Gender, the Market, and the Non-trivial in James

Gender, the Market, and the Non-trivial in James By Wai Chee Dimock, Brandeis University Editor's note: Professor Dimock's talk is printed here as delivered (without scholarly apparatus) at the Henry James Sesquicentennial Conference "Rethinking Gender and Sexual Politics: Henry James in the New Century," June 2, 1993. In a complex and philosophically resonant passage in Capital, Marx lays out his critique of the commodity form by critiquing its abstract operative principle, something like the epistemology of exchange. What he focuses on is the production of equivalence, the conversion of material objects into some quantifiable abstraction, so that things that are quite different can be shown to be quite similar, can be shown to have a common denominator, a measurable denominator, and can be taken to be commensurate and exchangeable. Money, the simplest and most handy vehicle of exchange, is the most obvious medium by which equivalence is being produced, and, for Marx, it is also the most obvious example of the violence that is done to the world by adequating it, by turning it into a kind of universal arithmetic, a comprehensive totality of uniformly calibrated and uniformly matchable terms. Marx is not the only one to have been struck by the mental juggling as well as the mental brutality inherent in the act of exchange. Aristotle, whom Marx cites with approval, had long ago observed in the Nicomachean Ethics that exchange works not only, most immediately, as a principle of economic transaction but The Henry James Review 15 (1994): 24-30. © 1994, The Johns Hopkins University Press Gender, the Market, and the Nontrivial 25 also, more obliquely, as a principle of epistemology, a way of apprehending the world, for "Money, acting as a measure, makes goods commensurate and equates them." Aristotle, however, simply takes note of this fact, without much outrage, but only with a kind of wariness as well as a philosophical tolerance, saying that even though, for practical purposes, things must be exchanged as the equivalent of one another, "in truth it is impossible that things differing so much should become commensurate." Marx, on the other hand, is nothing if not outraged by the postulate of equivalence in the commodity form. He is outraged for many reasons, not least of all because of the mystifications that he thinks it inflicts on the world. The postulate of equivalence, Marx argues, obscures the variety of human labor that goes into the making of disparate objects. It obscures, as well, its own arbitrary assignment of value, so that the commodity ends up confronting its human maker as a sovereign object, an autonomous given, and a complete enigma. Quite apart from the tangible workings of the market, then, Marx also objects to its intangible operations, which for him amount to a kind of concealment, a willful and insidious opacity, making the world at once unamenable to human control and impenetrable to human reason. I have talked about Marx at some length, partly to acknowledge one influential way of thinking about the market, one that focuses on equivalence as an instrument of mystification, and one that, in a somewhat modified form, is still very much current today, reappearing, for example, in Habermas's critique of equivalence as a self-legitimizing provision of the bourgeois state. But, mostly, I am putting Marx squarely in the foreground so that I can try out a line of argument different from his. Like Marx, I want to think about the market in epistemological terms. Unlike him, however, I am less worried about mystification than about something more like its opposite, something like an absolute clarity of explanation . The market, I want to suggest, works not only through concealment, but also through an adequating rationality whose ambition is to "account for" the world in a quite literal way, to make people and things not only calculable but absolutely transparent, absolutely explainable in their calculability. This line of argument—focusing on the tyranny of explanation rather than the tyranny of mystification—has in fact been an important alternative critique of the market, developed most powerfully by the Frankfurt school. Adorno and Horkheimer, for example, have argued that "Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes...