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Heads
or Tails: The Poetics of Money
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Heads or
Tails: The Poetics of Money.
By Jochen Hörisch. Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 2000. 349
pages. $39.95.
Money has become a hot academic commodity in recent years. The
sustained
economic expansion of the 1990's, the replacement of Cold War politics
by
issues of Russian and Chinese trade and economic integration, as well
as
the promises and perils globalization have prompted a number of
scholars
to look anew at the role played by finance in the shaping of social and
cultural life. This subject has been addressed to English readers from
a
literary critical perspective by, for example, Marc Shell and Patrick
Brantlinger, but the German speaking world still needs, claims Jochen
Hörisch, the kind of problem based literary analysis suited to
unpacking
the complex and paradoxical relations between money and literature, an
approach which makes it possible "to discover the currency of
meaning itself" (38). To this grand end Hörisch eschews literary
history as such (it merely relates text to text) in favor of a
narrative
that explores intertextual (subjects, motifs, and problems "having
to do with money') (36). The result is a head spinning tour of the
literary canon through the often competing, overlapping, and discordant
theories of Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Adorno, Benjamin, and Sohn Rethel,
among others, stitched together into an erudite and richly allusive (if
frustratingly unsystematic) meta interpretation of money's magical
disenchantment of the world.
At the heart of Hörisch's argument is the idea that money defines
modernity because (like the Communion rite of the preceding age and the
mass media of postmodernity) it performs an "ontosemiological"
function in providing a comprehensive [316/317] standard by which
everything can be understood and evaluated, social relations ordered,
and
the deepest questions about meaning and being answered. Belles lettres
allegedly offers a unique vantage to criticize this process because
only
poetic expression, which operates outside the utilitarian constraints
felt by scientific and quotidian discourse, can dispense with the
obsessive "covering" of the naked (non)truth lurking behind a
money ordered world. Only in a story can it be said that the emperor
has
no clothes.
Hörisch delivers on his promise not to write a conventional
literary
history, but underneath its sophisticated hermeneutics and avant garde
theory, Heads or Tails can be seen to belong to an even older
literary genre: demonology. It is the invention of money that cast
humanity out of its prelapsarian innocence into a world of
"universal deficiency" (152). Money is the "diabolical
medium" of modernity that has dissolved all qualitative difference
into a universal system of equivalence (and hence insipid indifference)
(221). Money has even seized hold of time itself, transforming it into
yet another scarce commodity. Hörisch is particularly vexed in
this
respect by the “gullibility” of so many millions to pay for life
insurance in the here and now in return for a company's dubious promise
to pay out thirty or forty years hence. He sees in this enterprise
nothing less than a "a stylistically problematic sacrilege"
that attempts phantasmagorically to fend off "finiteness, time, and
death" (128).
Of course life insurance policyholders are not remotely so naïve
or
megalomaniacal, but Hörisch’s sour appraisal of them is
characteristic of
the book's relentless identification of money with spiritual vacuity,
social alienation, ecological disaster, political turmoil and war. Even
a
vigorous critic of modern capitalism and its handmaiden money, might
well
pause to consider whether money might also, on occasion, confer social
freedom through its anonymity, or contribute to human happiness through
the increased availability and diversification of consumables, or, even
if as a consequence of naked self interest, overcome religious or
cultural prejudices -- benefits Joseph Addison marveled at during his
famous literary perambulation around the Royal Exchange at the
beginning
of the eighteenth century.
Historians will also find Hörisch's arguments weakened by
evidentiary and
logical shortcomings. A fundamental claim he makes is that "Western
rationality and subjectivity are epiphenomena of money" (178).
Accordingly, Hörisch attributes rationalist, post Socratic
philosophy to
the rise of coined money both because the interposition of money
created
an abstract system by which "various things are associated,
synthesized, comprehended and subsumed under uniform categories,"
and because the agora itself constituted the locus for the exchange of
philosophical ideas (182). But historians may justifiably object that
while the diffusion of coinage out of Lydia and Ionia from the seventh
century B.C.E. did have revolutionary implications, it wasn't
revolutionary in quite the way Hörisch would have us think. The
idea of
an abstract measure of value embodied in precious metal (in the form of
ingots, rings, wires, or tripods) developed as early as the third
millennium B.C.E.; and even in societies that lacked a metallic
exchange
medium it seems to have involved no great intellectual effort to extend
common barter media metaphorically into abstract units of account. Our
word "pecuniary," for example, is derived from the Latin pecus
(head of cattle). Hörisch's
argument that the circulation of
money shaped Western rationality [317/318] and subjectivity also fails
on
comparative grounds. Money developed in China at least as early as it
did
in Asia Minor, and coins have circulated in Islamic and Hindu lands
since
antiquity. If money is such a potent force in shaping philosophy,
literature, and culture, can its use really explain the intellectual
and
artistic properties of the West?
I suspect, however, that in the end Hörisch is less interested in
making
a persuasive historical case than in using history selectively to
suggest
aesthetic alternatives to money. These possibilities are never
delineated, but somehow involve the Promethean power of art to provide
(alternative versions of reality) (150) drawn either from a
paradisiacal
past before the advent of money or from a utopian vision of a world
where
gold shackles only criminals and a freed people finally (and perhaps
again) savors the world in its full immediacy.
SUNY College at
Potsdam
Geoffrey Clark
SOURCE: Yearbook of
German-American Studies, vol. 38,
2003, pp. 316-318.
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