"That Battle is Over"

"That Battle is Over" is a song overflowing with sarcasm, a glib survey of contemporary post-feminism – a site of conflict now dominated by what Nina Power has described as the "one dimensional woman," the feminine subject of late capitalism, where the hard won freedom of past feminist struggles culminates in the freedom to buy and the imperative to safeguard one's identity against precarious material conditions. Now Power's critique has a video to match.

Hval's song parodies the route taken by a good deal of anti-(or post)feminist discourse: gender equality has been won – that battle is over – and it's now simply up to individuals to choose the life they want. It's not uncommon for that same discursive field to privilege victim blaming, to understand power/agency as a matter of individual choice. What such discourse overlooks, in other words, are the conditions under which one's choices take place, the intersectional nature of oppression and the limitations of our current moment.

What we witness in this video are not scenes of contemporary solidarity but images of antiquated retreat: morose glimpses of conventional feminine activity. Such activity has been a crucial source of support for the proliferation of the nuclear family, not to mention white suburbia. As Hval poses her first few questions ("What are we taking care of?"), we're led into a dimly lit home, a worn-out domestic space: what has been the hidden site of work for many middle class North American women. Here, the role of caregiving demands to be performed: cooking, cleaning, attending to the needs of one's children. In the midst of these archetypes, our guide simply surveys the scene. She appears to be in uniform (a figure who has ostensibly benefitted from first wave feminism) returning from the labour force to that space which was once hers to look after.

The tinted colour palette, along with a cameo from Melissa Auf der Maur, draws parallels to the aesthetics of iconic videos from the mid-90s: videos by Hole, PJ Harvey and others, which, in their own ways, pointed to feminism's unfinished business. Despite the great progress made by women's movements, misogyny and sexism remain all to familiar. The male gaze continues to structure much of our popular culture and these videos, like Hval's, draw the viewer's externality into question. The figures who populate videos like "Violet" and "Down By The Water" are aware that they are being watched; they stare back into the spotlight that exposes them, recognizing the power of spectacle, which has become theirs to subvert. Their performances are parodic, but each one also approaches something emancipatory: an awareness of the deep power that spans across generations of mothers and daughters, a power that surpasses the residues of patriarchy and outshines its spectacles.

The video's director, Zia Anger, also provides some commentary:

I guess it goes back to '96 for me, and the ‘girl power’ mantra I've been repeating since I learned it from the Spice Girls. The female experience is far from singular (and even further from this white, suburban, American-retro dream), yet around every corner there is a common pain, a wisdom of ecstasy, and an obsession with the uncanny that we all share. Collaborating with an entirely female creative team (with the support of a few great gentlemen) gave birth to an exploration of Jenny's song and an inquiry into the sarcasm that pulses through it.

Jenny Hval's Apocalypse, girl arrives this June via Sacred Bones.

 

Reading and the Early Modern Liberal Subject (revised)

*The following is a working abstract that's currently being prepared for submission.

England's seventeenth century included a prolonged parliamentary struggle, a civil war, a period of republican experimentation, a restoration of its monarchy, and a constitutional revolution that would keep intact a Protestant state church. Centuries later, Christopher Hill famously argued for a reading of these events as the unfolding of England's "bourgeois revolution," the result of which was to establish conditions that were increasingly favourable to capitalist development. Alongside this socio-economic reorganization, liberal political thought, beginning with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, posited a model of the individual as a self-possessed, autonomous agent.

This essay engages the correspondence of bourgeoning liberal and literary histories in both the critical and contemporary reception of the later works of John Milton and emphasizes the role of reading as a crucial element in both histories. Through its fixation on the act of reading, Milton's poetry and prose reveal a link between the cause of self-possessive freedom and the hegemonic interests of the emerging bourgeois subject. Areopagitica (1645), for example, articulates the close relationship between conditions of reading and conditions of exchange within the marketplace, treating the threat of censorship as a disastrous intervention that is conceptually indebted to the threats of the Catholic institutionalism on the one hand and state-sanctioned monopolies on the other. In this case, reading becomes a constitutive activity of the Reformed English subject who relies upon open access to a plurality of texts in order to exercise individual choice and discernment.

This essay argues that Milton's late poems install reading as an overdetermined activity through which a modern, liberal subjectivity aligns itself with literary discipline. The term "literary" in this case refers to socially valued forms of writing that gain their support not simply from material conditions but from a historical network of circulation and reproduction; by literary discipline, I mean a specific conception of reading that is both represented and conditioned by Milton's late poetry, and by liberal subjectivity, I point ahead to the bourgeois individual who today remains a residual product of early modern England's socio-economic upheaval.

Already fraught with theological and economic significance, reading assumes an intensified political significance in Milton’s post-Restoration writing. Of True Religion (1673), his short essay on religious toleration, came late in the poet's career, but its argument for a theory of religious freedom based on "searching the scriptures" reveals the underlying logic of reading set out in Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes (1671). For Milton, the act of reading is necessary for salvation, not because reading somehow accomplishes God's work, but because without textual engagement one cannot be prepared to recognize and receive salvation as a free gift. To this end, Paradise Lost establishes interpretative activity as a prelapsarian, prehistorical reality: it thus naturalizes a liberal paradigm of ambiguity, competition, and discernment.

First published together, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes further this project by directly addressing the material conditions of reading in a hostile political climate. Through their joint format, Milton’s final poems lock their audience into a posture of reading that becomes tautological and, in this way, rehearses the contradictions of liberal ideology. Rather than a stance of tolerance and openness, Miltonic readers find themselves in an irreducibly active space of interpretation. While some contemporary critics have celebrated the activist content of Milton's poems, they have ignored the way in which it functions ideologically within an emerging capitalist environment.

Beginning with a genealogy of reading in Milton's early writing, I locate liberalism's ideological origins within a distinctly Protestant approach to interpretation. By focusing on Milton's late poems, I explore early modern reading as an active form of individual trial, increasingly disconnected from its social surroundings. I suggest that Milton's post-Restoration poetry develops a distinction between "fixed" and "fit" forms of reading, which corresponds to a capacity for individual and collective mobility despite what Milton perceived as the closure of England's political horizon. What first appears as a politically, theologically, and ethically overdetermined site of struggle in Milton’s writing returns as a versatile aspect of liberal ideology.

Happy May Day

The Ghost of Tom Joad

A week and a half ago, I took a trip down south to visit my grandpa. My connecting flights were short but spread out across most of the day. So when I arrived in Arizona, after being in transit for 10 hours, I found myself well into a book I'd long meant to read. I can now finally say that I've read John Steinbeck's novel, The Grapes of Wrath. There are all kinds of reasons why a book like this deserves to sit on high school and university syllabi, and Bruce Springsteen's 1995 album, The Ghost of Tom Joad, wasn't off the mark when it linked Steinbeck's courageous protagonist to the rights of migrant workers and the broader working class in the mid-90s. But for me, the haunting presence of the novel isn't so much the figure of Tom Joad, who, following the murder of Casey, the preacher, departs from the family to fight as a vigilante for workers' rights. Rather, as the novel's conclusion again highlights, it's the nameless mother (simply "Ma") that has been the real source of endurance for the Joads as they struggle to survive the constant horrors of the depression.

It's an incredible scene. The rain is pounding and the family camp has been flooded out; in the midst of this, Rose of Sharon has given birth to a stillborn child. Fearing pneumonia, Ma Joad pushes the family to higher ground and they happen upon an open barn. Here, Ma gets Rose of Sharon out of her wet clothes and sees to another child who has taken shelter there with his starving father. With the flood looming, she clears out the family and directs Rose of Sharon to nurse the dying stranger. It's with this bleak image that the novel ends.

My experience of reading Steinbeck's novel was also conditioned by another current reading project: I've been slowly working through the first volume of Marx's Capital with some friends here in Edmonton. The chapter we've discussed most recently is "The Working Day," which features a host of memorable quotes, metaphors, and allusions. Along with his famous comparison of capital to "dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour," I was struck by Marx's explication of so-called equal rights, which articulates much of what's going on in The Grapes of Wrath:

We see then, that, apart from extremely elastic bounds, the nature of the exchange of commodities itself imposes no limit to the working-day, no limit to surplus-labour. The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working-day as long as possible, and to make, whenever possible, two working-days out of one. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the labourer maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the working-day to one of definite normal duration. There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides. Hence is it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class. 

Here's Springsteen performing the Grapes of Wrath-inspired title track from his 1995 album.

Notes on Capital, Vol. 1 (III): Labour and Reproduction

Yesterday was International Women's Day and, among the many articles circulating around Facebook, I came across a recent interview with the radical feminist Silvia Federici published by Mute. Federici was an active part of the International Wages For Housework Campaign of the 1970s. The purpose of the movement, she recalls, was "to unmask not only the amount of work that unwaged houseworkers do for capital but, with that, the social power that this work potentially confers on them, as domestic work reproduces the worker and consequently it is the pillar of every other form of work."

Federici has done the crucial work of thinking through feminism, identity, and capitalism as related phenomena. For Federici, as for other Marxist feminists, patriarchy is both a system of social relations and the process by which they are reproduced and maintained. Reproduction, in other words, refers not only to a biological imperative but to the perpetuation of social relations. 

In the sixth chapter of Capital, "The Sale and Purchase of Labour-Power," Marx briefly addresses this hidden reality as a condition of labour-power, but allows it to remain hidden. The only agents that are given any mention in this section are unquestionably male, but, although the woman's labour goes unnamed as such, Marx here lays the groundwork for feminists such as Federici. First, Marx makes it clear that if the worker's existence depends on his ability to labour, he must be allowed a basic level of subsistence that includes "natural needs, such as food, clothing, fuel and housing." The production of value, in other words, depends on material conditions beyond the factory floor.

The value of labour-power is determined, as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this specific article. . . . Given the existence of the individual, the production of labour-power consists in his production of himself or his maintenance. For his maintenance he requires a certain quantity of his means of subsistence. (274)

The worker, in other words, must be allowed some recuperation: "Since more is expended, more must be received." His means of subsistence must be at a level that allows him to maintain his normal state as a working man. From there Marx follows the logic further, indirectly describing the other role of the feminine sphere in the maintenance of the labour-force.

The owner of the labour-power is mortal. If then his appearance in the market is to be continuous, and the continuous transformation of money into capital assumes this, the seller of labour-power must perpetuate himself 'in the way that every living thing perpetuates himself, by procreation'. The labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear, and by death, must be continually be replaced by, at the very least, an equal amount of fresh labour-power. Hence the sum of the means of subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means necessary for the worker's replacements, i.e. his children, in order that this race of peculiar commodity owners may perpetuate its presence on the market. (275) 

Marx doesn't name the woman as the specific agent of reproductive labour. Instead, he describes what's typically forgotten in the production process inherent to capitalism: the unrepresented, unaccounted for labour of reproduction. In this way, the ground of labour in Marx's theory of value depends upon another series of conditions hidden in plain view: conditions that allow for social reproduction to occur simultaneously on multiple levels. 

Notes on Marx's Capital, Vol. 1 (II)

Part II, "The Transformation of Money into Capital," is where things begin to get really interesting for me. As we saw in the previous post, money appears first in the circulation of commodities through the process C-M-C. Here, use-value (or consumption) is the final goal that removes a particular commodity from circulation. Money as capital, however, emerges as the inverse form of circulation: M-C-M, or, the transformation of money into commodities and their "re-conversion" back into money. Because money does not terminate in consumption its circulation functions, more or less, like a closed circuit. Its movement is driven not by use-value, but by exchange. While the exchange relations of commodities rely on qualitative differences wherein labour adds value (e.g. between corn and clothes), the cycle M-C-M looks like a simple tautology: the extremes (at either end) have the same economic form. This means that this circuit somehow encompasses a quantitative transformation. Marx denotes "the complete form of this process" as M-C-M', where M' equals "the original sum plus an increment" (surplus-value). While there is an external "end" for the simple circulation of commodities, the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself and its movement is therefore limitless. Here we re-enter the mysterious terrain of value.

The independent form, i.e. the monetary form, which the value of commodities assumes in simple circulation, does nothing but mediate the exchange of commodities, and it vanishes in the final result of movement. On the other hand, in the circulation M-C-M both the money and the commodity function only as different modes of existence of value itself, the money as its general mode of existence, the money as its particular or, so to speak, disguised mode. It is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement; it thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject. If we pin down the specific forms of appearance assumed in turn by self-valorizing value in the course of its life, we reach the following elucidation: capital is money, capital is commodities. In truth, however, value is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it changes its own magnitude, throws off surplus-value from itself considered as original value, and thus valorizes itself independently. For the movement in the course of which it adds surplus-value is its own movement, its vaporization is therefore self-valorization. By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs. (255)

Marx's playful analogy is of course deeply ironic, for as he explains in his next chapter, "Capital cannot . . . arise from circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to arise apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and not in circulation" (268). The circuit of M-C-M' is familiar territory for usurers (the accumulation of interest skips the commodity altogether and occurs between the extremes M-M') and merchants capital (buying in order to sell dearer). But both are derivative forms that appear before the modern form of capital (Marx frequently quotes Aristotle's condemnation of usury and up-selling as running contrary to Nature). We're left without any further explanation as to why these modes of surplus persist, and what "derivative forms" actually mean. However, it becomes immediately obvious what's at stake in the contradiction of M-C-M' when we arrive at Chapter 6. 

How do we explain this change in value in the money form? It has to happen in the commodity, between the two extremes of buying and selling. But as Marx notes, this change in value cannot happen at the beginning of this exchange (M-C) because we're talking about an exchange of equivalents; in other words, surplus-value must occur in the commodity's consumption.

In order to extract value out of the consumption of a commodity, our friend the money-owner must be lucky enough to find within the sphere of circulation, on market, a commodity whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption is hence a creation of value. The possessor of money does find such a special commodity on the market: the capacity for labour, in other words labour-power. (270)

Beginning Capital, Vol.1

If you've ever tried read Marx's Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, you know that it's a struggle to isolate any particular moment in the course of what is a carefully organized and highly systematic text. Nevertheless, I'll posting occasional notes, excerpts, and reflections as I work my way through it over the coming months. (At this point, I should probably mention that I'm doing this as part of a collective effort among friends, many of whom know the material much better than I do.)

Marx famously begins his critique with an analysis of the commodity form, before turning to the circulation of commodities, and eventually addressing the money form, which arises to govern their relations of exchange and use. One might have expected Marx to begin with the sphere of production and its relation to value (i.e., socially necessarily labour time), but instead we begin with the commodity. This starting point is not insignificant; rather it is a consequence of immanent critique within the conditions of capitalism, where the circulation of commodities forms the basis of ideological and material survival. In the midst of this, Marx crucially delivers his theory of value (distinguished, of course, from the fluctuations of price) and ends Part I with a brief discussion of the world market. 

By the end of this section we've learned that, besides the relative ease of its transferability, there is nothing necessary or natural about the money form; even its size and weight are essentially meaningless. Money first appears as an exchangeable commodity and is eventually raised above exchange relations to its status as the sole measure of value. Here, Marx deploys several memorable characters--the hoarder and the miser--as figures who fundamentally misunderstand the value of money (that is, as an end in itself, a source of value beyond the relations of exchange).

Money is best expressed through the formula C-M-C, which refers to the circulation of commodities (defined, at this point, by their different use values). Here the passage between commodities is mediated by the form of money, which stands in as a form of appearance for exchange value. Despite this straightforward logic of circulation, contradictions inevitably emerge, even before the enigmatic appearance of capital (coming in Part II):

There is a contradiction immanent to the function of money as a means of payment. When the payments balance each other, money functions only nominally, as money of account, as a measure of value. But when actual payments have to be made, money does not come onto the scene as a circulating medium, in its merely transient form of an intermediary in the social metabolism, but as the individual incarnation of social labour, the independent presence of exchange value, the universal commodity. This contradiction bursts forth in that aspect of an industrial and commercial crisis which is known as monetary crisis. Such crisis occurs only where the ongoing chain of payments has been fully developed, along with an artificial system for settling them. Whenever there is a general disturbance of the mechanism, no matter what its cause, money suddenly and immediately changes over from its merely nominal shape, money of account, into hard cash. Profane commodities can no longer replace it. The use-value of commodities become valueless, and their value vanishes in the face of their own form of value. The bourgeois, drunk with prosperity and arrogantly certain of himself, has just declared that money is a purely imaginary creation. 'Commodities alone are money,' he said. But the opposite cry resounds over the markets of the world: only money is a commodity. As the hart pants for fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth. In a crisis, the antithesis between commodities and their value-form, money, is raised to the level of an absolute contradiction. Hence money's form of appearance is here also a matter of indifference. The monetary famine remains whether payments have to be made in gold or in credit-money, such as bank-notes. (237)

William Morris and the politics of artistic production

In 1889, William Morris delivered a lecture titled "The Arts and Crafts of Today," which addressed the degraded state of labour and commerce in industrial England by working through the question of art's purpose in everyday life. Not simply an indictment of late Victorian society, Morris's lecture functions as a manifesto, justifying his radical position to an audience of artists while laying out the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts movement. Like the manifestos of later design movements, such as The Bauhaus, Morris's lecture assumes a close relationship between what he calls the "applied arts" and the complex form of society at large. For both movements, the design manifesto is a polemical call to all creative labourers to recognize their collective capacity to overturn and transform the status quo; it is an attempt to articulate an alternative vision of society in which art does not simply mask reality but actually improves it.

Modernist aesthetics can be seen as a direct engagement with the question of technology and its increasing dominance within industrial capitalism. In this way, the lineage of early twentieth century movements like The Bauhaus can be traced back to Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. If the design manifesto is itself the outgrowth of a modernist attitude toward art and life, it retains the same dialectical impulse that drove Morris to understand the applied arts as a sign of collective solidarity: it is at once critical of its immediate context and pragmatic about how to change it. As Morris's 1889 lecture demonstrates, the rise of the applied arts as a discipline directly follows from art's confrontation with capitalist modes of production and to social inequality.

In a landscape saturated with advertising and mass production, the applied arts provided Morris with tangible opportunities for intervention. His 1889 lecture recognizes this discipline as a site of labour that must be reconciled with degraded labour of the industrial factory. Art, according to Morris, has two related purposes. The first purpose has to do with use and consumption: art adds beauty to functional objects, it enables the enjoyment of everyday activities. Here, Morris suggests that in some forms of human labour (certain moments in agriculture, fishing, carpentry, etc.) beauty is already inherent in nature, or it would be if we recognized that this sort of work is necessary and dignified. Art's second purpose is to add pleasure to labour. Nature again figures into this definition because it models this relationship for us by making necessary activities like eating enjoyable.

For Morris, the vast separation between art and life was symptomatic of England's social and economic inequality. In his lecture, he points out that artists frequently fixate on a particular style or method and consequently lose sight of what that style might achieve. Such artwork finally expresses nothing more than the vanity of the artist: his self-satisfied ability to render a "clever" product, which simply mystifies and alienates his audience rather than working towards its edification. Within the conditions of capitalism, art cannot be commonly experienced: it becomes the lofty domain of aristocratic enjoyment; meanwhile, the factory work that sustains England's economy is stripped down to bare utility.

Removing art from utility does not make utility somehow more neutral; it rather works against the human spirit and against social progress. If we simply adhere to utility, suggests Morris, we have the choice between two dystopian futures. Either society will be organized in a way that allows for the exploitation of the many by the few (fascism), or, as a strict system of compulsory egalitarianism, not unlike the form of communism that would later envelop Eastern Europe. In either case everyday life is defined by the drudgery of work, which destroys creativity and instrumentalizes human energy.

In contrast, the true work of art for Morris must point to the unified bond of true society, where every individual endeavour is grounded, inspired, and made possible by collective interest. In this way, Morris's philosophy was grounded in the "constructivism" that would come to define the avant-garde in the early twentieth century: art is distinguished not by the finished product but by the social process that surrounds it and makes possible its creation (McGann 56). For Morris and, later, for The Bauhaus this impulse toward collective interest culminated in the work of architecture. In "The Bauhaus Manifesto" Walter Gropius suggests argues that arts and crafts must work together in unity in order to create complete objects, the most important of which is "the complete building." Like Gropius, Morris recognized architecture as a way to understand how art and life could influence one another. Even the fine arts, such as painting or sculpture, must be considered within the context of architecture and can aid in the construction of a unified space. The building, argues Morris, is "a unit of art": it is the pure expression of the lives of its builders and inhabitants. What bound these two groups together in previous societies was a common tradition. By Morris's time, that tradition had been superseded by the irrational demands of the market, all of which have led increased specialization and alienation for working classes. In this setup, ornamentation (what used to belong to the domain of art) is mass produced as an afterthought to utility, the ultimate purpose of which is to quicken commerce. The end of objects produced in this kind of context is profit, pure and simple. Beautiful work can therefore only be oppositional because it must, by definition, take into account the mutual conditions of production and consumption.

In his lecture Morris sees the buildings of industrial Britain standing in stark contrast to the cathedrals of the middle ages, not only because of their orientation towards commerce, but because such spaces reduce workers to blunt instruments. Because he is driven solely by commercial interest, Morris argues, the capitalist will either have machines do work of production or rely on "human machines": workers whose desire and creativity must be channeled into spare moments of leisure time. Under such conditions, the working classes are doomed to produce objects of mere utility. In other words, if ornamentation does make an appearance in factory products, it has no purpose beyond the self-interest of those who own the means of production.

Where other social critics of Victorian England, such as John Ruskin or Thomas Carlyle, valourized work as an inherently ennobling activity and risked having their arguments used to justify the further exploitation of the working classes, Morris was convinced that simple labour reform would not solve the problems of capitalism (Breton 43). Commerce, according to Morris, can only encourage exploitation and treat beauty as a superfluous ornament. When those engaged in the applied arts take seriously their conditions of production, they cannot but be aligned with rebellion. For Morris the free labours of applied artists are therefore the concrete appearance of utopian possibility; they carve out a space of critique and a space of hope. Such work, in other words, reminds us of what the industrial age has forgotten: that labour can be pleasurable, that social equality is attainable, and that both possibilities depend on one another.

Works Cited
 

Breton, Rob. "WorkPerfect: William Morris and the Gospel of Work." Utopian Studies 13.1 (2002): 43-56.

Gropius, Walter. "The Bauhaus Manifesto." Maria Buszek, n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

McGann, Jerome. "'A Thing to Mind': The Materialist Aesthetic of William Morris." Huntington Library Quarterly 55.1 (Winter, 1992): 55-74.

Morris, William. "The Arts and Crafts of Today." Marxists Internet Archive, n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

"How books are made" (1947)

books, capitalism, and christmas

I realize most of us don't really want to think about Christmas for another 12 months, but I can't resist posting this brief digression from the introduction to Ted Striphas' The Late Age of Print. I wish I'd read it prior to the holiday season, but I don't imagine that it would have changed my gift-giving habits. As per usual, my gift of choice comes in the form of a book, whether it's for the coffeetable or the nightstand. Whenever I return home to stay with my family, I feel as though I'm re-inhabiting the ever-expanding library that conditioned my childhood; and the feeling is only intensified at Christmas, when the strength of our bookshelves is tested yet again by an influx of new reading materials waiting to be consumed. As Striphas observes,  such gifts have already fulfilled an overlooked historical function:

Consider the fact that books were among the very first commercial Christmas presents. Not only that, but they were integral to the development of a modern Christmas holiday primarily organized around familial gift exchange. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century there emerged in the United States a new genre of books: gift books. These special anthologies, which publishers released on the cusp of the Christmas season, consisted of poetry, prose, illustrations, and, typically, a customizable bookplate. The popularity of gift books as Christmas presents is attributable to many factors, chief among them their status as mass-produced merchandise. Indeed, industrial production not only facilitated their availability en masse at the appropriate moment but, even more important, provided for their reception as tokens of intimacy and affection in at least two ways. First, a gift giver had to select from among many editions the one that best suited the recipient. Making the correct choice wasn’t easy since publishers produced a range of volumes, each targeted to individuals belonging to a particular social set. Selecting a mass-produced consumer good, in other words, became a meaningful expression of one’s consideration and goodwill in no small part through the popularity of gift books. Second, the bookplates allowed the gift giver the opportunity to further personalize his or her selection, for they generally included a small amount of blank space upon which to pen an inscription. These pages, however, were preprinted at the factory, again suggesting a blurring of boundaries between mass industrial production and personal sentiment. In any case, these examples illustrate the crucial role that books played in turning Christmas into a consumerist holiday. “Publishers and booksellers were the shock troops in exploiting—and developing—a Christmas trade,” writes Stephen Nissenbaum, “and books were on the cutting edge of a commercial Christmas.”

Books not only helped give rise to what’s become the capitalist holiday par excellence but they also “were on the cutting edge” of a broader and more fundamental economic transformation that occurred as the nineteenth century flowed into the twentieth. By this I mean the gradual transformation of capitalism from a form in which agriculture and intracapitalist exchange were primary engines of economic accumulation to one in which economic vitality increasingly hinged on working people’s consumption of abundant, mass-produced goods. Books—along with sewing machines, pianos, and furniture—were among the very first items that people purchased with the aid of a resource newly extended to them toward the end of the nineteenth century, namely, consumer credit. Although the practice of buying consumer goods on credit harbored negative connotations at the time of and even well after its introduction, an attractive set of books was considered by many to be a more or less acceptable credit purchase. Much like a sewing machine, it was assumed to be a productive investment rather than a frivolous purchase. Clearly, the moral value many people attribute to books provided an alibi for their existence as mass-produced merchandise. Books consequently became a test case for debt-driven purchasing, an activity that’s proven to be a lasting and even prosaic aspect of contemporary consumer culture.

I also can't resist posting another related quote that was circulating closer to Christmas. It comes from late queer theorist Eve Sedgwick. Consider it a companion to the previous passage.

The depressing thing about the Christmas season—isn’t it?—is that it’s the time when all the institutions are speaking with one voice. The Church says what the Church says. But the State says the same thing: maybe not (in some ways it hardly matters) in the language of theology, but in the language the State talks: legal holidays, long school hiatus, special postage stamps, and all. And the language of commerce more than chimes in, as consumer purchasing is organized ever more narrowly around the final weeks of the calendar year, the Dow Jones aquiver over Americans’ “holiday mood.” The media, in turn, fall in triumphally behind the Christmas phalanx: ad-swollen magazines have oozing turkeys on the cover, while for the news industry every question turns into the Christmas question—Will hostages be free for Christmas? What did that flash flood or mass murder (umpty-ump people killed and maimed) do to those families’ Christmas? And meanwhile, the pairing “families/Christmas” becomes increasingly tautological, as families more and more constitute themselves according to the schedule, and in the endlessly iterated image, of the holiday itself constituted in the image of ‘the’ family.

The thing hasn’t, finally, so much to do with propaganda for Christianity as with propaganda for Christmas itself.

postmodernism remembered

Marcus A. Jansen, "Surreal" (2009)

Postmodernism was certainly an expression of the late capitalist economy. Indeed, it's rare to find this much derided period of American optimism mentioned in academic writing without a reference to Fredric Jameson, who first coined the expression ("postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism") in the mid 1980s. On many fronts, it appears that we've entered something of a new cultural moment, where contemporary anxieties over life and death have trounced the optimistic attitudes of previous decades and demystified the ideals of free play and ironic detachment which came to define an aesthetic. And yet despite our return to the "hard truths" of the Real (or as Mark Fisher describes it, "capitalist realism") following 9/11, we've carried this cultural logic still further. If we have, in fact, moved into something beyond postmodernism, it might be worth asking what's at stake in breaking from it. Jameson's point is that the denigration of meta-narratives serves an important function in the perpetuation of capitalism. In literary terms, we might say, capital continues to play the main character in a meta-narrative perhaps even more insidious than those which postmodernism had sought to upend.


Marcus Jansen's "Surreal," featured above, illustrates the tenacity but also the continued appeal of the postmodern aesthetic. It also reminds me of one of my favourite book covers: Faber and Faber's first edition of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. Its cover perfectly captures the neo-noir aesthetic of Auster's postmodern detective story with its pastiche of American objects cast, along with the solitary figure, against a monochromatic backdrop. As much as I love this book, it's hard not to see a similar logic (recall Marx's explanation of the process of commodification in Capital) at work in Auster's description of the detective genre. "In the good mystery," Auster writes in City of Glass, "there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the power to be so – which amounts to the same thing…even the slightest, most trivial thing, can bear connection to the outcome of the story, nothing must be overlooked. Everything becomes essence." 

"What is capitalism?" (1948)