216 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 16 (2008) 185–238

Der ‘homo oeconomicus’ und sein Kredit bei Musil, Joyce, Svevo, Unamuno und Céline, Bernd Blaschke. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2004

Th e title of Blaschke’s book tells us that it links up with the kind of studies in the social sciences that are based on the proposition that a certain general idea, philosophy or concept is germane to the interpretation of specific issues. In the present case, it is obvious that economics and the economy are meant to figure prominently in achieving interpretive new insights into particular works of literature. Th is method is legitimate and even inevitable with regard to the fact that strong economic drives can be located in a conspicuous number of twentieth-century writers, such as the ones selected by Blaschke. Other names might be added. Blaschke himself mentions Hermann Broch, Th omas Mann, John Dos Passos, Emile Zola, André Gide, Luigi Pirandello, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ezra Pound, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Mehring and Ernst Toller (one might add Upton Sinclair, Th eodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and many others). However, as Blaschke correctly suggests at the outset of his monograph, the intertwining of literary criticism with political economy has not been sufficiently explored, unlike the multifarious mass of aestheticist, epistemological, psychoanalytical and sociological interpretations. Th e proof of the representation of aspects of economics in many modernist novels is, as Blaschke self-confidently declares, in the critical explanation of works written by the five modernist writers selected for his book. In the second, analytical, section he often triumphs against the theoretical odds to substantiate his thesis convincingly, though his claim to being a pioneer (besides Mark Osteen’s Th e Economy of ‘Ulysses’, 1995) of a new mode of research might be passed over as a young scholar’s brave self-promotion. Blaschke’s text is based on a doctoral dissertation (Free University Berlin, 2001), supervised by Gert Mattenklott, an eminent German professor of aesthetics, German literary history and cultural studies, and a member of the board of the German Institute of Critical Th eory (InkriT). Avowedly, Blaschke’s aim is to present a study in literary criticism, not in economics. In other words, what he seems anxious to avoid, though in fact he does not ultimately succeed, is to subordinate fictional narratives to the force of economic arguments. For this reason, he chooses a methodological procedure that is selective rather than deductive, and allows him a free hand to ‘orientate himself . . . towards an eclectically wide-ranging corpus of theories which are ushered in in order to elucidate particular economic figurations’ (p. 14; all subsequent quotations of German sources in my translation). In other words, he believes that he can operate between the Scylla of reducing literature to an illustration of economic theory and the Charybdis of literary close reading that marginalises economic topics. Th is ambiguous and elusive approach, however, has its risks, even if it goes with a sophisticated practice of textual analysis. On the one hand, it tends to neglect linguistic form which gives sense and meaning to a very particular aesthetic whole. Literature is not dogmatic; it is not logical; it is not reason-able. Literature establishes its particular authority; it is uncertain and open to interpretation.1 Th e critic’s permanent obsession with seeing

1. Blaschke has learnt from Mattenklott that works of literature are aesthetic formal entities. He also approves of Luhmann’s idea that art functions as ‘communicative disruptive action’ (‘kommunikatives Störmanöver’; p. 87). But when he plunges into the waters of economics and literature, the aesthetic principles drift gently away into the air of abstraction.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/156920608X276369 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 16 (2008) 185–238 217 various economic assumptions reified in the fictional text and to read the text as an act of representing these ideas is permanently in danger of going astray, or at least of fostering partial inferences. On the other hand, the conceptual premise upon which the project of interpretation is based must be carefully worked out in factual, epistemological and ideological ways. Weakness of the theoretical postulate will distort the results of practical critical reading. In the light of this, the flaws of Blaschke’s argument are revealed. He deliberately shies away from firmly grounding his own researches in a coherent theoretical basis which would allow him to assess systematically the specific forms of literary representation in which narration and economy converge. His hesitations are rooted in a sweeping rejection of ‘neo- Marxist’ approaches and ‘ideological critique’ which, as he muses, ‘almost exclusively talk about alienated and “false” forms of consciousness’ (p. 12). What Blaschke unveils at this early point of the book is his intention to table a contradictory position to Marxist materialist and historical thinking in toto and to Marxist literary criticism in particular, which, as he asserts against one’s better judgment, are ruled by a matrix of homological reflection, determinism and teleology. Ultimately evading the methods of historical materialism and subscribing to eclecticism, Blaschke decides in favour of a metonymic procedure of selecting particular categories which are meant to represent the economic space as a whole. Daringly, and obviously haphazardly, he chooses the notions of homo oeconomicus and credit as his major parameters. He argues that the

micro-economic conceptions of homo oeconomicus and credit . . . must be understood as a correlative to macro-economic, sociologically oriented analyses and also as coterminous with modernist novels which are structured around a single subjective protagonist. (p. 13.)

Neither the one nor the other are convincing. Generally speaking, the conception of separating particular categories for examining complex structures is an important tool of systematic analysis. (Marx sketches out logical categories such as capital in general and in particular, use-value, exchange-value, surplus-value, the commodity, etc.) But the logical terms have to be grasped within the structural whole of an economic system. Blaschke, however, dislikes this general principle. His ‘wide heuristic conception of economy’ falls into the ‘central terms’ (besides homo oeconomicus) of ‘money, exchange, value, gift and credit’ (p. 98). Depending on the given prospective possibilities of application, he deliberately calls particular categories into play in order to explicate a literary text. In this way, the terms turn into metaphysical entities, though they still denote particular aspects of the economic system. Th e dismissal of macro-economic theorems is proof of the fact that fundamental questions of political economy, for Blaschke, are to be viewed solely in terms of his individual non-materialist and subject-oriented propositions. He even ignores James Mill’s four Elements of Political Economy (1821), production, distribution, interchange and consumption; not to speak of Marx who points out, in a strictly materialist way, that capital and its self-utilisation are the starting point and the end, the motif and purpose of capitalist production; that production is always production for the benefit of capital, but not a means of shaping social life in such a way as to have a beneficial effect on all social producers.