When
Charles Lamb, a scholarship boy at Christ’s Hospital, was fifteen, one of his
patrons, Thomas Coventry, had a discussion with a City merchant, Joseph Paice,
concerning the boy. According to Lucas’s biography of Lamb, Coventry, a bearish
plutocrat of the pure 18th century type, said to Price, ““There is a lad that I
placed some years since in the Blue Coat school, now on the point of leaving
it, and I know not what on earth to do with him.” “Let him have the run of the
counting house till something better offers,” said Mr. Paice.” (71)
The conversation of such men was like unto the grinding mechanism of fate, and
they shaped Charles Lamb’s entire professional life from that moment on. Or
rather, they shaped one of the outstanding facts about Lamb: he made his money
as a clerk. He was first with Mr. Paice at the South Sea House, and then went
into the accounting department at India House.
Lamb is one of the exemplary clerks of literature. He wrote about it; he lived
it; he chafed within it, he knew the chair, desk, and great books where the
figures flowed down the page, representing empire and time. He worked in the
ruins of one colonial venture – the South Sea House – and in the midst of the
short flourishing of another – the India House – during a period in which the
merchant class was in need of the science of political economics and was
getting it from the likes of James Mill (India House) and David Ricardo
(merchant/speculator). In fact, the India House and its successor, the India
Colonial office, was a site associated with some of the great Victorian
intellectual families – the Mills, the Stephens, the Stracheys. Under its wing,
Macaulay sortied out to India and laid the foundation for the application of
utilitarianism to law, a work completed by James Fitzjames Stephen.
In a footnote to H.W. Boot’s informative article, Real incomes of the British
middle
class, 1760-1850: the experience of clerks at the East India Company (1999),
Boot defines the term clerk like this:
“… it conjures up Dickensian images of oppressed men on meagre incomes
struggling to
maintain respectability. In fact 'clerk' was a common appellation applied to a
large group of occupations ranging from the poorest menial clerk who never
earned more than 100 pounds per annum to men who carried the highest
administrative and financial responsibilities in government, commerce,and
finance. “
Lamb’s first Elia essay is a portrait of the clerks of South Sea house. The
characters are, evidently, composites, but the survey of this “Noah’s ark’ of
‘odd fishes’ catches the monumental ritual and economic importance of the desk
and the counter, which become symbolic centers of the life story. What the bed
is to the libertine, the desk is to the clerk. In each of his profiles, Lamb
divides the life into out of office information hobbies (and eating), and in
the office propinquities (and eating). As in Bartleby, one notices the strong
place of food in the office. Food not only provides the energy for labor power
– it provides a sensual outlet to another world, one that is not chained to the
desk. In the same way, the hobbies are rather like the larger shadow the clerk
casts as he makes his way out into the candlelit hours of his free time. “John
Tipp”, for instance, is an amateur musician, and has a life as one, with other
amateur musicians. But he also has another life: “But at his desk Tipp was
quite another sort of creature. Thence all ideas, that were purely ornamental,
were banished. You could not speak of anything romantic without rebuke.
Politics were excluded. A newspaper was thought too refined and abstracted.”
The major portion of Lamb’s time as a clerk was spent at the India House. He
was received there on April 5, 1792, in the accounting department. At that
time, according to Boot, the India House was one of the biggest employers in
London, paying 1,730 persons to keep the books, supervise the docks, guard the
sheds, etc. In Lamb’s case, he gave a five hundred pound bond and agreed to
work there for three years on probation, at the end of which he was to receive
a salary, which began at 40 pounds and rose, the next year, to 70. He spent
exactly thirty three years there, and was released early, with a handsome
retirement, no doubt due to his writing and his celebrity. In one of the great
Elia essays, The Superannuated Man, he describes the event of his retirement in
terms of time. As a clerk, he had Sundays off: “but Sundays, admirable as the
institution of them is for purposes of worship, are for that very
reason the very worst adapted for days of unbending and recreation. In
particular, there is a gloom for me attendant upon a city Sunday, a weight in
the air. I miss the cheerful cries of London, the music, and the
ballad-singers—the buzz and stirring murmur of the streets.”
He also had vacation: “But besides Sundays I had a day at Easter, and a day at
Christmas,with a full week in the summer
to go and air myself in my native fields of Hertfordshire.”
From his letters, one finds that Lamb had more free time than that – but as a
composite portrait of the clerk’s life, this is representative.
After his retirement, Lamb describes the experience of freedom – freedom that
is not political, but existential: “I was in the condition of a prisoner in the
old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty years' confinement. I could
scarce trust myself with myself. It was like passing out of Time into
Eternity—for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have his Time all to
himself. It seemed to me that I had more time on my hands than I could ever
manage. From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast
revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or
judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me.”
Let me depart from Lamb here, and bring into the picture Karl Marx’s writing
about the agent of circulation, which has given rise to a lot of controversy
among Marxist economists. On the one hand, in Capital II and III, Marx develops
his notion of ‘unproductive labor’, by which he simply means those activities
that are defined in terms of the circulation of the commodity, bought from the
producer, and put on the market to be bought either by a consumer or another
merchant or refiner. Marx also throws into the definition of unproductive labor
those things appertaining to surveillance, management, etc. There has been a
lot of controversy because the principles of the definition of unproductive
labor, in Capital, are slightly at variance with the principles laid down in
the Manuscript on Surplus Value from the 1860s. I myself think that the
division between unproductive and productive labor is confused by taking the
static view of it – in the course of time, an unproductive branch of labor can
generate a producing infrastructure, while productive labor in some branch can,
of course, become extinct, due to its being made obsolete by technology.
However, the reflections on commercial capital and money –
Warenhandlungskapital and Handlunggeld – are decisive, and sociologically apt.
This segment can be treated as an independent unit in the collective system of
circulation. Looked at in terms of social phenomenology, Marx makes this Hermes
place – the place of pure metamorphoses in which what happens is, in a sense,
that nothing happens. When the producer realizes his surplus value by selling
to the middleman, from the proceeds of which he again purchases labor power and
material to continue producing, the middleman, the Tiresias of capitalism, has
only begun. He has expended his capital, either borrowed or taken from his
stock, to buy products wholly for resale. There is evidently no magic in this,
and yet, like the producer, in the ideal case, the successful merchant realizes
a profit. While the merchant’s employees are exploited just as the factory
hands are, the merchant’s employees do not create the kind of surplus value that comprises productive
capital. And although they may be formally exploited just as the worker is,
there is a sociological difference that does drive a real divide between them.
About this, there is much to say. But for the moment, notice that for Marx,
this commercial segment is subordinate to the true producers, the
manufacturers. If the commercial segment becomes too important, accrues too
much economic power, the manufacturer can, theoretically, erase the middleman
and encroach into the merchant’s territory.
In fact, though, the dream of getting rid of unproductive labor – dreamt most
recently by the advocates of the New Economy who projected that the computer
maker would simply sell the computer on the internet, the automaker would sell
the auto on the internet, etc., etc. in a happy deflationary spiral satisfying
both customer and producer – does not happen.
Instead, as many Marxist economists (Sweezy, Moseley, Wollf) have pointed out,
on many dimensions the composition of developed capitalist economies shows that
unproductive labor – both in terms of surveillance work and in terms of
circulation – becomes increasingly important in developed capitalist economies
on several dimensions: for instance, in the number of people employed in
unproductive labor and the amount of the investment of the GDP in unproductive
branches of economic activity. In 1987, Edward Wollf estimated that as much as
40 percent of employees were unproductive laborers.
The peculiar sociological characteristics of this segment impress themselves
upon the dynamic of this segment – for it is from this segment that most
knowledge work, most representational work, has branched out.
It is here that the economic rationality of the classical type – homo
oeconomicus – emerged, and plausibly describes the kind of strategies that make
up the landscape of commercial metamorphoses. At the same time, it is here,
too, that the alienation from the time of one’s life has found expression in
the aesthetic sphere – in fact, thematically dominates the aesthetic sphere.
This is important in as much as the population of the aesthetic, or cultural
industries – driven originally by the necessity of closing the discontinuities
that can arise in this segment of circulation when demand lacks or there is an
oversupply of goods – overlaps the population that sits at the desks of the
counting houses. The media that they have produced is the semiosphere in which
all are now bathed, worker, housewife and clerk.
