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III. The Promise of Exchange Value
In Charles Johnson’s “Exchange Value” a situation that might also have turned out that way does not. The way the story plays out what happens when a certain kind of person is defeated by being between one habituated life and another yet to be invented because something good turns out to be unbearable, says something about why the phrase “political economy” must thread throughout our analysis of cruel and usual optimism.Why do some people have the chops for improvising the state of being unknowing while others run out of breath, not humming but hoarding?
As with Ashbery’s lyric, this story begins with a meditation on neighbors and neighborhoods. “Exchange Value” takes place during the 1970s on the South Side of Chicago, around 49th Street. The protagonists, eighteen year-old Cooter and his older brother, Loftis, are poor and African American. They do not drive downtown regularly to see their friends, or frequent other neighborhoods regularly: they do not have cars.
Home and the ’hood are spaces of localized, personalized practices of encountering, wandering, and scrounging. But here, the intimacy of proximity has nothing to do with anyone’s lyric intersubjectivity, even though the story takes place in the meditative rhythms of Cooter’s way of parsing a new situation. The subjects of “Exchange Value” are expressive and opaque, but with quite different valences than in our previous example.
The story opens onto a plot: two brothers concoct a plan to rob their possibly dead neighbor, Miss Bailey. Who is Miss Bailey? Nobody knows: she is a neighbor, so one does not need to know her; her job is to be around, to be a “character,” which is what you call someone who performs a familiar set of actions around you but is not intimate with you. Miss Bailey dresses in cast- off men’s clothes; like Cooter and Loftis, she eats free meals that she begs off of a local Creole restaurant; when Cooter gives her pocket change, she doesn’t spend it, she puts it in her mouth and eats it. This is what Cooter knows about her, deducing nothing more about her from her actions. The story takes place because she’s always around and then she isn’t. Cooter and Loftis think that perhaps she’s died and determine to get the first pickings.
This kind of behavior, this scavenging in other people’s stuff, is not characteristic of Cooter, but it doesn’t violate his fundamental relation to the world either. Compared to his brother, he’s always been branded a loser. “Mama used to say it was Loftis, not me, who’d go places . . . . Loftis, he graduated fifth at DuSable High School, had two gigs and, like Papa, he be always wanting the things white people had out in Hyde Park, where Mama did daywork sometimes.”
The children’s parents are both dead by this point in their lives: Papa from overwork and Mama because she was “big as a Frigidaire.” Having watched this, Cooter refuses to ride the wave of the American dream: remembering his parents “killing theyselves for chump change— a pitiful li’l bowl of porridge—I get to thinking that even if I ain’t had all I wanted, maybe I’ve had, you know, all I’m ever gonna get” and so organizes his life through the lateral enjoyments of fantasy “I can’t keep no job and sorta stay close to home, watching TV, or reading World’s Finest comic books, or maybe just laying dead, listening to music, imagining I see faces or foreign places in water stains on the wallpaper”.
But Cooter’s fantasies aren’t mimetic— they’re aleatory and passive ways of inhabiting and making an environment in which attachments are not optimistically pointing toward a cluster of transcendent promises but toward something else, something bearable that holds off not just the imminence of loss but the loss that, inevitably, just happened.
For Cooter fantasy isn’t a plan. It calibrates nothing about how to live. It is the action of living for him, his way of passing time not trying to make something of himself in a system of exploitation and exchange. In the political economy of his world, that system does not produce rest or waste but slow death, the attrition of subjects by the situation in which capital determines value. In this story, that scene dedicates the worker’s body to a deferred enjoyment that, if they’re on the bottom of the class structure, they are not likely to be around to take pleasure in, as his parents’ fate demonstrates. In contrast, Loftis’s relation to fantasy is realist. He inherited his parents’ optimism toward his life by being ambitious. But his strategies are strictly formal. He takes classes from Black Nationalists at the “Black People’s Topographical Library,” reads Esquire and The Black Scholar, and sews upscale labels onto his downscale clothes:28 to him getting ahead is what counts, whether it is via power, labor, or the “hustle”. His opinion of Cooter is quite low, because the younger brother is dreamy and has no drive. Nonetheless, they decide to do the job together.
Miss Bailey’s apartment is pitch dark and reeks of shit: a newspaper clipping from the Chicago Defender among the garbage reveals that her former employer, Henry Conners, had left her his entire estate, and that all of the years of scavenging and weirdness masked her possession of enormous wealth. It all makes sense in the dark. But when the light turns on, Cooter notes, “shapes come forward in the light and I thought for an instant like I’d slipped in space” (30). In this moment Cooter enters an impasse: his talent at making out foreign shapes becomes applied to his own life, which he can no longer occupy"
'Her living room, webbed in dust, be filled to the max with dollars of all denominations, stacks of stock in General Motors, Gulf Oil, and 3M company in old White Owl cigar boxes, battered purses, or bound in pink rubber bands. . . . [E]verything, like a world inside the world, you take it from me, so like picturebook scenes of plentifulness you could seal yourself off in here and settle forever. Loftis and me both drew breath suddenly. There be unopened cases of Jack Daniel’s, three safes cemented to the floor, hundreds of matchbooks, unworn clothes, a fuel- burning stove, dozens of wedding rings, rubbish, World War II magazines, a carton of a hundred canned sardines, mink stoles, old rags, a birdcage, a bucket of silver dollars, thousands of books, paintings, quarters in tobacco cans, two pianos, glass jars of pennies, a set of bagpipes, an almost complete Model A Ford dappled with rust, and I swear, three sections of a dead tree.'
How do we understand this collection not only of things but of details? Cooter’s verbal response is not to be a historian but a moralist: “A tree ain’t normal” (31). But to my eye the story’s main event, the scene of potential change, is somatic. Change is an impact lived on the body before anything is understood, and as such is simultaneously meaningful and ineloquent, engendering an atmosphere that they spend the rest of the story and their lives catching up to. It’s like winning the lottery, getting a wash of money they haven’t earned; being possessed by coming into possession of possessions, they are shocked into something impassive. This crack in the necessities of history makes Cooter’s head get light—“My knees failed; then I did a Hollywood faint” (32); Loftis “pant a little” and “for the first time . . . looked like he didn’t know his next move” (31).
Their bodies become suspended. But if riches change history, they also make it possible for history to be something other than a zone of barely or badly imagined possibility. Loftis returns to crazy reason and puts the break on their adrenalin. He forces Cooter to catalogue everything:
"Eventually, that cranky old ninnyhammer’s hoard adds up to $879,543 in cash, thirtytwo bank books (some deposits be only $5), and me, I wasn’t sure I was dreaming or what, but I suddenly flashed on this feeling, once we left her flat, that all the fears Loftis and me had about the future be gone, ’cause Miss Bailey’s property was the past—the power of that fellah Henry Conners trapped like a bottle spirit—which we could live off, so it was the future too, pure potential: can do. Loftis got to talking on about how that piano we pushed home be equal to a thousand bills, jim, which equals, say, a bad TEAC A- 3340 tape deck, or a down payment on a deuce- and- aquarter. Its value be (Loftis say) that of a universal standard of measure, relational, unreal as number, so that tape deck could turn, magically, into two gold lamé suits, a trip to Tijuana, or twenty- five blow jobs from a ho—we had $879,543 worth of wishes, if you can deal with that. Be like Miss Bailey’s stuff is raw energy, and Loftis and me, like wizards, could transform her stuff into anything else at will. All we had to do, it seemed to me, was decide exactly what to exchange it for. (34–35)
Cooter’s senses, awakened to the promises clustered around things, have truly become theoreticians. Exchange value is not identical to the price of things, but marks a determination of what else a thing can get exchanged for, as though money were not involved, exactly, in the mediations. Your coat for a piano. Your money for your life.
The scene of shocking wealth changes the terms of the meaning of life, of the reproduction of life, and of exchange itself. Loftis gets very quiet. Cooter grabs a bunch of money and goes downtown to spend it. But though downtown Chicago is just a few miles away, it is like a foreign country to Cooter: he does not speak its economic language. Theory aside, in practice Cooter doesn’t have a clue what to do with the money and realizes sickeningly, right away, that money cannot make you feel like you belong if you are not already privileged to feel that way. He buys ugly, badly made, expensive clothes that shame him right away. He eats meat until he gets sick. He takes cabs everywhere. When he gets home, his brother’s gone psychotic. Loftis has built an elaborate trap, a vault to protect the money. He yells at Cooter for spending, because the only power is in hoarding. Loftis says, “As soon as you buy something you lose the power to buy something” (36). He cannot protect himself from Miss Bailey’s fate: “suffering that special Negro fear of using up what little we get in this life” (37); inheritance “put her through changes, she be spellbound, possessed by the promise of life, panicky about depletion, and locked now in the past because every purchase, you know, has to be a poor buy: a loss of life” (37–38).
Notice how frequently Johnson reverts to the word “life.” Can a person on the bottom survive living “life” stripped of the illusion of indefinite endurance via whatever kinds of fantasmatic practices he’s been able to cobble together? How quickly can one dispense with the old bargains between defense and desire, adapting to a regime whose rules provide no felt comfort?
“Exchange Value” demonstrates the proximity of two kinds of cruel optimism: with little cultural or economic capital and bearing the history of a racial disinheritance from the norms of white supremacist power, you work yourself to death, or coast to nonexistence; or, with the ballast of capital, you hoard against death, deferring life, until you die. Cooter is the realist; he can see that there’s no way out, now, no living as if not in a relation to death, which is figured in all of the potential loss that precedes it. This story is exquisitely tender toward the surrealism of survival in the context of poverty so extreme that riches can only confirm insecurity.
On either side of the capital divide, human creativity, energy, and agency are all bound up in bargaining, strategizing: it only begins with the mother at the sink predicting which of her sons has the sense to ride the rhythms of remuneration in the system; the parents dying before the kids are of age because of having had to scavenge for what Cooter scathingly calls “chump change”; Cooter choosing to live to feed his passivity and capacity for fantasy; and Loftis living amorally among a variety of styles for gaining upward mobility. Before the windfall they all manifest the improvisatory opportunism of people on the bottom who, having little to lose, and living in an economy of pleading, sharing, and hiding, will go for something if the occasion permits .
But the inheritance the sons engineer produces a sensorial break for them, and whereas the earlier modes of optimism included a community and a meanwhile that meant being somewhere and knowing people no matter what style of living- on one chose, the later modes almost force privacy, hoarding, becoming pure potential itself. The inheritance becomes the promise of the promise, of a technical optimism; it sutures them both to life lived without risk, in proximity to plenitude without enjoyment. For Loftis it destroys the pleasure of the stress of getting through the day because the scale of potential loss is too huge. Cooter is more passive: he’ll fold himself in to his brother’s crypt because that’s who he is, a person who does not make spaces but navigates the available ones.
At the same time, the withdrawal of the brothers from even vague participation in a life made from scheming mimes another aspect of the logic of capital. We have seen that they have always been the subjects of cruel optimism and its modes of slow death, having inherited their parents’ future- directed, life- building, do- it- so- your- kids- won’t- have- to discipline of the respectable body and soul. Now, in this relation of life- building to life- expending, they induce new generational orientations toward exhaustion. From coasting to the activity of the hustle they embody styles of being that can seem anything from subcivilized and extralegal to entrepreneurial and ambitious, in the good sense. In this final logic, though, capitalist sensibility in “Exchange Value” manifests as crazy in the way that reason is crazy—not only crazy- dogged, crazy- compulsive, crazy- formalist, and crazy- habituated, but crazy from the activity of maintaining structural contradictions.
In this world the subject’s confrontation with singularity is the most horrifying thing of all. Singularity is the part of one’s sovereignty that cannot be handed off to a concept, object, or property. Under capitalism, money is power and if one has only surplus amounts of it, sovereignty is infinite and yet a weight that cannot be borne. Exchange value was supposed to leaven the subject through the handoff of value to another, who would return something in kind. The space of exchange would make breathing space, and breathing space is what the capitalist subject, in all of her ambition, is trying to attain—the good life, as in Ashbery’s poem. But what usually gets returned in the exchange of desire embedded in things is merely, disappointingly, a brief episode, often with a thing as memento of the memory and not the actualization of desire.
In “Exchange Value” the money form in particular reveals in- kind reciprocity as a mirage, the revelation of which destroys for the brothers, and Miss Bailey before them, the whole infrastructure of trust in the world that merges the credit with the affectional economy and keeps people attached to optimism of a particular kind. If consumption promises satisfaction in substitution and then denies it because all objects are rest stops amid the process of remaining unsatisfied that counts for being alive under capitalism, in the impasse of desire, then hoarding seems like a solution to something. Hoarding controls the promise of value against expenditure, as it performs the enjoyment of an infinite present of holding pure potential. The end, then, is the story’s tableau of the structural contradiction that shakes, stuns, and paralyzes its protagonists. Under capitalism, being in circulation denotes being in life, while an inexhaustible hoard denotes being in fantasy, which is itself a hoarding station against a threatening real, and therefore seems like a better aspirational realism. But in fantasy one is stuck with one’s singular sovereignty in an inex haustable nonrelationality. Therefore, an unquantifiable surplus of money— what any capitalist subject thought anyone would want—turns each brother into a walking contradiction, a being who has what everyone wants and yet who reveals that the want that had saturated the fantasy of the whole imaginable world is wanting, because sovereignty, while ideal, is a nightmarish burden, a psychotic loneliness, and just tainted. This means that the object of cruel optimism here appears as the thing within any object to which one passes one’s fantasy of sovereignty for safekeeping. In cruel optimism the subject or community turns its treasured attachments into safety- deposit objects that make it possible to bear sovereignty through its distribution, the energy of feeling relational, general, reciprocal, and accumulative. In circulation one becomes happy in an ordinary, often lovely, way, because the weight of being in the world is being distributed into space, time, noise, and other beings. When one’s sovereignty is delivered back into one’s hands, though, its formerly distributed weight becomes apparent, and the subject becomes stilled in a perverse mimesis of its enormity. In a relation of cruel optimism our activity is revealed as a vehicle for attaining a kind of passivity, as evidence of the desire to find forms in relation to which we can sustain a coasting sentience, in response to being too alive.