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.
