This response was published as part of the b2o review‘s “Finance and Fiction” dossier.

Matthew Potolsky–Decadent Style for Critical Finance Scholars: A Response to Signe Leth Gammelgaard

Signe Leth Gammelgaard’s “Flowers Without Meaning: Literary Decadence as Finance Aesthetics” rides a wave of work from the last twenty years or so that draws upon the longue durée history of capitalism to contextualize cultural production in innovatively materialist terms. Broadening its vision from the durable leftist influences of the Frankfurt School, Pierre Bourdieu, and Louis Althusser, as well as the deconstructive New Economic Criticism of the 1990s, this scholarship supplements questions of commodity culture, symbolic capital, ideology, and the nature of value with attention to global trade and conquest, modes of production, and the history of economic crises, often drawing on world-systems theory and theories of uneven and combined development as well. One keynote of this turn is the concept of financialization—perhaps most closely associated with the work of the economic historian Giovanni Arrighi—which directs special attention to the power of the financial industry and finance as such in the culture at large.

The most impressive recent work on financialization has tended to focus on literature of the 1980s and after, a period in which finance capital grew in power and influence at a historically unprecedented rate. But Arrighi, drawing on the longue durée studies of global capitalism by Fernand Braudel, sees financialization as recurrent feature of capitalist development, and therefore as one that has marked earlier periods as well. In her essay, Gammelgaard notes that the European fin de siècle was just such a moment and proposes that we can gain insight into the decadent aesthetic of the 1880s and 1890s by seeing it as manifestly a product of the financialized age. This is a claim with which I agree, and which I have been exploring in different terms in my current book project. In this response, I want to highlight the value of the approach Gammelgaard sketches in her essay and reframe her argument in ways that, to my mind, even better comport with how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers understood both decadence and finance capital. My largest claim will be that Gammelgaard’s account of decadent aesthetics should also be applied to the conceptual history of finance capitalism. Scholars of financialization can learn as much from decadence as scholars of decadence can learn from the literature on financialization.

Let me begin by briefly summarizing Arrighi’s argument to highlight the importance of the fin de siècle to his conception of financialization and economic cycles more generally. Arrighi argues in The Long Twentieth Century that the history of capitalism has been defined by “cycles of accumulation,” in which a succession of hegemonic centers of global economic activity rise and fall as they pass from periods of material expansion, when these centers invest chiefly in production and trade networks, to periods of financial expansion, when they turn increasingly to banking, credit, and speculation. The end of each cycle foretells a shift in political hegemony from one world city, region, or empire to another. Genoa gives way to Amsterdam, which gives way to London, which gives way to New York. At the beginning of each cycle, what Arrighi calls a “long century,” technological developments, access to newly valuable natural resources, or political innovations propel a new region to productive supremacy. That supremacy eventually underwrites a new cycle of financial supremacy, during which money, going abroad in search of greater profit, leads to the decline of the current hegemon and funds the rise of another.

As Arrighi’s history makes clear, and as Gammelgaard perceptively notes, the end of the nineteenth century was a period of financial supremacy, in which dramatic capital accumulation temporarily ensured British and European hegemony over the globe. Arrighi calls such recurrent periods “signal crises,” or, evocatively alluding to the fin de siècle and following Braudel, belles époques. The years after 1870 in Europe were marked by a succession of banking crises, stock-market crashes, and the so-called Long Depression, as well as by rampant speculation in overseas colonies and in large infrastructure projects like railways and canals. Gammelgaard accordingly reads Joris-Karl Huysmans’s classic 1884 decadent novel À rebours as a response to  economic reality that, despite its celebration of aesthetic withdrawal, is no less astute in its depiction of the financialized culture than stock-exchange novels from the period, like Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875) and Émile Zola’s L’Argent (1891).[1] Highlighting Huysmans’s descriptions of exotic flowers and the Latin language, Gammelgaard connects the novel with two coeval intellectual developments—Saussure’s structural linguistics and William Stanley Jevons marginal revolution in economics—that also point to a crisis of signification that reflects the abstracting character of finance capital.[2] Yet, while Saussure and Jevons lean into that abstracting character, Huysmans undertakes a kind of rear-guard action by insisting on the sensory and material, as if, Gammelgaard writes, he were “trying to figure out what to do with a materiality that can no longer really be understood through the models we know.”

I find this claim compelling, though to my mind it leaves perhaps the crucial question posed by the essay largely unanswered: what is it about the concept, history, or aesthetics of decadence that allows it to speak so precisely to the conditions of financialization? Many other movements in the period were immersed in sensuality (impressionism) or fascinated with images of cultural disintegration (naturalism), so these characteristics do not obviously set decadence apart. Writers like Trollope and Zola confronted the effects of late-century financialization more directly, and critics like John Ruskin pilloried bourgeois capitalism in much more incisive ways than the decadents did. Indeed, decadent writers rarely concern themselves the financial life of their characters, though matters of wealth, debt, credit, and investment do arise in their works. So, what does decadence offer that other contemporary writers and artists do not?

I want to offer two answers to this question. The first emerges from the literature on financialization itself. Since its earliest conceptualization, the notion of finance capital has been closely and persistently associated with the sense of lateness and decline. In the third volume of Capital, Marx casts finance as “the most superficial and fetishized form” of capital—a putative endpoint, in which normatively social (if alienated) relations are pushed to distorted lengths (1981, 515). Later theorists of finance capital like Rudolf Hilferding and Vladimir Lenin explicitly use the language of decadence to describe the phenomenon. In Imperialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism, Lenin describes finance as capitalism that has “grown ripe, over-ripe and rotten” (1917, 128). The word “last” (высшая) in his title is bitingly ironic in Russian, suggesting not just the end of a temporal sequence but also the characteristically decadent qualities of excess, exorbitance, and overrefinement. Arrighi, as we have seen, associates financialization with the decline of hegemonic regions, and draws his name for periods of signal crisis from the fin de siècle. In a passage that Arrighi cites as the inspiration for his project, Braudel calls belles époques “a sign of autumn,” an image that draws from the store of decadent tropes (1984, 246).

Decadence, then, is not only an aesthetic of financialization, as Gammelgaard shows, but is also part of the received conceptual framework for describing finance capital, which emerges as a manifestly decadent object. Both before and after the fin de siècle, commentators have drawn upon the concept to explain the rapid changes in the class system and generalized sense of historical transition that characterizes signal crises. The most important modern theorist of cultural decadence, the Baron de Montesquieu, wrote his influential Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734) in the wake of the so-called Financial Revolution in England, which created the Bank of England and authorized the sale of government bonds, and little more than a decade after the ruinous South Sea Bubble of 1721. In 1796, Thomas Paine published a pamphlet entitled The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance that took aim at excessive government borrowing. Braudel’s studies of capitalist economic cycles were written during the signal crisis of the 1970s, when contemporary regimes of finance began to emerge. The pattern also holds true for our contemporary era of financialization, as in works like The Hunger Games series (2008-10), where the capitol of Panem evokes decadent Rome in both its name (panem et circenses) and in the stereotypically decadent ways of its residents. The titular protagonist of Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf (2011) is modeled in large part on decadent characters like Des Esseintes.

We can draw two salient points from the persistent copresence of decadence and finance. Decadence, to begin with, provides a durable rhetoric and set of historical examples (above all, imperial Rome) for describing the excesses inherent to moments of financialization. As Montesquieu writes in his Cahiers: “in empires, nothing comes closer to decadence than great prosperity” (1951, 82). More significantly, though, it is historical concepts like decadence that allow critics to see signal crises as characteristic and recurring features of history, and not just as random accidents, signs of divine judgment, or evidence of human perversity. Tracing its lineage to cyclical theories of political history from antiquity and early modernity (Polybius, Machiavelli, Vico), the notion of decadence encourages commentators to assimilate present crises to past ones.[3] So, while financialization helps us historicize decadence, decadence also helps us historicize theories of financialization. In particular, it helps us recognize the ways in which such theories persistently frame rapid capital accumulation in terms of a familiar narrative of rise and decline. Decadence here is a cognitive map—shared by commentators on the left and the right—which interprets financialization in moral, affective, and historical terms. Finance capital is at once natural and perverse, the epitome and the exception, its demise both inevitable and richly deserved.

The second answer to the question of why decadence would emerge as a key finance aesthetic during the belle époque of the nineteenth century can be found in the aesthetics of decadence itself. Although scholars have tended to associate financialization with postmodernism, decadence offers an even more apposite model. Gammelgaard directs us to the decadent fascination with the sensual, material, and hedonistic, which she sees as a response to the loss of meaning under the regime of finance. But there are many other ways in which decadence might be seen to thematize the logic of financialization. Consider the centrality of fiction, artifice, and the lie in decadent aesthetics. In his 1890 dialogue “The Decay of Lying,” Oscar Wilde argues that reality is the “solvent that breaks up Art, the enemy that lays waste to her house” (2007, 83). “Art finds her own perfection within,” he writes, “and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance” (2007, 89). It is not difficult see a parallel between Wilde’s celebration of artifice and the characterization of finance as “fictitious” or “imaginary,” an entity opposed to what has long been termed the “real economy.” Finance, according to this pervasive opposition, is the unnatural product of art and human ingenuity, not of genuine human labor. Rather than lamenting such an apparent loss of materiality, decadent writers like Wilde parodically lean into it. They criticize novelistic realism for its retrograde commitment to fact and celebrate figures like the dandy, who treats life as a work of art. As Huysmans writes: “artifice was considered by Des Esseintes to be the distinctive mark of human genius. Nature, he used to say, has had her day” (2003, 22). He compares landscapes and sunsets to unimaginative tradesmen and shopkeepers—dealers in the wares of the “real economy.” The very difference between the “real” and the “artificial” that is foundational to traditional definitions of finance capital becomes an object of contemplation. By perversely celebrating art over nature, writers like Wilde and Huysmans thus anticipate Laura Finch’s observation that “The fictionality of finance is, of course, a fiction itself” (2015, 732).

The decadent interest in collecting and collections, which scholars have long tied to nineteenth-century consumerism, might also be understood as a reflection on financial accumulation. The sheer materiality of a collection offers more support to Gammelgaard’s claim that decadence challenges the abstractions of finance capital. But collections evoke the logic of financialization on a different level as well. Joshua Clover has suggested that financialization engenders an “autumnal” aesthetic, which transmutes categories of time into space, dissimulating the labor-time that lies at the origin of value.[4] There is no better image of this transmutation than a decadent collection, which brings objects created at different historical moments and by different cultures into a single physical space. In his 1889 essay “Pen, Pencil, and Poison,” for example, Wilde draws attention to collections of his subject, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, for whom “All beautiful things belong to the same age”: “we find the delicate fictile vase of the Greek … and behind it hangs an engraving of the ‘Delphic Sibyl’ of Michelangelo … Here is a bit of Florentine majolica, and here a rude lamp from some Roman tomb” (2007, 108-9). There are books by French poets, antique gems, and works by Turner. These objects are at once material things and evidence of the eclectic tastes of the decadent collector, whose curatorial eye subsumes temporal differences under the evaluative categories of the beautiful, the exceptional, or (like Des Esseintes’s plants) the perverse. It is such conceptual values—and not the monetary value of the objects—that justify their inclusion in the collection. In other words, the value of the collected objects, like that of many financial instruments, is more imaginary than “real.”

Perhaps the most suggestive connection between decadence and financialization, however, lies in a key nineteenth-century analytical category that Gammelgaard’s attention to linguistic signification unfortunately obscures: decadent style. The major concept under which decadent texts were categorized by contemporary critics, decadent style was (at first) a denigrating name for literary forms that transgressed against classical harmony and simplicity. Bloated, unbalanced, and marked by a superabundance of description and erudition, this style, for critics, mirrored the pathologies of its age. In the single most important characterization of decadence, Paul Bourget describes Charles Baudelaire’s decadent style, in proto-Durkheimian terms, as an index of social of disintegration: the book gives way to the page, the page to the sentence, and the sentence to the word. Friedrich Nietzsche would famously borrow this definition to define Richard Wagner’s decadent style, and along with it the atomizing nature of democratic politics.

The concept of decadent style was first proposed by the French critic Désiré Nisard in his 1834 study of first-century Latin poetry, Études de moeurs et de critique sur les poètes Latins de la décadence. When Bourget wrote his essay on Baudelaire, he was appropriating a term that was already well-established in French critical discourse. Writing at a moment that Marx, in The Class Struggles in France (1850), associates with the rise of the “finance aristocracy,” Nisard casts the style of poets like Lucan as a figure both for the decline of the Roman Empire and for the economic conditions of his own age. Marx sees the finance aristocracy as a bourgeois equivalent of the Lumpenproletariat—a group made up of former outsiders (primarily Jews, he notes), who improbably ascended to the height of cultural power after the 1830 July Revolution. Nisard sees something similar in ancient Rome. Arriving in the imperial metropole from colonial outposts in Iberia and North Africa, decadent Latin poets like Lucan and Martial subjected hallowed Roman literary traditions to their (bad) provincial taste, casting it in what Nisard terms “the bizarre jargon of the marketplace” (1834, I, 129). Nisard concludes his study with a comparison between decadent Roman poets and “decadent” contemporaries like Victor Hugo, whose poetic innovations he accuses of the same excessive reliance on description and empty erudition as his ancient forbears.

Read together, Nisard and Marx bring out something about financialized moments that does not often receive its due in critical finance studies: their disruption of the existing class structure. Finance elevates certain outsiders to new positions of privilege, for which they quickly come under attack by rival classes, who decry their “decadent” ways. Decadence in this case is the name given to formerly marginal members of society who have begun making their mark on a conceptual order that treats certain traditions, whether literary or economic, as unquestionably natural. While Nisard saw decadent style as something to be lamented, later decadent writers like Huysmans and Wilde, working in yet another moment of financialization, saw it as a cause for celebration. Des Esseintes’s Latin library, described in chapter three of À rebours, explicitly repudiates the scions of the Golden Age (Cicero, Horace, Virgil) in favor of precisely those “lumpen” outsiders like Lucan that Nisard and other critics of late-Latin style rejected. The sexologist and social reformer Havelock Ellis crystalized just this attitude when he compared Huysmans’s decadent style with the “fantastic mingling of youth and age, of decayed Latinity, of tumultuous youthful Christianity” that characterized African writers like Tertullian and Augustine (1898, 158). For Ellis, early Christianity embodies a condition of uneven and combined cultural development that anticipates the fin-de-siècle belle époque.^[5]

Like many other fin-de-siècle decadent writers—most of them queers, provincials, colonial subjects, and foreigners—Huysmans turns Nisard’s diagnostic category inside out, rendering what is typically a conservative cultural diagnosis potentially radical. The striking disruptions to the class structures that shape the culture of a belle époque may elicit apocalyptic prognostications from traditionalists (of all political stripes), but they also open up new possibilities for the formerly marginalized. This was certainly true of the fin de siècle, which saw the emergence of modern queer identity and the beginnings of anticolonial movements. Despite its common association with philosophical pessimism, the decadent aesthetic speaks to just this sense of new possibility. Condemnations of finance as the “last” or a “late” version of capitalism, which adopt the language of decadence only as a theory of bitter ends, crucially miss its longstanding association with new beginnings. As Neville Morely has put it, decadence “marks the moment when the future begins to come within reach, the point where the present weakens enough to make an alternative conceivable” (2004, 574).

In “Culture and Finance Capital,” his influential review of The Long Twentieth Century, Fredric Jameson, providing yet another example of the decadent logic of finance, maps Arrighi’s theory of economic cycles onto the familiar stylistic trinity of realism, modernism, and postmodernism. Each step in the stylistic sequence, Jameson argues, is marked by increasing abstraction, reflecting the growing dominance of finance capital. While realism retains a residual commitment to the concrete, modernism frees form and color from their dependence on objects, and postmodernism, as the terminal point in this evolution, detaches artistic styles entirely from their connection to history. Jameson gave no attention to decadent style in his essay, but he should have.^[6] More, perhaps, than any modern literary and artistic style, decadence is attuned to historical repetition, and since its earliest adumbration in the 1830s has been understood as the recurrent mark of so-called “decadent” ages—beginning, of course, with the paradigmatic case of imperial Rome. Jameson’s progressive narrative of stylistic change overlooks the cyclical nature of financialization in ways that closer attention to decadent writing would have precluded. The long twentieth century, as I noted above, raised financial markets to unprecedented prominence, but this is only an intensification of economic circumstances that have analogies in other long centuries, something both Arrighi and Braudel insist upon in their longue durée histories of capitalism. Indeed, as theorists from Paine to Lenin to Arrighi himself seem to recognize, if only at the level of imagery, decadence is the house style of financialization. Hence my concluding point: Not only should scholars of decadence follow Gammelgaard’s lead and attend closely to the literature on financialization, but scholars interested in financialization would learn much by attending more closely to the literature on and of decadence.

Matthew Potolsky is Professor of English at the University of Utah, where he teaches nineteenth-century literature and literary theory. He is the author of three scholarly monographs: Mimesis (2006), The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley (2013), and The National Security Sublime: On the Aesthetics of Government Secrecy (2019). He is also the editor of Classical Studies (2021), the eighth volume of Oxford University Press’ The Collected Works of Walter Pater; and co-editor of Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (1999).

References

Arrighi, Giovanni. 2010. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso.

Braudel, Fernand. 1984. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, III: The Perspective of the World, translated by Siân Reynolds. New York: Harper and Row.

Clover, Joshua. 2011. “Autumn of the System: Poetry and Finance Capital.” Journal of Narrative Theory 41, no. 1: 34-52.

Dowling, Linda. 1983. Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ellis, Havelock. 1898. Affirmations. London: Walter Scott.

Esty, Jed. 2016. “Realism Wars.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 49, no. 2: 316-42.

Finch, Laura. 2015. “The Un-real Deal: Financial Fiction, Fictional Finance, and the Financial Crisis.” Journal of American Studies 49, no. 4: 731-53.

Gagnier, Regenia. 2000. The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gaillard, Françoise. 1980. “A rebours ou l’inversion des signes.” In L’Esprit de la décadence I. Nantes: Minard.

Gasché, Rodolphe. 1988. “The Falls of History: Huysmans’s A rebours.” Yale French Studies 74: 183–204.

Huysmans, Joris-Karl. 2003. Against Nature (À Rebours), translated by Robert Baldick. London: Penguin.

Jameson, Fredric. 1997. “Culture and Finance Capital.” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1: 246-65.

Lenin, Vladimir. 1917. Imperialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism. London: Communist Party of Great Britain.

Marx, Karl. 1960. The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

Marx, Karl. 1981. Capital, Vol. 3, translated by David Fernbach. London: Penguin.

Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat. 1951. Cahiers (1716-1755), edited by Bernard Grasset. Paris: Grasset.

Morely, Neville. 2004. “Decadence as a Theory of History.” New Literary History 35, no. 4: 573-85.

Nisard, Désiré. 1834. Études de moeurs et de critique sur les poètes Latins de la décadence. 3 vols. Brussels: Louis Hauman.

Sewell, William H. 2012. “Economic Crises and the Shape of Modern History.” Public Culture 24, no. 2: 303-27.

Spackman, Barbara. 1999. “Interversions.” In Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, edited by Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky, pp. 35-49. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Wilde, Oscar. 2007. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, IV: Criticism, edited by Josephine M. Guy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[1] Extending her claim, we might also place À rebours in the company of more recent finance-era classics like Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), both of which recall fin-de-siècle forbears.

[2] Gammelgaard treads overfamiliar terrain here. The comparison of Jevons and Saussure recapitulates the insights of the New Economic Criticism; Gagnier (2000) explores the connection between fin-de-siècle writing and the marginal revolution; Dowling (1983) finds a key to decadent aesthetics in the history of linguistics. Other scholars—notably Gaillard (1980), Gasché (1988), and Spackman (1999)—explore the unusual workings of language and signification in Huysmans’s novel.

[3] On the extent to which economic crises function as historical events, see Sewell.

[4] Clover associates the term with W.B. Yeats, a writer deeply influenced by 1890s poetry, but finds his chief examples of autumnal style in postmodern figures like Pynchon and Ashbury.

[5] In his 1895 introduction to The Class Struggles in France, Friedrich Engels compares contemporary socialists to early Christians: “The Emperor Diocletian could no longer quietly look on while order, obedience and discipline in his army were being undermined…He promulgated an anti-Socialist—beg pardon, I meant to say anti-Christian—law” (1960, 41). The origin for this analogy is probably Ernest Renan, but it was clearly popular at the fin de siècle. It is worth asking, in this regard, whether Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development might not also have a decadent lineage. Trotsky’s literary criticism from the 1920s demonstrates an extensive knowledge (mostly critical) of fin-de-siècle literary forms, and his familiarity with such works might well have inflected his discussion of the peculiarities of Russian development in The History of the Russian Revolution (1930). He offers there a strikingly “decadent” theory of economic development.

[6] Jameson does make a surprising reference to Wilde in “Culture and Finance Capital.” Noting that Marxist critics have tended to avoid the exploring the stylistic implications of modes of production because it requires too many mediations, he writes that this avoidance is “no doubt in the spirit in which Oscar Wilde complained that socialism required too many evenings” (1997, 253). Gammelgaard’s account of decadence, it is worth noting, would, in Jameson’s sequence, be most akin to realism. For an effort to think cyclically about the resonances of fin-de-siècle forms, specifically about their opposition to realism, see Esty (2016).

This article was published as part of the b2o review‘s “Finance and Fiction” dossier. The dossier includes a response to this article by Matthew Potolsky. 

Signe Leth Gammelgaard–Flowers Without Meaning: Literary Decadence as Finance Aesthetics

In chapter eight of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, the protagonist Jean Des Esseintes muses on his collection of hothouse flowers. The novel is one of the most prominent examples of the literary decadence of the late nineteenth century and such artificially cultivated flowers (as well as the hothouse itself) are a recurrent motif in decadent literature. In his “Préface écrit vingt ans après le roman” Huysmans himself describes the flowers of À rebours as “aphonic” or “mute” (atteinte d’alabie, muette). This imagery of organic flowers, cultivated to mimic artificial flowers as the text explains, conjures up a rather striking scene which epitomizes the decadent aesthetic. This aesthetic can be understood, I want to propose, in light of contemporaneous economic developments, specifically the intensification of the impact of finance – as portrayed in other literary works from the same period, for instance the classic stock-exchange novels of Émile Zola’s L’Argent or Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now.

In what follows, I use Giovanni Arrighi’s model of financial expansion as a recurrent phenomenon throughout the history of capitalism. The final decades of the nineteenth century were one period of such expansion, where a major part of the money capital became invested rather in financial instruments and assets than in material production. The late nineteenth century, then, in some ways productively mirrors our current period of financialization which began in the 1970s, even if it is not understood as the same period of financial expansion in Arrighi’s framework (Arrighi 2010, 6–7). The significant rise in the impact of finance in the latter half of the nineteenth century occurred especially in the imperial centers of France and Britain. This rise has been portrayed in various ways in the literature of the period, and particularly within the framework of the realist novel, a subject of numerous studies in the past decades. In new economic criticism, the Victorian period specifically has been the focus of several important works, like Mary Poovey’s Genres of the Credit Economy and Catherine Gallagher’s The Body Economic. However, less attention has been paid to the literary fin de siècle, the stylistic developments of decadence and aestheticism.

In this article, I propose to outline some key parallels between the aesthetic traits of these movements and the concurrent development in the economic system, in particular the steady rise of financial instruments, trades, and structures. I start by analyzing the core decadent aesthetics traits as opposed to earlier realist aesthetics, and then contextualize these by their relationship to the development of Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics. I then show how Saussure’s linguistics parallel another theoretical shift, namely the marginal revolution in economic theory. Finally, I will examine how these three shifts respond to larger economic trends in the period; specifically, the switch from an emphasis on material production to an emphasis on financial investment and instruments.

The parallels between linguistic and economic systems have been illuminated before. My central point in this article is that the decadent aesthetics, specifically, render a representational shift in a way that generates an existential and perceptive view on this period and on its changes in both economics and language; namely a loss of meaning. It also presents a strategy of response to such a situation in the form of a renegotiation of the relationship between signs and material reality.

The mute flowers of decadence

Huysmans’s À rebours is a peculiar novel. While it has often been described as plotless,[1] the frame of the narrative in fact provides a simple storyline and the epitome of a decadent one at that. As the last scion of an old, degenerated family, Jean Des Esseintes delves into various extreme and debauched lifestyles before he, weary with the depraved Paris life, retreats to a house he buys outside the city, in Fontenay. The majority of the book details his decorating of this house and his aesthetic choices and sensory experiences with various stimulants: art, literature, colors, interior design, gemstones, flowers, music, perfumes, culinary delights. Finally, however, his body is worn out by his excessive enjoyment, and he is urged by his doctors to return to a normal life and “to enjoy himself, in short, like other people” (Huysmans 2009a, 173).

The flower chapter outlines very clearly how these aesthetic experiences work. It opens by stating that, though Des Esseintes has “always adored flowers” he is now only interested in one kind: the hothouse flowers. The passage outlines this development: after his love of real flowers, he had, in his previous life in Paris and in line with his “natural inclination towards artifice,” amassed a large collection of artificial flowers “faithfully imitated thanks to the miracles of gums and threads, percalines and taffetas, papers and velvet” (Huysmans 2009a, 72–73). However, with his move to Fontenay, a new phase emerges and the narrator comments regarding the artificial flowers: “He had long been fascinated by this wonderful art-form; but now he dreamt of planning a different kind of flora. After having artificial flowers that imitated real ones, he now wanted real flowers that mimicked artificial ones” (Huysmans 2009a, 73). As such, the hothouse blooms become an almost parodical expression of a crisis of representation, with plants cultivated artificially in “the carefully measured warmth of stoves” (Huysmans 2009a, 72), to look like fake ones, that in turn look like real ones.

Des Esseintes tours the horticulturalists of the area of Fontenay and orders a collection of plants. When they arrive, the narrative describes how some “were extraordinary, pinkish in colour, like the Virginal which looked like it had been made out of oilcloth or court plaster; some were entirely white, like the Albany, which could have been cut from the transparent pleura of an ox,” some “mimicked zinc, parodying pieces of punched metal that had been dyed Emperor green and stained with drops of oil-paint and splashes of red and white lead” (Huysmans 2009a, 73–74). As such, the sensory impression of the flowers takes center stage: how they look and what they look like. Conversely, the narrative does not in any way refer to the symbolic language of flowers, that is, metaphoric, traditional or symbolic meanings of love, hope or virtue.

This point is at the center of both Suzanne Braswell’s and Robert Ziegler’s analysis of the hothouse flowers of À rebours. Ziegler underscores, by reference to Huysmans’s own preface from twenty years later and thus written after his conversion to Catholicism, precisely the muteness of the flowers (Ziegler 2015, 51–52). In this “Préface écrit vingt ans après le roman,” Huysmans notes:

It would have been difficult, in that novel, to endow an aphonic flower, a mute flower, with speech, for the symbolic language of plants died with the Middle Ages and the exotic flora dear to Des Esseintes were not known to the allegorists of that age. (Huysmans 2009b, 190)

Ziegler’s analysis portrays this muteness through comparison to Huysmans’s later work, in particular the novel La Cathédrale, where the flowers and plants have become re-endowed with meaning through the work of religion, through Huysmans’s conversion. However, as the quotation shows, the mute flowers adhere to a modern condition, albeit the modernity that began already with the end of the Middle Ages.

Braswell’s analysis takes a broader view on this modernity and traces discourses on the symbolic language-of-flowers. Her reading stresses specific changes in these discourses precisely towards the end of the nineteenth century and she argues that, while Stéphane Mallarmé’s work nuances and elaborates the earlier traditions, the flowers in À rebours in turn “attack the tradition and parody its discourses, particularly those promoting the healthful and chaste aspects of horticulture” (Braswell 2013, 76, 83). The point that emerges is that these elaborate, exotic, and artificially cultivated plants have become such a perverse manifestation that they no longer signify; rather, they look like various forms of dying or diseased flesh, rendering distinct “necrotic dimensions” as Braswell terms it (Braswell 2013, 83). In the novel, this is seen in the passage on the next round of flowers to arrive:

they simulated the appearance of fake skin scored by artificial veins; and the majority, as though eaten away by syphilis and leprosy, exhibited livid flesh marbled with roseola and damasked with dartres; others were the bright pink of scars that are healing, or the browning tint of scabs in the process of forming; others were blistering from cautery or puffing up from burns (Huysmans 2009a, 74).

This imagery of decaying organisms, diseased tissue and putrefying flesh, however, links the floral passages to linguistic developments as they are described both in À rebours and in the movement of decadence more generally. In a previous chapter Des Esseintes meditates on his literary preferences, specifically among the Latin authors of the Roman decadence. Here, the narrator explains that:

Des Esseintes’s interest in the Latin language remained undiminished, now that it hung like a completely rotted corpse, its limbs falling off, dripping with pus, and preserving, in the total corruption of its body, barely a few firm parts, which the Christians took away to steep in the brine of their new idiom. (Huysmans 2009a, 31)

The advent of Christianity is given a key role in the development where the language of the Pagan Rome “decomposed like venison,” in fact “falling apart at the same time as the civilization of the Ancient World crumbled into dust, at the same time as the Empires, rotted by the putrefaction of the centuries, collapsed under the onslaught of the Barbarians” (Huysmans 2009a, 28).

The decadence of a civilization is thus matched by the decadence of its linguistic forms – forms that are in turn described in the same language as the appearance of the mute flowers, the flowers that have lost their metaphorical meanings. However, the idea of a decomposing organism of language is not specific to Huysmans. Indeed, in his Decadence and the Making of Modernism, David Weir comments on an earlier example of decadent criticism, namely Theophile Gautier’s essay on Baudelaire from 1868 (Weir 1995, 88–89). In this essay, Gautier, similar to Des Esseintes’s reflections, connect the decadent Latin literature to the literature of his own time. Moreover, he examines Baudelaire’s relationship to the “masters of the past,” in whom he cannot find an adequate model for his own period, since these masters had been born “when the world was young,” and “when as yet nothing had been expressed” (Gautier 1908, 38). Gautier writes further:

The great commonplaces that form the main stock of human thought were then in their first flush, and sufficed for simple geniuses addressing a people yet childish. But by dint of being repeated, these general poetic themes had become worn, like coins that have been too long in circulation and have lost their sharpness of outline; besides, life has become more complex, contains more notions and ideas, and is no longer sufficiently reproduced in artificial compositions inspired by the spirit of another age. (Gautier 1908, 38)

The metaphor of the worn-out coin instantly establishes a parallel between the representational system of money, and that of language. In the original French the wording is “perdent leur empreinte” rather than “lost their sharpness of outline”, so the image underscores how the coins have gradually lost their imprint, their stated value, effecting a mismatch between the form and content of the coin: its “meaning” has been skewed. The passage thus describes a shift in representation, and Gautier links this shift to a decadent Zeitgeist.

With recourse to Roland Barthes’s “L’Effet de réel,” this gap between form and content can be inscribed in a larger narrative. While Barthes’s short essay revolves mainly around his conception of the reality effect, towards the end of the text he speculates on a more general meaning of this particular effect. He argues that realism, conceived around the notion of this reality effect, is in fact a forerunner to the problematized representation of his own time, described in Barthes’s words as a “disintegration of the sign – which seems indeed to be modernity’s grand affair” (Barthes 2006, 234). Furthermore, he states, “the goal today is to empty the sign and infinitely to postpone its object so as to challenge, in a radical fashion, the age-old aesthetic of ‘representation’” (Barthes 2006, 234).

Barthes describes the concept of the reality effect, key to his understanding of realism, in a way that aligns with the decadent aesthetic seen in Huysmans’s flowers, namely that of a mute, unsignifying materiality. The reality effect thus invokes the material world not to signify anything specifically in a narrative context but merely to denote the reality of the stated utterance. Barthes writes:

Semiotically, the “concrete detail” is constituted by the direct collusion of a referent and a signifier; the signified is expelled from the sign, and with it, of course, the possibility of developing a form of the signified, i.e., narrative structure itself. […] in other words, the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism: the reality effect is produced, the basis of that unavowed verisimilitude which forms the aesthetic of all the standard works of modernity. (Barthes 2006, 234)

What Barthes describes here is essentially a “flat” material world, a disenchanted and meaningless observation of the purely material properties. However, Barthes’s analysis identifies this aesthetic through the conception of the “absence of the signified.” To understand this in more depth, I now turn to Ferdinand de Saussure’s original conception of the dual sign consisting of signifier and signified.

Saussure’s structuralism and the disintegration of the sign

Saussure’s most famous work is presented in the Cours de linguistique générale, a work based on a series of lectures given by him between 1906 and 1911 and compiled from notes by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Though Saussure never published this work himself, the course has had a large significance for various fields outside of linguistics and, according to letters and notes that have since been found, Saussure started thinking about issues in general linguistics already in the final decades of the nineteenth century – in other words, contemporary to the decadent movement (Culler 1976, 15). In fact, economics seems to have been an inspiration for the ways in which Saussure wanted to redefine linguistics, and in the Cours he refers to the content of the linguistic sign as its “value,” but only insofar as the signified, the concept or meaning of a sign, has a value exactly because it is part of a system of language and compared to other values and signs (Saussure 2011, 114–17).

The Saussurian innovation resides largely in the dual nature of the sign: it consists of two parts, namely signifier and signified. According to Saussure, language is not made up of connections between signs and the material world but is rather a system of signs comprised by signifiers and signifieds. The signifier is the sound-image (the image of sound exists even if it is not pronounced) and the signified is the mental concept, meaning what we think of when we hear the sound-image. The relation between these two parts of the sign is arbitrary; though there are some onomatopoetic words, in general the relation between a specific word and its mental concept is random. Saussure refers specifically to the signified as the “meaning” or “content” of the sign, which then has value in a system (Saussure 2011, 65–78, 114–17). As such, the signified also holds the mediating function of language, the process by which we interpret arbitrary signifiers into meaningful content which we can then draw upon in our interaction with the physical world. When the reality effect in the decadent aesthetics is conceived as a “direct collusion” between referent and signifier, a lack of a proper signified, it signals a loss of narrative meaning.

However, for Saussure this understanding also enables a new conception of linguistics itself. Language can be understood as a structure or system in which each sign has meaning only in relation to other, different signs. The material world – termed “the referent” in semiotics ­– lies beyond the scope of linguistics according to Saussure, as it is the structure of language that should be studied in this discipline. Hence, structural linguistics brackets the idea of an underlying material reality: Linguistics should thus not be concerned with the connection between referent and signified, or for that matter between referent and signifier, but should only study linguistics as a differential relationship between signs. It is the difference of one word from that of another that gives it its meaning, not its connection to any actual thing.

Barthes’s analysis shows a very explicit use of Saussure’s dual sign: the duality of signifier and signified enables an analytical description of what is happening when representation becomes problematic, when the materiality becomes mute and meaningless. The conception that the “form of the signified” is the narrative structure itself is, moreover, interesting in the sense that, while Barthes’s examples in the essay refers to realist works that do have a storyline or plot, À rebours is often described as a novel without a plot. While it is a feature of realism (and only realism) in Barthes, I argue that the reality effect is a core component of the estrangement of the mute flowers in À rebours. In Huysmans’s novel (and in decadence more generally) the reality effect becomes not only a specific aesthetic strategy but the whole point of the narrative: it is central to the loss of meaning that drives the novel.

Following the work of scholars like Mary Poovey and Jean-Joseph Goux, I would now like to contextualize this shift from the meaningful narrative of realism to a decadence describing a loss of meaning beyond Saussure’s contemporaneous structural linguistics, namely in a parallel to the economic sphere (which is present in Saussure’s theory, as I have already shown).

The liquid values of marginal utility

Around 1870, the field of political economy spawned a significant new set of ideas that, similar to the decadent literature, augurs a new relationship between material reality and language or signs, in this case the language of values and economics. Independently of each other, three theorists in three different countries simultaneously developed theories based on the notion of marginal utility: W. Stanley Jevons in England, Léon Walras in Switzerland, and Carl Menger in Austria. The basic tenet of these theories is the idea that the value of anything can be determined by the thing’s marginal utility, that is, the utility of the “last available item” of a specific commodity. The amount and availability of something thus becomes the central parameter, because its utility will decrease with the amount available. Thus, when there is plenty of water, even though it is necessary for survival, its value will be low. On the other hand, when water is a scarce resource, its value will be incredibly high. The value of a commodity is thus expressed by the commodity’s exchange value, its price in a market (Jevons 1999, 143). The notion of value in this way becomes tied to the concept of scarcity.

With the marginalist perspective the value of something thereby shifts away from the earlier focus on the cost it takes to produce it, and towards the intensity of the desire that it can create – essentially the shift goes away from production and towards consumption, and this has consequences for the relationship between prices – the monetary sign – and material world of commodities. To understand precisely what the shift in economic theory entails and how it parallels decadent aesthetics and structural linguistics, a brief review of Marx’s notion of value is useful.

While the earlier field of political economy spearheaded by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Robert Malthus, and Karl Marx had many disagreements, the prior theories all revolved around the concept of a labor theory of value. Marx divided the concept of value into three separate notions, namely “use value”, “exchange value”, and “value” itself (Marx and Engels 1996, 45–51). The latter one is at the core of his theory of capitalism as it elucidates how the exchange between capitalist and worker takes place. Capitalism, according to Marx, is the specific situation where the worker has nothing to sell but his labor power, and where the capitalist, conversely, holds the means of production including the necessary capital to establish a production of some commodity. Labor power is also a commodity and it is the only commodity a worker can sell. Contrary to other commodities, however, labor has the specific feature that it can produce more value than it takes to reproduce it – basically, a laborer can work more and produce more than what is required for her own reproduction and survival. This “more” is what Marx defines as surplus value, and the relationship between capitalist and worker is defined by the fact that the surplus value falls to the capitalist. While the basic level of reproduction is historically and geographically variable, the central mechanism remains the same, even if the worker is granted higher wages for her own reproduction (Marx 2016, 885).

However, the way Marx links the concept of labor time to value is central, because it shows how the whole economic system is linked to the material needs of a given society, and thereby anchors the theory in material reality. For labor to be the basic universal equivalent, namely the thing that enables the exchange of two qualitatively different commodities, Marx introduces the concept of abstract labor time. This concept expresses the amount of labor time necessary for a given society to uphold its current state and it is thus an abstract concept, not possible to measure in any exact way. The value of a given commodity is the labor time it takes on average to produce it, expressed as a fraction of the total socially necessary labor time of a society. Thus, the value of a specific commodity is not larger if it is produced by a slow worker than a similar one produced by a fast worker (Marx and Engels 1996, 48–49). As such the concept of abstract labor time both lodges the labor theory of value in a concrete material reality (namely the necessary amount of labor to sustain a society) and gives a commodity an underlying value described as a part of this necessary labor. It is this relationship to reality that changes with the new economics, and that change can in turn be related to the shift from realist narrative language to decadent mute description.

According to Marx the exchange value will over time stabilize around the actual value of something. Indeed, he states in volume one of Capital that “the labour time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of Nature” (Marx and Engels 1996, 86). Thus, while exchange values (that is, the prices) does figure into Marx’s theoretical edifice, they function mainly as expressions of the underlying value that has a relationship to societal value as a whole – and these expressions can be more or less representative or accurate (Marx 2016, 460). In the marginal utility theory, this calculation of labor time vanishes and production cost is assigned a different role, namely as a component of a cost-benefit analysis on the part of the producer. In marginal utility theory, also called neoclassical economics, value expresses only intensities of desire – the desire for the pleasure of consuming something versus the pain of acquiring it (the labor necessary for obtaining it), and relative to other things that can be acquired for the same amount of “pain.” These calculations of pleasure and pain then meet up with the similar calculations of other actors in a marketplace, and generates a price: the desire of the buyer for consumption meets the “pain” that the producer has put into creating it and therefore needs compensation for. The price becomes an exact expression of value, because value is no longer defined as some underlying quality, but only as the price that a good can obtain in a marketplace (Gallagher 2008, 126–27).

Jean-Joseph Goux expands on this point and claims:

Any questioning of “value” beyond a state of equilibrium momentarily offered by a market, or auction, of pure competition becomes a futile, useless, metaphysical and unscientific pursuit. For Walras, Karl Marx, like Adam Smith, remains a metaphysician; both Marx and Smith seek a unique and enduring principle that would fix value, the universal law regulating the exchange of products, which they find in the time of labour. (Goux 1997, 163)

I have dwelled at some length on this precise difference because the central shift regards a conception of labor and of the material reality to which prices refer. Thus, when we saw in the decadent literature a changed relationship between the referent and the signifier, expressed as a loss of the meaning – a loss of the signified – here we have a system of thought that is no longer interested in the relationship between signified and referent. Signs refer only to other signs in the system. As Goux portrays it, there is no longer any fixed point to which value refers, no concrete reality. Value only expresses wants, and these wants fluctuate according to scarcity (real or artificial), usefulness and, last but not least, the ability of something to create desire. Goux describes this conception of value as the “stock-exchange paradigm” as it fits with the way the stock exchange works. For Goux, this is not merely a change in economic theory, but a development that describes modernity as such, and like Barthes’s idea of “modernity’s grand affair,” it concerns a specific change in the way that signs work (Goux 1997).

However, while Saussure’s linguistics and marginalist economics both bracket the relationship of signs to the material world, the decadent aesthetics present a very precise way that the loss of a connection between societal values and material reality can take on an existential dimension and be perceived as a loss of meaning tout court. A few decades after Gautier’s aforementioned text, in 1881, a different critic of decadence, namely Paul Bourget, examines the relationships between linguistic and societal meaning through the example of Baudelaire in relation to decadence. The parallel Bourget sees between these two registers is through the image of the organism. A decadent society, he holds, is characterized by a state of affairs where the individual units, the smaller cells and lesser organisms, become independent and no longer work by subordinating their energy to the total organism. Same principle for language, he claims:

The very same rule governs the development and the decadence of another organism, language. A decadent style is one in which the unity of the book falls apart, replaced by the independence of the page, where the page decomposes to make way for the independence of the sentence, and the sentence makes way for the word. There are innumerable examples in current literature to corroborate this hypothesis and justify this analogy (Bourget 2009, 98).

This quotation, often cited and used as definition for the decadent style, describes fragmentation and lack of any conception of totality or coherent whole, and the text describes this “anarchy” as a state of decline of both the organism of society and that of language. With the parallels between the new economic thinking and the new linguistic theory of the final decades of the century, falling apart and lack of unity of the decadent aesthetics can be understood in relation to shifts in the economic sphere. However, while the marginalist theory shows a system that becomes unlinked to the material necessities of a given society’s reproduction, it does not explain what happened in the actual economy of the period and how that relates to literary expression. To explain this link, and why it results in an aesthetics of fragmentation and disunity, Mary Poovey’s work is more instructive than Goux’.

In Genres of the Credit Economy (2008), Poovey expounds on the parallels between money, economics, language, and literature in a historically grounded perspective, reading two centuries of British literary and economic history in conjunction. By doing so, Genres makes a key point about the historical dynamic between these two systems. In Poovey’s account, they do not only display parallel features, they also actively influence one another. Concerning specifically what Poovey terms the “problematic of representation” – that is, “the gap that separates the sign from its referent or ground (of value or meaning), whether the gap takes the form of deferral, substitution, approximation, or obscurity” (Poovey 2008, 5) – she states:

Unlike most Literary critics, however, I do not present the problematic of representation as a property of all systems of representation. Instead, I argue that representation becomes problematic—it presents problems that are both social and epistemological—only at certain times and under conditions that are historically and socially specific. A system of representation is experienced as problematic only when it ceases to work—that is, when something in the social context calls attention to the deferral or obfuscation of its authenticating ground. (Poovey 2008, 5–6)

The thing in the social context that can cause this awareness is mainly economic events, for instance crises, crashes, bubbles, and mania. Thus, Poovey foregrounds the notion that the representational function is historically variable, at the same time as she stresses the connection between linguistic and monetary systems. While Poovey does not operate with the Saussurian concepts of signifier and signified but rather conflates the notions of signified and referent in the above passage, it is clear that her point relates to the problem of materiality and meaning. Like the shifts related to decadent aesthetics, Saussure’s linguistics, and Goux’s reading of marginal utility theory, the sign begins to work differently. Huysmans’s novel shows, indeed, how such crises of representation can be interpreted through an aesthetics of the lost signified, in Barthes’ words the “direct collusion of a referent and a signifier.”

À rebours thus portrays a situation in which its protagonist experiences a ‘mute referent’ in place of a narrative signified for the flowers. However, for the reader of the novel the words themselves naturally still have a meaning – they still have a signified. Telling the story of a lost signified for the character – the story of a mute and meaningless materiality – thus becomes the narrative signified for the reader: the text becomes a meaningful expression about the loss of meaning in both a linguistic and an existential sense. Furthermore, while these flowers are no longer endowed with metaphorical meaning, they still look like something, namely decaying bodies, an image which is also used to describe the linguistic disintegration of representation in both Huysmans and elsewhere. In so far as these descriptions of flowers still do signify, they signify on the one hand the mute referent in a Barthesian sense, and on the other connote an imagery of disintegrating organisms. In both cases, they signal a shift in representation, a shift in the mediating function of the signified. With Poovey’s notion of economic events as a trigger for such representational issues in mind, I will now turn to the actual economic changes of the period.

The late nineteenth century crisis

The final decades of the nineteenth century saw an economic situation in the old European empires that in some central ways matches that of the US today: repeated crashes and volatile economy, a huge increase in the impact of the financial sector, staggering growth and a cut-throat price competition. In terms of imperial affairs, this period is known for the “scramble for Africa,” the intense round of colonization of African territories which increased the European control from 10 percent to 90 percent over two decades. Literary scholars and historians alike have described the massive boom in financial instruments and stock-companies, accompanied both by new legislation and the pressure for better information through a reliable, critical press (Kornbluh 2014, 1–2; Henry and Schmitt 2009; Poovey 2002, 17–18; 2008, 274; Taylor 2014). According to Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, the year 1870 augurs the financial phase of the period of capitalist development that he terms the British cycle, and this financial phase followed an initial phase of material expansion (characterized by increased production, colonial ventures and intensification of trade). The financial phase of this period was characterized by capital agencies withdrawing from investment in material production and trades, and concentrating instead on banking, money trades and finance, and such change indicates the decline of a period of capitalist development in Arrighi’s model. Drawing on the work of Fernand Braudel, Arrighi states that “financial expansions are taken to be symptomatic of a situation in which the investment of money in the expansion of trade and production no longer serves the purpose of increasing the cash flow to the capitalist stratum as effectively as pure financial deals can” (Arrighi 2010, 9). The late nineteenth century financialization thus spelled the end of the British (and French) cycle while the United States became the new power center, breeding new material growth.

The onset of literary decadence, the shift towards the financial phase, the invention of a new conception of economic value and modeling, and the birth of a new linguistic theory thus all center around these decades and the 1870s specifically. At the same time, these four events all display issues in the functioning of the signified: the role of the signified as mediator to the referent is challenged by the way that the referent appears irrelevant in marginalism and in structural linguistics, and the role of the signified is in turn replaced by images of a mute material referent in the later forms of realism and in the movement of decadence especially. However, I have yet to show the role of the signified in financialization. In order to do so I will turn once more to Marx’s writings.

In the Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865 (his only full draft for volume III of Capital), Marx analyses the dynamics of loan capital and interest and describes the basic mechanism through the model of capitalist production and surplus value. Where the typical cycle for capitalist production is expressed by the formula M–C­­­–M’, where an amount of money (M) is used to produce commodities (C), which can then be sold for a larger amount of money (M’ = the original amount + the surplus value), the expression of loan capital (that is, investments) becomes M–M’ to the lender-capitalist, where the surplus money derives from the interest paid on the loan. What disappears from the formula, then, is precisely the materiality of the commodity and, in Marx’s understanding also therefore the embodied abstract labor power required to produce said commodity. Instead, the formula expresses an amount of money that appears to be growing by itself over time. In chapter 5, part 1, he discusses the expression that the rate of interest is the “price of money,” calling this price a “purely abstract form, completely lacking in content” (“rein abstrakte und inhaltslose Form”) (Marx 2016, 458; Marx, Engels, and Müller 1992, 4:426). What is meant by this lack of content is outlined through a comparison to the prices of regular commodities governed by the following rule:

If supply and demand coincide, the market price of the commodity corresponds to its price of production, i.e., its price is then governed by the inner laws of capitalist production, independently of competition, since fluctuations in supply and demand explain nothing but divergences between market prices and prices of production (Marx 2016, 460).

Marx goes on to emphasize, then, that no such divergences exist for the “price” of capital (that is, the interest) as there simply “is no natural rate of interest. What is called the natural rate of interest means rather the rate established by free competition” (Marx 2016, 460). Marx thus outlines that the interest, the price of capital, is equal to what came to be understood as value by the marginalists, a value determined by competition and with no ties to the amount of labor needed to reproduce a given society. It is value in the sense that Goux terms the stock-exchange paradigm, and what is omitted from this conception is the labor of production, embodied in commodities, and which in Marx’s schema can be seen as the signified of money. I therefore suggest that these shifts–the shift of aesthetics, the shift of linguistics, the shift of economic theory–are in turn related to the larger shift from a society based on the production and commerce of commodities produced by labor power, to the commerce of various forms of financial products. Arrighi stresses this point of going from Marx’s theoretical model to a conception of historical phases and explains:

Marx’s general formula of capital (MCM’) can therefore be interpreted as depicting not just the logic of individual capitalist investments, but also a recurrent pattern of historical capitalism as world system. The central aspect of this pattern is the alternation of epochs of material expansion (MC phases of capital accumulation) with phases of financial rebirth and expansion (CM’ phases). In phases of material expansion money capital “sets in motion” an increasing mass of commodities (including commoditized labor-power and gifts of nature); and in phases of financial expansion an increasing mass of money capital “sets itself free” from its commodity form, and accumulation proceeds through financial deals (as in Marx’s abridged formula MM’). Together, the two epochs or phases constitute a full systemic cycle of accumulation (MCM’). (Arrighi 2010, 6)

This historical shift might perhaps also be used to understand why the theoretical framework of Capital, with its pinnacle of the labor theory of value, was not, after the 1870s, the most adequate framework to explain market dynamics, because, in a phase dominated by finance capital, the marginal utility theory more adequately explains how value is conceived since the economy is no longer organized mainly around material production. However, invoking the larger framework of the world systems as Arrighi does, reinscribes the finance capitalist systems as phases in a larger dynamic. And within this dynamic, what happens in phases of financial expansion, is that the signified of money (commodities and labor), disappears from view. We then get two new theories that explain how sign systems begin to work, and we get a decadent aesthetics that tries to renegotiate a material world that the theories are no longer concerned with.

The decadent literature, then, does not simply decouple language from the material realm like the structural linguistics or marginalist economics, but presents, rather, a different kind of connection to it. Most decadent works place a premium on the concept of sensory and sensual enjoyment, epitomized in Des Esseintes’s practices as an aesthete. While on the one hand, this enjoyment undeniably parodies consumption by taking it to the utter extreme, it can also be interpreted as an attempt to reconnect with the material world, to reinvent “meaning” as “sense” in a situation that is no longer mediated by the previous social functioning of the signified. The material world appears meaningless but at the same time menacing, strange, and incomprehensible, accessible only by the sheer sensory properties it invokes. And thus, these properties must be examined, dealt with, experienced, in “a new Hedonism” as it is termed in Oscar Wilde’s The picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde 2006, 22). The success of this “solution” however, is questionable, as most of the decadent works end on a somber note. Thus, when Des Esseintes ponders his return to normal society the book ends with his prayer to a divinity he fails to believe in: “Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who longs to believe, on the galley-slave of life who is setting sail alone, at night, under a sky no longer lit by the consoling beacons of the ancient hope” (Huysmans 2009a, 181).

Conclusion

While previous research has in various ways established parallels between language and money or economics, I have focused on decadent aesthetics because they show a very precise way that large economic changes in society can impact the ways in which we perceive the social and material world. They suggest, in particular, one way in which the subject can react to a phase of financial intensification: by a rather fetishistic relationship to materiality. In the decadent aesthetic, the properties of things in the material world become defining for our experience of them, rather than their social meaning, function, or usefulness. In decadent novels, this is also linked with excessive consumption, even hedonism. As there can no longer be found any social meaning, the only grounding principle for the subject is the sensory experience of the material world. This world, however, lacks any substantive ordering principle and becomes an excess of impressions.

By establishing the structural parallel between literary decadence and the economic and financial developments of the period, I am also suggesting that the free-floating, differential values of the Saussurian linguistics, and of the neoclassical economics, are responses to the same global developments in the mode of production. The final point I want to emphasize is that decadent literature’s way of responding to the changes I have discussed, differs from the theoretical responses in linguistics and economics by insisting on the relevance of sensory experience and materiality. In a sense, À rebours is trying to figure out what to do with a materiality that can no longer really be understood through the models we know, and it describes the loss of tethering that this social fragmentation results in. The protagonist becomes, quite literally, unhinged from a topsy-turvy world in which meaning remains at large.

Signe Leth Gammelgaard is a postdoc in comparative literature at Lund University. Her research focuses on the intersection of literary and economic history.

References

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This article is based on parts of my doctoral dissertation. (Gammelgaard 2020)

[1] White, “Introduction,” xx; in Wilde’s Dorian Gray, the book that so influences Dorian, and which is loosely based on À rebours, is described precisely as a “novel without a plot” (Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 106).