Counterfeit Capital: Poetic Labor and Revolutionary Irony 9780804786805

Citation preview

counterfeit capital

Counterfeit Capital Poetic Labor and Revolutionary Irony

Jennifer Bajorek

stanford university press stanford, california 2009

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. “The Bad Glazier” in The Parisian Prowler by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Edward K. Kaplan, printed by permission of the University of Georgia Press. Chapter 2 was first published in Diacritics, Volume 33, Number 1 (Spring 2003). An earlier version of Chapter 4 was published in Qui Parle, Volume 16, Issue 2 (Spring/Summer 2007). Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bajorek, Jennifer.   Counterfeit capital : poetic labor and revolutionary irony / Jennifer Bajorek.    p.  cm.  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-0-8047-5824-6 (cloth : alk. paper)   1.  Baudelaire, Charles, 1821–1867—Criticism and interpretation.  2.  Marx, Karl, 1818–1883. Das Kapital.  3. Irony in literature.  4.  Capitalism in literature. I. Title. PQ2191.Z5B2355 2008 841’.8—dc22 2007051702

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Abbreviations

ix

Introduction: Swindlers and Prophets

1

1. Paris Spleen (The Irony of Revolutionary Power)

13

2. Animadversions (Technics after Capital)

42

3. An/economy and Some Others (Accumulation and the Coming Injustice)

68

4. Insert into Blankness (Poetry and Cultural Memory in Benjamin’s Baudelaire)

94

Notes

119

Works Cited

133

Index

141

Acknowledgments

My first and most abiding thanks go to my teachers and doctoral committee members, who brought this project out of infancy at the University of California, Irvine: Étienne Balibar, Ellen Burt, Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, Andrzej Warminski, and Samuel Weber. To Jacques Derrida in particular, I wish I could express an impossible debt. Without Ellen Burt I would never have dared to write on Baudelaire, and I am grateful to her for her example. Classes and conversations with her about Rousseau and Mallarmé have also entered this book subterraneously. Étienne Balibar made reading Marx seem like fun and the obvious thing to do at any stage of career and life. I owe him special thanks for welcoming me into his classroom in Nanterre in the autumn of 1999. Sam Weber encouraged a certain rebellion early on. A book requires more time than a doctoral dissertation. It also requires more books, and the material conditions allowing one to read them. For two crucial years in New York, Eduardo Cadava and Thomas Keenan helped me to get these things when they were in short supply. Gil Anidjar was instrumental in opening up institutional resources during this same period. Melanie Ross was a particularly loving presence while in New York. Marion Picker called or came into town, more than once, at just the right time. For moral support spanning cities and decades, love and thanks go to Erin Ferris and Georgia Albert and, again, to Tom Keenan and Eduardo Cadava. No one deserves louder mention in these pages than Judith Butler. A junior scholar could not ask for a better mentor and friend, and I am grateful to her for her generosity, wisdom, and compassion, and for the intensity and grace of her intellectual engagement. This book would never have seen the light of day without her.

viii   Acknowledgments While in Berkeley, I was fortunate enough to share work and life with Ivan Ascher, Natalia Brizuela, Sarah Evans, Jeff Fort, Anne-Lise François, Colleen Lye, John Muse, Christopher Nealon, Catherine Rottenberg, Ann Smock, Annika Thiem, Yves Winter, and Benjamin Young, and I am grateful to all of them for conversations along the way. I would also like to thank the graduate student members of the Interdisciplinary Marxism Working Group for providing an exceptionally meaningful forum in which to present my work. I am indebted to the students in my graduate course on “The Figure of the Masses in Marx and Marxist Thought,” who gave me new eyes through which to read some very old texts. I am equally indebted to the students in two different iterations of my undergraduate course on “Literature and Theories of Radical Change” and in my fall 2005 class on the modern lyric. For financial support, I am grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and also to Judith Butler, Michael Mascuch, and the Rhetoric Department of the University of California, Berkeley. It is extremely pleasurable for me to express my debt to Elissa Marder, who swooped down in the eleventh hour when the going was getting tough and stood over the whole thing like a slightly fabulous fairy godmother. The title in particular has been touched by her wand. When the going got even tougher, Lochlann (Sarah) Jain just kept it going. I would like, finally, to thank my editors at Stanford, Norris Pope and Emily-Jane Cohen, for their support of this project, and Jeff Kinkle for his assistance with the bibliography and with compiling the index. A final word of thanks goes to my daughter, who shared the first five years of her life with this book, even if it was basically kicking and screaming; and to her father for being there with her, and for her, when I was not.

Abbreviations

baudelaire OC

Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Claude Pichois. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.

benjamin AP

The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard/Belknap, 1999.

GS

Gesammelte Schriften. 7 vols. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974–1989.

SW

Selected Writings. Ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. 4 vols. Cambridge: Harvard/Belknap, 1996–2003.

marx C

Capital. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin/New Left Review, 1976.

C2

Capital. Vol. 2. Trans. David Fernbach. London: Penguin/New Left Review, 1978.

C3

Capital. Vol. 3. Trans. David Fernbach. London: Penguin/New Left Review, 1981.

EB

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers, 1963.

x   Abbreviations GI

The German Ideology. Trans. Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat. Selected Writings. Ed. Lawrence H. Simon. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994.

R

Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses. Frankfurt am Main: Neue Kritik, 1969.

W

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Werke. Vols. 23–25. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1962–1989.

Translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

As Marx almost wrote, “Language makes history, but not under circumstances of its own choosing.” —Denise Riley

counterfeit capital

Introduction: Swindlers and Prophets

1. Lost and Transmitted If Baudelaire and Marx can still be considered our ancestors, the coiners and first critics of a modernity we still, every now and then, claim to inherit, it is not in the sense that this modernity has come to be glossed, as knowledge of a net loss in possibility: “To be modern is to know what is no longer possible” (Barthes 211). It is true that interpretations of Baudelaire have claimed to discover just such a loss, finding it more or less metonymically expressed in the type of the melancholic poet, piétinant through his perennially fractured mourning of Paris. (Metonymically because he does not remember anything, and transmits only what he cannot remember.) Interpretations of Marx of every stripe—classical, orthodox, post-Marxist—have, by contrast, staked their claims on the production of new possibilities from what must in fact have only seemed a loss. For all their apparent differences, both interpretations mimic the hocus-pocus whereby capital pretends to produce something from out of nothing, like a rabbit from a hat, even as it drags all that was once valued, apart from value, into its disappearing act. Marx on occasion refers to this as “swindling,” a word that, in German, preserves a clear relation to the dizziness caused in the mind of the presdigitator’s subject (C 96;

   Introduction: Swindlers and Prophets W 23: 19).1 Capital, or so this story goes, that condition of possibility of modernity. But since when has it been possible to mark, to measure, or in some other way to register either a loss or a gain in possibility? This modernity seems to think, or at least to want to believe, that both past and future can be measured; that they can be lost and therefore saved or saved up, kept or left intact, accounted for—as if time itself could be exchanged for something; as if possibility acquired the power, in time, to transform its own conditions of production, its own “conditions of possibility.” Once possibility is drawn in this way into the web of economic thinking, it starts to look like capital. Who can ever really know that the lost thing will not return, that what is now no longer possible will not someday be possible again? This possibility, that capital secretly rummages through the past even as it whispers to us seductively about the future, is, of course, one of the themes of Capital. Hence the leap of faith that, as Marx remarks, carves a mad love of possibility in capital’s heart. Here, to be modern, or better, to be a subject of capital, is not so much to know anything—neither is it to remember or to forget anything—as it is to start calculating with this leap of faith. If Baudelaire and Marx can still be considered our ancestors—the coiners of the words we still use (modernity, for example) and our loudest critics—it is because they uncovered this mad love of possibility within capital, and because they recognized in it both the ugliest possibilities of economic thinking and, all tangled up with them, a potentially interruptive force. Marx himself was not deaf to the revolutionary overtones of this analysis—for example, when he theorizes the links between capital and a different future in volume 3. In the chapter on “The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production,” Marx explains that credit gets rid of capital without actually getting rid of it: it revolutionizes the relation of capital to labor from within, such that “the opposition between capital and labor is abolished [aufgehoben]” (C3 571; W 25: 456). As the credit system develops the motive of capitalist production into “the purest and most colossal system of gambling and swindling,” he writes, the associated workers become “their own capitalist” (C3 571). The end of capital is not the end of capital, at least in part, Marx suggests in his discussion of the develop-

Introduction: Swindlers and Prophets    ment of credit, because capital always has the power to (re)make itself (as) possible. He calls the proponents of credit not only “swindlers” but also “prophets” (C3 572–73). Seen from the angle of this development, the revolution—not even the one that Marx himself prophesied—will not and cannot ever be a revolution “against” capital. And it is no longer possible to speak of a future that would not just be a repetition of the present possibilities without a heady dose of ironic vertigo slipping in. No wonder so many of the stories Baudelaire and Marx tell us about capital’s future are marked by a manifest investment in this vertigo. This book began when I noticed that Marx and Baudelaire posited, at strange places in their texts, a relationship between irony and capital. This relationship was, it seemed to me, at once unexpected and essential. For a short while, I persisted in the delusion that my reading might be neatly tied up with a question. For example, why does the belief in a different future call out for ironic expression under capital? It seemed possible to start with a reflection on the connections between elements of literature or literary language and a critical and deeply political response to capital. Like the man said: beware all who enter here. No sooner had I committed myself to this task than other questions gathered, some looking suspiciously like versions of the questions that Marx and Baudelaire had been asking. How to conceive of revolution under conditions dictating the infinite production and reproduction of the same? How to account for the long-standing dismissal of the idea that irony, which is always connected with infinitude and repetition, could have political pertinence or be connected in some way with the critique of capital? What if irony cannot be confined to literature or to language, but rather comes to inflect the production or circulation of all meaning or value under capital? In the pages that follow, I have tried to formalize at the level of the individual readings what Baudelaire and Marx were thinking or wanted us to consider when they asked us to reflect on capital in an ironic way. In many, but not all, of the texts I read, this reflection is carried out in a language that would be considered by many to be ironic in a literary or rhetorical sense; in many but not all of these texts, Marx and Baudelaire actually use the word irony. With and through these texts, I have

   Introduction: Swindlers and Prophets tried to track what an entire critical tradition has neglected or repressed when it has mistaken irony for something purely negative, in the sense of destructive, nihilistic, and even antipolitical. Negation and reversal are not always, or not only, destructive. The most unexpected and most unprecedented actions are not always the worst. Nor, for that matter, is destruction always a bad thing. In still other texts, the word irony does not appear on the page, and I have been concerned to explore the consequences of capital’s imbrication with the technical yet noninstrumental dimensions of human labor for its history and future, and for our ability even to imagine a different world.

2. Irony, Allegory, and Capital Irony has typically been defined, in the history of its theories, as a rhetorical device or “figure of speech,” with the Renaissance marking its first renaissance and Cicero and Quintilian acting as its most celebrated theorists. In other definitions, it has been treated as a more extended figure, in which its duplicity and complexity are understood to characterize a person (Socrates), an idea, the complicity of an entire community, or even the sensibility of an entire epoch. The figure of speech is, in these definitions, said to be extended to a “figure of thought.” In some accounts, this extension allows irony to transcend the baseness of rhetoric and become more sublime or philosophical. In other accounts, it only debases it further. In both cases, irony is persistently associated with double-voicedness, reflexivity, and vertigo. Hence the common thread, running through all of these definitions, of a copresence or mutual interference of two voices, two meanings, or two events, standing in an infinitely reversible relationship. One of the most commonly cited definitions says that irony is “saying one thing and meaning another” or “saying the contrary of what is meant.” I am not certain which of these definitions comes closest to the irony that interests me, nor would I want to suggest that it is the same one every time. Given my attention to the political nature of Baudelaire’s and Marx’s statements and my concern, above all, to explore the consequences of irony for their critiques of capital, we might imagine that the

Introduction: Swindlers and Prophets    irony connected with a community comes closest, but only if community is not reduced to a monoplanar encounter between subjects. This was, I think, already Baudelaire’s lesson, in passages such as this one from the late notebooks: Yes! Long live the Revolution! still! and despite everything! But me, I am no fool! I have never been a fool! I say “Long live the Revolution! ” as I would say “Long live Destruction! Long live Expiation! Long live Punishment! Long live Death! ” Not only would I be happy to be the victim, but I wouldn’t object to being the executioner—so as to feel the Revolution in two different ways! We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like we have syphilis in our bones. We have all contracted democracy and syphilis. (OC 2: 961)2

Witness the complexities that ensue when irony names, or comes in some other way to be connected with, the event or decision that would precede or prepare the effective instance or act of anticapitalist resistance. No sooner does Baudelaire say revolution than this saying troubles the very categories of “effectivity” and “resistance.” This passage has the added virtue of underscoring the poet’s preoccupation with transmission. Speaking of old questions coming back, and questions about transmission in particular, I should say something about my debt to Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s first and most monumental intervention was to argue—most explicitly, in the so-called Baudelaire book but also elsewhere3—that Marx’s and Baudelaire’s texts registered traces of the same event: capital conceived as a change in the nature and mechanisms of transmission of experience; the mechanization of production (be it of meaning or of value), or of human labor (manual or intellectual, virtual or embodied); the still-unfolding consequences of these changes for our conception of history. I have been inspired by Benjamin’s decision to think the material(ity) of capital’s history as a matter for poetry. I have been particularly preoccupied with Benjamin’s interpretation of Baudelaire’s poetry as a “new technology” of historical inscription and cultural transmission specifically adapted to capital. Part of what I have tried to show, and what I think a reflection on irony opens up after Benjamin, are the connections between the conception of history that emerges in his texts on Baudelaire and his more general or thematic statements about

   Introduction: Swindlers and Prophets materialist history. I have suggested that these more general statements clearly draw inspiration from a conception of history that is, in direct proportion as it is materialist, both textual and ironic. In my readings of Capital (above all, the discussions of primitive accumulation and capitalist accumulation in Chapter 3), I have tried to show that this “textual” history directly cites Marx’s.4 My debt is even greater when it comes to Benjamin’s second intervention, which was his theory of Baudelairean allegory. If, as Benjamin essentially argues, Baudelaire’s texts can be understood to speak allegorically by speaking with and through the commodity, it follows that the political-economic dimensions of circulation and exchange cannot be distinguished from more general problems of linguistic and historical transmission. Benjamin never gives us a full-blown theory of language’s economic principles, but his decision to write a materialist history of the nineteenth century through the lens of an interpretation of Baudelaire’s poetry is deeply rooted in key ideas about language’s material and economic nature.5 Nowhere is this clearer than in his theoretical pronouncements about allegory. Even if these pronouncements can seem a little cryptic (“Majesty of the allegorical intention: destruction of the organic and the living—extinguishing of appearances” [SW 4: 172]; “The devaluation of the world of things in allegory is surpassed within the world of things itself by the commodity” [SW 4: 164]), Benjamin is able to illuminate, through his theory of allegory, the broader social, political, and historical consequences of capital more lucidly than we might expect. In much the same way that Marx describes the realm of production as standing in a secret yet not-so-secret or repressed relation to circulation, Benjamin encourages us to imagine a kind of material underworld of language from which everything else bubbles up: meaning, reference, the value that enters infinitely into circulation, and which is (or so it is promised) infinitely capitalizable. Only once we grasp the weird brilliance of Benjamin’s interpretation of allegory as the linguistic equivalent of the commodity can we appreciate his statements about the peculiar prospects for historical and cultural transmission under capital. If, as Benjamin teaches, Baudelaire’s insights as a critic of capital are intimately bound up with all that is most original about his lyric work (the “taboo” on the future, the skillful management of the alexan-

Introduction: Swindlers and Prophets    drine, the appropriation and transposition of allegory from the baroque period to the modern), my aim is to show they cannot be confined to it. Whereas Benjamin sets out from the hypothesis that with Baudelaire we reach a “crisis of the lyric” and that the poet’s texts “render the possibility of lyric poetry problematic,”6 I argue that there remain lessons to be drawn from their power to move through this crisis. Irony also names this situation of impossible transmission.7

3. Poetry and Prose The term Baudelairean irony is a familiar one in the criticism. Although irony crops up most frequently with reference to the prose poetry project Spleen de Paris (Petits poèmes en prose) and to the critical prose works, it is crucial to note—as has Jean Starobinski—that the word and concept irony already make an appearance in Les Fleurs du mal.8 If this occurrence is noteworthy from the standpoint of the definition of irony, it is even more so from the standpoint of generic definition, for irony has frequently been considered the special province of narrative and has come to be associated, at least in European literary traditions, almost exclusively with the novel.9 In fact, the discovery of a lyric irony already in the verse poetry can be traced even further back, to the poet’s own famous remark in Au Lecteur (“To the Reader,” the collection’s dedicatory) that the poetry is destined to engage a reader who is either too bored—or too hypocritical—to read it. There is, the poetry itself suggests, a kind of irony in the very fact of the modern lyric’s existence. Benjamin only extends this line when he suggests that the true irony of Baudelaire’s self-situation in the dedicatory stems from the success of his poetic production under capital: “Baudelaire wrote a book which from the very beginning had little prospect of becoming an immediate popular success,” and yet, Benjamin goes on to emphasize, “[T]here has been no success on a mass scale in lyric poetry since Baudelaire” (SW 4: 313–14). If we follow this reading, the verse poetry posits itself as a kind of prototype and baseline measurement of every future irony and, in this sense, prefigures the theory of irony (really it is something closer to a manifesto) that is given in the famous preface to the prose poems.

   Introduction: Swindlers and Prophets By invoking the verse-prose distinction, I want less to offer a commentary on genre than to point out the ways that this distinction has traditionally been invoked, and then displaced or shifted, in order to produce artificial separations within Baudelaire’s corpus. Even if we could subscribe to the distinction between a theory and a practice of irony, or between those texts that use irony and those that only mention it, it would be possible to argue that both practices (the practice of theorizing and the practice of practicing irony) are sustained by the same reflection on the seriously compromised prospects for aesthetic and poetic production under capital. Some of the passages in Baudelaire that are most often interpreted as ironic precisely in connection with a critique of capital are found in the art criticism—for example, in the Salon of 1846, which opens with the scathing dedication to the bourgeoisie, and in the well-known text on laughter, De l’essence du rire . . . (On the Essence of Laughter . . . ). They can also be drawn from the lesser-read late notebooks, above all, as I have already suggested, from those published posthumously as Pauvre Belgique! (Poor Belgium! ). In the late texts on Belgium, Baudelaire explains that the Belgians are not able to understand him when he is being ironic: “When I felt I was being bad-mouthed, I wanted to nip this national passion in the bud, and, silly fool that I am, I used irony [et pauvre niais que je suis, je me suis servi de l’ironie]!” (OC 2: 854). He tells them that he is a spy, and they believe him. He tells them that he is a “pederast,” and they believe him. In the midst of a sectarian controversy over funerary rites, he is unable to understand why the Belgians are up in arms that a corpse was dug up. You would think they had been planning to eat it. What? Were you planning to eat it? As a matter of fact. . . . 10 In this same sequence, Baudelaire explains that the reason the Belgians don’t understand irony is that they are all capitalists. The problem with the Belgians, the Frenchman suggests, is that they spend one tenth of their revenue and capitalize the rest (“Le dixième du revenu est dépensé. Le reste capitalisé” [OC 2: 868]). Lest we be fooled by the racist and xenophobic overtones of the caricature—lest we be inclined, that is, to mistake these Belgians for actual Belgians—Baudelaire repeatedly points out that “[t]he point of a satirical writing is to kill two birds with one stone. In doing a sketch of Belgium, there is, as an added benefit, this advantage of doing a cari-

Introduction: Swindlers and Prophets    cature of France at the same time” (OC 2: 821). Belgium is, he explains in another passage, the spitting image of what France itself would have become had Louis Philippe been allowed to retain power (OC 2: 955). Given the ethicopolitical as well as the political-economic nature of the commentary, I would suggest that we think twice about the ironic schism running through Baudelaire’s texts. Rather than simply asking why Baudelaire felt compelled to write his poetic project twice—once in a version that is more or less lyric, and in verse, the second time in a version that is avowedly ironic, in a so-called poetic prose—it seems we should be asking: How might this double writing be related to the fact that this project is a critique of capital?

4. On the Coming of the Revolution with Figuration and without Form The principal interest of irony in a political context is that it limits our ability to conceive of man as a rational subject or purposive actor, and thus as a political agent, at least insofar as this agent has been conceived by traditional models. It has increasingly become a question, however, whether the rational subject or agent has ever been the true subject or agent of politics, and it is a touchstone of all of my readings of Capital that Marx’s own challenges to the subject of reason are profound. Whether the conditions for a genuinely transformative social or political movement or intervention must be actively and consciously prepared by this kind of subject or agent or whether they await fulfillment in a single movement with the forward march of capital is a question on which Marx himself never takes a clear position and is one of the most enduring aporias of Capital. Even before the aporia of revolutionary or transformative action emerges in Capital, Marx’s text describes a space in which all action has the potential to produce effects in a strange relation to instrumental reason and calculative thinking. Previous treatments of Marxian irony, however, have tended to define it overly narrowly, as a matter of formal or stylistic elements of language, without ever asking how it is, or might be, brought to bear on questions of political time and agency in Capital.11

   Introduction: Swindlers and Prophets Schematically, and with these questions in mind, we may note that Marx’s analysis leads to two different kinds of reflection on capital’s future in Capital. The first asks, in a mode that is hopeful and expectant but not necessarily utopian: So what if capital changes the very conditions of the future? That they wanted changing is the very core of the idea of anticapitalist revolution, which rests on a double postulate in its turn. First, capital calls for revolution; it calls revolution forth, as it were, from the future, and a future that is therefore different from, something other than, the accumulation of (more) capital—a future to which nothing “in” capital per se corresponds. The second half of this postulate holds that capital is itself, and always has been, a revolutionary force. This first reflection is in full dialectical swing. It has room for a production that would make its peace with destruction: for the possibility that capital may still change things for the better, even if it appears, so far, only to have changed them for the worse for a large number of people. It has time to temporalize, synthesize, and narrativize the relations among disparate elements while at the same time leaving open the possibility of a rupture and a radically different arrangement. The second reflection on capital’s place in history also hopes for a different future, but it has a harder time predicting, let alone promising, capital’s demise. It is no less sensitive to the seductions of capital’s transformative powers; if anything, it is more so. Hence it wants to know, in a mode at once concessive and anxious: Yes, something will have to change, but how? And then, if and when it changes, how will we know—will we even know—once it does? This second reflection is the true source of Baudelaire’s melancholy, which registers the arcane and complex links between capital’s powers of transformation and the very mode in which the future would have to come. This brings us back to the attempted definition of irony, which literary theorist Paul de Man infamously claimed elided capture by a single “concept.”12 De Man’s position—that irony belongs neither wholly to literature nor to some watered-down conception of the political nature of language as stemming from the negotiated nature of “human meaning” in all its forms13—drove him to take it up, repeatedly, as a problem of figural language. It is thanks to de Man that we understand how irony brings language, precisely thanks to this emphasis on figuration, out of

Introduction: Swindlers and Prophets    the sphere of “merely” technical (or “rhetorical”) matters and into the sphere of real or material events. This take on irony resonates with a great deal of new work on aesthetics and politics, including that work that comes largely out of new readings of Marx and that emphasizes new intersections of means and ends. It also suggests that it is only through grappling with mediation, and therefore with technics, that we are able to confront the power of both language and human beings to intervene— act, or just plain be—in the world. We will have occasion to think further about all of these connections in the individual chapters that follow.

chapter 1

Paris Spleen (The Irony of Revolutionary Power) Baudelaire would never have written poems if he’d had nothing more than the usual motives poets have for writing poetry. —Walter Benjamin (SW 4: 176)

How to account for the fact that one of the most singular responses to capital in the realm of art—by many accounts the most brilliant, indisputably the most obsessive, and one that continues to have effects— should have come in the form of lyric poetry? In his classic essay, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Walter Benjamin lets himself be guided by this question, remarking, “[T]here has been no success on a mass scale in lyric poetry since Baudelaire” (SW 4: 314). He goes on to argue that this success holds some mystery and even provokes (resorting to an old Marxist term) a crisis, to such an extent that some of Baudelaire’s motifs actually “render the possibility of lyric poetry problematic” (SW 4: 341). The riddle is phrased slightly differently in another of Benjamin’s late texts on Baudelaire, “Central Park,” in which it is stated that the poet placed a “taboo on the future”—in part, it is implied, because he saw no place in that future for his poetry (SW 4: 162). We may discern this same taboo in some of the more familiar moves of Les Fleurs du mal, such as the interposition of the ancient (l’antique) and the modern and the elevation of spleen, or melancholia, to the principal mode of relation to the past, including the past of poetic production. We have Benjamin to thank for tracing the connections between these moves and the crisis of

   Paris Spleen lyric production brought on by the rise of industrial capital in Paris—the so-called capital of capital—in the middle of the nineteenth century. We ourselves continue to have the vague sense that this response to capital should have come in some other medium: one more immediately connected with the technicization of production, for example, or with the many modifications sustained by the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility. Or that it should have come in a more obviously “aesthetic” medium: in painting, for example, or photography. It is worth noting that Benjamin’s earliest writings on Baudelaire approach his work through a discourse on photography, for which a discourse on architecture is substituted only much later on, in the project on the Paris arcades.1 Elsewhere Benjamin privileges photography, before film, as an example of a mode of aesthetic or cultural production with the power to realize new political possibilities and to transmit a “revolutionary content”—a power to which it seems Baudelaire’s poetry can only aspire (SW 2: 774). But as I said, this is all a bit vague, and was already so for Benjamin. Why should lyric production be any less touched by the processes of technicization and capitalization than another? The traumatic shocks that are, for Benjamin, the raw material of Baudelaire’s poetry, the yawning rents in the fabric of narrative time from which he claims modern experience emerges, were always already there in the lyric, in the peculiar figures to which it gives voice. Poetry has always been plugged into the more general fields of production and reproduction, the material, the mediatic, and the technical. It has always been wired. And really the same would have to be said for all language. As Plato (that cryptomaterialist) well understood, language is language only insofar as it gets drawn into, and draws resources from, a whole complex of technical and economic processes. This is why philosophy’s efforts to distinguish the statesman from the rhetorician, the philosopher from the sophist, were destined to fail from the start.2 This essential technicity of language is not a particularly modern, let alone a specifically capitalist, phenomenon. Of course, it is possible that this vague notion we have that language should remain untouched by capital is itself thoroughly ideological. This was, it seems to me at least plausible, already Baudelaire’s lesson. The poet’s critical insight into this ideology of purity achieves its

Paris Spleen    most crystalline formulation in Pauvre Belgique!, his last book project. In the notebooks for this project, it is repeatedly stated that the Belgians drink their own urine: “The faro comes from that great big latrine, the Senne—a beverage extracted from the city’s carefully sorted excrement. Thus it is that, for centuries, the city has drunk its own urine” (OC 2: 836). Similarly, we are told that they only drink wine “for show” (such as when a Frenchman comes to dinner): “The Belgians display their wines. They don’t drink them because they have a taste for them, but out of vanity, and in order to demonstrate their conformity, in order to be like the French” (OC 2: 833); “They drink wine in public, beer behind closed doors. They drink wine out of vanity, in order to seem French, but they don’t actually like it” (OC 2: 835). Perhaps worst of all, the Belgians— unlike Baudelaire, of course—always know the price, never the value, of great paintings: “The Belgians measure an artist’s worth from the price of his paintings” (OC 2: 931); “The Belgians’ way of discussing a painting’s worth. The dollar amount, always the dollar amount. This goes on for three hours. And then, after three hours of quoting the prices things are going for, they think they’ve actually had a conversation about painting” (OC 2: 933–34); “A minister, whose collection I am visiting, says to me as I sing David’s praises: “ ‘Am I correct in understanding that David is going up?’ I reply: ‘David was never in decline among intelligent people’ ” (OC 2: 934). The passion for urine drinking, the vanity of drinking wine only in public, the endless discussions of the art market—these are all figures of capital’s infinite self-extension: “One tenth of the revenue is spent. The rest is capitalized” (OC 2: 868). Elsewhere, the mania for capitalization is likened to cannibalism. Baudelaire’s understanding of the limitlessness of capital’s appetite is in perfect keeping with Marx’s—for example, in the early sections of Capital on commodities and money, in which we learn that nothing is barred from inscription within the capitalist system: linen as well as iron; life as well as death; cunning as well as blood, guts, and muscle (C 164)—poetry, adds Baudelaire, as well as prose. In view of the poet’s own preoccupation with this limitlessness, the question becomes not simply where we find evidence of capital’s hand in his poetry, but whether we can identify in his texts a mode of poetic production that is, in some sense, proper to capital. Only once we

   Paris Spleen have isolated this poetic principle can we begin to ask about a poetry that would support or, alternatively draw resources from, its negation or overturning, allowing for the elaboration of an anticapitalist or revolutionary poetic principle. It goes almost without saying that we are not talking about two different poetic corpuses or bodies of work but about the prospects for change or transformation within a single corpus with privileged links to capital.

1. “Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes” If we want to take up this question in the poetry itself, the first and most obvious place to go is to two well-known poems appearing early in the first cycle of Les Fleurs du mal (Spleen et Idéal): La Muse malade (“The Sick Muse”) and La Muse vénale (“The Venal Muse”). These poems explicitly treat the problem of their own production, like all muse poems. If the lyric muse is traditionally associated with a principle of inspiration, and thus with a Romantic and idealizing conception of poetic labor, this is the model that La Muse malade undoes.3 This muse is sick. What is wrong with her? Will it even be possible, given her condition, to write a poem? My poor muse, alas, what is your problem this morning? Your hollow eyes are peopled with nocturnal visions, And I see by turns reflected in your face Madness and horror, cold and taciturn. Have the greenish succubus and the rosy goblin, Poured for you fear and love from their urns? Have nightmares, with a despotic and unruly hand, Drowned you in the depths of some fabulous Minturne? (OC 1: 14–15)4

Things do not look good, and yet, on one reading, the crisis is only temporary. The poem’s first line suggests that it may be only this morning (ce matin) that the muse is sick. It is furthermore implied in the second quatrain that she may simply be suffering from insomnia: perhaps all she needs is a good night’s sleep. Also reassuring is that the descriptions of succubus and goblin, for all their grim allure, can be readily reinscribed

Paris Spleen    in a “healthy” conception of poetic inspiration, for they depend on the same movements of interiorization, introjection, and incorporation as other spiritual or incarnational models. Under healthy lyric conditions, the muse inspires the poet by “in-spiriting” him with creative breath or life, of which he is, for better or for worse, the vessel. Here, it is the creatures of the night who dispense fear and desire from their vessels for the muse to drink. The tercets follow through on this healthy reinscription, and any fear that may have been inspired in us by the muse’s sick day is almost immediately dispelled: Would that your breast, exhaling healthy scents, Be forever filled with hardy thoughts, And your Christian blood flow in rhythmic waves, Like the harmonious sounds of antique syllables, Where reign by turns Phoebus, father of song, And the great Pan, lord of the harvest. (OC 1: 14–15)

The poet’s desire that the muse’s blood flow in rhythmic waves, likened here to the harmonious or “numbered” sounds of antique syllables, is not just described but actually realized in the course of this description. It is, in other words, not despite her lapse but rather because of it that the sick muse constitutes a stimulus to poetic production and provides an occasion for the writing of a poem. This second reading has the virtue of mobilizing what is widely considered to be a kind of master trope of Les Fleurs du mal, through which a state of decadence or decay, whether natural or moral, shows signs of an unexpected fertility or fecundity, and, as it were, is turned to account. Other poems that might be included under this heading are the famous dedicatory, Au Lecteur (“To the Reader”), in which the poet appeals to his reader on the basis of a disinclination to reading. This reader is either too bored or too hypocritical to read poetry, and it is thus that he is addressed as the reader of these poems. Then there is Une charogne (“A Carrion”), a love poem written on the body of a maggot-ridden piece of roadkill. When, in order to convey a heightened sense of beauty’s transience, the speaker compares his girlfriend’s fate to that of the carrion with its legs spread in the air, he highlights an erotic charge that was already there in the memento mori. These are the poems, or at least the

   Paris Spleen readings of them, that underwrite the received interpretation of Les Fleurs du mal as not just depicting but actually blooming, or coming into the world, as “flowers of evil.” This interpretation is illuminating in that it grapples with elements of Baudelaire’s poetic production that are deeply bound up with capital. It nonetheless fails to account for other ways that these poems also work and construes Baudelaire’s lyric modernity overly narrowly. The second muse poem pushes us beyond this interpretation, for it confronts the question of the market explicitly and directly in order to flesh out its own self-conception as a commodity. In keeping with this market orientation, and in marked contrast to the first muse poem, La Muse vénale is turned strangely toward the future. The crisis of poetic production threatened in the quatrains is just that: (still) threatened. Lest we mistake this futurity for some sort of reprieve, however, it quickly becomes clear that there is no avoiding the crisis in this case either. This future orientation carries with it, like every orientation toward the market, a turn toward irony: Oh, muse of my heart, lover of palaces, When January looses her north winds, Through the dreary darkness of snowy evenings, Will you have embers to warm your freezing feet? Will you revive your marbled shoulders In the rays of moonlight that peep through the shutters? Feeling your purse as dry as your palate, Will you harvest gold from the azure vaults? (OC 1: 15)

A courtesan or prostitute—a “lover of palaces” (amante des palais) in a double sense—this muse not only has needs but is painted as a connoisseur of earthly delights. Like the sick muse before her, she is a strikingly sensual and embodied figure. She gets cold; she gets thirsty; but worst of all, as the time-honored trope of wintry desuetude drives home, she is getting old. Because she is a prostitute, her sensuality and embodiedness (read: her mortality) are closely connected with her status as a commodity. Forget inspiration; this is a muse for whom cash flow matters most. Hence the dryness of her palate is figured, in the second quatrain, in a single image with the drying up of her cash reserves: both reflect her in-

Paris Spleen    creasing inability to sell herself. O, muse of my heart, the poem apostrophizes, what will you do in hard times, once you have run out of money? Go and gather gold from the sky’s azure vaults? We may recognize in these azure vaults an allusion to the poetic flight of fancy thematized in Élévation (“Elevation”), another poem from the same cycle. In Élévation, in contradistinction to anything that seems possible in either muse poem, the poet exhorts his own spirit to soar above the earth and purify itself in the heavens, like those happy souls who talk to flowers. It is, of course, this soaring, “effortless” model of poetic production, in whose figural facade cracks had already appeared (with the schism of the speaking voice, the central trope of muteness, the need for vigorous exhortation in the first place), that is undermined by the competing models of the sick muse and the muse as prostitute: Happy is he who can with vigorous wing Launch himself into fields luminous and serene; He whose thoughts, like sparrows, Soar freely into the heavens every morning, —He who glides over the surface of life, and effortlessly understands The language of flowers and mute things. (OC 1: 10)

As for what replaces the fiction of this poetic effortlessness under capital, La Muse vénale could not be more explicit. Poetic labor is, precisely, labor, and as the tercets make clear, in the winter of her life, this muse will have to work for a living:5 To earn your evening bread you’ll have to swing The censer like a choirboy, and sing Te Deums of which you don’t believe a word, Or, starving clown, show off your charms, your smile Wet with tears that none see, to beguile And cheer the sick spleen of the vulgar herd. (OC 1: 15)6

La Muse vénale teaches us that there are always other flowers, other languages, other modes of poetic production, that are anything but effortless. The crisis of lyric production brought on by the substitution of labor in the place of inspiration is, here again, only temporary. So what,

   Paris Spleen we may say, if our muse is a washed-up whore? As was the case with the sick muse before her, her fall from the superior air into labor turns out to be an excellent topic of lyric poetry and provides the occasion for the writing of a poem. And yet, as the poem’s last line makes unmistakable, there is something about this particular mode of production that plunges poet, muse, and clown into melancholy—and we as readers (here figured by the vulgar onlooker) as well. There is, furthermore, as in Au Lecteur, a healthy dose of hypocrisy, and the toll of this labor remains veiled or hidden from view, as figured by the invisible tears of the clown.7 Both this melancholy and this duplicity are connected here, as elsewhere in Baudelaire’s corpus, with what is called spleen (la rate). They are also connected with irony.

2. Irony and Textual History To say that there are always “other languages” through which these poems speak to us about their own production, even as they speak to us simultaneously about muses, flowers, or capital, is to invoke the language of allegory, which the OED defines, conveniently, as “speaking otherwise than one seems to speak.” This same alterity, of speaking to meaning, characterizes some of the most frequently cited definitions of irony, such as “saying one thing and meaning another,” or, in the definition commonly attributed to Quintilian, “saying the contrary of what one means.”8 Before turning directly to the question of an ironic poetic principle, with which we are confronted by Baudelaire’s poetry, as we have just seen, together with the question about a capitalist one, it is helpful to look more closely at what allegory stands for in the more general literary theoretical discourse. In the case of one small corner of this discourse, that of de Manian deconstruction, allegory is twinned with irony and articulated within a theory of temporality, in which an understanding of the specifically figural or tropological dimensions of language becomes critical to any understanding of language’s intervention in the world. Drawing on this theory, we may sketch a series of hypotheses about certain rigorously historical dimensions of language that remain deeply bound up with this

Paris Spleen    other-speaking. Although de Man’s treatment of allegory is sometimes thought to descend from Benjamin’s discussion of allegory in the Trauerspiel book, it seems to me that it can be more properly and more suggestively understood as a response to Benjamin’s discussion of Baudelairean allegory, in which he posits a historical connection between the resurgence of allegory in Les Fleurs du mal and the crisis of lyric production brought on by capital. De Man’s discussion of the temporal and historical dimensions of linguistic reference allows us to elucidate certain ways that Baudelaire’s poetry might be connected to capital that are, I will suggest, ultimately divergent from Benjamin’s theories. In “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” de Man mounts an argument about the relationships among what are in fact three figures: symbol, allegory, and irony.9 The essay opens with a gloss of the different philosophical principles connected with the various figures, inheriting from a venerable tradition of classical and Romantic treatises on tropes (Du Marsais, Fontanier, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Friedrich Schlegel are all here) and also modern revisions of this tradition (by Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Benjamin). Thus de Man explicates the role in the symbol of totalizing and naturalizing conceptions of meaning and of reference, versus archival, sedimented, and dead-letter conceptions in the case of allegory. The essay is simultaneously concerned with figural language more generally, and it constantly circles back from its treatment of individual tropes and tropological principles to larger theoretical questions about how figural language differs from other language (if it does); how we recognize it when we see it (if we do); and how we know how to read it, with reading here standing in a clearly disjunctive relationship to either recognition or knowledge. The first distinction de Man explores is that between allegory and symbol. It is through this distinction that we come to appreciate the extent to which our experience as historical subjects hangs, precariously, on figures. The symbol, de Man explains, mobilizes principles of totality and infinity: he speaks in this regard of the “appeal to the infinity of a totality” as constituting “the main attraction of the symbol.” In allegory, by contrast, the sign “refers to one specific meaning and thus exhausts its suggestive potentialities once it has been deciphered” (Blindness 188). Allegorical language is, by virtue of this finitude, the thoroughly or most

   Paris Spleen properly historical language, for it lets the thing it refers to stay elsewhere (for example, dead or in the past) rather than trying to restore it. This attempted restoration is always risked or implied by the symbol, and it connects the symbol’s temporality—indeed, its entire history—with a metaphysics of presence. Allegory, in separating or marking itself off from its meaning, produces history according to a different, and radically differential, model: In the world of the symbol it would be possible for the image to coincide with the substance, since the substance and its representation do not differ in their being but only in their extension: they are part and whole of the same set of categories. Their relationship is one of simultaneity, which, in truth, is spatial in kind, and in which the intervention of time is merely a matter of contingency, whereas, in the world of allegory, time is the originary constitutive category. (Blindness 207)

On the basis of this passage, we may readily grasp why allegory becomes, for de Man, a privileged figure not simply of figural or tropological language, but of a certain temporal dimension of all language. Who could deny that time is the originary constitutive category of all language, and not only where it comes to us as writing? We may also think here of the Derridean différance, which is among other things a theory of history and of certain historical dimensions of language. This passage also helps us to understand why allegory becomes the mode of linguistic reference that is, for Marx and Benjamin, most closely connected with the commodity. The commodity always points beyond its “proper” sphere (that, say, of things) to the sphere of human relations, whose meaning it does not itself constitute and to which it does not belong. Or rather, and it is of course Marx who first seizes on this, the commodity does belong to the sphere of human relations, and yet, if and insofar as it is going to be, or circulate as, an improperly human thing (that is, a commodity), it must always bury, forget, or cover over this history. The commodity’s history is always a human history, and yet in order to be what it is, the commodity must cut itself off from those parts of itself that were human in the past. This constitutes the source and driving force of its fetishism and is what lends it the illusion of autonomy.10 The time of this history, both the event and its burial, cover-up, or

Paris Spleen    forgetting, is, strictly speaking, allegorical. As Marx himself insists, the commodity always refers to its own production in the sphere of human relations, but it can do so only under conditions ensuring they can be confined to a position of historical precedence. This sphere and these relations can be retained within the world of meaning only from the standpoint of what de Man calls “pure anteriority,” and it is only from this standpoint that they can be valorized—and made to signify. Allegorical reference, as de Man explains, always depends on a relationship between signs in which the reference to their respective meanings has become of secondary importance. But this relationship between signs necessarily contains a constitutive temporal element; it remains necessary, if there is to be allegory, that the allegorical sign refer to another sign that precedes it. The meaning constituted by the allegorical sign can then consist only in the repetition (in the Kierkegaardian sense of the term) of a previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it is of the essence of this previous sign to be pure anteriority. (Blindness 207)

De Man does not recur explicitly to the category of value in his analysis. As befits his preoccupation with Romanticism, he is more interested in the destabilizing effects of the allegorical relay for the narrative logic of a self or for the identity of a subject, who is now in a position of having to refer backward repeatedly to his own essence as pure anteriority, like the signs of which he is made.11 As will be clear when I return to Capital in Chapter 3, Marx’s own analysis of capital’s prehistory mobilizes a similarly textual conception of history, in the chapters on primitive accumulation, in an attempt to account for capital’s originary violence. For all their differences of emphasis and tone, however, de Man’s and Marx’s conceptions of history are linked by this concern with allegory. Both preserve an allegorical fracture at the origin. In direct proportion as the history of the one/the self/the same’s relation to the other is covered up, this history is preserved in, and as, a temporal relay between signs. Like allegory, irony preserves, continues to refer and to produce meaning from, this space of historical difference. But it cannot preserve these relations of pure anteriority. With irony, there is an infinitely repeated and repeatable interruption of two incompatible meanings, one of which is always the other’s negation, and neither of which can estab-

   Paris Spleen lish itself in a position of historical precedence, or “pure anteriority,” in relation to the other. This is the infinite vertigo and permanent parabasis that de Man is so fond of citing from Friedrich Schlegel. Each of two voices or of two meanings negates the other while at the same time referring to this other as its own historical condition, such that there ensues a kind of generalized referential disorder. This disorder, which posits the reference to alterity as a condition of meaning’s history, binds irony to textual and materialist conceptions of history. It also opens it toward more explicitly political questions. With irony, there is still anteriority, history, and event, but we are deprived of any reliable index as to what is past or belongs to the past. The consequences of irony for the self or subject who would constitute herself in language are for this reason rather more serious than were allegory’s considered on its own. Every last shred of reason will cling to the idea that something has to have happened, first and more or less archaically, in order for the sign or the text to be able to refer to it and continue to make sense, and this thing that has to have happened, be it another sign or a supposedly extralinguistic referent, must remain purely anterior. Without this remaining of the past event—without its remaining past or in the past—the very concept of history is threatened. It is possible to think of allegory and irony as producing or being produced by two different subjects or kinds of subject, one that would be more or less capable of tolerating this disorder (capitalist and revolutionary, bourgeois and proletarian), but to do so is to flatten the conception of history entailed by de Man’s analysis. Given the emphasis placed in de Man’s text—which in this sense can be understood to echo Benjamin’s late texts on history—on thinking a radical textual and historical interruption, we would do better to think of irony as a troping or transformation of allegorical time, such that it becomes possible to imagine a transformation of history, of the ways it means or comes into being, on the basis of a movement between these two figures. Where irony is understood as the “second” one, and therefore as this transformation’s condition of possibility, it becomes possible to speak of the production of an other history for the first time. This other history derives its interest from the fact that it was “already there” in the first (that is, allegorical) one without nonetheless being assimilable to the ideology of history as

Paris Spleen    progress, or indeed to any other teleologic. Irony renders history, as textual history, still living, our history, incomplete, not yet purely anterior. To write or to read such a history is to reconfigure our access to events in such a way that even the most buried, forgotten, or covered-over among them can be, if not revised or rewritten, then reread and understood otherwise.

3. Toward a Political Interpretation of Ironic Vertigo The interest of irony in a political context, and the reason for its near total repression in political thought, is that it limits our ability to conceive of man as a rational subject or purposive actor and thus as a political agent, at least as conceived by traditional models. Hence the many arguments “against” irony, which is construed as nihilistic and antipolitical. And yet, it has increasingly become a question whether the rational subject or agent has ever been the true subject or agent of politics, and whether this is the subject we want, or can be, as we respond to capital.12 If events can’t be made to stay in the past, there are consequences for how we understand the bases of any rational or purposive action at all. Irony may well destroy our ability to define subjectivity or agency within the limits of reason, but it does not follow that it is nihilistic and without political pertinence. It is even possible that irony is the very thing we want or need as we struggle to rethink the conditions of social and political transformation under capital. This prospect is underscored where irony is understood as a change in the rhetorical mode of a text or utterance, and when this change is raised to the status of an event whose relation to other events is undecidable. Not surprisingly, those who have addressed the matter of irony’s political effectivity have sought to minimize its threat by distinguishing it from other kinds of language. Hayden White, in his highly influential account of history as a tropological narrative, has this to say about irony’s political prospects: “Irony tends to dissolve all belief in the possibility of positive political actions” (38). Costas Douzinas, in his book on human rights and human rights discourse, maintains that “irony . . . is one of the most potent weapons of the cynicism and self-serving nihilism of

   Paris Spleen power and power-holders and can hardly be used on its own as a political program of resistance to cynicism” (13).13 These thinkers share the view that irony, whatever else it may be, is antipolitical—or at the very least, that it is always on the side of politics that one would prefer not to be on. They tend to see irony as unequivocally negative and destructive: it is always on the side of “cynicism,” “self-serving nihilism,” and power. Sympathetic as we may be to these thinkers and their projects, it is difficult not to notice that these arguments against irony depend on some rather extraordinary ideas about language. If irony is merely a matter of rhetoric, or merely a literary device, technique, or style—if it is a way of saying things rather than something that is said—it is implied that it is without content, purely formal. But to suggest that any single instance or use of language has such extraordinary power—the power to be always on the side of power—is to suggest something quite extraordinary about all language. For it assumes a model or moment of language in which meaning or content is itself of little significance, or at least in which a given meaning is of less significance than a given form. This assumption is extraordinary because it breaks down the distinction between irony understood as a figure of speech versus more extended definitions (the irony that characterizes a personality, a sensibility, or an epoch discussed, in the Introduction, as a “figure of thought”14). It also points to an understanding of language—indeed a whole worldview—in which language is never simply a means of communication, and in which its action does not consist exclusively in the transmission of a meaning or a content. This exteriority, or excess, of language to communication is not unrelated to what is sometimes called performativity, even if it cannot be reduced to it. Arguments against irony have typically avoided reckoning with these radically active, technical, and political qualities of language by positing what are essentially two types of politics, investing in a highly volatile and ultimately dangerous distinction between a politics of meaning and a politics of form. Even if the distinction could be maintained between these two types of politics, it is not at all clear how we would be able to choose between them, or even know which side we were on.15 We might cite here, as a potent counterexample to these arguments, a suggestive if somewhat elliptical passage from Benjamin’s essay, “The Author as Producer.”16 In this essay, Benjamin sets forth his own hypoth-

Paris Spleen    esis about certain technical and political qualities of language and how they might be activated for a revolutionary cause. In order for a work to have a quality that Benjamin dubs (presciently but in oblique relation to present-day usage) “political correctness,” it must also exhibit, he says, a kind of “literary correctness,” which brings a work’s political correctness into line with what he calls its literary tendency: I would like to show you that the tendency of a literary work can be politically correct only if it is also literarily correct. That is to say, the politically correct tendency includes a literary tendency. And I would add straightaway: this literary tendency, which is implicitly or explicitly contained in every correct political tendency of a work, alone constitutes the quality of that work. The correct political tendency of a work thus includes its literary quality because it includes its literary tendency. (SW 2: 769)

To ask about the “political tendency” of a given work or text—Is it revolutionary? Does it aim to overthrow the relations of production of its time? Is it counterrevolutionary?—is of little value if we do not also ask simultaneously about its literary tendency. There is, Benjamin goes on to say a few paragraphs further on, a “functional interdependence” between the correct (richtig) political tendency of a text and its “progressive literary technique.” This explanation, although highly compelling, raises as many questions as it answers. How do we identify this tendency of a work or text as political, that one as literary? How are we to understand, if one includes the other—the politically correct tendency, we are told, includes the literary one—what constitutes the specific quality of this political correctness and what constitutes its specifically literary qualities? And what about this “progressive literary technique”? If, as Benjamin puts it, there is a functional interdependence of aesthetics and politics in literature, how do we isolate the trait (it is simultaneously literary and technical) that would constitute this progressivity? Benjamin offers us a single clue when he privileges in his list of examples of “progressive literary technique” those that produce a rupture or interruption of the normal conditions of the work’s reception and when, drawing on an interpretation of Brecht, he argues for the interruption of the normal sequential organization of narrated events, or

   Paris Spleen plot: Brecht’s “Epic Theater . . . does not reproduce situations; rather, it discovers them. The discovery is accomplished by means of the interruption of sequences [eine Unterbrechung der Abläufe]. Yet interruption here has the character not of a stimulant but of an organizing function” (SW 2: 778; GS 2(2): 698). This and other passages in Benjamin’s essay read like a description of irony as permanent parabasis and thus as the best possible, or most progressive technique (even if it is something like the linearity of progress that is interrupted) for the transmission of a “revolutionary content” (SW 2: 774). “It may be noted,” Benjamin writes, “that there is no better trigger for thinking (the kind of thinking that would alienate the public from the conditions in which it lives, i.e., revolutionary thinking) than laughter. In particular, convulsion of the diaphragm usually provides better opportunities for thought than convulsion of the soul” (SW 2: 779). Readers of Baudelaire will think of the celebrated essay on De l’essence du rire . . . (On the Essence of Laughter . . . ), from which Benjamin’s statements about convulsion of the diaphragm could almost have been lifted. Readers of de Man will inevitably think of another of his texts on irony, “The Concept of Irony,” which closes with a manifesto-like excursus on irony as a negative or transgressive force. The excursus begins with a quotation of Friedrich Schlegel, from Über die Unverständlichkeit (“On the Impossibility of Understanding”), and calls to mind some of the same themes and gestures we find underscored in Baudelaire—hypocrisy, the transgression of “holy borderlines,” the threats posed to the welfare of families and of nations by certain kinds of language, or by certain kinds of relationship to it: But is nonunderstanding, then, something so evil and objectionable?—It seems to me that the welfare of families and of nations is grounded in it. . . . An incredibly small portion suffices, provided it is preserved with unbreakable trust and purity, and no restless intelligence dares to come close to its holy borderline. [ . . . ] Truly, you would be quite horrified if your request were answered, and the world all of a sudden became, in all seriousness, comprehensible. Is not this entire infinite world built out of nonunderstanding, out of chaos, by means of understanding? (Aesthetic Ideology 183)

De Man goes on to ventriloquize a critique of irony that readers will

Paris Spleen    notice sounds a lot like some of the more commonly heard critiques of deconstruction on the grounds of its investments in negative or destructive forces: That sounds very nice, but you should remember that the chaos is error, madness, and stupidity, in all its forms. Any expectation that one may have that deconstruction might be able to construct is suspended by such a passage, which is very strictly a pre-Nietzschean passage, heralding exactly “Über Wahrheit und Lüge.” Any attempt to construct—that is, to narrate—on no matter how advanced a level, is suspended, interrupted, disrupted, by a passage like this. (Aesthetic Ideology 184)

Rather than being merely, or so clearly, a nihilistic or antipolitical endeavor, it is possible that the construction of edifices out of chaos— “error, madness, and stupidity”—is a quintessentially political question or problem. At the very least, it starts to look like one under capital. What is capital, once every decision about the future has been snatched away from the grasp of human will and reason, if not the building blocks of this edifice, on which the welfare of families and of nations depends? As de Man himself suggests with his interpretation of Schlegel, irony confronts us with not simply the (de)construction of the world in the face of the accidents of language, but rather, precisely, the future of all of these events and processes. I said earlier that irony may be what we want or need as we struggle to rethink the conditions of social and political transformation under capital, and that this prospect is underscored where irony is raised to the status of an event whose relation to other events is, strictly speaking, undecidable. Baudelaire’s prose poems are a privileged site for thinking about this kind of event, and I will try to show, in the remaining pages of this chapter, the specific consequences of this undecidability for their critique of capital.

4. Paris Spleen as Irony Machine Baudelaire’s prose poems, or Spleen de Paris (aka Petits poèmes en prose), have frequently been considered the pièce de résistance of his ironic production.17 One reason for this is that the Spleen project quite

   Paris Spleen literally repeats and rewrites a number of the poems of Les Fleurs du mal in an ironic mode. For example, there are two Invitation(s) au voyage (“Invitation to the Voyage”), one in verse, the other in prose. Between them, the language of love and of unbridled lyricism—“There everything is orderly and beautiful / Luxurious, calm, and voluptuous” (“Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté / Luxe, calme et volupté” [OC 1: 53–54])—topples over into a more prosaic order, in which the flowery language of the “Invitation” in verse is made the object of an ironic comparison with the decidedly more workaday language of “pots and pans” or “kitchen utensils” (batterie de cuisine) (OC 1: 302). At the same time, it is a commonplace of the critical literature that the prose poetry collection expresses or is designed to express a kind of generalized ironic convulsion and an experience that is choppy or nonsequential, even in the account it gives of itself. In the so-called preface to the Spleen poems (really it is a letter to Arsène Houssaye, Baudelaire’s friend and the editor of the poems on the occasion of their first publication), Baudelaire tells us that Spleen de Paris forms a collection of which it cannot be said, without injustice, that it has neither head nor tail, since, on the contrary, everything in it is both tail and head, alternatively and reciprocally. Consider, I beg you, what admirable convenience that combination offers us all, you, me, and the reader. We can break things off wherever we want, I my reverie, you the manuscript, the reader his reading; for I do not bind the latter’s wayward will to the interminable thread of a superfluous plot. Remove one vertebra, and the two pieces of that meandering fantasy will be rejoined without difficulty. Chop it into many fragments, and you will find that each one can exist separately. (OC 1: 275)18

A bit further on, the poet locates this infinitely choppable experience as the collection’s “poetic” principle, placing the entire serpent under the sign of urban intersection and the countless relationships it engenders: “Which of us has not, in his ambitious days, dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme, supple and jerky enough to accomodate the lyrical movements of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the sudden starts of consciousness?” (OC 1: 275–76). What kind of principle is this? Can it even be sustained at the level of a principle? Can Spleen de Paris move beyond the “dream” of a poetic prose to fulfill its own ambition?

Paris Spleen    Among the many poems of Spleen de Paris that we might turn to in order to examine this question is Un plaisant (“A Joker”). The poem is marked by two tendencies and belongs to two classes of Baudelaire’s poetry whose relationship is difficult to grasp. On the one hand, it belongs to that very particular constellation of poems within the collection that incorporates jokes, puns, or clichés as organizing elements. It simultaneously includes the elements of class commentary and the social justice motifs familiar to us from such celebrated poems as Le Joujou du pauvre (“The Poor Child’s Toy”), Assommons les pauvres! (“Let’s Beat Up the Poor!”), and La Fausse Monnaie (“Counterfeit Money”). We are inclined to think that the play of the letter or the surging up of semiautomatic linguistic patterns does not belong to the same order as the revolution or the encounter with the other, or indeed to any other ethicopolitical order. And yet it is possible that Un plaisant stages an encounter between these two orders and even their collision: A Joker It was the New Year’s Eve explosion [C’était l’explosion du nouvel an]: chaos of mud and snow, crisscrossed by a thousand carriages, glittering with toys and candy, swarming with cupidities and despairs, official big city dementia fashioned to disturb the brain of the most steadfast solitary. Amidst this hubbub and din, a donkey was trotting briskly along, pestered by a lout armed with a whip. Just as the donkey was about to turn a sidewalk corner, a handsome gloved gentleman, polished, cruelly cravated and imprisoned in brand-new clothes, bowed obsequiously to the humble beast, and said to him, as he raised his hat, “I wish you a happy and good one!” [Je vous la souhaite bonne et heureuse!] then turned with a fatuous look toward some companions or other, as if requesting them to add their approval to his conceit. The donkey did not see that fine joker, and continued zealously to rush along where his duty called him. As for me, suddenly I was seized with an incommensurable rage against that magnificent imbecile, who for me concentrated in himself the very essence of France’s wit. (OC 1: 279)

The poem is shot through with binaries, some consisting of like or nonhierarchical terms (mud and snow [de boue et de neige], toys and candy [de joujoux et de bonbons], hubbub and din [tohu-bohu et vacarme]),

   Paris Spleen others resolving into opposites (desire and despair, chaos and solitude, public and private). Taken together, they point to the binary that, by the time we get to the poem’s end, is reversed: no one is laughing, the joke is not funny, and the man has made an ass of himself. Keeping in mind the lesson of the muse poems we read earlier from Les Fleurs du mal, the story Un plaisant tells us about its own production is a complex one. If the poem is produced from or out of a joke, then it is by no means certain what the joke is. Conversely, it remains possible there is no joke in a concrete sense, and that the beau monsieur is a “joker” (or a “wag,” to cite the quainter translation) in some other sense: in the sense that he is stupid enough to talk to a jackass. Moreover, it is possible that this is what provokes the narrator’s ire, with the fact that the man does so politely—bowing, doffing his hat, and wishing the ass a “Happy New Year”—working to underscore the gesture’s absurdity still further. (It is worth noting the echo of Poe’s “Man of the Crowd,” which Baudelaire had of course translated. The dandy’s bow corresponds to a single line: “If jostled, they bowed profusely to the jostlers.”) Against the backdrop of these questions, we may notice that there seems to be, in the formulaic salutation, a pun: a rhyme on the French words for year and ass, année and âne. The beau monsieur says to the jackass: “Je vous la souhaite bonne et heureuse! ” with the la referring to the substituted année in the clichéd formula: “Je vous souhaite la bonne ANNÉE,” the first syllable of which is, phonetically speaking, exceedingly close to âne. Whether this can even be called a pun is a question, and it is possible that this is the problem with the joke. If the pun is it, then it is not a very good one; it may be programmed as much by a semiautomatic pattern of letters as by the intention of a speaker—as much by the grammar or the syntax of a cliché as by any vouloir-dire. No matter what element we privilege in our reading, this semiautomaticity introduces a serious problem. What does it “mean” that the letters A and N appear at other junctures in the text—in the words gANté and ANgle, or in the word Fr-AN-ce, for example? What does it “mean” that words are made of letters? I spoke earlier, in defining irony, of a repeated and infinitely repeatable interruption of two incompatible meanings or readings, one of which is always the other’s negation. The force of the pun, its interruption, is not alien to this kind of negation. Puns and jokes, even if they

Paris Spleen    share something with accident, do not partake of the rupture of time by absolute chance. A pun, in order to be legible, cannot present itself as purely accidental. E. S. Burt has written eloquently about the necessity and difficulty of domesticating this kind of disorder and the lability and room for maneuver it engenders: For the pun to matter, the accident has to arrive as a significant accident, staged as something more than just an accident, say, as a sign where modification in the meaning system and the representation of what is will have been taking place. It has to appear as the dramatic opening of a gap between saying and meaning, speaking and writing, and so as an element in a unique pattern that allows us to think the meaning of that gap, without the pattern being derived from any prior idea or in imitation of some existing thing. Itself only a by-product of an effort at communication, the homonym threatens and recharges the meaning system. It provides a heteroclite element, shocking evidence of disarray, that negates signification but that can immediately be resemanticized (as meaning the death of meaning). (25)

Meaning is produced, its system remains, but it becomes increasingly difficult to speak within this system of an intelligible or reliable poetic or generative principle. If the occurrence of these two letters, A and N, can be understood to erupt as potentially playful and thus as potentially meaningful at any point, then no instance of their occurrence can be privileged. Taking a cue from this grammatical eruption, we may read an allegory of the poem’s production in its first line, which speaks of its own production in an explosion of letters: “C’était l’explosion du nouvel AN ” (“It was New Year’s Eve explosion”). A different but related allegory can be discerned in the narrator’s response to the beau monsieur, which, insofar as it condemns the beau monsieur (his esprit or wit, and, it would seem to follow, his joke), confronts us with the necessity of reading as a necessity internal to the poem. Unlike the dream of producing a choppy and infinitely choppable poetry, the narrator’s condemnation has the effect of inscribing us, as readers, within the text, such that any decision we make about its meaning is immediately referred to the value system it sets up: either we are stupid like the beau monsieur, or we are stupid like the jackass. In staging the encounter between two kinds of stupidity, Un plaisant allegorizes the only two positions available to us in the face of the meaning system’s explosion.

   Paris Spleen Other poems of Spleen de Paris fall, by means of the same or similar kinds of interruption, into unstoppable irony. In the collection’s opening poem, L’Étranger (“The Stranger”), for example, the stranger professes to hate gold (l’or) with the same vehemence that “we” hate our God: “Je le hais comme vous haïssez Dieu” (“I hate it as you hate God”) (OC 1: 277). No sooner does the stranger say this, however, than the other speaker addresses him as “extraordinary”—“Eh! qu’aimes-tu donc, extra-OR-dinaire étranger?” (“Then, what do you love, extra-OR-dinary stranger?”). L’Étranger is, by its own account, produced by this dissemination of the syllable “or” (gold). We may also think of Le Gâteau (“The Cake”), where the wordplay takes the form of a catachresis. Two beggars call their daily bread “cake” (gâteau) and it crumbles, as if by dint of the cliché alone: As I was placidly cutting my bread, a very slight noise made me look up. A little ragged creature stood before me, black, disheveled, whose hollow eyes, wild and as if beseeching, were devouring the piece of bread. And I heard him, in a low, hoarse voice, moan the word “cake [gâteau]!” I couldn’t help laughing when I heard the designation with which he agreed to honor my practically white bread [pain], and so I cut a nice slice and gave it to him. (OC 1: 298)

Along comes another beggar. They skirmish. By the end of the episode, the “cake” has changed hands so many times that “The piece of bread had disappeared, and its crumbs were scattered like the grains of sand with which it was mixed.” The narrator closes with this remark: “I remained saddened [by this spectacle] for quite a while, and I incessantly repeated to myself: ‘So there exists a magnificent land where bread is called cake, a delicacy so rare that it suffices to beget a perfectly fratricidal war!’ ” The land in which the narrator finds himself is no “true NeverNeverland”—no “vrai pays de Cocagne,” to cite one of Spleen’s pithiest lines—but rather, as the poem makes explicit, a land in which bread of any sort is hard to come by. Call it “France.” Given the effect of this chain of negations, substitutions, and reversals—cake for bread, a supposedly exotic scene into a perfectly mundane one—it is, strictly speaking, undecidable whether the transformation of bread into cake (and thus into nothing) is the result of the catachresis alone, or whether a trick, an abuse, of political economy is also at work.

Paris Spleen    In view of this ironic disruption of relations of historical precedence, it is no longer possible to decide which, or whether, one of these things comes first: whether the critique of pauperism, or for that matter the bourgeoisie’s touristic relation to it, is the poem’s proper or literal meaning, and the play on words merely its poetic face or figure, or whether the catachresis (cake for bread) comes first, hitching itself to the social critique only after the fact. We continue to have the feeling that one of these things, the catachresis or the social critique, must come first (or be “purely anterior”) in relation to the other. Of course, it is possible that this is the most ironic outcome by far of Spleen de Paris, and that our desire for this relationship of precedence is in error.

5. Bourgeois Glass Of the many texts signed “Baudelaire” that address the tricks of political economy, it is undoubtedly La Fausse Monnaie (“Counterfeit Money”) that plays most virtuosically on our error, playing with the distortions of time afforded by capital’s extended relay in the form of credit. La Fausse Monnaie clearly ironizes the seemingly infinite extension of these relays, inscribing them in oblique relation to capital’s own infinite and infinitizing powers of self-extension. As we will see when we return to this poem in Chapter 3, La Fausse Monnaie subjects the social and political dimensions of this self-extension to scathing critique and encourages us to rethink the vertiginous morality that spins out from capital—from its claim to produce new possibilities for the future “out of nothing”: like counterfeit money. It is this claim to produce the future as if it were brand new or unprecedented that, Baudelaire’s poem insists, the infinite-infinitizing extension of capital can’t not entail, even as it remains bound up with those elements of capital that are heterogeneous to any economic rationality. Before attending to the peculiar lesson of the counterfeit, however, let us turn to one of the lesser-read prose poems, Le Mauvais Vitrier (“The Bad Glazier”). Like La Fausse Monnaie, it describes a certain productive activity or power of poetry in excess of any conscious or purposive ra-

   Paris Spleen tionality. In contradistinction to the other, however, Le Mauvais Vitrier casts this excess or surplus of productive power as destructive of capitalist ideology in an explicit way and asks, ironically, about its own ability to appropriate or make use of this power. The Bad Glazier There exist characters, purely contemplative and completely unsuited for action, who, however, influenced by a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed of which they would not have believed themselves capable. Such as the one who, dreading to find distressing news from his concierge, prowls around her door for an hour without daring to enter; the one who saves a letter for two weeks without opening it, or only after six months gives in and completes a task necessary a year before. These people sometimes feel themselves brusquely rushed into action by an irresistible force, like an arrow out of a bow. The moralist and the physician, who claim to know everything, cannot explain the cause of this crazy energy which hits these lazy and voluptuous souls so suddenly, and how, incapable of carrying out the simplest and the most necessary things, one minute later they find an excess courage [courage de luxe] for executing the most absurd and often even the most dangerous acts. One of my friends, the most harmless dreamer who ever existed, once set a forest on fire to see—so he said—if fire would catch as easily as people generally assert. Ten times in a row, the experiment failed; but the eleventh, it succeeded all too well. Another would light a cigar next to a powder keg, because he wanted to see, to know, to try his luck, to prove to himself that he had the guts, to play the gambler, to feel the pleasures of anxiety, for absolutely no reason, out of caprice, for lack of anything better to do. It is the type of energy that springs from ennui and daydreaming; and those in whom it arises so unexpectedly are, generally, as I said, the most indolent and dreamiest of creatures. Another one, so shy that he drops his eyes even before a man’s gaze, and must summon up his entire pitiful will to enter a café or pass before a theater box office, where he imagines the ticket takers to be invested with the majesty of Minos, of Aeacus, and Rhadamanthus. He would abruptly throw his arms around an old man walking beside him and kiss him enthusiastically before the astonished crowd. Why? Because . . . because he found his expression irresistibly likeable? Perhaps; but it is more legitimate to assume that he himself does not know why.

Paris Spleen    More than once I have been the victim of such attacks and outbursts, which justify our belief that some malicious Demons slip into us and, unbeknownst to us, make us carry out their most absurd wishes. One morning I had got up on the wrong side of bed, sad, and worn out from doing nothing, and I felt impelled to do something great, a brilliant action. And I opened the window, alas! (Notice, if you please, that the spirit of mystification which, among certain persons, does not result from effort or scheming, but from a chance inspiration, if only because of the desire’s fervor, has much in common with that humor, hysterical according to physicians, satanic according to those who think a little more lucidly than physicians, which drives us irresistibly toward a multitude of dangerous or improper actions.) The first person I saw in the street was a glazier, whose piercing, discordant cry reached me through the heavy and dirty Parisian atmosphere. It would be impossible for me to say, moreover, why I was seized by a hatred for this pitiful man as sudden as it was despotic. “Hey! Hey!” I shouted for him to come up. Meanwhile I was thinking, not without some gaiety, that, since my room was on the seventh floor and the staircase quite narrow, the man must be experiencing some difficulty in effecting his ascent and bumping the corners of his fragile merchandise many times. He finally appeared. Curiously I examined all his glass, and I said to him, “What? You have no colored panes? no pink panes, no red, no blue, no magic panes, no panes of paradise? You are shameless! You dare walk through poor neighborhoods, and you don’t even have panes which make life beautiful!” And vigorously I pushed him towards the stairs, where he staggered grumbling. I went to the balcony and I grabbed a little pot of flowers, and when the man reappeared at the door, I let my engine of war drop down perpendicularly on the back edge of his pack. The shock knocked him over, and he ended by breaking his entire poor itinerant fortune under his back, which produced the brilliant sound of a crystal palace smashed by lightning. And, drunk with my madness, I shouted at him furiously, “Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!” Such neurotic pranks are not without peril, and one can often pay dearly for them. But what does an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has experienced for one second the infinity of delight? (OC 1: 285–87)

Whereas in Capital it takes the monumental intervention of the machine, or capital, to pervert this definition of man in accordance with intellectual or ideational principles, here we start out with a definition of human being inimical to purposive action: “There exist characters purely

   Paris Spleen contemplative and completely unsuited for action [Il y a des natures purement contemplatives et tout à fait impropres à l’action].” Similarly, we learn, in paragraphs two and five, of “these lazy and voluptuous souls . . . incapable of carrying out the simplest and the most necessary things,” who are therefore “the most indolent and dreamiest of creatures.” The third and fourth paragraphs go on to give us examples of these spaced-out souls doing what they do worst, which is to say, actually doing anything. (Hence the examples of arson or pyromania.) From the standpoint of capital, which subsumes all activity as productive activity, these dreamers are indeed unsuitable. Their actions are not just antithetical to production but actually destructive of its very motivation. As such, the examples given in these paragraphs can be taken to illustrate the reversal of the “normal” relation between action and production that was stated as a general proposition at the beginning. The problem, it turns out, is not that these people are lazy. It is rather that they exhibit, despite their essential idleness or indolence, a kind of hyperactivity: an excess of energy or courage. This strange supplementarity of lack and excess crops up a second time in the poem with regard to any possible knowledge or understanding of these actions. The friend who tempts fate in the form of a powder keg does so, we are told, “because he wanted to see, to know, to try his luck, to prove to himself that he had the guts, to play the gambler, to feel the pleasures of anxiety, for absoluely no reason, out of caprice, for lack of anything better to do.” What two “reasons” could be more antithetical than doing something in the name of “scientific” experimentation (pour voir, pour savoir) and doing something “just for the hell of it”? The same holds for the account we get of the arsonist’s adventure, in which the paradoxical success of the eleventh try can be understood to contradict rather than confirm the experimental hypothesis. Whereas traditional Marxisms generally hold that what is necessary to put an end to capital is an end of labor’s alienation (in which alienation all human activity is ultimately implicated) and thus an “expropriation of the expropriators” and transfer of social capital to the hands of the immediate producers, Le Mauvais Vitrier suggests that such steps are hardly necessary. There are already people walking the streets of Paris (some of our best friends . . . !) whose every move removes action from any meaningful relationship to reason. Read with this emphasis, Baudelaire’s text presents us with an

Paris Spleen    alternative to capital, or at least to a capitalist ideology that could be reduced to productivist ideology. Things get more complicated, however, when we turn to the encounter with the glazier. For one thing, the speaker recurs, in framing this encounter, to the motif of satanic or demonic possession. This motif throws a wrench in the logic of the prior reading, for the (self-)destruction of the relation between productive activity and instrumental reason is now conceived as supernatural (rather than “natural”: “Il y a des natures purement contemplatives . . . ”). To be sure, this turn to the supernatural can also be attributed to the poem’s debt to Poe. (Le Mauvais Vitrier is, among other things, a close reading and quasi-plagiaristic rewriting of Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse.”) But it can also be understood to prefigure the speaker’s admission that he takes a guilty pleasure in his perversion. What are devils and demons if not tropes, not simply for doing what one shouldn’t, but for enjoying it? This enjoyment constitutes a reason, such that this turn to the supernatural works, paradoxically, to introduce an element of rationality into the speaker’s account. It is a peculiarly nachträglich rationality, but one that partakes of instrumentality nonetheless. The second thing we may note about the encounter with the glazier is that it calls our attention to the fact that the speaker’s actions are not harmful to himself, but only to the glazier. Or better, it is harmful to his glass. We might be inclined to dismiss the poem’s concern with the precise nature of these wares as incidental, and it is possible to read the poem in such a way that the choice of this commodity (glass) is a matter of pure chance: I opened my window and “The first person I saw in the street was a glazier [La première personne que j’aperçus dans la rue, ce fut un vitrier].” Upon closer inspection, however, it is difficult not to notice the specific physical properties of this particular commodity, which, as panes of glass, are both fragile and transparent. At first glance, the events narrated in the poem hinge primarily on the panes’ fragility: the speaker, having taken an irrational dislike to the glazier, summons him to climb the stairs to his sixth-floor apartment, where, having examined his glass and found it wanting, he manifests his dissatisfaction by cursing the glazier, throwing him downstairs, and dropping a flowerpot on him, causing the glass to shatter. Needless to say, the sequence would not have been the same had the speaker spied a vendor of cookware. In

   Paris Spleen another sense, however, the events hinge on the panes’ transparency and on their perfection: their colorlessness. Despite a surface appearance of literalism—panes of glass that are perfectly transparent are, in one sense, very literal glass—they are possessed of an extraordinary figural potential. Thanks to this potential, the speaker is able to launch more than one engin de guerre—not only the flowerpot but a verbal weapon: the idiomatic expression voir la vie en beau—roughly, to see the world through rose-colored glasses. In light of this phrase (it is, like “Je vous la souhaite bonne et heureuse” in Un plaisant, also a cliché19), we see that events hinge, at least as much as they do on the glass’s fragility, on its transparency, and thus on its failed approximation or figural representation of capitalist or bourgeois ideology. On this reading, the glass—if not the glass the glazier actually carries, then all that it could or should be (pink, red, blue, magical, paradisiacal) in the narrator’s eyes—in addition to being a figure, is a literalization of certain ideological dimensions of language itself. As such, it calls our attention not only to the fact that language can pervert or distort something like seeing or representation, but also to the peculiar ways that it is called to do so under capital. This is, at any rate, one way to read the accusation leveled at the glazier: “What? You have no colored panes? no pink panes, no red, no blue, no magic panes, no panes of paradise? You are shameless! You dare walk through poor neighborhoods, and you don’t even have panes which make life beautiful!” The speaker curses the glazier for selling glass that is too transparent—for not selling, one could say, a sufficiently ideological glass. The glass can be read as a theoretical representation of the worker’s situation, its “transparency” to the one who looks from on high or from another scene: to the one who is not himself always already in the street or on the market, even if, under capital, no one can in truth be understood to occupy this position. If the glass, and by extension the encounter with the glazier, can be understood to mark out a critical moment or position with respect to capitalist economic relations, however, it is important to specify that it is not just the figural potential of the glass but rather its destruction that is central. Among the many things that are destroyed in the strange figure of these too-transparent panes is the notion that bourgeois or capitalist ideology could itself ever be destroyed according to calculable or programmable

Paris Spleen    protocols. In keeping with the (dis)organizing principle of the larger Spleen project (with the motifs of urban intersection and encounter), it is at once capitalist relations and the linguistic operations that sustain them that are subjected to ironic interruption and disarticulation here: “La première personne que j’aperçus dans la rue, ce fut un vitrier.” The fact that the first person is out there in the street, available to this encounter, only highlights the incalculable nature of the scene. It is one thing to observe that capital mobilizes all of the negative, destructive, antiteleological, and ultimately nonnarrative resources of irony. Many of the recent returns to Marx that emphasize real subsumption or the production of subjectivity have done just this, some with admirable precision, even if they do not speak of irony.20 But it is something else entirely to draw lessons from capital’s own ironic tendencies, in this case exemplified by the imperfect nature of its own ideologization, and thus draw lessons for its future transformation from its own resources. This second gesture, that of Le Mauvais Vitrier, is not simply critical but itself potentially transformative, insofar as it takes into account the irreducible historicity of its object as well as its “self.” This is why theories of politics that would dismiss or play down irony cannot grasp the poetic principle of Spleen de Paris. They would invariably construe this principle, if they could even approach it, overly negatively, as if the suspension of calculable or programmable protocols were always bad and the very thing we should be fighting. A less fearful (and less moralizing) reading would recognize that Baudelaire’s text, by inscribing the story it tells us about its own production in relation to a radically ironic movement, opens the concept and field of productive activity beyond any single determination of capital’s history. If we ourselves are still hoping for a different future—if, indeed, we are still hoping for or wanting something different from capital—it can only be that it will be similarly touched by this poetic excess.

chapter 2

Animadversions (Technics after Capital) The consumption of food by a beast of burden does not become any less a necessary moment of the production process because the beast enjoys what it eats. —Karl Marx (C 718)

We understand a little more intimately with every passing day that the field of capital’s transformation cannot be limited to that of material things in any simple sense. Marx himself had already demonstrated this limitlessness in his preliminary analysis of capital, in which he asks whether the field of capital’s transformation does not extend to the very conditions of the future, out of which any and every future—better, worse, or just plain different—would have to come. This demonstration of capital’s historical promiscuousness and revolutionary ambition is connected in nuanced and complex ways with his theory of labor in Capital, which wends its way through a series of definitions of labor that are plural, contradictory, and equivocal, and whose only consistent requirement is that this or that permutation of the future be weighed against the progressive extension of the concept of productive labor under capital. Even if we take for granted the limitlessness of capital’s transformation, it is difficult to say with any certainty where language falls in the grand scheme of a capitalist and capitalizing world. Language, neither person nor thing, has always stood in a privileged relationship to labor and to life. It can push us, sometimes quite unexpectedly, in the direc-

Animadversions    tion of the animal—which, despite an initial distinction from man by way of labor, is always a figure of the worker and his work. Or it can push us in the direction of the technical: the direction not of death, but of a prosthetic and capitalizable life that breaks with both inspirational and incarnational models. Both paths are, if we follow Marx’s analysis in Capital, not simply possible but necessary, according to the inexorable logic whereby capital transforms everything that ever was or might have been into a necessary moment of itself. If a written text (say, Baudelaire’s or Marx’s) succeeds in marking out a site or space of critical distance and even a resistant stance in relation to capital, this gives us cause to ask whether there is not something about its language that stands up to capital’s unprecedented powers of transformation. How might this textual or linguistic difference and power of resistance be connected with the technical yet noninstrumental conception of labor that Marx himself develops in the text of Capital? Before tracing this conception through what I will call Marx’s two codefinitions of labor in Capital (his definition of labor as a function of the human and his definition of labor as a function of the living body), we would do well to look more closely at how language has fared to date in the theoretical discourse on capital.

1. Language as Such and the Language of Capital It is more or less well known that for the Marx (and Engels) of The German Ideology, language, too, is something material: “From the start,” it is explained, “ ‘spirit’ bears the curse of being ‘burdened’ with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, in the form of language” (GI 117). We might also cite here the famous passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire on history as a process of language acquisition (EB 13–15). Few will forget the ironic theory of history that Marx lays out in this beloved text, in which it is explained that history happens twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Less often remarked is that this theory leads Marx to blame the corruption of the present possibilities for revolution on a bunch of bad translations:

   Animadversions Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such scenes of revolutionary crisis they anxiously . . . present the new scene of world history in . . . this borrowed language. [ . . . ] In like manner a beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new. [ . . . ] The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has cast off all superstition in regard to the past. Earlier revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to drug themselves concerning their own content. In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead. There the phrase went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase. (EB 13–15)

It does not take any great leap of imagination to deduce, from these and other remarks about its material and historical dimensions in Marx’s corpus, that language for Marx is vested with the power to produce violent and historic social and political events, both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary effects. Perhaps surprisingly, then, the theory of language in traditional Marxist discourse has generally repressed these statements and has remained overdetermined by an interpretation of language as belonging to the “superstructure.” In this as in all metaphysical discourses, language is relegated to the level of a second-order effect, reduced to an echo, reflection, or other potentially aberrant representation of supposedly more effective, real, or historical movements taking place at the level of the “base.”1 To make matters worse, Marx’s own remarks about language in Capital, in contradistinction to the texts on the 1848 revolutions or on the German ideologists, tend most explicitly to locate it in the sphere of circulation, such that its unwonted materiality is diminished from the standpoint of production, even as this materiality comes to play a crucial role in Marx’s account of the commodity and in the genesis of money. One consequence of this confinement of language to the order of circu-

Animadversions    lation, where we may persist in the delusion that it can be considered in isolation from production, is that, with the exception of a very few passages, any true account of language as a historical force is left out of Marx’s most sustained treatment of capital. Despite Marx’s painstaking attention to the burden of (historical) matter that is language, we are left, in Capital, without any explicit description as to how language might enter in, how it might partake of, or, alternatively, transform capital’s own transformative and revolutionary potential. This is not to say that a serious analysis of language has not led to some exceedingly important developments in the history of Marxisms. Indeed, it was because of their engagement with questions of language that a whole generation of structuralists succeeded in radicalizing Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism while simultaneously dismantling a whole series of fateful oppositions, including that between material and ideal worlds. On the heels of this dismantling, and following the minutest philosophical and political involutions of Marx’s own thought, came a radical inversion and reinscription of the relationship between aesthetics and politics.2 More recently, a new generation of deconstructors was not content to observe that the commodity is, already for Marx, essentially linguistic in nature, and went on to pose the (related yet ultimately very different) question of why language has to become a question, and a pressing one, for Marx’s critique of capital.3 It is one thing to say, as Marx himself says in some of the betterthumbed pages of Capital, that commodities speak their own language, but what matters from the standpoint of both present and future possibilities for transformation is less Marx’s use of prosopopeia than the kind of language this prosopopeia puts in the commodity’s mouth. Commodity language is not a proper language but rather a fetishistic, figural, or tropological one, as befits a thing that Marx likes to remind us is not a thing and that defies the very logic of the proper (C 932). As one reader quips of the famous talking linen: “it is a figure, and a figure of figure at that” (Keenan 124). The point is not simply that the commodity functions as a figure or according to a figural logic, but that it enlists its formidable powers of anthropomorphic distortion in the service of capital’s self-extension only by virtue of its essentially linguistic qualities. Without the emergence of a theory not just of language but also

   Animadversions of figural language under capital, there would be no table turning, no speaking in tongues—or for that matter, it seems, any description of the myriad processes and relations of production and circulation that form the theoretical object of Capital. At the limit, for Marx, even value is a figure, and as he is careful to point out, this figural quality defines what is most “proper” to value’s operation under capital: its essential impropriety and alteration by what is outside or other than itself. This figural quality implicates value, in Marx’s own arguments, in writing or in a written sign system: “Value . . . does not have what it is branded on its forehead. It rather transforms every product of labor into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, men try to decipher the meaning of the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of their own social product: for the characteristic which objects of utility have of being values is as much men’s social product as is their language” (C 167). Marx’s own emphasis on language as a social product, and on the (trans)formation of the commodity as a social product into a written sign, exposes the haunting of capital’s system by an even more tenacious opposition: that between production and circulation in general. Indeed, it is the most fundamental premise of Marx’s analysis of capital, within the text of Capital but also in other texts, that circulation does not take place, and really it cannot be said to exist, in isolation from production. Neither one can be said to exist without a constant and decisive mediation between them. This mediation may be present in any economy, capitalist or not. But Marx is interested in the specific form taken by this mediation under capital. As Marx himself puts it, with inimitable precision: “[T]he labor of the private individual manifests itself as an element of the total labor of society only through the relations which the act of exchange establishes between the products, and, through their mediation, between the producers” (C 165; my emphasis). This mediation is always the literal meaning of the hieroglyphic, and it is only through scrupulous attention to it that Marx is able to mount a more general critique of capital’s repression and obfuscation of the mediation of the relations between men through relations between things. This is why attention to language as a medium of circulation or, alternatively, to the linguistic elements and dimensions of every exchange relation will never be enough to gain us admission into the linguistic

Animadversions    equivalent of production’s “hidden abode.”4 Given Marx’s own preoccupation with the styles and techniques of repressing this mediation between production and circulation that are distinctive to capital, we ourselves can get no further than this by asking about the relationship of language to the commodity or to capital. The more fruitful and challenging place to search out the conditions of a language that would be capable of withstanding capital’s formidable powers of repressing mediation is in the conception of a technical yet noninstrumental labor that Marx himself develops.

2. Labor under Ideal Conditions Marx gives us what I will call two codefinitions of labor in Capital: on the one hand, his definition of labor as a function of the human; and on the other, his definition of labor as a function of the living body. Each definition is a codefinition insofar as its converse is also true—insofar as, for Marx, the humanity of man and the life of his body are each, in its turn, a function of work. We are not surprised to find that these codefinitions are not equivalent, or even necessarily consistent, and that the trajectory described by Marx’s text is in fact that of a radical divergence of humanity and life whose consequences are fatal, not only for naturalistic or biologistic conceptions of labor, but also for any alleged “humanism” of Marx’s project.5 This divergence allows us to trace a certain excess of labor over life in Marx’s text, which, I will suggest, is closely connected with technics. This connection comes particularly starkly into view in Marx’s discussion of the machine. It is in the name of the machine that Marx poses his first and most formidable challenge to the rational subject or agent, pushing us to ask to what extent labor can even be understood as a mode of rational or instrumental action in Capital. For the Marx of Capital, what distinguishes man from animal and at the same time defines labor is, at least in part, what we might call ideation. It is the essence of man, not simply that he effects a change of form in the materials of nature with the aim of fulfilling his needs—for even animals do this, and some apparently more effectively than humans— but rather that he is able to form an idea of those needs, and so to project or imagine their fulfillment. Thus Marx writes:

   Animadversions A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his head before he builds it in wax. At the end of every labor process emerges a result which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, and so already there in ideal form. (C 284)

Conversely, it is the essence of labor that it is something human, the mediation, by way of an exertion of force, of “material” and “ideal” elements: Labor is, first of all . . . a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He himself confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head, and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form useful to his own life. Through this movement he acts upon the nature outside him [auf die Natur außer ihm wirkt] and changes it, and in this way he changes his own nature at the same time. [ . . . ] Not only does man effect a change of form in the natural world; he simultaneously realizes [verwirklicht] his own purpose in it. This purpose, of which he is conscious, determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it. And this subordination is no isolated act. In addition to the exertion of the organs, a purposeful will is required for the duration of the work. (C 283–84)

Here Marx places emphasis not, as we might expect, on the comparatively static filling of a lack (what can be done instinctively or unconsciously, by means of a decidedly animal technical skill), but on a dynamic imperative to change things, which is connected with man’s intellectual and ideational character: man, in working, acts on the world, is active or effective. In so doing, he changes things, gives rise to things, or brings about effects. At the same time—and it is part and parcel of this changing—he realizes or actualizes a purpose, of which he is conscious and to which he subordinates his will. This consciousness, and indeed this subordination, are, for Marx, man’s original tekhne : the means by which he makes, in addition to the (other) things he makes, himself. Unlike the bee, who, if it were simply a question of building, would put man to shame, man wants to build, he has an idea of what he wants to build, and he knows

Animadversions    it. Only in building what is already there in his head, consciously and of his own volition, is he man, and does he change the world. Already we may mark two important points, the first in the context of Marx’s own project and the second in the terms set forth by Heidegger in his critique of the technical interpretation of thinking in the “Letter on Humanism,” and in his corollary critique in “The Question Concerning Technology,” of what he calls the instrumental and anthropological definitions of technics. First, it is crucial to note that Marx’s statement about an essentially intellectual, conscious, and purposive element of labor in no way goes against the statement of The German Ideology, in which we are told, in ostensible repudiation of Feuerbach, that “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life,” and that “Conceiving, thinking, the intellectual intercourse of men, appear . . . as the direct consequence of their material behavior” (GI 111–12). On the contrary, the apparent contradiction of the materialist postulate drives home that Marx’s theory of ideology and his theory of labor can be understood as two formulations of a single problem: the problem of domination and exploitation interpreted as a problem of production, under which heading the production of truths has always been included. As Étienne Balibar has argued, Marx sought, from The German Ideology forward, “to effect a critical division in the very usage of the concept of ‘truth,’ by bringing every utterance, every category, back to the conditions and to the historico-political stakes of its elaboration” (Philosophie 42–46). This interpretation of ideology, when brought to bear on the definition of labor just cited from Capital, suggests that the materiality of labor cannot so readily be opposed to some other term (ideas or consciousness, for example) when it is in fact the reciprocal transformation of material and ideal elements that, for Marx, labor at once names and induces.6 Again, as the passage from Capital clearly states: “Labor is . . . a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. [ . . . ] Not only does [he] effect a change in the materials of nature; he simultaneously realizes his own purpose in it” (C 284–84).7 This interpretation also sheds light on the ways in which Marx’s definitions of labor hinge on a disarticulation of the normal or presumed relations between being and time—a disarticulation shared with materialist conceptions of language

   Animadversions and of history. The emphasis on production suggests not only that a supposedly material labor incorporates ideal elements from the very first, but also that what is here called consciousness is always already at least potentially ideological. This potential is not due to the play of ideal or intellectual elements in the labor process alone. Rather, it results from the temporal and even historical gap required by every process if it is to be distinguished from its product. This gap is always there, and it is always necessary—if, at any rate, the ideological representation is going to be a representation of something; if consciousness is going to be consciousness of something; if “truth” is going to have a referent that would be, in actual fact, true. This is the first lesson of every theory of ideology across an otherwise broad spectrum of differences: that not just truth but reference depends categorically on this gap and on the possibility of a correspondence (or noncorrespondence) that would bridge it. At stake here is a distinction familiar to readers of Marx of every stripe, between a thing and its conditions of production—in this case, between a truth or an ideological representation and its conditions of production. The principal insight afforded by this distinction is at first glance more immediately Nietzschean than Marxian in nature: namely, that there is nothing internal to either the conditions or the process of this production that allows us to distinguish, reliably or with reference to a stable criterion, between ideology and truth. This lack of an internal criterion gives us insight, in turn, into the historicopolitical stakes of the working out of the distinction between truth and its others: between truth and falsehood, but also between one and another truth. This interpretation of ideology depends less on any simple opposition of material and ideal dimensions of the world (or of our experience of it) than on a recognition of the irreducible dynamism at the heart of every materialist conception of history, as well as an alternative understanding of materiality itself as a name for the working out of production’s historicopolitical stakes.8 Marx’s reinscription of consciousness at the origin of labor, when read in light of this interpretation, is evidence less of the ideological nature of labor per se than of the produced, and therefore in a circumscribed yet powerful sense, artificial nature of consciousness and of epistemological experience in general, under which heading labor can now be understood to belong. Thanks to this distinction, we are better

Animadversions    able to grasp in what sense ideation is for Marx a material condition of production, and why Balibar is able to say that Marx’s materialism has “nothing to do with” matter (Philosophie 24). Similarly, Derrida is able to say, citing Heidegger, that “Marx is not essentially a materialist,” or that “his materialism is not a philosophy of matter, but rather of work.” Or again, Derrida explains, Marx “is not essentially a thinker of being as matter. He is a thinker of being as work” (Derrida and Sprinker 191). With this imbrication of being and labor, there is an upping of the ante that helps us to remember that Marx’s reinscription of consciousness at the origin of labor elucidates the conditions that give rise to the production not only of truths (and therefore of ideology), but also of capital. This reinscription could be interpreted as an inversion or negation of the primacy of life over consciousness (“life determines consciousness”) only if what Marx calls the “material conditions of life” could be reduced to their natural or sensuous conditions. That the material conditions of life cannot be so reduced is of course demonstrated by Marx himself in Capital, when he argues that the capital relation is not natural or sensuous, yet it nonetheless becomes, by the time we get to full-blown capitalism, a material condition of life. Once the specifically capitalist mode of production has been established, as Marx at one point explains, “the means of subsistence are a particular form of material existence in which capital confronts the worker” (C 1004; original emphasis). The contradiction, if there is one, posed by Marx’s initial definition of labor in Capital is not to be found between an ideal consciousness and a natural or sensuous life, between which humanity and labor would then be divided, and is rather to be found within this originary division of labor, even before consciousness, between its human and its decidedly other parts.

3. Tekhne and Artificial Life This brings us to Heidegger, and to my second point. Not only does Heidegger’s thinking about technics have consequences for our more general thinking about production, but it is also explicitly framed as a response to Marx. If we accept that, for Marx, there is consciousness at the origin of labor—or better, if there is a willful subordination of

   Animadversions labor, by definition, to a conscious purpose—and if this subordination appears to be not only material but also technical (it is a means of making and of changing things), then we seem to have got ourselves caught in what Heidegger calls the technical interpretation of thinking as well as in what he calls the instrumental and anthropological definitions of technics. What matters here is not just our failure to avoid a bad or vulgar conception of technics, but also what this conception itself fails to grasp about the complexity of the definitions of labor we find in Marx’s text. The problem with what Heidegger calls, in the “Letter on Humanism,” the “technical interpretation” of thinking is that it reduces thinking to a process of reflection “in the service of doing and making” (Basic Writings 218). It is self-evident in what way Marx’s remarks about the ideational, volitional, and ultimately rational nature of labor are implicated here. Again: “At the end of every labor process emerges a result which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, and so already existed in ideal form” (C 284). Although there would be much to say (and Heidegger says it) about the consequences of the technical interpretation of thinking for our thinking about thinking, its consequences for our thinking of technics are more compelling, for this technical interpretation of thinking colludes with what Heidegger calls, in “The Question Concerning Technology,” the instrumental and anthropological definitions of technics. Although the instrumental definition holds that technics is a means to an end, the anthropological definition holds that technics is a human activity. Both hold that “to posit ends and procure and utilize the means to them is a human activity” and that technics is “a man-made means to an end established by man,” thus reducing causality to a “bringing-about” or “effecting,” in which every cause would then be reduced to a causa efficiens (Basic Writings 312–15). Again, there seems to be no help for Marx, given that all of his descriptions of labor locate it squarely within the adequation of means to ends, and to the end of human (self-)production in particular. Whereas for Marx, man is active and effective in the world precisely by virtue of his labor, Heidegger insists that for the Greeks (who alone managed to get it right, or at least certain among them: the pre-Socratics and a certain Aristotelian interpretation of them), properly technical causality had nothing to do with acting and effecting (“nichts mit dem Wirken

Animadversions    und Bewirken zu tun”) (Basic Writings 314; Vorträge 10). This reduction of technics to a bringing about or effecting leaves us with a conception of technics that is too self-contained. What Heidegger wants is a conception of technics that is turned outward, in a relation of indebtedness to and responsibility toward another (Schuld and Mitschuld)—an indebtedness and a coresponsibility that can no longer be construed in terms of a causality of bringing about or effecting. If we follow Heidegger, technics is not without a certain relation to instrumentality. Indeed, he tells us that the instrumental definition of technics is “uncannily correct” and conditions every attempt to bring human beings and technics into the right relation. Yet he also tells us that technics breaks with the logic of instrumentality in a movement of bringing forth (Her-vorbringen) or poiesis that hearkens back to a time when physis and tekhne were not yet separate.9 We should not fail to note that for Heidegger, technics here approximates poiesis, as much as natural (or “physical”) modes of bringing forth. This is important because conflicting claims have sometimes been made, particularly in those interpretations that confine themselves to the texts dealing explicitly with poetry.10 What is illuminating about Heidegger’s critique of the instrumental and anthropological definitions of technics once we bring it back to Capital is that it reveals the deepest and most significant relation between tekhne and labor as defined by Marx. On the one hand, the technicalinstrumental character of labor is so obvious that it would be silly to define labor as a process “in the service of doing and making”—when it is defined, precisely as it was in Capital, as the means by which man makes himself—or, better, by which he makes himself human—as well as, simultaneously, the means of human survival. Indeed, this is where we bump up against Marx’s second codefinition of labor in Capital, which holds that labor is a function of the human body as a living thing. As Marx explains, in the chapter on “The Sale and Purchase of LaborPower”: “[L]abor-power [is] . . . the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical body, in the living personality, of a human being” (C 270); or again, in the chapter on “The Commodity,” all labor is an “expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands, etc.” (C 134), that is to say, an “expenditure of human labor-power in the physiological sense” (C 137); and finally, in the chapter on “Simple Repro-

   Animadversions duction”: “labor-power . . . exists merely in the worker’s physical body” (C 716, my emphasis). At the same time, however, this definition holds that the life of man—the natural, biological, or zoological life of his body— is made possible by his work at the same time that it makes his work possible. Marx also writes (in “The Commodity”): “Labor, as the creator of use-values, . . . is a condition of human existence . . . ; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life” (C 133); or again (in the so-called unpublished chapter), “Labor is the eternal natural condition of human existence” (C 998, my emphasis). Once we take Marx’s second codefinition of labor into account, the instrumental definition of labor remains uncannily correct, but its anthropological character becomes questionable. For even if we accept that labor is a means to an end, and that “to posit ends and to procure and utilize the means to them is a human activity,” it does not necessarily follow that labor is itself “a man-made means to an end established by man.” This is not only because we cannot be sure that labor is itself something man-made under any conditions, but because (and this is even less certain) the maintenance and sustenance, production and reproduction of human life cannot be understood to be an end posited by human beings alone—at least, these are not ends posited by man alone under capital. What matters here, of course, is not just that the maintenance, sustenance, production, or reproduction of life may always be something more “natural” than “human” (for this would only shore up the naturalistic conception of labor that, as we have seen, Marx himself counters), or even that these processes mark the point at which what we call nature and what we call humanity become indistinguishable (the point, or so the theorists of biopolitics would argue, at which we obviate the very possibility of politics11), but rather that the maintenance, sustenance, production, and reproduction of life may always be the most artificial thing. And, under capital, they must be. As Marx does not fail to remind us, by the time we get to full-blown capitalism, the constant reproduction of the worker—the maintenance, sustenance, production, and reproduction of his living body, of his labor power, and therefore of his natural life—is an end that capital endlessly posits: “The constant

Animadversions    reproduction or perpetuation of the worker,” Marx famously writes, in the chapter on “Simple Reproduction,” “is the sine qua non of capitalist production” (C 716). Among the many things at stake here are Heidegger’s claim that Marx’s project depends on a metaphysical interpretation of man as animal rationale, and, as I have suggested, his own interpretation of that project, in the “Letter,” as a humanist one (Basic Writings 225–27). As Heidegger reads it, the metaphysical interpretation of man as animal rationale always leads us away from the human and back to the animal, thereby making of every humanism a thinly veiled zoomorphism. The philosopher speaks tellingly in this connection, again in the “Letter,” of our “appalling and scarcely conceivable bodily kinship with the beast” (Basic Writings 230).12 If we take seriously capital’s interference at every level of human, and not only human, life—as Marx’s codefinitions suggest we must—the stakes of an antihumanist reading of Marx open onto a new horizon. Indeed, if we trace this cleavage of man and animal through Marx’s own text, the unity of body-soul-mind13 on which it is supposedly predicated is pushed to the breaking point by his elaboration of a profoundly technical, antihumanist, and other than anthropological conception of the working body. What Heidegger’s account, it seems to me quite clear, fails to take into account is the antihumanist and other than anthropological character of labor already in Capital. What actually happens in Marx’s text, and what I will demonstrate in the remainder of this chapter, is his own repeated displacement of the labor-life relation from the sphere of the human to that of the mechanical. This displacement comes to be connected with a second cleavage of the animal—that is, the living, physical, or “organic” body (the German word is often Leiblichkeit)—and the human, which always figures as a kind of supplement to that body. As we will see, Marx repeatedly situates this division of life or of the living element of the working body from the rest, not just in man, but also in capital—a move that has consequences both for his theory of labor and for his theory of history. Marx’s repeated displacement of the labor-life relation comes most clearly into view in the chapter on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” in his presentation of what I will call the capital machine. To be sure, we are dealing with “real” machines in this chapter, whose pages are

   Animadversions filled with historical data about power looms and spinning jennies. But these are also the pages in which the machine achieves its highest level of theorization as an instance not just of technics but of its infinitization, and thus of what Marx describes as simultaneously an extension and a liberation of technics’ productive and transformative power. It exceeds the scope of this chapter to determine how Marx’s claims for the liberation of this power are connected with more explicitly political claims for liberation that we also find in his text: claims for the possible or actual freedom of human beings. That said, it bears remembering that for a certain philosophical tradition, tekhne has always been deeply bound up with human freedom, and that Heidegger is largely responsible for the modern rehabilitation of this tradition.14 Heidegger’s location of freedom as a mode of knowledge beyond the pale of human willing, most notably in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and in the lectures on Nietzsche, suggests that he is much closer to Marx than we might otherwise expect, at least when he tries to think the happy futures of technology.15 Heidegger writes in Nietzsche: “When man . . . in the process of mastering beings proceeds in such and such a way, then this proceeding against beings is supported and guided by a knowledge of beings. This knowledge is called tekhne” (1: 81). Marx’s formulation of a technical intervention in the experience of freedom forms part of this same tradition, and the question of human freedom suggests itself for reasons internal to his discussion of the machine in Capital. The limits of technical mastery and peculiarities of this technical mode of knowing come up repeatedly in Baudelaire, in whose texts the prospect of a freedom that would be “free” of technics is either ridiculed (as we saw in the preceding chapter) or dismissed as fiction (as we will see in the next one), and in which the realization of this freedom becomes a special task for poetry under capital.

4. The Capital Machine Early in the chapter on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” Marx calls the machine the “material foundation” of the capitalist system of production (C 554). The machine makes capitalism possible, yet it cannot be something capitalist itself, for elsewhere in the text, Marx as-

Animadversions    sures us that the machine is actually the material condition of production of an anticapitalist form of society, in which “the full and free development of every individual” will form “the ruling principle” (C 739). If the machine, in other words, is a trope or name borrowed from somewhere else, it is already clear that it is not just any trope in Capital. But what is the machine? How does it differ from the tool? How does it differ, for that matter, from the working body? At first glance, we have trouble distinguishing the machine from the tool, given that the first and most significant trait by which Marx defines the machine is its extension of labor beyond what he calls the “organic limitations” of the human body. Even the simplest tool—a hammer or a plow, for example—extends the working body beyond itself and is in this sense already prosthetic. In the case of the machine, however, this extension must be understood to take place in such a way that it is by definition potentially infinitizable. Thus Marx writes: The machine . . . is a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operations as the worker formerly did with similar tools. Whether the motive power is derived from man, or in turn from a machine, makes no difference here. From the moment that the tool proper is taken from man and fitted into a mechanism, a machine takes the place of a mere tool. The difference strikes one immediately, even in those cases where man himself continues to be the prime mover. The number of tools that he can use simultaneously is limited by the number of his own natural instruments of production, i.e., his own bodily organs. [ . . . ] The number of tools that a machine can bring into play at one time is from the outset freed from the organic limitations that confine the tools of the handicraftsman. (C 495)

Already in this potential for infinitization of the number of tools set to work, we see the interest the machine will hold for capital. A man may hammer all he wants, but he will only ever wield a single hammer, whereas there is no limit to the number of hammers that can be wielded by a machine. Or perhaps we should say there is no limit to the number of spindles: In Germany, they tried at first to make one spinner work two spinning-wheels, that is, to work simultaneously with both hands and both feet. That proved too exhausting. Later, a treadle spinning-wheel with two spindles was invented, but

   Animadversions spinning virtuosi who could spin two threads at once were almost as scarce as two-headed men. The Jenny, on the other hand, even at the very beginning, spun with twelve to eighteen spindles, and the stocking-loom knits with many thousand needles at once. (C 495)

But in this case, too, the machine seems only to supplement the tool—to extend it by extending the extension that was already proper to the tool. This supplementary extension is the tool, in its technical-instrumental dimension. A tool is something technical by definition; it can even seem, par excellence, the technical thing. This does not mean, however, that the tool is always something mechanical, especially once we remember that a tool may always be, for Marx, some living thing. This is the lesson of the motor, which represents the possibility of replacing “manpower” with nonhuman power—including machine power—as the prime mover of another tool or machine. Here, Marx makes it clear that, as a motor, the human being has always been replaceable. When a man persuades a horse to draw his plow, the horse may be transformed into a tool, but the plow is not, by virtue of this transformation, transformed into a machine.16 Thus Marx writes: [S]ome people try to explain the difference between a tool and a machine by saying that in the case of the tool, man is the motive power, whereas the power behind the machine is a natural force independent of man, as for instance an animal, water, wind and so on. According to this, a plough drawn by oxen, which is common to the most diverse epochs of production, would be a machine, while Claussen’s circular loom, which weaves 96,000 picks a minute, though it is set in motion by the hand of a single worker, would be a mere tool. Indeed, this same loom, though a tool when worked by hand, would be a machine if worked by steam. (C 493)

The lesson of the motor is critical but not decisive. If we want to get to what defines the machine for Marx, the decisive thing is work itself. The proposition is so simple as to risk being overlooked. If we follow Marx’s text to the letter, we have no choice but to conclude that the machine can be distinguished from the tool only by its displacement of the worker as a worker. For its defining feature consists in its displacement of man, not as a motor, but as the living, zoological, or physiological equiv-

Animadversions    alent of that part of the machine that Marx calls the “machine tool” (“die Werkzeugmaschine”) or the “working machine” (“die Arbeitsmaschine”): Upon closer examination of the machine tool or working machine proper we rediscover in it as a general rule, though often in highly modified forms, the very apparatus and tools used by the manual worker . . . ; but there is the difference that instead of being the tools of a man they are the tools of a mechanism, or mechanical tools. [ . . . ] The machine tool, therefore, is a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operations as the worker formerly did with similar tools. (C 494–95)

In a movement that is only apparently paradoxical (it is how every prosthesis works), the extension of labor that began with the tool, beyond the “organic limitations” of the living body, has come to displace that body, to supplement in the sense of supplant it. Under the regime of the machine, as the above passage makes explicit, it is not the “motor” that matters, not the mechanism that sets a given tool or machine to work that makes the difference, but the operation or handling of the tool as such. Again, Marx writes: “The machine, which is the starting-point of the industrial revolution, replaces the worker, who handles a single tool, with a mechanism which operates a number of the same or similar tools and is set in motion by a single motive power, whatever its form” (C 497). With the tool, extension remains dominant, and it is really only in its function as a motor that the working body can be replaced. With the machine, however, displacement is dominant and takes place at a different level. In a sense (although it makes almost no sense, if we want to retain a shred either of labor’s life or of its human qualities) with the machine, what is displaced is the working part of the working body itself. It is as if the living body were suddenly divided, by the introduction of the machine in the production process, between its capacity to move or propel—that is, what a horse can do as well as a man, and indeed, any animal—and its capacity to work: to operate a tool, work a loom, or spin a spindle—what a man as well as a machine can do, but no (other) living thing. With the machine, it is as if man were suddenly divided between what makes him most alive (here, his capacity for motion or animation) and what makes him most like a machine: his capacity for productive labor, even in the

   Animadversions face of his separation or alienation from the “intellectual potentialities” that once made that labor human.17 This would be all fine and good, and we would seem to have reached at least a minimal definition of the machine, but for one small problem: for all its pretensions to displace the working part of the working body in conjunction with labor’s progressive extension, the machine was already there in what Marx calls the collective worker.18 “For instance,” he explains (in the chapter on “Co-operation”), “if a dozen masons make a row, so as to pass stones from the bottom to the top of a ladder, each of them does the same thing; and yet their separate acts form connected parts of one total operation; these acts are particular phases which each stone must go through, and in this way the stones are carried up more quickly by the 24 hands of the collective worker than they would be if each man went up and down the ladder by himself ” (C 444). Or again, with increasing mathematical precision: “Twelve masons, in their collective working day of 144 hours, make much more progress with the building than one mason could make working for 12 days, because the combined worker or collective worker has hands and eyes both in front and back and can be said to be to a certain extent omnipresent” (C 445). These passages suggest that the collective worker does indeed replace “the worker, who handles a single tool, with a mechanism which operates a number of the same or similar tools”—it has “24 hands,” as Marx puts it, and “hands and eyes both in front and in back”—and it is indeed “set in motion by a single power source.” This source may be the despotic will of the feudal lord or of the slave owner (for Marx, as for so many, the reference here is to the construction of the pyramids in Egypt), or even the collective will of a tribe or a community. But it may also be the “will” of capital. The transition from capital as a potential motor of the sociomechanization of labor to a necessary one is deceptively simple. We may be inclined to think, “This is just the ‘work’ of the negative,” or the movement of what Marx elsewhere calls the “real subsumption” of labor by capital: the movement by which, once social labor brings capital into being, capital becomes a condition of labor’s socialization. Within certain limits, this negative or subsumptive movement can be understood to account for the contradictions that arise in Marx’s description of the process

Animadversions    of sociomechanization, such as when he writes that “The simultaneous employment of a large number of wage-laborers in the same labor process . . . forms the starting-point of capital” (C 453), but also writes that “[T]he capitalist mode of production is a historically necessary condition for the transformation of the labor process into a social process” (C 453). Or again, when he explains that “The control exercised by the capitalist is . . . a special function arising from the nature of the social labor process, and peculiar to that process” (C 449), and then goes on to explain that “[T]he ‘co-operation’ of wage-laborers is entirely brought about by the capital that employs them. The establishment of a connection between their individual functions, and their unity as a single productive body, lies outside of them, in the capital that brings them together and maintains them in that situation” (C 449–50). In fact, there are no contradictions here once we recognize that cooperation, like the machine it precedes and prefigures, is not capitalist in itself, but is rather only the means by which the capital-relation establishes itself as a real and material condition of labor’s socialization and therefore, by extension, of the socialization of the more general labor process: [A] certain minimum amount of capital was necessary in order that the number of workers simultaneously employed, and consequently the amount of surplusvalue produced, might suffice to liberate the employer himself from manual labor, to convert him from a small master into a capitalist, and thus formally to establish the capital-relation. We now see that a certain minimum amount [of capital] is a material condition for the conversion of numerous isolated and independent processes into a combined social process. (C 448)

At first, “[T]he command of capital over labor was only a formal result of the fact that the worker, instead of working for himself, works for, and consequently under the capitalist. Through the co-operation of numerous wage-laborers, the command of capital develops into a requirement for carrying on the labor process itself, into a real condition of production” (C 448, my emphasis). If we return to Marx’s second codefinition of labor, it becomes clear that this transition from capital as a potential motor of socialization to capital as a necessary (“real” or “material”19) one is evidence of more than

   Animadversions just the inexorable march of the dialectic. Or better, if it is evidence of capital’s dialectical movement, then it is also evidence that that movement is, at the same time, mechanical, in the very precise sense given the term by Marx. As he explains: “[T]here now arises a technologically and otherwise specific mode of production—capitalist production—which transforms the nature of the labor process and its actual conditions” (C 1034–35). With this transformation, capital becomes the material condition of labor, and indeed quite literally of its life, at least to the extent that this life can be reduced to mere subsistence or survival. Marx also tells us that the capital relation cannot be so established without transforming that body, quite literally, into a machine, incorporating its productive activity into an infinite and infinitizing operation (“co-operation”) into the production and reproduction not simply of human life, but of capital. In the end, as Marx explains: “Capital utilizes the worker, the worker does not utilize capital, and only articles which utilize the worker and hence possess independence, a consciousness and a will of their own in the capitalist, are capital” (C 1008). The transformation of the working body into a machine thus finds its counterpart in the transformation of capital into an intellectual (if not necessarily rational) force. Capital, like the machine that materially grounds it, is predicated on an inversion of the relationship between the tool and the working body. This inversion functions as a kind of second and secret definition of the machine throughout Marx’s text, where it is repeatedly described as an inversion of the relationship between “subjective” and “objective” principles: In those branches [of manufacture] in which the machine system is first introduced, manufacture itself provides, in general, a natural basis for the division, and consequently the organization, of the process of production. Nevertheless, an essential difference at once appears. In manufacture, it is the workers who, either singly or in groups, must carry on each particular process with their manual implements. The worker has been appropriated by the process; but the process had first to be adapted to the worker. This subjective principle of the division of labor no longer exists in production by machinery. Here the total process is examined objectively, viewed in and for itself, and analyzed into its constitutive phases. The problem of how to execute each particular process, and to bind the different partial processes together into a whole, is solved through the technical application of mechanics, chemistry, etc. (C 501–2)

Animadversions    Or again, he writes, in the chapter on “The Division of Labor and Manufacture,” in a passage I alluded to earlier: The knowledge, judgment and will which, even though to a small extent, are exercised by the independent peasant or handicraftsman, in the same way as the savage makes the whole art of war consist in the exercise of his personal cunning, are faculties now required only for the workshop as a whole. The intellectual potentialities of production expand in scale on one side because they vanish on many others. What is lost by the specialized workers is concentrated in the capital which confronts them. It is a result of the division of labor in manufacture that the worker is brought face to face with the intellectual potentialities of the material process of production as the property of another and as a power which rules over him. This process of separation starts in simple co-operation, where the capitalist represents to the individual workers the unity and the will of the whole body of social labor. It is developed in manufacture, which mutilates the worker, turning him into a fragment of himself. It is completed in large-scale industry, which makes science a potentiality for production which is distinct from labor and presses it into the service of capital. (C 482)

The “intellectual potentialities of production,” man’s intellectual potentialities, have been alienated from him, and Marx goes so far as to say that he may even be stupid in a clinical sense: “In manufacture, the social productive power of the collective worker, and hence of capital, is enriched through the impoverishment of the worker in individual productive power. [ . . . ] As a matter of fact, in the middle of the eighteenth century some manufacturers preferred to employ semi-idiots for certain operations which, though simple, were trade secrets” (C 483). The literal semi-idiot employed by the eighteenth-century manufacturer is a figure of the worker in general who, under capital, no longer works “for himself,” consciously realizing his purpose, and who, on the contrary, does not even know for whom or what he works, and in this way keeps the capitalist’s greatest trade secret: his own exploitation. Elsewhere, Marx makes the nature of this mutilation still more explicit: “In handicrafts and manufacture, the worker makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labor proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workers are the parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which

   Animadversions is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages” (C 548). The strict and literal displacement of the worker that defined the introduction of the machine in the labor process here gives way to his displacement by capital. By the time we get to full-blown capitalism, and regardless of whether or not any (other) machines have been introduced in the labor process, that process is no longer powered by man but by the infinite will to (self-)valorization of capital. The capitalist mode of production becomes a historically necessary condition for the socialization of labor because it discovers, precisely in that socialization, a “method . . . for the more profitable exploitation of labor” (C 453). Capitalization becomes a historically necessary condition of socialization because it is its best possible condition, and because there could be no more effective method for the extension, acceleration, or intensification of the labor process than to link it to capital’s infinite will to extend itself. Recall that the machine was to form the basis of a new society, in which “the full and free development of every individual” would be the ruling principle. What matters from the standpoint of possibilities for transformation, and for an opening of other futures for capital, is that the reverse will always hold. This other trajectory gives Marx’s presentation of the machine the power to illuminate, I believe at a much deeper level than the analysis of real subsumption alone, the radical and original relation between the essential technicity of labor and capital’s extraordinary powers of intervention in the world.20 The transformation of the labor process into a valorization process under capital is automatic—Marx refers to the “immediate unity” of the labor and valorization processes at several points (C 978–79, 991)—in the sense that it takes place independently of any man’s will, and even independently of the will of an entire class, popular misconceptions to the contrary. But it is automatic in a second and deeper sense also: in the sense that it takes place in accordance with a power that was already there in labor. Capital becomes the machine of its own production, but it can do so only in the wake of the labor that sets it in motion. By the time we get to capital, to that situation with respect to its establishment or “progress” that Marx calls “the specifically capitalist mode of production,” labor is no longer merely a tool for the fulfillment of human needs, for the maintenance, sustenance,

Animadversions    production, and reproduction of human life, but a machine for the (self-) production, (self-)reproduction, and (self-)valorization of capital. Marx reminds us elsewhere that the commodity engenders a similarly folded temporality and antiteleological calculus. Like the machine, it “is both the constant elementary premise (precondition) of capital and also the immediate result of the capitalist process of production” (C 949). This fold and this calculus structure Marx’s analysis from start to finish and account for capital’s becoming historical: “The circular nature of our presentation corresponds to the historical development of capital” (C 949). What is the machine? How does it differ from the tool? How does it differ from the working body? On what grounds does Marx dub the machine the “material foundation” of capital? The machine is at once capital and labor, from the moment that neither is the tool or the product of man alone: neither a means exclusively for the maintenance or sustenance of life nor the product of living labor power alone; but both a means and a product of living labor, and a means and a product of that dead labor called capital, whose driving motive and determining purpose are the infinite valorization of value at any cost. The machine becomes the “material foundation” of the capitalist mode of production on the grounds of its inversion of the normal or presumed relations between tekhne and life “itself.”

5. Poetics after Capital Having traced just some of the inversions marked out by the technical yet noninstrumental conception of labor we find in Capital, we are better able to understand why discrete instances and processes of labor are snatched from the grasp of human will and reason. The same holds for discrete decisions about capitalization, to say nothing of decisions about capital’s technical development: its “future” in a narrow sense. Snatched away at the same time is any possible rational decision or calculation regarding capital’s historical development. The prospects for human freedom can seem rather grim in this scenario, once it has been acknowledged that our power to produce or make or change anything has slipped from our grasp as rational subjects or agents. If we follow

   Animadversions Marx’s discussion of the machine to the letter, it becomes clear that no action undertaken by man could right the inversion of the technics-life relation. To accede to the ongoing transformation of both materiality and history that begins here is not to cede our every power of intervention. Technics does not categorically exclude action, any more than does capital.21 Indeed, it is possible that technics is what allows us to think the conditions under which we produce, make, or do something and intervene in the world in a relation of indebtedness and coresponsibility, without knowing or being able to calculate its effects in advance, and as responsibly as possible. These are nothing if not the conditions of revolution in a Marxian sense. Whether they are also the conditions of freedom remains an open question. This is why I have emphasized that the liberation of the productive power of labor by technics is, strictly speaking, always twofold in Marx’s account: labor is liberated both from the “organic limitations” of the human body and from the instrumental overdetermination of the human intellect—the definition of human being in accordance with an intellectual, conscious, or purposive and ultimately rational principle. It is thus neither simply labor nor human being that is transformed by technics, but rather something closer to their speed or scope as productive catalysts. Capital can’t produce something out of nothing. (As Marx himself reminds us: “[N]othing can ever emerge from the process of production which did not enter into it as conditions of production in the first place.”) And yet if this were the whole story, the entire process of labor’s liberation by technics would be tautological, and there could be no clearly definable difference between capitalism and any other economic system. Difference intervenes in the power of capital to transform its own conditions of production, and thus to produce, reproduce, and extend itself as something else—man, animal, or machine, for example. The historical development of capital from out of the technical yet noninstrumental conception of labor given us by Marx in Capital is, as a result of this difference, neither linear nor teleological. This has consequences, as Marx well understood, for the supposedly human nature of labor, and for history as well. It is in perfect keeping with Marx’s conception of the technical nature of labor that the prospects for human freedom are reworked and subject to new negotiation in the name of capital.

Animadversions    If I placed this reading of Marx’s codefinitions of labor within the framework of a reflection not just on capital but on its relation to language, this is not simply because language also marks a break with instrumentality at the heart of technics, or even because, as Derrida reminds us, there is no “before the machine” in language—just as, we may now venture, there is no “before the machine” in capital. “These machines have always been there, they are always there, even when we wrote by hand, even during so-called live conversation” (Derrida and Stiegler 38). If I have placed this reading within the framework of a reflection on language, it is because language allows us to glimpse in this break, and with greater clarity than any other machine, this simultaneously technical and revolutionary potential. Certain instances of language are sometimes privileged as an example of this machine, which comes to take labor’s place wherever its technical liberation is not reducible to calculation or instrumental reason—poetry, for example. Of all the modalities that might be called on to demonstrate this potential here, it remains for us to think language’s power not only to posit and produce, if precisely not to fashion by “pure fiction,” a world that is already different, but its power to destroy the world it gives us.

chapter 3

An/economy and Some Others (Accumulation and the Coming Injustice) Everything is reparable. There is still time. —Baudelaire (OC 1: 671) [T]he distinction between the one who operates with borrowed capital and the one who operates with his own is simply that one has to pay interest and the other does not. —Marx (C3 494–95)

Interpreters of Marx as diverse as Moishe Postone and Antonio Negri have suggested that Capital is a text as much about time as anything. One way to understand this is to recall that capital, as Marx repeatedly reminds us in the text, is precisely not a thing, but a relation, and the product of a whole system of relations: “[C]apital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things” (C 932). Capital is, it turns out, neither here nor there. Despite our impression that it has taken over everything, it does not in fact exist anywhere, not in any one place or at a given moment. Instead, it unfolds as the kind of participial nonpresence that Derrida taught us to read, many years before Specters of Marx, in “The Double Session,” in the present participle of Mallarmé’s Mimique.1 Indeed, we may say of capital, as has been observed of Mallarmé’s text more generally, that it is marked by a constant ellipsis of the verb to be.2 The whole thing happens “under the

An/economy and Some Others    false appearance of a present.” This explains why when Marx himself dares to pose the ontological question “What is capital?” it is in order to say things like “Capital, that is, value valorizing itself.” This valorization takes time. We have no other way to say or think about this, even if, as Derrida teaches us in Donner le temps, or Given Time, time is precisely no one’s and nothing’s, either to take or to give. Valorization’s present is no exception here. Whether this time in which capital unfolds can be or become historical was, it seems to me, already Marx’s question. Throughout the first volume of Capital, capital is irrevocably caught up with a decidedly flat or cyclical time, the time of the ever-always-the-same, clock time, economic time, the time of wage labor and the capitalist labor process. We may see this, for example, in the chapters on “The Working Day” and the treatments of “Day Work and Night Work. The Shift System,” “Laws for the Compulsory Extension of the Working Day,” “Laws for the Compulsory Limitation of the Working Day,” “The Struggle for a Normal Working Day,” or in the many chapters on surplus value, which include sections titled “The Length of the Working Day and the Intensity of Labor Constant; the Productivity of Labor Variable,” “The Working Day and the Productivity of Labor Constant; the Intensity of Labor Variable,” “The Productivity and Intensity of Labor Constant; the Length of the Working Day Variable”—to say nothing of all the chapters on “Wages,” in which Marx treats “Time-Wages” (as distinct from “Piece-Wages”), as well as, significantly, “National Differences in Wages,” moving us toward a more explicitly political analysis. Suffice it to say that it is not possible to conceive of “Time-Wages”; surplus value; a normal, extended, or limited working day; or, for that matter, value, tout court, under capital, without the clock. It is self-evident that it is difficult to get from this kind of time to a robustly materialist conception of history. Marx himself gestures toward this difficulty at multiple junctures in Capital, such as when he remarks on the strange chopping up or sectioning of time that forms part of the expansions, contractions, and other redistributions of time carried out by the socialization and division of labor in factory work. Thus he explains, in the chapter on “Co-operation,” that a single human being cannot get more than a twelve-hour workday out of a “natural day,” but under the

   An/economy and Some Others guise of cooperation (collectivization, simultaneity, sharing—without, however, sharing), a hundred men can get twelve thousand hours out of a single day (C 445). And this is only one example. For both Marx and for Benjamin after him, the task is not to reconcile two radically different modes or ways of experiencing time, although Benjamin toys a bit with this hypothesis in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (a text I will read in the next chapter). The principal task posed by capital to the materialist historian is not to insert the clock into history, homogeneous or empty time into something thicker. As Benjamin suggests in the well-known late text “On the Concept of History,” capital itself has seemingly infinite powers of reconciliation—and this is a big part of the problem. There is nothing capital can’t do in the service of its historicizing pseudo-history, including wake the dead.3 Hence the enormous difficulty of finding the right time for the revolution, which depends on the ability of the past to interpellate its inheritors at the very moment that they inherit a wholly other future. The biggest problem that capital poses for history is this capacity it exhibits to derive from the clock ever new modes or ways of experiencing time, adequate to all kinds of unprecedented things. Capital gives time to all kinds of things that will never be properly present or achieve temporal unity. We can grasp the finer nuances of capital’s strange temporal powers more clearly if we phrase the question thus: When is there capital? Show me, when does it exist? The staunchest Marxist as well as the fattest Halliburton executive will have no choice but to respond: There is capital whenever exchange values are truly equal to one another; whenever labor is justly compensated by wages and whenever the value of labor is adequately calculated by the clock; whenever markets are truly “free.” Such answers are woefully inadequate, not least of all because they give capital the very fictions it needs to rewrite its history—for example, in the form of the nursery tale or Kinderfibel with which Marx begins the chapters of Capital on so-called primitive accumulation (C 874). As readers of these chapters will recall, the “secret” of the so-called primitive accumulation is that there is no secret but rather an indelible history of violence. It is this violence that bourgeois political economy and capital’s own mystification of history always tries—and fails—to cover up: “In the tender annals of political economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial.

An/economy and Some Others    Right and ‘labor’ were from the beginning of time the sole means of enrichment. . . . In [real or] actual history, it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, violence, play the greatest part. [ . . . ] And this history, the history of expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire” (C 874–75). The poverty of these answers—that there is capital whenever values are equal, whenever labor is justly compensated by wages, whenever markets are truly “free”—does not stem only from the fact that these are fictions. Indeed, it has little to do with the fictional element per se, which, as Baudelaire will teach us when we turn to La Fausse Monnaie, is always present in money, and not only when it is false or counterfeit. It has rather to do with all the times and places that these fictions invariably displace or suppress. For who could deny that there is not also capital at so many other times and in so many other places—for example, in the poppy fields of Afghanistan, or in the oil fields of Iraq? Clock time and its derivatives will always be insufficient to a robust conception of history because they are insufficient to any rigorous understanding of capital’s history. It is not just a matter of all the things that can play themselves out, or fail to, while the clock is ticking. It is rather that clock time always has time, or makes it, for all kinds of things to happen without really happening, or (what is probably much worse) without leaving a trace. This is one thing we can be sure that capital will never do, despite the disappearance of the “money capitalist,” and even the disappearance of “real” capital in the form of property.4 There must be other times connected with capital, different from those measured by the clock.

1. False Appearances and Presents Before turning to Marx’s heady analysis of capital’s prehistory, without which it would not be possible to grasp the transition to its history, we might cite two short passages from Derrida’s excursus on the gift in Given Time. The gift, which Derrida repeatedly refers to as an aneconomic figure, is, in more than one text and for a long time (at least since Mauss’s Essai sur le don), the privileged face or figure of economy’s others. This question, of whether there is any “outside” of economy—or even

   An/economy and Some Others any “outside” of capital (which is not quite the same as this first question but which may quickly become confused with it)—crops up whenever we start asking about the relationship of capital to time, either to clock time or to the time of what in Capital Marx calls its real or actual history (wirkliche Geschichte): Now the gift, if there is any, would no doubt be related to economy. [ . . . ] But is not the gift, if there is any, also that which interrupts economy? That which, in suspending economic calculation, no longer gives rise to exchange? That which opens the circle so as to defy reciprocity or symmetry, the common measure, and so as to turn aside the return in view of the no-return? If there is gift, the given of the gift (that which one gives, that which is given, the gift as given thing or as act of donation) must not come back to the giving (let us not already say to the subject, to the donor). It must not circulate, it must not be exchanged, it must not in any case be exhausted, as a gift, by the process of exchange, by the movement of circulation of the circle in the form of return to the point of departure. If the figure of the circle is essential to economics, the gift must remain aneconomic. (Derrida, Given Time 7)

That the gift is described by Derrida here as outside economy, as not or other than economic, makes it all the more baffling that it should be, at the same time, intimately bound up with capital, unless this power to push beyond or rupture economy is somehow also capital’s. This is what Derrida himself seems to suggest when he locates this strange power of the gift to interrupt economy within time and as belonging to its nature: as if it were up to time to suspend economic calculation and open the circle: “If there is something that can in no case be given, it is time, since it is nothing and since in any case it does not properly belong to anyone; if certain persons or certain social classes have more time than others— and this is finally the most serious stake of political economy—it is certainly not time itself that they possess” (28). It is interesting to note in this context, and before leaving Derrida’s text behind, that Given Time is, like so many of his more overtly ethicopolitical analyses, a critique of social and economic injustice. It is about “deconstruction and the possibility of justice” and thus the fact that certain persons, or certain classes of persons, have more time than others. It is about this even if it can’t quite be about this, even if time is not actually what these people have. Derrida’s commitment to asking about this

An/economy and Some Others    injustice by questioning the limits not simply of capital, but of economy, reminds us that this is what Marx’s and Baudelaire’s texts are also about: less a given instance of economic injustice, a given gift, than the problem of a certain injustice that potentially drives every economy. The injustice is not just a temporary disproportion that could be righted through a Robin Hood–style redistribution of social wealth. It is deeper, more violent. Some people have more time than others. OK, so, Derrida cautions, it is not actually time that they have. But still, some people have more. It is possible that time, and more specifically a certain relationship of capital to it, is designed to make us forget this. Either way, how did it get to be this way? And do these people who have more owe anything to the others? Marx himself teaches us that there is not one way that things get to be this way, but rather different ways at different junctures in history, and capital is one of them. There are two moments in the text of Capital worth exploring if one wants to consider the question of time’s manipulation by capital in the context of a Marxian theory of history. The first is the discussion of capital’s “prehistory” in the closing section of Capital (volume 1), the section titled “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation.” The chapters on primitive accumulation are one of the few places in Capital where Marx explicitly addresses the story of capital’s origins. The story he tells turns on a full-fledged theory of history as a textual entity, without which the question of capital’s prehistorical violence could not be adequately addressed. The second moment is the more general discussion of what is called, simply, the accumulation of capital. Accumulation is less a question of capital’s historical origin than of its duration, its daily production and reproduction as we experience them. In much the same way that Marx talks about capital as a “mode of production,” he also talks about capital as a kind of “accumulation.” There is the production of capital versus the accumulation of capital, and these are, or they ought to be, distinct. However, it is not entirely clear what accumulation is. Is it a process? (Part 7 of volume 1 of Capital is titled “The Process of Accumulation of Capital.”) An event? A discrete instance or moment of capital’s existence? Is it a relation? Or is it, rather, a discrete instance or moment in the expression of the relation that is capital? One thing accumulation is not is an accumulated stock or bunch of stored-up stuff, a reserve, or

   An/economy and Some Others a stock of money that is earmarked to be cast back into the processes of labor and of valorization in the future. This alone could not account for the seal it sets on the domination of the capitalist over the worker, the so-called silent compulsion of economic relations: The progress of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition, and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance [bricht jeden Widerstand]. The constant generation of a relative surplus population keeps the law of the supply and demand of labor, and therefore wages, within narrow limits which correspond to capital’s valorization requirements. The silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker [der stumme Zwang der ökonomischen Verhältnisse besiegelt die Herrschaft des Kapitalisten über den Arbeiter]. Direct extra-economic violence [Außerökonomische, unmittelbare Gewalt] is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases. In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the “natural laws of production,” i.e., it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital. (C 899; W 23: 765)

The passages of Capital on the so-called primitive or “original” (ursprüngliche) accumulation, like the definitions of labor explored in Chapter 2, give yet another account of capital’s decentering of the rational political subject or agent. Capital’s threatened identification with economy’s other(s) is underscored, in this account, by the fact that there seems to be some sort of glitch, a hitch, in the transition from primitive accumulation to accumulation proper, confronting us with an undoing of narrative or historicist conceptions of history within the larger narrative of Capital. Again, how did it happen that the capitalist got to be a capitalist, the wage laborer—a wage laborer? That is to say, how did some people get to have more property than others (here it is a question of landed property), and thus a greater share of the means of production— more tools, more money, and thus the means to buy the labor power of certain other people, who have less, or even none, of these things?

An/economy and Some Others   

2. Marx’s Textual History (Primitive Accumulation) Marx’s answer could not be more clearly stated: the “secret” of the so-called primitive accumulation of capital is that there is no secret, but rather an indelible history of violence; the engine behind the concept of history at work here is the rampant injustice of capital’s brutal and bloody “prehistory.” How did some people get more? They took it—by theft, forcible expropriation, bloody legislation, the branding of so-called vagabonds with red-hot irons, the slicing off of ears. Marx emphasizes that it is this same history that gets rewritten or encrypted by political economy as an alternative and “revisionist” history: a “nursery tale,” or Kinderfibel, of a fictional state of nature that directly prefigures the more mature fiction of the “free” market (C 874). In the tender annals of political economy, “the idyllic reigns from time immemorial. Right and ‘labor’ were from the beginning of time the sole means of enrichment. . . . In [real or] actual history, it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, violence, play the greatest part. [ . . . ] And this history, the history of [the freedmen’s] expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” The history that Marx recounts in these pages is indeed bloody. The references to murder, maiming, and mutilation are frequent, the descriptions graphic. The recourse to what Marx calls “police methods” and the “discipline” of whips and chains in the centuries-long transformation of the freedman into a wage laborer is so thoroughly and painstakingly documented throughout these pages that the reader risks overlooking what is in fact the real “secret” of primitive accumulation: that it did not meet with resistance, or at least not with resistance sufficient to make a difference (C 904). This is the real secret, if there is one, and in a sense the greatest injustice recounted here. There was so much blood, as Marx thoroughly and painstakingly documents. In the face of all this injustice, expropriation, and violence, however, Marx observes, “The cries of the people and the legislation directed, for 150 years after Henry VII, against the expropriation of the small farmers and peasants, were both equally fruitless” (C 880). These remarks set up a key theoretical distinction that Marx makes in these pages between economic and other forms of violence. There

   An/economy and Some Others emerges, on the basis of Marx’s analysis of this failure of expropriation to produce effective resistance, a distinction between motives for violence that are economic and forms of violence that are in themselves extraeconomic, but through which economic motives are expressed. The distinction is politically as well as historically relevant. In making explicit the ties that bind Marx’s theory of the political to his conception of history, it attests to a more nuanced notion of the political or political life than has traditionally been granted Marx by his interpreters on both sides.5 Already in the case of “prehistorical” capital we are dealing with a sphere or dimension of the political in which violence cannot be explained away as an instance of some raw form of power, in which “might makes right” or as evidence of le droit du plus fort. That such an account was not and will never be sufficient was already implied by Marx’s concern with the minutiae of legislation. (Even if he reminds us, in the chapter on “The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist,” that “[R]evolutions are not made by laws” [C 915].) To locate violence in politics, and as indissociable from it, is to contradict even the most sophisticated Marxist understanding of politics as a “vanishing mediator” between economic and ideological strata of the social formation and underscores the extent to which such an understanding fails to account for the interpenetration of economic and political violence. This interpenetration cannot be confined to the “bourgeois” phase(s) of capital’s development, for, as Marx explains in this passage, it also takes place at a phase of capital’s (pre-)historical development. This is not to say that this interpenetration of economic and other forms of violence could be called purely a-historical either on the basis of the account Marx gives us here. He does not describe this interpenetration in such a way that we could seize it as an index or criterion marking capital’s passage into real or actual history. But he does suggest that it affects the prospects both for past (that is, prehistorical) resistance and for any possible future resistance to capital’s violence. This comes most clearly into view in a funny little passage in the chapter on “The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population,” in which Marx writes: “We leave on one side here the purely economic driving forces [den rein ökonomischen Triebfedern] behind the agricultural revolution. We deal only with the violent means employed [gewaltsamen Hebeln]” (C 883; W

An/economy and Some Others    23: 751). Although this passage clearly distinguishes the “purely economic driving forces” from the “violent means” employed in their service, it also suggests an alternative reading, in which the links between economy and violence are emphasized, such that the “purely economic driving forces” that precede and prepare capital’s properly historical advent are expressed by means of violence. These forces, from the moment they are violently expressed, are no longer purely economic but political. They are a matter simultaneously of legislative reform and of discipline in the raw sense, and they depend on a fusion of economics and politics. This reading hangs on the most bare-bones definition of politics as one mode of collective action and relation among others. The economic is the political, it passes into the political, by means of its violent expression. It exceeds the scope of this chapter to treat in depth the relationship between economic and political violence. I simply want to stress Marx’s emphasis on the dynamic quality of the relationships among different orders of violence. This potential for transformation within or among different orders of violence is what Marx refers to when he says that violence (die Gewalt) is “itself an economic force” (C 916). Capital enters history, if we follow Marx here, not just violently or as a form of violence, but by traversing and transforming the relationships among different orders of violence. If this is the true story of capital’s prehistory, however, it could be argued that its true (real or actual) history remains strangely unaccounted for. It would be foolish to think that there are not economic motives for political violence at other junctures in capital’s prehistory: that feudalism did not have its own articulation of orders of economic and political violence, or the so-called Asiatic mode of production.6 It could furthermore be argued that every instance of political violence has its own more “purely” economic motivation, in what is almost a caricature of vulgar Marxism. Marx himself is not interested in pursuing this line of argument here, however, and he seems rather to want to distinguish capital from other economic systems on the grounds of its articulation of different orders of violence in a way so total as to cover up the traces of its history. Hence the argument about the “silent compulsion of economic relations” is also an argument about the progressive polarization of society into two classes. The long passage that I quoted earlier is frequently cited as evidence of this covered-up “end” of capital: “It is not enough

   An/economy and Some Others that the conditions of labor are concentrated at one pole of society in the shape of capital, while at the other pole are grouped masses of men who have nothing to sell but their labor-power. Nor is it enough that they are compelled to sell themselves voluntarily. [ . . . ] The progress of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition, and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as selfevident natural laws” (C 899; W 23: 765). Production may or may not have an essential relation to politics. What the passage about the “silent compulsion of economic relations” makes exceedingly clear, however, is that it has one under capital. Capital sets the seal on its own distinctive style of domination, and it enters real or actual history only by repeating the violence of its prehistory on a daily (or hourly) basis. Indeed, as becomes clearer still when we read this passage to the end, capital’s polarization of society hinges on the historical establishment of wage labor and, in a strict and literal sense, on the clock. Again: “The constant generation of a relative surplus population keeps the law of the supply and demand of labor, and therefore wages, within narrow limits which correspond to capital’s valorization requirements. [ . . . ] In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the ‘natural laws of production,’ i.e., it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital.” If resistance was not possible—at least not sufficient resistance to make a difference, and to interrupt or block capital’s historical development—even in the prehistorical process of amassing wealth through brute force and expropriation, it follows that it will be even less so once the capitalist system has been fully, historically established and everyone (at both poles) considers the requirements of the capitalist mode of production to stem from “natural laws.” These requirements include the fiction of the poor man’s equality to all other men, here expressed as his dependence on capital. Without a doubt, the narrative we get in the chapters on primitive accumulation about capital’s violent “progress” makes perfect sense in the context of a whole Marxist tradition, whose daily bread is the elaboration of distinctions between repressive versus ideological state apparatuses, or between the formal and the real subsumption of labor by capital. It is worth noting, however, that this context and tradition are governed by a logic in which history is progressive and bound by narrative conventions,

An/economy and Some Others    even if they do not necessarily espouse the dialectical notions of history and of progress that are often thought to be central to Marx’s narrative in Capital. This is the same narrative that we have just seen come undone as a narrative that could get from point A to point B, that is, from prehistorical to historical capital, without accounting for the violent repetition of prehistory in the present. The particular mode of this undoing, which ensures that history and prehistory cannot be distinguished, does not answer our guiding question, but it allows us to rephrase it: How do we get from a time when it is necessary to use political violence as a means to economic ends to a time when the use of directly political violence is the exception? If we recall Marx’s analysis of the Kinderfibel about capital’s prehistory, we see that the real challenge to rigorous analysis of capital’s history is that it implicates prehistory in history, requiring us to think the daily repetition of the historical violence in the present. Another way of putting Marx’s (pre-)history lesson, shifting idioms only slightly, is to say that it requires us to think capital’s history in a nonnarrative mode. This connects capital directly to irony, and to the textual and ironic conceptions of history I explored in Chapter 1. For the reasons I gave there, this is not an easy kind of history to think.

3. Some People Have a Lot More than Others (Accumulation Proper) This brings us to Marx’s second discussion of capital’s history in Capital. These are the passages on accumulation proper. Capital, whatever else it may be, is not something that exists or takes place at the level of simple economic circulation, as Marx explains more than once. Nor has it ever been about the simple fulfillment of needs. It has never been limited to what is sometimes understood as the “good” (self-limiting) kind of economy (for example, in Aristotle’s division of economy between finite and infinite, true economy and chrematistics, in the Politics 7). If this were the case—if capital could be simply divided into good and bad instances, and in this sense referred for judgment to its own moral fictions—some people would not have so much more than others. This passage beyond pure and simple economic circulation takes

   An/economy and Some Others us from the analysis of capital in the mode of its so-called simple reproduction to the analysis of its “reproduction on an expanded scale.” This expansion of scale is one of the things that Marx calls accumulation. As I suggested earlier, accumulation is defined in several different and sometimes seemingly disparate ways in the text of Capital. Sometimes it is a process, but not always. Sometimes it is something approaching a decision that a capitalist makes. In other passages, the difficulty we have in sorting out what is meant by accumulation seems rather to stem from the fact that, whether we conceive of it as process or as decision, accumulation does not always clearly differ from what Marx calls capitalization— although it is at least plausible that we are meant to understand their difference as one of degree. In volume 2 of Capital, for example, accumulation is defined as an “Expansion [Erweiterung] of production” (C2 565; W 24: 485) or as a “Process of reproduction on an expanded scale [auf erweiterter Stufenleiter]” (C2 395; W 24: 321). It would be possible to argue that Marx had effectively said as much in volume 1, when he explained that the event or decision that is sometimes called accumulation comes, for all its resemblance to the event or decision we call capitalization, at a different point in the cycle: “Earlier we considered how surplus-value arises from capital; now we have to see how capital arises from surplusvalue. The use [Anwendung] of surplus-value as capital, or its reconversion into capital, is called accumulation of capital” (C 725). According to this understanding, accumulation is, precisely, the repetition and expansion of a process that was already taking place at a different historical juncture. Elsewhere in volume 2 we are told that accumulation is a “Capitalization of surplus-value” (C2 394; W 24: 321), or, alternatively, an “Extortion of surplus-value” (C2 579; W 24: 499). Quite apart from the emphases we may choose within these definitions, we may note that accumulation is defined, precisely through Marx’s own emphasis on capital’s repetition and expansion in all of them, by a very specific view to the future. Like capitalization, it marks the moment or operation whereby some portion of revenue is turned into capital, but in the case of accumulation, it seems that the expenditure is calculated specifically with a view to expanding the circle. This understanding is supported by several other passages and has the added virtue of echoing the most common understanding of accumulation in traditional Marx-

An/economy and Some Others    isms. Time is manipulated in both accounts, and it is manipulated with a view to something more than merely perpetuating the accomplished relations of domination and subordination. Accumulation is a repetition, and it quite literally repeats everything that we thought defined capital. But it is also a calculation that takes its own relation to the future into account on an ever-expanding scale. As such, it is more than just the decision to use surplus value as capital. It is the decision for, and use of, more surplus value. This inclusion of the always more, of this surplus of surplus, should not be mistaken for a desire for the same and thus for a closure of the circuit. There can be a slightly desperate bid for identity and self-preservation in the moment of value’s self-valorization. But this moment cannot be decoupled from the passage out from the desire for more of the same into a space of radical alterity. After all, this need for alterity defines value in its very condition of possibility. Capital in this sense only activates what was already there in value’s need for what is other—for its history but also, therefore, for its future—and, in the mode of accumulation, aggravates or spurs it on. Marx himself goes to some length to underscore this need for alterity when he explains that value must valorize itself in order to save its own skin, and to stop the present sum of surplus value from being drained to the dregs. It can do this only by producing more capital: “Accumulation,” writes Marx, always “requires the transformation of a portion of the surplus product into capital.” Without this transformation of the surplus value produced by capital into more capital, as Marx himself constantly reminds us, “the cup of surplus-value would be drained to the very dregs, and nothing but [the] simple reproduction [of capital] would ever take place” (C 726). The desire of capital to beget still more expands the scale of its domination, aggravating and aggrandizing it and making it worse. Capital’s expansion, which is not completely separate from its power to traverse and reorder the relations among different orders of violence, seems to mark capital’s passage into history in the mode of accumulation. If this desire stands at the beginning of capital’s true history—its history, that is to say, in the mode of accumulation— it becomes increasingly less certain that capital is simply one economy among others. How could any economy resist this calculation with the future, this desire not simply to save its own skin but to reproduce itself

   An/economy and Some Others by producing itself through others? Would every economy give rise, in this sense, to capital? The point here is not to plunge us into the naturalizing or historicizing error that causes us to mistake capitalist relations and social formations as natural or eternal. The only thing that appears as “natural” or “eternal” here is that capital should make so much worse the injustice it inherits from its prehistory. The story that Marx himself tells us about capital’s passage to accumulation properly speaking is organized in volume 1 around the figure of the spiral: “Looked at concretely, accumulation can be resolved into the production of capital on a progressively increasing scale. The cycle of simple reproduction alters its form and, to use Sismondi’s expression, changes into a spiral” (C 727). The figure of the spiral repeats, and even complicates, the failure of capital to make the transition from its prehistory to its history that we came across in Marx’s discussion of primitive accumulation. It is not just that the spiral seems to give the circle (that is, the first figure of value’s infinitizing selfvalorization) a certain historical dimension, thus pulling it away from the flat, homogeneous, and empty time that was earlier associated with the clock. (The clock remains fully operative as long as capital depends on the appropriation of labor power in the form of wage labor.) If, however, accumulation gives to capital its own, properly historical dimension, it is not clear whether this actually changes anything.

4. Phony Francs Baudelaire’s well-known prose poem, La Fausse Monnaie (“Counterfeit Money”) at first glance appears to be a fiction that is manifestly about the production and circulation of fictions. At the same time, just under the surface, Baudelaire’s text addresses the moral fictions underwriting capital’s infinite and infinitizing self-extension. Indeed, it is through its treatment of these fictions that the poem raises the same questions I have been tracing through my reading of Capital about the multilayered temporalities of capital. One axis of similarity we may note is that the poem follows the same arc, the same movement, of going from bad to worse, which we saw in Marx’s treatment of accumulation. We

An/economy and Some Others    see this, for example, in the many different outcomes that the narrator imagines for the beggar, which run the full spectrum from his striking it rich to being thrown into jail. By virtue of the figure of the counterfeit money that organizes and disorganizes its plot, the poem simultaneously disrupts this narrative by turning to address its own status as literature and as poetry. Nowhere in Baudelaire’s poetic corpus do we find so intricately intertwined the text’s autocritique of its own status as a poetic fiction and the critique of capital. A second axis of similarity can be found in the poem’s ironic treatment of the idea that we could ever distinguish between a “good” and a “bad” circulation of capital’s moral fictions, or between a “good” and a “bad” interpretation or deployment of capital. This emerges particularly starkly in the poem’s description of a certain equivocation of the gift and of our debt or obligation to the other. It is, I will suggest, as a reading and an ironic rewriting of its intertext and precursor—Rousseau’s fable about the counterfeit money in Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (The Reveries of the Solitary Walker)—that Baudelaire’s poem is able to function most powerfully as a critique of the prospects for meaningful ethical relation under capital. In oblique relation to this autocritique and to the critique of Rousseau, Baudelaire’s poem ultimately suggests that there are resources, and even a potential force of resistance, to be drawn from the fact that capital is itself founded in fiction, and (what is not quite an equivalent proposition) in poetry. Recall the bare outlines of the “plot.” Two men are leaving a tobacco shop. The narrator watches as his friend divvies up his change (presumably from the transaction just accomplished) with extreme meticulousness, putting coins of four different denominations into each of four different pockets. A silver two-franc piece is subject to closer scrutiny than the others before being deposited in the right trouser pocket. The narrator, observing this procedure, says to himself: “What a singular and minute distribution!” The two men encounter a beggar (un pauvre, later un mendiant). They give alms. The narrator immediately remarks aloud that his friend’s “donation” is significantly more prodigious than his own. He goes on to suggest that the friend has done the right thing, in the very peculiar sense, not, as we might have expected, that he has done a good deed, but rather in that he has produced a moment’s pleasure for himself

   An/economy and Some Others by creating a surprise for the beggar. The friend responds nonchalantly: “It was the counterfeit coin [C’était la pièce fausse].” There ensues the narrator’s extended reverie about the coin’s fate as well as the beggar’s. These are linked, although the nature of this link is in a sense the first thing questioned, in what is perhaps the first ironic gesture of the poem. At first, the narrator is duly impressed by what he perceives as the friend’s ingeniously creative and productive act. It seems, to the narrator’s mind, that thanks to the “donation” of the coin, anything has become possible for the beggar. Misfortune, even evil, is included here; but so are happy things also. Into his miserable brain: [T]here suddenly came the idea that such conduct on my friend’s part was excusable only by the desire to create an event in this poor devil’s life, perhaps even to learn the varied consequences, disastrous or other, that a counterfeit coin in the hands of a beggar might engender. Might it not multiply into real coins? Could it not also lead him to prison? A tavern keeper, a baker, for example, was perhaps going to have the beggar arrested as a counterfeiter or for passing counterfeit money. The counterfeit coin could, just as well, perhaps, be the germ of several days’ wealth for a poor little speculator. (OC 1: 324)8

And so the narrator’s fancy goes its course, “lending wings” to his friend’s mind and “drawing all possible deductions from all possible hypotheses,” until the friend speaks a second time, interrupting both the narrator’s reverie and his generous interpretation of the friend’s gift—or, at least (what is not quite the same thing), of the reasoning behind it. In speaking a second time, the friend effectively repeats what the narrator has already said to himself: there is no greater pleasure than creating a surprise. “Yes, you are right. There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.” With this supposed repetition, which is a kind of turning point or plot twist, the friend only betrays—or is understood by the narrator to have betrayed—a different motive than the one attributed to him until now. The twist lies in this reversal of motives, for the narrator takes the friend’s second statement, and his echolike affirmation of the “You are right [Vous avez raison],” to mean that he believes he has done a good deed while getting a good deal at the same time. The narrator himself, however, is no longer pleasantly surprised. He is, quite literally, “ap-

An/economy and Some Others    palled” (épouvanté). He discovers, or thinks he has discovered, that the friend, instead of wanting to give the gift of the pure event, has tried to get something for nothing: to get more value than he himself actually has in his possession, even if only in order to give it, and to give the beggar more than he hoped for, and then to take back from the gift, as it were, of this surplus value, a little something for himself: I then saw clearly that his aim had been to do a good deed while at the same time making a good deal; to earn forty cents and the heart of God; to win paradise economically; in short, to pick up gratis the certificate of a charitable man. I could almost have forgiven him the desire for the criminal enjoyment of which a moment before I assumed him capable; I would have found something bizarre, singular in his amusing himself by compromising the poor; but I will never forgive him the ineptitude of his calculation. To be mean is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that one is; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil out of stupidity. (OC 1: 324)

With this calculation, the friend fancies himself, at least in the narrator’s mind, a “generous gambler” (to crib a title from another of Baudelaire’s prose poems). There is a collision or contamination of moral or ethical and more mundanely economic or monetary economies here. The friend hopes to win in both, but ends only by cheating in both. The narrator’s suspicion of the friend’s duplicity is crucial in this regard—although it seems that it cannot be the whole problem, for no revelation of or attention to this duplicity in itself can account for the peculiar figural and referential properties of the money. The friend’s perversion seems to consist in something more than his cheating or doing evil (or potentially doing evil) to the beggar. His perversion seems to be more intimately connected with the already perverse or renegade status of the counterfeit. What is styled by the narrator as the ineptitude of his friend’s calculation clues us into the more general renegade status of the counterfeit coin with regard to the normal or legitimate functioning of money. Recall that the counterfeit’s perversion of money was, on the narrator’s first gloss, not really a problem, something pretty close to “excusable.” The possibility of this calculation’s ineptitude comes to infect, and the coin to signal the perversion of, all the circuits of value’s circulation. The attempt to calculate with the coin in two economies at once is deemed unforgivable.

   An/economy and Some Others It is easy to see that the counterfeit coin is a figure here, among other things, of capital. What has the friend tried to master, appropriate, and in some sense to capitalize on here if not the simultaneously productive and destructive power of capital with regard to value’s normal or legitimate functioning? Marx invokes something of this illegitimacy, this narcissistic perversion and almost autoerotic quality of capital when he defines capital as “value valorizing itself.” Capital never produces something out of nothing. As Marx constantly reminds us, in Capital, it never begets “more value” without constantly casting itself back into the processes of circulation and production. Without the constant transformation of the surplus value produced by capital into more capital, as we saw earlier, “the cup of surplus-value would be drained to the very dregs” (C 726). (In much the same vein, Marx reminds us that the miser is not a capitalist; his desire to keep his money to himself will never be rewarded by capital.) Capital never gets something for nothing, but it does approach a certain limit of reason, and of a rational grasp of value’s functioning, whenever it arrogates value’s powers of (self-)valorization to itself. It is worth noting that the power of performative language is also invoked by Baudelaire’s text here: this power of language to redraw the line between act and fiction, which approaches, asymptotically, the same limit. The performative utterance—like the counterfeit one in the figural economy of Baudelaire’s poem—always marks language’s crossing of the line between the regime of normal epistemological and referential relations, in which language functions as a means of communication, into another regime entirely, in which it functions as a machine for the production of events.9 The performative is invoked here, above all, by this desire for the production of the pure event, even if only to be immediately questioned, interrupted, and disavowed. This desire for the event or its production is a little like a definition of literature, which is another thing the counterfeit money is a figure of here. That literature may be the very event that threatens, or is threatened, in Baudelaire’s “Counterfeit Money”—in or by the counterfeit money—is already hinted at in the imagined scene of gambling, or “speculation,” whose connections to capital are a veritable commonplace of nineteenth-century literature. To be sure, literature insinuates itself in still subtler ways in Baudelaire’s poem, such as, for example, when we are

An/economy and Some Others    walked through the full spectrum of possibilities but never learn at any point what “actually happens” to either the money or the beggar. There is, at the level of the narrated events, precisely no verifiable event connected with the counterfeit: only literature. The simultaneous credibility and unverifiability of money, regardless of whether it can be considered a gift and quite apart from whether it is “really” counterfeit, is in this sense always what produces the poem by Baudelaire called “Counterfeit Money.”

5. “Dangerous like poetry in prose . . . ” To consider the definition or operation of literature in connection with Baudelaire’s “Counterfeit Money” is already to invoke the poem’s source text, Rousseau’s fable about the counterfeit money in the Reveries. I myself want to underscore the questions that Baudelaire’s text inherits from Rousseau’s. Do we give the beggar a gift? Does anyone ever give a beggar a gift? Or do we in fact owe him something? This question was already, significantly to my mind, in Rousseau’s fable in the Reveries, a question about literature: about its comparative freedom from obligation, its promised or wished for circulation outside the circuits of every possible moral or even ethical economy. Whereas in Rousseau’s text, however, literature is, or says it wants to be, the space of absolute freedom, in Baudelaire’s text, it seems to me quite clear, literature becomes the space where we are strangely beholden to the other. Such an inversion would already be ironic in a textbook sense, but what I would emphasize is that Baudelaire’s poem draws its critical resources less from this inversion than from the insights it affords into capital, which henceforth can be understood to move in literature’s space. Capital tells us, or thinks, it moves in the space of the “without obligation,” the extraeconomic space it seems to share with literature, but it doesn’t move in it because literature doesn’t actually move in it either—if we follow Rousseau. Recall the definitive move of Rousseau’s famous excursus on lying in the Reveries: to distinguish between two kinds of nontruth (they are not lies, at least not for Rousseau), both of which are figured by coun-

   An/economy and Some Others terfeit money. This decision to distinguish between two different kinds of counterfeit is, we have just seen, of central importance to Baudelaire’s version of the events. It is what makes it possible for Baudelaire’s narrator to have two different readings of the counterfeit. But even more important, once we turn to Rousseau’s fable about counterfeit money, is that it organizes an entire system of moral distinctions that is ultimately haunted by a single, highly unstable distinction, between a “moral fiction” and a “pure literature.” Baudelaire’s reading and ironic rewriting of this highly unstable system of distinctions leads him to suggest that capital’s moral claims—and, obliquely in relation to these, its ethical possibilities—are founded not simply on a fiction or whole network of fictions, but on a specific kind of fiction that is surprisingly close to literature. Capital’s foundation in literature, or in a mode of fiction that is closest to it in Rousseau’s account, is, precisely, neither neutral or harmless. This is what Baudelaire’s rewriting of the fable of counterfeit money in “Counterfeit Money” teaches us. In the Reveries, Rousseau resolves to examine himself, in the deepest recesses of his soul, on the possibility of his having, perhaps, lied in his life—and then lied about the reasons for this lying in a book (The Confessions). But what does it mean, exactly, to lie? I remember reading in a philosophy book that to lie is to conceal a truth that one ought to make manifest. It clearly follows from this definition that to keep quiet a truth that one is not obligated to say [taire une vérité qu’on n’est pas obligé de dire] is not to lie; but he who, not content, in a similar case, with not saying the truth, says its opposite, does he lie then or not? According to the definition, one cannot say that he lies. For if he gives counterfeit money to a man to whom he owes nothing, he deceives this man, without a doubt, but he does not rob him [Car s’il donne de la fausse monnaie à un homme auquel il ne doit rien, il trompe cet homme, sans doute, mais il ne le vole pas]. (67)

Rousseau goes on to follow up this distinction, between the truth we owe and the one we don’t, with a further distinction between an abstract and general truth—which ought to be valued above all else (it is the greatest good)—and those pesky little particular truths, which are very often indifferent, even occasionally harmful, and so best left out of circulation entirely. Rousseau says of these latter truths, banishing them definitively from the ethical economy he sets up, that it is not possible to owe “that

An/economy and Some Others    which is good for nothing” (68). Also explicated here is a whole hierarchy of lies, lies that are actually lies—that is, lies that rob us of the truth, together with an explanation of why an innocent lie is such a rare thing. Before our lie can be innocent, explains Rousseau, we must be certain that it will not harm anyone whatsoever, in any fashion: not the one to whom we “pass” it or anyone else. It is, says Rousseau, very hard to know this. Of paramount interest for our purposes is that this hierarchy of lies ends by redrawing the line between a lie, technically speaking, and fiction: “To lie with neither profit nor prejudice, to oneself or against another,” explains Rousseau, “is not to lie; this is not a lie; this is fiction” (71). No sooner is this line redrawn than we arrive at a final distinction, one between two different kinds of fiction: the moral or didactic fiction and the idle one. The moral fiction wants only to “clothe useful truths in an agreeable form.” Its nontruths are always proffered in the service of the good. This kind of fiction, says Rousseau, we call fable. The other kind of fiction, which is, strictly speaking, “amoral”—“There are other fictions that are purely idle”—Rousseau says everyone will be able to recognize. No one ever accuses their authors of a crime. Stories and novels (contes et romans) are of this sort, having no object other than amusement. It is significant that Rousseau defines literature as a matter of stories and novels. He does not even mention poetry. To lay out only one example of the critical insights Baudelaire’s ironic treatment of Rousseau’s fable affords us into the fictions undergirding capital, “Counterfeit Money” literalizes what is at best only implicit in the Reveries: that the man to whom we give money without owing him anything is a beggar. The example is privileged, the move crucial, for with this move, Baudelaire’s text calls starkly into question whether there is such a man: one to whom we can be sure we have no obligation. Rousseau is sure about this, or claims to be, and his entire demonstration rests on our ability to make this distinction. Baudelaire’s text negates and reverses Rousseau’s claim to certainty about this distinction, but it also negates and reverses, above and beyond this, an entire tradition of Christian charity, even an entire history of moral philosophy. But most ironic by far, and the more unsettling result of Baudelaire’s literalization of the other to whom we owe nothing as a beggar, is that it exposes the fiction

   An/economy and Some Others of the beggar’s radical exclusion from normal social or economic relations as the opposite of a moral fiction and perilously close to a lie. For what does La Fausse Monnaie do here but pick up, re-present, and repeat this fictional situation, the philosophical fantasy scene of being utterly without obligation, and rewrite or inscribe it at the very heart of economy? That is to say, in the streets of Paris, in the so-called capital of capital and during the rise of industrial capital in nineteenth-century Europe, it is reinscribed at the center of a whole series of economic calculations. If there is any question as to whether we are already “inside” economy here, we need only recall the poem’s treatment of the beggar’s eyes, the strange way they have of seeming to express gratitude and making us feel guilty at the same time: “I know nothing more disquieting than the mute eloquence of those supplicating eyes that contain, at once, for the sensitive man who knows how to read them, so much humility and so much reproach. He finds there something close to the depth of the complicated feeling one sees in the tear-filled eyes of a dog being beaten” (OC 1: 324). We find this same debt and sense of obligation raised by several other prominent beggars in Spleen de Paris. For example, in Les Yeux des pauvres (“The Eyes of Poor People”), the narrator feels deeply moved by a poor family looking in through a café window at himself and his girlfriend while they dine: “Not only was I moved by that family of eyes, but I felt a little ashamed of our glasses and decanters, larger than our thirst” (OC 1: 319). The girlfriend, for her part, finds the eyes themselves to be too big and says, “I can’t stand those people with their eyes opened as wide as coach doors!” Nor can we neglect to mention on this count Assommons les pauvres! (“Let’s Beat Up the Poor!”), which makes mincemeat of liberal platitudes about equality, which were apparently already laughable in Baudelaire’s time. Here, the narrator runs across a beggar who extends his hat “with one of those unforgettable looks that would topple thrones, if mind could move matter” (OC 1: 357–58). Again, it is already ironic that this fantasy scene “outside of economy” should be inscribed inside a clearly economic circuit. But it is even more ironic—and, I would argue, more powerful as a critical gesture— that “Counterfeit Money,” in depriving us of this fantasy, deprives us simultaneously of any possible scene or situation in which “counterfeit money” could be harmlessly passed. Baudelaire’s text thus deprives us of

An/economy and Some Others    literature, or of anything that would fit Rousseau’s definition of it. Blown to pieces here, together with Rousseau’s meticulous hierarchy and system of distinctions, is the fiction that literature is always harmless. Again, in Rousseau’s account, nontruth, in order to be either a moral fiction or literature, in order not to be a lie, must be harmless. Literature is, by definition for Rousseau, the counterfeit money that deceives but does not harm. And yet, in order to be harmless, it must be proffered in this fantasy situation of “no obligation,” which, if we follow Baudelaire’s text, nowhere exists. This fantasy was already shaken by the narrator’s first interpretation of the friend’s “donation,” when he included in his musings the possibility that the beggar might get caught passing the counterfeit money. There is no counterfeit money in this scenario of which one could ever say with absolute certainty that it is passed without harm. The fable of the counterfeit money that could be harmlessly passed is not clearly a moral or didactic fiction. Neither is it clearly an idle one. The fiction of counterfeit money is always potentially harmful because we recognize it, in its simultaneous credibility and unverifiability, as a figure of capital. True to the uncertainty of this formulation (it is itself simultaneously credible and unverifiable), we may note that all of the moral fictions on which capital depends are drawn into the circuit of the poem’s irony—such as, for example, the fiction that capital sets us free, or makes us all equal, or can make a better life for everyone. This is not at all certain. But above all, what Baudelaire’s “Counterfeit Money” dramatizes is the potential, not just for inequality to surface, but for injustice to arise, and then to get passed as harmless. This is why I would suggest we take one final cue from Baudelaire and call whatever is left over here, instead of literature, poetry. Baudelaire speaks explicitly, in the Salon of 1859, of certain dangers of poetry where it surges up, interrupts, or transgresses its own limits. Although the immediate theoretical object of Baudelaire’s text is fantasy here (la fantaisie in contradistinction to either history or genre painting), fantasy is likened to poetry on the grounds of its facility and openness, its “vastness” to rival a multiplied universe, and its connection with an absolute freedom, never to be mastered. The risk of this fantasy, it is implied, is that it can go any way: it can be the first thing happened upon and subject to brilliant illumination, or it can be the first thing happened upon and sullied. This fantasy lives in its transgression of

   An/economy and Some Others holy borderlines. It is, writes Baudelaire, “dangerous like poetry in prose [dangereuse comme la poésie en prose]” (OC 2: 644). La Fausse Monnaie suggests that, in the whole complex or network of moral and ethical fictions authorizing capital, the real problem is not so much that of who has, or doesn’t have, money. It is not so much a problem of having, or not having, money, or of owing anything to anyone, but rather of who is able, and even entitled, to read the fictions on which capital depends, who is entitled to submit them to more than one reading, and who decides—in the process—whether they are harmless. This reading takes time, and a kind of crazy attempt to calculate with time, as the narrator of La Fausse Monnaie emphasizes when he describes his “miserable brain” as “always concerned with looking for noon at two o’clock [toujours occupé à chercher midi à quatorze heures].”10 This madness is associated with the “desire beyond need” that is a defining feature both of literature and of capital. In the reading of Marx with which I began this chapter, I suggested that capital, even as it liberates its own future (touching and transforming its own conditions of possibility, seemingly miraculously), suppresses the violence of its history through the daily repetition of its originary violence. On the one hand, it seems irrefutable that once capital moves from simple reproduction to reproduction on an expanded scale, things get progressively worse for an ever-increasing number of people. This is, after all, what the famous theses about pauperization were about. Marx had already taken up this question in an explicitly political arena in his oft-cited discussions of colonization and globalization in the closing chapters of Capital.11 What remains unclear is whether capital, when viewed from the perspective of this progressive worsening, actually keeps things exactly the same—by making them worse. Is the accumulation of capital an event? Is the progressive worsening of an already existing situation an event? At the same time, despite Marx’s own remarks about capital’s foreclosure of effective resistance, he asks whether another reading of capital’s history does not always remain possible. This is, I tried to suggest, why he called his reader’s attention to the tropological and potentially ironic nature of the Kinderfibel, and why he linked his own reading of capital’s violent prehistory to the peculiar temporality of a double narrative: Kinderfibel and true history, capital’s history encrypted

An/economy and Some Others    and decoded, the nature of capital’s passage into history understood as more or less secretly versus more or less openly violent. In La Fausse Monnaie, Baudelaire seems to suggest not simply that capital’s true foundation is in the simultaneous credibility and unverifiability of the counterfeit, but that capital is in some sense always the least able or entitled to read its own fictions. Perhaps this is the supreme irony of capital’s foundation in fiction, and in prose poetry to boot, raising the dangers of “poetry in prose” to the level of a poetic principle. The revolution is, in this respect, on irony’s side.

chapter 4

Insert into Blankness (Poetry and Cultural Memory in Benjamin’s Baudelaire) I wonder . . . whether the very idea of a political program does not still pay an essential tribute to an outdated concept of the political. —Jacques Derrida (For What Tomorrow . . . 96)

To speak of revolution has always been to speak of the future, at least according to a certain Marxist tradition. This tradition is mistaken, as Benjamin reminds us. In the notes for his project on the Paris arcades, toward the end of “Convolute X” (his notes on Marx), Benjamin formulates this critique in a language that has little to do with novelty, invention, or new perspectives. He is instead concerned mainly with death: “The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death” (AP 667; GS 5(2): 819). Even through the mythologizing haze of our nostalgia for a time when capital’s murder could be imagined more credibly than now, the lesson bears repeating. The projection of revolutionary violence ever forward to the future forgets, and is even designed to forget, the prospect of a wholly other revolution: one that would have the power, in order to take place even once, to take place at any moment.1 Revolution is never simply a matter of tradition, and yet it must make its peace with the memory of all the dead generations. Marx’s own remarks about the difficulty of the revolution’s timing in The Eighteenth

Insert into Blankness     Brumaire call us back from the brink of forms of memory that would also be forgetting. These are the famous lines about the need to draw the revolution’s poetry from the future and thus to rid ourselves of superstition: “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future” (EB 15). At the same time, Marx makes it clear in this and other texts that, if there is to be revolution of any sort (true or false, social or political, tragic or farcical), the past must be articulated with its others. There is no clean break. It is the singular achievement of Benjamin’s late texts on Baudelaire to have sketched for us one possible way that we might get through capital, one way that we might move through the radical transformations of the structures of experience and memory that capital entails. I say these texts sketch one possible way we might get through these transformations, if not survive them, in order to underscore the difference between the time of this process and a break allowing forward movement. As is well known, Benjamin harnessed his theoretical energies in this period to the project of elaborating a theory of history that would not be assimilable to the theory of history as progress. He saw this theory as necessary on account not only of certain tendencies of fascism and of what he called “bourgeois habits of thought,” but of the theoretical instruments of Marxism itself, which he had begun to suspect were all too reflexively intertwined with their object. Critical to the formulation of this new theory of history and to the formation of this new historical material was a theory of poetry (Baudelaire’s), on which Benjamin came to base his most original and provocative claims about capital’s history and future. The latter, in particular, remained fragmentary. We cannot know whether this fragmentariness stems from the radical incompletion of his writing projects, or from something about the nature of that future. Benjamin was not alone among his contemporaries in his call for a refinement of the instruments of historical materialism. Nor was he alone in his articulation of this call with and through a project of literary or cultural criticism—one that would register the imprint of historical events in linguistic terms and conceive of the collective dimensions of human experience in accordance with textual models. The need to think a history that would not be colored by progressive and teleological protocols was a major impulse of many Marxist social and political theo-

   Insert into Blankness rists of this period, and the textual sensibilities exhibited by Benjamin’s “other histories” clearly anticipate those of later antihumanisms and deconstructions of the subject, even where these have been less explicitly concerned with the subject’s imbrication with capital.2 My own interest in Benjamin’s rethinking of history lies, I have already suggested, in its overwhelming dependence on a theory of poetry and on a specific poetic project (Baudelaire’s) that was already calculated, at the time of its writing, as an intervention in collective experience that could respond, in a meaningful way, to capital’s. Benjamin’s concern was never whether capital would have a future, but whether, if and when it did, there would be anyone there to inherit it. For Benjamin, capital was never simply a problem of political economy (uneven labor extraction), but of cultural and historical transmission.

1. Poetry at the Crossroads of Magic and Positivism Theodor Adorno was sympathetic to and even shared Benjamin’s concerns to elaborate a new materialist history from poetry, at least within certain limits, at the time that Benjamin was writing. Some of these limits are legible in the infamous exchange in the 1938 correspondence, in which Adorno roundly condemned the draft du jour of the Baudelaire project—even more roundly than he had condemned the previous draft, in 1935.3 Those familiar with the exchange will recall some of Adorno’s most scathing criticisms of Benjamin’s engagement with Baudelaire: you have set yourself at the “crossroads of magic and positivism”; your method has deteriorated into the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facticity”; you ascribe to mere “materialist enumeration” powers of illumination that are “reserved to theoretical interpretation” alone.4 Adorno’s comments make clear the extent to which Benjamin was alone in his turn to this poetic corpus in order to ground his claims. Even if Adorno was sympathetic to the special task that Benjamin assigned to Baudelaire’s texts, his remarks signal that he misses something essential about the nature or texture of this task, hanging on, as he does in them, to the distinction between, for example, “materialist enumeration” and “theoretical interpretation”—the very distinction that, on Benjamin’s reading, Baudelaire’s poetry breaks down.

Insert into Blankness     The claims that Benjamin makes for Baudelaire’s poetry can be quite striking, even a little hyperbolic. Still more striking than these claims is the conception of poetry on which they hinge. I will suggest, in the remainder of this chapter, that a deliberate breakdown of this distinction between “materialist enumeration” and “theoretical interpretation” forms the linchpin of his arguments about cultural memory in his Baudelaire interpretation. The precise nature of this breakdown is best explored through the well-known argument about the shock experience.5 Indeed, we might borrow Benjamin’s own language from his account of the psychic and historical structures reorganized by capital to describe the effect of this lingering investment on Benjamin’s readers: it is as if the critic’s decision with regard to this poetry were itself a historical event that had left a memory trace in the psyche of his corpus; as if his decision to freight up his reading of Baudelaire’s poetry as a transmitter of capital’s disruption of the conditions of collective experience had disturbed and reorganized the structure of that psyche in a way that all our chatter about the shock experience has thus far only tried to parry. Before turning to that theory in greater detail, we would do well to review one or two of the more general claims that Benjamin makes Baudelaire’s poetry bear. Through motley drafts, revisions, phases, and thoroughgoing restructurings of their architecture, the myriad texts comprising Benjamin’s Baudelaire interpretation are strung together by a single fil conducteur: the idea that capital touched Baudelaire’s poetry, at the level less of its themes than of its language, in the very way that it makes meaning or is made. It is, for Benjamin, in some sense always capital that produces Baudelaire’s poetry. This idea is difficult to reconcile with conventional understandings of linguistic reference. It requires, if we want to understand it, that we grapple with Benjamin’s description of the forking path taken by experience in the essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” There is, Benjamin writes, in Baudelaire’s poetry “something of the isolated experience, or ‘lived experience’ [these are the two received translations of Erlebnis] to which Baudelaire has given the weight of a long experience [Erfahrung]” (SW 4: 343). At first glance, the reader might imagine that we are dealing with a Romantic conception of poetry as an exteriorization of an immediate and so-called lived experience

   Insert into Blankness proper to (and appropriated by) the subject conceived as a space of radical interiority. Benjamin cites Wilhelm Dilthey’s influential book, Die Erfahrung und die Dichtung (Poetry and Experience), for which the passage of experience into poetry and out again would be a matter only of temporary mediation (SW 4: 314). Benjamin’s own deft manipulation of the distinction between the two different German concepts of experience makes it clear that lyric or poetic expression cannot be conceived as the mediation of a simple inside/outside structure. Indeed, the entire “Motifs” essay attempts to demonstrate that Baudelaire’s poetry derives its radical singularity from its power to record the accumulated weight of experience beyond the confines of a single psyche, consciousness, or subject and transmit it, thus investing a radically collective experience with the longue durée of Erfahrung. This transmission is, according to Benjamin, the secret of Baudelaire’s success and why Les Fleurs du mal, which had little prospect of success at the time that it was written, went on to acquire “the stature of a classic and become one of the most widely printed ones as well” (SW 4: 314). Benjamin gives this idea a first and still tentative formulation in the early pages of the “Motifs” essay, when he describes Baudelaire’s poetry as “grounded in an experience [Erfahrung] for which exposure to shock [Chockerlebnis] has become the norm” (SW 4: 318). He is considerably emboldened in his statement of this claim by the essay’s end, writing that Baudelaire has succeeded in taking the isolated experience of shock—Chockerlebnis—and transforming it into a Chockerfahrung. Baudelaire’s poetry, Benjamin will say, has saved what had been, at the moment of its writing, lost to experience and transformed it precisely by transmitting it, salvaging it for memory, for history, for us. Given the nature of capital’s interference, what this poetry transmits did not just risk being lost to experience in some accidental sense. Indeed, if we follow Benjamin’s text to the letter, it was lost—not only to the poet’s own experience but to that of his contemporaries, and, by dint of this loss, to us—until the poetry came along. Les Fleurs du mal has become a classic (mass-produced in all of the European languages) because of its power to save what had been lost to the individual psyche and transmit it. At the same time, it ensured itself a future as a record of that experience. Baudelaire’s poetry is a technology of memory and a

Insert into Blankness     technology, if not of mass production and technical reproducibility exactly, then of the recording and transmission of an experience that was already becoming a mass experience. Even as capital had deprived the mass of the urban population of the old conditions of experience (at least in Paris, the capital of capital), it replaced them with new if almost unrecognizable ones. The loss of the old conditions was not absolute. The psyche could be reorganized in such a way as to support new conditions of memory. This is the first claim that Benjamin makes Baudelaire’s poetry bear. This description of the poetic freighting up and transmission of experience plays an enormous part in Benjamin’s more general understanding of experience, which seems, by definition, to draw the individual into the collective and yet must be laid down in memory in order to do so—even if it can only be laid down in memory, under capital or under modern conditions, at the expense of consciousness and accessibility to voluntary memory: “Experience is indeed a matter of tradition, in collective existence as well as private life. It is the product less of facts firmly anchored in memory [Erinnerung] than of accumulated and frequently unconscious data that flow together in memory [Gedächtnis]” (SW 4: 314). On the one hand, this articulation of tradition and experience as unconscious data accretion fits with a common understanding of tradition as a common good that is precisely not appropriable by a single subject. In every time and place and in every historical period, this deeper level of experience is, if we follow Benjamin, the only one that can sustain investment with the weight of tradition; it is the very stuff of cultural memory and collective experience. But Benjamin is concerned with a historical shift, not only in the nature of tradition or of collective experience, but in the prospects for its emergence. That experience is always “a matter of tradition,” and therefore always collective, is not in itself historically specific. What is historically specific, in Benjamin’s account, is the power of capital to reduce the range of possible objects or contents of collective experience—and to reduce the chances of the kind of collective experience that would be transmissible. For a sustained exploration of Benjamin’s concept of tradition, I refer the reader to Andrew Benjamin’s exquisite article on “tradition and experience,” in which he suggests that it is not possible to understand Benjamin on tradition

   Insert into Blankness without first understanding his (ultimately more complex) arguments about memory, of which it is made. I differ from his account where it concludes that “The end of the story is the end of community” (125). It could be argued, as I believe this is Benjamin’s own argument, that the end of the story is the beginning of poetry, and that part of what is at stake in the “Motifs” essay (in contradistinction to “The Storyteller”) is the poetic rebirth of community.

2. Forget the Usual Motives Enter the extended engagement with Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which Benjamin deploys in order to radicalize this understanding of experience—or better, this understanding of the loss of experience as the price paid by the individual for his psychic integration (or disintegration) under capital. “Consciousness,” writes Freud, “takes the place of the memory trace [Das Bewußtsein entstehe an der Stelle der Erinnerungsspur].” “Therefore,” continues Benjamin, intricately stringing together quotations not only from Freud, but Proust, Bergson, and Reik (from whose voices it can sometimes be difficult to discern his own): “ ‘it would be the special characteristic of consciousness that, unlike what happens in all other systems of the psyche, the excitatory process does not leave behind a permanent change in its elements, but expires, as it were, in the phenomenon of becoming conscious.’ The basic formula of this hypothesis is that ‘becoming conscious and leaving behind a memory trace are incompatible processes within one and the same system’ ” (SW 4: 317). This fundamental incompatibility between the emergence of consciousness and the inscription of a memory trace forms the pivot of Benjamin’s shock theory. This theory holds that, under modern conditions, the event undergone by the psyche is forced to take one of two paths: wherever there is memory (that is, wherever the event has happened in such a way that traces are recorded), there cannot be consciousness of the event. Lack of consciousness is the condition of possibility of memory. Conversely, wherever there is consciousness, there can be no memory, and therefore no traces of the event, but only a parrying and blockage of

Insert into Blankness     experience. This parrying and blockage are the sign of the shock defense, whose signal achievement is “to assign an incident a precise point in time in consciousness.” One consequence of this fork in the road that experience must take under modern conditions is that vestiges of memory are “often most powerful and most enduring when the incident which left them behind was one that never entered consciousness” (SW 4: 317). In order for durable memory to emerge, we need the shock defense to fail. Baudelaire’s poetry is, for Benjamin, characterized by the failure of the shock defense. The poetry is thus assigned a collective and historical task: without Baudelaire’s poetry, there can be no history of the nineteenth century, and thus no document of the transformation of experience by capital—no saving and transmission of that history to us. Poetry is, in this account, a privileged form of collective or cultural memory for the subject of capital. Without poetry—or, more accurately, without Baudelaire’s poetry—there would be, for this subject, no experience. Without the invention and intervention of this new technology of memory appropriate to the subject of capital, there would be no history of the twentieth or even of the twenty-first century, no us. The second claim that Benjamin makes for Baudelaire’s poetry is closely allied to this one. This is the claim that this poetry dreams of capturing an experience that would “establish itself in crisis-proof form” (SW 4: 333). Like the claim that Les Fleurs du mal is essentially one big massproduced palimpsest of modern experience, the claim that this poetry seeks to establish a “crisis-proof ” experience holds out, again, the promise of memory under seemingly impossible conditions. When conjugated with certain other claims that Benjamin makes for this poetry’s privileged relation to the commodity, however, the claim for the establishment of a crisis-proof experience in poetic form suggests a highly specific intentionality, one connecting it to the artwork, but to an artwork that has made its peace with the commodity, its political-economic anamorph. Before turning to Benjamin’s description of this intentionality and of the linkage it must provide (between the crisis-proof experience and the commodity), it should be noted that this new technology of memory is weirdly unhinged from knowledge. In Giorgio Agamben’s account of the destruction of what he calls “traditional experience,” the disjunction between knowledge and experience performed by poetry can in fact be

   Insert into Blankness understood as a return of the separation that was, once upon a time, there in all experience.6 I will refrain from unpacking here the consequences of Agamben’s decision to incorporate Benjamin’s Baudelaire interpretation into a history of philosophy from which capital is conspicuously absent. Whether we accept Agamben’s description of an ancient separation between science and experience, mind and soul, nous and psyche, human and divine knowledge (“Infancy and History” 19), he embeds this radical incommensurability of knowledge and experience in the history of philosophy. Even if this hiatus is identified with an ancient history and the sediment of tradition, however, it here comes to be identified with capital. We thus find replicated in Benjamin’s concept of experience the interpenetration of ancient and modern. This is of course a topos and trope that are a signature gesture of Baudelaire’s poetic project in Les Fleurs du mal, and above all of the poems of the Tableaux parisiens. But how, more precisely, does Benjamin tell us that the garden of forking paths that threatens to suppress experience on two sides comes to be legible in a poem? How does a poem or a poetic corpus signal its intention to get experience across under the threat of its permanent suppression? We might turn here to one of the verse poems that Benjamin quotes at greatest length in the “Motifs” essay, Le Soleil. Although he might have chosen other poems of Les Fleurs du mal that thematize poetic production as commodity production (such as La Muse vénale, as we saw in Chapter 1), Benjamin prefers to read Le Soleil as the poem that best expresses this special intentionality:7 Through decrepit neighborhoods on the outskirts of town, where Slatted shutters hang at the windows of hovels that shelter secret lusts; At a time when the cruel sun beats down with redoubled force On city and countryside, on rooftops and cornfields, I go out alone to practice my fantastical fencing, Scenting chances for rhyme on every street corner, Stumbling over words as though they were cobblestones, Sometimes knocking up against verses dreamed long ago.8

In a loose analogy with Baudelaire’s own description of his friend, the painter Constantin Guys, at work in his atelier (in The Painter of Modern

Insert into Blankness     Life), Benjamin introduces the poem’s opening stanza as a depiction of the shock defense and an attempted blocking of experience: “Baudelaire made it his business to parry the shocks, no matter what their sources, with his spiritual and physical self. This shock defense is rendered in the image of combat. [ . . . ] In the opening stanza of Le Soleil, Baudelaire portrays himself engaged in just such fantastic combat” (SW 4: 319). In truth, there is only a single word in the quoted lines that can be understood to indicate such a combat: the description of poetic composition as an escrime, or fencing match. But even if it attaches itself explicitly only to a single word, Benjamin’s argument for the existence of a “traumatophile type” in Baudelaire’s poetry—the type for whom consciousness has intervened to parry the shock—is convincing. This interpretation is bolstered by the fact that the merciless beating of the sun’s rays (Quand le soleil cruel frappe à traits redoublés) suggests a generally hostile environment, one inimical to poetic composition. But his decision to confine his interpretation of this image to the level of biography9 does not advance our understanding. We still don’t know how we get from a simple self-portrait of the traumatophile to a more nuanced and more mediated recording and transmission of the shock experience, one that would be specifically poetic. Le Soleil may show parrying, but does it also perform it? Notice that Benjamin’s interpretation of the poet as traumatophile seems to omit and even to occlude elements of Le Soleil that work to confirm many of the most compelling elements of his shock theory. For example, the inside/outside structure of the urban landscape, in which the speaking “I” passes houses harboring secrets and shuttered against the noonday sun, is almost immediately troubled by the fact that sun does not actually function as a condition of visibility here. The poet’s task, and thus the work of poetic composition, is not to penetrate an interior from which he, like sunlight, has been barred. Rather, the work of writing poetry is described as taking place in a liminal space, in a decidedly other place with regard to any possible illumination. The poet’s stance may still be understood as combative: he may be mad and fighting demons (like the figure in Les Sept Viellards, which Benjamin also mentions), or he may be fighting the sun in other senses (battling the heat, working odd hours). No matter what interpretation we give this combat,

   Insert into Blankness however, none can adequately account for the vexed relationship that poetic production bears to consciousness here, a vexation exemplified by the encounter of the poet with the accidents of rhyme. The rhymes do not simply arrive by sheer happenstance of flânerie. Rather, they are depicted as bubbling up from the recesses of memory, or as arriving, more obliquely, by dint of memory’s lapse. This lapse can be taken in a literal sense, given the explicit emphasis on distraction and stumbling in the stanza’s closing lines. We may also notice the complex resonances between this depiction and Benjamin’s description of the forking path taken by experience in the shock theory. We might emphasize this crossing up of labor and accident, and the central role granted these rhymes tripped over within the poetic process. Or we may emphasize that the long-sought verse appears to arrive as a distant memory, as if by involuntary memory, and thus by accident at the same time. Le Soleil suggests that the stuff of poetry cannot be conjured up from memory by sheer force of will or produced by some other conscious process. It is produced only involuntarily: by stumbling over words. We will return to this opaque field of stumbling blocks from which the lines of poetry are remembered. It is among other things a figure of our own participation, as readers, in the work performed by Baudelaire’s poetry if it is to be the work of collective or cultural memory. Still on the topic of Baudelaire’s poetic process, we might turn to another passage, from another text by Benjamin, which puts this notion of a poetic lapse in contact with a slightly different account of Baudelaire’s poetic process. In “Central Park,” Benjamin writes about certain poetic secret weapons that Baudelaire is able to devise thanks to his “deep experience” (Erfahrung) of the commodity: Baudelaire’s strategy in the literary market: through his deep experience of the nature of the commodity, he was enabled, or compelled, to recognize the market as an objective court of appeals (see his advice to young writers). Through his negotiations with editors, he was continuously in contact with the market. His techniques: defamation (Musset), and counterfeit (Hugo). Baudelaire was perhaps the first to conceive of a market-oriented originality, which for that very reason was more original in its day than any other (créer un poncif ). This création entailed a certain intolerance. Baudelaire wanted to make room for his

Insert into Blankness     poems, and to this end he had to push aside others. He managed to devalue certain poetic liberties of the Romantics through his classical deployment of the alexandrine, and to devalue classicist poetics through the characteristic ruptures and defects he introduced into classical verse. In short, his poems contained special provisions for the elimination of competitors. (SW 4: 168)

If we look closely at this passage, we cannot fail to notice that Benjamin switches gears in the middle of this explanation of what Baudelaire’s poetry shares with the commodity. First he supports the claim that Baudelaire was “the first to conceive of a market-oriented originality” by citing the poet’s famous remark about the desire or need to create a cliché (créer un poncif ) as the hallmark of genius. He then switches to a different genre of evidence and example, drawn not from the stock of images, clichés, or tropes that might be offered as evidence of a market-oriented originality (an originality adapted to mass or technological production), but rather from the sphere of a-semantic poetic elements and above all meter. It is interesting, but ultimately difficult, to argue that a certain metrical tic, a given caesura, a given deployment of the alexandrine, assured the elimination of Baudelaire’s competitors. This kind of argument can be difficult to sustain, as can any argument about the origin or production of a poem in a-semantic elements of language, or for the intentionality of a poetic project that would ground itself in these elements, for much the same reason it gets tricky asking questions about the “meaning” of certain letters—the question to which we are always pushed by poetic rhythm or meter.10 This difficulty is not unrelated to the disjunction between knowledge and experience traced by Agamben. Part of what is at stake in this difficulty is that we need a different language to talk about the mass production and technical reproducibility of language than we do to talk about such potentialities with regard to image technologies such as the lithograph, daguerreotype, or photograph.11 It remains a question whether Benjamin ever succeeds in developing such a language here. Even in its absence, however, his remarks about the imprint left on Baudelaire’s poetry by his “deep experience” of the commodity make clear the determining role played by the commodity in the emergence of any possible experience under capital. Baudelaire’s poetry bears the burden of documenting the transformation of subjective experience under capital and transmits it to us, as our own experience, only if and insofar

   Insert into Blankness as it is itself a commodity. This to say that there will be no experience, no collective or cultural memory, no history under capital without the invention and intervention of a mode of experience that can come through circulation intact. Under these conditions, there will be no experience— no real, transmissible, durable experience, no Erfahrung—that does not come to us via the market; the market, which, we are now able to see more clearly, is not so much the telos of Baudelaire’s poetry as a complex of mechanisms whereby his poetry transmits history to us.

3. Insert into Blankness It is one thing to attribute the singularity of a poet or his poetic corpus to his skillful manipulation of the blanks or gaps he puts into his poetry, as these two otherwise significantly different descriptions of Baudelaire’s poetic process seem to do. It is something else, and striking, to find this singularity attributed to this manipulation of blanks in the same breath that this poetry is described as a new technology of memory. There is a risk that blankness will be construed as meaning’s negative image. Yet there emerges, at this point in Benjamin’s text, something more than a simple description of the caesura’s metrical function, and a deeper disjunction between meaning and memory. In another passage from the “Motifs” essay, Benjamin describes Baudelaire’s poetry as inserted “into blankness,” suggesting that meaning might come to be inserted and transmitted not beyond but rather because of this lapse. Quoting Valéry’s well-known essay, Situation de Baudelaire (“Baudelaire’s Situation”), Benjamin accepts Valéry’s attribution of an urgent sense of literary destiny to the poet: “How to be a great poet, but neither a Lamartine nor an Hugo nor a Musset?” But Valéry does not actually speak of destiny; he speaks instead of Baudelaire’s “raison d’état,” and it is this turn of phrase that sticks with Benjamin. There is, he writes, “something odd about referring to a ‘reason of state’ in the case of a poet. It contains something remarkable: the emancipation from isolated experiences [Erlebnisse]. Baudelaire’s poetic production is assigned a mission. Blank spaces hovered before him, and into these he inserted his poems [Es haben ihm Leerstellen vorgeschwebt, in die er seine Gedichte

Insert into Blankness     eingesetzt hat]” (SW 4: 318; GS 1(2): 615). The description of what Baudelaire’s poems get stuck into as blank or empty space seems, at first blush, to require a slight revision of the palimpsestic models of history and of memory that are the special province of poetry elsewhere in the “Motifs” essay. Up to now, the poetry seemed to be a technology of memory connected with multiple displacements of the event, losses and failures of memory, and writing on multiple planes and in multiple psychic systems at once. Here, we see a second description, in which poetry is itself inscribed within a larger palimpsest. Among the interpretations we may rule out is that this emptiness or blank space is another name for a gap in literary history that Baudelaire fills—as if to be a great poet, but neither a Lamartine nor an Hugo, meant that Baudelaire and his corpus could be inserted in the empty space between an Hugo and a Mallarmé. We can rule out this interpretation of literary history as a story of great men and the anxiety of their influence because Benjamin adamantly objects to this kind of linear narrative in his efforts to excavate a different kind of literary history throughout virtually all of his critical and philosophical essays on literature. It is helpful to understand what is so wrong about this conception of what, in the 1937 essay on “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” Benjamin calls “cultural history” if we want to grasp this final description of Baudelaire’s poetry as inserted into blank or empty space. In this essay, Benjamin launches a polemic against the notion of cultural history by mobilizing a claim that was first made by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology. This is the critical Marxist notion that there is no independent history of religion, no independent history of politics, and no independent history of culture, outside materialist history, which grasps all of the different human sciences as the “reflection in thought” of economic facts. He writes: There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. No cultural history has yet done justice to this fundamental state of affairs, and it can hardly hope to do so. Nevertheless, the crucial element does not lie here. If the concept of culture is problematic for historical materialism, it cannot conceive of the disintegration of culture into goods which become objects of possession for mankind. Historical materialism sees the work of the past as still incomplete. It perceives

   Insert into Blankness no epoch in which that work could, even in part, drop conveniently, thing-like, into mankind’s lap. The concept of culture—as the embodiment of creations considered independent of the production process in which they originate, or better, of a production process in which they continue to survive—has a fetishistic quality. Culture appears reified. The history of culture would be nothing but the sediment formed in the consciousness of human beings by memorable events, events stirred up in the memory by no genuine experience—that is to say, by no political experience. (SW 3: 267–68)12

In his efforts to clear away this fetishistic concept of culture as appropriable good, Benjamin elaborates a notion of history that closely parallels the notion of experience we get in the shock theory. History, the reader will note, is neither embodied in created works nor remembered by a consciousness. History, like the experience that seems at once to produce it and to give us access to it, consists of something other than what is merely memorable in the voluntary sense—as if consciousness and the truth of experience were, precisely, at odds. The materialist historian’s task, as distinguished from the cultural historian’s, is thus to find, and also to keep, what is here called incompletion in the work. In order for the historian to do this, however, incompletion must be inscribed in, recorded, and ultimately vehiculated by the work in such a way that its author or producer is, precisely, not conscious of it. It is already interesting to say that a work must convey the fact of the past’s not being over. But if we take seriously Benjamin’s insistence in this passage on the radical failure of human consciousness to give us access to genuine—that is, political—experience, we must take this idea one step further. (In the passage from the essay on Fuchs, experience is explicitly identified as political.) For Benjamin also suggests the work must convey historical incompletion without meaning or wanting to. Whatever traces of genuine experience are borne by the work cannot, by definition, be understood as a content: they are not the themes or meanings that an author sticks in his work, as if the work were a container or a vessel that could then transmit them to us, precisely because he is barred, in Benjamin’s account, from having any consciousness of it. The truth of experience and stuff of history are, for Benjamin, the polar opposite of such a content. To clarify this notion of historical truth transmitted by the work, we might cite Benjamin’s preoccupation with the distinctive marks left

Insert into Blankness     by the artisan on the work’s external form. In this passage from the “Motifs” essay, Benjamin’s artisan is not a figure of the author, at least not in any simple sense, but of the storyteller. He thus stands for a certain handling of the work in the process less of its creation than of its transmission, although it seems that Benjamin’s understanding of the artwork ultimately breaks this distinction down: The replacement of the older form of narration by information, and of information by sensation, reflects the increasing atrophy of experience. [T]here is a contrast between all of these forms and the story. . . . A story does not aim to convey an event per se, which is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds the event in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening. It thus bears the trace of the storyteller, much the way an earthen vessel bears the trace of the potter’s hand. (SW 4: 316)

Whatever is carried by these traces cannot be assimilated to information about the event. These traces are rather a metaphor for an unconscious or other surface for psychic inscription writ large as a vessel, whose only mode of access to the truth of the event would not be metaphoric but metonymic. This is perhaps counterintuitive, but not possible to grasp given Benjamin’s own handling of the figure of the vessel. For Benjamin, the vessel is a markedly textual metaphor for the story or the work: it is both the bearer of traces and an inscribed surface. And yet, given his explicit valorization of the power of the vessel (or the story) to convey, not the event per se, but rather the traces left by those who have handled it, it is suggested that the vessel gives us access metonymically, not to a meaning that it could contain and then spit back out again, but to events and meanings that have left their mark on its external surface. Given the fundamental incompatibility of trace and information for Benjamin, it makes sense to think that the “information” received about an event may take on the contours of a gap or blankness for either the individual psyche that handles it or for the poem it writes or reads. Consciousness here functions as a form of blankness for the subject, bearing no traces of his experience. Benjamin’s description of Baudelaire’s poetry as inserted into blank or empty space echoes key elements of his materialist conception of history articulated as a series of metonyms and in accordance with a logic of the Spur, or trace, and furthermore casts into

   Insert into Blankness relief the connections between this materalist conception of history and the shock theory. Where there is information, there can be no memory; where there is consciousness, there can be no traces of the event. This allows us to line up what previously seemed like disparate forms of lapse or blankness: the lapse of modern consciousness with regard to historical experience, the lapse of the alexandrine in the caesura, the lapses or blank spaces into which Baudelaire allegedly inserted his verse. It is as if blankness could function as a moment of simple suture, marking the passage of poetry into history and simultaneously the transmission of experience in poetic form.

4. Benjamin’s Cookie We should be cautious, however, about giving a meaning to these blanknesses that would articulate the task of Baudelaire’s poetry with that of history too hastily or too seamlessly—for example, by filling in the blank, or by making consciousness stand as a figure of negative knowledge, or by making it stand for lost content, or indeed stand in for temporarily lost but ultimately recoverable meaning. Benjamin himself gives us several reasons to be cautious here, one of which is the distinction between historical and prehistorical data, for which he also marks out a space in Baudelaire’s poetry. The very possibility that a distinction between a poetic transmission of prehistorical versus historical data can exist is of interest to the reader of “Motifs” because it suggests an alternative model of poetry and of poetic composition in which the past would be recorded, but not necessarily transmitted. What does it mean to make prehistory inscribable, memorable? Benjamin introduces the distinction between historical and prehistorical data recorded in memory by way of a commentary on what is easily the most famous sonnet of Les Fleurs du mal, Correspondances. Benjamin’s approach to the larger doctrine of “correspondences” and therefore to the sonnet are conventional, especially when compared with the theories already discussed: for example, where it posits the correspondences as evidence of the crisis-proof experience successfully established and captured in an “homage to bygone times” that had escaped the poet

Insert into Blankness     in the guise of le temps perdu (Benjamin himself is here paying homage, explicitly, to Proust’s interpretation of Baudelaire) or “the outdated” (SW 4: 334). The sonnet Correspondances becomes evidence, in this interpretation, of the successful establishment of correspondences between past and present; the correspondences become nostalgic insofar as they are empty of historical meaning. “Correspondances,” Benjamin writes, “are the data of recollection—not historical data, but data of prehistory [Die correspondances sind die Data des Eingedenkens. Si sind keine historischen sondern Data der Vorgeschichte]. What makes festive days great and significant is the encounter with an earlier life. Baudelaire [also] recorded this in a sonnet entitled La Vie antérieure. The images of caves and vegetation, of clouds and waves which are evoked at the beginning of this second sonnet rise from the warm vapor of tears—tears of homesickness. [ . . . ] What is past murmurs in the correspondences, and the canonical experience of them has its place in a previous life” (SW 4: 334; GS 1(2): 639). If we take this distinction seriously, at least some of Baudelaire’s poetry is not a technology of memory but of loss, or it is both at the same time. The lapse of memory represented by the successful recollection of prehistorical data is not a model of poetry to which history could ever attach itself. Described here is a poetic lapse that is utterly devoid of meaning, not in the sense that it is empty of content (or even of semantic content, as was the case with the caesura), but in the sense that its meaning has not (yet) become historical. In the temporality of this lapse, we as readers confront the possibility that we do not know how to read, or will not recognize as historical, the blanknesses that crop up in Benjamin’s own text. There is a kind of central silence running through those passages of the “Motifs” that deal, appropriately enough, with inclusions that manifest themselves as exclusions and things that become legible only in their absence—things that Benjamin himself finds “in” Baudelaire’s poems without telling or showing us exactly how, or where, to read them. For example, we may hear this silence in the critical lines about the figure of the masses: “The masses had become so much a part of Baudelaire that it is rare to find a description of them in his works. His most important subjects are hardly ever encountered in descriptive form. As Desjardins so aptly

   Insert into Blankness put it, [Baudelaire] was ‘more concerned with implanting the image in the memory than with adorning and elaborating it’ ” (322). Or again: “Baudelaire describes neither the Parisians nor their city. Avoiding such descriptions enables him to invoke the former in the figure of the latter” (322); “The crowd, whose existence Baudelaire is always aware of, does not serve as a model for any of his works; but it is imprinted on his creativity as a hidden figure” (321); or finally: “In Tableaux parisiens, the secret presence of the crowd is demonstrable everywhere” (323). Even as we are told that Baudelaire placed “the shock experience [Chockerfahrung] at the center of his art,” and even as we are told that the masses are, for the poet, a decisive factor in shock’s production, Benjamin keeps silent about how the poetry records the shock it must both experience and transmit. How does the poetry implant the image in memory—presumably in our memory, in the recesses of our great big involuntary cultural memory— without actually including it? How does the poetry, omitting the description of two things (Paris and Parisians), end up invoking both? Benjamin’s silence about how the crowd gets in calls to mind a passage from a much earlier fragment: one of the critic’s first known texts on Baudelaire, written in 1921 and titled simply, “Baudelaire.” In this remarkable little text, he writes: Let us compare time to a photographer—earthly time to a photographer who photographs the essence of things. But because of the nature of earthly time and its apparatus, the photographer manages only to register the negative of that essence on his photographic plates. No one can read these plates; no one can deduce from the negative, on which time records the objects, the true essence of things as they really are. Moreover, the elixir that might act as the developing agent is unknown. And there is Baudelaire: he doesn’t possess the vital fluid either. . . . But he, and he alone, is able to read the plates, thanks to infinite mental efforts. (SW 1: 361)13

What I find compelling about this photographic theory of history, which is in many respects cruder than similar theories we find in later texts (including “On the Concept of History”), is that it explicitly excludes the vital element: the developer. This exclusion—it is not an oversight but rather calculated and deliberate and the whole point—calls to our attention what can seem, at times, strangely displaced or forced underground in the shock theory. This is the material interface between psyches. There

Insert into Blankness     is no storyteller, no artisan, like the one we saw depicted earlier, who would bring the figure of the vessel into this account; there is no information and, even more to the point, no narration represented here. Baudelaire is not a storyteller; he is not even a photographer here; he is a spectator, looking at, and trying to read, undeveloped photographic plates. This suggests that, even more than the material interface between psyches (or between psyche and text), the shock theory leaves us wanting, and trying to formulate, a thesis about the material interface between consciousness and memory, whether we conceive of these as somehow internal to a given psyche or text, or whether we conceive of a psyche/ text as some kind of switching mechanism between two otherwise radically disjointed circuits traced by experiential data. Poetry may be a psyche, but it cannot only be a psyche. Or rather, if poetry is to be thought within the sphere of psychic life, something must be introduced into the psyche allowing it to move, in oblique relation to consciousness, in and out of history. The task, at least, assigned to Baudelaire’s poetry is clear. It is the recording and transmission, even the condition of possibility of experience’s recording and transmission, under capital: “One wonders how lyric poetry can be grounded in an experience for which exposure to shock has become the norm. One would expect such poetry to have a large measure of consciousness. . . . This is indeed true of Baudelaire’s poetry” (SW 4: 318). Benjamin explicitly attributes “a large measure of consciousness” to Baudelaire’s poetry, and yet he never actually tells us whether it is because of or despite this “large measure” of consciousness that this poetry succeeds in transmitting the truth of historical experience to us. Only language has the materiality necessary to mediate both recording and transmission. Only language has the proper measure of opacity necessary to “carry” the memory traces that form the inscription of history in an unconscious mode. The closest we come in Benjamin’s essay to a figure of the kind of language that could sustain this dual demand—to mediate but also to block or parry mediation—is a material object that is already familiar to us from Benjamin’s analysis of Proust in the “Motifs” essay. This is the cookie, which has the power to perform mediation precisely by blocking it. Proust’s cookie—the madeleine—is, in Benjamin’s interpretation and like the earthen vessel, a metonymic figure allowing for the distinction

   Insert into Blankness between information on the one hand, and access afforded to the truth of the event by involuntary memory on the other: “One afternoon,” explains Benjamin, “the taste of a kind of pastry called a madeleine, to which he later repeatedly returns, transported him [Proust/Marcel] back to the past, whereas before then he had been limited to the promptings of a memory which obeyed the call of conscious attention. This he calls mémoire volontaire. Its signal characteristic is that the information it gives about the past retains nothing of that past” (SW 4: 315). Benjamin goes on to emphasize the accidental nature of our encounter, as moderns, with the truth of our experience: quoting Proust, he says “that the past is situated ‘somewhere beyond the reach of the intellect and its field of operations, in some real object, though we have no idea which one it is’ ” (SW 4: 315). The past is situated somewhere beyond the reach of intellect—that is, Benjamin says, echoing Proust, in a cookie. Of course, the past is not actually in the cookie. Rather, it is metonymically linked to it, like the traces of experience inscribed on the vessel’s exterior surface. The trick is thus to find the right cookie at the right time. For what the cookie actually “records” and carries is not something inside it, but rather traces of all the other events in Marcel’s life, when he happened to have the experience of eating the madeleines. Baudelaire’s poetry is, for us, a psyche, and ours to share. But as a psyche—and this is Benjamin’s lesson—it can become an experiential and historical transmitter only by becoming a cookie at the same time. If we take Benjamin’s proposition seriously, this poetry must become the linguistic equivalent of Marcel’s madeleine for us—if, that is, it is to come down through history to us. We should feel lucky that Benjamin has found his cookie (it was, after all, his cookie first) and then transmitted it to us: in Baudelaire’s poetry. Without this poetry, and this thoroughly linguistic psychic space, there is no hope of any passage or transmission, not just from memory to historical consciousness, but from one textual inscription and recording of experience to another. The unconscious may be structured like a language, but language—or at least, in Benjamin’s account, Baudelaire’s language—must be structured like a cookie. If Benjamin’s theory of poetry is also going to be a theory of history or of cultural memory, then poetry must also be, for this theory, a madeleine, and it must become the linguistic equivalent of a madeleine for future generations.

Insert into Blankness    

5. Active History and the Poetry of the Future No doubt this explains the strange yet unmistakable emphasis on opacity, stumbling, and alternating lapses and involuntary joggings of memory in those passages in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” where Benjamin discusses Baudelaire’s poetic process. As we saw in his treatment of Le Soleil, Benjamin lingers on the poem’s description of its own poetic method, in which he is seen to go traipsing, or quite literally tripping, through the streets of Paris, stumbling over words—and not just over words, but also over fragments of words, over lines and rhymes, just as the solitary walker stumbles over paving stones in the glare of the afternoon sun. Benjamin is quick to connect this stumbling, bumbling poet figure with the shock experience and therefore with the subject of capital. He also speaks, toward the close of this same passage, of the “subterranean shocks” by which Baudelaire’s poetry is shaken. It is as if, Benjamin says, this poetry were rocked by subterranean shocks that caused its words to collapse. This same collapse marks the fall of Baudelaire’s poetry into irony, whether in verse or in prose. This fall need not be negative, nor even necessarily construed as destructive. Indeed, it could be argued that, where it becomes the transmitter of our history under capital, it is, or can become, depending on how it is handled, the bearer of a revolutionary force. We might borrow here a provocative and stunningly beautiful concept that Marx develops in a not unrelated treatment of this problem in The German Ideology, which posits the prospect of a history that would remain open to and thus able to account for what is here called “the active influence which earlier history exercises on later history” (GI 122; W 3: 46). This concept of history, in which the past would retain the power to exert an “active influence” (aktive Einfluß) on the future, has the advantage of helping us to grasp why the violence of capital’s prehistory never ends, why it never stops getting acted out or exerting its “active influence” on other eras, even on the most far-flung future(s) of capital. The point is never just to change things but rather to interpret their textual history in such a way that their transformation becomes, if not possible, then at least necessary. It is a matter of exploring the textual and thus actively historical nature of capital’s prehistory in order to grasp

   Insert into Blankness the textual and thus actively historical nature of its present, a present that is no less acutely marked by the same violence. On the basis of this observation, we may understand Benjamin’s silence about the crowd somewhat differently. As he explains, toward the close of his reading of Le Soleil, that the real location of the crowd in Baudelaire’s poetry—the crowd, you will recall, that is supposed to be there without actually being there, and whose secret presence is thus demonstrable everywhere—is not in some synesthetic echoing roar in the street (as both de Man and Jameson seem to suggest in their Baudelaire interpretations),14 nor even in the fetishization of a passing woman’s leg, but in the “words, fragments, and beginnings of lines” from which the poet, “in the deserted streets, wrests his poetic booty.” These fragments of words, collapsed in on themselves, Benjamin explains, form the true “phantom crowd” of Baudelaire’s poetry. It is the secret presence of these fragments that allows Baudelaire’s poetry to give us, on Benjamin’s reading, an account of capital as well as an account of our own destiny. We are the crowd, and its point of entry into the poetry. Recall that the materialist historian’s task was not just to find but also to keep or preserve intact incompletion in the work. We may now phrase this problem a tiny bit differently, emphasizing perhaps more starkly the role of history in the production and transmission of the work (rather than the role of the work in the production and transmission of history). We may now specify that the history that transmits a text to us must, precisely in order to do so, come down to us as incomplete. This is if and insofar it is going to be our history, and quite apart from whether we disavow or recognize it as such. The work of art or of poetry is not somehow incidental to history, nor does it pass through history unscathed, as its simple medium of transmission, or in such a way that historical continuity can be preserved. Rather it shatters (as Benjamin writes elsewhere) the unity of every historical moment. This it can do only by adding us, another thumbprint, to its meaning—or, better still, to its memory. This kind of passage, about the material opacities and cookie-like nature of Baudelaire’s language, makes explicit the singular challenge of Benjamin’s Baudelaire interpretation: it has us looking for experience and for history—and specifically for our shared history under capital—not in

Insert into Blankness     words and their meanings, but in the cracks and fissures through which we ourselves enter experience and history. Forget the cookie; we now see that a rock would be enough to hold this interpretation together. All that is needed is some material opacity stumbled upon in the course of reading and allowed to serve as a transmitter, rather than as an absorber, of shock. The prospects for historical transmission are indeed fraught. But this does not mean that nothing happens or gets transmitted.

Notes

introduction 1.  What Fowkes translates as “the full bloom of speculation and swindling” is a single word in German: Schwindelblüte. 2. In interpreting this passage, the secondary literature has tended to ignore the possibility that it might be ironic, or, where it has been admitted, to subsume an ironic negativity to a more superficially historical one. Klein, for example, reads this passage, together with others from Mon coeur mis à nu, as a denial and rejection by the mature and disillusioned poet of his politics in 1848. 3. It is important to bear in mind that Benjamin’s projected book on Baudelaire was never finished as a book, and that the book known to us as Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism is only a fragment of this project, or, better, a series of fragments of different drafts of what may or may not have been a single project. In the generally accredited account (reconstructed from Benjamin’s description of the project to his friends and editors, including Adorno, in the correspondence), the 1938 essay known to us as “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” was to be the middle of three sections, with the other two sections, “Baudelaire as Allegorist” and “The Commodity as the Subject of Poetry,” either unfinished or, depending on whose account one reads, not yet written. (On the complex relationship of the text published as “Central Park” to the projected first section of the book, “Baudelaire as Allegorist,” see Spencer, “Introduction to Central Park.”) Benjamin then scratched this version—in response, it is generally thought, to Adorno’s criticisms—and produced “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” in its place. (A fuller discussion of the “Motifs” essay appears in Chapter 4.) The debates about the relationship of Benjamin’s Baudelaire project to his other projects of the same period, including the now famous project on the Paris arcades, are too complex to discuss here. For a nuanced exploration of this question, see Espagne and Werner, “Ce que taisent les manuscrits,” “Les manuscrits parisiens de Walter Benjamin,” and “Vom Passagen-Projekt zum ‘Baudelaire.’ ” I am grateful to Alexander Gelley for sharing

   Notes these important sources with me. For a discussion of these questions tending in the opposite direction, see Jennings, “On the Banks of a New Lethe.” 4. It cannot hurt to recall, in an introductory context, the raw historical data arguing for a comparative reading of Marx’s and Baudelaire’s texts, quite apart from the precedent of Benjamin. Marx was born in 1818 in Trier; Baudelaire, in 1821 in Paris. Not only were they writing at the same time, but sometimes in the same city: Paris, but also, elliptically, at the beginning of Marx’s career and the end of Baudelaire’s, in Bruxellois exile. In 1844, Marx met and began his lifelong collaboration with Engels in Paris—the same year in which Baudelaire is thought to have composed the first of the poems of Les Fleurs du mal. Both participated actively in the 1848 revolutions in Europe. Marx started work on the Grundrisse in 1857, with Baudelaire publishing the first edition of the Fleurs in that same year. Baudelaire died prematurely of syphilis in 1867—the year of the long-delayed publication of the first volume of Capital. 5. That said, there have been many other such attempts (to work out a theory of language’s economic principles). See in particular Baudrillard’s treatment (Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe and Le Miroir de la production), which is exemplary of the work done on this and related questions in and around the Tel Quel group in France. Also worth mentioning here, for their more expansive treatments, are Goux and Shell. For a more recent attempt, see Woodmansee and Osteen. All of these texts on the political economy of the sign, however, remain committed to the symbolic models of economy and of language with which, I would argue, capital requires us to break. 6.  Benjamin first uses the phrase “die Krise der lyrischen Dichtung” (“the crisis of lyric poetry”) (in “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”) with reference to Baudelaire’s friend, Pierre Dupont (“The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” [SW 4: 11; GS 1(2): 526]). He later writes (in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”) that some of Baudelaire’s motifs “render the possibility of lyric poetry problematic” (SW 4: 341). I treat the role played by crisis in Benjamin’s larger Baudelaire interpretation in greater detail in Chapter 4. 7. It is interesting to note that Benjamin acknowledges irony at several junctures in his early texts on Baudelaire before dismissing it. In “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” he devotes several pages to Baudelaire’s political prose writings (in the Journaux intimes), attacking the poet’s use of irony as a sign of political impotence. Benjamin likens the statement of the prose texts to those of the conspirateurs de profession in 1848, and he describes Baudelaire’s tone as one of “devastating irony [verwüstende Ironie]” (SW 4: 4–5, GS 1.2: 516). The problem with the conspirateurs de profession, if we follow the distinction Marx makes (in the review of Chenu and de la Hodde), is that they attempt to make the revolution come too soon, in advance of the “adequate organization” of its conditions.

Notes    8. Of paramount importance here is Starobinski’s reading of L’Héautontimorouménos (“The Self-Tormentor”) in “Ironie et réflexion: L’Héautontimorouménos et L’Irrémédiable” (27–45). 9. Although they precede the invention of the novel, the Socratic irony of Plato’s dialogues and the so-called tragic irony of the dramatic plot twist essentially pave the way for this identification of irony with narrative. Hegel’s treatment of irony in the Aesthetics and Kierkegaard’s Concept of Irony have also been influential here. 10.  “I responded that I was a spy. And they believed me!” (OC 2: 854); “The wild jackal and the Catholic priest. [ . . . ] They stole a cadaver from us, can you believe it? What, was he going to eat it?” (OC 2: 896–99). 11.  See, for example, Wolff and Silva. 12.  See the opening gambit of “The Concept of Irony,” in de Man, Aesthetic Ideology. 13. For a useful summary of such arguments, see Colebrook, particularly her introductory chapter. chapter 1 1. For Benjamin’s deployment of photographic language and concepts in his interpretation of Baudelaire’s poetry, see the early fragment, “Baudelaire” (1921–1922), available in the new Harvard edition of Benjamin’s writings (SW 1: 361–62). I discuss this text briefly in Chapter 4. 2. For a reading of Plato that traces the consequences of their fraternal feud through the history of philosophy, see Kofman, Comment s’en sortir? 3. It is worth noting, even if only in a footnote, that, in contradistinction to Marx’s theory of labor, in which the idea traveled from the inside out to be realized in labor, in the Romantic conception of poetic composition, the idea must be interiorized if it is to motivate the writing of poetry. 4. For the English translations of Les Fleurs du mal, I have consulted those published in Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil (1989 [1955]), ed. Mathews and Mathews, silently modifying where necessary. 5.  La Muse vénale plays on the moral convention that the courtesan or fille de joie is motivated by decadence rather than economic necessity—for example, in suggesting that, when she is old, she will have to get a real job or, like the clown, turn tricks for the crowd. Yet it seems to me that no one was less likely to have actually subscribed to this convention than Baudelaire, in whose other texts the prostitute is, more often than not, a figure of the worker (more frequently than in Marx and less confusedly than in Benjamin). 6. For the tercets only, I quote C. F. MacIntyre’s translation in the Mathews and Mathews edition.

   Notes 7.  We find this same picture of the poet—as a washed-up clown with a duplicitous relation to publicity—in the work of Stéphane Mallarmé, where it is for some strange reason not always clearly referred back to his Baudelairean inheritance. 8.  Colebrook, for example, on the first page of her critical history of irony attributes this definition to Quintilian. 9. For de Man’s earliest—and, where the reading of Baudelaire is concerned, most suggestive—treatment of the allegory-irony relation, see “Allegory and Irony in Baudelaire,” in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism (101–19). It is worth noting that de Man first takes up the allegory-irony pair with reference to Baudelaire (and not the Romantic poets to which he will only later devote attention), framing his inquiry thus: “One would have to distinguish between at least two aspects of Baudelaire’s poetry, both of which could be called allegorical” (105). Further on in this same essay, de Man suggests that we may call the second “kind” of allegory “irony.” This distinction and logic of subordination echoes a similar distinction and logic found in classical rhetoric. At the same time, they indicate, ever so subtly, a gap or point of incompletion in Benjamin’s Baudelaire interpretation, insofar as it only takes up the first “kind” of allegory, and not the “second” (i.e., irony). 10.  Kofman is right to remind us that it is this illusion of autonomy, and not only the commodity’s anthropomorphism, that seals Marx’s definition of the fetish. See Kofman, Camera obscura. 11.  De Man will eventually define the project of literary theory as a refusal to confuse reference with phenomenalism, extending the insights garnered from his analysis of figural language to the means whereby the Romantic self or subject constitutes itself as an indefinite chain of aestheticizing and phenomenalizing impulses: “It would be unfortunate . . . to confuse the materiality of the signifier with the materiality of what it signifies. This may seem obvious enough on the level of light and sound, but it is less so with regard to the more general phenomenality of space, time or especially of the self; no one in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word ‘day,’ but it is very difficult not to conceive the pattern of one’s past and future existence in accordance with temporal and spatial schemes that belong to fictional narratives and not to the world” (Resistance to Theory 11). 12. For recent work in philosophy and theory that has made this question seem increasingly urgent, see Balibar’s latest phase of work, for example, in Masses, Classes, Ideas and Politics and the Other Scene. See also Butler’s work dating from roughly the same period, especially The Psychic Life of Power, and Butler et al., Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. For a rougher and more tentative (because earlier) treatment of this question which is nonetheless marked by

Notes    enduring brilliance and raw energy, see Nancy, The Inoperative Community. See also Cadava et al. 13. It is worth noting that human rights discourse has often stood in a perverse relation to Marxism, for reasons not unrelated to those I am exploring here. 14. For a concise and lucid history of irony’s theories, I refer the reader (as I did in the Introduction) to Colebrook. 15. A significant exception to this view of irony’s political dangerousness comes from the side of feminist theory. Some of the most notable examples in this line include Donna Haraway, who, in “A Cyborg Manifesto,” champions irony as “a rhetorical strategy and a political method” that socialist feminism ought to honor more than it has done (65). Naomi Schor, in an article that explicitly cites Haraway’s work, calls for “The appropriation by feminism of an irony that does not turn on castration,” and goes on to venture a number of interesting hypotheses about the relationship between irony and fetishism (95). (Although Schor is concerned principally with the sexual fetish, her hypotheses resonate suggestively with the commodity.) Finally, Ross Chambers draws on several different strains of feminist theory in order to elaborate two different practices of irony, which, he argues, should be kept separate. One, which he calls an “irony of negation,” is “closely tied to the discourses of power that it opposes,” whereas there is also an “other” practice of irony that is “less concerned with negating and more with appropriating the existing structures of power so as to put them to new uses” (“Irony and Misogyny” 276). Illuminating as these analyses may be, and they are of great originality and value, they remain deeply bound up with instrumental notions of language—with the notion that irony might be implemented as a strategy (Haraway), appropriated by a subject (Schor), or “put to use” (Chambers)—and thus dependent on conceptions of politics ill-adapted to respond to the break with instrumentality called for by capital. Exceptionally, Denise Riley, whose work on irony brilliantly articulates feminist with other political theories, avoids the pitfall of instrumentalization. Her choice of Echo as a figure of the subject or agent who is always in the constraint of irony is extremely suggestive in this regard (20–21). It would be irresponsible here not to mention Butler, who has explored this and other potentially dangerous, because limiting, understandings of the relationship between language and power to stunning effect across a broad range of sites and topics. For her treatment of the dangerousness of a certain mis- or nonunderstanding of performativity (under which these arguments against irony might be included), which expresses itself as a desire for censorship, and its impotence to grasp language’s power to injure, but also therefore to constitute subjects, see especially Excitable Speech. See also Nealon, who draws not only on Marx and Benjamin but on queer theory in his

   Notes treatment of contemporary poetry, for a still more recent example of work that “gets” irony’s political effectivity. 16. Really it is not an essay, but a lecture given at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris in April 1934. I am grateful to Eduardo Cadava for suggesting that I consider these passages in this context. 17.  See, for example, Johnson as well as, again, de Man’s early essay on “Allegory and Irony in Baudelaire,” in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism. 18. For the English translations of Spleen de Paris, I have generally relied on Kaplan’s translations in Baudelaire, Parisian Prowler, making the occasional silent modification. 19. On Baudelaire’s more general preoccupation with the cliché, see Nuiten and Geelen. 20. For a recent example, see Read. chapter 2 1. Althusser’s rethinking of ideology on the grounds of its materiality (its insertion at the interface of a given social formation and the conditions necessary to that formation’s reproduction) can be understood as an attempt to combat this tendency. See “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy. Also important to mention in this regard is Raymond Williams. See in particular his insightful reading of the superstructure-base metaphor from Marx’s 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in which he reminds us that it is, precisely, a metaphor and why this matters for our understanding of Marx not only as a literary theorist but as a critic of capital (75–82). 2.  When Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht (whom Benjamin visited in his Danish exile in the mid-1930s) came up with the formulation that one must respond to the “aestheticization of politics” with the “politicization of art,” they were simply following through on the dismantling of this opposition that had been prepared by Marx. Lacoue-Labarthe comments on the classically Marxist syntax of this formulation. He is also careful to point out that such “politicization” is the starting point of every totalitarian logic (61). 3.  See Keenan; Derrida, Specters of Marx; Hamacher, “Lingua Amissa”; and Miller. For an approach that sets out from more immediately Marxian questions and categories but ends up grappling with language according to deconstructive protocols, see Balibar’s work dating from the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly “The Vacillation of Ideology in Marxism,” in Masses, Classes, Ideas. 4. I refer to the well-known passage marking the transition from Part II, “The Transformation of Money into Capital,” to Part III, “The Production of

Notes    Absolute Surplus-Value,” of Capital, in which Marx invites us to “leave this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone, and follow them into the hidden abode of production [die verborgne Stätte der Produktion], on whose threshold is written, ‘No admittance except on business’ ” (C 279–80; W 23: 189). 5. A major rationale of post-Marxism has been the critique of the naturalistic and biologistic ontologies that are thought to undergird Marx’s understanding of labor. For a particularly clear statement of this critique, see Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s preface to the second edition of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. As I suggest in my own reading, however, Marx’s conception of labor is perhaps not quite so biologistic as has been thought. 6. Proving once again that the dismantling of the material/ideal opposition cannot be ascribed to a difference between early and late phases of Marx’s work. (For a highly influential account of early versus late, or humanist and/or precritical versus critical, phases of Marx’s work, see Althusser, For Marx, particularly the essays “On the Young Marx” and “Contradiction and Overdetermination”; and Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, particularly “Elements of Self-Criticism” and “On the Evolution of the Young Marx.”) For a nuanced interpretation that argues for the generalization of this dismantling through all of Marx’s work, see Labica and Bensussan, particularly “Travail (Labor)” (1176–79). Finally, see Löwy, who successfully demonstrates that the dismantling of the material/ideal opposition forms the basis of a Marxian theory of praxis—of which revolution would be, not incidentally, the social and political anamorph. 7. In much the same vein, Marx dubs labor a “free play,” or Spiel, of man’s “bodily and intellectual [geistigen] powers” (C 284), and he defines labor, in a passage from the so-called unpublished chapter, as “labor-power purposively expressing itself ” (C 980). 8. In later chapters (as in later intellectual history), this irreducible dynamism of the relationship between the conditions of production and the actual “product” of history will be associated increasingly with the work of Benjamin, for whom history can be conceived as a chronological and teleological process only through an act of mystification. It never hurts to point out Benjamin’s proximity to Marx on this question of a nonlinear and antiteleological conception of history, or to recall that this conception represents a refinement of certain strands of the theory of ideology. As Balibar so eloquently puts it: “[H]istorical materialism is constituted to the extent to which it can prove that the idealization of history is itself the necessary result of a specific history” (Masses, Classes, Ideas 91). 9. For a helpful explanation of the different distinctions that Heidegger makes between physis and tekhne—ancient, modern, pre-Socratic, Aristotelian,

   Notes etc.—as well as the differences that emerge within the various texts (from Being and Time and Introduction to Metaphysics through “The Question Concerning Technology”), see Glazebrook. Her remarks on Aristotle’s inheritance and modification of Heraclitus’ and Parmenides’ understanding of being as physis are particularly insightful (164–79, 199–205). I am grateful to Karen Feldman for this reference. 10.  “Physis too . . . is a bringing-forth, poiesis. Physis is indeed poiesis in the highest sense”; “We must observe two things with respect to the meaning of this word [tekhne]. One is that tekhne is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Tekhne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poetic” (Basic Writings 317–18). 11.  Hannah Arendt extends this argument in her reading of Marx in On Revolution, in particular in the chapter on “The Social Question,” in which she claims that “Marx’s place in the history of human freedom will always remain equivocal” because of what she perceives as the biopolitical underpinnings of his thought: “[S]ince he, unlike his predecessors in the modern age but very much like his teachers in antiquity, equated necessity with the compelling urges of the life process, he finally strengthened more than anybody else the politically most pernicious doctrine of the modern age, namely that life is the highest good, and that the life process of society is the very center of human endeavor” (63–64). She goes on to argue that “Nothing . . . could be more obsolete than to attempt to liberate mankind from poverty by political means; nothing could be more futile and dangerous” insofar as this attempt inevitably results in the invasion of biological necessity into the political realm: “the only realm where men can truly be free” (114). Agamben essentially continues this argument in Homo Sacer: “Today politics knows no value (and, consequently, no nonvalue) other than life, and until the contradictions that this fact implies are dissolved, Nazism and fascism—which transformed the decision on bare life into the supreme political principle—will remain stubbornly with us” (10). If, as both Arendt and Agamben suggest, the political—the properly political as opposed to the biopolitical—must keep a certain distance from life, and if it must in some sense invent a new relation to it, then my own reading of Marx would suggest that we must situate Capital as the first critique of biopolitics. This is one consequence of my demonstration that the capital-life relation cannot be dismissed as a political-economic question and rather saturates the very sphere of politics. On this point I differ from Hardt and Negri, who, in Empire, seem not to have registered Marx’s own nuanced intervention in these questions when they claim to articulate Marx’s project with a theory of biopolitics for the first time. 12. The characterization betrays Heidegger’s own latent anthropocentrism,

Notes    which was already evident in his readiness to subsume the instrumental to the anthropological definition of technics and which is always the flip side of this zoomorphic terror. 13. The expression is Heidegger’s: “die Einheit von Leib-Seele-Geist” (Basic Writings 236; Wegmarken 330). 14. For an essential treatment of the question of freedom in Heidegger, see Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom. Nancy argues that the thought of freedom undergoes a radical interruption with Heidegger (33). I think it is safe to say that this interruption is connected with his articulation of freedom and tekhne. 15. In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger says that “The essence of freedom is originally not connected with the will or even with the causality of human willing” (Basic Writings 330). In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” he says that technics “denotes a mode of knowing” (184). 16.  Heidegger also dissuades us from this understanding of the machine as an “autonomous tool,” which he attributes to Hegel: “When applied to the tools of the craftsman his [Hegel’s] characterization is correct. Characterized in this way, however, the machine is not thought at all from the essence of technology within which it belongs” (Basic Writings 322). 17. In using the word alienation (Entfremdung), my intention is not to invoke the complex debates about this term in the history of Marxism(s) (does it belong to a naïve and precritical humanism, such as that of 1844?). Rather, this is the word that Marx himself uses to describe the worker’s relation to the intellectual potentialities of the production process in Capital (C 482). 18.  Balibar dubs the discovery of this essence “the real movement of history” for Marx: “a becoming-labor of production . . . followed by a becomingproduction (or better still, a becoming-productivity) of labor” (Masses, Classes, Ideas 93). Although he traces Marx’s first formulation of this movement to The German Ideology, he gives us the means to contextualize it, as I have here, as part of the larger theoretical statement of Capital. 19. A definition of the Marxian real is hard to come by. For the purposes of this chapter, however, it is worth noting that, from The German Ideology forward, the real is always articulated in close yet oblique relation to the material, and that it is considered, across a broad spectrum of interpretations, to be fraught with Hegelian baggage. For a helpful introduction to key issues in the definition of the term, see Labica and Bensussan, particularly the entries on “Réalité (Reality)” (972–74) and “Subsomption formelle/réelle (Formal/real subsumption)” (1102–3). The former entry is of particular interest for the tension it outlines between a “reality-materiality” that is either produced or given and always strongly associated with necessity (natural or other) and a “reality-process”

   Notes that is always connected with the realization of possibilities and that calls for an active decision—a tension that, it could be argued, haunts the theoretical field of Marxism(s). Also worth noting in this context is the work of Althusser, in particular the essays collected in Lenin and Philosophy. Althusser’s famous definition of ideology in the ISAs essay—that it is “an imaginary relation to real relations” that is nonetheless endowed with a “material existence” insofar as it is inserted in the practices of an apparatus (Lenin 167)—is also a redefinition of the real. Finally, post-Marxism is abundant with new definitions of the real, drawing on sources from Gramsci to Lacan and emphasizing a need to think the real in relation to contingency. For an example of the latter, see Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus. 20. Antonio Negri has depended perhaps most heavily, among prominent Marx interpreters, on an interpretation and deployment of “real subsumption.” While I do not question the value of the term, which Marx himself of course uses, I find Negri’s repeated use of the term in conjunction with the notion of postmodernism problematic. See, for example, Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus (15–16). 21. It is worth noting that Heidegger, both in his critique of Marx and elsewhere, dissuades us from a practical interpretation of technics. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” he writes that “tekhne never signifies the action of making” (Basic Writings 184), and in “The Question Concerning Technology,” he reminds us that technics is not a human activity at all (the word for activity here is Tun, “doing”). chapter 3 1. The line from Mallarmé to which I am alluding opens with Paul Margueritte, aka Pierrot assassin de sa femme (Pierrot, assassin of his wife), miming presence—that is, the hymen between “desire and accomplishment, the perpetration and the memory of it”—and closes with the whole thing happening “under the false appearance of presence” (310). It exceeds the scope of this book to plumb the complexities of Mallarmé’s text as a critique of the metaphysics of presence. However, it is worth noting in passing that these two appearances, which may or may not be the same, or imitations of the same present, are joined by a pair of present participles, which are qualified as being “in the future (tense?), in the past (tense?)” (310). 2.  Derrida credits Jacques Scherer with this observation (Dissemination 216). 3.  “[E]ven the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious” (SW 4: 391). Benjamin is, of course, cribbing from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire here, although recent interpretations

Notes    of Benjamin seem to repress this. For a reading of “On the Concept of History” that treats, if programmatically, its indebtedness to Marx, see Fritsch. For a reading of the same that elucidates the impossibility of the revolution’s timing without simplifying or flattening Benjamin’s theses, see Hamacher, “Now.” 4.  Marx treats these disappearances in his analysis of the development of the credit system in volume 3 of Capital. 5.  See, for example, Mouffe: “The traditional move among leftists who were critical of Marxism has been to show that there was really no proper understanding of ‘the political’ in Marx” (122). Mouffe’s own projects, dating from her book with Laclau, were long at the vanguard of this critique (Laclau and Mouffe). Lefort presents us with a more polemical version of this argument and writes at length about what he perceives as an outright “rejection of the political” in Marx (254). Also worth mentioning here is Arendt, who presents a sustained critique of what she sees as Marx’s relative lack of interest in political questions. 6. For a vintage treatment of precapitalist modes of production, see Hindess and Hirst. 7. Recall that Derrida’s treatment of the imbrication of economic and moral life sets out from a reading of Aristotle and explores the “quasi-automatic” tendencies of economy in the Politics: “What takes shape here is the infinity or rather the indefiniteness of the ‘bad infinity’ that characterizes the monetary thing (true or counterfeit money) and everything it touches, everything it contaminates (that is, by definition, everything). What takes shape here is the quasi-automaticity of its accumulation and thus of the desire it calls forth or engenders. This is no doubt what Aristotle had in mind when he distinguished between chrematistics and economy. The first, which consists of acquiring goods by means of commerce, therefore by monetary circulation or exchange, has no limit in principle. Economy, on the other hand, that is, the management of the oikos, of the home, the family, or the hearth, is limited to the goods necessary to life. It preserves itself from the illusion, that is, from the chrematistic speculation that confuses wealth with money” (Given Time 158). The quasi-automaticity of the desire for accumulation stands as a reminder that accumulation itself is never the event. On performative language as an event-producing machine (whose violence is experienced, specifically, by bodies and not subjects), see de Man, in particular his final reading of Rousseau, “Excuses (Confessions),” in Allegories of Reading. 8. This is Peggy Kamuf ’s translation, published as an appendix to Derrida, Given Time. 9. The narrator’s insistence on the excuse and forgiveness—two speech acts par excellence—only works to underscore this. There are, of course, echoes of Rousseau’s excuses here, as Derrida makes clear in his return to Rousseau’s lies

   Notes and excurses on lying in the wake of his Auseinandersetzung with de Man. See, once again, de Man, Allegories of Reading, and Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon.” 10. On the question of this mad untimeliness, I again refer the reader to Derrida’s reading of the poem. 11. It bears noting here that contemporary discourses on globalization (and not only those that style themselves as “antiglobalization”) depend on drawing out certain historical continuities in relation to this thesis of progressive worsening. See, for example, Hardt and Negri (Empire and Multitude) and Retort. chapter 4 1. For an illuminating reading of Benjamin on the revolutionary “now” and its place in his theories of history, see Hamacher, “Now.” 2.  Beatrice Hanssen writes eloquently of Benjamin’s “other history” in her extremely beautiful book by that title. In borrowing, but also pluralizing, her term, my intention is to emphasize that Benjamin’s theory of history can neither call itself “new” nor be unified as one (a single theory of a single history). 3.  Considerable attention has been devoted to Benjamin’s correspondence with Adorno and to this exchange in particular, although to my knowledge, none of the critical literature has interpreted the stakes of Adorno’s comments on “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” with direct reference to Baudelaire, or indeed to Benjamin’s interpretation of his texts, choosing instead to mobilize the debate toward a rereading of Marx (Agamben, “Infancy and History”), of Derrida on Marx (Rapaport), or of Adorno’s own project (Kaufman). 4.  Selections from Benjamin’s correspondence with Adorno have been made conveniently available in the new Harvard edition of Benjamin’s writings, and I quote Adorno’s letter from this edition (SW 4: 99–105). A different selection, situated within a broader Frankfurt School conversation, can be found in Bloch et al. 5. For an explanation of the uneasy place occupied by Benjamin’s theory of the shock experience in the trauma theory industry, see Ball, “The Longing for the Material” and Traumatizing Theory. For a critique of the authority granted Benjamin’s shock theory in the emergence of a more general theory of traumatic modernity, see Sanyal. Note that Sanyal shares my insistence on theorizing irony’s political dimensions. However, she invests a great deal in the distinction between a “politics of form” and some other kind of politics—the very distinction against which I argue. 6.  “The idea of experience as separate from knowledge has become so alien

Notes    to us that we have forgotten that until the birth of modern science experience and science each had their own place. What is more, they were even connected to different subjects. The subject of experience was common sense, something existing in every individual . . . , while the subject of science is the nous or the active intellect, which is separate from experience, ‘impassive’ and ‘divine’ (though, to be precise, knowledge did not even have a subject in the modern sense of an ego, but rather the single individual was the sub-jectum in which the active, unique and separate intellect actuated knowledge)” (Agamben, “Infancy and History” 18). 7.  Le Soleil is the verse poem quoted at greatest length after A une passante, which is quoted in full. For a reading of the traces left by Benjamin’s own attempts to parry the blows he sustains in his reading of Baudelaire, see Marder. 8. For purposes of simplicity, I quote Harry Zohn’s translation from the edition of the “Motifs” essay included in the new Harvard edition of Benjamin’s writings (SW 4: 319–20). 9.  “Shock is among those experiences that have assumed decisive importance for Baudelaire’s personality” (SW 4: 320). 10.  See the arguments mounted by Adorno on the back of certain caesurae in Hölderlin, in which it could be argued he succumbs to his own “materialist enumeration.” Adorno claims that, through certain syntactical “cuts” or caesurae in Hölderlin’s late poetry, the “mediation [of judgment] is eliminated” and we are granted “consciousness of the non-identical object” (“Parataxis” 131–33, 146). For a discussion of the importance of “Central Park” within the larger constellation of Benjamin’s texts on Baudelaire, see Spencer, “Allegory in the World of the Commodity.” 11. I am referring to Benjamin’s well-known essays on the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility, in which printing technologies and, ultimately, photography are privileged. It is worth noting that, in one of Benjamin’s earliest known fragments on Baudelaire, written in 1921, he likens the historical nature of Baudelaire’s poetry to that of photography. I discuss this text briefly toward the close of this chapter. 12. The translation of the last line is problematic, due in part to the problem of translating Denkwürdigkeit in Benjamin: “Ihre Geschichte wäre nichts als der Bodensatz, den die durch keinerlei echte, d.i. politische Erfahrung im Bewußtsein der Menschen aufgestöberten Denkwürdigkeiten gebildet haben” (GS 2(2): 477). 13.  Many of the passages on Baudelaire in the arcades project resort to photographic or quasi-photographic logics, such as this one: “What I propose to show is how Baudelaire lies embedded in the nineteenth century. The imprint

   Notes he has left behind there must stand out clear and intact, like that of a stone which, having lain in the ground for decades, is one day rolled from its place” (Benjamin, AP 321). 14. I have in mind here de Man’s reading of Correspondances, in “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” published posthumously in Rhetoric of Romanticism.

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   Works Cited Glazebrook, Trish. Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science. New York: Fordham UP, 2000. Goux, Jean-Joseph. Économie et symbolique. Paris: Seuil, 1973. Hamacher, Werner. “Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-Language and Derrida’s Specters of Marx.” Ed. Michael Sprinker. Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. New York: Verso, 1999. 168–212. ———. “ ‘Now’: Walter Benjamin and Historical Time.” Trans. N. Rosenthal. Ed. Andrew Benjamin. Walter Benjamin and History. London: Continuum P, 2005. 38–68. Hanssen, Beatrice. Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.” Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65–108. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. ———. Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State Form. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. ———. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2004. Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics. 2 vols. Trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998 [1975]. Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. 2nd rev. ed. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993. ———. Nietzsche. Vol. 1. Trans. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1979. ———. Vorträge und Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000. ———. Wegmarken. 2nd rev. ed. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978. Hindess, Barry, and Paul Hirst. Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. Jameson, Fredric. “Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist: The Dissolution of the Referent and the Artificial ‘Sublime.’ ” Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism. Ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 247–63. Jennings, Michael W. “On the Banks of a New Lethe: Commodification and Experience in Benjamin’s Baudelaire Book.” Boundary 2 30.1 (Spring 2003): 89–104.

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Index

accumulation, 6, 10, 73–74, 79–82, 92, 129n7. See also primitive accumulation Adorno, Theodor, 96, 119n3, 130nn3–4, 131n10 Agamben, Giorgio, 101–2, 105, 126n11, 130n3, 131n6 allegory: 6–7, 20–24, 33, 122n9; as linguistic equivalent of commodity, 6; baroque versus modern, 7. See also figural language Althusser, Louis, 124n1, 125n6, 127n19 Arendt, Hannah, 126n11, 129n5 Aristotle, 52, 79, 125n9, 129n7 Balibar, Étienne, 49, 51, 122n12, 124n3, 125n8, 127n18 Ball, Karyn, 130n5 Barthes, Roland, 1 Baudelaire, Charles (works): —De l’essence du rire (On the Essence of Laughter . . . ), 8, 28; —Les Fleurs du mal, 7, 13, 16–17, 21, 30–32, 98, 101, 102, 120n4, 121n4; —selected poems from, by title: Au Lecteur (“To the Reader”), 7, 17, 20; Une charogne (“A

Carrion”), 17; Correspondances (“Correspondences”), 110–11, 132n14; Élévation (“Elevation”), 19; L’Invitation au voyage (“Invitation to the Voyage”), 30; La Muse malade (“The Sick Muse”), 16; La Muse vénale (“The Venal Muse”), 16, 18, 19, 102, 121n5; Le Soleil (“The Sun”), 102–4, 131n7; La Vie antérieure (“A Former Life”), 111; —Pauvre Belgique! (“Poor Belgium!”), 8, 15; —Spleen de Paris, 7, 29–31, 34–35, 41, 90; —selected poems from, by title: Assommons les pauvres! (“Let’s Beat Up the Poor!”), 31, 90; L’Étranger (“The Stranger”), 34; La Fausse Monnaie (“Counterfeit Money”) 31, 35, 71, 82–83, 90, 92–93; Le Gâteau (“The Cake”), 34; Le Joujou du pauvre (“The Poor Child’s Toy”), 31; Le Mauvais Vitrier (“The Bad Glazier”), 35–41; Un plaisant (“A Joker”), 31–32, 33, 40; Les Yeux

   Index des pauvres (“The Eyes of Poor People”), 90 Baudrillard, Jean, 120n5 Benjamin, Walter (works): Arcades Project, 14, 94, 119n3, 131n13; “The Author as Producer,” 26–7; “Baudelaire,” 35, 121n1; “Central Park,” 13, 104, 131n131; “On the Concept of History” 70, 112; “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” 107–8; The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 21; “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 13, 97, 115, 119n3; “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” 119n3, 120nn6–7, 130n3; “The Storyteller,” 100 Bensussan, Gérard, 125n6, 127n19 Brecht, Bertolt, 27–28, 124n2 Burt, E.S., 33 Butler, Judith, 122n12, 123n15 Cadava, Eduardo, 122n12, 124n16 Chambers, Ross, 123n15 Cicero, 4 cliché, 31–32, 34, 40, 105, 124n19 Colebrook, Claire, 121n13, 122n8, 123n14 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 21 crowd, 112, 116. See also masses de Man, Paul, 10, 20–24, 28–9, 116, 121n12, 122n9, 122n11, 124n17, 129n7, 129n9, 132n14 Derrida, Jacques, 22, 51, 67, 68–69, 71–3, 94, 124n3, 129n7–10, 130n9 Du Marsais, César Chesneau, 21

Engels, Friedrich, 43, 107, 120n4 fetishism, 22, 45, 108, 116, 122n10, 123n15 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 49 figural language, 10, 20–22, 40, 45–46, 85–86, 122n11. See also allegory, irony, fetishism, symbol Fritsch, Matthias, 128n3 Feldman, Karen, 125n9 Fontanier, Pierre, 21 Freud, Sigmund, 100 Geelen, Maurice, 124n19 Glazebrook, Trish 125n9 Goux, Jean-Joseph, 120n5 Guys, Constantin, 102–3 Hamacher, Werner, 124n3, 128n3, 130n1 Hanssen, Beatrice, 130n2 Haraway, Donna, 123n15 Hardt, Michael, 126n11, 128nn19–20, 130n11 Heidegger, Martin, 49, 51–53, 55–56, 125n9, 126n12, 127nn13–16, 128n21 Hindess, Barry, 129n6 Hirst, Paul, 129n6 Houssaye, Arsène, 30 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 131n10 Hugo, Victor, 104, 106–7 irony, 3–11, 18, 20–36 passim, 41, 79, 83–93 passim, 115, 119n2, 120n7, 121n9, 122nn8–9, 123nn14–15. See also figural language

Index    Jameson, Fredric, 116 Jennings, Michael W., 119n3 Keenan, Thomas, 45, 124n3 Klein, Richard, 119n2 Kierkegaard, Søren, 21, 23, 121n9 Kofman, Sarah, 121n2, 122n10 Labica, Georges, 125n6, 127n19 Laclau, Ernesto, 125n5, 129n5 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 124n2 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 106–7 Löwy, Michael, 125n6 lyric: 6–7, 13–20 passim, 30, 98, 113; crisis of, 7, 13–14, 16, 18–19, 21, 120n6. See also poetry machine(s), 37, 47, 55–67, 86, 127n16, 129n7 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 68, 107, 122n7, 128n1 Marx, Karl (works): —Capital, Vol. 1 and larger work, 1–2, 6, 9–10, 15, 37, 42–49 passim, 51–66, 68–82 passim, 86, 92, 120n4, 124n4, 125n7, 126n11, 127nn17–18 —Capital, Vol. 2, 80 —Capital, Vol. 3, 2–3, 68, 129n4 —A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 124n1 —The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 43–44, 94–95, 128n3 —The German Ideology, 43, 49, 107, 115, 127n18, 127n19 —Die Grundrisse, 120 masses, 78, 111–12. See also crowd

Mauss, Marcel, 71 melancholy, 1, 10, 20. See also spleen memory: 94–95, 97–101, 104, 106–8, 110–14 passim; collective or cultural, 97, 99, 101, 104, 106, 112, 114; involuntary, 104, 112, 114–15; poetry as technology of, 5, 98–9, 101, 106–7, 111 Miller, J. Hillis, 124n3 Mouffe, Chantal, 125n5, 129n5 Musset, Alfred de, 104, 106 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 122n12, 127n14 Nealon, Christopher, 123n15 Negri, Antonio, 126n11, 128nn19–20, 130n11 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 21, 29 (preNietzschean), 50 (Nietzschean), 56, Nuiten, Henk, 124n19 Paris, 1, 14, 37, 38, 90, 94, 99. 112, 115, 120n4 Poe, Edgar Allan, 32, 39 poetic labor (poetic production), 7–8, 16–19, 104, 106 poetry: distinction between verse and prose, 7–9; prose, 15, 29–30, 35, 82, 85, 92–93, 115, 120n7. See also lyric and memory Postone, Moishe, 68 primitive accumulation, 6, 70–71, 73–75. See also accumulation Proust, Marcel, 100, 111, 113–14 Quintilian, 4, 20

   Index Retort (collective), 130n11 Riley, Denise, 123n15 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 83, 87–89, 91, 129n7, 129n9; Reveries of the Solitary Walker, 83–89 Sanyal, Debarati, 130n5 Schlegel, Friedrich, 21, 24, 28–29 Schor, Naomi, 123n15 Shell, Marc, 120n5 shock, 14, 97–98, 100–104 passim, 108–10, 112–13, 115, 117 Silva, Ludovico 121n11 Socrates, 4 spleen, 13, 19–20. See also melancholy

symbol, 21–22, 120 (symbolic). See also figural language Stiegler, Bernard, 38 Starobinski, Jean, 7, 121n8 technics (tekhne), 11, 47–56 passim, 65–67, 126n10, 127nn12–15, 128n21. See also memory (technology of ) Valéry, Paul, 106 Williams, Raymond, 124n1 Wolff, Robert Paul, 121n11 Wordsworth, William, 21