This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “The Question of Literary Value”, edited by Alexander Dunst and Pieter Vermeulen.
Literature isn’t Invaluable—But It Can be Redundant
Nathan Taylor
Theodor Adorno once suggested that it’s pure ideology to believe anything like a fundamental human need for art exists (1997, 330). We might as well live in a world with no art at all. We’d get by just fine, Adorno surmises, not only because art doesn’t satisfy our most basic physiological needs, but also because we live in a system—monopoly capitalism—that perpetually manufactures false needs. Inevitably, any perceived need for art would be satisfied by something else. In such a world, art is nice to have, but it doesn’t sustain us, even when, as Adorno feared, it becomes an accessory to those transactions and exchanges that do—as in the culture industry.
Adorno’s suggestion—a kind of thought-experiment–is an exercise in considering what art, or literature, is worth. Yet unlike many proponents of aesthetic or literary value, Adorno is willing to concede that art might well be a superfluous or redundant part of life under capitalism (against a cultural elite that imagines art to be a necessary feature of their world). For the thinker of negative dialectics, however, that redundancy is a virtue, part of art’s power of determinate negation, its capacity to “break up the external exchange of need and satisfaction” (1997, 331). In its redundancy, Adorno is arguing, art refuses the transactional economy of commodity exchange that otherwise liquidates, as he might put it, all human life under capitalism.
I rehearse Adorno’s thought experiment because its basic logic is still with us in discussions of literary and aesthetic value. When humanists today defend art’s value or critique its ideological character, they tend, like Adorno, to imagine that some aspect of the aesthetic might escape capital’s value relations, whether they describe that escape, with Adorno, as superfluity or, more positively, as art’s immaterial worth. Even thinkers who don’t share Adorno’s patent sense for aesthetic negativity subscribe to a similar value exceptionalism, as some critics have usefully described it.[1]
Take Michael Clune’s recent Defense of Judgment, for instance, which puts a contemporary spin on the old genre of the defense of literature. Like Adorno’s thought experiment, Clune’s apologetics gnaw at common sensibilities about art, in this case by exposing the bad-faith positions that “professors” of literature (in both the sense of academic instructors, and the older sense of those who profess or avow) adopt when they claim equality but judge hierarchically. Clune, by contrast, concedes the elitism of judgment as a singular pathway to a “sphere of value not subject to market determination” (2021, 37). Judgment, by this account, acts as a bulwark against the market’s own metrics of value like popularity and sway, which Clune takes to be adjuncts to sales figures masking as falsely democratic ideals of preference. As part of an aesthetic education—one that requires, Clune admits, training, expertise, and a sizable investment of time and money—judgment points to artworks “that are worth our time”, and in doing so moves beyond economic value to “promise … values we may not yet know how to value” (182).
Taken together, Clune’s and Adorno’s critiques exemplify a particular brand of aesthetic exceptionalism, which we might more aptly describe as alternate inflections of a discourse of the invaluable, in all the semantic ambivalence afforded by that prefix “in-”. Clune treats art as a repository of something immeasurably valuable; Adorno as a negation of the economic laws of value that dictate exchange relations. One (Clune) reaches beyond the economic, the other (Adorno) pits itself against it. Both, however, align art and literature with a distinctly non-capitalist form of value—an invaluable value. Notwithstanding their political differences, or the fact that capital’s prospects of producing value look very different in 1970 than they do in 2021, Adorno and Clune share, in other words, a framing of the aesthetic in antagonism to what each respectively identify as resolutely capitalist modes of valuation. They treat aesthetic works less as exceptions to “the nets of the market”, as Clune puts it (2021, 10), than, with Adorno, as the vicars of values “no longer distorted by exchange, profit, and the false needs of a degraded humanity” (1997, 310).
Look around a bit and you’ll find plenty of other iterations of this double discourse of the invaluable. Its origins are undeniably Romantic, a trademark feature of an aesthetic movement that was historically coeval with capital’s reorganization of social life around the production of economic value. Friedrich Schlegel, for one, was explicit in dubbing literature “infinitely valuable” and thus paradoxically incommensurable to any other object of value (Schlegel 1967, 156). In doing so, he was following upon Kant’s Third Critique (1790), the widely acknowledged source of any attempt to demarcate artisanal or craft work from fine or free art as one that is produced without regard for remuneration and judged without interest.[2] In post-Kantian aesthetics, the double discourse of the invaluable would prove profoundly influential in attempts to describe the unusual dynamics of cultural production.[3] Even the most resolute critics of economic value flirt at times with the discourse of the invaluable, as when Marx, knee-deep in debates about productive and unproductive labor, likens Milton to a silkworm: “Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way a silkworm produces silk, as the activation of his own nature” (1976, 1044). It’s easy to blame this on Marx’s residual romanticism, but the fact is that Marx’s organicist metaphor of the silkworm would seem to hold open the prospect that certain kinds of art-making escape capital’s law of value.
Value, from within
In pointing to the enduring allure of the invaluable, I’m not suggesting we relinquish the attempt to locate a way out of the value relations we live in (abolishing those relations remains a worthwhile endeavor). I am urging that we think more precisely about what those value relations entail. The frame of the invaluable does this by revealing something otherwise obscured by the either/or-logics of aesthetic exceptionalism: while both negative (Adorno) and positive (Clune) inflections of the invaluable suggest a privative relation to economic value (either contravening or surpassing a capitalist form of value), they still remain squarely within the problem of value. That is, they adhere to a third, alternate sense of the prefix “in-”: less grammatically nullifying than relational in the sense of being located within, even installed in a regime of valuation. The question becomes how the shibboleth of the invaluable operates this side of the laws of value it combats, laws which generate the desire for a discourse of the invaluable in the first place.
In their account of literary value, Joshua Clover and Christopher Nealon target positions like Adorno’s and Clune’s for how they imagine discrete domains of aesthetic and economic value, “endlessly worr[ying] over their degree of separation or intermixed-ness” (2017, 212). Usefully, Clover and Nealon dispense with the hackneyed terms of aesthetic autonomy to demonstrate how such models promulgate a story about modernity that can be alternately triumphant or tragic but which is always incremental and linear (“a story in which there is simply ‘more capitalism’ now than there once was”) (212). Such a narrative, they argue, is quick to devise a social ontology of subsumption which literature might variously resist or succumb to. In holding open the prospect “that there is some kind of value external to capitalist value”, these domain models neatly separate the politics of the aesthetic from the economics of value expansion under capital; they imagine literature and art might point the way to modes of non-capitalist valuation in which the political economy of value would have no sway (213). Where domain models falter, per Clover’s and Nealon’s argument, is less where they desire an alternative to capitalist valuation than where they overstate the political effectivity of aesthetic value as an “opposing form of value” or overlook the historical development of artmaking in its relation to the shifting and often volatile ways capital reinforces its efforts to expand value (208). Any proper understanding of literary or aesthetic value would, by contrast, begin by assessing that relation, by offering a measured historical account of “the particulars of how we have ended up organizing life so as to produce value” in the first place (196).
This critique might strike some as unapologetically materialist (it is), but its import for assessing the invaluable is patent. For one, it prompts us to think more intensely about the social basis of a desire for the invaluable, for an enclave of non-economic value. It also demands a more robust historical account of art and literature’s position within the arrangement of social life around value production. These are tall orders, but one way forward, I’d argue, would be to query whether the sort of fine art or literature we’re inclined to label invaluable might not more properly be described in terms of its worthlessness, that is: its dynamics of devaluation. Rather than construe this circumstance of an art rendered worthless, redundant, or superfluous to economic value production as an outside to value (as Adorno surmised with his thought experiment), we might grasp its superfluity as both an effect of and condition for capital’s efforts to expand value, as part of capital’s internal dynamics. What the materialist approach to value clarifies is this: what capital throws off as superfluous or redundant for the expansion of value doesn’t lie outside the value relation but is rather its most glaring consequence. Superfluity is, then, the negative corollary to an extended process of accumulation; the inverse to a superabundance of commodity goods and a paradoxical feature of the build-up of social wealth in the form of value—a dynamic that contemporary crises and so-called “jobless recoveries” make overwhelmingly clear.[4]
From this angle, we can see that Marx might in fact have been onto this sense of the invaluable when he labelled Milton an unproductive worker. Marx’s metaphor of the silkworm might seem to suggest a Romantic escape from the capitalist industry of letters, but his point in specifying Milton’s unproductivity is this: the value of Milton’s literature can only be assessed by first assessing its position within the larger arrangement of social life around the production of value. As Sarah Brouillette points out, Marx isn’t saying that Milton’s literature “articulates the pristine, original, self-grounding individual imagined by bourgeois aesthetic theory” (2019, 527). What he is saying is that unlike the assembly-line-like writer churning out texts for a publisher to sell in a literary marketplace, Milton is not valorizing capital when he puts pen to paper. The social setting of his artistic work is different, even redundant, but it nevertheless remains defined by its relation to that social arrangement.
What are the consequences of this sense of the invaluable for literary study? For discussions of literary value? To get a handle on what a more ambivalent sense of the invaluable might mean for how we appraise literary value, we could do worse than to turn to the literature present at the genesis of both that form of value and the discourse of the invaluable—a literature that would prove influential for nearly all discourses of value in the value-obsessed nineteenth century, and one which would subsequently find its way into Marx’s own thinking of value: German Romanticism.[5]
Superfluous Life
In 1838, the German Romantic Ludwig Tieck published a short novella titled Of Life’s Superfluity (Des Lebens Überfluss) in a novel literary format: the paperback literary periodical. This publication was significant—beyond its place and format of publication—for several reasons. For one, Tieck was an epochal figure. He was hanging around in Jena, the hub of early Romanticism, when the Schlegel brothers were translating Shakespeare and working through the aftershocks of Kant’s critical philosophy, which for Tieck as for the others of his cohort implied that art is sacrosanct. Tieck was around when Goethe died in 1832, as politics grew heated in the restoration years that followed the French Revolution and when early socialists began devising their own romantic alternatives to industry. Tieck watched the Prussian guild system collapse and the market for factory laborers rise. And sitting in the relics of a feudal court, he saw a new generation of radical writers like Marx and Heine (who despised Tieck) flee to political exile as Europe inched towards yet another revolution. All of this is to say that when Tieck published a story about life and superfluity in 1839, he’d long been witnessing the reorganization of social life—and its art—around the production of what he, decades ahead of Marx, called surplus.
The novella’s plot is simply told: two banished lovers, one bourgeois, one aristocrat, are forced into exile and withdraw entirely into the confines of their impoverished attic apartment. Compensating for their economic deprivation and isolation in a gruellingly cold winter, they turn their surroundings into a refuge for poetic life, doubling down on their romantic commitment as they renounce any and all material possessions as frivolous surplus. Their renunciation is part of what the male protagonist, Heinrich, dubs a cynical—in the sense of Diogenes—philosophy of poverty. As the lovers run out of firewood, the situation grows desperate. Heinrich, under the influence of one Crusoe-tale too many, elects to chop down and burn the wooden staircase that connects the lover’s apartment to the outside world—a move that both solves and exacerbates things by fully severing ties to the mundane and “prosaic” world, as he describes it (Tieck 1854, 18). Yet what should’ve put an airtight seal on their poetic enclave ultimately does the opposite: the world of prose returns in full force in the novella’s final scene when the owner of the house—the lovers’ landlord—shows up, police in tow, with an eviction notice, seeking restitution for the violation of his property.
The saving grace—and turning point—comes with the arrival of an old friend, who managed to locate the lovers-in-hiding by way of a prized 1477 edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that Heinrich, tight on funds, had pawned off, but in which he’d noted his current address. Along with the Chaucer edition (a book Tieck well knew marked a new print age of literary distribution), the friend—a speculator—brings Heinrich a hefty return on an investment he had brokered in a colonial joint-stock company. As the friend puts it: “The capital which you had entrusted to me at the time of my departure has so rampantly grown in India that you might now consider yourself a rich man” (67). That’s enough to placate the landlord, who had mistaken Heinrich for a property-destroying socialist revolutionary but who’s happy to receive redress after all. In the end, that capital and the rare book act as the novella’s deus ex machina, restoring order and marking the lovers’ turn of fortune towards a less threadbare life.
It’s a dramatic and tightly wound story. Even worse, it’s an overwrought one, begging to be read as a tongue-in-cheek allegory of Romanticism’s own unwinding, written by its longest-living representative. The allegory operates through a matrix of cliched references to Romanticism itself: its penchant for medieval romances and tales like Chaucer’s, its obsession with arabesque and ornate forms, and its penchant for the absolute and unconditional, in the sense of the self-enclosed, the inwardly absolved of the world, and the stubbornly indolent (what in the heyday of theory was called ‘inoperativity’).[6] But Tieck’s allegory, like all allegories, has a second layer: its explicit concern with economic value. The novella offers a compendium of a new vocabulary of capitalist value, from “surplus” and “superfluity” to “consumption” and “capital”. And it would appear upon first glance to promulgate the “cozy axiomatics” of Romantic anti-capitalism, as Gayatri Spivak once put it: “use good, exchange bad; use concrete, exchange abstract, etc” (Spivak 1999, 177). But what makes Tieck’s novella late Romantic is how it employs the protocols of Romantic irony to evoke and parodically depose those axiomatics simultaneously.
Back to the staircase: If the novella is begging to be read as an allegory of the invaluable value of the poetic—which finds abundance in absolute minimalism, and wealth in renouncing material needs—this allegory pivots on the question of whether there exists a “bulwark” against the encroachment of market value, to frame it as Clune might. In Tieck’s novella this bulwark is the staircase that Heinrich destroys to hold the “prosaic” world at bay. Tieck’s text is clever in its use of symbols and its form: it refuses any absolute “inside” or “outside”, any unidirectional up or down, and it knows that antitheses are, like the staircase, still a form of relation. So even when the staircase is gone, its owner is not. Hence the landlord, whose arrival on the scene not only marks the return of the prosaic (after its negation) but also the self-defeating logic of conflating surplus with superfluity. Heinrich confronts the landlord with his philosophy of cynical poverty, arguing that the staircase was a superfluous and “empty luxury”, a redundant relic of the prosaic economy he rejects (thereby following the example of Diogenes, who threw away his wooden cup after seeing a peasant drink water with his hands). The landlord, however, counters: “I once saw a guy hold his mouth straight up to the faucet to drink … so your Mr. Diogenes might just as well have chopped off his hand” (Tieck 1854, 61).
The landlord’s point is this: unconditionality has its own painful conditions and any effort to be absolved of those conditions, to withdraw into the invaluable space of the absolute, to make a virtue of deprivation, isn’t a pathway to another sort of overabundance but an exercise in frivolity. Here, the dual layers of the text’s allegory collapse into each other. Heinrich’s Romantic attempt to valorize an unconditional poetic existence runs up against a value relation that had rendered him superfluous to its prosaic world. As he puts it: “The world left me and I left the world to the extent that nobody was willing to appraise my value at a noteworthy amount” (45). Heinrich’s hope was that to be superfluous to the world might mean to be afforded the luxury of resigning. But he is forced to admit that to be invaluable is in fact to be devalued, cast off as surplus in the specific sense of redundant and worthless to that world’s circuits of valorization, yet still painfully accountable to them.
The novella patiently works through the paradoxes of this worthlessness. It maps a social space in which a valuable enclave of non-value might be defended to the point of its collapse; and it insists on the impossibility of such an autarkic space of non-value. Ultimately, Tieck’s novella operates beyond a “domain model” of value by virtue of the way it stages the deus ex machina of capital and its superintendents—the investor, the cop, the landlord. The prescience of Tieck’s play with surplus and superfluity is crucial here. It’s 1838. It would be another two decades before Marx would identify the ‘moving contradiction’ of capital in the way it reduces its very source of growth, “posit[ing] the superfluous in growing measure as a condition—question of life or death—for the necessary” (Marx 1993, 706). But that reduction is what Tieck’s novella enacts in a register for which the term allegory turns out to be a stretch. Tieck’s text takes the purported unconditionality and invaluable value of Romantic literature literally. It says: in an age of seemingly self-aggrandizing capital, Romantic literature’s trademark surfeit—the poetic overabundance that Friedrich Schlegel at the outset of the century still called invaluable—flips into redundancy. Tieck’s prose still cleaves, just barely, to the Romantic fantasy of being rid of conditionality altogether. But it also stages the breakdown of that Romantic idea, which buckles under the pressure of a nascent realism, one that consists in demonstrating that fantasies of the invaluable last only as long as it takes to be evicted. In other words, it cancels out its allegory of Romantic absolution from the world by pointing to the overt and very prosaic fact that to be in excess of the world is simply to be redundant to it.
Our discussions of literary value might benefit from attending more carefully to this redundancy, not as the basis for an invaluable aesthetics but for how it anticipates an ambivalent dynamic of value production that continues to exert its pressure today—capital, cops, landlords, and all.
References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1997. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. Translated by Liz Heron. London: Verso.
Beech, Dave. 2015. Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Boever, Arne De. 2019. Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1995. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Brouillette, Sarah. 2019. “Literature and Culture”. Bloomsbury Companion to Marx, edited by Jeff Diamanti, Andrew Pendakis, and Imre Szeman, 525–31. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Clover, Joshua. 2019. Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings. London: Verso.
Clover, Joshua, and Christopher Nealon. 2017. “Literary and Economic Value”. In Christopher Nealon, Infinity for Marxists: Essays on Poetry and Capital, 195-213. Leiden: Brill.
Clune, Michael W. 2021. A Defense of Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. 1988. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital, Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin.
Marx, Karl. 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin.
“Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital”. 2010. Endnotes 2. https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt.
Schlegel, Friedrich. 1967. “[Lyceums-Fragmente]”. In Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, Vol. 2:1, edited by Hans Eichler, 147–64. Paderborn: Schöningh.
Simmel, Georg. 2011. The Philosophy of Money. Translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. London: Routledge.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tieck, Ludwig. 1854 [1838]. Des Lebens Überfluss. In Ludwig Tieck’s Schriften, Vol. 26, 3–70. Berlin: Reimer Verlag.
[1] On economic exceptionalism see Beech 2015; on aesthetic exceptionalism see Boever 2019 as well as his contribution to this issue.
[2] Here’s Kant: “Beautiful art must be free art in a double sense: it must not be a matter of remuneration, a labor whose magnitude can be judged, enforced, or paid for in accordance with a determinate standard; but also, while the mind is certainly occupied, it must feel itself to be satisfied and stimulated (independently of remuneration) without looking beyond to another end” (2000, 198). Tellingly, Kant’s double freedom is what Marx inverts when he notes that the historical prerequisite for capital is the laborer’s freedom “in the double sense that as a free individual he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale” (Marx 1976, 272).
[3] The double discourse of the invaluable plays an outsized role in sociologies of culture as well, from Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money to the “pragmatic” sociology of Luc Boltanski today. Arguably, it is this discourse which constitutes the central object of study for Pierre Bourdieu’s study of the “restricted field” of cultural production as well, which begins with an analysis of an “economic world turned upside down”, one in which artists’ insistence that their work is priceless (“without commercial value”) facilitates the emergence of a distinctly non-economic set of criteria for evaluating a work’s worth (1995, 81). For Bourdieu, a work’s status as economically invaluable is its condition of possibility for becoming valuable within the symbolic economy of the restricted field, which paradoxically can be converted back into economic capital.
[4] On surplus and superfluity in this sense, see “Misery and Debt” (2010).
[5] Marx’s penchant for the sort of Romantic fairy tales that Tieck helped establish as a genre is well documented. It’s notable, however, that Marx’s own fairy-tale rhetoric is most evident when he’s writing about the lumpen with little awareness of Tieck’s fairy-tale like novella about surplus and the lumpen. On Marx’s fairy-tale lumpen see Clover 2019, 194.
[6] See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988. Giorgio Agamben, an eminent thinker of inoperativity, discusses Tieck’s novella in another context in Infancy and History (1993).