Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form

by Anna Kornbluh

During a tumultuous period when financial speculation began rapidly to outpace industrial production and consumption, Victorian financial journalists commonly explained the instability of finance by criticizing its inherent artifice―drawing persistent attention to what they called “fictitious capital.” In a shift that naturalized this artifice, this critique of fictitious capital virtually disappeared by the 1860s, replaced by notions of fickle investor psychology and mental equilibrium encapsulated in the fascinating metaphor of “psychic economy.”

In close rhetorical readings of financial journalism, political economy, and the works of Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, Kornbluh examines the psychological framing of economics, one of the nineteenth century’s most enduring legacies, reminding us that the current dominant paradigm for understanding financial crisis has a history of its own. She shows how novels illuminate this displacement and ironize ideological metaphors linking psychology and economics, thus demonstrating literature’s unique facility for evaluating ideas in process. Inheritors of this novelistic project, Marx and Freud each advance a critique of psychic economy that refuses to naturalize capitalism.

Genres: Theory, History

232 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2013

About the author

Anna Kornbluh is Associate Professor of English at UIC. She is the author of Realizing Capital, and the manuscript, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space. Articles on Marxist aesthetics have appeared in Mediations, Novel, the LARB, Understanding Film: Marxist Perspectives, Lacan & Contemporary Cinema, and the Bloomsbury Companion to Marx.

Reviews

[Tom L · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent intervention in literary criticism on the intersection of literary and economic form, typically dominated by Foucauldian inflected New Historicism and "new economic criticism." Against the latter, Kornbluh deploys a Marxist-deconstructionist hermeneutic that is able to grasp literary form as more than just a manipulator of belief in "fictitious capital" and "fictitious capital" as more than just the imposition of a financial fiction on reality. Here, it is the rhetorical figure of metalepsis that does all the work. Metalepsis, broadly interpreted, is the substitution of an effect for its cause. Thus in financial speculation one invests in a future--or effect--before causality has actually brought it into existence. Hence the enormous risk. Kornbluh argues that while "fictitious capital" already operates on one level of metalepsis, the Victorian novel operates on yet another. Faced with the devastating risks of speculation, the Victorian novel argues, Kornbluh claims, for a tight moderation of psychic economy, of libidinal expenditure. If the market is dominated by booms and busts, the individual must moderate their own libidinal (and financial) investments in order to remain stable in the midst of crisis. Thus psychology, by way of metaleptic displacement, becomes the location of the novel's proposed resolution of the dangers of speculation out of control--an ideological and utopian solution to a real-life problem as Fredric Jameson might say. The chapter on Marx--a brilliant tour de force interpretation--argues that _Capital_ reverses this psychological displacement, by making capital into the protagonist of what Kornbluh cleverly calls Marx's Victorian novel. Thus regrounded in the economy, psychology becomes in Marx's hands a metaphorical way of talking about the financial system as a kind of subject and structure in its own right. The final chapter on Freud argues that Freud never intended his economic metaphors to be made literal, but rather saw them as just that, metaphors for thinking and talking about the psyche. Kornbluh thus warns against using Freud as a justification for the metaleptic leap from the economy to psychology that her Victorian novels (and some 21st-century economists) typically want to make. Kornbluh's book is one of the most exciting books of Victorian criticism to come out in sometime. Its deconstructionist hermeneutic, however, confronts its own limitations, threatening, by way of the very metaleptic procedure it describes, to displace the very possibility of grasping capitalism as a concrete reality. Here, it tends to rejoin the "new economic criticism," from which it had wanted to differentiate itself, by construing the economy as a linguistic structure. Even if it is often, as Marx sometimes did, convenient to draw parallels between language and the economy, it is equally important to assert their difference.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 3 out of 5]

The thesis is simple: "realism" in novels is not a mimesis at the level of content, but rather at the level of form. The future anterior tense that governs financial speculation, "fictitious capital," is also at play in the psychic economy of the Victorian novel, examined through a brilliant reading of sympathy in George Eliot's Middlemarch, alongside readings of Dickens, Trollope, Marx, and Freud.