Autumn of the System: Poetry and Financial Capital

Part I

If the reign of finance in the cycle of capital accumulation is always a "sign of Autumn," we seem finally to have arrived at the onset of Winter (Braudel 246). Or so one must suspect from the collapse of the global economy that began its run-up around 2006 and manifested itself in full over the course of 2007-2008. Whether this crisis is terminal remains a matter of open debate.¹ Certainly if this is indeed the end of a cycle of accumulation, in some way like the end of the British Empire (or that of the United Provinces or the Italian city-states), each such conclusion is always different in its particulars. It would be presumptuous to propose what the shape or meaning of this finale might be, much less the nature of the transition to some next cycle or the nature of the next cycle itself. The problem of imagining this sequence, we might say, is the fundamental narrative problem of our historical moment.

But this is quite different from saying that the fundamental problematic of the historical moment is necessarily narrative in nature. In beginning to develop a mind of Winter, it does not seem too early to wonder: what then may we say about Autumnal literature? By which I mean to ask, what form will prove to have been best suited to grasp the contours of that still mystifying and elusive regime which rode American hegemony downward to darkness on extended credit? Another way to formulate this question (and it may well be that formulating it with some care is itself a sufficiently ambitious task) would be thusly: is M-C-M·(Commodity-Money) a narrative motion? And particularly, M-C-M· as it has fashioned itself in the current era of financialization?

Certainly recent Marxist literary criticism has battened far more sturdily to the matter of narrative; this is not, however, as simple an affinity as it may at first appear.²

It is worth recalling at this juncture that M-C-M· is not the formula for economic circulation as such, but a specific mode of same: that of capitalism. Parallel to this is the oft-elided fact that Marx nowhere claims that the sale of commodities for money is peculiar to capitalism, but rather that particular to capitalism is a changed order of money and commodities, bound by its own internal dynamic to universalize itself.

So, we might say, it is a matter of moments and movement and how they are articulated together—what could be more a question of narrative? In Marx's well-known passage,

The simplest form of the circulation of commodities is C-M-C, the transformation of commodities into money, and the change of the money back again into commodities; or selling in order to buy. But alongside of this form we find another specifically different form: M-C-M, the transformation of money into commodities, and the change of commodities back again into money; or buying in order to sell. Money that circulates in the latter manner is thereby transformed into, becomes capital, and is already potentially capital.

Now let us examine the circuit M-C-M a little closer. . . . The character and tendency of the process M-C-M, is therefore not due to any qualitative difference between its extremes, both being money, but solely to their quantitative difference. More money is withdrawn from circulation at the finish than was thrown into it at the start. The cotton that was bought for £100 is perhaps resold for £100 + £10 or £110. The exact form of this process is therefore M-C-M·, where M· = M + D M = the original sum advanced, plus an increment. This increment or excess over the original value I call "surplus value."

(Capital 96-98)

It is in this most basic of Marxian formulations (the "general formula of capital"), that one sees narrative's most primitive relation on the logic of capitalism as opposed to other modes of production. For it is only under capitalism that one begins with money which seeks...