Money and modernism: The rise of a theme in early 20th-century Italy

Abstract

The primary purpose of this article is to examine how the theme of money developed in the work of the key early 20th-century Italian modernist writers Giovanni Papini, Aldo Palazzeschi, Giovanni Boine, and Carlo Michelstaedter. It also studies the connection between the theme of money and two central concepts in modernist literature: the crisis in the concept of objectivity, and the interpretation of reality as a continuous flow that rejects every possible conceptualization. I argue that money was a metaphor for the crisis of objective truth, a symbol for an existence that had lost all perspective from which to judge and order reality.

Keywords

Aldo Palazzeschi Carlo Michelstaedter Giovanni Boine Giovanni Papini modernism money

A central theme in modernism is the perception of reality as flow in continuous movement. At the end of the 19th-century and the beginning of the 20th, philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, and writers such as Robert Musil and Luigi Pirandello, focused on the subject’s perspective as no longer able to give an overall, immobile, stable form to reality; even when this form was realized, it was immediately perceived as an artificial and abstract construction.¹ The need to accept the eternal mobility of existence became almost imperative, since every attempt to immobilize existence itself through judgment or interpretation, or to freeze it in a stable conceptual or artistic representation, was perceived as an unnatural and authoritarian act. This was exemplified in Nietzsche’s (2015: 304) metaphor of the wanderer:

He who has attained to only some degree of freedom of mind cannot feel other than a wanderer on the earth – though not as a traveler to a final destination: for this destination does not exist. […] He may not let his heart adhere to firmly to any individual thing; within him too there must be something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transience.

Reality had become protean, a continuous flow, perpetually mobile, in which a subject itself was caught: “Life is a continual flux which we try to stop, to fix in stable and determined forms, both inside and outside ourselves” (Pirandello, 2005: 137). From inside the flow, no subject could build a stable identity; a subject with no identity was one incapable of ordering reality, because of the lack of perspective from which to achieve this task. This so-called “crisis of foundations” was an epistemological process defined, among others, by Max Horkheimer (2012 [1947]: 15) in Eclipse of Reason as: “at a certain point thought became unable to conceive objectivity or started to deny it.” The theme was so prevalent in the philosophy and literature of the period that the crisis of the concept of objectivity (of the subject, of reality, of language, etc.) can be considered central to the modernist experience.

This new philosophical perspective soon came to be connected with the subject of money, and by 1900 neo-Kantian philosopher Georg Simmel had published The Philosophy of Money. Simmel retracted the Marxian argument over the progressive shift from an economy founded on use value to one founded on exchange value; he showed how this shift undermined old social ties and previous ideological world views that were still based on collective, communitarian values.² Simmel highlighted how an economy based on exchange value could shatter commonly held beliefs that had been considered stable and immobile. When the circulation of commodities becomes an endless series of exchanges between commodities and money, a commodity does not necessarily have use value for the parties involved because it now intrinsically contains the possibility of another exchange. According to Simmel, the crisis of stable and shared values (of the objectivity of reality) so depended on this economic transformation that reshaping human relations modified previous ideological and cultural directives:

The principle of valuation in the mode of money economy finds its clearest expression here. It is not the commodity that is the center of interest here but the price – a principle that in former times not only would have appeared shameless but would have been absolutely impossible. (Simmel, 2011: 335)

Like Marx, for Simmel money became the touchstone of the entire system: the constantly exchangeable good that mediates exchanges and causes the continual fluctuation in value of the commodities themselves. This was because these had a temporally and socially established (abstract) value in place of their real value. For Simmel, unlike Marx, this phenomenon was not negative because money became the hinge that reunified social disconnection and allowed a surplus of freedom to choose what we really needed.

For Marx, as it is well known, exchange value as abstracted in money volatilized value stability related to an economy founded on use value (where money would still retain dialectically progressive worth) and tied individuals in the form of rationalized atomization. Every exchange was mediated by the power of money: this bound individuals but left them atomized in the desire to satisfy their own egoistic interests. It objectified them in unequal, money-based relationships, i.e. the social forms of their jobs and social positions. This social form appeared natural and non-historical because it concealed the social characteristics of labor and the laborer in their relationship to others. Therefore, according to Marx's (2009) Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, money was the essence of the human being (their social position) separated from the human being themselves.

For Marx, and later Simmel, money became linked with that crisis of stable values at the center of modernist experience. The subject of money underlined and reinforced the modernist philosophical crisis. The emergence of the theme of money in literature showed the impact of the philosophical crisis.³ This focus on flow and on the crisis of objectivity – the inability to link the universal and particular, or life and its representation – was connected to the triumph of exchange value represented by the power of money. Inevitably, authors' own views were crucial to the manner in which they treated the crisis.

When viewed positively (Palazzeschi), money played a positive role; when viewed negatively (as a dissolution of fundamental values, the definitive end of the dream to capture Being and the absolute), money played a negative role (Boine).

Among Italian modernist writers, the theme of money developed in four different manners.

Some, such as Giovanni Papini, interpreted it through the typical ideological line of reactionary anti-capitalism, in which money embodied the negative features of industrial modernity, capitalists, socialist movements, and unions: “Class struggle dominates the world […]. A struggle […] between two groups of men both greedy for material goods” (Papini, 1960: 23). In this perspective, both capitalism and the opposing forces were part of a “realm of money” (Papini calls this “the god Mammon”) that destroyed the former ideological universe, causing the decay of spiritual values in favor of material values, thereby destroying the role of the intellectual as caretaker of those values: “Plutocracy and demagogy, sisters in purpose and in spirit, […] contend with each other for control of the seditious masses” (Papini, 1921: 286). The whole 19th-century ideological arsenal would have been wiped out by a “power of money” comparable to the very entry into 20th-century modernity, to the recognition of the progressive decline of all qualitative, social, and religious values in favor of market quantification: “Democracy, as it is today […] is nothing but an ideological-parliamentary smokescreen to conceal the dealings of the real powers – especially Money, which comes before all others” (Papini, 1963: 86). Papini’s standpoint was typical of the petty bourgeois intellectual at the beginning of mass society. Having lost his previous position as vate or maître à penser, he was caught between the reduction of his social role (in academia, journalism, or bureaucracy) and new socialist, common ideological production. He thus reacted through the paroxystic defense of spiritual values and inner life, and identified in money the symbol of an ideological-economic system no longer willing to provide him with the old privileges. On a similar ideological line, Giuseppe Prezzolini (one of Papini's peers) wrote:

The intellectual smashed the old order of the world, in which every individual was born with his task ready and with his path drawn and underpinned by the eye of God in the sky […]. Yet, suddenly, the intellectual realized that he had created […] a dangerous new enemy that in a society made of freedom and completion found its perfect ground to multiply […]: and this enemy was money. […] in past centuries there had been spiritual interests and traditions to stop it, no longer […]. Money is an impersonal force, with neither homeland nor language […]. Against this new shapeless power […] that moves from State to State […], that invades, conquers, assimilates men, faiths, parties, there is only the intellectual, with his art, his word, his thought, […] for defending the heritages of national cultures, languages, arts. The entire century is a struggle between spirit and money, between the philosopher and the banker. (Prezzolini, 1913: 356–358)

The intellectual had the duty of opposing the humanistic values of the spirit against this “realm of money,” extolling everything that countered the cosmopolitanism and trans-nationalism of capitalism and Marxism, the values of his own nation first of all. Papini and Prezzolini took the typical line of “reactionary modernism,”⁴ which found fertile ground in fascist nationalism and its alleged opposition to capitalism. This also found a voice through intellectuals such as Ernst Junger and Stefan George in Germany, Hugo von Hofmannsthal in Austria, and Frédéric Mistral and Maurice Barrès in France.

The second money-related thread to develop in Italy was more directly connected with liberal modernist ideology. The Florentine writer Aldo Palazzeschi was a champion of the modernist perspective that glorified the erosion of the objectivistic assumptions of metaphysics and systematic philosophy as a new place of freedom for the individual.⁵ Palazzeschi's entire literary trajectory occurred within the framework of a psychological novel that described his personal journey from a neurotic situation of pain—in the search for an objective truth—to one of cheerfulness. It also signified reality in the form of continuous “possibility” (the continual emergence of what presumed objectivism wanted to suppress) which he called “fantasy.” He stated, “that which bestows in truth […] takes away in fantasy” (Palazzeschi, 2004: 480). Fantasy, i.e. reality from the point of view of “possibility,”⁶ was the place of a judgment of reality assumed to be the absence of judgment. The relationship between subject and reality was examined as a presupposed identity, dismantled by the attempt to establish objective truths. Palazzeschi’s artistic path during the Belle Époque represented the supposed self-consciousness of that identity.

This new modernist writer, who according to Musil (2017: 11) lived in a “mist, fantasy, daydreams, and subjunctive mood,” refused any essence or objective truth and declared this impossible:

… it seemed to me that words were prisoners of a formula from which they should be freed, that they had been drained of all power of expression, I saw them fallen to the ground like larvae, and it seemed to me, when looking at an object, that I could not see it in its true essence, I would have wanted to see it as it was seen by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. And I remember that one morning I went to see a villa that I liked very much, whose owners I knew and of which I had a precise knowledge of every detail. I went like a painter with his box of oils, taking a pencil and a notebook to portray it with words. As soon as I had finished and read what I had written, while looking at the object before me, I felt a sense of dizziness: the villa on my notebook bore not the slightest relation to the one I had used as a model, nothing corresponded to its aesthetic appearance or to the life that went on inside it. The dizziness was replaced by a feeling of exhilaration that led me to walk on endlessly, aimlessly, in the unreal world of fantasy and happiness. (Palazzeschi, in Accrocca, 1960: 312–314)

The separation between reality and artistic representation is clear in this youthful memory: experience transforms the initial essentialist condition, the Adamic condition of knowledge through representation of reality, into the realization of its impossibility. Representation declares itself separate from life. However, this passage shows a clear path from discomfort to happiness. Initial frustration from the desire for truth becomes a “state of exhilaration” with humorous undertones. Representation, separated from reality, reveals its nature as a simulacrum, but the lack of a link between reality and representation then causes joy. Representation becomes one of the “possibilities” contained in reality. Only thus can representation cease to be a painful reflection on the loss of a stable referent to reality and become an ironical monument to a life that cannot be frozen as an immobile concept.

Palazzeschi centered his entire modernist production on these assumptions: in La piramide, written between 1913 and 1914, he related this philosophy to money.⁷

La piramide is a novel that represents a manner of conceiving reality that denies the individual a privileged viewpoint in its interpretation. This is brought to its logical conclusion by exalting the “possibilistic” virtues of fantasy, thus lessening the univocal sense of reality, i.e. to its multiplication, where the multiplication of meanings is the same as admitting their meaninglessness.⁸

Palazzeschi’s pyramid hits right at the center of the crisis of foundations, where the crisis of objectivity extends to the narrator's words, which are also constantly denied: “Yearn for that night of love with all your heart, and … don’t overlook the hours of waiting … For that matter, do as you please” (Palazzeschi, 2004: 499). The need for a constant, possible opposing and unstable interpretation is reflected in the first part of the novel (In Three). Here, the protagonist finds himself specularly ensnared by the contrasting statements of the Optimist and the Pessimist. Although they represent two diametrically opposite views, these characters approach the matter in the same way: they enclose reality in a predetermined cage, and through this they inform reality with a supposedly totalizing meaning. Modulating themselves on opposing assertions of “Yes” and “No,” they follow rhetorical paths that refer to specific interpretive universes (the Optimist calls up ideas of purity and elevation, the Pessimist evokes images of a decidedly more prosaic world). The positions are presented as archetypal: interpretation is schematized in two totalizing discourses. Both offer the protagonist an absolutizing model which tries to impose meaning on reality by removing alternatives. For Palazzeschi, this only emphasizes the need to devote oneself to a meaning; and so, we see the protagonist comically go—within minutes—from fully subscribing to the views of the Optimist to whole-heartedly accepting those of the Pessimist. Each independently valid monologue cannot stand up in dialog. The characters—now far from a common interpretive horizon—replace it with a fictitious psychological simulacrum, the nature of which, however, is revealed by the paratactic juxtaposition of these multiple viewpoints. This is a parable to illustrate the decline of the law of the excluded middle ground: logically, demonstrating that two contradicting propositions are both true is impossible, and shows that neither is saying anything real. Palazzeschi’s plan, however, was not to separate definitions from the “possibilistic” nature of their de-structuring. To contrast these characters' attitudes, the Ego adopts a strategy of multiplying simulacra, creating identity masks (In Two), and increasing possible interpretations of reality.

In upsetting every symbolic value, the devaluation of the world is intended to salvage all the possibilities that have been lost in the representations through which we try to overlap reality.⁹ This is why narrative must experiment with identities by multiplying the simulacra of identity. Reflecting on the saying “He who has a friend has a treasure,” Palazzeschi (2004: 421) redirects the relational contact to the personality of the writer themselves: the longed-for friend is paradoxically discovered in the folds of a multi-perspective individuality. In other words, the presumed psychological unity of the subject is broken up into fragments of identity. Far from unsettling the subject, this gives them vital support to increase the number of their possible identities. The crisis of the centered identity, typical of some modernist literature,¹⁰ is avoided by using masks to reinforce the subject, highlighting the potential nature of the identity itself. The appearance of the phantasmic doppelgänger reactivates the unexpressed possibilities through the continuous dialogic counterpoint. This dialogic counterpoint therefore multiplies the possible interpretations of reality. Palazzeschi shows how one-way thinking can prevent people from understanding reality, but illustrates the risks of applying the same procedure to the subject's experiences through the filter of identity. The appearance of the doppelgänger reveals the porosity of the subject, and of the subject’s attempts to interpret reality.

From thought and identity, in the last part of the book (Alone) Palazzeschi examines desire, interpreted as synonymous with the countless possibilistic variants. It centers on a man who constantly plans trips (to Venice, Rome, Naples, Egypt), organizes them in every detail, anticipates the wonderful sensations that await him, but then decides not to leave and instead plans another journey. He develops an aptitude for fantasy that discredits the value of real experience and elevates dreams to a new, more complex level of reality.¹¹ In an unrealized dream, experience remains intact because the possibilities in it reflect opportunities not offered by the reality of the journey. For example, the dream-world of Rome allows the appearance of historical figures (“and suddenly, in the shade of an arch, I will have the impression of seeing a company of ghosts at a banquet, and right at the center: Nero”; Palazzeschi, 2004: 464). Contemporary characters too are shown to the reader through fantasy:

And again, in the piazza, before leaving, I will look up at the Papal Palace, at the Pope's apartments, in the vain desire of seeing him suddenly appear at the window, like a young girl waiting for her fiancé to go by in the evening, I will go and wait at the house of his sisters […]. But perhaps they are all up there, with their big brother, playing omo nero [a card game similar to Old Maid] together. (Palazzeschi, 2004: 466)

The ironic exaltation of possible realities intends to devalue reality at the moment when, being realized, it would proffer itself as the only model:

I have been to Venice, Rome, Naples, it’s true, but the real journey I made there is precisely the one that disturbs my imagination […], if I had never been to Venice, how much more colorful it would be to me; the canals, the bridges, the fondamentas, the porticos and the under-porticos, how much more charming they would be to my eyes if I didn’t know exactly what they look like — my dream would have no boundaries. […] Venice, Rome, Naples would be a hundred times greater and more beautiful. (Palazzeschi, 2004: 478)

Thus, even desire needs to be placed in a negative setting, as the procrastination of desire itself. This is because the form created by realizing the desire would prove to be an incomplete experience because it would be deprived of its alternative possibilities. This is the reason for the paradoxical praise of expectation the novel ends with:

May you never get to Venice! […] Oh! Were there for everyone a city on earth, […] like Venice, even funnier, even stranger, even more beautiful, a city like that, that makes one dream, but a real city, where real people breathe and walk and love, with their houses and hotels, whose name appears on maps and in railway timetables, in rate charts, from which people send letters and postcards to friends and relatives, but where the engine’s whistle, upon arriving at the station, would melt one’s last breath in one’s breast. (Palazzeschi, 2004: 486–487)

In the final step to analyzing the human relationship with things, the act of buying comes to represent the end of fantasy about the object. The “thing” is inhabited by a nothingness that cancels and disintegrates it: what matters is its shadow, or the money with which it can be purchased:

The nice little package of thousand-lire notes tucked away in your mattress […]. As long as they stay in the package, they are the house, the villa, the farm, the journeys, they are the things you most love and desire, they are everything, they are happiness, but they become “nothing” once you spend them on even one thing. (Palazzeschi, 2004: 490)

For Palazzeschi, money and the possibility of using it means being able to consider reality from the point of view of ‘possibility,’ or what Palazzeschi defines as fantasy. For him, money is the perfect correlative of a reality understood by modernist epistemology to be a flow. This is because it is money that allows one to go beyond the realistic solidity of the object (use value) to disproportionately amplify the features of the object itself, and finally see it for its exchange value. Money is the correlative of an epistemology that sees all forms, interpretations, and representations as regulative pretenses to fight against.

By declaring all tangible objects pointless, and the search for truth to be an arbitrary urge for domination, intended to repress the diversity of life, Palazzeschi reduces reality to a game of representation, i.e. to an exchange value where no “possibility” has more value than any other, and all are convertible.

The third approach is similar to that of reactionary anti-capitalism but shows greater awareness of the connections between new cultural perspectives and social transformation, and better understanding of the role played by the modernist philosophical crisis.

Giovanni Boine was a small-town intellectual and the last descendent of an impoverished family of landowners. He interpreted the opposition between objective truth and the unstoppable flow of reality in terms of a clash between “land” and “money.” The solidity of the land, where change was part of the continuity of tradition, and the rhizomatic movement of money, significantly expressed through the metaphor of the ever-moving sea, are thus compared:

The mills in the valley are closed and the stores along the coast are wide open. […] And money and money: […] the wealth of merchants […]. The tiny estates periodically die of hardship because the olive groves grow tired, and the rich city, the rich merchants, buy them and assimilate them. […] And this people of the sea that grows fat, the tribe of merchants that grows steadily richer. […] this people of the sea, this tribe of traders, […] take away the custom-houses, take away the barriers, even let the land die […]. Free trade, free fighting. […] The souls of those who call themselves conservatives in Italy, who call themselves the heirs of the conservatives in Italy, are the hybrid souls of slaves to Money, the cunning souls of people who deceive others and themselves. They deceive the nation’s true conservative forces by serving the interests and working for the forces of ambiguity. (Boine, 1983c: 400–405)

Boine used money to symbolize the collapse of epistemological certainty, or the link between the disappearance of that certainty and the instauration of exchange value. Only land (the expression of a society governed by the principle of repetition) could guarantee meaningful action because it was an expression of community and sharing. The ideologization of the economic-social component connected with the land becomes a unifying cultural center, opposed to the epistemological disintegration that reflects the atomization of society.

Yet the rejection of historical, class-based positioning led Boine to depict the conflict on a purely abstract cultural level. This allowed the proletarianized intellectual the canonical illusion of preserving his traditional role—consider the reference to “smart people”:

There are two policies: one concerning money and one concerning the land. […] Twenty years ago it was still possible to be fooled, it was still possible to believe in the famous struggle between […] the proletariat and the bourgeoisie […]. Now all smart people know that it’s about the realm of Money, about the rough play of Money, about the titanic convulsions of impersonal Money […]. Socialists and industrialists are not foes at all: they are players sitting at the same table. […] the one of Money, the one of the fluids, mocking, international life of Money; and the one of the Land, of the slow, secure, conservative, and tenacious life of the land; they are two poles, two fundamental trends. (Boine, 1983c: 403–404)

If Boine’s reference to a pre-capitalist power gave “people” a role pre-defined by the intellectual, it also formed the basis of an ethical-cultural action which, claiming to be universal, was considered hostile to the bourgeois State (the political expression of the ambiguous realm of money), even though it was actually a struggle between industrialists and landowners within it. The conflict between land and money allowed a clear idea to emerge of what kind of nation to build: one beyond epistemological/social disintegration, and built on the unifying assumption of what Boine calls “religion”:

their roots are deep in the land that their fathers toiled, they are like plants rooted in the land of their fathers, […] I say that it is this stubborn, religious attachment to the land, the strongest beam, the firmest basis of our nation. Because this, I say, is religion, this is steadfastness, this is religious immutability, […] beyond the mutability of today, beyond the changeable, hapless present is the secret reality of eternity. […] And I say that without the religion of eternity, our nation will have no life. (Boine, 1983c: 406–407)¹²

Boine envisioned a connection between the nation-state and Catholicism. Here, religion would be the cornerstone of a communitarian principle of aggregation (the Catholic soul of Italy), and the nation-state would offer an ethical-political perspective to restore the values shattered by monetary modernity. This position allowed Boine to summarize the intellectual capacity of the educator as “he who takes it upon himself to interpret the historical-spiritual institution of Catholicism on behalf of the people” (Mangoni, 2002: 10; emphasis in original). This education had to be based on the acknowledgment of a unifying/universalistic element (land, tradition, even race) that could re-establish the community: “no effort is durable outside of tradition, because nothing lasts unless it can harmoniously fit in with all other things past and present” (Boine, 1971: 32–33).

The contrast between objectivity and the flow of life is set out with particular determination in the short story La città. The “heroic sense of lawfulness,” the need for “moral rigor,” and the “deep respect for everything that is not individual arbitrariness, that is traditional institution” (Boine, 1983b: 422) characterize the protagonist. These are constantly contrasted with the imminent ruin (“everything falls apart; nothing lasts any more!”; Boine, 1983b: 422) he perceives in the city’s institutions and then in himself. This shatters his thoughts and his language: “… a hopeless feeling of ruin deep down in the dark recesses of the soul […]. Thinking in him, the process of thinking in him was thus reduced to a series of jolts and convulsions […]. Lack of universality” (Boine, 1983b: 422).

Reality without foundation acquires purely phantasmic characteristics, which do not create a place of freedom (which was the case for Palazzeschi), but are only disconnected elements with no link to universal objectivity:

With no ideals, with no social regulations, with no religious intimacies […] the Mass was a charade […]. And so, it was that one Sunday, during his afternoon stroll, the impression of impending disaster erupted in him with all the intensity of a hallucination […]. Why then is everything holding up? […]: everything was resting on a void, with no foundation […]. Corruption was in everything. (Boine, 1983b: 424–426)

The last image in the protagonist's mind is a compendium—one of the most complete in early 20th-century European literature—of the themes of the epistemological crisis experienced by a whole generation. No distinctions are made between the fundamental and the accidental, the collapse of logical hierarchy, the triumph of ambiguity, the impossibility of meaningful experience, the feeling of flowing endlessly, the loss of personal identity, or the triumph of a “living matter” that refuses re-composition or representation:

And the city lived on; and the city unperturbedly flowed. Then came the catastrophe. Even the last beam of his old spiritual edifice […] came tumbling down […]. The robust bracing of his world made of logicality, made of laws, made of skillful voluntary efforts, undermined, upset, and gradually disrupted by evil, […] every firm logical connection, every scale of values by which to make judgments, by which to prioritize and order the world around him and inside him […] collapsed. […] good and evil were mixed together, the right and the wrong, the true and the untrue. The world blew like a storm in the night […]. There was no more law, there was no more order, there were no more rational explanations […]. And then, little by little, the city – no longer judged – started to grow again before him, alive and real. […] and the city entered; inside him […]. Wild, overflowing plenitude of copious life as in a well-fertilized field, […] a primordial triumph of turbid sap without form, […] the world of chaos! […] a confident force beyond all law, unaware of any law, a force with no orderly tendency for law. […] a flowing richness, rolling up, down, back, forth through the streets of the city like a huge, swaying tide […]. The city, without a consciousness looking over it […]! Full of sunlight and full of the smell and the sound of the sea. (Boine, 1983b: 428–434)

By contrasting money and land, Boine symbolized the contrast between a cultural ideology of joyously accepting the collapse of objective truth and ancient social values (for Boine, the dominant ideology of the new bourgeoisie-dominated world), and a tragic stance to reactivate those values and past certainties.

However, pre-capitalist criticism of bourgeois society failed to realize that it had become a functional part of that same society, leaning ideologically on this feudal reaction while the class struggle advanced. Contrary to Boine's belief, this was no alternative logic residing in real and universal social structures and stratifications. It was merely a formal logic that hinged on fading cultural myths of the land, and justified the ideological products of historical derivation as biological, starting with the idea of a natural inequality of man: “natural law, […] which in its recent formation […] we have come to call nation; and which in its remote formation […] it is fair to call race” (Boine, 1983a: 536; emphasis in original).¹³ From this ideological standpoint, Boine began to see race as opposing the fragmentation of capitalist society and its main symbol: money. Pre-capitalist thought, which craved a restoration of qualitative life beyond market quantification, emerged during the First World War and the Fascist era, absolutely subaltern to the new ideological directives of nationalist and imperialist capitalism.

Finally, the general meaning of the work of writer and philosopher Carlo Michelstaedter is key to understanding his analysis of money. An outline of his philosophy puts this into context.

Michelstaedter’s philosophy, developed in Persuasion and Rhetoric which he wrote between 1909 and 1910, originated in Arthur Schopenhauer’s concepts of will. According to Michelstaedter, in the moment of will, the subject interprets the whole of reality according to this will. In their relationship with the object, the subject—following the necessity imposed by his own will—absolutizes the real as a whole within the desired object. The subject even absolutizes themselves in the contingency of their relationship with that object:

Inasmuch as something is pleasant, the whole person is therein involved. – And as it converges on that thing as its own, so it draws therefrom the illusion of individuality. What I like, what is useful to me: that is my conscience: that is my reality. (Michelstaedter, 2003a: 44)

An individual subject's consciousness (and consciousness of themselves as a subject) was merely their state of will. This determined their disposition towards the real, superimposing their own consciousness on an object in the moment they desired it. In this sense, for Michelstaedter the I-World relationship could not be a cognitive, unidirectional experience. The cognitive act, as dictated by the subject's will, remained the reification of itself in a reality which expressed the forms of that will: “Man attributes to things that do not have in themselves an absolute value as determined things […] an absolute value, […] the things that are necessary for him to satisfy his needs become a reality for him” (Michelstaedter, 2003b: 40).

The object, through the will to possess, becomes a representation of the presumed absoluteness of the subject. The will expresses a possibility of possession that the subject interprets as value, because for the duration of that willing, the characteristics of the desired object represent the way in which the subject interprets all of reality. If I am hungry, I am all stomach: the world is a store of edible things. This “hunger” is not exhausted in simply tending toward objects, because in this perspective other humans are also defined as suitable objects: “It is mine because it represents the certainty of being able to satisfy my hunger in eating it […]. And loved ones are necessary in the same manner” (Michelstaedter, 2003a: 40).¹⁴

Yet, the presumed ontological consistency (identity) offered by possession of the object is continuously shattered. Firstly, because desire for the object is temporal, modifying both the desire and the object itself. Secondly, because “objects” (including living beings) are willing in turn. By functioning, the determined will of the individual subject opens the way to a reality founded on the continuous attempt of one entity to overpower others. For all individuals, reality in this form becomes a set of usable objects to which they attach perception in order to satisfy their will:

The flower sees the propagation of its pollen in the bee, while the bee sees sweet food for its larvae in the flower. […] Neither knows whether its affirmation coincides with the other’s or whether conversely its affirmation deprives the other of the future […] And when coincidence does not provide for the continuation of both, when the cog of one large or small gear does not fit into the cavities of another or vice versa, inimical violence manifests itself. (Michelstaedter, 2008: 32–33; emphasis in original)

For the subject, the object is instrumental. Being instrumental, it ontologically reconfirms the subject. This is true for every subject before any other subject, who considers the other one a thing.

In this mechanism that Michelstaedter called “correlativity,” the wills of subjects assert themselves in an attempt to oppress other wills, to annex them and make them their own. Michelstaedter’s vision of the social sphere reflected Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Humans, wrote Michelstaedter, “contend for the security of being able to violate nature and make use of the accumulation of past labor” (Michelstaedter, 2008: 113). Whoever wins the battle affirms their individuality and forces the other to locate their own identity in the duty of serving the wills of the master. Here, unlike in Hegel, master and slave were inseparable, in a dual mechanism that ultimately coincided with the social structure itself. Though violence persisted, it was disguised by abstraction in social knowledge. This prevented an explosion of uncontrolled violence/suffering that could destroy the mechanism. What society expressed as knowledge entered individuals’ minds as objective knowledge, although it was only the knowledge created in master/slave dialectics. This was therefore a social knowledge formed in the unequal contrast between individuals' opinions:

Men have found in society a better master than individual masters because it does not demand of them a variety of labor, but only a small, simple bit of labor, familiar and obscure […]. Society does what no master would: it makes its slaves participants in its own authority by transforming their labor into money and giving money the force of law […]. In this manner, everyone in organized society violates everyone else by means of the omnipotence of the organization. (Michelstaedter, 2008: 116–118)

For Michelstaedter, progressive rationalization extended below the cultural level and was rooted in a series of precise material elements. If property was how the subject (the subject-master) exercised their right to implement their own interpretation of reality, money was the tool for communicating social violence; the abstract instrument with which the subject expressed (imposed) their right to interpret/use reality (“money corresponds to an extraordinary form of individuality”):

One has affirmed his individuality before the other, and the other has his future cropped and is at the mercy of the victor in that he wants to live and cannot take advantage of his own labor power. The other then gives him the means of living, provided that he works for him […]. And this latter, the slave, is matter before the master – he is a thing. […] The master makes use of the slave through his form, through his labor power. He makes him feel that his right to exist coincides with the sum of duties toward the master; his security is conditioned by his uninterrupted adherence to the needs of the master. (Michelstaedter, 2008: 113–114; emphasis in original)

Michelstaedter's interpretation was Marxian: money was the abstract form of the individual's social position, through which they interacted with their fellow human beings: “Money, the actual means of communicating the societal violence by which each is the master of the work of others […] [is] ‘the concentrate of labor’, ‘the representative of law’, the drive belt turning the machine’s wheels” (Michelstaedter, 2008: 118). In this society, having money meant having the right to decide who would triumph in the conflict of opinions, because money mediated the relationships between individuals.

Money became the device that abstractly expressed the individual’s will within the mobile flow of interpretations. Yet, the individual will, to win the debate on interpretations, wills desire to be one and the same with the social will, and social will is directed by whoever holds a stronger social position precisely through holding the money. Money would warp the status quo because the initial attempt to reify the object would become a voluntary self-reification on the part of the subject in relation to the structures of society.

By adapting to these structures, the subject could have a stable identity. The subject’s interpretation of reality would triumph, but only because they willed misguided social ideas to be their own.

Thus, knowledge became the system through which people sublimated the clash of wills where society, completely disarticulated and polarized, was re-articulated as abstraction.

The individual who wanted to win an argument or satisfy a need came to understand that this was best done by adapting themselves to the structures of social consensus in order to lend more force (authority) to their argument. This external structure appeared to be a natural law, because the exchange of wills, in contrast, served as the base for the abstraction of these same wills. The system was actually determined by the dominant wills of society, because that abstraction was the relationship of the balance of power between people, abstracted as objective knowledge. Clearly this objective knowledge did not constitute a real social agreement. Rather, it corresponded to the will of those holding power in society. It was the abstract form (the reification) of historical contrasts. It was merely the abstraction of relationships/contrasts among individuals, bent to the will of those who controlled social ideologies through money.

Through this interpretation, Michelstaedter succeeded in criticizing both the intellectual positions that supported the end of objective truth and universal values (Palazzeschi), and those interested in recovering those values (Boine).

In Michelstaedter’s philosophy, accepting the flow of opinions, interpretations, and points of view as reality did not correspond to the principle of freedom arising from the collapse of metaphysical objective truth. This is because individuals’ interpretations—and the inevitable contrasts between them—could never be equal because the opinions held by better-placed members of society will always win.

Unlike Hegel, Michelstaedter saw slave and master finish by integrating their social wills. However, his reading was no misinterpretation of Hegel equating the two figures. Rather, the wills to which the slave adapts in the forms of social security and cultural ideology are no longer his: they are those of the master, transmitted—in societal organization—through a progressive leveling out of ideologies.¹⁵ The subject-master dictates the rules that abstract the correlativity of contrasts. The social abstraction of knowledge is the expression of the real balance of power between master and slave. Therefore, declaring all interpretations equal (as for Palazzeschi) means allowing the interpretations of whoever is stronger in society to triumph.

Similarly, Boine's intellectual positions ended up corroborating an already hegemonic doxa. Both responses were revealed to be part of the same cultural operation and abstractive structure, reflecting the forms of a social control in the culture that re-stabilized disaggregation.

The system of correlativity, subject to the contingency of contrasting wills, was one of violence and insecurity. This violence had to be subsumed into a perfectible cultural code, in which the will could always be found as an abstract, socialized form of itself. Through culture and through social institutions, individualities were forced to unify into an abstracted whole: this presented social morality as individual morality, and the contrasting relativity of individuals as an abstract categorization of Being.

Through his work, Michelstaedter succeeded in elevating understanding of the relationship between money and the modernist philosophical-literary crisis to a new level. Like Palazzeschi and Boine, Michelstaedter understood the link between the philosophical crisis and the new role of money in society; yet, unlike them, he did not interpret the cultural crisis as an intellectual fight between relativism and “will of truth.” For Michelstaedter, as for Marx, money embodied the relative and the absolute, disaggregation and stabilization. Its powerful social role expressed the hegemony of a class that maintained its power not by relying on timeless religious truths of religion or systematic philosophy, but through the continuous, abstract re-aggregation of a shattered and atomized social structure.

Footnotes

Notes

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