The Poetry of Business
Mikhail Epstein
In Russian, the word “capitalism [kapitalizm]” unwittingly drags behind it the concept of
“accumulation [nakopleniya]”.
A capitalist is an accumulator [nakopitel'], one who accumulates capital [kopit capital]. Such similarity of sound played more than a
little into the hands of the revolution and has to do with a number of its
linguistic successes, such as “Bolshevik”, “Cheka”, “Soviet Power”[1].
The new regime needed words not only with an intrinsic [“v''evshayasya”] positive connotation (“bol’she” – greater, “nacheku” – on the alert, “sovet” – advice, counsel), but with negative ones as
well. Although the words “capital” and “capitalist” came from the West, it is
as if they were cast purposely for the Russian ear in order to incite righteous
hatred for those that “accumulate” (kopiat).
But these are all just, as the linguists say,
“popular” or “folk”, that is false etymologies[2].
In fact, capitalism is the least connected with accumulation. In any case, far
less than the “covetous knight” with his coffers of gold from the feudal past
or the steward with his rusting warehouse from the socialist past.
Capitalism throws back all its profits into
overhead so it can make more profit. Profit itself does not settle like a dead
weight, but comes forward as an elusive, transcendental essence, which requires
newer and newer efforts and expenditures. Transcendence, in the language of
philosophers, is breaking the boundaries of our experience, the attraction to
other, supersensory worlds. The importance of capitalism lies in the fact that
it uncovered transcendence specifically where it was least presumed to be – in
the economic foundations of society, in the world of business. By tradition
this world is considered devoid of poetry, dead, stagnant, restrictive to the
soul. The genius stood in opposition to the craftsman, the poet to the
merchant.
This is the very reason capitalism achieved universal success
– it introduced poetry, a gravitation to the boundless in the realm of business
itself. The material world has turned out to be a function of striving for
profit, which by no means required nothing but material gain. Profit is always
more than what it brings its owner, it breaks past the boundaries of the
necessary, the essential, the required, it is pro-fit or pri-byl’ , which sounds almost like "out-fit",
orne-byl’ (fairy-tale,
fanciful story) – a pure growth of existence, a jump into uncertainty, the
element of artistic creation.
Past economic systems were built on the
consumption of what was produced, on a balance between investment and return.
The approach to business was utilitarian: the slave owner got from his slaves,
and the feudal lord from his serfs and vassals what he needed for a luxurious
life. Capitalism began to produce for the expansion of production itself.
Balance yielded to advance: capitalism is the art of investing, brilliant
expenditure. Before, practical men were basically occupied with extricating
means for their own use and pleasure, but capitalism began to throw about,
waste these means as in a stormy game of love. It is no accident that the
accelerated development of capitalism in Europe coincides with the age of
Romanticism. Romanticism is not at all a protest against capitalism, against
the spirit of profit, as the Marxist point of view is accustomed to hold.
Capitalism and Romanticism possess the same historical impetus – the French
Revolution; a shared psychological motive – individual enterprise; and finally,
a shared metaphysical aim – a gravitation to the boundless. All ancient,
“naïve” forms of management, with their orientation to the finite,
consumed product, were cast aside by capitalism, just as Romanticism cast aside
all naïve, classicist forms of poetry with their embodied, well-considered
ideal. The ideal wound up being thrown to the future, to the past, to the
impossible, to nowhere, poetry became languor for an unattainable ideal and mockery,
irony about all finite forms of its embodiment.
Thus the principle of boundlessness entered into
poetry, and it has illuminated the world of capitalist undertakings. From now
on every product is merely the form of a particular commodity which elicits in
its buyer a need that can only be satisfied by the next commodity. Capitalism
corresponds with that developmental stage of the universal spirit that Hegel
called unhappy consciousness. It is a doubling of consciousness that can in no
way reunite with that which makes it it [“samost’”] in a single personality, but which constantly
critiques and casts off its inconstant aspects. Such a consciousness is in need
of things that would at once grant it the possibility of self-confirmation and
of self-negation. Accordingly there was born an “unhappy” form of the things
for which there was no guarantee of a firm place next to man in his social
structure, but rather a changeable, provocative function in human
self-consciousness. A commodity is a challenge to whoever buys it: Can you be
worthy of me? Do you deserve to wear me, play me, travel with me? Show what you
are capable of!
Every time I purchase something, I’m glad for
the opportunity to be something I wasn’t. I buy a radio – this means that today
I am a great listener of radio, my “ego” flies through the ether. Inside myself there is something
ethereal – this is why I purchased the radio: in order to feel the ethereal
part of my “ego” better. I purchase a tennis racket – this means that today I
am a great athlete, my “ego” is the resilience of the ball, the joy of the hit,
the distance of the rebound. Inside myself there is a certain elasticity, a
certain sharpness of the swing and the exactitude of the aim; I purchase a
racket in order, at last, to become myself, that which I am.
To buy means to become. To buy oneself is
impossible, but it is exactly this impossibility that forms a world of endless
marketable possibilities. In buying newer and newer things we become – but can
never fully become – ourselves. Hence the rapid moral and psychological
wornness of the commodity, which easily winds up at the dump – for ahead, in a
certain metaphysical light, there shines the essence of the absolute commodity,
which is as elusive as my unconscious, my super-Ego. The absolute commodity is
my “ego”, which, unfortunately for me and fortunately for the world’s
merchants, I cannot buy anywhere. That which is suggested in purchasing is only
one of many forgotten elements of my “ego”. The commodity reminds me of it, plunges
into a Romantic day-dream about my omnisufficiency [vsedovol’stvo], omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence. This
day-dream is called “acquiring oneself,” but every time it just ends in the
acquisition of the next commodity.
Hence the commercial which always, in endless
variations, plays the same tune: My dissatisfaction with myself, my unhappy
consciousness. A typical example: An ad for a certain brand of beer which
hovers over the roofs of many American cities from Washington to San Francisco.
What exactly is beer, and what does it have to do with me? Well, specifically
that it is the forgotten, frothing, fresh, lightly intoxicating part of my
“ego”. Of course, beer came from Germany, and not simply from Germany, but from
all the bottomless depth of German thought, which seeks the secrets of the
subject, the secrets of the superman. And there in the beer add is Nietzsche’s
enormous head with its famous little fetlock of a moustache, the bristling will
to power which foretold the appearance of the leaders and furors of the 20th
century. Beneath the strong-willed chin is an inscription that summarizes all
of Nietzsche for mass consciousness: “What is man?” Opposite Nietzsche stands a
glass of that same intoxicating and frothing substance, and that question about
man is answered: “Now you can understand this and much else.”
But who on earth would believe that beer would
help you understand yourself and the meaning of life? But the add does not call
upon you to believe. In this it differs from the ideological slogan, which
requires literal apprehension [vospriyatie] and absolute acceptance [priyatie]. Slogans suffocate the consciousness of their
only rightness, there lies in them the ponderousness of heathen
indisputability, of the naively and miraculously appearing and openly
incarnated ideal. An advertisement insists on nothing – it proposes. Before it
man is rich, above all, in potential choices. For an advertisement links this
or another material product with the endless game of possibilities. An advertisement
is a small allusion to what we can become, a momentary day-dream of another
existence, a call to transcendence. An advertisement is Romantic. A thing
proves to be a function of internal self-determination, when man above all
searches his entire environment for – and never finds – himself.
Before capitalism man lived in a world of solid,
long-living things, which outlived their allotted time, and passed from
great-grandfather to great-grandson. With capitalism everything changed: now
things are drawn into the world of man, like fleeting charms, fragile
temptations. Capitalism is the poetry of things deprived of grave material
substance and turned into signs of changeable possibilities, moveable
correlations between the me of today and the future me. The thing has
desolidified, become an informing [vest’], a short and penetrating call addressed to everyone: who are you?
what kind of gloves do you wear? whose hands do you shake? what do you take
away with you from the mystery of contact? Gloves, shoes, rackets, radios are
different opportunities for me to be something else, to be what I am not
already. I am not I: and here the celebration of the commodity, expressly as a
means of celebrating my decision to become something else, my selection of
myself on the advantageous background of boundlessness which stands before me,
digs into this new boundlessness, into the difference between me and myself.
The existence of the thing in the quality of a
commodity, despite the gloomy theories of alienation, is, to be exact, festive
and Romantic: the thing is not passed to me by inheritance, but is chosen from
among many things, like a bride, like a new experience, something earmarked far
in advance, like a rupture in the physical solidity of the world. Yes, the
commodity is alienation: labor, force, whatever you want, but isn’t there in
every living being this need to be alien to oneself, to create something alien
from oneself – a need for carnival, disguises, costume changes, surmounting, gambling,
creation? To be the owner of just one’s own powers, the user of just one’s own
things – what boundless depression of initiative! The worker alienates his
strength in creating a commodity, the buyer alienates his strength in the
acquisition of the commodity – long live the strength of alienation! that,
which is deployed everywhere by capitalism like a game of possibilities, giving
away my “ego” in exchange for an alien one. This exchange of alienations with
ourselves is the absolute of the Romantic movement, which forces us constantly
to cast off our next “ego” like a hardened mask.
Of course there are theories that advance a
return to things in their own right, absolutes, unquestionable like peasant
shoes, which are separate from the beginning and end of man’s fate: in earth and
in dust, in the field and along the road. There aren’t just more, but there
should be, and there must be more and more similar theories, along the lines of
Heidegger[3].
They express the second circle of Romantic languidness, from the beginning,
proudly breaking of with the thingness of an available ideal, which for this
reason pines for an ideal of thingness itself, for simple, domestic, warm
things. But where is this happy, pre-commodified thingness? Forever abandoned
by capitalist humanity, it only appears to him in theoretical and poetic
fantasies, thingness is still more conditional, more queerly unattainable, more
self-controlled than the thingness of the commodity itself. For the thingness
of a commodity, while it may have been transferred to a sign of boundless
opportunities, still serves man specifically as thingness, as an alien,
tangible, paid-for existence. The thingness of Heidegerrian representations has
already definitively merged with man’s nostalgic state of possession, which
searches everywhere, but nowhere finds its genuine, happy “ego.” This thingness
attests to no remuneration, it is devoid of foreignness, and so its sole
existence lies in the ideal space of a painting, or a museum, or philosophic
hope, like one more opportunity for the “ego” to hold on to itself for itself.
The utopia of the uncommodified thing is
organically inherent in all totalitarian regimes, which blame capitalism for
making people more unhappy by increasing their needs and wants. Hence the conundrum
of making man happy, incarnating the ideal, naturalizing business, restraining
the marking, reducing its noise and disquiet to a parochial unity [tsekhovaya
spaika], reducing the
boundlessness of profit to the happiness of on-hand existence and general
prosperity. Not only Nazism, to which Heidegger was close, but also communism,
inspired by the Marxist critique of the market and estrangement, tried to
create its own poetry of the people’s business and place it in opposition to
capitalism. If capitalism introduced an unhappy consciousness within economics
itself, communism created a poetry of happy economic ideas, of planned tasks
which reeled in business from without and substituted the game of its interior
possibilities with the strength of exterior necessity. “We are driving mankind
to happiness with an iron hand” read a slogan of the early years of the
revolution. Uncommodified production was the specter of such imminent
happiness, when the closest ranks of comrades, of their own accord, put an end
to the commodified relations between them. In the old days, the word “comrade”
used to mean: a companion in dealing with commodities on the trade routes. So
why can a commodity, if its higher goal, comradeship, can be thus achieved, and
economics change from being commodified-market one directly to being a
comradely one?
The mistake lies in the fact that labor was
poeticized as a supposedly magic way of extracting man from the ape and the
subsequent extraction of all the miracles of civilization from man. Moreover,
labor was taken from the worker specifically on the model that in him there was
the least poetry, the least strictly human motives and aspirations. Marxism
justly critiques man’s subjugation to the machine, but does not propose another
model for mankind besides the proletariat, which is the product of such
subjugation.
Labor is necessary, but even in the coarsest
material activity it is preceded by a moment of freedom. The only poetic moment
in business is the entrepreneur’s activity, which Marxism turned away from with
splendid sanctimonious indignation. You could say that it was precisely this
lack of esthetic receptivity that was the ruin of the Marxist project in as far
as the worker’s activity, however you raise it from political considerations,
ethical considerations or what have you, cannot breathe life into business, it
is poetically unconvincing, in it there is no pursuit of or impulse towards the
absolute. The worker’s labor submits to a plan which was drawn up for him by
the entrepreneur, but this plan is only secondary in relation to the game that
the entrepreneur himself plays, where the stakes are his entire fortune, life,
honor and the well-being of his family. The plan, that is the subordinate and
mechanical moment of production, turned out to be an end in itself under
socialism, it was protected from the risk which, under capitalism, precedes the
plan and breathes life into it.
The proletariat works, the capitalist runs
risks. The poetry of business is the poetry not of labor, but of the business
enterprise, of the risk which entails great danger and requires great daring.
This means that it is not the same risk and excitement that hovers in the
gaming-house, where the gambler gives himself over to the power of chance. The
entrepreneur forces chance to bet on him; he leaves nothing to chance, he plays
not at blind roulette, but at transparent chess. But for this very reason his
winnings can cost him far more then the casino attendee who easily takes
comfort in and is rewarded by the fickleness of fortune. In the casino you only
win what is in the kitty; in business you win everything that makes up the
dignity, fate and career of the player. The risk is not eliminated, quite the
opposite, the possibility of calculating it professionally increases the size
of its unforeseen consequences. Namely, risk is the basic category of
capitalism, which unites it with everything fantastic, surprising and
improbable which ever happened in history. On the level of risk, the
undertakings of Rockefeller and Ford hardly differ from the undertakings of
Napoleon and Charlemagne. To risk means to fulfill the commandments of the most
Romantic of all philosophies: “live dangerously,” “love fate” and “earn the
love of fate” (Nietzsche).
The true entrepreneur personally wins little
from his Napoleonic schemes. He could dine in the best restaurants, bathe at
the best health resorts, fly on a personal jet, possess all the best for the
gratification of his soul and body for ten million. Why then does he need ten
billion? “Impossible to eat or drink or kiss it” – this is the same astounding
uselessness, which, according to the words of N. Gumilyov[4],
we experience before poetry. It is inaccessible to the five senses – and in the
tortures of aimlessness there is born within us a sixth organ, the one with
which we apprehend the “rosy dawn over the cooling heavens”. Doesn’t the
entrepreneur apprehend before him the dim outlines of a new gigantic
undertaking in the same way?
It is precisely this difference between a million,
which you can drink up, and a billion, which is impossible to drink up, which
makes the entrepreneur a poet, a bearer of the sixth sense. The difference,
which does not compensate for all the labor and losses, makes up the soul of
capitalism, its poetry, its transcendence. And its loneliness. May the social
character of labor grow – may entrepreneurship remain the destiny of the loner.
It is not for the man of big business to divide this breakthrough to the other,
this weight of responsibility, this instant of fervor with anyone: he remains
alone before the face of the possible, as before a blank sheet of paper. “What
shall we do with deathless verse?” What shall he do with countless profits?
He knows that he can do nothing with deathless
verse, or with countless profits. But this idleness lies at the base of any
great task. It is exactly this nothing, this whim, this profit-fairy tale [pribyl’-nebyl’] that moves the millions of furnaces, machines,
conveyors where millions of workers are preoccupied with how to carry out the
plan to the letter; with a schedule calculated down to the second, where no one
will recognize, and should not recognize the poetic line born of an instant of
nonsense, muttering, uselessness.
April
1992
Transl.
by Thomas Dolack
[1] Andrei Sinyavsky has shown that “on these three words, as on three whales, the regime stood and is standing”. See Abram Terts, “Literaturnyi protsess v Rossii [The Literary process in Russia]” in the collection “Mif o zastoe [The Myth of Stagnation]” , Lenizdat, 1991 p. 313 (first printed in the newspaper “Kontinent [Continent]” (Paris), 1974
[2] Etymology is the subset of linguistics that studies the derivation and original meaning of words and roots. It would appear to be the only discipline where the word “popular” and “false” are used as synonyms. However, the language brooks no lies, even to its privileged carrier – the people. In this sense the humble etymology presents a wonderful example to history, sociology, political science, ethnology and other, much more influential disciplines.
[3] Martin Heidegger, 20th century German existentialist philosopher, proclaimed a return from a technological civilization to the forgotten truth [istina] of existence as it is, in particular, revealed in the Van Gogh painting depicting peasant shoes (an analysis of it is given in Heidegger’s work “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936).
[4] From Nikolai Gumilyov’s poem “The Sixth Sense” (1921).