Modernism, Finance, Value, Form

What does the term modernism signify? A distinct historical period? Or an aesthetic mode, which flourished in a particular moment, but which exceeds—in its early, late, and contemporary iterations—the boundaries of its own assumed periodization? These are not new questions, but they are lent a new and vital efficacy by Regina Martin's Modernism and Finance Capital: British Literature, 1870–1940.Martin suggests, in the book's introduction, that modernism is best understood as a “‘constellation’ . . . of historical, political, economic, social, and cultural phenomena working in dialogue with one another at the turn of the twentieth century” (3). This “constellation,” more particularly, limns “the translation of shifting forms of economic and social value into a problem of aesthetics so that the formalism associated with modernist writing is an aesthetic and semiotic corollary to—not representation of—the historical processes of finance capital” (3). The constellation metaphor is joined, in Martin's account, to Raymond Williams's concept of a “structure of feeling.” Both of these figures are attempts to grasp what Louis Althusser termed the “complex unity” of capital, the interrelation—and mutual irreducibility—of its social composition and its apparatuses, or modalities, of mediation. On the one hand, then, Martin's book is generatively engaged in debates about what modernism is, or about what and when it was. And on the other hand, it contributes, in similarly edifying terms, to the broader critical problematic of what literature in particular does—what it can tell us about the world that other aesthetic or narrative forms, including history and theory, cannot, and how it not only reflects the world but is bound up in the process of its perpetual becoming and evolution. This ambitious scope is matched, in Modernism and Finance Capital, by a charmingly capacious theoretical vocabulary. Giovanni Arrighi's work on the shape of capital's historical unfolding is coaxed into conversation with Brian Massumi's reflections on the “affective intensities” of our corporeal life, and the capacities of literature to illuminate it. Such juxtapositions are occasionally dissonant, but that dissonance might be registered as an echo of the book's critical objects—the formal multiplicity of modernism, or the contradictions of capital itself. The argument proceeds via a series of literary case studies, organized into three parts, each of which explicates one of the “historical processes of finance capital” that Martin is keen to highlight: “The rise of the professional classes, the economic turn toward London, and the development of the modern corporation.” Each of these material transformations corresponds, respectively, to emergent modernist forms: “Speculating subjectivity, urban poetics, and affective intensity” (6, 5).The hermeneutic premise that underlines part I is that character, in Victorian novels, functions as a kind of “value form,” in the Marxian sense. In Martin's words, “Character is, like Marx's commodity, the dominant value form around which systems of signification and acts of exchange organize themselves in the moral universe of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels” (36). These “acts of exchange” include marriage, most prominently, but also other relations or engagements that confer a certain social status (qua social capital) while remaining apparently free from the messy sphere of the market. Character, in other words, both mirrors economic forms and is a bulwark against their total ascendance; it is one crucial ingredient of expanded reproduction that is nonetheless “stable” in the face of capital's frenzied and destructive search for new sources of valorization. The modernist novel, though, Martin asserts, “dispenses with that project.” Modernist fictions “are no longer concerned with character reading as an organizing principle and as a touchstone for the consolidation of meaning and value” (36). Instead, “modernist literature depicts a model of subjectivity that encodes the logic of volatility,” which is basic to finance capitalism. Value, in such narrative or poetic worlds, “emerges out of a radical and constant re-forming . . . and de-realizing”; it becomes, Martin asserts, less a stable form than a technology or expression of “formlessness” (36).Martin tracks this shift via readings of Anthony Trollope's Palliser series, the detective fictions of Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle, and Virginia Woolf's The Waves. Trollope's Palliser novels, Martin contends, make vivid the individual and collective anxiety conditioned by the rise of finance capital; the specter of “desire” and risk—expressed by restless romantic longing or the impulse toward financial speculation—is counterposed to the ultimate equivalence of marriage and the virtue of steadily accumulated and conservatively maintained wealth. But if character and concrete stores of value prevail, in a moralistic sense, in Trollope's fictions, their fading symbolic and material power is also made plain. In Collins's The Moonstone and Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, meanwhile, the waning efficacy of character, or its increasing elusiveness, maps onto new formations of class, which foreground the increasing centrality of white-collar professionals—the stewards and accountants of capital in the moment of its financialization. Here it is not character but “professionalism” that acts as a check on the superfluity of speculative desire. This new class of professionals, though, is compelled to constantly accumulate and reshuffle its own “human capital,” which recasts character (or personality) as a fluid and performative, rather than stable and essential, source of value. In The Waves and myriad other modernist works, character—like the commodity form, newly displaced by the play of financial signs—becomes an “unnecessary friction,” and desire and excess are both liberated, enacted rather than constrained by literary form.This “speculating subjectivity” and the broader “aesthetic of volatility” to which it belongs emerged in concert with a new poetics of the urban. In part II, Martin chronicles how the pervasiveness and intensification of financial processes transformed Britain's economic geography, as overaccumulated capital—moored in disparate industrial towns—migrated to London, where it was invested in burgeoning institutions and practices of speculation. In literary-historical terms, this spatial reorientation coincided with the fading prominence of the provincial novel and the rise of the urban novel—if belatedly so, Martin notes, echoing Raymond Williams, as the provincial novel had prevailed for a generation after society itself had become predominantly urban (81). As one expression of the economic turn, “modernist novels register a cultural turn toward London,” while redefining a form—the novel—that, historically, had been shaped by “the spatial configuration of the feudal estate” (81).This emergent “urban poetics” is especially evident, Martin demonstrates, in novels such as Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, H. G. Wells's Tono-Bungay, and Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark. In the provincial novel, the “old logic of industrial capital in which commodities and character are repositories of meaning” dovetailed with the coherent socio-spatial cartography of the feudal estate. In the London narratives of Hardy, Wells, and Rhys, by contrast, the “perpetual volatility” of finance capital—the untethering of value from the commodity form and from character—is expressed by the “nonorder” of the metropolis (107). The denizens of these novels struggle to cognitively map their surroundings, to apprehend the shape of the city or the relationship between city and country. Tess—a quintessential provincial fiction of the late Victorian period—is perhaps an unlikely candidate for inclusion in this assemblage. But as Martin suggests, Hardy's novel—and indeed his entire oeuvre—betray a concern with the incursion of London into the provinces—the ways the social and cultural forms of the city (the “structure of feeling” of finance capital) bleed into the country, disfiguring its pastoral quality, and blurring its apparently stable regimes of meaning and value.If Tess dramatizes the porous boundaries between country and city, and gestures toward the coincidence or collision of industrial and financial mechanisms of valorization, it also models, in its form, the imbrication of Victorian realism and modernism. Tess, Martin indicates, is an instance of realism that is haunted by the specter, or infused with the “ache,” of modernism—the social disintegration it registers, and the (ambivalent) aesthetic newness it heralds. Martin's book is at its strongest when it attends to these sites of synthesis or indistinction, the interrelation of, rather than sharp break between—in the case of part II—spatial orders, capitalist modes of production, and literary forms. The years from 1870 to 1940, which Modernism and Finance Capital invokes in its subtitle, are borrowed from Arrighi's schema of global capital's expansionary cycles. It was these decades, according to Arrighi, that marked the financial phase of Britain's economic hegemony. But as Arrighi was careful to stress, and as Martin also acknowledges, the cyclical movement from commodity production to financialization does not entail the wholesale displacement of the former by the latter. Finance capital may have been paradigmatic, in material and financial terms, around the turn of the century, but the relations and cultures of industry absolutely remained central, throughout those decades, to the structuring of both British society and the world-system at large.The task, in other words, is not only to trace the transition from one cycle of accumulation to another, or one literary period to another, but to think about the dynamics of their concurrent combination—to examine the cooperation between industrial and finance capital, say, and to uncover the germ of modernism in realism, or the residue of realism in modernism. Such interrelations or syntheses are implicit in many of Martin's readings, but they enter the analytic foreground when the angle of her lens widens to capture not only Britain but global processes and relations of capital, which the British empire had helped reshape. The chapter that concludes the book's second part focuses on Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark. Here, the salient dialectic is not country and city—within England—but colony and metropole. Martin's astute analysis of the novel highlights how Anna, a colonial subject who is sent to England from the Caribbean after the death of her mother, struggles to make sense of the metropolitan world she encounters, or to reconcile—to grasp the relationship between—her former home and her current one. The acute sense of alienation that marks her British life, that is, is one symptom of an arrested or unrealized cognitive mapping, a disorientation evinced at the level of form. “The resulting aesthetic,” Martin writes, “is one of sparsity and void; the novel can be read as a semiotic system of dearth: sentences left incomplete, actions that don't make sense, and questions and answers that are incommensurate” (125). In this instance, the “aesthetic of volatility” that modernism encodes is not merely an effect, or expression, of the cataclysms of finance capital; it reflects, more expansively, the complex “constellation” of global capital, the manifold parts—distinct modes, spaces, and temporalities of accumulation—that make it up, and the struggle to apprehend their interrelation.One might anticipate that the third and final part of Modernism and Finance Capital would inhabit this more expansive analytic frame, locating British modernism within capitalist modernity, the shape and substance of which finance capital had decisively transformed. And in one sense it does; Martin demonstrates how Conrad's imperial novels—Lord Jim, Victory, and Nostromo—adumbrate, however imperfectly, the changing nature of capitalist social relations on a global scale. At the same time, though, and with more sustained attention, part III turns inward, into the body—that of the corporation and of the individual. Conrad's imperial novels, Martin contends, “associate the family-owned firm with a presence of territorialized, material value and emotional connection to history, nation, and family,” which has, Conrad laments, been replaced by the “deterritorialized materialism of a modern corporation that trades in affect.” The latter movement—from a located “semiotics of emotion” to a deterritorialized “semiotics of affect”—is clarified, Martin suggests, by the modernist poetry of Ezra Pound, H. D., and T. S. Eliot (130, 131). “Affect,” Martin writes, advancing her own definition of a sometimes vague theoretical concept, “denotes a state of being in suspension in which the impact of body and object cannot be translated into socially mediated meaning through cognition, expression, and actions” (162). Pound, H. D., and Eliot, she argues, refuse to perform that translation; instead, the “affective state” itself remains the “image,” or the “object of poetic contemplation” (162–63). In this way, these instances of modernist poetry both crystallize the value that inheres in “affective intensity” and unconsciously resist the capture of that value by the modern corporation, which, Martin asserts, is eager to “mine the energy potential of affectivity”—to seize upon affect as a key site of valorization (to “translate” it, in other words, into a more measurable unit of value).The dialectic of affectivity, or affective intensity—its status as a source of both economic value and literary value—frames the conclusion to Modernism and Finance Capital. In the closing pages, Martin revisits the book's foundational idea that modernism and the “historical processes of finance capital” constitute a definite constellation, within which affect acts as an “anchoring node” (186). In my reading, the precise shape and composition of this constellation is no more clear at the end of the volume than it was at the beginning. But perhaps that is because the various concepts or terms or forms or modes that make it up are themselves never fixed as discrete phenomena or as a set of relations. Martin implies as much when she refers to the “affective complexes” of “perpetually reconfiguring social contexts” (196). And indeed, the book's closing lines compellingly identify the drift or reverberation of modernism beyond its paradigmatic periodization to “the multiplicities it is still becoming,” within the stubborn twilight of our own financialized age (199).