ABSTRACT
Common sense tends towards habit and consensus; a prevailing way of doing things to which one has to appeal if a project or idea is to gain traction in practice. It appears as a constraining force which, in Spinoza’s terms, would be described as a disagreement between forces greater than our own, meaning one’s own productive capacity for generating and acting on ideas is diminished. Disclosure through common sense is described by Greenblatt as a lived phenomenon to which literature is especially drawn: poetry, drama, and prose fiction play themselves out in the everyday world, since men and women repeatedly find themselves in effect speaking the language of the literary. Chichikov’s is able to create a flourishing market through a supremely entrepreneurial act that is predicated upon and sustained by desire. Much like Iago, Chichikov connects desires so that a proto-organizational form is emerging; an assemblage held together by this desire.
