assume such characterization as a means of providing dramatic unity to an
experience. Commodities become directors to and of character and are committed
to the goal of self-transformation as part of a more general mimetic model of
culture based on the prevalence of media, using example rather than discipline and
imitation rather than coercion; ‘the paradigmatic body of our societies is no longer
the mute body moulded by discipline, but rather it is the bodies and souls marked
by the signs, words and images (company logos) that are inscribed in us’
(Lazzarato 2005a: 8).
Rightness as an aesthetic
And so to the final model of value, a model which I want to approach through
the figure of Wallace Stevens. By all accounts, Wallace Stevens (18 7 9–1955) was
a man who enjoyed life. He was a lawyer, admitted to the New York bar in 190 4 ,
who worked in New York until 1916. In that year he left New York and moved
to Hartford, Connecticut to join the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company,
where he worked in its fidelity and surety claims department. He became a Vice-
President of the company in 193 4 but refused all advancement after that date. He
was proud of his work and was seemingly very good at it. He even published a
couple of short papers on insurance.
Stevens was also undoubtedly one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets. By
most counts, a late bloomer – he was 36 before he published his first work, did
not publish his first book until 1923, and is widely regarded as having written
some of his finest work in his sixties and seventies – Stevens is now judged by many
writers to be the quintessential modernist poet.
One of Stevens’s key tasks was to resonate with the moments of sudden rightness
in an ultimately bewildering world, those moments of everyday life when ‘mere’
things seem to light up, seem to become ‘precious portents of our powers’ (Stevens
1960: 1 74 ):
The dark metaphysical activity of the poet is described in musical terms, where
rightness would be a kind of harmony between mind and world. In this sense,
our being-in-the-world would be experienced as emotional attunement, which
is one rendering of Heidegger’s Stimmung, which is otherwise rather flatly
rendered as ‘mood’. Metaphysics in the dark is a kind of music where rightness
means sounding right.
(Critchley 2005: 39)Such a determined pursuit of rightness can be interpreted as presaging one
aspect of the new model of efficacy, one with many forebears, of course, but one
which heralds a different kind of belief in the causationof the object. If the word
‘belief’ has a quasi-religious tone, that is as it should be, for this form of efficacy,
a ‘metaphysics in the dark’ (Critchley 2005), consists of enlarging the powers
of objects through a series of procedures and technologies for building their
52 Part I