MATERIAL, LITERARY NARRATIVE AND CULTURAL ECONOMY

Abstract

In this paper I argue that thinking about the material in cultural economy has much to gain from culture itself. Specifically, I explore the potential of literary narrative for conceptualizing and writing material within a performative cultural economy. Drawing on the industrial short stories of Primo Levi (The Periodic Table, The Wrench, A Tranquil Star), I provide a literal reading of these works, highlighting their foregrounding of material encounters, the importance of process (and not just product), and materials’ instability in process, and their connections to theorizations of economies as assemblage. The paper also explores how Levi writes material to presence using the techniques of narrative discourse, particularly mimesis. The paper concludes by arguing that narrative is a means to writing a performative cultural economy and that cultural economy needs to rekindle the arts of story-telling. Paying attention to literary narrative shows how this might be achieved.

Keywords:

• material
• literary narrative
• materiality
• Primo Levi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author acknowledges the support of ‘The Waste of the World’ programme, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (RES0002320007) (http://www.thewasteoftheworld.org). Thanks to Ash Amin, Mike Crang, Jessica Dubow, Ray Hudson and Peter Jackson for their comments on previous versions of the paper; to Rob Ferguson for first alerting me to The Periodic Table; to three anonymous referees and to Tony Bennett for their helpful and supportive comments and suggestions for improvements; and to Neil Hyatt and Martin Stennett (Materials Science, University of Sheffield) for the exposure to chemistry and for showing a social scientist that material matters.

Notes

1. An indication of the absence of the material register from performative cultural economy is provided by Amin with Thrift (2007), Table 1, p. 148.

2. To focus on the short story is not to privilege this literary form over others, nor to say that literary representations of physical material are confined to the short story. Other fictional genres may be as worthy of investigation, for example, science fiction. Nonetheless, as I show below (Sections 4 and 5), the short story is of particular interest for its ways of working with narrative.

3. Of the key social science writers on materiality, only Haraway works in an overtly literary manner. She too flags the potential in narrative but stops short of working in narrative to write physical material.

4. Gordon (2007) provides the best introduction to Levi scholarship (and see Patruno 1995; Pugliese 2005). Whilst the majority of work continues to focus on the Holocaust, survivor/witness testimony and Jewish culture and identity, Levi's writings speak additionally to ethics, science and industrial work, as well as to debates in Italian and European literature (see, for example, Antonello 2007; Belpoliti & Gordon 2007; Cannon 1990; Cicioni 1995; Gordon 1997, 2000, 2001; Harrowitz (2007), Hartman 2001/2; Pireddu 2001).

5. See Chapter 3 of Cicioni (1995), Angier (2002), Roth (1986), Thomson (2003).

6. The primary texts are: The Periodic Table (1985), The Wrench (1987), and A Tranquil Star (2007).

7. There are, of course, other penalties for writers, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Salman Rushdie being prime examples. Levi's point remains, however. Writers’ constructions crumble not as a result of their physical fabrication but because of the ideas they might convey.

8. Gordon (2000) draws similar parallels between Levi and Benjamin, highlighting the importance of story-telling to Levi's oeuvre and its connections to testimony and ethics in Levi's work.