July 13, 2021

book review: on having and being had

In On Having and Being Had, Eula Bliss meditates on the ideas that define our modern world, even if we don’t want them to---capitalism, money, art, accumulation, consumption, autonomy, and desire. Whether that be desire for the vital things, like security or purpose or happiness, or the luxuries, like upright pianos or a house with a yard.

Bliss also examines her own position in a class-based society, as someone who was well-educated and grew up secure if not wealthy; who bounced from job to job and lived precariously as a broke artist in her early adulthood; and now, as a professor at an elite school, finally making enough to afford a house. She writes to dig deeper into herself---”dismantling” herself---and the way her ideas about money have changed. She asks again and again, to fellow party guests and friends and the authors in the books she reads, what does capitalism mean? She understands the damage it has done and continues to do to our society, yet must confront how she now benefits from it. 

Intertwined with her concerns about capitalism are also her concerns about art. One of the central themes of the book is the paradox of art---Art should be priceless and many artists see their work as "pure" and resist its commodification---yet the only way artists can make art is if they are paid for it. Art is in many ways unbound by the systems of capital, especially because it can’t be consumed in the way that iron, crops, or electricity can. Nor is it useful in any quantifiable way as with kilojoules or calories. Yet, an artist's craft can’t be cultivated without financial security, which provides freedom and time. 

She wanders through these questions about how art and capitalism are intertwined, and yet she doesn’t seem to settle. This feels right for this book, which is a collection of vignettes, conversations, and impressions revolving around her subject matter. Conclusions are sometimes reached, sometimes not; the facts of an exchange are often laid out in a way that encourages the reader to reach their own conclusions. 

To be honest, I picked up this book because I initially thought it was written by a Black woman. I knew it was about class and consumption and I wanted to read from an intersectional perspective. Bliss acknowledges the way her Whiteness influences how she thinks about class, money, servitude, and exchange, but she doesn’t interrogate it. This is yet another subject that she dances around without slipping in completely. That was acceptable to me; Having and Being Had is a personal project, intended to move through the discomforts of Bliss’s own experiences. And perhaps to delve into the intersection of race and class would have presumed too much about what Bliss herself could have added to that conversation.

She makes some questionable implications about precarity that don’t feel justified, yet could have been. For example, she compares riding a bike to driving a car, saying how a car gives security and a bike is more dangerous, yet a bike ride provides so many wonderful things a car ride doesn’t---the wind in your face, the panorama of your surroundings. Precarity, she writes, is something like liberation. Which may be true, but she doesn’t quite dig into its costs. Perhaps that was intentional---perhaps she didn’t want to say what many of her readers would already know. But ultimately, it felt like she was doing math without considering all the variables.

Bliss's writing style is both conversational and rhythmic, and she seamlessly weaves in the voices of her subjects---the writers, her friends, her husband and son, the works that she uses to frame her ideas. I eagerly tore through this book, but perhaps more than for the style, I was invested because Bliss admits to the same silly things and thoughts and privilege that I experience myself. The book mirrors the world I come from and, in many ways, a world I expect to be a part of when I leave school---not rich, but secure in the face of rent, hospital bills, accidents; able to purchase a few expensive and beloved things here and there, while working a job that feels purposeful and joyful. Bliss investigates questions I am also interested in---How do comfort and convenience, relationships of service, and the material objects we value shape our lives? How do we make and value art within capitalism? How do we take care of the Earth and other people when our comfort is often detrimental to theirs? How can you be a good person, and do good work, in our capitalist society?

She presents one idea on this through the work of Lewis Hyde, who writes about how the communism of Stalin wasn’t really anti-capitalist, because he centralized the wealth into the state and turned it into more wealth, even as he redistributed it. “... to move away from capitalism,” Hyde writes, “is not to change the form of ownership from the few to the many, but to cease turning so much surplus into capital, that is, to treat most increase as a gift.”

When we are lucky or successful, the way to escape the accumulation of capitalism---and therefore its greed and demand for growth---is to share what we have with others. Gifting is the opposite of accumulation. It is transmutation---we receive a gift from someone, and can use that gift to create something for another person, again and again and again, with something like love.

Thanks for reading, and talk again soon,
---Mia