Name: Batya Ungar-Sargon

Title: The Ontological Materialism of the Novel

Abstract: In this paper I question the nature of the imagination and its place in the reception of the early novels and the logic of commodities. I argue that the early novels constructed fiction as a kind of submission to the logic of fantasy that rendered explicit and thus precluded the logic of commodification of which Adam Smith is usually argued to be the father. I argue that not only is this logic whereby exchange value is the metaphor of use value not possible in the encounter with the novel as art object, but that objects in general in the eighteenth century were regarded as always being a moment of play between aesthetic, exchange and use values. The logic of fantasy that binds the subject to the object of her desire essentially objectifies the subject to herself, and the aesthetic is this process made visible. Imaginary capture is thus the precondition of the aesthetic and the political simultaneously. This reading of the early novels follows the work of John Guillory in its questioning of the accepted logic of consumer culture by reading both Smith and Kant as having nuanced versions of the relation between the aesthetic and the political. I take this argument one step further by interrogating the prefaces to the early novels for the kind of imagination they were imagining their readers to have, and how that imagination was a place of both freedom and submission. The secret of these novels and I would argue the fictional more generally could thus be stated as follows: if the signifier is aesthetic, the signified is political. I call this assessment of the art object ontological materialism because I am suggesting a signified that is non-transcendental as the most political position of all.