Aesthetics, Economics and Commodity Culture: Theorizing Value in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain

Aesthetics, Economics and Commodity Culture: Theorizing Value in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain Josephine Guy University of Nottingham CONSUMERISM, consumption and the commodification of culture —in recent years these have become some of the dominant terms in the literary and cultural historiography of late nineteenth-century Britain .1 We are frequently invited to view specific cultural products of the time not as works that embody humane values but rather as commodities whose worth is to be understood in terms of their exchange value in an increasingly complex and overcrowded market. As Patrick Brantlinger , one of the most trenchant advocates of this new historiography, has put it, we must learn to view nineteenth-century fiction "as a commodity, exchangeable for money."2 At the same time, however, other critics have drawn attention to the ways in which some cultural works (although functioning as commodities) attempted to resist or disguise their commodity status by self-consciously critiquing the terms and values of consumer culture. So Dickens's Little Dorrit can be viewed as a condemnation of capital accumulation; or Wilde's society comedies both exploit and undermine consumerism by simultaneously exhibiting and subverting images of consumption.3 The fundamental proposition common to this body of criticism is that the values of art and of the market are—in some complex but not fully explained way—inseparable. And the logic of this position is not simply that the production and exchange of particular artifacts involves commerce with market values; rather it is implied that even contemporary theorizing about art cannot escape the modes of evaluation produced by a market (that is, a consumer) economy. In this respect, one of the most recent and striking claims about the mterconnectedness of art and the market in the late nineteenth century 143 ELT 42 : 2 1999 concerns an alleged congruence between ways in which the market (or economics) and art (or aesthetics) were conceptualized. Specifically, Regenia Gagnier has argued that the concept of "aesthetic man" (as articulated by Walter Pater) "converges" with the re-conceptualization of "economic man" by marginal utility theorists in general and by the Manchester economist William Stanley Jevons in particular. In both cases the individual is figured as a "passive consumer" with "insatiable wants." In this view, it is exactly "the terms" of economic theory—"rational choice and revealed preference"—and its methods—"individualism , subjectivism, behaviourism"—which are seen to be paralleled in aesthetic theorizing.4 In this kind of account the precise nature of the relationship between aesthetic and economic discourses is not specified in any detail: it exists only at a very general level. So no argument is made about actual borrowings or influences, nor indeed about causality (how and where, for example, Jevons's work might have been a necessary condition for that of Pater, or, possibly, vice-versa).5 Rather, the connection is asserted at the level of what is first described as a "parallel," and then later more forcefully as a "convergence."6 This slippage from the term "parallel" to what is virtually its opposite—a "convergence"—is revealing. It strongly implies, but fails actually to argue, that the relationship between the two kinds of discourse amounts to something more substantial than mere coincidence or contiguity. Their coexistence is assumed to gesture towards (or to be evidence for) some "larger," more fundamental phenomenon in late nineteenth-century culture. So it is argued that such a continuity "provides insights into the social changes that underlay economic theory, changes that lent universality to the fin-de-siècle European consumer." More precisely, the convergence between the languages of late nineteenth-century aesthetics and economics helps to explain how the creation of "a new kind of man [or woman]... whose advanced stage of development was signified by the boundlessness of his desires" came to dominate twentieth-century economic theory.7 The proposition that the "insatiable" fin-de-siècle consumer was "universal" and "European" suggests a historical phenomenon that was pervasive and thus difficult to resist. In this way it prepares the ground for the novel claim that even the work of a writer as retiring, as ascetic and donnish as Pater (not normally associated with the vulgar excesses of consumerism...