Kornbluh - Realizing capital financial and psychic economies in Victorian form

REALIZING CAPITAL

REALIZING CAPITAL

Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form

Anna Kornbluh

Fordham University Press

New York

2014

Copyright 2014 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kornbluh, Anna.

Realizing capital : financial and psychic economies in Victorian form / Anna Kornbluh.First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-5497-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. English literature19th centuryHistory and criticism. 2. Finance in literature. 3. EconomicsPsychological aspectsEngland. 4. Economics and literatureEnglandHistory19th century. I. Title.

PR468.F56R43 2014

820.93553dc23

2013017377

Printed in the United States of America

16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

To Gregory, who read it all in the end, and who, because he is my singular, spectacular sibling, reads all the same material differently.

Contents

Mr. Casaubon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large drafts on his affections would not fail to be honoured; for we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.Middlemarch

Acknowledgments

It would be unwise to commence a work about financial metaphors with a tally of debts, so I would say instead that many midwives delivered this book and many loved ones raised it. At the University of California, Irvine, the infant project was nurtured by Etienne Balibar, Natalka Freeland, Jayne Lewis, and Irene Tucker, and above all by the incomparably wonderful, impossibly brilliant Julia Reinhard Lupton. Kenneth, Hannah, Lucy, Isabel, and Eliot Reinhard made Southern California a home for me; Mia McIver, Benjamin Bishop, Craig Carson, Debra Channick, Patricia Goldsworthy, Kir Kuiken, Janet Neary, and Vanessa Osborne made that home warm. At the University of Illinois at Chicago, where The Institute for the Humanities provided indispensable support for the books maturation, Jennifer Ashton, Nicholas Brown, Mark Canuel, Lennard Davis, Madhu Dubey, Stephen Engelmann, Chris Messenger, Walter Benn Michaels, and Mary Beth Rose set all the best ground rules, and my generous mentor Lisa Freeman helped me reframe them, while Sunil Agnani, Ainsworth Clarke, Rachel Havrelock, Nasser Mufti, and Roger Reeves formed a joyful cohort. Graduate students in my seminars Symbolic Economies, Freud and Victoria, and Formalism and Its Discontents, especially Davis Brecheisen, Ryan Brooks, Heather Doble, Jim Nyenhuis, and Trevor Strunk, offered insight and cheer. Beyond institutional walls, Elizabeth Anker, Rick Barney, Eleanor Courtemanche, Jodi Dean, Dorit Geva, Eleanor Kaufman, Kiarina Kordela, Adam Kotsko, Leigh Clare LaBerge, Rob Lehman, Caroline Levine, Todd McGowan, Steven Miller, Anna Parkinson, Emily Rohrbach, Molly Anne Rothenberg, Eric Santner, Emily Steinlight, and Audrey Wasser were and are the sisters and brothers that sustain and inspire. Before there was even an inkling of a project, the infinitely talented, magnetically energetic Andrea, John, and Gregory Kornbluh, for whom words and ideas and books are the stuff of life, made every endeavor seem doable, every uphill adventure seem desirable. And after many things were in place, Ezra Friedman gave them luster and magic and a whole new order. Mira Blue Friedman gestated gently during final revisions, and slept sweetly during the production phase of this other baby.

A version of first appeared as On Marxs Victorian Novel, Mediations 25, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 1538.

Introduction

A Case of Metaphysics: Realizing Capital

As we contemplated the fire, and as I thought what a difficult vision to realize Capital sometimes was, I put my hands into my pockets.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 1860

To realize capital is no mean feat. When Dickenss narrator glumly appraises the dim financial prospects of his nave enterprising friend, the simple indicative clause I put my hands into my pockets effectuates a contrast between the materiality of hands and the ideality of vision, the physical gesture and the metaphysical realization. Beside the worldly difficulties of acquiring capital, such a contrast underscores, stand the philosophical difficulties of realizing capital, securing the status of real for something evidently ethereal. Ambitious nafs and their generous friendsand every other player in the mid-Victorian economyfound themselves beset by these difficulties of the real as a result of the ascendance of capital propelled by financialization, the transition to an economy in which the speculative begetting of money from money supersedes the industrial production and consumption of goods. Additional crises convulsed throughout the 1870s. The frequency and extremity of financial instability over most of the nineteenth century, in my reading, frames Dickenss observation that realizing capital posed some difficulties: how can one reliably go about the business of getting on if the bottom keeps falling out? Worse yet, how can something so manifestly tempestuous be moored in reality? Difficult to accumulate, capital is also difficult to stake as real. Traversing concrete and abstract, literal and figurative, Dickenss very phrase to realize capital crackles with ironyan irony that reverberates throughout the Victorian novel.

As the Victorians preferred verb for financial genesis, to realize keys us in to the dynamic flux of the real in the epoch of financialization. According to Dr. Johnsons dictionary, when realize first came into financial usage in the eighteenth century, it meant, as we might expect from the idiom real estate, to convert money into land. The Victorian usage, by contrast, connotes the conversion of land into money, and more generally the conversion of assets, whether real estate or virtual futures, into the realer real of capital. To realize capital under financialization is a difficult vision because the real has crossed sides. How can something be made real if real itself is hard to pin down? Perhaps a difficult vision could regard real capital as something other than an oxymoron, but the vision of Great Expectations fully beholds these incongruities, pointing to the ontological instability and epistemological uncertainty of making something real when the real is on the make. No wonder it deems this predicament a case of metaphysics.

Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form analyzes this case of metaphysics of the mid-Victorian moment. It explores diverse mid-Victorian discoursesfinancial journalism, emerging psychology, political economy, and, above all, the realist novelas they register these numerous difficulties in realizing capital. In these discourses we will encounter the idea of fictitious capital and its manifold significations, all at base denoting the intuition that capital is not realnot only not material nor concrete, but not subject to the laws of time and space of this world, not possible to ground in ordinary logic. In nonfiction prose and through the literary conventions of realism (the aesthetic movement stirred by questions about the real), the Victorians trained their sights on the difficult vision of realizing fictitious capital. From the 1830s until the 1860s, Dickens was far from alone, and yet