Imaginary Vaiue and the Vaiue of the Imaginary: J. G. Schlosser, E. T. A.

Hoffmann, and the Convergence of Aesthetics and Economics in German Romanticism

Richard T. Gray

To produce means to generate a third thing, to mediate between two conflicting things and force the creation of a third thing out of their conflict.Adam
Mller, Versuche einer neuen Theorie des Geldes

Economics and Aesthetics as Sciences of Vaiue

n the closing decades of the eighteenth century, two "new" scientifictheoretical disciplines, economics and aesthetics, burst on the European intellectual scene and immediately began to assert their precedence over other areas. Although at first glance their simultaneous ascendancy may seem like historical serendipity, core issues and concerns yoke them together. Both focus primarily on human productivity and seek philosophical explanations for its refinement and increase, and both are fundamentally sciences of value, which attempt to assess, measure, and explain differential worth. To be sure, economics and aesthetics did not spring up without precursors or antecedents. But the forerunners of aesthetics were normative, regulative programs, extending back at least to Aristotle's Poetics, that dictated standard practices and conventions governing production in the individual arts. Only with Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's Aesthetica (1750-58) were the foundations laid for a philosophical-theoretical aesthetics that treats human

Modprn Language Quarterly 72:3 (September 2011) DOI 10.1215/00267929-1275172 2011 by University of Washington

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artistic sensibility as a subcategory of sensual perception.' Similarly, economics had existed as the branch of general statecraft devoted to the management and accumulation of wealth, and the theories of the so-called physiocratic school, codified in Franois Quesnay's Tableau conomique of 1759 and promulgated from the 1750s to the French Revolution, are commonly recognized as the first scientific economics, which defines the economic domain as a closed system of interdependent elements and relations operating together as a harmonious whole. Both aesthetics and economics became scientific disciplines when a prescriptive, normative model that laid out conventions or policies for action gave way to a systematic and theoretical model of the universal founding principles of human artistic and economic productivity. Instead of being formulated as a dispersed set of ad hoc legislative practices, aesthetics and economics as philosophical-theoretical disciplines came to be organized as internally logical, interactively dependent systems, concerned primarily with defining the establishment and operation of value within their circumscribed domains. Economics and aesthetics, however, had different approaches to questions of value. Aesthetics focused on the subjective moment of value attribution. As codified in Immanuel Kant's theory of aesthetic judgments, the primary problem was how to claim universal validity for individual judgments of "taste." Kant's resolution depended on a common human faculty or sensibility, the sensus communis.^ Aesthetic judgments are by nature' qualitative and as such escape easily defined standards of measure. Economic theory, by contrast, generally circumvents the quagmire of subjectivist judgments by reducing all value considerations to quantitative principles. Barbara Herrnstein Smith dubs this conflict between aesthetics and economics a "double discourse of value," with the former grounded in inspiration, discrimination, taste, and transcendence and the latter expressed in terms of calculation, cost-benefit analysis, profit, and utility.^
' Baumgarten introduced aesthetics as an academic discipline in a series of university lectures begun in 1742. Forabriefsummary of his theories and their sustained influence throughout the eighteenth century see Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3-20. 2 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, vol. 10 of Werkausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 156-60; 19-22. ' Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 127.

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Consequently, the sisterly relationship between economics and aesthetics is often marked by rivalry and competition about how to define value. Adam Smith charted the rudiments that would dominate economic value theory for nearly a century by distinguishing "value in use" from "value in exchange.''^ The latter, less tangible notion is not the asking pricewhich has subjectivist implicationsbut instead the "quantity of labour" required to produce of refine that commodity. "Labour," Smith apodictically asserted, "is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities" (1:47). The first chapter of David Ricardo's consolidating work of classical economic theory. On the Principles ofPolitical Economy and Taxation, is accordingly titled "On Value" and begins from Smith's distinction. Classical aesthetic theory, for its part, has no place for use value or for quantified measures of exchange value. Beginning with Karl Philipp Moritz's foundational statement, in the 1785 "Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schnen Knste und Wissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten" ("Essay toward a Unification of All the Eine Arts and Sciences under the Concept of What Is Complete unto Itself"), which asserts that beauty affords "a higher and more selfless pleasure than the merely utilitarian,"^ and continuing with Kant's definition of beauty as "disinterested pleasure" (122-24; 5), aesthetic value was explicitly opposed to economic use value, which it viewed as tied subjectively to the interests of a particular individual. Smith's concept of an "invisible hand" "finessed the problem of individual interest with the seemingly counterintuitive claim that by pursuing selfish interests, people ultimately serve the common good.^ There is a noteworthy structural parallel between the economic theory
* Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Gauses of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, textual ed. W. B. Todd, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 1:44. 5 Karl Philipp Moritz, "Versuch einer Vereinigtmg aller schnen Knste und Wissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten," in Schriften zur sthetik und Poetik, ed. Hans Joachim Schrimpf (Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1962), 3. Throughout this essay, all translations from German sources are my own. 6 For Smith's classic formulation of the invisible hand see 1:26-27, 456. Albert O. Hirschman analyzes this reflex as a reinscription of destructive, subjectivist "passions" in terms of countervailing, communally informed "interests" (The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Gapitatism before Its Triumph, 20th anniv. ed. [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997], 21-43).

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that public affairs are best served by a devotion to self-interest and the aesthetic principle that individual judgments of taste resonate with universal human assessments; both present the private and subjective as the vehicle for articulating what is common and public. But here begins a turf war between economics and aesthetics. Thus in the second of his letters titled ber die sthetische Erziehung des Menschen {On the Aesthetic Education of Humanity, 1795), Friedrich Schiller launches a broadside against utilitarianism as an inappropriate standard for measuring the value of art: ''Utility is the grand idol of the age, to which all energies must pander and which all talents must respect. Measured on this crude scale, the spiritual merit of art has no weight, and, robbed of all motivation, it disappears from the century's noisy marketplace.'"' Schiller's marketplace alludes to economic pragmatism, against whose ascendancy his program of an ''aesthetic education" is intended as a historical antidote in the face of his fear that economic standards of value threaten to annul the significance of the aesthetic and push art to the margins of human society. Still, aesthetics and economics shared an engagement with the productive capacity of the imagination. At least since M. H. Abrams's book The Mirror and the Lamp, the shift in aesthetic theory from mimetic representation toward the productive imagination has become a critical commonplace.8 By 1790 Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft presumes general agreement that the principle of imaginative genius has supplanted the dogma of sterile imitation (243; 47). In what follows I will outline the role of the productive imagination in economic discourse of this period. Although in general the glorification of the imagination in Romantic aesthetics runs parallel to its sustained suppression, even vilification, in economic theory, the power of the imagination comes into prominence briefly as a productive and value-creative force during the debates in Germany from 1770 to 1789 over the theoretical coherence and pragmatic applicability of physiocratic economic doctrines.^
' Friedrich Schiller, ber die sthetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, in Erzhlungen; Theoretische Schriften, vol. 5 of Smtliche Werke, ed. Gerhard Fricke and Herbert C. Gpfert, 5 vols. (Munich: Hanser, 1959), 572. 8 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 22. ^ For a review of this German controversy about physiocratic principles see Kurt Braunreuther, "Die Bedeutung der physiokratischen Bewegung in Deutschland in

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A defense of the imagination as a formative economic principle manifests itself most prominently in the writings ofJohann Georg Schlosser (1739-99), whose primary claim to fame in European intellectual history is tied to his close association with Goethe, his wife's brother. After examining the rise and fall of imaginative value theories in economics and Schlosser's theories in particular, my investigation will conclude with an analysis of E. T. A. Hoffmann's last short story, "Des Vetters Eckfenster" ("My Cousin's Corner Window"), a narrative that stages a confrontation between economics and aesthetics with regard to the human imagination as a productive force. Hoffmann's text, written and published in 1822, can be read not merely as his poetic testament^" but also as a retrospective commentary on this tussle between economics and aesthetic theory over the value of the imagination and its role in the production and consumption of economic and artistic products.
Subjective and Objective Economic Vaiues

In the notes to section 63 of his Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts {Fundamentals of the Philosophy of Right, 1821), G. W. F. Hegel makes an

assertion that could stand as a motto for the central concerns of his age: "Many things become clearas soon as one has a firm determination of what constitutes value."'' Indeed, this section undertakes to define the concept of (economic) value by theorizing the transformation from

der zweiten Hlfte des 18. Jahrhunderts" (PhD diss., Humboldt University, 1955);
and Keith Tribe, Governing Economy: Th Reformation of German Economic Discourse,

iy^o-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univereity Press, 1988), 1 19-31. I examine the far-reaching cultural and literary-aesthetic implications of this debate in the chapter
"Economics and the Imagination" in Money Matters: Economics and the German Cultural

Imagination,- iyyo-1850 (Seatde: University of Washington Press, 2008), 109-69, to which some of my argumentation here is indebted. K' See Detlef Kremer, "Panorama und Perspektive: 'Des Vetters Eckfenster,' " in E. T. A. Hoffmann: Erzhlungen und Romane (Berlin: Schmidt, 1999), 184; Gerhard Neumann, "Ausblicke: E. T. A. Hoffmanns letzte Erzhlung 'Des Vetters Eckfenster,' " in Hoffmanneske Geschichte: ZM einer Literatunuissenschaft als Kultunuissenschaft,

ed. Gerhard Neumann (Wrzburg: Knigshausen und Neumann, 2005), 223; and Rolf Selbmann, "Dit mit Horaz: Zur Poetik von E. T. A. Hoffmanns Erzhlung 'Des Vetters Eckfenster,'" E. T. A. Hoffmann-Jahrbuch 2 (1994): 76-77.
" G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse, vol. 7 of Theorie-Werkausgabe, ed. Eva Moldenhauer

and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 136.

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use value to exchange value. Hegel begins by defining concrete "use" (Gebrauch) as both a qualitative and a quantitative relationship to a specific "need" (Bedrfnis)qualitative because only certain objects will satisfy that need, quantitative because some objects will satisfy it better than others (Philosophie des Rechts, 135). Only its quantitative use in relation to this need makes any object comparable, for Hegel, with other objects that satisfy this same need, and this act of comparison entails a shift from concrete use to abstract "usefulness" or "utility" (Brauchbarkeit). The quantifiable component, which constitutes an abstraction from the particularity of the object's qualities, determines the object's value. To become something with value, any object must undergo a fundamental transformation from a condition of quality into one of pure quantity. It becomes an object in the true, idealist sensethat is, an object of consciousnessonly when one abstracts from its particularity and nudges it down the road to conceptuality. Value hence does not attach to the object itself but is a function of the object viewed as a sign.i2 Hegel's theory of economic value as a desubstantialized conception of the object presumes a universal similar in kind to the universally subjective judgments of taste guaranteed by Kant's sensus communis and so parallels Kant's identification of aesthetic value with judgments of taste: both theories begin by abstracting fundamentally from the particularity of the object's use; both philosophers locate the attribution of value in a mental or cognitive operation (the faculty ofjudgment for Kant, the process of abstract conceptualization for Hegel); yet both, finally, insist that value is not simply determined by an individual but partakes of a universality lent it by the universal nature of the cognitive operation itself. Hegel's Philosophie des Rechts thus marks a significant intellectual-historical convergence of aesthetics and economics. His position regarding economic value could hardly be more distant from the standard of classical economic theory, which defines value in terms of the concrete and quantifiable measure of human labor. Karl Marx was the most immediate intellectual respondent to '2 Jean-Joseph Goux traces this process of idealization in the monetary form,
which he describes as "an exemplary shift from the instrument to the fetish, from the fetish to the symbol, and from the symbol to the simple sign: a movement toward idealization, a shift from material prop to relation" {Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Ereud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990], 49).

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Hegel's theory of economic value. In his Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen konomie {Foundations of the Critique ofPolitical Economy, 1857-61),

Marx seeks to come to terms with the commodity's "double existence": its conflicting status as at once a "natural" and an "economic" fact. Like Hegel, he argues that the value of a commodity is formulated independently of its concrete, objective being: this value "not only can but must simultaneously assume an existence that is distinct from its natural existence."'^ When he asks why this is so, Marx supplies the same answer as Hegel: value is a quantitative differential unrelated to the object's qualitative properties. "Because commodities as values are only quantitatively different from one another, every commodity must be qualitatively distinct from its own value" {Crundrisse, 60). Indeed, as Marx's deliberations develop further, the resonances of Hegel's definition of value from the Philosophie des Rechts become even more discernible. For Marx as for Hegel, in the economic aspect of its "double existence" the commodity is transformed into a mere sign. The natural distinctness that any commodity shares with all other commodities then comes into conflict or "contradiction" {Widerspruch) with the economic equivalence it represents in its existence as an article available for exchange, with the result that "the commodity assumes a double existence, next to its natural one a purely economic existence in which it is a mere sign [bloes Zeichen], a cipher for a relationship of production, a mere sign for its own value" {Crundrisse, 60). For Marx as for Hegel, the unique constitution of the commodity is identified precisely as its double existence, its nature as a thing that satisfies a particular need, and its status as a value that emerges through a process of differential comparison and abstraction. As a value, the commodity is not an object at all, but a "mere sign," that is, a mental or conceptual construct. This sign character of the commodity, for both thinkers, is represented by money as the concrete representative of this value abstraction (Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts, 137; Marx, Crundrisse, 65). However, whereas Hegel defends abstract value as more "substantial" than the concrete usefulness of the object itself, Marx corrects his theory, which "stands . . . on its head," by placing it back on its material

li* Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen konomie, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Dietz, 1974), 60.

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t.i* When Marx equates Hegel's "sign that represents value" (Philosophie des Rechts, 136) with the appositive formula "a cipher for a relationship of production," he is lodging his protest against the ethereality of Hegel's theory of value and tracing its roots back to the concrete, material domain of economic production. Already just prior to this analysis of the double nature of the commodity, Marx insists that economic value is nothing but the objectification of human labor, measured in terms of time: "Every commodity (product or instrument of production) is equal to the objectification of a particular period of labor. Its value, the relationship in which it is exchanged with other goods . . . is equal to the quantity of labor time realized in it" (Grundrisse, 59). Here Marx affirms his unwavering allegiance to the labor theory of economic value championed by Smith and Ricardo. At the same time, however, he cannot circumvent completely the more mystified Hegelian theory of economic value that abstracts from the concrete characteristics of the object to ascertain the differential coefficient of its economic value. It is as though Marx viewed Hegel's conceptual acrobatics for establisbing economic value as notbing but a subjective, cogitative manifestation of any commodity's true objective value, as expressed in units of labor (time). Indeed, Marx analyzed and denounced just this divergence between objective labor value and the mysteriously subjective value that humans attribute to the commodity almost ten years later, in the famous section of the first volume of a5 Kapital that deals with the fetish character of the commodity. The opening passage of this analysis of commodity fetishism charts precisely the transmogrification of the commodity from a simple, concrete object into a complex, mysterious thing of value: A commodity appears atfirstglance to be a self-evident, trivial thing.... But as soon as it [a wooden table] appears as a commodity, it is meta. morphosed into a sensual supersensual thing. It no longer only stands with its feet on the ground, but also stands, with regard to all other commodities, on its head and generates out of its wooden head freakish ideas, much more fantastic than if it got up and started dancing on its own accord. (Kapital, 85)

't Karl Marx, Das Kapitat: Kritik der politischen konomie, vol. 1, vol. 23 of Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz, 1972), 85.

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There appears to be nothing mysterious at all when a piece of wood is transformed, through the simple application of human creativity and labor, into a table, an object with greater usefulness, and hence with surplus value. Yet, at the moment that it becomes a commodity, that is, an object in a relationship of exchange with other objects, this purely sensual, empirical thing is distorted by metaphysical whimsy, so that it assumes the guise of a contradictory "sensual supersensual thing." It now stands on its "head," instead of on its material "feet," because its commoditization has invested it with the mystifying power of the human imagination. This is what motivates Marx to compare "the mystical character of the commodity" {Kapital, 85) with the fetish object of religious rites, in which imaginary ideas similarly take on the character of real, autonomous objects that govern concrete human social relations: Here [in the nebulous realm of the religious world] the products of the human mind appear as autonomous figures that have their own life and stand in a relationship among themselves and with human beings. The same is true in the commodity world of the products of the human hand. I call this the fetishism that adheres to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as commodities, and that hence is inseparable from commodity production. {Kapital, 86-87) The conceptual, or imaginative, process by which human beings abstract from the concrete object to establish its value, which means to constitute it as a sign, comes to dwarf the real acts of production and form-giving labor that make the object a commodity in the first place. The mystifying manipulations of the imagination displace the objective determination of value as measured in terms of labor hours and transform the objective character of the commodity's production by means of human labor into a "hidden secret" {Kapital, 89). Marx lifts this veil of mystery through a simple insistence on this hidden secret of human labor. Only the labor theory of value can dispel the "fetishism" attached to the commodity and set it back on the "feet" of its material constitution; the "un-covering" {Entdeckung) of the hidden secret of human labor "annuls the semblance of the merely relative determination of the value quotient of products of human labor" {Kapital, 89). By focusing exclusively on the quantifying element of human labor, we can banish the mystifying consequences of the imaginative comparison of

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commodities that establishes their exchange value as a relative worth. Marx's protest against Hegel's idealistic conception of value as sign and against the fetishistic mystery of the commodity reasserts the classical economic theory that renders value as a function of labor. The only role that imagination plays in the Marxian system is one of mystification, which must be undone for the commodity to be acknowledged in its fully fledged material nature. Given the dominance of the labor theory of value in classical economic doctrine, one wonders why Marx expends so much time and intellectual energy attacking the "phantasmagoric form" of value attribution {Kapital, 86). Imaginary value was established in aesthetics, as when Schiller's sthetische Erziehung calls the capacity to valorize semblance "a genuine expansion of humanity" and "a decisive step in the direction of culture" (656).'^ To be sure, in certain strains of German economic theory there had also been a movement toward embracing the formative role of imagination in the constitution of economic value, and Marx's extended analysis of commodity fetishism can be seen as an attempt to deal a deathblow to any such economic heresies. But the real antagonist is the sister discipline of aesthetics. Marx's position thus is representative of the hard-line attempt of economic theory, even into the second half of the nineteenth century, to ward off any infection of its substantive, quantifiable measure of commodity value by the more amorphous, subjective, and hence "consumerist" orientation of aesthetic value theories, guided by the phantasmagoric and rationally ungovernable power of the imagination. However, this did not prevent certain individuals from the aesthetic side of the value divide from trying to make a case for the relevance of imaginary value considerations in the sphere of economics.
Imaginary Vaiue

When Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740-1817) delivered his inaugural lecture in 1778 on his appointment as professor for public finance
'f' In the same (twenty-sixth) letter of the sthetische Erziehung, Schiller identifies the "art of semblance" as the specifically human domain of sovereignty, and he explicitly associates this world of appearances, which takes precedence over meager reality, with "the instibstantial realm of the imagination" (658).

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and administration at the Kameral-Hohe-Schule in Kaiserslautern the first institution of higher education in the German territories that concentrated on questions of state economic policy and public administrationhe laid out the rudiments of an economic theory bifurcated along the lines of two distinct categories of human need: existential and psychological. The first he aligned with material commodities themselves, the second with imaginary demands generated by the human fantasy: The preservation of existence is promoted by fundamental drives anchored in human nature or by physical desires. They cause the emergence of essential needs, which are occupied with the struggle for their own satisfaction. However, the elevation of the human being . . . stems from psychic sources, from the imagination. These also summon up psychological desires, which ultimately, due to the power of habit, have an infiuence on the finest substance of the body itself, thereby prodticing coincidental and luxurious, needs, after whose satisfaction one strives with almost the same hunger as for the means to satisfy one's essential needs.'^ In this dualistic economy, concrete, existential necessities stand in opposition to imaginary, psychological ones. Corresponding to the dualism of physis and psyche, the former promote the preservation of life in a steady-state economy, while the latter function as motors for enhancement and hence contribute to a progressive economic development. Jung-Stilling's remarks represent a major intervention into one of the most hotly contested economic debates of the later eighteenth century: the dispute over the role of luxury goods in the systematic understanding of political economy. The mainstream physiocratic school condemned luxury as a frivolous diversion of economic resources from subsistence needs to superfluous gratifications. It advocated reinvesting all surplus value in natural production, since only such material reinvestments could fuel an incremental increase in the productive capacity of nature.i^ But a small group of opponents like Jung-Stilling pointed
"'Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling, "Oeffentlicher Anschlag bei dem Antritte des Lehrstuhles der praktischen Kameralwissenschaften auf der Kameral Hohen Schule
zu Lautern," in Wirtschaftslehre und Landeswohlstand: Sechs akademische Eestreden, ed.

Gerhard Merk (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1988), 18-19. " The Marquis de Mirabeau helped establish this priority of rudimentary physical needs over the desire for luxury items when he argued that the aim of eco-

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to the inventive capacity of the human imagination and the need to ratchet up human productive energies by generating new desires that demanded fulfillment.'^ One of the most articulate of the antiphysiocrats was Schlosser. Born into a family that exerted considerable political and economic influence in his native Frankfurt am Main, Schlosser initially felt a strong theoretical affinity for the agricultural orientation of physiocratic economic policy. However, he turned against the physiocrats after experiencing firsthand the devastating conditions that their principles left behind in the German duchy of Baden-Durlach under the rule of Margrave Karl Friedrich. On entering the employ of Karl Friedrich in 1773, Schlosser first set out to reform and rejuvenate those provinces that had been subject to experiments directed and enforced by the leading, most dogmatic German physiocrat, Johann August Schlettwein (1731-1802). Schlosser's principal economic insights, articulated in his PolitischeEragmente of 1777 and in his monumental attack on physiocracy, Xenocrates,
oder Ueber die Abgaben {Xenocrates; or. On Taxatiori) of 1784, derive largely

from his experience of the practical incapacity of physiocratic doctrines to effect economic stability and advancement. Like Jung-Stilling, Schlosser insists on two fundamentally contrary economic paradigms. Schlosser's conception goes farther, however, in that he realizes that economic policy must be compatible with the available wealth and resources. Whereas the physiocrats viewed nature as the sole source of human wealth and enrichment, Schlosser adds the human imagination as a second, creative and form-giving faculty. Like
nomic policy was to bring needs and desires into the closest proximity. Only this, he believed, would contribute to the development of a tightly knit community. See
the "Extract from Rural Philosophy," in The Economics of Physiocracy: Essays and Transla-

tions, ed. Ronald L. Meek (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 59-60. J. G. A. Pocock notes more generally that for the economic theoiy of the eighteenth century, frugality, as an especially touted virtue, played the significant role of making allowances for reinvestment into production ( The Machiavellian Moment: Elormtine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 19751,445). '8 Conceptions of what we now call the "libidinal" economy were just taking shape in theoretical deliberations at the end of the eighteenth century, paving the way for a paradigm shift in economic thought that Joseph Vogl locates around the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century in Germany (Kalkl und Leidensciiaft: Poetik des konomischen Menschen, 2nd ed. [Zrich: Diaphanes, 2004], 12-17).

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Jung-Stilling, Schlosser associates the former with a limited, steadystate economy, the latter with a system of desires and their satisfaction that is in principle open-ended. He outlines the distinction in the Politische Fragmente: "Just as the wealth of nature is exhaustible [erschpflich], so are the needs it calls forth. Nature could never satisfy the needs of the imagination. Only the imaginary wealth of money could satisfy these needs."i9 Schlosser's proposition that nature's productive capacity is "exhaustible" flies in the face of physiocratic theory, which views nature as a boundless resource. Eor him, infinite productivity stands no longer on the side of nature but on that of the human imagination. If the "natural" economy is strictly circumscribed both by the finitude of human existential needs and by nature's restricted productive capacity, the "imaginary"'economy knows no bounds in its ability either to generate new needs or to produce new resources that satisfy them. The symbol of this infinite productivity is the "imaginary wealth" of money, for, according to Schlosser, only the monetary economy encompasses the inexhaustible resources capable of fulfilling the infinite desires generated by the imagination. Schlosser was one of the first economists to acknowledge this sea change in the domain of political economy in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. He aligns the natural economy with the traditional "agricultural state" (Ackerbaustaat), and the "imaginary" or monetary economy with the "trading nation" (Handelstaat). In Schlosser's view, the epoch of the flourishing agricultural economy is past, superseded by the blossoming of an economy based on monetary trade. The reasons lie with the finite character of the former and the infinite quality of the latter: Before monetary wealth emerged, that state was considered prosperous in which many people could eat their fill. Agricultural products are exhaustible [erschpflich]; if the price is exhaustible, so is the commodity. Everything given by nature is exhaustible.The creations of the imagination are not exhaustible. Monetary wealth is a product of the imagination. It made prices inexhaustible [unerschpflich]; and now the commodity as well. (PolitischeFragmente, 34-35)

^ ]ohnnn Georg Schlosser, Politische Fragmente (Leipzig, 1777), 34.

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Since nature is exhaustible, so are its products, the needs they satisfy, and hence also their value; by contrast, the imagination is inexhaustible, as are its products, the needs it can generate, and the surplus values it can create. To be sure, Schlosser does not recommend that all states must now pursue growth economies based on monetary trade; rather, those territories whose primary wealth resides in the soil should rely on an agricultural economy, whereas those nations poor in fertile ground but rich in human imagination should turn to money and trade {Politische Fragmente, 37-38). The shift from a natural to an imaginary economy also brings with it decisive social transformations. For if the agricultural state knows only the distinction between the sated and the hungry, the monetary state allows for infinite modes of social distinction; imaginary needs produce imaginary distinctions {Politische Fragmente, 35). The superfluity of the imagination affects the social order as limitlessly as the economic order. There is a remarkable affinity between the terms of Schlosser's economic vision and contemporaneous arguments for the value of art. Schlosser has essentially wedded economics with aesthetics by transferring to the economic realm a theory of the imagination widely promulgated in Romantic aesthetic conceptions. The affinities with Hegel's Vorlesungen ber die sthetik (delivered 1817-29, published 1835) are especially striking. Hegel begins with a circumscription of the domain of aesthetics and a defense against objections to the philosophy of art. Artistic beauty, born of Geist, is superior to natural beauty, because products of spirit/mind inherently stand above those of nature. Artistic creativity is free and infinitely productive. To be sure, the infinitely variable products of artistic fantasy present a challenge to the systematizing rubrics of the philosophical mind. But even if art is by definition not susceptible to systematic, "scientific" {wissenschaftliche) investigation, it can be fruitfully subject to "philosophically reflective" {philosophisch reflektierende) observations, which are no less scientifically reliable.2" Many terms that Hegel Usesincluding free activity, wealth, productivity, plenitude, productsare primarily economic, and his inexhaustibly creative aesthetic fantasy corresponds closely to the inexhaustible
2" G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen ber die sthetik I, vol. 13 qf Theorie-Werkausgabe, ed.

Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 26.

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imaginary economy sketched out by Schlosser. Indeed, Hegel explicitly plays up the pun in the words schpferisch (creative) and unerschpflich (inexhaustible). The very attributes that Hegelas representative of German Romantic aesthetic theoryascribes to art and aesthetics, Schlosser already identified as the principles underlying the emergent monetary economy. Schlosser was certainly aware of the borrowings from aesthetics that underpinned his economic paradigm. One of those peculiarly talented polydisciplinary intellectuals of the later eighteenth century, he not only concentrated on questions of political economy but also dabbled in critical philosophy and even aesthetic theory. One of his essays, "Ueber die Dichtkunst" ("On the Art of Poetry," 1794), treats poetry in typical period fashion as the supreme artistic expression, capable, like the arts in general, of elevating and enhancing human cultivation.21 His aesthetic deliberations parallel the transformation that he has outlined in the domain of political economy: a "natural" aesthetic grounded in the principle of imitation should be supplanted by an "imaginary" aesthetic based on the transformative enrichment of nature. Literature "elevates" {hebt) the human soul, "because i t . . . subordinates the world to our desires" ("Dichtkunst," 382). Schlosser's early version of a libidinal economy, however, transcends aesthetics, for while art has the power to subjugate the world to human desire, the economic imagination generates new desires that demand fulfillment. . Schlosser's reliance on principles derived from aesthetics becomes clearest in the dialogue Xenocrates, his last work on economics. Xenocrates debunks physiocracy's insistence on the so-called impt unique, the single tax assessed on agricultural products. Since the physiocrats claimed that only the reproductive power of nature was capable of increased production and the creation of supplementary value, it followed that only agricultural production should be subject to taxation.22 Xenocrates counters by arguing that surplus value also accrues when products of nature are subjected to the form-giving activities of human beings. As
21 Johann Georg Schlosser, "Ueber die Dichtkunst," in Kleine Schriften, vol. 6 (Frankfurt am Main, 1794), 38182. 22 On the physiocratic theory of the impt unique see Henry Higgs, The Physiocrats: Six Lectures on the French Economistes of the Eighteenth Century (1897; repr. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1963), 44.

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in Schlosser's earlier economic theory, imagination both awakens and subsequently fulfills new needs and thereby contributes to economic expansion.23 Schlosser then adds human "energies" (Krfte) as a new concept, and these serve as intermediaries between needs and their fulfillment. Imagination remains responsible for generating hitherto unacknowledged needs; then these new needs stimulate new energies as engines of greater productivity. In Schlosser's circulatory dynamic, enhanced productivity redounds to stimulate renewed imaginative creativity. The crux of Schlosser's argument is a distinction between matter and form appropriated from aesthetics. He avoids assuming that matter can somehow exist independent of its form, or that form can exist as pure abstraction, freed of any substance to which it lends shape. But he distinguishes form from content with respect to value production, for the value of a commodity's content can be assessed independent of its form. One value-adding process, natural production, generates new matter; a different one, human energy, lends this matter a more felicitous form (Xenocrates, 99). Energy seems to be Schlosser's approximation of what classical economists would express in terms of labor. But Schlosser's "energies" remain more nebulous and subjective, thereby resisting the drive toward quantification inherent in the labor theory of value. Natural production is restricted to utility, whereas imaginative form-giving transcends usefulness by lending the material aesthetic enhancements: Since need is no longer satisfied by the mere products theinselvesthat is, no longer views them purely in terms of utility, but rather in terms of form, color, beauty, etc. there must also be something else that satisfies this new need; this is fashioning [Formgebung]. And since the product itself is not sufficient to pay for this fashioning, a new price must arise, which drives the fashioners [Eormgeber] on to give the product the form that the new need demands. And this, in turn, is nothing but renewed fashioning. (Xenocrates, 112-13) Here Schlosser describes the circulatory spiral in the "imaginary" economy whereby purely aesthetic desires (form, color, beauty) lead to the refashioning of the natural product, and this refashioned product in
23 Johann Georg Schlosser, Xenocrates, oder Ueber die Abgaben: An Gthe (Basel,
1784), 100-102.

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turn gives rise to more sophisticated aesthetic demands, which once again require products shaped by more refined fashioning, and so on into infinity. The utility of the product itself remains an unalterable constant, and hence the price of the commodity can increase only if something other than utility, namely, aesthetic attributes, enters into the economic equation. All other economic variables, including the availability or scarcity of the natural product and the fluctuation of value in the system of supply and demand, remain suspended. All quantitative measures of value, such as the labor time invested in the transformation of a natural object into a commodity, are set aside to focus solely on the qualitative refashioning and the consumer's subjective, psychological investment in the aesthetically enhanced product. The value of the material product itself is fixed by its utility; all surplus value beyond the utilitarian base derives from the formal, creative, imaginative refashioning. In other words, the differential between use value and exchange value is grounded in nothing other than the continual aesthetic refashioning of the natural object and the consequent stimulation of new aesthetic desires. Whereas the natural economy, driven by unchanging utility, would always be restrained by finite needs, the imaginary, aestheticized economy has the potential for ever-increasing growth. In Schlosser's (and Hegel's) terms: the inexhaustibility of the creative imagination incessantly generates new values. With Schlosser, economics and aesthetics, as the disciplines concerned with the increase and measure of value, have joined forces. Schlosser notably holds up precisely the phantasmagoric investment of human beings in the objects they create and consume, which Marx would demonize as commodity fetishism, as the principal motor behind economic and cultural advancement.

E. T. A. Hoffmann's "Des Vetters Ecitfenster": Visionary Vaiue

Known today primarily for his literary creations, E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was a multitalented artist who also expressed himself through musical compositions and paintings. Like that of so many Romantics, however, his artistic existence stood in conflict with his mundane life as a trained jurist and civil servant in the Prussian ministry of justice. Even among the Romantics, Hoffmann stands out as a

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fervent advocate of the inestimable power of the imagination. One of his fictional characters, the hermit Serapion, represents the paradigm of the creative genius who relies exclusively on his visionary fantasy for the generation of literary works. Serapion's imaginative visions come alive as if they were empirical events witnessed not only by their author but by his audience as well. His imagination is also characterized by its infinite productivity: he can generate an unending series of ever-new stories.24 In accord with the so-called Serapiontic principle, imaginative elaboration in "Des Vetters Eckfenster" works together with empirical observation.25 Set above a teeming marketplace, this story dramatizes the confrontation and convergence between economics and aesthetics that are sketched in the preceding sections of this essay. Hoffmann's tale recounts a dialogue between two unnamed cousins, whereby the cousin who serves as the story's first-person narrator is trained by the second, invalid cousin in an art of observation.26 The marketplace and its world of commodities are juxtaposed to the imaginative elaborations of the cousins, who stand above and apart from it.2'^ The invalid cousin is a successful writer whose mansard rooms are identified with the confined but productive space of the literary imagination,28 but he suffers from a severe psychological conflict stemming

2'' E. T. A. Hoffmann, "Der Einsiedler Serapion," in Werke, ed. Herbert Kraft and Manfred Wacker, 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1967), 2:225-26. 25 Peter von Matt provides the most lucid and succinct description of the Serapiontic principle, which glorifies imagination as the sole font of poetic creativity (Die Augen der Automaten: E. T. A. Hoffmanns Imaginationslehre als Prinzip seiner Erzhlkunst [Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1971], 14-18). For the interdependence of the imagination and empirical observation, however, see Matt, 34-35; and Ulrich Stadler, "Die Aussicht als Einblick: Zu E. T. A. Hoffmanns spter Erzhlung 'Des Vetters Eckfenster,' " Zeitschrift fr deutsche Philologie 105 (1986): 5 0 8 . 26 The setting replicates that in which Hoffmann himself lived at this time in Berlin, in his apartment at Taubenstrae 31, with its view over the Gendarmenmarkt. Hans Dieter Schfer develops in more detail the autobiographical implications of Hoffmann's story ("Hoffmann am Fenster," Athenum^ [1998]: 40-42). 2' Walter Benjamin was one of the first to examine the dynamic between empirical observation and imaginative amplification that is operative in Hoffmann's text; see his 1930 radio address "Das dmonische Berlin," in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhuser, 7 vols, in 15 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972-89), 7.1:91-92. 28 E. T. A. Hoffmann, "Des Vetters Eckfenster," in Werke, 4:382.

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from his inability to transform his immaterial fantasies into concrete literary commodities. He thus finds himself caught between the hyperactive productivity of his imagination and the physical inability to produce written works. The narrating cousin's description invokes both artistic and economic production: "The most severe malady was unable to check the fast-paced mechanism of fantasy that continued to labor inside him, constantly producing [erzeugend] ever new things" ("Eckfenster," 381). Especially curious is the mechanical metaphor, underscored by verbs of production and labor, that portrays the invalid cousin's imagination not as a typical Romantic organism but as a machinelike factory that never ceases to run. The narrating cousin himself becomes a kind of marketing middleman: since the invalid cousin can no longer write his stories down so as to convert them into salable commodities, the narrator must fill this role, ironically turning this very story into a written record of the invalid cousin's verbally enunciated fantasies.^9 Fusing economic and aesthetic discourses, the narrator compares the crippled cousin's literary output with that of the French writer Scarron, based on the "dearth [Sparsamkeit] of his products [Erzeugnisse]" ("Eckfenster," 381). Erzeugnisse echoes the gerund erzeugend from the previously cited passage, with its aura of manufacture, while Sparsamkeit invokes thriftiness, even parsimony, in marked opposition to the hyperactive imagination conjured up in the same passage. The invalid cousin's literary creativity is torn between scarcity and overproduction. Eramed by these reflections on the poet-cousin's literary aesthetics, the internal story of "Des Vetters Eckfenster" evolves as a series of observations made by the two cousins, perched at their corner window overlooking the bustling market and sharing a spyglass to focus on details culled from the chaotic scene. The market's thicket of stalls and the incessant movements of the pulsating crowd of shoppers embody the dynamic process of economic circulation. The narrating cousin at first is overwhelmed by the hubbub and activity: "The entire market appeared to be such a tightly compressed mass of people as to make
29 Wulf Segebrecht stresses that the narrating cousin primarily undergoes a transformation into a recorder of the written word and that this poetic education is linked with his training in the art of imaginative observation {Heterogenitt und Integration: Studien zu Leben, Werk und Wirkung E. T. A. Hoffmanns [Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1996], 127-29).

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one believe that an apple thrown down into it would never reach the ground" (383). The dynamism of the market is the economic analogue to the restless creativity of the invalid cousin's imagination, and just as the narrator learns to discipline his gaze to make sense of the chaos, his cousin's imagination clearly requires a parallel disciplinary strategy. Indeed, the circulating mass of people does begin to coalesce, for the narrator, into a composite image: "This left me with the impression of a large bed of swaying tulips, driven by the wind" (383). Yet even when the scene begins to take on a certain regularity and form, it induces in the onlooker a kind of "dizziness" {Schwindel), which the narrator compares to the delirium in that state between wakefulness and sleep that immediately precedes dreams (383). At this point the poet-cousin interrupts to insist that the narrator lacks the keenness of observation that is prerequisite to poetic sensibility: "Cousin, cousin! Now I see that not even the tiniest spark of literary talent glows in you. You lack the first requirement ever to follow in the footsteps of your noble, lame cousin; namely, an eye that truly sees" (384). With this, the invalid hands over the spyglass and begins to school his cousin. He concentrates on a single detail lifted out of the market scene, attached to a particular individual, and then employed as a springboard for a fictionalized narrative.^" A woman wearing a yellow, turbanlike scarf, for example, is transformed into a French exile whose husband earns a tidy income in a branch of French industry (384); another woman, wearing a silk hat, becomes a "rabid housewife," the daughter of a wealthy citizen who is engaged to a privy councillor (385); and a man with black trousers who uses a square box as his shopping basket is alternately transmogrified into a former "master draftsman" {Zeichenmeister) and a French pastry cook (394-96). The term Zeichenmeister is itself suggestively ambiguous, alluding not only to a master draftsman but to either an artistic portraitist orwhen understood literallya master semiotician. In this last rendering the term refers to the poet-cousin himself, who proves throughout this text that he has mastered the art of rendering simple observed objects as manifoldly

'"' Stadler emphasizes how the training regimen practiced here selects significant details out of the mass of impressions (515).

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meaningful semiotic ciphers.^' However, if the artistic cousin practices physiognomic interpretation (386), it is a physiognomy less of the face than of the personal object or the possessed commodity; his elaborations on the people he singles out invariably take their point of departure from some article worn, carried, or acquired. Eor example, the first customer the cousins scout carefully studies any commodity, using both eyes and hands, before making a purchase: "She grabs a plucked gooseshe handles it with the fingers of a connoisseur" (384). A second customer illustrates the parallel between the cousins' physiognomic gaze, the basis of their literary art, and the physiognomy of the commodity: "Just look how she eyeballs and touches, how she haggles over everything and purchases nothing" (385). Although she applies all her perceptual sensual skills to evaluate the items offered for purchase, and bargains relentlessly, sbe leaves empty-handed. In this regard she represents the economic analogue of the lame cousin's incomplete literary practice: as she has nothing concrete to show for her efforts, so too the cousin revs up the assembly line of his imagination without producing a material work. The customers are confronted with a virtually infinite wealth of goods, from among which they must choose the most valuable ones by applying their own arts of discernment; as such, they find themselves in the same situation as the narrator, who first sees nothing in the market but a chaotic mass. Both customer and narrator face the overwhelming task of sifting through the sensory overload presented by the dizzying supply of commodities. In addition, they must avoid falling victim to so-called Vexierware, tantalizing commodities that are, as the narrator remarks, "calculated for the effect they make on untrained eyes" (386). Thus for the knowledgeable shopper, as for the talented author, discerning eyes constitute the indispensable tool. The shoppers are forced to apply "all the arts of mercantile cleverness" in their selection of commodities (386), just as the cousins practice the art of skilled observation

'^' Lutz Hagestedt notes the semiotic character of the market {Das Genieproblem
bei E. T. A. Hoffmann: Am Beispiel illustriert; Eine Interpretation seiner spten Erzhlung "Des

Vetters Eckfenster" [Munich: Brehm, 1991], 76). However, he fails to stress that only the imaginative activity of the cousins transforms the observed details into semiotically meaningful constructs.

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enhanced by imaginative fantasy. Moreover, when all visual testing and bartering is done, the customers invest all their imaginative and libidinal energy into the chosen commodity. One customer must violently tear himself away from the "seductive object of his desires" (395), and another sheds tears of disappointment when, after selecting a longedfor item and negotiating an acceptable price, she discovers that she lacks enough cash to seal the purchase (586). The dialectic between keen observation and imaginary investment in a selected object operates in the marketplace of commodities no less than in the mind of the writer. This parallel has profound implications for the structure of Hoffmann's story. As the shoppers peruse the articles for sale, make their selections, invest their imaginative energies in the chosen items, and place them in their shopping baskets, so the two cousins scan the market scene, pick out the objects that stir their fancy, embellish these objects and their owners by means of imaginative fictionalization, and add this episode to the repertory of incidents that make up their literary narrative about the market day. Hoffmann's series of twelve episodes, each constituting a distinct scene that contributes to the composite image of life at the market, may have been drawn from popular calendar literature,32 or from the orbis pictus convention in the tradition of William Hogarth,33 but it also replicates the act of commodity shopping. This explains why, in a story infused with suggestive objects, the shopping basket looms as an omnipresent symbol.34 Ultimately, "Des Vetters Eckfenster" is itself a shopping cart overflowing with the assorted fruits of the cousins' detailed, observations and imaginative fabulations. Thus the literary aesthetics both theorized and practiced in the story cannot be disentangled from the economic practices it takes as its thematic substance.
'2 Jrgen Gunia and Detlef Kremer, "Fenster-Theater: Teichoskopie, Theatralitt und Ekphrasis im Drama um 1800 und in E. T. A. Hoffmanns 'Des Vetters Eckfenster,'" E. T. A. Hoffmann-Jahrbuch g (2001): 78. 33 The lame cousin himself alludes to this tradition when he compares the universe of commodities available at the stall of a tradeswoman to an orbis pictus ("Eckfenster," 387). See also Bernard Dieterle, Erzhlte Bilder: Zum narrativen Umgang mit Gemlden (Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1988), 107. 'i An informal tally registers more than twenty-five references to baskets for the display and purchase of commodities, in a text that spans only twenty-six pages.

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This convergence of literary-aesthetic and economic practices is underscored when the poet-cousin recalls encountering a flower girl at the market, biding her time by reading a book. In a narrative that tends toward the amalgamation of individual scenes into a series of independent and equivalent elements, this episode stands out for several reasons. Instead of occurring in the present and under the observation of the cousins, it is an already full-fledged story, drawn from the poet-cousin's memory of a time when he was still mobile enough to visit the market himself. Significantly, it derives not from his pursuit of keen observation- but from his refusal to observe: he is reluctant to watch what is happening at the flower girl's stand because it reminds him of this past, unpleasant occurrence (3gi). Eurther, as a dialogic exchange between the poet and the flower girl, the episode emulates the structure of Hoffmann's narrative itself. Einally, this event that is both memorable and haunting stands at the veritable center of Hoffmann's text. Surely it is no coincidence that the event's core theme is the intertwining of economic and literary-aesthetic issues, raising questions about literary marketing, readership, authorship, and the poetic work as economic commodity. The poet-cousin begins by relating his joy at the sight of an assiduously readingflowergirl. He is particularly fascinated by her total absorption in her book (3gi). In her case, the writer's imaginative investment pays immediate dividends by stimulating the naive reader's imaginative engagement. But if the cousin is vicariously flattered by this girl's immersion in the creation of a fellow writer, how much more flattered must he feel when he discovers that it is one of his own works! This recognition causes him to approach the girl, under the pretense of interest in buying some flowers, to query her about her reading experience: Excited, totally inflamed by the sweetest feelings of authorship, I asked with feigned indifference how the girl liked the book. "Oh, my dear sir," the girl replied, "this is a very droll book. Atfirstone gets a bit confused in the head; but then one has the feeling that one is participating in the action itself." To my great amazement, the girl related to me the contents of this little fairy tale clearly and distinctly, so that I recognized that she must have already read it several times. (391 -92) At first disoriented but eventually drawn wholly into the imaginative world, the flower girl has an experience like that of the narrator as

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he adjusts his perceptive apparatus to clarify the chaos of the marketplace. Initially overcome by a sense of dizziness, he resorts to the "art of observation" to latch on to firm points that lend the amorphous scene a meaningful pattern (383).^s Toward the end of Hoffmann's story, the narrator comments on this way of interpreting a confused and formless field of vision; "In surveying the entire marketplace, I notice that those flour wagons, above which sheets are stretched like tents, make possible a picturesque view, because they provide the eye with a stable point around which the colorful mass of impressions forms distinct groups" (400). Here the narrator fuses once more the simple art of observation with an explicitly aesthetic practice: art is constituted as an organization of the visual and, by extension, of the imaginative field through the establishment of stable points of orientation. Once again, this technique self-reflexively describes the procedure that the cousins and Hoffmann himselffollow to organize this series of vignettes. Clarity, discernment, orientation, ordered narratives, and semiotically meaningful configurations arise only at the interface where the concrete perception of particular material objects is enhanced by an imaginative fabulation that elaborates on them. Transposed to economic terms: the value of any commodity emerges at the intersection between its material qualities and the libidinal fantasies projected onto it. There is, in other words, no economic or aesthetic value that is not both "natural" and "imaginary," material and phantasmagoric, at once. When the poet-cousin, swelling with pride and self-confidence due to the flower girl's praise of his work, then introduces himself as its flesh-and-blood author, the girl responds with disbelief: The girl stared at me speechlessly, with wide eyes and open mouth. . . . I tried to demonstrate to her in all possible ways my identity as author, but it was as though she were made of stone. . . . It turned out that the girl had never considered that the hooks she read first had to be written. The notion of a writer, a poet, was completely foreign to her, and I amfirmlyconvinced that further interrogation would have revealed the pious, naive belief that God Almighty causes books to grow like mushrooms. (392)
'5 Neumann remarks on the parallel between these two episodes, which for him signals a self-reflexive application of the cousins' principles of observation to the act of reading (231).

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Contrary to the poet-cousin's opinion, the flower girl's belief that books simply appear is neither naive nor informed by religious doctrine; instead, it represents a transposition of the economic ideology of the physiocrats, who believed that only divine nature could produce anything new of value, to the realm of hurnan manufacture. Precisely because the books she reads strike her as so valuable, the flower girl cannot help but view them as what the physiocrats termed "gifts of nature."36 From her perspective, they are, in other words, economic equivalents to theflowersshe herself hawks: just as these flowers spring from the soil, so too, she imagines, literary works grow up as natural products. Hoffmann had drawn on the writings of a leading German cameralist, Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi (1717-71), for another late story, "Meister Johannes Wacht." Even if he had not, however, physiocracy had aroused such fierce debates in German intellectual circles that Hoffmann would surely have been familiar with its central tenets. His playful allusion to physiocratic economic doctrine ironizes an aesthetic ideology that views artistic creativity as nothing but a natural gift. Indeed, once the flower girl accepts the idea that books are humanmade, she adds insult to injury by asking the cousin whether he has written all the books in the lending library. To her innocent mind, books are, if not effortless products of nature, then things turned out by the shelfful in a factory. ^^ We are reminded of the narrator's own application of mechanical metaphors to his cousin's imagination (381). One way or the other, the paradigms of production that shape the flower girl's views derive from economics, and her naive response to the cousin's assertion of his creative authorship invokes the parallel controversies about the establishment of economic and aesthetic forms of value that were fought out in this period.
'S On the physiocrats' insistence on surplus value as a "pur don de la nature," a pure gift of nature, see Hans Immler, Natur in der konomischen Theorie (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1985), 299-300, 325. " The cousin himself alludes to the "uniformity" of the books distributed by the lending library, all of them placed in identical covers that mark them as its property (391). On the dynamics of the lending library and its importance for the theme of the literary marketplace in Hoffmann's story see Carlos Spoerhase, "Die sptromantische Leseszene: Das Leihbibliotheksbuch als 'Technologie' der Anonymisierung in E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'Des Vetters Eckfenster,'" Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fr Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 83 (2009): 581 - 8 6 .

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Hoffmann's own take on the rudiments of literary-aesthetic value creation, as expressed in "Des Vetters Eckfenster," is ambivalent. He refuses to valorize unflinchingly the freedom and spontaneous productivity of the imagination, but he also shuns an aesthetic ideology that relies entirely on mimesis as the realistic replication of empirical observations.3^ His very ambivalence highlights an interactive dynamic between precise perception and imaginative embellishment, material reality and its phantasmagoric transformation. In the realm of Hoffmann's aesthetics, the material object and its fetishized commodity form can harmoniously coexist. Indeed, in this text literary artifacts are never divorced from the pragmatic issue of their circulation as economic commodities. Throughout Hoffmann's story the discourse of aesthetics is invaded by the language and conceptual apparatus of economic thought. But the inverse is also true, for the marketplace that the cousins observe is continually rendered as a domain in which value is ascribed to commodities by imaginative, aesthetic principles. There is one place in Hoffmann's story where the issues of disciplined visual perception and imaginative inventiveness are explicitly bundled together with the question of economic value. Toward the story's conclusion a blind ex-soldier plays a double economic role as a vegetable seller's beast of burden and as a beggar (397-400). In a tale in which keen vision plays such a dominant role, it comes as no surprise that blindness is considered the paramount disability. Yet what first calls the narrator's attention to this man is the pose he strikes, with his head elevated, as though he were struggling to gaze into the distance (398). Eor this cousin, the only compensation for the inability to see the external world is the "inner eye," which provides the blind man with comfort and hope (398). The cousins observe the interactions between this man and his benefactors for some time, remarking on the irony that those who give the smallest coins do so ostentatiously, whereas those
38 It is a matter of intense critical debate whether Hoffmann's story reaffirms his early glorification of imagination as the sole font of creativity or represents a jettisoning of this principle in favor of precise observation, thereby anticipating a paradigm shift to realism. For a summary of this debate see Kremer, 184-85. My own reading tends to support those scholars, such as Neumann (227) and Selbmann (72-74), who emphasize the interactive moment between empirical observation and imaginative elaboration.

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who give the most do so matter-of-factly, eschewing acknowledgments of gratitude. For the narrator, however, what is most remarkable is the blind man's failure to exhibit any sign of thankfulness beyond a meager movement of his lips. Again the lame cousin comes to the narrator's aid by supplying an interpretation: it is symptomatic of the man's resignation. "What is money to him? He can't use it; it attains value only in the hand of someone else, in whom he must deferentially place his trust" (400). This remark constitutes perhaps the most puzzling statement of the entire text. What prevents the coins the blind man receives from having any value? Is it that he cannot see them, as though vision alone could tell him that these metal disks are money? Or is it that value can be established only by an act of exchange, in which coins are traded for a commodity? Even if the latter, the man's inability to peruse the goods for sale would prevent him from ascertaining that he is purchasing the highest-quality products and thereby obtaining the most for his money. Moreover, what does it mean that he must trust another person to come to terms with value? Does this simply imply, as the narrator suggests, that the beggar is subject to the whims of the vegetable woman, who uses him as she sees fit? Or does it mean that he is dependent on the value decisions of the benefactors who give him either large- or small-denomination coins, or even on the merchants who can arbitrarily determine both the value of those coins and the value of the commodities for which they are traded? The case of the blind man seems to demonstrate irrevocably that imagination alonethe "inner eye"cannot establish value. Relegated to the empty gesture of observation, the blind man is in a situation that parallels that of the narrator prior to receiving his cousin's lessons in the art of observation. Disoriented in the world of economic (and aesthetic) values, the blind man too is threatened by Schwindel (383), for the German word suggests not only dizziness but also the possibility of being swindled. The blind man's inability to establish value on his own highlights the interactive dimension of value attribution. Because value comes into being predominantly in acts of exchange, it is, at bottom, a discursive construct, a conjecture or convention that relies on mutual agreement.^^
'9 On the establishment of value as a discursive construct see David Ruccio, Julie Graham, and Jack Amariglio, " 'The Good, the Bad, and the Different': Reflections on Economic and Aesthetic Value," in The Value of Culture: On the Relationship between

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Here the crossover between economics and aesthetics becomes most apparent in Hoffmann's story: just as the blind man relies on others to ascertain the value of coins or commodities, the poet-cousin is dependent on the flower girl, representative of his reading public, to establish the value of his own literary work. Moreover, the dialogic structure of "Des Vetters Eckfenster" stresses how semiotic, economic, and aesthetic values are determined through personal exchange and interchange. This explains why Hoffmann's story culminates in the cousins' deliberations about how the largely peaceful negotiations of the marketplace radiate outward into a largely harmonious, balanced, and self-policing sociopolitical order. In the words of the lame cousin, "This market is now a true likeness of eternally changing [wechselndes] life" (405-6), where the pun on the word wechselndes, suggesting both change and exchange, ties the sociopolitical world to its economic underpinnings. Thus the economic exchange of the marketplace, which serves as the basis of the cousins' observations and literary vignettes, is echoed by the communicative exchange in the act of reading as well as in the communicative interaction between the cousins themselves. They observeor do they invent?one further scene exemplifying the potentially harmonizing power of fabulative fiction: two hawkers, who perennially sit together and whose different wares suggest that they are not competitors, nevertheless are constantly at odds with one another. However, on this day a shared invention, developed around a customer who fails to make a purchase, gives rise to unaccustomed harmony and generosity (386-87). This scene is a microcosm of the harmonious social interactions that can emerge from any act of economic, discursive, or imaginative exchange. According to Hoffmann's text, economic, aesthetic, and even sociopolitical value arises at the interface of the material and the imaginary, the visual and the visionary, the objective and the subjective. The harmonious constitution of human social exchange requires the rearticulation ofthose disparate theories of value that, at the end of the eighteenth century, migrated into the separate disciplines of economics and aesthetics. This, too, might justifiably be called an aesthetic edu-

Economics and the Arts, ed. Arjo Klamer (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, lgg), 56. In his introduction Klamer discusses the notion of "conjective value" as something that emerges only from interactive conversation (10).

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cation of humanity; however, it is one in which the historical divorce between aesthetics and economics has been mended. Schlosser's application of a conception of the creative imagination, derived from the realm of aesthetics, to the establishment of a subjectivist theory of economic value and Hoffmann's late tale, which plays out the convergence of economic and aesthetic discourses around the principle of an infinitely productive imagination, mark the beginning and end points of the half century of German Romanticism. Both authors seek to heal the rift that separated economics and aesthetics into competing disciplines and theories of value by subordinating objective quantification to subjective qualification, that is, by projecting the principles of aesthetic idealism onto questions of economic value formation. Indeed, Hoffmann makes the more global case that the principles of imaginative aesthetics underwrite even the most basic patterns of human perception and social interchange. Whatever its object might be, the proper "art of observation," his story suggests, is mediated by the creative amplifications of human imagination. Far from expanding the field of vision, the spyglass through which the cousins peer strategically limits it, so that the details it brings forward are rendered as ciphers that can be subjected to infinite imaginative extension and elaboration. Although it would take another fifty years or so, Schlosser's and Hoffmann's theories of imaginative value would be vindicated even in the domain of economics, despite Marx's attempt to banish them to the nebulous realm of commodity fetishism. The Romantics' conception of literary and aesthetic value thus ultimately, if unwittingly, paved the way for modern notions of economic value that were grounded in the subjective judgments, imaginings, and desires of consumers.

Richard T. Gray is Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Germanics at the University of Washington. He is author, niost recently, of Money Matters: Economics and the German Cultural Imagination, 1770-1850 {2008). He is also general editor of the University of Washington Press series Literary Conjugations, which publishes interdisciplinary books in literary studies.

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