Poundwise: Towards a General Critique of Economy

Abstract

Pound’s ‘obsession’ with money and usury has been well documented, and is generally dismissed as the main root of all his ‘aberrations’. I should like to show that, on the contrary, his lifelong concern with money and economics not only provides a key to his system of thought — in which, indeed, it rationalises certain important delusions — but also reveals an attempt to inscribe the moving and complex signature of his name in the world of history and art. An ultimate self-reference underlies the scattered allusions to actual facts and theories and ties up his ‘voice’ to an idiomatic writing. Although it sounds a little too complacent to agree wholeheartedly with Allen Ginsberg that Pound’s economics are ‘right’,² one can asseverate that they stimulate an understanding of our world in a manner both novel and perplexing; moreover, if they are at times inextricably confused, they are never boring, and the source-books to which the reader is directed prove worth reading. Obviously, one never reads Pound for his economic theories only, but any reading which would try to discard them as an unnecessary adjunct to the gems or lyrical purple patches would fail by Pound’s own standards: it would overlook the wish to create a totalitarian synthesis of culture, and remain blind to the particular strategies dictated by the nature of the text.

What is the meaning of ‘useful’? … What is capable of use in the hands of some persons, is capable in the hands of others, of the opposite of use, called commonly ‘from-use’ or ‘abuse’ … . Thus, wine, which the Greeks in their Bacchus, made, rightly, the type of all passion, and which, when used, ‘cheereth god and man’ (that is to say, strengthens both the divine life, or reasoning power, and the earthly, or carnal power of man); yet, when abused, becomes ‘Dionusos’, hurtful especially to the divine part of man, or reason. And again, the body itself, being equally liable to use and to abuse, and, when rightly disciplined, serviceable to the state, both for war and labour; but when not disciplined, or abused, valueless to the State, and capable only of continuing the private or single existence of the individual (and that but feebly) — the Greeks called such a body an ‘idiotic’ or ‘private’ body, from their word signifying a person employed in no way directly useful to the state; whence, finally, our ‘idiot’, meaning a person entirely occupied with his own concerns. (John Ruskin, ‘Ad Valorem’, Unto this Last¹)