Linguistic Labor: Production of Aesthetic and Financial Value

Abstract

This essay analyzes how the process of financial quantification of linguistic labor affected the development of the social form of literature in capitalist societies. My methodological framework is cultural materialism, through which the classical communication model of literature is reinterpreted in accordance with the objective relations which make it possible. It proceeds from the intersection of language and money as universal equivalents, the emergence of linguistic labor power, through the commodification of language, formation of use and exchange values in the said context, and the formation of literary discourse. Along these lines, I attempt to show how the modern understanding of literature emerges at the beginning of the 19th century opposing the institutions of private linguistic property, as a specific form of labor which is not labor, which thus cannot be subsumed under capital, and whose concrete articulation aims to have a universal reach, in spite of the fact that its products necessarily become commodities in order to reach the public. Literature, therefore, up until the middle of the 20th century, understands itself as a strategy of resistance to the capitalist mode of production that simultaneously cannot sustain itself without its institutional mediation. Finally, this essay aims to show how the given process was crucial in the articulation of linguistic forms of modern literature, as well as the autonomous norms for its evaluation, which we know by the name of aesthetic value.