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Psychic Economies of Modernism: The Material Limits of
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PSYCHIC ECONOMIES OF MODERNISM: THE MATERIAL LIMITS OF
CONSUMER CAPITAL

By

Carey James Mickalites

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2005

ABSTRACT

PSYCHIC ECONOMIES OF MODERNISM: THE MATERIAL LIMITS OF
CONSUMER CAPITAL

By

Carey James Mickalites

This dissertation examines British and American modernist narrative to articulate
a model of the subject of modernity in relation to consumer capitalism during and
following the second industrial and technological revolution. I read Dreiser, Joyce, Ford,
Freud, Dos Passos, Lewis, and Rhys to show a range of literary interventions into the
contradictory ideologies of twentieth century consumerist abundance. These modems
narrate psychic and cultural economies of loss and acquisition, in terms of melancholia
and narcissism, gendered disembodirnent and collective identification, as effects of
capital’s expansion and flux. For each of these writers the category of the subject is
shaped by the tension between loss and surplus in a consumer economy, and subjectivity,
in turn, figures a fictional zone from which to critique a pervasive commodity culture.

The traditional understanding of modernism as an effort to transcend the alienated
experience of modernity through an authorial precision in assembling the cultural
fragments shored up against the ruins of bourgeois society can be reconfigured as a
historically immanent process of critique. Modernism, as Fredric Jameson has repeatedly
shown, is a historical product of mass commodification. But by showing the continuous
creation of new desires to stem from overproduction, modernism also exposes the
fundamental contradictions of a capitalist system that devours itself in its necessary

expansion. I thus argue that, through its figurations of subjectivity and psychic economies

of loss in anxious flux with the market, the modernist text performs a tacit critique of

capitalist expansion on its own grounds.

Copyright by
Carey James Mickalites
2005

This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my father, Carey James Mickalites, Sr.
(23 February 1946 — 17 January 2005).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................... 1

CHAPTER 1
“THE POWER AND SATISFACTION OF THE THING”:
CAPITAL AND THE LIMITS OF GENDER IN SISTER CARRIE

AND WOMEN AND ECONOMICS ............................................................. 23
CHAPTER 2

CAPITAL’S INTERIORITY COMPLEX:

JOYCE, FORD, AND THE AESTHETICS OF EXCHANGE .............................. 66
CHAPTER 3

PERVERSE PLEASURES OF SPECTACLE:

TIME AND VISION IN DOS PASSOS AND LEWIS ...................................... 109
CHAPTER 4

LOSS INCORPORATED:

JEAN RI-IYS AND THE MELANCHOLIC ECONOMY

OF LATE MODERNISM ........................................................................ 163
ENDNOTES ....................................................................................... 189
WORKS CITED .................................................................................. 194

Introduction

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” (Ulysses 34)

This project works to interrogate late capitalism and the commodity form through
the “fictions of capital” (Godden) we call modem narrative. The shift from industrial to
late capitalism hinges on the second technological revolution—which gave us
photographic mass reproducibility and the cinema, swifier modes of urban transport, and
a boom in popular and high-brow magazine publications fed on advertising revenues.
That revolution also gave us literary modernism. Woolf wrote about the pleasures of
shopping and the inequalities of sex and class structuring modern society, Joyce
painstakingly incorporated the commodity detritus of 1904 into his picture of the mental
operations of Leopold Bloom and Gerty McDowell, and Eliot gave us the dark,
fragmented wasteland of overproduction. Reading turn of the century naturalism through
early and high-modernist formal experimentation and late modernism’s interest in the
public construction of subjectivity in the face of mass production and politics, we witness
a continuing cultural preoccupation with the ways in which capital acts on the subject.
And that process of shaping subjectivity, simultaneously thrilling and threatening, part of
everyday life in the metropolis and yet uncanny, is appropriated by literary modems in
attempts to understand, aestheticize, and critique the dominant economic system of
modernity. Just as an advertising industry comes increasingly to play on the fears and
desires of individual consumers, as part of the process of generating new markets for
increasing production, the project of modernism explores and experiments with new
psychic and narrative economies to express the cultural anxieties attending the necessary

1

production of surplus.

In the chapters that follow, I read British and American modernist texts to
articulate a model of the subject of modernity in relation to consumer capitalism during
and following the second industrial and technological revolution. I read Dreiser, Joyce,
Ford, Simmel, Freud, Dos Passos, Lewis, and Rhys to show a spectrum of cultural
interventions into the contradictory ideologies of consumerist abundance. These modems
represented the impending scarcity or loss which drives and marks the interior limits of
capital by way of corresponding psychic and cultural economies shaping the subject of
capitalist modernity, specifically melancholia and narcissism, gendered disembodiment
and collective identification. For each of these writers the category of the subject is
shaped by the tension between loss and surplus in a consumer economy, and figures a
fictional zone from which to critique commodity culture as part of a pathological system.

Fredric Jameson has tirelessly reminded us of the close yet ambivalent historical
relation between commodification and modern literary production. High modemisrn, in
particular, not only follows fiom the development of mass culture and the increasing
commodification and reification of modern experience, but is arnbivalently, self-
consciously, and structm'ally dependent upon that earlier formation; the high modernist
text “signals the vocation not to be a commodity” (“Reification and Utopia” 16). He sees
this modernist effort at resistance as “reactive, that is, as a symptom and as a result of
cultural crises, rather than a new ‘solution’ in its own right” (16). Further, Jameson’s
symptomatic reading posits the subject in modem writing to be a product and expression

of late capitalism. Dreiser’s Carrie is a “closed mon ” of desires accessible to readers

only through “identification and projection” and an expression of “the newly centered
subject of the age of reification,” but “the effects of reification—the sealing off of the
psyche, the division of labor of the mental faculties, the fragmentation of the bodily and
perceptual sensorium—also detemrine the opening up of whole new zones of experience
and the production of new types of linguistic content” informing experimental and
mainstream writing of the early twentieth century (Political Unconscious 160). The
reactive modernist text and the reified psyche of modern subjectivity are thus, for
J arneson, mutually irnbricated. The impressionistic inwardness associated with canonical
Anglo-American modernism is an effort “to reappropriate an alienated rmiverse by
transforming it into personal styles,” an effort that seems “to reconfirm the very
privatization and fragmentation of social life against which they meant to protest”
(Fables 2). But this failed protest gives rise to an important ambivalence; modernism
does reinforce the “fragmentation and commodification of the psyche” but its
practitioners also “seek to overcome that reification as well, by the exploration of a new
Utopian and libidinal experience of the various sealed realms or psychic compartments to
which they are condemned, but which they also reinvent” (14). This theoretical synthesis
of commodification/reification, the psychological subject, and modernist writing, then,
makes the modemist project a “protest” against itself, “a protest against the reified
experience of an alienated social life, in which, against its own will, it remains formally
and ideologically lock ” (14).

In the wake of Jameson’s definitive work why should we continue to study the

relationship between cultural modernism and capitalist modernity? What is to be gained

by re-examining modernist conceptions of subjectivity and the subject as a product of
capital? Why should we read capital through modernism when the development of
twentieth century consumerism is a cultural and historical topic in its own right? At the
risk of exposing my own anxiety of influence, I want to take issue with Jameson’s
symptomatic reading of modernism and the subject of capital. Modernist production is
symptomatic of capital’s repetitive, expansive reproduction of commodities (and new
market segments), and the texts I read in this project figure the bourgeois subject in ways
that express the failed promises of twentieth century ideologies of abundance: through
conceptions of its desires (and how they are formed), its relation to the body, its fixations
on loss and acquisition. The consumer subject, by definition we might say, is constituted
by its relation to surplus and contingency, that contingency being embodied in the
commodity-objects that mediate social life and the subject’s relation to itself. The
conflicted figurations of the psychological subject—from the naturalism of Dreiser
through the early high-modernism of Joyce and Ford, the internalization of spectacular
time in Dos Passos and Lewis, to a psychic interiority anxiously posited on market
relations in Rhys—show modernist subjectivity as one of negotiation with the
contingency of capital. Thus, rather than reading modernism as a necessarily failed
“protest” against the reified social life of commodity culture, I suggest that modernism
inhabits and foregrounds the contradictory forces of capital, building an aesthetic out of
those contradictions, in order to self-consciously critique the system of its own making.
Recent work on modernism and material culture expands on Jameson’s

groundbreaking work. Edward Comentale, for example, reads the cultural work of the

period and its part in the violence of an expanding market based in the continuous
production and consumption of difference. Comentale draws an important distinction
between the British avant-garde and classical modernism. The former, in its violent push
for newness and formal difference, “performs the continual production of difference and
thus afiirms a market that must ceaselessly and efficiently overcome itself with new
products” (31); in turn, many modemists recognized that no radical aesthetic effort was
“immune to the expanding market” but was “quickly contained and neutralized by the
affective dimensions of advertising, fashion, and consumer demand” (7). In contrast,
“‘classical’ modernism, with its emphasis on contingency and limit . . . provides a
potential critique and alternative to modernity” (4). “The [classical] work’s very promise
of fulfillment,” he continues,
is denied by its own coldness or inaccessibility; it thus both inspires and
impedes the spectator’s desire for identification or sublimation. British
artists valued this intentional halting insofar as it could transform blind
desire into conscious choice, as it could expose the treacherous
identifications of modern culture and reground the subject within the
world. (8)

Comentale is right to point out that the market’s need to “overcome itself’ by
endless reproduction of difl‘erence poses a significant problem for literary and artistic
experimentation, and that the classical tum offers one means of resisting the process of
commodity identification through aesthetic coldness. But this take on the avant-garde

versus classicism, while it demonstrates an important internal conflict within the

modernist project, also reinscribes Jameson’s model of modernism as “reactive, . . . as a
symptom and as a result of cultural crises.” That is, by offering and withholding the
firlfillment of identification, modernist texts challenge the ideological limiting of desire to
consumer choice, but not necessarily in order to “reground the subject” in a world
somehow more real than the reified dreamscape of consumption. Rather, modernism
works to show psychic economies in flux and therefore to destabilize the ideology of the
individual in a free market. By foregrounding the material limits, embodied in the
commodity form, that structure economic surplus and the consumer subject, modernism
is a project of immanent critique. To make this argument, we need to inhabit those
contradictory material limits of twentieth century capital that shape, and are reshaped by,
literary modernism.

The psychic and narrative economies of modernism take shape within and against
the material limits of consumer capital. This latter phrase, the second halfof my title,
requires explanation. The material limits of twentieth century consumerism take two
distinct yet mutually imbricated forms. The first occupies and defines the social spaces of
consumption. Following Marx’s model of the exchange value of the commodity as
constitutively concealing the labor time of its making and use value, the booming
consumer economy of the early twentieth century is posited against its own interior
materiality of the laboring body. Mark Seltzer describes the consumer subject’s relation
to market society as a “privilege of relative disembodiment or relative weightlessness” in
consumption, a disavowal of the natural, material body through social identifications

mediated by appropriate commodities (124). This “achievement of personation,” as

Seltzer calls it, depends on the disavowed materiality of labor, constitutive of social and
individual subjectification in relation to surplus. Just as “the wealth of any wealth class is
ultimately derived flour a labouring class,” as Richard Godden puts it (2), the booming
development of department stores and advertisements appealing to “individual”
consumers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries requires the “erasing of the
memory of labour through the gratification of leisure” (4). We see this disavowed interior
limit structuring consumerist abundance across a range of modernist texts. Consider, for
example, The Great Gatsby and its figure of the “ash-grey men” laboring in the uncanny
zone between West Egg and New York who “stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens
their operations from your sight” (27), or Sophia’s observation in Good Morning,
Midnight that a thriving service economy posits leisured consumers against “the dark
background” of faceless, surplus labor (26). But perhaps nowhere is this socially
repressed, interior limit of consumer capital more anxiously evident than in Sister Carrie,
the text I focus on in chapter one. Carrie’s coming into a sense of self-presence through
her rise to stardom and identification with the magical trinkets she once could not afford
is figured in the novel against the surplus bodies of labor and unemployment. Thus,
Carrie as a closed “monad” with an inaccessible psychic interior, a psychological subject,
is a product of the necessarily repressed, the interior, material limits of consumer capital.

Carrie exemplifies the modem psychological subject as an expression of the
contradictions of capital, particularly the ideology of abundance that works by displacing
its own interior limits. In Deleuze and Guattari’s reinterpretation of Marx, capital is

simultaneously a limit and a devouring, expansive surplus. Capital operates according to

a “double movement”:
[O]n the one hand, capitalism can proceed only by continually developing
the subjective essence of abstract wealth or production for the sake of
production, that is, “production as an end in itself, the absolute
development of the social productivity of labor”; but on the other hand and
at the same time, it can do so only in the framework of its own limited
purpose, as a determinate mode of production, “production of capital,”
“the self-expansion of existing capital.” Under the first aspect capitalism is
continually surpassing its own limits, always deterritorializing further,
“displaying a cosmopolitan, universal energy which overthrows every
restriction and bond”; but under the second, strictly complementary,
aspect, capitalism is continually confionting limits and barriers that are
interior and immanent to itself, and that, precisely because they are
immanent, let themselves be overcome only provided they are reproduced
on a wider scale. (259)
As an end in itself capital is its own interior limit, and yet its reproduction requires that
that limit be widened, displaced: “the ever widening circle of capitalism is completed . . .
only if the surplus value is not merely produced or extorted, but absorbed or realized”
(234). A society that successfully and continually expands its interior limit via expanding
consumption relies on an operative tension between scarcity and abundance. Capital
constitutes the subject along the lines of this contradictory double-movement.

We see this process at work most clearly, and in its most concentrated form, in the

subject’s relation to the mass produced commodity. Regenia Gagnier, tracing the shift in
economic thinking from a nineteenth century emphasis on scarcity to a twentieth century
focus on consumer markets, argues that “scarcity became the dominant feature of
economic man’s environment only when the economy seemed ostensibly to shift from
scarcity to abundance. Only multiple consumer choice made people aware of their
relative scarcity” (20), and that “modern man would henceforth be known by the
insatiability of his desires” (4). Speculative capital—investing simply to generate more
capital—relies on the increasing production of new consumer needs and desires
supported by, among other things, advertising and improved technologies for image
reproduction. Late capitalism expands its interior limits by displacing them onto the
consumer subject. And literary modems, whether resistant to, thrilled by, or ambivalent
about new means of representation and advertising as a growing cultural text in its own
right, frequently figure new forms of subjectivity emerging with capital’s ever-widening
limits. Subjectification is part of the general process of technological modernization that
“has been seen to entail a retraining or disciplining of the subject” (Daly 59), and
produces psychic economies that register, through the cultural work of literary

. modernism, the material limits structuring surplus. The seduction of the commodity, its
personalized promises, works on a necessary failure. If modem advertising, for example,
“both exposes and remedies defects” in offering an idealized wholeness of the body and
self “which is constantly deferred,” as Tim Armstrong points out (100), this is because
the widening circle of capital (exchange values) necessarily diminishes the value of

particular commodities, as Marx had already shown. The consumer subject, and its

anxieties, is constituted in this materialized loss driving the production of surplus.
Psychic economies of modernism, ranging from the cold extemality of an early Joyce or
a later Lewis to the full-blown intermingling of consciousness and discourses that lie
outside of and precede the subject (as in Ulysses or The Waves), ambivalently figure
subjectivity in flux with capital’s voracious and continuous overcoming of its own
material limits. . .

It is in light of these external and internalized material limits of market culture
that we should approach the problem of psychic inferiority in the period. Interiority—
whether understood in terms of psychological depth, individual memory, or the mental
make-up of the subject in structural relation to the object world—is both a defining and
crisis-ridden aspect of the subject of modernity. Several critics have laid useful
groundwork in examining modernist interiority, usually along period-specific lines, and
its relation to broader concerns with politics, technology, gender, and capital. Michael
Levenson traces a shift fiom the pre-war modernism of Conrad, James, and Ford and its
“retreattothesurer. . . zoneoftheself’inthefaceofexpandingdemocracyandmass
culture to the equally reactionary classicism of Eliot, in which “the dissolution of the
boundaries of the self” and of consciousness is cencomitant with formal restraint and
discipline that works to transcend “the cult of inner experience” (61, 197, 211). More
recently, Michael Trainer has argued that modernism was always “an efl‘ort to escape the
limitations of nineteenth-century individualist conventions and write about distinctively
‘collectivist’ phenomena,” making it the artistic expression of the shift fi'om laissez-faire

liberalisrn’s celebration of the individual to collectivist politics (3). Using what Freud

10

describes as a collective unconscious released from repression in the crowd, Tratner
argues that modemists “sought to release the passions of group involvement that
capitalism had suppressed” in its emphasis on a dominating rational ego (46). Similarly,
Michael North sees the period between the wars as one of a becoming unconscious of
private and public alike; the public sphere is increasingly conceived of as irrational, “the
very source of prejudice and bias” and, at the same time, “the private self is already
thoroughly public” (70).l As each of these critics demonstrate, modernism from the turn
of the century through the inter-war period expresses a political and social shift fi'om the
individualism and presupposed psychic autonomy of Liberalism to an irrationality at the
heart of both the individual unconscious and collectivist politics. While my work in the
chapters that follow does not work to dismantle any of these arguments, I do want to
stress that the shift is not so simple. The blurring of subject-object categories, categories
that structure interior psychic zones of the modem self, make interiority a conflicted site
across the literature of the period. Whether figured as outside the contingencies of finance
and commodity exchange or as fully constituted by the market, interiority does not
disappear from the cultural imaginary, but is a zone from which modernism critiques the
dominant social system of modernity.

Psychic economies of modernism, including interiorities in flux, are profoundly
implicated with the problem of the object qua commodity. It is dificult to think
modernist subjectivity somehow beyond the pale of the commodity world (even much
avant-garde work of the period incorporates the outmoded commodity junk of the

previous generation, as Walter Benjamin and Hal Foster have shown). And if interiority

ll

as a zone of crisis is most consistently figured by modems as either retreating from or
incorporating the repetitively new objects of commodity culture, then those objects,
precisely since they blur the boundaries of subjectivity, play a central role in the
modernist imaginary. Douglas Mao usefully articulates the problem the made object
holds for modernism in the face of the constant absorption of the social and cultural
landscape by commodification. “What the object world represented for modemists above
all,” Mao observes, “was a realm beyond the reach of ideology but not secure against the
material consequences of ideological conflic ” (9). This bind is complicated further by
the relation of modernist production to commodity culture: “few if any modemists were
immune to the pleasures of consumption, [but] most also showed a profound mistrust of
the capitalist formations that made what Adomo called a ‘culture industry’ possible”
(18). Thus the profound ambivalence we have long associated with modernism centers on
“a complex relation to the culture of the commodity in which horror and surrender were
not only compounded but, at times, scarcely distinguishable from each other” (18). The
“horror and surrender” Mao rightly observes stems specifically from a modernist
engagement with the commodity-objects that embody the slippage between their
exchange value in a system of equivalences and particular material signification. Just as
John Dowell in Ford’s The Good Soldier expresses a need for “anchorage in the spot,”
the “attachments” and “accumulations” and familiar objects “that seem to enfold one in
an embrace” (27), modernism often registers a profound anxiety induced by the subject’s
psychic investment in objects whose material stability is always-already thwarted,

subsumed by the temporal contingency of surplus and exchange value. “The

12

commodity,” as Terry Eagleton argues, “is a kind of grisly caricature of the authentic
artefact, at once reified to a grossly particular object and virulently anti-material in form,
densely corporeal and elusively spectral at the same time” (Ideology 203).2 Modernist
interiority, and modernist subjectivity, is shaped and unsettled by its relation to the object
as both “corporeal” and spectral,” by the internalization of this slippage between the
material and the ghostly equivalence of exchange.

As I have suggested, the increasing distrust and reconfigurations of psychological
interiority and its integrity do not provide for a clear teleology; rather, inferiority poses a
recurring problem across and within a larger matrix of psychic and narrative economies
of modernism and of capital. In working to theorize capital through modernism, I focus.
on what I see as four of the most pressing cultural concerns of the period: gender and the
visuality of consumption, the impending loss or sacrifice structuring the system of
commodity exchange, the pervasive force of capitalist spectacle, and the threat of
economic depression. Admittedly, each of these categories could be studied throughout
the period in its own. right, and they overlap, inflect, and inform one another. So while
there is a chronology implied in my reading literary modernist production specifically in
the period between 1900 and 1939, that chronology is designed to show the shifting
conceptions of the subject in terms of those categories that register the material
contradictions of twentieth century capital in the cultural sphere. Finally, each of these
modernist configurations of the subject of capital—revealing a pathologically expanding
and devouring market—is at once symptomatic and critical. In spite of his moral

interjections, Dreiser’s text is symptomatic, positing Carrie’s reified conscious desires

l3

against the bodies invisible to the spaces of leisured consumption, bodies devoid of the
privileged markers of gender. The restrictive, impersonal economy of Joyce’s Dubliners
is less interested in exploring the psychic depth of Dublin’s lower-middle-classes than in
portraying them as subjects paralyzed by a national industry restricted to feeding the
growth of international finance (After the Race, for example, which I read in chapter
two). And Ford constructs a schizophrenic narrative around an anxious loss not only of
cultural stability (as Ford himself lamented), but also around the displacement of an
authorial, knowing subject by the system of relational exchange values. But even these
symptomatic narratives of reified psychic space, expressing the cultural unconscious of
the material limits of capital, read from our own historical vantage point, lay a certain
critical groundwork within modernism writ large. Ifthe subject is shaped by the
constantly displaced limits of capital and the homogenizing force of exchange value, and
the modern text reproduces that system, then the text also works to defamiliarize and
denaturalize the repressive system of commodity-govemed social relations. Reading such
a symptomatic production of the modernist text helps us “to understand the unconscious
as material history and history as the unconscious, as the necessarily repressed that can be
rendered visible in sites of contradiction or incomplete elision” (Brown, Material
Unconscious 5). The modern text, even as symptom, exposes the mutually enfolded
psychic and social sites of contradiction. As such we witness an uneasy modernist
engagement with the psychic economies of capital that, through a critical ambivalence of
its own historical moment, constructs stories of that moment based on its own

contradictions. This is modernism as immanent critique.

l4

Situating modernism within the material limits of capital—through its figurations
of psychic economies mediated by the commodity form—helps us to qualify Jameson’s
definitive work on modernism as a symptomatic formation of commodity culture.
Modernism historically emerges fiorn commodity culture and the shift from high to late-
capitalism, but also works dialectically within that historical moment. In aestheticizing
psychic economies as they are reified by the pervasive force of commodification and
capital’s expansive limits, modernist production works to expose the contradiction
between Enlightenment rationality and the irrational flux of speculative capital. Textual
economies of modern narrative, despite differences in technique and ideological
positioning, build an aesthetic out of the signs of wasteful overproduction and the
alristorical contingency of exchange, an aesthetic that explores the devouring logic of
commodification for its own cultural ends. As Douglas Mao points out, Lewis and Woolf,
for example, “found the explosion of making made possible by mass production
techniques at once stimulating and perverse” (135), and “existential explorations could be
prompted by the spectacles of large—scale production and the modern subject’s
bombardment by commodities” (134). And if that bombardment is figured with the
attendant failures of the commodity to live up to its promises, modernism operates, from
within, on the contradictions of capital. Terry Eagleton’s “idea of culture” is useful here;
the cultural figures as a transformative set of utopian possibilities existing within the
reality of the present and “can thus become a form of immanent critique, judging the
present to be lacking by measuring it against the norms which it has generated itself”

(22). Culture thus “can act as a critique of the present while being based solidly within it”

15

(23).

Eagleton’s historical dimension is particularly important for understanding
modernist production and its anxious relation to commodity culture. The long-held view
of the modernist text transcending the alienated experience of modernity through an
authorial precision in assembling the cultural fragments shored up against the ruins of
bourgeois society, can be reconfigured as a historically immanent process of critique.
Modern narratives of the subject of market culture work to reproduce and to hold in
tension the material limits structuring surplus. In other words, the modernist text figures
its own present to be lacking by showing that the “norm” of capital—its continual
reproduction of itself—necessitates and contains its own material limits.

We can now return to the specific cultural and psychic configurations that these
narratives both express and use to critique ideologies of surplus. In chapter one I read
Dreiser’s Sister Carrie to articulate a model of gender in spectacular consumption.
Dreiser’s novel is obsessed with the historical moment of its own making, whisking
Carrie through the newly emergent department stores, electrically lit city streets, and
fashionable districts of Chicago and New York at the turn of the century. Her rise to
stardom is marked by an increasingly disembodied status, following the process Mark
Seltzer has called an “aestheticization of the natural body” through practices of
consumption (124). Gender is both a socio-economic construct and a performative
category. The novel figures Gilrnan’s “sex-relations” as fundamentally economic and
corresponding to a nineteenth century divide between masculine public production and

feminine domestic consumption, but also shows the historically emerging privilege of a

16

performative gender in consumption. Gender is marked by “the power and satisfaction of
the thing” that is the commodity fetish, and the narrative shapes the production of
Carrie’s psychic depth and desires, self-presence and gendered performativity around the
auratic, visual appeal of commodities that “touched her with individual desire” (26). But
the commodified gendered subject is radically juxtaposed with the invisible surplus
bodies of labor, the material bodies marking the interior limits of capital and gendered
consumerism. Carrie as consumer subject par excellence and as the novel’s foremost
figure of the psychological subject thus illustrates what Jameson calls the “psychological
monad” of reified consciousness, but that status is posited on the necessarily repressed
and displaced limits of capital.

In chapter two I turn to the pre-war modernism of Joyce and Ford to discuss the
problem of the psychological subject and questions of interiority as a problem of
commodity exchange. I begin with a discussion of Georg Simmel’s model of modern
exchange, in which objective value accrues to the material object through an affective
“tinge of sacrifice.” In two-sided exchange, surplus is created through the feeling of loss
attending acquisition, and the origin of value thus seems to lie with the subject. But
Simmel’s model, which implies the Marxian division between exchange and use value,
presupposes a material object to be exchanged. I take up this problem through Joyce’s
“After the Race” and “Two Gallants,” both of which posit interiority and psychic desire
as products of the objects of exchange, namely money and the IOU. These commodity-
objects function as “support for a properly ‘extemalized’ desire” characteristic of pre-war

modernism (N icholls 179), but also as structural support for interiorized subjectivity. And

17

as embodiments of the radical contingency of value in an exchange economy, the object.
unsettles any presupposed and autonomous subjective interior. This objectification of the
subject via exchange is supported by a formal tension between a restrictive, “miserly”
economy of the text (Osteen) and its figurations of deferred surplus. I then turn to the
anxious impressionism of Ford’s The Good Soldier. Dowell’s disjointed narrative is a
result of his inability to “anchor” himself in the external object world and expresses
Ford’s lament that mass democracy and mass production—modernity—result in an
increasing abstraction and leveling of culture and psychic integrity. The problem of the
novel is not, as many critics suggest, that Dowel] is an unreliable narrator,3 but rather that
unreliability is already built into the contingent, external objects that mediate modern
psychic interiors. In bringing Joyce’s early nee-realism together with Ford’s
impressionism, I do not simply want to show stylistic and formal differences within a
conflicted modernism. For these formally and figurally different narratives both emerge
fiom a problem of the object, whose contingency undermines the psychic interiors the
object is held to support. Against the autonomous psyche of a privileged Cartesian
observer, these texts pit the subject between the materiality of the object and the
ephemerality of exchange.

Capital’s tautological spectacles simultaneously embody surplus and temporal
contingency and function as governing epistemological referents of twentieth century
collective and visual culture. In my third chapter I argue that capitalist spectacle—
advertising and cinema, for example—both begs a collective fixation and marks a

temporality of the present in its own future reification, its impending outmoded status. In

18

John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, narrative and subjective time follow the logic of
the commodity form, and the novel locates subjectivity between spectacle’s tautological
newness and its own waste. I read this commodity-govemed temporality with Walter
Benjamin’s theory of the “outmoded” in the avant garde to argue that the novel’s
figurations of the residual waste structuring the spectacular present poses a challenge to
capital’s ahistoricity. In Time and Western Man, Wyndham Lewis attacks the fetishized
temporality of spectacle in both popular culture and politics, seeing capitalist spectacle as
both cause and symptom of a regressive, irresponsible “child-cult.” But the text formally
builds its critique upon massive assemblages and constellations of the spectacular,
homogenizing, temporally contingent commodity form. By assembling internally
contradictory elements of mass culture, Lewis’s text inhabits and employs the distracted
fixations begged of spectacular capital in order to expose them as pathological regression.
On both sides of the Atlantic we thus see investments in the “perverse pleasures of
spectacle” constitutive of modem temporality and collectivity, an investment that also
yields a modernist pleasrue of critique Operative within the complacency of capital’s
eternal present.

I conclude my dissertation by reading Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight with
Freudian psychology to show the economy of melancholia structuring the novel and, in
turn, the melancholic economy of capital informing Freud’s theory. I read these texts
together to show that introjected loss and an acquisition impulse are parts of the same
economy defining the subject of capital. In Freud’s model, introjecting a lost, material

object constitutes the subject’s ego around that loss, but can also develop into manic

l9

acquisition. Rhys figures the subject’s introjection of an occluded material, bodily
particularity demanded by commodity culture as that which sustains consumption. The
second part of the discussion extends this model of melancholic-manic consumerism to
the dissolution of subject-object barriers and of bodily integrity in late modernism. I
apply Freud’s understanding of an affective, bodily ego (in The Ego and the Id) to the
novel’s figurations of residual traces of embodiment, lines in the flesh as a text of the
body. Bodily text and embodied memory work to disrupt the homogenizing,
commodified construction of the private self. The displacement of loss structuring
consumer capital defines the melancholic-manic subject; Rhys’s late modernist writing of
that subject pathologizes capital. But the traces of embodiment defining the subject
provide a material excess irreducible to the manic thrust of capital to homogenize its
subjects.

Each of the different conceptions of psychic and textual economies I trace
throughout the period show modernism as a project of immanent critique. The
dissertation explores psychic and narrative economics as they are shaped by the material
limits structuring surplus, as well as modernists’ interests in gender, the cultural role of
advertising and spectacle, and new configurations of embodiment and disembodiment.
Each of these concerns reveals the ambivalently critical role modernist production plays
in consumer capital and the reification of subjectivity, while also pointing to other texts
that might seem all too obviously absent. Woolf‘s novels, for example, narrate
disembodied leisure with an ambivalent awareness of the laboring and servant classes

that make such a lifestyle possible. Eliot’s classicism incorporates the disjecta of

20

commodity culture into its cold aesthetic form in an effort to resist what he feared as the
commercial erasure of cultural tradition. And Ulysses performs every psychic
configuration of advertising and consumerism that I discuss. Aside from the frustrating
but necessary process of selection, the reason I do not examine these and other relevant
texts is that I want to cover less critically traveled terrain. That said, readers will notice
that this project also does not work to illuminate or rescue any clearly marginalized texts
fiom the period, with the possible exception of including Dreiser with the modernist
canon. But my purpose in what follows is not to redefine modernism by making it a more
inclusive project or using it simply to celebrate alterity and difference, as should be clear
by now. Such studies are unquestionably valuable in bringing to the cultural and
intellectual fore texts previously disregarded because of inequalities of race, sex, and
social and cultural capital. But they also risk reproducing and reinscribing capital’s
“continual production and consumption of cultural difference” (Comentale 3). All of the
texts I consider work, at a more fundamental level, to link cultural and psychological
anxieties of loss, embodiment, and self-presence to a modernist understanding of the
pathological expansion of capital.

Having briefly dwelt on what the following pages do and do not argue, and before
turning to the makings of the gendered consumer in Dreiser, I want to echo the dream of
one philosophical modernist. At the conclusion to his study of Baudelaire, Walter
Benjamin describes the historical dialectic operative within capitalist modernity:

Every epoch not only dreams the next, but while dreaming impels it

towards wakefulness. It bears its end within itself and reveals it—as Hegel

21

already recognized—by ruse. With the upheaval of the market economy,

we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even

before they have crumbled. (176)
We might read this as a model for the modernism I describe in what follows. As a
multifaceted, intemally-conflicted project emerging with the repetitive'dream world of
what we have come to call twentieth century consumerism, Anglo-American modems
incorporate the contradictions and failed ideological promises of abundance in an effort
to waken subjectivity out of the expansive limits of capitalist tautology. “The upheaval of
the market economy” has not occurred, but the modems’ critical acknowledgment of
capital’s wasteful production of its own ruins dreams our own epoch. Modernism bears
the nightmares of historical modernity within itself, as an unfinished project of immanent

critique of the material limits of capital.

22

Chapter 1

“The Power and Satisfaction of the Thing”: Capital and the Limits of Gender in Sister
Carrie and Women and Economics

Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is perhaps more explicitly concerned with exploring urban
consumption than any other tum-of-the-century American novel. This concern, more
specifically, is expressed as an uncanny anxiety driving the narrative. We see this
narrative anxiety in both the text’s obsessive structural symmetry and in its
representations of characters who seek to construct social identities by way of visible
relations to commodities, relations that seem to enable, very much according to Marx’s
logic of commodity fetishism, what Mark Seltzer has called “the privilege of relative
disembodiment in consumption” (136). Indeed, this privilege inscribes every body in the
text, sometimes ironically, as it consistently denies the body’s presence, as location of the
subject of desire or even as object of commodification and desire in looking. Even in
Carrie’s rise to stardom, the process of commodification signaling her full entry into
market relations that the text ambivalently substitutes for agency, the process is one in
which her name in lights effects that subjectification by displacing an embodied status.
This signals a crisis of agency repeatedly encircled by the narrative, in which the question
of who produces that disembodied image—Carrie as socio-economic agent or the system
of exchange, capital accumulation, and commodity display often rendered in “naturalist”
terms—remains unanswered. ‘

This unresolved crisis serves to situate Dreiser’s 1900 novel within a modernist

problematic that includes questions of self-making, subjectivity and consciousness, and

23

desire in terms of the social constructions of gender within an uneasy shift from
productionist ethics to the acknowledgment of economies measured by consumption.
This shifi, however, is not teleological, as the problems in Gilman’s gendered progress
will show, but rather one that modernist texts interested in commodity-govemed social
and subject relations symptomatically reproduce, often as a way of narrating the failure to
contain the uncarmy that structures those relations. Tim Armstrong refers to this generally
as “an expression of the anxieties of modernity in relation to flows of desire and capital”
(9), anxieties which are variously registered on or around the body “as the locus of
anxiety, even crisis” (4). I read Dreiser with Gilman to foreground this crisis of the
subject around the tensions of gendered embodiment and disembodiment that emerge
with a growing literary interest in the contradictions and pathologies of capital. In other
words, in this chapter I explore the pathological anxieties that attend the privileged
disembodied status of gender as a way of exposing the signifying threat to subjectivity
and representation in an emerging of consumer economy.

To fully explore how these texts pathologize market culture and the discourse of
economic progress, we need to ask how they posit the relations between the social body
and the force of capital. How do the flows and concentrations of capital produce and
make visible the producing or consuming body? What is the structural role of surplus
bodies—the laboring, material bodies from which surplus is extracted—in representing
the privilege of relative disembodiment as marked by capital? What kinds of frictions
result from reading these texts together, and in contradiction, and how do those frictions

indicate problematic cultural relations between gender, capital, and socially produced

24

bodies? It is in exploring these questions that we see both texts involved in a project of
negotiating and interrogating the limits of gender as defined by the flows of capital. Both
articulate the economic production of gender as symptomatic of the anxieties created by
economic abundance structured on scarcity. Specifically, Sister Carrie read against
Gilman’s socioeconomic theory of sex-relations speaks to the larger social concerns of
the contradictions of capital legible in gender, the corresponding racialization of and by
gender, and the crisis that acknowledging these forces poses for narrative and a realist
project of representation. Gender serves as a performative, even liberating category in
this story of an emerging consumer economy, but is constituted by that which it
simultaneously constructs as its outside: the abject threat of embodiment that is
antithetical to the abstract privilege of capital. Reading the social configurations of
gender in Dreiser and Gilman allows us to critique the limits of capital and its
pathological construction of gender.

Recent critics of Sister Carrie interested either in the text’s ambivalent
Naturalism, or in psychologizing the characters’ object-desires, tend to ignore the
intersections of capital, gender, and the body that govern the narrative and in a way that
anticipates the economic anxieties of modernism. Karl lender, for example, reads
Hurstwood’s financial and bodily decline as “a dialectic of character and circumstance,”
calling this dialectic “distinctively modem” (64). By extension, he sees Hurstwood’s
movement toward poverty and death as a reflection of dialectical history, “a conflict
between nostalgia for a vanishing agrarian ideal and the dynamism of an emerging

consumer culture” (64), which he argues is played out in the psychology of failure and

25

denial as Hurstwood gradually retreats from any possibilities of paid work. Clare Virginia
Eby, in the first long study of Dreiser and Veblen, focuses on the psycho-social points of
intersection between the two contemporary American writers, particularly arguing for the
significance of Veblen’s “pecuniary emulation” in informing not only Dreiser’s text but
recent cultural theory as well. Applying Veblen’s theory of the psychology of social
display in consumption (his “pecuniary emulation” , she contrasts Carrie’s “hungry self-
creation” in buying clothes and acting (118) with Hurstwood’s tragic need for social 'self-
maintenance, embodied in his economic failure haunted by “the specter of [his] former
self” (133). In her constructionist position on the self, Eby reads the movement of the text
as governed by the contrast between Carrie’s self-creation in consuming (as a kind of
agency) and Hurstwood’s failure to emulate associated with his static sense of self.

Eby’s insistence on Veblenian social psychology in Dreiser usefully puts forth a
fin de siecle view of the consumer subject. But her argmnent does not fully consider the
sociality and geography of the urban flow of capital and desire in the novel. By contrast, I
argue that the text’s anxious preoccupation with the consuming subject and the
contradictions of capitalist desire shows how normative subject categories work to
disavow those contradictions, particularly the material limits against which surplus is
figured. Fredric Jameson links the psychological to the historical symptom, claiming that
“‘Carrie’ has become a ‘point of view’: this is in effect . . . the textual institution or
determinant that expresses and reproduces the newly centered subject of the age of
reification” that is partly based in the relays between that self, the body, and the exterior

language of commodification. We see this in a “modern practice of style in Dreiser, a

26

strange and alien bodily speech which, interwoven with the linguistic junk of
commodified language, has perplexed readers of our greatest novelist down to the present
day” (160-61). It is in light of this “strange and alien bodily speech” that we should
consider how commodified desire in the period shapes the social and individual body.
Irene Gammel, in a slightly different historical bent, reads Dreiser with Foucault’s work
on sexuality, in which the body and sexuality are not natural but parts of a “complex
historical construct” (32). She claims that Dreiser’s novels “[strengthen] the impression
of the body as an easily graspable, physical or natural entity, whose existence is
presumed to have been hidden behind veils of conventions” (32). This is an important
strain in Sister Carrie. But rather than chastising the novel for such ideological naivete,
it’s important that we consider its interest in the natural body as an afier-efi‘ect of capital
and its social contradictions, as something retroactively posited in support of a
disembodied consumer ideal. Other recent readings focus on the relations between capital
and technology, the body and desire, or masculine production of desire and projection of
the threats of cultural destabilization inherent to capital progress. Tim Armstrong, in an
argument focused on the commodification of electricity and its implications for desire
and self-making in the text, observes that Carrie’s ability “to turn her talent into a
commodified product, a ‘name in lights,’ signals the liberation of desire from the
domestic sphere and its deployment in the marketplace” (25). The result, he argues, is
that “Carrie is more than simply a human being, a body; she becomes a desiring-machine
whose energies are understood by the engineer. That is the real scandal of Sister Carrie,

that a human being should become a system for sustaining and disseminating desire”

27

(26). Charles Harmon, on the other hand, sees scandal in the ideological production of
gender, one that serves in the period to conceal the social and cultural contradictions of
capital. More importantly, he sees the text as reflexive of a socio-economic dependence .
on waste (bodies, selves, and objects) and the cultural management of the anxieties that
result, in which, “instead of entertainment, Carrie’s work is revealed to be flmdamental to
the stabilization of capitalism’s internalized contradictions,” and “Dreiser’s treatment of
Carrie’s rise effectively dramatizes the methods by which normalized gender
relationships were used to manage the anxieties that beset subjectivity within an
urbanizing capitalism” (131).

Much of my argument concurs with Harmon’s—especially his claim that “the
subtle utilization of gender roles” helped manage the anxieties triggered by capitalist
growth (137). But I want to ask both how gendered embodiment and disembodiment are
shaped around capital and how those categories function in market culture as the very
condition of making the bodies present. For while “normalized gender relationships were
used to manage the anxieties that beset subjectivity within an urbanizing capitalism”
(131), this also assumes the pro-existence of those gender relations that are then simply
reinvoked to contain the contradictory dependence on labor in creating a limitless
surplus.

I want to show, then, how Dreiser’s text, in light of Gilman’s economic feminism,
reveals that the consumerist body is made self-present by the movement of capital which,
through the commodity, marks and en-genders bodies. But I also stress throughout the

chapter that this self-presence is posited by way of the threat of the interior specters of

28

surplus, the paradoxical invisibility of those bodies not culturally mediated by capital.
The chapter thus moves from theorizing gendering capital fi'om the picture of the
social/pathological that emerges from reading Dreiser against Gilman, the cartographies
of modem consumption and capital, to the way Sister Carrie figures its subjects therein. I
conclude the chapter by considering the self-reflexivity of the narrative itself. The novel’s
inability to wholly reduce the subject to the social formation of bodies exposes the
interior limits of capital-constructed gender.

1.

“When a girl leaves home at eighteen, she does one of two things,” says the
narrator at the novel’s opening; “Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or
she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse” (7). While
the narrator’s explicit concern here is with virtue, morality, and the corruption of young
girls by the sexual allures of the modern city, it also raises a problem of the social body
that governs much of the text. The act of assuming a “standard,” while it grants an active
subject, also implies a pre-existing “standard,” a logical limit to subjective agency. The
seeming inability to resolve questions of agency in the modern production of the body or
its cultural image is similarly evident in Peter Brooks’s Body Work, in which he claims
that in modern culture “the material body, like the individual personality, is a final point
of reference, an irreducible integer, in views of the world that are increasingly
secularized,” and “with the decline of traditional systems of belief, the meanings of the
body no longer are assigned; they must be achieved. This means that each body must in

turn be made semiotic—receive the mark of meaning” (54). For Brooks, then, the body in

29

modernity is not an ontological a priori, but rather socially and culturally inscribed with
meaning. But at the same time he claims that the meanings of the body “must be
achieved” and “receive the mark of meaning.” This contradiction is symptomatic of a
distinctly modem problem of representing the body, a problem with which contemporary
culture and politics still struggle. That said, we can turn to Dreiser’s engendering of the
body. Moving fiom the question of her fate, the narrator passes over the bodies of Carrie
and the traveling salesman Drouet, in which Carrie is “a fair example of the middle
American class” and “in the intuitive graces she was still crude. She could scarcely toss
her head gracefully. Her hands were almost ineffectual. The feet, though small, were set
flatly” (8). Similarly fragmented, awaiting the narrator’s mark of meaning, Drouet is first
made present by his voice, then by Carrie’s being “conscious of certain features out of the
side of her eye. Flush, colorful cheeks, a light mustache, a gray fedora hat” (9). Without
“good clothes,” moreover, “he was nothing” (10). Drouet is described as an assemblage
of commodities on the surface of the body that conceal, fetish like, nothing, the nothing
of sexual desire as lack taking as its object “the indescribable thing that made up for
fascination and beauty in [Carrie]” (11).

What is this “thing” and why is it indescribable? The text resists representing the
natural body beyond the visible fragments of hands, feet, and clothing. The opening of
the narrative suggests that the material body does not exist prior to its external
representation. The bodies of both characters are spectral after-effects of the fetish
objects representing them; embodiment, sexuality, sexual difference, and desire follow

the objects and images that socially define them. From Drouet’s flashy dress to Carrie’s

30

name in lights to Hurstwood’s physical decline, the body as known entity requires a
surplus, a disembodied relation to its own commodity image to bring it into being. We
see this in returning to the opening passage of the novel, in which the well-clothed Drouet
points to his name on his business card and says to Carrie “That’s me” (12); agency
follows its external, object-representation as, most importantly, that which can be
exchanged, as Carlie “felt that she had yielded something” after receiving the card (13).

This early mention of loss, appropriation, possession, and account balances of the
self signals the gendered flow of capital in the rest of the novel, in which a positive
balance sheet indicates surplus, and this surplus is manifest in the social product, the
commodity, that is the gendered subject. Dreiser repeatedly suggests that the circulation
and growth of capital is fundamentally gendered, revealed in certain forms of control of
cultural capital, in terms that mark out a social economy of abundance structured on lack.
In other words, capital, while certainly shaping sexual desire in the text, and while not
preceding sexual identity, does serve as the condition of the latter. Gender is an effect or
product of capital and serves to contain and distance the abject, pathological surplus
bodies on which continued accumulation depends.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics both clarifies and complicates
the relations between sex, gender, the body and capital in Dreiser. The sexed body-—
categorized as masculine or feminine—in Gilman’s argument is both natural and socially
formed. Her central premise is that in industrial societies at the turn of the century sex
relations are primarily economic. Differentiated fiorn other animals, humans are “the

only animal species in which the sex-relation is also an economic relation. With us an

31

entire sex lives in a relation of economic dependence upon the other sex, and the
economic relation is combined with the sex-relation. The economic status of the human
female is relative to the sex-relation” (5). Further, women in industrial society are
implicitly likened to slaves, explicitly compared to peasants, in their economic
dependence on masculine productivity: “their labor is the property of another: they work
under another will; and what they receive depends not on their labor, but on the power
and will of another” (7), a condition that is not due “to any inherent disability of sex, but
to the present condition of woman, forbidding the development of this [masculine] degree
of economic ability” (9). This analysis is of course important in its participation in late
nineteenth and early twentieth century discourses on domestic and public space,
production and consumption, and sex-roles under attack by early feminists. Veblen
explains an economy of gender in similar terms, claiming a vicarious economic subject
position for women in which the housewife’s consumption is an expression of normative
and accumulative masculine industry outside the home (61 ). Gilman also argues that
bourgeois divisions of labor and the resulting increase in national production, technology,
and wealth have necessitated vicarious social and cultural participation: “the female
obtains her share in the racial advance only through him” (9).

It is not enough, however, to indicate a pecuniary gender operative in the period
in order to explain those conceptions of capital and gendered bodies. More importantly,
we see in Gilman’s argument the implicit but radical positing of the very creation of
gender within and by the oppressive and exclusionary flow of capital; it is not “any

inherent disability of sex” but the triangulated force of capital, production, and power, all

32

stabilized by cultural assumptions of normativity, that produce gender as disembodied
ideal distinct from the productive body yet maintaining the economical, functional role of
maternity. And it is this production of gendered identification that retrospectively posits a
natural body even as it abjects that body. Carrie’s entry into market culture illustrates this
process: aligning her name, capital-marked homosocial male space, and the movement of
the narrative over against her laboring body in the shoe factory, the narrator concludes
Drouet’s mention of her to Hurstwood prophetically: “Thus was Carrie’s name bandied
about in the most fiivolous and gay of places, and that also when the little toiler was
bemoaning her narrow lot, which was almost inseparable fiorn the early stages of this, her
unfolding fate” (50).

Dreiser and Gilman both figure an organic social system inherited from an
Enlightenment view of an atomistic social and political system of progress or growth.
What is radically different in both thinkers, and what points toward the consciously
modernist break with eighteenth and early nineteenth century figurations of the social
organism or machine is the acknowledgment of a surplus that constitutes the social body,
the cancer-like growth of capital as an end in itself. And if the body’s being made present
to itself and the symbolic order of exchange is contingent upon its image according to the
logic of the commodity and capital as surplus, then we need to ask under what conditions
this subject of capital is produced.

The economic historicizing of Dreiser read against the social-evolutionary
speculations of Gilman help articulate the social conditions through which gendered and

surplus bodies emerge on the modern stage. Gilman asserts that the pathologically

33

underdeveloped female of the human “race” is a direct result of the social concentrations
of production and capital. The continued circulation and growth of capital and “racial
progress” depend upon its inscription of gendered, categorical normativity, and her
argument sheds considerable light on my reading of Sister Carrie and its own anxious
efforts to represent the relations between gender, social surplus, and desire. Together,
Dreiser and Gilman show how capitalized gender systems rely on what Judith Butler
describes as the normative process of “assuming a sex” at the expense of other
possibilities. For Butler, the “exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed . . .
requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet
‘subjects,’ but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject” (3).

Ifwe apply Butler’s point specifically to the “domain” of capital, we see how
Dreiser’s text anticipates her notion of the constitutive outside, specifically insofar as the
outside structures gendered disembodiment. The passage describing Carrie’s first visit to
The Fair, for instance, inserts the surplus bodies, or “constitutive outside,” within the
historical expansion of consumer capital. The passage figures the coordination of capital
as the condition of the visible social spaces of consumption:

The natme of these vast retail combinations, should they ever permanently
disappear, will form an interesting chapter in the commercial history of
our nation. Such a flowering out of a modest trade principle the world had
never witnessed up to that time. They were along the line of the most
effective retail organization, with hundreds of stores co-ordinated into one

and laid out upon the most imposing and economic basis. They were

34

handsome, bustling, successful affairs, with a host of clerks and a swarm
of patrons. Carrie passed along the busy aisles, much affected by the
remarkable displays of trinkets, dress goods, stationary, and jewelry. Each
separate counter was a Showplace of dazzling interest and attraction. She
could not help feeling the claim of each trinket and valuable upon her
personally, and yet she did not stop. There was nothing there which she
could not have used—nbthing which she did not long to own. The dainty
slippers and stockings, the delicately fiilled skirts and petticoats, the laces,
ribbons, haircombs, purses, all touched her with individual desire, and she
felt keenly the fact that not any of these things were in the range of her
purchase. She was a work seeker, an outcast without employment, one
whom the average employee could tell at a glance was poor and in need of

a situation. (26)

The visual movement of the text complicates the very essentialist assumptions of

sexed desire that it invokes. The passage begins by announcing its role in narrating the

“commercial history” of the United States. The focus on the development of large

corporatemergersinthelatenineteenthcenturyiswrittenintermsofthedepartment

store, “the most effective retail organization, with hundreds of stores co—ordinated into

one and laid out upon the most imposing and economic basis.” The key here is the socio-

economic discourse of organization. The passage, and much of the novel as a whole,

carefully articulates the accumulation of capital functioning within an organic system of

units or organs of production, distribution, display, and consumption, the latter even

35

parasitically rendered as “a host of clerks and a swarm of patrons.”

The text’s movement from a telescopic to a microscopic view shows Carrie’s
desires—distinctly bodily, felt desires—to follow upon an almost magical appeal
commodity display. We could read this as an instance of a patriarchal productive system
shaping feminine desire. Rita Felski addresses this view as an irrationality that is
distinctly modem, based in a “managed desire, manipulated by a logic of calculation and
rationalization in the interest of the profit motive,” in which “women’s emotionality,
passivity, and susceptibility to persuasion renders them ideal subjects of an ideology of
consumption that pervades a society predicated on the commercialization of pleasure”
(62). She ultimately rejects this thinly veiled behaviorism in favor of one that includes
“women . . . becoming consuming subjects” (64). Felski is right to reject models of the
passive feminine consumer, partly because they tend to reinscribe the gendered economy
of growth they try to critique. But the above passage in Dreiser suggests a social
production of bodily desire that her privileging of consumption as social act of agency
can only tenuously support. Dreiser’s text posits an organic system of sales, based in the
commodities displayed, as a surplus that produces its own consumers. Carrie as body
comes into view only as desire and lack and, more importantly, as an rmcanny remainder,
surplus body without labor, an “outsider,” the repressed (invisible) yet constitutive
outside of the organs of production and consumption.

This organic system figured by the early passages in the novel contains the
surplus, material bodies that structure capital expansion and a gendered cultural system.

The text performs this in its sharp contrast between the organically figured department

36

store filled with commodity fetishes that magically “claim” the bodily desire of its
subjects, and the shoe factory as site of mechanistic production and bodily fragmentation,
the site of a material embodiment that haunts the narrative as a whole. Starkly juxtaposed
with this primal scene of consumer desire is the men’s shoe factory where Carrie is first
employed. Carrie, unlike the other workers is untrained, ineflicient, unable to adapt her
body to the mechanical demands of industrial production. Her unnamed trainer, after
voicing the basic instructions for punching eyeholes in leather uppers, “suited action to
word” (38). This collapsing of performance and linguistic representation contrasts with
Carrie’s strained performance rendered as an inability to disarticulate language-psyche
from bodily, mechanical performance: failing to keep up with the divided, repetitive
motions of the production line, “she was concentrating herself too thoroughly—what she
did really required less mental and physical strain” (40).

This juxtaposition shows the mechanical structuring the capital-gender matrix of
commodity culture. The laboring bodies in the passage, those that suit action to word,
lack any clear shape and even the cultural markings of dress, adornment, or hair that
serve visually to represent most of the characters in the text. They exist in the narrative
by way of the machines that serve as bodily extensions, able to work efficiently,
unconsciously, in a mode of mechanical embodiment. Thus, economic and productive
needs not only shape the need to labor, but produce the body that does labor; if labor is
the only commodity available, this brings commodification directly into line with the
body as its product, in Marxist terms. The passage renders the workers as a homogeneous

mass, undifferentiated bodies that are determined by the repetitive labor they perform.

37

These are the culturally repressed, abject bodies of labor against which the text’s
figuration of gender as defined by capital is built. This complicates a reading like Laura
Hapke’s, who responds to Dreiser’s descriptions of working women as “‘shapeless’ and
‘colorless’” (106), which she claims is used in Sister Carrie to maintain Carrie’s “innate
purity” (111). What such a reading misses is how the labor scene and its reduction of the
female body to its product of labor also brings Carrie’s body into being, in a logic of the
symptom that is key to understanding the relations between bodies, genders and capital in
the rest of the narrative. For one, the factory labor is prosthetic, in that the workers need
not concentrate on the work itself. But this is the mechanically embodied, perverse
underside to Freud’s observation in Civilization and Its Discontents that “man has, as it
were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is
truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him
much trouble at times” (44). Linking mechanical production to embodiment figures a
radical limit to subjectivity. This is different from Carrie’s “[withdrawal] into herself”
(42) against the implied sexual promiscuity of the other laborers, and her feeling that the
“place . . . impressed itself on her in a rough way” (40). Failing at mechanical
reproduction by “concentrating herselftoo thoroughly” signals the direct confrontation _
with the reality of material embodiment: “her hands began to ache at the wrists and then
in the fingers, and towards the last she seemed one mass of dull, complaining muscles,
fixed in an eternal position and performing a single mechanical movement which became
more and more distasteful, until at last it was absolutely nauseating” (41).

This revolting experience of embodiment structures cultural images of the

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commodified body in the rest of the novel. In articulating the role of the socially
produced body image in shaping the subject, Elizabeth Grosz argues that “without the
mediating position of the body image, [the] interactions with the organic and the
psychical would not be possible. It is by affecting, modifying, transforming the body
image, on one side or the other, that each is able to effect transformations in the other”
and that “the body image is as much a function of the subject’s psychology and
sociohistorical context as of anatomy. The limits or borders of the body image are not
fixed by nature or confined to the anatomical ‘containerjthe skin” (73-9). Grosz’s point
that the images of the body extend beyond anatomy offers a more interesting way to read
the production of laboring bodies in Dreiser’s text than readings that lament his authorial
dismissal of the laboring community. The body image posits a dynamic relationship
between the subject and the social and cultural forms of the body understood in terms of
race, gender, class, and cultural capital. In this sense, the laboring women are not only
figured, through Carrie as a “point of view,” as nameless and formless, but as a
threatening specter in which the social images of the body are collapsed into the organic
processes of bodily/economic production. The zone of performative gender offered by
capital cannot be perceived here; rather, the body as produced and producing is uncannily
linked to its mechanical embodiment, registered as the machines slowly shut down and
“there was an inaudible stillness, in which the common voice sounded strange” (41), and
this is in turn associated with the repetitive threat of identification with abjection: not
only does the factory smell of oil and leather, but “the washrooms were disagreeable,

crude, if not foul places” (41-2). Further, when Carrie withdraws into herself, it is not

39

only, as Hapke claims, because Dreiser “casts her as a princess among the serfs” (109),
but because Carrie embodies what Fredric Jameson calls “the textual institution or
determinant that expresses and reproduces the newly centered subject of the age of
reification” (160). The reified centered subject of commodity culture and the gendering
movements of capital requires an abject surplus, the threat of embodiment always
distanced by capital and commodity.

Labor clearly structures and sustains consumption, and the women laborers in
Sister Carrie are the abject embodiment of surplus, economic and biological. The near
equation of economy (capitalist production) and biology opens the question of race and
its role in discourses of progress. To bring the problem of racialized labor to the fore, we
can turn to Gilman and the way her pathologizing of gendered industrial society invokes
discourses of racial development. The radical force of Gilman’s analysis in Women and
Economics lies, we recall, in her assertion that sexual differentiation is fundamentally
economic; that is, she rejects a social-Darwinist pseudo-biologism. But a certain racial
biology still informs her text, marking a limit to her critique of masculine production.
Gilman argues that “the economic progress of the race, its maintenance at any period, its
continued advance, involve the collective activities of all the trades, crafts, arts,
manufactures, inventions, discoveries, and all the civil and military institutions that go to
maintain them” (8). But, she continues, “such economic processes as women have been
allowed to exercise are of the earliest and most primitive kind. Were men to perform no
economic services save such as are still performed by women, our racial status in

economics would be reduced to most painful limitations” (8). This progress is already

40

hindered, paradoxically, by its own internal order, in that “the more absolutely a nation
has triumphed over physical conditions, the more successful it has become in its conquest
of physical enemies and obstacles, the more it has given fiee rein to the action of social
forces which have ultimately destroyed the nation” (24). This “internal disease,” as she
calls it, is the economic sex-relation that equates woman and maternity to the exclusion
of other forms of productivity, and thus undemrining the potential for a collective,
working social order: “the woman . . . hinders and perverts the economic development of
the world” (121).

In Gilman’s critique, “race” is thus both biologically given, human, and socially
and economically constructed. Further, the category of race precedes modern
“womanhood,” casting the woman as an internally racialized other. Citing discourses of
woman-as-consumer under cultural assumptions of masculine production and progress,
she calls this nonreciprocal consumption “the enforced condition of the mothers of the
race” that is linked to “the perverted condition of female energy” (119). A culturally
disavowed primitivism is built into the discourse of progress, which she can only explain
by way of racial categories; the sexed division of labor, she claims, “keeps alive in us the
instincts of savage individualism which we should otherwise have well outgrown” (121).
Thus the. economic relegation of woman to maternity, domesticity, and consumption
(vicarious consumption in Veblen’s comparable analysis) is not only a pathological,
perverted hindrance to “racial progress,” but posited simultaneously on a comparison to
and distancing from less developed races, as she asks, “how do we, with the human brain

and the human conscience, rich in the power and wisdom of our dominant race—how do

41

we, as mothers, compare with our forerunners” (181). Finally, the “cure” for this
pathological racialization of women under industrial capitalism is economic
independence and equality in production opportunity—a natural, apathological
development of the social organism which would lead to “enormous racial advance”
(317). The acknowledgment of race as the economic precursor to gender (“sex-
relations”), and as artificially produced, is here to be governed and advanced naturally.
The logic her operates on a curious contradiction: the text’s radical rejection of biological
essentialism is posited against and within a racial limit, the primitivism internal to
progress limits both that progress and Gilman’s argument. In short, the move beyond
racialized gender in industrial society requires that difference as perversion be culturally
located elsewhere. ‘

This social limit to gender and capital informs the spaces of consumption in Sister
Carrie. Just as abject embodiment is bound up with wage labor, positing both as
regressive factors on which commodification and consumption are implicitly based,
progress in the novel necessitates the construction of and confrontation with racialized
specters of embodiment. The quintessential representative of upper-middle-class
domestic space, for instance, is the Hurstwoods’ home. The domestic economy is built
on its incorporation and abjection of a service labor that vaguely embodies biologistic
race, essentialized and naturalized in its close proximity to the necessity of labor over
against the economic privileges culturally manifest in “the ‘perfectly appointed house’”
(83). Here, in fact, the textual materiality, the quotation marks that signify a citation

without giving the original, establishes or refers to an externally system of exchange

42

value. As in the department store passage, the text moves inward visually, from the
public view of the house “near Lincoln Park,” to the ten rooms “occupied by himself, his
wife Julia, and his son and daughter,” where “there were besides these a maid-servant,
represented from time to time by girls of various extraction, for Mrs. Hurstwood was not
always easy to please” (82, my emphasis). Obviously, the servant is occluded by the
economy of the home. More importantly, the idea of the maid-servant is “represented” by
the laboring bodies given only a vague ontological reference to biological-racial groups;
the racialized body that marks the transgression of public and private, commercial and
domestic, is almost erased, denied presence and agency by its representational function.
The potentially eruptive force of the racially and sexually specific body is diminished,
disappearing with the labor it performs, in its commodification. Further, Hurstwood’s
quick dismissal of “the rancorous subject” is symptomatic of the displacement of the
threat of embodiment and its specificity onto the more easily managed threat of
commercial contamination of the domestic. Anne McClintock explains this in the context
of Victorian Britain: “domestic space became racialized as the rhetoric of degeneration
was drawn upon to discipline and contain the unseemly spectacle of paid women’s work”
(165). Thus, invoking the Enlightenment view of the family as a microcosmic image of
economic society, with its division of labor and c00peration based in sex differences in
the domestic traceable from Hobbes through Marx, Darwin and Freud (Birken 72-4), the
narrator establishes the “home atmosphere” within “the mystic chords which bind and
thrill the heart of the nation.” The Hurstwood’s home is not “infused with this home

spirit,” not because of the racialization of non-gendered wage labor, but, implicitly

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aligning that with the bourgeois standard, discontent and discord are based in disharmony
between George Hurstwood and his “not easy to please” wife. The citation of consumer
authority is thus ironic, inserted as it is into that which the “perfectly appointed house” as
standard disavows: “the rancorous subject” (82) of the variously extracted yet all equally
other Marys. What Gilman sees as the degeneration of the consuming, domestic woman
is here displaced by its constitution against the racialized laborer in the very act of
domestic consumption.

But the domestic is only one scene in which embodiment is figured as surplus to
be managed by bourgeois normativity. Clearly contrasted with earlier references to the
crowd, that moving, shadowy site of safety that swallows up the abj ectly-embodied
Carrie as work-seeker (27-8), the later Broadway scene privileges the crowd as a dynamic
force of representation that brings its subjects into being by way of a representation, a
semiotics ofthe body, that is both distanced horn and makes present any specific material
body. Made visible within a consumer gaze, “it was literally true that if a lover of fine
clothes secured a new suit, it was sure to have its first airing on Broadway”(288, my
emphasis). The focus on the literal, performative function of fashion both suggests and
denies any prior embodiment. For Carrie this involves a coming to consciousness in the
crowd, a specular economy of consciousness; in the Broadway crowd Carrie “awoke to
find that she was in fashion’s crowd, on parade in a show place—and such a show place!”
(289). Consumer self-fashioning that denies embodiment (bodily form, movement are
elided from the passage except at a removed level by way of clothing description)

suggests Benjamin’s description of the nineteenth century flaneur as “someone

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abandoned in the crowd. In this he shares the situation of the commodity. . . . The
intoxication to which the fldneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity around
which surges the stream of customers” (55). The commodity fetish implicitly invoked by
Benjamin, as the magical effect of concealing the labor time of commodity production is
similarly evoked in Dreiser’s description of the fashionable subject. It is not only that
subjects are commodities, that they must make themselves objects, or even identify
themselves with objects in commodity culture. Rather, just as Benjamin suggests, the
process of abandonment in the crowd following the intoxicating allure of the commodity
locates subjectivity precisely in the process that conceals labor time. The body is granted
the consumerist ideal of its own integrity by way of negation. Similarly, gender and its
cultural markers precede and occlude the sexed body in a way that, the text suggests,
constructs the gendered consumer subject around those limits against embodiment. The
repeated references to staring, ogling, gazing, and display are both conditioned upon and
submerged by the commodified, normalizing gender that denies sexual specificity and
even the sexual desire it calls up. Thus, “men in flawless topcoats, high hats, and silver-
headed walking sticks” look at the women “in dresses of stifi‘ cloth, shedding affected
smiles and perfume,” who wear also “rouged and powdered cheeks and lips” (289).
Desire and its reconfiguration by consumer capital merges commodity and sexual
- fetishism.

This normalizing of gender and desire via commodity display operates against the
spectral presence of beggars, illustrating Jonathan Crary’s claim that fashion works as “a

protective shield of signifiers, a reflective armor carefully assembled to mask a core of

45

social and psychic vulnerabilities” (118). Ifit is “literally” the case that a new suit (and
not the body within it) ‘Vvas sure to have its first airing on Broadway,” then this is posited
in the text against the very literal surplus bodies that economically and culturally
structure the desexualized, disembodied dynamics of consumer display. Just as the text
renders the gendered subject of capital against the abjection of labor and homogenized
others, it also exposes the pathological concentration of capital through its surplus bodies.
The interior limits to the spaces of spectacular consumption on Broadway and the Casino
where Carrie performs are figured by the “peculiar individual” who “took his stand at the
corner of Twenty-sixth Street and Broadway” (431), the mysterious “Captain” who works
each night to find beds for the homeless. In its juxtaposed views of “the night, pulsating
with the thoughts of pleasure and exhilaration—the curious enthusiasm of a great city bent
upon finding joy in a thousand different ways” (431) and the homeless men emerging
from the shadows to seek nightly aid from the captain, the novel “shows that the enticing
sense of possibility that characterizes American culture is constantly accompanied by—
even dominated by—the colossal waste of human talent that is necessary for the growth
and health of capitalist economies” (Harmon 137). More importantly, once within “the
glare of the store lights,” surplus bodies become legible as degenerate, worn, ill: “some of
the faces looked dry and chalky; others were red with blotches and puffed in the cheeks
andunderthe eyes; one ortwo were rawbonedandremindedone ofrailroad hands”
(433). As in the factory scene, bodies are reduced to their functional components, as
“hands” of labor. And while the figures are all male and associated with labor, the

gendering of the Broadway scene is absent, clearly enough, reduced in fact to a spectral

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embodiment that can only be represented by way of pathological markings.

Distinctly free fi'om Dreiser’s moralizing, the captain and his entourage operate
within the narrative as the surplus bodies conditioned by the life under the fire signs,
necessarily repressed by a culture defined by capital. Like the economically-induced
pathology of “woman” and “race” as the degenerative core of progress in Gilman’s
argument, the spaces of consumerist, gendered identification in meet their interior,
repressed limits in a pathological degeneracy necessitated by the movement of capital in
the novel. Visible surplus bodies are not so much a threat to the world in which Carrie
moves, but part of that world. The text illuminates the socially surplus body as a
pathological excess irreducible to the limits of gender.

11.

Having examined the social spaces of consumption as defined by the movement
of capital, we can focus more attention on Dreiser’s figure of the gendered consuming
subject. Subjectivity is shaped around the experience of the body in relation to
commodification. Specifically, the body takes on a relative value within the semiotic
systems of consumption, raising a problem of representing the subject. While Carrie is
often described in nineteenth century terms of the feminine—passive, domestic,
dependent—and Hurstwood according to the masculine, public rationality of
management, the text complicates these categories through a distinctly modernist crisis of
representation encircling gender. What the text calls “the power and satisfaction of the
thing” (230) locates its subjects between an interior fantasy of wholeness of body and self

promised by commodity culture even as this promise is based in the split between self

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and representation inherent to commodity-governed social relations.

Carrie’s experience in the shoe factory, we recall, is one of uncanny embodiment,
most intensely rendered in the working women who, lacking capital, are reduced to
functional bodies defined in their relation to machines (where lack and the mechanical
meet on and define the prostheticized body). Even as she struggles with the mechanical
embodiment demanded by factory labor, Carrie’s disembodied status begins to unfold
into the commodification of the name. When Drouet first mentions her to Hurstwood, the
narrator reminds readers that she “was bemoaning her narrow lot, which was inseparable
fiom the early stages of this, her unfolding fate” (50). We can apply a Freudian
understanding of the embodied ego here, in which the ego “is something like an internal
screen onto which the illuminated and projected images of the body’s outer surface are
directed” (Grosz 37). In Dreiser’s picture of modern consumerism this spit becomes one
in which the ideal ego is always one of externally-imposed exchange value that both
offers and denies embodiment. Carrie’s fate, retrospectively considered by the narrator, is
“unfolding,” dividing within itself, between a prosthetic embodiment indicative of lack
and a name that can accumulate capital and, in so doing, represent and engender a body
and its fantasy of integrity.

Money, as the most fundamental commodity-object, provides a useful trope
through which to theorize the split consumer subject. The passage in which Drouet gives
the desperate Carrie two ten-dollar bills serves to introduce the problem of the gendered
subject in a cultural economy that both constructs and denies the body in terms of surplus

and lack. Prostitution is implied, even as sexual desire is all but elided from the narrative,

48

when Drouet “made her take [the money]” and Carrie “felt bound to him by a strange tie
of affection” (62). But Carrie’s ambivalence is important here: she feels ashamed and
thrilled, the narrator tells us. It is this thrill that complicates an otherwise traditional
reading of patriarchy, including Veblen’s notion of women in western culture as emblems
of masculine productive power and social status. Rita Felski observes that the prostitute
in modern culture, as “both seller and commodity . . . was the ultimate symbol of the
commodification of eros, a disturbing example of the ambiguous bormdaries separating
economics and sexuality, the rational and the irrational, the instrumental and the
aesthetic” (19). The threat that Felski points out certainly applies to Carrie’s sense of
shame as she comes to inhabit the “ambiguous boundaries” between sex and the market.
But if we recall Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism as the metaphysical attachment
“to the products of labour” resulting in “social relations between things” (83-4), then
Carrie’s acceptance of the money, resulting in an uncanny “tie of affection,” Opens up the
division between the organic, sexual body and the subject as commodity. Money initiates
the intersubjective relation between Drouet and Carrie and serves as the mediating object
through which the abstraction of consumer desire in the text takes shape. We can
consider this in Georg Simmel’s terms: “money is the purest reification of means, a
concrete instrument which is absolutely identical with its abstract concept; it is a pure
instrument. The tremendous importance of money for understanding the basic motives of
life lies in the fact that money embodies and sublirnates the practical relation of man to
the objects of his will, his power and his impotence; one might say, paradoxically, that

man is an indirect being” (211). Money as pure instrumentality and abstract concept helps

49

explain the novel’s figuration of disembodiment as the condition of the consuming
subject. It is the seeming privilege of “indirectbeing” through exchange that, by contrast,
posits mechanical and prosthetic embodiment as a threatening outside or perverse
reduction of the subject in market culture to the cycle of production and waste.

The simultaneous separation and relation brought about by the mediation of
money is linked to questions of gender and power in the passage. In denying Carrie the
masculine rationality of economic value, the narrator explains that

It was something that was power in itself. One of her order of mind would
have been content to be cast away upon a desert island with a btmdle of
money, and only the long strain of starvation would have taught her that in
some cases it could have no value. Even then she would have had no
conception of the relative value of the thing; her one thought would,
undoubtedly, have concerned the pity of having so much power and the
inability to use it. (63)
Having and using power, the narrator claims, particularly as embodied in the object of
money, are distinct. This distinction, moreover, needs to be rationalized according to the
relative value of money, which we can read as also implying capital and commodities.
The claim that she would have no conception of money’s relative value, however, is
contradicted by an rmderstanding by negation: having the object while acknowledging the
inability to use it, its removal from the market economy, and the “pity” resulting,
indicates a negative conception of value based in exchange. Power does not inherently

reside in money, other commodities, or the subjects possessing them. It emerges only

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from the abstract relations between things, a ghostly presence haunting the consumer
subject.

It is this ghostly power associated with money and the commodity that shapes
disembodied, gendered conceptions of the self in the novel. The contradictory notion that
money is “power in itself’ recalls of course Marx’s designation of the commodity as
fetish, as a base material object to which the “metaphysical subtleties” of exchange value
accrue (81). But the novel interestingly complicates Marx’s socially systemic fetishism,
establishing a point of contact between capital-based power and gender within a merging
of Freud’s theory of the infantile gift and a Marxian surplus. Freud discusses the role of
feces for the infant as “part of the infant’s own body” and that which “represent[s] his
first ‘gift’: by producing them he can express his active compliance with his
environment” (52). Drouet’s gift, then, while not biological or organic, is of the same
logic of compliance and excess. If in Gilman’s economic analysis women are gendered
(“sexed”) by way of dependence, then Drouet’s gifi shows his “active compliance with
his environment” in constituting Carrie’s gendered, dependent status. In these terms, the
money is also excess, surplus, potential capital; in Situating Carrie on the threshold of
gendered desire via the money-gift, she also appears on the limit between surplus bodies
and disembodied gender marked by capital—desire, on the border between her “shame”
and desire.

Therefore, rather than dwelling on the absence or violent dismissal of agency in
the text’s representation of commodified subjectivity and desire, I read in Carrie a

displacement or deferral of humanist-individualist agency within a trajectory that moves

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fiom the specter of embodiment to the spectacle of a commodified disembodiment. In the
seductive offer of disembodying spectacle, the text operates on an important temporal
reflexivity. Carrie’s rise to a commodified subject signaled repeatedly by her name in
lights shows a disembodied gendered subject in the process of commodification, but also
points to an anxiety of the suspected limits of capital and desire that constitute the subject
within a temporality defined by the traumatic memories of embodiment.

Tim Armstrong argues that Carrie’s “ability . . . to ‘electrify’ her audience, to turn
her talent into a commodified product, a ‘narne in lights,’ signals the liberation of desire
from the domestic sphere and its deployment in the marketplace” (25). It is as though she
is able to escape the domestic confinement of degeneracy in Gilman’s analysis, and even
to overstep the limits of production that the novel represents as a threatening reduction of
the body to its labor capacity, to a commodity in contrast with Gilman’s predictions of
sexual equality based in a productivist ethos. The reproduction of the name in the public
market shows the commodification of Carrie, making her a gendered subject suspended
between embodiment and the iterative force of the name as image of capital. Upon
encountering her name in a newspaper theater review, “she read it with a tingling body”
and then “hugged herself with delight” (407). This reflexive relation to selflrood brought
out by the commodification of the name is supported by the relation between that body
A and private space, in which the latter confers not only economic status but also an
economy of the body as knowable on the condition of private space. When assigned her
own dressing room, “her sensations were more physical than mental. In fact, she was

scarcely thinking at all. Heart and body were having their say” (414). The affective

52

experience of the body follows private property. When she is offered rooms at the
glamorous Wellington on the grounds that her “name is worth something” (415), she
revels in the split between capitalized name and private body. Carrie’s “unfolding fate”
thus reconfigures nineteenth century conceptions of the feminine-domestic within a
performative gender that effectively blurs the bormdaries between self-making and
commodification.

We can situate this move toward the disembodied performative within the
temporal progression of the narrative. Gender is supported by a traumatic, retrospective
embodiment. In the process of her shift of affection from Drouet to Hmstwood, Carrie is
described in a way that supports Armstrong’s point that the novel’s equations of electric
images and desire anticipate the later twentieth century star system (26): “Every hour the
kaleidoscope of human affairs threw a new luster upon something, and therewith it
became for her the desired—the all. Another shift of the box, and some other had become
the beautiful, the perfect” (139). The fateful shifting of the kaleidoscope, always casting a
“new luster” upon something else, follows the repetitive newness of the commodity
culture in which Carrie’s desires take shape. Desire lies outside the subject and is shaped
by contact with the commodity. But the narrative situates this notion of desire as
consumer choice against a traumatic limit to memory and knowing, the limits that define,
through disavowal, the disembodied consumer. Carrie is able to leave the factory behind,
but the abject laboring body retums, as that which cannot be fully assimilated by her new
environment, when the narrator describes her vision of “many a spectacle” of labor:

On the street sometimes she would see men working—Irishmen with

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picks, coal heavers with great loads to shovel, Americans busy about some
work which was a mere matter of strength—and they touched her fancy.
Toil, now that she was free of it, seemed even a more desolate thing than
when she was part of it. She saw it through a mist of fancy. . . . Her old
father, in his flour-dusted miller’s suit, sometimes returned to her in
memory, revived by a face in a window. A shoemaker pegging at his last,
a blastrnan seen through a narrow window in some basement where iron
was being melted, a benchworker seen high alofi in some window, his coat
off, his sleeves rolled up; these took her back in fancy to the details of the
mill. . . . Her sympathies were ever with that underworld of toil fiom
which she had so recently sprung, and which she best tmderstood. (140)
The intrusive vision that signals memory indicates the traumatic limits of memory in
psychoanalytic discourse. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan
asks, “is it not remarkable that, at the origin of the analytic experience, the real should
have presented itself in the form of that which is unassimilable in it—in the form of the
trauma, determining all that follows, and imposing on it an apparently accidental origin?”
(55). Carrie’s vision and the resulting memory suggest the limit, the line dividing
laboring bodies, wavering between the invisible surplus on which the commodity
landscape is structured and the eruptive reminders of socially, economically constituted
surplus bodies denied the power of the thing. We see thus, particularly for Carrie as
consumer subject and, almost inversely for Hurstwood, the threatening specter of

embodiment (as distanced from capital) as a repetitive force, in which “we see preserved

54

the insistence of the trauma in making us aware of its existence” (Lacan 55), which, in its
simultaneous repetition and resistance to signification, “is then specifically held
responsible for the limits of remembering” (129). It is this notion of the limit, the
narrative origin centered on traumatic memory that triggers, again, Carrie’s fantasy in
Sherry’s in New York: “But in a flash was seen the other Carrie—poor, hungry, drifting
at her wit’s end, and all Chicago a cold and closed world, fi'om which she only wandered
because she could not find work” (298). Carrie’s experiential journey from material
embodiment and financial desperation to the spectacle of the male gaze is posited on a
retrospectively acknowledged embodiment, registered as a traumatic limit to
remembering, the eternal threat of slipping into the spectral world of surplus bodies. We
see, therefore, a performative notion of the gendered subject within the turn-of-the-
century consumer landscape, but one that in its repeated acts and rituals of consumption
tied up with spectacle, works constantly to keep, as Robert Seguin points out, that
“specter of class society at bay” (27), the specter written across the surplus bodies of
consumption.

And while Carrie’s material condition denies a comparison with the manifest
violence we usually associate with trauma, the logic of the imaginary does indicate that
of traumatic memory in defining the subject, particularly in the consumer environment
that marks the subject’s temporal divisions even as it conceals these under a veil of the
promised integrity of the self through gendered identifications. Further, the production of
the gendered subject is based in a cultural pathologizing of embodiment, the uncanny

association of the women laborers with the foul space of the factory being one example.

55

This system of pathology expresses class division even as class division is repressed.
Economic dependency and the limits of agency resulting from the tenuous inclusion of
the feminine within the category of a human “race” is shown to be a surplus embodiment
denied the capacity to produce (in Gilman) and the abject structuring consumer privilege
in Dreiser. The temporal limits against which Carrie emerges as subject are intimately, if
subtly, related to a distinctly, economically, gendered coming-into-being, in her interests
as they shift from Drouet to Hurstwood to Ames. Embodiment, then, like psychological
interiority or integrity, is an after-effect, a fictional construction based in the anxiety-
laden threat of impending loss.

It is in this light that we should read Ames’s advice to Carrie towards the end of
the novel. As an electrical engineer, Ames is partly responsible for designing the urban
geography of energy and light fueled by capital. As such, his character functions as a
trope linking capital, progress, and the visual. That positioning lends his voice a certain
authority when he calls Carrie the “representative of all desire” and tells her “it just so
happens that you have this thing” (448). The phallic reference is clear, but as a
commodified image that is socially produced, we should note a distinction between
having and being “this thing.” Judith Butler’s treatment of the performative is useful: “the
reading of ‘performativity’ as willful and arbitrary choice misses the point that the
historicity of discourse and, in particular, the historicity of norms . . . constitute the power
of discourse to enact what it names. To think of ‘sex’ as an imperative in this way means
that a subject is addressed and produced by such a norm, and that this norm—and the

regulatory power of which it is a token—materializes bodies as an effect of that

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injunction. And yet, this ‘materialization,’ while far from artificial, is not fully stable”; it
“requires a differentiated production and regulation of masculine and feminine
identification that does not fully hold” (187). The production of gendered subjects against
the disavowed specters of laboring, racialized bodies requires this “regulatory power” in
sustaining gendered norms, but the very vagueness of Ames’s statement—“you have this
thing”—points to the instability of the process. And while Carrie, far from subverting sex
roles, bows and curtseys on stage according to nineteenth century bourgeois norms, the
text’s playing on the thing, the phallic and yet arbitrary force of capital, suggests this
performative or slippage as a threat immanent to commodity culture.

This slippage is manifest in the figure of Hurstwood who, in his theft, sacrifices
the power of the thing and comes gradually to inhabit the abject world of embodied need.
The narrator represents the early stages of Hurstwood’s decline with a hyperbolic
equation of capital and the organic, linking material fortune to the physical development
of the body: “Either he is growing stronger, healthier, wiser, as the youth approaching
manhood, or he is growing weaker, older, less incisive mentally, as the man approaching
old age. There are no other states” (304). This implies, as the passage continues to
illustrate, an invisible division between the two states, only that the biological “tendency
toward decay” is offset by the potential of “fortune” to continue to amass capital, as long
as the “process of accretion is never halted” (305). While passages like this in Dreiser
have often been read within a naturalist paradigm—the naturalizing of the social forces
shaping the subject——the economy of biological degeneracy here contains a curious twist:

the body “naturally” decays beyond a certain point, but the decay in accretion of wealth is

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halted from the outside.

The process of Hurstwood’s accretion is of course halted, and his physiological
decline, his “tendency toward decay,” is a direct manifestation of increasingly limited
capital. Capital comes to define decay and embodied need by negation. As the power of
the thing slips away, so too does the satisfaction of living vicariously through fortune.
The explicit equation of capital and organic growth, rather than naturalizing the social
forces of exchange, serves to economize the biological, and does so in terms of gendered
consumption and its constitutive abj ection of embodiment as impending threat. When
Carrie, desperate for income, finally decides to seek acting work on her own, leaving
Hurstwood alone in their shabby apartment, “he saw her depart with some faint stirrings
of shame, which were the expression of a manhood rapidly becoming stultified” (347). .
The text clearly aligns masculinity with capital; sexual desire is in fact notably absent.
And this explains his response to the clerk at the Brooklyn City Railroad when, applying
for a position, and is asked what he is (for what he is trained), he replies, “‘I’m not
anything’” (379). Reduced to bodily need, he is not anything, paradoxically, and yet in
light of his coming entry into the spectral world of the Captain’s beggars, this loss of the
thing and not being anything serves to structure Carrie’s success and Hurstwood’s former
self over against this ontological negation. This negation of being following the loss of
capital narrates, through Hurstwood, what Butler describes as “the unspeakable, the
unviable, the nonnarrativizable that secures and, hence, fails to secure the very borders of
materiality. The normative force of performativity—its power to establish what qualifies

as ‘being’——-works not only through reiteration, but through exclusion as well” (188).

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Dreiser’s performative gender and its abject, its constitutive outside, on which
subjectivity in the text is constructed, not only anticipates Butler’s arguments, but, as this
reading of the capital-based privilege of disembodied gender shows, locates such a theory
of gendering performativity specifically within an imaginary of consumerism. The
surplus bodies of consumption exist as the necessary specter structuring the connection
between the social economy of consuming and a culturally rendered pathology, each the
condition of the other and meeting on the body they constitute in gender. This not only
reiterates the modernity of such an ambivalent, divided notion of the subject, but serves
to place Sister Carrie in conversation with modernism and its self-referential problems of
linguistic representation, anticipating, on the bodies of its subjects, an anxiety at the heart
of modernist representation, especially when navigating between individual desire and
the formative power of socio-historical discourse. Toward concluding, I will now turn to
this problem of narrative representation of the subject in the novel as a problem of the
cultural anxieties arising from the material distinction between representation and
embodiment.

III.

Carrie as commodity-star has the power of the thing bound up in her name (in
lights) and yet the text repeatedly points to this as distinct from, and yet the condition of,
a bodily becoming. Her unfulfilled desire as productive force behind that image is linked
to the socio-economic waste structuring consumer excess and its representation within
the cultural imaginary of a continual becoming through commodity-identification. .

Hurstwood’s degeneration from the narrative point of his theft frustrates any attempt at

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resolving this tension in terms of agency/desire as against the inscription of the body in
its relation to surplus, abjection. Temporality of the subject is fiagrnented, marked by
varying degrees of disembodiment via capital or experiences of the material limitations of
the natural body. These tensions reside in the ambivalence, even contradictions, of the
narrative voice and are symptomatic of the consumer landscape it works to represent
through subjects variously shaped by capital. This then serves to situate Dreiser’s text
within a modernist problem of linguistic representation that includes Conrad’s displaced
narrative voices through which the ambivalent representations of race and empire take
shape, and the explorations of language, commodities, and bodies in urban consumerism
that we see in the work of Dos Passos, Joyce, Lewis, Rhys, and others. More importantly,
the narrative anxiety stemming fiom the problem of representing the consumer body not
only points to the limits to narrative resolution as symptom of modern social pathology,
but opens a performative space within twentieth century representations of gender, one
that repeatedly challenges the very limits within which it takes shape.

Despite the pathos in the narrator’s concluding observations of the unfulfilled star,
the questioning of representation as a force in commodity-governed gender-making self-
reflexively speaks to a distinctly modern anxiety structuring the conception of the
“subject” in commodity culture. Summing up the “progress” of Carrie in light of her
dissatisfaction, the narrator recites the “things” that drew her, marking her narrative
spatially and temporally: “Chicago, New York; Drouet, Hurstwood; the world of fashion
and the world of stage—these were but incidents. Not them, but that which they

represented, she longed for. Time proved the representation false” (463). While the

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narrator implies that there might be a “true” representation, it also renders that judgment
tenuous at best. The passage elides, or even conceals that which is to be represented: the
body visualized by contact with the commodity, the fetishistic representations of the
forces of capital and desire. On the one hand, the narrator’s foregrounding
“representation” and its being “false” calls into question the entire narrative of Carrie, the
coming into being as subject by way of contact with capital and commodification that
renders the organic body abject even as it constitutes it. This, moreover, suggests and
questions the promise of integrity held out by gendering capital in the shape of the
commodity (in Carrie’s first visit to The Fair, the commodities on display “all touched
her with individual desire, and she felt keenly the fact that not any of these things were in
the range of her purchase” [26]), which Armstrong describes as advertising’s “posit[ing]
a body-in-crisis, a zone of deficits in terms of attributes” (98). In other words, the
narrative thread concerned with Carrie-as-becoming through the gendering relation to
capital, a commodified definition of disembodied status, is deemed false.

The self-reflexivity of the text here exceeds, however, a rejection of spectacle or
fashion—the commodity form, in short—on the grounds of some illusory falseness of
market culture. Based in the almost obsessive play on the shifting limits to the subject
and agency, including the threat of embodiment constituted by the limits of capital, what
the text deems false is any attempt at representing the consuming subject solely on the
grounds of its own making, a self-contained presence. Carrie, as en-gendered, is left
unfulfilled by the promises of capital held out by the commodified objects of desire as

fetishistic representation, but her unfulfillrnent must be read against the specter

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necessitated by gender. Shortly before this concluding scene, the narrator describes the
Bowery types nourished by surplus, the formation of bodies which “caused a daily
spectacle which, however, had become so common by repetition during a number of
years that now nothing was thought of it” (450), and “they were of the class which simply
floats and drifts, every wave of people washing up one, as breakers do driftwood upon a
stormy shore” (451). Finally, and in keeping with this merging of spectacle and
homogenized spectrality, the text figures this ever-present wave of bodies as antithetical
to a consumerist obsession with the production of difference and the new: “from the
beginning to the present time there had been little change in the character of these men”
(451). Just as the Marxian surplus is that which conceals material labor, subjectification
as disembodied by capital occludes the materiality of certain bodies; gender as privileged
performative category is a “false” representation insofar as it participates in the making
of and distancing from the specter of bodily material, the surplus bodies structuring the
power of the thing.

Thus, the autonomous consuming subject is a fiction structured against the
materiality of embodiment, which entails all the disavowed threats to integrity in terms of
sexual, racial, and class difference. This posits a challenge to the limits inscribed by
capital and serving to constitute its subjects on the exterior, the abject, and thus departs
from Gilman’s analysis of economically-defined gender and her hopes for productive
inclusion. Gender in these texts is a socio-economic construct, but within the cultural
imaginary of its performative possibilities, it is also based in a problem of representation

stemming from the contradictions of surplus. Dreiser’s text calls into question a realist

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project of representation, and the text’s self-reflexive denial of its ability to represent in
realist fashion not only anticipates other twentieth century (modernist) experiments with
linguistic representation, but locates such a challenge to realism within the limits of
capital anxiously governed by a semiotics of the body always tied to surplus. The failure
of Sister Carrie to resolve its tensions of economically made bodies and a performative
agency locates modern consumer subjects in a space between, in which the anxiety of the
limits of capital and the performance of gender coalesce around and against the
disavowed materiality of the bodies it constitutes, the surplus bodies of modernism.
acct.

Sister Carrie articulates a psychic becoming in which gender is produced
within—and problematized by—the privileged spaces of disembodied consumption. The
novel participates in late nineteenth—century Naturalism in that the self, subjectivity, and
the body’s visibility are largely determined by the social forces of production. But
Carrie’s becoming what Jameson calls the psychologically “closed monad” of late
capitalism is posited against the repressed surplus bodies devoid of both gendered
identity and private interiority. This understanding of the consruner subject split by the
contradictory social spaces of capital also anticipates “high” modernist literary and
cultural production. The modernist problem of psychic space emerges, as I argue in
chapter two, from the constitutive tension between abstract finance capital and its
materially finite forms, whether cash or the empty promises of the commodity. By pitting
Joyce’s “miserly realism” (Osteen) against Ford’s accretive impressionism we see how

modemists locate the subject of exchange, the “self” of modernity, within the

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contradictory impulses of commodity exchange. Further, I read Joyce and Ford together
in order to map a defining conflict within modernist narrative, a conflict traditionally read
as a question of aesthetic form. High-modernist form—including its questioning of
psychic interiority in the face of public exchange—is symptomatic of a subjectivity
“anchored,” to use John Dowell’s term in The Good Soldier, in external objects. I work
with Bill Brown’s understanding of “how literature helps us to understand the
unconscious as material history and history as the unconscious, as the necessarily
repressed that can be rendered visible in sites of contradiction or incomplete elision” (The
Material Unconscious 5). However, we can also locate such a symptomatic reading of the
psychological in light of the material limits structuring capital surplus, a tension
firndamental to Joyce’s and Ford’s investments in the formal aestheticization of the
subject of exchange.

For Joyce and Ford, despite the stylistic differences in their narratives, the subject
of modernity is founded between investment in the object under commodity exchange
and a simultaneous afl'ect of loss symptomatic of the failed promises of an exchange
value that is always deferred or displaced. Georg Simmel’s sociological model of
exchange, in which each act carries with it a “tinge of sacrifice” (44), helps contextualize
the modernist aesthetic problem of materiality under corporate capital. For Simmel,
subjective loss determines objective value in the process of exchange. While such a
model speaks to modernist discourses of subjectivity in the market, I interrogate
Simmel’s assumptions by looking to the material objects structuring the space of

exchange, the materiality which his subjectivist stance necessarily presupposes. It is this

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assumed yet disavowed materiality that produces the “tinge” or trace of sacrifice. But this
disavowal, based in the reification of closed off psychic interiority, is part of the problem
informing modernist questions of form. “After the Race” and “Two Gallants” construct
narrative form around the problem of representing the object as supplement to the absent
force of capital, pitting the subject between presence and absence, surplus and
contingency. In Ford, objects must be psychologically invested in an uncertain process of
anchoring the temporal and spatial flux of consciousness. Explicitly, these texts posit a
different origin of object-value; implicitly they show a psychology of loss informed by
the social pervasiveness of commodity culture. This psychology of loss is centered on an
uncanny, material object that always defers or displaces value, structuring subjective and
objective values around immanent loss. It is through this loss structuring the commodity-
thing’s presence and value that I read a narrative engagement with formalizing psychic
depth—definitively modernist psychic economies—in terms of material contradictions of
capital. Just as Carrie enters commodity culture, is interpellated, when in The Fair “she
could not help feeling the claim of each trinket upon her personally” (26), a modernist
aesthetics interested in the tensions between psychic interiority and external world is

founded on exchange—material, psychic, and sexual—and its uncanny objects.

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Chapter 2
Capital’s Interiority Complex: Joyce, Ford, and the Aesthetics of Exchange

In The Good Soldier, the early fiction of Joyce and Lewis, and Georg Simmel’s
sociology of exchange, the subject is a product of exchange with made objects. For each
of these, modernist subjectivity emerges within the increasing threat to the autonomous,
self-possessed, rational individual of Enlightenment, and the subject is site of crisis
endemic to modernity and an increasingly international corporate capitalism.4 At issue is
not whether these thinkers or this internally conflicted breed of modernist cultural
production are socially, politically, or ethically reactionary. Rather, a focus on psychic
interiority as a subjective site both produced and challenged by capital and its
contradictory relation between surplus and contingency exposes a sense of loss immanent
to capital’s material forms.s As site of this tension, the very constructedness of subjective
interiors figures a space of cultural critique immanent to the pathological growth of
corporate, international capital. }

In this chapter I read the pre-war modernism of Joyce and Ford to show that
psychic interiority is shaped by the contingent world of object exchange. An interior
space of psychological depth, while not wholly an effect of object relations, does register
the referential slippage between the material object and the purely relational, fleeting,
spectral value of exchange. It is on the grounds of this contingency, interior to capital
growth, that Ford and Joyce share a psychological economy of narrative; Joyce’s realist
use of a detached narrator and Ford’s schizo-narrative of the loss of selfin the
equivalencies and contingencies of value are two sides of the same coin. First, the pre-

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war modernism of Joyce and Ford reveals an interest in the psychological and
epistemological crisis emerging from the contradictions of material exchange in which
the objects of commodified value embody the loss immanent to capital surplus. Second,
my metaphor of the coin is more than a simple, two-sided pun. The objects of exchange
foregrounded by the texts I read here figure Marx’s “social relations between things”
(84), and the material representation of capital surplus, but also the embodiment of
materialized loss, temporal contingencies of value marking desire. The flux of capital and
a psychic economy of consumerism circulate around those objects (whether coin,
commodity, or the body of the other), and the subject of exchange is one of flux,
suspended between the external object world and a conflicted interior space of desire.

In Georg Simmel’s sociology of exchange, the subject is shaped between loss and
investment, a tension generated by the paradoxical production of surplus in sacrifice.
Applying a Marxian understanding of diminished returns to the level of subjective affect,
he posits a psychic energy that moves between the subjects of exchange across a
mediating object, generating value. Energy and affect ambiguously generate a surplus of
energy through expenditure:

What one expends in interaction can only be one’s own energy, the
transmission of one’s substance. Conversely, exchange takes place not for
the sake of an object previously possessed by another person, but rather
for the sake of one’s own feeling about an object, a feeling which the other
previously did not possess. The meaning of exchange, moreover, is that

the sum of values is greater afterward than it was before, and this implies

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that each party gives the other more than he had himself possessed. (44)
Further, “of all kinds of exchange, the exchange of economic values is the least free of
some tinge of sacrifice” (44). A mutual surplus is generated in two-sided exchange, but is
simultaneously touched on both sides by the “tinge of sacrifice.” Sacrifice involves not a
quantifiable or named object, but a “tinge,” a coloring or trace evoking an affective
mood, and is constitutive of both a psychic “solipsism” and the objectivity of modern
exchange, the latter emerging out of the former in an interior economy of balancing:
“This subjective process of sacrifice and gain within the individual psyche is by no means
something secondary or imitative in relation to interindividual exchange,” he continues.
“On the contrary, the give-and-take between sacrifice and attainment within the
individual is the fimdamental presupposition and, as it were, the essence of every two-
sided exchange” (46, my emphasis). That fundamental presupposition is itself predicated
on a psychic interior, individual psychic spaces each working to balance sacrifice and
gain in a way that produces mutual surplus: “we should not let ourselves be misled
because in exchange this process is reciprocal, conditioned by a similar process within
another party. The natural and ‘solipsistic’ economic transaction goes back to the same
fundamental form as the two-sided exchange; to the process of balancing two subjective
events within an individual” (46). Objective value depends on a psychic balance sheet,
the subject’s constant negotiation between sacrifice and gain. The psychological
negotiation that occurs within each individual allows value to emerge from the made
object: “all feelings of value . . . which are set free by producible objects are in general to

be gained only by foregoing other values” (47).

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This dialectic between the interindividual and a psychic interior based on the
balancing of energy expenditure opens a critical problem in high-modernist attempts to
narrate the subject of exchange. Joyce also shows that surplus and desire are generated
and sustained by an affective sacrifice. But the stories I read here also complicate
Simmel’s dialectic by figuring loss to originate in the object of exchange, the material
object that Simmel’s argument presupposes. We can begin with the energies of capital in
Joyce, and the way those energies both illuminate the surplus social body and prefigure
the interior psychic balance sheet of the subject of exchange.

I.

Read together, “After the Race” and “Two Gallants” articulate a dialectical
tension between capital and commodity, international finance capital and its local,
signifying objects of exchange. Further, both the status of particular bodies and an
interior life of desire are governed, simultaneously, by an authorial, restrictive economy
and its ambivalent figurations of surplus. In what has traditionally been read as modernist
narrative objectivity or extemality, and what Mark Osteen has more recently described as
a “miserly” narrative economy, the two stories work together in mapping the production
of social space as text. The social text is governed by the flux and internal limits of
capital, and psychic interiority is displaced by an ambivalent logic of exchange. Before
theorizing an early Joycean psychic space constituted around the absent thing-ness that
goes by the name of commodity, I want to read the stories’ figurations of capital as
indicative of the limits to an Enlightenment celebration of the individual in the public

sphere.

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Both stories begin with descriptions of the depressed rn'ban space of Dublin.
“After the Race” juxtaposes the poverty-ridden masses of colonial Ireland, the surplus
bodies of imperial economic control, with the flows of foreign capital. As “the cars
[come] scudding in towards Dublin,” the masses emerge into the textual field of vision as
a body marking and marked by the space of economic stagnation through which the
commodity-machines of capital flow: “At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers had
gathered in clumps to watch the cars careering homeward and through this channel of
poverty and inaction the Continent sped its wealth and industry. Now and again the
clumps of people raised the cheer of the gratefully oppressed” (42). “Two Gallants”
similarly opens with social space illuminating its subjects. As evening descends, “the
streets, shuttered for the repose of Sunday, swarmed with a gaily colored crowd. Like
illumined pearls the lamps shone from the summits of their tall poles upon the living
texture below which, changing shape and hue unceasingly, sent up into the warm grey
evening air an unchanging unceasing murmur” (49). “After the Race” foregrounds
international corporate capital by which the masses are “gratefully oppressed,” while the
constantly changing texture of the crowd in “Two Gallants” merges into an “unceasing
murmur,” suggestive of the simultaneous newness and repetitive homogeneity of
commodification. Both stories situate “the masses” within the flows of capital; both
foreground the open space of exchange as constituted in a simultaneously expansive and
restrictive economy. The flows of bodies and desire follow and are illuminated by the
flows of capital. The social and the individual psychological spaces of exchange merge,

and “each of these two kinds of space involves, underpins and presupposes the other”

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(Lefebvrel4). As subjects and objects of exchange converge within the virtual text of
capital, Joyce’s stories problematize, at their openings, a realist division between a
psychological “closed monad” (Jameson 160) and a solid signifying extemality.

A psychic economy of flux between excitement and reserve emerges from the
tension between surplus and its limit under the restrictive textual economy of “After the
Race.” Jimmy Doyle’s investment of his father’s capital in the French auto industry
generates thrill, affect: Jimmy is “too excited to be genuinely happy” (43). This psychic
tension, or distinction between excitement and happiness, is symptomatic of that between
acquisition and expenditure, the text’s dialectical economy. Investment generates a
surplus of capital and energy. Spoiled spendthrift, investor, and thrilled participant in the
spectacle of speed, Jimmy not only has “a great sum lmder his control,” but is the trope of
consciousness grounded in the simultaneity of expenditrne and gain. His inherited
financial “instincts” and awareness of his father’s invested expenditure toward
accumulation “had previously kept his bills within the limits of reasonable recklessness
and, if he had been so conscious of the labour latent in money when there had been
question merely of some freak of the higher intelligence, how much more so now when
he was about to stake the greater part of his substance” (44). The language here ironically
naturalizes the contradictions of exchange-based surplus, placing it in the realm of
“instincts” and personal “substance.” As in Simmel, sacrificing part of one’s “substance”
is necessary to increasing “the sum of values” (Simmel 44). In Joyce’s story, however,
this is figured as a division between capital surplus and its material value, resulting in a

subject split between material and exchange values. Jimmy’s attempt “to translate into

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days’ work that lordly car in which he sat” (45), invoking a closed model of quantifiable
labor time, fails. The commodity split between material use value and its “metaphysical
subtleties and theological niceties” (Marx 81) shapes the subject around the tension
between sacrifice and surplus, entropy and energy.6

The text manages this irrational capital flux with its own reserved economy. The
language of (capitalist) economy yields the economy of Joyce’s short fiction and its
operative tension between references to characters’ psychic interiority and immaterial
surplus on the one hand and an authorial, restrictive formal economy on the other. The
bare description of Jimmy’s excitement suggests the dominance of the pleasure principle
in the Freudian economy. Consciousness, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is figured as
the psychic agent responsible for binding impleasurable excitations; the dominance of the
pleasure principle is maintained by binding, or minimizing the shock of, both external
forces and instinctual impulses. The process of binding instinctual impulses “into a
mainly quiescent (tonic) cathexis” is a reserved economy, bent on maintaining pleasure
via reducing unpleasure, which, however, “does not imply the suspension of the pleasure
principle. On the contrary, the transformation occurs on behalf of the pleasure principle;
the binding is apreparatoryactwhich intreducesandassuresthedominanceofthe
pleasure principle” (75-6). The pleasures of managed accretion and loss similarly
determine the affect of exchange in Joyce’s story. Prior to dinner, Jimmy gives “a last
equation to the bows of his dress tie, [and] his father may have felt even commercially
satisfied at having seemed for his son qualities often unpurehasable” (45). Commercial

satisfaction is based in a binding of excess, the elusive qualities that generate surplus are

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managed, figured by the neat “equation” of Jimmy’s tie and bound by the narrative
economy that privileges external description over a surplus of interior pleasure. Further,
the Doyles’ dinner party celebrates their investment in the French company and
articulates social being within the seemingly limitless potential of capital merger; the
gathering is one of “productive consumption” and surplus is a self-reproducing end in
itself. The language of the text describes, rather than reproduces, conversation, linking
the economy of language to that of material exchange, or, in Mark Osteen’s formulation,
“words circulate like money and thereby figure exchange in several registers at once”
(182). The text employs the language of capital growth as determinant of the social body
and its discursive economy; after dinner “the party was increased by a young Englishman
named Routh” and the men “talked volubly and with little reserve” (46, my emphasis).
The figuration of social discourse emerging from the language of surplus economy,
however, ambiguously posits that surplus on (the threat of) lack: they have “little reserve”
with which to (re)produce. This contradiction inherent in the economy of social discourse
is supported, again, by the text’s reserve. The content of excess is both distanced from
and contained by Joyce’s restricted textual economy, or, in Osteen’s formulation, “Joyce
uses the mock realism of documentary facts [in Ulysses] but undermines it by permitting
the text to smuggle in tropes, homophones, and tricks that demonstrate how the linguistic
economy of realism—one meaning per word——always eludes its encirclement by the
forces of authority” (201). Reproducing itself by way of the continued expenditure of the
subject’s limited reserve, verbd exchange is figured as the paradoxical economy of

surplus generated by managed expenditure.

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The (anti-) climactic gambling scene illustrates the way surplus is structured on
material loss, throwing the rationality of bourgeois exchange and accumulation into
question. In his reading of late nineteenth-century American cultural economies of
leisure, Bill Brown usefully articulates the threatening role gambling poses within
capitalism’s systems of rationality:

If Lefebvre is right that people perform a spontaneous critique of everyday
life ‘achieved in and by leisure activities,’ then gambling may be the
transhistorical and transcultural recreational form that can achieve a
specifically economic critique of modern life. It produces a spectacular
economy of loss and gain dislodged from a rationalized system of
production and remuneration. (71)
Gambling as performance “dislodged” from economic rationalism exposes the
irrationality concealed by “mechanization” and “calculability”; quoting Lukdcs, Brown
argues, “the economic system is in fact incoherent—‘a chance affair’—-the irrationality of
which becomes plainly visible at moments of economic crisis” (100). As the men in
Joyce’s gambling scene “[fling] themselves boldly into the adventure” and “[drink] the
health of the Queen of Hearts and the Queen of Diamonds” (48), they perform the
transhistorical play of chance Brown locates outside the realm of rational capitalist
management. Play is measured in gains and losses, appropriately blurring into the
immeasurable with the intoxicating supplement of excess alcohol: “Play ran very high
and paper began to pass. Jimmy did not know exactly who was winning but he knew that

he was losing. But it was his own fault for he fiequently mistook his cards and the other

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men had to calculate his I.O.U.’s for him” (48). The text here inverts the privilege of
rationality over the surplus it is to sustain, and shows an ideology of managed abundance
to be structured on the promise of unlimited expenditure.

But this reading also serves to qualify Brown’s critical location of gambling as
“dislodged” fiom or outside rationalized capitalist economies. While he is right to assert
that “gambling remains irreducible to the market” (96), Joyce’s gambling scene maps an
economy of diminution and accumulation as the inherently irrational heart of modern
exchange and its narratives. For example, “Jimmy rmderstood that the game lay between
Routh and Ségouin. What excitement! Jimmy was excited too; he would lose, of course”
(48). The constitutive tension between excitement and loss centers around the paper
IOUs, objects that signify value by deferral, spatially and temporally. As material support
for virtual capital, the IOU marks the future by way of impending loss and gain,
foregrounding the irrationality of a surplus structured on continuous deferment. The
temporal displacement of value together with the incaleulability of loss is submitted to
the text’s figural and formal restraint: in a stupor of alcoholic consumption and
spectacular financial expenditure, Jimmy retreats to the manageable task of “counting the
beats of his temples” (48).

The problem of psychic interiority—and of its representation—emerges fi'om this
tension between the material embodiment and displacement of value. The IOU serves as
the “support for a properly ‘extemalized’ desire” attributed to an alleged monolithic male
modernism (N icholls 179). This operative extemalized desire, however, is complicated

by its own system of aesthetic representation. The IOU as centralized thing and the

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external marker of desire structures psychic interiority around the temporal contingency
of value and thus around negation. Jacques Lacan’s reading of das Ding in Freud, and of
the subject split by its investment in an always-already lost object, sheds light on Joyce’s
rendering of subjective value based in the uncanny materiality of the object of exchange,
whether coin, commodity, or IOU. Laean’s interpretation of the pleasure principle posits
the subject and its desire as “oriented around the Ding as F remde” (Book VII 52), foreign
and often connotatively uncanny. This model “assumes that it is this object, das Ding, as
the absolute Other of the subject, that one is supposed to find again. It is to be found at
the most as something missed. One doesn’t find it, but only its pleasurable associations”
(52). This pleasure at a remove hinges on a play of the presence and absence of a
governing materiality: “What is sought is the object in relation to which the pleasure
principle functions. This functioning is in the material, the web, the medium to which all
practical experience makes a reference” (53). And such a reference hinges on a
problematic Vorstellung, representation centered on the materiality of the object as
absence; “the Thing is not nothing, but literally is not. It is characterized by its absence,
its strangeness” (63).

In this light, the IOU is not only a temporally contingent sign of equally
contingent capital value, but figures, at a remove, as the material center of loss affectively
registered: “Jimmy did not know who was winning but he knew that he was losing.” But
the obj ect “in relation to the pleasure principle” here becomes not only the absence of
value, but the material signifier linking the pleasure principle, as invoked by Lacan, to a

modernist economy of expenditure. The cards and the IOUs are clearly temporally

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contingent embodiments of desire in flux between capital gain and expenditure,
excitement and entropy. At the close of the race, J immy is “too excited to be genuinely
happy” (43), because “rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does
the possession of money” (44). Speed and notoriety linked to the machine embodying
international finance capital “scudding in towards Dublin” (42), are afl'ectively rendered
as excitement perversely structuring the pleasure principle: excitement at the story’s end
is linked to impending loss, the absence embodied in the IOU, as Jimmy’s “regret,” is of
an “impleasure correspond[ing] to an increase in the quantity of excitation and pleasure
to a diminution” (Freud, Beyond 4).

Capital surplus and contingency, subjective affect and loss, also govern the
economy of “Two Gallants.” Corley’s material-sexual exchanges reveal that the
conflicting motives in two-sided exchange structure an infinite displacement of value and
desire. His meeting with the servant girl—who is significantly occluded from the story’s
social-textual economy—is one of chance and a source of parasitic acquisition:
“Cigarettes every night she’d bring me and paying the tram out and back. And one night
she brought me two bloody fine cigars—O, the real cheese, you know, that the old fellow
usedto smoke. . . . Iwasafiaid,man, she’dgetinthcfamilyway. Butshe’suptothe
dodge” (51). The assumed reciprocal promise of marriage is appropriately displaced,
deferred; she is “up to the dodge,” or evasion of bourgeois reciprocal obligation. Her
expenditure, of her own cash and her employer’s fancy cigars, yields a sexual return that
is glaringly (and teasingly?) absent from the text. This expenditure as investment in a

deferred and displaced return of surplus is the counterpart to Corley’s parasitic economy

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and to his investments in woman as commodity. Having spent money on countless and
nameless women, he rejects such sexual investments by concluding, “And damn the thing
I ever got out of it” (52). But the dialogue is predicated precisely on loss, expenditure
without return. Being, in this instance of male verbal exchange, is structured on a
constantly deferred Having, exceeding any simple sexual contract.

The impending loss driving capitalist surplus via expenditure we see in “After the
Race” figures here on the microsocial level, taking the form of an inherent imbalance
based in conflicting motives between partners. Again, Simmel articulates such conflicting
motives in terms of expenditure (of energy, psychic investment legible in one’s
“substance”) generating surplus: What one expends in interaction can only be one’s own
energy, the transmission of one’s substance. Conversely, exchange takes place not for the
sake of an object previously possessed by another person, but rather for the sake of one’s
own feeling about an object, a feeling which the other previously did not possess. The
meaning of exchange, moreover, is that the sum of values is greater afterward than it was
before (44). The subjective, verbal exchange in “Two Gallants” figures Simmel’s model
of a founding imbalance in motivationally conflicting exchange processes, but in a way
specifically based in and posing a challenge to a male homosexual economy. “Spend[ing]
money on them right enough” does not yield a sexual return, a surplus, except “ofi‘ of one
of them” (52) teases Corley. That one encounter suggests the logic of the prostitute in
Rita F elski’s formulation: “both seller and commodity, the prostitute Was the ultimate
symbol of the commodification of eros, a disturbing example of the ambiguous

boundaries separating economies and sexuality, the rational and the irrational” (19). As

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Corley tells Lenehan, “she’s on the turf now. I saw her driving down Earl Street one night
with two fellows with her on a car” (53). But the significance here lies in eschewing
moral agency; her multiply invested, commodified body is not a result of Corley’s
“doing,” but the object that serves to solidify and sustain (male) social exchange, as
Corley’s argument that “there was others at her before me” suggests that the sexual object
is one of pure exchange value, of the homogeneous, abstract commodity form. The male
verbal exchange foregrounded by the text circulates around the simultaneously material
and immaterial body of the woman and anticipates Luce Irigaray’s model of “women on
the market.” Under modern capitalism woman, according to Irigaray, is the material
support for the disavowal of a frmdamentally homosexual male economy: “Reigning
everywhere, although prohibited in practice, hom(m)o-sexuality is played out through the
bodies of women, matter, or sign, and heterosexuality has been up to now just an alibi for
the smooth workings of man’s relations with himself, of relations among men” (172).
Further, “the use made of women is thus of less value than their appropriation one by
one. And their ‘usefulness’ is not what counts the most. Woman’s price is not determined
by the ‘properties’ of her body—although her body constitutes the material support of
that price” (174-5).

But the point here is not that the text, in light of Irigaray’s model, simply
articulates the objectification of women and bodies under patriarchal capitalism. Rather,
the woman’s body figures as an infinitely substitutable material support of psychic
investment, that around which a psychology of loss in exchange takes shape. The text’s

one overt reference to a possessive psychic interiority posited against extemalized desire

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is voiced as a threat emerging fiom within this (homo)sexual economy. As the servant
girl enters their field of vision, and Lenehan asks to “have a squint at her,” possessive
individualism links the external object of desire to the guarded fantasy of interiorized
ownership: Corley’s defensive response is to ask “are you trying to get inside me?” (54).
If Lenehan’s gaze at the woman as object of desire poses a threat, it is because it is both
stepping between Corley and the woman, taking possession (in a scopophillic economy),
and crossing the interior threshold of desire for that object: borrowing a gaze
threateningly avows that private psychic interiority is predicated on the external material
objects of exchange. Further, this kind of seopic consumption relies on deferred fantasy,
the limit structuring desire, as Lenehan argues, “all I want is to have a look at her. I’m not
going to eat her” (54). The suggestion of a regression to the oral phase, during which the
ego is constituted in the oral consumption of a cathected (substitute) object, and “the
sexual aim consists in the incorporation of the object” (Freud, Three Essays 64), is both
offered and withheld" But the point is that when reduced to its bare material necessity the
system of exchange structuring male psychic economies betrays the interiority (Simmel’s
“solipsism”) it supposedly supports.

This betrayal is supported by a tension between imagination driven by lack and
the text’s formal restraint; the subject of narrative—interior psychic life—is both private,
autonomous, and a conventional fantasy emerging from capital’s material(ized) limits.
Left alone, Lenehan is given an interior life, but one linked to the psychic entropy
implied in Simmel’s model of exchange, Jimmy’s being “too excited to be genuinely

happy,” and the Freudian limits to pleasure. As he eats his meager meal of peas and

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ginger beer, vision and consumption meet on the grounds of an interiorized absence, and
this within the restrained moral judgment of Joyce’s realism:
In his imagination he beheld the lovers walking along some dark road; he
heard Corley’s voice in deep energetic gallantries and saw again the leer
of the young woman’s mouth. This vision made him feel keenly his own
poverty of purse and spirit. He was tired of knocking about, of pulling the
devil by the tail, of shifts and intrigues. He would be thirty-one in
November. Would he never get a good job? Would be never have a home
of his own? He thought how pleasant it would be to have a warm fire to sit
by and a good dinner to sit down to. . . . He might yet be able to settle
down in some snug corner and live happily if he could only come across
some good simple-minded girl with a little of the ready. (57-8, my
emphasis)
Possession is predicated on a lack that structures the bourgeois fantasy of private
domestic space. But more importantly, Corley’s “energetic gallantries” are linked to the
“sensual leer” of pleasure and juxtaposed with both Lenehan’s “poverty” and the
entropic, shock-resistant vision of “settl[ing] down in some snug corner.” And as this is
to be attained by finding “some girl with a little of the ready,” Lenehan’s thinking/fantasy
suggests lotteries or gambling or advertising—bliss with little effort or expenditure. A
girl as absent fantasy figures the virtual value of investment capital.
This absence driving surplus is materially (and symbolically) rendered at the

story’s conclusion, when Corley opens his hand to reveal that “a small gold coin shone in

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the palm”; that coin becomes the material support—das Ding—of absence structuring
desire, an emptied symbol around which the narrative is retroactively constructed. The
text elides both affect, or conscious investment in the coin, and the sexual investment in
the encounter between Corley and the woman. But as newly acquired money-obj ect
revealed to be the object of desire operative within the narrative, it is also structurally
determined by both the subjective loss preceding it and a future contingency, the loss in
expenditure determining its value. As such, money here “plays several contradictory
roles,” as Osteen points out, in that it “not only represents a standard of value (Imaginary
function) and a real quantity that may be stored—signs of stasis—but also functions as a
medium of circulation and hence a symbol of motion (Symbolic function)” (72). But in
“Two Gallants,” removed from the leveling force of exchange (and its failure, imbalance)
as well as any indication of use, it also flmctions as a doubled no-thing, simultaneously a
substantive object and “sublime thing” (Brown, A Sense 41). The male economy
structured on a fantasy of psychic interiority in acquisition thus hinges on absence made
present, given material support in circulation, deferral, and contingency. The coin is an
empty material signifier betraying the subject’s autonomy by rendering it a deferred
category of infinite exchange.
Together, these two representative stories map a tension important to modernity
and modernist examinations of capital and the material constitution of subjectivity. A
psychic economy hinging on symbolic loss emerges between investment capital and its
abstract contingency (“After the Race”) and its money and commodity forms on the level

of two-sided exchange (“Two Gallants”). The subject of capitalist exchange in Joyce’s

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realism is only legible as an affective response to the uncanny nature of the material
forms capital takes. Here it’s worth repeating the operative tension between “excitement”
and pleasure operative in “After the Race,” which is comparably figured in the mutually
imbricated expenditure of energy and endless movement toward entropy in “Two
Gallants” (where Lenehan’s constant motion figures nonproductive walking as
simultaneous expenditure of energy and consumption of time). The mechanical-temporal
logic of labor—the extraction/expenditure of energy in the reproduction of surplus——
perversely structures an impossible leisure around deferred acquisition. But movement
and entropy also structure a conflicted psychic economy which can only be figured as
affect: the material objects of exchange inform the embodied subjectivity of capital’s
limits, whether it is Simmel’s solipsistic seller, Joyce’s gambler reduced to counting the
beats of his temples, or Lenehan’s pathetically rendered fantasy of sensual pleasure
emerging from the absence of a little of the ready. Such descriptions of affect constitute a
“miserly” textual economy of representing absence, often by gesturing toward some
temporally displaced or deferred presence. The material embodiments of capital value
mark subjectivity by and as negation, imbricating subjective value in the limits and
deferral of the commodity-object. But the modernist radicality of Dubliners lies in its
simultaneous withholding or elision of psychic interiority as seat of subjective desire in
that the exchanging and exchangeable subject is pitted between a formal aesthetic of
objective signification and its figurations of surplus. In other words, in Joyce’s social
space of exchange founded on loss, psychic interiors of possessive individualism are a

fantasy of the uncanny nature of capital.

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The Good Soldier narrates subjectivity, and the subject’s attempt to “anchor”
itself in the objectivity of things, as a crisis continually circulating arotmd the impending
slippage of simlifieation, the deferred presence embodied in the objects of exchange. Of
interest is not the question of the impressionist narrator’s (un)reliability, but the
psychological subject emerging from the contingency of value embodied in the objects of
exchange, those objects which supposedly mound the private bourgeois psychic interior.
Thus, the formal and stylistic differences between Joyce’s early realism and Ford’s
accretive impressionism are nonetheless part of a shared preoccupation with objects of
exchange—commodities, money, bodies—as contradictory embodiments of loss, surplus,
and immanence.

IfJoyce’s authorial narrative economy subsumes private psychic interiors under
the material conditions of social exchange, Ford’s narrative foremounds mind as
anxiously guarded private property. In A Genealogy of Modernism (1984), Michael
Levenson traces the shifting relationship between “physis, the elaboration of an external
physical space,” and “psyche, the construction of an internal psychological space” (7)
within early modernism. Beginning with Conrad, he sees an aesthetic shift from or
alteration of Enlightenment Humanism’s primacy of the centered, rational subject as the
determinant of meaning in the external, material world. “The sovereign subject has not
disappeared,” he claims of Conrad’s narrators; “it has only retreated to safer, if more
narrow, mound,” a mound posited in various forms of literary impressionism, by “the

dissociation of fact and subjectivity” (35). Levenson notes Ford’s lament of the decline of

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the liberal humanist subject under mass democracy, production, and consumption: “we
are standardizing ourselves and we are doing away with everything that is outstanding,”
to point out that Ford “attributed the change to the spread of mass democracy, mass
education, and mass culture” (50).8 Levenson argues that Ford is exemplary of a large-
scale shift to “literary individualism”; Ford’s “reheat to a sceptical individualism was not
only a literary retreat—from moralizing, generalizing, rhetoric, sentimentality—but quite
confessedly a retreat from mass culture, widening democracy and the political crises of a
declining liberalism,” and that “the individual subject became the refuge for threatened
values. The process was almost territorial: as traditional values were jeopardized, there
was a retreat to the surer, if more modest, zone of the self” (61).

Tamar Katz takes up this problem specifically in terms of literary impressionism
and its gendered negotiations with psychic interiority in a radically shifting public sphere.
She centralizes the figure of “the newly mobile woman [who] offers literature a subject
both public and private, vulnerable and interiorized,” marking a problem of “how to
mound masculine literary authority” (1 8). While she locates this problem in a broad
cultural shift from feminized domestic spaces associated with inferiority to a kind of
feminizing dissemination across the public sphere, resulting in a tension between “a
world broken into false surfaces and unknowable depths” (125), her narrative operates on
a striking circularity as it outlines the gendered problem of interiority and modern
narrative:

In his extended essay “Women and Men,” written in 1911-12 and

serialized in the Little Review in 1918 . . . his discussion of the relation

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between men and women becomes an essay on the mysterious
inaccessibility of character. Just as gender relations quickly become a
question of interior mystery for Ford, so too do the ideas of internal
mystery and the narrative means of rendering it lead him inexorably to the
unstable relation between the sexes. (109)
The circularity here——that gender relations create “interior mystery” and this in turn leads
Ford to consider gender relations—is perhaps symptomatic of an impressionism that tries
to anchor the subject in its perceptions of external objects in order to posit a psychic
interior that is both separate from and dependent upon those objects. The modernist
problem of representing psychic interiors conceived in an increasingly public sphere of
consumption and exchange does include gender relations, particularly with middle-class
female consumers playing an increasingly important role in the expansion of commodity
culture. But such a focus on gendered duality displaces or disavows the flux and
contingencies of capital shaping the subject—public and private—through its relation to
commodifieation and material culture.

Levenson’s genealogy and Katz’s more recent formulation of the problems of
subjectivity centered around the lmknowable depth of the psyche are useful in mapping
the private psychological subject in the public sphere as an important site of modernist
conflict. More interestingly, however, these critical accounts (separated by sixteen years)
share an investment in socially and historically locating Ford and his contemporaries
without considering the force of international capital structuring the novel’s problematic

category of the narrating subject. We do well to recall Fredric Jameson’s claims for a

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capitalist psychology at the heart of modern narrative, a subjectivity emerging “in the
object world of late capitalism” which is “accompanied by a decisive development in the
construction of the subject” and “by the constitution of the latter into a closed monad,
henceforth governed by the laws of ‘psychology’” (Political Unconscious 160). This
process marks the subject as “the textual institution or determinant that expresses and
reproduces the newly centered subject of the age of reifieation,” that subject centered by
way of “the sealing off of the psyche” (160). John Dowell’s narration of the uncanny
sexual exchanges shaping the subjects of the narrative and its melodramatic tragedy, as
an act narrators perform “just to get the sight out of their heads” (9), supports Jameson’s
claim. But the novel also allows us to extend such a consideration of the effects of
commodification on modern subjectivity and its unconscious; for it is just this centered
psychological subject with which the novel takes issue if we read the construction of an
lmreliable narrator as critique of the form of high-capitalist exchange as embodied in the
fleeting thingness of its objects.

Narrative anxiety hinges on “the sealing off of the psyche,” or understanding the
subject as a reified psychological monad. John Dowell’s opening announcement of “the
saddest story” is linked to the uncanny nature of the Other, ambiguome stating that “my
wife and I knew Captain and Mrs. Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know
anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them” (7). This link
between sadness and the Other that exceeds straightforward observation/representation
and a psychology of exchange posits a melancholic loss and alienation as a contradiction

internal to the logic of possessive individualism and acquisition. Dowell doubts his

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memory in the face of lost “permanence” and “stability” (10) among the four
protagonists, resulting in schizophrenic assertions: “and yet I swear by the sacred name of
my creator that it was true” (11). And this impressionist-schizophrenic flux structures and
betrays psychic depth by way of the material(ized) limits of knowing; a Cartesian
epistemology anchored in private possession is figured as impending decay:
If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core
and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four
days, isn’t it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple? So
it may well be with Edward Ashburnham, with Leonora his wife and with
poor dear Florence. And, if you come to think of it, isn’t it a little odd that
the physical rottenness of at least two pillars of our four-square house
never presented itself to my mind as a menace to its security? (1 l)
Psychic depth, memory, and value hinge on the anxious awareness of a temporal
contingency that both structures the private subject’s knowledge and is “a menace to its
security.” More importantly, however, possession of “a goodly apple” that is later
perceived to have always-already been rotten at the core—which we can read here as
material support for hidden motives—raises questions of the temporal limits of knowing
structuring a subjectivity in flux. So when Dowell laments shortly thereafter that their
period of unbridled wealth and consumption marked by melodramatic breaks in the
various socio-sexual contracts—saying “to have all that and to be all that! No, it was too
good to be true” (l3)—he expresses simultaneously a modernist “mowing preoccupation

with interiority as a more primary zone of tru ” and the failure of that project “traceable

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to a sense of epistemological crisis” (Jacobs 30, 38). Loss marks the shifting limits of
memory as the site of unreliable, anxiety-ridden, uncanny psychic depth.

But this preoccupation with loss, rendered as unreliable memory, is part of
Dowell’s need for “anchoring” in objects of exchange, das Ding in Lacan’s reading of
Freud, that stands in for absent and contingent capital value. The impressionist style
registers an expressionist content in the narrative’s tourist economy of psychic
experience; shock governs the impossible need for anchorage as the narrative voice
seems to follow the circulation and flux of capital. The four protagonists’ whirlwind tour
of the meat cities of the Continent hinges on vision impressing itself on the mind, but
fleeting: “Not one of [the cities] did we see more than once, so that the whole world for
me is like spots of colour in an immense canvas. Perhaps if it weren’t so I should have
something to catch hold of now” (19). And while this is a problem of memory as
detached from the material, it is a problem rooted in the material, the text’s obsession
with a materiality out of which desire, memory, and interiorized fantasy emerge. Bodily
movement is in conflict with the presumed stasis of signifying objects, producing an
anxiety of affect that governs the narrative. “I dare say the patients get a home feeling
and some sort of anchorage in the spot,” Dowell proclaims while reflecting on Florence’s
stay at the Nauheim baths in 1904 (27). That “home feeling” requires that subject and
object remain in mutual stasis, which, in turn depends on possessive individualism and
accumulation. Unfamiliar “open space” threatens to strip the subject of its hold on the
external and itself:

But, for myself, to be at Nauheim gave me a sense—what shall I say?—a

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sense almost of nakedness—the nakedness that one feels on the sea-shore
or in any meat open space. I had no attachments, no accumulations. In
one’s own home it is as if little, innate sympathies draw one to particular
chairs that seem to enfold one in an embrace, or take one along particular
streets that seem fiiendly when others may be hostile. And, believe me,
that feeling is a very important part of life. (27)
The result here is the exchange of one pathology for another; anxiety stems from the
absence of objects with which to identify (“no attachments, no accumulations”). This
need for identification also anticipates Freud’s distinction between object-choice and a
remessive identification in Group Psychology (1921), in “that identification has
appeared instead of object-choice, and that object-choice has regressed to identification
. . ; it often happens that under the conditions in which symptoms are constructed, that
is, where there is repression and where the mechanisms of the unconscious are dominant,
object-choice is turned back into identification—the ego assumes the characteristics of
the object” (48). Dowell feels the need to identify via object-choice, but only as negation.
The loss of a stable object world in marking out a finite space of mind and self leaves him
in a state of identification similar to Freud’s model of remessive object-choice in the
absence of a stable object. This also extends our concern with the materiality of psychic
investment which, in Ford’s novel, links such anxiety-ridden remession to knowledge
and the imagination. The knowledge of Florence’s suicide hinges on “some little material
object, always, that catches the eye and that appeals to the imagination” (126). That little

material object, the flask of prussic acid, becomes pure thing, Das Ding eluding the

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novel’s system of exchange while it also links the repression and identification that drive
exchange.

Material objects, infinitely exchangeable, both sustain and betray psychological
depth anxiously associated with the private “self” of bourgeois modernity. Two objects
operative in the novel—Florence’s flask and Leonora’s key to her secret dispatch box—
link a problematic subjectivity to the mystery of the commodity form, both split between
empirical knowledge and the “metaphysical subtleties” (Marx 81) of surplus and
abstracted, rationalized contingency. The loss necessitated and presupposed by exchange
is embodied in the material object which, in turn, shapes the affective psychic economy
of loss in “the saddest story” and renders the status of the subject one of infinite
displacement in excess of the materiality in which it invests. The text’s anxious psychic
economy follows the logic of the signifiying displacement of value operative in the
commodity’s simultaneously material and immaterial form. The narrative economy
redeploys the economy of object exchange, reproducing the subjective anxiety produced
by the contingency of the object in an effort to show that unreliability originates in the
commodity object. First, the flask of prussic acid signifying Florence’s suicide (rendering
it valuable, we might add) and marking Dowell’s memory suggests a traumatic limit to
memory centered on the object and driving the narrative. In Lacan, the traumatic subject
repeats rather than remembers, and this repetition circulates around that which exceeds
symbolic representation, “that which is unassimilable in [the real] . . . determining all that
follows, and imposing on it an apparently accidental origin” (BookXT 55). The

materiality of the simrifier which, in trauma, cannot be reduced to or contained by the

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symbolic order “is then specifically held responsible for the limits of remembering”
(129).9 The flask recurs, in traumatic repetition, as the little material object marking the
limits of remembering. But, more importantly, value only accrues to the object in the
narrative by becoming literally emptied, when Florence consumes the prussic acid. This
emptying of the material (signifier) retroactively creates narrative value and indicates the
material limits to possession just as Florence’s bodily desire exceeds the marriage and
sexual contract. In the narrative virtually devoid of production, the subject is anxiously
suspended between the emptied material signifier and a virtual value that is always-
already displaced. Leonora, the rational manager of capital investment, also embodies
value in excess of the material, again through the objects’ displacement of value:
Certain women’s lines guide your eyes to their necks, their eyelashes, their
lips, their breasts. But Leonora’s seemed to conduct your gaze always to
her wrist. And the wrist was at its best in a black or a dog-skin glove and
there was always a gold circlet with a little chain supporting a very small
golden key to a dispatch box. Perhaps it was that in which she locked up
her heart and her feelings. (39-40)
The fashionable markers of the body as value indicate, on the one hand, what Jonathan
Crary has described fashion to be, “a protective shield of signifiers, a reflective armor
carefully assembled to mask a core of social and psychic vulnerabilities” (118),
vulnerabilities, in this case, emerging fi'om the absent surplus that is capital. However, as
the gaze traverses the aesthetics of the physical we witness an infinite visual economy

summarized by the displacement of value to the absent dispatch box which the narrator

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assumes to hold emotional investment and the “ cart” of the subject. The subject is an
uncarmy categorical space in flux between the material and the (absent) value it simrifies.
And the object, the key, is the second operative material signifier. Unlike Florence’s flask
marking the traumatic limits of memory, however, the key and its dispatch box suggest
the Lacanian Thing. Just as Joyce’s IOUs embody an always-already lost value in the
object’s associations, Leonora’s key is the material signifier around which the subject as
displaced value is structured. But both the flask and the key serve to figure subjectivity as
alterity, marking consciousness, memory, and value with the absent surplus they refer to.
The subject of capital is the infinitely displaced value of its objects.

Leonora thus figures as the uncanny embodiment of capital value, exceeding her
own materiality through infinite displacement. This is part of a logic in which the body
becomes sheer surface simrification, reduced to a materialism that is divorced from and
sustains capitalist abstraction and that structures an anxious psychic economy. As
Dowell’s vision of Florence as commodity figure in a history of sexual exchanges
unfolds, he realizes “that Florence was a personality of paper—that she represented a real
human being with a heart, feelings, with sympathies and with emotions only as a bank
note represents a certain quantity of gold,” and, upon hearing of her earlier sexual liaison,
he “thought suddenly that she wasn’t real; she was just a mass of talk out of the guide-
books, of drawings out of fashion-plates” (142), or what David Trotter has recently called
“the pure product of social mimesis” (215). This logic of loss retroactively informing
possession and reducing the subject-as-other to the empty signifier or representation of

exchange value serves to secure, but only tenuously, a fantasy of detached psychic

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interiority. He cannot chase her to prevent her drinking the prussic acid because “it would
have been like chasing a scrap of paper—an occupation imloble for a mown man” (142).
In other words, the material as sheer representation—whether the body or money-—
threatens the subject’s fantasy of a sealed-off psyche through the displacements of
investment as value. Subjectivity is produced by a materiality that displaces that which it
represents and whose value is temporally contingent, a subjectivity anxiously constituted
in the threat of contingency.

Further, the link between the indeterminacy of representation and the temporal
contingency of value both determines and dissolves the borders of privileged psychic
space according to the logic of capital and commodity. The anxiety-ridden unknowability
of Edward Ashburnham, for instance, hinges on the tension between the absent rule of
capital—represented by the Burlington Arcade firm in the fashionable Piccadilly
district—and a catalogueue of fetish objects of the self, objects of exchange marking a
fantasy of subjective stasis. Edward’s suggestion to buy from Burlington is based in an
economy of potentiality that structures the temporal economy of the subject. But as
finance capital structures the subject around potential surplus, it also yields an
epistemological crisis of absent production and distribution; the problem of knowledge
(of the subject) is a problem of capital flux:

Otherwise I should not remember the name of the Burlington Arcade. I
wonder what it looks like. I have never seen it. I imagine it to be two
immense rows of pillars, like those of the Forum at Rome, with Edward

Ashburnham striding down between them. But it probably isn’t—the least

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like that. Once also he advised me to buy Caledonian Deferred, since they
were due to rise. And I did buy them and they did rise. But how he got the
knowledge I haven’t the faintest idea. It seemed to drop out of the blue
sky. (32)
The speculative knowledge of capital is naturalized and de-realized, rendered uncanny.
Edward is the similarly uncanny subject of capital: “And that was absolutely all I knew of
him,” Dowell continues, except for those other “things” he knew of Edward. Edward
Ashburnham is a category in flux between investment knowledge and the litany of
commodities whose exchange value, once possessed, is transferred onto the body as site
of contingent value. The subject, again, is a shifting category of the uncanny as Dowell
concludes that “that was all there was ofhim, inside and out” (33).

We can apply the temporal contingency of value operative and the novel’s
participation in a high-modernist discourse of cultural consumption to the transitive
nature of modern subjectivity exemplified by Bergson and William James. The shift in
psychology’s emphasis on spatial models of psychic unity (Crary 60) to operative
accounts of consciousness as temporal flux historically coincides with a shift to economic
models of abundance, speculative capital, and consumer choice. First, as Stephen Kern
writes, J arnes and Bergson “agreed that [thought] was not composed of discrete parts,
that any moment of consciousness was a synthesis of an ever changing past and future,
and that it flew ” (24). This “‘personality . . . flowing through time’” constitutes an
“inner self” based in “‘a continuous flux, a succession of states, each of which announces

that which follows and contains that which precedes it’” (Bergson, qtd. in Kern 25). Ford

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applies a similar temporal thinking to the novel, emphasizing the “synthesis” of

unordered impressions constituting psychological interiority:
It became very early evident to us [Ford and Conrad] that what was the
matter with the novel, and the British novel in particular, was that it went
straight forward, whereas in your gradual acquaintanceship with your
fellows you never do go straight forward . . . To get . . . a man in function
you could not begin at his beginning and work his life chronologically to
the end. You must first get him with a strong impression, and then work
backwards and forwards over his past. (qtd. in Kern, 30—1)

But the temporal flux of psychic successions and impressions defining an inner
self is informed by a change in economic thought. As many historians and critics have
noted, economic thinking shifts around the end of the nineteenth century. With the
necessary proliferation of commodity forms under increasing mass production,
“scarcity,” as Regenia Gagnier has recently argued, “was no longer a material obstacle
but a recognition of society’s ability to create unlimited new needs and desires as its
productive capacity and leisure time increased” (1). While this account is perhaps too
universalized and hence historically reductive, it is part of a larger post-Marxian process
in which “value ceased to be comparable across persons: it became individual, subjective,
or psychological. The theory of economics became more psychological than
sociological” [(4).10 The increasing productive capacity and expanding market generate
the psychological flux articulated by Bergson and James and narrated by Ford,

exemplified in the novel’s fixation on the impossibility of fully knowing the self or other

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when both are psychologically mediated by the temporal contingency of capital and its
objects of exchange. And we see this ideological shaping of modern psychology
according to the commodity form most clearly in the logic of twentieth century
advertising, in which, as Franco Moretti writes, “we find precisely the randomness,
rapidity, discontinuity, uncontrollability and depth of the stream of consciousness. . . .
[But] the associations of stream of consciousness are by no means ‘fiee.’ They have a
cause, a driving force, which is outside the individual consciousness. . . . the absence of
internal order and of hierarchies indicates its reproduction of a form of consciousness
which is subjugated to the principle of the equivalence of commodities” (Moretti 196-7).

Such a model of consciousness “subjugated to” the abstract “equivalence” of the
commodity form is certainly operative under capital’s foremounding of exchange value,
but Moretti’s argument does not fully consider the contingencies of commodity value that
structure consciousness and challenge internal psychic order as pathologically narrated by
Ford. “Knowledge of one’s fellow beings” is destined to failure, to eternal incompletion
and flux because linked to the “dishonesty” of capital value, temporal contingency, and
this is the epistemological problem informing the crisis to the subject centered on a
privileged psychic interiority. “How does one put in one’s time? How is it possible to
have achieved nine years and to have nothing whatever to show for it?” asks Dowell in
reflection. And having nothing to show for it does not devolve upon the souvenir logic of
collecting kitsch, but upon the contingency of value fundamental to such psychic,
subjective investment in the object:

Upon my word, I couldn’t tell you offhand whether the lady who sold the

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so expensive violets at the bottom of the road that leads to the station, was
cheating me or no; I can’t say whether the porter who carried our traps
acrossthe stationatLeghornwasathiefornowhenhe saidthatthe
regular tariff was a lire a parcel. The instances of honesty that one comes
across in this world are just as amazing as the instances of dishonesty.
After forty-five years of mixing with one’s kind, one ought to have
acquired the habit of being able to know something about one’s fellow
beings. But one doesn’t. (44)
The equivalence of commodities (violets) is concomitant with the contingency of value
under capital flux. Honesty and dishonesty are empty terms, subsumed under the drive
for surplus as an end in itself. Dowell anxiously registers this fundamental contradiction
of capital—interior to its functioning—as that which constitutes the paranoid subject of
leisure reduced to protecting his psychic deposit box.

As the passage also suggests, exchange-based contingency shapes a fundamental
alterity, an inability to fully know one’s self or the other. In a similar vein, Jonathan
Crary argues for a shift in late nineteenth century realism from mimesis to “a tenuous
relation between perceptual synthesis and dissociation” (92). The newly emerging and
problematic relation between synthesis and dissociation—or unity and framnentation in
traditional literary terms—is indicative of the way capital flux both informs and betrays
modernist psychic interiority. We see in Manet’s In the Conservatory, for example,

a figuration of an essential conflict within the perceptual logic of

modernity, in which two powerful tendencies are at work. One is a binding

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together of vision, an obsessive holding together of perception to maintain
the viability-of a functional real world. The other, barely contained or
sealed over, is a dynamic of psychic and economic exchange, of
equivalence and substitution, of flux and dispersal that threatens to
unmoor the apparently stable positions and terms that Manet seems to
have effortlessly arranged. (92)
Ford stages this conflict between a “holding together of perception” and exchange based
in substitution, but in such a way that the former can only fail in the face of the latter. The
inability “to know something about one’s fellow beings” is based, Dowell speculates, in
“the modern civilised habit—the modern English habit of taking everyone for manted”
(44) according to the equivalencies of exchange. This problem of equivalence and flux in
exchange is the temporal contingency of value that both generates and is in conflict with
Dowell’s need for psychic anchoring, as he later says that “with all the taking for granted,
you never really get an inch deeper [into the psyche of the other] than the things I have
catalogued” (45). And that need repeatedly registers a psychic economy of loss that is
shaped by modern systems of exchange. In the multiple sexual exchanges around which
“the saddest story” retrospectively circulates, the failed reciprocity of the marriage
contract is expressed as loss. Florence’s infidelity is part of Dowell’s loss of anchoring in
external objects and Edward’s series of affairs are investments in the “equivalence and
substitution” of bodies, requiring an expenditure that leads, in turn, to the Ashbumham’s
financial decline. These failed psychic and interpersonal exchanges illustrate the

epistemological crisis of the novel. The text is a schizo-narrative; its self-reflexive

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unreliability stems fi'om the inability to resolve the tension between anchoring desire in
the external objects of commodification and exchange—Including sexually charged,
invested bodies—and the flux of contingency which those objects represent.

In fact, the “viability of the real world” is figured as a lost feudal order (associated
with Edward) seemingly in conflict with capitalist homogenization and flux,
equivalencies, contingencies, and surplus. Edward embodies these contradictions. As a
remnant of a leisurely class generously, if patriarehically, providing for his tenants, he
also “consumes” women across the class spectrum. But his consumption, which is also
marked by a continuous expenditure of desire, meets with the “rational” management of
capital, the historical absorption of all surplus. Sexual surplus (what Freud would call
hyper-cathected drives) is contained and sublimated by the figure of La Dolciquita and
the cool calculations of “a perfectly reasonable commercial transaction” (187). Even the
secrecy of the transaction, a kind of surplus knowledge, is absorbed by the logic of
managed speculation: “there was the risk—a twenty per cent. risk, as she figmed it out”
(187), that the Grand Duke would hear ofthe affair,and the virtual threat thus requires
real payment. Managing the multiple potential flows of desire here follows the interior
tension of desiring capital, as capitalist production works both to liberate and contain
desire. We can follow Deleuze and Guattari’s reinterpretation of Marx and the limits of
desire under late capitalism, particularly their claim that “capitalism . . . liberates the
flows of desire, but lmder the social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of
its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the

movement that drives it toward this limi ” (139-40). As part of the process of capitalist

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expansion, “reproducing its immanent limits on an ever larger scale” by both producing
and absorbing surplus (234), the channels of desire open with expanding production, but
must be managed and recontained to be sustained. It is this contradictory liberation and
management of desire in the interest of expanding the interior limits of speculative capital
that governs the sexual exchanges in Ford’s novel, exemplified by the affair between
Edward and La Doleiquita, and that produces what Dowell calls “the saddest story.” We
might claim, in fact, that the story’s sadness lies less in its melodramatic narration of loss
than in its self-reflexive rendering of its subjects as products of the contradiction of
capitalist desire, the result and expression of sehizo—capital.

The novel’s form, in fact, is the counterpart to a psychic economy of loss based in
speculative exchange. The text is a flux of dimessions and chronological contradictions,
resulting in what one reader has called an overall “uncertainty . . . reinforced by the
narrative’s method of promession, which stages madual revelations by withholding the
narrator’s knowledge of central events” (Katz 131). In other words, exchange is the
disavowed virtual threat to the materially and psychologically anchored narrating subject.
The Good Soldier, like the subject of capital, is a formal dimession, performing the
flmdamental contradiction between capitalist mowth and contingency on the one hand
and loss endemic to material exchange on the other. “Is all this dimession or isn’t it
dimession,” asks Dowell in recalling his impressionist memories of their Continental tour
with the Ashburnhams (19). The answer, “again, I don’t know,” has been read as setting
up an unreliable narrator in an effort to resist the feminized and sexualized circulation of

knowledge in favor of a masculine standard of impersonality (Katz 131-2). I would

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argue, however, that dimession as unreliability and its schizophrenic paranoia is Ford’s
formal effort at rendering, in order to defamiliarize, the contradiction and structurally
necessary relation between material loss and absent surplus. As negative narrative
accretion, The Good Soldier is fundamentally about capitalist exchange.

In his discussion of Ford’s impressionism and the psychic trace, Peter Nicholls
argues, “the impression is . . . merely the trace deposited in the mind by a previous
experience, leaving art to re-present that trace so precisely that the intervening passage of
time will be obliterated” (172). His description is accurate, and appropriately suggests the
reification, the congealing of social history and the private mind under capitalist
production, that the novel appropriates. The formal unfolding of schizophrenic revelation
supports but also complicates this model. The first moment of crisis occurs during the
visit to Marburg, when Florence praises Luther’s protest as the Weberian origin of
Edward’s capitalist work ethic, simultaneously denouncing the Catholic Irish. This racial
economy of history sets the terms, in that particular narrative moment, for Leonora’s
contemptuous appeal to John—“‘don’t you know that I’m an Irish Catholic’” (55). Later,
however, Dowell acknowledges this moment as the origin of the liaison between Edward
and Florence as well as Leonora’s recognition of the attraction: “And then——smash——it all
went. It went to pieces at the moment when Florence laid her hand upon Edward’s wrist,
as it lay on the glass sheltering the manuscript of the Protest” (219). Ifwe recall Dowell’s
early epistemological quandary of whether the later discovery of Edward’s and
Florence’s “rottenness” throws the past-present into question, possession marks the stable

space of mind; but the contingency of possession is also potentially a “menace to its

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security” (11). The mental trace is “re-presented . . . precisely,” but with a difference.
Any psychic trace structuring possessive interiority is contingent, subject to the slippage
in meaning under capitalist exchange. In this way, the formal representation of psychic
interiors inhabits and critiques the internal limits of capitalism. As Deleuze and Guattari
put it:
Schizophrenia . . . is indeed the absolute limit that causes the flows [of
capital] to travel in a fiee state on a desoeialized body without organs.
Hence one can say that schizophrenia is theexterior limit of capitalism
itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism only
functions on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or
displace this limit, by substituting for it its own immanent relative limits,
which it continually reproduces on a widened scale . . . . Hence
schizophrenia is not the identity of capitalism, but on the contrary its
difference, its divergence, and its death. Monetary flows are perfectly
schizophrenic realities, but they exist and function only within the
immanent axiomatic that exercises and repels this reality. (246)
John Dowell’s schizo—narrative and self-questioning memory, in this light, are more than
some simple social mimesis of a pathological capital. If Deleuze and Guattari are right in
positing monetary flows as schizophrenic, and this as the system’s own constantly
reproduced and displaced alterity-within-itself, then Ford’s construction of an unreliable
narrator is an effort to expose and pathologize capital on its own molmds of alterity. The

contingency of value, the slippage of meanings and impressions under capitalist

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exchange, is a “menace to [mind’s] security.” But the schizo-narrative reproduces, as
subjective affect and momentary impressions, the schizophrenic difference operative
within capital’s expansion. In its foremounding of schizophrenia as “the conclusion of its
deepest tendency,” The Good Soldier narrates an immanent menace to capital’s
tautological security.
arena

The aesthetics of Joyce and Ford are profoundly ideological. Rooted in the
contradictory market forces that they represent and critique, however, the texts I have
examined here exceed a simple mimetic impulse. In their deliberate aesthetic
experimentation with the problematic relation between subject and object under capital,
they take us beyond a Lukécsian model of the inevitable reproduction of capitalist
ideology on the level of the subject, exposing, rather, the referential slippage in the
commodity form that allows for an aesthetic critique of the terms of its own making. We
can approach this by way of the perverse logic of the commodity form, and Terry
Eagleton’s discussion of “the Marxist sublime” is useful. As Eagleton argues, the
commodity “is a kind of misly caricature of the authentic artefact, at once reified to a
mossly particular object and virulently anti-material in form, densely corporeal and
elusively spectral at the same time” (Ideology 208). This split between presence and
absence is sustained by the continuous displacement of value “in an endless deferral of
identity,” making the commodity “the contingent bearer of an extrinsic form” and yet
“forming a compact space in which the pervasive contradictions of bourgeois society

bizarrely converge” (208-9). And while this latter point simply repeats the concealing of

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labor operative in Marx’s model of the fetish, its significance for us—and for a modernist
critique of exchange and its unconscious—lies in the commodity’s endless, “metonymic
chain” of reference, the “endless accumulation of pure quantity [that] subverts all stable
representations” (212), producing an irreconcilable fissure between material signifier and
surplus. Most importantly, this fissure is the space of ideological production, ofa
fantastic conflation of materiality and abstract form; following G.A. Cohen, Eagleton
summarizes this conflation as illusion: “‘Confusion of content and form creates the
reactionary illusion that physical production and material mowth can be achieved only by
capitalist investment.’ It is the bourgeois political economists who are in this sense the
‘classicists,’ wedded to a conflation of capitalist form and productive material” (217).

Despite their stylistic differences—and the radically different representations of
exchange-based consciousness—the aesthetics of Joyce and Ford intervene in this
ideological conflation of materiality and capital mowth. “After the Race” figures the
simultaneous material particularity and spectrality embodied in the French automobile
racing through Dublin, generating “excitement” in the split between its presence among
“the matefully oppressed” and the absent capital to which it refers. This is what Eagleton
calls the “endless deferral of identity” of the commodity form, most legible in the IOUs
that, in their homogeneity, can only refer to equally homogenized finance capital.
Similarly, the coin retroactively driving the economic parasitism of Corley and Lenehan
operates as both irreducible material thing and as the Lacanian Thing of desire, referring
to an unattainable smplus. This is where Joyce’s revision of social realism takes on its

radical critique: in subsuming the materials and subjects of exchange under a tightly

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contained descriptivist form, those objects also refer to the extra-textual space of capital.
And here is where we might revise traditional Joyce scholarship; rather than seeing the
Joycean epiphany as a sudden flash of moral insight, we should pay attention to the way
the text inhabits the radical fissure between material representation and the extrinsic,
displaced value to which it refers, locating reified subjectivity in that fissure. As such,
Joyce’s restrictive economy simultaneous with its extra-textual references critically
occupies the space of the commodity form, the “space in which the pervasive
contradictions of bourgeois society bizarrely converge.” Similarly, Dowell’s failed effort
at “anchoring” in the particularity of any object is Ford’s success. The novel’s form of
expansive repetition and revelation conflicts with Dowell’s investment in objects as
sources of stable signification; the epistemological crisis, the contingency of all
knowledge driving the flux of the narrative, is of an endless accumulation of endlessly
deferred value.

Desire is displaced by capital flows in “After the Race,” constituting the subject '
in an infinite flux of acquisition: Jimmy is “too excited to be genuinely lmppy.” “Two
Gallants” foremounds the commodification and reification of desire, in which bodies are
displaced, desexualized by the coin as exemplary commodity, the embodiment of
contingent and deferred value. The reified subjectivity figured by the restrictive economy
of these narratives emphasizes the division between capital and the commodity form on
the one hand and material objects on the other, showing the illusory conflation of an
ideology of abundance and its material signifiers. The subject of exchange, however

minimized in its representation of desire, affect, or psychic depth, is a categorical site of

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the loss fundamental and internal to the flows of capital across the social and individual
body. Therefore, reading J oyee together with Ford posits a tension between extemalized
desire and internalized flux, representative of a defining modernist conflict, between a
realist effort to represent the materiality of everyday life and the anxious explorations of
psychic depth, the latter anticipating, for example, Woolf’s work of the 1920's and thus
pushing the limits of any rigid literary-historical parsing.ll Joyce’s subjects, while not
wholly lacking social agency, embody the limits of capital structuring surplus and thus
circulate with the movement of capital, driven by its own impending, internal loss; the
thrust of acquisition is always already marked by loss. Ford’s narrator is the
schizophrenic voice of capital flux, a psychic writing symptomatic of the contingency of
value embodied in the commodified objects of anchorage.

And while Joyce’s narrative voice and Ford’s leisured individual of disembodied
vision perhaps signal the detachment we have long associated with an elite canonical
modernism, they also emerge as immanent to the force of capital, locating the
pathological threats to individuated psychic space in the flux and contradictions of
capitalist exchange. In this light, stories of modemists detached from the market (or from
political economy, for that matter) appear as reductive fantasies. The formal conflict
between Joyce’s narrative detachment and Ford’s anxious impressionism
symptomatically registers the necessary tension between finance capital and the body in
the market, a tension out of which emerges a psychic economy of flux, the internalization
of loss in acquisition. But this linkage on the mounds of the contingency of value also

locates internally conflicted modernist narrative symptomatically and critically within the

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I material limits of capital, as “a form of immanent critique, judging the present to be
lacking by measuring it against the norms which it has generated itself” (Eagleton, The
Idea of Culture 22), in which the subject of exchange as psychic flux emerges fiom the
contradictory embodiment of loss and surplus in the objects of exchange. A modernist
narrative of negative accretion is the culturally symptomatic performance of psychic
economies of loss in the socially managed systems of surplus creation; as the privileges
of psychic interiority and disembodied detachment unfold in an economy of eternal loss,
modernism’s subject of exchange becomes the site of a cultural critique of the social,

internal limits of capital.

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Chapter Three

Perverse Pleasures of Spectacle: Time and Vision in Dos Passos and Lewis

In this chapter I argue that spectacle is central to understanding a collective
epistemology under modern consumer capitalism, privileging vision in a way that links it
to and structures our experience of time. In its various guises under consumer
capitalism—including advertising, photomaphy, cinema, and the dissemination of
spectacular events in the popular press—spectacle performs and embodies the
exponential reproduction of surplus for a presumably collective vision. And while
modern spectacle shares a visual centrality with its more traditional historical forms (of
repeated ritual performing shared community values, for example), in following the
temporal reproducibility of the commodity form, capitalist spectacle also governs the
temporal experience of the eternally new we customarily associate with modernity.

As Mary Anne Doane points out, two operative modalities of modernity are
“abstraction/rationalization and emphasis on the contingent” (10-11). During and
following the second technological revolution, the rapid change and contingency
associated with technological advance and economic surplus “[become] synonymous
with ‘newness,’ which, in its turn, is equated with difference and rupture—a cycle
consistent with an intensifying commodification” (20). More specifically, she
distinguishes between the event and spectacle by claiming a different relation to temporal
contingency. In early cinema and the questions it raises over the recording or elision of
temporal contingency, spectacle emerges as one “attempt to deal with the temporal

instability of the image [which] involves not the taming of the contingent, but its denial,”

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she argues. “Like the event, spectacle effects a coagulation of time . . . . The event bears a
relation to time; spectacle does not. Spectacle is, as Laura Mulvey has pointed out,
fundamentally atemporal, associated with stasis and the antilinear” (170). Further,
“spectacle functions to localize desire, fantasy, and longing in a timeless time, outside
contingency. In this respect, spectacle, in contrast to the event, is epistemologically
reactionary, decidedly unmodern,” whereas “the event comes to harbor contingency
within its very structure” (170, 171).

The operative modality of spectacle is indeed based in its denial of contingency.
But its seeming timelessness, its very “denial” of contingency, is a relation to time. First,
effecting a “coagulation of time” presupposes a relation between the spectacle and its
temporal status, even if only suggesting a false totality, an absolute present shaped
around it. Secondly, spectacle’s denial of its own contingency is part of its temporal
structure when this admittedly “unmodern” construct is seen in its modern, commodified
form simlifying capital surplus. In its very “timeless time,” capitalist spectacle,
increasingly implicated with twentieth century visual technologies, is fimdamentally
structured on its impending loss of value and future outmoded status. The radical
simultaneity of temporal contingency and its denial effected by the newness of
commodity reproduction simiificantly informs the fascination and anxieties of
modernism’s immanent relation to market culture, demonstrated by Dos Passos’s
narrative flux and Lewis’s polemics. By appearing as the radically new, the visual event
marking the present, any particular spectacle necessarily anticipates its impending reified,

outmoded status, thus structuring modern subjects’ experience of time as suspended

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between these two moments and arousing Wyndham Lewis’s complaint that modern,
collective urban culture is “the trance or dream world of the hypnotist” (11). Modernists
between the wars interested in the ideological cultural leveling of mass-oriented politics
and consumption, “the unconscious mass mind” (Tratner 11), centered around spectacular
representations of capital mowth such as mass marketing and the proliferation of
commodities, were variously intrigued or shocked by, imitative or critical of, the role of
spectacle in shaping the cultural imaginary. Reading the force of spectacle in shaping
psychic economies of narrative in Dos Passos together with Lewis’s critique of the “time-
mind” helps show how collective and individual experiences of time coalesce around
capital’s systems of spectacular representation. But more importantly, both authors show
a modernist anxiety of temporal contingency and configure that anxiety with the
ephemeral value of spectacle in an effort to critique the totalizing force of capital through
its psychic, subjective effects.

That said, literary modernism’s interest in the spectacular time of capitalist
modernity is not only one of fatalistic loss, pessimistic outrage, or nostalgia for a pre—
capitalist historical continuity, much less one of a naive rejection of market culture. Dos
Passos’s Manhattan Transfer reshapes realist narrative around the temporal dream-world
of spectacle, while Lewis’s Time and Western Man critiques a cultural fixation with the
dreamy present of the spectacular commodity form. The formal and logical differences
between these texts of course demonstrate divergent modernist responses to the central
epistemological role of capitalist spectacle. More importantly, though, Dos Passos and

Lewis share an ambivalent, critical acknowledmnent of modernism’s position in mass

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culture: both posit the impending outmoded status—that which structures the temporal
limits of capital—built into the logic of spectacular referents of surplus, and thus expose
a contradictory newness at the heart of capitalist production and its culture of
consumption. Both authors, in other words,“ acknowledge that spectacle shapes a perverse
collective pleasure of the eternally new in order to carve out a site of material critique
immanent to the capitalist expansion between the wars.

I’m applying the term spectacle in a way that posits a critical relay between Guy
Debord’s critical observations in The Society of the Spectacle and a Freudian
understanding of perverse fixation. Debord’s analysis situates spectacle not only as the
primary organizing referent of modern society, around which “all consciousness
converges” (12), but as always intimately linked to the proliferation of the commodity
form. Extending a traditional Marxist notion of alienation under capitalist production to
the social effects of late capitalism, he argues that “the spectacle is not a collection of
images; rather, it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images” (12).
Further, the (re-)production of these mediating images is concentrated in the expanding
pervasiveness of commodities, leveling the vision of the masses: “commodities are now
all there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity” (29). Such a mass
fixation determined by the pervasive role of commodity production converges, on the
level of the subject, with a psychoanalytic understanding of perversion. In the Three
Essays, Freud acknowledges that a “perverse” attachment to objects supplemental to
libidinal aims is universal (3 7), but that when the object mediating that aim becomes the

site of “exclusiveness and fixation” it can be regarded “as a pathological symptom” (27).

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It is this psychoanalytic understanding of pathological exclusive fixation, beyond
libidinal supplement, that I apply to the paradoxical relation between mass production
and spectacle, in which “the would be singularity of an object can be offered to the eager
hordes only if it has been mass-produce ” (Debord 45), to reveal a collective economy of
perversion, a fixation on the repetitive production of capitalist spectacle.

More recently, Jonathan Crary has argued persuasively for the centrality of
spectacle in modernity in general and cultural modernism in particular. Crary reads
spectacle through the paradoxically intertwined modalities of attention and distraction,
arguing that modern phenomena of distraction have a “reciprocal relation to the rise of
attentive norms and practices” (1), which he exhaustively traces through nineteenth and
early twentieth century discourses in the social sciences, philosophy, and aesthetics.
Modern spectacular culture, in his model, emerges fi'om new scientific understandings of
embodied and hence contingent vision, having “no enduring features,” being “embedded
in a pattern of adaptability to new technological relations, social configurations, and
economic imperatives” (l 3). My argument attempts nothing nearly so comprehensive, but
his comments on the role of specifically capitalist spectacle deserve attention. The
increasingly pervasive “stream of heterogeneous stimuli” and its call for recurring
inattentiveness in the twentieth century, he argues, “have produced alternate experiences
of dissociation, of temporalities that are not only dissimilar to but also fundamentally
incompatible with capitalist patterns of flow and obsolescence” (77). Modern
subjectivity, understood as temporal experience in flux between the new and the obsolete,

is further shaped by an “essential conflict within the perceptual logic of modernity”: the

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tense cooperation between a perceptual realism of focused attention versus “a dynamic of
psychic and economic exchange, of equivalence and substitution, of flux and dispersal”
threatening temporally stable subject positions (92). But while he suggests a psychic
economy of fleeting temporality emerging with the spectacles of capitalist exchange, one
which is potentially “incompatible” with the flux of capital, Crary’s argument does not
fully take this tension into consideration.

This tension performed by capitalist spectacle, as both epistemological focus of
consumer subjects’ attention and marker of a dissociative experience of temporal order,
structures modernist responses to and narrative reconfigurations of a rising culture of the
spectacle. The work of Des Passos and Lewis between the wars anticipates Debord’s
critique of the cultural pervasiveness of the mass-produced commodity image. Their
work also marks a growing cultural ambivalence about finance capital and mass
consumption, about the spectacular images of surplus and their relation to collective
psychic and epistemological systems. But it is on the mounds of this ambivalence that my
reading of the role of spectacle in literary modernism diverges from Debord’s model. I
begin by reading Manhattan Transfer for its figurations of subjectivities shaped by the
technologies of capitalist representation according to the logic of commodity time, and
this in light of Walter Benjamin’s conceptions of commodity culture’s collective wish
images and the dialectical potential of their impending outmoded status. I then consider
Lewis’s seemingly reactionary attacks on modern culture’s fixation with the successive
flow of time associated primarily with Bergson in order to draw out Lewis’s forceful

critique of subjectivity as it’s shaped by the ever-new and ever-the-same promises of the

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spectacular commodity form. Finally, in reading these otherwise disparate texts together,
I show how both anticipate the totalizing force of spectacle (Debord), and yet
performatively inhabit the logic of spectacle as a zone of immanent critique. The
reproduction of the commodity form and its temporal contingency generates collective
fixation. By foremounding the immanent pastness and material limits of value built into
the spectacularly new, these texts work to expose the temporal stasis structuring the new
and the effect of this tension on the subject. The result of this exposure is a critical
engagement with the ahistoricity demanded of spectacle. A (modernist) pleasure of
critique is the counterpart to the collective perversion of capital.

Manhattan Transfer begins with birth and the discourses of rapid capitalist
mowth through financial speculation; it ends with the wasted remains of commodity
capital. The novel figures the metropolitan subject as suspended between these moments.
We can begin in medias res. The epimaph to the “Nickelodeon” chapter collapses future
and past within the concentrated spectacular field of vision in the already outmoded
stereopticon, tomorrow and yesterday measured by commodities always on their way out:

A nickel before midnight buys tomorrow holdup headlines, a cup of
coffee in the automat, a ride to Woodlawn, Fort Lee, F latbush A nickel
in the slot buys chewing gum. Somebody Loves Me, Baby Divine, You’re
in Kentucky Juss Shu As You’re Born bruised notes of foxtrots go
limping out of doors, blues, waltzes (We’d Danced the Whole Night
Through) trail gyrating tinsel memories On Sixth Avenue on

Fourteenth there are still flyspecked stereopticons where for a nickel you

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can peep at yellowed yesterdays. Beside the peppering shooting gallery
you stoop into the flicker A HOT TIME, THE BACHELOR’S
SURPRISE, THE STOLEN GARTER wastebasket of tomup
daydreams A nickel before midnight buys our yesterdays. (264)
A nickel buys the future in the form of a leisurely drive or a pack of gum; a nickel buys
the visual pleasure of the past contained in the present. The “gyrating tinsel memories”
are linked to advertisements for spectacles past, which have become the wasted
“daydreams” and “yellowed yesterdays” marking the temporal contingency of vision in
the spectacular landscape of commodity culture. I will unpack this passage further below,
but here we do well to note the centrality of spectacle, doubled as stale advertisement
seen in the not-so-cunent technology of spectacle, in governing a temporality of the
present structured on the commodity’s slipping into the outmoded. Modernity is figured
in the spectacle of the now in tension with the immanent waste of the past.

In the urban landscape of the text, collective and psychic economies are shaped
around the spectacular representations of capital flux. As in Dreiser’s earlier, naturalistic
account discussed in chapter one, Manhattan Transfer repeatedly juxtaposes the visible
spaces of surplus with the spectral sites of wasteful overproduction. The novel’s foremost
surplus body, Bud Korpenning, moves from Broadway through zones marked by the
wasted products of the recent past and into the suburban space of middle-class
consumption early in the novel. In what becomes his eternal quest for work and for the
metropolitan “center of things,” he

walked down Broadway, past empty lots where tin cans glittered among

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mass and sumach bushes and ragweed, between ranks of billboards and
Bull Durham signs, past shanties and abandoned squatters’ shacks, past
gulches heaped with wheelscarred rubbishpiles where durnpcarts were
dumping ashes and clinkers until he was walking on new sidewalks
along a row of yellow brick apartment houses, looking in the windows of
grocery stores, Chinese laundries, lunchrooms, flower and vegetable
shops, tailors’, delicatessens. (33)
Bud’s movement from the void-land where nature and the wasted “simis” of commodity
culture meet in the poverty invisible to a still-spectacular center of capital both predates
post World War H urban sprawl,12 and places that center of modernist epistemology in an
uncanny relation to its spectral waste.l3
But the text does more than simply stage a return of capital’s repressed by
figuring a socio-geomaphical linkage between surplus and its wasteland. Capital’s
tautological representations shape metropolitan subjectivity. For example, the following
passage describing the young and jobless Jimmy Herf foregrounds the spectacular
legibility of capital:
Jobless, Jimmy Herf came out of the Pulitzer Building. He stood beside
of pile of pink newspapers on the curb, taking deep breaths, looking up the
glistening shaft of the Woolworth. It was a sunny day, the sky was a
robin’s egg blue. He turned north and began to walk uptown. As he got
away fi'om it the Woolworth pulled out like a telescope. He walked north

through the city of shiny windows, through the city of scrambled

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alphabets, through the city of gilt letter signs.

Spring rich in gluten Chockful of golden richness, delight in every
bite, THE DADDY OF THEM ALL, spring rich in gluten. Nobody can
buy better bread than PRINCE ALBERT. Wrought steel, monel, copper,
nickel, wrought iron. All the world loves natural beauty. LOVE’S
BARGAIN that suit at Gumpel’s best value in town. Keep that schoolgirl
complexion JOE KISS, starting, lightning, imrition and generators.
(315)

The narrative and visual movement shifts from the buildings as spectacular embodiments
of capital investment and rationality to the jarring superlatives of advertising slogans,
linking them by a process of reading the visual simls of investment and consumer capital.
Like the description of Bud’s movement through the wasteland of yesterday’s
commodities, the passage here organizes spatial epistemology around spectacle, while
also, in tension with the former passage, positing that organization against the spectral
zone of poverty and labor. The material, social space of the city and of the novel is
organized around the relative value of the visible.

Such passages articulatea dialectical relationship between surplus and its
impending waste, part of the text’s exposure of the naturalization of spectacular spatial
epistemology. The epimaph to “Nine Days’ ”Wonder,” one of the episodes most explicitly
concerned with the flows of capital and its commodified bodies, describes the end of the
day on Wall Street in the terse language of the press and stock market reports.

Mechanical labor time, as “elevators go up empty, come down jammed,” meets with the

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reportage of spectacle: “SENATORS 8, GIANTS 2, DIVA RECOVERS PEARLS”
(158). The totalizing and naturalized movement of capital frames this jolting mimesis of
the language of spectacle; the passage begins with the sun setting over Jersey at the end
of the Wall Street work day and concludes: “It’s ebbtide on Wall Street, flood tide in the
Bronx. The sun’s gone down in Jersey” (158). The relative visibility of the social
landscape and its bodies ebbing and flowing with speculative capital is naturalized;
capital flux is figured with the solar cycle.

The figurative naturalization of the movement of capital is the effect of capital’s
self-reflexive universality, suggesting the extent to which it shapes the psychic economies
of its subjects according to its own flux. Or, echoing Georg Simmel, individual
metropolitan psychology is founded on “the intensification of emotional life due to the
swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli” (325). We see this in the
novel’s figuration of collective identification around the “meat lady on a white horse,” an
advertisement for Danderine. Reading the spectacular simrs of consumer space opens the
way for interpellation as the subject negotiates its own position in relation to the social
signs of surplus, or, as another reader has put it, “the metropolis is a world of iconic
signs, turning the letters into figures, the characters into compulsive readers and
consumers. The word made sign invades their inner lives” (Goodson 99). First at Lincoln
Square and then at Thirty fourth Street, “a girl rode slowly through the baffle on a white
horse; chestnut hair hung down in even faky waves over the horse’s chalky rump and
over the giltedged saddlecloth where in meen letters pointed with crimson, read

DANDERIN E” (129, 135). The repetition in plainly descriptive prose anticipates

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Debord’s claim that “the world we see is the world of the commodity” (29). The
repetitive description suggests both the centrality of spectacle (and the fixation it begs)
and a realism that assumes a clear relation between simlifier and the world it simlifies, but
it also elicits the playful mockery of the product slogan compulsively performed by Stan.
In jest with Ellen Thatcher he chants, “With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
And she shall make mischief wherever she goes” (133), and later reiterates the slogan in
its original form: “And she shall cure dandruff wherever she goes” (135). The doubled
repetition—one in realist prose and the other performed humorously by consuming

subj ects—is a striking narrative performance of the tautology of spectacle as described by
Debord: “its means and ends are identical” (15) in that as image of sheer surplus, “the
only thing into which the spectacle plans to develop is itself” (16).

In fact, Ellen’s private response to public spectacle—the Danderine lady——
symptomizes this very tautology. After witnessing the text’s first mention of the “meat
lady,” she later tells Stan that the Danderine lady “impressed [her] enormously” (133, my
emphasis). As the narrative then tracks her movement to the park, where she becomes the
object of two sailors’ gazes, the continuous, filmic movement of the narrative passes
swiftly from the Danderine lady to Ellen’s stroll in marnmatical third person, enabling the
visual transference of the epistemological force of spectacle fiom the one to the other,
registered as affect: “she could feel their seameedy eyes cling stickily to her neck, her A

thighs, her ankles” (129). The fixation on individual body parts/objects to which a meedy
gaze “cling[s] stickily” corresponds to the Danderine lady—“with rings on her fingers

and bells on her toes”—and the erotic investment in the relative value of those parts.

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Ellen participates in a mass psychology in which “identification endeavors to mold a
person’s own ego after the fashion of the one that has been taken as a model” and
whereby “the ego assumes the characteristics of the object” through its introjection
(Freud, Group Psychology 47-9). The narrative movement similarly throws the relation
of ego and object into question: to be “impressed” by spectacular capital, according to the
logic of the narrative, is to become its object. The text resituates Freud’s psychoanalytic
model in the public space of consumer desire.

But more importantly, this naturalized epistemology following the flows of
capital hinges on spectacular temporality, that out of which the novel’s psychic and
narrative economies emerge, and to which I now turn. The novel’s organization of a
simultaneously alienated and collective epistemology around the spectacular spaces of
capital and its waste relies on and defamiliarizes the temporality of the commodity form
as repetitively new. This newness, on which the spatial centrality of spectacle is posited,
includes the repressed temporal contingency figured in the lirninal and spectral site of
capital waste through which Bud moves. The novel presents this temporality by way of
psychic effects, performing a psychic economy structured on the temporal contingency of
value embodied in the commodity form, wherein newness is equated with compulsive
repetition and constituted against the pastness, or outmoded status, contained in and yet
suspended by spectacle.

The material remains of surplus and commodity that embody and structure the
temporal contingency of value are not only, as we see in Bud’s entry to the city through

its lirninal wasteland, spatially repressed; they are also fundamentally constitutive of

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memory and the subject’s sense of its own history and future, relegating memory to the
laws of the commodity. Following his mother’s funeral, the young J immy Herf walks to
forget the auditory, olfactory, and tactile sensations associated with the ritual; the visual
is elided from memory, displaced by the visual landscape of barnside advertising, where
death, vision, and memory curiously meet. The passage traces Jimmy’s movement out of
a densely populated suburban sector, registering a shift in the visual landscape in flux
with childhood consciousness:
on the sides of barns peeling letters spelled out LYDIA PINKHAM’S
VEGETABLE COMPOUND, BUDWEISER, RED HEN, BARKING
DOG And muddy had had a stroke and now she was buried. He
couldn’t think how she used to look; she was dead that was all. (109)
The catalogue of particular advertisements followed by ellipsis materially generates the
rhetorical effect of infinity, the eternal present of spectacle in all its tautological excess.
However, such self-referential infinity is in tension with the temporal contingency
materially figured in the “peeling letters.” And this pastness, spatially repressed, not only
has its rhetorical and figural corollary in death, but throws the status of visual memory,
the subject’s history, into question. Memory is displaced by the continuous process of
spectacle slipping into the past, illustrating Debord’s claim that spectacular events “are
quickly forgotten, thanks to the precipitation with which the spectacle’s pulsing
machinery replaces one by the next” (114), and Richard Godden’s more recent
formulation that “amnesia has always been one of the staples of a successful commodity

culture” (4). Thus, the concluding clauses—“she was dead that was all”—deploy a

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grammar of the infinite with a logic of finitude, echoing the temporal repetition of the
commodity form.

However, the tense juxtaposition of the dream-world of capital’s seemingly
infinite chain of self-referentiality and the universal real of death also works to
defamiliarize the totalizing force of the former. Deleuze and Guattari describe the
necessary tension between capital and its limits: “the ever widening circle of capitalism is
completed, while reproducing its immanent limits on an ever larger scale, only if the
surplus value is not merely produced or extorted, but absorbed or realized” (234). And
capitalism “has interior limits under the specific conditions of capitalist production and
circulation, that is, in capital itself, but it flmctions only by reproducing and widening
these limits on an always vaster scale” (250). Dos Passos’s narrative does more than
simply expose these limits of capital (in socio-spatial terms) ever in flux and defining the
consumer spaces of the metropolis. In figuring capital’s tendency of continuous
absorption via the forgetting subject, it also works to denaturalize and defamiliarize the
process whereby reproducing the commodity form as spectacular representation acts as a
displacement of capital’s immanent, impending limits concomitant with the subject’s
forgetting and displacement of death.

First, the text works to denaturalize spectacular time by positioning subjectivity
between the homogenizing commodity form and the statistical rationalization of death.
After receiving X-ray treatment for an ailing throat, Ruth Prynne meets a failing fellow
actor, Billy Waldron, who mentions bouts of melancholia and neurasthenia, and warns

her about x-ray treatment possibly causing cancer. Traveling to another engagement,

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Ruth rides the subway crowded with various bodies “under the sourcolored
advertisements,” while the repetitive rationality of medical statistics echoes in her
consciousness:
Cancer he said. She looked up and down the car at the joggling faces
opposite her. Of all those people one of them must have it. FOUR OUT
OF EVERY FIVE GET Silly, that’s not cancer. EX-LAX, NUJOL,
O’SULLIV AN ’8 She put her hand to her throat. Her throat was terribly
swollen, her throat throbbed feverishly. Maybe it was worse. It is
something alive that mows in flesh, eats all your life, leaves you horrible,
rotten The people opposite stared straight ahead of them, young men
and young women, middleaged people, meen faces in the dingy light,
under the sourcolored advertisements. FOUR OUT OF EVERY FIVE A
trainload of jiggling corpses. (266)
Statistical knowledge renders the body uncanny; self-knowledge is governed by an
abstraction and rationalization of impending threat. The visual trajectory links this
uncanny relation with the body to advertising spectacle and back to a statistical
knowledge hovering between certainty and uncertainty, illustrating what Mark Seltzer
describes as “the conversion of individuals into numbers and cases and the conversion of
bodies into visual displays” in a social control mechanism linking statistics and
surveillance (100), which, in the realm of consumption, “has the effect of inciting and
directing that consumption” (114). The statistic, in other words, reduces the subject’s

knowledge of itself to a quantifiable threat met with a set of medical conditions, linking

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health to consumption in order to better incite consumption.

But this is only half the picture. Ads govern the scene, creating a momentary
epistemological frame for the subject. And if advertising spectacle contains its own
slippage into the forgotten past, as we saw in the case of young Jimmy Herf, then here we
see, again, the psychological emerging floor the fleeting material representations of
abstract capital within a modernist psychic economy that hinges on the temporality of the
spectacular commodity. In Group Psychology, we recall, Freud writes that “identification
endeavors to mold a person’s own ego after the fashion of the one that has been taken as
a model” (47), and that by way of introjecting that model, “the ego assumes the
characteristics of the object” (48). Manhattan Transfer’s figurations of psychic
economies in the public space of capital elide any such ego-model that Freud would
approve of, setting up instead the pervasive “sourcolored advertisements” as organizing
referents of the passage’s visual epistemology. In the shifting visual movement from
those ads to the desperately felt threat of illness, the text figures the effect of introjection.
As the governing visual referent, the ads are for laxatives, appropriately indicating the
body’s failure to rid itself of waste, of contingency, and this is figurally linked to Ruth’s
uncanny relation to her body as object of medical knowledge and impending death. The
body becomes the object of contingency itself, felt as uncanny object to the subject. We
thus have a psychic economy in which the momentary effects of the commodity form and
generalized statistical illness meet on the particularized body. In figuring the
displacement of contingency fiom the commodity form to the private body, the passage

also figures that contingency in league with a seemingly rational, universal threat. Thus,

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anxieties stemming from the temporal contingency of the world of capitalist spectacle,
spectacle continuously arresting attention. in a state of fleeting distraction, is in collusive
tension with the statistical rationalizing of knowledge and value.

Significantly, this exposes the production of illness under a pervasive and
expanding commodification, where the naming of physical conditions follows the
production of new treatments. But I want to ask, more frmdamentally, how the
psychological here speaks to a larger cultural economy of contingency. The threat of
getting cancer endlessly repeated by the medical statistic not only directs consumption,14
but structures, absorbs, and redirects the contingency of surplus embodied in the
spectacle. Advertising as investment of surplus in generating an immeasurable surplus is
both cause and effect of contingency. The linkage between the immanent pastness of
commodity spectacle (“sourcolored advertisements”) and the body as corpse is
triangulated with the repetitive limit-effect of medical statistic, that which seeks
rationally to contain and direct contingency—of capital and the body—in a process of
continuous absorption. This is the paradoxical temporal stasis at the heart of capital flux.
The subject is suspended between these fimdamentally contradictory forces of surplus
and the rationalization set in place to direct its movement, materially indicated by the
ellipses that link and yet exceed the two. The textual blank spaces of meaning position
the subject within a process of immanent pastness built into an unattainable present of
knowing itself, its body.

On these mounds, the novel articulates spectacle as a site around which a perverse

pleasure of repetitive newness takes shape. The temporal stasis of capital’s continuous

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absorption of surplus posits an interesting correspondence between the Deleuzian model
it figurally anticipates and a definitively modernist critique, registered in the dream world
of the commodity form become spectacular representation of collective desire. In other
words, I would like to offer a curious link, via the novel, between the expansive internal
limits of capital, on the one hand, and the potentially dialectical force of collective wish
images as articulated by Walter Benjamin.

Before turning to Benjamin’s collective wish-image and its dialectical potential
for immanent critique, however, we need to note the link between the pervasive force of
commodity spectacle and the repetitive dream of the eternal present, a link the text
figures as constitutive of the political ideology of consumption. The language of liberal
humanism in its American form, in the words from the Declaration of Independence—
“Pursuit of happiness, unalienable pursuit”—emerge randomly and fully reified into the
jolting images of the urban scene governed by commodity capital and shaping Jimmy
Herf’s consciousness. Frustrated with newspaper work, love, and the city, he wanders at
night down South Street, still hearing the clicking of typewriters, and “obsessed” by an
unnamed skyscraper from which “Faces of Follies girls, glorified by Ziegfeld, smile and
beckon to him” (327). He endlessly circles the building in a hallucinatory trance, looking
for the entrance, and

Every time he closes his eyes the dream has hold of him, every time he
stops arguing audibly with himself in pompous reasonable phrases the
dream has hold of him. Young man to save your sanity you’ve got to do

one of two things . . . Please mister where’s the door to this building?

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Round the block? Just round the block . . . one of two unalienable

alternatives: go away in a dirty soft shirt or stay in a clean Arrow collar. 1

(327)
The language of a liberal humanist ideal is reified—frozen into a stasis beyond both
praxis and critique——but at the same time (as the passage intimates) deterritorialized by
the wave of capital surplus sustained by the voice of commodity. The unalienable rights
of American humanism, once fully enmossed by the market, devolve into a binary logic
of having or not having, being in or out. Reification then depends on an a priori
deterritorialization which, despite the violence it employs, offers a critical force
unfolding fi‘om the ideology of the “fi‘ee” market. In other words, the passage not only
registers capitalist deterritorialization, the absorption of surplus producing a static dream
temporality, which Debord calls a “false consciousness of time,” but it also exposes the
unremitting force of the past dialectically contained in the ever-present emptiness of
spectacular capital. The question raised by the passage might run something like: How
does one awaken the political ideals of Enlightenment within the material confinement of
a clean Arrow collar?

We can begin to answer this question by considering Benjamin’s theory of
collective wish images, where a historical ideal and the inadequacies of the current state
of production meet in the material present. In “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth
Century,” Benjamin describes the collective images of capitalist production:

Corresponding to the form of the new means of production, which in the

beginning is still ruled by the form of the old (Marx), are images in the

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collective consciousness in which the new is permeated with the old.
These images are wish images; in them the collective seeks both to
overcome and to transfigure the immaturity of the social product and the
inadequacies in the social organization of production. (4)‘5
We might read, in Jimmy’s dream centered around the “tinselwindowed skyscraper”
(327), Benjamin’s collective image, itself “permeated with the old,” reified language of
liberal humanism and the ever-new, repetitive language of an Arrow advertisement.
However, Benjamin’s description and J immy’s dream—both representative of the
congealing effect commodification has on an historical ideal—are in themselves limited.
As Karen Jacobs points out, collective wish images “prepare the mound for revolutionary
awareness, requiring mediation by concrete material forces to be reconstellated into
properly dialectical images” (215).

That said, does the novel simply mimic the contradictory forces of 19203
capitalist production, forces constitutive of the spatial and temporal epistemologies of its
subjects? The answer is both yes and no. Manhattan Transfer’s revision of (naive)
literary realism lies not only in figuring the collective and psychic economies emerging
fiom the fleeting memory of the commodity, but in the appropriation of that very form;
the paradoxical temporal stasis of consumer capital, repeatedly embodied in its
spectacular self-representations, is the content of the novel. Against the organic,
naturalized flows of capital ideologically corresponding to the sun rising and setting over
Wall Street, the narrative is built around the momentary spectacles of a Danderine

woman, a vaguely recalled Ziegfeld performance, or a series of laxative ads in radical

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juxtaposition with the tin can disjecta marking the temporal and spatial limits of
spectacular surplus, revealing that in the latter, structuring capitalist historicity, “we begin
to recomlize,” as Benjamin observes, “the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even
before they have crumbled” (Charles Baudelairel 76).

What I’m calling the novel’s immanent critique operates through a repetitive
foremounding, following the formal logic of spectacle, of contingency. By insisting on
the role of the outmoded structuring the promises of the present, the novel renders the
urban space of consumption uncanny. In this focus on the false consciousness of
commodity temporality, my reading reverses that of AC. Goodson, who claims that
“restoring [the novel] to the expanded horizon of metropolitan modernism means
recognizing the way the modernist text inhabits and naturalizes the alien element that is
mass culture” (92). The novel inhabits a space where mass culture is already naturalized;
it works to denaturalize and defamiliarize by foremounding the temporal limits of its
commodity-saturated collective space. In a passage at the novel’s conclusion echoing
Bud Korpenning’s passage through the liminal zones of capital waste and thus marking a
textual return of the materially repressed, J My Herf aimlessly wanders away fi'om the
consumerist dream world of the decentered center of Manhattan, where yesterday’s
objects of value become the ruins structuring the contradictory present and past of
spectacle. Again unable to remember anything, wondering if “this is amnesia” or
madness (359), Jimmy “walks on, taking pleasure in breathing, in the beat of his blood, in
the tread of his feet on the pavement, between rows of otherworldly flame houses” (360),

the ephemeral monuments of bourgeois production. Then,

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Sunrise finds him walking along a cement road between dumping mounds
fill] of smoking rubbishpiles. The sun shines redly through the mist on
rusty donkeyengines, skeleton trucks, wishbones of Fords, shapeless
masses of corroding metal. Jimmy walks fast to get out-of the smell. He is
hunmy . . . . At a cross-road where the warning light still winks and winks,
is a gasoline station, opposite it the Lightning Bug lunchwagon. Carefully
he spends his last quarter on breakfast. That leaves him three cents for
good luck, or bad for that matter. (3 60)

The sun rises, in radical juxtaposition with the naturalized site of Wall Street ’
speculation discussed above, over the expelled waste of yesterday’s surplus, illuminating
the constitutive ruins marking bourgeois time. But this is not some grim, outlying
perversion of Wall Street and Broadway; Jimmy’s careful expenditure leaving him a few
pennies for good or bad luck transfers the rational logic of investment and abstract capital
to the space of its skeletal remains, emphasizing the radical temporal contingency that
mutually irnbricates “wishbones of Fords” with the Woolworth building, ruins with
monuments. In this way, the text shows the pervasiveness of market logic through a
psychic and visual economy hinging on spectacular representation, as well as the chance
that is subsumed by the ideological totality of the market, the paradox Brown describes as
“assimilating chance to assert its immunity to chance: nothing accidental can happen to
the market because accidents happen only within the market” (Material Unconscious 99).
The location of such ideological concealment as “within” is key here, for the text’s

concluding figuration predicts the pervasive spread of late capitalism, when “capital,”

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according to Debord, “is no longer the invisible center determining the mode of
production. As it accumulates, capital spreads out to the periphery, where it assumes the
form of tangible objects. Society in its length and breadth becomes capital’s faithful
portrait” (33).

Manhattan Transfer aspires to a “faithful portrait” of the second technological
revolution and its cultural registers of improved transportation and rapid increases in
material production, in which, as Hal Foster points out, “the outmoded was brought to
consciousness as a category” (165). The surreal landscape through which Jimmy passes,
in fact, suggests a critical intersection with Benjamin’s investment in a surrealist
outmoded, the use of “the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings,” aging
photos and fashions, objects of the recent past which, through their embodiment of loss in
the ahistorical temporality of capitalism, might “bring the immense force of ‘atmosphere’
concealed in [them] to the point of explosion” (“Surrealism” 181-2). Hal Foster’s reading
of surrealist art in light of Benjamin’s interest in the outmoded provides a useful
summary here, one we can extend to Dos Passos’s journalistic constellation of capital’s
artefacts statically marking the temporal flows of capital and shaping the metropolitan
subject as a category. “The surrealist outmoded,” he argues, “posed the cultural detritus
of past moments residual in capitalism against the socioeconomic complacency of its
present moment” (159), allowing for “a twofold immanent critique of high capitalist
culture”:

On the one hand, the capitalist outmoded [ranging from nineteenth century

panoramas to leftover fashions to obsolete machines] relativizes bourgeois

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culture, denies its pretense to the natural and the eternal, opens it up to its
own history, indeed its own historicity. In effect, it exploits the paradox
that this culture, under the spell of the commodity, has any history at all.
On the other hand, the capitalist outmoded challenges this culture with its
own forfeited dreams, tests it against its own compromised values of
political emancipation, technological promess, cultural access. (162)
The spectacular visual referents of the novel’s spatial and temporal epistemology, from
skyscrapers to stereopticons, are repeatedly thrown into juxtaposition with the skeletal
remains structuring the time of the commodity form. Ifthe dreamscape of consumer
capital defining the city-text is perpetuated by the promises of staying “in a clean Arrow
collar,” then the novel’s chronology of these objects slipping into the past, structuring
psychic and collective economies around contingency and loss along the way, also offers
a modernist critique on these very mounds, challenging the necessarily “forfeited
dreams” held out by spectacular capital. Consciousness of the eternal present as it is
structured by immanent pastness (the outmoded) is a product of the repetitive production
and consumption of the new, but also exceeds, and is an alternative to, capitalism’s total
reification of mind.

We can now return briefly to the framnented stereopticon passage with which I
began my discussion of Manhattan Transfer. “A nickel before midnight buys tomorrow”
and “our yesterdays” (264), and frames the epimaph’s image of the “flyspecked
stereopticons,” marked with a shit figurally and rhetorically corresponding to yesterday’s

spectacles in the present field of vision, capital’s “yellowed yesterdays.” Benjamin’s wish

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images as embodiments of a collective desire to overcome the limits of the current mode
of production are figured here in terms of the promises of consumption, ever opening out
to the future; purchasing a newspaper or a day’s ride out of the city is an investment in
time itself. But the experience of the present and its disavowed outmoded future meet in
the “wastebasket of tomup daydreams,” the sites where the fantasies of political, social,
and individual emancipation as promised by the dreamscape of the spectacular
commodity form are challenged. Ifthe pervasive historicity of bourgeois culture is an
eternal present with its eyes on the future, then the spectacles marking that historicity also
announce their own temporal limits. And this is where Dos Passos’s narrative
incorporation of the collective wish images of democratic utopias becomes radically
dialectical, for as the spectacle’s outmoded status is contained in its present as governing
referent of consumer capital’s epistemology, such an epistemology is exposed in all its
perversion, its firture past tense, and past utopias unfolding into the future.
it i 4! 4| 4|

While Manhattan Transfer offers a fictional critique of capital’s ahistoricity
through its dialectical figurations of the outmoded, Wyndham Lewis’s Time and Western
Man indicts modern culture’s “glorification of the life-of-the-moment” (1 1). In a way that
is comparable to the novel’s dialectical images, Lewis’s text constellates the spectacles of
capital toward exposing the contradictory stasis structuring the reproduction of the new.

In fact, contradiction is no alien to Lewis’s method, and his antagonistic role in
British modernism is long and complex. His often frustratingly contradictory writing on

politics and art, as well as his ambivalent yet politically or morally reprehensible

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positions on women, homosexuality, and, to use our currently fashionable term, identity
politics, make him difficult to read, more difficult to redeem. But, as I argue in what
follows, his critical diagnoses, employing a dialectic of subversive mimicry, offer a
powerful modernist critique of the commodity-governed mass consciousness he is
understood to have so loathed. I read Lewis’s agmession towards the “child-cult” and its
remessive, narcissistic collective exemplified in popular culture—advertising, cinema,
popularized science and philosophy, modern literature and art—as based in a
fimdamental critique of capital and its cultural representations. In Time and Western Man
(1927) he reads the temporal contingency of value and simiification in advertising, for
example, as part of a larger cultural discourse, a pervasive time-obsession in politics,
science, philosophy, and art. Consider the following passages:

Advertisement also implies in a very definite sense a certain attitude to

Time. . . . It is the glorification of the life-of-the-moment, with no

reference beyond itself and no absolute or universal value; only so much

value as is conveyed in the famous proverb, Time is money. (1 1)

[Advertising] has battered and deadened every superlative so much that
superlatives no longer in themselves convey anything. A11 idea of a true
value—of any scale except the pragmatic scale of hypnotism and hoax—is
banished forever fiom the life of the meat majority of people living in the

heart of an advertising zone, such as any meat, modern city. (1 3)

Advertisement has functioned in the social and artistic or learned world

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rather as the engineer has in the factory. It has taught the public—as the
engineer taught the producer—that as Advertisement-value nothing is
refuse or waste. Indeed, the garbage is often more valuable than the
commodity from which it proceeds. (14)
Time and Western Man thus foremounds advertising—where surplus and contingency
most clearly meet in the cultural sphere of modernism—as the premier example of the
tautological force of capitalist spectacle emptied of meaning, following the logic of the
commodity form. It is in this light that I read Lewis’s vast constellation of contemporary
social and cultural pathologies, ranging from a remessive “child-cult” steeped in a
consumerist narcissism to the objectification of individual will concomitant with the
ideology of mass politics.

Lewis’s anxieties concerning what he calls the “innocent public” of the middle-
classes, by now well—documented in modernist studies,16 correlate with Debord’s
Marxian recomlition of capitalist spectacle as “a social relation between people that is
mediated by images,” and thus to the governing force of spectacle in modernist
epistemology. Douglas Mao astutely maps Lewis’s anxious responses to mass culture and
politics in the context of artistic production and the status of the object, pointing out that
“Lewis insisted that one of the meat threats of the modern age . . . was a virulently
spreading cult of childhood which, by promising to absolve its votaries of the adult
responsibility of political participation, served the aims of world leaders trying with
unprecedented thoroughness to turn their citizenries into will-less herds” (91). Further,

this construction of the modern masses as will-less herds centers on passive vision: “what

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is to be condemned is the subordination of the object to a subjectivity enamored of its
power to see . . . and fi'ightened by its power to do, a consciousness that can neither
restrain itself from trying to reach the external world nor commit itself to the work of
genuine transformation” (107). Mao’s focus on Lewis’s productionist ethics opposed to
the ideological passivity of mass culture is useful, but does not fully examine the role of
mass produced spectacle informing Lewis’s critique of the “will-less herds,” a critique
that takes part in a much larger modernist discourse on time and vision.

Herd instinct, the cultural leveling of mass psychology and its “remessive” child-
cult are all linked to a temporal epistemology of an eternal present centered around
spectacular capital. Before turning to Lewis’s explicit critique of these cultural
pathologies and their symptomatic relation to spectacle’s temporal contingency, we
should situate his attacks on consumer spectacle, as articulated in Time and Western Man,
in a larger cultural and intellectual context. Book I focuses on popular culture and its
icons of collective desire, suggesting its central role in sustaining the broader collective
ideologies he works to unmask. In a particularly ambiguous comment on the fascination
of Charlie Chaplin, Lewis suggests a hegemonic model of consumerism but leaves the
source of power unclear:

For the head of a crowd is like a pudding en surprise. Everything is put
into it; it reacts to the spectacles that are presented to it partly under the
direction of those spectacles, but mainly according to the directing
synthesis of all that has fallen or been stuffed into it, coming fi'om all that

is going on around it. That, I think, is the way in which Chaplin endeared

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himself to the meat public of the mass-democracy. (65)

While it is important to note the sheer force of spectacle Lewis acknowledges, the
emphasis is on the “directing synthesis” that stuffs the “head of the crowd.” The crowd
reacts to the spectacular figure of Chaplin, but more filndamentally, Lewis suggests, the
collective psyche of the crowd is shaped by a decentered flux or multiplicity of spectacle,
the “all that is going on around it.” Finally, Chaplin as exemplary spectacle is little more
than a figuration or fleeting embodiment of the directing synthesis of mass desire, that
which allows him to “[endear] himself to the meat public.”

Thus, the problem of agency and the public, for Lewis, comes down to the
ideological construction of the masses’ images of desire in spectacle. In locating mass
epistemology on the spectacle or current cultural icon of the consumption of technology,
he expresses a cultural anxiety shared with other influential psychological and
sociological models of the modern crowd. Georg Simmel’s turn of the century
sociological work on metropolitan psychology helps us to begin mapping these
productive tensions. “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) takesias its founding
premise nineteenth century intellectual and political thought, whose “motive” is the
individual’s “resistance . . . to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological
mechanism” (324), and that an understanding of modern metropolitan social life requires
“an investigation of the adaptations made by the personality in its adjustments to the
forces that lie outside of it” (325). And this individual adjustment opens the way for
moup cohesion on the exclusion of individual irrational impulses under capitalism’s

rational abstraction:

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Punctuality, calculability, and exactness, which are required by the
complications and extensiveness of metropolitan life are not only most
intimately connected with its capitalistic and intellectualistic character but
also color the content of life and are conducive to the exclusion of those
irrational, instinctive, sovereign human traits and impulses which
originally seek to determine the form of life fi'om within instead of
receiving it fiom the outside in a general, schematically precise form.
(328-9)
“The forces that lie outside” the individual personality, the rational abstraction connected
with capital exchange and mowth, intersect with Lewis’s emphasis on the uncanny force
shaping collective identification around the fleeting spectacles that embody it. Lewis’s
figuration, however, proposes a fundamental irrationality subsuming or precluding what
Simmel calls “sovereiml human traits,” opening a discursive tension within modern
epistemologies centered on spectacle, the crowd, and subjectivity.

By the 19203 we witness what at first seems a polar shift in thought on modern
mass psychology. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud borrows
heavily fi'om Gustave LeBon, taking fi'om him the founding premises (which he modifies
as he develops the argument under a psychoanalytic model) regarding the submersion of
the heterogeneous elements of individuals in a crowd leading toward the release of
common instinctual impulses. “LeBon thinks,” Freud states early on, “that the particular
acquirements of individuals become obliterated in a moup, and that in this way their

distinctiveness vanishes. . . . what is heterogeneous is submerged in what is

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homogeneous” (8-9). Implicitly participating in the increasingly influential role of
statistics in the social sciences, Freud points out that this results in an “average character”
emerging from the moup conditions “which allow him [the individual] to throw off the
repressions of his unconscious instinctual impulses” (9). The average or collective
leveling of individuals is thus based on a set of universal unconscious impulses (to which
anyone who has witnessed a riot or European football match can testify), but Freud
complicates this simple model borrowed from LeBon, explained via the psychology of
identification with an object, in that what solidifies and sustains collective identification
and its mass leveling of individuals is the uncanny creation “of a state in which an
individual’s private emotional impulses and intellectual acts are too weak to come to
anything by themselves and are entirely dependent for this on being reinforced by being
repeated in the other members of the moup,” and that suggestion, the incitement to act,
“is not exercised only by the leader, but by every individual upon every other individual”
(63).

Freud’s description corresponds to Lewis’s assertion that crowd mentality, as a
collective, is constituted in and by the “spectacles” of suggestion wielded by the
“directing synthesis” that violently stuffs it with the increasing stimulation of modern
life. But the psychoanalytic model is intended as ahistorical. Considered isomorphically,
then, Freud’s moup psychology based in shared, unconscious impulses outside the scope
of historical conditions and Simmel’s model in which those impulses are excluded by

moup cohesion under modern capitalist rationality seem mutually exclusive. Lewis’s

claims are clearly based in the historically situated observations of cinema and mass

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consumption, and yet seem tenuously to link these conflicting approaches to the subject
of the masses. These radically different models, despite their positing antithetical origins
to a homogenizing moup psychology, are part of a set of productive tensions emerging
with twentieth century consumer capitalism and its reliance on spectacle.

Michael North’s informed reading of Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, which
he calls “one of the most influential books of 1922" (67), helps both to locate
(historically) and resolve these tensions and, more particularly, to situate Lewis’s analysis
of the threatening collective leveling in relation to capitalist spectacle. North notes
Lippmann’s indebtedness to Freud, particularly the force of a shared unconscious
irrationality shaping the public, what Lewis condescendingly attacks as “the head of a
crowd.” Lippmann essentially inverts the Enlightenment ideal of the public sphere as an
abstract, collective, discursive space checking individual impulses and on which much
democratic thought is still based. For Lippmann, the term public opinion registers a shift
from the rational public sphere of the Enlightenment to a realm of collective prejudice
and unconscious drives, exemplified and sustained by the dissemination of knowledge in
the mass media, where private interests mold information for the equally biased public.
Thus, “the private self is already thoroughly public” (70), part of a “public unconscious”
constituted in its conflicting drives and phobias (72). More importantly, this public
construction of the private self relegates individual agency to the fleeting realm of biased
representation: “Since the individual cannot personally check on any more than a tiny
segment of this world, he or she is utterly at the mercy of representations, the accuracy of

which can be verified only by reference to other representations” (72).

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The modern metropolitan subject, for Simmel, renounces its irrational impulses,
its “sovereign human traits” (328); for Freud, the historically comparable subject of the
masses is potentially reconstituted in a collective release of universal impulses in the
crowd, where the individual intellect or ego is too weak to assert its sovereignty; while
for Lippmann the public sphere is already constituted on a model of collective drives in
conflict with one another. My point here is not that these models of subjectivity in a
modern collective are to be resolved. Rather, Lewis stages these tensions, engaging in a
larger cultural attempt to negotiate the relations between modern spectacle and mass
consumption, politics, and psychology, a negotiation informing modernists’ often
ambivalent responses to market culture. But more importantly, in its participation in this
conflicted discourse of the collective, individual impulses, and the rational, Time and
Western Man foremounds the role of capitalist spectacle in shaping collective and
individual identities. In doing so, the text exposes what these other models disavow: the
repetitive force of spectacular change structuring a modern epistemology and mass
psychology “at the mercy of [temporally contingent] representations.”

The subsuming of the individual qua will under modern mass democratic
institutions exemplified and concentrated in the metropolis is, for Lewis, based in the
“spectacular change” of technology, science, and mass production. Social and cultural
homogenization is not so much a product of renunciation (Simmel) or an a priori
collective unconscious, but historically emerges with a hegemonic (re-)production of
spectacle: “The adventitious stimulus given to the historic sense, the imposition of this

little picturesque flourish or that, a patina like that manufactured for the faking of

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‘antiques’ . . . goes hand in hand and side by side with a world-hegemony, externally
uniform and producing more every day a common culture” (80).‘7 And this externally
imposed process of standardization of the simulacra machine of production is
symptomatically represented in technological advancement and the fetishistic
consumption of science, the “revolutio ” force, momentum, and promess of
modernity masking and sustaining a mass conservatism:
What I am trying to show by these remarks is that what we call
Revolution, whose form is spectacular change of the technique of life, of
ideas, is not the work of the majority of people, indeed is nothing at all to
do with them; and, further, is even alien to their instincts, which are
entirely conservative. From one century to the next they would remain
stationary if left to themselves. And, again, all the up-to-date, “modernist”
afflatus consists of catchwords, and is a system of parrot-cries, in the case
of the crowd. Even so they are vulgarizations, of the coarsest description,
of notions inaccessible to the majority in their original form and
significance. The cheap, socially available simulacrum bears little
resemblance to the original. And all the great inventions reach the crowd
in the form of toys (crystal-sets, motorcars), and it is as helpless children
that, for the most part, it participates in these stirring events. (120, my
emphasis) 1
While Lewis clearly rejects the notion of a public unconscious as agent of change, he

does stress a passive mimicry in crowd psychology, an instinctual conservatism,

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generated by spectacular simulacra; the majority unknowingly participates in historical
events, but as children consuming the “watered down” advances of science “adapted to
herd-consumption” (120). In this way, his thinking serves to link the “adaptations” of the
subject to external forces noted by Simmel to the force of repetition among individuals
sustaining the collective in Freud’s model (the conservative reactions to suggestion fi'om
one individual to the next) to the private self constituted in the public sphere of
representation in Lippmann’s public unconscious.

Time and Western Man stages these models in conflict within one polemic, '
exposing each to be equally symptomatic of the expulsion of the subject qua will. First,
Lewis notes what he calls the “triumph of the Unconscious” over the rational, conscious,
individual intellect (300). The rational political subject of Enlightenment humanism has
little power against the sensationalism of a public unconscious, and the subject is thus of
the masses: “Inside us . . . the crowds were pitted against the Individual, the Unconscious
against the Conscious, the ‘emotional’ against the ‘intellectual’” (300). What Simmel
calls “the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external
and internal stimuli” (325) is, for Lewis, the presupposition for the violent ousting of
individual will. In Lewis’s words, “the ‘Unconscious’ is really what Plato meant by the
‘mob of the senses,’ or rather it is where they are to be found . . . . It is in ‘our
Unconscious’ that we live in a state of common humanity. There are no individuals in the
Unconscious” (301).

This collective, sensational unconscious is, more importantly, the reduction of

subjective agency to the passive acceptance of the imperatives governed by the fleeting

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reproduction of capital’s spectacular images; will exists only as “objectified,” made

present in the spectacular world of exponential mowth and commodification, producing
the picture of a Will that just goes on for some reason “objectifying” itself,
resulting in the endless rigarnarole in which we participate, and of which
(qua Will) we are the witnesses. It produces Charlie Chaplin, the League
of Nations, wireless, feminism, Rockefeller; it causes, daily, millions of
women to drift in fiont of, and swarm inside, gigantic clothes-shops in
every meat capital, buying silk underclothing, cloche-hats, perfumes,
vanishing cream, vanity-bags and furs; it causes the Prince of Wales to
become one day a Druid, and the next a Boy-Scout; it enables Dempsey to
hit Firpo on the nose, or Gene Tunney to strike Dempsey in the eye, and
the sun to be eclipsed; for one thing to “build bonnie babies,” and another
universally to sustain “schoolgirl complexions.” It is a quite aimless, and,
hem our limited point of view, nonsensical Will. (312)

Lewis’s catalogue of the spectacles of consumption and the consuming of
spectacle, the reduction of will to its objectified images embodying capital surplus, is
itself an “aimless” flux of spectacle. The endless production of objectified will in
spectacular, quickly consumable forms, only refers to other acts of spectacular
representation (like Lippman’s unconscious public sphere as a system of representations).
Lewis’s rhetoric, mimetically reproducing this spiraling-out of technologically produced
desire, works to expose the superfluous yet contradictory impulses of a collective

consumerist will (“to build bonnie babies” while maintaining the outward appearance of

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one’s own youth). And the reduction of will to an objectified collective form follows the
temporal contingency of the commodity. The collective leveling or objectification of will
is linked to the reified conflation of the visual and time according to the flux of spectacle,
producing in turn an eternal present devoid of social responsibility and subjective
autonomy.

Lewis’s critique of vision, particularly in the chapter appropriately titled “The
Object Conceived as King of the Physical World,” is a critique of the commodity form as
the dominant epistemological referent shaping the collective experience of time.
Although often read as a reactionary polemicist, a role he in fact cultivated fiom the early
days of Blast and its bold-print blessing, blasting, and cursing of every aspect of
contemporary political, popular, and artistic culture falling in the Vorticist wake, Lewis is
careful to negotiate between the mental world of temporal flux and the “solid objects” of
a “spatializing mind.” His concern, in other words, is not to throw the spatial world of
solid objects in the face of an ephemeral, fleeting temporality, but to place the two in
relation by criticizing the relegation of vision to the momentary sensations begged of the
spectacular commodity form, implicitly attacking a bourgeoning epistemology of the
masses of (passive) consumers. First, we should note that he sees his own belief in an
“objective reality” containing “stable and substantial solid objects” (383) being displaced
by the world as a moving picture, a series of impressions made by the ever-present
“states” of those objects: “it is this picture for which the einematomaph of the physics of
‘events’ is to be substituted,” and “people are to be trained from infancy to regard the

world as a moving picture. In this no ‘object’ would appear, but only the states of an

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object” (3 83). Lewis privileges vision, but interrogates a visual culture of an ephemeral
present in which the momentary “states of an object” repeatedly displace memory and
any will to know. Contemporary object philosophy seeks “to cut down the picture of the
physical world to what we see. What we know should be excluded” (3 83).

He repeatedly suggests that the world as cinematic screen shapes the “time-mind”
according to the fleeting, immaterial forms of capital and the temporality of the
commodity. Bringing Lewis’s understanding of memory to the fore will help us to more
fully masp his critique of commodity spectacle as a critique of capitalist temporality.
Lewis promotes a “memory that gives that depth and fullness to our present, and makes
our abstract, ideal world of objects for us” (3 83). Memory, dialectically informing
sensation, allows for an abstract understanding stemming from within the object world as
opposed to an epistemology of successive movements that result in “a flat world . . . of
successive, flat, images or impressions. And, further, these images or impressions are, as
far as possible, naked and simple, direct, sensations, unassociated with any component of
memory” (3 84). Lewis’s critical description of time theory’s displacement of memory by
a fleeting temporal vision strikingly anticipates Debord’s alignment of forgetting with
capital’s ongoing production of spectacle, in which spectacular events “are quickly
forgotten, thanks to the precipitation with which the spectacle’s pulsing machinery
replaces one by the next” (114). The result of “spectacle being the reigning social
organization of a paralyzed history” and collective memory is, Debord concludes, “a false
consciousness of time” (114), what Lewis calls a “‘continuous present’ of [the] temporal

appearance” of spectacle, “consumed (and immediately evacuated)” of meaning under a

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visual modernity “based on optical illusions, the phenomena of distorting media” (3 89).
For both Lewis and Debord, then, forgetting is central to defining the subject of
spectacle. This comparison serves not only to locate Debord’s concerns within a
modernist imaginary, but, more importantly, suggests a way of reading Lewis’s more
broadly cultural and political concerns as symptomatically stemming from the temporal
contingency of spectacular value. History is reduced to a closed dialectic of production
and consumption of the new, which Lewis locates specifically in the commodity time of
advertising. In neo-Bergsonian thought, he claims, “‘reality is a history.’ It is a pure
dialectical promession, presided over by a time-keeping, chronologically-real, super-
historic, Mind, like some immense stunt-figure symbolizing Fashion, ecstatically assuring
its customers that although fashions are periodic, as they must and indeed ought to be,
nevertheless, by some mysterious rule, each one is better than the last, and should (so the
advertisement would run) be paid more for than the last, in money or in blood” (212).
This understanding of historical production as hegemonic reality machine is in
compromising collusion with the process of erasure of the material realities of the past.
The material contradiction of capital surplus structured on the commodity’s embodiment
of its outmoded status under mass production governs a cultural history of diminishing
returns and exhaustion: “You can no longer nourish yourself upon the Past; its stock is
exhausted, the Past is nowhere a reality. The only place where it is a reality is in time, not
certainly in space. So the mental world of time offers a solution. More and more it is used
as a compensating principle” (81). In other words, the continual present of the advertiser

and his spectacular representations of the new produce, compensate for, and conceal an

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underlying exhaustion structuring temporality. The material realities of past and present
are rendered abstractions, subsumed by the repetitive dominance of overproduction and
the commodity form.

The result is a collective pathology in which psychic and cultural economies are
shaped by spectacle’s creation and disavowal of contingency. He makes this point most
emphatically (and hyperbolically) in his “Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce” and the
“peculiar spectacle” of Ulysses in Book One, the section most concerned with mass
culture. Psychic interiority, internal monologue as narrative method is not only, for
Lewis, based in a weak, feminized aestheticism (Mac 93) or a pathologically passive
impressionism (94) associated with Proust, Ford, and others, but is, more fundamentally
and systemically, indicative of subjectivity as objectified will, centered around the dead
stuff of commodity time, of the spectacular recent past. The “psychological” technique
that is, under Lewis’s satirical pen, both Ulysses the text and cultural symptom, is a
production of “an Aladdin’s cave of incredible brie-a-brac in which a dense mass of dead
stuff is collected, from 1901 toothpaste, a bar or two of Sweet Rosie O’Grady, to pre-
nordic architecture,” creating an “expanse of objects, all of them lifeless, the sewage of a
Past twenty years old” (89). Lewis’s reading of Ulysses as a sepulchral cave of material
culture and a spectacular assemblage of yesterday’s mass products with a smattering of
the ancient world thrown in links “the mythical guise of commodity exchange, in which
the self-identical perpetually presents itself as the new (Wolin, qtd. in Jacobs 214) to the
sewage-like waste on which spectacular (re)—production is based. Reproducing the self-

identical commodity as the new necessitates waste (as in Dos Passos’s fictional

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commodity landscape) and produces, according to Lewis, a reified psychology (legible in
Joyce’s technique), a cultural symptom of what Debord calls “the triumph of irreversible
time [as] its metamorphosis into the time of things” (105).

It is in the world of things, however, that Lewis stakes a cultural critique,
negotiating between the leveling and making-passive of consumers under capital’s
spectacular dream world of temporal flux on the one hand and a collective, immanent
materialism on the other. Part of this involves what Douglas Mac has called, in the
context of Lewis’s critique of Schopenhauer, the “existential explorations [that] could be
prompted by the spectacles of large-scale production and the modern subject’s
bombardment by commodities” (134). While Mac is right in suggesting that Lewis and
other modemists during what has been called the second technological revolution did
little more than explore the increasing bombardment and centrality of capitalist spectacle
in modernist epistemology, his reading does not consider the temporal flux of commodity
culture as site of critique in Time and Western Man. For it is on the mounds of the
homogenizing effects (temporal and cultural) of mass commodity production, that which
Lewis found both “stimulating and perverse” (Mac 135), that the text gestures toward a
potential disruption of the ideological forgetting upon which a collective, passive
unconscious of “herd-consumption” (120) depends. The formal satire marks an effort at
opening a space of redemption, a material collectivism over against an ideological
egoism of vision following the logic of spectacular commodity time.

As opposed to the “einematomaph of the physics of ‘events’” training modern

subjects “from infancy to regard the world as a moving picture” (3 83) of an eternal

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present, Lewis promotes a visuality linking the material world and memory. “The
traditional belief of common-sense, embodied in the ‘na'l'f’ view of the physical world,”
he satirically claims, “is really a picture. We believe that we see a certain objective
reality. This contains stable and substantial solid objects. When we look at these objects
we believe that what we are perceiving is what we are seeing. In reality, of course, we are
conscious of much more than we immediately see” (3 83). In promoting this material
consciousness over a cultural unconscious devoid of will and political and critical
agency, he reminds us of the force of memory in constructing the perception of those
solid objects of the material world: “It is memory that gives that depth and fullness to our
present, and makes our abstract, ideal world of objects for us” (3 83). In light of this
memory which exceeds commodity temporality we can synthesize his critique of the
fetishistic isolation of the eye and of the epistemological contingency built into the
structure of capitalist spectacle, toward a critical vision not reducible to the laws of the
market. The following passages reveal these opposing modalities of vision:
[I ]t would be the opposite of the truth if you wish to isolate the Eye. For it
is against that isolation that we contend [my italics]. On the other hand, if
by “philosophy of the eye” is meant that we wish to repose, and materially
to repose, in the crowning human sense, the visual sense . . . then it is true
that our philosophy attaches itself to that concrete and radiant reality of the
optic sense. That sensation of overwhelming reality which vision alone
gives is the reality of ‘common-sense,’ as it is the reality we inherit fiom

pagan antiquity. And it is indeed on that ‘reality’ that I am basing all I say.

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(392)

In the world of Advertisement, Coué-fashion, everything that happens

today . . . is better, bigger, brighter, more astonishing than anything that

has ever existed before. . . . An individual looking, with his intellect,

before and after, seeing far too much at a time for the requirements of the

advertiser or hypnotist, is not at all the affair of the Advertisement. (12-13)
His privileging of the “concrete reality” of the “visual sense” needs to be read in the
context of memory, necessarily erased in a commodified epistemology hinging on
spectacular change. Advertising, we recall, has “battered and deadened every superlative
so much that superlatives no longer in themselves convey anything” (13), suggesting the
tendency of capital to absorb and redeploy all surplus through spectacle. And this is key
to any understanding of a modernist visual culture. Capital extorts the very materiality,
material difference, and material force of language itself, that on which it (a priori)
depends. Contrasting spectacle emptied of reference to anything beyond itself with an
acknowledmnent of its immanent pastness gestures toward a modernist critical vision of
autonomous will. But these passages together also reveal a curious tension between a
shared, “common-sense” reality in visual perception and the individual subject’s capacity
to resist the “continuous present” (389) of the empty event of the advertisement, capital’s
repetitive self-representation. And it is fiom within this tension, hinging as it does on the
epistemological problem of spectacular time, that both the radical force and productive
limits of Lewis’s critique emerge.

The critical force of Time and Western Man lies in its interrogation of the private

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ego as constructed in the public space of capital flux. Fredric Jameson makes a similar
point in his study of Lewis, arguing that “modernism not only reflects and reinforces
[the] fiagmentation and commodification of the psyche as its basic precondition”; it also
tries “to overcome that reification” by exploring the libidinal potential contained in those
sealed psychic spaces, perhaps allowing access to a “more authentic existence” (Fables
14, 39). I amee with this reading of Lewis’s modernism, but Jameson’s usual focus on the
hegemony of production processes has its limits, excluding a consideration of Lewis’s
interest in the collective bourgeois responses to spectacle, responses or effects that are
constitutive of a pathological cultural moment. The ideology of a private subject, for
Lewis, is sustained by temporal contingency both produced and concealed by spectacle,
resulting in a subjectivism divorced from the “reality” of the material. Consumer
spectacle appeals to the “private” fantasies of the individual of the masses, constituting
the individual subject as both narcissistic and of a will-less, possessive ego. In this light,
Lewis points out that “the eye is, in the sense in which we are considering it, the private
organ; the hand the public one” (393), but that
the cutting up of the ideal, public, one, exterior, reality of human tradition,
into manifold spaces and times, leads to a fundamental ‘subjectivity’ of
one sort or the other. And we would emphasize that our ideal, objective,
world which was wrought into a unity—the common ground of
imaginative reality on which we all meet—is being destroyed in favour of
a fastidious egoism, based on a disintegration of the complex unit of the

senses, and a granting of unique privileges to vision, in its raw, immediate

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and sensational sense. (394, my emphasis)
This “common moun ” of an aesthetic unity of the senses is what Lewis holds out
against a remessive child-cult, the cultural leveling symptomatic of the homogenizing
force of capital, and the epistemological passivity wrought flour a visual fetishism
begged by the commodity form. F etishizing the visual is a fragmented, formalized
aesthetic, simultaneously operating on an aesthetic rooted in the sensual from which it
historically springs (Eagleton, Ideology l3) and reducing it to a scopic immediacy of the
“sensational.” Although reactive, the arguments in Lewis’s text exceed their own
traditional conservatism. While he does not make the point explicitly, I read the text’s
constellation of the seemingly limitless subjects and objects of capital, as well as the
“disintemation of the complex unit of the senses” by a privileged vision, as symptomatic
of the force of commodity spectacle. Or, to invoke Eagleton, “it is not the use of an object
which violates its aesthetic being, but that abstraction of it to an empty receptacle which
follows from the sway of exchange-value and the dehurnanization of need. Classical
aesthetics and commodity fetishism both purge the specificity of things, stripping their
sensuous content to a pure ideality of form” (205). The egoistic “cutting up” of public
human space linked to a rendering asunder of the senses—both occurring under the logic
of the commodity—is another instance of capital’s absorption of a visual logic in its own
tautological reproduction, begging of its subjects passive, pornomaphic consumption of
an (im)mediate temporal reality. The text’s obsessive constellation of the exemplary
technologies of commodity culture and its temporal contradictions exposes and

challenges a “fastidious egoism” emerging from a privileged spectacular vision. When he

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describes a narcissistic mass consumption of the spectacular images of capital
(exemplified in the reception of Chaplin), claiming that “the pathos of the Public is of a
sentimental and also a naively selfish order. It is its own pathos and triumphs that it
wishes to hear about” (64), Lewis does more than state a consumerist truism from a
reactionary position. He exposes, rather, the ideological limits of an ego driven by the
temporally ephemeral world of commodity-objects, an ego conceived as a “private” mode
of vision fetishistically divorced from the very material, public, historical realities which
shape that vision.

The polemic exposure of subjectification under the temporal epistemology of the
commodity form, of modernity, would seem also to expose the limits of Lewis’s own
critique, his cultivated role as critic surveying the cultural landscape fiom a privileged
position beyond its contradictions and infantilisms. Despite the satirical force aimed at
the production of consciousness emerging from capital’s fleeting and spectacular self-
representation, he does not strike a clear note of resolution or offer a promarn for
revolutionary change. As Douglas Mao puts it, “Lewis knows that all this selling and
buying is not the human project, but by the same token he does not know what that
project could in fact be, can offer nothing that would circumvent commodity culture’s
centrality to quotidian life and consciousness or rival in imaginative force the
overwhelming massiveness suggested by his heterogeneous list of goods” (134). Indeed,
aside from a certain critical-satirical consciousness-raising, it would seem that Lewis’s
extensive familiarity with philosophies of time and their various cultural expressions

serve as a mere tool for opposition to a pervasive epistemological modality. But I would

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like to suggest that this very limit in the conception of Time and Western Man ofl‘ers a
productive way of reading the relations between spectacle, consumer capital, time, and
consciousness in a way that sheds considerable light on Lewis’s modernism and its
profoundly complex—and often contradictory—relations to the market. Despite the
absence of a consistent and radical critique, the text stages the contradictory limits of
collective culture, reduced as it is to passive attachments to the objectified will of
spectacular consumption.

Time and Western Man can be characterized by its flux and repetition, superlative
rhetoric, and infinite expansion, symptomatic of the concepts and cultural phenomena it
attacks, especially spectacular capital." But what drives the flux of Lewis’s writing—and
provides us with the most forceful critique of the time of commodity culture—is
contradiction. One of the main problems of Ulysses is Joyce’s craftsman-like assemblage
of the “Aladdin’s cave of incredible brie-a-brac in which a dense mass of dead stuff is
collect ” constitutive of a modern psychology steeped in “the sewage of a Past twenty
years old” (89). This complaint might open the way for Benjaminian dialectical
arrangement of the outmoded, exposing the temporal limits of capital as embodied in its
commodity form. Further, Joyce’s textual assemblage of outmoded commodities might
support Lewis’s critique of capitalist technological history as dialectical promess, in
which “reality” is governed by “Mind, like some immense stlmt-figure symbolizing
Fashion, ecstatically assuring its customers that although fashions are periodic . . .
nevertheless, by some mysterious rule, each one is better than the last, and should . . . be

paid more for than the last” (212). Lewis, however, displays no critical investment in the

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outmoded; rather, contradiction drives the accretive excess of his text. The attack on
Joyce’s collection of commodities past would seem to undermine Lewis’s own attack on
the ideological forgetting necessary to spectacular capital, as in his claim that “an
individual looking, with his intellect, before and after, [sees] far too much at a time for
the requirements of the advertiser” (13). The time-mind he sees in Ulysses is of an
obsession with the past, with the outmoded of material production and consumption,
whereas the time-mind of Bergsonian theory and fashion culture is a problem of the
successive states of an eternal present devoid of memory and agency. Lewis’s method of
contradiction resists privileging either temporal modality as well as positing a moderate
middle-mound. Rather, the text constellates Joyce’s collection of the recent past with the
historical amnesia begged of mass commodity production in order to show the
contradictory remession contained by a promess limited to production and consumption.
This contradictory method, while revealing the argumentative limits to Lewis’s
external critical role, also poses a powerful internal tension: the fleeting form of spectacle
embodying and concealing the interior temporal limits of capital is the critical content of
the text. In a recent article on Adomo’s Constellation and Benjamin’s Dialectical Image,
Steven Helmling reads a mimetic force of juxtaposing contradictory, non-dialectical
elements in Dialectic of Enlightenment, particularly the stasis of reification at the heart of
capitalist “promess.” Putting binary ideas into play—in a deconstructive move on
Helmling’s part—produces “forcefields within which the energies of certain
contradictions pulse and clash” (par. 31), allowing for an immanent critique that

“undertakes not to solve, or to make disappear, but precisely, to display, to expose, which

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must mean, to sufilzr, and in that special sense to ‘perform,’ to make happen, to ‘repeat’
and . . . ‘reliquify,’ in the writing itself” (par. 32). The contradiction between Lewis’s
disparagement of Ulysses and his own massive textual assemblage is symptomatic and
critical of the contradictory coexistence of reification and promess. The historical,
including its contradictions, is resistant to the leveling temporal force of spectacle and a
commodity-govemed cultural economy that is “as unsubstantial as a mist on a Never-
Never landscape” (81).

It is on the mounds of this contradictory immanence that we can finally situate the
tension between will and false egoism, a tension shaping Lewis’s own ambivalent
privileging of vision. Will is eclipsed by its reification, which he terms objectification, as
the endless reproduction of spectacular desire. The text “suffers” and “repeats” the
fetishized visual commodity culture that results in the mist-enshrouded landscape of
passive consumers. The “naively selfish order” of a bourgeois public reduced to seeing
“its own pathos and triump ” (64) represented to it by Chaplin and department stores,
boxers and posing politicians is in league with “the pictme of a Will that just goes on for
some reason ‘objectifying’ itself, resulting in the endless rigamarole in which we
participate, and of which (qua Will) we are the witnesses” (312). Lewis constellates the
contradictory imperatives of this objectified will and the “fastidious egoism” of mass
culture. These problems of identification with the mass produced commodity are the
contradictory particulars dialectically contained in the lmiversal of spectacle. An
objectified will of collective identification and the “fastidious egoism” of a remessive,

sensational immediacy would seem to cormteract each other; but Lewis’s text posits the

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two terms as the contradictory, yet dialectically charged, imperatives of spectacular
culture. The “endless rigamarole” of spectacular vision following the logic of the
commodity form reproduces the tautological will of collective passivity. But juxtaposing
publicly made desires and the narcissistic self works to make an uncritical collective
identification and a childish egoism “pulse and clash.” The text pleasures in its own
contradictions in order to “reliquify,” through the reified objects of mass production and
consumption, the collective and the individual, the visual and memory, and to bring each
out of the stasis of repetitive, eternal succession.

Lewis himself describes this re-production of forcefields out of contradiction as
“beyond action and reaction.” The Art of Being Ruled, published in the previous year,
explains his dialectical method, what I have been calling a modernist critique immanent
to spectacular capital, and is useful in better understanding the critical force of Time and
Western Man. Against “the naively conventional ‘revolutionary’ [as] a stereotyped,
routine protocol of a living activity, vulgarized for the purposes of mass use” (3 59),
Lewis proposes a dialectical “double movement”:

No logical future has taken pictorial shape in these pages [in The Art of
Being Ruled]. All that has been done is to lay down a certain number of
roads joining the present with something different fiom itself; yet
something necessitated, it would appear, by its tendency. Both what is
desirable and what is not in it contribute contradictorily to this impression.
It is this double movement (proceeding fiom combined disgust and

satisfaction) that must make the planning of these roads so difficult (357)

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Further, he hopes to offer “a statement of a position that would be entirely irreconcilable,
but irreconcilable outside of the cadres and cliches of any recomrized federated opinion
. . . the statement of a position ‘beyond action and reaction’” (359).

This dialectical sparring—exemplified in the lengthy catalogues of spectacle that
ironically appropriate the “aimless will” reproduced in commodity culture—is an effort at
creating a modernism that resists and exceeds commodification. Modernism, as Jameson
has noted, stakes its force on being both part of twentieth century consumer capitalism
and working to develop forms that resist total absorption by that very system (Signatures
16).19 And every student of modernism knows its history of being consumed by the
pervasive consumer market, fiom a published photo of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses
to Nicole Kidman giving us a sexy new Virginia Woolf to Hollywood’s marketing of the
leisure industry ambivalently critiqlwd in The Great Gatsby, not to mention the less
thrilling and sensational examples like glossy new editions of literary modernisrns
appearing in student bookstores each year. This has not happened with Lewis or his work.
But this is not to say that Lewis is the better modernist than Joyce, Woolf, or any number
of others. Rather, I hope it serves to emphasize my point that texts like Time and Western
Man and The Art of Being Ruled, in failing (or perhaps better, refusing) to promote a
complete modernist treatise, are part of a different kind of project, one of constellating
the contradictions of capital built into its spectacular forms of (self-) representation. This
constellation effect—building on the contradictory logic of the commodity form and the
passive temporality it begs of its subj ects—seeks to reawaken some force from within the

endless rigamarole cf capital’s spectacular, tautological landscape.

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The spectacular representations of capital between the first World War and the
depressions leading to the second, at least for moderrrists like Dos Passos and Lewis,
produce a subject suspended between fixation and distraction. Modernist visual culture
emerges from the centrality of the commodity form and its necessary reproduction as
tautologically bigger and brighter, faster and flashier than its predecessor, regardless of
use-value, making such visual fixation the complimentary respite, perhaps, from
modernity’s increasing instrumentalization of the psyche. This pleasure, in the
psychoanalytic sense of perverse fixation, operates on a disavowal of the outmoded status
written into the commodity form. The tension between the new and the outmoded,
contained in each of capital’s self-representations, governs the temporal dialectic of
modernity, always re-synthesized by the absorption and redeployment of surplus.

But this is not a closed dialectical structure; critique is built into its disavowed
stasis, even if it lies dormant in the stasis of commodified time. For Lewis, spectacular
time produces the objectified will that both participates in and is witness to the endless
rigamarole of overproduction and mass consumption. Dos Passos figures, 5 la Benjamin,
the material limits internal to capital’s historical amnesia. Neither text—whether the
experimental realism of Manhattan Transfer or the rhetorical excesses of Time and
Western Man—offers a brave new world outside the historical process of material
production and its spectacular ideology. But in foremounding the contradictory stasis
structuring the time of spectacle, Dos Passes and Lewis articulate a modernist dialectical
pleasure of critique from within the perverse pleasure of distracted fixation. A textuath

of the spectacular, one that seeks to resist the logic of the commodity form in which it

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participates, emerges, resonating down through our own historical moment as an

unending modernist project of immanent critique.

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Chapter 4
Loss Incorporated: Jean Rhys and the Melancholic Economy of Late Modernism

An advertisement for Burgoyne’s Tintara in the April 2, 1930 issue of British
Vogue claims that the wine “Promotes Health [and] Prevents Ill-Health.” The ad features
two photomaphs of the same woman’s face. The face on top: shades of may fading into a
charcoal backmound, downward looking, the woman’s hands pressing the sides of her
face in a state of anxiety; the one beneath: sharper contrast, holding the viewer’s gaze
with a smile bordering on laughter. “Which is you?” reads the bold caption. Should the
woman buy and drink the wine, she would be well-defined, would attain a physical and
psychological intemity through that consumption; without it she is ill, haunted by a
spectral anxiety.

While the advertisement asks for a simple identification, the process of
identification is founded on a split; we are looking at the “same” face of a fashionable
woman who embodies both states, health and spectral illness, at once. The ad relies on
the harmless threat that both of these states are ‘you,” but suggests that they are mutually
exclusive, divided by the commodity and its promise of health. This split illustrates, on
the one hand, Mark Seltzer’s model of disembodiment in consumption, where the
appropriate mediation through consumption produces a “relative weightlessness” or
“aestheticization of the natural body” (124).20 But the ad’s tautological appeal—which is
central to consumerism stimulated by image-based advertising—also serves to locate
illness as a central trope, following the logic of the commodity, in defining modern

consumer subjectivity and its conception of a bodily ego. If we follow the top-to-bottom

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visual logic of the ad, then the spectral figure of illness both precedes and is a condition
of the intemity and blissful self-satisfaction promised by the commodity. The offer of a
“restored vitality” through consumption posits that vitality, and the consumer subject,
against loss. In other words, the privilege of relative disembodiment, of restored vitality,
is predicated on a loss of vitality in the natural body. But rather than excluding the
natural, material body, the ad’s rhetorical thrust relies on a spectral occlusion; the
consumerist ideal is built on loss. The ad throws its promise of disembodied vitality and
health into question by positing it against an always already internalized loss.

Such anxieties—hinging on a presupposed loss and legible in advertising rhetoric
of the period—are also part of a modernist cultural discourse, one that late literary
modemists understood to constitute the consumer subject. Jean Rhys’s Good Morning,
Midnight exemplifies a late modernist understanding of the subject suspended between
material loss—whether in the form of money or the necessarily failed promises of
commodities—and surplus. The melancholic narrative treats the subject’s sense of
impending loss as symptomatic of consumer capitalism. My attention to a melancholic
consumerism in Rhys is indebted to Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of capital’s reliance
on a double movement: continually producing a surplus-for-its-own-sake, in the form of
increasing overproduction, necessitates the expansion, “retenitorialization,” of its own
“interior and immanent” limits (259). Capital of course extorts or absorbs every available
mode of production, vampire-like, in its reproduction of surplus. But the point I draw
from Deleuze and Guattari is that the limits to continued overproduction and

consumption (geomaphic or otherwise) drive the production of surplus by being

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reproduced “on an ever-larger scale” (234), always displaced. For Rhys, this
displacement of capital’s immanence takes a specifically subjective form, producing a
psychic economy of loss centered around the material body. The body is spectralized in
the process of standardization through contact with the commodity, producing a
melancholic psychic economy—most legible in capitalist crisis—as the trope of modern
consumer subjectivity. The text turns a condition of capital into, and expresses it as, a
psychological condition.

I am thus interested in the preoccupations with loss shared by its psychoanalytic
theorization and literary treatments of subjectivity in negotiation with a consumer
economy, both of which center on a distinctly material absence structuring subjectivity.
Two recent studies serve to exemplify a recent melancholic turn in modernist studies and
to situate my argument.

Luke Carson’s Consumption and Depression (1998) and Esther Sénchez-Pardo’s
Cultures of the Death Drive (2003) bracket the mutually imbricated discourses of a
consumer economy and melancholic loss in modernism. In his study of Stein, Zukofsky,
and Pound in light of 19305 economic crisis, Carson argues for a universal melancholic
subject of modernity. A melancholic loss fimdamental to capitalist exchange, he argues,
points to and is sustained by the utopian ideals of Enlightenment: “the utopian impulse
. . . remains within the pathology of modernity, exacerbating its melancholia by finding
substitutes in order to conceal the originary loss of the unnamed thing that haunts it as its
promise of fulfilment” (6). In the ideological transformation from nineteenth-century

mass production driven by ideologies of scarcity to twentieth-century mass

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consumption,21 threats of scarcity are displaced by ideologies of abundance (7), which in
turn conceal the constitutive sacrifice of modern capitalist exchange that is “always off-
balance” (10—11).22 The thrust of his argument is that mass consumption sustains an
economy of scarcity by concealing the loss of an unknown object of desire, producing “a
state of emergency requiring all the ideological resources of the symbolic structures of
the social and economic” (45). Thus, “what both [Stein and Pound] fear in the emerging
consumer economy and its phantasm of material abundance is the imaginary and
melancholic concealment of this constitutive sacrifice or loss” (11, my emphasis). But
impending loss or crisis is not concealed, as I argue below. Rather, capital’s immanence
is displaced onto the consuming subject, yielding a psychic economy of manic
consumption that ideologically sustains an originary, unknown loss.

Esther Sanchez-Pardo maps Melanie Klein’s theories of melancholia and the
death drive in order to read loss at the heart of modernist explorations of object relations,
gender, and sexuality. Her “aim is to explore an endemic mal du siecle that under the
guise of melancholia, depression, or manic-depressive illness came to the fore in the
period between the two world wars,” and she claims “that uncovering the social causes
that induce depression or melancholia is an urgent task if we want to understand a
psychic dynamic that is not divorced fiom its social and material foundations, from its
specific mounding in history, and from its complex implications at a larger than
individual level” (7, 217). However, aside fi'om providing new and invaluable ways of
reading gender and sexuality in modernism around loss, her argument does little to

theorize the economic relations between individual pathology, the social and material,

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and literary modernism. It is as if capital, as object of modernist studies, is lost, uncannily
marking her study in its absence.

My argument intervenes in these two approaches. In reading Rhys’s Good
Morning, Midnight with Freud on melancholia and the bodily ego, I show how the
psychoanalytic account of melancholia and mania follows the contradictory logic of
capital, in which surplus is driven by its own immanent, repeatedly displaced limits. In
Rhys this takes the form of an unknown loss, displaced onto the subject, driving
commodity consumption and social identification. The novel, like Burgoyne’s ad, shows
consumer acquisition following fiom loss, and so posits a melancholic-manic subject of
capital. Rhys’s work, and Good Morning, Midnight in particular, may seem an obvious
choice for illustrating modernist melancholia. My defense against this charge takes three
lines. First, the novel not only allows us to show, but stakes its literary formal claims on,
the unknoWn nature of the lost object structuring both the Freudian account of
melancholia and the logic of consumer capital and its subjects. Second, the narrative
shows melancholia and mania to be parts of the same consumer ideology, shedding light
on the problematic relation between the two states in Freud’s model. And finally, in its
figurations of a bodily ego constituted in terms of loss and surplus, in continuous
negotiation with market demands, the novel posits consumer subjectivity as a potential
site for critique of a pathological social system. Rhys’s late-modernist narrative sees the
melancholic-manic subject as symptom of the loss on which surplus is predicated, and the
particular bodily ego as an immanent challenge to capital’s pathological culture of

consumption and its concomitant disavowal of embodiment.23

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Freud’s model relies on a definitive and paradoxical materialism. “Mourning and
Melancholia” differentiates between the two states—beyond their shared symptoms”—
by way of an ambiguous idealism in melancholia, ambiguous because the idealist form
emerges fiom and carries residual traces of an originary material loss. Distinct from one
in mourning, the melancholic subject may be “aware of the loss [i.e., of the object itself]
which has given rise to his melancholia,” but “only in the sense that he knows whom he
has lost but not what he has lost in him” (245). Freud concludes fiom this that in
melancholia the ego becomes structured around the lost object, the unknowable “what”
the object represents. The ego incorporates the object qua loss, the libidinal energy
attached to the original object is withdrawn into the ego, and the result is an emptying of
the ego. Thus, “in mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in
melancholia it is the ego itself” (246). This emptying of the ego constitutes a split: part of
the ego breaks off and forms the “critical agency” that directs libidinal energy as
reproaches against the site of incorporated loss. This leads to the problematic crux on
which much of the developing model hinges: identification:25

But the fiee libido was not displaced on to another object; it was
withdrawn into the ego. There, however, it was not employed in any
unspecified way, but served to establish an identification of the ego with
the abandoned object. Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and
the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it
were an object, the forsaken object. In this way an object-loss was

transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the

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loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and
the ego as altered by identification. (249)

The ego’s identification with the lost object takes shape through incorporation of
the loss, Situating the ego in the shadow of the lost object. The figuration of the shadow, I
want to stress, functions as an uncanny remainder of the material and its symbolic weight
(the “what he has lost in him”), which, Freud later points out, can be “assimred” only to
the unconscious, “the region of the memory-traces of things” (256).“5 The pathological
identification of the melancholic hinges on the incorporation of a lost materiality in
constituting the ambiguous idealism Freud uses to distinguish it fiom mourning. The
trace of the material sustains the ideal in its absence, generating a psychic economy in
which the agency of the ego “can become diseased on its own account” (247).

Good Morning, Midnight narrates ego identification governed by material loss
and resulting in a subjectivity suspended between the natural body and disembodied
identifications with capital and commodity. Disembodied consumption and the public
construction of the private self are concomitant with the impending absence of money
and commodity, the absent simrifiers of the material limits of capital. The text is
organized around acquisition and expenditure, and money embodies the contingency of
capital against which Sophia experiences her body. The force of repetition, for example,
drives a striking passage at the end of Part III of the novel: “Now, money, for the night is
coming. Money for my hair, money for my teeth, money for shoes that won’t deform my
feet (it’s not easy now to walk around in cheap shoes with very high heels), money for

good clothes, money, money. The night is conring. That’s always when there isn’t any.

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Just when you need it there’s no money. No money. It gets you down” (120). Tim
Armstrong reads such passages in the novel as the internalization of a commodified
bodily ideal, representative of much 19305 literary production in response to the
increasing role of idealized and framnented bodies in advertising. He observes that
Sophia “constantly experiences her body as failure and dreams of rejuvenation” (101). He
is right to treat this as an example of the general, paradoxical function of modern
advertising, in which framnenting the body while promising wholeness or intemity is
what “renders the commoditization of the body possible” (98), a commodified wholeness
“which is constantly deferred” (100), but his reading does not consider the role of loss
operative in framnentation and deferred intemity, the repeated production of the
fashionable body. Bodily commodification is profoundly linked in the text to material
loss and to the disavowal of that body’s materiality.
If, for Freud, the melancholic subject knows “whom he has lost but not what he

has lost in him,” Sophia’s lack of money assumes value as material absence simlifying a
seemingly limitless quantity of commodities. And while memories of former lovers recur
throughout the narrative, her dead infant’s body functions as a governing trope of loss, an
uncanny material remainder that exceeds a commodified body ideal. First, the infant’s
corpse is juxtaposed with a refashioning of the body. When Sophia describes the erasure
of stretch marks with bandaging, that process of erasure is both distanced horn and
uncannily marked by the materiality of death, loss:

When I complain about the bandages she says: “I promise you that when

you take them off you’ll be just as you were before.” And it is true. When

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she takes them off there is not one line, one wrinkle, one crease.

And five weeks afterwards there I am, with not one line, one wrinkle, one

crease.

And there he is, lying with a ticket tied round his wrist because he died

in a hospital. And there I am looking down at him, without one line,

without one wrinkle, without one crease... (52)
The erasure of bodily marking can only be approached indirectly and ironically; the
ritualized remaking of the virginal female body fetishistically idealized by consumerist
discourses of health and beauty (and here repeatedly mentioned as absence) is ironically
offset by the spectral, dead body, made present by the institutional marking of death.

But bodily erasure in the passage exceeds observations of the commodified

female body spectacularized by market culture; it points to a psychic economy in which
the subject is in constant negotiation between the body’s mortal materiality and an
abstract bodily ideal both promised and deferred by commodity culture. Producing the
body “without one line” leaves only a memory trace, linking the process of its
commodification to material loss Idealization through erasure performs and sustains the
material loss constituting the melancholic consumer subject. While the text indicates the
shared symptoms of melancholia and mourning described in Freud’s essay—“painful
dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love” (244)—it
significantly elides the process of mourning. Emotion is absent; “lying there with a ticket
tied round his wrist because he died in a hospital,” the child’s dead body serves rather to

ironize the fantasy of the timeless body under material erasure: “And five weeks

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afterwards there I am, with not one line” (52). The subject “knows whom [she] has lost
but not what [she] has lost in him,” signaling what Freud calls the “pathological” state of
melancholia (over healthy mourning). The uncanny materiality of the corpse is linked to
Sophia’s refashioned body. And while there is an ambivalent attachment to the child prior
to its death, the text stresses that Sophia’s sense of loss is fundamentally driven by
money.27 Specifically, the lack of money—which we’re led to understand is partly
responsible for the death—comes to be materially simrified by the corpse and yields the
subject’s experience of her body as that of the emptied melancholic ego:

Afterwards I couldn’t sleep. I would sleep for an hour or two, and then

wake up and think about money, money, money for my son; money,

money...

Do I love him? Poor little devil, I don’t know if I love him.

But the thought that they will crush him because we have no money—that

is torture.

Money, money for my son, my beautifill son....

I can’t sleep. My breasts dry up, my mouth is dry. I can’t sleep. Money,

money.... (50)
A similar bodily, affective response occurs in Rhys’s After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, when
Julia states, “‘when you’ve just had a baby, and it dies for the simple reason that you
haven’t enough money to keep it alive, it leaves you with a sort of hunger’” (80). Both
passages see the affective state of pathological melancholia as determined by a fixation

with money and its absence.

172

The hospital passages in Good Morning, Mdnight are recollections, temporal
disruptions of Sophia’s desperate attempts at bodily identification with the commodity,
the process Armstrong calls the “equation of capital and the commoditized body.” More
importantly, these exemplary passages of loss conclude with ellipses, material textual
omissions that highlight the unknowable loss at stake. But, as the narrative moves from
the recalled loss of the child to Sophia’s “transformation act” (53) involving a dye job,
those textual omissions also serve to link materialized loss to consumption as bodily
transformation. At the hairdresser’s Sophia “can’t look on at [the] operation” (52, my
emphasis). The overdeterrnined, surgical term further links the sensual experience of the
body’s (social) exterior to the medical tag simrifying the child’s death in a hospital for the
poor and to the “operation” of bandaging, the reconstruction of a bodily ideal via erasure.
This uncanny linkage, I contend, is a residual trace of incorporated loss; the process of
bodily commodification via consumer investment, in which the body is left “without one
line,” indicates the “memory traces of things” constitutive of the melancholic ego. Her
“transformation,” the extemalized process of supplementarity in fashion, posits an ironic
relay between loss (of the child) and the occlusion of the particular material body in a
consumerist logic of commodified disembodiment. Identification with the commodity, in
Rhys, is predicated on what Freud calls “an identification of the ego with [an] abandoned
object” (249). And that abandoned object is infinitely exchangeable with money or
commodity, the material elements of ideal capital.

Rhys figures what Carson calls the “constitutive lack of the economy” as a

psychic wounding linked to the occlusion of bodily particularity. Freud’s biological

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metaphor of the economy of melancholia is useful here. Melancholia is sometimes
worked through (as in mourning) by the ego’s “freeing its libido from the lost object”
(252), but, Freud notes, given the tenacity of the melancholic ego’s hold on the lost
object, this gives us no “insight into the economics of the course of events” (253). Rather
than fiee itself, the melancholic ego is sustained by an economy of wounding: “The
complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic
energies—which in the transference neuroses we have called ‘anticathexes’—-from all
directions, and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished” (253). The biological
metaphor is also a perversion of the biological; cathected energy does not heal the
wound, but continues to drain the ego of its resources in an economy of expenditure with
no return. And if Rhys’s juxtaposition of idealized bodily erasure and the materialization
of loss in Sophia’s dead child registers a materialized absence structuring the logic of
consumerism and its “privilege of relative disembodiment” (Seltzer 124), then the text’s
pathologization of market culture’s ideological occlusion of bodily particularity sheds
light on Freud’s paradoxical figuration of the wound. The Freudian economy of
melancholia follows the logic of a melancholic economy, where the “impoverished” ego
is symptomatic of impending material loss If the consumerist body is posited on a
promise of self-possession, performed in self-fashioning, then this is based in a founding
loss, a presupposed psychic wound linked to the occlusion of bodily materiality and
sustained by the cathectic energies of capital.

Early in the novel Sophia figmes this wounding at the heart of the social

economy. Remembering her (inept) sales role in a women’s clothing shop in Paris, she

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likens the surplus bodies feeding an increasingly standardized service economy to a

wound necessitated by the concentration of capital:
Well, let’s argue this out, Mr. Blank. You, who represent Society, have the
right to pay me four hundred francs a month. That’s my market value, for I
am an inefficient member of Society, slow in the uptake, uncertain,
slightly damaged in the fray, there’s no denying it. So you have the right
to pay me four hundred fiancs a month, to lodge me in a small, dark room,
to clothe me shabbily, to harass me with worry and monotony and
unsatisfied longings till you get me to the point when I blush at a look, cry
at a word. We can’t all be happy, we can ’t all be rich, we can’t all be
lucky—and it would be much less frm if we were. Isn’t it so, Mr. Blank?
There must be the dark background to show up the bright colors. (25-6,
my emphasis)

The body is materialized as wounded (“damaged”) and, simultaneously, visually

occluded from the abstract force of “Society” that determines “market value.” Reduced to

the “monotony” of “the dark backmound,” the material body is figured as the necessary

surplus marking the limits to capital and necessarily emptied of particularity, a surplus

body.

While the passage offers a comparison between Freud’s metaphorical wound and
the “damaged” surplus bodies of the market, we need to examine the process of
identification on which a (melancholic) consumer economy depends. “A bit of an

automaton,” Sophia’s routines of excessive drink, dining, and self-fashioning correspond

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to her seemingly narcissistic identification with the other. Identification in the novel is
always mediated by commodities in a process we customarily associate with
consumerism (and this ranges from Marxian fetishism as “social relations between
things” (84) to modern humanist attacks on the ills of socially alienated individuals to
postmodern observations of the tautology of society qua consumers). Before turning to
the problem of psychic interiority in Rhys, I want to conclude this section by showing
how melancholia and mania are mutually imbricated through ambivalent identification in
the novel. Rhys’s melancholic subject, suspended between loss incorporated and
ideologies of abundance embodied in the commodity, is fundamentally ambivalent. And
ambivalent identification with the object, through consuming as an “automaton,” offers a
productive way of re-reading the problematic relation between melancholia and mania in
the Freudian schema.

In the Freudian economy, melancholia shows a “tendency to change round into
mania——a state which is the opposite of it in its symptoms” (253). While Freud
acknowledges that the transition might be “non-psychogenic,” he defers to a psychic
origin (253), suggesting an ambivalence operative within the psychoanalytic method.
Mania develops when, for reasons the text does not fully elaborate, the cathected energies
‘ that split the ego by binding the incorporated lost object have been liberated, indicated
when “the manic subject plainly demonstrates his liberation from the object which was
the cause of his suffering, by seeking like a ravenously hunmy man for new obj ect-
cathexes” (255). Freud first offers an explanation based in the constitutional ambivalence

of melancholia, in which the psychic energy invested in berating the internalized loss

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might heal the wound, leaving those energies free to reinvest elsewhere. But he rejects
this explanation, noting that it blurs the distinctions between the pathological economy of
melancholia and the process, observable in mourning, of releasing hold on the object. The
melancholic subject, he suggests, shows symptoms of an originary narcissistic object-
choice, a remession linking melancholia to a manic phase: “The accumulation of cathexis
which is at first bound and then, after the work of melancholia is finished, becomes free
and makes mania possible must be linked with remession of the libido to narcissism. The
conflict within the ego, which melancholia substitutes for the struggle over the object,
must act like a painful wound which calls for an extraordinarily high anticathexis” (258).
But, as Freud’s conflicted teleological attempts suggest, the relation between melancholia
and mania raises two simrificant questions: on what mounds is the liberation of cathected
energy linked to a narcissistic remession, and, if the manic subject seeks out “new object-
cathexes,” must it be formulated as developmental remession? This is the economic
problem of melancholia.

Rhys’s narrative of ambivalent identification helps clarify this problem.
“Wander[ing] aimlessly along a lot of back streets,” window shopping, Sophia resembles
Benjamin’s reading of the flaneur in Baudelaire, only to betray the flaneur’s privileged
autonomy fi'om market relations by a narcissistic relation to the other mediated by the
commodity (Arcades 420).” The link, noted earlier, between melancholia and bodily
“transformation” through consumption becomes a flux of introjection and projection.
Peering through a shop window, Sophia observes a “dishevelled” woman, whose

expression she describes as “terrible—hunmy, despairing, hopeful, quite crazy. At any

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moment you expect her to start laughing the laugh of the mad” (57-8). But Sophia then
becomes the object of her own gaze, asking, “watching her, am I watching myself as I
shall become? In five years’ time, in six years’ time, shall I be like that?” (57-8). This
narcissistic relation informs a critical self-beratement in the eyes of fashion society, and
indicates the melancholic ambivalence fundamental to commodity culture:
I am trying so hard to be like you. I know I don’t succeed, but look how
hard I try. Three hours to choose a hat; every morning an hour and a half
trying to make myself look like everybody else. Every word I say has
chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy
weights . . . . But think how hard I try and how seldom I dare. Think—and
have a bit of pity. That is, if you ever think, you apes, which I doubt. (88)
These passages suggest Jean Baudrillard’s model of narcissistic consumption, in
which “it is by coming close to your reference ideal, by being ‘tr'uly yourself,’ that you
most fully obey the collective imperative and most closely coincide with a particular
‘imposed’ model.” Identifying with one’s “reference ideal,” he argues, stems fiom a
collective narcissism: “consruner society conceives itself as, precisely, a society of
consumption and reflects itself narcissistically in its own image . . . right down to each
individual” (95). However, Sophia’s narcissistic identification—“trying so hard to be like
[them]”—suggests a certain failure necessitated by Baudrillard’s model when she says “I
do not succeed.” The subject is suspended between a mimetic impulse of collective
narcissism and the necessary impossibility of fully becoming its reference ideal. The

logic of the consumerist narrative therefore suggests not only that necessary impossibility

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but mounds it in an unknown loss, the founding ideological presupposition of what I have
been calling a melancholic economy of such a collective bourgeois narcissism. Sophia’s
“transformation act” of self-making through consumption is an identification with a
collective, narcissistic image of the commodified body, but the occlusion of bodily
particularity in the process is also a redeployment of the inexpressible personal loss of her
child. In‘her picture of the modernist consumer, Rhys qualifies Freud’s understanding of
narcissism as a remession to an originary object-choice; collective narcissistic
identification serves to link Freud’s figure of the “wound drawing to itself cathected
energies” to the manic as “a ravenously hunmy [consumer] in search of new obj ect-
cathexes.” And if the emptied melancholic ego is figured as the occluded particularity of
the material body, then melancholia and mania are parts of a single economy, a self-
sustaining pathological culture of capital.

Rhys’s narrative thus shows the melancholic-manic subject to be a symptom of
consumer capital. However, through figurations of a bodily ego irreducible to the
standards of a narcissistic reference ideal, the melancholic-manic subject is also a site of
critical ambivalence. In order to show how this melancholic ambivalence offers a mode
of critique I want to make a brief detour through The Ego and the Id. Freud locates the
ego between external, perceived reality and psychogenic impulses, a dynamic affective
zone constituted by bodily sensation and libidinal investment:

A person’s own body, and above all its surface, is a place from which both
external and internal perceptions may spring. It is seen like any other

object, but to the touch it yields two kinds of sensations, one of which may

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be the equivalent to an internal perception. Psychophysiology has fully

discussed the manner in which a person’s own body attains its special

position among other objects in the world of perception. (15)
He concludes that “the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface
entity, but is itself the projection of a surface,” and “the ego is ultimately derived from
bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus
be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body, besides . . . representing the
superficies of the mental apparatus” (16).

On the one hand, we can situate this within shifting modernist understandings of
the social subject: between the conceptions of psychic interiority posited on a
disembodied status manted by the privileges of (ideal) capital, and the movement toward
understanding psychic topomaphies as constituted in and by situated embodiment. This
is, in other words, a modernist acknowledmnent of its own historically-situated failure of
the transparent viewing subject,29 anticipating late-modemists like Rhys, Barnes, and
Beckett. But to fully make this argument we need to position Freud’s model of a bodily
ego between a consumerist psycho-social occlusion of the material body and the interior
limits of capital (impending economic crisis driving the reproduction of surplus, A la
Deleuze and Guattari) structuring the melancholic-manic subject of modernism.
The melancholic ego is emptied by a loss incorporated, by its becoming the lost

object; when seen in light of Freud’s later model of a bodily-ego and Rhys’s narration of
bourgeois homogenization, this loss is figured on the particular, material body. But by

linking melancholic identification to manic consumption, the novel also figures the

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continuous return, the trace, of material embodiment, the bodily ego, in a way that
disrupts a privileged and disembodied ideal. In so doing, the novel argues for a
subjectivity irreducible to the notions of “self” constituted in the closed circuit of loss and
narcissistic identification, bodily lack and completion.

First, a pleasure of expenditure linked to bodily subjectivity emerges fiom the
constitutive loss of disembodied exchange. Following the departure of her lover Elmo,
Sophia is driven by repetitive consumption and self-fashioning, but the text resists both a
melancholic attachment to lost love and positing that self-fashioning as simply
concealing a loss. Having received money fiom family in England, consumption follows
the mechanical time of production:30 “Eat. Drink. Walk. March. Back to the hotel” (120),
but also allows for leisured shopping: “Tomorrow I’ll go to the Galeries Lafayette,
choose a dress, go along to the Printemps, buy gloves, buy scent, buy lipstick, buy things
costing fcs. 6.25 and fcs. 19.50, buy anything cheap. Just the sensation of spending,
that’s the point” (121, my emphasis). Thus invoking and subverting both the monotony
of an expansive commodity culture and the logic of rational investment, the money-gift
becomes the object in which a purely affective pleasure of expenditure is invested. In
other words, “the sensation of spending” offers a pleasure of expenditure founded on the
linkage of loss and manic acquisition. Again, this suggests Sophia to be a product of a
melancholic-manic social economy, but it also posits an ego continuously refashioned by
the meeting and passing of money and skin.

Money as commodity and symbol is just one marker in the heterogeneous system

registering the flux of corporate capital. The process of narcissistic identification shared

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by Freud’s speculations on mania and the homogenizing force of commodity culture we
saw in Sophia’s window shopping spree is also indicated by the logic of advertising."
When Sophia exclaims, in an interior voice symptomatic of commodity-governed social
relations posited on (universalized) loss, “I am trying so hard to be like you,” only to
reject the fashionable “you” as unsympathetic “apes,” copies, the text operates on a
governing ambivalence central to the necessarily failed promises of advertising. In a
curious process of identification with a series of ads during her premlancy, the text
complicates narcissism as remession to an originary object attachment: ads speak to the
individual consumer but only by universalizing consumers on the mounds of presupposed
loss. The ambivalent subject emerges from this universal threat; during the morning
sickness phase Sophia sees “the chemist’s shop with the advertisement of the Abbé
Something’s Elixir—it cures this, it eures that, it cures the sickness of premlant women.
Would it cure mine? I wonder” (110).

The near conflation of advertisement and bodily response is more than mere
narcissistic identification with the commodity’s promise of health and bodily intemity.
The concluding “I wonder” strikes a note of ambivalence that informs the erasure of
stretch marks in previous passages, where the fashionable body is defined by negation:
“with not one line, not one wrinkle, not one crease” (52). In light of the ambivalent
response to the advertisement, the process of erasure—which occurs later chronologically
but previously in the narrative’s organization—works to figure a recurring memory trace
on the bodily ego. This erasure and its psychic trace exposes individual self-fashioning as

a fantasy of its public, ideological, universalized construction. Such a move critically

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locates the material failures of the commodity against a psychic economy that potentially
exceeds the circular chronology of loss and acquisition. This psychic dynamic
corresponds to Freud’s model of the bodily ego negotiating between responses to internal
and external excitations while also Situating that process in the market space of
commodified body-images or disembodied ideals.32 In doing so, Rhys’s late modernist
narrative points to the necessarily failed logic of a closed psychic interior. The novel’s
(Sophia’s) interior monologue voices a continuously refashioned bodily ego, the ego in
constant negotiation between the images provided by commodity culture and the
recurring material traces of an occluded bodily materiality.

Echoing the specter haunting the split consumer in the ad with which I began,
Sophia, while gazing into a mirror in the private space of a public lavabo, figures the
body’s eternal, ghostly return: “‘Well, well,’ it says, ‘last time you looked in here you
were a bit different, weren’t you? Would you believe me that, of all the faces I see, I
remember each one, that I keep a ghost to throw back at each one—lightly, like an
echo—when it looks into me again?’ All glasses in all lavabos do this” (142). On the one
hand, this intense figure of recurring memory indicates and results from anxieties of
bodily aging and decay, intensified in the passage by excessive drink. More importantly,
Sophia’s dialogue with her reflection posits a material bodily ego as both retroactively
constituted in loss——the ghost of the body’s past suggesting the melancholic ego under
the “shadow” of the incorporated lost object—and as a recurring excess or remainder
collapsing exterior and interior, past and present, through the ego as “the projection of a

surface” (Ego 16). While the passage symptomatically suggests consumerism’s reliance

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on internal loss structuring ego-identification and its corollary of manic consumption and
bodily supplementarity, it also figures “the character of the ego [as] a precipitate of
abandoned object-cathexes . . . contain[ing] the history of those obj ect-choices” (19).

In doing so, the novel anticipates Dcrrida’s “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in
which the psyche is a system of “writing as the interruption and restoration of contact
between the various depths of psychical levels: the remarkably heterogeneous temporal
fabric of psychical work itself” (225), constituting an economy in which “the subject of
writing is a system of relations between strata: the Mystic Pad, the psyche, society, the
world” (227). The memory traces in Rhys’s text articulate such a system by way of the
material remainders marking the psychic space of the narrative, wherein the cathexes
determining the ego repeatedly erupt as residual matter exceeding the managed sociality
and reified homogeneity of fashion culture. Writing the heterogeneous temporality of
interior monologue is a forceful material performance of psychic—and thus embodied—
particularity.

Rhys’s writing the ego as a history of object choices and the traces they leave
works to interrupt disembodied identification posited against a constitutively disavowed
loss. By pitting the psychic traces of loss against a privileged fantasy of interiority, the
novel exposes the ideological limits of consumer subjectivity shaped by disembodied
consumption. First, Sophia’s suicide attempt is the recurring origin of the story. But what
determines this temporal point as origin is the material, visible remainder marking body
and ego and bridging the present of narrative time and an antecedent unknown loss.

Having been rescued, “nobody would know I had ever been in it,” she thinks, “except, of

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course, that there always remains something” (10). This “something,” I contend, is the
unknown material trace, embodied in a psychic economy always mediated by the
heterogeneous flux of consumerist identification, contained by and disruptive of fantasies
of privileged psychic interiors posited on the logic of manic acquisition and presupposed
psychic-economic loss. Towards the novel’s end Sophia explicitly figures psychic
interiority as a fantasy of possessive individualism, countered with a critical ambivalence
of embodiment. She works for an unnamed literary producer who openly acknowledges
market value as determinant of cultural expression, and describes her as “shrewd as
they’re born . . . hard as a nail, and with what a sense of property!” claiming, “they
explain people like that by saying that their minds are in water-tight compartments, but it
never seemed so to me. It’s all washing about, like the bilge in the hold of a ship, all
washing around in the same hold—no water-tight compartments. . . . Fairies, red roses, the
sense of property—Of course they don’t feel things like we do” (140-1). Interior psychic
space is explicitly linked to “a sense of property” divorced from bodily sensation,

relegated to the fantasy realm of fairies.

*****

Focusing on the later work of Lewis together with Barnes and Beckett, Tyms
Miller argues that late modernism reveals a shift away from “high modernism’s emphasis
on interiority; its appeal to allusive ‘depth’ and ‘roundness’ of character; its obsessive
concern with temporality and history; its foremounding of the ways that events are

psychologically mediated” (86).33 Such concerns with interiority are critical

185

commonplace in studies of Joyce, Woolf, and Eliot, for example, and support his claim
that late modernism explores the dissolution of subj ect-object barriers manifest in an
“unsettling of individual subjectivity,” in which “the inner life . . . had appropriated the
object-world in which people lived and moved, now taking the shape of a city street, later
of a shOp window, then perhaps of a cinema or a fascist parade” (39, 45). Rhys’s
melancholic interior narrative, as anticipated by Freud, supports Miller’s generalizations,
locating problems of psychic interiority, subjectivity, and embodiment within the
contradictory forces and imperatives of consumer capitalism. As I have argued, the
“allusive depth” of individual subjectivity is not an a priori, and Rhys’s use of a “high”
modernist interior monologue in a “late” modernist text performs a material psychology
of embodiment as both symptom and critique of the paradoxical public construction of
the private self.

In its melancholic narrative of consumption, then, Good Morning, Midnight
pushes the limits of literary-historical parsing. The novel does more than suggest a socio-
economic parallel to, or constitution of, the bourgeois melancholic subject. First
published in 1939, Situating its narrative in the 1920s and early 1930s, and constructing
its fictional space as interior monologue within the flux or de- and reterritorialization of
capital in a localized money economy, the novel not only pathologizes bourgeois self-
making in homogenization, but non-chronologically spans, consumes, and is governed by
historical and ideological tensions between abundance and lack. In doing so, the text
figures material loss as the founding crisis linking social fantasies of abundance to

economic realities of Depression (where the crisis-limits of capital are most legible on a

186

large scale), and does so, particularly, in the urban cultural spaces of mass consumption.
Rhys’s ambivalent interior narrative, finally, negotiates those social spaces of self-
making by foregrounding the occlusion of the particularized materiality of the body
produced by and sustaining a melancholic economy and its closed circuit of subjectivity-
in-exchange, in loss. In this light, Freud’s model can be read for the preoccupations with
an economy of loss it shares with modemists in the market, and as embodying in its
logical tensions and irresolutions the contradictory logic of a consumerist flux between
melancholic loss, manic acquisition, and narcissistic identification.

But the occluded materiality of embodiment continually resurfacing in Rhys’s
narrative and figured by Freud as a psychic “wound” drained by melancholic cathexes
also offers a site of embodied ego-identification in modernism, an increasingly
acknowledged public production of subjectivities and bodies, not just the psychological
mediation of public events. Ever in “transformation,” as a body commodified in and by
the repeated tension between erasure and its psychic traces, Sophia is haunted by a
mirrored ghost in the privacy of a public lavabo; the residual materiality of the past
returns and disrupts a consumerist ego constituted in loss and return. A privileged fantasy
of psychic interiority in disembodiment—the min ’8 “water-tight compartments” posited
on “a sense of property”—is an expression of the anxieties immanent to social relations
and the individ “self” governed by the failed promises of the commodity.

This haunting specter is the material body repressed by melancholic economies,
the occluded site of the founding loss of surplus and impending crisis. The critical

problem of narcissistic identification in Freud’s model—as regression in mania following

187

a melancholic materialization of loss—in this light, is shaped around the material specter
of the body that haunts the social economy. Sophia’s mirrored ghost inverts the
ideological narcissism sustaining a pathological economy; the sheer materiality of the
body forcefirlly registers the contradictory denial of its particularity in capital-
determined, standardized, body ideals. Further, this inverted narcissistic identification in
Rhys’s narrative takes shape in a space of a public libidinalization of bodies, effecting a
force of psychic mediation that radically exceeds its ideological construction of psychic
interiority and the self that are central to consumerist subjectivity and disembodiment.
The novel’s critical ambivalence—immanent to a melancholic consumer economy and its
pathological identification—offers a modernist investment in collective embodiment
irreducible to the fiction of psychic depth posited on loss and acquisition. This is what we
might call a modernist ethical move: between the faces separated by the commodity
fetish and consumer capital’s reliance on loss incorporated—Burgoyne’s site of psychic
depth and its material spectrality of loss in identification—is a materialist subjectivity

that is ambivalently, critically attuned to the limits of consumer capital.

188

NOTES

189

 

1. See also Tyrus Miller’s “The End of Modernism” in Late Modernism (26-64), and the “Introduction” to
Karen J acobs’s The Eye ’s Mind, both of which usefully articulate the blurring of subject-object baniers in
modernismbetweenthewarsaspartofaboomingmasscultme.

2. Bill Brown describes this problem in a similar way: “the doubleness of the commodity (its use value and
exchange value) might be said to conceal a more fimdamental difference, between the object and itself, or
the object and the thing, on which the success of the commodity, the success of capitalism, depends” (A
Sense 13-14). Denida’s deconstructive reading of the commodity form is also consistent with this thinking.
Use value, he argues is a ghostly yet material after-effect of commodification: “the commodity . . . haunts
the thing, its specter is at work in use-value. This haunting displaces itself like an anonymous silhouette or
the figure ofan extra [figuranre] who might be the principle or capital character” (151).

3. For exemplary discussions that treat both Ford’s reaction to democracy and mass culture and the
question of unreliability in the novel, see Levenson (103-136), Nicholls (165-192), and Katz (108-137).

4. Forapersuasivestudyofmodemistcollectivismasashififi'omnineteenthcentmyindividualism, see
Michael Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics. Tyrus Miller’s Late Modernism also takes up collectivist
efl‘orts among the modems, but focuses on the period between the wars. For a discussion of the problem of
modernist artistic and individual autonomy in the face of increasing mass production, see Douglas Mao,
Solid Objects.

5. For a discussion of the relation between managed surplus and temporal contingency in modernity, see
Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time. For a study of the epistemological crisis in visual
representationwithinmodernismandeapitalism, seeKarenJacobs, TheEye’sMind.

6. For a reading of the split in the object itself, constitutive of the commodity, see Bill Brown’s recent
reading of Marx’s model of commodity fetishism: “the doubleness of the commodity (its use value and
exchangevalue)mightbesaidtoconcealamorefirndamental difl‘erence,betweentheobjectanditself,or
theobjectandthething,onwhichthesuccessofthe commodity,mesuccessofcapitalisrn, depends”(A
Sense of Things 14).

7. Seealso TheEgoandtheIdforacomplieationoftheor-alphase, likeningittothemeehanismsopaative
in melancholia: “It may be that by this introjection, which is a kind of regression to the mechanism of the
oral phase, the ego makes it easier for the object to be given up. . . . It may be that this identification is the
sole condition under which the id can give up its objects” (19).

8. ThiswasalsoaprimaryconcernbehindWyndhamlewis’ stiradesagainstmassculnn'e, despitehisown
disparagemmtofimpressionismanditspractitioners, includingI-‘ord. Seechapterthreeofthisdissertation
for my discussion of the role of capitalist spectacle in Lewis’s critical writing on mass culture.

9. See also Linda Belau’s essay, “Trauma and the Material Signifier.”

10. See also Fox and Lears on the shift, in the United States, from “a nineteenth-century ‘producer ethic’—a
value system based on work, sacrifice, and saving. . . into a dominant twentieth-century ‘consumer ethic’”
(x).

11. I am thinking in particular of Michael Levenson’s influential study, A Genealogy of Modernism.

12.GuyDebordcriticallynotesthislateeapitalistgeography,inwhich“capitalisnolongertheinvisible
centerdetemmingmemodeofproducfimAsitaccmnulates, eapitalspreadsouttotheperiphery"(33).

190

 

13. We might also compare this to the brilliant passage in The Great Gatsby where Nick Carraway
describes the wasteland between West Egg and New York. Invisibly linking the two zones of fantastic
consumption “is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and
grntesquegardenswhere ashestakethe forms ofhousesandchimneysandrising smokeandfinally,witha
transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air” (27).

14. This exponential production ofmedication and newly emerging “conditions” is ever more fully
developed in our current historical moment. We might think, for example, of the many drugs entering the
market each year for male impotence, social anxiety, and depression, marketed via such all-inclusive
rhetoric as “Do you often feel tired?” “Are you withdrawn in a crowd, unable to be yourself?” etc.

15. In Benjamin’scomplexoeuvre,and inthispassage inparticular,there isaproblematictendencytorely
on a naive Jungian universal category of the collective unconscious defined by static archetypes acting as
stable signifiers. However, as Susan Buck-Moms points out, “the images of the unconscious [in Benjamin]
are . . . formed as a result of concrete historical experiences, not (as with Jung’s archetypes) biologically
inherited (278).

16. See Michael Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics, Michael North, Reading 1922, Tyrus Miller, Late
Modernism, Douglas Mao, Solid Objects.

17. Here Lewis strikingly anticipates Theodor Adorno’s philosophical and sociological work on the culture
industry. In his essay, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regession of Listening,” for example,
Adorno notes the “liquidation of the individual” in hand with the ideology of “individualism” under
modern mass production and consumption: “The sacrifice of individuality, which accommodates itself to
the regularity ofthe successful, the doing ofwhat everybody does, follows m the basic fact that in broad
areas the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardized production of consumption goods. But the
commercial necessity of connecting this identity leads to the manipulation of taste and the official culture’s
pretence of individualism which necessarily increases in proportion to the liquidation of the individual”
(40).

18. In this way, Time and Western Man differs from Lewis’s other major non-fiction work from the same
period, The Art of Being Ruled, which is much more argumentatively straight-forward; likewise, two of his
most important fiction works, the early Tarr (1918) and The Apes of God, follow relatively simple and
intensely rigid structures. And as both novels articulate many of the same ideas of Time and Western Man
and together serve to bracket the text chronologically, the formal and repetitive excess I’m discussing here
in the context of spectacular society deserves mention.

19. JamesonworkstomodifytheFrankfirrtSchool’sfi'equentcelebration ofmodelnismassubversiveto
reification and instrumentalimtion. “Modernism,” he argues, “can only be adequme understood in terms
of that commodity production whose all-informing structural influence on mass culture 1 have described
above: only for modernism, the commodity form signals the vocation not to be a commodity, to devise an
aesthetic language incapable of offering commodity satisfaction, and resistant to instnnnentalization. The
difference between this position and the valorization of modernism by the Frankfurt School . . . lies in my
designation of modernism as reactive, that is, as a symptom and as a result of cultln'al crises, rather than a
new ‘solution’ in its own right: not only is the commodity the prior form in terms of which alone
modernism can be structurally grasped, but the very terms ofits solution—the conception ofthe modernist
textasthepmductionandtheprotestofanisolatedindividual,andthelogicofits signsystemsassomany
private languages . . . are contradictory and made the social or collective realization of its aesthetic project”
(16).

20. For Seltzerthis process is integral to notions ofself-making through consumption: “a privilege of
191

 

relative disembodiment or relative weightlessness is one sign of the aestheticization of the natural body in
market culture, and such an aestheticization of the body one sign of the achievement of personation through
practices of consumption” (124).

21. Foradetailedstudyofthegradualshifiinpoliticaleconomyfiommodelsofscarcityandproductionto
an emphasis on the creation of new needs and desires in consumers, see Regenia Gagnier, The Imatiability
of Human Wants (1-60).

22. See also Georg Simmel’s essay “Exchange” for an early twentieth century sociological discussion of
an imbalance in modern exchange. Simmel argues that objective surplus arises from the subjective
balancing of loss and acquisition; acquiring an object invested with a surplus of “feeling” also always
entails a “tinge of sacrifice” (44). Even Simmel’s emphasis on the psychological and subjective creation of
surplus and loss presupposes a material object to be exchanged

23. For useful studies of modern market culture’s disavowal of embodiment, see Seltzer (47-90),
Armstrong (77-105), and Jacobs.

24. Thesharedsymptomslistedmmetextmmfifldejecfiomcessafionofunerestintheoutsidewofld,
loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a
degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings,” except that the “disturbance of self-regard
is absent in mourning” (244).

25. Judith Butler focuses on melancholic ambivalence as central to gender identification in her reading of
“Mourning and Melancholia” together with The Ego and the Id, in The Psychic Life of

Power: Theories in Subjection (132-150). While 1 consider the role of ambivalence in identification below,
questions of gender are beyond the scope of this essay, and here I am most interested in the material-
economic implications of Freud’s essay.

26. The uncanny nature of material memory traces discussed here also anticipates, we might note, Freud’s
discussion of the tmconscious in light of the Part-Cs. system in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In
developing a model of consciousness as “on the borderline between outside and inside,” excitations
crossing this threshold “leave permanent traces behind in them which form the foundation of memory” but
which are most powerful when they never enter consciousness, thus forming what we might call a dynamic
economy of material unconscious (26-27).

27. At this early stage in the narrative there is no elem indication of the constitutive role ambivalence plays
in Freud’smodel ofmelancholia, inwhichitsplitsthe egoandresultsinacertainpainfirlpleasuremrough
in the critical agency’s beratement of the incorporated loss, the loss determining the ego.

28. WhatBenjamincallsthe“dialectic offlAnerie”posits“themanwhofeelshimselfviewedbyall”
against an undisclosable psychic depth, “the man who is utterly undiscoverable, the hidden man” (420).
Sophia incorporates the gaze of others to the extent that any hidden psychic depth is always mediated by
commodified bodily ideals.

29. AccordhngmenJacobsTmtesimpaspecfivalismischaractaizedbyammomdu, disembodied,
objective, and ahistorical vision. From the nineteenth century onward, Cartesian perspectivalism comes
under increasing assault, its assumption of a detached, neutral observer discredited by a competing scopic
regime traceable to the Baroque.” This scopic regime, manifest in social sciences, the development of a
consumer economy turning its producers, following Debord, into (passive) consumers, and the cinema,
evolves into a “model of compromised transparency which comes to achieve dominance in the twentieth
MW’ (7)-

192

 

30. Both Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard argue that time as commodity under industrial production (in its
modern and late capitalist forms) shapes leisure and consumption. For Debord, “the entirety of the
consumable time of modern society ends up being treated as raw material for the production of a diversity
of new products to be put on the market as socially controlled uses of time” (111). Baudrillard also notes
the endless redeployment of the use value of time in producing exchange value, claiming that “the time of
consumption is that of production” and that “leisure is not the availability of time, it is its display. Its
fundamental determination is the constraint that it be difi’erentfi-om working time. It is not, therefore,
autonomous: it is defined by the absence of working time” (155, 158). Despite the differences between
Debord’s traditional Marxism and Baudrillard’s structuralist anthropology (as 1 see it), their understandings
of the production of leisure time clearly converge with Sophia’s mechanical use of time in the novel.
However, as I discuss below, Rhys figures affective pleasure and a constitutive ambivalence in potential
excess of such a hopelessly hegemonic state of affairs.

31. For an interesting study of early twentieth century advertising as social, heterogeneous narrative which,
as employed in Joyce’s Ulysses, “reshaped the reception of narrativity as a whole,” see Jennifer Wicke,
Advertising Fictions (120). In The Commodity Culture of Victorian England Thomas Richards begins with
the nineteenth century in arguing that the commodity image becomes a frame of reference in shaping
modern English cultural and national identity well into the twentieth. For the early twentieth century role of
advertising in shaping not only cultural frames of reference but in its specific relationship to informing the
reception of modern literature, see Catherine Turner, Marketing Modernism Between the T590 World Wars.
For similar studies concerned with modernism and advertising in the market as parts of a broad,
heterogeneous cultural narrative, see Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading,
eds. Kevin Dettrnar and Stephen Watt. See also Stuart Ewen’s thoroughgoing, if at times under-theorized,
analysis of commodity image and style in twentieth century consumerism, All Consuming Images. While
this list is not exhaustive, it does indicate the recent interest in advertising as cultural text and many
modernists’ responses, whether reactionary, radical, or experimental, in acknowledging its force in shaping
modern consciousness and narrative.

32. RmtauunflmemyumwmksmmessasmiecumnddimmsimmmpSWMcembodhnemm
Freud. Elizabeth Grosz, forexample, goes so farasto argue (in herreading ofTheEgoandtheId)thata
“significatory, cultural dimension implies that bodies, egos, subjectivities are not simply reflections of their
cultural context and associated values but are constituted as such by them” (38).

33. See also Michael North’s Reading 1922 for a genealogy of this earlier development in modernism, in
the making of what he calls “the public unconscious” (67). He notes the growing publicity of
psychoanalysis, particularly in England and the United States, as part of a political and cultural recognition
of “irrationality and bias” at the heart of the public sphere. Refering to Freud’s Group Psychology,
Lippmann’s Public Opinion, and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, to name a few, he argues for conceptions of the
publicsphembecommgmcreasmglybasedma‘pubhcmmnxious”me“mcmsfiunedma
psychoanalytic model” (72).

193

 

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