunity to remain increasingly devalued commodities.3 Rhys’s fourth novel, Good Morning, Midnight, features the oldest of the four heroines. A woman in her 40s with a small but stable source of income, Sasha Jensen has been lent money by a female friend to buy clothes and “transform herself” in Paris; she dyes her hair and purchases clothing with the explicit intention of avoiding “looking old” (1971: 11). In the years before the novel opens and after the departure of her husband, Sasha lived as precariously as the other heroines, relying on the commodification of her body when she was desperate for a meal. In the “present time” of the novel, however, because she is not financially desperate, Sasha’s position on the market is somewhat different from those of the other women (and from her own in the past). Whereas the other characters are objects of desire, subject to sexual exploitation in exchange for cash or clothes, Sasha is marked by her age and her fur coat as one who desires, and the men who approach her on the street offer to sell her things, not buy from her. When a gigolo first approaches her, Sasha thinks, “this is where I might be able to get some of my own back… to hurt him a little in return for all the many times I’ve been hurt” (72-3). But while her position as consumer seems potentially empowering, Sasha finds the social consequences of her age frightening and confusing. She undertakes the “transformation act” meant to stave off the appearance of age and to allow her to circulate as both respectable and desirable, and by the end of the novel Sasha has resumed the role of passive object of another’s desire. Like the other novels, then, Good Morning Midnight poignantly explores the relation between women’s age and the economic market and demonstrates that even with some economic security, 3

It is, perhaps, ironic that Rhys herself finally attained a degree of economic security — as well as literary celebrity — only when she was in her seventies. She published Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 after nearly 25 years of literary silence and financial hardship. See Carole Angier’s biography of Rhys (1990) for a suggestive analysis of the “lost years” and of Rhys’s reemergence.

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the effects of age require ever-greater investments of finances and energy mobilised for the purpose of appearing static and unchanging. Sasha articulates both her growing anxiety and her increasing need for money as she approaches the “midnight” of middle age: “Now, money, for the night is coming,” she says to herself. “Money for my hair, money for my teeth, money for shoes that won’t deform my feet (it’s not so easy now to walk around in cheap shoes with very high heels), money for good clothes, money, money. The night is coming” (144). At the same time that she requires money to replace and sustain the parts of her body that are changing, Sasha also exemplifies the ways in which spending on fashion items eases her anxieties about the linear progression of time: Tomorrow I’ll go to the Galeries Lafayette, choose a dress, go along to the Printemps, buy gloves, buy scent, buy lipstick, buy things costing fcs. 6.25 and fcs. 19.50, buy anything cheap. Just the sensation of spending, that’s the point. I’ll look at bracelets studded with artificial jewels, red, green and blue, necklaces of imitation pearls, cigarette cases, jeweled tortoises… And when I have had a couple of drinks I shan’t know whether it’s yesterday, today or tomorrow. (145)

Sasha begins the passage with a temporally situated plan for “tomorrow” (i.e., “Tomorrow I’ll go to the Galeries Lafayette”), but it becomes clear that her goal — through the purchase of ornaments and accessories and with the help of “a couple of drinks” — is precisely to lose track of the passage of time and to mask the onset of age. In The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes suggests that “the importance of money essentially flows from its being a link between the present and the future” (Keynes 1936: 293). For Rhys’s characters, money provides a link between the present and the future precisely by allowing women to cover up evidence of the past. The investment in cosmetics has a three-fold significance in Rhys’s work. Through her purchases, Sasha makes up her face and body to “make up,” that is, to compensate, for passing time. In After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, the narrator says of Julia Martin, “To stop making up would have been a confession of age and weariness. It would have meant that Mr. Mackenzie had finished her.” Sasha and Julia are terrified of losing the ability or the will to “make up,” to conform cosmetically with expectations about commodified femininity, and thereby to compensate for the loss of youth through purchases that mask or prosthetically renew the surface of the body. Indeed, Rhys’s early novels are haunted by older women with “half-dyed hair” and unkempt nails who no longer have the will or resources to make up for passing time by making up their bodies. In Rhys’s work, however, the

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depiction of these two kinds of making up are contained within a third kind of making up; that is, in Rhys’s strategies for structuring her narratives. In her first-person novels especially (Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning Midnight), Rhys constructs a polyphony of narrative voices that blend perceptions of past, present, and anxieties about the future in what has often been described as a “stream of consciousness.” In Rhys’s novels, however, I would argue that the narrative is less a stream flowing in one direction than an attempt to hold in contemporaneous stasis the various stages of time in order to resist the loss of value socially dictated for women as they age. “To make her look young:” Molly Bloom Staves Off the Ash Pit In “Sex and Credit: Consumer Capitalism in Ulysses,” Michael Tratner argues that: The central trait of the modernist novel — stream of consciousness — may... be part of a transformation of the nature of property. As objects turn into “income-streams,” so selves turn into streams of constantly changing mental states. Advertising relies on this new vision of the self: By providing constantly changing mini-fantasies for people to occupy, advertising keeps changing people’s desires, minute by minute... not only does one keep wanting different things, one keeps becoming different people, so even the same things may inspire new desires in the changed persona one has become. (1993: 11)

Tratner’s depiction of an economy built on constant change and flux suggests that early twentieth-century economic developments both mirror and enable a liberation from fixed “mental states.” Citing Joyce’s Molly Bloom as an advocate for the free circulation of desire, Tratner suggests that the proliferation of advertising creates a multitude of shifting desires and protean personalities. However, as both Thomas Richards and Garry Leonard point out, advertising also established or contributed to a fixed standard by which femininity was measured — in particular, a standard of youthful beauty. “At one and the same time,” Richards writes, the image of the “seaside girl” that became popular in advertising during the late nineteenth century “marked off the adolescent female body as an object of commodity culture and changed the shape of women’s anatomy by making that body normative and compulsory” (Richards 1990: 241). By the 1920s, Richards demonstrates, “the ideal type of womanhood has become prolonged girlhood” (244). In a sense, then, advertising at the turn of the century contributes to the fear of physical and social change and the loss of value to which women are often

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subjected as they age. I would suggest that rather than encouraging “constantly changing mental states,” advertising can have the effect of stifling desires and stunting development, encouraging women to imagine the inexperienced, adolescent female body as the ideal of femininity. Of course, Molly Bloom’s desires are impressively wide-ranging, and she is significantly more at ease in the role of desiring subject than, say, Sasha Jensen or Anna Morgan.4 However, at the same time that Molly’s rhetoric is marked by multiplicity and change, it is also, like that of Rhys’s women, constrained by the injunction not to change — that is, by the need to stay young, or at least to appear young. Indeed, as Tratner himself points out, Molly adopts the language of advertising when she sees the satisfaction of sexual desire as a way to “make her look young” (Tratner 1993: 10; Joyce 1986: 18: 1408). While I agree that the goal and frequently the effect of advertising are to create new desires, I would argue that the range of acceptable fantasies and personae is limited, and that the goal for women might be to arrest change rather than to promote it. As a participant in the culture of exhibition and consumption, Molly knows that the stakes of temporal and physical change are very high for women: “It’s all very fine for them but as for being a woman as soon as youre old they might as well throw you out in the bottom of the ash pit” (18: 746-47). Molly asserts that she is “young still” (as corroborated, perhaps, by the proof of fertility that punctuates her monologue), but she fears and tries to prepare against what she calls being put “back on the shelf” (18:1399). Molly employs several strategies in response to her anxieties about the “shelf” or “ash pit:” One is to gather up a store of commodities (clothing, underwear, a gold bracelet) and a breadth of experiences against the threat of future obsolescence. Her expenditure of sexual energy can be seen not necessarily, as Tratner suggests, as a borrowing on credit against the expectation of future growth and success, but rather (like Sasha) as a means of compensating for a socially perceived loss and of shoring up her resources against a culturally imposed expiration date. In a sense, then, Molly buys into assumptions about women’s loss of value with age, and tries to make the most of her “4 years more of life up to 35” (18: 475). Yet through her discursive strategies, Molly both calls attention to and resists the effects of aging. She repeatedly compares herself to the fifteen-year-old Milly (“I was just like that”), establishing a cross-generational continuity that is emphasised by the echoing similarity of their names. Molly bears witness both to her own past youth and to Milly’s inevitable aging, as when she remarks that it is a 4

Of course, Molly also inhabits a notably different class status than any of Rhys’s central characters.

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pity that Milly’s pretty features “won’t stay that way” (18: 1066). At the same time, however, Joyce marks the inadequacy of social notions of chronological age, even as he depicts Molly’s anxious concerns about approaching sexual obsolescence. In a form that stands in contrast to the other chapters of Ulysses, Joyce crafts an unpunctuated rhetorical style of simultaneity that allows Molly to build a unified narrative out of her life, keeping all the different temporal aspects of it in play. Rhys and the “No Time Region” Like Molly’s monologue, Rhys’s early novels reflect the anxieties and dangers associated with the passing of time not only in their content but also through their structure. In 1934, Rhys wrote to her friend Evelyn Scott about her progress on the novel Voyage in the Dark: “The big idea — well I’m blowed if I can be sure what it is. Something to do with time being an illusion I think. I mean that the past exists — side by side with the present, not behind it; that what was — is” (1984: 24). Similarly, of Sasha Jensen in Good Morning Midnight, Rhys writes, “I wanted her to enter the ‘no time’ region there” (1984: 138). For Sasha, every step in the “present” of the novel is accompanied by memories of the past. While at some moments she tries to resist what she calls her “film mind” and repress the memories, at other times she welcomes the “ordered, undulating procession [that moves] past [her] eyes” and through her narrative (109). While in Paris, Sasha buys a painting of an old Jew that appeals to her because it evokes what she calls a “no time” or — perhaps, more accurately — an “all time” region, in which past, present, and future are held together in play: “He is singing ‘It has been,’ singing ‘It will be,’” Sasha says of the figure in the painting, calling to mind the way her narrative shifts unsteadily among the different phases of her chronological trajectory (53). Of course, it is well known that modernist writers drew on new scientific and philosophical theories of the subjective or relative experience of time such as those posited by Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein.5 Rhys’s novels, however, pointedly convey the interrelated narration of memory and “the present moment” as a gendered strategy with which to deflect or resist the social consequences of age. At the same time that it illustrates the experience of various moments in time as overlapping and concurrent, where past, present, and future are equally alive to the subject, Rhys’s writing (like the clock in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and the progress of the sun in 5

See, for example, Kern (1983) or Schleifer (2000).

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The Waves) also emphasises the irrevocable social as well as biological wasting brought on by chronological time. Indeed, Rhys’s novels highlight the contrast between the subjective feeling that “the past exists side by side with the present” and the perception of the individual by others, to whom memories and experiences are registered only as marks and wrinkles on face and body. Since those marks are thought to diminish the value of those who must circulate on the market of male desire, the aging woman can be seen as having to participate in what might be called a double-masquerade; she must mask herself in the appearance of youthful femininity, which, according to psychoanalysts like Joan Riviere, is it itself a masquerade.6 Indeed, it seems significant that Riviere published her famous essay, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” in 1929, just as Rhys was beginning to publish her novels, and that “Masquerade” was for some time the working title of Rhys’s first novel.7 If women in general are defined as marking and masking what they lack with the fetishising process of the masquerade, Rhys’s novels suggest, then aging women might be understood as performing a double-masquerade in trying to recreate the youthful feminine appearance that is itself a cover-up for what women lack. If, as Luce Irigaray suggests, the masquerade consists of “what women do in order to recuperate some element of desire... to submit to the dominant economy of desire in an attempt to remain ‘on the market’ in spite of everything” (1985: 133), then we must consider the position of the older women within the “dominant economy of desire” and what the stakes and the options might be for them to remain “on the market” in spite of everything. “Quite Like Old Times:” Temporal Economies of the Masquerade Reading Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and Joyce’s Ulysses together can be useful in several ways. Both narratives are structured around the absence of a son who died in infancy, and numerous critics have read the closing words of Good Morning Midnight (“Yes — yes — yes” (1971: 190)) as either an affirmative echo or a nightmare revision of Molly Bloom’s final words.8 In addition, though, I think understanding the centrality of aging in 6

“Womanliness... could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it...” (Riviere 1986: 38). 7 Mary Lou Emery (1990) considers Rhys’s interest in masks and masquerade in the context of the West Indian Carnival and Bakhtinian notions of the carnivalesque. 8 Thomas Staley and Arnold Davidson, for example, both read the ending of Good Morning Midnight as an affirmative echo of Molly Bloom’s last words, while Coral Ann Howells and Carle Angier interpret it as a hopeless surrender to silence, madness,

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the narratives of both Molly and Sasha allows us to reconsider these authors’ formal experimentation with the simultaneous experience of time as another element of the feminine masquerade. In her essay “Youthfulness as a Masquerade: Denial, Resistance, and Desire,” Kathleen Woodward suggests that youthfulness can itself be seen as another version of Riviere’s “masquerade,” another attempt to cover or compensate for that which is missing. “In a culture which so devalues age,” she writes, “masquerade with respect to the aging body is first and foremost a denial of age, an effort to erase or efface age and to put on youth” (1991, 148). In the stories Rhys tells, she demonstrates the dual masquerade of femininity and youth her characters must perform in order to maintain value in the sexual marketplace. Through the prism of the double-masquerade, we can recognise the significance of the various registers of “keeping up appearances” in Rhys’s novels as well as in Molly’s monologue. I would argue, however, that the masquerade works on a narrative level as well: by narrating in a present tense voice that shifts between Sasha Jensen’s earlier life in Paris with her husband and her later visit alone, for example, Rhys creates a narrative chronological doubling that enables the older woman to cloak herself in memories — albeit often painful ones — of her youth. Similarly, through Molly Bloom’s temporally unstable and memory-filled monologue, Joyce illustrates a woman’s need to cling to traces of her youth and resist change. Reading the third, formal level of the masquerade helps highlight the ways Rhys and Joyce both draw on a technique of narrative simultaneity in order to call attention to the social and financial consequences of aging in an historical moment when youth begins to be promoted as the normative state. We can see the formal aesthetic both authors employ as a technique that highlights, criticises, and recasts the (perceived) need for women to try to hold youth and age in a kind of balance. Through their fiction, both Rhys and Joyce engage in another kind of “make up” as they make up fictions that call on readers to reconsider their assumptions about gender and age. Good Morning Midnight opens with these words: “‘Quite like old times,’ the room says. ‘Yes? No?’” (1971: 9). The suspension of both yes and no, past and present, forecasts the balance of voices and perspectives that masquerade through Sasha Jensen’s multivalent, present-tense narration. The opening of the novel is set at “what they call an impasse” — the literal meaning is the cul-de-sac on which her third-rate hotel is located, but at the same time, Sasha surely refers to the sense of paralysis and stagnation, of the impossibility of engaging in social and libidinal exchange, and the resultant or oblivion. As I suggest in the brief discussion of Good Morning Midnight above, my understanding of the final passages is closer to the latter reading.

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necessity of stasis. The two photographs of Rhys with which I began appear on opposite pages of her collection of letters. While they mark the differences incurred by age, they also balance each other as they are both simultaneously in play, mimicking the contemporaneous experience of past and present that women are called on to embody and that Rhys’s narratives depict. Like the image of the old Jew in the painting Sasha buys, Rhys’s photographs together create an image that is “double-headed, double-faced… and with four arms” and that both marks and resists the implications of time, “singing ‘It has been,’ singing ‘It will be’” (1971: 109). The photographs enable us not only to reconsider Rhys’s insistent thematic attention to the gendered economics of aging, but also to interpret her formal aesthetic. They let us see Rhys’s style — and Joyce’s — not simply as instances of modernist experimentation with the perceptions of time, but as strategies specifically rooted in gendered anxieties about aging and the need for women to hold youth and age in a precarious contemporaneous balance. The two photographs together — like the temporal multiplicity of Joyce’s and Rhys’s narrative styles — suggest the difficulties and dangers that libidinal, psychological, and financial exchange pose for aging women. Together they remind us that the youthcentered culture of advertising that emerged alongside modernism looks at only half of the picture, and sings only half of the song. Works Cited Angier, Carole. 1990. Jean Rhys: Life and Work. London: Andre Deutsch. Davidson, Arnold. 1985. Jean Rhys. New York: Frederick Ungar. Emery, Mary Lou. 1990. Jean Rhys at “World’s End.” Austin: U. of Texas P. Freud, Sigmund. 1965. “Femininity.” In New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York: Norton. Howells, Coral Anne. 1991. Jean Rhys. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Joyce, James. 1986. Ulysses: The Corrected Text. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior. New York: Random House. Kern, Stephen. 1983. The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Keynes, John Maynard. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. New York: Macmillan. Leonard, Garry. 1991. “Women on the Market: Commodity Culture, ‘Femininity,’ and ‘Those Lovely Seaside Girls’ in Joyce’s Ulysses.” Joyce Studies Annual 2: 27-68. Rhys, Jean. 1992. Quartet. New York: Harper and Row.

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—. 1984. Jean Rhys Letters, 1931-1966. Ed. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly. London: Andre Deutsch. —. 1982. Voyage in the Dark. New York: Norton. —. 1972. After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. New York: Harper and Row. —. 1971. Good Morning, Midnight ( 1938). New York: Norton. Richards, Thomas. 1990. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851-1914 Stanford: Stanford UP. Riviere, Joan. 1986. “Womanliness as a Masquerade.” In Formations of Fantasy. Ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan. London: Methuen. 35-44. Schleifer, Ronald. 2000. Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880-1930. New York: Cambridge UP. Tratner, Michael. 1993. “Sex and Credit: Consumer Capitalism in Ulysses.” James Joyce Quarterly 30.4-31.1: 695-716. Woodward, Kathleen. 1991. “Youthfulness as a Masquerade: Denial, Resistance, and Desire.” In Aging and its Discontents. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 147-166.

THE QUEST FOR VALUES: TRADITIONAL SOURCES IN TWO LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVELS OF ADVENTURE ELIO DI PIAZZA As a concept, value expresses the central tenets of economic thought, affecting the theoretical image of wealth and its literary representation. Reasoning about value constitutes the very core of rhetorical and discursive formations; it argues about places and significations within the realm of quantities. This essay concerns a number of discourses on value, which are historically distinct in their objects and aims. Notwithstanding their diversity, they converge on the same cognitive substance and, above all, on the same link with the economic assets of society. In late nineteenth-century novels of adventure, the quest for treasure is regarded as an undertaking aimed at the possession of quantities of value. The final discovery brings about a catharsis through the treasure’s exchange value. The concept of value directs the writer’s imaginative itinerary toward the material world of goods and of their circulation. In so doing, it connects the literary image of treasure to the contemporary economic theories and views.

In the field of cultural relations, the concept of value is of primary importance, from both an ideological and an economic perspective. It makes concise statements concerning material interests, the schemata and procedures of the social distribution of goods; it does so by placing them in a conceptual framework inspired by economic theory and moral philosophy. As a concept, value expresses the central tenets of economic thought, affecting the theoretical image of wealth. Moreover, being an ideological component of one thread of social relations, the concept of value immediately refers to the specific context in which the writer operates and elaborates his own system of representation. Reasoning about value constitutes the very core of rhetorical formations, propositions and discursive units; it plays its main role in assigning to any object a place and a signification in the realm of quantities. Although theoretical thinking covers several disciplines (e.g., economics, philosophy, religion, literature), the concept of value descends directly from

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cultural and productive formations. It refers to these formations, with a view to clarifying the origin of the idea of value, determining how it exists within the object, explaining and defining its mensurability. My investigation concerns a number of discursive formations, which are clearly distinct in their object: the beautiful, the useful, personal and collective wealth. Notwithstanding their diversity, these formations converge on the same cognitive substance, that is, value in its widest sense. From the pre-industrial period up to the present, defining value has always meant providing a description and an account of the dual function of the objects of exchange. On the one hand, these definitions are marked by the same interest in the utility of those objects, by the internal and distinctive properties of their material bodies; on the other, they are marked by a quantitative proportion, by what is common to different objects, thus being reduced to a single monetary measure. In economic thought from Aristotle onwards, the investigation of value follows a twofold direction: use and exchange. The mystery of value arises from this enigmatic duplicity by which the object is described. In the ninth chapter of the Politics, Aristotle presents value as a reflection of necessity and need. Wealth, as it is used for survival, is necessary both to the individual and to the community; to condemn it, he writes, means to refuse the very principle of existence (1992: 80-84). Nevertheless, he cannot ignore the contradiction between the finiteness of need and the boundlessness of accumulation, between the physiological alternation of desires, and the satisfying but artificial expansion of value: contradictions which spring in the first place from the absence of any boundary in nature itself. To explain his thesis, Aristotle recalls the myth of Midas (1992: 82), and uses it as an instance of the incompatibility between the two types of value. In repudiating the gift from Dionysus, the king recognises that wealth is not exchangeable for the satisfaction of needs, and acknowledges the natural groundlessness of monetary equivalences. Midas’ gilded kingdom is but an accumulation of indistinguishable quantities, a kingdom of identities from which the singleness of objects has been erased. Since any object, in this context, is debased to the level of a golden and ghostly picture, the king is unable to benefit from the wealth he accumulates more and more abundantly. Because everything is transformed into gold, any exchange creates further exchange, ad infinitum, but prevents any use being made of the objects with which the king comes into tactile contact. Whenever something presents itself as an object of exchange, it is converted into a quantitative value, so that it is no longer suitable for and susceptible to

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consumption. The paradoxical legend of Midas unravels the enigma of value, a mystery represented by the tragicomic paradox of use and exchange. Medieval economic thought rested on the principles of the Peripatetic School and of Patristics; however, the scholastic philosophers tried to lessen Aristotelian extremism, by recognising value as the specific mark of the singularity of objects. This rationale is encapsulated in Thomas Aquinas’ “just price” (1999: q. 77). The material principle of scholastic thought on value is to be found in peasant labour, in the way it is carried out and expropriated. According to scholastic thought, peasant labour is subordinate to divine creation: it starts an occult mechanism that progressively creates and brings to maturation the natural product. To them, paradoxically, the only true peasant is God; humans are mere collaborators who confine themselves to sowing seed and harvesting the crop (the agricultural end product). All else is in the hands of the unseen peasant, who is responsible for the nurturing, the sprouting, and the fructification; this divine peasant brings the productive cycle to its conclusion. The actual labour of the peasants themselves is only an infinitesimal fraction of the entire cycle. As Anselm of Canterbury writes, the value of that labour is imperceptibly incorporated into an infinitesimal fraction of the “supreme essence” of goods (1969: 39-40). The scholastic idea of value occurs in the treasure of Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale,” in the Canterbury Tales. In the prologue, the Latin motto defines cupidity as the root of evil. This ideological enunciation immediately becomes a partisan thesis: “in chirches whan I preche […] my theme is alwey oon, and evere was — Radix malorum est Cupiditas” (1974: 148). In the argumentative and narrative sections, the writer reaffirms Timothy’s thesis, already quoted in the prologue. The qualitative “adventure of value” is conveyed by the conversion of the real price into an ethical price and, similarly, by the total exclusion of labour. The “oold man” replies to the three comrades, who ask him where Death’s hiding place is: “turne up this croked wey/ for in that grove I lafte hym, […] under a tree, and there he wole abyde” (153). Beneath the tree, however, the rascals discover some containers overflowing with “floryns fyne of gold” (153), a treasure whose use value is death itself. The sinuous “croked” road leads to the wood and ends at the base of a tree; it goes from the grove to the “grave.” It is the road that transforms a dream of wealth into a funereal reality, the consequence of a spine-chilling moral metamorphosis of value: from the enriching “tresor,” “This tresor hath Fortune unto us yiven/ In myrthe and joliftee oure lyf to lyven” (153), to the “synne of avarice” (154), which is the very cause of death. Thus, in order to increase their wealth, the three rascals plot against each other, and, totally blinded by cupiditas, eventually die by the hand of others. They become victims of the

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treasure’s use value, at the very moment that they are desperately searching for its exchange value. The concept of value became part of an organic economic theory in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The discourse on value was closely bound up with the idea of the nation and the phenomenon of colonisation. It was influenced by production, from the beginning of the socalled “primitive” industrial phase, and fed by the labour of journeymen and by the gold which was poured into England by travellers to the New World. The Chaucerian metaphor of value underwent a drastic change in the writings of the travellers and explorers of the sixteenth century. In a letter that Columbus had written in 1503, we read: “Gold! What a marvelous thing it is. With it also the souls could ascend the heaven” (in Galbraith 1998: 47). The demoniac simile, by which the precious metal was once described, is now completely replaced by a new, attractive and alluring figure. Mercantilism regarded exchangeable objects as cold monetary equivalents, and so ignored their hidden substance and internal principle. The art of enrichment implied the capacity to accrue values. The phrase “to encrease our treasure” sounded like the motto of the new economic policies. That art was grounded on well-defined methods and programmes, on plain rules and behaviours. Mun enumerates them in England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade, when he enjoins the selling of goods to foreign countries at a price higher than their original purchase price. The differential between exports and imports is called treasure: “that part of our stock which is not returned to us in wares must necessarily be brought home in treasure” (1999). As the intellectual experience of mercantilism came to a close, at the beginning of the industrial revolution, the discourse on value became indissolubly intertwined with that on productive labour. In 1763 Adam Smith declared that labour was the real measure of the value of all commodities: “The value of any commodity […] is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables […] to purchase or command” (1999). This was an assertion that swept away the last uncertainties generated by the naturalistic preaching of the Physiocrats. The appeals that Quesnay made from his Tableau Économique, that trade should obey a vague and indefinite lois de la nature, and that merchants should either place their trust in a concurrence de commerce devoid of rules or abandon themselves to the anarchy of laissez faire, came up against the pragmatic systematicity of Smith’s economic plan. Ricardo’s theoretical approach to production and distribution was founded upon the further extension of the quantitative concept of value. In his essay, On the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock, Ricardo writes that an increase in wealth originates from a rise in value or quantity “by obtaining an increased quantity […], but also by the increased

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exchangeable value of that quantity” (1815: 377). To Ricardo, exchange value is merely “embodied labour,” nothing more than what may be measured by the price of manual work. The mensurability of value, the possibility of transforming it into quantity, depends exclusively on the labour necessary to produce the commodity. In late nineteenth-century novels of adventure, the quest for treasure is regarded as an undertaking whose aim is the possession of quantities of value. Its discovery, in fact, brings about a catharsis through its exchange value. Once the island is reached, the heroes of Treasure Island prepare to act as “discourse brokers,” seeking profit from the wealth lying sluggishly underground. This verbal brokerage anticipates a metamorphosis of value and, above all, prepares an ideological defence of the flow of capital toward the centre of the Empire. Flint’s loot is little more than a bulk of monetary value to squander merrily when the seekers return to England: “[…] money to eat — to roll in — to play duck and drake” (1994: 40). In Stevenson’s island that value lies in a momentary condition of idle drowsiness. During a hunt that leaves the hunters breathless, every narrative event, every phase of the search, marks a step toward the acquisition of the quantified aspect of value. The conclusion of the furious treasure hunt realises Jim’s dream of riches and, indirectly, that of his mother, who is firmly resolved to recover Black Dog’s debt. The antepenultimate chapter of the novel chronologically closes the hunt of Jim, of the gentlemen adventurers and the buccaneers. For a less reassuring conclusion, the final stretch is scattered with traps; Flint’s grisly marks, Billy Bone’s jokes, at the crucial moment of the narration, retard the race, which becomes more and more frantic. Conquest is possible only after a desperate and risky adventure into the “beyond;” its reward is in the cathartic conversion into exchange value. Stevenson’s seekers estimate the value of the treasure by considering the position it seems to hold in the quantitative system, its potential convertibility into money, and its capacity to be assimilated into the sphere of proportional relations. The individual and class differences between the orderly and disciplined crew sailing under the national flag, and the scoundrels waving the Jolly Roger, disappear before a common end. Everyone shares the same goal: to bring value back to life, and release it from its inactivity. However different the two groups are, their goal is the same: the conversion of value, the repudiation of a moral rather than a utilitarian definition of it. To Silver, the treasure has a univocal meaning: “the seven hundred thousand pounds” (1994: 211). For their part, Jim, Squire Trelawney, and Captain Smollett depict the treasure in mostly quantitative

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terms: “great heaps of coin” (217). Winners of the chase, they carefully ponder what they have gained: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Georges, and Louises, doubloons and double guines and moidores and sequins, the pictures of all the kings of Europe for the last hundred years, strange Oriental pieces stamped with what looked like wisps of string or bits of spider’s web, round pieces and square pieces, and pieces bored through the middle, as if to wear them round the neck  nearly every variety of money in the world must, I think, have found a place in that collection. (1994: 219)

Stevenson’s island is nothing but a temporary site of value, the hellish and harsh territory of the contest for wealth. It is an impenetrable container, inside of which the desired substance rests — an unhealthy and feared island, full of dangerous cliffs, sinister peaks and swamps. It is a detested place that, nevertheless, holds a precious trophy within its depths. It is, therefore, an island that one must visit if one wishes to accomplish a metamorphosis of value. Stevenson expresses an epistemological balance between the container and the contained, by which both are in opposition to each other in terms of their discourse on value. Buried in the island, the treasure subsists only in the form of unproductive value; disinterred, freed from its sluggishness, it awakens with the recovered attire of its exchange value. In that precise moment, the island loses its sole attraction. Having seized the loot and raised sail to return to England, Jim watches, with joy, the gradual disappearance of the island below the horizon; he sees it sink like an empty, unusable sack: “and before noon, to my inexpressible joy, the highest rock of Treasure Island had sunk into the blue round of sea” (1994: 222). Jim’s initial dream, the delightful dream he had had in Bristol, waiting to take to the open sea in his schooner (47), is transformed at his return into the nightmare of repudiated use values: “Oxen and wain-ropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island; and the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts” (224). Deprived of its content, the island loses its charm, being deprived of the only substance that gave it, life. The logic that distinguishes Treasure Island reappears in Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, chiefly with reference to the concept of value. The two novels differ in their descriptive modes and linguistic texture; nonetheless, these differences do not hide the substantial ontological homogeneity of the rhetorical devices. This homogeneity is manifest in the quest for treasure, viewed by Haggard as an undertaking aimed at the utilitarian transformation of value. Stevenson and Haggard both conceal, the former in the island’s caves and the latter in the mines of Kukuanaland,

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analogous heaps of value, collected after the joint labour of natives, buccaneers, adventurers and bourgeois seekers. In this way, Stevenson’s Flint finds his counterpart in Haggard’s Silvestre; they both constitute narrative expedients to improve the treasure, the final and decisive expansion of its value. The labour of Solomon’s miners adds to the treasure, in conjunction with Quatermain’s exhausting attacks, with Henri’s “northern” braveries and with Good’s cunning tricks. In the deserted mines are found “stacks of gold quartz piled up ready for crushing” (1989: 21), which had been drawn out by nameless workers, “workers, whoever they were” (21); figures of the past, recent or remote, whose labour is presently buried in the exclusive shape of its use value. Haggard reworked the biblical myth of Solomon’s treasure; yet during the industrial age that myth had lost its archetypical characteristic. Galahad’s precious sword, which Malory counts among the riches accumulated by the sage king of Israel, shares the moral meanings of the Solomonian archetype. The knights in Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) search for treasure in their quest for spiritual virtue; a treasure buried in the world of moral perfection, the discovery of which is seen to be the hardest of their exertions: “we seek that we shall not find” (1969: 302) or, as the hermit Nancien later predicts to the brave knights: “ye go to seek that ye shall never find, that is the Sangrail; for it is the secret thing of Our Lord Jesu Christ” (307). Malory’s treasure is not exhibited as an exchangeable value, whereas the treasure described by Haggard, completely barren of social content, is no more than a pile of monetary quantities. Haggard places the “wonderful mines of bright stones” (1989: 22) within Twala’s surreptitious domain. Unlike Solomon’s legendary Ophir, that domain is the venue of evil, injustice, and savagery. This space shows the same hellish morphology as Stevenson’s island. Through Gagool’s words, Haggard defines such a space as “The place of Death” (265), a dreadful wrap that covers the new dominion of value. Unlike the chamber in which Malory’s Graal is held, “they heard the chamber door open, and there they saw angels” (1969: 365), the dark grottoes and the caves of monetary value safeguard the cool products of human labour “which in some past age had evidently been hewn, by hand-labour, from the mountain” (Haggard 1989: 265). In line with the productive idea of value, Haggard describes Solomon’s treasure in quantitative terms, entirely neglecting its original sacredness. Every piece is carefully numbered, estimated and, finally, reduced to a bare cipher. By the sinister light of Sir Henri’s lamp, which breaks through the lugubrious shadows of the cave and highlights the splendour of the precious stones and coins, Quatermain mathematically

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calculates the value of the loot. The bourgeois hero skims the list of items, reducing them to a single value and, finally, erasing their essential identities. The tusks, made of the same ivory as Solomon’s throne, are stacked in hundreds: “there, alone, was enough ivory before us to make a man wealthy for life” (1989: 276). Then, the light falls on some chests that are overflowing with coins “of a shape that none of us had seen before” (276). Haggard’s heroes painstakingly count: “a couple of thousand pieces in each box, and there are eighteen boxes” (277). When, in the end, the light penetrates an inner niche of the cave, the three adventurers are dazzled by the “silvery sheen” of the diamonds contained in the three caskets: “uncut diamonds, most of them of considerable size” (278). They have nothing to do but count them, reducing each piece of the treasure to a single, representative figure: “there before us were millions of pounds’ worth of diamonds, and thousands of pounds’ worth of gold and ivory” (279). A comparison of the two modes of describing treasure, the moral and the utilitarian, makes it possible to identify a system of conceptual rules of which the text is the carrier and the cultural and productive environment are the main sources. The concept of value directs the writer’s imaginative itinerary toward the material world of goods and their circulation. In so doing, it connects the literary image of treasure to the social and epistemological conditions in which it is shaped.

Works Cited Aquinas, Th. gennaio. 1999. Summa theologica (1274). http://www.newadvent.org/summa. Aristotele. 1997. Politica. I, 9. Ital. trans. Torino: Utet. Chaucer, Geoffrey. 1974. “The Pardoner’s Prologue.” In The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Oxford: Oxford UP. D’Aosta, Anselmo. 1969. Monologion (1077). Ital. trans. Bari, Laterza. Galbraith, J. 1998. Economics in Perspective (1987). Ital. trans. Milano: Rizzoli. Haggard, H. 1989. King Solomon’s Mines (1885). Oxford: Oxford UP. Malory, Th. 1969. Morte d’Artur (1485). London: Penguin. Mun, Th. 1999. England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (Maggio 1664). http://www.northpark.edu/acad/history/Classes/Sources/Mun.html Ricardo, D. 1815. Works. London: McCulloch. Smith, A. 1999. Draft of “The Wealth of Nations” Aprile (1763). http://www.bibliomania.com/NonFiction/Smith/Wealth/index.html Stevenson, R. L. 1994. Treasure Island (1883). London, Penguin.

CONTRIBUTORS David Bennett received his BA and PhD degrees in literary studies from the University of York. He is Director of Postgraduate Studies at the Department of English with Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne/Australia. His research interests include theories and cultural practices of modernism and postmodernism; the politics and aesthetics of art censorship; critical theory; cultural studies; and the influence of psychoanalysis on modern conceptions of subjectivity. His publications include Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity (1998), Cultural Histories: Pluralism and Theory (1993), and Rhetorics of History: Modernity and Postmodernity (1990). Nicole Bracker received her BA from the University of Hamburg, the University of Warwick and the University of Basel, and her MA and PhD from the University of East Anglia. Her general research interests include the rewritings of Robinson Crusoe, the intersection of literature and economics, particularly the critical force of Bataille’s general economy and its impact on recent theories of textuality. She has published articles on the Sirens’ Song, Michel Tournier, Gertrude Stein and Roland Barthes. Steven Connor has taught at Birkbeck College since 1979, where he is currently Professor of Modern Literature and Theory and Pro-Vice-Master for International and Research Students. His current work is on the cultural phenomenology of skin. His publications include Charles Dickens (1985), Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (1988), Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (1989, 1996), Theory and Cultural Value (1992), The English Novel in History, 1950 to 1995 (1995), James Joyce (1996) and Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (2000). Eleanor Courtemanche received her BA in Literature from Yale University and a MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. In 1994, she was awarded a DAAD fellowship to the Freie Universität in Berlin. She has taught at Cornell and at Colby College in Maine, and is currently the

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Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in English and Cultural Studies at Macalester College in St.Paul, Minnesota. She is currently completing a book on Invisible Hands: Laissez-Faire and the Realist Novel in 19th-Century Britain and Germany. Elio Di Piazza is Professor of English literature at Palermo University. He has published essays on Rider Haggard, Kinglake, Stevenson and Kipling. He is the author of a book on Godwin, Un antagonismo imperfetto (1983), and has published on the novels of adventure L’avventura bianca (1999). He has also edited Narrazioni dell’impero (1995) and is presently working on the impact of colonialism on the XIX century novel. Nadja Gernalzick, obtained her MA in Comparative Literature in 1993 and PhD in American Studies in 1998 from Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, where she is assistant professor. She is currently working on her habilitation, on the intersection of autobiography and media studies. Other research interests include: performance studies, theories of textuality, business ethics. The title of her PhD thesis is Kredit und Kultur: Ökonomieund Geldbegriff bei Jacques Derrida und in der amerikanischen Literaturtheorie der Postmoderne. Joyce Goggin completed her PhD on “The Big Deal: Card Games in 20thCentury Fiction” in Comparative Literature at the Université de Montréal in 1997. She went on to receive a postdoctoral fellowship for research on Dutch painting in the 17th century at the University of Amsterdam. She is currently a part-time lecturer at the University of Leiden and remains affiliated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Stefan Herbrechter is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Analysis at Trinity and All Saints, College of the University of Leeds, UK where he teaches courses in Cultural Studies, Critical and Cultural Theory and Literature. He is the author of Lawrence Durrell, Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity (Postmodern Studies; Rodopi, 1999) and the editor of Cultural Studies: Interdisciplinarity and Practice (2002), Discipline and Practice: The (Ir)resisitbility of Theory (with Ivan Callus; 2004) and Post-Theory, Culture, Criticism (with Ivan Callus; 2004). Jessica Maynard teaches American Studies in the Department of English at King’s College London. She has published essays on Henry James and Wilkie Collins and is currently working on a study of urban fiction and corporate culture.

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Matthew Pateman is Senior Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Hull. His research interests lie in theories of postmodernity and postmodernism, and contemporary British fiction. He is currently working on a book on the literary aesthetics of Jean-François Lyotard, and a book on the fiction of Julian Barnes. Cynthia Port is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation is entitled “‘Nothing but Change:’ Women’s Economies of Aging 1919-1939.” Gerald Posselt is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Freiburg. His publications include: “Of Words, Men and Monsters. Zur Rhetorik der Tropen bei Locke und Vico“ in Paragrana; „Katachrestische Resignifikationen. Zur Rhetorik des Performativen von Aristoteles bis Nietzsche“ in Historische Anthropologie der Sprache (2001). Major research areas include philosophy of language, history of philosophy and rhetoric, semiotics, deconstruction, poststructuralist theories. Dorothy Rowe is a lecturer in Art History and Theory at the University of Surrey Roehampton. Her main research interests include issues of race, gender and modernity in Imperial and Weimar Germany, the image of the city in German painting and theories of urban space. She is the author of several articles on Imperial and Weimar Berlin and her forthcoming book is entitled Representing Berlin: Sexuality and the City in German Modernism 1896-1930. Philip Tew is Course Director for the MA in English Studies at the University of Central England in Birmingham, and an Honorary Reader in English and Aesthetics at the Anglo-American Institute, University of Debrecen, Hungary. He is also joint Director of the London Network for Textual Studies. He has written widely on literature and literary theory. His recent publications include B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading (2001). “Reconsidering Literary Interpretation,” in After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism (2001). Forthcoming are a book-length study of Virginia Woolf, and a chapter on novelist A. L. Kennedy for the collection Contemporary British Fiction Post-1979: A Critical Introduction which he also co-edits. He is currently working on a study of Contemporary British Fiction and its theoretical contexts.

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English Studies A Journal of English Language and Literature Editor: J.M. Blom, English and American Institute, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands

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Did Eliot know Hulme? Final Answer RONALD SCHUCHARD

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Frost's North of Boston, Its Language, and Its People DAVID SANDERS

In Search of Genius: T.S. Eliot as Publisher SUMAN GUPTA

Ezra Pound/Ming Mao: A Liberal Disciple of Confucius FENG LAN

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