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Michael Clune’s analysis of
postwar American literature posits that a number of artworks of this
period display a fascination with the market. According to Clune,
these artworks fictionalize forms operative on the actually existing
market, creating an aesthetic category which he terms“economic
fiction” (25). Economic fiction, according to Clune, radically
reorients intersubjective relations and may hold emancipatory
possibilities. Clune sees this economic fiction, as well as its model
of revised subjectivity, at work in a number of postwar American
cultural products, including the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Frank
O’Hara, the films of PT Anderson, the novels of William Burroughs
and Kathy Acker, and in Clune’s most original and convincing
chapter, hip hop music.
Perhaps Clune’s most daring
move is to break with New Historicism and Cultural Studies by
disembedding this economic fiction – an aesthetic category – from
its grounding in the social and economic. To do so, Clune builds on a
Heideggeran notion of the autonomous artwork, an artwork that
produces its own space, that “belongs uniquely within the region it
itself opens up” (qtd. in Clune 12). This artwork and its
conceptual content are not determined by pre-existing social and
economic paradigms; rather, they open “a hole” in these systems,
offering passage into other possibilities (8).
Clune finds the source of
economic fiction in Karl Polanyi’s The
Great Transformation
(1944) in which the economist reorients Marx’s struggle between
social classes as a struggle between the market and social relations
as such. For Polanyi, there is a conflict between the market and
society; the market tends to “annihilate all organic forms of
existence and to replace them by a different type of organization”
(Polanyi qtd. in Clune 46). This new type of organization involves
“the mythic disembedding of the economic form from the social, the
utopian vision of a world in which economic relations replace social
relations” (47). The market, in other words, reproduces and
promulgates its forms in discourses, in the imagination. As Clune
argues, “this ambiguously fascinating image circulates through the
social world, shaping new perspectives and desires” (46). The
process of disembedding the aesthetic from reality resembles the
Romantic separation of art and life, and similarly, it poses problems
for the artist (or the critic) when it is time to reconnect the two
and demonstrate the significance of these aesthetic forms in reality.
Clune goes on to argue that
economic fiction is accompanied by the appearance of a new kind of
subjectivity. Subjectivity in the Western tradition has been
described as a kind of social relation or, “intersubject-ivity”,
that requires a look of recognition (28). Self-consciousness exists,
as Hegel argues, because “the self perceives at the same time that
it is perceived by others” (qtd. in Clune 28). Because the look
establishes a space between the self and the other, the ‘you’ has
a constitutive role in the shaping of the ‘I’. In a discussion of
The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath, Clune argues that Esther, the heroine, who has lost
the ability to recognize herself in the mirror, escapes the type of
subjectivity that depends on the look. When Esther is able to see
herself in the mirror once again, the mirror cracks, and according to
Clune, “the line zigzagging down the center of the broken mirror is
the jagged smile of a new kind of subject” (29). This new subject
has escaped into a space outside of intersubjective relations. Clune
holds that Esther experiences a “radical subjectivity” (30) which
reconfigures her connection to the rest of the world, and that
Esther’s “intensified access to language” after this event is
proof that this radical subject maintains a communal attachment (30).
The over-production of language, of talking to oneself or to no one
at all, however, is often associated with solipsism or even insanity,
so it is not necessarily the case that language, as Clune implies,
will maintain a communal element.
Among Clune’s most convincing
chapters is the one in which he discusses hip hop music, a musical
genre often concerned with economics and money. Clune argues that the
rapper attempts to exit interpersonal relations through a display of
wealth. He focuses on two generic conventions in hip hop music: the
antagonistic and even violent address to a ‘you’, as well as the
recurrent images of the rapper’s invisibility. E.g. “Stares of a
million eyes / and you’ll never realize /you can’t see me”
(qtd. in Clune 129). This invisibility is often facilitated by money,
glittering wealth that blinds the addressee. E.g. “What kinda nigga
/ got diamonds that’ll bling blind ya?” (qtd. in Clune 128). This
erasure of the other’s sight, Clune argues, is an attempt to erase
its subjectivity: “If I become a subject by becoming the object of
another subject, rap money makes me a subject by depriving the other
of subjectivity” (133). For the rapper, money means direct access
to a collective value that doesn’t require the recognition of
another. This is a unique reading of hip hop, one that subverts the
typical interpretation of rap culture as conspicuous consumption,
which is, contrary to Clune’s assertion, an attempt to be seen by
the other. Clune’s reading also radically revalues black
invisibility. Here the black rapper is not held outside of social
relations; instead this invisible, but “amplified subjectivity,”
replaces social relations altogether (134).
While Clune’s reading of rap
music involves using money to destroy social relations in favour of a
new subjectivity, in his conclusion, Clune attempts to give this new
subjectivity an emancipatory, communal function. Clune evokes the
kind of subjectivity that would occur in Marx’s communism. A
communistic utopia, Clune argues, would require a radical subversion
of the intersubjective social world:
If the capitalist process is a process of
objectification, the counter-process seen by Marx is a process of
subjectification. Reification will be reversed, and a new mode of
collective life will arise with the collapse of the spaces between
subjects. (153)
This community would produce an
“invisible, non-social experience” (151). While the life
processes of subjectivity in this community are still material, they
are no longer objectified and therefore no longer visible. In such a
world, Clune holds, inequality cannot exist because individual
subjects do not exist as such. Inequality disappears; it has been
made irrelevant (158). It is worth considering, however, that the
subversion of inequality would seem to result in a monolithic
identity. If the differences between subjects collapse and there is
no objective, local basis of selfhood, how in fact could identity be
achieved at all? Clune, to be clear, is not necessarily endorsing
this new kind of subjectivity. Rather, his position is that there is
a desire for, or movement towards, this kind of subjectivity.
Clune’s economic fiction
provides a useful analytical tool for reading the postwar artworks
that display a fascination with economic forms. With that said, the
political ramifications of Clune’s thinking are not clear. At times
he seems to speak to the arrival of this new postobjective
subjectivity, and one wonders if Clune expects the economic fiction
to actually replace economic reality. The disembedding of the
aesthetic from the social that Clune requires for his argument,
however, would seem to preclude this possibility, rendering the
economic fiction a kind of escapism. Furthermore, while this new
subjectivity is produced by a fiction, this fiction is itself being
produced and circulated by the functioning of the actually existing
market. So while this utopian vision spreads, the real inequalities
that the current market produces grow as well. It would seem, then,
that the supposed fix to inequality doesn’t require any
intervention in how the real market functions. In this way, Clune
seems to reproduce Marx’s problem of the historical necessity of
the revolution.
AARON GIOVANNONE
University of Calgary
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