The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune 0816616876, 9780816616879

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The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune

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Thcory and History of Literature Edited by Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse Volume 60. Kristin Ross The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and th;Paris Commune Volume 59. Edited by Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich Reading De Ma 11 Reading Volume 58. F. W.J . Schelling The Philosophy of Ar1 Volume 57. Louis Marin Portrait of the King Volume 56. Peter Sloterdijk Thinker 011 Stage: Nietzsche's Materia/ism Volume 55. Paul Smith Disceming the Subject Volume 54. Réda Bensmaïa The Barthes Effect Volume 53. Edmond Cros Theory and Practice of Sociocriticism Volume 52. Philippe Lejeune On Autobiography Volume 51. Thierry de Duve The Readymade: Marcel Duchamp, Pai111i11g and Modemiry Volume 50. Luiz Costa Lima Control of the lmaginary Volume 49. Fredric Jameson The ldeologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, 2 Volume 48 . Fredric Jameson Tite ldeologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, l Volume 47. Eugene Vance From Topic 10 Tale: Logic and Narrativiry i11 the Middle Ages Volume 46. Jean-François Lyotard The Differend Volume 45. Manfred Frank What ls Neostructuralism? Volume 44. Daniel Cottom Social Figures: George Elio1, Social History, and Literat)• Representation Volume 43 . Michael Nerlich The ldeology of Advemure, Volume 2. Volume 42. Michael Nerlich The ldeology of Adl'enture, Volume l. Volume 41. Denis Hollier The College of Sociology Volume 40. Peter Sloterdijk Critique of Cynical Reason Volume 39. Géza von Molnar Romantic Vision, Ethical Co11text: Novalis and Artistic A111011omy Volume 38. Algirdas Julien Greimas 011 Mea11i11g: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory Volume 37. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy Volume 36. Alice Yaeger Kaplan Reproductions of Banaliry: Fascism, Litera/ure, and French Intellectual life Volume 35. Denis Hollier The Politics of Prose Volume 34. Geoffrey Hartman The U11remarkable Wordsworth Volume 33. Paul de Man The Resistance to Theory Volume 32. Djelal Kadir Questi11g Fictions: Latin America's Family Romance For other books in the series, see p. 171.

The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune Kristin Ross Foreword by Terry Eag1eton

Theory and History of Literature, Volume 60

\ \ 1 University of Minnesota Press, M.mneapolis

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Contents

Copyrighl ocie1y-Francc-Mis1ori·-l9th ceniury. 6. Cily and town life in litermurc 1 1itle. fJ Senes.

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FOREWORD I vii

Foreword Terry Eagleton

Socialist revolution would seem to demand the impossible not only of the power system it con fronts but also of those who carry it through. To execute any profound social transformation calls for a resoluteness of purpose far beyond our customary dim,_ sporadic perception of ourselves as effective human agents. The revolut1onary ~mues are those of efficiency and sobriety, organizational capac11y, and a readmess for self-sacrifice. Anyone who has taken a realistic measure of the power of the bourgeois state, and believes that such power could be sigm~cantly dented without the utmost self-discipline and determination on the part of 11: antagomsts. reveals an env1ably sanguine turn of mind. f )et such_ revoluti?n_ary virtues are, of course, part of the problem as much as o the soluuon. For Il is not difficult to see how they mirror the very system the ~;: su;:'sed tlo subven. Resoluteness, efficiency, sobriety, self-sacrifice· if w~ rn ese va ues at ail we learn them b d1 • they help to line If this is the cas y an arge from those whose pockets · e, we can turn to a dif~ t k' d f . ary rhetoric entirely and s eak . eren 111 o rcvolut1011of the disheveled, decente~ed o~~t oRf t'hel r~solute, mtcgrated polilical agent but 1 · e\o ut1ons are about the h • . •• uucs as much as the construcr·1on of them the ge t' r f s atten• ng of 1denas well as of polnical constitutions If th. - nera ion o antasy and disorder about cnough, historically speakin~ t ey ~1e no'., then we probably know just will fail-fail, at least in ail tl ' of pre ict w1th some confi_1dence that they Lo · ie most undamental wa T'' 111s Bonapcme finds someth'ing. h ys. ,ie 18th Brumaire 0 r , bo . in erently theat · 1 d ~ gr,;at urgeo1s revolution~ traced a. th nca an melodramatic in the fiction. masking, posturin~ and uns e~ are by the play of fantasy, rhetoric and . maskmg, a costumed staging 'and gran d.1ose v,

inflation ?f _th_e signifier that is always already symbolic, and so eastly translated into poettc 1d101:n- The 18rh_Brumaire, one might say, is Marx·s maJor semiotic text, all to do w1th t~e fissunng of historical signifiers and sigmfieds, parody and political cross-dressmg, the merging of fantasy and reality in the crucible of intensive social change. Revolutions blow the lid off the unconscious in ways no revolutionary pro~am cou_ld hope to foresee, releasing a libidinal charge whose relation to determtnate social goals will always be ambiguous and uneasy. White the cadres worry about the food supplies, the people shoot at the clocks. Not ail the time, of course. Revolutions, by definition. are made not by the cadres but by the masses; and for this to corne about requires on their part just those austere virtues that stand in deeply ambivalent relationship to the aesthctic, somalie, self-pleasuring dimensions of revolutionary insurrection. There seems tome as yet no adequate political mode! to articulate these two vital moments 111 some persuasive way. Nobody is greatly enamored these days of the notion of a pure class subject, whole and affirmative in its unitary identity. that has merely to materialize itself in historical practice to corne imo its own. Such subjects are usually little more than some suitably collectivized version of our old friend the bourgeois humanist subject, who has a stubborn enough history not ro yield ground simply by being, so to speak, taken into public ownership. The idealiLed class subject would always seem to know already exactly what it needed. to be intuitively present to itself in its demands and desires: the political problem 1s then reduced to the question of its self-objectification, as though such objecufication were not the condition of its self-discovery as much as the consequence. This well-bounded, essentialized. self-transparent subject is commonly thought to be the privileged revolutionary candidate of Marxism, though it might be rather more accurate to speak of it as the privileged candidate of a certatn early phase of the work of Georg Lucâcs. The Marxist-Leninist tradition. perhaps these days the most ignorantly travestied of ail socialist lineages among so-called radicals, was never quite as conveniently simpleminded as that. Mar'list political theory has been ail about blocs, alliances, class fractions. cross-class solidarities: what else was the concept of hegemony, widespread in the Second lnternational but known to most only through the writings of Antonio Gramsci. than an attempt to think through the awesome complexity and contradictoriness of a re\olutionary process that could never turn on a single isolated agent? As for Leninism, it would have been a little imprudent of the Bolshevik leaders to imagine some pure proletarian essence going it alone, in a sociery whcre the proletariat was not only a small minority marooned in an ocean of potentially revolutionary peasants, but disaffection was rife throughout sections of the intelligentsia and the petty bourgeoisie. No doubt, however, the convenient caricatures of Mar'lism will continue to be offered; and no doubt too the proper dismissal of a now thoroughly discredited pure class subjcct will continue to obscure the kernel of truth 111 this doctrine. Ir

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FOREWORD FOREWORD .J ix

• oioa, ·cally dubious to dream of some self-composed r · li and ep1stcm o ' it ,s po ,uca Y , d ·1, •s side of social change, state precisely what its interior ocnt who can alrca y. 11 . I r h a.,. . , - · surely equally dubious to ignore t 1e ,act t at a group nccds and dcs1res arc. ,1 ' 5 . . d . I d' · soc,a 1srupof people couragcou s cnough to take on the. hardsh1ps of profoun . . . . ak of the oroanized brutahty of the bourgeois stare, must be 111 110n. not 10 spe o . . . The paradox of revolu11onary change 1.s that 1t prosome sensc seIr-affirmative • ' . . Yidcs oppresscd pcoples with the opport~111ty to con~truct an 1dent1ty for thcm.. but that without some such idcnllty already 111 place that process could se 11cs, ncver be mitiatcd. Contemporary rcvolutionary nationalism is surely a case in poim The most sterilc brand of such n_ationalis,_n wis_hes t? throw off imperiali~t rule in order to assert an already establlshed national 1dent1ty, whose only flaw 1s 1o have been contaminated and repressed by the presence of the colonialists. ln an expression/blockage mode! dear to mosc Romantic thought, the colonized know already who they are; it is just that the colonialist refuses to listen. A more promising paradigm of revolutionary nationalism appreciates that the antiimperalis1 question rums on constructing the conditions in which il would be in principle possible for the colonized to lïnd oui what they mighr become, a dilemma over which the imperialists have never lost much slecp. Yet how is a people entirely bereft of culture, identity, and indigenous will to achieve anything as formidable as that? If the un1ainted class subject is to be rejected, then, it should perhaps be with a modicurn of caution. The alternative revolutionary paradigm to which we can lhen lurn, that of the fractured. libidinal, disordered subject, involves equi valent gains and losses. Few oversights have more drastically impoverishcd Marxism than its deafness_ to the_ libertarian tradition. lt is not so much, perhaps, that Marx,srn has de111ed the important truths of this heritage, as that it has perilously deferred _thern. Pleasure, desire, anarchie revoit, the illegible, unincorporable, and 111art1culable: Lhese things will have their moment, after the main business of the day has been concluded-except, of course, that such business will then n:ver be conclu_ded, _or c~en ~ubstantially advanced. Marxism has long been a. are that_rhere _,s an mfantile d1sorder known as instant gratification, which conSlltutes a hvmg msult to those men and women throughout the annals of socialist st;gg~e who were he:oically prepared to sacrifice Lheir own happiness for the sal e o others. A re~dmess to defer grati li cation' to look with suspicion on those ;~s:~r'onvert revol~t1on to their own private consumptional ends is suret not in to be upbra,_ded. To characterize revolution, as Raymo~d w·11· y h done as an essentially 1 • 1 1ams as . alwa;s be thos~ more d::!~:;ocedss ,lsflto recall the sober truth that there will an se ess than oneself who . f ' t11e values of pleasure and bodily well-bein . • . . ie use to endorse med in which these values may be available ~ unul the con_d1t1ons have _been creever, to turn this admirable stance . h or ail. 1_1 ,s qulle another th111g, howinto t c scelerouc dog t'1 h . . nothmg 111 the richness of l'b t · . . ma sm t at would see i er anan1sm but irresponsible self indu! gence.

Perhaps, thcn. the revolutionary subjcct we arc searching for is the dclirious subject~in-proccs~ of the ear_Iy Tel Quel, fragmcnted into ccstatic nonidenllty by revoluuonary desi:e. This w,11 certainly safeguard us from the alarmingly repletc subject of a certa 111 Marx,st thcory; the only problem 1s that such an agent, in some of ils versions at least, \:ould hadly seem self-collectcd cnough to topplc a \ bottle off a wa ll , let alone bnng down the state. li is neces 5ary for us to '"aestheticize·· the revolu1ionary proccss, and i1 is equally essential for us ro do nothing of the sort. On the one hand, revolution is for the fullïllment of the men and women who make it; on the other hand, the hypostasizing of revolut1onary action as some magnilïcent end in itself, with ail the self-gencrative, self-validat111g nature of the work of art, returns us to the dangerous mythologizing of Georges Sorel and the cari y Walter Benjamin. How is the revolutionary subjcct ro be tensed and spaced out, centered and decentered, sober and drunk, German and French, at one and the same time? What is the ratio within revolutionary action of ego and id, prose and poetry? lt is on these questions that Kristin Ross's coruscating study of Arthur Rimbaud and the Paris Commune may shed some light. The Commune, as Kristin Ross reminds us, was certainly no carnival. Sorne twenty-lïve thousand insurgents were dead on the streets of Paris in May 1871. more than in any of the battles of the Franco-Prussian war. Yet if it was not a carnival, it shared certain carnivalesque features, as this study brilliantly demonstrates. More than most classical revolutions, the Commune was a question of the rapid, dizzying transformation of everyday life, a dramatic upheaval in commonplace understandings of time and space, identity and language. work and leisure. The material precondirions for rhis Jay in the nature of the insurrection itself. For the Commune, if one may risk the tautology. was a peculiarly political revolution, in a highly political society. Its base lay not in heavy inùustry and an organized Iarge-scale proletariat, but in the seizing, defense. and transformation of a place, a city, a sector of "civil society" where men and women lived and congregated, traveled and talked. It was a revoit not so much within the means of production, rooted in factory soviets and a revolutionary worl..ing-class party, as one within the means of Iife themselves. lt was a revolution out on the streets from the start, an uprising for which the bone of revolutionary contention was the streets themselves, rather rhan the streets as a front-line ùefense of a prolctarian seizure of capital. 1t was thus a peculiarly mobile. multiple affair, in which what mattered was the citizen rather than the producer, the political issue of contrai over everyday culture as a whole rather than the protection and promotion of a more narrowly conceived class identiry. What the various subordinatc groups, classes, and class fractions had in common was precisely the besicged bastion of Paris, of a space that belonged 10 them ail; and there could consequcntly be a

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x I FOREWORD

. . h class Jines bctween worker and artisan, revolutionary . constant traffic ac,oss 1 ~ womcn and disaffected hterat1. . r . 1 ·,s constalll movement of transgression, of the d1smant tng and Jt ,s prec1se1) 1 1 fR ' . f · 1 and physical space. that lies near the heart o oss s account. remapp111g O socia • · · h. b The Commune rai~•es its fist 'against convenltonal spatial . h1erarc . . ,es - etween disunct Parisian quartiers, country and_ city, _and, by 1m~ltcatt~n. t~at global . of terrain betwcen France the 1mpenal metropolts and tts citent coloc?ne-Bup I this confoundino and "horizontalizing" of hierarchies, for which nies. u o d' C 1 Ross·s symbolic index is the Communards' demolition of the V~n ome _o umn, forces ils way into the sphcre of cultural production too, 111terrogat111g. the assumed distinctions between worker, artist, and artisan. and collaps111g rece1ved oppositions within discourse between high art and popular reportage, poetic and political, the venerable and the vernacular. The event of the Commune emerges 111 this lioht as an early thcatrical instance of whal we now know as the avantgarde, as°'ihe mantle of an Arthur Rimbaud passes to Mayakovski and on to Bertoit Brecht. Rimbaud. for Ross, is the poet of the Commune, which is no doubt one rcason wh) a hermetically textual avant-garde in our own time has managed by some curious oversight to edit him out of their canon. To view him as the poet of the Commune is not, however, to engage in empirical scholarly debate about whether he actually leaned on a barricade on some particular Wednesday morning. The Commune forms the substance of much of Rimbaud's work, not as content or explicit reference, but as tumult. transgression, mobility, hyperbole, leveling, hypersensoriness, iconoclasm. Political history inscribes itself in the very force fields of his texts, between the lines and within the rhythms, in the whole kind of aslonishing practice they are, rather than as some empirical background against which they can be measured. And to say this is to claim that this rcmarkable study does for Arthur Rimbaud what Walter Benjamin, in his great Passagenarbeit, did for Charles Baudelaire. lt is not clear that the author would entirely appreciate the compliment, since there is scant reference to Benjamin in her text, and the work on Baudelaire is absent from the bibliography. One detects a touch of the anxiety of influence here, of a silence evident enough to be cloquent; but there are surely some notable methodological parallels betwcen the two studies, which extend well bcyond the fact that both concem the city of Paris. To suggest that it does not matter whether the Commune makes a referential appearance in Rimbaud is to recall Bcnjamin's comment on Baudelaire and the crowd: the urban masses are so pervasively evident in his poetry that they never actually put in an appearance. Benjamin's hcrmeneutic is not "symbolic," grasping the poetry of Baudelaire as an ~-x~re~sive..emanation of a particu_lar social history, but allegorical, treating the s1~n:fier _ofthe_ texts_as a ma~enal reality in its own right but then, by the allegonst s dev1ous, 111gen1ous slc1ght of hand, veering them impudently on their

f'OREWORD

XI

axis until thcy corne to speak obliquely in the . . • ' matenalny of. the1r letter· of more than thcmse 1ves. The relatton between te very h. d I an 1story here 1s . x a question of forrn and force, o f lïnding the vcry language of lh . . . poems ahve w11h electnc . . e . h currents and s hock tng conJunctures that spring froni a , more-t an- 11terary source Tt is surely some such allegorical method that Kr·st· R · · h · • . 1. tn oss ,s practtcmg ere · h • too even 1f her text never pauses to speak of n What ch , . . . . • arac1enzes t e a11egonst is a certain 111tcrpretat1ve wrenchmg and daring an aiche · 1 d. f mica rea tng o arcane . . . . , connections, allowmg ~ su~den tdiosyncratic correspondence 10 fla~h through in a moment _of what BenJamm w~uld have called profane illumination It is a protomatcnaltst meth~d ~gams_t wh1ch T~eodor Adorno sternly inveighed. involving as il does a boldly tnltmate Juxtapost11on of an item of the "base" with one of the "superstructure"; but for ail its heterodoxy il can be a fertile. original approach, and much of the power of Ross's analysis can be seen 10 flow from it. A number of exarnples can be given. There is the moment, fairly early on in the book, when Ross suggests a casually brilliant homology between the fa~hioning of barricades in the Commune and a radical form of writing. Barricaùes involve a kind of bricolage, a provisional cobbling together of wha1ever bits and pieces corne usefully to hand; they are the anrithesis of the monumental. recycling quotidian abjects for slartling new purposes. Thar this may also serve as a perceptive account of the poetic techniques of a Rimbaud. indeed of the revolutionary avant-garde in general, is then lhe "literary"' point 10 be made, although the point is already, by delïnition, a good deal more than that. Agam. there 1s the absorbing excursus of vagabondage, which manages to move ail the way from how Rimbaud poetically experienced his own body to the vital political issues of tabor, laziness, frcedom, and leisure, in a striking polilical somalies for which some fascinating sociological evidence on vagabondae in ninetcenth-c_en1ury France is deftly marshaled. The point here. as in the book 's ot_her illummatmg allegorical ploys, is that the eclecticism and bricolage of the obJect under_ study, its disdain for conventional generic catcgorizations. is being constantly m1:rored by the author's own hermeneutical transgressions, hcr freewheeling. rag-p1ckmg range over a plethora of disparate forms of writing. As a final eumple lrom _a · •tn ong111a · · 1 ·111s1g • hts, one m,o ·oht 111en1·1on the concept of .. R1mbauù s work prod1gal of aoitated vibraverse as somehow a ''swarm, .. a cap1·11 ary ne(\"Ork • "' ' , repc1111ve . - - sornethino - - - - of - the busy mu 1ttp · 1·1c1ty ·. of theu rban crowd · L1ke . the crowd, tians with 0 "' ·tndetermmate · 1Y bounded • equivalencm 0 • paratac. • the prose poem is straooling, 00 • • h ark the pomt whcre languagc I tic replete with a density and d1zz1ness t a m, . . . . - ù 1s ' to take off beyond language. w here a ven·iable welter ot ltngu1st1c mo es about jostle and collidc. b d · own bounds. lt is ·, v lution tends to rrave1 cyon 11~ . L1ke l~nguage, eve_ry re ~ . 1 institutions without dreaming for a moment ol hard to d1smantlc part1cular socta · . . . - ~tto"ether At its fines!. . . . .bc t·d from 111st1tuuona1I1Y" "' · what Il m1ght be ltke to be 1I ra c . . .. d Ih ··revolution within the rcvoluthe anarchist tradition has always signifie e

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FOREWORD

. h t -mains to be donc what fantasies and desires still go tion ·· mark,ng out w a rc · · • · . · ocntly ncccssary political changes have been mstalled. 1t hungrv whcn cc, tmn ur,, . .. . •• th, whole to the poets of revolutions to remmd the pohuc,ans has bccn 1c 1t. on e · . • , 1 . ,- ally adcquate transformation would be one of the flesh 1tself. that th~ on } 1n . , " · • " 1· . ·. · Ro,s .·. 1s · "~ccordinoly acute to see that Rimbaud s assocm11ty, 11s llampKnsun o ' , ish, adolescent. plague-on-you-all bohemianism, is n~ standard part of the _poete maudit idcntikit but the sign of his profoundest social engagemen.t. As m the \iork of that English Arthur Rimbaud, William Blake, the function of these apparently callow antisocial gestures is to draw attention to the limits of the political. for the sake of those who would fetishize that whole dimension. ''Jam sorry to sec my fellow countrymen bothering themselves with politics," Blake wrote. ·'House of Commons and 1-louse of Lords seem tome to be fools. They seem to me 10 be something other than human life." But that, of course, was just the kind of political proclamation for which, in Blake·s lime, you might tïnd yourself arrested . Blake, like Rimbaud, springs from the artisanal petty bourgeoisie-and carries something of that into his similarly electic, bizarre, vernacular poetic forms. viewing poetry (as did the literary Communards) as a kind of political disruption and intervention. If one thinks of that tïnest and wisest of English social revolutionaries, William Morris, the historical necessity of a Blake or a Rimbaud is surely not in doub!. Neither of them would have been comforably at home in Morris's beautiful, generous-minded, intolerably staid, decent, and civilized utopia Il is against the grain of this, as Ross reminds us, that we must recall Rimbaud's (and for that matter Blake's) "transformed Utopian body of 111fïnite sensation and libidinal possibility.' · As long, of course, as we also recall William Morris's tireless grass-roots political activity on behalf of the Social Democratic Federation and the Socialist League, and ask ourselves just how efficient!) a Blake or a Rimbaud would have contributed to ail that tedious, urgent committee work. The concept of space forms the thematic keystone of this book, as its title suggests; and Ross is surely right to claim that this idea has proved of far less g lamorous appeal to radical theorists than the apparently more dynamic, exhilarating notions of narrative and history. This is ironie, because for Marxism, at least, it is thar eminently spatial object, the human body, with which everything begins and e~ds. Marxism tells a story that tracks the body ail the way up from the oppos111g thumb to the military-industrial complex. Bodies of a certain kindprematurely bo.rn, com~unica~ive, needing to labor-must inevitably generate, unlike oth~r anunal bodies, a h1story; and for Marxisrn that history is a matter of the. way th1s body extends itself into nature only to tïnd that it has been plundered of 1ts sensuous w~alth. The g~al of Marxism is the restoring to the body of its plundered sensua~1ty; when th1s has taken place, Marxism rnay wither away. Jt was Marx h1mself who, in a rebuke to the drafters of the Goth p · · d h a rogram, insiste t at nature, not only labor power, was the source of value. The human

FOREWORD

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body produces value only insofar as it inhabits a . . stuff it shares . lt is hard for us now to imagine th space, ~n env1ronment whose . at revolut1on 111 the percept1011 0 r • _ social space that accompa111ed the transition from f d • • · . eu a 11sm to capnalism Space . · . in feudaltsm 1s parce11zed, regionalized particula . d . . . . . , r, an Il ,s prec1sely Lh1s. as Perry Anderson has argued 111 h1s L111eages 0 r rhe Ab. . S • • • 'J :.o1lt/1s1 tale. that helped to enable the nse of cap1tahsm. What traumatic unhea . 1 f . . . . va o percepuon 1s 111volved in thrnkmg of the poht1cal no longer as a question of local . • r· _ _ . . sovere1gnty. o something mterwoven wJth the labor and k111ship relauons ofa spe -fi b . _ . c, 1c p Iace. ut as an abstr~ct natwna/ formation? John Barrcll has reminded us in h1s study of the English peasant-?oet Jo~n Cl~re that there is not even a word 111 English for a tract of land that 1~ perce,ved v1sually but not necessarily pictorially The terni wc have, of course. 1s "landscape"; our very terminology of place ,s an aesthetic one. Kristin Ross's book is nowhere more instructive than when n sceks to rcdeem the idea of space from such aesthetic reifïcations, showing us how the very construction of the discipline of geography 111 nineteenth-ce~tury France was an ideological arm of imperial rule. Her study thus Joins the English school ofMarxist geographers, of David Harvey and his colleagues. who seek 10 remind us that nothing could be more political than just the way objects are spat1ally distributed. The finest Irish play of the last decade, Brian Friel's '.Trc111sla11011:,, displays the British rewriting of Gaelic place-names as an intolerablc act of violence. Kristin Ross has rescued Arthur Rimbaud for a left that is in dire need of him: and her book, with its lucid, companionable style, will surely stand as a maJor. permanent contribution to the socialist history of modem culture. It is churlish. 111 that light, to end on a rather more qualifying note. Ross's book shares a now fashionable suspicion of the "scientifïc" or "mature" Marx, and the tcrm "mature" in her text is unfailingly shown in those ironie quotation marks. 1t is perhaps worth remembering that the "mature·· Marx inclu.d.es noc onl~ Capiwl, but what is probably the fines! study of modern French pollues ever wntten. The !8rh Brumaire. Notions of "rnacuiity" and "immaturity" indeed smack of the thouoht police·, it would be an eccentric commentator who cou Id categorize the t:> youno Marx 's Paris manuscripts as adolescent. On the contrary, we have yet to 0 · ·1·111 Ross speaks of how. the. Corn· catch up wJth them. ln a splend1·ct passage, Kns mune was Jike an adolescent, moving at once too fast and too slow, leehng t~e earth shift' under its feet at the very moment it idled out its symbolic games 111 ·msoucmnt · · • d1sregard of the tenors that th reatcned. it · Such reflecuons recall I Franco Moretti 's comments on the centra l·ry o f the 1dea of youth . for revoluuon. . . .in h.1s ex·h·tarat·,no The Wnv. oifrhe World.. Yet ,f there ,sa good ary R omanttctsm, 1, ,, . . . .· h . 1 oood maturity. l\larxism cares lor matunty bccause ,t 1mmatu11ty, t erc 1s a so a o . ·lau htered If ou try on socialdoes not wish to sec men and women needlessly s g. · Y . d de la Commllnc (Paris'. E. Lachaud, 187 1). 149-50 5 Louis Barron, Sous J,, drap L11ro1'éIcrmticm ,·mrr1){1rée des peuph•., Européens (Paris: Pion. IS(>.I) 24 Sec Rifl-111. • \\'ell-formed Phrases, .. csp. 22-25. 25. Den" Poulot, Le Sublime, 011 /c trm•aillcur comme il est 1•11 1870, et ce q11'il pe111 être (Paris: ~J;.Lspcm. 19S0). See especially the brilliant 111troduction to this ed1tion by Alain Cottereau, "Vie quotidienne et résistance ou, rière à Paris en 1870 ... 7-102. Conereau re1nterpret1 Pou lors condemnahon of the worker tn Le S11b/i111c a, an encyclopedia of the ruses de,•eloped by workers to rcsist ellor1' tù control Lhcir work and home hfe. 26. Alfred Dehau\ Dir1io1111air,• de le langue rerte (Pans. Ma11>0n & Flammarion, 1883), indispensable for read111g Rimbaud. delines these workers' slang terms: chouellc, a superlative of good; rupm. superlative of noble or elegant; c/'a11aquc, to be solid or resolute The firsl edition of Delvau's d1ct1onary appeared m 1865. 27 Rancière. Le Philosophe et ses 11au1•res, 108. 28 Courbet. c,ted m Robert Baudry... Courbet et la Fédération des artistes," Europe, AprilMa) 1951. 125. 29. RJncière. Le Philosophe el ses pauvres, 92. 30 Le Comte d'Hérisson, No111·ea11 joumal d'11n Officter d'ordo1111a11ce: La Co1111111111e (Paris: Ollendorff. 1889). 295-96. R1fkm's discussion of Gaillard is part of his forthcommg book; see what are undouhtedly the most useful and provocative analyses of cullural movement (particularly visual and musical) at the end of the Second Empire and du ring the Commu ne in the articles clled in notes 15 and 22, and m .. No ParticularThing 10 Mean." 8/ock 8 (1983): 36-45. 31 Elisée Reclus. c1ted in Gary Dunbar, .. Elisée Reclus. Geographer and Anarchist," Amipoc/e 10 and 11 (1979): 16. 32. Jacques Rancière, "La Représentation de l'ouvrier o u la classe impossible ... in Phillipe Lacoue-Lebarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy (eds.), Le Retrait du politiq11e, (Paris: Galilée, 1983), 96. 33. Ranc,ère, "La Représentation de l'ouvrier." 103. 34. Walter Beniamm, "Conversations with Brecht." in U11clers1t111ding Brecht, trans. Anya Bostock (Londow New Left Books. 1973), 116. 35. Lou,s Gabriel Gauny. Le Philosophe plébie11, ed. Jacques Rancière (Paris: Le Découverte, 1983). 115-16. 36. Ernest Delahaye. Rimba11c/: t.:Arti.He et l'être 1110ml (Paris: Albert Messein, 1923) , 38. 37 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Writi11gs 011 the Paris Com1111111e, ed H. Draper (New York: Monlhly Re\"lew Press. 1971 ). 76. 38 See Derek Sayer and Philip Corrigan, "Late Marx· Continuity, Contradiction and Leaming," in Teodor Shanin (ed.). Lme Mm:t and the Russimt Road: Man and the ·'Peripheries of Capita/ism · (New York. Monlhly Review Press, 1983), 77-94; see also. in the same volume, Shanin's .. Laie Marx. Gods and Crafl5men, " 3-39 . These two article, urgue, with 1nterestmg differences of opmion. for a reevaluation or the late Marx m the light of his own consideration of the Paris Commune and Russian revolutionary populism. 1 am indeb1ed 10 these articles for the version of Marx that follows, and to Terry Cochran for making me aware of this book.

.J--

[

39. See Jacques Rougerie. Procès des Co111111un11rds, 125-34, for a systematic breakdown of the backgrounds of the Communards. See also Manuel Castells. "Cities and Re,alution: The Commune of P..ui,, 1871.'' Ill City and the Grmsmots rBerkeley: University of Californ,a, 1983), 15-26. 40. lProsper-Oll\er Lissagarny, Hwoire de la co1111111111e de 1871 ( 1876; reprint, Paris: Maspero, 1967), 10.

INTRODUCTION J 31

c Lucio Colletti 's discussion of Marx 's criiique of Hegel in h,s introduction Karl ',J -11 Se · an.. 10 trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Bcnton (New York: Vintage, 1975), _ _e\p. v tVritings. l E11r . 7 56

41~;. Karl Marx. Critique of flegel'.s Doctrine of the Siate

111

E,,r/_v \Vriting,. 189-90.

,.\3. Ibid., 190.

_. 44 Marx. preface to the 1872 German ed111on of The Co111m11r11.1t Ma11ifr.