The Body Economic by Gallagher Catherine;

Author:Gallagher, Catherine;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2008-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

THE APPARENT DEATH OF THE AUTHOR

We have so far looked at two locations for the storage of vital energy outside of bodies: commodities generally and the waste matter that results from their consumption. Chadwick suggested a third: literary texts. Indeed, he proposed that works by Carlyle, Dickens, and Ruskin should be read aloud, “In weaving shops and in places of semi-automatic” labor, where “works of imagination” and “matters of stirring interest” have already been “found to give to the hand, somewhat of the life energy and regularity of movement, which the band gives to the march” (514). Political economy, he claimed, could find something productive in the texts even of its critics, provided they were passionate enough to rouse and quicken their auditors: “[T]he ‘dismal science, ’ to use Mr. Carlyle’s phrase, may find a place for him, and for imaginative writers, like our friends Mr. Dickens . . . and Mr. Ruskin” in the very process of value extraction. For the army of industrial “hands” they could perform the part of the marching band, enlivening their listeners to work, “and [providing] . . . aid, which they may not have intended,— to capital and production.”34 Chad-wick no doubt appreciated the irony of the proposal: it would be a fitting recompense for Carlyle and Ruskin to find their ringing denunciations of political economy put to use to increase capital accumulation.

The suggestion may be half facetious, but it calls our attention to the sort of energy transfer that texts were thought to effect. Regardless of what they might say about industrial production, Chadwick considered the writers we’ve been examining to be sources of animation, which lay dormant in their represented language. “Force” was contained in their words; it was placed there by their labor and genius and could be drawn out again by a reader, as if it were stored in a battery. A text, in short, was another form of suspended animation, holding not only ideas but also their animating motive power. Moreover, although the texts of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Dickens might originally have served some defined authorial purpose, they could be reused indefinitely for aims that the authors “may not have intended.” Carlyle may be opposed to the dismal science, but his textual resting place, conveniently separated from his intentions, can be transferred into the productive process. To Chadwick, texts seem inexhaustible and fully appropriable; they can be recycled endlessly, and consequently, despite his irony, he presents them as ideal sources of energy. Almost literally “ideal”; Chadwick calls their “pleasurable mental excitement” a “metaphysical means” for sustaining productive human force. In contrast, what he calls the “physical means”— “food, clothing, housing”— can remain stubbornly external to production. No matter how good the physical means of reproducing force, Chadwick assures us, “the work, after a time, goes on heavily, wearily, slowly,” and a “metaphysical means” must be employed to make the energy flow from the body of the worker to the product. The metaphysical means themselves, moreover, seem to expand

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