Spending and Spirit
Review of Regenia Gagnier, The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000) viii + 255 pp ISBN: 0-226-27853. Review first appeared in Women: A Cultural Review, 12.2 (2001): 149-41.
For a long time artists and economists seemed content for aesthetics and economics to stand neatly in a relation of non-relation. Whatever art was, it was something irreducible to getting and spending, and whatever economics was, it could be expected to have no authentic application to the particular expenses of spirit involved in art-like activities and objects. For some years now, this division of the spoils between the aesthetic and the economic has come to seem ever more unsatisfactory and implausible, not least because it has started to become clear how much the aesthetic and the economic depend on each to make their livings.
The rise of cultural studies has been nourished by the denunciation of aesthetic ideas as the carriers of systematic oppression and disadvantage, not least in respect of gender, since aesthetic thought typically identifies ‘the artist’ as masculine and sees women as approximating to the dumb and inchoate raw material of art. And yet some of those carrying forward this denunciation have continued to hold to the possibility of other, more positive purposes and possibilities for aesthetic thought or experience, whether in the neo-Adornianism of Jameson or Eagleton, or the ‘radical aesthetic’ recently explored by Isobel Armstrong.
But most of this critique has come from what Regenia Gagnier calls ‘culturalists’ rather than economists. What it has hitherto lacked is an intellectual amphibian capable of living both in the aqueous medium of the aesthetic and the drier terrain of economic thought. Regenia Gagnier is superbly this creature. She qualifies herself to offer her configuring of the economic and the aesthetic realms in the most simple and old-fashioned way – by having read more economics than anybody else in the game. Her example will change the ways in which thinking about the nature of value will now have to proceed.
Many commentators have tracked the rise of modern notions of the aesthetic to the eighteenth-century fin-de-siècle, and the Romantic attempt to which it gave rise to affirm value out of art’s very irrelevance to the market. Gagnier centres her enquiry in the next fin-de-siècle, in the period characterised on the one hand by Aestheticism, Decadence and the gender trouble of early modernism and, on the other, by the rise of a new paradigm in economic thinking. This latter, the so-called ‘marginal revolution’, derives largely from the work of Stanley Jevons. Against those like Marx, who maintained that the value of a commodity was effectively equivalent to the amount of labour it cost to produce it, Jevons’s work, along with that of Carl Menger and Leon Walras, in effect made value indistinguishable from price. Whether it is a matter of my labour, my life, or the lettuces from my allotment, all are worth precisely whatever it is that somebody can be persuaded to shell out for them, their choice being guided by no celestially-ordained index or rate of exchange, but by their conception of the utility to them of such items. Only one general principle can be asserted: that, once basic needs of subsistence are satisfied, the desire for variety and the varieties of desire can be counted on to multiply infinitely. ‘Modern man’, Gagnier comments, ‘would henceforth be known by the insatiability of his desires’ (p. 94). The ‘social will’ of the mid-Victorian science of political economics, with its careful calculation of needs, values and satisfactions, evaporates into the multi-parameter ‘hedonic calculus’ of preferences and prejudices, wishes and whims, kinks and addictions. Such a shift from the attempt to determine intrinsic value to the swimming relativity of price seems precisely in phase with the philosophical shift to perspectivism, with Matthew Arnold’s ambition to ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’ modulating into Pater’s recommendation to the critic ‘to know one’s impression as it really is’.
The mapping that Regenia Gagnier here offers of the striations and adjacencies of economics and aesthetics in the later nineteenth century is quite breathtaking in its reach and intricacy. Her thought is subtle, steady and indefatigable. Her writing is ardent, impassioned and funny. Most telling is her explication of the parallels between the aesthetic discrimination of the dandy of the decadent and the monad consumer who was coming into being both in theory and economic fact at the end of the nineteenth century. The idea of ‘the man of taste’ was predictably masculine. But what Gagnier identifies as an earlier mode of ‘productionist’ thinking in aesthetics persists to challenge this consumptionist model of male authority, for example in the work of feminists like Olive Schreiner, who saw decadent, modern men as enervated parasites living off the labour of others.
Many writers on the aesthetic attempt to squeeze themselves and their readers into a one-size-fits-all definition of what the aesthetic most essentially is or can do. The most valuable lesson of The Insatiability of Human Wants is that changing forms of economic thought conjugated different and competing versions of what counts as aesthetic thought. Gagnier distinguishes three in particular: the ethical, having to do with self-regulation; the political-economic (centring on ideas of production and reproduction); and the physiological, concerned with pleasure and experience.
The most daring wager of the book consists in its final explorations of what it calls the ‘practical aesthetics’ of the hyper-commodified world of the late twentieth century in the light of its discoveries about the complex ecologies of economic and aesthetic rationality in the nineteenth century. The discussions of the piratical high-finance culture of the 1980s and the scandalous disfigurement of the aesthetics of postmodern urbanism by the tribes of the homeless are tenacious and unflinching, and have a positively Victorian confidence in the power of facts and statistics to make the reader see and imagine. At times, it seems as though it is only the flame-retardant effects of this material which is preventing the white heat of Regenia Gagnier’s outrage from reducing the page to cinders. She is as appalled by the rampant economism of recent decades as any Carlyle, Ruskin or Mill. Aware as she is that this economic world is in one sense also ‘aesthetic’ through and through - driven by hedonic calculus rather than self-denying Protestant imperative - she nevertheless urges us to retain a Victorian sense of the political possibilities of the aesthetic. Here she falls into what may be her only error, by shrinking ‘the aesthetic’ down into one representative and valued form - the power, as represented emblematically for her by San Francisco’s Theatre of the Homeless, to make a stage or space of self-representation. ‘The aesthetic’ here, as that saving aperture upon the real, and the as-yet-unreal possible, ‘functions as aesthetic spaces have always functioned when they have meant something more than social capital: as a space of freedom’ (p. 232). But this confidence is inconveniently at odds with the her book seems to have taught us about the indeterminate value of the many different things said to be aesthetic. Talking oneself into confidence in ‘the aesthetic’ as such under these circumstances seems to depend on a familiar but dubious syllogistic routine. The Theatre of the Homeless has good effects; the Theatre of the Homeless displays some residually ‘aesthetic’ features; therefore the good effects of the Theatre of the Homeless are the result of its specifically aesthetic features. In fact, there is less and less said about the aesthetic as the book proceeds, which is surely as it should be. If the survival of our ‘social will’ indeed depends upon our aesthetics, as Regenia Gagnier says it does, we are in even worse trouble than we might have thought.
| Steve Connor | London Consortium | School of English and Humanities | Birkbeck College |