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No Change Without Purchase: Olaudah Equiano and the Economies of Self and Market

2005; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/eal.2005.0055

1534-147X

Ross Pudaloff,

American and British Literature Analysis

No Change Without Purchase Olaudah Equiano and the Economies of Self and Market Ross J. Pudaloff (bio) Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and exchanges all things, it is the general confounding and compounding of all things—the world upside-down—the confounding and compounding all natural and human qualities. —Karl Marx Actually, the laboring man has not the leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. —Henry David Thoreau By the middle of the nineteenth century, a consensus about the triumph of capitalism had been reached by its many critics. What was wrong with capitalism, according to both Karl Marx and Henry David Thoreau, was the reduction, indeed, the collapse of all value to its price in the market and the alienation of the now reified person from his true nature. Exchange could not be confined to goods and services; rather, the self became commodified and alienated in the endless series of exchanges of market capitalism. Commodification, then, was the fall of man, and the task of the writer and activist, Marx and Thoreau agreed, was to change the world so that man could recover his true self. The opposition between a commodified self and an authentic subjectivity mystifies the relation of the latter to raced and gendered norms. "Man" as the nineteenth century used it inevitably connotes white males, that is, those who possessed (or at least believed they possessed) an identity that might be devalued in the market. Consider, however, the difference entry into the marketplace might have for those who by law and custom (here I mean the poor, people of color, and women) had no public identity, [End Page 499] whose self existed only as negatively defined by absence from the public realm, from discourse and from power. These might regard the market and the prospect of exchange and commodification differently, if only because the inability to confine exchange to goods and service promised a public self, regardless of how compromised or truncated it might be from the perspective of those who saw their already existing subjectivity under threat from the marketplace.1 The critique of commodification has proven so influential, especially in literary and cultural studies, that it has become easy to forget the specific conditions under which it emerged and flourished. J. G. A. Pocock points out that "denunciations of commerce as founded upon soullessly rational calculation and the cold, mechanical philosophy of Bacon, Hobbes, Locke and Newton" only began to appear around 1789, the year in which, among other events, Olaudah Equiano's autobiography first appeared (Virtue 50).2 The post-Romantic critique of commodification occludes earlier understandings of the relation among politics, economics, and the self. Praise for commerce and manufacturing emanating from many eighteenth-century radicals (Thomas Paine, for example) drew upon a logic that exchange and commodification could produce a subject where none had heretofore existed, indeed where there had been no place for that subject to stand or be. John Brewer puts the matter succinctly: "[T]he link between radical politics and commercialization, forged by voluntary associations, could hardly have been stronger" (201). A newly produced "I" would gain a public existence through its exchange and commodification. Hence, writings by those whose entry into the public realm is the result of exchange (here the female narrators of published captivity narratives are a good example) privilege exchange as the means by which those figures could achieve a public and recognized identity. The economic and political promise of commerce did not mean subscribing to what later became the norm of capitalist economic thought, namely, that rationality was the essence of the system. On the contrary, as Daniel Defoe wrote, "Trade is a mystery . . . . A sort of Lunacy in Trade attends all its Circumstances, and no Man can give a rational Account of it" (Brewer 213). Trade of course was this way because it was feminine. As Terry Mulcaire has argued, the feminized figure of Credit was valued by Defoe and other Whigs because her "instability" came to...