Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form by Anna Kornbluh (review)

Anna Kornbluh’s contentious and passionately argued book is a welcome attempt to nudge the practice of criticism toward urgent questions about wealth and poverty. It’s worth noting that the lever it uses to accomplish this task is sometimes a little bit roughly forged. Consider this note on Adam Smith, from a chapter on Middlemarch (1871–72): “In focusing on Adam Smith,” Kornbluh writes, “I should like to invite the critical liturgy on the philosophical and biographical experiences behind Eliot’s sympathy to be more responsive to the economic context and ramifications of her ethics” (179). The sentence seems to be searching for the best tone in which to deliver its invitation, mixing the studied politeness of its subjunctive with the rank satire implied in “liturgy.” Still, if we allegedly worshipful Victorianists can bear the occasional blows of Kornbluh’s satire, we will find in this book a good deal to inspire us.

The book’s subject is the “ideological normalization of finance” in Victorian culture (9). Kornbluh notes that financial capitalism—the mode of social organization that privileges the derivation of profit for investors at a distance—was not seen as normal in the mid-nineteenth century. Its occupations were not typical occupations, and its activities were not understood to be in line with the moral norms of that world, however these might be construed. In the Victorian era finance capital was “fictitious capital,” a phrase that registers a skeptical view of this system (2). This potentially critical stance, Kornbluh argues, was sidelined through the gradual development of the concept of “psychic economy,” the understanding of human mental life as a kind of inner marketplace (9). In this view, which Kornbluh tracks primarily in Victorian social-science writing, subjective experience is seen as a system of exchange in which a finite (and thus scarce) quantum of mental energy is chartered and banked and invested in a range of activities or preoccupations. The resulting idea of the human subject thus provides an enduring alibi for the imposition of market relations and the privileging of them above any other mode of enterprise. If each of us is a little capitalist, with a portfolio in the bourse of his or her own thoughts and desires, then transforming all the earth into a great bourse must be the right thing to do: it must represent the good and natural course of history.

If Victorian critics understood investment capital, coalescing in corporate persons and leveraged through debt, as “fictional,” the tempting response would be to locate by contrast a principle of economic value that is real. This, it is often presumed, was Karl Marx’s response to the world of Victorian finance. This would be the so-called humanist Marx, the one who supposedly advocated a regime in which the real, useful value of things could predominate over the virtual costs they create when produced for exchange. Kornbluh’s excellent chapter on Marx refutes this view. If financial capitalism is a fiction, then Marx, in Korbluh’s hands, suggests that capital itself functions as a kind of novelistic protagonist, the central figure in an exemplary narrative of development. Economic actors in capitalist economies then function in some way like the readers of novels, following the story of capital’s rise and fall, chasing its peripatetic action, and imagining their own stories in these terms. We “readers” of capital (the money, not the book) shape our own experience through this identification. From this perspective, Marx responds directly to the theory of “psychic economy” that naturalized capitalism. In Kornbluh’s reading, Marx says that it’s not the case that the mind functions as a mini-economy; rather it’s the social force of capital, when its logic of accumulation is privileged in an expanding financial system, that imposes itself upon us. Subjectivity is not essentially economic; rather our economic arrangements provide a tempting but inaccurate metaphor for our inner lives. [End...