Category: The b2o Review

This article was published as part of the b2o review‘s “Finance and Fiction” dossier.

The Anxiety of Inflation (On Ben Lerner’s The Lights)

Peter Makhlouf

“Then he was aware of moving at an impossibly smooth rate, and there was the Brooklyn Bridge, cablework sparkling, Liza was cursing at the little touch-screen television in the taxi, which she couldn’t seem to turn off, and he reached out a hand to help her and experienced contact with the glass as a marvel, like encountering solidified, sensate air.”

—Ben Lerner, 10:04

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift

Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,

Beading thy path—condense eternity[i]

Hart Crane’s inspired dedication to Brooklyn Bridge revisits ancient paradigms of influence. Originating as a late antique astrological concept, influence or influentia, as it was known, named the astral flux emitted from heavenly bodies. This starry stuff formed the material substrate for an otherwise immaterial soul. The common substance of star and soul underwrote the belief that stars exercise an outsized “influence” on our earthly fate, particularly our poetic faculty (or lack thereof).  Crane’s invocation transmembers[ii] the astral idiom of the ancients: the influxus stellarum (“starry flux”) filling the soul of the poet becomes the artificial lights sweeping across the bridge’s steeled thews. Modern tectonic feats become a well of inspiration for modern American poetry.

According to this ancient doctrine, starry influentia shapes both our productive and reproductive capacities, both creation and procreation. The formative thrust of influence is thus bound to the projection of futures plastic and possible or fated and foregone. In newspaper columns, among the blogosphere exegetes of the zodiac, this ancient doctrine persists into our culture today—but transformed. Witness the determinist lore that populates modern astrological occultism, which so infuriated Theodor Adorno at mid-century.[iii] Adorno detected in Americans’ starry-eyed fascination with astrology a displacement of the fatal sense of helplessness incited by capitalism and its unfettered technological domination.

Inlayed in the ocean floor beneath the Brooklyn Bridge is one of North America’s densest concentrations of fiber optic cables.[iv] The proliferation of these vast undersea networks in the last half century has been driven by the exigencies of high-volume, high-frequency trading.[v] Beginning in the 1980s, telecommunications companies carried out Promethean feats of engineering in order to outfit Lower Manhattan with one of the globe’s most sophisticated infrastructures for lightspeed internet connection. The Brooklyn Bridge is just “[d]own Wall [St. -PM],” Crane reminds us in his invocation, and financial markets have served as the engine driving continued private investment in these local fiber optic networks. For competitive advantage often comes in the form of milliseconds won thanks to faster connections.[vi] “[M]odernization project[s] will make lower Manhattan ‘future-proof,’”[vii] Verizon proudly informs us. Such infrastructures will ensure that automated future trading can progress unabated even if New York City is swallowed up by the very environmental catastrophes that these energy-intensive systems exacerbate. The ancients figured starry influence as a luciform body (αὐγοειδές/φωτοειδής)[viii]; Crane romantically re-metaphorized physical lights as stars; the pulses of light that speed along fiber optic cables and transmit reams of data (whether a poem or a derivatives trade) literalize the metaphor once and for all.

Crane’s The Bridge and Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” are the two primary influences on Brooklyn resident Ben Lerner’s recent collection The Lights[ix], which, as the opening poem “INDEX OF THEMES” informs us, is composed of:

Poems

about stars and

how they are erased by street

lights (3) […].

We awake in a desolate wasteland of light pollution, a lambent storm of celestial rays, blue light, metaphors, materials, the “soft | glow of the screen [which] comes off on our hands” (4), as ink once might have. The poet is fretfully aware that technological development has eclipsed these once stalwart symbols of poetic influence:

At some point I realized the questions were the same questions. […] I’m tracking the advent of the credit economy. The implications for folk music of the fact that stars don’t twinkle—the apparent perturbation of stars is just a fluctuation in the medium—is something we want to understand. (18)

The stars have been erased first by street lights (still quaint) and, eventually, by the credit economy’s pulses of light, darting below the East River. Fluctuating media expose this primary trope of influence as an optical illusion. What Lerner here terms “folk music” names the object of his quest in these poems: a form of collective enunciation with which the lyric voice may or may not be commensurate. But why is the evanescence of starlight a matter for folk music? And why is this the same question as delving into the advent of the credit economy?

As I explore in what follows, the lights of Lerner’s title figure nothing less than the prodigious effectivity of today’s fusion of finance and media, which generates influence at a scale far surpassing that of literary writing. Rather than understand the anxiety of influence at play in Lerner’s work within the Bloomian drama of literary history—a gigantomachia of poet against poet[x]— the theory of poetry here proposed reconstrues the post-Romantic condition of belatedness as the fate of the poet in the age of digital technology, with its propensity to colonize futures through self-realizing financial models. Lerner’s poetry vies with the financial fictions of traded futures, which foreclose upon poetry’s ability to imagine alternative worlds. [xi]

On the example of The Lights, this essay seeks to reconceive “the exhaustions of being a latecomer” (to borrow a Bloomian locution) in light of the atrophy of imaginative power precipitated by market logics. Fernand Braudel famously christened the advent of financialization “a sign of autumn,” a late-stage in the palingenetic cycle of capitalist accumulation.  For scholars of literature, such autumnal metaphorics are mainstays of the poetic tradition. In the feuilles mortes of Verlaine’s “Chanson d’Automne,” the “limp leaves” rounding out Eliot’s The Wasteland, fall surfaces time and again as a guiding trope for the burden of modern literature’s belatedness, the impotence of its influence.[xii] What could be an antiquarian project of constructing a genealogy of influence becomes rather a critique of the exhaustion of our social imaginary by economic speculation.[xiii] For the “sign of autumn” may have once figured a poet’s anxious stance towards predecessors. But today it names not only an anxiety in the face of finance’s power, but the consciousness of how the poetic act relates to the possible end of today’s economic system, of final-stage late capitalism in its lateness.

I. Voice (Flatus vocis)

Lerner is an undeniably intelligent bard of the digital age, whose recent writings offer a diagnosis of the increasingly belligerent tenor of our public discourse. His 2019 The Topeka School proleptically sketches the political consequences of our frenetic mediasphere, while his recent parable of the internet age, “The Hofmann Wobble,” asks what it means to write imaginative prose in an era in which contemporary literature and the information economy both depend on the discursive production of fiction.[xiv] His works of the last decade evince a “promethean anxiety”[xv] as to the perceived superiority of technology’s productive and creative—that is to say, poetic—capacities. Implicitly naming a literary dynamic, this anxiety is not simply directed at print literature’s uncertain place in the world of technical media (a facet of our media ecosystem that can be dated at least to 1900[xvi]), but at the fusion of finance and media particular to the past half-century of economic reforms. “Iridescent unregulated financial derivatives,” in Lerner’s words, are responsible for the “vast human poem” woven by today’s platform capitalism.[xvii]

Such platforms thus inherit the vision of a collectively laboring chorus envisioned by Bloom on the first page of his book proper: “Shelley speculated that poets of all ages contributed to one Great Poem perpetually in progress.”[xviii] We are far from a hermetic doctrine of poet against poet. The Lights asks what remains of poetry’s ability to shape collectivity (the implicit concern of Bloom’s above quote) in the face of the internet’s idée fixe of connectivity. “Imagine a song,” opens an early poem:

that gives voice to people’s anger. […] The anger precedes the song, she continued, but the song precedes the people, the people are back-formed from their singing, which socializes feeling, expands the domain of the feelable. (6)

In an age of rage and ressentiment, what generates collective forms of feeling is not poetry but the algorithms of social media so finely attuned to the mutual circulation of anger and profit.[xix] The poem remains uneasy about the potential for song being swallowed up by “talk” (6), the dizzying torrents of online chatter that found group identities through targeted feedback loops.[xx] The verb “socialize” rather impishly suggests that the social-democratic dream and the social-media nightmare are photographic negatives of one another.

The book’s third poem “Auto-Tune,” serves as an ars poetica for the whole. The title refers to the famous audio processing program used to correct the infringements of timbre and pitch once cherished as uniquely expressive elements of the voice.[xxi] The vocal frequency domain thus “signifies the recuperation of particularity by the normative” rather than Barthes’s “grain of a particular performance” (8). The verdict is delivered in an affectless prose whose line breaks coincide only too comfortably with punctuation. Instead of the age-old communitarian paradigms of sacred polyphony that unite individuals in a choral mass, Auto-Tune’s dumb mathematics sum up the world’s voices to produce the statistical illusion of human totality—in a single voice. The poet would like to occupy this position of enunciation, at once singular and collective, in order “to sing of the seismic activity deep in the earth and the | destruction of the earth for profit” (8). But the tweaked voice that could do so depends on the very computational logic that is today at the forefront of “permanent wars of profit” (11).[xxii]

This vocal bereftment is articulated in the language of influence. Lerner tries his hand at myths of priority. Caedmon, “the first poet in English” (8), discussed at length in his 2016 essay The Hatred of Poetry[xxiii], re-appears in “Auto-Tune” as one asked to sing “the beginning of created things”:

Here my tone is bending toward an authority I don’t claim

(“founding moment”),

but the voice itself is a created thing, and corporate; (9)

The reference to Cadmon is a mythologizing feign that allows Lerner to shroud the dilemma of technology’s monopoly on utterance in the garb of prophetic inspiration. Despair is re-cast as the hallowed origin of a poet otherwise riven by the stress of molestation and “authority”.[xxiv] For in the end, one “can only sing in a corporate voice of corporate things” (9). The pun has a way of truth about it. A better vision of collectivity is foreclosed upon if corporate control monopolizes the means and media to do so. If poetry can’t offer a vision of a better world, then all we are left with is “the sound of our | collective alienation” (10).

Not simply the voice but the breath that propels it returns throughout the collection as the medium of these “bad forms of alienated collective | power” (55): in the toxic waste of Fukuyama inhaled continents away (38, 55) or “all the beautiful conspiracies, which means ‘to breathe together,’ the ancient dream of poetry” (71). Social media’s conspiracies see to fruition what poetry could only fantasize. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner returns time and again to Whitman’s oneiric politics of an “I” that could serve as metonym for corporate fictions such as the nation or humanity. In the poetry, the problem returns as one of the medium. Lerner remains enthralled by a 50-second phonographic recording of Whitman reciting lines from his “America”:

what I miss most

is the distortion, noise of the wax cylinder,

the flaws in the medium that preserve

what distance it closes […]. (37)

The repetition of dis- in metrically proximate positions twice in three lines leaves a sonic trace such that “what distance it closes” stutters into “what distance it discloses.” Nostalgia’s love affair with distance is a kind of media effect because media bring us close to a given reality while also holding us at bay (the fate of celebrity images, Whatsapp voice notes from lost lovers, pornography, and Eucharistic adoration). Here, the media effect of nostalgia is a nostalgia for lost media effects. The distributed totality of poetic voice that Lerner dreams of through the Whitman recording is as chimerical as a longing for the phonograph in the digital age, or the living voice in the age of the phonograph. For all has been converted to bits of data anyway.

To hear Whitman’s voice, Lerner undoubtedly listened to one of the many recordings available on Youtube. Perhaps no such recording is more famous than the one found in a conversation between Paul Holdengräber and Harold Bloom at the New York Public Library, when Holdengräber plays the recording for an initially oblivious Bloom who only later realizes what he has heard: “Oh! That was the voice himself!” he exclaims, “Play it again.”[xxv] This primal scene of influence between the great theorist of the agon and “the voice himself”—did Bloom envision a capitalized V?—is shaped by medial conditions. Only fitting for the man whose memorious powers won him the popular image of “Literature, Incorporated” thanks to the medial metaphors of tape recorder and computer invoked in the endless string of articles hyping Bloom’s monstrous poetic recall.[xxvi] Indeed, Bloom found himself embroiled in his own anxieties of influence when, in answering his question “And what is Poetic Influence anyway?”, he was sure to distinguish his approach from the industry of “allusion counting […] that will soon touch apocalypse anyway when it passes from scholars to computers”. But Bloom’s anticomputational anatomy, like Lerner’s dream of a mass medium that could synthesize the masses, proffers figments of total vocal incorporation only to retract them through the spectral drift that recording technologies introduce into vocal presence. For technologies of inscription preserve authenticity on the condition of reproducibility. The a priori of the recorded lyric “I” reaching a collective audience is that it forfeits its status as authentic speech.

II. Lights (Influence)

Today, primordial scenes of influence do not involve the voice etched in the record but the cool blue-white of the laptop open to Youtube. The guiding trope of The Lights figures the prodigious effectivity of today’s culture of the screen—the TV, the smartphone, the laptop—in shaping communities, leveraging affects, channeling desires, fostering communication and crafting selfhood. Screens unite us in forms of greater or lesser sophistication, whether through network effects or the sheer fact that we’re all plugged in to an increasingly centralized mainframe.[xxvii] What is the place of poetry in today’s United States where Whitman is a recording (now watched, now heard) on Youtube and online influencers have arrogated to themselves the clout (and money) of the sorts that the literary ilk may once have earned?[xxviii] In a recent interview about the book, Lerner slinks towards an answer when asked about the collection’s persistent figuration of the lights as extraterrestrial contact. “Who or what are ‘the lights’?,” asks the reviewer, “Are they actual aliens? Muses? Ghosts?” Lerner replies:

All of the above. The lights are definitely the imagination of alien contact. In the title poem of the book, they are presented most explicitly as extraterrestrial. But it’s also about the human possibility of a certain kind of mis-reading—how we experience atmospheric effects or light pollution or whatever as a sign of possibility or mystery. Unexplained phenomena represent a kind of otherness or alterity, but then come back to us as just a way of understanding our own alienated version of the self or collective. Bad forms of collectivity can become a figure for collective possibility, an old and inexhaustible idea.[xxix]

We learn little that’s new here. The poems themselves reflect time and again on the warped perceptions and paranoid delusions fostered by online networks and the glowing screens that grant us access to them. Striking here, rather, is Lerner’s eminently Bloomian locution “mis-reading,” a gloss on “mis-prision,” which Bloom defines as “a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation […] self-saving caricature […].”[xxx] Mis-prision is one of the many useful lies for parrying influence.[xxxi] Lerner’s imaginary of alien presences and ancient muses is a salvific etiology, a way of disavowing the fact that the lights are the screens and light pulses with which today’s poet must vie. This disavowal forms the flimsy pretext for reintroducing the Romantic language of (poetic) mystery or the MFA theoryspeak of ‘alterity’ in order to endow contemporary poetry with the hieratic sway of which fiber optic networks have dispossessed it.

Lerner’s response distances accordingly: the lights are not UFOs but rather “the imagination” thereof. Just as the imaginary of extraterrestrial contact is already a psychic displacement of our own collectivity, so is Lerner’s myth of alien contact a swerve away from the reality that digital infrastructures possess a near monopoly on crafting collectives. But just as…so clauses are, as every good high school literature student knows, rhetorical operations, which, it turns out, replicate at the level of figurative language a metaphoric operation inherent to computational technology itself.

I’m referring here to the manner in which the vast majority of us, civilians in matters of digital media, only have access to the ineluctable material infrastructures of fiber optic cables and computer hardware through the prosopopoeitic (>προσωποποιία, “to fashion a face, personify”) functions of the aptly-named interface. The reference of the eponymous “lights” slides from the “actual” pulses of light to the lit-up display of the screen on which are projected the metaphoric translations of computer processing. As Wendy Chun has argued, it is precisely the inaccessibility of the “Real” of computing that is responsible for the close link between fiber optics and paranoia.[xxxii] Re-formulating what Jameson first formulated as “cognitive mapping,” one could say that paranoia re-figures material processes as secret conspiracies in the same way that computers re-figure hardware as software.[xxxiii] The resulting “technical delusion” metaphorizes the relationship of media and power through an occult imaginary of spirits, flows, waves, aliens (in short: influences)—a representational process “deluded” because fictional, while also generative of the sorts of political delusion endemic to our conspiratorial Zeitgeist.[xxxiv]

Thus, Lerner’s anxiety of influence here is scarcely reducible to the dominance of new media over print or even the present-day forms of influence that threaten to outstrip the literary. Rather, it is in no small part the prodigious effectivity of these metaphorizing operations that challenges poetry on its own grounds. (Need we recall that at least as far back as Aristotle metaphor was considered the bread and butter of poetics?) It is with this in mind that we can read Lerner’s poetry anew, beginning with the title poem in which this luminescence is granted its faux-etiology:

At least the white poets might be trying to escape, using

the interplanetary to scale

down difference under the sign of encounter and

late in a way of thinking, risk budgets

the steal, the debates about face

coverings, deepfakes, we would scan

the heavens, discover what we’ve projected there

among the drones, weather events, secret programs […]. (14)

The hope that the singular white poet may speak for the body politic is ironized along with visions of the interplanetary.[xxxv] Extraterrestrial imaginings conveniently produce a humanity devoid of difference given that, from the perspective of the aliens, we are indeed a single race. In the wake of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol Building, no one reading the fifth line can help but hear “The Steal,” another myth—facilitated by the media landscape—of alien invaders trying to seize power. (Who the aliens are depends on your party registration.) But against whom is the charge of belatedness levied? Is “late in a way of thinking” to be read in apposition to the poets who only now repurpose technical delusions as a literary technique? Or is it the commoditized “risk” traded in the form of personified light pulses (today’s form of personified capital) that are dismissed as epigones?

Literature and the internet uncannily resonate, as poetry anguishes over the influence of other media and the internet agonizes over the influence of anti-Semitic bogies, secret cabals. Both produce fiction: verse on the one hand, “deepfakes” vel sim. on the other. In 1973, Bloom insisted that “the meaning of a poem can only be another poem,”[xxxvi] his own swerve away from McLuhan’s pronouncement one decade earlier that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium.”[xxxvii] McLuhan illustrated his claim on the example of “electric light [which] is pure information.”[xxxviii] Lerner’s “lights” level the difference between their competing sentences anyway.

For at the extreme, contemporary poetry is this mis-prision of literature’s impotence in the face of computers:

I came into the cities at a time when stray military transmissions

were confused for signs of alien life, a kind of poetry

I came into the cities at a time in which all but the poorest among us

had been colonized by blue light […]. (55)

But one need neither be an “intelligent” poet (the critical consensus on Lerner) nor possess an Eliotian idiom in order to employ aliens as a last-ditch effort to influence the public: all Orson Welles needed was a radio. In a now infamous 1938 CBS broadcast, Welles presented his adaptation of War of the Worlds. In the play’s carefully scripted opening sequence, an announcer “interrupted” the program to relay to listeners that alien troops had descended from Mars and begun their conquest of planet Earth. Panic ensued when a number of the listeners believed that Martians had indeed landed in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Already in 1938, the test of literature’s enduring relevance was whether it could adapt to a new media format so as to leverage influence, where leveraging influence was defined as the ability to incite mass hysteria.[xxxix]

The transition from two-way wireless to one-way broadcasting formed the media-historical backdrop against which the War of the Worlds episode unfolded.[xl] From its advent, radio had been the object of popular fantasies of catching stray Martian transmissions. As radio transformed into a strictly receptive device for commercial programming from a select few companies, unease about the corporate control of this mass medium arose in turn. The paranoid reception of Welles’s broadcast thus figured the political economy of influence as an alien “invasion” in the homes and ears of the American listener, in part by reaching back to an imaginary of radio’s capacities prior to corporate control. In metonymically collapsing alien transmissions as a kind of poetry[xli], Lerner’s figuration follows the same arc in a different direction: he usurps for his art an effectivity akin to corporate-backed mass media. The efficacy of Welles’s extraterrestrial fable depended on a narratological metalepsis, a seeming intrusion of the extra- into the intradiegetic as the narrator “interrupts” this fictional program. Lerner’s collection proves to also depend on such a narrative legerdemain.

III. Money (Inflation I)

“THE DARK THREW PATCHES DOWN UPON ME ALSO,” (a quote from Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”) the longest and in some respects most significant poem of the collection, originally stems from Lerner’s unclassifiable 2014 work 10:04.[xlii] Part Four of the autofictional novel recounts the author’s residency in the city of Marfa, Texas, a cultural hub famous for the phenomenon of the Marfa lights. Believed to be atmospheric distortions of the headlights beaming across from Highway 67, the Marfa lights have been ascribed to an array of otherworldly phenomena, from UFOs to ghosts to errant spirits of the departed. Lerner the poet is keen to hold on to this “misapprehension” of “our own | illumination returned to us as sign” (36). What he terms a misapprehension is a process of re-estimation, the dumb medium of light now endowed with the significance, value, and meaning in which poetry transacts.

An allegory of influence emerges. For Bloomian misprision is fundamentally founded on a manipulation of values (“an ironical over-esteeming or over-estimation”[xliii]). Marfa’s light pollution and the static of Whitman’s recording, debris produced as technological side effects, here become the sources of poetic inspiration. Lerner’s quest for a medium of collectivity culminates in the ultimate fiction of value:

I deliver money to boys with perforated organs:

“unionism,” to die with shining hair

beside fractional currency, part of writing

the greatest poem.

[…]

the small sums

will grow monstrous as they circulate, measure:

I have come from the future to warn you. (33)

Much of the poem, like the 10:04 chapter from which it derives, is devoted to Lerner’s reading of Whitman’s 1892 autobiography “Specimen Days.” Of special importance is the scene in which Whitman darts through the wards of the Union wounded to leave behind “fractionals,” banknotes issued in place of the coinage that had fallen victim to currency speculation since the start of the Civil War. It is in this dissemination of money that Whitman comes closest to Lerner’s dream of fictionalizing a social body. “[W]riting | the greatest poem” is akin to investment, while the representative capacity of national currency serves as salve for the perforated bodies of the soldiery, metonymically: a body politic fractured by Civil War. Fear not that Whitman usurps his epigone’s task, for the contemporary poet rises up in admonishment in the final quoted lines: rampant inflation secures Lerner a victory, as poetic worth is measured in sheer number.[xliv] The voice from the future offers a poetic calque on influentia and its cognate inflatio. Indeed, our current use of the word “inflation” to mean the devaluation of currency derives from the monetary crisis of the Civil War, for which fractionals served as a stop-gap measure.[xlv] (Lerner terms it a time when “inflation rages” (30).) But since inflation’s inverse mathematics swell numbers while diminishing real value, we’re left wondering who exactly can be said in the end to possess the greater share of influence.

Both words ultimately derive from infl(u)are, to flow or breathe in(to), and carry with them an entire lexical field of currents, gusts, winds, and ultimately: specters, spirits and ghosts.[xlvi] According to the guiding conceit of the Marfa lights and the spectral projection that makes them possible, the poetry of The Lights is revealed to be but a secondary effect, like wave interference, produced by the circulation of money and its attendant inflated values. Just as these scenes of literary encounter with Whitman and other predecessors become imbricated in the dynamics of the credit economy, so too does the task of fictionalizing collectivity. In “Autotune,” Lerner’s ponderous “dream of a pathos capable of redescription, | so that corporate personhood becomes more than legal fiction” reveals him to be a careful reader of Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies. Among Kantorowicz’s exhaustive catalogue of corporate political fictions, we find his account of fiscus, the body of wealth and goods that figure the national body, a premodern precursor to today’s national treasuries. With the fiscus began a strand of political thought connecting corporatist metaphors with the circulation of money that ran through the veins of the body politic.[xlvii]

Poetic subjectivity’s constitution by the alien invasion of influence renders poetic personae dependent on porous passivity, that immoral seizure of the self that Wilde took to be the marring stain of influence.[xlviii] Like Whitman before him, Lerner retropes this passive “loafing”—which he defines in the corresponding passage in 10:04 as “a condition of poetic receptivity” (168)—as an active embrace shuttling between the one and the many. Being open to influence through one’s “perforated organs” becomes the sine qua non for the poetic production of the commons:

the almost-work of taking everything personally

until the person becomes a commons,

a radical “loafing” that embraces the war

because it also dissolves persons, a book

that aspires to the condition of currency. (36)

But the persistent figuration of poetry as monetary circulation warns us against reading for the intersubjective psychology of the Bloomian account. The classical desiderata of literary hermeneutics—assessing authorial subjectivity, qualitative influence (strong vs. weak poets), and semantic value—yield to an economy of social forms: personifications of the body politic, literature’s inflationary rhetorics, and the quantitative scaling-up of (internet) influence.[xlix]

When returned to its place within the narrative economy of 10:04, Lerner’s poem proves to be obsessively concerned with inflecting the the anxiety of influence towards the anxiety of inflation. Taken as a whole, 10:04 itself is organized by a plait of subplots. First, as Arne De Boever has amply reconstructed, the work is fixated on the financialization of the novel and the possible inflation of its value in the interstice between the virtual (the future novel for which Lerner receives a handsome advance) and the actual (the novel, 10:04, which we have in our hands).[l] Constructing “futures” through influence—a financial term to which Lerner returns time and again—extends to the second subplot: his attempt to impregnate his best friend Alex by various means. In accord with the ancient lexical field of influentia, the starry flux said to bear the immaterial soul was believed to be contained within the sperm. (The Latin word influxus named both the starry flux descending to earth and the act of insemination.) The final subplot concerns literary influence in the most literal sense, as the narrator hatches a plan to forge his own papers so as to sell his archive (at a premium) to a willing librarian.

Inflatio, influxus, influentia—three subplots each in some way organized around the financialization of influence, broadly conceived. The impregnation subplot is markedly queer, as we readers are left wondering whether the narrator’s “abnormal sperm” reaches its destination thanks to the wonders of financialized medicine (costly IUI treatments) or good old-fashioned sex, both of which he and Alex indulge in. “Biological and textual mortality”[li] are thematized in tandem, and the novel’s inflection of influence towards alternatively financial, biological and literary-historical senses probes narrative possibilities for fictionalizing the future beyond self-realizing market models. The late Mark Fisher, in his now epochal Capitalist Realism, made a compelling case for reading narratives of sterility in film and literature as a displaced “anxiety” of the inability to imagine a different future.[lii] Fisher invokes Bloom explicitly, whose poetic theory is based in the forging of genealogical relations between past, present and future through the medium of influence. Admittedly, Alex is not sterile; she becomes pregnant; a future is possible. The question is simply whether the obsessive talk of money grafted on the discussions of insemination means that the financial imaginary now completely dictates how that future may be envisioned.

Within the intradiegetic fiction of the text, all that the narrator produces upon his publisher’s advance is the poem “THE DARK THREW PATCHES DOWN UPON ME ALSO,” included in Lerner’s future collection The Lights. And though the narrator insists, “[n]obody is going to give me strong six figures for a poem,”[liii] Part IV, set in Marfa, is prefaced by an apodictic “Money was a kind of poetry.”[liv] What does it mean to inflate poetic value in this manner? Consider the textual history of the novel. Part III’s autofictional short story “The Golden Vanity,” rife with metaleptic intrusions of the narrator in his story, appeared first in the June 11, 2012 issue of The New Yorker, prefaced a day earlier by an interview in newyorker.com with the author(-cum-narrator?) Lerner about the interplay between self, author and narrator[lv], the very triad at play in this short story about an author forging his correspondence for money. The short story was subsequently included in this autofictional novel, organized around the same rebarbative triad of personae and devoted to recounting the writing of the very novel we have in our hands (10:04), within the frame of which all that is written is a poem (“THE DARK…”) published in Lana Turner Journal ahead of the novel and subsequently included in The Lights. Discourses on autofiction (which have shaped the reception 10:04 as much as The Lights) have tended to remain mired in moralizing plaints about narcissism.[lvi] But this refraction of writerly selves deserves, rather, to be understood as a function of how fiction is financed[lvii], how influence is inflated, in the contemporary literary market.

IV. Debt (Inflation II)

“Bundled debt” is Lerner’s choice phrase, repeated twice in the collection, for a form of society produced through money, one of “the bad forms of alienated collective power.” The imposition of financial policies since the 70s has led to a constitutive shift in the capital structure of social welfare, which no longer relies on interest-free state investment but rather the ruthless predations of financial markets. What facilitates this process is securitization, the transformation of debt into tradable assets on the market.[lviii] Securitization structurally shifts the risk of economic investments from private creditors and financial firms to state actors while, conversely, eliminating social services through austerity, privatization, and increasingly personalized indemnity. “Bundled debt” thus represents a kind of perverse contre-jour (the title of one of the poems on the Russian revolutionary Victor Serge) in which we find the image of our own socialized existence returned to us in the form of expropriated debt. Lerner manages to capture at the level of syntax the very ambiguity of the figure here in question (I cite again the lines quoted above):

late in a way of thinking, risk budgets

the steal, the debates about face

coverings, deepfakes, we would scan

the heavens, discover what we’ve projected there

among the drones, weather events, secret programs […]. (14)

One way of understanding the enjambed “risk budgets | the steal” is that the budget for risk in today’s debt economy is itself the steal (taken as predicate), the plundering of public wealth for the sake of a few private beneficiaries. According to the other reading, with its implied reference to the 2020 election, risk accounts for (“budgets” as verb) the public paranoia of “the steal” as an intrinsic part of how the financialization of debt and online media produce these deformed specters of society and its others. Together, economic deprivations are experienced by vast swathes of the disenfranchised American population as personal slights, a sense of being “owed” by elites, Communists, immigrants, Democrats, Jews, whomever “we’ve projected there.”[lix]

These lines rest on a delusional metaphorization of political economy into a paranoid panoply of figures (aliens, aura, waves), a process that could be traced back to the attempt to represent the otherwise unrepresentable hardware of digital technologies. Part and parcel of this metaphorization process is the re-figuration of predatory financial mechanisms (a material process) as the scheming of a secret cabal (a spectral undertaking), a process precipitated by recent developments in the economic sphere. For the fiscal orthodoxy regnant in recent decades figures class warfare as a neutral monetary policy, concealing economic machinations (a material process) beneath the necessary ghost of the “invisible hand” (a spectral undertaking). Post-Bretton Woods and, even more intensively, in the years following the 2008 crisis, the liberalization of credit through state treasuries has rendered monetary policy—most often under the pretext of combatting inflation—a feverishly politicized domain of financial decision-making. Inflation generates political delusion due to the delusional re-casting of austerity measures as apolitical, objective necessities.[lx] Of such concern to the modern poet is the manner in which bundled debt, risk, and currency—inextricably fused as they are with the digital media of today’s computer networks—are able to exercise an outside influence on the citizenry through this financial fabulation.

Thus the drama of influence staged in Lerner’s verse pits the poet not against the rival literary predecessor, as Bloom’s poetic agon would have it, but rather against the forces of finance. Bloomian agon here bends towards a political agonistics as theorized by Chantal Mouffe, who employs the term to name the interminable conflict of dissenting actors necessary for democratic participation.[lxi] Actualizing a political latency in Bloom’s theory, Lerner’s poetic agonistics stages the monopolization of the democratic sphere by capital personified. In opposing finance’s usurpation of the place of poetry, he agonistically opposes its usurpation of the space of democracy.

Lerner takes up this line of thought again in “The Circuit,” which opens with a fantasy of porous boundaries between flesh and light worthy of David Cronenberg. The dream of “hit[ting] the body | with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet | or just very powerful light” is a verse arrangement of Trump’s April 2020 musings on the possibility of healing a body politic then ailing from the pandemic. Indeed, what passes for politics today is the passing of light through the body, from fiber to screen, screen to retina, corporate device to corporate collectivity. (Who knows this better than Trump and Musk?) The effulgent light of poetic influence is usurped. Fiber optic pulses can translate any media, any linguistic utterance, into the same form. Thus the late nineteenth century task of upholding semantic intractability against the language of the mass media is now defunct. Even if the poet offers a reboot of Mallarmé’s opposition to newspeak and writes in the language of today’s information systems—”malware | poets uploaded into language” (65)—the point remains that:

the fascist reaction and I

was mimetic of what I thought I opposed

with my typing […]. (66)

The singular “was” implies a singular subject, fascist reaction and lyric “I” now fused.

Poetic programs, modernist or postmodernist or neo-existentialist (“a new language of commitment” (66)) will not save us so long as any form of inscription is completely owned by a set number of conglomerates who dictate the terms of its circulation. Nothing short of seizing the means of poetic production will change the lyric landscape. The unholy marriage of fiber optic networks and financial markets issue in the birth of

the lightning-fast trades

of bundled debt, among the most beautiful phrases

in American English […]. (65)

Figured in this debt is not just the bundle of fibers that transmit securities traded on the market, but also what the poet owes in the drama of literary influence, his penury in the face of a technology that can craft the finest phrases.[lxii] Perhaps the last historic acts of writing were the paper blueprints on which Intel engineers sketched designs for the hardware architecture of the first integrated microprocessor.[lxiii] Today’s poet can only languish in nostalgia:

I want to make that sound

of setting something down

on paper as opposed to under

glass, ghostly opposition […]. (26)

When Lerner grafts the modifier “late in a way of thinking” onto his phrase “risk budgets” or describes how in today’s media ecology,

the book idles

In the chest, the new-old decadence

The fast-slow time of it

The arriving early to lateness (74)

the temporality that he is outlining is specific to the financial episteme under which we live. “[A]rriving early to lateness” articulates, in one fell swoop, anxieties about the fate of print media as well as a prescient definition of the financial markets that transact in securities and derivatives. Futures and options, two of the key assets traded in today’s economy, depend on a temporal involution by which the future is retroactively priced as a present-day asset.[lxiv] In Bloom’s genealogical saga, the temporality of influence functions in much the same manner, as paternity and primacy become negotiable, subject to refiguration. As Edward Said once described it: “The past becomes an active intervention in the present; the future is preposterously made just a figure of the past in the present.”[lxv] While his summary of influence’s labile tempo is particularly fitting, I cite Said because he had foregrounded (already in 1976) the historical and political dimensions of Bloom’s account, over and against its reduction to a rarified theory or closing exercises in canonicity.[lxvi]

In the above-cited interview with Hitzig, Lerner speaks of the “direct threat” to the “possibility of reception and transmission today” by the “debased rhythms and flattening and aggression of such ‘platforms’.” But the threat extends beyond the local anxieties of internet chatter to a felt impotency before the task of voicing collective demands, imagining alternative futures, and refusing the retreat of each into a private corner of rage. Luddism offers little succor. By the collection’s end, we find Lerner attempting to imagine what it might mean to recognize digital media as the sine qua non of our collective vision. Whitman’s omnivorous odyssey across Brooklyn Ferry and Crane’s mystical synthesis of America in The Bridge suddenly yield to a network of hyperlinks that recompose the organicity of the folk tradition (now composed of blue light):

the words of the song from and for the future I recorded on my phone in a common dream, for dreams are commons. The screen is badly cracked and I get glass in my finger every time I touch it. Something is lost in the transcription because it doesn’t have words, but room tone is gained, a sound bed is made. That’s why I’m sending my friends links: I want all my friends linked and listening as they fan out across the bridges until it is part of the folk tradition, the blue tradition, the wordless silent part I anonymously contributed by living. […] Its basic idea is that time can be defeated for an hour if everyone breathes together, but songs are not made out of ideas, they’re made out of glass, the aerosolized glass that damages performers. (112)

The cracked looking-glass becomes the precondition for (re-)finding totality. For when the screen breaks the illusion of interface is shattered and we are forced to come to terms with the dumb materiality in our hands. Lerner’s collection forces us to consider that which is repressed in order to produce the seamless spectacle of the lit-up display, alias, The Lights.

Peter Makhlouf is Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He has published widely in both academic and public-facing venues and is currently completing his first book on the decadence problematic in twentieth century German culture. His next book project explores the category of influence at the crossroads of poetics, media, and political economy over the past century.

[i] I cite from the excellent edition Hart Crane’s ‘The Bridge’, ed. Lawrence Kramer (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 4.

[ii] Transmemberment being the at once conjunctive and dissociative rhetoric integral to Crane’s poetic vision: see Lee Edelman, Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).

[iii] See the writings collected in Theodor Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth (London: Routledge, 1994).

[iv] For a readable introduction to the physical infrastructures of the internet see Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (New York: Ecco, 2012); on New York specifically see the fascinating little volume Ingrid Burrington, Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2016).

[v] On the latest chapter, see https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-frequency-traders-push-closer-to-light-speed-with-cutting-edge-cables-11608028200

[vi] https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a7274/a-transatlantic-cable-to-shave-5-milliseconds-off-stock-trades/

[vii] https://www.verizon.com/about/news/critical-steps-completed-bringing-fiberoptic-connectivity-lower-manhattan

[viii] See Abraham Bos, The ›Vehicle of the Soul‹ and the Debate over the Origin of this Concept,” Philologus 151, (2007), 31–50.

[ix] Ben Lerner, The Lights (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2023).

[x] It has, to my view, never been noted that Harold Bloom’s epochal The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: 1973) appeared in that annus horribilis of 1973, which fell under the influence of an ominous star. Oil shocks rippled through the developed world; the collapse of the Bretton-Woods agreement spelled the end of the gold standard; and the industrial boom of the postwar period finally sputtered to an unprofitable end. The US economy’s transition from industrial to financial capital was well underway, facilitated by the Black-Scholes equation for derivatives trading which appeared in print in the same year. So began the epoch that Ernst Mandel in his 1972 book would term Late Capitalism. Though no one foresaw this conjuncture, Bloom’s concept of “influence” would go on to play a defining role in the financial markets and digital media that were, in 1973, just beginning their precipitous rise. The fullest account of the significance of 1973 in financial history may be found in Mikkel Frantzen, “1973: A Monument to Radical Instants,” in The Birth of the Financial Thriller: Making a Killing in the 1970s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024).

[xi] See Cédric Durand, Fictitious Capital: How Finance is Appropriating Our Future, trans. David Broder (London: Verso, 2017).

[xii] For the most thoroughgoing study of this theme, see Ben Hutchinson, Lateness and Modern European Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[xiii] My aim is thus neither to seek new digital tools for the study of influence nor to trace the shifts in literary form born of the pressures of new media. For the most concerted attempt to take stock of this new media landscape, see Alan Liu, Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

[xiv] Ben Lerner, The Topeka School (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2019); Ben Lerner, “The Hofmann Wobble: Wikipedia and the assault on history,” Harper’s Dec. 2023, 23-32.

[xv] Hannes Bajohr,”Algorithmic Empathy: Toward a Critique of Aesthetic AI,” Configurations 30 (2022), 203-31, cites this term as an expression of human’s alienation in the face of technologies’ superior creative powers and thus, implicitly, as a literary dynamic emerging from the anxieties of technology’s perceived poetic capacities.

[xvi] According to Friedrich Kittler’s account in both Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 1990) and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 1999).

[xvii] “The Hofmann Wobble,” 30

[xviii] Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 19.

[xix] See Joseph Vogl, Capital and Ressentiment: A Brief Theory of the Present, trans. Neil Solomon (London: Polity, 2022).

[xx] See Brian Judge, “The birth of identity biopolitics: How social media serves antiliberal populism,” New Media & Society 26/6 (2024), 3273-89.

[xxi] On the history and cultural politics of autotune see the excellent essay by Simon Reynolds, “How Auto-Tune Revolutionized the Sound of Popular Music,” https://pitchfork.com/features/article/how-auto-tune-revolutionized-the-sound-of-popular-music/.

[xxii] See Justin Joque, Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics and the Logic of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2022).

[xxiii] Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2016).

[xxiv] On molestation and authority in the endeavor to found a literary beginning, see Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975).

[xxv] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi0AMyniYc, 4:33f.

[xxvi] See Marc Redfield, “Literature, Incorporated: Harold Bloom, Theory, and the Canon,” in Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 103-124.

[xxvii] See Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). In her “Common Sensing? Machine Learning, ‘Enchantment’ and Hegemony,” New Left Review 144 (Nov/Dec 2023), Hito Steyerl probes how tech companies are carrying out data mining operations in the Global South in order to rope populations worldwide into new financial networks that wed blockchain to AI.

[xxviii] On the economics of influence see Emily Hund, The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023).

[xxix] “Ben Lerner in conversation with Zoë Hitzig,” November (2023) https://www.novembermag.com/content/ben-lerner.

[xxx] Anxiety of Influence, p. 30

[xxxi] On the logic of lie and metaphor effected by the finance economy see Amin Samman, “Capital of Lies” in boundary2online, Special Issue: The Gordian Knot of Finance (Dec. 2024), https://www.boundary2.org/2024/12/amin-samman-capital-of-lies/.

[xxxii] On the dialectic of fiber optic enlightenment see Wendy Chung, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

[xxxiii] Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

[xxxiv] Jeffrey Sconce, The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insanity (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2019); on the poetics of paranoid ideation, i.e., the way in which paranoid politics depends on the work of imaginative creation, see Zahid Chaudhary, “Paranoid Publics,” History of the Present 12/1 (2022), 103-126.

[xxxv] A theme that returns in The Hatred of Poetry.

[xxxvi] Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 95.

[xxxvii] Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium Is the Message,” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1964), p. 8.

[xxxviii] ibid.

[xxxix] For the relevant texts, see John Gosling, Waging the War of the Worlds (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2009); for a study of the event, see Brad Schwartz Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015).

[xl] I follow here the account offered by Jeffrey Sconce, “Alien Ether,” in Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 92-123.

[xli] Note the ambiguity of “a kind of poetry” referring to either “signs of alien life” or “stray military transmissions” or the metaphoric process whereby the latter is translated into the former.

[xlii] Ben Lerner, 10:04 (New York: Picador, 2014).

[xliii] Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, xiii.

[xliv] A theme famously explored by the poet-turned-hedge-fund-employee Katy Lederer in The Heaven-Sent Leaf (Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2008).

[xlv] This is also the period when the term “fictitious capital” emerges in England; see Durand, Fictitious Capital, p. 41f.

[xlvi] See Rainer Specht, “Einfluß,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie online, https://doi.org/10.24894/HWPh.793.

[xlvii] Ernst H. Kantorowicz, “Christus-Fiscus,” in The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2016 [1957]), 164-92; cf. 342-346. Cf. Gerhard Scharbert and Joseph Vogl, “Zirkulation, Kreislauf,” in Joseph Vogl and Burkhardt Wolf (eds.), Handbuch Literatur & Ökonomie (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019), 347-51.

[xlviii] Early in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry Wotton declares: “There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral – immoral from the scientific point of view. […] Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul.”

[xlix] Franco “Bifo” Berardi has laid the groundwork for a critical theory of finance poetics in his The Uprising: Poetry and Finance Capital (Los Angeles: semiotexte, 2013).

[l] Arne De Boever, “Financing the Novel: Ben Lerner’s 10:04,” in Finance Fictions: Realism and Psychosis in a Time of Economic Crisis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 152-180.

[li] Lerner, 10:04, 55.

[lii] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: zero books, 2009), 3.

[liii] Lerner, 10:04, 137.

[liv] Lerner, 10:04, 158.

[lv] June 10, 2012: Interview with Cressida Leyshon (https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/this-week-in-fiction-ben-lerner).

[lvi] For a recent example, see Rhian Sasseen, “Extremely Online and Incredibly Tedious,” The Baffler, June 12, 2024: https://thebaffler.com/latest/extremely-online-and-incredibly-tedious-sasseen.

[lvii] Something also highlighted in De Boever, “Financing the Novel.”

[lviii] On these developments see Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man (Los Angeles: semiotext(e), 2012).

[lix] On the structural relationship between finance and political paranoia, see Fabian Muniesa, Paranoid Finance (Cambridge (UK): Polity, 2024).

[lx] On this point see the two important recent contributions of Paul Mattick, “From the Great Inflation to Magic Money,” The Return of Inflation: Money and Capital in the 21st Century (Cornwall: Reaktion, 2023), 121-46 and Stefan Eich, “Silent Revolution: The Political Theory of Money After Breton Woods,” in The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022), 177-205.

[lxi] See Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) and Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London/New York: Verso, 2013). On the necessity of contestation in opposing the anti-democratic nature of contemporary monetary politics see Stefan Eich, “Democracy and the Political Limits of Monetary Politics,” boundary2online, Special Issue: The Gordian Knot of Finance (Dec. 2024), https://www.boundary2.org/2024/12/stefan-eich-democracy-and-the-political-limits-of-monetary-politics/.

[lxii] On the implications of computer code for print media see N. Katherine Hayles, Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).

[lxiii] On this point see Friedrich Kittler, “There Is No Software,” in The Truth of the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of Presence, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 219-229.

[lxiv] On transactions between poetics and economy in the wake of financialization see Joshua Clover, “Retcon: Value and Temporality in Poetics,” Representations 126/1 (2014), 9-30.

[lxv] Edward W. Said, “The Poet as Oedipus,” (a review of Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading), NY Times Book Review, April 13, 1975.

[lxvi] See “Interview: Edward W. Said,” Diacritics Vol 6 no. 3 (1976), 30-47.

This response was published as part of the b2o review‘s “Finance and Fiction” dossier.

Matthew Potolsky–Decadent Style for Critical Finance Scholars: A Response to Signe Leth Gammelgaard

Signe Leth Gammelgaard’s “Flowers Without Meaning: Literary Decadence as Finance Aesthetics” rides a wave of work from the last twenty years or so that draws upon the longue durée history of capitalism to contextualize cultural production in innovatively materialist terms. Broadening its vision from the durable leftist influences of the Frankfurt School, Pierre Bourdieu, and Louis Althusser, as well as the deconstructive New Economic Criticism of the 1990s, this scholarship supplements questions of commodity culture, symbolic capital, ideology, and the nature of value with attention to global trade and conquest, modes of production, and the history of economic crises, often drawing on world-systems theory and theories of uneven and combined development as well. One keynote of this turn is the concept of financialization—perhaps most closely associated with the work of the economic historian Giovanni Arrighi—which directs special attention to the power of the financial industry and finance as such in the culture at large.

The most impressive recent work on financialization has tended to focus on literature of the 1980s and after, a period in which finance capital grew in power and influence at a historically unprecedented rate. But Arrighi, drawing on the longue durée studies of global capitalism by Fernand Braudel, sees financialization as recurrent feature of capitalist development, and therefore as one that has marked earlier periods as well. In her essay, Gammelgaard notes that the European fin de siècle was just such a moment and proposes that we can gain insight into the decadent aesthetic of the 1880s and 1890s by seeing it as manifestly a product of the financialized age. This is a claim with which I agree, and which I have been exploring in different terms in my current book project. In this response, I want to highlight the value of the approach Gammelgaard sketches in her essay and reframe her argument in ways that, to my mind, even better comport with how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers understood both decadence and finance capital. My largest claim will be that Gammelgaard’s account of decadent aesthetics should also be applied to the conceptual history of finance capitalism. Scholars of financialization can learn as much from decadence as scholars of decadence can learn from the literature on financialization.

Let me begin by briefly summarizing Arrighi’s argument to highlight the importance of the fin de siècle to his conception of financialization and economic cycles more generally. Arrighi argues in The Long Twentieth Century that the history of capitalism has been defined by “cycles of accumulation,” in which a succession of hegemonic centers of global economic activity rise and fall as they pass from periods of material expansion, when these centers invest chiefly in production and trade networks, to periods of financial expansion, when they turn increasingly to banking, credit, and speculation. The end of each cycle foretells a shift in political hegemony from one world city, region, or empire to another. Genoa gives way to Amsterdam, which gives way to London, which gives way to New York. At the beginning of each cycle, what Arrighi calls a “long century,” technological developments, access to newly valuable natural resources, or political innovations propel a new region to productive supremacy. That supremacy eventually underwrites a new cycle of financial supremacy, during which money, going abroad in search of greater profit, leads to the decline of the current hegemon and funds the rise of another.

As Arrighi’s history makes clear, and as Gammelgaard perceptively notes, the end of the nineteenth century was a period of financial supremacy, in which dramatic capital accumulation temporarily ensured British and European hegemony over the globe. Arrighi calls such recurrent periods “signal crises,” or, evocatively alluding to the fin de siècle and following Braudel, belles époques. The years after 1870 in Europe were marked by a succession of banking crises, stock-market crashes, and the so-called Long Depression, as well as by rampant speculation in overseas colonies and in large infrastructure projects like railways and canals. Gammelgaard accordingly reads Joris-Karl Huysmans’s classic 1884 decadent novel À rebours as a response to  economic reality that, despite its celebration of aesthetic withdrawal, is no less astute in its depiction of the financialized culture than stock-exchange novels from the period, like Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875) and Émile Zola’s L’Argent (1891).[1] Highlighting Huysmans’s descriptions of exotic flowers and the Latin language, Gammelgaard connects the novel with two coeval intellectual developments—Saussure’s structural linguistics and William Stanley Jevons marginal revolution in economics—that also point to a crisis of signification that reflects the abstracting character of finance capital.[2] Yet, while Saussure and Jevons lean into that abstracting character, Huysmans undertakes a kind of rear-guard action by insisting on the sensory and material, as if, Gammelgaard writes, he were “trying to figure out what to do with a materiality that can no longer really be understood through the models we know.”

I find this claim compelling, though to my mind it leaves perhaps the crucial question posed by the essay largely unanswered: what is it about the concept, history, or aesthetics of decadence that allows it to speak so precisely to the conditions of financialization? Many other movements in the period were immersed in sensuality (impressionism) or fascinated with images of cultural disintegration (naturalism), so these characteristics do not obviously set decadence apart. Writers like Trollope and Zola confronted the effects of late-century financialization more directly, and critics like John Ruskin pilloried bourgeois capitalism in much more incisive ways than the decadents did. Indeed, decadent writers rarely concern themselves the financial life of their characters, though matters of wealth, debt, credit, and investment do arise in their works. So, what does decadence offer that other contemporary writers and artists do not?

I want to offer two answers to this question. The first emerges from the literature on financialization itself. Since its earliest conceptualization, the notion of finance capital has been closely and persistently associated with the sense of lateness and decline. In the third volume of Capital, Marx casts finance as “the most superficial and fetishized form” of capital—a putative endpoint, in which normatively social (if alienated) relations are pushed to distorted lengths (1981, 515). Later theorists of finance capital like Rudolf Hilferding and Vladimir Lenin explicitly use the language of decadence to describe the phenomenon. In Imperialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism, Lenin describes finance as capitalism that has “grown ripe, over-ripe and rotten” (1917, 128). The word “last” (высшая) in his title is bitingly ironic in Russian, suggesting not just the end of a temporal sequence but also the characteristically decadent qualities of excess, exorbitance, and overrefinement. Arrighi, as we have seen, associates financialization with the decline of hegemonic regions, and draws his name for periods of signal crisis from the fin de siècle. In a passage that Arrighi cites as the inspiration for his project, Braudel calls belles époques “a sign of autumn,” an image that draws from the store of decadent tropes (1984, 246).

Decadence, then, is not only an aesthetic of financialization, as Gammelgaard shows, but is also part of the received conceptual framework for describing finance capital, which emerges as a manifestly decadent object. Both before and after the fin de siècle, commentators have drawn upon the concept to explain the rapid changes in the class system and generalized sense of historical transition that characterizes signal crises. The most important modern theorist of cultural decadence, the Baron de Montesquieu, wrote his influential Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734) in the wake of the so-called Financial Revolution in England, which created the Bank of England and authorized the sale of government bonds, and little more than a decade after the ruinous South Sea Bubble of 1721. In 1796, Thomas Paine published a pamphlet entitled The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance that took aim at excessive government borrowing. Braudel’s studies of capitalist economic cycles were written during the signal crisis of the 1970s, when contemporary regimes of finance began to emerge. The pattern also holds true for our contemporary era of financialization, as in works like The Hunger Games series (2008-10), where the capitol of Panem evokes decadent Rome in both its name (panem et circenses) and in the stereotypically decadent ways of its residents. The titular protagonist of Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf (2011) is modeled in large part on decadent characters like Des Esseintes.

We can draw two salient points from the persistent copresence of decadence and finance. Decadence, to begin with, provides a durable rhetoric and set of historical examples (above all, imperial Rome) for describing the excesses inherent to moments of financialization. As Montesquieu writes in his Cahiers: “in empires, nothing comes closer to decadence than great prosperity” (1951, 82). More significantly, though, it is historical concepts like decadence that allow critics to see signal crises as characteristic and recurring features of history, and not just as random accidents, signs of divine judgment, or evidence of human perversity. Tracing its lineage to cyclical theories of political history from antiquity and early modernity (Polybius, Machiavelli, Vico), the notion of decadence encourages commentators to assimilate present crises to past ones.[3] So, while financialization helps us historicize decadence, decadence also helps us historicize theories of financialization. In particular, it helps us recognize the ways in which such theories persistently frame rapid capital accumulation in terms of a familiar narrative of rise and decline. Decadence here is a cognitive map—shared by commentators on the left and the right—which interprets financialization in moral, affective, and historical terms. Finance capital is at once natural and perverse, the epitome and the exception, its demise both inevitable and richly deserved.

The second answer to the question of why decadence would emerge as a key finance aesthetic during the belle époque of the nineteenth century can be found in the aesthetics of decadence itself. Although scholars have tended to associate financialization with postmodernism, decadence offers an even more apposite model. Gammelgaard directs us to the decadent fascination with the sensual, material, and hedonistic, which she sees as a response to the loss of meaning under the regime of finance. But there are many other ways in which decadence might be seen to thematize the logic of financialization. Consider the centrality of fiction, artifice, and the lie in decadent aesthetics. In his 1890 dialogue “The Decay of Lying,” Oscar Wilde argues that reality is the “solvent that breaks up Art, the enemy that lays waste to her house” (2007, 83). “Art finds her own perfection within,” he writes, “and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance” (2007, 89). It is not difficult see a parallel between Wilde’s celebration of artifice and the characterization of finance as “fictitious” or “imaginary,” an entity opposed to what has long been termed the “real economy.” Finance, according to this pervasive opposition, is the unnatural product of art and human ingenuity, not of genuine human labor. Rather than lamenting such an apparent loss of materiality, decadent writers like Wilde parodically lean into it. They criticize novelistic realism for its retrograde commitment to fact and celebrate figures like the dandy, who treats life as a work of art. As Huysmans writes: “artifice was considered by Des Esseintes to be the distinctive mark of human genius. Nature, he used to say, has had her day” (2003, 22). He compares landscapes and sunsets to unimaginative tradesmen and shopkeepers—dealers in the wares of the “real economy.” The very difference between the “real” and the “artificial” that is foundational to traditional definitions of finance capital becomes an object of contemplation. By perversely celebrating art over nature, writers like Wilde and Huysmans thus anticipate Laura Finch’s observation that “The fictionality of finance is, of course, a fiction itself” (2015, 732).

The decadent interest in collecting and collections, which scholars have long tied to nineteenth-century consumerism, might also be understood as a reflection on financial accumulation. The sheer materiality of a collection offers more support to Gammelgaard’s claim that decadence challenges the abstractions of finance capital. But collections evoke the logic of financialization on a different level as well. Joshua Clover has suggested that financialization engenders an “autumnal” aesthetic, which transmutes categories of time into space, dissimulating the labor-time that lies at the origin of value.[4] There is no better image of this transmutation than a decadent collection, which brings objects created at different historical moments and by different cultures into a single physical space. In his 1889 essay “Pen, Pencil, and Poison,” for example, Wilde draws attention to collections of his subject, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, for whom “All beautiful things belong to the same age”: “we find the delicate fictile vase of the Greek … and behind it hangs an engraving of the ‘Delphic Sibyl’ of Michelangelo … Here is a bit of Florentine majolica, and here a rude lamp from some Roman tomb” (2007, 108-9). There are books by French poets, antique gems, and works by Turner. These objects are at once material things and evidence of the eclectic tastes of the decadent collector, whose curatorial eye subsumes temporal differences under the evaluative categories of the beautiful, the exceptional, or (like Des Esseintes’s plants) the perverse. It is such conceptual values—and not the monetary value of the objects—that justify their inclusion in the collection. In other words, the value of the collected objects, like that of many financial instruments, is more imaginary than “real.”

Perhaps the most suggestive connection between decadence and financialization, however, lies in a key nineteenth-century analytical category that Gammelgaard’s attention to linguistic signification unfortunately obscures: decadent style. The major concept under which decadent texts were categorized by contemporary critics, decadent style was (at first) a denigrating name for literary forms that transgressed against classical harmony and simplicity. Bloated, unbalanced, and marked by a superabundance of description and erudition, this style, for critics, mirrored the pathologies of its age. In the single most important characterization of decadence, Paul Bourget describes Charles Baudelaire’s decadent style, in proto-Durkheimian terms, as an index of social of disintegration: the book gives way to the page, the page to the sentence, and the sentence to the word. Friedrich Nietzsche would famously borrow this definition to define Richard Wagner’s decadent style, and along with it the atomizing nature of democratic politics.

The concept of decadent style was first proposed by the French critic Désiré Nisard in his 1834 study of first-century Latin poetry, Études de moeurs et de critique sur les poètes Latins de la décadence. When Bourget wrote his essay on Baudelaire, he was appropriating a term that was already well-established in French critical discourse. Writing at a moment that Marx, in The Class Struggles in France (1850), associates with the rise of the “finance aristocracy,” Nisard casts the style of poets like Lucan as a figure both for the decline of the Roman Empire and for the economic conditions of his own age. Marx sees the finance aristocracy as a bourgeois equivalent of the Lumpenproletariat—a group made up of former outsiders (primarily Jews, he notes), who improbably ascended to the height of cultural power after the 1830 July Revolution. Nisard sees something similar in ancient Rome. Arriving in the imperial metropole from colonial outposts in Iberia and North Africa, decadent Latin poets like Lucan and Martial subjected hallowed Roman literary traditions to their (bad) provincial taste, casting it in what Nisard terms “the bizarre jargon of the marketplace” (1834, I, 129). Nisard concludes his study with a comparison between decadent Roman poets and “decadent” contemporaries like Victor Hugo, whose poetic innovations he accuses of the same excessive reliance on description and empty erudition as his ancient forbears.

Read together, Nisard and Marx bring out something about financialized moments that does not often receive its due in critical finance studies: their disruption of the existing class structure. Finance elevates certain outsiders to new positions of privilege, for which they quickly come under attack by rival classes, who decry their “decadent” ways. Decadence in this case is the name given to formerly marginal members of society who have begun making their mark on a conceptual order that treats certain traditions, whether literary or economic, as unquestionably natural. While Nisard saw decadent style as something to be lamented, later decadent writers like Huysmans and Wilde, working in yet another moment of financialization, saw it as a cause for celebration. Des Esseintes’s Latin library, described in chapter three of À rebours, explicitly repudiates the scions of the Golden Age (Cicero, Horace, Virgil) in favor of precisely those “lumpen” outsiders like Lucan that Nisard and other critics of late-Latin style rejected. The sexologist and social reformer Havelock Ellis crystalized just this attitude when he compared Huysmans’s decadent style with the “fantastic mingling of youth and age, of decayed Latinity, of tumultuous youthful Christianity” that characterized African writers like Tertullian and Augustine (1898, 158). For Ellis, early Christianity embodies a condition of uneven and combined cultural development that anticipates the fin-de-siècle belle époque.^[5]

Like many other fin-de-siècle decadent writers—most of them queers, provincials, colonial subjects, and foreigners—Huysmans turns Nisard’s diagnostic category inside out, rendering what is typically a conservative cultural diagnosis potentially radical. The striking disruptions to the class structures that shape the culture of a belle époque may elicit apocalyptic prognostications from traditionalists (of all political stripes), but they also open up new possibilities for the formerly marginalized. This was certainly true of the fin de siècle, which saw the emergence of modern queer identity and the beginnings of anticolonial movements. Despite its common association with philosophical pessimism, the decadent aesthetic speaks to just this sense of new possibility. Condemnations of finance as the “last” or a “late” version of capitalism, which adopt the language of decadence only as a theory of bitter ends, crucially miss its longstanding association with new beginnings. As Neville Morely has put it, decadence “marks the moment when the future begins to come within reach, the point where the present weakens enough to make an alternative conceivable” (2004, 574).

In “Culture and Finance Capital,” his influential review of The Long Twentieth Century, Fredric Jameson, providing yet another example of the decadent logic of finance, maps Arrighi’s theory of economic cycles onto the familiar stylistic trinity of realism, modernism, and postmodernism. Each step in the stylistic sequence, Jameson argues, is marked by increasing abstraction, reflecting the growing dominance of finance capital. While realism retains a residual commitment to the concrete, modernism frees form and color from their dependence on objects, and postmodernism, as the terminal point in this evolution, detaches artistic styles entirely from their connection to history. Jameson gave no attention to decadent style in his essay, but he should have.^[6] More, perhaps, than any modern literary and artistic style, decadence is attuned to historical repetition, and since its earliest adumbration in the 1830s has been understood as the recurrent mark of so-called “decadent” ages—beginning, of course, with the paradigmatic case of imperial Rome. Jameson’s progressive narrative of stylistic change overlooks the cyclical nature of financialization in ways that closer attention to decadent writing would have precluded. The long twentieth century, as I noted above, raised financial markets to unprecedented prominence, but this is only an intensification of economic circumstances that have analogies in other long centuries, something both Arrighi and Braudel insist upon in their longue durée histories of capitalism. Indeed, as theorists from Paine to Lenin to Arrighi himself seem to recognize, if only at the level of imagery, decadence is the house style of financialization. Hence my concluding point: Not only should scholars of decadence follow Gammelgaard’s lead and attend closely to the literature on financialization, but scholars interested in financialization would learn much by attending more closely to the literature on and of decadence.

Matthew Potolsky is Professor of English at the University of Utah, where he teaches nineteenth-century literature and literary theory. He is the author of three scholarly monographs: Mimesis (2006), The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley (2013), and The National Security Sublime: On the Aesthetics of Government Secrecy (2019). He is also the editor of Classical Studies (2021), the eighth volume of Oxford University Press’ The Collected Works of Walter Pater; and co-editor of Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (1999).

References

Arrighi, Giovanni. 2010. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso.

Braudel, Fernand. 1984. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, III: The Perspective of the World, translated by Siân Reynolds. New York: Harper and Row.

Clover, Joshua. 2011. “Autumn of the System: Poetry and Finance Capital.” Journal of Narrative Theory 41, no. 1: 34-52.

Dowling, Linda. 1983. Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ellis, Havelock. 1898. Affirmations. London: Walter Scott.

Esty, Jed. 2016. “Realism Wars.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 49, no. 2: 316-42.

Finch, Laura. 2015. “The Un-real Deal: Financial Fiction, Fictional Finance, and the Financial Crisis.” Journal of American Studies 49, no. 4: 731-53.

Gagnier, Regenia. 2000. The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gaillard, Françoise. 1980. “A rebours ou l’inversion des signes.” In L’Esprit de la décadence I. Nantes: Minard.

Gasché, Rodolphe. 1988. “The Falls of History: Huysmans’s A rebours.” Yale French Studies 74: 183–204.

Huysmans, Joris-Karl. 2003. Against Nature (À Rebours), translated by Robert Baldick. London: Penguin.

Jameson, Fredric. 1997. “Culture and Finance Capital.” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1: 246-65.

Lenin, Vladimir. 1917. Imperialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism. London: Communist Party of Great Britain.

Marx, Karl. 1960. The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

Marx, Karl. 1981. Capital, Vol. 3, translated by David Fernbach. London: Penguin.

Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat. 1951. Cahiers (1716-1755), edited by Bernard Grasset. Paris: Grasset.

Morely, Neville. 2004. “Decadence as a Theory of History.” New Literary History 35, no. 4: 573-85.

Nisard, Désiré. 1834. Études de moeurs et de critique sur les poètes Latins de la décadence. 3 vols. Brussels: Louis Hauman.

Sewell, William H. 2012. “Economic Crises and the Shape of Modern History.” Public Culture 24, no. 2: 303-27.

Spackman, Barbara. 1999. “Interversions.” In Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, edited by Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky, pp. 35-49. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Wilde, Oscar. 2007. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, IV: Criticism, edited by Josephine M. Guy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[1] Extending her claim, we might also place À rebours in the company of more recent finance-era classics like Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), both of which recall fin-de-siècle forbears.

[2] Gammelgaard treads overfamiliar terrain here. The comparison of Jevons and Saussure recapitulates the insights of the New Economic Criticism; Gagnier (2000) explores the connection between fin-de-siècle writing and the marginal revolution; Dowling (1983) finds a key to decadent aesthetics in the history of linguistics. Other scholars—notably Gaillard (1980), Gasché (1988), and Spackman (1999)—explore the unusual workings of language and signification in Huysmans’s novel.

[3] On the extent to which economic crises function as historical events, see Sewell.

[4] Clover associates the term with W.B. Yeats, a writer deeply influenced by 1890s poetry, but finds his chief examples of autumnal style in postmodern figures like Pynchon and Ashbury.

[5] In his 1895 introduction to The Class Struggles in France, Friedrich Engels compares contemporary socialists to early Christians: “The Emperor Diocletian could no longer quietly look on while order, obedience and discipline in his army were being undermined…He promulgated an anti-Socialist—beg pardon, I meant to say anti-Christian—law” (1960, 41). The origin for this analogy is probably Ernest Renan, but it was clearly popular at the fin de siècle. It is worth asking, in this regard, whether Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development might not also have a decadent lineage. Trotsky’s literary criticism from the 1920s demonstrates an extensive knowledge (mostly critical) of fin-de-siècle literary forms, and his familiarity with such works might well have inflected his discussion of the peculiarities of Russian development in The History of the Russian Revolution (1930). He offers there a strikingly “decadent” theory of economic development.

[6] Jameson does make a surprising reference to Wilde in “Culture and Finance Capital.” Noting that Marxist critics have tended to avoid the exploring the stylistic implications of modes of production because it requires too many mediations, he writes that this avoidance is “no doubt in the spirit in which Oscar Wilde complained that socialism required too many evenings” (1997, 253). Gammelgaard’s account of decadence, it is worth noting, would, in Jameson’s sequence, be most akin to realism. For an effort to think cyclically about the resonances of fin-de-siècle forms, specifically about their opposition to realism, see Esty (2016).

This article was published as part of the b2o review‘s “Finance and Fiction” dossier. The dossier includes a response to this article by Matthew Potolsky. 

Signe Leth Gammelgaard–Flowers Without Meaning: Literary Decadence as Finance Aesthetics

In chapter eight of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, the protagonist Jean Des Esseintes muses on his collection of hothouse flowers. The novel is one of the most prominent examples of the literary decadence of the late nineteenth century and such artificially cultivated flowers (as well as the hothouse itself) are a recurrent motif in decadent literature. In his “Préface écrit vingt ans après le roman” Huysmans himself describes the flowers of À rebours as “aphonic” or “mute” (atteinte d’alabie, muette). This imagery of organic flowers, cultivated to mimic artificial flowers as the text explains, conjures up a rather striking scene which epitomizes the decadent aesthetic. This aesthetic can be understood, I want to propose, in light of contemporaneous economic developments, specifically the intensification of the impact of finance – as portrayed in other literary works from the same period, for instance the classic stock-exchange novels of Émile Zola’s L’Argent or Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now.

In what follows, I use Giovanni Arrighi’s model of financial expansion as a recurrent phenomenon throughout the history of capitalism. The final decades of the nineteenth century were one period of such expansion, where a major part of the money capital became invested rather in financial instruments and assets than in material production. The late nineteenth century, then, in some ways productively mirrors our current period of financialization which began in the 1970s, even if it is not understood as the same period of financial expansion in Arrighi’s framework (Arrighi 2010, 6–7). The significant rise in the impact of finance in the latter half of the nineteenth century occurred especially in the imperial centers of France and Britain. This rise has been portrayed in various ways in the literature of the period, and particularly within the framework of the realist novel, a subject of numerous studies in the past decades. In new economic criticism, the Victorian period specifically has been the focus of several important works, like Mary Poovey’s Genres of the Credit Economy and Catherine Gallagher’s The Body Economic. However, less attention has been paid to the literary fin de siècle, the stylistic developments of decadence and aestheticism.

In this article, I propose to outline some key parallels between the aesthetic traits of these movements and the concurrent development in the economic system, in particular the steady rise of financial instruments, trades, and structures. I start by analyzing the core decadent aesthetics traits as opposed to earlier realist aesthetics, and then contextualize these by their relationship to the development of Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics. I then show how Saussure’s linguistics parallel another theoretical shift, namely the marginal revolution in economic theory. Finally, I will examine how these three shifts respond to larger economic trends in the period; specifically, the switch from an emphasis on material production to an emphasis on financial investment and instruments.

The parallels between linguistic and economic systems have been illuminated before. My central point in this article is that the decadent aesthetics, specifically, render a representational shift in a way that generates an existential and perceptive view on this period and on its changes in both economics and language; namely a loss of meaning. It also presents a strategy of response to such a situation in the form of a renegotiation of the relationship between signs and material reality.

The mute flowers of decadence

Huysmans’s À rebours is a peculiar novel. While it has often been described as plotless,[1] the frame of the narrative in fact provides a simple storyline and the epitome of a decadent one at that. As the last scion of an old, degenerated family, Jean Des Esseintes delves into various extreme and debauched lifestyles before he, weary with the depraved Paris life, retreats to a house he buys outside the city, in Fontenay. The majority of the book details his decorating of this house and his aesthetic choices and sensory experiences with various stimulants: art, literature, colors, interior design, gemstones, flowers, music, perfumes, culinary delights. Finally, however, his body is worn out by his excessive enjoyment, and he is urged by his doctors to return to a normal life and “to enjoy himself, in short, like other people” (Huysmans 2009a, 173).

The flower chapter outlines very clearly how these aesthetic experiences work. It opens by stating that, though Des Esseintes has “always adored flowers” he is now only interested in one kind: the hothouse flowers. The passage outlines this development: after his love of real flowers, he had, in his previous life in Paris and in line with his “natural inclination towards artifice,” amassed a large collection of artificial flowers “faithfully imitated thanks to the miracles of gums and threads, percalines and taffetas, papers and velvet” (Huysmans 2009a, 72–73). However, with his move to Fontenay, a new phase emerges and the narrator comments regarding the artificial flowers: “He had long been fascinated by this wonderful art-form; but now he dreamt of planning a different kind of flora. After having artificial flowers that imitated real ones, he now wanted real flowers that mimicked artificial ones” (Huysmans 2009a, 73). As such, the hothouse blooms become an almost parodical expression of a crisis of representation, with plants cultivated artificially in “the carefully measured warmth of stoves” (Huysmans 2009a, 72), to look like fake ones, that in turn look like real ones.

Des Esseintes tours the horticulturalists of the area of Fontenay and orders a collection of plants. When they arrive, the narrative describes how some “were extraordinary, pinkish in colour, like the Virginal which looked like it had been made out of oilcloth or court plaster; some were entirely white, like the Albany, which could have been cut from the transparent pleura of an ox,” some “mimicked zinc, parodying pieces of punched metal that had been dyed Emperor green and stained with drops of oil-paint and splashes of red and white lead” (Huysmans 2009a, 73–74). As such, the sensory impression of the flowers takes center stage: how they look and what they look like. Conversely, the narrative does not in any way refer to the symbolic language of flowers, that is, metaphoric, traditional or symbolic meanings of love, hope or virtue.

This point is at the center of both Suzanne Braswell’s and Robert Ziegler’s analysis of the hothouse flowers of À rebours. Ziegler underscores, by reference to Huysmans’s own preface from twenty years later and thus written after his conversion to Catholicism, precisely the muteness of the flowers (Ziegler 2015, 51–52). In this “Préface écrit vingt ans après le roman,” Huysmans notes:

It would have been difficult, in that novel, to endow an aphonic flower, a mute flower, with speech, for the symbolic language of plants died with the Middle Ages and the exotic flora dear to Des Esseintes were not known to the allegorists of that age. (Huysmans 2009b, 190)

Ziegler’s analysis portrays this muteness through comparison to Huysmans’s later work, in particular the novel La Cathédrale, where the flowers and plants have become re-endowed with meaning through the work of religion, through Huysmans’s conversion. However, as the quotation shows, the mute flowers adhere to a modern condition, albeit the modernity that began already with the end of the Middle Ages.

Braswell’s analysis takes a broader view on this modernity and traces discourses on the symbolic language-of-flowers. Her reading stresses specific changes in these discourses precisely towards the end of the nineteenth century and she argues that, while Stéphane Mallarmé’s work nuances and elaborates the earlier traditions, the flowers in À rebours in turn “attack the tradition and parody its discourses, particularly those promoting the healthful and chaste aspects of horticulture” (Braswell 2013, 76, 83). The point that emerges is that these elaborate, exotic, and artificially cultivated plants have become such a perverse manifestation that they no longer signify; rather, they look like various forms of dying or diseased flesh, rendering distinct “necrotic dimensions” as Braswell terms it (Braswell 2013, 83). In the novel, this is seen in the passage on the next round of flowers to arrive:

they simulated the appearance of fake skin scored by artificial veins; and the majority, as though eaten away by syphilis and leprosy, exhibited livid flesh marbled with roseola and damasked with dartres; others were the bright pink of scars that are healing, or the browning tint of scabs in the process of forming; others were blistering from cautery or puffing up from burns (Huysmans 2009a, 74).

This imagery of decaying organisms, diseased tissue and putrefying flesh, however, links the floral passages to linguistic developments as they are described both in À rebours and in the movement of decadence more generally. In a previous chapter Des Esseintes meditates on his literary preferences, specifically among the Latin authors of the Roman decadence. Here, the narrator explains that:

Des Esseintes’s interest in the Latin language remained undiminished, now that it hung like a completely rotted corpse, its limbs falling off, dripping with pus, and preserving, in the total corruption of its body, barely a few firm parts, which the Christians took away to steep in the brine of their new idiom. (Huysmans 2009a, 31)

The advent of Christianity is given a key role in the development where the language of the Pagan Rome “decomposed like venison,” in fact “falling apart at the same time as the civilization of the Ancient World crumbled into dust, at the same time as the Empires, rotted by the putrefaction of the centuries, collapsed under the onslaught of the Barbarians” (Huysmans 2009a, 28).

The decadence of a civilization is thus matched by the decadence of its linguistic forms – forms that are in turn described in the same language as the appearance of the mute flowers, the flowers that have lost their metaphorical meanings. However, the idea of a decomposing organism of language is not specific to Huysmans. Indeed, in his Decadence and the Making of Modernism, David Weir comments on an earlier example of decadent criticism, namely Theophile Gautier’s essay on Baudelaire from 1868 (Weir 1995, 88–89). In this essay, Gautier, similar to Des Esseintes’s reflections, connect the decadent Latin literature to the literature of his own time. Moreover, he examines Baudelaire’s relationship to the “masters of the past,” in whom he cannot find an adequate model for his own period, since these masters had been born “when the world was young,” and “when as yet nothing had been expressed” (Gautier 1908, 38). Gautier writes further:

The great commonplaces that form the main stock of human thought were then in their first flush, and sufficed for simple geniuses addressing a people yet childish. But by dint of being repeated, these general poetic themes had become worn, like coins that have been too long in circulation and have lost their sharpness of outline; besides, life has become more complex, contains more notions and ideas, and is no longer sufficiently reproduced in artificial compositions inspired by the spirit of another age. (Gautier 1908, 38)

The metaphor of the worn-out coin instantly establishes a parallel between the representational system of money, and that of language. In the original French the wording is “perdent leur empreinte” rather than “lost their sharpness of outline”, so the image underscores how the coins have gradually lost their imprint, their stated value, effecting a mismatch between the form and content of the coin: its “meaning” has been skewed. The passage thus describes a shift in representation, and Gautier links this shift to a decadent Zeitgeist.

With recourse to Roland Barthes’s “L’Effet de réel,” this gap between form and content can be inscribed in a larger narrative. While Barthes’s short essay revolves mainly around his conception of the reality effect, towards the end of the text he speculates on a more general meaning of this particular effect. He argues that realism, conceived around the notion of this reality effect, is in fact a forerunner to the problematized representation of his own time, described in Barthes’s words as a “disintegration of the sign – which seems indeed to be modernity’s grand affair” (Barthes 2006, 234). Furthermore, he states, “the goal today is to empty the sign and infinitely to postpone its object so as to challenge, in a radical fashion, the age-old aesthetic of ‘representation’” (Barthes 2006, 234).

Barthes describes the concept of the reality effect, key to his understanding of realism, in a way that aligns with the decadent aesthetic seen in Huysmans’s flowers, namely that of a mute, unsignifying materiality. The reality effect thus invokes the material world not to signify anything specifically in a narrative context but merely to denote the reality of the stated utterance. Barthes writes:

Semiotically, the “concrete detail” is constituted by the direct collusion of a referent and a signifier; the signified is expelled from the sign, and with it, of course, the possibility of developing a form of the signified, i.e., narrative structure itself. […] in other words, the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism: the reality effect is produced, the basis of that unavowed verisimilitude which forms the aesthetic of all the standard works of modernity. (Barthes 2006, 234)

What Barthes describes here is essentially a “flat” material world, a disenchanted and meaningless observation of the purely material properties. However, Barthes’s analysis identifies this aesthetic through the conception of the “absence of the signified.” To understand this in more depth, I now turn to Ferdinand de Saussure’s original conception of the dual sign consisting of signifier and signified.

Saussure’s structuralism and the disintegration of the sign

Saussure’s most famous work is presented in the Cours de linguistique générale, a work based on a series of lectures given by him between 1906 and 1911 and compiled from notes by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Though Saussure never published this work himself, the course has had a large significance for various fields outside of linguistics and, according to letters and notes that have since been found, Saussure started thinking about issues in general linguistics already in the final decades of the nineteenth century – in other words, contemporary to the decadent movement (Culler 1976, 15). In fact, economics seems to have been an inspiration for the ways in which Saussure wanted to redefine linguistics, and in the Cours he refers to the content of the linguistic sign as its “value,” but only insofar as the signified, the concept or meaning of a sign, has a value exactly because it is part of a system of language and compared to other values and signs (Saussure 2011, 114–17).

The Saussurian innovation resides largely in the dual nature of the sign: it consists of two parts, namely signifier and signified. According to Saussure, language is not made up of connections between signs and the material world but is rather a system of signs comprised by signifiers and signifieds. The signifier is the sound-image (the image of sound exists even if it is not pronounced) and the signified is the mental concept, meaning what we think of when we hear the sound-image. The relation between these two parts of the sign is arbitrary; though there are some onomatopoetic words, in general the relation between a specific word and its mental concept is random. Saussure refers specifically to the signified as the “meaning” or “content” of the sign, which then has value in a system (Saussure 2011, 65–78, 114–17). As such, the signified also holds the mediating function of language, the process by which we interpret arbitrary signifiers into meaningful content which we can then draw upon in our interaction with the physical world. When the reality effect in the decadent aesthetics is conceived as a “direct collusion” between referent and signifier, a lack of a proper signified, it signals a loss of narrative meaning.

However, for Saussure this understanding also enables a new conception of linguistics itself. Language can be understood as a structure or system in which each sign has meaning only in relation to other, different signs. The material world – termed “the referent” in semiotics ­– lies beyond the scope of linguistics according to Saussure, as it is the structure of language that should be studied in this discipline. Hence, structural linguistics brackets the idea of an underlying material reality: Linguistics should thus not be concerned with the connection between referent and signified, or for that matter between referent and signifier, but should only study linguistics as a differential relationship between signs. It is the difference of one word from that of another that gives it its meaning, not its connection to any actual thing.

Barthes’s analysis shows a very explicit use of Saussure’s dual sign: the duality of signifier and signified enables an analytical description of what is happening when representation becomes problematic, when the materiality becomes mute and meaningless. The conception that the “form of the signified” is the narrative structure itself is, moreover, interesting in the sense that, while Barthes’s examples in the essay refers to realist works that do have a storyline or plot, À rebours is often described as a novel without a plot. While it is a feature of realism (and only realism) in Barthes, I argue that the reality effect is a core component of the estrangement of the mute flowers in À rebours. In Huysmans’s novel (and in decadence more generally) the reality effect becomes not only a specific aesthetic strategy but the whole point of the narrative: it is central to the loss of meaning that drives the novel.

Following the work of scholars like Mary Poovey and Jean-Joseph Goux, I would now like to contextualize this shift from the meaningful narrative of realism to a decadence describing a loss of meaning beyond Saussure’s contemporaneous structural linguistics, namely in a parallel to the economic sphere (which is present in Saussure’s theory, as I have already shown).

The liquid values of marginal utility

Around 1870, the field of political economy spawned a significant new set of ideas that, similar to the decadent literature, augurs a new relationship between material reality and language or signs, in this case the language of values and economics. Independently of each other, three theorists in three different countries simultaneously developed theories based on the notion of marginal utility: W. Stanley Jevons in England, Léon Walras in Switzerland, and Carl Menger in Austria. The basic tenet of these theories is the idea that the value of anything can be determined by the thing’s marginal utility, that is, the utility of the “last available item” of a specific commodity. The amount and availability of something thus becomes the central parameter, because its utility will decrease with the amount available. Thus, when there is plenty of water, even though it is necessary for survival, its value will be low. On the other hand, when water is a scarce resource, its value will be incredibly high. The value of a commodity is thus expressed by the commodity’s exchange value, its price in a market (Jevons 1999, 143). The notion of value in this way becomes tied to the concept of scarcity.

With the marginalist perspective the value of something thereby shifts away from the earlier focus on the cost it takes to produce it, and towards the intensity of the desire that it can create – essentially the shift goes away from production and towards consumption, and this has consequences for the relationship between prices – the monetary sign – and material world of commodities. To understand precisely what the shift in economic theory entails and how it parallels decadent aesthetics and structural linguistics, a brief review of Marx’s notion of value is useful.

While the earlier field of political economy spearheaded by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Robert Malthus, and Karl Marx had many disagreements, the prior theories all revolved around the concept of a labor theory of value. Marx divided the concept of value into three separate notions, namely “use value”, “exchange value”, and “value” itself (Marx and Engels 1996, 45–51). The latter one is at the core of his theory of capitalism as it elucidates how the exchange between capitalist and worker takes place. Capitalism, according to Marx, is the specific situation where the worker has nothing to sell but his labor power, and where the capitalist, conversely, holds the means of production including the necessary capital to establish a production of some commodity. Labor power is also a commodity and it is the only commodity a worker can sell. Contrary to other commodities, however, labor has the specific feature that it can produce more value than it takes to reproduce it – basically, a laborer can work more and produce more than what is required for her own reproduction and survival. This “more” is what Marx defines as surplus value, and the relationship between capitalist and worker is defined by the fact that the surplus value falls to the capitalist. While the basic level of reproduction is historically and geographically variable, the central mechanism remains the same, even if the worker is granted higher wages for her own reproduction (Marx 2016, 885).

However, the way Marx links the concept of labor time to value is central, because it shows how the whole economic system is linked to the material needs of a given society, and thereby anchors the theory in material reality. For labor to be the basic universal equivalent, namely the thing that enables the exchange of two qualitatively different commodities, Marx introduces the concept of abstract labor time. This concept expresses the amount of labor time necessary for a given society to uphold its current state and it is thus an abstract concept, not possible to measure in any exact way. The value of a given commodity is the labor time it takes on average to produce it, expressed as a fraction of the total socially necessary labor time of a society. Thus, the value of a specific commodity is not larger if it is produced by a slow worker than a similar one produced by a fast worker (Marx and Engels 1996, 48–49). As such the concept of abstract labor time both lodges the labor theory of value in a concrete material reality (namely the necessary amount of labor to sustain a society) and gives a commodity an underlying value described as a part of this necessary labor. It is this relationship to reality that changes with the new economics, and that change can in turn be related to the shift from realist narrative language to decadent mute description.

According to Marx the exchange value will over time stabilize around the actual value of something. Indeed, he states in volume one of Capital that “the labour time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of Nature” (Marx and Engels 1996, 86). Thus, while exchange values (that is, the prices) does figure into Marx’s theoretical edifice, they function mainly as expressions of the underlying value that has a relationship to societal value as a whole – and these expressions can be more or less representative or accurate (Marx 2016, 460). In the marginal utility theory, this calculation of labor time vanishes and production cost is assigned a different role, namely as a component of a cost-benefit analysis on the part of the producer. In marginal utility theory, also called neoclassical economics, value expresses only intensities of desire – the desire for the pleasure of consuming something versus the pain of acquiring it (the labor necessary for obtaining it), and relative to other things that can be acquired for the same amount of “pain.” These calculations of pleasure and pain then meet up with the similar calculations of other actors in a marketplace, and generates a price: the desire of the buyer for consumption meets the “pain” that the producer has put into creating it and therefore needs compensation for. The price becomes an exact expression of value, because value is no longer defined as some underlying quality, but only as the price that a good can obtain in a marketplace (Gallagher 2008, 126–27).

Jean-Joseph Goux expands on this point and claims:

Any questioning of “value” beyond a state of equilibrium momentarily offered by a market, or auction, of pure competition becomes a futile, useless, metaphysical and unscientific pursuit. For Walras, Karl Marx, like Adam Smith, remains a metaphysician; both Marx and Smith seek a unique and enduring principle that would fix value, the universal law regulating the exchange of products, which they find in the time of labour. (Goux 1997, 163)

I have dwelled at some length on this precise difference because the central shift regards a conception of labor and of the material reality to which prices refer. Thus, when we saw in the decadent literature a changed relationship between the referent and the signifier, expressed as a loss of the meaning – a loss of the signified – here we have a system of thought that is no longer interested in the relationship between signified and referent. Signs refer only to other signs in the system. As Goux portrays it, there is no longer any fixed point to which value refers, no concrete reality. Value only expresses wants, and these wants fluctuate according to scarcity (real or artificial), usefulness and, last but not least, the ability of something to create desire. Goux describes this conception of value as the “stock-exchange paradigm” as it fits with the way the stock exchange works. For Goux, this is not merely a change in economic theory, but a development that describes modernity as such, and like Barthes’s idea of “modernity’s grand affair,” it concerns a specific change in the way that signs work (Goux 1997).

However, while Saussure’s linguistics and marginalist economics both bracket the relationship of signs to the material world, the decadent aesthetics present a very precise way that the loss of a connection between societal values and material reality can take on an existential dimension and be perceived as a loss of meaning tout court. A few decades after Gautier’s aforementioned text, in 1881, a different critic of decadence, namely Paul Bourget, examines the relationships between linguistic and societal meaning through the example of Baudelaire in relation to decadence. The parallel Bourget sees between these two registers is through the image of the organism. A decadent society, he holds, is characterized by a state of affairs where the individual units, the smaller cells and lesser organisms, become independent and no longer work by subordinating their energy to the total organism. Same principle for language, he claims:

The very same rule governs the development and the decadence of another organism, language. A decadent style is one in which the unity of the book falls apart, replaced by the independence of the page, where the page decomposes to make way for the independence of the sentence, and the sentence makes way for the word. There are innumerable examples in current literature to corroborate this hypothesis and justify this analogy (Bourget 2009, 98).

This quotation, often cited and used as definition for the decadent style, describes fragmentation and lack of any conception of totality or coherent whole, and the text describes this “anarchy” as a state of decline of both the organism of society and that of language. With the parallels between the new economic thinking and the new linguistic theory of the final decades of the century, falling apart and lack of unity of the decadent aesthetics can be understood in relation to shifts in the economic sphere. However, while the marginalist theory shows a system that becomes unlinked to the material necessities of a given society’s reproduction, it does not explain what happened in the actual economy of the period and how that relates to literary expression. To explain this link, and why it results in an aesthetics of fragmentation and disunity, Mary Poovey’s work is more instructive than Goux’.

In Genres of the Credit Economy (2008), Poovey expounds on the parallels between money, economics, language, and literature in a historically grounded perspective, reading two centuries of British literary and economic history in conjunction. By doing so, Genres makes a key point about the historical dynamic between these two systems. In Poovey’s account, they do not only display parallel features, they also actively influence one another. Concerning specifically what Poovey terms the “problematic of representation” – that is, “the gap that separates the sign from its referent or ground (of value or meaning), whether the gap takes the form of deferral, substitution, approximation, or obscurity” (Poovey 2008, 5) – she states:

Unlike most Literary critics, however, I do not present the problematic of representation as a property of all systems of representation. Instead, I argue that representation becomes problematic—it presents problems that are both social and epistemological—only at certain times and under conditions that are historically and socially specific. A system of representation is experienced as problematic only when it ceases to work—that is, when something in the social context calls attention to the deferral or obfuscation of its authenticating ground. (Poovey 2008, 5–6)

The thing in the social context that can cause this awareness is mainly economic events, for instance crises, crashes, bubbles, and mania. Thus, Poovey foregrounds the notion that the representational function is historically variable, at the same time as she stresses the connection between linguistic and monetary systems. While Poovey does not operate with the Saussurian concepts of signifier and signified but rather conflates the notions of signified and referent in the above passage, it is clear that her point relates to the problem of materiality and meaning. Like the shifts related to decadent aesthetics, Saussure’s linguistics, and Goux’s reading of marginal utility theory, the sign begins to work differently. Huysmans’s novel shows, indeed, how such crises of representation can be interpreted through an aesthetics of the lost signified, in Barthes’ words the “direct collusion of a referent and a signifier.”

À rebours thus portrays a situation in which its protagonist experiences a ‘mute referent’ in place of a narrative signified for the flowers. However, for the reader of the novel the words themselves naturally still have a meaning – they still have a signified. Telling the story of a lost signified for the character – the story of a mute and meaningless materiality – thus becomes the narrative signified for the reader: the text becomes a meaningful expression about the loss of meaning in both a linguistic and an existential sense. Furthermore, while these flowers are no longer endowed with metaphorical meaning, they still look like something, namely decaying bodies, an image which is also used to describe the linguistic disintegration of representation in both Huysmans and elsewhere. In so far as these descriptions of flowers still do signify, they signify on the one hand the mute referent in a Barthesian sense, and on the other connote an imagery of disintegrating organisms. In both cases, they signal a shift in representation, a shift in the mediating function of the signified. With Poovey’s notion of economic events as a trigger for such representational issues in mind, I will now turn to the actual economic changes of the period.

The late nineteenth century crisis

The final decades of the nineteenth century saw an economic situation in the old European empires that in some central ways matches that of the US today: repeated crashes and volatile economy, a huge increase in the impact of the financial sector, staggering growth and a cut-throat price competition. In terms of imperial affairs, this period is known for the “scramble for Africa,” the intense round of colonization of African territories which increased the European control from 10 percent to 90 percent over two decades. Literary scholars and historians alike have described the massive boom in financial instruments and stock-companies, accompanied both by new legislation and the pressure for better information through a reliable, critical press (Kornbluh 2014, 1–2; Henry and Schmitt 2009; Poovey 2002, 17–18; 2008, 274; Taylor 2014). According to Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, the year 1870 augurs the financial phase of the period of capitalist development that he terms the British cycle, and this financial phase followed an initial phase of material expansion (characterized by increased production, colonial ventures and intensification of trade). The financial phase of this period was characterized by capital agencies withdrawing from investment in material production and trades, and concentrating instead on banking, money trades and finance, and such change indicates the decline of a period of capitalist development in Arrighi’s model. Drawing on the work of Fernand Braudel, Arrighi states that “financial expansions are taken to be symptomatic of a situation in which the investment of money in the expansion of trade and production no longer serves the purpose of increasing the cash flow to the capitalist stratum as effectively as pure financial deals can” (Arrighi 2010, 9). The late nineteenth century financialization thus spelled the end of the British (and French) cycle while the United States became the new power center, breeding new material growth.

The onset of literary decadence, the shift towards the financial phase, the invention of a new conception of economic value and modeling, and the birth of a new linguistic theory thus all center around these decades and the 1870s specifically. At the same time, these four events all display issues in the functioning of the signified: the role of the signified as mediator to the referent is challenged by the way that the referent appears irrelevant in marginalism and in structural linguistics, and the role of the signified is in turn replaced by images of a mute material referent in the later forms of realism and in the movement of decadence especially. However, I have yet to show the role of the signified in financialization. In order to do so I will turn once more to Marx’s writings.

In the Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865 (his only full draft for volume III of Capital), Marx analyses the dynamics of loan capital and interest and describes the basic mechanism through the model of capitalist production and surplus value. Where the typical cycle for capitalist production is expressed by the formula M–C­­­–M’, where an amount of money (M) is used to produce commodities (C), which can then be sold for a larger amount of money (M’ = the original amount + the surplus value), the expression of loan capital (that is, investments) becomes M–M’ to the lender-capitalist, where the surplus money derives from the interest paid on the loan. What disappears from the formula, then, is precisely the materiality of the commodity and, in Marx’s understanding also therefore the embodied abstract labor power required to produce said commodity. Instead, the formula expresses an amount of money that appears to be growing by itself over time. In chapter 5, part 1, he discusses the expression that the rate of interest is the “price of money,” calling this price a “purely abstract form, completely lacking in content” (“rein abstrakte und inhaltslose Form”) (Marx 2016, 458; Marx, Engels, and Müller 1992, 4:426). What is meant by this lack of content is outlined through a comparison to the prices of regular commodities governed by the following rule:

If supply and demand coincide, the market price of the commodity corresponds to its price of production, i.e., its price is then governed by the inner laws of capitalist production, independently of competition, since fluctuations in supply and demand explain nothing but divergences between market prices and prices of production (Marx 2016, 460).

Marx goes on to emphasize, then, that no such divergences exist for the “price” of capital (that is, the interest) as there simply “is no natural rate of interest. What is called the natural rate of interest means rather the rate established by free competition” (Marx 2016, 460). Marx thus outlines that the interest, the price of capital, is equal to what came to be understood as value by the marginalists, a value determined by competition and with no ties to the amount of labor needed to reproduce a given society. It is value in the sense that Goux terms the stock-exchange paradigm, and what is omitted from this conception is the labor of production, embodied in commodities, and which in Marx’s schema can be seen as the signified of money. I therefore suggest that these shifts–the shift of aesthetics, the shift of linguistics, the shift of economic theory–are in turn related to the larger shift from a society based on the production and commerce of commodities produced by labor power, to the commerce of various forms of financial products. Arrighi stresses this point of going from Marx’s theoretical model to a conception of historical phases and explains:

Marx’s general formula of capital (MCM’) can therefore be interpreted as depicting not just the logic of individual capitalist investments, but also a recurrent pattern of historical capitalism as world system. The central aspect of this pattern is the alternation of epochs of material expansion (MC phases of capital accumulation) with phases of financial rebirth and expansion (CM’ phases). In phases of material expansion money capital “sets in motion” an increasing mass of commodities (including commoditized labor-power and gifts of nature); and in phases of financial expansion an increasing mass of money capital “sets itself free” from its commodity form, and accumulation proceeds through financial deals (as in Marx’s abridged formula MM’). Together, the two epochs or phases constitute a full systemic cycle of accumulation (MCM’). (Arrighi 2010, 6)

This historical shift might perhaps also be used to understand why the theoretical framework of Capital, with its pinnacle of the labor theory of value, was not, after the 1870s, the most adequate framework to explain market dynamics, because, in a phase dominated by finance capital, the marginal utility theory more adequately explains how value is conceived since the economy is no longer organized mainly around material production. However, invoking the larger framework of the world systems as Arrighi does, reinscribes the finance capitalist systems as phases in a larger dynamic. And within this dynamic, what happens in phases of financial expansion, is that the signified of money (commodities and labor), disappears from view. We then get two new theories that explain how sign systems begin to work, and we get a decadent aesthetics that tries to renegotiate a material world that the theories are no longer concerned with.

The decadent literature, then, does not simply decouple language from the material realm like the structural linguistics or marginalist economics, but presents, rather, a different kind of connection to it. Most decadent works place a premium on the concept of sensory and sensual enjoyment, epitomized in Des Esseintes’s practices as an aesthete. While on the one hand, this enjoyment undeniably parodies consumption by taking it to the utter extreme, it can also be interpreted as an attempt to reconnect with the material world, to reinvent “meaning” as “sense” in a situation that is no longer mediated by the previous social functioning of the signified. The material world appears meaningless but at the same time menacing, strange, and incomprehensible, accessible only by the sheer sensory properties it invokes. And thus, these properties must be examined, dealt with, experienced, in “a new Hedonism” as it is termed in Oscar Wilde’s The picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde 2006, 22). The success of this “solution” however, is questionable, as most of the decadent works end on a somber note. Thus, when Des Esseintes ponders his return to normal society the book ends with his prayer to a divinity he fails to believe in: “Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who longs to believe, on the galley-slave of life who is setting sail alone, at night, under a sky no longer lit by the consoling beacons of the ancient hope” (Huysmans 2009a, 181).

Conclusion

While previous research has in various ways established parallels between language and money or economics, I have focused on decadent aesthetics because they show a very precise way that large economic changes in society can impact the ways in which we perceive the social and material world. They suggest, in particular, one way in which the subject can react to a phase of financial intensification: by a rather fetishistic relationship to materiality. In the decadent aesthetic, the properties of things in the material world become defining for our experience of them, rather than their social meaning, function, or usefulness. In decadent novels, this is also linked with excessive consumption, even hedonism. As there can no longer be found any social meaning, the only grounding principle for the subject is the sensory experience of the material world. This world, however, lacks any substantive ordering principle and becomes an excess of impressions.

By establishing the structural parallel between literary decadence and the economic and financial developments of the period, I am also suggesting that the free-floating, differential values of the Saussurian linguistics, and of the neoclassical economics, are responses to the same global developments in the mode of production. The final point I want to emphasize is that decadent literature’s way of responding to the changes I have discussed, differs from the theoretical responses in linguistics and economics by insisting on the relevance of sensory experience and materiality. In a sense, À rebours is trying to figure out what to do with a materiality that can no longer really be understood through the models we know, and it describes the loss of tethering that this social fragmentation results in. The protagonist becomes, quite literally, unhinged from a topsy-turvy world in which meaning remains at large.

Signe Leth Gammelgaard is a postdoc in comparative literature at Lund University. Her research focuses on the intersection of literary and economic history.

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This article is based on parts of my doctoral dissertation. (Gammelgaard 2020)

[1] White, “Introduction,” xx; in Wilde’s Dorian Gray, the book that so influences Dorian, and which is loosely based on À rebours, is described precisely as a “novel without a plot” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 106).