wastepaper

Spectres of ‘Marks’

03 Mar 2017 ∞

‘The Coming Rapture’ by Charles Anderson. The painting is reproduced on the front of a postcard Gaddis sent to his friend John Aldridge in 1985.

Communication and Capitalism in William Gaddis’s J R

There are allusions to Marx and Marxism scattered throughout J R, William Gaddis’s second novel. At the dysfunctional school where much of the narrative takes place, the dedication engraved over the entrance reads ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ — the famous line from Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program (though in Gaddis’s text the motto is written in pseudo Greek lettering, which helps to conceal the reference from both the reader and the school’s administrators).¹ It is said of one character, Stella Angel, that her surname ‘was changed from Engels, somewhere along the way’, suggesting a possible ancestral link with Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels.² A quotation from Lenin (‘Who uses whom?’) appears in the notes for Jack Gibbs’s unfinished book.³ Gibbs also mentions Karl Marx in connection with the motto over the school entrance (which turns out to have been the handiwork of his friend, an artist called Schepperman), but the only other appearance of Marx’s name in the text of J R is a pun which links his name to currency, language, and communication: a woman using a payphone in the cafeteria answers a call for ‘Mister Marks’.⁴

So: with the exception of the quotation from Lenin, these references to Marx and Marxism are comic, ridiculous, maybe even flippant; they’re funny because they don’t amount to much more than a few superficial traces of a utopian tradition which is otherwise absent from the blithely capitalist world of the novel. And yet in this mercenary, post-McCarthyite setting even these harmless echoes of anti-capitalist sentiment can sound to some characters ‘crazy dangerous [and] subversive’.⁵ The effect is tragicomic: the disproportionate outrage which the name ‘Marx’ always threatens to provoke only demonstrates the mindless rigour with which these revolutionary tendencies have been extinguished. Nevertheless, these references do not necessarily announce a Marxist commitment on the part of Gaddis or his novel; rather they are ‘marks’, part of the system of signs, names, and jokes that make up this postmodern literary text. The principal theme of J R may be capitalism in the United States, but Gaddis does not mount an attack on the mode of production in its totality, instead tending to focus on circulation (particularly the world of finance) without delving too much into production (wage labour and the production of surplus value). The novel’s critique is unsystematic: Gaddis is less interested in the nuances of proximate and root causes than in the diverse symptoms of capitalism’s contradictions — for instance, the way that privatisation of the education system results in the school’s lessons being transformed into farcical television broadcasts, or the role of multinational corporations in the destruction of nations in southern and central Africa.

It may be useful, then, to think about J R alongside Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, keeping in mind Derrida’s ‘fidelity to a certain spirit of Marxism’ (something he detects in the practice of deconstruction); there may be an affinity between the political content of this postmodern novel and those post-structuralists who examine the effects of discourse and communication on the material world.⁶ Like Derrida, who disavows ‘Marxist doctrine’ (its ‘systemic, metaphysical, or ontological totality’, as well as its ‘fundamental concepts of labor, mode of production, social class’), Gaddis’s novel does not speak for the world’s proletariat as often as it speaks for an intangible human potential, represented in the struggles of several embattled artists in the novel.⁷ Each of these characters suffers the effects of ‘production on the basis of exchange values’, which causes their work to be ‘alienated’ from them, objectified, and thus made vulnerable to the chaos of the marketplace, where the subtler qualities of their art go unrecognised.⁸ Indeed, the parts of the novel dealing with artistic production sometimes risk reproducing a critique of capitalism which Marx repudiated, namely the romantic lament for a lost ‘artisan’ individuality imagined to be fuller and more self-sufficient than the one that supersedes it in the system of commodity production.⁹ But Gaddis adds other elements to the novel’s many sub-plots — concerning language, audience, and communication — which make the nature of his complaint slightly more difficult to classify, and closer in some respects to that of Derrida.

The painter Schepperman is the subject of one of these subplots: his paintings have been bought up and hoarded by Zona Selk, a wealthy investor who expects his work to appreciate, and the arrangement has even been formalised in a contract that stipulates Schepperman cannot sell his paintings to anyone else.¹⁰ At first the deal suits him, with Selk ‘giving him enough to buy paints and live’, but he is quickly driven mad by the knowledge that his ‘statements’ are being locked up in a cellar where nobody can see them, thereby destroying the ‘only God damn reason he’d painted them’ (the words of his friend, the failed novelist Thomas Eigen, another of the novel’s thwarted artists).¹¹ The alienation Schepperman experiences here is not strictly the same as the alienation discussed by Marx in the first volume of Capital— i.e. a condition which develops alongside the increasing automation and division of labour under capitalism — but a form of alienation that afflicts the artist in particular, because his subordination to the ‘objective world of values’ and the transformation of his work into ‘alien property’ combine to vitiate the intersubjective potential of his art.¹² The purchasing power of Selk, opposite the poverty of Schepperman, makes possible an unequal exchange in which the artist’s work is appropriated and loses its status as ‘statement’ (a word Schepperman is said to repeat manically), being reduced instead to a mere object or a fungible store of value. The communicative function of the work is the thing endangered by the transaction.

All of which suggests that Gaddis is preoccupied with the failures of communication that proliferate due to capitalist dynamics. The theme develops as Gaddis considers the fates suffered by the other artists in the novel. The young composer Edward Bast is commissioned by a stockbroker, Crawley, to write music for a film Crawley has produced. When they meet to discuss Bast’s progress the conversation turns to the nature of composition, and whether the music is fully realised in the mind of the composer prior to it being performed:

—Just tell me something, Bast. When you sit down to compose, do you hear this tumti tumti tum and then get it right down on paper? or . . .

—Yes well that’s a little difficult to . . .

—No no don’t try to explain it to me probably wouldn’t understand it if you did, prodigious Bast, prodigious, that grandeur we talked about I can almost feel it right here in my hands . . . and the case came up briefly—just the sheer bulk of it, spared nothing have you.

—Yes well I felt you’d want it scored for full orchestra and of course dealing with ninety-five instruments is . . .

—Each playing its part to fill the screen with the breath of life, to make us feel the vastness of the plains, the purple mountains’ majesty all down in these little hentracks.¹³

Crawley, insisting on a very limited idea of grandeur and ‘bulk’, has no access to the ideal, intangible form of Bast’s work, and no real interest in the abstract quality of music and the process of its composition, which involves a translation from subjectivity to notation and then to performance. By taking possession of the work in this scene Crawley literally objectifies it, marvelling at its physical form (both its heft and the visible complexity of the marks on the page), while confessing a complete incomprehension of its meaning. He can only envision its role in the completed commercial film, by which time it will already have been recorded to tape and reified. Crawley is not even particularly interested in the logistics of performing the composition: at the mention of the ninety-five instruments he leaps ahead to a vision of the work already recorded and set alongside the film. Bast’s composition is thus reduced to a dead artefact (the score) and a taped, infinitely reproducible performance. Towards the end of the novel Bast becomes more irritable about this, as he tells Eigen when he goes to collect another score he has written:

—Yes, yes here they are look. They don’t really look like anything do they.

—Yes fine, now . . .

—A lot of, like a lot of chickentracks don’t they, look. I mean it’s all still just what I hear there isn’t it.

—Fine yes! now . . .

—I mean until a performer hears what I hear and can make other people hear what he hears it’s just trash isn’t it Mister Eigen, it’s just trash like everything in this place everything you and Mister Gibbs and Mister Schramm all of you saw here it’s just trash!¹⁴

These are Bast’s last words in the novel, and their meaning is ambivalent. He is outraged that his practice as a composer is not recognised for its intrinsic value independent of exchange, but at the same time he seems to grudgingly acknowledge that a work without an audience will amount to nothing more than the discarded ‘trash’ that surrounds him in the apartment where he works on his score. Like Schepperman, he thinks he should be able to produce art for its own sake, but in the context of a system of commodity production it is only by guaranteeing that someone else ‘hears what I hear’ that he can hope to distinguish his work from the intrusive noises, strewn papers, and random objects which seem to crowd in entropically whenever Gaddis describes Bast or Gibbs attempting to work on their creative projects.

The world of J R therefore represents in caricatured form a social system in which the Midas touch of exchange threatens to reduce everything to noise, trash, discarded objects: not only the artwork produced by Bast, Eigen, Gibbs, and Schepperman, but even the words printed on the various boxes in Gibbs’s apartment, which are repeated so frequently throughout the novel (in place of nouns like ‘box’ or ‘book’) they become meaningless.¹⁵ As the meaning of these phrases and names diminishes they become more concrete and tangible, no longer denotative words but things which fill up the apartment and crowd the text’s syntax, as in a sentence such as ‘he came down on 1 Doz 59¢ Wise Potato Chips Hoppin’ With Flavor! to bring the score under the light’.¹⁶ The reverse side of this accelerated process of commodification is noted elsewhere in the novel by eleven-year-old J R Vansant: ‘everything you see someplace there’s this millionaire for it […] someplace there’s this water fountain millionaire and this locker millionaire and this here lightbulb one I mean like even the lightbulb there’s this glass millionaire […]’ ¹⁷ A world populated by so many fungible commodities will necessarily testify to the existence of countless ‘millionaires’, the owners of the titles to the means of mass production, while the individual artist will become ever more invisible, marginalised by the singular nature of his work.

The novel’s peculiar form also helps to develop this critique of capitalism in other, stranger directions. The text of J R mostly consists of dialogue, and the dearth of conventional narration often makes the setting seem intangible, the voices disembodied: characters exist only through the medium of symbolic exchange, their presence and personality nothing more than the residue of their language use and the patterns of their speech — in other words, the ‘hentracks’ that make up the text. The novel contains only piecemeal and fragmentary descriptions of the characters’ physical form, and the third person narration rarely intervenes to attribute dialogue to names. Yet the book is not a play script: it is meant to be read and not performed. However closely the dialogue resembles actual speech, and however much it evokes in the mind of the reader actual voices, the characters do not ever fully materialise and the setting remains a virtual world of signs and commodities.

Proceeding from a similar observation about the novel’s characters and form, Mark C. Taylor has suggested that J R is a novel about ‘floating signs and fungible currencies’, and that its style serves to represent ‘a new world disorder in which reality has dematerialized’.¹⁸ Placing Gaddis’s novel in the context of the 1960s and early ‘70s, he compares the disappearance (or endless deferral) of the referent in post- structuralist theories of language with the end of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates and dollar-gold convertibility, which was dismantled between 1971 and 1974, just prior to J R’s publication in 1975.¹⁹ For Taylor, J R is an expression of the crisis of confidence produced by these two dematerialisations, of language and of money. Similarly, and with more precision, Nicholas Spencer’s article on the ‘transition to postmodernity’ dramatised by J R measures the world of Gaddis’s novel against David Harvey’s theory of ‘economic postmodernity’, demonstrating that J R responds to many of the same economic and cultural phenomena Harvey recognises in the post-Keynesian and post-Fordist regime of ‘flexible accumulation’.²⁰

Spencer’s essay goes further and finds ‘the dominance of facts, pragmatism, and capitalist utility’ criticised throughout J R, and especially in the excerpts from Gibbs’s book.²¹ The few sentences from Gibbs’s manuscript that appear in the text describe an irresistible tendency in American culture towards ever greater capitalist rationalisation. Gibbs makes the argument that economic Taylorism and the philosophy of William James both serve a common purpose: the justification and refinement of capitalist exploitation through an insistence on ‘the identification of the real with the measurable’.²² The ineffable part of the real which does not survive the translation from use value to exchange value is lost forever. William James’s famous ‘cash-value’ metaphor, used extensively in his discussion of epistemology, is the epitome of this American ethos.²³

Gaddis demonstrates how such rationalism and pragmatism aids and abets capital accumulation, especially where language is involved. One major subplot in the novel concerns a fictional African country, Gandia, where an agent of Typhon International is orchestrating the secession of ‘Uaso province’, an area rich in cobalt, nickel, and other minerals.²⁴ This is an obvious reference to the Congo crisis of 1960: the leftist leader ‘Nowunda’ is Patrice Lumumba, and ‘Uaso province’ is Katanga, which seceded with encouragement from Belgian and US capitalist interests. When this subplot is first introduced, it is in connection with a written contract, and the details emerge from one half of a phone conversation:

Down in seven. In order to expedite this and so forth and so forth the government agrees to advance to Typhon International the sum of thirty-nine point seven million dollars […] . . . what? Because if they wanted to buy nickel they would have said nickel. They didn’t come to us to buy nickel. They didn’t come to us to buy iron or arsenic they came to buy cobalt and cobalt occurs in smaltite, if we come across nickel or iron or anything else in the ore reduction that’s . . . well let them scream giveaway ²⁵

In this scene and others located at Typhon International Gaddis shows how technologies of communication and abstraction (the telephone and the contract) facilitate the accumulation of capital: first, by enabling the manipulation of the material world at a distance; secondly, by giving ‘title’ to its contents and creating the linguistic and symbolic scaffolding on which ownership is built; thirdly, by allowing Typhon to ‘pass over in silence’ certain parts of the material world when it is in their interest to do so (in this case, they omit the nickel and iron from the contract).²⁶ This is a representation of the preliminary workings of imperialism and finance capital which is consonant with first hand accounts of the Congo’s destabilisation: Thomas Kanza, in his history of the Congo’s struggle for independence, remarks that the wording of the documents circulated at pre-independence ‘Round Tables’ either omitted or concealed certain details of the arrangements which would guarantee the country’s continued economic dependence on Belgium:

The basis of their talks was a collection of working papers prepared by Belgian experts. The Congolese had not the experience to recognize the glaring omissions in them, the absence of certain vital information, just as they had no way of knowing the various secret financial and other agreements which had been made between the Belgian government and some of its allies, and between Belgian financial bodies and other European and American business concerns.²⁷

Aporias, omissions, and indeterminacy inevitably become the sites of dispossession in a system of distributed, symbolised ownership. Ironically, this critique of capitalism in J R reveals that ‘Marks’ — language, writing — are the false friends of the exploited. In this respect Gaddis’s novel has something in common with Jean Baudrillard’s influential work For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, which claims to demonstrate the mutually sustaining relationship between ‘the code’ (language, sign and signified, and by extension the symbolic part of ideology) and the social forms particular to capitalism, notably the divergence between use value and exchange value.²⁸ Gaddis’s critique may be unsystematic, then, but it captures the spirit of Western academic antipathy to capitalism that prevailed after 1968, a spirit inclined against symbolic structures first and foremost and material economic ones only secondarily.

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