ANYBODY LIVING A PRIVATE LIFE IS A BELIEVER IN MONEY. GERTRUDE STEIN, THE GREAT DEPRESSION, AND THE ABSTRACTION OF MONEY

The article considers Gertrude Stein’s reflections about the increasing abstraction of economics in response to the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal in a number of explicitly political pieces from the mid-1930s, including “A Political Series” (1935), and her five brief newspaper commentaries on “money”: ”Money”, “More About Money”, “Still More About Money”, “All About Money”, and “My Last About Money” (1936). The article then relates them to Walter Benjamin’s and Giorgio Agamben’s ideas about the religious implications of the money system that resonate with Stein’s salute to the “believer in money” as security against contemporary authoritarian tendencies. Stein’s opinion pieces argue against taxation, unionism, and public spending, yet also demonstrate the slippery passage between her explicit conservatism, her economic liberalism and her still present radicalism and critique of patriarchal authority as they recycle crucial elements from contemporaneous works such The Geographical History of America (1935) and Everybody’s Autobiography (1937).


EARNING MY FIRST DOLLAR
In 1933, at the age of 59, the American writer Gertrude Stein published her first and only bestseller The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. This event is often framed as a turning point in her career, both in her own accounts and in the reception. And it can certainly be recognized as a turning point in her relation to money.
In the sequel called Everybody's Autobiography (1937), she writes about her experience of finally making money on her writing:  and about being seen, loved, and paid for. From having a secure sense of the "real value" of her work, Stein suddenly experienced her work, and herself along with it, as having an exchange value, which, as Luke Carson has suggested, resulted in "the chiastic confusion of inside and outside that results from the circulation of the commodity on the market." 5 The logic of deflation implied in this narrative has established a hierarchy of sorts in the oeuvre, where her earlier, more playful work written before this "fall" and breaking radically with conventions of grammar and syntax is often valued higher and ascribed more weight than the work adapting a more immediately accessible language and directly addressing a broader audience, with the result that the latter has been, at least to an extent, ignored or conceptualized as some sort of exception that can be disregarded.

THE WANDERING OF MONEY AND WORDS
In the following, I will address some of Stein's briefer texts from the mid-1930s, all of them attempts at concrete political commentary, and all centred on economic issues. At the centre of my concern is "A Political Series" which was written in 1935 but

COMING HOME FOR THE DEPRESSION
Besides being written after Stein made her first dollar, when her relationship to money and publicity arguably had changed, the commentaries are also texts that respond to Stein's experience of revisiting an America that had changed during her many years abroad. First of all, she had not been around to witness the culmination of the transition to a free market economy and the rapid industrial expansion that had taken place in the first decades of the twentieth century, introducing mass production, mass labour, and, eventually, mass consumption that was growing exponentially up until the stock market collapse of 1929.
And then, when Stein arrived in 1934 it was to an America in the middle of the Great Depression. The lightness of her tone in these writings makes it easy to forget that they are coming out of, and addressing, an experience of severe crisis that was prevalent in the 1930s. While post-war popular conceptualizations of World War II and its immediate prelude often promote a narrative of the solid capitalist democracies led by the United States defeating decadent, fascist regimes, it is important to remind ourselves that the global political situation in the 1930s was a lot less clear-cut to the people living in it.
As Enzo Traverso has suggested, in Europe following World War I, a historical coupling of liberal democracy with "total war" gave birth to totalitarian political ideas, which were "the outcome of a process of brutalization of politics that shaped the imagination of a whole generation. The text is constructed around an analogy between the two American Roosevelts, Franklin D. and his distant relative and presidential predecessor, Theodore, and the two French Napoleons, as equally disastrous figures for their respective countries. It rhetorically asks whether getting rid of money is indeed the strategy behind Roosevelt's wide-spanning economic and social program, or if he is just "electioneering"-that is, trying to feed everybody so that they will re-elect him.
Stein's argument here assumes a scarcity economy. As she argues, the monetary system works only when there is a certain scarcity; if everyone has enough money, money will lose its value. Roosevelt "trying to evacuate money of meaning" by overspending it in his New Deal resembles the accusations she faced from conservative contemporaries against her own linguistic style, especially in repetitive pieces like "Business in Baltimore," as "trying to evacuate the English language of meaning." 17 Stein's most characteristic stylistic feature, her repetition, is what apparently comes closest to this strategy of overspending. Yet, Stein's repetitions-or insistencies-are informed by a way of counting that does not derive from the same source as the counting of Roosevelt or of her Baltimore banker cousins. In fact, when living in Baltimore, Stein did not spend her days with her banker cousins and uncles. Rather, as she recounts in her lectures, she sat around with her little gossipy aunts, from whom she not only learned that there was no such thing as repetition, as long as the speaker was "talking and listening at the same time" 18 but also realized for the first time that "the natural way to go on counting is by one and one and one." 19 Thus, although Stein is clearly anxious about unreal sums of capital sabotaging the scarcity principle of the "old" patriarchal economy she knew and resisted, but also depended on, in the realm of poetry she can count freely like her little aunts, and exploit the essentially feminist strategy of poetic overspending in an anarchist undermining of the power of "Patriarchal Poetry," as the title of her 1927 long poem goes.
In "A Political Series" Stein describes the approach of Roosevelt as not only patriarchal but also highly un-American and ascribes his election to a profound identity crisis in American society after World War I where people have become accustomed to obeying orders and submitting to authority. As in Traverso's analysis, Stein identifies in the American public a tendency to obey as soldiers do, calling out contemporary American democracy as a system subjected to the same damaging sort of paternalistic organization as that of war. In Stein's highly idiosyncratic analysis, Roosevelt with his New Deal policies is reacting to the Depression, but, like his predecessor, he is acting without any sensibility for the American way: When I say Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt are not American I mean they do not feel America to be a very large country around which anybody can wander and so although a government is there it is not always anywhere near but they feel it to be a little country which they can govern, and so it is European and not American. 20 So, Roosevelt acts as if America is a little country that can be governed and not-as it is in truth, according to Stein- which seems, in a way, to exhaust the potential of this parallel for Stein. The meditation returns to the question of defining money, repeatedly by way of Roosevelt's overspending as described in "A Political Series." Unlike government, war, and politics, but like master-pieces, money is "not finishing," but it is also differentiated from master-pieces: "What is money and what is romanticism it is not like human nature because it is not finishing it is not like a master-piece because it has no existing." 26 The factor separating the abstract value of money from the abstract value of masterpieces is its reality. Money, in the end, is like romanticism, not concerned with or tied down by physical reality. This unreality inherent to (Stein's conception of) money once again recalls Benjamin's text on religion of money. But unlike money, masterpieces in Stein's meditation do exist in the physical world and art is thus kept out of the realm of religion.

WHO SETTLES A PRIVATE LIFE?
In In "A Political Series," the idea of a private life is presented in opposition to the paternalistic government, yet here Stein also suggests an immediate source for the concept, which, somewhat surprisingly, appears fairly patriarchal in nature: "As Robinson Crusoe's father said to him the pleasantest state of man is to be neither rich nor poor and to remain in enjoyment of a private life." 29 This bourgeois ideal of a middle ground of appropriate riches-derived not only from the foundational work of the bourgeois European novel in its most masculine incarnation, but even taking at face value the advice of Robinson's father-becomes the precondition of the private life that immediately ties it to the ideal of privation, of scarcity, that was also defended in the "Money" texts: What is a private life.
Well I guess you may say roughly that a private life is when not everybody is being fed.

MONEY OR FATHERING
The patriarchal nature of the monetary system was always well recognized by Stein, and, as Ulla Dydo has observed: "However free Stein's thinking about art, whenever wills and property enter, her ideas take patriarchal forms." 32 Accordingly, when confronted with the crisis economy of the 1930s, the only alternative to the prodigal father promising to feed everybody that Stein is able to come up with is another father. As she speculates in "Money": if there was any way to make a government handle money the way a father of a family has to handle money if there only was.
The natural feeling of a father of a family is that when anybody asks him for money he says no. Any father of a family, any member of a family, knows all about that. 33 This restraining "no" of the family father not only clashes frontally with the repetitive, reproductive "yes" of Stein's femininely Then again, Stein had her own frailties in relation to the paternalistic financial power. As she reminds us in "All about money": "The queen was in the parlor eating bread and honey the king was in his counting house counting out his money." 34 As a rule, women, including Stein herself who broke so many boundaries in her life, were not allowed into the heart of the economic sphere.
Money is the warrantor of female freedom and enjoyment but at the same time the property of the patriarch. In a time of too much fathering Stein defends the autonomy of the market as a crucial principle to secure her freedom of mind and body-yet, she knew very well, that even money comes with strings attached.
In the "Money"-series Stein's liberalist commentary becomes gradually more cynical: the first piece repeats the concern about a dangerous feeling of the unreality of money driving the politicians to overspending. "More about Money" ponders the dilemma that the British parliament was established to keep the king from spending too much money, but in America there is no institution able to stop congress from spending. "Still More About Money" makes an argument about the horrible consequences of government welfare programs, arguing that unemployment benefits makes the work force lazy, and then nothing will get done, and is topped with an elaboration of cultural prejudice against the Indo-Chinese, the nationality of the servant that Stein and her partner Alice Toklas had currently employed in their Paris household, since they had "given up trying to employ french people, those who were not working were unemployed and that was no way of changing them back to work." 35 "All About Money" claims money is the one feature to differentiate man from animal, and once again repeats the scarcity argument. The monetary system will only hold if you count the money by one and one and one, instead of throwing around large, abstract sums that make no real sense to you. "My Last About Money" could have been authored by any present-day neoliberal politician stating as it does the familiar argument that too much redistribution of wealth in terms of taxation and welfare programs for the poor will kill initiative and progress: we need the rich in order for society to function because if we get rid of the rich, we will all be poor. And finally, it presents an explicit defence of colonialism as necessary for the capitalist expansion that was powered by the desire for "individual liberty" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but which unfortunately can no longer be satisfied due to the lack of new territory to colonize: "The virgin lands are getting kind of used up, the whole surface of the world is known now and also the air, and everywhere you see organization killing itself by just ending in organization." 36  with all her might, but she is also very aware of "the private being political," although in another sense than the one this expression implied for the 1960s and -70s feminist movement that coined it.
For one thing, casting Stein as a poet of the household sphere bluntly ignores the conscious blurring of the borders between private and public space that were definitional to Stein's salon which shared its semi-public space with her non-public household sphere, and which remains crucial to any understanding of Stein's life and work. Furthermore, as evoked in the introduction to this text, the household objects at the centre of Tender Buttons and other early works are already infected by consumer culture, the private sphere of Stein, never entirely free from money or politics.
In The Human Condition, Arendt also discusses how the borders between the private and public spheres are breaking down in the modern capitalist economy based on wage labour. In the modern consumer economy, the labourer inhabits the public realm, but it is no longer a public realm in the way of the Greek polis, that is, relieved from the fulfilment of basic needs. Instead, it is an intermingling of private and public spheres, it is a mesh of "private In Arendt's analysis, money is the vehicle that secures the transportation and exchange between the spheres. This is the same reason why Pound wanted the monetary system to be controlled by the fascist leader. Since money was the medium that powered the traffic between the spheres, the implementation of a statecontrolled currency could also bring it to an end. Here, Stein takes another path. If we recall the meditations on money and art in The Geographical History, the material reality of master-pieces is what separates them from money that ultimately "has no existence." We can see why Stein in her poetry is not primarily concerned with producing an aesthetic representation of capital to compensate for its abstraction, but rather with putting money and artworks to use as parts of a material and collaborative infrastructure that turns literature into an economy in itself, a circulation of aesthetic value which implies the freedom of the reader to "think of something," the value of which we are affirmatively assured: "That is it […] But yes yes/ By no means cease." Although she may not have been able to sell her work to make money in the beginning of her career, she managed to distribute it via her salon that placed itself between public and private space. But in the end, of course, the salon also existed because of money: not the money of wage labour addressed by Arendt, but the old-world money of paternal inheritance Stein used to purchase paintings.
Stein's commentaries all defend the private sphere, but they also make absolutely clear that the private sphere is infected by the public sphere all the time as it is secured by the presence of money.
And in response to this condition, Stein proposes an attitude commemorating the figure of Benjamin's capitalist worshipper, that of a true "believer in money." Curiously, it appears to be Stein's enthusiasm for classic American liberalist, free-market capitalism, as it comes out most clearly in the "Money"-texts, that effectively prevents her from following the course of Pound.
Although her anti-patriarchal impulses take her a good step forward, it is her adherence to capitalism that in the end saves her from fascism.
In the mid-1930s Gertrude Stein had suddenly been thrown into the modern publishing economy and experienced the estranging effects of the circulation of her writing and herself on the free market. At the same time, she was confronted with the American crisis economy where money, as we have seen, was being cut loose from the scarcity economy, the gold standard, and the patriarchal financial system of savings, interest, and inheritance that she had regularly undermined in her writings but also depended on for her sustenance, and moving rapidly towards the unpersonal, abstract, self-representational, and speculative capital of our contemporary economic paradigm. But even here, underneath the new abstract economy, she curiously identified another bourgeois patriarch to replace the old one, as she discovered that money is never just a neutral vehicle. Money may not begin or end, as she meditates in The Geographical History of America, but in times of crisis it tends to return to the father anyway.