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... ion as I saw it, colossal and jagged (360) With its fragmented formal style and its endless citations of brands by which everything and everyone is identified characters almost absent beneath their Armani suits, and beyond conversations about restaurants, American Psycho may well be read as description of a society that has arrived at the conclusion of a Marxist logic of commodity fetishism as developed by a logic of social reification. This logic as expanded in Georg Lukacs essay Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat (1971: 83 209) draws on Marx's section in the first chapter of Capital titled The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof (1954: 71 - 83) where A commodity is a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of mens labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour (72). This deceptive nature of the commodity, where human social relations come ultimately to be presented as nothing but relations between so many products is allegorized throughout American Psycho, particularly highlighted in the constant detailed descriptions of characters attire. The final outcome of Marx's fetish is that, in this relentless process of alienation, it becomes more difficult to distinguish people from commodities. Lukacs (1971), commenting on the above quoted passage, writes, Subjectively where the market economy has been fully developed a mans activity becomes estranged from himself, it turns into a commodity which, subject to the non-human objectivity of the natural laws of society, must go its own way independently of man just like any consumer article [the] fragmentation of the object of production necessarily entails the fragmentation of its subject Neither objectively nor in his relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of the process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system [The fate of the worker] is typical of society as a whole in this self-objectification, this transformation of a human function into a commodity reveals in all its starkness the dehumanized and dehumanizing function of the commodity relation (pp. 87, 89, 92).
Ive quoted at some length because these comments compare strikingly with Batemans dehumanized, fragmentary, surface, surface, surface existence in American Psycho: there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory I simply am not there My personality is unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent (AP 362). But even after this confession: I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing (AP 362). Batemans world is an articulation of one where Marx's commodity fetishism and Lukacs social reification have been taken to their logical extremes, as exemplified in the quotes from Ellis text and the contradiction between hyper-realistic details concerning commodities and brands and the novels fragmentary form I wrote of above. For this reason I would not argue that Batemans vicious and cold-blooded murders are some kind of perverse cry from the heart, some sort of ultimately desperate attempt to revolt or transgress the reified world in which Bateman lives.
Rather, for Bateman it is as if there is no humanity nor identity left whatsoever the dehumanization has reached to such an extent that people are just like consumer articles his to take and do whatever he wishes with in order to gain some kind of intensity, or adrenaline rush. This is, paradoxically, the central theme of American Psycho. Paradoxical, because it reads as a text extremely occupied with postmodern ideas of fragmentation, lack of depth, centre and any hint of transcendent meaning. Yet concerned as it is with communicating the sovereignty of the signifier it also reads as a violent (literally) critique of that sovereignty. I refer thereby to Foucaults (1976: 215 237) critique of our society's profound logo phobia, a sort of dumb fear of this mass of spoken things, of everything that could possibly be violent, discontinuous, querulous, disordered and even perilous in it, of the incessant, disorderly buzzing of discourse to analyze [this fear] we must question our will to truth restore to discourse its character as an event [and] abolish the sovereignty of the signifier (229). This fear is pronounced in the drive to incessant rationalization of discourse, a rationalization that I believe strongly echoes Lukacs rationalizing process of reification where all disorderly qualities are converted into calculable quantities.
It echoes Batemans constant anxiety in terms of the unresolvable tension between the disorderly way he feels and acts and the fact that he claims that his feelings and actions are meaningless. Strikingly, this fear also shows up in reviews like Teachout's, from which I quoted at the beginning which can not see literary disorderliness and fragmentation such as Ellis in other terms than an aesthetic failure on the part of the author. American Psycho is a novel an aesthetic act. According to Jameson (1981: 79) the aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal solutions to unresolvable social differences. American Psycho refuses any particular set of imaginary or formal solutions it is to this extent a nihilistic work, however nihilism can also function as a powerful critique a point which reviewers like Teachout, overly concerned with respecting conventional formal integrity seem unable to take. LIST OF REFERENCES: Foucault, M. (1976) Appendix: The Discourse on Language in The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Harper Colophon.
Jameson, F. (1981) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, London: Methuen & Co. Lukacs, G. (1971) Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat in History and Class Consciousness, trans. R. Livingstone, London: Merlin Press.
Marx, K. (1954) The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof in Capital, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing. Teachout, T. (1991) American Psycho (book review). National Review 43: 11 pp. 45 - 46.
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