Oppositional character under capitalism: underground men and beasts 1

“Let the following stand as a remarkable proof of the frivolous nature of the magic art. Of all animals it is the mole that the magicians admire most! a creature that has been stamped with condemnation by Nature in so many ways, doomed as it is to perpetual blindness and adding to this darkness a life of gloom in the depths of the earth and a state more nearly resembling that of the dead and buried. There is no animal in the entrails of which they put such implicit faith, no animal they think better suited for the rites of religion …” Pliny, Natural History

There are two undergrounds in the Modern era, distinguished mainly by who or what inhabits them. One is the underground of the mole or beast; one is the underground of the revolutionary or reactionary. They touch each other, but they stem from different beginnings – one from magic and nature, the other from waste and the order of the city.

The first takes its emblem from this moment in Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5, after Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost of his father, when he swears his friends to secrecy and – as the stage directions say – “the ghost cries under the stage” three times:


HAMLET

Never to speak of this that you have seen,
Swear by my sword.

Ghost

[Beneath] Swear.

HAMLET

Hic et ubique? then we'll shift our ground.
Come hither, gentlemen,
And lay your hands again upon my sword:
Never to speak of this that you have heard,
Swear by my sword.

Ghost

[Beneath] Swear.

HAMLET

Well said, old mole! canst work i' the earth so fast?
A worthy pioner!

The old mole is, of course, a spirit – the spirit of the dead king, unrightfully deprived of his life and throne. The spirit is, as well, the announcer of dreadful news, not only of murder but of incest. It is the spirit of sovereignty in the underworld, and what it urges is secrecy and action. The phrase is revived in Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy to apply to the spirit of reason:

“For it has taken a long time for philosophy in our time to have been brought forth; so tardily and slowly it [the spirit] works to bring itself to this goal. What we can see in a brief time in memory went by in reality in this long fashion. Because in this the concept of the spirit strives, aptly in itself, with its whole concrete development, riches, external subsistence, to develop itself, advance in itself, and develop out of itself. It always strides forward, because only the spirit is progress. Often it seems to forget itself, to be lost; but inwardly opposed to itself, it is inwardly working forward – as Hamlet says of the ghost of his father, “bravely done, honest mole” – until it, strengthened inwardly, now breaks the surface of the earth, that separated it from the son, its concept, so that the earth crumbles. In such times it puts on seven mile boots where the earth, a soulless, rotten building, has collapsed, and it shows itself in the shape of renewed youth. This work of the spirit, to know itself, to find itself, this activity is the spirit, the life of the spirit itself, Its result is the concept, that by which it is grasped: the history of philosophy the clear insight, that the spirit willed this in its history.”

This sense of the old mole as not only the revengeful sovereign but the spirit of reason – and of history, in as much as history is moved, that is, has its historicity, not in the natural laws that govern time and place, but by the dialectical ones that govern the sense of time and place – puts one underground, of the mole, in contact with another underground, that of the revolutionary.

This is the second underground, that of the sewer and the city. It has a less clear history, since it is stamped with its poetic form after it has existed as a kind of historic legend. Let me propose Marat as the first inhabitant of this underground, which is made not by a creature under the earth, but by a builder under the city.

The underground, here, is more plainly a sewer. And the sewer is not just the mechanism by which the city’s wastes are voided, but also a refuge from power in the city. It mirrors dethroned sovereignty in being the place of abjection. Yet it is also the place from whence comes a threat to destroy the order of the city.

In Donald Reid’s Paris Sewers in Sewerman, there is a useful account of the association between the sewer and Marat. It was known that the sewer served as a hiding place for criminals in the 18th century, and it was also a fact that Marat had, at various points in his life, had to hide from the cops, or – in the days before the Revolution – from angry patrons. Marat’s skin, famously, was covered with running sores, the symptoms of prurigo. He emitted a disturbing body odor. All of which could be taken as signs of some disease contracted in the depths, among the wastes.

And yet, who are the wastes? In one of his malicious anecdotes, Chamfort tells us that Madame, the daughter of King Louis XV, was playing with one of her maids when she looked at the maid’s hand, then at her own, and said, “What? … you have five fingers too, like me? And she counted again just to make sure.” The creatures below, the wastes of the kingdom, the poor and the laborers, these seemed to rank among the wastes. Marat may not have seen this as clearly as a nineteenth century pamphleteer, but he attacked the order of the rulers with an astonishing vehemence, expressing the feeling of being one of those ‘thrown away”.

Hugo plays upon these images in the chapters in the fifth book of Les Miserables dedicated to Pierre Emmanuel Bruneseau, Napoleon’s inspector of the sewers. Hugo’s imagination was seized by the fact that Bruneseau made an expedition beneath Paris to explore the sewers, just as though he were exploring a different continent. For the sewer tunnels had been erected without any systematic order – like the Spirit in Hegel, they advanced, but they were also inwardly contradictory. Bruneseau proposed to map them so that they could be organized, as so the frequent flooding of the streets with filth from the sewers could be averted. This expedition, or really, series of expeditions conducted from 1805 to around 1812, resulted in a published report. Hugo’s account is about details left out of the report, which may be the author casting his fiction in the glamour of journalistic truth, or may be the result of private information he had actually gathered about these expeditions. In any case, at one point the team comes upon a rotting grill between two branches of the sewer:

“The most surprising encounter was at the entry to the Grand Egout. This entry had been closed, in the past, by a grill of which there remained only the joints. On one of the joints was found a sort of shapeless, soiled rag, which, without doubt, arrested there in the passage, had floated in the shadows until it finally came to the point of being almost unthreaded. Brunesceau approached his lantern and examined this bit of cloth. It was of very fine batiste, and distinguished in one of its less eaten away corners buy a heraldic crown interwoven into it above the letters : LAVBESP. The crown was that of a marquis and the seven letters signified Laubespine. They recognized that they were viewing a piece of the winding sheet of Marat. Marat, in his youth, had had his loves. It was when he was part of the house of the comte d'Artois in his quality as doctor of the stables. Of these loves, historically affirmed, with a great lady, there remained to him this bedsheet. A wreck or a souvenir. At his death, as it was the only fine linen that he possessed, he’d been wrapped in it.”

This filthy, stained bit of bedsheet was the veritable flag of the underground man.

A more ordinary story is told by Michelet. ‘The mise en scene,” he writes, “ counts for much in the revolutionary life.” Marat, he claims, liked to associate himself with his hiding place, in the basement – the ‘cave’ – of the Cordeliers.

The chapter before, Hugo had written, about the sewers, sous la confusion des langues il y avait la confusion des caves. Dédale doublait Babel. (under the confusion of tongues there was a confusion of caves: the labyrinth doubles Babel). This notion that, under the great metropoles there was a sort of Venice of shit – an anti-city – comprehends an old mythic idea of the labyrinth. In Tim Ingold’s History of Lines, there is a consideration of those intricate designs, those multiply crossing lines, whose purpose, according to anthropologist Alfred Gell, is apotropaic. “By this he means the practice of inscribing complex and
visually puzzling designs upon surfaces in order to protect those sheltered
behind them from attack by evil spirits or demons.” Gell’s idea was that the labyrinth was the same kind of apotropaic design. Ingold disagrees – this is an instance where the effect of a trace – which is a line on a surface – is confused with a thread – that is, a line with its own surfaces.

“But as an explanation of the labyrinth, Gell’s suggestion is wide of the
mark. This is because it assumes from the outset a kind of ‘demon’s eye
view’ – an aerial perspective from which the overall layout of the maze
may be surveyed and represented in a pattern-like form. Such a perspective,
however, is not available to the terrestrial traveller who is already embarked
upon a journey across the earth’s surface – a journey that is tantamount to
life itself. The entrance to the maze marks the point not at which he touches
down upon the surface, but at which he goes underground. Now as an interface
between earth and air, the ground is a kind of surface that is visible from
above, but not from below. It does not have another side. Thus at the very
moment of going underground, of entering the labyrinth, the surface itself
disappears from sight. It appears to dissolve. This moment marks the transition
from life to death. Thenceforth – and quite unlike Gell’s demon which,
caught in the contemplation of an apotropaic pattern, is glued to a surface –
the ghostly traveller finds himself in a world without any surface at all. Every
path is now a thread rather than a trace. And the maze of passages, never
visible in its totality, can only be reconstructed by those few – such as the hero Theseus, or the Chukchi shaman who drew the sketch for Bogoras –
who have visited the world of the dead and made it back again.


In Custine’s account of his tour of Russia in 1839, he remarks that Nijni Novgorad, a ‘bazaar town”, “reposes on a subterranean city, a superb, vaulted cloaque, an immense labyrinth where one loses oneself, if one penetrates without an experienced guide. Each street of the fair section of the city is doubled by a superior gallery which follows it under the earth over its complete length and serves as the outlet for filth. These sewers constructed of building blocks are cleaned many times a day byy a multitude of pumps which are used to draw water from the nearby river. One penetrates into these galleries by large stairways made of beautiful rock.”

Magnificent filth – the waste that waits for its moment. This is the pole that connects the revolutionary to the reactionary in the formation of the oppositional character under capitalism. It connects the man in the sewer, or, more prosaically, the man in the basement of the Cordelier club, to the man under the floorboards, the man in a mousehold – Doestoevsky’s underground man.

the anthropological use of the novel

In his preface to Anthropology from the Pragmatic Point of View, Kant wrote:

“Finally, there are those things that are not, in truth, sources of Anthropology, but supplements [ Hülfsmittel] to it: world history, biographies, and yes, even plays and novels. Because although both of the last are not actually founded in experience and truth, but only in poetic imagining, and the exaggeration of characters and situations are allowed wherein persons are set as in dream images, and this seems to hold nothing out for the teaching of the knowledge of mankind, still these characters, as they are sketched out by a Richardson or a Moliere, must have their fundamental features taken from out of the observation of the real action and forbearance of men because they, although exaggerated to a degree in quality, must after all still agree with human nature.”

The key to the exaggeration of the artist is the degree of accuracy of his observation of the characters and situations of human kind. But what kind of accuracy is it that is pitched against exaggeration? It is not the mathematical precision of science; rather, what holds the correspondence together, here, is what is plausible. The “agreement” with human nature is not a correspondance with natural fact, but an correspondance to what we consider to be a plausible account of what humans do.

Evans, in Aristotle’s Concept of Dialectic, claims that Aristotle uses two words, endoxos and eikos, to speak of a certain kind of reasoning from probabilities. The two words are often confused in translation to mean ‘what is generally received” or what is plausible. Endoxos can mean famous or glorious, or it can be applied to views that have a certain weight, that come with a certain reputation; endoxon can mean a common belief, a commonplace or view. The weight of a view, its human probability, comes, then, not from some fact about the world, but from the regard we have for the source of the view, or in other words, the regard we have for the persons who, we suppose, have the view. The plausible is, thus, always a view that refers to some class or group. That view of a group, the opinion held by the public – and what counts, here, as the public – the consensus, the serious, is all encrypted in the exaggerations of ‘a Richardson or a Moliere”. The writers are, in a certain sense, allowed the dreamer’s freedom to distort. But, as with dreams that we consider to hold truths about the past or future, through the distortion we can read a certain message. The message, for the anthropologist, concerns what is magnified in dramatic incidences – that is, the elements of a character. And what gives the character its unity is the logic of the plausible, the inferences that find their objective side in, say, the deductions of Sherlock Holmes – who understands character in terms of the neglect of a sleeve, or the tilt of a hat. This logic, as Aristotle says in the Topics, defines the dialectical method:

“Now reasoning is an argument in which, certain things being laid down, something other than these necessarily comes about through them. (a) It is a 'demonstration', when the premises from which the reasoning starts are true and primary, or are such that our knowledge of them has originally come through premises which are primary and true: (b) reasoning, on the other hand, is 'dialectical', if it reasons from opinions that are generally accepted. Things are 'true' and 'primary' which are believed on the strength not of anything else but of themselves: for in regard to the first principles of science it is improper to ask any further for the why and wherefore of them; each of the first principles should command belief in and by itself. On the other hand, those opinions are 'generally accepted' which are accepted by every one or by the majority or by the philosophers-i.e. by all, or by the majority, or by the most notable and illustrious of them. Again (c), reasoning is 'contentious' if it starts from opinions that seem to be generally accepted, but are not really such, or again if it merely seems to reason from opinions that are or seem to be generally accepted. For not every opinion that seems to be generally accepted actually is generally accepted. For in none of the opinions which we call generally accepted is the illusion entirely on the surface, as happens in the case of the principles of contentious arguments; for the nature of the fallacy in these is obvious immediately, and as a rule even to persons with little power of comprehension. So then, of the contentious reasonings mentioned, the former really deserves to be called 'reasoning' as well, but the other should be called 'contentious reasoning', but not 'reasoning', since it appears to reason, but does not really do so.”

What is “generally accepted” is what is endoxos. There is, of course, a difference between a literary character and an argument, even in the most didactic of texts, but literary characters, in Kant’s view – a view that is ‘generally accepted’ by a philosophic tradition going back to Aristotle – are made out of what we would expect, and a little bit more – that little bit being a matter of the art of the observer.

In an essay by Genette on vraisemblence (or plausibility) and motivation in literature, he quotes a letter from Bussy-Rabotin to Madame Sevigne concerning The Princess de Cleves in which he decries one of the actions of the heroine for partaking of what ought not to be done, even if such things are done. What happened in the novel “should only be said in a true story.”

Bussy-Rabotin’s sentiment is one we can easily recognize. It is alive in the way people speak of books, plays, movies, tv. But, oddly, it drives more of a wedge between what Aristotle called the demonstrative and the plausible. It is as if we have gone through the mirror of art and come out on the other side, for the truth of art is precisely the contrary of what “should only be said in a true story.” This is not, I must emphasize, an aesthetic that died in Madame Sevigne’s salon – you have merely to hear politically committed people speak of a film or a novel to realize that there is a whole political bienseance in which what might be said in a true story should not be said, or should be said otherwise, in a false one.

In The Princess de Cleves, in fact, Madame de la Fayette underlines the violation of the rules of bienseance, and even plausibility, by having her heroine write that her confession to her husband is ‘without example’ – or as Genette puts it, has the support of no generally accepted maxim.

Genette applies the system of the plausible to the question of motive, which is after all the test of the property and distinctness of character – that is to say, the element that diversifies character. The avaricious character is motivated by love of money to make a certain deal. The saint is motivated by love of humanity to help a certain person. But the modern, Genette points out, is characterized by a movement away from the maxim, the reputation, the consensus, the ‘what ought to be’, and towards the gratuitous, the implausible – towards what Manchette, the French mystery writer, called the behavioristic style, in which action does not refer, explicitly, to motive. Genette calls this the decline, or transformation, of the discursive voice in the novel. Balzac, for Genette, is the classic example of a writer whose authorial asides – representing the whole system of the plausible - intrude the discursive, or the explanation by way of motives, into the heart of the story. But the massiveness of Balzac’s explanations actually undermine the system of the plausible by revealing the arbitrariness of the “psychological explanation”. One is continually coming across very different, even contradictory, psychological explanations in Balzac for the same type of action. As Genette points out, Balzac’s generalizations can often be reversed, as for instance in his novel The Cure of Tours, when he writes, “Blessed are the poor in spirit! He could not, like many stupid people, support the boredom that was caused in him by the presence of stupid people. People without wit are like weeds that like to grow in good soil, and they like to be amused as much as they bore others.” As Genette says, such explanations almost irresistibly call for “Ducassian inversion” – that is, for the kind of inversion of the common maxim that pleased Lautreamont. In so elaborately motivating his characters, Balzac ‘protests too much’: he betrays the “arbitrariness of the recit.” For, of course, the Cure of Tours can do almost anything. There is no natural control upon him, no fact that impinges on his making. This can lead to the direction of apparently immotivated action or, as Genette observes, to the absolute expansion of discourse, or the ‘essayistic’ – from Balzac to Proust there is less distance than one thinks.

It is the plausible, then, that is engaged by the dialectical. In consequence, dialectic always bears the slight impress of the “who” that believes, makes a maxim, follows a norm – that is, the slight impress of the banal.

Elia meets Karl Marx at the South Sea House

When Charles Lamb, a scholarship boy at Christ’s Hospital, was fifteen, one of his patrons, Thomas Coventry, had a discussion with a City merchant, Joseph Paice, concerning the boy. According to Lucas’s biography of Lamb, Coventry, a bearish plutocrat of the pure 18th century type, said to Price, ““There is a lad that I placed some years since in the Blue Coat school, now on the point of leaving it, and I know not what on earth to do with him.” “Let him have the run of the counting house till something better offers,” said Mr. Paice.” (71)

The conversation of such men was like unto the grinding mechanism of fate, and they shaped Charles Lamb’s entire professional life from that moment on. Or rather, they shaped one of the outstanding facts about Lamb: he made his money as a clerk. He was first with Mr. Paice at the South Sea House, and then went into the accounting department at India House.

Lamb is one of the exemplary clerks of literature. He wrote about it; he lived it; he chafed within it, he knew the chair, desk, and great books where the figures flowed down the page, representing empire and time. He worked in the ruins of one colonial venture – the South Sea House – and in the midst of the short flourishing of another – the India House – during a period in which the merchant class was in need of the science of political economics and was getting it from the likes of James Mill (India House) and David Ricardo (merchant/speculator). In fact, the India House and its successor, the India Colonial office, was a site associated with some of the great Victorian intellectual families – the Mills, the Stephens, the Stracheys. Under its wing, Macaulay sortied out to India and laid the foundation for the application of utilitarianism to law, a work completed by James Fitzjames Stephen.

In a footnote to H.W. Boot’s informative article, Real incomes of the British middle
class, 1760-1850: the experience of clerks at the East India Company (1999), Boot defines the term clerk like this:


“… it conjures up Dickensian images of oppressed men on meagre incomes struggling to
maintain respectability. In fact 'clerk' was a common appellation applied to a large group of
occupations ranging from the poorest menial clerk who never earned more than C100 p.a. to men
who carried the highest administrative and financial responsibilities in government, commerce,
and finance. “

Lamb’s first Elia essay is a portrait of the clerks of South Sea house. The characters are, evidently, composites, but the survey of this “Noah’s ark’ of ‘odd fishes’ catches the monumental ritual and economic importance of the desk and the counter, which become symbolic centers of the life story. What the bed is to the libertine, the desk is to the clerk. In each of his profiles, Lamb divides the life into out of office information hobbies (and eating), and in the office propinquities (and eating). As in Bartleby, one notices the strong place of food in the office. Food not only provides the energy for labor power – it provides a sensual outlet to another world, one that is not chained to the desk. In the same way, the hobbies are rather like the larger shadow the clerk casts as he makes his way out into the candlelit hours of his free time. “John Tipp”, for instance, is an amateur musician, and has a life as one, with other amateur musicians. But he also has another life: “But at his desk Tipp was quite another sort of creature,. Then all ideas tht were purely ornamental were banished. Thence all ideas, that were purely ornamental, were banished. You could not speak of any thing romantic without rebuke. Politics were excluded. A newspaper was thought too refined and abstracted.” (Vol. 2, 9)

The major portion of Lamb’s time as a clerk was spent at the India House. He was received there on April 5, 1792, in the accounting department. At that time, according to Boot, the India House was one of the biggest employers in London, paying 1,730 persons to keep the books, supervise the docks, guard the sheds, etc. In Lamb’s case, he gave a five hundred pound bond and agreed to work there for three years on probation, at the end of which he was to receive a salary, which began at 40 pounds and rose, the next year, to 70. He spent exactly thirty three years there, and was released early, with a handsome retirement, no doubt due to his writing and his celebrity. In one of the great Elia essays, The Superannuated Man, he describes the event of his retirement in terms of time. As a clerk, he had Sundays off: “but Sundays, admirable as the institution of them is for purposes of worship, are for that very
reason the very worst adapted for days of unbending and recreation. In particular, there is a gloom for me attendant upon a city Sunday, a weight in the air. I miss the cheerful cries of London, the music, and the ballad-singers—the buzz and stirring murmur of the streets.”

He also had vacation: “But besides Sundays I had a day at Easter, and a day at Christmas,
with a full week in the summer to go and air myself in my native fields of Hertfordshire.”

From his letters, one finds that Lamb had more free time than that – but as a composite portrait of the clerk’s life, this is representative.

After his retirement, Lamb describes the experience of freedom – freedom that is not political, but existential: “I was in the condition of a prisoner in the old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty years' confinement. I could scarce trust myself with myself. It was like passing out of Time into Eternity—for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have his Time all to himself.
It seemed to me that I had more time on my hands than I could ever manage. From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me.”

Let me depart from Lamb here, and bring into the picture Karl Marx’s writing about the agent of circulation, which has given rise to a lot of controversy among Marxist economists. On the one hand, in Capital II and III, Marx develops his notion of ‘unproductive labor’, by which he simply means those activities that are defined in terms of the circulation of the commodity, bought from the producer, and put on the market to be bought either by a consumer or another merchant or refiner. Marx also throws into the definition of unproductive labor those things appertaining to surveillance, management, etc. There has been a lot of controversy because the principles of the definition of unproductive labor, in Capital, are slightly at variance with the principles laid down in the Manuscript on Surplus Value from the 1860s. I myself think that the division between unproductive and productive labor is confused by taking the static view of it – in the course of time, an unproductive branch of labor can generate a producing infrastructure, while productive labor in some branch can, of course, become extinct, due to its being made obsolete by technology.

However, the reflections on commercial capital and money – Warenhandlungskapital and Handlunggeld – are decisive, and sociologically apt. This segment can be treated as an independent unit in the collective system of circulation. Looked at in terms of social phenomenology, Marx makes this Hermes place – the place of pure metamorphoses in which what happens is, in a sense, that nothing happens. When the producer realizes his surplus value by selling to the middleman, from the proceeds of which he again purchases labor power and material to continue producing, the middleman, the Tiresias of capitalism, has only begun. He has expended his capital, either borrowed or taken from his stock, to buy products wholly for resale. There is evidently no magic in this, and yet, like the producer, in the ideal case, the successful merchant realizes a profit. As Marx likes to emphasize, while the merchant’s employees are exploited just as the factory hands are, the merchant’s employees do not create surplus value. And although they may be formally exploited just as the worker is, there is a sociological difference that does drive a real divide between them.

About this, there is much to say. But for the moment, notice that for Marx, this commercial segment is subordinate to the true producers, the manufacturers. If the commercial segment becomes too important, accrues too much economic power, the manufacturer can, theoretically, erase the middleman and encroach into the merchant’s territory.

In fact, though, the dream of getting rid of unproductive labor – dreamt most recently by the advocates of the New Economy who projected that the computer maker would simply sell the computer on the internet, the automaker would sell the auto on the internet, etc., etc. in a happy deflationary spiral satisfying both customer and producer – does not happen.

Instead, as many Marxist economists (Sweezy, Moseley, Wollf) have pointed out, on many dimensions the composition of developed capitalist economies shows that unproductive labor – both in terms of surveillance work and in terms of circulation – becomes increasingly important in developed capitalist economies on several dimensions: for instance, in the number of people employed in unproductive labor and the amount of the investment of the GDP in unproductive branches of economic activity. In 1987, Edward Wollf estimated that as much as 40 percent of employees were unproductive laborers.

The peculiar sociological characteristics of this segment impress themselves upon the dynamic of this segment – for it is from this segment that most knowledge work, most representational work, has branched out.

It is here that the economic rationality of the classical type – homo oeconomicus – emerged, and plausibly describes the kind of strategies that make up the landscape of commercial metamorphoses. At the same time, it is here, too, that the alienation from the time of one’s life has found expression in the aesthetic sphere – in fact, thematically dominates the aesthetic sphere. This is important in as much as the population of the aesthetic, or cultural industries – driven originally by the necessity of closing the discontinuities that can arise in this segment of circulation when demand lacks or there is an oversupply of goods – overlaps the population that sits at the desks of the counting houses. The media that they have produced is the semiosphere in which all are now bathed, worker, housewife and clerk.

Michelet's plunge into the crowd

Michelet published his translation of Vico’s New Science, which gave him a key to the meaning of revolution, in 1827, three years before the revolution of 1830. Recall this was the year, as well, that Raphael made his pact with the wild ass’s skin. In his introductory discourse to Vico’s work, Michelet gave his own interpretation of the long cycles that organize Viconian universal history, and in so doing foretold his own work as a historian and mythographer. The great and self-conscious mythographies, like The Sea, or The People, or Woman, or most famously, The Witch, are cast in the heroic mode on the modern scale. Vico, Michelet explains, took it that in the infancy of the world – the world of the Cyclops, the pre-homeric world - a name such as Hercules and the concept of the hero are not completely separated. Vico, in Michelet’s reading, is doing something like what we see in Plato’s Cratylus, where the divine root of the word is a key to the crowd of generalizations to which it falls heir, a crowd that, like Dionysian bacchantes, tear out bits of meaning for themselves. In Michelet’s mythographic work, the crowd is oceanic, and the word of some general class – women, the people – will stand in for a type of giant. A new type of giant, the modern giant.

The discovery of Vico was Michelet’s key to escaping the imprisoning notion of the positivists that history is simply a mechanical progress, a view that allowed the positivists to take a deflationary view of revolution. For the positivists, there are always roundabouts, benevolent and rational policies, that render revolution obsolete. Taking Vico as his guide allowed Michelet to upset the equivalence between revolution and some benevolent set of alternative rational policies. Rather, in the heart of revolution is a force that no mechanical progress would predict or could divert. It is the force of the great cycles of history, breaking through the dead level of the mental tone of a civilization. For, in Michelet’s words, barbarism does not only apply to the commencement of society, but to its end. The second barbarism marks the fall of a social order, which is always in the service of the “two natural laws” of history that Michelet claims to pull out of Vico: “those who can’t govern themselves, will have to obey” and “the empire of the world is to the best”. The best – the meilleur – are not the morally best, but those who understand how to govern. Thus, the last period of a civilization is marked by the paradoxical application of those laws: “One hundred times more barbarian in the last period of civilization than they were in their infancy! The first barbarism was natural, the second is made of reflection. The former was ferocious, but generous; an enemy could flee or defend himself; the latter, not less cruel, is more perfidious and cowardly: it is in embracing that they love to strike. Thus don’t fool yourself: you see a crowd of bodies, but if you are searching for human souls, the solitude is profound; these are nothing but savage beasts.” (XL)

In 1842, when Michelet published The People, he had begun to give up the Christian belief that some God operated above history, insuring that the great cycles play themselves out. Barthes, in his book on Michelet, contrasts two modes of representation in Michelet: the survol, that is, the overflight, and the plunge. The plunge is both a method and a physical exercise – the water cure, or the plunge into a mudbath, where Michelet cured himself of his political and hypochronical complaints in 1854. Barthes too quickly, I think, identifies the survol with Michelet, connecting the men, the events, nature and history, when I believe the movement is not only towards the hypertrophy of Michelet’s egotism, but towards a populist politics. The plunge – as in plunging into the ocean – is the experiential mode of The People, as Michelet makes clear in the introductory letter to Quinet. Barthes is right to capture the moment of egotistic identification, for Michelet’s People are, as it were, emblematized in Michelet’s life – one in which, as he says, he worked with his hands, not only in ‘making books’, but in “composing them materially” – “I assembled letters before assembling ideas, I am not ignorant of the melancholy of the atelier, the boredom of long hours.” (58) Michelet was the son of a typesetter and worked in the family printshop. However, this plunge into the self’s history is the double of another plunge, which is also associated with the book: “When the progress of my History led me to occupy myself with contemporary questions, and I cast my eyes upon the books in which these questions were treated, I confess that I was surprised to discover them almost all in contradiction with my memories. Then I closed my books and I re-placed myself among the people as much as was possible; the solitary writer replunged into the crowd, he heard the noises, noted the voices.” (58)

And what did he note? The People is a sort of mixture of fieldwork, philosophy and historical insights, and bears some relationship with the journalistic sociology of those who explored the popular sectors for the new newspapers, or who wrote from the heart of those sectors. In many respects it is like Engels The Situation of the Laboring Class in England, although Michelet was never as ‘cool’ as Engels – Engels would not have written a chapter entitled : Du servage et de la haine.

It is in that first chapter that Michelet shows his ability to absorb the actual tendencies at work around him. Here he is on the factory system:

“Everyone who does not know how to do anything comes to offer himself to the manufacturer to serve the machines. The more they come, the more wages drop, the more they are miserable. On the other side, the merchandise, fabricated thus at a low price, descends to the reach of the poor, in such a way that the misery of the worker-machine diminishes somewhat the misery of workers and peasants, who are probably seventy times more numerous.” (96)

As in Engels, the privileged example is the manufacture of clothing. Michelet goes further than the facts of the price system, noticing that the changes in the clothing of the people are a moral fact, with which the economic fact is intrinsically interwoven. “One sees then what an immense and powerful consumer the people are, when they participate. The shops were emptied at one blow.” (97)

This economic and moral fact necessarily imposes politically on everyday life: :The machine, which seems to be an aristocratic force by the centralization of capital, is actually a powerful agent of democratic progress.” How? Michelet is not talking in quantitative terms, as an economist, but in qualitative terms, as an ethnographer. For what is the use value of a dress? One of its uses, instilled for millennia by way of sumptuary laws, was to distinguish between classes. What is happening is that this difference of appearance can no longer simply be assumed: “These are not simply physical ameliorations, it is a progress of the populace in the exterior and in appearance, on which people judge each other; it is, so to speak, visible equality.”

But there are counter-tendencies in tendencies, currents in currents. There are maelstroms. The change here comes at the price of subjecting the worker-machine to a systematic abasement. “The head turns and the heart contracts when, for the first time, one entes one of these feerique houses where the iron and the brass, polished, blinding, seem to go of themselves, have the air of things that think and will, while man, pale and feeble, is the humble servant of these steel giants.” (98)

Here is laid out a peculiarly Cartesian nightmare, one which constricted more than one heart in the nineteenth century. When Ruskin makes this his cause, his red-white objection to industrialization, he runs his objection in the opposite way than Michelet – he moves from the abjection produced by the machines to the abjection produced by their products. For Ruskin, the embourgeoisification of the people is a huge loss, not a gain. It is a loss of, for instance, the system that once put together cottage made clothing and fairs, traded for a false equality that will, inevitably, bleed to death the traditional society of the vast majority.

The issues here are confused who look for clear lines between the reactionary and the revolutionary, or the backwards looking and the progressive.

However, to return to the Michelet and Engels – there is one point in which they compliment each other as, so to speak, anthropologists of the great transformation. That is in the world of discipline enforced in the ‘fairy houses” where the steel giants do the thinking. In one section of The Position of the Working Class in England, Engels reproduces the rules in force at one of the factories in Manchester (which no doubt are reflected in other factories). Among them is this one: “Every worker who speaks to another or who is found singing or whistling will be fined six shillings.” (Engels 1892, 399)

Light is cast on the meaning of this prohibition by Michelet, who takes up the history of the machine-worker with the example of the tisserand – the weaver. The condition of the two are distinguished because the latter has the time to dream: It happens in manual work that follows our impulsion that our intimate thought, identifying with the work, sets it to the thought’s steps, and that the inert instrument to which one gives movement, far from being an obstacle to spiritual movement, becomes the aid and the companion. The mystical weavers of the middle ages were celebrated under the name Lollards beause, in fact, in working they lullabied, sant in a low voice, or at least mentally, some nurse’s song. The rhythm of the shuttle, pushed down and pulled up in four four time, is associated with the rhythm of the heart. In the evening there was often found that with the weaving of the cloth there was also woven, in the same numbers, a hymn, a complaint.” (99)

the philosophy of the diary

How do we – this we, this other and me, the writer, this shadowing and secret sharing editorial we! – gather our data about the formation of character under capitalism? What does ‘under capitalism” even mean?

One can imagine a computer, being steadily fed data concerning the everyday habits of the population that existed ‘under capitalism” for two hundred to three hundred years, storing it and collating it, tying, a cybernetic Varuna, person to person in the coils of its 0 and 1, from which would emerge, at some point, a hermeneutic, a heuristic, a set of axioms, or maybe simply a surrender to the ceaseless flow of info for its own sake.

One can imagine an economist making a model of what the character should be.

One can imagine a novelist tracing the events in some fictitious character’s life that are somehow meant to be typical.

Or one can keep a diary and make penetrating generalizations that go outward towards the world and inward towards one’s own peculiarities, a mutual articulation that is always perched in the doubtful state between the outward and inward, like Raphael’s hat. The diary keeper’s entries share some formal characteristics with the accountant’s – both rely on the spread sheet principle that objectifies time, both “account” – a word which, according to the OED, has its root in the Latin computare, which has a further root in putare, pruning trees or ‘cleaning”, purifying. Although putare could also mean counting. Let’s quote Girard Minaud, in La comptabilite a Rome: essai d’histoire economique…, quoting Emile Benveniste here:

Emile Beveniste considered that one ought to being with the technical sense of putare: “In following (from the base to the top) the count, to detach successively the articles which have been verified. From this, ‘to verify, purify””. This image can be understood by seeing the pruner begin his work from the lowest branches for progressing towards the height of the tree and attaining its summa. The procedure explains why the summa designated, for the ancients, what is called the “total” today, but also the ‘sum’. E. Benveniste has in effect taken care to specify, concerning addition: “In the classical civilizations this operation is conducted according to a different model than our own. One made the count of numbers superposed on one another not, as with us, from the highest to the lowest, but from the lowest to the highest, until attaining what they called the summa, that is to say, the superior number.” (169)

The tree, the accountant, the diarist and the computer – a root connects them all, and an inversion marks a history.

But of course the computer and the accountant have specialized in a certain branch of objectivity, while the diarist, the clerk of literature, prefers not to.
(tbd)

the thread

“The first distinction I would make is between two major classes of line,
which I shall call threads and traces. By no means all lines fall into either
category, but perhaps the majority do, and they will be of most importance
for my argument. A thread is a filament of some kind, which may
be entangled with other threads or suspended between points in threedimensional
space. At a relatively microscopic level threads have surfaces;
however, they are not drawn on surfaces.” – Tim Ingold, Lines: a brief history, 41

The God Varuna, for example, has the magical power to tie people at a distance by ties as magic as all sovereignty in these [indo-european] civilizations. Varuna is always omnivoyant, all powerful and a ‘binder’ by that very magic. Indra, himself, ties by the atmosphere that is his laces and his thread. Varuna acts like a binder with his passive reticulation, Indra proceeds by aggressive acts of imprisonment.” – Christian Werckele, “The power of the ephemeral and the network of the invisible”.

There are three themes that I should clarify here, should have clarified by now.
One is that the character of man or woman under capitalism is always in some relationship, whether voluntary or involuntary, knowing or unknowing, with the mythic rational economic agent, with homo oeconomicus. Though first explicitly given a name and a habitation in the golden years of mathematical economics, when the models were carved out of perfect and perfectly fictitious models of marketplaces structured by the irresistible attraction of an equilibrium between supply and demand, the myth has roamed far, in the century since the 1890s, among the policy papers, economics textbooks, legal codes, and in the popular mindset. The hero of economic rationality has even voyaged to all the disciplines and founded colonies there.

A second theme, which may seem unrelated (o bind these themes, great stringer of men!) is an opposing tug on the formation of character under capitalism. This is the tug of alienation. I take this theme primarily from Marx, not only because I think his construction of alienation in the 1840s supplies us with a perfect tool for understanding why capitalism is peculiarly oppressive, but also because, in Capital, he produced a picture of capitalist society that allows us to do nuance: for alienation varies according to the level in which the economic agent is placed. The alienation of the producers has taken the greatest share of attention, but the level of the producers, if we trust the (Engels edited) second and third books of Capital, is different from the level of the agents of circulation. One of my hypotheses is that the agents of circulation, which have become much more numerous than the producers in the developed economies, suffer from a different form of alienation, one that incorporates not only the alienation of the assembly line worker but, as well, the alienation that arises from the remove from production. Although Marx does not predict that the agents of circulation will become preponderant as the industrial system of production evolves, one can credibly draw on Marx’s insights to understand this story.

Foregrounded in this network of speculation, I want to look at a certain lineage within modernity, which inherited the reticular wisdom of the moralistes of the early modern period and transformed it into the clerk’s Dao. The clerks of literature, the clerks of the arts, figure here both as the makers of characters in which the stress and Sturm of capitalism is registered and as characters themselves. Indra’s net, here, becomes James’ In the Cage.

And then the third theme. For in tracing out these tendencies, or more frankly, creating this Begriffsroman, where concepts are the plot elements, I am struck by how the great theoreticians of modernization (Marx, Simmel, Weber, Foucault, etc.) have invested the story with an absolute sweep. The story is that of the iron cage – cages again! – in which all forms of archaic economic activity are ruined and buried under the system of economic rationality, until rationality becomes synonymous with self-advantage. The narrative, here, is epic, but I think it leaves out everyday life, that unpurged primitive remnant. When we plunge into the worlds of work or home, when we look at the now endless media net in which we all struggle, when, in short, we plunge into the negotium and otium, the public sphere and the private, we find the capillary work of earlier forms of exchange and reciprocity still as active as ever. They appear now as the favor you do a friend, now as the barbecue cookout, now as the shared task, now as mental illness and night sweats – they appear all over the place, barter and gift, earmarked money and piggy banks. All the archaic forms that bow to homo economicus return, secondary elaborations that spring up even in the most economically ‘rational’ institutions. This does not seem to me to be an accident, a feature of incomplete modernization, but the persistent, human supplement. The collective vision of the alienated clerks is of a world in which that supplement is extinguished.

These are my threads.

the outside and the inside of a hat: the decline of aura

So much depends upon the hat…

When Raphael is explaining the prison of debt into which he is forced in order to court Foedora, he speaks of a spectre that haunts him: “In the midst of poetry, in the midst of an idea, or at dinner, surrounded by friends, with happiness, with sweet raillery, I see enter the room a man in a chestnut colored suit, holding in his hands a dilapidated hat (un chapeau râpé). That man will be my debt, my letter of credit, a specter who will wilt my joy, who will force me to quit the table to speak to him…”

It is the dilapidated hat in the hand of the specter, in the hand of debt itself, Raphaël’s double – for the man is the spirit of Raphaël’s signature on the letter of credit – of which I’d like to speak. If a hat, in the Freudian dream language, is an augur of castration, what further effect is put into play by the delapidation of the hat?

Balzac has already alerted us, at the very beginning of Peau de Chagrin, that much will depend on the hat. In the first sequence in the book, as we follow Raphael’s trajectory through Paris, we find him going into a casino – at which point the authorial voice bursts out with the following commentary:

When you enter into a house of games, the law begins by despoiling you of your hat. Is this an evangelic and providential parable! Isn’t it rather a manner of concluding an infernal contract, with you in demanding I don’t know what stake? Is it to require you to keep a respectable attitude before those who are going to win your money? Do the police infiltrated into these social sewers insist on knowing the name of your hatmaker, or of yours, if you have inscribed it on the interior band? Is it at last in order to take the measure of your skull and construct an instructive statistical table on the cerebral capacity of gamers? On this point, the administration keeps a complete silence. But know well, hardly have you made a step onto the green carpet than you no longer belong to yourself .”

Balzac is capable of outbursts that predict all the styles to come – here, surely, we have the style of Melville, a sort of opium dream decoding of the fate of the world, as written in the language of the world’s little accessories. It is this warning that we should remember when reading of another night’s wanderings – the night in which Raphael, plucked of all his money and still unable to move the heart of Foedora, finds himself staring at his hat as the rain stops on a Paris street.

“And I always loved, loved that cold woman whose heart wanted every second to be conquered and who, in always effacing the promises of the previous day, the next day made herself into a new mistress. In turning under the grill of the Institute, a feverish movement held me in its grasp. I remembered that I hadn’t eaten. I didn’t possess a cent. And to top it all off, the rain had deformed my hat. How to approach, thenceforward, an elegant woman and present myself in her salon without a satisfactory hat? Thanks to my extreme care, even as I cursed the stupid and ignorant fashion for exhibiting the inside of our hats while keeping them constantly in our hands, I had up to that moment maintained mine in a doubtful state. Without being curiously new or dryly old, denuded of pelt or very silky, it could pass for the problematic hat of a careful man – but its artificial existence had arrived at its last gasp: it was wounded, dejected, over with, a true rag, worthy representative of its master.”
Raphael’s hat is, of course, ruined for show. And yet, what is this ruin? It is a question not just of keeping the hat new looking, but keeping this particular thing – a hat, a thing that protects the head from, among other things, rain and mud – in a doubtful state of care, which is exhibited by the inside of the hat – the coiffe, the band. Where, remember, the police might look for the name of the owner.
The outside and inside of Raphaël’s hat is a model of something uncanny inside use value – inside the artificial existence of the commodity.
While the state of the hat is a variable within the grammar of fashion circa 1830 that has gone out of fashion, one can easily find equivalents for the outside and inside of the hat today – for instance, in that perpetually doubtful thing, a pair of blue jeans.

markets and talismans (changed a bit)

The great metaphor for George Foster’s thesis of the image of the limited good, published in the 1960s, preceded George Foster by one hundred years: it is the talisman in Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin, or The Wild Ass’s Skin.

Treasure, treasure-hunting and rarity are all bound up with each other in a stubborn cosmic vision of the distribution of goods in the world that appears in our dreams, love life and friendship. This world is ruled, as I will point out multitudinously in this essay, by Nemesis. No one saw the affective changes that were occurring in the switch between the regime of the old economy and the new – the economy of Polanyi’s Great Transformation, the economy of growth – better than Jules Michelet. Michelet, writing in 1846, picks up on the difference between the terms 'treasure' and "money" to demarcate a division not only between the emotional regimes of wealth but in how these dominant affects correspond to a basic division between urban and rural society. For the peasant who comes to the city: “How difficult it is, what force one needs, what domination of oneself to hold money captive and the pocket sewed close, when everything solicits the worker! Add to this that the savings account that stands guard over an invisible money gives one none of the emotions of the treasure that is buried and dug up by the peasant with so much pleasure, mystery and fear…” [La Peuple, 95, my translation]

The People, Michelet’s experiment in a sort of romantic ethnography – using his own experience, hearing with his own ears the 'voices of the crowd' – is a shifty text, romantic, full of sentiments, displaying too much the pulses of its heart – and yet Michelet’s instincts for the larger social facts is very good. He sees very well, just as Marx does, that agriculture is being industrialized – it is for this reason that he compares a British agricultural economy that has devolved into an agribusiness that employs workers or tenents with the small holding farmers of France. But he also sees the tension between ‘invisible’ money and visible treasure, an object to be buried. It is a tension between the invisibility of the system and the hiddenness of piecemeal primitive accumulation. Latter in the nineteenth century, Georg Simmel will take up the issue of the difference between the money economy of capitalism and the ‘natural’ economy of the small holder. For Simmel, the affective side of economics – pleasure, mystery, fear – are not contingent or accidental properties that one can put to one side, but feed back largely into economics as it is incorporated – a death drive - in a whole way of life.

Balzac’s Human comedy doesn’t just try to capture the workings of French society from the Revolution to the apogee of the Bourgeois King, Louis-Philippe – in its many passages, incidents, cities, shuffles of character, essayistic asides, it crystallizes into plot and counterplot the cosmic vision of capitalist society at the moment when it first becomes aware of itself. Marx’s affinity for Balzac comes out of his similar venture in Capital, although Capital, of course, surveys the comedy from a different focal point, in which the Human is denuded of the moraliste’s universality that still raggedly clung to it for Balzac.

In The Wild Ass’s Skin, we are, once again, plunged into the world of the search for luxury objects and their seemingly odd markets, where the deals are all about valuing the ‘invaluable’. In this case, the object is a beautiful woman who has inherited a fortune – Foedora. She is first introduced to Raphaël, the novel’s protagonist, by Rastignac, under the category of her price: she is the unmarried possessor of an income of 80,000 livres. That income comes from investment in bonds – properly, she possesses 80,000 livres in ‘rentes’.
La peau de chagrin is a young novel, written in 1830 and published in 1831 and considered the first of the Human Comedy novels. It begins with the magical contract that, as I noted above, is a wonderful image of the limited good. Here is the premise of the book, unrolled at the very beginning, when we follow Raphaël de Valentin as he walks about in a fever, waiting for night to come so he can throw himself off a bridge. In the course of his wandering, he comes upon a shop full of odds and ends, and in it he finds a mysterious talisman made of onyx hide. The talisman is inscribed with a phrase in Arabic. Balzac, that master of cod learning, reproduces it and allows Raphael the knowledge to read the “Sanskrit”, as the owner of the odd shop calls it. promises to make the wishes of the person who uses it come true. “If you possess me, you will possess all. But your life belongs to me. God wills it. Desire, and your desires will be realized. But regulate your wishes according to your life. It is there. For every wish, I will shrink, like your days. Do you want me? Take me. God grants it to you. So be it!” And so the desire for fortune, the want realized, is paid for in kind – by a counter-gift of the days of one’s life. The talisman is the very image of one way of looking at the almost magical supply of goods and services that already, in 1830, could be felt on the horizons. The culture of growth never shakes off Nemesis, who balances and casts an evil eye on the “too much”.
Under this image, Balzac sets up Raphaël’s rescue from poverty and suicide. And it is after the talisman has realized the first of his wishes – for Raphaël is unexpectedly rescued from poverty and the feeling that he must commit suicide that very night – that we hear how Raphaël came to be in such a plight. It is a tale he tells a group of his friends, and some sympathetic demi-prostitutes.
I love the story, I love the operatic language that Balzac employs, I love the vital energy of this text that expands as the onyx skin contracts. I will pluck from my love the story of Raphaël’s hat.
Under a more secular magic spell, cast by Rastignac, Raphaël – who has been living happily on a pittance that he inherited, frugally, writing a philosophical work that he is sure will gain him esteem and the means to continue his esoteric studies – throws away that money in a mad attempt, via theater tickets, carriages and suppers, to seduce Foedora. Foedora is quite a name – a name that wreaks of foeter, of odor, and of foeter hepaticus, the breath of the dead, a medical term applying to the smell of the breath of patients having a certain genre of disease. In short, the name is vampiric. And so it is that Raphaël transitions from the man in the attic, struggling with his thoughts – the man who has prided himself on living on 1100 francs over a period of three years, “three sous for bread, two sous for milk, three sous of meat” every day, carefully managed – to a man on the burning streets of Paris in 1830 (the burning streets to which Michelet refers to when, in his History of France, he speaks of the moment when the great work appeared to him – when he saw how the fall of Charles X and the Revolution and all the kings could be fit into a Viconian system, a system of circles and counter-circle, a maelstrom, and needed to be written), looking at his hat.

use value blues: finding products of human labor after the deluge

I am going to take off from where I left off writing about the market in antiques and objets d’art in Cousin Pons. Let me suspend, for a moment, the notion of the image of the limited good, and return here to the symbolic regime of treasure.

As I have pointed out, this is a rather specialized secondary market – an after the deluge type of market, a combination of archaeology and panning for gold. In Balzac’s Cousin Pons, archaeology is one of the master metaphors, with now the authorial tone taking on the archaeologist’s role and disinterring Pons as a fossil, and now – descending a level to the characters in the plot itself - one of Balzac’s bourgeois heavies, President Camusot de Marville, giving a lecture on archaeology to his husband-hunting daughter, who has not recognized that Cousin Pons’ gift of a Watteau fan is not a ‘petite betise’, but evidence, on the contrary, that Pons is to be reckoned with.

“The reunion of knowledges that demands these ‘petites bêtises’, Cécile, he said, taking up his thread again, is a science which is called archeology. Archeology comprehends architecture, sculpture painting, gold work, ceramics, wood work, a completely modern art, lacework, etc. tapestry, in the end, all the creations of human labor.” [my translation]

It comes down to a question of human labor and its products. Yet the archeologist is not the capitalist, or not quite. His view of objects is aesthetic and historical, and his discoveries and finds transform the first, or primary time of the circulation of commodities into that of a second time, in which the trace of labor is valued for itself – the signature, the mark of the making, the mark of the time of the making, the archaeological ‘almost-nothing’ that gives the product of human labor its invaluable value – its collectable value.

clerks and moralists

Two notes on what I have been working on:

1. The literature of the moralistes, a literature which is, at the center, a reflection on character, is the great ancestor of the literature of the clerks, the marginal Daoist tradition that runs from the clerk Hamaan to the clerk Kafka. Character, for the clerks, is a ruin, a roofless and desecrated temple, an archaeological site – the clerks all respond, in one way or another, to the Bartleby principle: I would prefer not to. The world of the clerks reflect fully the two removes that characterize the modern – the remove from nature and from production – both removes, of course, managed by Capital. The clerks inherit the moralists lack of systematicity (the idea of the essai, of experience as a trial, an experiment), but among the clerks that lack has turned to hatred. And this hatred, what is it? It is hatred of the dominance of substitution, a fear of losing their interiority, their difference, completely to substitution. It is a fear that arises from their place as agents of circulation, in Marx’s terms.

2. When considering Pons, or the man who sacrifices himself to a deal, to the joy of the deal, for objects that are ‘useless’, that are ‘aesthetic’ – I have all too quickly brought up the term obsession, with all its psychoanalytic meaning. But obsession in the 18th or 19th century can be interpreted with the heuristics-in-use at the time.

on markets and choicemaking

I'm rerunning this post, with some changes, from 2005. I want to pick up Heilbroner's critique of the idea of choice by reviewing the controversy between the young Macaulay and James Mill concerning utilitarianism, which, on the surface, pitted Macaulay's conservatism against Mill's radicalism. The subject of Macaulay and utilitarianism is a confused one, as the older Macaulay used Bentham as a template for undertaking the production, ex nihilo, of a code of laws for the British Raj. A topic around which swirls much scholarly conflict.

But on to this post.

I stayed for a couple days in Malinalco in 2004 as the guest of a friend of my friend, M. One day, M. wanted to get some tomatoes and some underpants for her little boy. We walked around the cobbled streets. It was late afternoon. M. wanted to complete our task before the sun went down, because after dark, the pedestrian in Malinalco is prone to attack from the packs of dogs that suddenly seem to materialize out of the shadows. Residents have gates to shut after dark, so they can avoid unwanted canine intrusion.

To get the underwear, we went to a few shops. None of them had the kind M. was looking for. To get the tomatoes, we didn’t go to a shop. We went to the market.

Like every Mexican village, there are some streets in the center of town upon which, every day, venders pitch their stands. Some markets are elaborate, with vendors of Barbie dolls, sunglasses, hats, and computer games pitched next to vendors of cucumbers, watermelons, corn, and tacos. Some are less elaborate. An economist, looking at these structures, might well see materialization of the purest form of market – the one to one relationship between vendor and consumer is such that prices actually reflect real dickering, supply and demand in action.

However, since Karl Polyani’s day, economists have seen something else.
In the Summer, 2004 Social Research, dedicated to Robert Heilbroner, the economist who died last week, there were two articles concerned with Polyani and Heilbroner’s notions of the market. In one of the articles, “Heilbroner and Polanyi, a shared vision”, Robert Dimand notices that the two writers both felt that the key to economic history is not given to us by the neo-classical notion of the natural market. Rather, like Karl Polyani, the market as we know it on the larger, global scale – capitalisme, quoi - can only be understood in the context of its managed overthrow of pre-capitalist exchange systems.

Here are the opening grafs of Dimand’s article:

IN THE OPENING PARAGRAPH OF HIS INTRODUCTION TO A COLLECTION OF debates among Marxist historians and economists over The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism that were initiated by Dobb (1946), Rodney Hilton (1976: 9) recalled that Karl Polanyi (1948) "thought that Dobb had retained from Marx what was bad (the labour theory of value) whilst discarding what he, Polanyi, thought was Marx's "fundamental insight into the historically limited nature of market organisation.'" Beyond condescending praise of Polanyi's review for "a serious attitude to the problems of a Marxist analysis" and passing mention in the next paragraph that R. H. Tawney's review of Dobb "did not raise any of the general theoretical problems which Polanyi hinted at," Hilton (and the other contributors reprinted in the volume) proceeded to ignore Polanyi's challenge as thoroughly as any mainstream neoclassical economist could have done.

In contrast, Robert Heilbroner shared the fundamental insight that Polanyi derived from Marx, and brought it to the attention of millions of readers. Over four decades and in 11 editions of The Making of Economic Society, Heilbroner examined the replacement of socially embedded provisioning by the market as a means of organizing society and production during the Industrial Revolution, while in seven editions of The World Philosophers that spanned nearly half a century he explored the accompanying changes in how economists thought about the economy. In his vision both of how the economy had changed and how economic thought had interacted with these changes, Heilbroner stood shoulder to shoulder with Polanyi.”

One of the things philosophers have learned from Freud and Heidegger is that forgetting is a manufactured act – although the manufacturers may not quite understand their own intentions or the process that went into them. There were two, overlapping forgettings that constituted the ideological foundation of the Cold War in the American sphere. One was the forgetting of how this “replacement of socially embedded provisioning by the market as a means of organizing society and production during the Industrial Revolution” took place. This forgetting foreclosed on both the ravages of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America, and the cost of producing free market economies in the colonial sphere. The terror famines that occurred in Ireland and India under British rule, for instance, were dropped as a subject of discussion, or – in the case of Ireland – sentimentalized. It took Mike Davis’ book, The Victorian Holocaust, to revive interest in a series of famines that, at the turn of the century (circa 1900) in England, were well known to any educated English socialist.

The other great forgetting was about the wars that bubbled up in the capitalist world, finally ending in World War I. In fact, the whole history of the Russian Revolution was systematically distorted by cutting out the crucial facts of the war on the Eastern front – the senseless slaughter of up to two million Russians. Given the shadow of that fact, the bitter Civil War between the Red and White forces could no longer be told as a morality tale in which bad Reds killed wonderfully royalist Whites. Nor could one construct the nice myth of Lenin as the father of the Gulag with quite the straightforward indignation required, if one asks about the capitalist forces in Britain and Germany and France that authored a war that decimated 8 million people. That this slaughter was crowned, in hindsight, as a war in defense of democracy -- when, of course, it was a war in defense of a particular power arrangement among capitalist states, the governing classes of which were agreed on the necessity of perpetuating white power -- was a grim joke.

Polyani and Heilbroner, however, were exceptions to the Cold War rule. They would notice, about those markets, the use of public space, the margins of profit that were not derived from the rational bickering between seller and consumer but often on quite seemingly irrational prejudices on both sides of the buyer/seller divide, indicating different regimes of values. They both questioned the gauge of efficiency in the role of these markets – something M. and I discovered in our odyssey in search of underwear, here.

These issues were Heilbroner’s specialty. In the same issue of Social Research there is an exemplary Heilbroner piece, Economics as Universal Science, which quietly mocks those who, like Gary Becker or certain members of the Chicago School, claim that economics can act as the master-science for studying human behavior (plus, of course, a thrilling dose of sociobiology).

Heilbroner starts off by asking where we locate economies, if they have such modeling force in telling us about human behavior. His own premise goes like this:

“I shall undertake this task by starting from the premise that the continuity of society requires structured ways of assuring social order. These ways range from the routines and habits of daily life to formal institutions of law and order. In referring to this spectrum I shall use the term "sociological" as a portmanteau term that covers the order-bestowing influences of private life, of which incomparably the most important are the pressures of socialization exerted by parents on their offspring--pressures that teach children how to fulfill the roles expected of them in adult life. The second term, "political," I use in the conventional sense of the institutional means by which some group or class within society can enforce its will over other groups or classes. The definition of these terms is less important than my intention to describe a protective canopy of behavior-shaping arrangements, part informal and private, part formal and public, that protects the community from actions that would threaten its continued existence.

“Both the sociological and political elements in this canopy are fundamentally concerned with an aspect of social order and coherence that is usually referred to only obliquely. This aspect is the general state of obedience or acquiescence without which the armature of rights and privileges that defines any social order could be retained only by force and overt repression. With his customary candor, Adam Smith called this necessary aspect of society "subordination": "Civil government," he wrote, "suppose[s] a certain subordination." We shall return many times to this theme, but the challenge it raises should now be clear. It is the disconcerting idea that economics is socialization or
subordination in disguise.”

Heilbroner sees, however, that the ‘imperial” economist, as he calls him, can give two responses to the placement of the socius at the center of society. One is that the socius is actually a network of decisions, and hence of choices. Economics is the science that is going to rationalize that hodge-podge of choices by gauging it according to an optimal model that follows a simple rule: all choices are motivated by the perception of an advantage. It doesn’t matter if the perception is wrong, or distorted, or ignores long term advantages, etc. What matters is the logic of advantage.

The other answer, Heilbroner thinks, is to make economics the study of the division of labor that lies at the heart of the social order. Thus, subordination can again be wrapped into economics.

Heilbroner’s consideration of these options in the light of what Polyani calls the Great Transformation – the emergence of an international, hegemonic capitalist system in the last two hundred some years – is more insightful than the guff one usually gets from economists. Here are two more grafs to chew on:

"Economics thereby takes the economic system to be the living model of capitalism, containing within its categories and conceptions everything that is essential for its comprehension. It is here that economics betrays its fatal limitations as a universal science, and its knavish consequences as an imperial doctrine.

"The first such consequence is that economics itself appears as a neutral rather than a charged explanation system for capitalism. This becomes apparent in many ways. A term of great importance such as "efficiency," for example, is regarded as a quasi-engineering criterion, rather than one whose unspoken purpose is to maximize production as a profit-making--not a purely engineering--endeavor. Similar unnoticed sociopolitical meanings cling to other such terms, including "production" itself, which is counted in the national income accounts only insofar as it results in commodities, not use-values. In much the same fashion, the fundamental unit of the economic system is taken to be the rational maximizing "individual." The economic system is thus conceived as a society of hermits, not as an order of groups and classes.

"This concealment of a social order is most clearly evidenced when we notice the manner in which economics rationalizes functional income distribution. Marx wrote scathingly of Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre, each entitled to receive a reward for the contributions each has made to the social product, but modern economics has forgotten the fetishisms that Marx exposed. Of even greater importance, it has no explanation for, or interest in, the curious fact that the reward paid as net profit, which goes only to owners of capital, gives them only a "residual" claim on output, after all factors, including capital, have been paid their marginal products. In view of the repeated demonstrations of economics that the tendency of the market system is to eliminate such residuals as mere transient imperfections of the system, one must be a sociologist or political theorist to explain why owners of capital seem so eager to protect these dubious claims. Thus the manner in which the market supports the class structure of capitalism is a matter before which economics is silent--indeed, a matter of which it is, in some sense, unaware."

treasure hunting - the archaic economy of tomorrow!

Remark, here, on the double aspect of this transaction, at once modern and archaic. The modern aspect is found in the whole question of value: Pons and his fellow experts in bricabracology are commodifying, instead of monumentalizing, the past. About this aspect, I want to say a lot in this essay. I’m more interested, here, in the archaic aspect – that “merchandise of chance” - implicit in the very activity of treasure seeking in what the economists would call a secondary market. What is premodern here – and what, in fact, was never liquidated in modernity – is a way of thinking about treasure, about gifts, about bargaining, and about value.

I know about treasure from childhood, and from some vague memories of my grandmother, who was, during part of her life at least, very much the antique collector. In fact, one of my strongest childhood memories is reading in a rattan chair from the Philippines that erected itself, like a queen in shabby exile, on her back porch, during hot summer days. Surely I read Treasure Island sitting there.

In childhood, wealth is treasure, from the money saved in piggy banks to digging for imaginary pirate’s loot. I went on expeditions into the ‘woods’ around our neighborhood in suburban Atlanta with my friend Mark, tracing back streams into land that was already surveyed for the next wave of housing, looking for likely caches of Confederate gold.

The connection between the hidden and wealth reveals a mode of thinking about wealth from the point of view not of earning it – not of labor – but of finding it, of cutting the all too mortal tie of work. Yet the utopian, land of cockaigne aspect of things is only one determinant of the treasure myth. Treasures are guarded. Treasures are wealth in their most guarded form from the evil eye of the other. Treasures are about the powerful notion of wealth that has prevailed in agricultural based economies before the world of economic growth – before the world, that is, in which economic growth was expected, even assumed. This was a world ruled over by Nemesis – in which all the things of the world were scarce.

As Balzac explains, the pleasure that Pons took in his objets d’art, or the pleasure taken by the real collectors of Balzac’s acquaintance, or, I daresay, the pleasure taken by my grandmother, was greatly increased by the disparity between the price he (and them) acquired the piece for and its ‘value’. That value, like the value of any commodity, is realized in the market place. But the pleasure is realized in the finding of the treasure, which is materialized in the history of the bargain. Here, the forces engaged have to do with something like the hau of the Maoris, the spirit of the thing mentioned in Mauss’ Essay on the Gift. That spirit is engaged in the contests of ‘prestation’ – of giftgiving – that are at the center of Mauss’ essay. It is also engaged in the fan given to Presidente Marville, a fan bearing a signature by Watteau affirming its authenticity.
Anthropologically, these forces, these exchanges, are not captured within the framework of capitalist rationality.
In “ Treasure-Hunting: A Magical Motif in Law, Folklore, and Mentality, Württemberg, 1606 –1770”, by Johannes Dillinger and Petra Feld, there are a number of accounts of treasure hunting in Europe in the early modern era. One begins with a certain Margaretha Schütterin, the wife of a stonemason in Schwaikheim, who saw a ghost on day in the Winter of 1704. The ghost asked her to help him and 16 other souls (who also, apparently, appeared to her) who had been walking for 240 years by finding a treasure they had deposited in Schütterin’s house, hiding it from rampaging soldiers. They were monks in life, and needed the release in the afterlife which would follow upon Schütterin uncovering the treasure and using it, in part, for charitable works.

One of the monks explained that she had been chosen to do this because she had the same horoscope as Christ. Schütterin did what she could, which was to gather money from her friends and family to comply with the various tasks that would free the ghosts and lead to the treasure. This included paying for masses to be read, buying candles, and giving alms. By these means she extracted 912 Gulden out of a local baker, David Fischer.
“When he doubted her assertions, she made him believe that there was a competition between potential creditors. Margaretha Schütterin managed to establish a sort of `investment trust’ of treasure-hunters by promising them profits of up to 100,000 Gulden. The use she allegedly made of the money given to her, i.e. to donate it to pious causes in Catholic churches, could not easily be checked by the creditors. She finally left her husband whom she probably managed to deceive with her ghost story, too, and fled with the money. When Fischer denounced Margaretha SchuÈ tterin after her flight, he was sentenced to a fine of 14 Gulden for unlicensed treasurehunting, although he maintained that she had assured him that the treasure hunt had been permitted by the duke.”


Dillinger and Feld turn here, to explain the obsession with treasure, to George Foster’s work on the limited good – or the zero sum economic attitudes of Mexican peasants. Foster’s paper is a famous and disputed foray into the peasant mentalite. Clearly, he is working in the same vein as Mauss and – though Foster might never have read him – George Bataille, who developed a metaphysics of the abject and the sovereign built on the kind of generosity and madness inscribed in the society of the limited good. This is Foster’s explanation of it.
In this paper I am concerned with the nature of the cognitive orientation of peasants, and with interpreting and relating peasant behavior as described by anthropologists to this orientation. I am also concerned with the implications of this orientation-and related behavior to the problem of the peasant's participation in the economic growth of the country to which he may belong. Specifically, I will outline what I believe to be the dominant theme in the cognitive orientation of classic peasant societies,* show how characteristic peasant behavior seems to flow from this orientation, and attempt to show that this behavior—however incompatible with national economic growth—is not only highly rational in the context of the cognition that determines it, but that for the maintenance of peasant society in its classic form, it is indispensable.4 The kinds of behavior that have been suggested as adversely influencing economic growth are, among many, the "luck" syndrome, a "fatalistic" outlook, inter- and intra-familial quarrels, difficulties in cooperation, extraordinary ritual expenses by poor people and the problems these expenses pose for capital accumulation, and the apparent lack of what the psychologist McClelland (1961) has called "need for Achievement." I will suggest that peasant participation in national development can be hastened not by stimulating a psychological process, the need for achievement, but by creating economic and other opportunities that will encourage the peasant to abandon his traditional and increasingly unrealistic cognitive orientation for a new one that reflects the realities of the modern world.

2. The model of cognitive orientation that seems to me best to account for peasant behavior is the "Image of Limited Good." By "Image of Limited Good" I mean that broad areas of peasant behavior are patterned in such fashion as to suggest that peasants view their social, economic, and natural universes—their total environment—as one in which all of the desired things in life such as land, wealth, health, friendship and love, manliness and honor, respect and status, power and influence, security and safety, exist in finite quantity and are always in short supply, as far as the peasant is concerned. Not only do these and all other "good things" exist in finite and limited quantities, but in addition there is no way directly within peasant power to increase the available quantities. It is as if the obvious fact of land shortage in a densely populated area applied to all other desired things: not enough to go around. "Good," like land, is seen as inherent in nature, there to be divided and re-divided, if necessary, but not to be augmented.

the modern and the archaic in a sale

Continuing the post I put up yesterday. Get used to this, scattered and few readers of LI!

…

Sylvaine Pons, the ‘poor cousin’ in Balzac’s Cousin Pons, is first seen as an incredibly ugly, elderly man hurrying one afternoon through the streets of Paris, holding a package that evidently contains something fragile. He is dressed in the style of the 1810s and 20s, in the Paris of the 1840s – a fact that leads Balzac to treat him, and in fact the whole Parisian scene, as something ‘archaeologic’. It is a term that resonates throughout the novel, foriIf Pons is a relic, he is also the man with the passion for relics. He is a treasure hunter. His tragedy unfolds within a triangle of wants: 1.) the want of sex, denied to Pons when he was young on account of his ugliness and his lack of prospects; 2. the want of bibelots, objets d’art, in the pursuit of which Pons has become an expert, chasing down the stray treasures of the ancien regime for almost forty years; and 3) the want of the stomach, the one desire that brings our man down. Pons, as a musician, enjoyed enough of a vogue in the 1820s that he could dine out. And just as his desire for beautiful objects is a compensation for his lack of sexual satisfaction, his desire for good food is fed by a stomach and tongue – organs that Balzac, in the course of the book, treats almost as independent systems of intelligence, another kind of sex – so too he becomes an epicure in his way. It is this that leads him to become, little by little as his vogue wanes, a man who has to plan his way into the houses and to the tables of those rich people who are his ‘cousins’.

After treating us to the archaeological spectacle of Pons, that afternoon, in the Paris street – digging outward towards his deeper history, and that of the world in which he collects his objects, a world in which there exist real people like Sauvageot (an actual figure, a poor musician “like Pons, without a great fortune as well, [who] proceded in the same manner by the same means with the same love of art, with the same hatred against the illustrious rich who have cabinets made for themselves in competition with the merchants”) – Balzac takes us down to earth, or rather to the real-time moment in which Pons arrives at his destination – his cousin Camusot’s house (now the President Marville) – and presents the woman of the house, the Presidente Marville, with his find: a fan painted by Watteau. Let’s underline the fact that the fan is presented as a gift. And it is an aspect of Marville’s vulgarity that she not only does not recognize the name Watteau, but that she orders Pons’ meal, in his hearing, as a counter-gift – violating the rule that spaces out giftgiving, and making it seem like a return, an exchange.

I am fascinated by the complex economics of the scene. Here is Pons, trying to explain to the inexpressibly stupid Presidente Marville what he has done for her in finding the fan in a place on Rue de Lappe, at a brocanteur’s – which, according to a 1786 dictionary of official terms (Dictionnaire universal de police) is he who traffics in diverse and chance merchandise (“marchandise de hazard”)”:

“"I know all those sharpers," continued Pons, "so I asked him, 'Anything fresh to-day, Daddy Monistrol?'—(for he always lets me look over his lots before the big buyers come)—and at that he began to tell me how Lienard, that did such beautiful work for the Government in the Chapelle de Dreux, had been at the Aulnay sale and rescued the carved panels out of the clutches of the Paris dealers, while their heads were running on china and inlaid furniture.—'I did not do much myself,' he went on, 'but I may make my traveling expenses out of this,' and he showed me a what-not; a marvel! Boucher's designs executed in marquetry, and with such art!—One could have gone down on one's knees before it.—'Look, sir,' he said, 'I have just found this fan in a little drawer; it was locked, I had to force it open. You might tell me where I can sell it'—and with that he brings out this little carved cherry-wood box.—'See,' says he, 'it is the kind of Pompadour that looks like decorated Gothic.'—'Yes,' I told him, 'the box is pretty; the box might suit me; but as for the fan, Monistrol, I have no Mme. Pons to give the old trinket to, and they make very pretty new ones nowadays; you can buy miracles of painting on vellum cheaply enough. There are two thousand painters in Paris, you know.'—And I opened out the fan carelessly, keeping down my admiration, looked indifferently at those two exquisite little pictures, touched off with an ease fit to send you into raptures. I held Mme. de Pompadour's fan in my hand! Watteau had done his utmost for this.—'What do you want for the what-not?'—'Oh! a thousand francs; I have had a bid already.'—I offered him a price for the fan corresponding with the probable expenses of the journey. We looked each other in the eyes, and I saw that I had my man. I put the fan back into the box lest my Auvergnat should begin to look at it, and went into ecstasies over the box; indeed, it is a jewel.—'If I take it,' said I, 'it is for the sake of the box; the box tempts me. As for the what-not, you will get more than a thousand francs for that. Just see how the brass is wrought; it is a model. There is business in it. . . . It has never been copied; it is a unique specimen, made solely for Mme. de Pompadour'—and so on, till my man, all on fire for his what-not, forgets the fan, and lets me have it for a mere trifle, because I have pointed out the beauties of his piece of Riesener's furniture. So here it is; but it needs a great deal of experience to make such a bargain as that. It is a duel, eye to eye; and who has such eyes as a Jew or an Auvergnat?"
The old artist's wonderful pantomime, his vivid, eager way of telling the story of the triumph of his shrewdness over the dealer's ignorance, would have made a subject for a Dutch painter; but it was all thrown away upon the audience. Mother and daughter exchanged cold, contemptuous glances.—"What an oddity!" they seemed to say.
"So it amuses you?" remarked Mme. de Marville. The question sent a cold chill through Pons; he felt a strong desire to slap the Presidente.”
And who among Balzac’s readers, at this point, does not?
Remark, here, on the double aspect of this transaction, at once modern and archaic. The modern aspect is found in the whole question of value: Pons and his fellow experts in bricabracology are commodifying, instead of monumentalizing, the past. About this aspect, I want to say a lot – but let me do this later. I’m more interested, here, in the archaic aspect – that “merchandise of chance” - implicit in the very activity of treasure seeking in what the economists would call a secondary market. What is a treasure?

a more personal beginning

I've been worrying that the style in which I'm trying to write my Bio of H.E. is too scholastic, and not gnostic or eccentric or personal enough. So I am thinking of beginnning something more like this.

...

I was in my second year of college, in the town of S., a long time ago, hen I first came down with what I know now is a sort of disease: the want of a desire to want. I was living in a furnished apartment above a garage full of old photographs. The garage was attached to a mansion inhabited by an eccentric and presumably wealthy couple, although I only had any relations with the wife, Mrs. M., a former CIA agent and photograph enthusiast (hence, the piles of old darkroom equipment and boxes of photographs in the garage, along with a very old and never driven Bentley

I was happy with the furnishings, and especially with Mrs. M.’s choice of firehouse red as the predominant color in the kitchen (stove, table, chairs, and even tea kettle). Then my father came by one day – they lived twenty miles outside of S. – and gave me a television.

Up until this point, I’d had no trouble with television. One of my first purchases, from my first job as a teenager, had been a small portable tv. This allowed me to watch tv in my bedroom, my own shows rather than those of my parents or brothers and sisters when they had dibs on the big tv in the downstairs room which was all set up for it – the couch and the chairs turned towards it even when they were empty and the set was off, as if the room was somehow asleep. But as I tried to find a place for the tv my father gave me, I suddenly felt that I didn’t really want it.

Up until that point, it hadn’t occurred to me not to want the wantable things that America is so full of. Looking back, this rather trivial moment was like the first symptom, the first black buboe that signifies that you have the plague. Because, as my life unfolded, I discovered I didn’t want almost any of the major wantable things. I didn’t want a car. I didn’t want a home. I didn’t want a boat, or a stereo system, or a credit card, or a closet full of clothes. I didn’t even want a couch. It wasn’t even that I was infected with a hippie Puritanism that meant that I wanted other people not to want these things; it was simply that I never, well, felt the urge to go out and buy them.

The significance of the PC and the Internet for me was that, in the nineties, I finally wanted something. But I didn’t want the latest things, even there: I was quite content with, say, Windows95 long after that software had been rendered obsolete. I only gradually and grudgingly have been pulled along by the trendy currents of personal computing design. Plus, my job, as a free lancer, depends on the computer.

I would not have a problem with the want of wanting if I didn’t have pretensions far above my station – for even when I was perched in my firehouse red kitchen in the town of S., I planned on being a writer. I planned on writing novels, in fact. I didn’t plan on poor thin narratives, but thick ones, fat cultural steaks full of the greases and hamburger of the America I saw around me, all its idiocies and splendeurs in my – and its - ephemeral moment. The most fabulously wealthy country of all time! My idea of the novel was on the lines of those of Balzac, whose Human Comedy – if considered as one novel, on the order of, say, In Search of Lost Time – is at the top of my list of great novels. Balzac not only wrote of people wanting lots in the restoration France of his time, but he himself was a tremendous and unmanageable wanter, which is how he went through fortunes as a sort of industrial plant of best sellers and still managed, most years, to remain well in debt. He wanted houses, he wanted art, he wanted excellent food and wine, he wanted women, he wanted clothes. In the letters to his future wife, Madame Hanska, who was as beautiful as a portrait and, more to the point, beautifully wealthy, plus being geographically distant on her Ukranian estates – where she couldn’t poke her nose too much into Balzac’s Parisian business - Balzac would heap up in great lists the things he wanted – the houses that they would both live in, jewels, objects of art - in a sort of fireworks of mad accounting and mad connoisseurship, while at the same time he would keep her advised of his schemes for liquidating his debts, which by 1844 amounted to, on his account, about 150,000 francs.

“I went out for the first time the day before yesterday. I bought a clock for our salon of an unheard of magnificence, and two pale blue garnet vases that are not less magnificent. All this for almost nothing. Great news! Rothschild wants my Florentine marbles. He is doubtless going to come to see them. I want fourteen thousand francs for them. Another piece of news! The Girardon Christ, bought for one hundred fifty francs, is estimated at five thousand francs, and twenty thousand francs with the frame [by Bustolone]. And you scold me, o louloup, for my dealings in the kingdom of Bricabrac-erie!” [ - my translation Lettres a l’etrangere, vol. 2, 446]

Balzac abundantly satisfied his love of bricabrac-erie in his novels, in which characters are always setting up apartments or houses with lavishly described furnishings – and it finally achieves its metaphysical form in Cousin Pons. Balzac’s reveling in such things as frames by Bustolone or boudoir figurines turned out by 18th century craftsmen had, as he well knew, a political sense: Balzac not only turned his negative capacity into a shopping catalogue, but he had a very high sense of the history behind the object and a genius for understanding how they were all connected. In the period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the storehouse of goods that had been accumulated for centuries in noble estates and monarchial palaces, in churches and bourgeois hôtels, were swept away in the deluge (the deluge to which Louis XV had so famously referred), to reappear in the pawn shop, the cart of the dealer in curios at the foire, among dealers in old furniture located in shadowy side streets, or mysteriously present on the fireplace mantel of the provincial peasant who had enriched himself buying seized church lands.