Literature and Capital by Thomas Docherty

Author:Thomas Docherty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

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It is in the wake of this 1980s privatization project that Piketty notes the significant reversal of the earlier positive trend towards greater social equalities. The reversal takes a very specific and significant form. It is marked first of all by the return of a rentier society, rehabilitating the importance of capital wealth as such, especially insofar as that is vested in the ownership of property and land. As we see this reflected in recent English fiction, it produces the new account of the city of London, where foreign citizens buy houses not for the purpose of living there but simply as capital investments. This explains some of the logic that underlines Lanchester’s Capital and Coe’s Number 11: houses are not even rented out here, because the capital return on them no longer needs the actual materialization of rent. We have gone even beyond a stage of rentier capitalism; and the consequence, in literature, is a fiction that highlights not just the increasingly immaterial conditions of wealth (in money that has no actual existence, in Lanchester’s case), but also the driving of capital further and further underground, into the very substructures of our societies (as in Coe’s eleven-story basement).

A new factor also emerges, however; and it is this that is of most significance in relation to the extended institutions of literature. This new element is the rise of the managerial class, with the ‘astonishing heights’ of salary inflation that are reached by top executives and managers, especially in financial services, but also, increasingly, right across the managerial class as such.22 We will find that the institutionalization of literature, when related explicitly to capital, requires that literature be subject to management. Furthermore, this management extends to those engaged in the study of literature, such that readers and writers themselves become re-configured in terms of ‘human capital’.

The consequence is that as history has continued the trend towards re-establishing large economic inequalities essentially as the normative condition of social life, we have reached a new social construct today. ‘To a large extent’, argues Piketty, ‘we have gone from a society of rentiers to a society of managers’. The distinguishing characteristic of the manager, in terms of labour conditions, is that the manager essentially lives off the labour of others. In feudalism, the lord lived off the fat of the land, a land that was worked by labourers who were dependent on the lord for their survival and livelihood. Now, the manager lives parasitically off the material labour of the office-worker, as it were; and, correspondingly, the office-worker’s livelihood is increasingly in the hands of her or his manager. We have moved, therefore from a society of rentiers or ‘people who own enough capital to live on the annual income from their wealth’, to a new society ‘in which the top of the income hierarchy ... consists mainly of highly paid individuals who live on income from labour’.23

This meets with little resistance, partly because it seems to be an advance on the servility of

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