Marx, Gogol: dead souls among the woodfall

 

Its very hard to find anything in Gogol, right up to the meaning; Gogol somehow shrinks from your touch, wriggles away. He hides, and when you finally find him it won’t be right, it won’t be him: it isn’t that you have found him, but that he thrust himself out where you didn’t expect him, where there was no place for your ideas of him, where he wasn’t yesterday. That Gogol is no longer where you remember him; this one is not where you expect him. – “Being Burried Alive, or Gogol in 1973 – Andrei Bitov

 On the one hand, it is a mere coincidence that, as Marx was writing about windfallen wood in 1842, in Russia, a novel named Dead Souls was passed by Nicholas I’s censors and published. On the other hand, no Gnostic historican can afford to turn up his nose at mere coincidence – for are we not the slaves of intersignes? And surely this must be an intersigne, an exchange happening in the basement below universal history, where all the dealers in codexes are busy cutting them up and mashing them back together.

 To look at windfallen wood from the aspect of whether it can be defined as private property, Marx claims, tells us a lot about what private property is defined as. The same can be said for buying dead souls – souls that exist on an equality with live ones on the tax rolls. What Chichikov has figured out (and was born to figure out – in Chapter XI, Gogol’s portrait of the birth and schooling of a rational choicer certainly shows us this much) – is what we now know in various other forms – the credit default swap, the leveraged buyout, etc. Which is that in capitalism, the nominal, given the right circumstances, easily triumphs over the substantial. One buys a company making real things – like mattresses – with debt itself. All of these brilliant financial innovations were not dreamt of in Nicholas I’s Russia; and yet, buying dead souls in order to take out a loan from the government to buy a substantial estate – Chichikov’s general plan – touched on the very essence of financialization. Touch on its intersection with the forces of life and death – which is why in the town of N. (a town Gogol describes in his notes as pure emptiness), a stout middle aged man, looking neither handsome nor ugly, having no real distinguishing trait about him, could, in the course of his business, eventually be mistaken by the townspeople for the Antichrist – that is, Napoleon – himself.

Meanwhile, in Köln, Marx is writing about dead wood and live ownership.

Marx, in the Holzdiebstahl articles, allows himself to speak of the “poorer” class - ärmere Klasse – which, for those of us who’ve done our time on the Marx job, followed the old man’s routines, read the letters, tapped the secondary literature, written our reports, know the drill – is an indication that we are in the early stages of the man’s career here, in this text. The Marx of 1860 knows that the class of the poor misconceives class – which describes levels within the system of production, not something as contingent as income. The class of workers may be poor, but their class status is defined by what they do. Meanwhile, as those covering the classical and neoclassical economists know, the poor remain fixed as a primary economic unit in their schemes and dreams, in crude opposition to the ‘rich’. For class has dissolved as an organizing property among the economists, and economic units are determined outside of their place in the system of production – outside of their productive function, which enters in terms of a labor market. The labor market is a marvelous thing, a beast as fabulous as any reported by Pliny. The labor market, of course, then gives us a throwback sociology, which gives us these things – the poor, the rich – as a sort of hybrid of magic and statistics. In the neo-classical world, the rich face the poor, in the first instance, without mediation, and then, in the second instance, in an interface mediated by the state, that ‘redistributes’ money from the rich to the poor. This is the fairy tale, this is the leitmotif, this is how it is told on all holiday occasions. And thus, so much is allowed to the second of Polanyi’s double movement – that is, the movement that pulls against and curbs the social excesses of the pure market system. The state, here, functions solely to take care of the welfare of the poor. On the other hand, the first movement is ignored – in which the state redistributes, indeed, makes possible, the welfare of the rich. The state is the dead machine that creates its live doctor Frankenstein – that is, private property itself. A process that accompanies capitalism down to the present day, where private property can now be had in the genes of a virus; we cut up the planet’s atmosphere and apportion it out. And so property emerges where no property was – and so accustomed are we to this phenomenon that we do not even think about or see it.

Thus, even at this point in his life, Marx – without his essential tools of class and the system of commodities – understood that this ‘side of the economy is, as it were, being twisted out of shape by the application of categories that do not reflect the dynamic axis of the economic system – in fact, seem as though they were designed to obscure it. The law is no longer written on stone tablets, but jimmied into place by those who control the legislative activity. All of which rather disturbs the high abstractions of the philosophy of law taught to Marx in Berlin. And – as the articles on wood theft show - the greatest of these misprisioning category-makers and voluntary blindspots turns out to be the divide between the private and the public spheres, which is ideally true, and practically a sham.

 Yet, as I’ve pointed out, at this point in his career Marx is still working with these categories, still looking at socialism with the eyes of a lawyer – or rather, a philosopher of law. There is an old and oft told tale about how all of that works out, which skips over the Rheinisher Landtag and puts Marx in a capsule with Hegel, where they struggle for dominance. And who am I to object? The tale is all well and good and philosophisch like a hardon – but we should remember that Marx isn’t, actually, in a capsule, nor is he simple a figure in the history of philosophy, with its Mount Rushmore like heads. Neither the law nor justice jumped out of Hegel’s encyclopedia. The law was something any peasant, any Josef K., could bump into in the midst of life, in a wood. The legal approach to property, Marx will find out, is one-sided – insufficient. It is only when this insufficience gets too big for its britches and goes around presenting itself as the totality that we fall into mystification.

 Marx already touches on parts of that mystification in these articles – but I feel irresistibly impelled, by every imp in my bloodstream, to sample some Gogol here, who had a knack, a supernatural knack, for dramatizing muddle. In the 9th chapter of Dead Souls, as we watch two women devise, between them, a story about Chichikov’s plan to elope with the governor’s daughter for which they haven’t a shred of evidence or even a thought that proceeded their confab – as this beautiful error is hatched in their gossip, and the two women become more and more descriptions of themselves – the agreeable lady and the lady who is agreeable in all aspects – Gogol pops his head out to make a rather astonishing case that this is the equivalent of what happens when the historian – shall we even say, the universal historian? – conjectures a story into the world:

 

That both ladies finally believed beyond any doubt something which had originally been pure conjecture is not in the least unusual. We, intelligent people though we call ourselves, behave in an almost identical fashion, as witness our scholarly deliberations. At first the scholar proceeds in the most furtive manner, beginning cautiously, with the most diffident of questions: ‘Is it not perhaps from there? Could not such-and-such a country perhaps derive its name from that remote spot?” Or: Does this document perhaps not belong to another, later period?” Or: “When we say this nation, do we not perhaps mean that nation there?” He promptly cites various writers of antiquity and the moment he detects any hint of something – or imagines such a hint – he breaks into a trot and, growing bolder by the minute, now discouses as an equal with the writers of antiquity, asking them questions, and even answering on their behalf, entirely forgetting that he began with a timid hypothesis; it already seems to him that he can see it, the truth, that it is perfectly clear--- and his deliberation is concluded with the words: “So that’s how it was, that is how such-and-such a nation should be understood, that’s the angle from which this should be viewed!

 

To so radically equate gossip with historical philosophy leads us, surely, to Marx – if only because Gogol, too, is responding to the ‘historical school’ that derives from Herder, Schiller and Schelling; and because Marx, like Gogol, has an eye for the principle of the ludicrous. There are two ludicrous themes in the wood theft articles. One consists in how, exactly, law is re-creating the status of the private property holder in the face of his history – “for no legislation abrogates the legal privileges of property, but it only strips it of its adventurous character and imparts to it a bourgeois character”. There is certainly an undertone in this description, which makes the normalization of feudal law into a cynical play, a game of dress down and dress up, of stripping the adventurer and imparting to him the burger’s placid certainties, that reminds us of Gogol’s Insprector General – and may have been meant by Marx to refer to Beaumarchais. No undertone of comedy is ever insignificant in Marx. Our second ludicrous theme consists in the parallel Marx draws between the modal status of the windfallen wood and of the poor. The wood that by custom is gathered in the forest – wood that is scattered, strewn - is cut off from the organic tree, and thus becomes philosophically unnecessary and organically dead. Meanwhile the gleaners, the poor are also cut off, in as much as their customary rights are contingent [zufaellige] concessions, and thus their very existence, insofar as it is based on these customs, is outside of justice [Recht] – which puts it in Robin Hood’s realm, apart, accidental. In fact, in a beautiful phrase, Marx claims that the custom [Gewohnheit] or usages of the poor are the “anticipation of a legal right.” The spirit of Benjamin, the angel of history Benjamin so fiercely invoked, floats over this idea that the little tradition, the shared usages of the peasants, anticipates the moment of their legal recognition in the future. That anticipation is, of course, the revolution.

On balance

 

 While the aesthetic sphere is full of objects corresponding to the sense  of sight or of hearing, there are no objects directly correlating to the the sense of balance. Dance and sports are the closest we get. Roger Caillois was clever in noticing the role of dizziness in certain kinds of games, which he categorized under the rubric ilynx. Caillois was not a systematic thinker; he was also a Cold War liberal of the very anti-marxist type. These two facts have to be held in mind when reading Jacques Ehrman’s terrific attack on Caillois in “Homo Ludens revisited” (1968), which holds a special place in the history of deconstruction in America.  Ehrman’s attack must have sounded like Martian in 1968, while now it is part of our lingo:

“For finally, if the status of "ordinary life," of "reality," is not thrown into question in the very movement of thought given over to play, the theoretical, logical, and anthropological bases on which this thinking is based can only be extremely precarious and contestable. In other words, we are criticizing these authors chiefly and most seriously for considering "reality," the "real," as a given component of the problem, as a referent needing no discussion, as a matter of course, neutral and objective.”

Still, given the limitations of Caillois ideological adherence to the White Mythology, it is also true that Caillois provides the elements for throwing into question – that is, getting dizzied by – the “very moment of thought given over to play.” Ehrman’s thesis has still not inflected our official historiography, which looks towards vast economic forces, or a high concept notion of politics, as its objects, and leaves aside such things as drugs, inebriation, sport, etc. as minor concerns. You will find much more about drugs and drug smuggling in journalistic history accounts than you will find in any recent academic history of, for example, Cold War America, thus separating “ordinary life” from the “extraordinary” life of the historical process.

The meeting of ordinary life and extraordinary life in the governance of our somatic chemical structure does, I think, go back to how an official sense of balance is maintained and idealized in the moral sphere. Ilynx is not easily exorcized, and it pops up in philosophy too – that very peculiar discourse of extraordinary life. Marx’s notion, or non-notion, of revolution plays an illynx like role in his larger framing of modernity.  Nietzsche’s notion of the “eternal return of the same” – that reactionary version of revolution – is, I think, a form of vertigo, of getting lost in time and space, in as much as time and space are themselves lost, never original, always copied.

Emile Cioran, in the Twilight of Thoughts, writes about vertigo as an existential expression of the most radical doubt. I think vertigo is an important, maybe a governing condition in Cioran’s work. For Cioran, the verticality of the human animal is primary to that animal’s domestication – it precedes language. Vertigo is thus a strike against the empire of the human.

“Everything that is not inert must, in different degrees, support itself. And how much more must man, who only accomplishes his destiny inventing certitudes and only maintains his position by the tonic of illusions. But he who begins to face himself, who slips into the transparency of his own position, who is a man only through the indulgences of his memory, can he still call upon the traditional support, his animal verticality, can he still hold himself up when he is no longer himself?”

For Cioran, the fall into time is really a fall, a threat to the backbone, a passage down and down the dark well.  In Cioran’s opinion, a romantic anarchic one, all of history is an injury to the sense of balance.

 

Which brings me to an instance of balance finding itself. I saw this. I saw it this Sunday, in Parc Royal, when Adam showed me how he could ride a bike. He had tried bike riding last year in Montpellier, but he never made it past the stage  of his parents holding him up. This year, after ardently wishing for a bicycle, one appeared under, or not really under but leaning next to, the Christmas tree. We took him out to Parc Picasso, one cold Thursday, and went racing about with him. It was A. who figured out that the perfect thing was to hold onto the back of his coat while he pedalled along, his little helmet slopping jauntily over to one side. She would let go for ten seconds, twenty. Then, catching up, hold again. Saturday, I did not go with them to the Parc. And as I was sitting at home, pretending to work, I received a video from A. It showed Adam biking by himself. Biking all around the course in the Parc Royal! I was filled with a parent bird feeling. The nestling spread its wings. The vacant air became a living thing. The boy, 8 years old, attached to a metal frame and two wheels, found his balance Tao. Joy filled the world.

The part that is left out by the thinkers of vertigo.