Oblomov Machines. Making Imagination Work in 19th Century Economic and Literary Discourses. In: For what it’s worth. Challenging and negotiating value in literature and in economic theory. Mannheim, 03.06.2017. (original) (raw)

Opening up new perspectives and pathways, imagination and intellectual capacity play an important role in economic processes and are decisive for their future viability. Understood as a factor of economic growth, imagination is relevant to a cognitive-cultural understanding of capitalism and its related formulas like Human Capital and the Attention Economy. From a slightly different perspective and in different scope, though, treatises on intellectual capacities can also be found in 19th Century’s texts on the economy, as for example in “The Economy of Human Societies and Finance [Die Oekonomie der menschlichen Gesellschaften und das Finanzwesen]” (Stuttgart 1845) by Georg Cancrin, former Finance Minister of the Russian Empire. In my presentation, I would like to focus on the economic and cultural relevance of imagination and intellectual capacity and their textual representations. In his canonical novel “Oblomov” (1859), Ivan Gončarov presents the main protagonist of his text, Il’ja Il’ič Oblomov, as the epitome of Russian economic and social backwardness. Although characteristically more complex and likeable than his counterpart, Andrej Ivanič Stol’c, Oblomov is unable to adopt the economic techniques his half Russian, half German friend is capable of. Instead of working on the economic recovery of his noble estate, most of the time Oblomov spends lying on the sofa and watching his housekeeper Agaf’ja Matveenva Pšenicyna doing the housework. With its contrast between the ever-static and over-sized Oblomov and the dynamic but rather mechanic Stol’c, Gončarov’s novel discusses the peculiarity of economic practices in relation to their cultural embeddedness and textual representability. The successful endeavors of Stol’c, however, are seldom presented in detail as if economic prosperity and perspicacity could not be depicted adequately. Instead, Oblomov’s economic powerlessness produces dizzy-making images of an idyllic and anachronistic oikonomia. Against the grain of most commentators who focus on the inter-cultural differences postulated in the novel concerning economic practices and their valuation, I would like to stress a striking analogy on the meta-literary level between literary and economic writings concerning imagination and intellectual procedures. Those literary questions of economic representability and imagination show many analogies with the discussion of intellectual capacity in Cancrin’s “The Economy of Human Societies and Finance”. Irrespective of some generic differences, both literature and theory deal with the interweaving of economic and mental processes. In both cases, processes of economic and cultural valorization are related to imagination and intellectuality.