Between the credit crunch and the greek debt crisis, the cohead of emea global finance kindly found time to walk me through the fixed-income trading floor of Barclays Capital. I noted no vestige of bull pen or bear pit in what seemed a high-end call center, but mainly I listened. At one point, in relation to derivatives trading, my guide spoke of “real money,” “less real money,” and “barely real money.” Perhaps prompted by the economic historian Robert Brenner's assurance that “the real economy” retains links to manufacture (1), I asked what made money real. The ensuing rebuke, graciously delivered, continues to give pause: “You sound like my father.” He had a point: given that I am a child of Britain's long postwar recovery through manufacture (there was no economic miracle here), might not my allegiance to a labor theory of value in matters literary be no more than an archaic, conditioned response? Karl Marx and Frederick Engels define language as “practical consciousness” made from “agitated layers of air” (51) and acting on a reality whose elements it renders inseparable from its processes. Their definition, in its subsumption of the intellectual in the laborious, might have been made for the academic son of a printer.