Null-Exit Pamphleteering, or #VALUE!

In this essay, I want to think about the ways in which creative and critical texts might be read as an oblique record of economic transactions, as accountancy by other means. How do writers and their texts position themselves with regard to accountancy? Or, to be more specific, what is the relationship between Peter Manson’s work and double-entry bookkeeping? In order to answer this question, I offer an exposition of Samuel Beckett’s discussions of narrative and literary criticism as forms of double-entry bookkeeping, and then argue that Manson’s Adjunct: an Undigest playfully asks at key moments to be read as an act of accounting. This text situates itself in Beckett’s line of thought on accountancy and literature insofar as Adjunct and its reception reconfigure and expand our notions of accountancy, offering a mashup of these seemingly immiscible categories. Manson, like Beckett, repudiates the historically dominant form of accounting known as double-entry bookkeeping in favour of a series of single entries in Adjunct, shards shorn of correspondence which, in their seeming arbitrariness, highlight the processes of valorization preceding their entry into the ledger of the text. This repudiation has ramifications for how we read the rest of Manson’s output. I argue that ‘The Baffle Stage’ models on the level of form, and particularly in its rhyme, the constraints of pulsations of credit and debit which manifested in the financial crisis of 2007–8.

historian Karl Polanyi once claimed that a 'form of accounting, in which the sums were not expressible in common units, would of course not yield anything rationally intelligible.' 2 Without a unit of measurement, the above inscription would just be so much noise. Fifteen what?
What is rationally intelligible for Polanyi, as for all respectable bookkeepers working since the Renaissance in the name of God and Profit, is what can be quantified in terms of market price, the economy as in your bank balance, stock market prices, mortgage rates, student debt, the change you drop into a takeaway coffee cup. Polanyi's statement, if we read it as a generalized claim, is of course completely wrong -that which is expressible in no unit whatsoever is still rationally intelligible, even if it is vague and eschews computation. Those who disagree would probably not be predisposed to Peter Manson's poetry. My point in writing this essay is not that the qualitative must be preserved in the face of an enemy tendency known as quantification, but to ask whether writing and accountancy are always imbricated, and how? 3 How far has writing come from its origins? How has that curious variant of writing known as poetry, which has been called 'the Art of Numbers,' disambigu- There is the temptation to treat every concept like ' a bass dropt neck fust in till a bung crate' and make a really tidy job of it. Unfortunately, such an exactitude of application would imply distortion in one of two directions.
Must we wring the neck of a certain system in order to stuff it into a contemporary pigeon-hole, or modify the dimensions of that pigeon-hole for the satisfaction of the analogymongers? Literary criticism is not book-keeping. 5 The Italian political philosopher Vico (1668-1744) is most famous for the Latin aphorism verum esse ipsum factum (meaning 'what is made is what is true'), an early instance of materialist historiography. Later in the essay, Beckett will rely on Vico to sketch a theory of the origins of language. Beckett is concerned throughout the above passage with equivalence and blurring distinctions, repeatedly scorning whatever is neat. The concepts and the evidence will not match up in this essay, he states boldly, the work cannot be pigeon-holed or constrained by the concepts applied to it, nor the concepts by the texts. The claim that literary criticism 'is not book-keeping' is a normative statement insofar as it is a claim that literary criticism should not be bookkeeping or in any way akin to it. Implicit in the opening and closing statements of this paragraph is a notion of 'identification' and balance which suggest that Beckett is specifically referring to double-entry bookkeeping.
Double-entry bookkeeping is governed by the axiom that assets equal liabilities plus equity. The liability and equity accounts should balance, which means that for each transaction there will be a debit made to one or several accounts and a credit made to one or several accounts. Each account has a credit column and a debit col- Adjunct. This form of bookkeeping is all about symmetry, the accounting ledger is a rhetorical act designed to justify commerce, which was regarded with suspicion in the context of Christendom -it is not just practical but also aesthetically pleasing. 6 To return to the passage quoted above from Beckett, the work and the concepts applied will not be made neatly equivalent across some well-balanced double-entry system, equivalent or at least commensurable entries always made in the ledger of 'the real' and the ledger of 'the abstraction.' This is the 'neatness' which is said to be a ' danger' in Beckett's first sentence. Beckett's essay will not be exact in its application of concepts because literary criticism is not double-entry bookkeeping. Clearly, Beckett thinks that double-entry and narratives have some kind of relationship. There are forms of literary criticism and narrative which are akin to a doubleentry system in accountancy. In Beckett's metaphor, there is a debit in the meant account and a credit in the said -the said is the text, the meant the level of allegorical meaning. The details the narrative gives should not be taken and used as some kind of credit note to be used at another store to withdraw or decipher the true meaning of the text. The perfect allegory would be like a perfectly balanced double-entry account, everything in the said column would have an exactly corresponding action, transaction, or value in the meant column of another account. If Snowball sneezes during his speech, Orwell must be making reference to something. Beckett's strawman of allegory is that it is the complete antithesis to Roland Barthes' reality-effect, in which there are extraneous details present to simply assist the pulley system suspending readerly disbelief. 8 In this hypothetical allegory, there are no remainders or loose ends. Then there would be the single-entry system, where there is only the said or only the meant, or perhaps the said and the meant coincide, as indeed 'Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce' suggests when it offers 'Work in Progress' as an example of language and meaning coinciding: 'When the sense is dancing, the words dance.' 9 That is to say, as Beckett does in the review, that 'The Island' of Jack B. Yeats' Amaranthers 'is not throttled into Ireland' and there 'is no symbol' nor 'satire' in the novel. 10 It is not about Ireland, it is about its own fictional space. Yeats' book, for Beckett, is not double-entry like allegory, but a 'single series of imaginative transactions.' 11

Marius
Buning says that Beckett has a preference for 'single-entry bookkeeping that is only concerned with jotting things down in straightforward form. ' 12 Before turning to Manson's work, it might be useful to look at another attempt to tie narrative and accountancy together. B. S. Johnson's novel Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (1973) is about a disaffected young man who decides to live by the principles of double-entry bookkeeping. 13 Creating 'Moral Double-Entry,' also known as karma, Malry notes that ' every bad must have its corresponding good,' and for Malry to be ' debited' is to be slighted or annoyed or wronged. The text leans heavily on cultural associations across words in economic discourse, as when economy is used in the sense of 'little' or 'few' and ' credit' is used as a synonym for 'believe.' 14 Malry moves from minor acts of personal revenge to large-scale terrorism, from bombing hoaxes to an actual bombing and finally the poisoning of West London's drinking water.
He adds 'socialism not given a chance' to the debit column of his ledger after overhearing a conversation among socialists. 15 Account-entries, we can see in this text, clearly rely on sets of evaluations and ideas and societal configurations that are not neutral -the fact that socialism has not been given ' a chance' is worth £311,398.00 What use is the extra cash a carbon tax might get you in an era of irreversible global warming?
At the start of 'An Imaginative Work!,' Beckett compares literary criticism and prose to accountancy. The review begins thus: 'The chartered recountants take the thing to pieces and put it together again. They enjoy it. The artists takes it to pieces and makes a new thing, new things.' 16 Chartered Accountants are given a seal of approval by the royals in England, and a Chartered recountant, I think, would be an official literary critic with the approval of some secular authority, for example a University. The recount of 'recountants' brings us close to the sense of accounting as narrative, as story-telling. Beckett is playing with the etymological links between tell and weighing, muddying the distinction between account's narrative and numerical meanings. Buning parses this as follows: 'literary critics' are only interested in taking the literary work 'to pieces and then putting it together again, without making something new of it.' 17 It was in Scotland that Accountancy first became chartered, specifically Edinburgh in 1854. 18 Later in the same year, the Institute of Accountants in Glasgow, Peter Manson's birthplace, petitioned the Queen for a Royal Charter. 19 The Petition was signed by 49 Glasgow accountants, and it made the case for accountancy as a distinct profession of great respectability. It pointed out that accountancy required a varied group of skills which are mathematical and legal (as they were frequently employed by the courts to give evidence on financial matters). Their petition was successful. These bourgeois accountants mount the ramparts of professionalism in 1854 as capitalism solidifies, the laws of value singing numbers into their ears, a social harmony surrounded by, and built atop, the expropriated labour of the working class, housework, slave labour. What doesn't get into the account, what is its precondition and surround, what are its silences and distortions? In the process of making an account, of noting down prices and costs, a whole host of entities, events, and processes are made into economic externalities. 20 Much poetry speaks not only the matter left silent by accounts, but addresses accounts as acts of omission and error founded on social injustice.
Manson's Adjunct, which frequently namedrops Johnson, can feel at times like a narrrative which refuses all externalities. 21 It is a sottisier insofar as it is randomized jottings, although it was edited rigorously once it was finished. Manson's 'An essay on poetry and language' offers a description of Adjunct and how it came about: Adjunct: an Undigest began in 1993 as an attempt to gather together those interesting or funny examples of found language to which my reading habits had begun to sensitise me, and which I felt were in danger of passing me by.
I bought a large notebook, and devised a system whereby each new entry would be written on a page selected by a random number generator (I didn't want the book to imply too linear a narrative, and enjoyed the often startling juxtapositions the method produced). 22 Manson has frequently theorized a 'language surface' in interviews which seems to inform his poetics, and might also be useful for reading his poetry and prose. There is, in this notion, a distrust of depth. Tom Betteridge notes that the 'language surface' of Adjunct unifies ' a diverse range of language fragments,' and has a 'levelling effect' on them. 23 Craig Dworkin's 'Poetry Without Organs' relates Manson's work to the New Sentence, the 'uncreative' or conceptual current of poetry to whom Dworkin pledges allegiance, and the school of chance-generated works. Dworkin's essay offers a useful list of the categories of entry he finds in this text. Much criticism of this text takes it as a given that each sentence is an ' entry,' which not only suggests that there is something diary-like about Adjunct but that it is like an account-book. 24 Indeed, economic concerns regularly appear in the text as 'fiscal anxieties,' most pressuringly in the language of job-hunting. 25  The form of Adjunct skirts close to that of literary criticism, as it offers quotations, and plays with the language of that form, for example claiming it has a thesis statement. 36 Sottisiers have a history of being useful for literary criticism. 37 Perhaps one of its objects of study is James Joyce's Finnegans Wake -certainly, some of the The juxtaposition produces in us a need to inquire as to the links between one entry and the next, though the entries were placed together randomly. But there might be a common element to every entry in Adjunct, in that it insists on its situatedness, on moments of apparent synchronicity in a lived life, even as that life feels devalued (as the autobiographical and despairing entries about job-hunting imply). At the same time, this refuses to become a transcendental principle of equivalence or meaning.
Adjunct is an exercise in forcing us to read the text in such a manner that we consider what has gotten into the text and why, and the processes of valorization the author's life has been subject to. In Manson's Adjunct, each entry is a glimpse of a thread that can be followed beyond the loom. It is to insist that over a certain period, at a certain 'cut rates,' 'obey the marketplace' and 'crisis of a nation.') 42 The title of the poem plays with the idea of the Lacanian Mirror stage. 43 In replacing 'Mirror' with 'Baffle,' the poem is not only referring to bafflement as confusion, but 'Baffle' as an archaic Scots term which refers to a poor old tired horse. 44 It is complexly autobiographical doggerel, delighting in puns and bawdiness. Manson describes it in some remarks delivered in 2013 at the Sheffield Poetry Festival as 'an attempt to write a rhymed satire against the ego,' which he claimed 'failed' because his 'ego got in the way.' 45 Greg Thomas observes that the poem, and Manson's poetic persona, is 'powered by a veritable dynamo of masochism' which is 'often hilarious.' 46 Ellen Dillon has described some of her own mathematical explorations of the poem, and while these do not quite resolve into a claim, they give some glimmer of how maths and Manson's work might be explored, and the thrilling and playful ways this poetry prompts a kind of pareidolia in its readers. 47 Typical of its mix of abjection, far-flung cultural reference, and rigour is the line 'MAOI-ist self denunciation' in the thirty-seventh stanza, referring directly to monoamine oxidase inhibitors, best known as powerful anti-depressants, and obliquely punning on 'Maoist' practices of self-critique. 48 MAOIs also featuring in Adjunct: 'I was prescribed Niamide (an MAOI), a drug that was rarely administered because of the dangers associated with it (especially the well-known cheese effect) and the spectacular side-effects.' 49 The 'cheese effect' is an acute attack of hypertension (aka high blood pressure) The first line of this quatrain reworks some lyrics Sparks' 'This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us' from 1974 (the original lyrics are 'The mammals are your favourite type'), but here the 'you' addressed is the financial class, foisting subprime mortgages onto people with low credit ratings who will therefore be put into debt peonage, or as the poem puts it, eaten twice and had. A subprime mortgage is a type of mortgage that is normally issued by a lending institution to borrowers with low credit ratings, which were central to the 2008 financial crisis. 59 In this loans, the borrower has a larger-than-average risk of defaulting, and so they are in fact charged more -you owe more money because you have less money. This is done to perpetuate the financiers' phenotype, i.e. the composite of a financier's traits, behaviour, If poetry has often been figured as a kind of love-making, this poem has been dampened. 61 The shuffle might imply a form of dance, to a music, perhaps the music of finance. However, finance is also enjambed as a verb across a stanza break, investing in the written word's obsessive fear that it, or any part of it, is repulsive or may become so. If certain poems might be able to buck a critic off themselves, this poem is too tired to do so. Manson's poem is almost directly paraphrased in Franco 'Bifo' Berardi's The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (written in 2011), a text whose major weakness is the absence of any discussion of contemporary poetry. Berardi suggests, like Manson's poem written three years earlier, that meaning is a bit like debt, that shrugging off meaning might be like shrugging off debt: Poetic language is insolvency in the field of enunciation: it refuses the exaction of a semiotic debt. Deixis (δεῖξις) acts against the reduction of language to indexicalization and abstract individuation, and the voice acts against the recombinant desensualization of language. Poetic language is the occupation of the space of communication by words which escape the order of exchangeability. 62 Writing in the Italian autonomist tradition, Berardi holds that collective cooperation and knowledge (the general intellect) are the current source of value and the new engine of capital accumulation. I think that Berardi over-estimates the importance of both language and poetry in politics, and fails to adequately outline poetry's rela-tionship to finacialization. But it is worth remarking on the conjunction between this moment in Berardi and Manson. In the above, he writes that 'Poetic language is insolvency in the field of enunciation,' which means that in the act of pronouncing words poetic language nonetheless refuses to pay off any 'semiotic debt,' avoiding pointing to a signified. Meaning was, for Beckett, a whole other account book than the said.
To fold Beckett's metaphor into the line: the poem has had the debit in the meant account foisted on it. The poem is insolvent with regard to meaning. Deixis refers to words and phrases that cannot be fully understood without contextual information -such as me or here -words that point to something. Berardi in the above wants a return to the body through deixis, to 'sensualization.' In its own playful way, Manson's poetics subjects itself to the oppressive but hilarious strictures of rhyme to produce a poem which cannot help but be 'insolvent' in terms of what Beckett would figure as the meant account or (in the strong form of Beckett's position) the level of allegorical meaning. 'The Baffle Stage' is deictic in manifold ways -in Manson's oeuvre, in its linguistic play, in its repeated insistence on its place in the world as it is currently constituted. When Beckett or Berardi think of meaning as something akin to debt, it veers towards the theoretical rather than the affective.
It is also worth noting that 'The Baffle Stage's concern with debt is intimately linked to the poem's other references to excrement, humiliation, and feelings of disgrace and degradation insofar as they are all often linked to the feelings of debtors. 63 It leans more heavily towards the affective rather than the theoretical aspects of this claim.
In this manner, Manson's Adjunct and 'The Baffle Stage' get at the ways on which our ecological and economic relations structure the conditions of our life and poetry.
The poem doesn't want to go on, it is being asked to perform a task it cannot, and it goes on anyway. The meaning of 'The Baffle Stage' is nothing but the ways in which it is forced to dance a shuffle to the rhyme-scheme dictated by the realm of finance and cycles of credit and debt, a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, and on and on. Many stanzas in 'The Baffle Stage' begin with a 'the' or an ' a' and give a sense that a new sentence begins with a new subject. Some of the grammatical subjects of the stanzas I have quoted include 'the subprime mammals,' 'sir void,' 'the written word's dysmophophobia,' and ' ambient faeces.' It is as if the poem has to keep beginning again, starting over again, resetting after cycling through one two circulations of rhyme, a-b-a-b, start again, a-b-a-b, start again. But towards the end of the poem the stanzas begin to tumble together, becoming longer units linked by verbs.
Knots of owing, meaning, and debt pervade Adjunct: 'The world owes the poet nothing and we should not be expected to dig and delve into a rambling discourse searching for some inner meaning.' 64 The idea that the world does not owe anyone anything, be they child or refugee, is a deeply violent one. This is obviously heavily ironised, but something is happening here in the regularity with which we encounter the figuration of reading and writing in the text and beyond it as giving and owing, credit and debt. Part of the pleasure of 'The Baffle Stage' is this low-brow selflaceration and its nonsense-jokes which rely on common tropes around reading and poetry. Meaning is nothing like debt, meaning is loose and fungible and qualitative, although like debt it is something you could be locked up for. 'The Baffle Stage' is an exercise in building up some kind of immunity to just how marginalized and devalued poetry is in our current societal formation by homeopathic self-application. This poem, and its rhyming, models the half-assed shuffle of debt and credit we all do as we move from paycheck to paycheck, job to job. It is emphatically not double-entry bookkeeping -rather than things being double here they are cut off and annulled, rather than entries and insides there are exits and surfaces, rather than the retention of books there is a profligate generosity of pamphleteering. Nor is it balanced, it is caving in, unable to match external pressure, a slow-motion implosion under external duress. I have been trying to read some of Manson's poetics as an attempt to estrange or highlight or mess with capitalist mediation through focusing on the relationship between his work and accountancy. But perhaps the clearest way to make this point is to tell you the simple fact that if you put any poem into your average