[Digital Poetics 4.2] Ophélimité: a specimen of emptiness by Keston Sutherland

'Off to bed' by Keston Sutherland

The long attempt to discredit Marx’s revolutionary critique of capital entered its first great phase in the decades following the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871. That massacre and the eruptions of proto-fascistic chauvinism and violent anarchistic melancholy that it triggered left the optimistic project of self-transformation by some figure called the 'revolutionary subject of history' looking more and more grotesquely improbable; the idea of a vocation to find our happiness on earth and the idealistic dream of 'one brotherhood of all the human race' began in these decades to sound increasingly idiotic. Rousing, dithyrambic appeals to the crushed and downtrodden multitude to look to the coming of Liberty, which they will recognize by its resemblance to Heaven’s Sun girt by the exhalation of its own glorious light, and, while they wait, to get the soul ready to spurn the chains of its dismay, began in these years to grate and jar as never before. The revolutionary ode in the majestic, full-throated style of Schiller or Shelley, that not long ago shook the heart with heroic passion, was now more likely to sound like the fatuous libretto of some saccharinated scrap of infantile Zukunftsmusik. The language of revolution suffered a major drainage of poetic power; which is also to say, the aesthetic dimension of that language came increasingly to seem merely aesthetic. Trying to get the future started by the ancient means of rousing, pleasing and edifying now looked, more than ever before, like stupidity and denial, a kind of histrionics or acting out, and symptomatic, probably, of a feeble or unwilling grasp of reality. 

It was in this grim atmosphere of defeat, hysteria and retrenchment that Marx’s critique first came under sustained attack by economists, and what Keynes called ‘modern economics’ first sprang to life. The attack on Marx from the right, by economists committed to the development of a ‘science’ of consumption that would once and for all do away with the labour theory of value, took the form of an attack on Marx’s ‘literariness’ and was launched under the banner of ‘facts’. Marx was accused of being a literary writer who ignored facts. Marx’s contempt for facts was inseparable from, or simply the expression of, his attachment to dialectical concepts in particular and unnecessary philosophizing in general. This intransigent attachment, from which Marx never was able to shake free, together with his literariness, meant that Marx’s theory, especially Capital, had – in the words of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk – ‘no future’. Marx’s theory ‘has a past and a present, but no abiding future’, Böhm-Bawerk wrote in 1896: 

Of all sorts of scientific systems those which, like the Marxian system, are based on a hollow dialectic, are most surely doomed. A clever dialectic may make a temporary impression on the human mind, but cannot make a lasting one. In the long run facts and the secure linking of causes and effects win the day.[1]

‘The Déclaration des droits de l’homme […] seems to us today only a colourless collection of abstract and confused formulas’, wrote Georges Sorel in 1905.[2] The generations of European economists who shot to fame and influence in the three decades after the Paris massacre were at pains to consign Marx’s theory of value to the same colourless dead end.  

The historian of economics Maurice Dobb gives a useful summary of what he calls the ‘shift in structure and perspective of economic analysis’ during the period. 

Emphasis shifted away from costs incurred in production, and hence rooted in circumstances and conditions of production, towards demand and to final consumption; placing the stress on the capacity of what emerged from the production-line to contribute to the satisfaction of the desires, wants, needs of consumers. From this shift of emphasis derived a certain individualist or atomistic bias of modern economic thought—preoccupation with micro-analysis of individual market-behaviour and action and the rooting of economic generalization in such micro-phenomena.[3]

The first impetus for this shift was William Stanley Jevons’s Theory of Political Economy. Published in 1871, as if to coincide with the destruction of the commune that same year, Jevons’s Theory announced the discovery of so-called ‘marginal utility’, the idea that the price of commodities is nothing to do with labour but must be determined mathematically by calculating the margins by which the utility of individual goods fluctuate depending on the complex set of circumstances in which they are consumed. Production and the life and experience of the individual productive worker are all but deleted from the theoretical picture, along with the claim to scientific validity of the whole history of so-called classical political economic thought from Smith through Ricardo to Marx, and the set of categories and concepts that belonged to its logic. Focus is shifted to a new concept, or, rather, a new use or purpose for the word ‘subjectivity’, namely, the nominally ‘subjective’ character of acts of consumption interpreted as the measurable data of prior states of desire, appetite and need. Keynes called this the start of the modern theory of economics; and according to Schumpeter, Vilfredo Pareto was ‘one of its great founders’.[4] 

Pareto was ‘a pioneer of econometric investigation.’[5] He was, according to the description of the economic historian T.W. Hutchison, 

an angrily pessimistic self-exiled Italian nobleman whose intellectual life […] was for the most part a lonely and lengthy personal pilgrimage in revolt against the political ideas of his father and the parliamentary régime (or ‘pluto-democracy’ as he called it) of his country.[6]

Pareto was ‘strongly anti-socialist’.[7] He despised Marxism and made it a particular objective of his economic theory to point out the vacuous character of the economic theory of Das Kapital, by taking special aim at what he thought was the fundamental concept of Marx’s critique, the concept of value. If Marx’s concept of value could be shown to be absurd or useless, then the whole monstrous edifice of Marxist theory and practice, both revolutionary and political, would soon enough come crashing down. Again and again this concept is targeted by Pareto for dismissal, derision or abuse. ‘So many vague and occasionally even contradictory meanings have been given to the term value that it is better not to use it in the study of political economy’, he wrote.[8] The claim of any possible economics to the status of science would henceforth depend on the thorough eradication of the concept of value as Marx had styled it. Marx was, said Pareto, a ‘literary’ economist. ‘There exists no entity resembling what the literary economists call value’, he wrote.[9] Marx was a fantasist and a metaphysician who ignored social and economic reality composed of observable facts and who preferred instead to play around with toys of thought like value, substance and essence. ‘Let others concern themselves with the nature, with the essence of “value”’, Pareto wrote; ‘I am interested only in seeing whether I can discover which regularities are presented by prices.’[10] Price is a fact. Value is an obnubilated notion of something more than price that can never be quantified by econometric analysis and therefore has no meaning for economics. ‘The time will come’, Pareto cheerfully prophesies, ‘when Political Economy, like any other science, will be essentially quantitative, and hence should be dealt with exclusively by mathematics.’[11] Even supposing that such a thing as value in Marx’s sense did exist, says Pareto, ‘consideration of this metaphysical entity would be completely useless.’[12] ‘The wholesale copper prices on the London exchange’, he wrote, ‘are facts […] outside of these prices there is nothing real which is the “value” of copper.’[13] In addition to such facts as these, there are facts that we may correctly call subjective, or psychic facts, such as, for example, that ‘The common man is especially concerned with his present needs, he wants to eat, drink and satisfy his sexual desires.’ This, says Pareto, is a ‘psychic fact.’[14] Just so, he writes, ‘it is certain that […] one who is starving does not experience great pleasure in looking at a painting.’[15] 

Pareto’s derision of Marx’s concept of value was especially vitriolic in his sociological and polemical writings.[16] It was these writings in particular that were admired by Mussolini, who made Pareto a senator of Italy in the first fascist government. Pareto explained that the ‘literary’ theory of value in Das Kapital was at root merely a spontaneous overflow of class resentment by the losers in a society run by elites. Marx had concocted the literary idea that the lives of workers are the very substance of commodities in the hideous form of Gallerte, that commodities are dead labour sucked out of the body of the living individual and rendered into an undifferentiated, gelatinous substance, and his excitable followers the Marxists had diligently suspended their disbelief in this meaningless literary fiction, which they treated as a ‘new gospel’, because they counted on it to amplify their grievance and to make their claim to political power sound compelling.[17] Once the socialists got their hands on the levers of government, says Pareto, the literary theory that they pretended was economics and exploited as an intellectual stimulus to stir up the indignation of the working class was no longer necessary, despite whatever rousing proclamations of undying ideological loyalty to Marx’s analysis might now and again prove expedient for the purposes of hanging on to power. For this reason, the concept of value could safely be decommissioned and sacralized into a relic, a bit of poetical metaphysics good for gathering academic dust. 

Marx’s theory of value has become antiquated in our day since the socialist leaders have little by little come into the management of public affairs. The assertion that value is crystallized labour was nothing other than the expression of a sentiment of unrest felt by the superior elements of the new aristocracy, compelled as they were to remain in the lower strata. Consequently, it is quite natural that as they enter the higher strata, their sentiments change, and as a result their mode of expression changes too.[18] 

Undistracted by the literary theory of Das Kapital, the scientific economist could set to work on measurable realities and on facts. Pareto thought this work required a new concept, one based on Bentham’s concept of utility and on Jevons’s more sophisticated concept of marginal utility, but more powerful than either of these, because decisively cut free from the superfluous tangle of normative assumptions about how objects that are useful ought to be of some benefit to the individual who uses them. The concept Pareto proposed was ‘ophélimité’. ‘We employ the term ophélimité, from the Greek, to express the rapport de convenance which makes a thing satisfy a need or a desire, whether legitimate or not.’[19] ‘Ophélimité’ is a kind of marginal utility. The first glass of wine, Pareto says, is always more satisfying, because more pressingly desired, than the second, which is better than the third, etc. The logic of wine holds likewise for water:

In a given place, for a determinate individual, the quantity of water at the disposal of this individual passes by insensible degrees from the quantity zero to a quantity exceeding all the desires of this individual; and to each degree will correspond a different rapport de convenance between the water and the individual who consumes it. Ophélimité has its degrees; it is a quantity, and as such, it is subject to the general laws established by the science of quantities.[20]

The rapport de convenance is an idea Pareto lifted from Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. Montesquieu says in letter 83 that justice is a ‘rapport de convenance’. This famous phrase is carefully rendered in one English translation as ‘relation of suitability’, in order, apparently, to avoid what is surely the more obvious but, in this context, more disconcerting alternative phrase, ‘relation of convenience’ (‘God must necessarily be just’, writes Usbek to Rhedi in the letter 83, and then directly adds, ‘Justice is a relation of suitability [rapport de convenance].’[21]  Montesquieu later treated the problem of convenance at greater length in The Spirit of Laws, where the possible convenience of acts of torture is considered.) ‘Ophélimité’, says Pareto, ‘is an entirely subjective quality’, in a sense analogous to how justice cannot be a Platonic Idea, but must depend on what is suitable in any given situation.[22] Whether or not I want another a glass of wine is strictly a question of whatever I do in fact feel at the moment and on the spot where I am offered one, nothing more. The ‘subjectivity’ of the determinate individual at a given time and place is, for economic purposes, nothing more complex than this: a succession of states of desire of diminishing intensity, ending in zero, each state nominally quantifiable and expressed hierarchically in an index of ordinal numbers. ‘It is enjoyable to listen to a concert for one hour, but if it goes on past that point, we end up taking less and less pleasure in it’, Pareto explains.[23] Subjectivity is categorically not problematic: ‘We accept ophélimité as a brute fact’, says Pareto: ‘it presents no difficulties.’[24] ‘There is no need’, he says, ‘actually to measure these pleasures and these pains, but only to consider them as quantities. Recognizing that a quantity exists and measuring it are two different problems.’[25] Pareto called this economics of the brute fact of ophélimité ‘une économie pure de l’individu.’ ‘This science is not merely similar to mechanics,’ he writes, ‘it is, properly speaking, a genre of mechanics. There is a mechanics of the point; there is a pure economics of the individual.’[26] 

The économie pure de l’individu turns out to be a theory of the separation of individuals from one other worthy of the Lacan who proclaimed that there is no such thing as a sexual relation. The brute fact is, 

The ophelimity, or its index, for one individual, and the ophelimity, or its index, for another individual, are heterogeneous quantities. We can neither add them together nor compare them. […] A sum of ophelimity enjoyed by different individuals does not exist; it is an expression which has no meaning.[27]

Marx’s idea in The Holy Family that ‘the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form’, complete with the literary corollary that ‘theoretical consciousness of that loss’ leads to ‘no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need […] to revolt against this inhumanity’, is an expression which has no meaning for the pure economics of the individual, because there is no such thing as a sum.[28] What Marx calls an inhuman condition should in any case properly be called a ‘negative ophelimity’, which is Pareto’s concept for an act of consumption performed in a state of pain, which means, below the ordinal point of zero desire. 

Individuals and their incommensurable indexes of ophelimity are also individuals who cannot be changed or improved, or barely: Pareto’s économie pure de l’individu is a theory of the individual who is naturally liable to be contradictory and illogical, and who is very often, like the socialist, vile, false, hypocritical and a sheep, but who we should not expect to be transformed. ‘“As long as the sun shall shine upon man’s misfortunes, the sheep will be eaten by the wolf.”’, Pareto reminds us. ‘All that is left is, for those who know and can, to avoid becoming sheep.’[29] Pareto’s contempt for Marx and for Hegel’s meaningless metaphysics (‘we (call us empiricists or experimentalists, as you please) know nothing beyond the relative and indeed do not even know the meaning of the absolute’) extends to and probably originates in hatred of the idea of self-transformation.[30] The idea of subjectivity as an ardent traversal of the shapes of spirit is as much a confabulation as the idea of a sum of the inhuman, and as despicable. Concepts are not part of any work of self-transformation, either of an individual or of a class, except in a literary sense that need not trouble the economist; they are nothing but names for what science alone can quantify. ‘I’, Pareto proudly declared to Benedetto Croce, ‘am the most nominalist of nominalists.’[31] If, notwithstanding their general irremediableness, individuals do nonetheless sometimes appear to change, it is because they get power or lose it; insofar as they really do change, it is because they decay. The bourgeoisie is despicable, Pareto thinks, but only because it is ‘senile’.[32] Concepts, too, have their senescence, and in the end will become victims, much like individuals, and as fittingly. 

Only those unfortunate bourgeois humanitarians can dream of a government that is nothing but milk and honey, and demand that the carabinieri and soldiers should let themselves be stoned and wait until one of them drops dead before using arms. One can be sure that the police of the future elite will not be so patient, for the concepts of those who shall be in command will be the concepts of vigorous youths and not the concepts of childish old men.[33]

Pareto’s own concept of ophélimité was his chief boast as an economist and his obsession. The opening chapters of the Cours d’économie politique of 1896 are stuffed to bursting with repetitive proclamations of the originality of this concept accompanied by stagey professions of surprise that no other economist ever discovered it before he did. Pareto explains that Marx’s failure to discover ophélimité is responsible for his inability to comprehend that ‘fantasy’ is in fact subjective (this mistake is apparently made on the very first page of Capital, where Marx says that the commodity is an object that satisfies human needs, whether of the stomach or of fantasy). This failure to grasp the subjective character of fantasy led Marx straight into the ‘error of placing the origin of value in labour’, says Pareto.[34] Marx had not clearly specified that the needs that of course differ between individuals differ because individuals are different and find themselves in different circumstances; for Pareto, this crucial omission to spell out his own thought proved that Marx never had a concept of subjectivity at all. 

Marx’s concept of subjectivity, like his concept of value, was too rich, too complex, too poetic and too logically extreme for Pareto. The dismissal of Marx’s economics as ‘literary’ amounts to the repudiation of Marx’s concepts for being too full. A comment by Hutchison on Pareto’s cherished brainchild concept helps make sense of this antipathy. ‘‘Ophelimity’, says Hutchison, 

is simply a neutralized version of ‘utility’ expressing an attempt to empty out all suggestions of utilitarian or hedonist ethics from the analysis of value. ‘Ophelimity’ simply means ‘what makes a good desirable to the consumer’, whether it is really going to do him any ‘good’ or not. This terminological novelty is hardly in itself of much significance, and never secured wide adoption, but it does mark a certain stage in the conscious emptying out of content from the utility concept, preparatory to the proposal for its complete abandonment.[35]

The conscious emptying out of content preparatory to its complete abandonment is Pareto’s basic logical operation, one he performed not only on ‘the utility concept’ of Bentham or Jevons, but on every concept of Marx that he could get his hands on. Value is ‘a meaningless entity’; desire is a quantum; fantasy is ‘subjective’, strictly in the so-called empirical sense that consumers can in theory be treated as though they are motivated by it; wanting more is a term in a series that ends with wanting nothing, a ladder of ordinal numbers terminating in every case at the point of zero desire; the absolute is unintelligible; and infatuation with metaphysical concepts is an index of class resentment that properly evaporates at the point of graduation to political authority. The pessimism, or more specifically, the hatred of optimism, expressed in this repetitive emptying out of the concept, is not merely fundamental to the inauguration of modern economics at the point where literature and poetics are derisively exiled from the world of facts and programmatically terminated by empirical econometrics. It is also the hatred that still now is active in the conservation of that difference by theorists or interpreters of Marx who want the critique of capital not to have a poetics, as well as the continuous reproduction of the anti-speculative dogma that there is no such thing as a sum of desire, happiness, suffering or inhumanity. To conceive that sum requires the work of the fullest possible concepts, conceptual plenitude, the music and not merely the logic of critique, and a poetics of the critique of capital and the economy. 

Endnotes:

[1] Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Karl Marx and the Close of his System, ed. Paul M. Sweezy, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1949, 117.
[2]  Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, ed. Jeremy Jennings, Cambridge: CUP, 1999, 208.
[3]  Maurice Dobb, Theories of Value and Distribution since Adam Smith, Cambridge: CUP, 1973, 167-8.
[4]  ‘Jevons’s Theory is the first treatise to present in a finished form the theory of value based on subjective valuations.’ John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Biography, London: Palgrave, 2010, 131; Joseph A. Schumpeter, The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism, ed. Richard Swedberg, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991, 288. 
[5]  T.W. Hutchison, A Review of Economic Doctrines 1870-1929, Westport: Greenwood, 1975, 219.
[6]  Hutchison, A Review of Economic Doctrines 1870-1929, 216.
[7]  Hutchison, A Review of Economic Doctrines 1870-1929, 219.
[8]  Vilfredo Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, trans. Ann S. Schwier, ed. Ann S. Schwier and Alfred N. Page, London: Macmillan, 1971 (1st in Italian 1907), 177.
[9]  Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, 178.
[10]  Pareto, ‘On the economic principle: A reply to Benedetto Croce’ (1901), trans. F. Priuli, Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia, Nuova Serie, vol.71, No. 2/3 (2012), 37.
[11]  Pareto, ‘On an error of Cournot in the mathematical treatment of political economy’ (1892), Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia, Nuova Serie, vol. 34, No. 1 (2012), 308.
[12]  Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, 178.
[13]  Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, 178.
[14]  Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, 309.
[15]  Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, 183.
[16]  ‘There is general agreement that Pareto’s economic sociology is the antithesis of Marx’s sociology’, according to R. Cirillo, The Economics of Vilfredo Pareto, London: Frank Cass, 1979, 33.
[17]  S.E. Finer, ‘Introduction’ to Pareto, Sociological Writings, trans. Derek Mirfin, London: Pall Mall, 1966, 11. On Marx's concept of Gallerte, the edible substance of dead labour, see Keston Sutherland, 'Marx in Jargon' http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_1.1/KSutherland.pdf, reprinted with some changes in Stupefaction, Chicago: Seagull Books, 2011.
[18]  Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, 319.
[19]  Pareto, Cours D’Économie Politique, Lausanne, 1896, 3. This and all subsequent translations from this text are my own.
[20]  Pareto, Cours D’Économie Politique, 8.
[21]  Montesquieu, Persian Letters, trans. C.J. Betts, London: Penguin, 162. Etienne Balibar points out that in French rapport ‘traditionally signifies a proportion or objective structure’ rather than a relationship with a subjective dimension. The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner and Gregory Elliott, London: Verso, 2017, 141.
[22] Pareto, Cours D’Économie Politique, 4.
[23]  Pareto, Cours D’Économie Politique, 12.
[24]  Pareto, Cours D’Économie Politique, 5.
[25]  Pareto, ‘Comment se pose le problème de l’économie pure’ (1898), Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto, T. 1, No. 1 (1963), 125. My translation.
[26]  Pareto, ‘Comment se pose le problème de l’économie pure’, 127.
[27]  Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, 192.
[28]  The Holy Family, MECW, 4, 36-7. Marx was anticipated in the idea of a sum of inhumanity by Condorcet, who wrote in 1793 that the arts are often carried to their highest degree of perfection among peoples whose long subjection to the influence of superstition and despotism ‘has consummated the degradation of all the human faculties [a consommé la degradation de toutes les faculties humaines].’ Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progress de l’esprit humain, ed. Alain Pons, Paris: Flammarion, 1988, 114.
[29]  Pareto, The Rise and Fall of the Elites (1901), Totowa: Bedminster Press, 1968, 65.
[30]  Pareto, ‘On the economic principle: A reply to Benedetto Croce’, 37.
[31]  Pareto, ‘On the economic principle: A reply to Benedetto Croce’, 35.
[32]  Pareto, The Rise and Fall of the Elites, 87.
[33]  Pareto, The Rise and Fall of the Elites, 81.
[34]  Pareto, Cours D’Économie Politique, 8.
[35]  Hutchison, A Review of Economic Doctrines 1870-1929, 220.

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Keston Sutherland is a poet, critic and theorist. His books include Scherzos Benjyosos, Whither Russia, Poetical Works 1999-2015, Stress Position and Hot White Andy. 

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The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.