Labors of Imagination: Aesthetics and Political Economy from Kant to Althusser

Notes

n o t e s preface 1. In two influential studies, The Economy of Literature and Money, Language, and Thought, Marc Shell makes far-reaching claims for the extent to which all literary texts ‘‘can be analyzed in terms of economic form.’’ Shell, Economy, 7. In The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, Walter Benn Michaels examines the models of selfhood inherent to capitalist modes of representation. For an analysis of ‘‘the language and logic which poetic and economic ‘systems’ share,’’ see also Kurt Heinzelman, The Economics of the Imagination, xi. 2. In Cultural Capital, John Guillory argues that ‘‘a consideration of the texts, pretexts, and contexts of Adam Smith and Kant reveals an original indistinction of aesthetics and political economy as discourses. Both . . . gestate in the body of what . . . was called ‘moral philosophy,’ and they can be said, with only the slightest recourse to the grotesque, to have been separated at birth’’ (302–3). A number of other studies have sought to elaborate similar dynamics. In Models of Value, James Thompson maintains that political economy and the British novel are both produced by the crisis that ensues with the ‘‘modern reconceptualization of money from treasure to capital’’ (2). David Kaufmann makes a similar claim in The Business of Common Life, arguing that political economy and the novel achieve newfound intellectual significance concurrently at the beginning of the nineteenth century and that both discourses should be regarded as efforts to respond to the demand for ‘‘new descriptions of and apologias for the economy , the state, morality, and citizenship’’ prompted by ‘‘the rapid growth and institutional consolidation of commercial capitalism’’ (169). 3. In ‘‘The Interests in Disinterestedness,’’ Martha Woodmansee has argued that the modern notion of art as an autonomous object to be contemplated disinterestedly arose in eighteenth-century Germany as a defensive effort on the part of authors who feared that their own work would not fare well if its significance were measured by its success in the emerging market for reading material. It is not obvious whether Woodmansee can account for how the spe177 178 Notes to Pages xii–6 cific circumstances that organized the ‘‘origin’’ of this idea affected its critical or ideological function in debates over the next two centuries. Today, Pierre Bourdieu is often cited as the preeminent theorist of the contingency of aesthetic value. See, in particular, Bourdieu, Distinction. In American literary scholarship, these controversies are most familiar from critiques of the canon as a hegemonic edifice grounded in a hierarchy of contingent valorizations . For an analysis of the ironies that plague the dialectics of universality and particularity encountered by relativist projects, see Guillory, Capital, 269–340. 4. See, in particular, Paul de Man, ‘‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant’’ and ‘‘Kant and Schiller,’’ in Aesthetic Ideology, 70–90 and 129–162, resp. introduction: production, history 1. Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle, 4. 2. Ibid., 4–5. 3. Ibid., 5. 4. In Is There a Text in This Class?, Fish writes, ‘‘Last time I sketched out an argument by which meanings are the property neither of fixed and stable texts nor of free and independent readers but of interpretive communities that are responsible both for the shape of a reader’s activities and for the texts those activities produce’’ (322). 5. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘‘Towards a Poetics of Culture,’’ 12. 6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 170. 7. On Karl Philipp Moritz as a crucial anticipation of the Critique of Judgment , see Jonathan Hess, Reconstituting the Body Politic, esp. 37–57. 8. ‘‘Art,’’ Kant writes, ‘‘is distinguished from nature as doing (facere) is from acting or operating in general (agere); and the product or result of art is distinguished from that of nature, the first being a work (opus), the second an effect (effectus).’’ Kant, Judgment, 170. 9. Ibid., 171. Kant is often accused of remaining within a bourgeois aesthetic in which art is merely the negation of the realm of political economy rather than a genuine examination of its ‘‘antilabor’’ aspects. For one version of this argument, see Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, esp. 39–40. 10. Kant, Judgment, 170–1. 11. Alexander Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, 36. 12. Kant, Judgment, 230. 13. These remarks echo a distinction Kant makes in his Logic when he says that cognition must conform to a rule that is either Manier (‘‘free’’) or Methode (‘‘constrained’’). Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, 9:139. 14. Kant, Judgment, 182 (translation modified). 15. In Kant...