Writing the Economic Subject in Modern Western Europe

Aileen Behrendt and Nicholas Courtman

Over the last decade, literary and cultural scholars have increasingly turned their attention towards the ways in which authors, artists, and thinkers engage and have engaged with economic subjects in the widest possible sense of the term – that is to say, both with the subject of the economy and its various facets, as well as with the way in which economic processes, institutions, and dynamics form and shape individual subjectivity.¹ This surge in critical interest is undoubtedly linked to the after-effects of the Financial Crisis of 2007–2008 and the ensuing years of austerity politics, which have seen the intensification of existing inequality in the distribution of wealth and resources, both within individual Western nations and on a global scale. Economic concerns have also begun to receive more mainstream attention in both public discourse, aided by the popular success of authors like Paul Mason and David Graeber,² and in political discourse and policy settings, as evidenced by the growing number of politicians expressing support for Universal Basic Income. While the outcome of these ←9 | 10→policy debates is uncertain, such initiatives are only likely to gain in significance in the wake of the large-scale furlough and Kurzarbeit programmes that have been introduced in numerous countries following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The economic recession that is projected for the coming years as a result of the economic shutdown that followed the global outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 will surely further exacerbate many of the central problems of modern societies. The developments and tensions surrounding work’s value not only as a factor in the calculation of economic gain, or in the formation of material to satisfy human needs, but also as a source of meaning, personal and social identity, and as a vector for social integration and exclusion, run through many of the contributions in the current volume.

Even though the surge in critical interest is partly a result of contemporary political and economic developments, the numerous scholarly publications on economic subjects as reflected and refracted through literary and philosophical texts from earlier centuries demonstrate that this interest is by no means restricted to the current moment. One could rather claim that the financial crisis, in (once again) revealing the fundamental instability of the contemporary global capitalist economic system, has reinvigorated interest in the origins of that system, and its historical trajectory towards global dominance.³

Prior to this renewal of scholarly interest, matters of the economy and work had, with the exception of several significant publications,⁴ spent ←10 | 11→several decades on the periphery of literary and cultural studies in the wake of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ and poststructuralism’s emergence as the dominant critical paradigm within the discipline from the 1980s onwards. The collapse of “really existing” socialism and the integration of the former Eastern bloc into the capitalist system, heralded by Francis Fukuyama as the ‘End of History’,⁵ undoubtedly also contributed to this process, thoroughly detracting from the appeal of the Marxist and Marxian theoretical frameworks that had informed the study of the relationship between labour, economics, and cultural production since the late 1960s, and indeed for much of the twentieth century.

Although Marx never produced a systematic aesthetic theory, his writings contain a number of remarks and reflections on literature and other arts that proved to be extremely influential for later theorists and critics.⁶ The origins of the most significant trends in twentieth-century Marxist literary theory and scholarship can be traced to two diverging strands that emerged at the beginning of the 1930s. One of these was the state-ordained doctrine of socialist realism, developed first in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s,⁷ before later being prescribed, emulated, and reworked in the various states behind the Iron Curtain in the post-war period. The other strand finds its origin in the works of members of the Frankfurt School, such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, and other associated figures, such as Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch.⁸ Despite their differences in approach, both of these strains of Marxist-inspired literary criticism were united by their understanding of literary and cultural criticism as a form of ideology critique, operating within the fundamental ←11 | 12→ideological tenets of a more-or-less traditional Marxism.⁹ By the late 1980s, at the same time that many of the central tenets of traditional Marxism seemed to have been disproved by the course of history, several scholars had begun to approach the study of the intersections of literature, the arts, and the economy in a manner that was less aligned with traditional rhetoric of class struggle, and instead, drawing upon the methodologies of New Historicism and Foucauldian discourse analysis, examined the relationship between the economic and cultural spheres as one of interpenetration, mutual influence, and reciprocal exchange, in which metaphors, concepts, figures, and narratives crossed over between them.

This ‘New Economic Criticism’, as it was named in the title of a significant 1999 collection of essays espousing such approaches,¹⁰ was of a less overtly political bent, seeking to identify, describe and analyse the relations between economic developments, economic thought, and the arts, without immediately setting such analysis in the service of an existing political agenda or within an overarching political (master)narrative, as had been the case in much Marxist literary criticism. Since the Financial Crisis, though the numerous works examining the historical semantics of the term ‘work’/‘labour’ and their antitheses (play, idleness, laziness, etc.) in modernity, for example, still draw heavily on the methodological toolkits of the New Economic Criticism,¹¹ recent scholarship has often been far more overtly political and critical in its tone, both in its analysis of contemporary neoliberalism, and in its analysis of works of art from earlier historical periods. Our volume reflects these analytical trends and the more overtly political tone of recent scholarship, presenting essays that trace Marxist thought and its influence in theories of economic criticism ←12 | 13→alongside contributions that follow the methodology of Foucauldian discourse analysis.