Malthus Our Contemporary?: Toward a Political Economy of Sex

MAUREEN N. MCLANE Malthus Our Contemporary?: Toward a Political Economy ofSex Species Means Guilt. —Bruce Andrews1 . . . desire, as Aristotle knew, is all angle, and so he gave us the math to keep track of our loves: Number, he said, has two senses: what is counted or countable, and that by which we count. —Angie Estes, “Take Cover,” Tryst2 I BEGIN WITH A REMARK OF HAZLITT, WHO IN THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE glossed an aspect of what we might call The Malthus Meme: “There is this to be said for Mr. Malthus, that in speaking of him, one knows what one is talking about.”3 But do we know what we’re talking about when we talk about Malthus? This essay proposes to reopen the question of “Mal­ thus,” and of Malthusian reckoning—or rather, to track the many ways Malthusian political economy might provide one horizon for a reckoning historicizable yet interminable and trans-specific. Or perhaps it is more precise to say that this essay partakes of, even as it registers, a return to Mal­ thus in several fields. Malthus is, among many things, a Romantic theorist I would like to thank Kevin Gilmartin, who first invited me to return to Malthus, and to thank as well the three anonymous readers for Studies in Romanticism: this essay benefited im­ measurably from their responsiveness, severity, and scrupulosity, and from the attentiveness of Charles Kzepka and Deborah Swedberg. Best thanks as always to Laura Slatkin. i. Bruce Andrews, “Species Means Guilt,” Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, ed. Paul Hoover (New York: Norton, 1994), 532-34. 2. Angie Estes, “Take Cover,” Tryst (Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 2009), 62-63. 3. William Hazlitt, “Mr. Malthus,” in The Spirit ofthe Age: or, Contemporary Portraits (New York: John Wiley, 1849), 149. SiR, 52 (Fall 2013) 337 338 MAUREEN N. MCLANE of change in biological populations; he is also necessarily a theorist of time—the time of production and reproduction within and across genera­ tions (and indeed across species), how this timing might be sped or slowed. Malthus emerges here as a sexual theorist worth taking seriously; his work intriguingly anticipates the possibility of rethinking biological networks through information theory. This essay proposes as well that Malthusian counting is not an arithmetic, geometric, or even algorithmic operation so much as a matching operation—and here I draw on recent work by (among others) Marjorie Levinson. For one wittily efficient take on The Malthus Meme, consider Stephen Leacock, Canadian poet and humorist, in his Depression-era “Oh! Mr. Malthus!” (1936): “Mother, Mother, here comes Malthus, Mother, hold me tight! Look! It’s Mr. Malthus, Mother! Hide me out of sight. ” This was the cry of little Jane In bed she moaning lay, Delirious with Stomach Pain, That would not go away. All because her small Existence Over-pressed upon Subsistence; Human Numbers didn’t need her; Human Effort couldn’t feed her. Little Janie didn’t know The Geometric Ratio. Poor Wee Janie had never done Course Economics No. 1; Never reached in Education Theories of Population,— Theories which tend to show Just how far our Food will go, Mathematically found Just enough to go around. This, my little Jane, is why Pauper Children have to die. Pauper Children underfed Die delirious in Bed; Thus at Malthus’s Command Match Supply with true Demand.4 4. Stephen Leacock, “Oh! Mr. Malthus!” in Hellements ofHickotwmics in Hiccoughs of Verse MALTHUS OUR CONTEMPORARY? 339 “Theories of Population,” “The Geometric Ratio,” “subsistence,” “Sup­ ply” and “Demand”—all are keywords of Malthusian political economy, “geometric ratio” perhaps the most marked as a Malthusian phrase, desig­ nating the rate of increase of animal populations (destined to outstrip any increase in the vegetal kingdom, which according to Malthus would in­ crease only along an “arithmetic ratio”). Malthus’s concerns and his con­ ceptual apparatus were of course those of his age, yet as Leacock’s bounc­ ing couplets attest, they were still and newly citable in the 1930s; and in several ways, mutatis mutandis, Malthus’s concerns remain ours. It seems timely, then, to assess whether and how Malthus might still be “good to think with,” in Claude Levi-Strauss’s...