Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure Author(s): Carolyn Lesjak Source:

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UTOPIA, USE, AND THE EVERYDAY:OSCAR WILDE AND A NEW ECONOMY OF PLEASURE
BY CAROLYNLESJAK

Dear, dear! How Queer everything is today! And yesterday things went on just as usual. -Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

In 1966, Herbert Marcuse,returningto Eros and Civilizationto add a "politicalpreface," asked the crucial question "Can we speak of a juncture between the erotic and political dimension?"'This question was promptedby what Marcusesaw as his overlyoptimisticassumption when the book was originallypublishedin 1955 that "the achievements of advancedindustrialsocietywould enable man to reversethe direction of progress, to break the fatal union of productivityand destruction, libertyand repression-in other words, to learn the gay science of how to use the social wealth for shapingman'sworld in accordancewith his Life Instincts, in the concerted struggle against the Purveyors of Death."2 Our alienationfrom the language alone which Marcuseuses (and even from his more tempered reflectionsin the preface) speaksto the distancewhich now separatesus from the 1960s and its languageof liberation.If in 1966 Marcusecould still turn to the internationalarena and the revolution in Vietnam, specifically,as a site for at least "the historicalchance of turningthe wheel of progressto anotherdirection," what we now face is the opening of Vietnamto the West and marketoriented economic reforms." Clearly, given our changed historical moment, the liberationof both eros and civilizationdoes not lie with an (impossible)returnto an equation of the two. But, as I want to argue, nor does it lie with a rejectionof the languageof eros or pleasureitself. between the erotic and the Rather,it is the nature of the "juncture" politicalof which Marcusespeaksthat needs to be reconsidered. I The seeds for this reconceptualization, suggest, lie in the work of Oscar Wilde and his attempts to create a new economy of pleasure based on the paradoxicalnotion of what I will call the labors of hedonism; the notion, that is to say, that pleasure is something to be
ELH 67 (2000) 179-204 2000 by The JohnsHopkinsUniversityPress

179

worked at and worked for. Or, as Bertolt Brecht fashionsit, "pleasure takes some achieving,I'd say."4 readingof Wilde'swork in this light A involvestwo importanttheoreticalshifts:first,to showhow the notion of pleasurein his texts dovetailswith notionsof use versusexchangevalue, commodificationand commodity logic, the utopian and the everyday; and second, to uncouple the concept of pleasure from sexualityper se and to link it instead to a more expansive notion of use. These twin operations-the detachmentof pleasurefrom sexualityand the connection of pleasure to a new kind of use-not only link pleasure to what Marcuse refers to as the "politicalfight" or the larger political and economic structureswhich define and delimit pleasure, but, in turn, excavate the space for a more complex and varied understandingof pleasure. A reconsiderationof how use and the utopian function in Wilde equally requires a reassessmentof his genealogy as a political thinker. Wilde'sgestures towardsocialismhave commonlybeen disregardedas mere polemic, yet another rhetorical feint in Wilde's repertoire of personae. Renewed attentionto his notion of use, however,shows him more firmlyplaced as a fellow-traveler sortswhose workrepresentsa of continuationof the English socialistprojectof the 1880s, and especially of WilliamMorris.Morrisand Wilde, despite their stylisticdifferences, each focus on ways of overcoming the increasing separationof labor from any notion of pleasure. As surplusvalue and profit, that is to say, become the primarymotiveof production,laboris instrumentalized a as which can only realize itself within the terms of capitalist commodity production.As such, it becomes merely a means of existence, alienated from its own self-realization. Pleasure is opposed to abstractlabor,but defined by it negatively-as that which is not work-as simultaneously capitalistlogic colonizes ever greaterdomainsof experience. Both William Morris and Oscar Wilde implicitly acknowledgethis conceptual and real divide and try to overcome it in their own ways. William Morris attempts to redefine labor, and with it pleasure, by envisioning a kind of creative labor which places pleasure at the very foundation of society."Art is defined by Morris as the expressionof pleasure in labor, and his utopia in News from Nowhere is one of artisans.OscarWilde providesa counter-narrative Victorianconvento tions by imagining,also throughArt, an expandednotion of needs and use which privileges pleasure and the imaginationover utility. What their utopianvisions share is the premise that alienatedlabor results in an alienationfrom the very objects of human production.As such, any attemptto overcomethat fundamentalalienationis connected to labor. 180 Oscar Wildeand a New Economyof Pleasure

Where they differ is in their purview: while Morrisfocuses our attention on the processes of laborand its revaluation pleasure,Wilde points us as to the commodityworld, challengingus to taste of the pleasures of a varied and expansiveobject world liberatedfrom the reductivedictates of commodity exchange and the necessity of possession as private Wilde, much more so than Morris,speaksdirectlyto a modem property. developedworld:where Morrishearkensbackto a medievalartisanship, Wilde fully embraces the multitude of offerings of modernity. His attention to consumption and the seductions of commodity fetishism provide a greater sense of the degree to which pleasures have been will developed by capitalismand, accordingly, only be trulyliberatedby its positive sublation. The placement of Wilde in the company of Morris significantly expands our reception of both his politics and his pleasures. First, it in demandsthat we reinstatethe "undersocialism" his essay The Soulof Man Under Socialismto its rightfulplace as the precondition for the pleasuresWilde'scollection of texts invites us to celebrate. Second, it challenges a common reading of Wilde as an idealist whose aesthetic ultimately becomes a way of escaping the material world. Finally, it establishesfor pleasurea dual function:it is not only to be celebratedin and of itself, but also as a figure for a largersocial transformation to yet occur.' From this viewpoint,then, Wilde'sdecadence and aestheticism, his self-generation of the personality "Oscar Wilde," his multiple posturings, sexual practices, and epigrammaticstyle of mimicry and reversalcan be seen as interventionsinto the increasinglylimited and limiting public sphere of late-Victorian capitalistculture. These intera useful and, to my mind, inspiringcritiqueof ventionsnot only provide bourgeois definitions of labor and pleasure, but usefully put into question the productivist biases that have haunted much socialist thought since Marx, and provocativelysuggest how pleasure, much ignored by such thought, can-and must-be articulatedwithin a leftwing project.
I. THE WILDEAN TOUR

Like William Morris,Oscar Wilde dares to ask:What is work?And following hard on its heels: Why work? An early response of Wilde's, "The Decorative Arts,"even looks uncannilysimilarto and indeed at times mimics (if not directly repeats) Morris'smore sustained replies. "TheDecorativeArts"was a mainstayof Wilde'sratherscant repertoire of talksfor his Americanspeakingtour in 1882. (Whenhe firstarrivedin CarolynLesjak 181

New York,in fact, he had under his belt just one lecture, "The English Renaissance,"and quickly found himself at a loss, once newspapers began printinghis comments before he arrivedat his new destination.) In essence, "TheDecorativeArts"arguesthat the workerand the artist are interchangeable.The notion of "decorativeart"itself is defined by Wilde as "the value the workmanplaces on his work, it is the pleasure that he must take in making a beautiful thing." In other words, one works to make art and to make art is to take pleasure in one's work. Following from this claim, Wilde concludes a la Morristhat "a democratic art [will be] made by the hands of the people and for the benefit of the people, for the realbasis of all artis to be found in the application of the beautiful in things common to all and in the cultivation and development of this among the artisansof the day."7 was On the same Americantour,"TheDecorativeArts" coupled with Wilde's "House Beautiful."In this piece Wilde moves into a different registeraltogetherin terms of both style and effect, as he takes us on a walking tour of the typical bourgeois household. What we find is an inventory of nitty-grittydetails. Seemingly nothing is left untouched, from the question of flaringgas chandeliers(a definite no-no, destined to discolor and ruin everything else you might do in the way of decorating the room) down to Queen Anne furniture (which gets a thumbs up, much favoredover its Gothic predecessorwhich was "very to well for those who lived in castles and who needed occasionally use it but means of defence or as a weapon of war," ratherout of place in as a nineteenth-centuryAmerica).8 The whole essay proceeds apace in this manner:"Butto returnto our room,""Aboutthe ceiling,""Asregards windows,""Asregardsdress,"down to such fine points as trousers get dirty, and knee-breeches are more comfortable;high boots should be worn in the streets to ward off mud, while low shoes and silk stockings are are for the drawingroom;and, cloaks, unquestionably, to be much to coats.' Given these criteria,Wilde, the masterof upsetting preferred audience expectation,finds the Rocky Mountainminer to be the bestdressed man in America. There is more than humor (althoughplenty of that, too) in each of these essays, and between them, in their juxtaposition. the first essay If on the decorativeartsrepresentsWilde'sphilosophy, the second, his and tour, as RichardEllmann suggests, this raises the question of why in Wilde the one alwaysthreatensto collapse into the other. For as Wilde continually and substantiallychanged "The English Renaissance,"it came to look more and more like "The DecorativeArts,"which in turn evolved into "The House Beautiful."(Sometimes whole passages even
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are lifted fromone text to the next.)The point, though,is not to readthe blurringof philosophyand tour as a failureon Wilde'spartbut ratherto see the tour itself as the form of Wilde'sphilosophy:composed as it is of a series or collection of objects, it embodies the very form and method of Wilde'sthought and of his appropriation the object-world.Just as of he will collect other people's words-Morris's, Ruskin's,Whistler's,to name but a few-he will, throughouthis work, collect and continually reassemble the objects of Victoriansociety, its furniture,its dress, its conventions,not to mention his own words and his own actions. The most significantaspect of this listing, this collecting, this serial assemblage of objectsand so on, is thatWilde does not attemptto imbue them with an overarchingsameness;he does not attempt to equate them in any way, but instead enjoys their multiplicityand variety and unlocks them from the homogeneityto which their existence as mere objects of exchangeconsigns them. Another very importantpoint, and something that is very Wildean and perhaps one of his more utopian moments, is that need becomes from taste ("You've got to have that Queen Anne indistinguishable just is reinvented as use. This development is furniture"); similarlyluxury interesting to consider as a figure in Wilde for what the early Marx referredto as the "richnessof historicalhuman needs"-that is, these are needs that only develop after the base needs of survival (food, clothing, shelter) are historicallymet and the diversityof humanwants expands. Taste, pleasure, and luxury are thus inseparable from the concept of use yet ideally separatefrom necessity. In this sense, the space mapped by Wilde's"tour"functions less in terms of Ellmann'scontrastbetween philosophyand tour and more in terms of the distinctionbetween place (lieu) and space (espace) Michel that describe de Certeau drawsin his discussionof modern narrations apartmentsand streets. A place involves relationshipsof coexistence: "The law of the 'proper' rules in the place: the elements taken into considerationare beside one another,each situated in its own 'proper and distinctlocation, a location it defines."A space, on the other hand, has none of this stability or univocity;it "existswhen one takes into considerationvectors of direction,velocities, and time variables.Thus space is composed of intersectionsof mobile elements."'The tour, as an oscillationbetween seeing and going, as an organizationof movements, makes space look like a practiced place. The tour becomes a or unique site for what Certeau terms "enunciativefocalizations," "the of the body in discourse.""' practice CarolynLesjak 183

This practice-of the body in discourse,ratherthan as discourse-is suggestive for describing the effect of Wilde's prose more generally, moving somewhere between essay and dialogue, prose and drama, philosophy and tour, life and art, written and spoken word. For de Certeau, space operates in a mannerhomologousto the spoken word:
On this view, in relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of actualization, transformed into a term dependent upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformationscaused by successive contexts."2

It is this ambiguityof actualization,the nonequivalenceof place and space, the linguistic and the material, and a whole series of other that of nonequivalencies delineatesthe socialtopography Wilde'sworkone that defies the staticallytopographical its emphasison what can in be done to and made out of a pre-establishedgeographyor an imposed
order.'13

Thus while Wilde'slater, more properlyliteraryworkswill supplant the figureof the artisanwith that of the artist,the philosophyunderlying their role in his aesthetics remains the same: "the applicationof the beautiful in things common to all."'4Similarly, method of the tour the will manifest itself in new styles, from the diversionarystyle of The Picture of Dorian Gray to the aphorismsprefacing it.15But what will draw all these disparateelements together and yet maintainthem as differentis a new notion of use which emerges in the very qualitatively form throughwhich Wildeansocial space is defined, namelythe formof the collection.
II. LISTS, CATALOGUES, AND COLLECTING

Oscar Wilde was an inveterate collector-a collector of nineteenthcentury platitudes, imperial jewels, beautiful young boys, scandalous fin-de-siecle flowers, and yellow press. In the now tales, rich tapestries, famouschaptereleven of Dorian Gray,we are given an inventoryof the resultantobjects of Dorian'sevolvingpassionsfor collecting,which lead from the spoils of empire to the substanceabuse of opium dens. In its intimate relationto imperialism,Dorian'scollection lends itself, as Eve Sedgwick has noted, to an Orientalistreading. But as Sedgwick also of observes,thisdisplay imperial bootydeniesthe verylogicof Orientalism it might seem to invoke in its simultaneousocclusion of any singular Occidentalsexualand nationalbody againstwhich the exotic Other is to be offset:
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With orientalism so ready-to-hand a rubric for the relation to the Other, it is difficult (Wilde seems to want to make it difficult) to resist seeing the desired English body as simply the domestic Same. Yet the sameness of this Same-or put another way, the homo- nature of this sexuality-is no less open to question than the self-identicalness of the national borders of the domestic.16

This questionable self-identicalness, I want to argue, contains within it a radical notion of the nonidentical; an epistemological relation, that is to

say,in which there is a necessarygap between subject and object which the subject does not in turn necessarilytry to overcome. Theodor Adorno describes the relationshipof nonidentitybetween subject and object in terms of a nonidealist dialectics. He sees the
separation of subject and object as both real (because it expresses a real,

and the operativeseparation) illusory(becauseit hypostasizes separation):

Though they cannot be thought away, as separated, the pseudos of the separation is manifested in their being mutually mediated-the object by the subject, and even more, in different ways, the subject by the object. The separation is no sooner established directly, without mediation, than it becomes ideology, which is indeed its normal form ... the mind will then usurp the place of something absolutely independentwhich it is not; its claim of independence heralds the claim of dominance. Once radically separated from the object, the subject reduces it to its own measure; the subject swallows the object, forgetting how much it is an object itself."7

The whole dynamicof chapter eleven resistsjust such a collapse of

subject and object in its movement from object to body (or subject) to object. Dorian's list proceeds from perfume to music to jewels to embroideries and ecclesiastical vestments. Each description brings Dorian back to himself, to his body. His exploration of music ends with his return to Wagner's Tannhauser, "seeing in that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul" (D, 166). In the chasubles he collects and "in the mystic offices to which such things were put, there was something that quickened his imagination" (D, 172). Looking

at the ancestralportraitsin his picture-gallery, "they seemed to follow went"(D, 176). But, always,the movementbackto the him whereverhe self is one which refuses a resting place. These returns are equally an
expansion outward to new objects and new sensations, a continual recreation of what Wilde refers to as a "strangeness" (D, 163) like that essential to romance. It is never a question of holding out the possibility

of a returnto some Edenic identity between subject and object nor its CarolynLesjak 185

opposite, the liquidationof the subject. Subject and object are neither from nor independentof one another.The very fact of undifferentiated Dorian'spictureunderscoresthis differentiatedstate:as an object, it has constitutedDorian;at the same time, Dorian as subjectis separatefrom yet united with it: "He hated to be separatedfrom the picture that was such a part of his life" (D, 172). form of use which circumWhat Wilde imaginesis a non-utilitarian of vents the transformation use-value into exchange-valuein the comto modityform and thus recreatesa differentrelationship the objects of the commodityworld.That is, the veryform of collectingserves both as a recognition of the temptations of commodity fetishism and as a resistanceto it. Collectingrefuses anyeasy recourseto an over-valuation or simplification(throughtransparency)of use-value in opposition to exchange-value.A collected object possesses instead an amateurvalue but no use-value;things are liberated from the drudgeryof use-value. The rejectionof use-valueis not, however,a wholesale rejectionof use itself, but rather of an instrumentaluse-value that can only relate to objects in terms of mere utility. What is thus liberated from the drudgery of use-value is a different valorizationof use, which, in its refusal of mere utility,maintainsthe integrityof objects and, crucially, makes possible an intimate relationshipto them. Relationsof nonidentityfunctionin The Pictureof Dorian Gray on a number of different levels. In terms of defining the nationalbody, as Eve Sedgwickargues,Wilde'sown life and its specularization embodies nationaldifferencewithin nationaldefinition.Moreover, literalbody the of Oscar Wilde-from his bulky physical make to his gay homosexual gestures and persona-calls into question the self-identicalnessof the male English body: "it dramatizedthe uncouth nonequivalenceof an English nationalbody with a Britishwith an Irish, as domestic grounds from which to launch a stable understanding of national/imperial These relationsof nonidentityimply an economy of excess; relations."'8 a queer economy that seeks to make of characternot an essence but a mobile set of reactions.19 The kind of doubleness (at the very least) that this nonequivalence implies is equallyapplicableto the male sexualbody.Dorian'scollection is a collection of historieswhich is also a coded collectionof gay history, an intervention in the history of men desiring men. In this register, chaptereleven functionsas a gay manual,a repertoirefor an identitybut, crucially,one that is always already not identical to itself.20 To returnto the metaphorof space, this repertoireopens or makesspace in female spaces-interior decorating, the collecting of bibelots, dress 186 Oscar Wildeand a New Economyof Pleasure

fashion, flower arrangement-for men. Men in this London move languidly:they lounge and loll on sofas, sip chocolate, and lose themselves in Wagnerianopera. At the most basic level, divisionsof gender are underminedas domestic space is made availablefor and luxuriousto men. Domestic space is thus both re-decoratedand un-domesticated. Once its doors are flung open and the Wildeantour begun, all sorts of products flow into its previouslyfortified, sanctified space. Instead of domestic space-structured the architectureof an earlier "industrial" on divisionsof labor,gender,nationality, sexuality-the domestic as and escape hatch or hermetic counter-spaceto the economic does not exist in this Wildeanworld.These are the very kindsof compartmentalization that Wilde'stexts ceaselessly complicate and prove insupportable.The same men recreatingthe domestic in Wilde are also English gentlemen who patronize proper English male clubs and freely circulate in the wider public sphere. They are men made of and by many social and sexualrelationsand situationsthat are recognizedas public ratherthan artificially relegated to the putatively"private" sphere. So that, even as the novel closes down so many things, in its coupling, for instance, of substanceabusewith addictionor its construction(at times) of a natural/ unnaturaldivide, it simultaneouslyoffers a new model of the subject of on predicated,significantly, a new understanding the object. At the same time that Wilde recreatesa differentrelationshipto the objects of the commodityworld, his materialistaesthetic grappleswith the lure of those self-same objects as commodities. In short, Wilde is fully awareof what he is up against.Most vividly,Wilde'sdescriptionof the opium den in The Picture of Dorian Gray conjures the strange transmogrifying powers of commodity fetishism:"Dorianwinced, and looked round at the grotesque things that lay in such fantasticpostures on the ragged mattresses.The twisted limbs, the gaping mouths, the staringlustrelesseyes, fascinatedhim. He knew in what strangeheavens they were suffering,and what dull hells were teaching them the secret of some new joy" (D, 224).21 Wilde, like Marx,finds the commodityto be "avery queer thing":
A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows, that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point of view that those properties are the product of human labor. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in

CarolynLesjak

187

such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than "table-turning"ever was.22

That which constitutesits acrobaticenigmaticalcharacteris theform of the product of labor-as commodity.Wilde'samateurvalue frustrates the equationof all value with exchangevalue, and thus at times permits one to see behind the veil of the commodity to the labor which produced it. A sociality is thus produced which goes beyond the reductive sociality of commodity fetishism, which Marx so pointedly of summed up as the transformation the relationsbetween people into This amateurvalue, identified in the mere relationsbetween things.23 Wilde with the collector and the act of collecting, thwartsthe abstract of quantification qualitativedifference (the conversionof use value into exchangevalue). Writing specificallyon book collecting, Walter Benjamin links the collector's passion to the aleatory and to memory: "Every passion borderson the chaotic,but the collector'spassionborderson the chaos of memories. More than that:the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuouslypresent in the accustomedconfusion of these books."24 The books function as Benjaminian ruins, containing within them a whole host of memories:memoriesof the cities in which they were found, of the past, and of the selves congealed in them as objects. Benjamin's essay ends on a note of collector's jouissance:
O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! ... inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector-and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to beownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.25

The Pictureof Dorian Gray offers glimpses of a similar jouissance, but with a crucialdifference:the collector'sbliss of which Benjaminspeaks is not sustainablewithin the evolving relations of Dorian'sstory or its eventualculmination.His progressiontowardsan ever greaternarcissistic identificationwith his portraitultimatelydenies the kind of distinctness between subject and object that makes possible an intimate relationshipto objects. To recoverthat relationof intimacywithout the 188 Oscar Wildeand a New Economyof Pleasure

dominationof the object by the subject:that is the utopianpromise of Wilde'scollection. Still caughtbetween the utopianand the present, the a Age of Dorian stages a dialecticof contradictions, dialecticwhich does not so much offer solutionsas pose problems." One form the dialectic as problematictakes is that between art and utility or, more generally, between freedom and necessity.
III. THE COUNTER-CONCEPTOR THE GREEN FLOWER

In order to carve out the realm of freedom from the realm of necessity,Wilde needs to attackthe very bourgeois forms that reduce needs to mere utility and reduce the objects that meet those needs to mere commodities;he needs to denaturalizeand defamiliarizethem, in order that they may be reappropriated all their richnessand variety. in (This is a two-step process: first, to defamiliarize,disassociate,disassemble; second, to reassemble, reconfigure, reappropriate.)Reminiscent of the goals of BrechtianVerfremdungseffekt, Wilde sees the need to put accepted truthson the high wire before they can be evaluated.As he puts it, "Totest realitywe must see it on the tightrope.When the verities become acrobatswe can judge them" (D, 64). One of Wilde'sweapons of estrangementis the epigram.Like Walter Benjamin's description of the modern function of quotations, the epigramis born out of despair:despairof the present (not the past) and cut the desire to destroyit. As Basilcounters Lord HenryWotton,"You life to pieces with your epigrams"(D, 126). The epigram functions to tear things out of context while simultaneouslymaintainingthe very
concept wrenched out of place in an altered state. In The Picture of

Dorian Gray, strewnwith countlessexamplesof such epigrammatic wit, Dorian proclaims,"I don't think I am likely to marry,Henry. I am too much in love"(D, 71). Here the concept of love is sustained(Wildeand Dorian indeed like it), but is critiqued in its social expression in the institutionof marriage.The aphorismworksand is humorousprecisely because it enacts a dissociationof the senses; a severingof the feelingof love, in this case-from its common sense second-natureexpression. In fact, its expression-marriage-is revealed to be incompatiblewith the feeling-love. The turn of thoughtinvolvedis ingeniousinsofaras it marks the borders of what is considered thinkable and, in so doing, makes alterable those very borders. These turns insinuate a slippage between meaningsand institutionscommonlythoughtof as existingin a relation of expressive identity. Once unmoored from its anchoringin love is potentiallyfree to circulatein myriadformsand realize marriage, itself more fully. CarolynLesjak 189

in are and Meanings institutions equallyestranged a kindof recycling by or Wildewhichat timesseemslikean almostendlessreproduction re-useof the same objects, phrases, quotes, even characternames. Perhaps the most extreme exampleof this is to be found in Wilde'sresponse during his trialin 1895 to the question from the prosecution:What is "the love that dare not speak its name?""2 the midst of acting finallyto expose In the natureof his relationship with LordAlfred Douglas,Wilde borrows from his own past notes and combines two separatespeeches from The Pictureof Dorian Gray, one by LordWottonand one by Dorian.As the critic Neil Bartlett asks, "If this, the truest of all his speeches, is a quotation,or worse, a quotationfrom his own work, then what answer can we hope to have to our question, the only questionwe ever want to ask of history,the first questionwe must askof ourselves,is this true?"28 In a sense, Bartlett,via Wilde, answersthis questionhimself. Describing the mannerin which nineteenth-centurygay men operated in relation to bourgeois norms, narratives, and histories, Bartlettclaims that "they read between the lines of history,stole its best lines for their own use. They were magpies, thieves, bricoleurs for whom the past could be Within this mode, reassembled, given new and wicked meanings."29 Bartlett'sfirst question, "Is this true?"should be the last question to be asked. Indeed, this is the most un-Wildeanof questions. Instead of an epistemologygroundedin authenticityor identity,and thus in competing truth claims, Wilde'splay with historyasks us to concern ourselves with alterable subjects and processes of social reproductionopen to reassemblyby magpies,thieves, and bricoleursalike. In a manner similarto his unsettling of institutionalizedmeanings, Wilde assaultsthe notion of uselessness, a value with a more obvious relationshipto labor.The fancifulabandonwith which Wilde trumpets uselessness is proportionateto the singularlyinstrumental,purposive ends of bourgeois society. To the bourgeois valuationof productivity, use, the nobility of labor, heterosexual sexuality, and reproduction, OscarWilde throwsdown, as gauntlet,the green flower:"It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasureis sterility.A workof art is useless as a flower is useless. A flowerblossoms for its own joy."30 With the green flower Wilde elevates style, beauty,and uselessness over truth, authenticity,or utility.Each of the formernegate bourgeois,capitalistvalorization; each of the latter involve an arrestingof production-of knowledge, self, objects-and a consequent reification. In fact, for Wilde reificationis the real crime-a prime example of which is to be found, fittingly, in the story of "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime." While attending a party at Lady Windemere'sin which the
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cheiromantist,Mr. Podgers, is present reading all the guests' futures, LordArthurlearnsthat his particular is to commit murder.Plagued fate this prediction, and the convictionthat surely he cannot go on with by his marriageplans until this murder has been duly committed, Lord Arthurdecides to take mattersinto his own hands. Ratherthan waiting expectantlywith no control over when the deed might be sprungupon him, he determinesto get the murderover and done with, post-haste. Driven by such dutiful determination, the sheer arbitrarinessof a suitablevictim for his crime is of no concern. (Throughout story,we the follow LordArthur's numerousattemptsat murder,rangingfrompoison to bombs, all of which are miserablybungled until at last, and purely accidentally,Lord Arthur bumps into Podgers while walking by the Thames and neatly does awaywith him into the river.) On the face of it, we are easily led, like lambs to the slaughter,to presume that the eponymous crime is murder.But a closer look-and this movement is the truly Wildean one-suggests that the crime in question is really Lord Arthur'sfalse reading of his predicted future. The cheiromantist,that is, reads Lord Arthurin the specific context of his practice of cheiromancy:as a fortune teller, naturally he must future. In response, LordArthurinterpretsthe claim prophesyArthur's as a duty and is unable to see that its meaning is merely provisional, occasionedby the expectationsof fortunetelling. This misreadingis offhandedlyenough made clearat the end of the storyby LadyWindemere, lack who, twistingthe proverbial knife, objectsnot to the cheiromantist's of authenticity but rather to his heartfelt expressions of romantic sincerity: "Do you remember that horrid Mr Podgers? He was a dreadfulimpostor.Of course, I don'tmind that at all, and even when he wantedto borrowmoney I forgavehim, but I could not standhis making love to me. He has really made me hate cheiromancy.""31 For her, his fraudis transparent. Lord Arthur's false sense of duty has its twisted familialcorrelatesas well. The last scene of the story,one of maritalbliss (LordArthurenters his garden,a bubblingbeautiful daughterat each elbow, while his wife looks on adoringly)is, we know,built on poison, explosiveclocks,and in the end murder.A brief look at just one of these capers, the exploding clock, reveals the kinds of connections Wilde is drawingbetween the acts of duty performedby LordArthurand their desired end, marriage. In Lord Arthur'ssecond try at murder,he attempts, with the help of Count Rouvaloff, "a young Russian of very revolutionarytendencies" (L, 33) and a suspected Nihilist agent, to blow up his uncle by placing explosivesin a libertyclock. The explosionhowevermisfiresand merely CarolynLesjak
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knocks the liberty figure off her pedestal, resulting in nothing more explosive than the breakingof liberty'snose. The fiasco is related to Lord Arthurin a letter from his niece, who relates her father'sreaction to the incident:"Papasays [the Nihilists]should do a greatdeal of good, as they show libertycan'tlast, but must fall down. PapasaysLibertywas invented at the time of the French Revolution.How awfulit seems!"(L, 37-38) Like the figure of liberty sitting atop the failed explodingclock, the final familyscene is presented as an invented one, as a self-consciously dramatic tableau-and equally one which should elicit the response "Howawfulit seems!"These Wildeantwistspeel awaysecond naturein this case, of the family--revealingthat which appearsto be naturalas a product of social invention,and hence subject to reinvention. This peeling away brings us, as well, to one formulationof Wilde's concept of Individualismwith a capital I, which has little to do with Once Mr.Podgers'sprophecyis written on his bourgeois individualism. so to speak, Lord Arthursees himself faced with the choice of hand, living for himself (that is, not murderinganyone and, as a result, not being able to marry)or living for others (murderingsomeone and thus being free to marry).Hard as the choice maybe, he "knewhe must not suffer selfishnessto triumphover love"(L, 24). Just as Wilde will argue in The Soul of Man UnderSocialism,here he underscoresthe fallacyof living for others, a choice which, in this case, leads to the ethically fatuous actionstaken by Lord Arthurin the name of a putativeselfless love. The specious self-denial illustratedby Lord Arthur,in essence, defines for Wilde the limits of bourgeoisindividualism.
IV. COLLECTIVE INDIVIDUALISM

Againstthe limitationsof selfless duty,Wilde'sview of individualism consists of an "unselfishselfishness"which in turn forms the basis of looks like, I want to pleasure.32To see what this kind of "selfishness" turn now to what may at first seem an odd place to find a theory of pleasure:Wilde'sDe Profundis.De Profundis,the last piece of prose Wilde ever wrote, is a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas,written in the last months of Wilde'simprisonment.Wilde, as is by now well-known,was put on trialin 1895, chargedwith "posingas a Sodomite" none other by than Lord Douglas'sfather.And it was in fact an earlier love letter to Douglas which became prime evidence againstWilde in the case. He was eventuallyfound guiltyand sentenced to two yearsof hardlabor.As Wilde wryly sums up the trial in De Profundis,"I go to prison at last. 192 Oscar Wilde and a New Economyof Pleasure

This is the result of writing you a charming letter."33 Filled with bitterness toward Douglas as Wilde recollects their life together and its ending for him in Reading Gaol, De Profundis is generally read as a moratorium on the utopian individualism Wilde puts forward in The Soul of Man Under Socialism. But as I want to suggest, it is precisely in De Profundis that Wilde clarifies just what his notion of pleasure entails and what its larger social ramifications are. Written from Reading Gaol, Wilde's long, soul-baring letter to Lord Alfred Douglas has been enshrouded since its writing in intrigue, personal adversity, and melodrama. In an introduction to the text, Vyvyan Holland lays out all the mysterious details of the letter in fine detective thriller form: the fact that Wilde was only allowed one sheet of paper at a time in the initial writing of it; the refusal by the prison authorities to deliver the document to Robert Ross as requested by Wilde; the handing of the complete manuscript to Wilde himself as he left the prison on 19 May 1897; the attempt by Alfred Douglas to destroy the manuscript (under the false belief that the copy he was sent by Ross was the one and only original); the presenting of the manuscript in 1909 to the British Museum with the proviso that it remain sealed for sixty years (with the interesting coincidence that it would then be unveiled during the height of the '60s); and, finally, its early unveiling in 1913 and the subsequent and rapid publication in America of the original carbon copy by Robert Ross, as a means of circumventing Douglas's plans to publish it there himself accompanied by his own comments .34 The path of De Profundis is at least as ambient as the events and emotions it narrates. In De Profundis, Wilde composes a new catalogue, this time one, as Bartlett notes, detailing the costs of his pleasures: The pleasureswe repeat, and repeatedlyenjoy, are necessaryto our Wilde listing the trivialcircumlives. But the image of the bankrupt thatat anymomentthis repetition stancesof his pleasureis a reminder realization the pleasurehas that maycease to be effective.The appalled come to an end is not simplythe weepingof a richmanwho has lost his possessions.Now that the reveller(the lover) is stone-coldsober, the as mustbe catalogued and vine leaves,the champagnes the moonstones all-too-accurate signs of the life he has led in this, his chosen city. De Profundisis a letter from a man who realizesthat the method of his pleasureconcealedthe fact that pleasurehas both originsand consequences,thatit takesplacewithina specificeconomyandthatit can, at any moment,be takenaway.Perhapswe requireof our pleasuresthat they concealthese facts. How could we enjoyourselvesif we worried too much that our whole culture is based on the consumptionof pleasures,on the pleasuresof consumption?35

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Wilde's own letter offers a provisionalresponse to Bartlett'sconcerns. For, in reality,De Profundiscataloguestwo kinds of pleasure and two kinds of consumption.On the one hand, as Bartlettidentifies,there are the pleasuresof which Wilde and Douglas partook,pleasuresdescribed variouslyby Wilde as "appetitive" (DP, 98); "unintellectual" (DP, 99); for amusements,for ordinaryor less ordinarypleasures"(DP, "simply 101); characterizedby "longspells of senseless and sensual ease" (DP, 151); and "aweaknessthat paralysesthe imagination" (DP, 101). All of these descriptionsshare, in Wilde'sview, a slaveryto things, which, in turn, entails a waste of freedom.Wilde, you see, was not perfect even in his own eyes. Juxtaposedto these "hardhedonist"(DP, 169) pleasures is another in kind of pleasure,which does not "traffic the marketplace, nor use a huckster'sscales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel alive"(DP, 134). This pleasure is the pleasure of love and the imagination;a pleasure, the exercise of which is an end in itself. "Theaim of love is to love: no more, and no less" (DP, 134). Through this latter notion of pleasure lies the possibilityfor the recreationof the criticalfaculty-a faculty which would truly understandthe uses of things, and in this understandingrevive the creative and imaginativefaculties lying dormantwithinindividuals with no means of expressionwithin a public but dominatedby market relations.As Wilde says, "we call ours a sphere utilitarian age, andwe do not knowthe uses of anysingle thing.We have that water can cleanse, and fire purify,and that the Earth is forgotten motherto us all. As a consequence our artis of the moon and playswith shadows,while Greek art is of the sun and deals directlywith things" (DP, 208). In place of the "dulllifeless mechanicalsystemsthat treatpeople as if they were things"(DP, 176), Wilde-via Christ-discovers in objects a multitude of ways of experiencingthe materialworld: "The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in temples madewith hands"(DP, 164).36 It is thus in the expansion of our possible relations to objects that pleasure is to be found. A new qualitativedifference is ascribedto the object, a difference that liberates it from the merely instrumentaland leveling relations of exchangevalue. LikeWilde'scollecting,and his disruptionmore generallyof simple equivalences,this kind of expansive,pleasurableuse involvesa laborthat goes beyond base need, a relationship have seen we elsewhere figured as taste, and here as imagination.37 Taste and imagination are reflectiveof human needs ratherthan utilitarian, base needs and as such reflect the richnessof those needs. 194 Oscar Wilde and a New Economyof Pleasure

In De Profundis, however, Wilde assigns the greatest imaginative capabilitiesto sorrow.Sorrowis the "ultimatetype both in life and art" (DP, 161) because it wears no mask:"there is no truth comparableto sorrow... Otherthings maybe illusionsof the eye or the appetite,made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrowhave the worlds been built" (DP, 161). But this assessment, I think, must be placed within the context of Wilde'sprison experience. For Wilde himself, in The Soul of Man UnderSocialism,interpretsthe elevationof sorrowor to pain (as in the teachingsof Christianity date) as only one step towards the fuller realizationof joy and a truly free expressionof living labor. "The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great. It was necessary that pain should be put forwardas a mode of self-realization."'38 as he goes on to argue, "painis not the ultimate mode of But, perfection. It is merely provisionaland a protest. It has reference to wrong, unhealthy, unjust surroundings.When the wrong, and the disease, and the injustice are removed, it will have no furtherplace. It was a greatwork,but it is almost over. Its sphere lessens every day"(S, 53). If anything,then, Wilde'smove back to pain and suffering as the supreme emotions is most reflective of the intractablymaterialistbasis of his thought. Despite his denials to the contrary,prison, to quote JohnnyCash,changesa man, a fact to which everypage of De Profundis attests. Wilde even withinthe airof doom thatpervadesDe Profundis, Finally, is able to conjure a social practice firmly rooted in the experiential possibilitiesof the present. Wilde'simaginingsof a new body and new pleasureslook within the present for utopianways of relatingto objects and the world which are not reducible to commodification.His assault on the present reclaims the utopian from within, and in so doing proffers glimpses of a new modernity in which individual pleasures would no longer come at the expense of the collective. Paradoxically, Wilde sees in socialismthe full realizationof Individualism.
V. WILDEAN SOCIALISM

Neither a bourgeois individualist (or liberal democratic) nor an a strandof Marxism, Wilde is best situatedwithin a particular anarchist, whose basis lies not in valorizinglabor (as in much Socialist utopianism thought) but in a liberationfrom labor. It is at heart a socialism of is was beautiful,""socialism enjoyment."39 pleasure:"socialism In opposition to dominant Victorian culture, Wilde, much like William Morris,does not unthinkinglycelebrate manual labor. As he CarolynLesjak
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writes in The Soulof Man UnderSocialism,"thereis nothingnecessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading.It is mentallyand morallyinjuriousto man to do anythingin which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labor are quite pleasurelessactivities,and shouldbe regardedas such"(S, 32). Whereas at present machinescontrolhumans,in a society of freed Individualism, humans will be served by machinery.The past reliance on human slavery-a fact preventingthe attainmentof true Individualism-will be on supersededby technology:"Onmechanicalslavery, the slaveryof the the future of the world depends"(S, 33). This is so because it machine, is principallythrough cultivated leisure that individuals are able to achieve perfection. Before turning to what exactly Wilde means by perfection, it is importantto note that the liberationfromlaborwhichhe espouses is not a turn awayfromlaborper se, that is to say,from all formsof productive claim to the right to be lazy.Instead, the activity,or even a Lafarguian liberationinvolved is a liberationfrom the absolute necessity to work of under the force of what Wilde calls the "Tyranny want"(S, 21). What is fundamentallyat issue is a liberated state of labor in which all individuals-not just those few, in the currentsystem,who, as holdersof private property, are free from want-would be free to choose the sphere of activitythey enjoyand thus which gives them pleasure:"Every man must be left quite free to choose his own work. No form of compulsionmust be exercisedover him. If there is, his workwill not be good for him, will not be good in itself, and will not be good for others. And by work I simply mean activityof any kind"(S, 24). The relationshipbetween freely chosen and pleasurablework and perfection is then causal:once individualsare able to choose their own activity,they can fully realize themselves and thus become what Wilde refers to as the "perfectpersonality"(S, 26). Perfection is embodied, in historically, such figures as Darwin, Keats, M. Renan, and Flaubert. Their exceptionaltalents are able to be realized, accordingto Wilde, because they have been able to isolate themselves, "to keep [themselves] out of reach of the clamorousclaims of others"(S, 19). (These clamorous claims, however, are not, as they might first appear, the claims of a collectivity against which Wilde will oppose his notion of Individualism. Rather,their clamorissues from a misdirectedaltruism.) In the future, in order that all individualsmay realize perfection or the "perfectpersonality," private property must be abolished. Wilde's of the degradedlives and distortedvalues produced under the reading present system of privatepropertyshares much with Marx's analysisof
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private propertyin the early Paris manuscripts-both in detail and in tone. Both highlightthe elevationof havingover being underthe system of privateproperty;the measureof value by materialthings;the lack of free and joyful development of the individual;and the consequent crushing on all fronts of truly human needs and values. With the abolitionof privateproperty,manyVictorian socialinstitutionsalso must and the entire currentstructureof family disappear, includingmarriage life. Even emotions themselves must be transformedand some simply made obsolete. Jealousy,for instance,so closely bound up with conceptionsof property, wouldsurelydie out underSocialism Individualism.40 and These connections between Wilde and Marx also suggest another affinitybetween the two: a conceptionof laboringpracticesas the motor of historicalchange.AlthoughWilde nowhereexplicitlyfocuses on labor to the extent that Marxdoes (or Morris,for that matter),his analysisof the manner in which private propertywarps individuals'personalities and, consequently, the larger public sphere, is inseparable from an of understanding laborunder capitalismas estrangedand alienatedand froman unalienatedvisionof laborundersocialism.As Marxstates,"the subjectiveessence of private property-private property as activityfor it itself, as subject,as person-is labor."41 Moreover, is onlywhen private has been graspedas a contradiction, understood,that is, as the property base antagonismof society,that resolutionsto its logic can be anything but piecemeal:
The antithesis between lack of property and property, so long as it is not comprehended as the antithesis of labor and capital, still remains an indifferent antithesis, not grasped in its active connection, with its internal relation-an antithesis not yet grasped as a contradiction.... But labor, the subjective essence of private property as exclusion of property, and capital, objective labor as exclusion of labor, constitute private property as its developed state of contradiction-hence a dynamic relationship moving to its resolution.42

Wilde encodes this dynamicin what he refers to somewhatvaguely as the law of life, or the evolution towardsindividualism.This evolution only makes sense with an understandingof some notion of untapped laborcapacitiesinherent in individualsbut unable fully to be expressed within capital logic. At one point, Wilde describes, for instance, "the latent and potentialin mankindgenerally" greatactualIndividualism (S, 24-25). And, later in the essay,he arguesthat "to askwhether Individualismis practicalis like askingwhether Evolutionis practical.Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolutionexcept towardsindividualism. CarolynLesjak 197

arrested Where this tendency is not expressed,it is a case of artificially growth, or of disease, or of death"(S, 49). Unalienated labor is to be found, then, in the realizationof the perfect personality:it is "Humanity[amusing]itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure-which, and not labour, is the aim of man-or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admirationand delight"(S, 33). (When Wilde refers to labor, he does so in reference to alienated capitalistlabor,or what he calls "necessaryand unpleasantwork" [S, 33].) Unalienated labor, in other words,is the joy of livinglabor,of a form of humanactivitydriven neither by compulsionnor necessity. fromthe necessityof unpleasant workand In orderto free individuals thus allowfor cultivatedleisure, the state is to deal with the necessity of unpleasantwork. The state is to be an associationthat organizeslabor and manufactures and distributescommodities.It is to be the province of use; its sole purpose to make what is useful. The individual,on the other hand, is to make what is beautiful. Given this vision of the state, Socialism stance, many have coupled with Wilde's anti-Authoritarian characterizedWilde'sviews as more properly anarchistthan socialist. Yet, the labeling of Wilde as an anarchistis really not accurate. To position him in the anarchist campis to lose the important waysin which his ideas are thoroughlypart of a socialisttradition,not only in terms of his analysisof privatepropertybut also in terms of his acknowledgment of the continued need for the state under socialism.Instead of doing awaywith the state altogether,he simply envisionsit transformedfrom an oppressive,authoritarian body into a voluntaryassociation.His brand of Individualism better thought of as a reaction againsta particular is form of state governmentwithin one strandof socialistthought, a view of the state tainted with ideas of authorityand compulsion. And as FredricJamesonconjecturesaboutour own historicalmoment in which images of centralizedplanningcarrywith them the stigmaof Stalinism and, with it, the loss of individualfreedoms,
a beginning might be made with those contemporary endorsements of socialism that attempt to formulate the great collective project in individualistic terms, as a vast social experiment calculated to elicit the development of individual energies and the excitement of a truly modern individualism-as a liberation of individuals by the collective and an exercise in new political possibilities, rather than some ominous social regression to the pre-individualistic and the repressively ar-

chaic.43

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It is just such energies that Wilde draws upon and works to develop when, time and time again throughout his prose and essays, he embraces change and the new. Given this, I think a good deal of the confusion surrounding Wilde's notion of Individualism arisesfrom his exemplaryuse of art as the most intense mode of Individualism world has known.Often the producthe tion of art and the ability of artists in the past to attain at least an realized Individualism" 24) is presented by Wilde as "imaginatively (S, almost entirelya solipsisticactivity.He speaksof the need for artiststo be left alone, unhinderedby concerns for their neighborsor the public, "An and unfetteredby the constraintsor dictatesof authority: individual who has to makethings for the use of others, and with referenceto their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him" (S, 34). It is this line of reasoningthat leads TerryEagleton, for instance,to argue that "though Wilde wishes, like Marx, to universalizeindividual self-development, it this will not for him be achieved throughmutuality.On the contrary, will be achieved by each individualleaving the other alone."44 But this perspective leaves out a crucial aspect of Wilde'sargumentin Soul of Man, namely the changed nature of society necessary for an actual, to ratherthan a merely imaginative(and hence limited), Individualism As be realized.45 Wilde arguesearly on in the essay,
Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and ensure the material well-being of each member of the community. It will, in fact, give Life its proper basis and its proper environment. (S, 20)

It is only after this conditionof Life, of public wealth and co-operation, can has been attainedthat Individualism trulydevelop:"But,for the full of Life to its highest mode of perfection, somethingmore development is needed. What is needed is Individualism" 20-21). (S, In this light, Wilde's protestations against authority,the people, public opinion, and so on look less like retreatsinto a new variationof than a spiritedrevolt againstcurrentconditions bourgeoisindividualism which make of these collectivitiesso many forces of social control. For cannot Wilde, as for Morris,the productionof the beautifulstructurally coexist with the institution of private property. As Wilde cautions throughoutThe Soul of Man UnderSocialism,ownershipalwayscomes that is false; with its costs: privatepropertyhas set up an Individualism CarolynLesjak
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one which misses the true pleasure and joy of living. In a rare moment in which Wilde positionsanythingin terms of morality, goes so far as he to declaredefinitivelythat "itis immoralto use privatepropertyin order to alleviatethe horribleevils that result from the institutionof private property"(S, 20). Thus, the nature of false individualism,and, conversely, the possibility for the flowering of a true individualism,is directly dependent on the mode of production.At the end of Soul of he Man, describingthe necessaryconditionsof the new Individualism, claims that "itwill be what the Greekssought for,but could not, except in Thought,realizecompletelybecause they had slaves,and fed them; it will be what the Renaissance sought for, but could not realize completely except in Art,because they had slavesand starvedthem"(S, 53). Takenas a whole, there is nothing reformistaboutWilde'ssocialism. While it may not be able to realize the heights of its own bravado,it holds no truckwith gradualistapproachesto change nor with claims to the contingencies of "practicality": what is a practicalscheme? A "For scheme is either a scheme that is alreadyin existence, or a practical scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions. But it is exactlythe existingconditionsthat one objects to; and any scheme that could accept existing conditions is wrong and foolish"(S, 48). Instead the socialismWilde espouses is inconceivablewithoutstructural change. or altruismas remedies which are part of Arguingagainstphilanthropy the disease they hope to cure, Wilde calls for a reorganization the of materialconditionsof society on a revolutionary scale:"Theproper aim is to try and reconstructsociety on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.And the altruisticvirtueshave reallypreventedthe carrying out of this aim"(S, 20). Perhaps then the most mystifyingaspect of Wilde's socialism still remainsthe idealist strokeswith which he paints his final picture of a world in which the new individualismhas been achieved-an achievement that seems at times almostself-propelled:"thenew Individualism, for whose service Socialism,whether it wills it or not, is working,will be perfect harmony"(S, 53). But lest this last rallyingcall be taken too much out of context, it is equally importantto remember that in the same essay Wilde also describes the very drive toward Utopia as endlessly generativeand never-ending:"whenHumanitylands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realizationof Utopias"(S, 34). Wilde's"newIndividualism" thus, finally, is best understoodas a "new hedonism" or a qualified utopianism.46On the one hand, it is a that of nor recognition neitherasceticrejections consumption productivist 200 Oscar Wilde and a New Economyof Pleasure

conceptions about work, technology, and efficiency are the answer. Positioning the utopian as the useful because useless, it counters prevailing Victorian valorizationsof use and utility and attempts to establisha radicallydifferent relationshipto the object-worldthan that offered by the commodity form. On the other hand, it is not simply pleasure for pleasure'ssake. Its erotics of consumption are fully premised on a relationshipamongproducersliberatedfrom the mediating moment of exchangevalue. Its pleasuresare simultaneously contingent, conditional,thoroughlyhistorical,local, complex, and everyday.It is a hedonismwhich not only containsthe preconditionsfor the pleasuresit servesas a balefulmarkerof providesa brief taste of, but simultaneously how far there is yet to go to make such social transformations possible. To the question of whether there is a link between pleasureand politics (the question with which we began), Wilde's collective individualism providesa qualified"yes,but"whose realizationhinges on philosophizing utopiaat home, in the everydayuse of the very objectsthat currently hold us in thrall.47 SwarthmoreCollege
NOTES 1 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (1955; Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), xxi. 2 Marcuse, xi. SMarcuse, xvii. 4 Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo (1940), trans. John Willett (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1994), 76. 5 For Morris's views on creative labor, see esp. his "Useful Work Versus Useless Toil" (1884) and "Art and Socialism," in Political Writings of William Morris, ed. A. L. Morton (New York: International Publishers, 1973). 6 Fredric Jameson makes this point in his essay on pleasure as a political issue, claiming that the thematizing of a particular 'pleasure' as a political issue ... must always involve a dual focus, in which the local issue is meaningful and desirable in and of itself, but is also at one and the same time taken as thefigure for Utopia in general, and for the systemic revolutionary transformation of society as a whole" (Jameson, "Pleasure: A Political Issue," in Formations of Pleasure [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983], 13). As I hope to show, Wilde adds to this view of pleasure by taking both sides of the equation equally seriously. Thus he not only addresses "politics" through his critique of the constitutive categories of modernity-reified notions of labor, "productive" [heterosexual] sexual relations, technological progress, nationalism and imperialism-but also provides the beginnings of a vocabulary of pleasure as pleasure, an area left largely unexplored by left intellectuals. 7 Wilde, "The Decorative Arts" (1882), in Kevin O'Brien, Oscar Wilde in Canada: An Apostle for the Arts (Toronto: Personal Library, 1982), 151-52. 8 Wilde, "The House Beautiful" (1882), in O'Brien, 172. 9 Wilde, "The House Beautiful," in O'Brien, 180.

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10 Michel de Certeau,The Practiceof EverydayLife, trans. Steven Rendall(Berkeley: Univ. of CaliforniaPress, 1984), 117. " De Certeau, 119. 12 De Certeau, 117. 13 Other approaches towardWilde have tended to take a couple of differentdirections. One is to see Wilde'spersonality (somewhatruefully)takingover his principles(as in the anotheris to conflatehis personality, his case of RichardEllmann); specifically homosexuCrafttend to do. See ality,with his principles(andhis prose)as criticssuch as Christopher RichardEllmann,Oscar Wilde (New York: VintageBooks, 1987), 194; and Christopher Desire in EnglishDiscourse,1850-1920 Craft,AnotherKind of Love:Male Homosexual (Berkeley:Univ. of California Press, 1994), 106-39. 14 In The Pictureof Dorian Gray, for instance, this will be expressedas "The artistis the creator of beautiful things"(Wilde, The Pictureof Dorian Gray [1891; New York: Penguin, 1985], 21; hereafter cited parentheticallyin the text by page number and abbreviatedD). Ellmannotes how the form of Dorian Gray promptsa new set of standards 15 Richard by which to read it. As he distinguishesits form, "Wildemade it elegantlycasual, as if writing a novel were a diversionratherthan a 'painfulduty' (as he characterizedHenry James'smanner)"(Ellman,314). 16 Eve KosofskySedgwick,Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley:Univ. of California Press, 1990), 175. 17 Theodor Adorno,"Subjectand Object"(1969), in The EssentialFrankfurtSchool Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1982), 499.

homosexualdesire in The Pictureof Dorian Gray that focuses on the sexual intensities of what is disembodied in the text, on "a current of desire whose subjectis finallynowhere, and thus everywhereat once" (320), see Jeffrey Nunokawa,"HomosexualDesire and the Effacement of Self in The Picture of Dorian Gray,"AmericanImago 49 (1992): 311-21. 20 Within such a multiform can modeling of the subject,Wilde understandably claim pieces of each of his characters:"BasilHallwardis what I think I am;Lord Henrywhat the worldthinksof me; Dorianwhat I wouldlike to be-in otherages,perhaps" 265). (D, 21 As Neil Bartlett mentions, Wilde's description of this den contributes to the emerging documentaryschool of writing. Middle-classjournalists,urban anthropologists, and working-classauthors at this time began exploring the down and out for sensationalstoriesand newspaperexpose Bartlettgoes on to note that in fact this same den had been describedbefore by at least two other writers-James Greenwoodin an expose of Tiger Bayfor the Daily Telegraphand RichardRowe in his book Foundin the Streets (1880). The point Bartlett wants to make about the structure of this kind of writing is that it alreadypresumes a great divide between the informantand his/her subject at the same time that it is troubling:"it creates a picture of an uneasy London, a city in which poverty,vice and violence have a constantpresence, in which they could at any moment cease to be simply scandals,reportsin the newspaper,and could erupt onto the streets" (Who Was That Man: A Presentfor Mr. Oscar Wilde [London: Serpent'sTale, 1988], 142-46). At the same time, Bartlett draws attention to the fact that in all this literature,with all its claims to the truth, no mention of homosexualsor homosexualculture appears,although, unquestionably,they and it existed, lived, and worked within the same trollinggroundsas the pimps and prostitutesbeing exposed.

18 Sedgwick, 176. 19 For a different reading of

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"2Karl Marx, Capital (1867), trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, 3 vols. (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 1:76. 23 Marx, Capital, 1:77. in Illuminations, trans. Harry 24 Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library" (1931), Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 60. 25 Benjamin, 67. 26 This is where one can really distinguish Wilde from Morris. While Morris grounds his vision of utopia in the historical present, he nonetheless envisions the overcoming of alienation as a reuniting of subject and object, of the producer with his or her product, of the individual and the community, of the subject with itself, in a condition of seamless identity. Morris's future is a return to a previous unity. It is precisely this that Wilde implicitly rejects. Wilde, in addition to never taking the almost hundred-year leap into the future, as Morris does in News from Nowhere, grounds his utopia instead in a principle of non-identity, and asks us to think of a world beyond alienation that is not dependent on a recovery of pleasures lost in the processes of capitalist production. Instead the serial and non-identical nature of Wilde's utopia emphatically embraces new pleasures. 27 For this example and numerous others, see Bartlett, 201-5. 28 Bartlett, 204. 29Bartlett, 227. 30 Wilde to R. Clegg, April 1891, quoted in Bartlett, 46. 31 Wilde, "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime," in Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd, 1954), 42. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number and abbreviated L. 32 Edward Said, "The World, the Text, and the Critic," in The World, The Text, and The Critic (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), 42. 33 Wilde, De Profundis and Other Writings (London: Penguin Books, 1986), 120. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number and abbreviated DP. 34 See Vyvyan Holland, "Introduction," in DP, 91-95. 35 Bartlett, 185-86. 36Wilde also claims at another point that "Like Gautier, I have always been one of

those pour qui le monde visible existe"(DP, 207).

37 See above, p. 181, where I explain this distinction in the context of Wilde's American tour talks as a revaluation of need as taste, and of use as luxury.
38

Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number and abbreviated S. 39 Quoted in Ellman, 121. with Brecht's aesthetic in this 40 See S, 29-32. Again, Wilde's sentiments share much regard. In his writings on epic theater, Brecht counters the idea that emotions can only be stirred by empathy and argues that emotions are historical and hence mutable: "The emotions always have a definite class basis; the form they take at any time is historical, restricted and limited in specific ways. The emotions are in no sense universally human and timeless." See Brecht on Theater, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 145. 41 Marx, Economicand Philosophic Manuscripts 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (New of York: International Publishers, 1964), 128. 42 Marx, Economicand PhilosophicManuscripts,132. 43 Jameson, "Actually Existing Marxism," in Marxism Beyond Marxism, ed. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca Karl (New York: Routledge, 1996), 32.

Wilde, The Soul of Man UnderSocialism,in De Profundisand Other Writings,52.

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GreatHunger:Studiesin Irish Culture(London: and 44 TerryEagleton,Heathcliff the Verso, 1995), 339. 45 JonathanDollimore also holds that Wilde's aesthetic is one of "toughmaterialism" and sees his notion of individualism having"lessto do with humanessence, Arnold's as inner condition,than a dynamicsocial potential, one which implies a radicalpossibility of freedom 'latentandpotentialin mankindgenerally"' ("DifferentDesires: Subjectivity in and Transgression Wilde and Gide,"Genders2 [July1988]: 27). comes from Kate Soper'sworkon pleasureand the 46 This notion of a "newhedonism" models of the utopian.She arguesfor challenge it offers to currentfeministand Marxist a utopianismthat "needsto trouble some of the blanderimagesof pleasureand in doing so associate an anti-capitalist and egalitarianpolitics with more complex affective and moral understandings" (Soper, TroubledPleasures:Writings on Politics, Gender and Hedonism [London:Verso, 1990], 14). 47 Fredric Jamesonargues that Bloch's work on the utopian is premised on the idea that "realphilosophizing begins at home ... in lived experienceitself and in its smallest and Form [Princeton:PrincetonUniv. details, in the body and its sensations"(Marxism Press, 1971], 122).

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