Political-activist literary critics were once an endangered species. The rise of capital to absolute global dominion and the concomitant withering of socialist aspirations affected departments of literature throughout the 1980s and 90s, and by the turn of the millennium even the best political criticism lacked all conviction. Today, however, a new breed of politicized critic is emerging, full of the passionate intensity that springs from a righteous sense of historical vindication. They tend to be American, and to define their politics in opposition to what they regard as the effete intellectual culture of old Europe. They point out that neoclassical economics has implications for literature that are at least as suggestive as those offered by the Marxist tradition, and they argue that the social and political triumph of the market ought to be reflected in humanities departments. They unabashedly apply their political agenda to their intellectual endeavours, they eagerly proselytize to a receptive, youthful audience, and they appear to herald a new era of overt political advocacy in literary criticism.

Russell A. Berman’s Fiction Sets You Free is a startlingly ambitious redefinition of literary politics in terms of the cultural theory developed in Berman’s previous book, Anti-Americanism in Europe (2004). Some familiarity with that work’s argument is useful to grasp the nature and scope of his project here. In the earlier book, Berman interpreted the cultural hostility which he claims many Europeans feel towards the United States as the manifestation of a deep-seated moral envy. American foreign policy has “raised moral standards in world affairs. The United States has disrupted the blissful ignorance of a world opinion prepared to ignore suffering. Resentment results”. Europeans pout sullenly at the shining moral rectitude displayed in the liberation of Iraq: “World opinion prefers to overlook genocide. Anti-Americanism results because the United States challenged this moral lethargy”.

For readers struggling to understand how the selfless heroism of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney might evoke envy in the less virtuous, Berman traces European resentment over the war to a recalcitrant, irrational prejudice against market forces. Addiction to “welfare” enervates to the extent that a robust foreign policy becomes unthinkable: “The opposition to regime change [in Iraq] is, in the final analysis, about preventing any change in the welfare-state regimes of Western Europe”. Berman despairs of the European Left’s “strange political culture that combines anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Semitism, along with a generalized resistance to modernity and the free market”. In a recent report to the Hoover Institution, he stressed that this spiteful Euro-jealousy is founded on an economic base: “The inability to reform – in the labor market, in impediments to trade, and in the social welfare network – is precisely where the problem of anti-Americanism enters . . . . Although Europe urgently needs structural reform, it hides behind the smoke screen of anti-Americanism, which is really anti-capitalism”.

This economic determinism is the key to Berman’s strategy in his new book. Like the most doctrinaire dialectical materialist, he insists that cultural trends are epiphenomenal reflections of economic interests. Anti-Americanism is “really” anti-capitalism, and in Fiction Sets You Free, Berman suggests that anti-capitalism is the true source of an intellectual anti-humanism which opposes imagination, enterprise, even literature itself. His argument is based on the thesis that literature assumes, and thus helps to create, a capitalist mentality in the reader. He is convinced that, by its very nature, literature “contribute[s] to the value structure and virtues of a capitalist economy”, and to “the dissemination of capitalist behavior”, because all fictional writing “cultivates the imaginative prowess of entrepreneurial vision”. It does this, Berman suggests, simply because it is not true. By describing situations other than those that actually pertain, “literature imposes an economic choice on the reader”. All fictional texts are thus “indispensable sources for capitalist psychology” because they address themselves “to entrepreneurial risk takers who have the will to imagine”.

European readers may find it difficult to envisage the thought processes that have led to such outlandish conclusions. But in the US, people hear demotic versions of these arguments daily on the radio, and academics are also accustomed to debating the theories of Ayn Rand with libertarian undergraduates. Americans will therefore be less taken aback by Berman’s account of written literature’s origins, according to which “the suspicion in oral cultures towards nonconformist individuals” fuels a desire to escape “collectivist pressure to conform” by writing down narratives instead of reciting them in public. The literary author thus becomes a heroic “paradigm of the fictional character” on the model of entrepreneurial Übermenschen such as Achilles and Odysseus.

This Darwinian aesthetic fetishizes the bellum omnium contra omnes. Berman notes that a work of literature comes into existence surrounded by antecedent texts “which threaten to crush it”. The luckless text is thus plunged into a desperate struggle for survival, forced to “assert itself against its competitors and predecessors”. All literary texts are constantly competing against each other, and literature as a whole is constantly competing against everything else. The battles fought by literature include “a constant, and constitutive, competition with the visual image”, “a competitive relation to other kinds of writing” and an especially fierce “competition with other cultural forms”, in which literature’s fictional status constitutes its “competitive advantage”. The deployment of evolution as a universal explanatory key has already spread beyond biology into sociology, psychology and, above all, economics. Berman is trying to import it into literary theory. He uses “a Darwinian axiom” and an “evolution-theoretical claim” to support his contentions, and displays the influence of Richard Dawkins’s theory of “memes” in his speculations on “literature’s genomic character”. Darwin has long been invoked to suggest that market behaviour reflects human nature; Berman argues that literature exhibits a similarly competitive law of the jungle in its “capacity to model adversarial and entrepreneurial individuality”.

He insists that his theory applies to the entire canon of Western literature, which sits uneasily with his claim that the market economy is “most definitely a precondition of artistic freedom”. If it is true that “the dynamism of market exchange imbues the work of art with its own spirit of freedom”, then we might expect that texts produced in a market economy would be markedly superior to those written in a feudal or socialist society. We would also expect that works written with an eye to the market, those which incorporate the demands of the market into their content, in short those books whose processes of production are “commercialized”, would necessarily be better than those that take no account of market exigencies. And yet we find no such thing. Rather the reverse.

But Berman generally refrains from applying his theory to particular texts, remaining content with universal declarations: “The dismissal of commercialism in literature is, in the end, an expression of a hostility to market mechanisms by an appeal to a vague but implicitly elitist assumption about culture”. This is another way in which his book breaks new ground. In the twentieth century it was the Left which often attacked high culture as elitist; now we find a right-winger attacking the resistance of a cultural elite “toward both popular culture and the marketplace”. In place of such snobbery, Berman proposes a “commodity aesthetics” that would celebrate the “logic of the market integrated into the work”. Since “writing is in part a function of competition in the marketplace” and “artistic freedom is an effect of capitalist relations”, the critic “ought to be able to trace any individual writer’s next move as part of a market dynamic influencing the character of ongoing writing” and to read “the integration of artistic production into a capitalist system” as “a source of its emancipatory substance”.

These are ideas whose time had surely come. The cultural dominance of the market seemed until recently so strong that it would be surprising if a militantly pro-capitalist literary criticism had not emerged. Internal developments within the economy also facilitate a convergence with semiotics, as financial transactions grow more obviously abstract and symbolic. In fact, the analysis of autonomous, performative representation carried out by Jacques Derrida and the deconstructionists parallels the development of money into a non-referential, efficacious system of signification.

We might expect a supporter of capitalism to applaud Derrida’s theory. The autonomous signs studied by deconstruction emerge out of market exchange, which involves the imposition of a symbolic exchange-value on a substantial use-value. So ardent a market enthusiast as Berman ought to relish this process, as many Continental postmodernists do, especially in view of Derrida’s detailed and illuminating comments on the birth of writing, a phenomenon to which Berman attaches immense importance. But Fiction Sets You Free mentions Derrida just once, disparagingly. In fact Berman is scornful of postmodernism in general. He positions himself as a conservative defender of the Western tradition, and especially of the free, autonomous individual, of which he considers that tradition the source and guarantor. The problem is that the unrestricted market economy whose virtues Berman commends so loudly is inimical both to the individual and to the cultural tradition which allows the individual to flourish.

It is paradoxical for an advocate of the Western cultural tradition to laud market capitalism. For in the very brief period in which it has held earthly power, market capitalism has essentially destroyed that tradition – profaning everything sacred, evaporating everything solid, and directing its destructive might with particular intensity against the autonomous individual. It has instituted the rule of appearance over essence, of signs over things, of things over people, of dead labour over living labour. It exploits base appetites and fosters insatiable desires, giving rise to epidemic addiction and depression. There have been many societies in which large numbers of people dedicated their lives to the pursuit of economic self-interest through the market. But there have been no societies in which the pursuit of economic self-interest through the market was held to be an admirable way to spend one’s life. Our society is unique in having produced that philosophy. One of the reasons to read the literature of the past is to learn how anomalous our society is in its self-interested single-mindedness.

It was Aristotle, a thinker much revered by cultural conservatives, who elaborated the distinction between exchange-value and use-value, on which ethical objections to the rule of the market are based. Plato deplored the psychological effects of commodification and showed that usury is irrational. Moses forbids covetousness, Paul finds the love of money to be the root of all evil, Jesus declares it impossible to serve God and Mammon. The market finds no moral defenders at all until the seventeenth century, when Hobbes and Mandeville begin to accord it a grudging tolerance. Eighteenth-century political economists and utilitarians retained a profound suspicion of commercial ethics. Nineteenth-century conservatives such as Coleridge and Carlyle, and twentieth-century reactionaries such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, deplored the market’s cultural influence more vehemently than any Marxist. Fully fledged, unequivocal pushers of market morality such as Rand and Friedrich Hayek remained isolated until the last quarter of the twentieth century. The ideas Berman presents as fundamental to the 3,000-year-old Western tradition do not long predate Gordon Gekko.

So his search for precursors cannot have been easy. Even so, it would surely have been possible to find a more convincing prophet of the redemptive qualities of market capitalism than Theodor Adorno. In Anti-Americanism Berman declares that “the defense of autonomy and particularity means that Adorno’s implied economic theory – despite his Marxist background – is closer to Hayek than to Stiglitz”. In Fiction Sets You Free he announces that Adorno “insisted on the point that no genuine work is solely a commodity, thereby shielding it from the hostile judgment otherwise implied by Marxist anti-capitalism”. To suggest that Adorno was an advocate of “commodity aesthetics”, to attribute to him an “implied economic theory” which resembles Hayek’s, is an outrageous provocation. Adorno saw art as offering a final bulwark against the dehumanizing effects of commodification, a last refuge for the autonomous subject in flight from the totalitarian power of the market. This only emphasizes the visceral disgust Adorno invariably expresses towards commercialism. Berman’s brazen attempt to corral Adorno into his corner does his project no service. Nor is it necessary to that project’s success. Berman is riding on the coat-tails of the Zeitgeist: he has no need of endorsement by the wise men of the past. They’re with Lenin in the grave.

Russell A. Berman
FICTION SETS YOU FREE
Literature, liberty, and Western culture
270pp. University of Iowa Press. $42.50; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £30.95.
978 1 58729 604 8

David Hawkes is Professor of English at Arizona State University. His most recent book is The Faust Myth, 2007.

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