Having and Being Had

by Eula Biss

I am afraid to own a Body – I am afraid to own a Soul – Profound – precarious Property – Possession, not optional – —EMILY DICKINSON

“People are so completely and so powerfully alienated that they are reduced to things; in the meantime, the things they produce and the things they purchase have acquired all the livingness that people have lost.”

“One of the main things Marx noticed about capitalism,” she writes, “is that it really encourages people to have relationships with things instead of with other people.”

He means consumption, which was once the name for a wasting disease, and is now the word anthropologists use for almost everything we do outside of work—eating, shopping, reading, listening to music. Consume, he notes, is from the Latin consumere, meaning “to seize or take over completely.”

What I wanted, more than anything, was the illusion of permanence the house provided.

“Modernization was supposed to fill the world—both communist and capitalist—with jobs, and not just any jobs but ‘standard employment’ with stable wages and benefits. Such jobs are now quite rare; most people depend on much more irregular livelihoods. The irony of our times, then, is that everyone depends on capitalism but almost no one has what we used to call a ‘regular job.’”

Not having money is time consuming. There are hours spent at laundromats, hours at bus stops, hours at free clinics, hours at thrift stores, hours on the phone with the bank or the credit card company or the phone company over some fee, some little charge, some mistake.

“But, beyond doubt, wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding.”

What’s to blame is the comfort that a higher class status affords—the independence, the insularity, the security, the illusion of not needing other people.

The $4 million condo seems excessive even to the people who live there. The expense is a measure of the distance between them and other people. The rich feel morally compromised, so they try to be good.

We shouldn’t ask our rich to be good, in other words, we should ask our economic system to be better.

“Markets are constructed by people,” Appelbaum argues, “for purposes chosen by people—and people can change the rules.”

This is practice. And practice is all I want out of art.

As I work, I pass through a predictable cycle of confusion, frustration, and despair, reaching the end of every day feeling thoroughly debased, with nothing on the page. I report all this with amazement, because I know, as Connie does, that something will come of this nothingness.

This is a middle class with capitalist aspirations. And that is why Marx considered this class dangerous. It is a class of conflicting allegiances and internal contradictions.

Your class, in this approach, is determined by how much you have of three kinds

of capital—economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital. Or, what you own, what you know, and who you know.

“Class consciousness is knowing which side of the fence you’re on.”

So, she says, is this what we do now? We just keep earning money and replacing this stuff with better stuff?

leisure is a form of conspicuous consumption, with time being what is consumed.

Capitalism couldn’t really take hold, Weber noted, until people became convinced, one way or another, to make more money than they needed. That would seem an easy sell today, but it wasn’t in seventeenth-century England, when many commoners still earned money only occasionally, lived mostly by subsistence, and felt that they had enough, much to the frustration of the landowners who wanted them to do steady work for wages. “A man does not ‘by nature’ wish to earn more and more money,” Weber argues, “but simply to live as he is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose.”

I know now that this is how it is with work—sometimes the contract is revised while you’re on the job, already undressed.

A journalist recently observed, he says, that the last time we walked away from an accumulation of capital this significant was Emancipation.

“Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. . . . White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment.”

Remember that “the object resists, the commodity shrieks, the audience participates.”

I would still have plenty of work, I say, even without my job. I would have the work of writing, the work of research, housework and yard work, and the work of caring for a child. Work, in fact, is interfering with my work, and I want to work less so that I can have more time to work. I need another word.

Work, if we are fortunate, is rewarded with money, but the reward for labor is transformation.

The burning of women, the enslavement of Africans, and the theft of indigenous land were all, Silvia Federici suggests, part of the same process. Capitalism, she writes, has always depended on theft and violence.

He carries a laminated pamphlet in his breast pocket, folded into thirds, a list of all the poems he knows.

Standing on the train platform,

or waiting in line at the grocery store, he takes out this list and recites a poem in his mind. If he doesn’...

I’m intrigued by his collection, so precarious, requiring constant maintenance, and worth nothing. It produces no app...

But I don’t see much evidence that what anyone gets for their work has anything to do with what they deserve.

If that’s how it makes you feel, she says, then why do you do it? Because there’s no other choice, I’m tempted to answer, if you’re compelled to make art. But I think she’s asking where the pleasure is in this work. It’s in the making, I know that much, though the process itself isn’t exactly pleasurable.

We’re in service to the art, I tell my student, bent to it. There’s pleasure in this posture, in being bettered by the work.

“Willing bondage” is how Lewis Hyde describes the service of the artist who is working to master an art, but art doesn’t appear in these definitions. Service is the act of paying interest on a debt, labor that doesn’t produce a commodity, and a ceremony of religious worship.

Maybe what’s news is that now we’re calling this domination, when we used to just call it marriage.

And that’s all I want out of my work—to be tied up the way I want to be tied up.

I had read that women did not negotiate as successfully as men and I wanted a man’s advice on this. His advice—to the woman he loved a little bit—was not to ask for anything.

“Daily meaning as well as daily bread,” Terkel writes, is what people are looking for in work, “a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

Part of what makes a job good,

they understood, is the sense that what you do matters.

“For children play is serious learning. Play is the real work of childhood.”

He had no right to play, Frost thought, with work that other men did for pay. Or if he did, his right was love. Their right was need. Theirs was the better right—agreed. But still, he wouldn’t separate the two. Only where love and need are one, / And the work is play for mortal stakes, / Is the deed ever really done / For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

Eric was my student, many years ago, and now he’s writing a book about air-conditioning, which is really a book about how our comfort is destroying our world.

Perhaps we should all keep a memento of the Titanic, just to remind ourselves of how safe disaster feels.

This is how art eats, I think—it feeds itself with art.

Her death two years later was convenient for the real estate agent, in that it allowed her work

to become a product unfettered by the troublesome person who made it.

I think of Toni Morrison and the women she lived among in Queens in the seventies. She was a single mother supporting two young children, but she’d send a check, a “grant,” to another woman writer, say Toni Cade Bambara, whenever she made some extra money