Michael W. Clune's stunningly original study probably demands more than one reading to unlock its full argument, and readers need to be well versed in the work of F. A. Hayek, Hannah Arendt, Karl Polanyi and Marx's “Critique of the Gotha Program,” among other theoretical materials. But anyone with an interest in rap will find chapter 5 indispensable. Clune argues that rap offers an interpretation of money which separates social from economic value. Rap interprets money in terms of a relation between performer and audience in which money promotes invisibility. Bling, as a visible form of money, blinds the other, making the rapper invisible to the audience, dazzled by the reflection of light shining from wrist, neck or tinted car windows. In the formal asymmetry between first and second person of rap, the rapper becomes a subject taking the audience as an object. Where an earlier generation of black artists (Ellison, for example) read invisibility as absence of social recognition and therefore as a form of deprivation, rap revalues invisibility as a route of access to value independent of the social. While this may sound utopian, Clune outlines a convincing model of the dynamics of the rap performance, based in part on Michael Fried's analysis of the techniques of modern painters to establish the fiction of the beholder's absence before the canvas. Rappers undermine the sense of performance in various ways, while embracing an aesthetic formalization to protect antisocial money from absorption by the social world. As Clune comments, utopia is hard to see, but that may not be a negative. Invisibility is not the sign of the impossibility of another world, but its guarantee. In this reading (markedly against the new historicist approach in which there is a continuity of literary texts with social relations) art disembeds economic form from the social. The oldest aesthetic power is the power to absorb the attention, itself a technique of the invisible, as in the example of the reader absorbed in a novel or the listener lost in music.

What works for rap also works well for the poets discussed: Frank O'Hara (a persuasive account of the ways in which his work presents choice as an instant response to the options of the immediate environment) and Plath, where a crisis of recognition is associated with a vastly intensified access to the plenitude of language, and a radical subjectivity where failure of recognition expands access to communal value. But for this reader, at least, the possibility of nonabsorption posed a problem for long narratives, where the temporal demands must interrupt the experience and reconnect the reader with the social world. William Gaddis's JR is, in Clune's own description, a five-hundred-page novel consisting entirely of unattributed dialogue. A new form of subjectivity may well emerge from this aesthetic space but one wonders how many readers traverse it in its entirety – and his other major examples, William Burroughs and Kathy Acker, may raise similar doubts. None the less, Clune offers a provocative and challenging definition of economic fictions as works of art which open a space in which market relations are set to work organizing experience, a space distinct from both the social visions of the left and the individualism of the right, and he makes a powerful case that attending to literary form is not an alternative to doing social criticism but a better way of doing it.