LITMIR.BIZ

      The style of the useful. A novelist as great as Defoe devoted his last, most ambitious novel entirely to this idea. Emile will want to know all that is useful, Rousseau had written, and nothing but that; and Goethe—alas—observed the second clause to the letter. ‘From the Useful by Way of the True to the Beautiful’, we read at the beginning of the Wanderjahre (1829);⁴¹ a novel where, instead of the usual ‘pleasure garden or modern park’, one finds ‘fields of vegetables, large beds of medicinal herbs, and anything that may be useful in any way’.⁴² Gone is the conflict between the useful and the beautiful that had been the key to the previous novel about Wilhelm Meister, the Apprenticeship of 1796; in the ‘Pedagogical Province’ of the Wanderjahre conflict has given way to functional subordination; having ‘chosen to be useful’,⁴³ explains one of the few artists present in the novel, a sculptor, he is now perfectly happy to make anatomical models, and nothing else. The fact that art has been deprived of its recently acquired purposelessness is repeatedly presented as a commendable progress: ‘as salt is to food, so are the arts to technical science. We want from art only enough to insure that our handicraft will remain in good taste’, writes the Abbé to Wilhelm;⁴⁴ ‘the rigorous arts’—stonecutters, masons, carpenters, roofers, locksmiths . . . —adds another leader of the Province, ‘must set an example for the free arts, and seek to put them to shame’.⁴⁵ And then, if necessary, the punitive, anti-aesthetic side of Utopia makes its appearance: if he sees no theatres around, Wilhelm’s guide curtly informs him, it’s because ‘we found such impostures thoroughly dangerous . . . and could in no way reconcile them with our serious purpose’.⁴⁶ So, drama is banned from the Province. And that’s it.

      ‘The Renunciants’, reads the subtitle of the Wanderjahre, indicating with that word the sacrifice of human fullness imposed by the modern division of labour. Thirty years earlier, in the Apprenticeship, the theme had been presented as a painful mutilation of bourgeois existence;⁴⁷ but in the later novel, pain has disappeared: ‘the day for specialization has come’, Wilhelm is immediately told by one of his old associates; ‘fortunate is he who comprehends it and labors in this spirit’.⁴⁸ The day has come, and falling in step is a ‘fortune’. ‘Happy the man whose vocation becomes his favorite pastime’, exclaims a farmer who has gathered a collection of agricultural tools, ‘so that he takes pleasure in that which his station also makes a duty’.⁴⁹ A museum of tools, to celebrate the division of labour. ‘All activity, all art . . . can only be acquired through limitation. To know one thing properly . . . results in higher cultivation than half-competence in a hundred different fields’, says one of Wilhelm’s interlocutors.⁵⁰ ‘Where I am useful, there is my fatherland!’,⁵¹ adds another and then goes on: ‘If I now say, “let each strive to be useful to himself and others in all ways”, it is neither a doctrine nor advice, but the maxim of life itself.’

      There is a word that would have been perfect for the Wanderjahre—had it only existed at the time Goethe was writing: efficiency. Or better, the word did exist, but it still indicated what it had for centuries: ‘the fact of being an operative agent or efficient cause’, as the OED puts it: efficiency as causation, and nothing more. Then, around the mid nineteenth century, the shift: ‘fitness or power to accomplish, or success in accomplishing, the purpose intended; adequate power, effectiveness, efficacy.’⁵² Adequate power: no longer the mere capacity to do something, but to do it without any waste, and in the most economic way. If the useful had turned the world into a collection of tools, the division of labour steps in to calibrate the tools towards their ends (‘the purpose intended’)—and ‘efficiency’ is the result. They are three consecutive steps in the history of capitalist rationalization.

      Of capitalist rationalization—and