In my first post, I tried to discuss one rationale for the recentish fashion for autofiction—that it is an attempt to retain the traditional bourgeois novel’s concern with the economy without expanding into absurdity. If the modern global economy seems somehow too big to plot, it isn’t yet too big to think. One of my many, many readers, however, reached out to say that it seemed strange to lump Rachel Cusk in with the more clearly world-system bestriding Lerner. Is she not concerned with an entirely different set of questions, about art and life, and the seemingly bitter struggle between men and women?
Yes. Cusk is self-evidently not trying to write the novel ‘after late capitalism’. There is no real attempt to make the story of one person’s thoughts carry the ripples from the global supply chain anchored beneath it. Rachel Cusk, in spite of her extreme self-consciousness, is not self-conscious about political economy. This is, on the one hand, self-evidently true. And yet something about that unconscious patch, I think, results in a medium that carries a uniquely vivid impression of political-economic questions, like the footprint on the sand of Crusoe’s island.
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From what I can tell, Cusk’s actual politics are demographically predictable. The liberalism of well off, well-educated, Gen X homeowners. But what Cusk understands, and inhabits with something like a demonic energy, it seems to me, is the spirit of the commodity itself. I don’t mean the goods that are commodities. I mean the form of abstraction that allows us to see things as exchangeable.
I’ll try not to get too deep into Marxian jargon here. For Marx, in the most orthodox understanding, the exchange value of a commodity expresses ‘socially necessary’ labour time. In capitalism, humans come to understand that human energy, human effort can be agglutinated, and weighed up against itself in any object, and this concept of value is what permits exchange. It also guarantees that production for profit rests on the exploitation of labour.
In neoclassical economics, on the other hand, prices are the expression of individual desires and their satisfactions. These can be aggregated, by a kind of blank abstraction called money, into the price of goods, as a result of the differently weighted opinions of everyone as expressed in their willingness and ability to pay.
I don’t think it’s a writer’s job to care very much about whether Marx or the neoclassicals are right. But they might perhaps be interested in the imaginative act of creating value, where an object is somehow made, as if by magic, to contain this mysterious stuff, whether that is the value of the human life and labour that went into it, or the value of the human desire that wants to hold it close.
Here’s a nicely imaginative passage of Marx on the nature of the commodity:
The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.
Marx’s ‘wondrous ideas’ are the system of capitalism itself. This is a system which seems to us not to be the product of human decisions, but dictated to us by objects. The price of gas has risen, the world must readjust accordingly. Some people will have to go hungry. The energy market has spoken. This, is, roughly speaking, what he referred to as the fetish character of commodities.
You don’t actually need to believe in the labour theory of value to believe in commodity fetishism (though here is an allegedly empirical study on the LTV), you just need to believe that there are ways of bestowing personhood on things, some of which might serve ritual and self-justifying functions in a society. A lot of literary critical energy has consequently gone into linking Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism to the ways that finished works of art might become commodities, objectionably masking the labour that went into them—and the social relations which permitted or mandated that labour—from the reader, drawing attention only to the work’s completeness and isolation, and thus dancing to the tune of capitalism itself.
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In her essay ‘Making Home’, Rachel Cusk discusses her desire to transform the space of a London flat she bought, and speaks of the way that her own labour to transform the house into what she wanted returned in the new interior itself, as a kind of haunting. At home, everywhere I looked I now seemed to see a hidden part of myself that was publicly exposed
The objects here come alive, as they do for Marx; but they do not exactly pretend to an independence from social relations of production. Instead, they contain the lingering remnants of her labours, and her desires, and her relationships. The domestic interior becomes the ghost of its implicitly feminized owner.
For me, the best line in Cusk’s essay occurs when one of Cusk’s acquaintances see the house, pre-refurb, and reads its dishevelled, non-prettiness as an act of resistance by Cusk, against the need to transform your living space into a magazine photoshoot:
He complimented me on taking this stand against the ubiquity of middle-class tastes; he appeared to view it as an artistic and philosophical position. Don’t ever change it, he said with a small smile. I’ll be disappointed if you do.
This moment of classic Cuskian smugness-ventriloquy is emblematic of the way she links her interior spaces to the desires and labours of women. It is they, she suggests, who need to live in domestic interiors, and in objects, who are compelled to express themselves through things that in theory (Marxist or otherwise) cannot be expressive.
But, you might be asking, isn’t this precisely an instance of doubly intense commodity fetishism, a wrong way of imagining the social relationships inside objects? From the standpoint of the consumer, and not the producer. Isn’t she having a relationship with the objects as if they were people?
My girlfriend and I watch a TV show funded by the world’s largest corporation, where individual fashion designers compete to be ‘the next global brand’, and I love the moment where they have to talk about ‘their girl’. In the business of fashion, the clothes make the woman. If commodity fetishism is, in the strictest Marxist reading, whereby we mistakenly imagine commodities to be, not people’s work, but in some sense, people—ends in themselves—surely we can go further, as Theodor Adorno and countless later critics of the advertising industry did, and see that we are even more under the sway of commodities when we picture the life we live through them?
Well, yes. Obviously. But does a writer need to perform a sort of self-conscious curtsy to Adorno in order to say something interesting about commodities? Must we adopt the smugly iconoclastic view of the man who will be disappointed when Cusk acquires a magnificent kitchen island? Or is his iconoclasm itself just another way of being under the commodity’s sway, granting it magical malign powers, an idol to be smashed, some kind of fetish?
Maybe it’s more interesting or powerful to, as it were, tune in to the imaginative wavelength the commodities dance to. Maybe this is the one that art itself emerges from, the urge to put some of ourself into the world, to make mute things speak, of our labours and our desires.
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The first book of Cusk’s ‘trilogy’, begins with a billionaire, a man at the top of the pole built as a fetish of the contemporary social relations of capitalism:
Before the flight I was invited for lunch at a London club with a billionaire I’d been promised had liberal credentials. He talked in his open-necked shirt about the new software he was developing, that could help organisations identify the employees most likely to rob and betray them in the future. We were meant to be discussing a literary magazine he was thinking of starting up: unfortunately I had to leave before we arrived at that subject. He insisted on paying for a taxi to the airport, which was useful since I was late and had a heavy suitcase.
I love the line here ‘he talked in his open-necked shirt’, which obviously conveys a sketch of what kind of person he is through his consumption choices, but is also profoundly grammatically weird. Wearing an open necked shirt, he talked, would be the more conventional way of putting it. But then we wouldn’t have this blurred line between the shirt and the person. He is not simply speaking while wearing the shirt, he is speaking in the shirt, the shirt is doing some of his speaking for him. As the passage develops, Faye, the trilogy’s taciturn and yet extraordinarily judgemental narrator, shows us this person’s desire to leave an impression of himself somewhere, anywhere:
The billionaire had been keen to give me the outline of his life story, which had begun unprepossessingly and ended—obviously—with him being the relaxed, well-heeled man who sat across the table from me today. I wondered whether in fact what he wanted now was to be a writer, with the literary magazine as his entrée. A lot of people want to be writers: there was no reason to think you couldn’t buy your way into it. This man had bought himself in, and out, of a great many things. He mentioned a scheme he was working on, to eradicate lawyers from people’s personal lives.
It's funny stuff. But I think it’s also crucial to begin the novel this way—with a frustrated billionaire, someone who wants to be taken seriously as an artist, who is trying to get into the business of artists, the examination of persons and relationships, sifting them and assessing their value. It’s important to read the novel as taking place in a space which is fully ruled by capital, but in which capital is just another medium, like art, through which desires are expressed.
There’s not enough space to offer a full reading of the trilogy in this way, which does a lot, very richly and well. But these are books which seem to me to inhabit the logic of capitalism, the endless projections of desire and the longing for fulfilment as comprehensible in money terms, to show the human face of capitalism itself. As Faye goes around listening to stories, making her living as a writer, renovating a flat, quietly judging, we see the entanglement of all of this business with narrative. That human face of capitalism is the space for stories that we make everywhere, perhaps, as Marxists might argue, to our cost.
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While, like most people who care about these sorts of things, I was a fan of the trilogy, I think I preferred Second Place, Cusk’s most recent novel. Its narrator, M, is perhaps less trendily restrained than Faye, and the weirdness of simply rewriting a memoir about DH Lawrence coming to stay may have contributed to the book’s comparative critical underperformance. But the novel is so good, I think, partly because, asymptotic to its hammering out of its big questions of men, women, and art, it is all about the difference, or similarity between art and property, art and commodity.
The novel is set in motion by an encounter with Art, or so it claims. The great painter L comes to stay with the medium-successful novelist M, who invites him because she once felt connected to his work during a profound emotional crisis. After some disappointments, L finally does come to stay with M and her husband Tony, lodging in their ‘second place’ a tasteful cottage beside their house in rural Norfolk. L brings with him his young girlfriend, Brett, and disrupts the cosy family vibe (of M, Tony, her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend Curt) by being one of the most monstrous art monsters imaginable.
L is determined to ruin M, to prove that she is a nothing, by comparison to him, and we see this as a battle of the sexes, a battle which culminates, finally, in a vision of the dependence of masculine art on womanhood. L sees M and her daughter swimming naked in the night, and paints his finest work, a revelation of his own infantile neediness, before having a stroke, crawling away to Paris, and dying.
In order to paint this picture of primal struggle, however, Cusk apparently needs to offer us a struggle over the nature and meaning of property. M wants L to paint the landscape around her house. She wants him to be her houseguest, and she is shocked when he violates her hospitality, when he doesn’t paint the world as she sees it, and when he desecrates her property. The second place itself, the property, represents a funny fantasy of freedom:
We built the second place when Tony bought a parcel of wasteland that bordered our land, to prevent it from being misused. The rules here about development are strict, but of course people find all kinds of ways to get around them. The most usual one is to plant trees in order to cut them down again for money, pale and sapless trees that grow fast and straight up in rows like soldiers and then are quickly felled like soldiers too, so that what’s left is a shorn mess of amputated stumps. We didn’t want those poor soldiers marching past our windows to their deaths day and night! So we bought it, intending to turn it over to nature, more or less, but once we’d started clearing away all the brambles and fallen trees we came upon a whole different story.
The word ‘story’ there might strike you as a little heavy handed in isolation, but I think it works as a way of entangling control and narrative into the house they build there, which is also the space of art, the second place, and the space of property. It is the fantasy space that is a bit like our imagined relationship with a commodity.
As the novel proceeds, and the second place receives its disrespectful squatters, the fantasy of control is upended. M wants to treat L’s art, in a manner of speaking, as her property, something she can express herself with. He resists that, and tries to teach her a lesson about the ‘real’ nature of art. The kind of stories we want to tell ourselves about ourselves, through the ownership of commodities, are perhaps not the same as the ugly, terrifying stories we must confront in order to make great art. L, in his violation of the space, reveals that truth; he turns M’s property into something else, hostile to the settled and implicitly feminine order that M’s cottage represents.
M's own control of the narrative, in the end, is also rendered questionable. She begins with her first encounter with the paintings of L, and explains why she wants him to stay, what he means to her. But the reason he ‘really’ comes is because a collapse in the art market has bankrupted him.
On the one hand, such an economic motive represents another failure of M’s, the story is not her property; it is at the mercy of L and this larger system he fits into. read this way, the property market undermines both M and L’s art.
But, on the other hand, this motive distorts or clarifies L’s own desire to bring artistic chaos into M’s property. Whatever kind of pure art he represents, its misogyny, embodied in the cruel mural he paints on M’s wall of her as a repellent crone/Eve, may seems also to be an intensification of his frustration with the market. Home ownership, by dint of being domestic space, seems to be feminine, for Cusk. It is the place where women, as she sees it store or leave the impress of their fantasies (We might think, too, of the labour of social reproduction not counted as value-creating labour by classical Marxism, but insisted upon by later Marxist feminists). By taking revenge against M’s femininity, we can see L making this association too. He is feminized by the market and reasserts his power by denying that anything feminized could be associated with art, including domestic interiors. And yet all his art is dependent, both on the market, and on the feminine that he longs for. His art in the end, is a commodity, destined to decorate those self-same domestic interiors.
And what are the subject matters of novels themselves if not domestic interiors? The chain that Cusk creates, linking art, narrative, womanhood, and property, seems to me to be one that depends on something that cannot be called a critique of the logic of commodities. The things you own, the curtains that are so important in this novel, for example, are not the labour that went into them; but they really do absorb the desires people feel, in a way that feels like art. If the romantic critique of capitalism is that we are alienated from our labour when we see our work turn into commodities that do not speak of ourselves, modern consumer capitalism offers us another way to make these objects speak. We can use them to tell stories about ourselves, not as producers, but as consumers. M can consume L’s art and turn it into her own story.
Ben Lerner, Cusk’s peer in major Gen-X autofiction, holds a cup of coffee and fantasises about the ‘majesty and murderous stupidity’ of the labour arrangements that put it in his hand. Cusk fantasises about the kinds of personhood inside things that she can consume. If you want to be economistic about it, you can perhaps say that Cusk embraces the consumer identity that we could trace to the deindustrialization of the ‘core’ countries of ‘the west’. Western writers are all consumers really, rather than producers, and so how else should they envision art, if not through consumption?
But again, does a vision of art-making as like commodity consumption make for bad art? Do we need to see through the fetish to the labour? Here’s a little parable from the king of anti-commodity thinking, Theodor Adorno:
The mortally sick Beethoven, who flung away a novel by Walter Scott with the cry: “The fellow writes for money,” while himself proving an extremely experienced and tenacious businessman in commercializing the last quartets – works representing the most extreme repudiation of the market – offers the most grandiose example of the unity of the opposites of market and autonomy in bourgeois art. The artists who succumb to ideology are precisely those who conceal this contradiction instead of assimilating it into the consciousness of their own production, as Beethoven did:
What I mean to say, in general, is that Cusk is a great bourgeois artist. Where cowards might flinch, and traitors sneer, she inhabits the world of modern market society, grasps its imaginative ways of being. She bends them to her own ends and produces something autonomous. This is worth any number of pseudopolitical attempts to decommodify the novel. Think of the man who doesn’t want Cusk to have her kitchen island. If she wrote to please him, that would only cheapen her art.