Reading Capital with Little Nell

This essay makes claims at several levels of generality. Its largest project is to suggest that there is embedded in Marx’s account of capital an unresolved problematic of materiality. On its face, Marxian theory understands capital as an accumulation of exchange value in the abstract. Unattached to any material object, capital will throw itself without reserve into whatever form promises at any moment to maximize its capacity of absorbing surplus value from labor. I will argue that material objects pose a kind of resistance to the incessant changes of shape that characterize capital—or at least that such a resistance is implied, though not theorized, by Marx.

The initial sign of this resistance will be that objects wear away under capital’s touch, so that it runs the risk of appearing, not as a theoretically limitless hoard of abstract exchange value, but as an accumulation of worn out things. This latter is the desublimated form of capital; following Slavoj Zizek, I will argue that capital, like money, also has a sublime form, and that these twinned modes of appearance offer a way of understanding capital’s materiality, and more generally that of the exchange value that comprises it.

These claims appear below in the specific context of a reading of Dickens’s 1840 novel The Old Curiosity Shop. This reading will be in the broadest sense formalist, since it will propose that the novel allegorizes the formal conditions of its own existence. But it will use Marx’s categories to show that the formal characteristics of text, and more particularly of the textual commodity, are historically contingent, and that Dickens’s allegory is thus historically determined. It will also, however, use Dickens’s allegory to interrogate Marx; adopting Dickens’s figure of the material residue that has has no proper place in the scene of exchange, it will attempt to define the characteristics of an object whose misrecognition is a necessary precondition to the representation and accumulation of exchange value, and hence to the formation of capital. ¹

I

Why the curiosity shop is hard to find: The Old Curiosity Shop takes its name from a home that is also a place of business. In Dickens this is rarely a happy conjuncture, and often touches on the uncanny, as is attested by the line that runs from the stationer’s shop in Sketches by Boz (“Shops and their Tenants”) through that in Bleak House to the Clennam house in Little Dorritt and, perhaps, the Bower in Our Mutual Friend. In The Old Curiosity Shop the conjunction of home with business is peculiarly marked in that the shop and the home not only occupy the same premises, but are also indistinguishable from one another in their contents, since as far as one can gather from the novel’s descriptions of the place all of its furniture—even that of Nell’s bedroom ² —is curious and hence in principle for sale. It is true that at no point in the novel does anyone enter the curiosity shop as a customer; to this extent, the character of its furnishings as commodities for sale is purely theoretical. But it is also true that by the opening of the novel the shop’s owner, Nell’s grandfather, has pledged it and all of its contents as security for loans he has raised to support his compulsive gambling.

The articulation of the difference between objects in use and objects destined for sale was one of the major tasks of early Victorian culture in general and of Dickens’s novels in particular. Victorian urban architecture and social practice speak the difference between use and exchange in the increasing emphasis they place on the supposed impermeability of the bourgeois domestic sphere to commercial or business transactions of any kind. In many of Dickens’s idealized versions of the domestic, a network of intense affects binds the bourgeois users of objects to their property in relations whose effect is to single out that property and distinguish it from the anonymous mass of commodities for sale.

Such a relation to his furniture for instance characterizes Master Humphrey...