The tyranny of things (trivia in karl marx and mark twain)

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 28, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 442-468

  Brown, Bill ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61249416919     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/449048     Document Type: Article

References (111)

1. See Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: à Biography (New York, 1966), p. 228
2. The house was built in Hartford's literary colony, Nook Farm, where the Clemenses had such neighbors as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Dudley Warner. Details of the house can be found in Kenneth R. Andrews, Nook Farm: Mark Twain's Hartford Circle (Seattle, 1967)
3. Wilson H. Faude, "Mark Twain's Connecticut Home," Historic Preservation 26 (Apr.-June 1974): 16-20
4. and The Renaissance of Mark Twain's Home: Handbook for Restoration (Larch-mont, N.Y., 1978)
5. and Hugh F. McKean, The "Lost" Treasures of Louis Comfort Tiffany (Garden City, 1980), p. 103
6. Clarence Cook, The House Beautiful: Essays on Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks (New York, 1878), p. 96
7. The Cook source, and à comparison of the House Beautiful description in Life on the Mississippi with the description of the Grangerford parlor in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, were crucial components of the compositional chronology for Huckleberry Finn that Walter Blair established in Mark Twain and Huck Finn (Berkeley, 1960)
8. For an account of the relation of these descriptions to one another, see Lucille M. Schultz, "Parlor Talk in Mark Twain: The Grangerford Parlor and the House Beautiful," Mark Twain Journal 19 (Summer 1979): 14-19
9. Samuel L. Clemens, letters to Charles Warren Stoddard, 26 Oct. 1881, and to William Dean Howells, 28 Jan. 1882, Mark Twain's Letters, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine, 2 vols. (New York, 1917), 1:404-5, 416
10. Anon., "The Contributor's Club: The Tyranny of Things," Atlantic Monthly 97 (May 1906): 716-17
11. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer, 2 vols, in 1 (New York, 1969), 1:246-612, 2:690-95
12. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature," Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York, 1983), p. 25
13. Clemens, Mark Twain's Autobiography, 2 vols. (New York, 1924), 1:226, 227
14. Quoted in Kaplan, Air. Clemens and Mark Twain, p. 228
15. See Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880-1920, ed. Simon J. Bronner (New York, 1989)
16. The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T.J.Jackson Lears (New York, 1983)
17. and Lears, Fables of Abundance: à Cultural History of Advertising (New York, 1994)
18. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes, 3 vols. (London, 1990), 1:163; hereafter abbreviated C
19. William James, review of The Sense of Beauty, by George Santayana, Essays, Comments, and Reviews, vol. 17 of The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), p. 536
20. George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory (1896; New York, 1936), p. 30
21. hereafter abbreviated SB. The book is based on à course of lectures Santayana delivered at Harvard between 1892 and 1895
22. In Kant's view, aesthetics as such concerns representation and not objects: the feeling of pleasure "denotes nothing in the object, but is à feeling which the Subject has of itself and of the manner in which it is affected by the representation" (Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James creed Meredith (Oxford, 1928),§1, p. 42
23. hereafter abbreviated CJ. On the suppression of the object in Kant's Critique and in aesthetics more generally
24. see Martin Jay, "Drifting into Dangerous Waters: The Separation of Aesthetic Experience from the Work of Art," in Aesthetic Subjects, ed. David McWhirter and Pamela Matthews (Minneapolis, 2002)
25. For a different account of Kant, though, see Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York, 1992), chap. 3
26. Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics (New York, 1877), p. 2
27. See also Henry Rutgers Marshall, Pain, Pleasure, and Aesthetics: An Essay Concerning the Psychology of Pain and Pleasure, with Special Reference to Aesthetics (London, 1894)
28. Santayana marks his difference from the coarser brands of physiological aesthetics by emphasizing the difference between bodily and aesthetic pleasure, the latter providing an "exhilarating" "illusion of disembodiment" (SB, p. 29). In this way, he struggles to return aesthetics to the senses, but not to the body
29. Kant, Critique of Judgement, §7, p. 52
30. This Penguin edition includes à note by Marx: "One may recall that China and the tables began to dance when the rest of the world appeared to be standing still-pour encourager les autres." Fowkes explains that this reference is "to the simultaneous emergence in the 1850s of the Taiping revolt in China and the craze for spiritualism that swept over upper-class German society. The rest of the world was 'standing still' in the period of reaction immediately after the defeat of the 1848 Revolution" (C, 1:164)
31. Marx docs in fact mention desire, but only in à footnote, where he defers to Nicholas Barbon: '"Desire implies want; it is the appetite of the mind, and is as natural as hunger to the body'" (C, 1:125). Of course, what accounts of consumer culture have insistently claimed and shown is that "desire" is anything but natural. It is important to add that Marx's argument against abstraction, against the mystification that occults the human history of the object, hardly amounts to a stand against consumer goods
32. See Peter Stallybrass, "Marx's Coat," in Border Felishisms, ed. Patricia Spyer (London, 1998), pp. 183-207
33. Marx cites an authority for this definition of wealth, but the authority he cites is himself, The Critique of Political Economy
34. The mystery of the commodity form requires an act of demystiftcation to unveil its truth; the fetishism of commodities necessitates an act of defetishization to disclose their actual content. For an extensive account of this relation between essence and appearance, see Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination (New York, 1993), esp. pp. 58-61, 166-71
35. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp. 83, 84
36. That is, Lukacs fails to describe what we are to understand by the "character of things as things" in the same way that, as Heidegger objected (without ever specifying Lukacs), he fails to describe for us what "we are to understand positively when we think of unreified Being" (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [New York, 1962], p. 72)
37. For a reading of Being and Time as à response to Lukács, see Lucien Goldmann, Lukács and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy, trans. William Q. Boel-hower (London, 1977)
38. Walter Benjamin, "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (1935), The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), p. 7; my emphasis; hereafter abbreviated "P." Benjamin's understanding of the commodity is far more complex than I can suggest here
39. See, for instance, Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass., 1986)
40. Simmel made something of the same point when he wrote about the Berlin trade exhibition in 1909. Explaining how the fair assembles "the products of the entire world in a confined space as if in à single picture," he describes how the competition between such a surplus of goods within that picture necessitates presenting something other then their "usefulness and intrinsic properties": "the interest of the buyer has to be aroused by the external stimulus of the object, even the manner of its presentation." But Simmel's account of commodity aesthetics remains untroubled by à Marxist perspective because Simmel, as he clarifies at length in the second chapter of The Philosophy of Money, had no faith whatsoever in the concept of use-value (or the labor theory of value to which it is bound) (Georg Simmel, "The Berlin Trade Exhibition," trans
41. Sam Whimster, Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, trans. David Frisby et al., ed. Frisby and Mike Featherstone [London, 1997], pp. 256-57)
42. See Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and Frisby (London, 1990), pp. 79-100
43. For an extensive account of the schisms between psychological and economistic accounts of value, see Jack Amariglio and Antonio Callari, "Marxian Value Theory and the Problem of the Subject: The Role of Commodity Fetishism," Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), pp. 186-216
44. Given the fact that "aesthetics is Marx's blind spot," as W. J. T. Mitchell puts it, there's nothing surprising about the fact that commodity aesthetics has no place in Capital
45. See W.J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, 1986), chap. 6
46. On the department store, see Ralph M. Hower, History of Macy's of New York, 1858-1919: Chapters in the Evolution of the Department Store (Cambridge, Mass., 1943)
47. Robert W. Twyman, History of Marshall Field and Co., 1852-1906 (Philadelphia, 1954)
48. Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Chicago, 1986)
49. and William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1993), chaps. 1-8
50. Émile Zola, The Ladies' Paradise, trans, pub. (1883; Berkeley, 1992), p. 16
51. On the department store in France, see Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton, N.J., 1981)
52. Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1982)
53. Anon., "Zola," The Literary World, 14 July 1883, p. 228
54. For an especially vicious attack, see anon., "Zola's New Novel," review of The Ladies' Paradise, by Zola, The Critic, 10 Mar. 1883, p. 104
55. For a comprehensive account of Zola's reception in America, see Albert J. Salvan, Zola aux États-Unis (Providence, 1943)
56. Lears, Fables of Abundance, p. 6
57. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York, 1973), pp. 89, 90
58. Simon Nelson Patten, The New Basis of Civilization, ed. Daniel M. Fox (1907; Cambridge, Mass., 1968), p. 139
59. Clemens, The Prince and the Pauper (1881; New York, 1990), p. 44
60. hereafter abbreviated PP. For reasons that will become clear, my quotations are from the 1996 photographic facsimile of a copy of the first American edition. The University of California Press published a scholarly edition in 1979
61. Clemens, letter to Howells, 11 Mar. 1880, Mark Twain's Letters, 1:377
62. A more psychological account of this novel might read it in relation to William James's account of "The Consciousness of Self," where he tries to describe how, for instance, Peter, waking up in the same bed with Paul, believes he has dreamt his own dream and not Paul's. See William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890; Cambridge, 1983), p. 317
63. Anon. "Mark Twain's "The Prince and the Pauper," The Century 23 (Mar. 1882): 784. Despite the book's critical success in America, it was not popular by Twain's standards
64. In his note on the curiousness of the determinations of reflection, Marx writes: "For instance, one man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the other hand, imagine that they are subjects because he is king" (C, 1:149 n. 22)
65. Slavoj Žižek usefully extrapolates: "'Being-a-king' is an effect of the network of social relations between a 'king' and his 'subjects'; but-and here is the fetishistic misrecognition-to the participants of this social bond, the relationship appears necessarily in an inverse form: they think that they are subjects giving the king royal treatment because the king is already in himself, outside the relationship to his subjects, à king" (Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology [London, 1989], p. 25). From Žižek's perspective, the fetishistic relation between humans gives way, with the advent of capital, to the defetishization of this relation and the fetishization of the relation between humans and objects. Twain, however, collapses the difference by inserting a mediating object within the fetishistic relation between humans
66. See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: à Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J., 1957)
67. And see Claude Lefort, "The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism," in The Political Forms of Modem Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), p. 302 and Democracy and Political Theory, trans
68. David Macey (Minneapolis, 1988), p. 244
69. Of the totem, Durkheim writes that "in a & general way, a collective sentiment can become conscious of itself only by being fixed upon some material object; but by this very fact, it participates in the nature of this object, and reciprocally, the object participates in its nature" (Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain [New York, 1965], p. 269)
70. William Shakespeare, Henry V, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 6 vols. (New York, 1988), 4.1.232
71. On King Richard II, see Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, pp. 24-41
72. Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as à Political Factor (New York, 1991), pp. 255, 257
73. See Jacques Lacan, "Death and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet," trans
74. James Hulbert, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, in Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore, 1982)
75. See Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, p. 244
76. Clemens, letter to Benjamin Ticknor, 14 Aug. 1881, Mark Twain's Letter's to His Publishers, 1887-1894, ed. Hamlin Hill (Berkeley, 1967), p. 140
77. For further information on the illustrations, see Beverly R. David and Ray Sapirstein, "Reading the Illustrations in The Prince and the Pauper" in PP, pp. 22-26
78. Engels writes of the apparently "incorporeal alien powers" that seem to control men's lives, experienced when the "product rules the producer" (Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, trans. Alec West [New York, 1972], pp. 233, 234)
79. In my effort to simplify this reading of Twain, I have elided three Renaissance contexts: the first is the emergence of the concept of fetishism in the sixteenth century (see William Pietz, "The Problem of the Fetish, 1," Res 9 [Spring 1985]: 5-17)
80. the second is the place of commodity objects (see Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare [New York, 1992], chaps. 6 and 7
81. and Ann Rosalind Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory [Cambridge, 1999])
82. and the third is the transition from feudalism to capitalism (see Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital [Ithaca, N.Y., 1991])
83. Anon., "Seals," American Law Review 1 (1867): 638
84. Anon., "Looked upon with Veneration," Green Bag 3 (Sept. 1891): 395
85. G. H. Parkinson, "The Great Seal," The Leisure Hour 31 (1882): 371
86. Annette B. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-Wliile-Giving (Berkeley, 1992), p. 6
87. Indeed Twain was afraid of having the seal illustrated because he thought he might somehow be accused of forgery
88. David Starkey, "Court and Government," in Revolution Reassessed: Revisions in the History of Tudor Government and Administration, ed. Christopher Coleman and Starkey (Oxford, 1986), p. 46
89. Starkey's essay is the best account of the struggles over the signet, the various seals, and the sign manual, and Cromwell's effort to establish and then circumvent standard sealing procedures. My thanks to Jonathan Goldberg for pointing me to this essay
90. Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 5.2.53
91. Aristotle, De Anima, trans. R. D. Hicks (Amsterdam, 1965), 424.a.l7, p. 105. The analogy between the act of imprinting and the act of conception was commonplace in Shakespeare and Renaissance writing more generally, and it harks back to Plato and to Aristotle
92. See Margreta de Grazia, "Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg, and Descartes," in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. Terence Hawkes, 2 vols. (New York, 1996), 2:64-94
93. Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Natural Intelligence, trans, and ed. George Heffernan (Atlanta, 1998), p. 141
94. Neil Hertz, "Dr. Johnson's Forgetfulness, Descartes's Piece of Wax," Eighteenth Century Life 16 (Nov. 1992): 176
95. My discussion here is indebted to this essay, as to Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (London, 1978)
96. and de Grazia, "Imprints." It seems inevitable that Descartes, to reach his conclusion, would have posited as the exemplary external object the tablet of wax that Plato had used to figure the mind; palimpsestically, that is, he renders a scene by the fire where, at its outset, the mind contemplates the mind
97. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, in Collected Writings (New York, 1995), pp. 472, 467
98. Daniel Greenleaf Thompson, Politics in à Democracy: An Essay (New York, 1893), p. 3
99. "The subject of democracy," Žižek writes, "like the subject of psychoanalysis, is none other than the Cartesian subject in all its abstraction, the empty punctuality we reach after subtracting all its particular contents (Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture [Cambridge, Mass., 1991], p. 163)
100. See also Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), pp. 141-62
101. Clemens, Life on the Mississippi (1883; New York, 1996), pp. 400, 404, 406
102. Edgar Allan Poe, "The Philosophy of Furniture," Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe: Poems, Tales, Essays, and Reviews, ed. David Galloway (Harmondsworth, 1967), pp. 414, 415
103. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1889; New York, 1979), p. 244
104. De Toqueville, Democracy in America, 2:537
105. Albert Bigelow Paine, introduction to Clemens, Mark Twain's Autobiography, p. vii
106. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right," in The Marx-Engels Reader, trans, pub. ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, 1978), p. 19
107. This is quoted and discussed in the context of other such metaphors by Thomas M. Grant, "The Curious Houses That Mark Built: Twain's Architectural Imagination," Mark Twain Journal 20 (Summer 1981): 1-10
108. Clemens, Mark Twain's Autobiography, 2:34
109. Freud explains that the melancholic "knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him" (Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans, and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. [London, 1953-74], 14:245)
110. De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2:538; my emphasis
111. Emerson, "Experience," Essays and Lectures, p. 473