"The natural outlawry of women"

 

In a famous passage in Marx’s Grundrisse, Marx wrote about the character form introduced by money: “The exchangeability of all products, services, relationships against a third, material one, which can without exception be exchanged – thus the development of exchange value (and the money relationship) is identical with general venality, corruption. General prostitution appears as a necessary phase of the development of the social character of personal resources, faculties, abilities, activities. More politely expressed: the universal relationships of exploitation and need.”

The Grundrisse was published by the Marx Engels institute, after its discovery among the manuscripts, in the 1930s. Long after the publication of Emmy Hennings Branded (or Stigma – Der Brandmal). This journal of a prostitute is easily assimilated into Emmy Hennings own life, but it is written as and conceived as a novel. The protagonist is, like Hennings, an actress and dancer, who is “guided” to prostitution by a man who provides her with the money to live. When we first meet her, she is on the verge of starvation – and nobody is going to feed her for free. Her use value at this point seems to be nill. The man who buys her food, however, sees a use and exchange value in her. And the narrator – without using the word prostitution – soon “has” money.

In a very brilliant bit (the book, written in the high style of the expressionists, is full of brilliant bits), the narrator has a sort of revery in which she becomes money – the coin or paper bill in her hand or pocket. And the money that she is, is everywhere, throughout the town. She is as available, as widespread, as common, as money.

“I would really like to know if money is the only visible sign of my “fallen state” (Verwarhlosung). Money in my pocket appears, to me at least, questionable. More and more suspicious. Money is disgrace, the most overt sign of scandal. I clean my money with a pocket tissue before I put it in harmless hands; thus, it is at least externally clean. The money is always false, but even so, it works capitally as exchange. There is no real (echtes) money, I tell myself. It would be only by chance that such a thing could be called real. What one exchanges is always something other. I can not, however, so subjectively make these value judgments. I have ordered a roll and a cup of coffee, and for this I put down my insane ten mark piece on the marble table. For this ten mark piece I will lay myself on the table, I will pay with myself Thus I lay a ringing gold coin on the table. And am I just this? Can one compare oneself with a gold piece? Me? Still I have something glimmering in me.”

To be identical to one’s pocket money – and at the same time, not to be identified with it, as it is purely exchangeable. Hennings’ prostitute experiences, due to her position, the impossible identity of the capitalist subject, who is what she earns. Prostitutes exist in the pores of the system – especially back in prewar Europe, half ancien regime, half industrial treadmill of production. In those pores, consumer culture is being transformed, and that transformation is the landscape of bars and restaurants and rent for the hour rooms, the places where eating, drinking and fucking is going on, the place of the transitory, where the narrator (we find that she is named Dagney, or at least uses that name, a third of the way into the book, when she records a conversation) is most at home, and most homeless. “I or the money? What a phantasmagoric, licenced swindle (Schwindel – also, vertigo).” Licenced, pantentierte – as in the licence to be a freelance prostitute.

In a sense, I read this book, or encounter it, with too much knowledge, since I know that this is a chapter not only from Dagny’s life, but Emmy Hennings. Though I might be clever enough to think that no piece of money is really authentic, I can be dull enough, as many a reviewer has been, to think that the woman who writes the journal in the novel is actually Hennings. Memoir, and not fiction. Hennings, however, was a writer with high talents, and if this journal is Dagney’s, I think we can assume that, at least for the author, Dagney’s life is not merely her shadow. Role-playing, who would know better? This is, in a sense, the way expressionist fiction often crossed the boundary between life and art, but not so that we can so directly privilege the former without losing a crucial nuance. The former only gains its value – its desperation is earned – only if it can be poured into the latter. Hamsun, Hennings contemporary, also put his adventures in Copenhagen in Hunger, yet that is read as a novel, and I think it is on that model that Hennings was working. The intensity of a life, the “glimmer” that is not in the gold piece, provides an illumination within the novel, which is a fictive in its gestures, its specifics, its self-reflection. Prison, another of Hennings novels, is bound up with Branded: the former novel also lifts a chapter, or chapters, from her real life. Hennings had short stays in prison, once for “stealing” – apparently, some client didn’t want to pay, so she took her pay and the client went to the police. She wrote Prison in 1918, and her partner, Hugo Ball, read it: “I now live as quietly as though in a cell. Your book, my dear, lies in my arms and legs. It entered my blood like a poison. I am a by no means contemptible public; it will have a wide effect.”

I don’t know if Grisélidis Réal, the Swiss prostitute and poet who militated for sex workers rights in the seventies, read Hennings Branded. And I’m almost sure that Colette, Hennings contemporary, never read her work, and may never have heard of her. All three, however, share an outlook, which is novelistically summoned by Christina Stead in her portrait of Henny Pollit, the wife and sworn enemy of Sam Pollit in The Man who loved Children: “the natural outlawry of womankind.” If law is founded in the will of the people, this outlawry is simply a fact: women have been denied full citizenship for millenia. Under the boot of the law, but never of the law. This chthonic postulate is hard to reconcile with feminism, with a feminism that has been so much about the law, within the law. It does inject a certain scepticism, not so much of nature but of history, into any feminist dogma. It is no accident that Hennings novels (Branded, Prison) are so concerned with the justice and the injustice of the law. And reflect her curious Catholic anarchism.

Hennings reflections on money might well have been influenced by reading Bakunin. Hugo Ball notes he was reading Bakunin’s The Paris Commune and the idea of the state in 1915, when he and Hennings were starting the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.

From Ball’s letter to a friend: ’Socialism, life with and in the people – at the moment Emmy Hennings and I are playing in a small suburban Variete. We have snake charmers, fire-eaters and ropewalker, everything one could wish for. One looks deeply into life here. One is poor, and yet very enriched.”