Now the polemic is given another, supplementary turn: for it follows, according to Michaels, that since Dreiser's is a work of absolute immanence to the market, Dreiser criticism can only dishonestly exhibit these texts as the market's critique. Suddenly, therefore, we are confronted with the unexpected reemergence of one of the central problematics of all radical or Marxist literary or cultural criticism: namely, how the negative is to be conceived in practice and, in particular, how one can impute critical value to works that are ideologically or representationally complicitous with the "system." What is at first blush politically shocking in Michaels, then, is not the evaluation of Dreiser himself (despite the writer's conscious ideological positions). It is what was shocking in a classic version of this debate which turned on a writer fully as ambiguous as Dreiser, namely, Balzac, in whose works commodity lust is also very much an issue, along with Tory fantasies of landed squireship and overt monarchist positions (of a very different complexion from Dreiser's). One is, I think, permitted to disagree with Marx and Engels and to judge Balzac to be far more deeply corrupt and irrecuperable than they thought (although in that case their position -- that Balzac was able to register contradictory social forces more acutely than merely "liberal" writers -- is the more complicated and interesting one). What is probably more shocking about such discussions in The Gold Standard is the very presence of this problematic itself, which has never interested formalist or aestheticist criticism and which we thought belonged to us: that the "other side" should now draw up its battle lines on our own terrain -- and offer to fight it out on matters of literary and cultural "subversion" or negative, critical value -- is now even more alarming that the appropriation of those economic materials and topics mentioned earlier and hitherto associated with the Left. Doubts about the viability of critical and mostly dialectical models of the negative function of culture have, of course, come to be widespread in the poststructural period: but they have mostly been expressed by writers who remained political and "hommes de gauche," and whose "methods," like deconstruction, promised to be more subversive and more "revolutionary" than the traditional ones. But Michaels no longer raises, I think, any more than the New Historicism in general, any claim of "revolutionary" or subversive value for his own work.