Stories that begin with the claim to be the story of all stories, the summation of affairs as they stand in a given place and time, benefit from the force of unity without having to do much other than have their narratives set within an absolute final condition which, seemingly on its own, takes on a suggestive power of inevitability.

Yet if this inevitability is a forced conclusion, it’s one stemming from a universalized desire for expiation, a desire to have life breathed into matter, to have matter entered into circuits of exchange. With Bergson’s formulation, expiation can be thought of as a kind of unloading in which memories of past privations are transformed into images which, taken in aggregate, incline toward matter whose relinquishment in thought and substance makes possible its redemption as capital. Matter here is presented as an aggregate of planes, insubstantial limitations of solids, such that matter is held to have not any actual existence.

Yet what must be implied here is a kind of fatalist rationale in which any notion that things could have turned out differently with respect to the privation itself is dismissed as denial. Such reasoning functions paradoxically – not only does it find confirmation in its precision of occurrence after the fact, we see it as nonetheless imparting a necessary vitality in that it supplies to the narrative an otherwise missing tension. Not to say nothing of the nature of the capital, since something should be said. Whose hand is doing the aggregating seems an important question insofar as it is the aggregate of labor that is being defined as capital. Who is to undergo the privation that is to be relinquished, in which the work of relinquishing keeps the privation in place though it ceases to function as a referential support? It seems that lack of critical engagement with respect to questions such as these is how there comes to be the kind of mass forgetting that Hannah Arendt saw as giving rise to totalitarianism, to say nothing of unfounded claims to entitlement premised on grievances that never happened to you but to somebody else (D. Haase 1993 in Tatar, ed. 2017). In the words of Dylan, “You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you.”

On the other hand, to say ‘certain stories are a narrative of beginnings among others’ is to expose the discourse contained within them to contradictions, to bring about their fall, to bring about a degradation of language into loose talk. Or so goes the claim, one that is attended by an anxiety over the possibility of an ever-worsening condition of ephemerality of the past into oblivion, of a condition now or in the future that replicates or repeats what did happen, ending in what Kant stated with indifference, “the annihilation of all existing things.”

Given the choice however, one sides with generosity, as Bachelard seems to have done in his diagnosis of the fear of a worsening condition as at bottom merely an error of perception:

…Nothing justifies this substantial persistence of fire in coloring matter, but the substantialist thought can be seen at work: that which has received fire must remain burning, and hence corrosive (1938, 1968, p. 60).

In other words, the persistence of memory gets in the way of imagining discontinuity, such that objectively false ideas continue to be linked with rapid fire certainty, yet Bachelard further maintains that objective truth or falsehood would in any case be accidental to the underlying, unconscious values underwriting “the persistence of certain explanatory principles. By a gentle form of torture, psychoanalysis must make the scientist confess unavowable motives” (60).

The author in his thin volume kept his focus narrowed to historical accounts of theories of combustion, which seem to be more accessible to refinement than are fictional accounts of how things work. In the latter case, the narrative often is entangled with similar unconscious bias. Melville’s story of Bartleby is one example. The discomfiture the narrator undergoes in the presence of this puzzling figure hinges on an apparent assumption that, insofar as the individual has more or less capacity for private wealth accumulation, the collective capacity for private wealth accumulation is ultimately destructive to the being of the Other. The narrative works as long as this assumption is unexamined. Perhaps it goes without say. Yet for this to happen everyone would have to be purely selfish, and it’s hard to maintain that anyone is purely anything. Rather such reasoning seems useful in its justification of a necessary conservatism to prevent ‘liquidation’ of stored energy, another suspect claim premised on lack, or the specter of lack, which strangely enough seems to be more prevalent where there is private wealth.

The conclusion isn’t inevitable, of course. The state of puzzlement as to what’s handed down could as well be one characteristic of the kind of light bright enough to tell a tale yet dark enough to keep me from seeing myself fully, i.e. the time of invention. After Weber, times of innovation often are met with indirection. There are capital and monetary supplies as means by which the capitalist spirit works itself out if it is able, as well as what Weber described as “mysterious shady spots,” presumably those in which the capitalist spirit is not permitted to work itself out, at least not in any straightforward way. According to Weber, if you want to know about the change in direction of the economic forces behind capitalist forms of exchange, look not to the origin of the capital sums made available for use, but to the motive forces at play in developing the capitalist spirit.

What that is could be expiation countenanced more directly as ‘up for grabs’ – as much a likelihood of upward and outward recognition of human labor and creativity on the open market as a downward motion that seeks to extort private human frailties.

Thus the stranger who blows into town, whether Abraham Zogoiby or Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, may see the absolute final condition as having to do with that which has not been reckoned with and distributed among human frailties. He may recognize this privation as one having the power to lift if universalized and distributed over a generalized space. Yet insofar as his is a zero sum game, ‘expiation’ looks more like exploitation in which the stranger exacts a material redemption of his own at the expense of everyone else, a choice that mirrors a certain type of mental conditioning. But even then, insofar as these narratives point up obsolescence as a weakness that can be capitalized on, these are nonetheless representations of what a repressive means of wealth production looks like, manuals of style rather than instruction. The obsolete, the irrelevant, these are capitalized on not only because they can be but more broadly because it is pleasurable to see “redeemed” that which falls outside of use value and this is what makes the exploitation more thrillingly true than empathy or forgiveness which continues to deny the objective reality of all that is … such that to refuse to believe in the materiality of what is given is similar to insisting on the materiality of what is given, an absurdity that the authors themselves exploit to our delight.

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