ETA Hoffman, Aesthetics, And German Romanticism

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 conflict-ing things and force the creation of a third thing out of their conflict.—AdamMüller, Versuche einer neuen Theorie des Geldes

Economics and Aesthetics as Sciences of Vaiue

I n the closing decades of the eighteenth century, two "new" scientific-theoretical disciplines, economics and aesthetics, burst on the Euro-

pean intellectual scene and immediately began to assert their prece-dence over other areas. Although at first glance their simultaneousascendancy may seem like historical serendipity, core issues and con-cerns yoke them together. Both focus primarily on human productivityand 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 andaesthetics did not spring up without precursors or antecedents. But theforerunners of aesthetics were normative, regulative programs, extend-ing back at least to Aristotle's Poetics, that dictated standard practicesand conventions governing production in the individual arts. Only withAlexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's Aesthetica (1750-58) were the foun-dations 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 tothe management and accumulation of wealth, and the theories of theso-called physiocratic school, codified in François Quesnay's Tableauéconomique of 1759 and promulgated from the 1750s to the FrenchRevolution, are commonly recognized as the first scientific economics,which defines the economic domain as a closed system of interdepen-dent elements and relations operating together as a harmonious whole.Both aesthetics and economics became scientific disciplines when aprescriptive, normative model that laid out conventions or policies foraction gave way to a systematic and theoretical model of the univer-sal founding principles of human artistic and economic productivity.Instead of being formulated as a dispersed set of ad hoc legislative prac-tices, aesthetics and economics as philosophical-theoretical disciplinescame to be organized as internally logical, interactively dependent sys-tems, concerned primarily with defining the establishment and opera-tion of value within their circumscribed domains.

Economics and aesthetics, however, had different approaches toquestions of value. Aesthetics focused on the subjective moment ofvalue attribution. As codified in Immanuel Kant's theory of aestheticjudgments, the primary problem was how to claim universal validityfor individual judgments of "taste." Kant's resolution depended on acommon human faculty or sensibility, the sensus communis.^ Aestheticjudgments are by nature' qualitative and as such escape easily definedstandards of measure. Economic theory, by contrast, generally circum-vents the quagmire of subjectivist judgments by reducing all value con-siderations to quantitative principles. Barbara Herrnstein Smith dubsthis conflict between aesthetics and economics a "double discourse ofvalue," 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 uni-versity lectures begun in 1742. Forabriefsummary of his theories and their sustainedinfluence throughout the eighteenth century see Kai Hammermeister, The GermanAesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3-20.

2 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, vol. 10 of Werkausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Wei-schedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 156-60; §§19-22.

' Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Criti-cal Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 127.

Gray • Aesthetics and Economics in German Romanticism 371

Consequently, the sisterly relationship between economics and aes-thetics is often marked by rivalry and competition about how to definevalue. Adam Smith charted the rudiments that would dominate eco-nomic value theory for nearly a century by distinguishing "value in use"from "value in exchange.''^ The latter, less tangible notion is not the ask-ing price—which has subjectivist implications—but instead the "quan-tity of labour" required to produce of refine that commodity. "Labour,"Smith apodictically asserted, "is the real measure of the exchangeablevalue of all commodities" (1:47). The first chapter of David Ricardo'sconsolidating work of classical economic theory. On the Principles of Polit-ical Economy and Taxation, is accordingly titled "On Value" and beginsfrom Smith's distinction. Classical aesthetic theory, for its part, hasno place for use value or for quantified measures of exchange value.Beginning with Karl Philipp Moritz's foundational statement, in the1785 "Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schönen Künste und Wissen-schaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten" ("Essay towarda Unification of All the Eine Arts and Sciences under the Concept ofWhat Is Complete unto Itself"), which asserts that beauty affords "ahigher and more selfless pleasure than the merely utilitarian,"^ andcontinuing with Kant's definition of beauty as "disinterested pleasure"(122-24; §5), aesthetic value was explicitly opposed to economic usevalue, which it viewed as tied subjectively to the interests of a particularindividual.

Smith's concept of an "invisible hand" "finessed the problem ofindividual interest with the seemingly counterintuitive claim that bypursuing 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 schönen Künste undWissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten," in Schriften zur Ästhetikund Poetik, ed. Hans Joachim Schrimpf (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1962), 3. Throughoutthis essay, all translations from German sources are my own.

6 For Smith's classic formulation of the invisible hand see 1:26-27, 456. AlbertO. Hirschman analyzes this reflex as a reinscription of destructive, subjectivist "pas-sions" in terms of countervailing, communally informed "interests" (The Passions andthe Interests: Political Arguments for Gapitatism before Its Triumph, 20th anniv. ed. [Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997], 21-43).

372 , MLQ »September 2011

that public affairs are best served by a devotion to self-interest and theaesthetic principle that individual judgments of taste resonate withuniversal human assessments; both present the private and subjectiveas the vehicle for articulating what is common and public. But herebegins a turf war between economics and aesthetics. Thus in the sec-ond of his letters titled Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen {Onthe Aesthetic Education of Humanity, 1795), Friedrich Schiller launches abroadside against utilitarianism as an inappropriate standard for mea-suring the value of art: ''Utility is the grand idol of the age, to which allenergies must pander and which all talents must respect. Measured onthis crude scale, the spiritual merit of art has no weight, and, robbedof all motivation, it disappears from the century's noisy marketplace.'"'Schiller's marketplace alludes to economic pragmatism, against whoseascendancy his program of an ''aesthetic education" is intended as ahistorical antidote in the face of his fear that economic standards ofvalue threaten to annul the significance of the aesthetic and push artto the margins of human society.

Still, aesthetics and economics shared an engagement with the pro-ductive capacity of the imagination. At least since M. H. Abrams's bookThe Mirror and the Lamp, the shift in aesthetic theory from mimetic rep-resentation toward the productive imagination has become a criticalcommonplace.8 By 1790 Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft presumes generalagreement that the principle of imaginative genius has supplantedthe dogma of sterile imitation (243; §47). In what follows I will out-line the role of the productive imagination in economic discourse ofthis period. Although in general the glorification of the imaginationin Romantic aesthetics runs parallel to its sustained suppression, evenvilification, in economic theory, the power of the imagination comesinto prominence briefly as a productive and value-creative force duringthe debates in Germany from 1770 to 1789 over the theoretical coher-ence and pragmatic applicability of physiocratic economic doctrines.^

' Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe vonBriefen, in Erzählungen; Theoretische Schriften, vol. 5 of Sämtliche Werke, ed. GerhardFricke and Herbert C. Göpfert, 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 KurtBraunreuther, "Die Bedeutung der physiokratischen Bewegung in Deutschland in


A defense of the imagination as a formative economic principle mani-fests itself most prominently in the writings of Johann Georg Schlosser(1739-99), whose primary claim to fame in European intellectual his-tory is tied to his close association with Goethe, his wife's brother. Afterexamining the rise and fall of imaginative value theories in economicsand Schlosser's theories in particular, my investigation will concludewith an analysis of E. T. A. Hoffmann's last short story, "Des VettersEckfenster" ("My Cousin's Corner Window"), a narrative that stagesa confrontation between economics and aesthetics with regard to thehuman imagination as a productive force. Hoffmann's text, written andpublished in 1822, can be read not merely as his poetic testament^" butalso as a retrospective commentary on this tussle between economicsand aesthetic theory over the value of the imagination and its role inthe 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 anassertion that could stand as a motto for the central concerns of his age:"Many things become clear—as soon as one has a firm determinationof what constitutes value."'' Indeed, this section undertakes to definethe concept of (economic) value by theorizing the transformation from

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

iy^o-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univereity Press, 1988), 1 19-31. I examine thefar-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, towhich some of my argumentation here is indebted.

K' See Detlef Kremer, "Panorama und Perspektive: 'Des Vetters Eckfenster,' " inE. T. A. Hoffmann: Erzählungen und Romane (Berlin: Schmidt, 1999), 184; GerhardNeumann, "Ausblicke: E. T. A. Hoffmanns letzte Erzählung 'Des Vetters Eckfen-ster,' " in Hoffmanneske Geschichte: ZM einer Literatunuissenschaft als Kultunuissenschaft,

ed. Gerhard Neumann (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2005), 223; andRolf Selbmann, "Diät mit Horaz: Zur Poetik von E. T. A. Hoffmanns Erzählung 'DesVetters 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 Moldenhauerand Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 136.


use value to exchange value. Hegel begins by defining concrete "use"(Gebrauch) as both a qualitative and a quantitative relationship to a spe-cific "need" (Bedürfnis)—qualitative because only certain objects willsatisfy that need, quantitative because some objects will satisfy it betterthan others (Philosophie des Rechts, 135). Only its quantitative use in rela-tion to this need makes any object comparable, for Hegel, with otherobjects that satisfy this same need, and this act of comparison entailsa shift from concrete use to abstract "usefulness" or "utility" (Brauch-barkeit). The quantifiable component, which constitutes an abstractionfrom the particularity of the object's qualities, determines the object'svalue. To become something with value, any object must undergo afundamental transformation from a condition of quality into one ofpure quantity. It becomes an object in the true, idealist sense—that is,an object of consciousness—only when one abstracts from its particu-larity and nudges it down the road to conceptuality. Value hence doesnot attach to the object itself but is a function of the object viewed as asign.i2 Hegel's theory of economic value as a desubstantialized concep-tion of the object presumes a universal similar in kind to the universallysubjective judgments of taste guaranteed by Kant's sensus communis andso parallels Kant's identification of aesthetic value with judgments oftaste: both theories begin by abstracting fundamentally from the par-ticularity of the object's use; both philosophers locate the attributionof value in a mental or cognitive operation (the faculty of judgment forKant, the process of abstract conceptualization for Hegel); yet both,finally, insist that value is not simply determined by an individual butpartakes of a universality lent it by the universal nature of the cognitiveoperation itself. Hegel's Philosophie des Rechts thus marks a significantintellectual-historical convergence of aesthetics and economics. Hisposition regarding economic value could hardly be more distant fromthe standard of classical economic theory, which defines value in termsof 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 thefetish to the symbol, and from the symbol to the simple sign: a movement toward ide-alization, a shift from material prop to relation" {Symbolic Economies: After Marx andEreud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990], 49).


Hegel's theory of economic value. In his Grundrisse der Kritik der poli-tischen Ökonomie {Foundations of the Critique of Political 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. LikeHegel, he argues that the value of a commodity is formulated indepen-dently of its concrete, objective being: this value "not only can but mustsimultaneously assume an existence that is distinct from its natural exis-tence."'^ When he asks why this is so, Marx supplies the same answeras Hegel: value is a quantitative differential unrelated to the object'squalitative properties. "Because commodities as values are only quan-titatively different from one another, every commodity must be quali-tatively distinct from its own value" {Crundrisse, 60). Indeed, as Marx'sdeliberations develop further, the resonances of Hegel's definition ofvalue from the Philosophie des Rechts become even more discernible. ForMarx as for Hegel, in the economic aspect of its "double existence" thecommodity is transformed into a mere sign. The natural distinctnessthat any commodity shares with all other commodities then comes intoconflict or "contradiction" {Widerspruch) with the economic equivalenceit represents in its existence as an article available for exchange, withthe result that "the commodity assumes a double existence, next to itsnatural one a purely economic existence in which it is a mere sign [bloßesZeichen], a cipher for a relationship of production, a mere sign for itsown value" {Crundrisse, 60). For Marx as for Hegel, the unique constitu-tion of the commodity is identified precisely as its double existence, itsnature as a thing that satisfies a particular need, and its status as a valuethat emerges through a process of differential comparison and abstrac-tion. 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 thecommodity, for both thinkers, is represented by money as the concreterepresentative of this value abstraction (Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts,137; Marx, Crundrisse, 65).

However, whereas Hegel defends abstract value as more "substan-tial" than the concrete usefulness of the object itself, Marx corrects histheory, which "stands . . . on its head," by placing it back on its material

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


t.i* When Marx equates Hegel's "sign that represents value" (Philoso-phie des Rechts, 136) with the appositive formula "a cipher for a relation-ship of production," he is lodging his protest against the ethereality ofHegel's theory of value and tracing its roots back to the concrete, mate-rial domain of economic production. Already just prior to this analysisof the double nature of the commodity, Marx insists that economicvalue is nothing but the objectification of human labor, measured interms of time: "Every commodity (product or instrument of produc-tion) is equal to the objectification of a particular period of labor. Itsvalue, 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 ofeconomic value championed by Smith and Ricardo. At the same time,however, he cannot circumvent completely the more mystified Hege-lian theory of economic value that abstracts from the concrete charac-teristics of the object to ascertain the differential coefficient of its eco-nomic value. It is as though Marx viewed Hegel's conceptual acrobaticsfor establisbing economic value as notbing but a subjective, cogitativemanifestation of any commodity's true objective value, as expressed inunits of labor (time). Indeed, Marx analyzed and denounced just thisdivergence between objective labor value and the mysteriously subjec-tive value that humans attribute to the commodity almost ten yearslater, in the famous section of the first volume of Öa5 Kapital that dealswith the fetish character of the commodity.

The opening passage of this analysis of commodity fetishism chartsprecisely the transmogrification of the commodity from a simple, con-crete object into a complex, mysterious thing of value:

A commodity appears at first glance 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 standswith its feet on the ground, but also stands, with regard to all othercommodities, on its head and generates out of its wooden head freakishideas, much more fantastic than if it got up and started dancing on itsown accord. (Kapital, 85)

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


There appears to be nothing mysterious at all when a piece of woodis transformed, through the simple application of human creativityand labor, into a table, an object with greater usefulness, and hencewith surplus value. Yet, at the moment that it becomes a commodity,that is, an object in a relationship of exchange with other objects, thispurely sensual, empirical thing is distorted by metaphysical whimsy,so that it assumes the guise of a contradictory "sensual supersensualthing." It now stands on its "head," instead of on its material "feet,"because its commoditization has invested it with the mystifying powerof the human imagination. This is what motivates Marx to compare"the mystical character of the commodity" {Kapital, 85) with the fetishobject of religious rites, in which imaginary ideas similarly take on thecharacter of real, autonomous objects that govern concrete humansocial relations:

Here [in the nebulous realm of the religious world] the products of thehuman mind appear as autonomous figures that have their own lifeand stand in a relationship among themselves and with human beings.The same is true in the commodity world of the products of the humanhand. I call this the fetishism that adheres to the products of labor assoon as they are produced as commodities, and that hence is insepa-rable from commodity production. {Kapital, 86-87)

The conceptual, or imaginative, process by which human beingsabstract from the concrete object to establish its value, which means toconstitute it as a sign, comes to dwarf the real acts of production andform-giving labor that make the object a commodity in the first place.The mystifying manipulations of the imagination displace the objec-tive determination of value as measured in terms of labor hours andtransform the objective character of the commodity's production bymeans of human labor into a "hidden secret" {Kapital, 89). Marx liftsthis veil of mystery through a simple insistence on this hidden secret ofhuman labor. Only the labor theory of value can dispel the "fetishism"attached to the commodity and set it back on the "feet" of its materialconstitution; the "un-covering" {Entdeckung) of the hidden secret ofhuman labor "annuls the semblance of the merely relative determina-tion of the value quotient of products of human labor" {Kapital, 89). Byfocusing exclusively on the quantifying element of human labor, we canbanish the mystifying consequences of the imaginative comparison of


commodities that establishes their exchange value as a relative worth.Marx's protest against Hegel's idealistic conception of value as sign andagainst the fetishistic mystery of the commodity reasserts the classicaleconomic theory that renders value as a function of labor. The onlyrole that imagination plays in the Marxian system is one of mystifica-tion, which must be undone for the commodity to be acknowledged inits fully fledged material nature.

Given the dominance of the labor theory of value in classical eco-nomic doctrine, one wonders why Marx expends so much time andintellectual energy attacking the "phantasmagoric form" of value attri-bution {Kapital, 86). Imaginary value was established in aesthetics, aswhen Schiller's Ästhetische Erziehung calls the capacity to valorize sem-blance "a genuine expansion of humanity" and "a decisive step in thedirection of culture" (656).'^ To be sure, in certain strains of Germaneconomic theory there had also been a movement toward embracingthe formative role of imagination in the constitution of economic value,and Marx's extended analysis of commodity fetishism can be seen as anattempt to deal a deathblow to any such economic heresies. But the realantagonist is the sister discipline of aesthetics. Marx's position thus isrepresentative of the hard-line attempt of economic theory, even intothe second half of the nineteenth century, to ward off any infectionof its substantive, quantifiable measure of commodity value by themore amorphous, subjective, and hence "consumerist" orientation ofaesthetic value theories, guided by the phantasmagoric and rationallyungovernable power of the imagination. However, this did not preventcertain individuals from the aesthetic side of the value divide from try-ing to make a case for the relevance of imaginary value considerationsin the sphere of economics.

Imaginary Vaiue

When Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740-1817) delivered his inaugu-ral lecture in 1778 on his appointment as professor for public finance

'f' In the same (twenty-sixth) letter of the Ästhetische Erziehung, Schiller identi-fies the "art of semblance" as the specifically human domain of sovereignty, and heexplicitly associates this world of appearances, which takes precedence over meagerreality, with "the instibstantial realm of the imagination" (658).


and administration at the Kameral-Hohe-Schule in Kaiserslautern —the first institution of higher education in the German territories thatconcentrated on questions of state economic policy and public admin-istration—he laid out the rudiments of an economic theory bifurcatedalong the lines of two distinct categories of human need: existentialand psychological. The first he aligned with material commoditiesthemselves, the second with imaginary demands generated by thehuman fantasy:

The preservation of existence is promoted by fundamental drivesanchored in human nature or by physical desires. They cause the emer-gence of essential needs, which are occupied with the struggle for theirown satisfaction. However, the elevation of the human being . . . stemsfrom psychic sources, from the imagination. These also summon uppsychological desires, which ultimately, due to the power of habit, havean infiuence on the finest substance of the body itself, thereby pro-dticing coincidental and luxurious, needs, after whose satisfaction onestrives with almost the same hunger as for the means to satisfy one'sessential needs.'^

In this dualistic economy, concrete, existential necessities stand inopposition to imaginary, psychological ones. Corresponding to thedualism of physis and psyche, the former promote the preservation oflife in a steady-state economy, while the latter function as motors forenhancement and hence contribute to a progressive economic develop-ment. Jung-Stilling's remarks represent a major intervention into one ofthe most hotly contested economic debates of the later eighteenth cen-tury: the dispute over the role of luxury goods in the systematic under-standing of political economy. The mainstream physiocratic schoolcondemned luxury as a frivolous diversion of economic resources fromsubsistence needs to superfluous gratifications. It advocated reinvestingall surplus value in natural production, since only such material rein-vestments could fuel an incremental increase in the productive capacityof nature.i^ But a small group of opponents like Jung-Stilling pointed

"•'Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling, "Oeffentlicher Anschlag bei dem Antritte desLehrstuhles der praktischen Kameralwissenschaften auf der Kameral Hohen Schulezu 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 rudimentaryphysical needs over the desire for luxury items when he argued that the aim of eco-


to the inventive capacity of the human imagination and the need toratchet up human productive energies by generating new desires thatdemanded fulfillment.'^

One of the most articulate of the antiphysiocrats was Schlosser. Borninto a family that exerted considerable political and economic influencein his native Frankfurt am Main, Schlosser initially felt a strong theo-retical affinity for the agricultural orientation of physiocratic economicpolicy. However, he turned against the physiocrats after experiencingfirsthand the devastating conditions that their principles left behind inthe German duchy of Baden-Durlach under the rule of Margrave KarlFriedrich. On entering the employ of Karl Friedrich in 1773, Schlosserfirst set out to reform and rejuvenate those provinces that had beensubject to experiments directed and enforced by the leading, most dog-matic German physiocrat, Johann August Schlettwein (1731-1802).Schlosser's principal economic insights, articulated in his PolitischeErag-mente 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 doctrinesto effect economic stability and advancement.

Like Jung-Stilling, Schlosser insists on two fundamentally contraryeconomic paradigms. Schlosser's conception goes farther, however, inthat he realizes that economic policy must be compatible with the avail-able wealth and resources. Whereas the physiocrats viewed nature asthe sole source of human wealth and enrichment, Schlosser adds thehuman 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. Seethe "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 eighteenthcentury, frugality, as an especially touted virtue, played the significant role of makingallowances for reinvestment into production ( The Machiavellian Moment: Elormtine Politi-cal Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition [Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 19751,445).

'8 Conceptions of what we now call the "libidinal" economy were just takingshape in theoretical deliberations at the end of the eighteenth century, paving theway for a paradigm shift in economic thought that Joseph Vogl locates around theturn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century in Germany (Kalkül und Leiden-sciiaft: Poetik des ökonomischen Menschen, 2nd ed. [Zürich: Diaphanes, 2004], 12-17).

Gray • Aesthetics and Eoonomios in German Romanticism 381

Jung-Stilling, Schlosser associates the former with a limited, steady-state economy, the latter with a system of desires and their satisfactionthat is in principle open-ended. He outlines the distinction in the Poli-tische Fragmente: "Just as the wealth of nature is exhaustible [erschöpflich],so are the needs it calls forth. Nature could never satisfy the needsof the imagination. Only the imaginary wealth of money could satisfythese needs."i9 Schlosser's proposition that nature's productive capac-ity is "exhaustible" flies in the face of physiocratic theory, which viewsnature as a boundless resource. Eor him, infinite productivity stands nolonger on the side of nature but on that of the human imagination. Ifthe "natural" economy is strictly circumscribed both by the finitude ofhuman existential needs and by nature's restricted productive capac-ity, the "imaginary"'economy knows no bounds in its ability either togenerate new needs or to produce new resources that satisfy them. Thesymbol of this infinite productivity is the "imaginary wealth" of money,for, according to Schlosser, only the monetary economy encompassesthe inexhaustible resources capable of fulfilling the infinite desiresgenerated by the imagination.

Schlosser was one of the first economists to acknowledge this seachange in the domain of political economy in the closing decades ofthe eighteenth century. He aligns the natural economy with the tradi-tional "agricultural state" (Ackerbaustaat), and the "imaginary" or mon-etary economy with the "trading nation" (Handelstaat). In Schlosser'sview, the epoch of the flourishing agricultural economy is past, super-seded by the blossoming of an economy based on monetary trade. Thereasons lie with the finite character of the former and the infinite qual-ity of the latter:

Before monetary wealth emerged, that state was considered prosperousin which many people could eat their fill. Agricultural products areexhaustible [erschöpflich]; if the price is exhaustible, so is the commod-ity. Everything given by nature is exhaustible.—The creations of theimagination are not exhaustible. Monetary wealth is a product ofthe imagination. It made prices inexhaustible [unerschöpflich]; and nowthe commodity as well. (PolitischeFragmente, 34-35)

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


Since nature is exhaustible, so are its products, the needs they satisfy,and hence also their value; by contrast, the imagination is inexhaust-ible, as are its products, the needs it can generate, and the surplus val-ues it can create. To be sure, Schlosser does not recommend that allstates must now pursue growth economies based on monetary trade;rather, those territories whose primary wealth resides in the soil shouldrely on an agricultural economy, whereas those nations poor in fertileground but rich in human imagination should turn to money and trade{Politische Fragmente, 37-38). The shift from a natural to an imaginaryeconomy also brings with it decisive social transformations. For if theagricultural state knows only the distinction between the sated and thehungry, the monetary state allows for infinite modes of social distinc-tion; imaginary needs produce imaginary distinctions {Politische Frag-mente, 35). The superfluity of the imagination affects the social orderas limitlessly as the economic order.

There is a remarkable affinity between the terms of Schlosser's eco-nomic vision and contemporaneous arguments for the value of art.Schlosser has essentially wedded economics with aesthetics by transfer-ring to the economic realm a theory of the imagination widely promul-gated in Romantic aesthetic conceptions. The affinities with Hegel'sVorlesungen über die Ästhetik (delivered 1817-29, published 1835) areespecially striking. Hegel begins with a circumscription of the domainof aesthetics and a defense against objections to the philosophy of art.Artistic beauty, born of Geist, is superior to natural beauty, becauseproducts of spirit/mind inherently stand above those of nature. Artisticcreativity is free and infinitely productive. To be sure, the infinitely vari-able products of artistic fantasy present a challenge to the systematiz-ing rubrics of the philosophical mind. But even if art is by definitionnot susceptible to systematic, "scientific" {wissenschaftliche) investigation,it can be fruitfully subject to "philosophically reflective" {philosophischreflektierende) observations, which are no less scientifically reliable.2"Many terms that Hegel Uses—including free activity, wealth, produc-tivity, plenitude, products—are primarily economic, and his inexhaust-ibly creative aesthetic fantasy corresponds closely to the inexhaustible

2" G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I, vol. 13 qf Theorie-Werkausgabe, ed.

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


imaginary economy sketched out by Schlosser. Indeed, Hegel explicitlyplays up the pun in the words schöpferisch (creative) and unerschöpflich(inexhaustible). The very attributes that Hegel—as representative ofGerman Romantic aesthetic theory—ascribes to art and aesthetics,Schlosser already identified as the principles underlying the emergentmonetary economy.

Schlosser was certainly aware of the borrowings from aestheticsthat underpinned his economic paradigm. One of those peculiarlytalented polydisciplinary intellectuals of the later eighteenth century,he not only concentrated on questions of political economy but alsodabbled in critical philosophy and even aesthetic theory. One of hisessays, "Ueber die Dichtkunst" ("On the Art of Poetry," 1794), treatspoetry in typical period fashion as the supreme artistic expression,capable, like the arts in general, of elevating and enhancing humancultivation.21 His aesthetic deliberations parallel the transformationthat he has outlined in the domain of political economy: a "natural"aesthetic grounded in the principle of imitation should be supplantedby an "imaginary" aesthetic based on the transformative enrichmentof nature. Literature "elevates" {hebt) the human soul, "because i t . . .subordinates the world to our desires" ("Dichtkunst," 382). Schlosser'searly version of a libidinal economy, however, transcends aesthetics, forwhile art has the power to subjugate the world to human desire, theeconomic imagination generates new desires that demand fulfillment.

. Schlosser's reliance on principles derived from aesthetics becomesclearest in the dialogue Xenocrates, his last work on economics. Xenocratesdebunks physiocracy's insistence on the so-called impôt unique, the sin-gle tax assessed on agricultural products. Since the physiocrats claimedthat only the reproductive power of nature was capable of increasedproduction and the creation of supplementary value, it followed thatonly agricultural production should be subject to taxation.22 Xenocratescounters by arguing that surplus value also accrues when products ofnature 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), 381—82.

22 On the physiocratic theory of the impôt unique see Henry Higgs, The Physiocrats:Six Lectures on the French Economistes of the Eighteenth Century (1897; repr. Hamden, CT:Archon Books, 1963), 44.


in Schlosser's earlier economic theory, imagination both awakens andsubsequently fulfills new needs and thereby contributes to economicexpansion.23 Schlosser then adds human "energies" (Kräfte) as a newconcept, and these serve as intermediaries between needs and theirfulfillment. Imagination remains responsible for generating hithertounacknowledged needs; then these new needs stimulate new energiesas engines of greater productivity. In Schlosser's circulatory dynamic,enhanced productivity redounds to stimulate renewed imaginativecreativity.

The crux of Schlosser's argument is a distinction between matterand form appropriated from aesthetics. He avoids assuming that mat-ter can somehow exist independent of its form, or that form can existas pure abstraction, freed of any substance to which it lends shape. Buthe distinguishes form from content with respect to value production,for the value of a commodity's content can be assessed independent ofits form. One value-adding process, natural production, generates newmatter; a different one, human energy, lends this matter a more felici-tous form (Xenocrates, 99). Energy seems to be Schlosser's approxima-tion of what classical economists would express in terms of labor. ButSchlosser's "energies" remain more nebulous and subjective, therebyresisting the drive toward quantification inherent in the labor theoryof value. Natural production is restricted to utility, whereas imaginativeform-giving transcends usefulness by lending the material aestheticenhancements:

Since need is no longer satisfied by the mere products theinselves—thatis, no longer views them purely in terms of utility, but rather in termsof form, color, beauty, etc. — there must also be something else thatsatisfies this new need; this is fashioning [Formgebung]. And since theproduct itself is not sufficient to pay for this fashioning, a new pricemust arise, which drives the fashioners [Eormgeber] on to give the prod-uct the form that the new need demands. And this, in turn, is nothingbut renewed fashioning. (Xenocrates, 112-13)

Here Schlosser describes the circulatory spiral in the "imaginary" econ-omy whereby purely aesthetic desires (form, color, beauty) lead to therefashioning of the natural product, and this refashioned product in

23 Johann Georg Schlosser, Xenocrates, oder Ueber die Abgaben: An Göthe (Basel,1784), 100-102.


turn gives rise to more sophisticated aesthetic demands, which onceagain require products shaped by more refined fashioning, and so oninto infinity. The utility of the product itself remains an unalterableconstant, and hence the price of the commodity can increase only ifsomething other than utility, namely, aesthetic attributes, enters intothe economic equation. All other economic variables, including theavailability or scarcity of the natural product and the fluctuation ofvalue in the system of supply and demand, remain suspended. All quan-titative measures of value, such as the labor time invested in the trans-formation of a natural object into a commodity, are set aside to focussolely on the qualitative refashioning and the consumer's subjective,psychological investment in the aesthetically enhanced product. Thevalue of the material product itself is fixed by its utility; all surplus valuebeyond the utilitarian base derives from the formal, creative, imagina-tive refashioning. In other words, the differential between use valueand exchange value is grounded in nothing other than the continualaesthetic refashioning of the natural object and the consequent stimu-lation of new aesthetic desires. Whereas the natural economy, drivenby unchanging utility, would always be restrained by finite needs, theimaginary, aestheticized economy has the potential for ever-increasinggrowth. In Schlosser's (and Hegel's) terms: the inexhaustibility of thecreative imagination incessantly generates new values. With Schlosser,economics and aesthetics, as the disciplines concerned with theincrease and measure of value, have joined forces. Schlosser notablyholds up precisely the phantasmagoric investment of human beingsin the objects they create and consume, which Marx would demonizeas commodity fetishism, as the principal motor behind economic andcultural 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 himselfthrough musical compositions and paintings. Like that of so manyRomantics, however, his artistic existence stood in conflict with hismundane life as a trained jurist and civil servant in the Prussian min-istry of justice. Even among the Romantics, Hoffmann stands out as a


fervent advocate of the inestimable power of the imagination. One ofhis fictional characters, the hermit Serapion, represents the paradigmof the creative genius who relies exclusively on his visionary fantasy forthe generation of literary works. Serapion's imaginative visions comealive as if they were empirical events witnessed not only by their authorbut by his audience as well. His imagination is also characterized by itsinfinite productivity: he can generate an unending series of ever-newstories.24 In accord with the so-called Serapiontic principle, imaginativeelaboration in "Des Vetters Eckfenster" works together with empiricalobservation.25 Set above a teeming marketplace, this story dramatizesthe confrontation and convergence between economics and aestheticsthat are sketched in the preceding sections of this essay.

Hoffmann's tale recounts a dialogue between two unnamed cous-ins, whereby the cousin who serves as the story's first-person narratoris trained by the second, invalid cousin in an art of observation.26 Themarketplace and its world of commodities are juxtaposed to the imagi-native elaborations of the cousins, who stand above and apart fromit.2'̂ The invalid cousin is a successful writer whose mansard rooms areidentified with the confined but productive space of the literary imagi-nation,28 but he suffers from a severe psychological conflict stemming

2'' E. T. A. Hoffmann, "Der Einsiedler Serapion," in Werke, ed. Herbert Kraftand 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 Sera-piontic principle, which glorifies imagination as the sole font of poetic creativity (Die

Augen der Automaten: E. T. A. Hoffmanns Imaginationslehre als Prinzip seiner Erzählkunst

[Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1971], 14-18). For the interdependence of the imaginationand empirical observation, however, see Matt, 34-35; and Ulrich Stadler, "Die Aus-sicht als Einblick: Zu E. T. A. Hoffmanns später Erzählung 'Des Vetters Eckfenster,' "Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 105 (1986): 5 0 8 .

26 The setting replicates that in which Hoffmann himself lived at this time inBerlin, in his apartment at Taubenstraße 31, with its view over the Gendarmenmarkt.Hans Dieter Schäfer develops in more detail the autobiographical implications ofHoffmann's story ("Hoffmann am Fenster," Athenäum^ [1998]: 40-42).

2' Walter Benjamin was one of the first to examine the dynamic between empir-ical observation and imaginative amplification that is operative in Hoffmann's text;see his 1930 radio address "Das dämonische Berlin," in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. RolfTiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 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.


from his inability to transform his immaterial fantasies into concreteliterary commodities. He thus finds himself caught between the hyper-active productivity of his imagination and the physical inability to pro-duce written works. The narrating cousin's description invokes bothartistic and economic production: "The most severe malady was unableto check the fast-paced mechanism of fantasy that continued to laborinside him, constantly producing [erzeugend] ever new things" ("Eckfen-ster," 381). Especially curious is the mechanical metaphor, underscoredby verbs of production and labor, that portrays the invalid cousin'simagination not as a typical Romantic organism but as a machinelikefactory that never ceases to run. The narrating cousin himself becomesa kind of marketing middleman: since the invalid cousin can no longerwrite his stories down so as to convert them into salable commodities,the narrator must fill this role, ironically turning this very story into awritten record of the invalid cousin's verbally enunciated fantasies.^9Fusing economic and aesthetic discourses, the narrator compares thecrippled cousin's literary output with that of the French writer Scar-ron, based on the "dearth [Sparsamkeit] of his products [Erzeugnisse]"("Eckfenster," 381). Erzeugnisse echoes the gerund erzeugend from thepreviously cited passage, with its aura of manufacture, while Sparsamkeitinvokes thriftiness, even parsimony, in marked opposition to the hyper-active imagination conjured up in the same passage. The invalid cous-in's literary creativity is torn between scarcity and overproduction.

Eramed by these reflections on the poet-cousin's literary aesthet-ics, the internal story of "Des Vetters Eckfenster" evolves as a series ofobservations made by the two cousins, perched at their corner win-dow overlooking the bustling market and sharing a spyglass to focus ondetails culled from the chaotic scene. The market's thicket of stalls andthe incessant movements of the pulsating crowd of shoppers embodythe dynamic process of economic circulation. The narrating cousin atfirst is overwhelmed by the hubbub and activity: "The entire marketappeared to be such a tightly compressed mass of people as to make

29 Wulf Segebrecht stresses that the narrating cousin primarily undergoes atransformation into a recorder of the written word and that this poetic education islinked with his training in the art of imaginative observation {Heterogenität und Inte-gration: Studien zu Leben, Werk und Wirkung E. T. A. Hoffmanns [Frankfurt am Main:Lang, 1996], 127-29).

388 lyiL'Q • September 2011

one believe that an apple thrown down into it would never reach theground" (383). The dynamism of the market is the economic analogueto the restless creativity of the invalid cousin's imagination, and just asthe 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 thenarrator, into a composite image: "This left me with the impression ofa large bed of swaying tulips, driven by the wind" (383). Yet even whenthe scene begins to take on a certain regularity and form, it inducesin the onlooker a kind of "dizziness" {Schwindel), which the narratorcompares to the delirium in that state between wakefulness and sleepthat immediately precedes dreams (383).

At this point the poet-cousin interrupts to insist that the narratorlacks the keenness of observation that is prerequisite to poetic sensibil-ity: "Cousin, cousin! Now I see that not even the tiniest spark of liter-ary talent glows in you. You lack the first requirement ever to followin the footsteps of your noble, lame cousin; namely, an eye that trulysees" (384). With this, the invalid hands over the spyglass and beginsto school his cousin. He concentrates on a single detail lifted out of themarket scene, attached to a particular individual, and then employed asa springboard for a fictionalized narrative.^" A woman wearing a yellow,turbanlike scarf, for example, is transformed into a French exile whosehusband earns a tidy income in a branch of French industry (384);another woman, wearing a silk hat, becomes a "rabid housewife," thedaughter 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 shoppingbasket is alternately transmogrified into a former "master draftsman"{Zeichenmeister) and a French pastry cook (394-96). The term Zeichen-meister is itself suggestively ambiguous, alluding not only to a masterdraftsman but to either an artistic portraitist or—when understoodliterally—a master semiotician. In this last rendering the term refersto the poet-cousin himself, who proves throughout this text that he hasmastered the art of rendering simple observed objects as manifoldly

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


meaningful semiotic ciphers.^' However, if the artistic cousin practicesphysiognomic interpretation (386), it is a physiognomy less of the facethan of the personal object or the possessed commodity; his elabora-tions on the people he singles out invariably take their point of depar-ture from some article worn, carried, or acquired.

Eor example, the first customer the cousins scout carefully studiesany commodity, using both eyes and hands, before making a purchase:"She grabs a plucked goose—she handles it with the fingers of a con-noisseur" (384). A second customer illustrates the parallel between thecousins' physiognomic gaze, the basis of their literary art, and the physi-ognomy of the commodity: "Just look how she eyeballs and touches, howshe haggles over everything and purchases nothing" (385). Althoughshe applies all her perceptual sensual skills to evaluate the items offeredfor purchase, and bargains relentlessly, sbe leaves empty-handed. Inthis regard she represents the economic analogue of the lame cousin'sincomplete literary practice: as she has nothing concrete to show for herefforts, so too the cousin revs up the assembly line of his imaginationwithout producing a material work.

The customers are confronted with a virtually infinite wealth ofgoods, from among which they must choose the most valuable ones byapplying their own arts of discernment; as such, they find themselves inthe same situation as the narrator, who first sees nothing in the marketbut a chaotic mass. Both customer and narrator face the overwhelmingtask of sifting through the sensory overload presented by the dizzyingsupply of commodities. In addition, they must avoid falling victim toso-called Vexierware, tantalizing commodities that are, as the narratorremarks, "calculated for the effect they make on untrained eyes" (386).Thus for the knowledgeable shopper, as for the talented author, dis-cerning eyes constitute the indispensable tool. The shoppers are forcedto apply "all the arts of mercantile cleverness" in their selection of com-modities (386), just as the cousins practice the art of skilled observation

'̂ ' Lutz Hagestedt notes the semiotic character of the market {Das Genieproblembei E. T. A. Hoffmann: Am Beispiel illustriert; Eine Interpretation seiner späten Erzählung "Des

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


enhanced by imaginative fantasy. Moreover, when all visual testing andbartering is done, the customers invest all their imaginative and libidi-nal energy into the chosen commodity. One customer must violentlytear himself away from the "seductive object of his desires" (395), andanother sheds tears of disappointment when, after selecting a longed-for item and negotiating an acceptable price, she discovers that shelacks enough cash to seal the purchase (586). The dialectic betweenkeen observation and imaginary investment in a selected object oper-ates in the marketplace of commodities no less than in the mind ofthe writer.

This parallel has profound implications for the structure of Hoff-mann's story. As the shoppers peruse the articles for sale, make theirselections, invest their imaginative energies in the chosen items, andplace them in their shopping baskets, so the two cousins scan the marketscene, pick out the objects that stir their fancy, embellish these objectsand their owners by means of imaginative fictionalization, and add thisepisode to the repertory of incidents that make up their literary narra-tive about the market day. Hoffmann's series of twelve episodes, eachconstituting a distinct scene that contributes to the composite image oflife at the market, may have been drawn from popular calendar litera-ture,32 or from the orbis pictus convention in the tradition of WilliamHogarth,33 but it also replicates the act of commodity shopping. Thisexplains why, in a story infused with suggestive objects, the shoppingbasket looms as an omnipresent symbol.34 Ultimately, "Des Vetters Eck-fenster" is itself a shopping cart overflowing with the assorted fruits ofthe cousins' detailed, observations and imaginative fabulations. Thusthe literary aesthetics both theorized and practiced in the story cannotbe disentangled from the economic practices it takes as its thematicsubstance.

'2 Jürgen Gunia and Detlef Kremer, "Fenster-Theater: Teichoskopie, Theatralitätund Ekphrasis im Drama um 1800 und in E. T. A. Hoffmanns 'Des Vetters Eckfen-ster,'" E. T. A. Hoffmann-Jahrbuch g (2001): 78.

33 The lame cousin himself alludes to this tradition when he compares the uni-verse of commodities available at the stall of a tradeswoman to an orbis pictus ("Eck-fenster," 387). See also Bernard Dieterle, Erzählte Bilder: Zum narrativen Umgang mitGemälden (Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1988), 107.

'•i An informal tally registers more than twenty-five references to baskets for thedisplay and purchase of commodities, in a text that spans only twenty-six pages.

Gray • Aesthetios and Economics in German Romanticism 391

This convergence of literary-aesthetic and economic practices isunderscored when the poet-cousin recalls encountering a flower girlat the market, biding her time by reading a book. In a narrative thattends toward the amalgamation of individual scenes into a series ofindependent and equivalent elements, this episode stands out for sev-eral reasons. Instead of occurring in the present and under the obser-vation of the cousins, it is an already full-fledged story, drawn fromthe poet-cousin's memory of a time when he was still mobile enoughto visit the market himself. Significantly, it derives not from his pursuitof keen observation- but from his refusal to observe: he is reluctant towatch what is happening at the flower girl's stand because it remindshim of this past, unpleasant occurrence (3gi). Eurther, as a dialogicexchange between the poet and the flower girl, the episode emulatesthe structure of Hoffmann's narrative itself. Einally, this event that isboth memorable and haunting stands at the veritable center of Hoff-mann's text. Surely it is no coincidence that the event's core theme isthe intertwining of economic and literary-aesthetic issues, raising ques-tions about literary marketing, readership, authorship, and the poeticwork as economic commodity.

The poet-cousin begins by relating his joy at the sight of an assidu-ously reading flower girl. He is particularly fascinated by her total absorp-tion in her book (3gi). In her case, the writer's imaginative investmentpays immediate dividends by stimulating the naive reader's imagina-tive engagement. But if the cousin is vicariously flattered by this girl'simmersion in the creation of a fellow writer, how much more flatteredmust he feel when he discovers that it is one of his own works! This rec-ognition causes him to approach the girl, under the pretense of interestin buying some flowers, to query her about her reading experience:

Excited, totally inflamed by the sweetest feelings of authorship, I askedwith feigned indifference how the girl liked the book. "Oh, my dearsir," the girl replied, "this is a very droll book. At first one gets a bit con-fused in the head; but then one has the feeling that one is participatingin the action itself." To my great amazement, the girl related to me thecontents of this little fairy tale clearly and distinctly, so that I recog-nized that she must have already read it several times. (391 -92)

At first disoriented but eventually drawn wholly into the imaginativeworld, the flower girl has an experience like that of the narrator as


he adjusts his perceptive apparatus to clarify the chaos of the market-place. Initially overcome by a sense of dizziness, he resorts to the "art ofobservation" to latch on to firm points that lend the amorphous scenea meaningful pattern (383).^s Toward the end of Hoffmann's story, thenarrator comments on this way of interpreting a confused and formlessfield of vision; "In surveying the entire marketplace, I notice that thoseflour wagons, above which sheets are stretched like tents, make possiblea picturesque view, because they provide the eye with a stable pointaround which the colorful mass of impressions forms distinct groups"(400). Here the narrator fuses once more the simple art of observationwith an explicitly aesthetic practice: art is constituted as an organizationof the visual — and, by extension, of the imaginative — field throughthe establishment of stable points of orientation. Once again, this tech-nique self-reflexively describes the procedure that the cousins — andHoffmann himself—follow to organize this series of vignettes. Clarity,discernment, orientation, ordered narratives, and semiotically mean-ingful configurations arise only at the interface where the concrete per-ception of particular material objects is enhanced by an imaginativefabulation that elaborates on them. Transposed to economic terms: thevalue of any commodity emerges at the intersection between its mate-rial qualities and the libidinal fantasies projected onto it. There is, inother 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 dueto the flower girl's praise of his work, then introduces himself as itsflesh-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 thegirl had never considered that the hooks she read first had to be writ-ten. The notion of a writer, a poet, was completely foreign to her, and Iam firmly convinced that further interrogation would have revealed thepious, naive belief that God Almighty causes books to grow like mush-rooms. (392)

'5 Neumann remarks on the parallel between these two episodes, which for himsignals a self-reflexive application of the cousins' principles of observation to the actof reading (231).


Contrary to the poet-cousin's opinion, the flower girl's belief thatbooks simply appear is neither naive nor informed by religious doc-trine; instead, it represents a transposition of the economic ideologyof the physiocrats, who believed that only divine nature could produceanything new of value, to the realm of hurnan manufacture. Preciselybecause the books she reads strike her as so valuable, the flower girlcannot help but view them as what the physiocrats termed "gifts ofnature."36 From her perspective, they are, in other words, economicequivalents to the flowers she herself hawks: just as these flowers springfrom the soil, so too, she imagines, literary works grow up as naturalproducts. Hoffmann had drawn on the writings of a leading Germancameralist, Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi (1717-71), for another latestory, "Meister Johannes Wacht." Even if he had not, however, physioc-racy had aroused such fierce debates in German intellectual circlesthat Hoffmann would surely have been familiar with its central tenets.His playful allusion to physiocratic economic doctrine ironizes an aes-thetic ideology that views artistic creativity as nothing but a natural gift.Indeed, once the flower girl accepts the idea that books are human-made, she adds insult to injury by asking the cousin whether he haswritten all the books in the lending library. To her innocent mind,books are, if not effortless products of nature, then things turnedout by the shelfful in a factory. ̂ ^ We are reminded of the narrator'sown application of mechanical metaphors to his cousin's imagination(381). One way or the other, the paradigms of production that shapethe flower girl's views derive from economics, and her naive responseto the cousin's assertion of his creative authorship invokes the parallelcontroversies about the establishment of economic and aesthetic formsof 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 ökonomischen Theorie (Opladen:Westdeutscher Verlag, 1985), 299-300, 325.

" The cousin himself alludes to the "uniformity" of the books distributed by thelending 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 ofthe literary marketplace in Hoffmann's story see Carlos Spoerhase, "Die spätroman-tische Leseszene: Das Leihbibliotheksbuch als 'Technologie' der Anonymisierung inE. T. A. Hoffmann's 'Des Vetters Eckfenster,'" Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literatur-wissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 83 (2009): 581 - 8 6 .


Hoffmann's own take on the rudiments of literary-aesthetic valuecreation, as expressed in "Des Vetters Eckfenster," is ambivalent. Herefuses to valorize unflinchingly the freedom and spontaneous pro-ductivity of the imagination, but he also shuns an aesthetic ideologythat relies entirely on mimesis as the realistic replication of empiricalobservations.3^ His very ambivalence highlights an interactive dynamicbetween precise perception and imaginative embellishment, materialreality and its phantasmagoric transformation. In the realm of Hoff-mann's aesthetics, the material object and its fetishized commodityform can harmoniously coexist. Indeed, in this text literary artifactsare never divorced from the pragmatic issue of their circulation aseconomic commodities. Throughout Hoffmann's story the discourseof aesthetics is invaded by the language and conceptual apparatus ofeconomic thought. But the inverse is also true, for the marketplace thatthe cousins observe is continually rendered as a domain in which valueis ascribed to commodities by imaginative, aesthetic principles.

There is one place in Hoffmann's story where the issues of disci-plined visual perception and imaginative inventiveness are explicitlybundled together with the question of economic value. Toward thestory's conclusion a blind ex-soldier plays a double economic role as avegetable seller's beast of burden and as a beggar (397-400). In a talein which keen vision plays such a dominant role, it comes as no surprisethat blindness is considered the paramount disability. Yet what first callsthe narrator's attention to this man is the pose he strikes, with his headelevated, as though he were struggling to gaze into the distance (398).Eor this cousin, the only compensation for the inability to see the exter-nal world is the "inner eye," which provides the blind man with com-fort and hope (398). The cousins observe the interactions between thisman and his benefactors for some time, remarking on the irony thatthose who give the smallest coins do so ostentatiously, whereas those

38 It is a matter of intense critical debate whether Hoffmann's story reaffirmshis early glorification of imagination as the sole font of creativity or represents ajettisoning of this principle in favor of precise observation, thereby anticipating aparadigm shift to realism. For a summary of this debate see Kremer, 184-85. Myown reading tends to support those scholars, such as Neumann (227) and Selbmann(72-74), who emphasize the interactive moment between empirical observation andimaginative elaboration.


who give the most do so matter-of-factly, eschewing acknowledgmentsof gratitude. For the narrator, however, what is most remarkable is theblind man's failure to exhibit any sign of thankfulness beyond a meagermovement of his lips. Again the lame cousin comes to the narrator's aidby supplying an interpretation: it is symptomatic of the man's resigna-tion. "What is money to him? He can't use it; it attains value only in thehand of someone else, in whom he must deferentially place his trust"(400). This remark constitutes perhaps the most puzzling statement ofthe entire text. What prevents the coins the blind man receives fromhaving any value? Is it that he cannot see them, as though vision alonecould tell him that these metal disks are money? Or is it that value canbe established only by an act of exchange, in which coins are tradedfor a commodity? Even if the latter, the man's inability to peruse thegoods for sale would prevent him from ascertaining that he is purchas-ing the highest-quality products and thereby obtaining the most forhis money. Moreover, what does it mean that he must trust anotherperson to come to terms with value? Does this simply imply, as the nar-rator suggests, that the beggar is subject to the whims of the vegetablewoman, who uses him as she sees fit? Or does it mean that he is depen-dent on the value decisions of the benefactors who give him eitherlarge- or small-denomination coins, or even on the merchants who canarbitrarily determine both the value of those coins and the value ofthe commodities for which they are traded? The case of the blind manseems to demonstrate irrevocably that imagination alone—the "innereye"—cannot establish value. Relegated to the empty gesture of obser-vation, the blind man is in a situation that parallels that of the narratorprior to receiving his cousin's lessons in the art of observation. Disori-ented in the world of economic (and aesthetic) values, the blind mantoo is threatened by Schwindel (383), for the German word suggests notonly dizziness but also the possibility of being swindled.

The blind man's inability to establish value on his own highlightsthe interactive dimension of value attribution. Because value comes intobeing predominantly in acts of exchange, it is, at bottom, a discursiveconstruct, a conjecture or convention that relies on mutual agreement.^^

'9 On the establishment of value as a discursive construct see David Ruccio, JulieGraham, and Jack Amariglio, " 'The Good, the Bad, and the Different': Reflectionson Economic and Aesthetic Value," in The Value of Culture: On the Relationship between


Here the crossover between economics and aesthetics becomes mostapparent in Hoffmann's story: just as the blind man relies on others toascertain the value of coins or commodities, the poet-cousin is depen-dent on the flower girl, representative of his reading public, to establishthe value of his own literary work. Moreover, the dialogic structure of"Des Vetters Eckfenster" stresses how semiotic, economic, and aestheticvalues are determined through personal exchange and interchange.This explains why Hoffmann's story culminates in the cousins' delibera-tions about how the largely peaceful negotiations of the marketplaceradiate outward into a largely harmonious, balanced, and self-policingsociopolitical order. In the words of the lame cousin, "This market isnow a true likeness of eternally changing [wechselndes] life" (405-6),where the pun on the word wechselndes, suggesting both change andexchange, ties the sociopolitical world to its economic underpinnings.Thus the economic exchange of the marketplace, which serves as thebasis of the cousins' observations and literary vignettes, is echoed by thecommunicative exchange in the act of reading as well as in the commu-nicative interaction between the cousins themselves. They observe—ordo they invent?—one further scene exemplifying the potentially har-monizing power of fabulative fiction: two hawkers, who perennially sittogether and whose different wares suggest that they are not competi-tors, nevertheless are constantly at odds with one another. However, onthis day a shared invention, developed around a customer who fails tomake a purchase, gives rise to unaccustomed harmony and generosity(386-87). This scene is a microcosm of the harmonious social interac-tions that can emerge from any act of economic, discursive, or imagina-tive exchange. According to Hoffmann's text, economic, aesthetic, andeven sociopolitical value arises at the interface of the material and theimaginary, the visual and the visionary, the objective and the subjective.The harmonious constitution of human social exchange requires therearticulation ofthose disparate theories of value that, at the end of theeighteenth century, migrated into the separate disciplines of economicsand aesthetics. This, too, might justifiably be called an aesthetic edu-

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


cation of humanity; however, it is one in which the historical divorcebetween aesthetics and economics has been mended.

Schlosser's application of a conception of the creative imagina-tion, derived from the realm of aesthetics, to the establishment of asubjectivist theory of economic value and Hoffmann's late tale, whichplays out the convergence of economic and aesthetic discourses aroundthe principle of an infinitely productive imagination, mark the begin-ning and end points of the half century of German Romanticism. Bothauthors seek to heal the rift that separated economics and aestheticsinto competing disciplines and theories of value by subordinating objec-tive quantification to subjective qualification, that is, by projecting theprinciples of aesthetic idealism onto questions of economic value for-mation. Indeed, Hoffmann makes the more global case that the prin-ciples of imaginative aesthetics underwrite even the most basic patternsof human perception and social interchange. Whatever its object mightbe, the proper "art of observation," his story suggests, is mediated by thecreative amplifications of human imagination. Far from expanding thefield of vision, the spyglass through which the cousins peer strategicallylimits it, so that the details it brings forward are rendered as ciphersthat can be subjected to infinite imaginative extension and elabora-tion. Although it would take another fifty years or so, Schlosser's andHoffmann's theories of imaginative value would be vindicated even inthe domain of economics, despite Marx's attempt to banish them to thenebulous realm of commodity fetishism. The Romantics' conceptionof literary and aesthetic value thus ultimately, if unwittingly, paved theway for modern notions of economic value that were grounded in thesubjective judgments, imaginings, and desires of consumers.

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

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ETA Hoffman, Aesthetics, And German Romanticism