Counterfeit Capital

Poetic Labor and Revolutionary Irony

Jennifer Bajorek

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780804786805
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire européenne

Counterfeit Capital is a comparative and interdisciplinary study exploring the unexpected yet essential relationship between irony and capital in the texts of Baudelaire and Marx. It argues for the renewed relevance of their work to contemporary thinking about the place of aesthetic and cultural experience in social and political life and articulates their poetic and philosophical innovations with their political statements in new and powerful ways. Through readings of Baudelaire's poetry and prose and Marx's Capital, this book illuminates their ongoing contribution to our understanding of themes and topics at the forefront of contemporary theoretical debate, including the effects of new technologies on the means of human action and transformation and the prospects for community and memory under capitalism. This book also revisits Walter Benjamin's interpretations of the philosopher and the poet. Rereading Baudelaire and Marx together with the unplumbed lessons of Benjamin's interpretations, it contributes to a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on the political dimensions and effects of language and to the current rethinking, in Marxist and post-Marxist theory, of conceptions of political time and agency.

CHAPTER 1

Paris Spleen (The Irony of Revolutionary Power)

Baudelaire would never have written poems if he’d had nothing more than the usual motives poets have for writing poetry.

—Walter Benjamin (SW 4: 176)

How to account for the fact that one of the most singular responses to capital in the realm of art—by many accounts the most brilliant, indisputably the most obsessive, and one that continues to have effects—should have come in the form of lyric poetry? In his classic essay, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Walter Benjamin lets himself be guided by this question, remarking, “[T]here has been no success on a mass scale in lyric poetry since Baudelaire” (SW 4: 314). He goes on to argue that this success holds some mystery and even provokes (resorting to an old Marxist term) a crisis, to such an extent that some of Baudelaire’s motifs actually “render the possibility of lyric poetry problematic” (SW 4: 341). The riddle is phrased slightly differently in another of Benjamin’s late texts on Baudelaire, “Central Park,” in which it is stated that the poet placed a “taboo on the future”—in part, it is implied, because he saw no place in that future for his poetry (SW 4: 162). We may discern this same taboo in some of the more familiar moves of Les Fleurs du mal, such as the interposition of the ancient (l’antique) and the modern and the elevation of spleen, or melancholia, to the principal mode of relation to the past, including the past of poetic production. We have Benjamin to thank for tracing the connections between these moves and the crisis of lyric production brought on by the rise of industrial capital in Paris—the so-called capital of capital—in the middle of the nineteenth century.

We ourselves continue to have the vague sense that this response to capital should have come in some other medium: one more immediately connected with the technicization of production, for example, or with the many modifications sustained by the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility. Or that it should have come in a more obviously “aesthetic” medium: in painting, for example, or photography. It is worth noting that Benjamin’s earliest writings on Baudelaire approach his work through a discourse on photography, for which a discourse on architecture is substituted only much later on, in the project on the Paris arcades.¹ Elsewhere Benjamin privileges photography, before film, as an example of a mode of aesthetic or cultural production with the power to realize new political possibilities and to transmit a “revolutionary content”—a power to which it seems Baudelaire’s poetry can only aspire (SW 2: 774).

But as I said, this is all a bit vague, and was already so for Benjamin. Why should lyric production be any less touched by the processes of technicization and capitalization than another? The traumatic shocks that are, for Benjamin, the raw material of Baudelaire’s poetry, the yawning rents in the fabric of narrative time from which he claims modern experience emerges, were always already there in the lyric, in the peculiar figures to which it gives voice. Poetry has always been plugged into the more general fields of production and reproduction, the material, the mediatic, and the technical. It has always been wired. And really the same would have to be said for all language. As Plato (that cryptomaterialist) well understood, language is language only insofar as it gets drawn into, and draws resources from, a whole complex of technical and economic processes. This is why philosophy’s efforts to distinguish the statesman from the rhetorician, the philosopher from the sophist, were destined to fail from the start.² This essential technicity of language is not a particularly modern, let alone a specifically capitalist, phenomenon.

Of course, it is possible that this vague notion we have that language should remain untouched by capital is itself thoroughly ideological. This was, it seems to me at least plausible, already Baudelaire’s lesson. The poet’s critical insight into this ideology of purity achieves its most crystalline formulation in Pauvre Belgique!, his last book project. In the notebooks for this project, it is repeatedly stated that the Belgians drink their own urine: “The faro comes from that great big latrine, the Senne—a beverage extracted from the city’s carefully sorted excrement. Thus it is that, for centuries, the city has drunk its own urine” (OC 2: 836). Similarly, we are told that they only drink wine “for show” (such as when a Frenchman comes to dinner): “The Belgians display their wines. They don’t drink them because they have a taste for them, but out of vanity, and in order to demonstrate their conformity, in order to be like the French” (OC 2: 833); “They drink wine in public, beer behind closed doors. They drink wine out of vanity, in order to seem French, but they don’t actually like it” (OC 2: 835). Perhaps worst of all, the Belgians—unlike Baudelaire, of course—always know the price, never the value, of great paintings: “The Belgians measure an artist’s worth from the price of his paintings” (OC 2: 931); “The Belgians’ way of discussing a painting’s worth. The dollar amount, always the dollar amount. This goes on for three hours. And then, after three hours of quoting the prices things are going for, they think they’ve actually had a conversation about painting” (OC 2: 933–34); “A minister, whose collection I am visiting, says to me as I sing David’s praises: “‘Am I correct in understanding that David is going up?’ I reply: ‘David was never in decline among intelligent people’ (OC 2: 934). The passion for urine drinking, the vanity of drinking wine only in public, the endless discussions of the art market—these are all figures of capital’s infinite self-extension: “One tenth of the revenue is spent. The rest is capitalized” (OC 2: 868). Elsewhere, the mania for capitalization is likened to cannibalism.

Baudelaire’s understanding of the limitlessness of capital’s appetite is in perfect keeping with Marx’s—for example, in the early sections of Capital on commodities and money, in which we learn that nothing is barred from inscription within the capitalist system: linen as well as iron; life as well as death; cunning as well as blood, guts, and muscle (C 164)—poetry, adds Baudelaire, as well as prose.

In view of the poet’s own preoccupation with this limitlessness, the question becomes not simply where we find evidence of capital’s hand in his poetry, but whether we can identify in his texts a mode of poetic production that is, in some sense, proper to capital. Only once we have isolated this poetic principle can we begin to ask about a poetry that would support or, alternatively draw resources from, its negation or overturning, allowing for the elaboration of an anticapitalist or revolutionary poetic principle. It goes almost without saying that we are not talking about two different poetic corpuses or bodies of work but about the prospects for change or transformation within a single corpus with privileged links to capital.

1. “Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes”

If we want to take up this question in the poetry itself, the first and most obvious place to go is to two well-known poems appearing early in the first cycle of Les Fleurs du mal (Spleen et Idéal): La Muse malade (“The Sick Muse”) and La Muse vénale (“The Venal Muse”). These poems explicitly treat the problem of their own production, like all muse poems. If the lyric muse is traditionally associated with a principle of inspiration, and thus with a Romantic and idealizing conception of poetic labor, this is the model that La Muse malade undoes.³ This muse is sick. What is wrong with her? Will it even be possible, given her condition, to write a poem?

My poor muse, alas, what is your problem this morning?
Your hollow eyes are peopled with nocturnal visions,
And I see by turns reflected in your face
Madness and horror, cold and taciturn.

Have the greenish succubus and the rosy goblin,
Poured for you fear and love from their urns?
Have nightmares, with a despotic and unruly hand,
Drowned you in the depths of some fabulous Minturne?
(OC 1: 14–15)⁴

Things do not look good, and yet, on one reading, the crisis is only temporary. The poem’s first line suggests that it may be only this morning (ce matin) that the muse is sick. It is furthermore implied in the second quatrain that she may simply be suffering from insomnia: perhaps all she needs is a good night’s sleep. Also reassuring is that the descriptions of succubus and goblin, for all their grim allure, can be readily reinscribed in a “healthy” conception of poetic inspiration, for they depend on the same movements of interiorization, introjection, and incorporation as other spiritual or incarnational models. Under healthy lyric conditions, the muse inspires the poet by “in-spiriting” him with creative breath or life, of which he is, for better or for worse, the vessel. Here, it is the creatures of the night who dispense fear and desire from their vessels for the muse to drink.

The tercets follow through on this healthy reinscription, and any fear that may have been inspired in us by the muse’s sick day is almost immediately dispelled:

Would that your breast, exhaling healthy scents,
Be forever filled with hardy thoughts,
And your Christian blood flow in rhythmic waves,
Like the harmonious sounds of antique syllables,
Where reign by turns Phoebus, father of song,
And the great Pan, lord of the harvest. (OC 1: 14–15)

The poet’s desire that the muse’s blood flow in rhythmic waves, likened here to the harmonious or “numbered” sounds of antique syllables, is not just described but actually realized in the course of this description. It is, in other words, not despite her lapse but rather because of it that the sick muse constitutes a stimulus to poetic production and provides an occasion for the writing of a poem. This second reading has the virtue of mobilizing what is widely considered to be a kind of master trope of Les Fleurs du mal, through which a state of decadence or decay, whether natural or moral, shows signs of an unexpected fertility or fecundity, and, as it were, is turned to account.

Other poems that might be included under this heading are the famous dedicatory, Au Lecteur (“To the Reader”), in which the poet appeals to his reader on the basis of a disinclination to reading. This reader is either too bored or too hypocritical to read poetry, and it is thus that he is addressed as the reader of these poems. Then there is Une charogne (“A Carrion”), a love poem written on the body of a maggot-ridden piece of roadkill. When, in order to convey a heightened sense of beauty’s transience, the speaker compares his girlfriend’s fate to that of the carrion with its legs spread in the air, he highlights an erotic charge that was already there in the memento mori. These are the poems, or at least the readings of them, that underwrite the received interpretation of Les Fleurs du mal as not just depicting but actually blooming, or coming into the world, as “flowers of evil.” This interpretation is illuminating in that it grapples with elements of Baudelaire’s poetic production that are deeply bound up with capital. It nonetheless fails to account for other ways that these poems also work and construes Baudelaire’s lyric modernity overly narrowly.

The second muse poem pushes us beyond this interpretation, for it confronts the question of the market explicitly and directly in order to flesh out its own self-conception as a commodity. In keeping with this market orientation, and in marked contrast to the first muse poem, La Muse vénale is turned strangely toward the future. The crisis of poetic production threatened in the quatrains is just that: (still) threatened. Lest we mistake this futurity for some sort of reprieve, however, it quickly becomes clear that there is no avoiding the crisis in this case either. This future orientation carries with it, like every orientation toward the market, a turn toward irony:

Oh, muse of my heart, lover of palaces,
When January looses her north winds,
Through the dreary darkness of snowy evenings,
Will you have embers to warm your freezing feet?

Will you revive your marbled shoulders
In the rays of moonlight that peep through the shutters?
Feeling your purse as dry as your palate,
Will you harvest gold from the azure vaults? (OC 1: 15)

A courtesan or prostitute—a “lover of palaces” (amante des palais) in a double sense—this muse not only has needs but is painted as a connoisseur of earthly delights. Like the sick muse before her, she is a strikingly sensual and embodied figure. She gets cold; she gets thirsty; but worst of all, as the time-honored trope of wintry desuetude drives home, she is getting old. Because she is a prostitute, her sensuality and embodiedness (read: her mortality) are closely connected with her status as a commodity. Forget inspiration; this is a muse for whom cash flow matters most. Hence the dryness of her palate is figured, in the second quatrain, in a single image with the drying up of her cash reserves: both reflect her increasing inability to sell herself. O, muse of my heart, the poem apostrophizes, what will you do in hard times, once you have run out of money? Go and gather gold from the sky’s azure vaults?

We may recognize in these azure vaults an allusion to the poetic flight of fancy thematized in Élévation (“Elevation”), another poem from the same cycle. In Élévation, in contradistinction to anything that seems possible in either muse poem, the poet exhorts his own spirit to soar above the earth and purify itself in the heavens, like those happy souls who talk to flowers. It is, of course, this soaring, “effortless” model of poetic production, in whose figural facade cracks had already appeared (with the schism of the speaking voice, the central trope of muteness, the need for vigorous exhortation in the first place), that is undermined by the competing models of the sick muse and the muse as prostitute:

Happy is he who can with vigorous wing
Launch himself into fields luminous and serene;
He whose thoughts, like sparrows,

Soar freely into the heavens every morning,
—He who glides over the surface of life, and effortlessly
understands
The language of flowers and mute things. (OC 1: 10)

As for what replaces the fiction of this poetic effortlessness under capital, La Muse vénale could not be more explicit. Poetic labor is, precisely, labor, and as the tercets make clear, in the winter of her life, this muse will have to work for a living:⁵

To earn your evening bread you’ll have to swing
The censer like a choirboy, and sing
Te Deums of which you don’t believe a word,

Or, starving clown, show off your charms, your smile
Wet with tears that none see, to beguile
And cheer the sick spleen of the vulgar herd. (OC 1: 15)⁶

La Muse vénale teaches us that there are always...