Abstract
This introductory chapter theorizes a “fictional” approach to capitalism. It explicates the development and raison d’être of a study of the representational and performative role of interrelated epistemic, ideological and literary narratives in the American socioeconomic context. It explains why exploring those narratives as a three-pronged discursive configuration helps to define and understand the American variety of capitalism, and its intrinsically Schumpeterian dynamics. Other major points dealt with include the axiological evaluation of the fictions of capitalism, and the resilience in the United States of a realist fictional mode which activates belief in the truth-value of creative fictions. The second part of the chapter consists in a summary of all the contributions that highlights the potential of transdisciplinary conversations at the interface of economics, sociology and literary studies.
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Notes
- 1.
Its central economic relevance is analyzed by Durand (2017). For its more discursive and literary dimensions, see Shonkwiler (2017) and Topia (2017, pp. 30–31) on “the Financial imagination”; Jameson (2010, 2011) on the “financialized imagination”; or Haiven (2011); Haiven and Berland (2014) on “Finance as Capital’s Imagination.”
- 2.
Is a Theory of Capitalism Possible?
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
Initially a form of sermon among the Puritans.
- 6.
Slave narratives can be read as so many attempts to expose the contradiction in the Constitution and come closer to the truth.
- 7.
Arrighi (1994) identified four accumulation cycles in the capitalist world-system, each with its associated hegemonic center: Italian cities in the sixteenth century, the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, nineteenth-century Britain, and the United States after 1945.
- 8.
In other words, whenever speculation takes over from investment in production as the main source of profit, an era of capitalism is coming to an end and a new one is inventing itself.
- 9.
As hinted at by Emerson (1842) who, in “The Transcendentalist,” typifies “The sturdy capitalist” with these words: “no matter how deep and square on blocks of Quincy granite he lays the foundations of his banking-house or Exchange, must set it, at last, not on a cube corresponding to the angles of his structure, but on a mass of unknown materials and solidity, red-hot or white-hot, perhaps at the core, which rounds off to an almost perfect sphericity, and lies floating in soft air, and goes spinning away, dragging bank and banker with it at a rate of thousands of miles the hour, he knows not whither,—a bit of bullet, now glimmering, now darkling through a small cubic space on the edge of an unimaginable pit of emptiness” (p. 241).
- 10.
Shonkwiler’s more recent book, The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification and the Limits of Realist Fiction (2017), develops this theme.
- 11.
“Almost all of the developments we associate with modernity—from greater religious toleration to scientific discovery—required the kind of cognitive provisionality one practices in reading fiction, a competence in investing contingent and temporary credit” (Gallagher , p. 347).
- 12.
That is linked to the contradiction between the constant creation, accumulation and valorization of capital—the law of diminishing returns induces an endless quest for boundless growth (See Arnaud, infra)—and the struggle over the appropriation/redistribution of surplus value.
- 13.
An early formulation of this view is in Minsky 1974: “the financial system swings between robustness and fragility and these swings are an integral part of the process that generates business cycles.”
- 14.
“Confidence” is like “fiction,” a double-faced signifier, asset or liability: a synonym for “trust or faith in a person or thing,” the reversal of its meaning is inscribed in the compound “confidence man,” “a person who swindles others by means of a confidence game” (The Free Dictionary), suggesting that it is of the essence of confidence that it can be betrayed (Vatanpour , infra).)
- 15.
Otherwise known as “the dot-com crisis.”
- 16.
While dictionaries concur on first defining “fictitious” as “what is false and is intended to deceive people,” no agreement seems to exist about “fictive” which, depending on dictionaries, is given first as a descriptive or a depreciative modifier. Definitions of “fictional” do not include negative features, relating it most clearly to imaginative invention and artistic creation. Despite these differences, all three adjectives can refer to what relates to works of fiction.
- 17.
Gallagher (2006) shows for instance how the novel is the type of fictional narrative “in which and through which fictionality became manifest, explicit, widely understood, and accepted” “as, over the course of the eighteenth century, readers developed the ability to tell [fiction] apart from both fact and (this is the key) deception” (p. 336; 338).
- 18.
The function of American realism as a buttress of capitalism is a question which critics have repeatedly addressed. See La Berge and Shonkwiler (2014).
- 19.
Quantitative economists’ current interest in fiction amounts to a return of the suppressed. (“Marx’s commodity stems from the Balzacian shop,” Rancière reminds us (2010, p. 164).) A striking illustration of this suspect trend is Robert J. Shiller’s (2017) Presidential address delivered at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in January 2017 and entitled “Narrative Economics ,” a plea for the expansion of the field of economics in the form of the quantitative study of the effect of popular, non-factual narratives on an economy’s health. “We economists should not just throw up our hands and decide to ignore this vast literature. We need to understand the narrative basis for macroeconomic fluctuations, and to think about how narrative economics ought to be more informing of policy actions now and in the future,” he writes (p. 10). The centerpiece of the article consists in a “reading” of “the 1920–1921 Depression, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the so-called ‘Great Recession’ of 2007–2009 and the contentious political-economic situation of today, […] as the results of the popular narratives of their respective times” (p. 10). The modeling of fictions with a view to getting ever closer to zero-error forecasts may be the ultimate quant’s (quantitative economist’s) fantasy, i.e. actually run against the spirit of political economy with its complex approach of phenomena, by perpetuating the belief that anything boils down to a system of equations (Boyer , infra). But Shiller’s attempt is certainly in sync with the zeitgeist: his research registers the greater “impact of non-factual narratives” “after the relatively recent advent of modern information technology and social media” (p. 4–5).
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
Vatanpour’s “excursion” into British literature is justified by the striking thematic similarities the two novels bear to each other. Additionally, Amis’s protagonist jets back and forth between the two sides of the Atlantic.
- 24.
Pynchon’s digital waste comes after A.R. Ammons’s poem Garbage (1993) and Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), in which waste (its past, present and future, its economics, even its metaphysical meaning) is abundantly theorized and dramatized through various characters.
Politics too produces waste: “we are now in a political landscape littered with what Alex Williams called ‘ideological rubble’ ” (Fisher , 2009, p. 78).
- 25.
Gary Saul Morson, Morton Schapiro (2018) Cents and sensibility: What economics can learn from the humanities, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
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Coste, JH., Dussol, V. (2020). The Fictions of American Capitalism: An Introduction. In: Coste, JH., Dussol, V. (eds) The Fictions of American Capitalism. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36564-6_1
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