equality

It strikes me as an odd thing that our econometricmaniacs have never considered whether there is an average point spread at the heart of republican government – that is, a spread between the richest and the poorest.

I was struck by this thought reading a passage in Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn where Orwell presents a six point program for Labour. Here is the second point:
“Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest tax-free income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one.”
Has any well known public intellectual in the West said anything remotely as radical in the last twenty years? And yet, it isn’t really radical at all. Orwell is simply putting a figure on one of the oldest strains in democratic culture, going back far before, say, Babeuf in the French Revolution.

It would do infinite good to the disparate, small and more radically inclined grouposcules to settle on a figure and try to impress this into the public mind.

What is the current figure? At the moment, according to David Leonardt – taking the figure from the government – there is, on the one hand, this: “0.01 percent of earners — that is, the top 1/10,000th of earners, a group that began at $8.6 million in annual income…” And then there are the bottom earners. The press likes to bundle the top earners into larger packages – say the top 10 or 20 percent – which is highly misleading. In fact, even if one uses the median income stat as a marker – with 47 percent of households reporting 50,000 per year or less – we get a spread of around 100-1.

How is that disparity paid for? Every day, the newspapers, those pipelines of conventional wisdom, announce we can’t afford this or that: social security, medicare, etc. In fact, those stories are right. Except that they don’t include an invisible codicil: we can’t afford our entitlements AND our income inequality. The system that was set up after WWII assumed that we would do our best to tax the uber-wealthy. Of course, we haven’t done that for over thirty years now. This Reagonomics space has produced an amazing difference in amount of wealth accumulated by the top and the bottom. Using Saenz’s studies, G. William Domhoff puts it like this:

“As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers).”

This, of course, is utterly disguised by the system. The world of YouTube is so different from the world of, say, movies and television because it is a world that reflects that disparity – whereas the mediasphere has long cut off the bottom 80 percent. Hollywood weeps over its own virtue when it deigns to show any figure making less than 200 thou per. One of the amazing things about the Wire was not the plot, the cops, etc. – it was simply the acknowledgment that people actually live in the urban housing that suburbanites carefully scoot around, traveling through highways that ring cities. Imagine that! Myself, as my income is in the bottom 15 percent, I was rather thrilled to see people wearing the type of clothes I wear – cast offs from Goodwill – living in the type of rented space I live in.

The art of this era is so dominated by depictions of the wealthiest that it makes the era of Louis XIV look democratic. At least the peasants of Perrault were not trotted out and exhibited as freaks on reality game shows.

A serious radical plan for change would attack the invisible codicil. Equality may be an impossible goal, but inequality is a cancer.

if the service worker is a servant, the service economy is the servant economy

In the Library of Babel, no doubt, one can find all the books that drifted through the projects of the great writers – Nietzsche’s book on the Eternal Return of the Same, for instance. Among these books, the one I’d love to read is Marx’s book on Balzac – which, Engels told some correspondent after the Old Moor’s death, was among the projects that were to come after the works on the political economy. How well we know the utopia of "after", the project that is coming up next!

I think the so called “fourth” book of Capital, which Kautsky edited from the notebooks – otherwise known as Theories of Surplus Value – may be Marx at his most Balzacian. For instance, in considering unproductive labor, the example that comes to mind is the mistress – a most Balzacian figure. Whose labor is classically unproductive, in Adam Smith’s sense – it is labor paid entirely out of revenue, or the excess [Ueberschuss] deriving from productive labor.

I’ve been building a case – as my readers may have noticed – that the category of productive/unproductive labor operates inconsistently in Marx – but that once one frees that category from its uniform determination by value, we can see how useful it is in mapping class positions. Although my commentors think I am screwing the pooch, here, and that value theory is aligned with the p/u distinction, I can’t see how this can accommodate the entirety of what Marx says about productive labor. For instance, I can’t see how the policeman – and indeed, all state employees – engage in unproductive labor – that is, their work does not enter into the valorization process of capitalism – while teachers do engage in productive labor. Let me quote a little bit here from a section about the class origins of the revenue upon which unproductive labor lives:

“If according to A. Smith, labor is productive that is directly exchanged against capital, so there comes into question, apart from the form, the material elements of capital which is exchanged against labor. These are dissolved in the necessary means of life; thus mostly in commodities, material things. Whatever the laborer has to pay from his wages to the state and church forms a deduction for services that are forced upon him; what he pays for education is damned little; when he does it, it has a productive effect, because it produces labor power; whatever he spends for doctors, lawyers, priests is paid to misfortune; there remains very few unproductive labors or services wherein the wage of the laborer is dissolved, since he of course cares himself for his own consumption costs (cooking, cleaning the house, and most of the time, even repairs).”

Now, Marx's goal, here, I think, is to show that revenue can be traced to money spent by the laborer and money spent by the capitalist - both have 'extra' money. But the money spent by the capitalist far outweighs that spent by the laborer - the servant occupations will naturally cluster around those at the top of the capitalist food chain. These useful remarks, however, contain an internal echo, a sort of muddying of the categories. For it seems that cooking or cleaning or the work of lawyers and doctors is considered unproductive not simply due to their location in terms of simple circulation, but rather, in contrast to a hierarchy that exists in the ‘necessary means of life’. Hence, education suddenly surges out as an exception to the rule defining the unproductive by the form of the exchange value it lives on. Instead, we find the category wobbling between systematic determinations, responding to the two semantic pulls I mentioned above – one pull being the definition of productive labor in terms of its valorization within capitalism, the other pull being the definition of productive labor in terms of the production of a value for social reproduction. Of course one must remember that Marx’s purpose hangs over this entire discussion, which is to destroy the system that produces value from the bourgeois point of view in the first place.

Yet CK and Nicole’s objections to my interpretation of the productive/unproductive category have made me delve more deeply into what Marx has to say in the TSV, especially with regards to social reproduction – that descendent of what Herder called Bildung. Marx has some surprisingly astute things to say about the origin of the service economy – or, as Marx might call it with more truth, the servant economy. It is, after all, the servant who is disguised in the modern service worker. And his consideration of a society which consists of a plurality of unproductive workers is strikingly prescient of the direction in which capitalism has gone. Here, I think, we might do well to think about Marx in terms of his relation to Balzac – which is very unexplored, especially in comparison to his relation to Hegel. Balzac’s sense of the very grain of servant class’s life – as in Cesar Birotteau – is, I think, a very big influence on Marx’s observations here.

on an essay by Louis Dumont

In the fifties and sixties, there was a certain amount of interest in Jasper’s “axial age” – the period in which, supposedly, the Greek, the Indian and the Chinese civilizations all established a founding distinction between the transcendent and the temporal. Left out of the axial age are the Africans and the Mesopotamians – Egypt and Sumer.

Daedelus held a symposium on this idea in 1975 to which they invited an article by Louis Dumont. This post is going to be about his essay, “On the Comparative Understanding of Non-Modern Civilizations”. Alan McFarlane’s essay on Dumont is helpful – it is here.

Dumont is doubtful about the suggestion that there was either a hidden connection between the axial civilizations, or that we should us the term from a perspective in which we have chosen “our” civilization – the Greek. His essay is, in part, a standard plea for the primacy of the emic understanding of culture in any comparison of cultures.

“Professor Momigliano has set the basic, indeed, the liminal question, with great clarity. Conscious of being heir to the classical trinity of Greco-Roman-Judeo Christian civilization, we can choose one of two strategies. Either we can remain purely and simply within this established configuration and go on looking at all other civilizations as strange entities, which can nevertheless be approxi mately described by reference to our configurational coordinates, or we can try and transcend this limitation in order to gain a more catholic perspective, con sidering each of the civilizations in question in its own right. The latter alternative, the catholic approach, is not commonly practiced today, though some may naively imagine that it is. Nor is that approach impossible, as others may maintain.”

This plea runs through modernity in correlation with a set of other heuristics – all of which arise in some kind of opposition to the happiness culture. The plea for the imagination, the critique mounted from the notion of alienation, and the anthropological principle of relativism are all, I think, linked. In fact, in a post last year, I made a plea, myself, for seeing the rupture that Foucault takes to be the moment in which Man emerges as the subject of the social sciences as, really, the rupture that defines the Other as the primary source for the social scientific image of Man. The displacement of the human limit within the definition of Man is, I think, symptomatic of the various discourses of the subject.

So much, then, for placing Dumont’s notion in an intellectual geneology. Dumont is best known for his book, Homo Hierarchicus, which is anthropology on the grand scale. Since the symposium was working on the grand scale, Dumont, here, tries to define hierarchy – his great theme – against what he takes to be characteristic of modernity. In Dumont’s schema, Marx is the grand master of modernity – and here excuse me if I quote a long bit. Hey, I know from my own experience that quoting long bits of text make me skip over the quote and get to the meat – but this long bit is essential to Dumont’s point:

“We must go still further and guard against the unwary or generalized use in our field of any and all of our current conceptions. Conflict - I might even say, contradiction - looms large in our ideology. We believe in regulated -and even to a degree, unregulated - conflict, and certainly this is functional or "rational" in our world. To take immediately apparent and widespread representations, we have not only the "class struggle" and "the struggle of all against all" but also the "race struggle" of the Nazis, the perhaps abortive "generation struggle" of some student movements, the altogether more promising "sex struggle" of the "Liberation" movements. When I say that this is an important ideological phenomenon, I do not mean that it exists only in the imagination, and not "out there," but surely a foreigner who might hear of our social life only in such terms would conceive of it in a very unilateral or biased way. Such representations, incidentally, are not eternal, and the "struggle against nature" has perhaps now entered its old age.”

Dumont, in this essay, wants us to see the varieties of this archetype of struggle as a social thematic unique not just to the “West”, but also to modernity. But first, a word about the "West". One of the myths we take for granted is that the West – that we – come from the Greeks, although of course we - those of us who descend from European settlers in America, and those of us who live Europeanly in Europe, come from a whole different group of people who came from Central Asia. But when we say ‘West”, we pretend this isn’t so – except for a few like Rimbaud, perhaps: “J'ai de mes ancêtres gaulois l'oeil bleu blanc, la cervelle étroite, et la maladresse dans la lutte. Je trouve mon habillement aussi barbare que le leur. Mais je ne beurre pas ma chevelure.”

In any case - against this conflict model, Dumont, famously, posed a hierarchical model – a model in which parts could be absorbed by, rather than polemicized by, the whole.

Dumont summarily lists three elements that he believes make up the fundamental modern ideology: individuals as the bearers of ultimate value (whether moral or conceptual, as the final level to which all things social can be reduced); the relation of people to objects (which is the great definer of the individual); and thirdly, wealth – about which I should quote Dumont:

“3. Wealth constitutes an autonomous category centered on movable wealth but in cluding, secondarily, immovable wealth. (Marx noted that this had been the case only in small, exceptional, merchant societies). This point is a corollary of the preceding one. In the traditional, as against the modern, case, immovable wealth is attached to power over men, while movable wealth is disparaged and/or subordinated.”

Dumont summarizes his anthropology of classical Indian society in this way: he believed that he could obtain a “unified view of the religions of India, based on the recognition of the fundamental role of the renouncer, and a revision of the place of kingship in Indian society from an early date.” It is the renouncer – especially put in juxtaposition with the three elements of the traditional ideology – that fascinates me in this essay.

“At the end of our period we find, correlatively with the beginnings of caste, a full-fledged and peculiar social role outside society proper: the renouncer, as an individual-outside-the-world, inventor or adept of a "discipline of salvation" and of its social concomitant, best called the Indian sect. These sects were religio-philosophic movements transcending the Hinduism of the man-in-the-world. They also were to be perennial in India and acted powerfully on this Hinduism, witness the two most prominent of them in retrospect, which appeared near the end of our period, Buddhism and Jainism.”

What is renunciation about? Dumont thinks it is, firstly, about rejecting the sacrificial economy in which the priestly caste plays the primary role; and secondly it is about internalizing sacrifice. But ‘rejection’ already sets this up in the conflict terms we turn to, as of second nature. For Dumont, within the hierarchical society, the fundamental gesture is “relativising”. Dumont works with a fundamental binary between the Brahmin and the renouncer – and it is in this relation that the differentiation between the priest and king – between sacred rule and rule that is sacralized – takes place, with the king, then, in a sense gaining his sovereignty by establishing a latent relationship with the renouncer.

Here, Dumont makes a very interesting observation:

“The main comparative interest of the Indian outworldly individual is perhaps that we clearly understand his origin. It begins when persons of noble birth, questioning priestly rituals and values, go into the wilderness in quest of ultimate truth. Then, while the society, under the preeminence of the priests, hardens into a ritualistic social order, an institution appears by which a man (in principle, a man of superior birth only) may leave the social world and his duties in it, ceremonially die to it, and care only for himself and his liberation from the fetters of the human condition. From a traditional point of view, it is much more difficult to understand the emergence of the modern value, i.e., how the individual can be come, as against the society as a whole, the bearer and embodiment of ultimate values, and how correlatively the society can come to be thought of as merely a collection, a juxtaposition, of such individuals.”

My ears perk up when I reach the word fetters – and when I think of the major textual role that fetters play in Marx. From the viewpoint of a renouncer, what could be more obvious than the statement - you have nothing to lose but your chains – leveled against the supreme product of the division of labor?

This post is a detour - but then, it is part of the genius of the blog form to build a system out of detours, and by so doing, point to the poetic fact that all of the connections between the central points in a system are detours.

class and the economy

I’ve been pondering, evidently, productive and unproductive labor, which I have come to think do not function as economic explanations so much as explanations of the intersection between capitalism and the production of new class categories. Or perhaps I should say this: that Marx’s remark, in The Communist Manifesto, that the tendency in bourgeois society to shrink the fundamental class structure to just two – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat – does not express itself, in the social world of the nineteenth century, as a simplification, but rather as a complication. Dumezil’s notion of the trois functions – priests, warriors and producters – or clerks, nobles, serfs – defining traditional societies is prefigured in the proto-sociologists of the 18th century. In the three estates system, the estates are easily recognized and identified with. Under that system, class analysis is easier because it is written on the very face of any representation that emerges in that sphere. The destruction of the old order is heralded in the Sacre of Hegel’s Phenonenology, which is as a sort of grand Manifesto of the clerks. However the transition to a dominantly bourgeois society, which emerges as a result of radically overthrowing the long tripartite structure, makes class identity more difficult, rather than less.

...
I’ve been trying to return to the themes of the human limit, using the various things I have come to the surface with from my recent immersion in Marx’s ocean. Marx’s awareness of the human limit itself has a sort of obvious gravitational force that I have to defy, at some point, lest I be swept into the great orbit of perpetual commentary.

So, herewith a few more jumbled notes.

In Enracinement, Simone Weil notes that collectives through which we can remember (and through remembering, remain in continuity with) the past have dwindled, under the spell of modernity, to the state. The family has been hollowed out, so that there is no question, within it, of honoring or even showing any interest in the ancestors. Economic forms, the union, the firm, exist as instruments to destroy that continuity – or so she claims. Thus, the state is the only entity left standing.

While organized labor does have a stronger collective memory than she gives it credit for, I think this is generally sociologically true. This deracination, as she calls it, is a dimension of what I call the artificial paradise, which seals itself against the past as against a thing that the human cannot control. But I would give more credit than does Weil, ever the bearer of the absolute, to the clerks. The third life is where continuity with the past has come to rest.

what is the sound of one hand clapping - more on productive labor

“Due to the claque, a play is made now like they used to make a commercial operation: and soon one will set oneself up as an author as one sets oneself up as a banker, a bookstore owner or a cloth merchant.” My translation. Quoted from an anonymous pamphlet in Theater in Balzac’s La Comedie Humaine, by Linzy Erika Dickinson 98.]

The “science of reception” was, of course, studied by the “generals” among the claqueur. There’s something fascinating in this branch of emotional labor – that is, the production of emotions in others for the purpose of sale. It did not, of course, escape the eyes of the literati – after all, they were rubbing shoulders with the claqueur. They were, so to speak, simply on different ends of the industry. There were authors who did not like this. Hugo, for instance – who, as Amie has reminded me, I need to work on! – was supposed to have refused to allow the claques to attend Hernani – although alas, as Graham Robb shows in his biography, this legend isn’t true. What Hugo did was pay for downmarket claqueurs – from the popular quarters.

I’ve been trying relate this thread to what Marx has to tell us about productive and unproductive labor. In the Grundrisse, he relates this directly to the notion of class.

“It does not yet belong here, but it can be remembered here, how the creation of surplus labor on the one side corresponds on the other side to the creation of minus-labor, relative idleness (or in the best case, non-productive labor) on the other. This is understood firstly by capital itself; than even the classes, with which it shares it. Thus from paupers, flunkies, Jenkins, etc. living from surplus produce – in brief, the whole train of retainers; to the part of the serving class who do not live from capital, but from revenue. An essential difference of this servant and the laboring class. In relation to the whole society the creation of disposible time then even as the creation of time for the production of science, art, etc. It is in no way the course of development of society, that, because and individual has his needs satisfied, it now creates his superfluity; instead, because an individual or class of individuals are forced to work more than is necessary to satisfy his need – because surplus labor on the one side becomes non-labor and surplus wealth posited on the other. The reality is that the development of wealth exists only in these antitheses: while the possibility is that just in this development lies the possibility of its abolition.”

What I called a “stage” in my last post – to Nicole’s objection – is coordinate with the notion that revenue – the revenue from the great land owners, the aristocrats – flows into the parfumers shops (like Balzac’s Cesar Birotteau), and supports the ‘non-labor”ing laboring classes.

In the Theories over Surplus Value, Marx considers the half and half economies, non-labor, and productive labor:

“Where all labor is partially recompensed by itself as is the agricultural labor of sharecroppers [Fronbauern] for example, and is partly exchanged against revenue as the manufacturing work of cities in Aisa, no Capital exists and no wage labor in the sense of the bourgeois economy. These determinations, thus, do not derive from the material routine [Leistung] of work nor from the nature of their products nor the routines of work as concrete work, but instead from the particular social forms of the social relations of production in which they are realized [sich verwirklichen]

An actor for example, or even a clown, is according to this a productive laborer when he works in the service of a capitalist, of an entrepreneur, to whom he returns more labor than he takes in the form of his working wage; while a freelance tailor who comes to the capitalists home and makes him a pair of pants and creates for him sheer use-value is an unproductive worker. The labor of the first is exchanged against capital, and the second out of revenue. The first creates a surplus value, when in the second, revenue is consumed.” [259]

metaphysical subtleties

I’m most dissatisfied with the fact that, in the interesting comments in my post on circulation work, I squirted a darkness as of squid ink over the issue at hand.

Since the point is important – the place (or not) of productive and unproductive labor in Marx – I’m going to make a brief post that will only make sense to those who’ve read the comments thread.

I think the question is mired, a bit, in another issue. Undoubtedly, capitalism contains a heterogenous mix of incompletely capitalist economic forms. A woman who works as a maid, or a groom in the stable on a rich man’s estate, are not much different than a craftsman who runs his own shop. What Marx calls simple circulation locates a stage in the development of capitalism, in which the valorization process is, as it were, immature. The maid’s service in the house is paid for immediately. If she is exploited, it is not because the people who pay her are using her to create capital – at least directly. As a self employed person, she may use some of her earnings to buy some of her own supplies. Or she may buy a lottery ticket. The thing is, from the point of view of the bourgeois economy, she does not produce value in the full sense of the term.

But what if this maid finds the backing to hire other maids, and starts a maid service?

Here I think is where the controversy starts.

The maids are performing the same service –cleaning. The maid company contracts with customers and pays the maids. At this point, I think, we have three points of view.

1. The maid’s service itself, cleaning, produces no value, because cleaning itself is not a productive activity. It is a non-productive service. Although the maids have commodified their time, this has no bearing on the question at hand. The maid service – that is, the company – produces no value. This seems, at least, to be hinted at in the Grundrisse.
2. The maid service, cleaning, does produce value, and thus we have capitalism with all the trimmings. Productive and unproductive labor refers, then, to stages in the development of capitalist enterprise, not to the output of any particular enterprise. The maid’s service company produces value. In the full sense of the word.
3. The maid service does produce value for the cleaning service, but – this is my position – Marx sometimes uses the category of productive and unproductive value in such a way that he artificially separates the maid’s cleaning service from, say, the toy manufacturer. But, I contend, he is inconsistent about this. In the end, he doesn’t come down with a clear distinction between a maid service company and a toy manufacturer.

My view, of course, is 3. Unproductive versus productive labor – which, as Marx says in the Grundrisse, is, from the bourgeois point of view, correctly separated by Adam Smith – seems to me to unhelpfully intrude on the story of the genesis of the commodity. In the back of my mind, I am thinking of the fetish for industrialism of the communist economies – my suspicion being that they picked up on this distinction, and it became one of the drivers in the process of trying to produce a certain kind of proletariat, one concentrated in heavy industry.

But for all that, there is still something at the bottom of the productive/non-productive distinction which has some hold not only in the economy, but in our social practices. Take Maricopa, Arizona. I’ve mentioned Maricopa before – this NYT article about the place was burned into my brain cells. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/realestate/keymagazine/406ariz-t.html?pagewanted=all Most of the economic activity in Maricopa was building houses for other people to buy – from outside Maricopa. In a sense, the only reason to live in Maricopa was to sell other people on living in Maricopa. This reflexivity, and the lack of endogenous “industry”, seems to cry out for the word, unproductive. Just as circulation work seems to valorize valorization, so, too, certain forms of labor seem ‘parasitic’ on other forms of labor, so that one wants to organize one’s analysis around a hierarchy, going from the productive to the unproductive.

Yet I think, ultimately, this is a reversion to superstition. One must resolutely remember that one’s point of view about the usefulness of a product or service has no bearing on its use-value, which is an objective matter. Thus, one only wants to find mature valorization – not just the exchange of money, but the full circuit that entails surplus value and the reproduction of capital – and say, this is productive labor in a fully developed capitalist system.

Commodities and Reality, or Balzac and a peach

I found a reference to a conversation recorded by Leon Gozlan between Vidocq and Balzac in Robb’s biography of the latter. I went to Gozlan (o, the things you can do on the Internet!) to read it myself. I am not sure what to make of Gozlan, who may well have been heavily fictionalizing himself. In any case, he sets this story about the time that Balzac was trying to cut Les Paysans for its serialization. Readers of LI will remember that Marx chose to illustrate the force of the capitalist system, as it borders older, archaic modes of production, with the story of Les Paysans.

According to Gozlan, the process left Balzac tired and discouraged. Vidocq, who was among the company who had gathered at Balzac’s place one night, saw this, and said:

“I say that you give yourself a lot of pain, Monsieur de Balzac, to create stories of the other world when reality is before your eyes, near your ear, under your hand.”

“Ah, how charming, you believe in reality! I would never have supposed that you were so naïve. Reality! Tell me about it: you have returned from that beautiful land. But go on – it is we who create reality.”

“No, monsieur de Balzac.”

‘Yes, monsieur Vidocq; you see the true reality, it is this beautiful Montreuil peach. The one which you call real, it grows naturally in the forest wild. Very well! That one is worth nothing. It is little, sharp, bitter, impossible to eat. But this one here that I am holding has been cultivated over one hundred year, obtained by trimming it to the left or the right, by transplantation to drier or looser soil, by certain grafts – this one at last, which one eats and which perfumes the mouth and the heart. This exquisite peach, it is we who have made it the only real one. The same procedure occurs with me. I obtain reality in my novels the way Montreuil obtains reality in its peaches. I am a gardener in the realm of books.”

Reality and value – such will be our text, following up my post concerning circulation work. LI’s occasional critic and reader, Mr. Chuckie K., advanced the thesis that I misunderstood Marx, here. Let me recommend the comments thread. And let me advance to an example – a piece of reality that was incorporated in 1820, in Paris, under the title, l'assurance des succès dramatiques. This agency, run by a former wigmaker named Porchon and his partner, a M. Sauton, would hire people to make a play or an opera a success. These claqueurs would be sure to applaud, laugh loudly at the jokes, cry copiously at the sad parts, and in other ways make sure that a playwright’s opening night went well. Porchon would even loan money out to the writer – Alexander Dumas was one of his grateful clients.

We possess a ‘Memoir of a Claqueur” (1828) by one Louis Castel Robert. Robert’s story was of a reality that, like Balzac’s peach, required the intense cultivation of history – the history of France in the 1820s. Having inherited some money, and being of a tender, philosophical disposition, Robert, a young man in Paris, naturally pissed his funds away on drink, women, books and idleness. At the end of this process he confronted an unpleasantness that many of his type encountered, viz, debtors prison. In Sainte Pelagie, he had the good fortune to fall in with a man named Mouchival. Mouchival was a common looking fellow – yet Robert soon learned he was not so common after all. He was only in Sainte Pelagie due to a misunderstanding, practically - having co-signed on a loan for a friend – for Moucival, like Porchon, was always a friend in deed – he found himself being charged with it. The man, however, was quite equal to the situation. As an entrepreneur in the claqueur field, he had simply written to a rich client who fancied himself a dramatist and expressed the need for some cash, for which he would, in the future, supply such services as may be required, yours truly. Thus, he was utterly confident of rescue. Rescue, in the form of francs, eventually did appear, but sent by an actress – through which he, in turn, rescued his promising young acquaintance, Robert. Which is how Robert found a place to fill in the world as a claqueur.

The claqueur was a character type in Paris. The yellow gloves of the claqueur were particularly distinctive, and became a nickname for the claque crowd. – les gants jaunes. Robert writes that Mouchival gave him ‘elementary instructions in the science of cabales, and treated, as an experienced master, all the articles of the tactics proper to making plays succeed or fail.” Robert learned the “circumstances in which it was necessary to applaud or whistle, cry or laugh, be silent or scream, yawn or blow your nose.”

The romantics, particularly Schiller, had invested a utopian hope in the division between work and play; but for the capitalist, for whom every boundary is a living thing, that division promises not the sweetness of life, but an unexploited margin of profit.

As Mouchival soon teaches the young man he has inexplicably taken under his wing, the surface work of the claqueur is just one link in the chain of profit. A more noticeable link is in the work of selling tickets. A certain number of tickets are allotted, free, to the claqueur. He can sell the superfluity himself. But the claqueur is not the only one to scalp tickets. Indeed, a good part of the theater world, from the actor to the usher to the critic, supplements their income on such sales.

Well, more on this subject in the next post.