For Love and Money: Of Potboilers and Precautions

Abstract

Intercourse means commerce, they told us in school. And we giggled at the explosive word that went off in more than one direction. But the confusion is more than simply a joke of mistaken referents or of metaphoric allusions to intimate contact and interested exchange. It is a tangle of productive sex and enterprising business revealing an adjacency of practices that add up to modernity. In a metaleptic circle of cause and effect, modern desire for family and for wealth seemed to drive those practices, and they helped form the kind of modern subject who desired them. The circularity illustrates what Nietzsche said about the fiction of empirical moorings (279-80). The moorings invented themselves to produce an illusion of stability. This is what happened at the beginnings of European modernity, as Mary Poovey shows in A History of the Modern Fact: truth grounded in empirical facts turns out to be a metaleptic effect of the seventeenth-century fiction of precise accounting, a rhetorical compensation for numbers that could not add up in the precarious conditions of mercantilism. But a century later, precise and transparent accounts were no longer performances that interpreted irregular data; they required proofs of economic and civic credibility. In a broad stroke, we can say that the foundational fiction that followed from honorable entrepreneurship is the dynamic law of desire for development as the natural drive of our particular and collective lives. Laissez-faire was the slogan.