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MARX ET CO REVISITED. REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ECONOMY IN RALF ANDTBACKA’S WUNDERKAMMER (2008)

The present article studies the representation of economy in Wunderkammer (2008), a collection of poetry by Finland-Swedish author Ralf Andtbacka. Going back to the historical form of cabinets of curiosities, Wunderkammer depicts acts of buying, selling, and collecting. By showing the connectivity of objects and their impact on human subjects, Andtbacka actualizes and deconstructs topics originally initiated by Karl Marx, such as value, fetish, commodifica-tion, and alienation. The portrayal of capitalism, both past and pres-ent, in the book is highly ambivalent. On the one hand, collecting functions as a critical, anticapitalistic act. On the other hand, eco-nomic discourse has invaded the text and turned the author into a writing machine powered by the energy of neoliberal labor. Besides an excess of objects, the poems display an overflow of information, a characteristic feature of a postcapitalist economy. As an exam-ple of cognitive mapping, Wunderkammer allegorically portrays humans, objects, and information in the middle of a paradoxical economic transformation.

These words in old English introduce an order of "Any thing that Is strang" that an anonymous writer wishes the merchants and captains to bring back from their journey. Then follows a long list of various things: exotic animals, plants, and stones, elephant heads, fish, and seeds. We meet an individual who desires rare objects from abroad, can afford them, and has connections to people who can fulfill these expectations. The reader encounters this letter on the second page of Wunderkammer, Finland-Swedish author Ralf Andtbacka's fifth collection of poetry.
Wunderkammer depicts collecting and is, in and of itself, a huge collection. The poems included in the book consist of lists of various kinds: of literary representations of collections of objects, depictions of the psyche of the collector, and the many possible ways of organizing a collection. Julia Tidigs has aptly described it as "encyclopedic," because of its "expansive net of motifs ranging from the collection of names and objects to the relationship between poem and reader." 2 Interestingly, many of the poems are about buying and selling and use economic language with direct and indirect references to money, capital, fetishes, and reification. An economic discussion also takes place on a meta-level as the book describes the passion of owning, the prices of objects, and the logics of commerce. In addition, the poems that consist of catalogues of things relate to colonialism and consumerism. Between the lines, the book tells a story of the economic development of the Western world and is a partly humorous, partly critical depiction of how capitalism transforms humans, things, language, and literature. Thus, the initial order of strange things immediately introduces us to (one of) the central topics and contexts of this experimental collection of poetry-namely, buying and selling, consumption, capitalism, and colonialism. In short: it begins with a presentation of the historical background of the present economic system and situation.
In this article, I examine some of the ways in which Wunderkammer discusses money and forms of production as they pertain to capitalism. When studied in terms of economic discourse-such as value, the relation between subject and object, forms of labor, and knowledge-the book reveals several topics of interest. I have discussed these themes in previous work and will begin by presenting my findings so far. 3 Later, however, I have noticed that when writing about economy and contemporary literature, my colleagues and I operate with a rather automatic critical attitude towards the neoliberal market economy. In our articles, we frequently describe late capitalism in terms of alienation and commodification of all aspects of human life. 4 Such an all-inclusive frame of interpretation makes one feel that a re-evaluation is necessary-after all, a questioning of (one´s own) automatized thinking is one of the more important scholarly tasks. 5 Therefore, I will develop my earlier work further by referring to two recent re-evaluations of capitalism: one that looks at markets and money in terms of connectivity rather than disintegration, and second, a presumed postcapitalism put forward by information technology. Taking his point of departure in a Latourian view on money as a non-human actor in human societies, Martijn Konings emphasizes the role of money and economy in "the expansion of network connections and the constitution of these new alliances as part of objective social facts." 6 His perspective relates to the emotional and relational dynamics of everyday economic activity.
Konings sees the influence of Karl Polanyi's critique of capitalism as important for the current views within social sciences and criticizes contemporary progressive thought for being incapable to grasp the affective life of economy. 7 The Polanyian thought includes a depiction of economy as a corrosive, fragmentational force. 8 Therefore, we "deny money's iconic characteristics, its pragmatic origins and complex connectedness." 9 Paul Mason, for his part, strives to replace neoliberalism by sketching a (utopian) economic model for the information age. According to Mason, the technological development has come to a point where current capitalism is no longer able to adapt to the changes that have taken place. His major argument is that due to the rise of new technologies, information now has a spontaneous tendency to dissolve markets, destroy ownership and break down the relation between work and wages. In short: the old factors of productionland, labor, and capital-have become secondary to information. 10 Approaching the topic from two different directions, both Konings and Mason offer novel perspectives on the characteristic features of capitalism, its current state, and its impact on human societies.
What I find important is that they put forward alternatives to the all-inclusive frame of the disembedding effects of late capitalism. The first signal of the book's relation to the development of capitalism comes already in the title. In a passage entitled "Wunderkammer" at the end of the book, one reads that collections of rare, exotic objects became popular in Europe during the sixteenth century. 11 The collections were, according to the author, ways of structuring the world, and products of the expansion of knowledge due to the great journeys of exploration.
Andtbacka repeatedly exposes the book's relation to a historical tradition. The cabinets of curiosities, also called Kunstkammer or Wunderkammer, were collections of objects from various parts of the world, manmade as well as found objects, often valuable and rare pieces. They were rooms or cabinets filled with objects that the collector had gathered according to a special logic, the principle of pertinence. 12 The objects ordered from the merchants of Ginne Company would thus be perfectly suitable for a cabinet of curiosities. According to Horst Bredekamp, who has studied cabinets of curiosities from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Kunstkammer demonstrated their owner's wish to understand "the earth in its horizontal, spatial entirety." 13 As such, they were products of people's expanding knowledge of the world, of colonialism and global commerce.
The existence of cabinets of curiosities in the past, as well as in the present, emphasizes the global circulation of knowledge, objects, images, and ways of thought. Already during the era between 1400 and 1800, called by historians "the first global age," a wide range of goods circulated across continents and global markets, the merchants of the Ginne Company being but one example of this international trade. 14 Thus, the cabinets of curiosities might be apprehended as a form of "cognitive mapping," the term used by Fredric Jameson to describe "the self-conscious attempt by individual and collective subjects to represent and to situate themselves in relation to an unrepresentable social

VALUE, FUNCTIONALITY AND THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED
Value and transactions of various kinds are the topics that Wunderkammer frequently discusses. They have, of course, an obvious connection to the economy and economic discourse.
The collection of poetry includes some ironic allusions even to literary value, but above all, it is concerned with economic value.
Wunderkammer is a book that is characterized by excess. It "There is something special about the things." Repeatedly, the objects collected in Wunderkammer become fetishes, objects with nearly magic properties that take command over the collector.
The absurd, odd character of the things listed in "Ting" soon strikes the reader. First, instead of picking out only a couple of the most valuable things, the poem depicts an excess of objects.
Second, although the project of this cabinet of curiosities is similar to that of its predecessor, namely, to map the entire globe by collecting things, here the global space is full of nonfunctional objects, old, useless or unusual things. The several hundred years of development of capitalism, consumerism, and global commerce has resulted in a world that has become a junk space. 19 The objects depicted have one thing in common: their value, or rather, the opposite of it, as they are worthless. The collection consists of worn out parts of machines, or useless parts of nature; unknown objects, without any use value; and, finally objects that do not really exist, which can then be used for nothing. The objects listed are either useless, nonfunctional or impossible to own. During the Renaissance in Italy, cabinets of curiosities were single rooms, extravagant, fanciful spaces displaying the rare and unusual artifacts that belonged to elites. 20 Hence, "Ting" provides an ironic response to traditional cabinets of curiosities, as the objects in it are anything but the best of their kind. "Ting" can also be scrutinized in relation to the development of economies in general. While the production of use value reigned in traditional and pre-modern societies, a striving for surplus value through the exploitation of labor dominates the production of things within capitalism. In the light of consumer capitalism, to collect used, unwanted, superfluous things might be an alternative, even ironic or revolutionary act. What's more, the things listed have one common feature: they exist outside value as it was defined by Marx. They have no use value or exchange value anymore, nor do they relate to value understood as the abstract labor time needed to produce a commodity. Once, some of the things listed were commodities, but no longer. Furthermore, the objects miraculously obtain new value, as collection value Another consequence of the capitalist mode of production is that of amnesia, put forward in "Brändöelegierna": "All relations in a late capitalist society transform into, / yes, what they transform into, is hard to remember: / on the desk a candle snuffer, a paper knife, a tape punch. / We eat them like fair trade fruits." 37 I have already discussed this passage earlier as a self-reflexive analysis of the present state of late capitalism: the commodification process has reached its uttermost phase resulting in a total amnesia when it comes to the relation between subjects and objects. Here, Andtbacka also playfully parodies the analyses and discourse of Marxist scholars on current capitalism. 38 Konings argues that processes of "forgetting" are not necessarily signs of fetishism. Forgetting might also endorse an intimate familiarity-certain things are so familiar that we are not able to see them. Therefore, it bears witness of our ability to grasp a complex network of connections as a coherent unity. 39 Again, Andtbacka turns to paradox. The relation between the objects on the table and the observer is absurd and impossibleyou cannot eat objects such as paper knives; nevertheless, you are made aware of ethical production as a demand on the late modern consumer. The depiction shows that "we" have indeed forgotten how to use the things described. In addition, the next verse of this elegy urges us to forget still more. The narrator advices us to overlook "that tone" and "that thing," and to think of other ones, which desire nothing from us. 40 Disremembering is thus both a consequence of fetishism, and an act, which serves as a way to cope in the late capitalist society.
In the poem "Naturalia & artificialia," the happy end is the complete merging of objects and their owners. Konings questions the traditional critique of capitalism for its negative views of economy and money, especially its externalizing and disembedding effects. In Marxist theory, these concerns are expressed in the concepts of commodity fetishism and reification. 41 Konings asserts the opposite, money's inherent connectivity, its ability to create relations, constitutive associations and attachments. 42 Wunderkammer in its turn represents yet another viewpoint: it clearly shows that capitalism and its effects on human beings, objects, language, and societies, are not neither-nor, but both-and. Transactions certainly create connectivity, as Andtbacka's poems show, for example in the encounter of the seller and the buyer of the cigar box, and in the complete merging of subject and object. They, however, also bring about destruction and death, paradoxical situations without solution, disappearance of individual subjects and human beings, even violence.
Overall, Wunderkammer scrutinizes the ways in which economic discourse creates subjectivity, and the kinds of subjectivity it produces. The subject, the "I" speaking, is similar to objects and things: produced for certain purposes, in similar kinds of processes and production lines. Thus, the utilitarian, instrumentally rational individual of modernization has been replaced, at least partly, by an associative conception of the self. 43

FORMS OF LABOR
The word "Wunderkammer" occurs in Andtbacka's book several times and has a number of meanings. One of the poems entitled "Wunderkammer" depicts various forms of production and is therefore of relevance here. In this poem, the author states at the beginning: "EVEN I get at times the question / what it is that makes me write. / Let me explain". 44 The writer/narrator in the poem then starts to describe the view from his workroom desk to a gym in another part of the old factory building where he works.
What he sees is strange: he has a partial view of people doing their exercises at various apparatuses; what he sees are legs running on running carpets, using exercise bikes, training the inner thigh muscles in what resembles a gynecological examination tableall this is described as a "concert of anonymous movement." 45 He then describes how the power produced by gym exercisers is connected to various kinds of cables, both old-fashioned and new, which force their way through the walls of the building and continue all the way through the earth's crust to the earth's core.
There, they make a U-turn, making their way up to his part of the factory, through the corridor on the third level, and opening up a door that has the text "Wunderkammer" written on it with white letters against a black background. Having forced their way into the room, the cables sneak up to the author, who sits at a table facing his computer, and connect to his brain. "Approximately like this is how I imagine it all to be," he closes the poem. Creative work is often seen as a privileged site of aesthetics and as inherently different from other modes of production. Here, on the contrary, the physical labor has been replaced by creative work, signaling a major shift towards economy centred on creativity and authorship.
The factory represents the industrial history of capitalism, while the office where the author sits with his computer constitutes the key place of production in the twenty-first century. His writing however is not the product of creative inspiration, but the result of the muscle energy produced by the people at the gym. The author becomes part of an assemblage of human-machine-energy, transformed this way into a machine for production of text. He rents an office in a former factory; he is an intellectual worker producing a text with aesthetic and critical content. When the book is finished, it becomes a product offered on the market-a commodity to be bought and consumed.

KNOWLEDGE AND INFORMATION INTRODUCING NEW FORMS OF WORK AND ECONOMY
The book not only introduces its reader to endless lists of objects, it also presents an abundance of data which has consequences for the kind of economy depicted in Wunderkammer, that of selling The significance of information in Andtbacka's book also leads us back to the beginning of this article, to "To the Marchants of Ginne Company." At the end of Wunderkammer, a note states that the letter cited on page 2 is from John Tradescant the elder to "the secretary of the admiralty" Edward Nicolas, dated July 31, 1625.
Despite the fact that the reference is incorrect, (the letter is on page 6, not on page 2 as the note states), it is obvious that the note refers to the letter at the beginning. On the one hand, the book consists of information collected from various sources on the internet and contributes to our understanding of a new form of creative production. As such, it is both a portrayal of and a product of the new info-capitalism. On the other hand, much of the information is hard to understand and difficult to grasp as parts of a meaningful whole. Overall, the facts and data obtained are as abundant, fragmented and contradictory as information found on the internet. The latter is cut off from original context and lumped together according to an "irrational" logic. Therefore, much of the data collected can no longer count as 'information': facts provided by learning about something or someone. By performing a search in a search engine however, we finally learn about John Tradescant the elder, an English botanist and gardener, who at the beginning of the 17th century travelled widely collecting plants and seeds for the gardens of his employers, noble persons.
He was a collector of first rank. 54 Thus, the citation that, at first sight, appears as an enigmatic piece of data, turns out to have its own, logical place in the book.
At the end of the book, the author explains that cabinets of curiosities were ways to represent a macrocosm through a miniature cosmos, and the collections strove to combine magic, knowledge, and aesthetics. 55 The tradition of cabinets of curiosities has been interpreted as an attempt to make sense of the world at a time when the amount of knowledge was fast expanding.
We now face a phase in human history with even more radical and faster expansion of knowledge. The excessiveness of Andtbacka's book is then not only a result of its working method-that of collecting, but also a characteristic feature of the accelerating growth of information technologies.

TO CONCLUDE
"There is a growing body of evidence that information technology, far from creating a new and stable form of capitalism, is dissolving it […]. The first people to say this were an awkward squad of philosophers, management gurus and lawyers," Paul Mason states. 56 And, I would like to add, a number of authors, among them the Finland-Swedish author Ralf Andtbacka.
In Wunderkammer, several developments connected to work, writing, economy, and capitalism take place. First, an author is transformed from a creator into a collector. This opens up an opportunity for a play with various forms of value: surplus value, collector value, use value, market value, and aesthetic value. The value of objects such as litter, useless and worthless things, is utterly reversed, as worthless things miraculously turn into very valuable rare items. This involves also the depiction of the magic power of things over collectors, the ability of objects to turn into subjects with the authority to change the behavior of human subjects. The boundary between litter and fetish disappears, and so does the distinction between subject and object. Objects are actors that connect people and places in the massive global networks created by capitalism and colonialism. They float in from all over the world and come together in excessive piles on a flea market close to you. In this way, Wunderkammer depicts a global junk space that is the outcome of several hundred years of production and market economy. As such, it shows the impact of capitalism on our surroundings and on our view of ourselves, offering in that sense a return of the repressed side of the capitalist mode of production.
It questions not only value, but also rationality.
On another level, the collection uses and parodies the language of capitalism as it uses words and phrases from the market and transforms the views and discourses of economic thinkers such as Karl Marx. Besides that, it offers a description of the development of capitalism by presenting various forms and phases of labor and brings them together by using the form of cabinets of curiosities.
Wunderkammer obviously tells its reader that the present state of affairs is not altogether new. As such, cabinets of curiosities more generally, and Wunderkammer more specifically, function as archives of passed phases of global development, buying and selling, and writing about it. The author-collector is in a perpetual state of curiosity and wonder, collecting not only objects but also information, putting them together according to various