Until the eighteenth century in Catholic countries, the predominant notion of confession was pre-eminently that of a sacrament. In the legal sense – that is, the sense ended up on trial, either in a ecclesiastical or secular court – the sacramental sense existed as a sort of sanctioning halo around the most direct witness to a crime – the witness of the perpetrator himself. The sacramental sense of confession lent itself to the justification of torture, that strange moment in the juridical process in which pain – usually associated with the punishment merited by the guilty – is used to give a proof of guilt. Punishment first, the sentence afterward – torture is by its nature an inversion of the course of justice, or at least its institutional logic. Torture can, of course, exist after the sentence – torture then merges with all the other punishments, and it loses its sacramental associations. Its diminishment becomes a purely humanitarian matter. It is through a connotation of sacrament that the torturer did not wholly undo the foundation of the law, its sanction, which, although making full use of fear, transcends fear in fairness, in proportion. The great cynics – for instance, De Sade – discerned in torture the true motive behind the law, the disorder of the libertine grin behind the solemn mask of the judge. The law, here, is wholly conformable to a certain desire in the hands of those who have the power to realize their desires, and who, in the process, take pleasure from their hypocritical pretense that they don’t.
In the Protestant countries, the sacramental sense of confession was outlawed, or at least banned in the Protestant church, and so it was taken out of the domain of the sacred into the domain of the autobiographical, the novelistic, the psychological, the criminal. Torture, then, is stripped of anything but utility. Still, even as confession is transferred from the sacramental to the secular domain, it is never fully disassociated from purgation and purification. The secular world may be one of different shames and rewards, but the old semiotic devils, the purges and purifications of the cult, retain a trailing, epiphenomenal insistence, like the shadow of a demon projected on the wall by a trick of the gesture of a hand.
It is in the form of confession that a truth other than the truth of experiment and scientific theory still holds on in a world of total utility. And yet, it is shoulder to shoulder with the world of total utility, just as the underground man is shoulder to shoulder with the stenographer – whose function is to be absolutely transparent. To be as if she isn’t there at all.
And yet of course she is. If the underground man hides, confession is his weapon, but it is not a weapon that he can employ without imagining the stenographer, the official representative of the desk, the typewriter, the office, the report. This should give us an idea of how odd it is to make confession a weapon. For it means the stripping away of the intervening structures that keep us – society, the state – from seeing the confessor, whose express desire is to find a mousehole. Or, like Rousseau, to retire to a remote and safe harbor. It is as if the motive that has produced so many underground labyrinths to confuse the seekers behind one, around one, is, in a gesture, vetoed. And yet, it is not hard to see the philosophical unity between this contradiction between the underground and the compulsion to exhibition. The pawnbroker in The Gentle Creature calls it pride, but what is that pride in? It is the pride of the non-identical.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Sunday, March 20, 2011
He comes with his underground: the stenographer
In the introduction to his story, A Gentle Creature, that Dostoevsky produced for his column, A Writer’s Diary, he traced the story back to a fait divers about a seamstress who committed suicide with an icon in her hands. Dostoevsky scholars have found other routes to the story – Dostoevsky brooded over a similar plot long before the newspaper story precipitated the narrative as a whole in his mind. Unlike Henry James, whose introductions are quite consciously framing work, existing outside the work itself and eminently dispensable to those who want to get the thing itself, Dostoevsky does not quite cut the umbilical cord so elegantly. The intro is shot through with the same eye gleaming urgency as the narrative – it seems to be of a piece with the monologue of the pawn broker through whose consciousness the story unfolds. This is what Dostoevsky says about his method, here:
“If there had been a stenographer to listen to him and note it [the narrator’s monologue] down, the result would doubtless be more staccato, more unformed than that I am presenting to the reader, but, or so it seems to me, the psychological order would remain the same.” [Translated from the French]
I have connected the underground as one of the loci – a metaphorical and metaphysical locus – in which was formed, in the nineteenth century, the oppositional character under capitalism. And I have also noted the relationship to the agent of circulation – to, in fact, the growing cultural dominance of what Mill called the Middle Class, the ancestor of what C. Wright Mill called the White Collar class.
For Dostoevsky, as it happens, the stenographer is not a neutral figure. He met the woman who became his second wife, Anna Grigoryevna, when he hired her as a secretary – a stenographer. In Joseph Frank’s biography, we read:
Dostoevsky, who had agreed to try working with a stenographer only with great reluctance and as a last resort, was nervous and distraught, obviously at a loss on how to treat this newly intrusive presence. To break the ice, he began to question Anna about her study of stenography, then a relatively new method of transcribing speech… Anna informed him that her class had begun with more than a hundred students, but only twenty-five were left at the end; many, thinking that stenography could be mastered in a few days, had dropped out when this supposition proved false.” (156)
In fact, the image of the couple – of the teller and the scribe, or the stenographer – seems to arrive in Dostoevsky’s work after he has already used this method extensively. It is the method of the Night section of The Demons, and, similarly, of Notes from the Underground. It is important that in the notes leading up to A Gentle Creature, Dostoevsky imagines a pawn broker who is “misanthropic… with an underground’. [Ludmilla Koehler, Five minutes too late…] In both the Notes and The Devils, the problem of epistemological access, that is, the question of who knows the story, or the events that become the story, and how they interpret them, and how their interpretation is woven into the events themselves – that problem which bedeviled and enchanted James – is cut with one, clumsy (at least from the standard of the novel as James conceived it) blow. Testimony and confession, here, converge. “Who is that other who is always besides you…”
The stenographer is not a mirror, is not epistemologically neutral, but creates an epistemological situation, one in which the teller can be ‘caught out’ – can ‘slip up.’ Ultimately, the stenographer is an ambassador of police power. It is the invisible stenographer that creates, in these stories, the sense of a thing happening that will be reiterated in a police interrogation room or in court.
It is surely important, too, that the narrator of A Gentle Creature is a pawnbroker who quotes Goethe’s Faust. The pawnbroker or money lender was the shadow side of the financial power that is embodied in bank, one of the major hubs of circulation. The pawnbroker, in one of his first conversations with the woman – or, actually, girl - whose suicide hangs over the story compares himself to Mephistopheles. The pawnshop is, for Dostoevsky, the place that the money economy loses all its pretences, and shows itself, at last, as the ultimate exploiter of human despair. Dostoevsky, like Marx, was, much to his disgust, personally acquainted with pawnbrokers. Both lived and worked under the gun. Under their various manias, their undergrounds.
“If there had been a stenographer to listen to him and note it [the narrator’s monologue] down, the result would doubtless be more staccato, more unformed than that I am presenting to the reader, but, or so it seems to me, the psychological order would remain the same.” [Translated from the French]
I have connected the underground as one of the loci – a metaphorical and metaphysical locus – in which was formed, in the nineteenth century, the oppositional character under capitalism. And I have also noted the relationship to the agent of circulation – to, in fact, the growing cultural dominance of what Mill called the Middle Class, the ancestor of what C. Wright Mill called the White Collar class.
For Dostoevsky, as it happens, the stenographer is not a neutral figure. He met the woman who became his second wife, Anna Grigoryevna, when he hired her as a secretary – a stenographer. In Joseph Frank’s biography, we read:
Dostoevsky, who had agreed to try working with a stenographer only with great reluctance and as a last resort, was nervous and distraught, obviously at a loss on how to treat this newly intrusive presence. To break the ice, he began to question Anna about her study of stenography, then a relatively new method of transcribing speech… Anna informed him that her class had begun with more than a hundred students, but only twenty-five were left at the end; many, thinking that stenography could be mastered in a few days, had dropped out when this supposition proved false.” (156)
In fact, the image of the couple – of the teller and the scribe, or the stenographer – seems to arrive in Dostoevsky’s work after he has already used this method extensively. It is the method of the Night section of The Demons, and, similarly, of Notes from the Underground. It is important that in the notes leading up to A Gentle Creature, Dostoevsky imagines a pawn broker who is “misanthropic… with an underground’. [Ludmilla Koehler, Five minutes too late…] In both the Notes and The Devils, the problem of epistemological access, that is, the question of who knows the story, or the events that become the story, and how they interpret them, and how their interpretation is woven into the events themselves – that problem which bedeviled and enchanted James – is cut with one, clumsy (at least from the standard of the novel as James conceived it) blow. Testimony and confession, here, converge. “Who is that other who is always besides you…”
The stenographer is not a mirror, is not epistemologically neutral, but creates an epistemological situation, one in which the teller can be ‘caught out’ – can ‘slip up.’ Ultimately, the stenographer is an ambassador of police power. It is the invisible stenographer that creates, in these stories, the sense of a thing happening that will be reiterated in a police interrogation room or in court.
It is surely important, too, that the narrator of A Gentle Creature is a pawnbroker who quotes Goethe’s Faust. The pawnbroker or money lender was the shadow side of the financial power that is embodied in bank, one of the major hubs of circulation. The pawnbroker, in one of his first conversations with the woman – or, actually, girl - whose suicide hangs over the story compares himself to Mephistopheles. The pawnshop is, for Dostoevsky, the place that the money economy loses all its pretences, and shows itself, at last, as the ultimate exploiter of human despair. Dostoevsky, like Marx, was, much to his disgust, personally acquainted with pawnbrokers. Both lived and worked under the gun. Under their various manias, their undergrounds.
Monday, March 14, 2011
(edited) Underground 2: the man without a character
Two questions help us classify undergrounds: who lives in it? And where is it?
At first glance, the latter question seems to pick at a mere tautology. The underground should surely be under the ground. This, however, is not the case: undergrounds are not simply underground, but are portable, made out of a habitat, a milieu, a political choice, a crime. How these things become underground depends on the metaphoric filter that connects a symbolically charged place with the modern. Or even pre-modern. There is, for instance, an underground in the brain in as much as a memory is perceived as hidden – it sinks into a ‘hole’ in the brain. When Augustine evokes memory in the Confessions, he evokes the underground:
“All these things, each one of which came into memory in its own particular way, are stored up separately and under the general categories of understanding. For example, light and all colors and forms of bodies came in through the eyes; sounds of all kinds by the ears; all smells by the passages of the nostrils; all flavors by the gate of the mouth; by the sensation of the whole body, there is brought in what is hard or soft, hot or cold, smooth or rough, heavy or light, whether external or internal to the body. The vast cave of memory, with its numerous and mysterious recesses, receives all these things and stores them up, to be recalled and brought forth when required.”
Memory, in this image, is a sort of drain as much as a cavern. Drainage is what sewers are about, and sewers are what modern cities are about. The image of memory as that into which the senses drain, the underground of the soul, is one that will re-emerge in Freud.
Sewage was the main target of what Alain Corbin calls the ‘strategy of de-odorization” recounted in his book, The Miasma and the Jonquil. “To disinfect – and thus deodorize – participates, besides, in a utopian project: that which aims to seal off the witnesses of organic time, to repress all the irrefutable markers of duration, those prophecies of death which are excrement, the product of menstruation, the decay of the corpse and the stink of the cadaver.” (134)
‘I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.”
Such is the beginning of the most famous account of the underground: Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. The title to which has been a famous translator’s quandary. Notes from under the floorboards? Notes from a Mouse Hole?
Joseph Frank, in his biography of Dostoevsky, records this attack on Dostoevsky, mounted in two articles the Russian Messenger: [they] accused him of being ‘immoral’ and of fixing “the reader in the stinking atmosphere of the underground, [which] little by little, against the intentions of the author and perhaps in spite of them, blunts his sense of smell and accustoms him to this stinking underground.”
Dostoevsky, in his notes to The Raw Youth (which he was writing at the time, in 1875), responded: “I am proud to have exposed for the first time, the real image of the Russian majority… its misshapen and tragic aspects. The tragic lies in one’s awareness of being misshapen.” And he continued concerning “the tragedy of the underground, which consists of suffering, self-laceration, an awareness of a better life coupled with the impossibility of attaining it… What can sustain those who do try to improve themselves? A reward, faith? Nobody is offering any reward, and in whom could one have faith? Another step from this position, and you have extreme depravity, crime (murder). A mystery.”
Smells and stinks are certainly one of the physical features that the Underground Man notices. He imagines himself in a hole, as an insect, a mouse, and notes that his cleaning lady, an old peasant, “ill natured from stupidity, and moreover, there is always a nasty smell about her,” while in the next sentence he remarks about the unhealthy effects of the St. Petersburg climate – which is clearly based on the theory of the miasma. In fact, the narrative is traversed by a metaphoric in which nasty thoughts and nasty smells are interchanged, especially when the underground man is considering himself in the aspect of a verminous beast:
“Apart from the one fundamental nastiness the luckless mouse succeeds in creating around it so many other nastinesses in the form of doubts and questions, adds to the one question so many unsettled questions that there inevitably works up around it a sort of fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions, and of the contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action who stand solemnly about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing at it till their healthy sides ache. Of course the only thing left for it is to dismiss all that with a wave of its paw, and with a smile of assumed contempt in which it does not even itself believe, creep ignominiously into its mouse-hole. There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above all, everlasting spite.”
At the time that Dostoevsky was writing the Notes from the Underground, the Paris sewage system was being overhauled by Haussmann. Interestingly, “Haussmann was reluctant to allow any human faeces to enter the magnificent collecting channels of the new sewer system, and only did so under intense pressure from the city's municipal authorities. The desire to separate 'clean' storm water from 'dirty' human waste was integral to Haussmann's conception of an orderly flow of water through urban space.” (Matthew Gandy, 1999) At this time, the inspector of the sewage system, Eugene Belgrand, had the inspired idea of hiring Nadar to photograph the underground spaces. (Gandy)
…
We’ve been following the clerk, the pre-eminent circulation agent in a system presided over by infinite metamorphoses and a gnawing lack of production. The media as we know it – that system of signs and images that has begun, in the eighteenth century, to break free of one bureaucracy of clerks – the church – and is branching out of the purely circulation segment in the total system of commodity circulation under capitalism – is the natural locus for both the alienation of the clerk and the work of the journalist.
I want to note the connection with the clerk, the middleman, the creator of metamorphoses. The Underground Man makes a special point of being a government bureaucrat – a broker of documents in a chain that stretches from the “underground advokatura” (see William Pomeratz’s 1993 article) to the high state functionary. This, I think, is not a coincidence, but an intersigne.
The underground, here, mirrors the middle – a stream of waste reflects the stream of paper.
The underground, as we have said, comes in two ‘types”. The underground in which a man or woman hides is the product of a couple: the hider and the seeker. One of the determinants of the underground in which a person hides is the nature of that from which the person hides. The Great Seeker, here, is usually taken to be the State. The underground city is not just a mirror of the above ground city, but it is a potential repository of the above ground city’s perversities – robbery instead of legal exchange, perverse sexuality instead of marriage, the violent overthrow of the state instead of court or legislative politics. But the couple can also be otherwise: the hider can be coupled with the more amorphous seeker, society. In the nineteenth century, the state increasingly casts itself as the representative of society – but they operate along different axes from the point of view of the underground man.
Alain Roger, in the Breviare de la betise, astutely, exhaustively follows the ‘logic of tautology’ that is the form of one of the underground man’s great obsessions – betise, or stupidity. Roger distinguishes the banal, a simple accumulation of identity statements, A is A, man is man, from the tautologies that give life to stupidity: Man is always man. More, woman is always woman. More, a Jew is always a Jew. The temporal index of the “always” is the beast’s, or rather, the brute’s mark. In the 19th century, French writers from Balzac through Flaubert and Baudelaire to, finally, Bloy seized on the second form of tautology and, by citing it obsessively, by collecting it, by daydreaming over it, sought to shame it by mirroring, repeating, overhearing, echoing it – by trumping tautology with its own sound, look, smell, characteristic gait, household, habits, bank account, and all the stuffings. The attack on stupidity was an attack on the bourgeoisie – always the middle class. In England, as Alexander Herzen pointed out at the time, this attack was mounted with more restraint by John Stuart Mill in his essay on Liberty. Herzen sympathizes with Mill, but at the same time mocks him, for it is Herzen’s idea that Mills attack on conformity is superficial: conformity, Herzen thinks, is the natural product of a historical process, and Mill is caught up in the contradiction between defending that historical process – which, for our purposes, we will call the society of the market economy – and decrying its product. “But this deterioration of individuality, this want of temper, arre only pathological facts, and admitting them is a very important step towards the way out; but it is not the way out. Mill upbraids the sick man and points to his sound ancestors: an odd sort of treatment, and hardly a magnanimous one.
“Come: are we not to begin to reproach the lizard with the antediluvian ichthyosaurus? Is it the fault of one thaqt it is little and the other was big? Mill, frightened by the moral worthlessness, the spiritual mediocrity of this environment, cried out passionately and sorrowfully, like the champions in our old tales: “Is there a man alive in the field?” (Herzen, 460)
Herzen is an almost unique intelligence in that his viewpoint mixed a Russian experience with a thoroughly European education. 19th century Russia witnessed a different relation between society and the state than did France. In Czarist Russia, the two are so imbricated, and at the same time so amorphous, that the difference highlighted by Roger between the tautologies of banality and stupidity doesn’t function. Gogol – and Dostoevsky after him – collapses the stupid into the banal, and makes the banal the starting point for the fantastic. The banal, as Gogol once wrote, was his speciality. Dmitry Merezhkovsky, in his great essay on Gogol, gives us a sense of the writer’s realism that has not been taken up by the literary critics who are so fascinated by the topic, from Belinski to Lukac. Gogol’s starting point is the infinity of the divine. If the devil is the opposite of the divine, he is the opposite of the infinite. “The Devil is the noumenal median of being, the denial of all heights and depths – eternal planarity (ploskost’), eternal banality (poshlost’). The sole subject of Gogol’s art is the Devil in just this sense, that is, the Devil as the manifestation of “man’s immortal banality,” as seen beneath the specifics of place and time – historical, national, governmental, social; the manifestation of absolute, eternal, universal evil – banality sub specie aeternitatis.” (57-58)
This banality is something we will come back to again and again. It is, certainly, more lurid, more comic, more real than simply the logic of identity against which Alain Roger pits the truly stupid. In a serf society – or a slave society, like the United States – that banality constitutes that ‘quiet desperation’, that gravitational field that brings all things down to one level for the American underground man – Thoreau and Melville in the 19th century – and which follows Huck to the Territories and beyond.
Alain Roger, however, largely neglects the banal in favor of stupidity. In an interesting analysis of Barthes Mythologies, he detects a certain … complaisance in Barthes for the proverb, for the prole and the peasant. The ‘happiness of identity’ given by tautology is all shoved onto the petit bourgeois. It is at the center of the middle class cult of good sense: “Good sense is like the watchdog of petit-bourgeois equations: it stops up all the dialectical exits and defines a homogenous world.” Stupidity, in this form, is aggressive, according to Barthes. Roger disagrees: “It seems to me essentially sufficient. It is there that its force resides, which is inertia.” (68-69)
Thursday, March 10, 2011
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.
Monday, March 07, 2011
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.
“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.
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
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)
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