smell and its manufacture: a hurried note

So where does smell rank in the order of things?

Cesar Birotteau is fascinating not only because the characters often seem to be mere vehicles for monetary transactions, but also because Balzac has a fine sense for the infra-class differences that pit supplier against manufacturer, the building owner against the tenant, the proprietor of the shop against the landlord, the financier against the client – all differences that are at once matters of money and matters of stations in the circulation of capital.

Over this whole construct, this speculative web, sits the changes in a perfumery. One which, as Balzac saw, was on the verge of shedding its old form as a mere outgrowth of the revenue of the great bourgeois and the nobility, and donning a new form as a mass luxury provider. Now this thing requires marketing and chemistry, the annexation of the third life and the use of science – embodied, in Balzac’s novel, by a natural philosopher in the old mold, Vauquelin. The old natural philosopher was not part of a team, and did not have at his disposal the statistical tools that restructured the whole of experimental science. Rather, the heroic myth of the experimentum cruces is metonymic with the individual genius, the artisan-manufacturer of discoveries. Balzac, in one way, was just such an individual genius – Baudelaire was astonished by the absolute nullity of Balzac’s juvenilia, and all the more appreciative of the effort, the act of the will, that seemed to make Balzac a genius. And, of course, metonymic with the genius and his discovery was the financier and his coup.

I must organize these notes better, but I've been pressed for time this week. I will add to this argument later today.

Accumulation, alienation and the part-man

In the last post, I made a first stab at explaining accumulation in Marx’s terms.

In this post, I want to begin with two long quotes. The first is from 2004.

“Li is the fastest worker on a long, U-shaped assembly line of about 130 women who put together Mini Touch 'n Crawl Minnie, a scampering version of the Disney character activated by a baby's nudge.

“Li moves with lightning speed — gluing the pink bottom, screwing it into place, getting the rest of the casing to adhere, tamping it down with a special hammer, pulling the battery cover through its slats, soldering where she glued, testing to make sure the leg joints on the other side still work, then sending it down the line.
The entire process takes 21 seconds.

She generally works 5½ days a week, as much as 10 hours at a time. Her monthly wage — about $65 — is typical for this part of China, enough for Li to send money back home to her poor farming family in Henan province and to afford a computer class in town.
But Li, 20, pays a heavy price: Her hands ache terribly, and she is always exhausted — a situation to which she seems resigned.

"People at my age should expect some hardship," said Li, clad in bluejeans and a pink factory blouse, which she left unbuttoned to reveal a white T-shirt emblazoned with the silhouette of Mickey Mouse. "I should taste bitterness while I'm young." – “Mattel struggles to balance profit with morality” by Abigail Goldman Nov. 28, 2004.

The second quote is a long one in which Marx does some summarizing work. Always the Leo, Marx’s summaries are like the MGM symbol that proceeded its movies: full throated roars:

“The law according to which, thanks to the progress in the productivity of social labor, the growing mass of the means of productivity can be put in a motion relation to the progressively decreasing expenditure of human power, this law expresses itself on a capitalist basis [auf kapitalistischer Grundlage] in which it is not the laborer who applies the instrument of labor, but the instrument of labor who applies the laborer - in the fact that the higher the productive power of labor, the greater the pressure of the laborer on the means of employment, the more precarious become his condition of existence: the sale of his own power to the multiplication of someone else’s wealth, or to the self-valorisation of capital. The quicker the growth of the means of production and the productivity of labor over the productive population capitalistically expresses itself in the inversion, that the working population always grows faster than the valorization needs of capital.


As we saw in the fourth section, the analysis of the production of surplus value: within the capitalistic system are realized all methods to the increase of the social productive power of labor, to the cost of the individual laborer. All means to the development of production are transformed into means of dominating and exploiting the producers, of crippling the laborer into a part-person, in devaluing him to an annex of the machine, in negating with the pain of his labor its content, in alienating from him the intellectual powers of the labor process in the same measure, wherein science has finally been incorporated in it as an independent power; it distorts the conditions, under which he works, subjects him during the working process to the most petty and hateful depotism, transforms his lifetime into his worktime, and throws his wife and child under the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all the methods of production are at the same time methods of accumulation and every extension of accumulation is, inversely, the means to the development of this method. It follows that in proportion as Capital accumulates, the position of the worker [Lage des Arbeiters], whether his pay be high or low, must worsen.” [610 my translation, 798 Fowkes]

This is a high riding bill of indictment. One notices – and I put this down against those who, as Duncan has pointed out, discount alienation as an idea Marx tucked away in his notebooks in the 1840s, never to bring it out again – that the same complex of textual figures [the worker as a living and intellectual being, alienation, and the machine as the image of his doom] – come into play here, in almost the same way they figure in the Economic and Philosophical notebooks. Alienation, far from being about the essence of man, is about an essential structure in the construction of capitalism.

This may seem like a petty debating point in the interminable squabbling among Marx’s interpreters. It is, however, useful to keep in mind – it is something I’ll return to later.

According to the classical and neo-classical criticism of Marx’s economics, it is in evaluating the price of labor that Marx shows that, underneath, the market is fundamental to his interpretation of capitalism after all. Because what does Marx tell us, with his marvelous phrase about the reserve industrial army and his remarks about the surplus labor population, except that it is ultimately supply and demand that determines the labor market?

Again, one must extract Marx from the dogmatic image of Marx. There is no question that for Marx, the realization of value in the market is done under the press of what I would call surface conditions. The competition between capitalists is one; another is the competition among workers. Those surface conditions, of course, can have more profound consequences – they set up incentives that operate up and down the system.

But ultimately, supply and demand come back to the structure of capital – to variable and constant capital, which together make up the organic composition of capital. Thus, Marx does not envision a labor market that tends towards an equilibrium between the demand for labor and its supply – ‘full employment’, in the bogus phrase of the economists. Rather, this is a market that expresses the profound disequilibrium between the power of the worker and the power of the capitalist, expressed in terms of dependence. The power of the capitalist is the power given by the accumulation of capital. When the laborer sells his labor power, he not only commodifies his labor time, but he adds to the accumulation process by which the capitalist acquires a number of powers- for instance, the power to change the organization of production. These powers, in the capitalist system, are considered the natural concomitants of growth. Looking at the workers themselves, they may be getting more prosperous every year. But looking at the position of labor – the Lage – we get quite a different picture, which is of the conditions of the bargaining power of labor. Galbraith’s useful phrase – countervailing power – nicely expresses the positional power of the players in the capitalist system.

Marx’s image of the industrial reserve army again turns us back to the place of alienation. Just as an army is united by its morale – its disposition to go into battle – so, too, is the industrial reserve army. Alienation is easy to spot in the workplace. It comes out in phrases like, well, I guess I’m lucky to have a job. Or Li’s infinitely sorrowful phrase: "I should taste bitterness while I'm young."
Inversely, the position of the capitalist class is structured by a continual effort to liquidate the supply and demand conditions that the classical economists think consider to be so healthy for the working class. The upper management in corporations in America have long formed a kind of guild, in which strange value laden criteria suddenly appear, approved by the economist/theologians of the system as the height of rationality. Thus we are told that x deserves some absurd compensation packet because, under x’s ‘leadership’, the company made a billion dollars in profits over the last ten years. The same economists who would be shocked if x’s secretary or the guys on the loading dock of x’s company demanded pay based on a similar principle find X’s demand almost saintlike in its humble reach for what X surely deserves. One could, of course, create an index of the compensation of the CEOs of the top 500 Fortune companies and tie the pay to the lowest paid – thus shifting the scale downward in a competitive, market-y friendly way – but it is pretty easy to predict that this will never happen. Supply and demand as a surface phenomena determining wages quickly turns into an ideology that is used like the law of gravity over those who lack the bargaining power to fight back – the workers – while it is simply tossed aside when determining the wages of those who own the capital.

my darling was naked, and knowing my heart...

Aristotle’s schemata of tropes gave us the sight-lines for comedy – the pain that is not pain, the ugliness that is a lure rather than a repulsion, the play between the height and the depth, all constructed from the point of view that comedy is ultimate determined by the audience that enjoys it – an audience that is ultimately base, or common qua audience. There is obviously going to be a problem with comedy from the point of view that identifies pleasure and pain as opposites, feelings that take polar positions on a continuum. Similarly with the point of view that identifies the beautiful, and the high, as the desirable, against the ugly, and the low, as the repulsive.

These tropes don’t reappear in Baudelaire’s essay under Aristotle’s signature. In fact, the essay begins with a question of signature – Baudelaire has read ‘somewhere’ the phrase, la sage ne rit qu’en tremblant. This is a maxim that Baudelaire develops, but doesn’t sign – and yet, he dare not attribute it to another writer. It is an instance – and what writer has not felt like this – of deja-ecrit – in which, just as in deja-vu, one has the feeling that one has seen the thing one is writing down before. To have seen it is to have read it, and to have read it means someone has written it. Something has gone wrong, though – there’s a small deviation in the author’s authority, for neither the writer nor anyone that the writer knows wrote the sentence, exactly.
In an essay in which Satan and temptastion quickly come to the forefront, this deja-ecrit is not external to the system of the text. Rather, the uncertainty of it as a maxim – a pronouncement that gains its truth content from the authority of the experience of the speaker, out of whose mouth it came. Laughter, which also comes out of the mouth, and also seems to hover outside of the speech acts that we sign – is, then, first approached from a quote of a phrase spoken by no one person.

Baudelaire proposes to give us the essence of laughter, but we very quickly see that, in fact, there are at least two kinds of laughter, and a diachronic and geographic politics of laughter. What is it about the ‘modern’ - a magical term for Baudelaire – that has produced the predominent form of laughter – the laughter of pride?

The modern is explicitly posed, by Baudelaire, as a term opposed to the pre-modern or a-modern – the non-European, or the Ancient. At the center of the modern is Satan – for Baudelaire as well as Gogol. Although Gogol’s term, posh’lust, was, of course, not known to Baudelaire, they are both working with the same insight into the ‘real’ – that is, the insight that the routinization of the ‘real,’ or banality, is evil at its core. Evil – mal – is of course as much a preoccupation of Baudelaire’s as of Gogol’s, while the routine – production itself – is a preoccupation of Marx’s.

I have not yet quoted – translated – from the essay, because it would be too powerful to quote before we get these remarks out of the way. To pretend that I can quote anything, and that it is all the same, and that I will apply my little apparatus to draw out the themes, study the development, etc. – well, I think that is simply false. I know incantation, I know enchantment when I see it. There’s a myth about hypnosis – that one can plant a post-hynotic suggestion. Well, reading the Essence of Laughter certainly leaves me feeling that – I must change my life.

So I’m not going to pretend that this is any text.

One final remark: In The Essence of Laughter, Baudelaire’s arguments keep falling under the sway of his tableaux – there are a number in this essay that could easily be prose poems, including one that, I think, is one of his greatest prose poems. Logos, enchanted by mythos, dances. We could – and will – apply to this fact about the formal structuring of the essay the points raised by its themes – which is the kind of gesture that infuriates a certain kind of philosopher, who insists on maintaining a rigid separation of levels in analyzing discourse.

ps - I'll add this today:

“In the earthly paradise (be it supposed in the past or to come, memory or prophecy, like the theologians or like the socialists), in the earthly paradise, that is to say in surroundings where it seems to man that all created things are good, joy would not be in laughter. No pain afflicts him, his face would be simple and homogeneous, and the laughter that now agitates the nations would no longer deform the traits of the face. Laughter and tears will not make themselves visible in the paradise of bliss.” [ne peuvent pas se faire voir dans le paradis de delices.]

Baudelaire’s essay on laughter contains, as I have said, a number of tableaux that do not quite serve wholly as examples, which is how images and situations are put in the service of explanation by philosophy – but rather as a kind of hieroglyph, symbols made out of a combination of elements that are, themselves, already symbolic. The hieroglyph is, of course, read, but – especially in an alphabetic culture – something in it resists the transparency of reading. Or to put it in a nineteenth century vocabulary, form, here, never completely absorbs function. There’s an excess of vision, if you will, encoded in the hieroglyph.

Myself, I want to draw out two of those tableaux.

The first, which falls under the paradisial theme in the essay, concerns one of the odder falls from grace in literature. It is not, though, unprecedented – Baudelaire was a reader of Choderlos de Laclos, and knew the famous chapter, in Liasons Dangereuses, in which the Vicomte de Valmont recounts his conquest of Cecile by means of laughter:

“The little person is a laugh-er: and to promote her gaiety, I bethought myself, in our entr’acts, to tell her all the scandalous adventures that passed through my head, and to render them more piquantes and to fix her attention more closely, I put them on her mother’s account, and I amused myself by ornamenting her with vices and ridiculousness.”

Baudelaire’s Eve falls due to a caricature which, Baudelaire further supposes, is connected to “those times there” – to the time of royalty. This Eve is, for those who know their Baudelaire, irresistibly evocative of Jeanne Duval. Biographers of Baudelaire – I’m thinking in particular of Joanne Richardson – use the testimony of Baudelaire’s contemporaries to give us a picture of Duval – and in so doing, they strangely ignore the crudeness of the testimonies. We do know that Baudelaire made an immense sacrifice for Jeanne – he sacrificed another woman for her, his mother. Madame Aupick could not understand why Charles lived with Jeanne, what “hold” she had on him, and absolutely refused to see Jeanne.

Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, Madame Aupick’s views have tended to be adopted by Baudelaire’s biographers.

So much for personal detail. Baudelaire illustrates what he takes to be the relationship between laughter and innocence – in the cosmic sense, an innocence that finds all created things good – by imagining a first encounter with the alluring ugliness of caricature.

“Permit me a poetic supposition which will serve to verify the justice of these assertions, which many people will no doubt find spotted with the apriori of mysticism. Lets try, since the comic is a damnable element of a diabolical origin, to put it in an encounter with an absolutely primitive soul and coming out, so to speak, from the very hands of nature. Take for example the great and typical figure of Virginie, who perfectly symbolizes absolute purity and naivete. Virginie arrives in Paris still moist from the ocean fogs, and gilded by the tropical sun, her eyes full of the great primitive images of the waves, mountains and forests. She falls here into a civilization full of excessive, mephitic turbulence, she – all impregnated with the pure and rich smells of the Indies – she, attached to humanity by her family and love, by her mother and her lover, Paul, as angelic as she is, and whose sex is, so to speak, not distinguishable from hers in the unappeaseable ardors of a love that doesn’t know itself. God, she knew in the church of Pamplemousse, a little church, modest and puny, and in the immobility of the tropical azure, and in the immortal music of the forests and torrents. Certainly, Virginie is very intelligent, but a few images and a few memories are enough for her, just as a few books will do for the Sage. Thus, one day Virginie encounters, by chance, innocently, in the Palais-Royale, in the pane of glass of a glazier, on a table, in a public place, a caricature! A caricature that is appetizing for us, swollen with bitterness and rancor, appropriate to a bored and perspicacious civilization. Lets imagine a goodly farce of boxers, some brittanic enormity, full of clotted blood and seasons with some monstrous goddams; or, if this smiles better on your curious imagination, lets suppose that before virginal Virginia’s eye there spreads some charming and agitated impurity, a Gavarni of those times, and of the best, some insulting satire against royal folly, some plastic diatribe against the Parc-aux-Cerfs, or he down in the mud precedents of a favorite, or the nocturnal escapades of the proverbial Austrian. The caricature is double: the design and the idea, the violent design, the biting and veiled ideea; a painful complication of elements for a naïf spirit, accustomed to understand by sheer intuition things as simple as it. Virginie has seen: now she looks. Why? She is looking at the unknown. Besides, she hardly understands what it means or what its use is. However, do you see, suddenly the wings unfold, there is the trembling of a soul that veils itself and wishes to get away? The angel has felt that the scandal is there. And, truly, I say unto ye, that if she has understood or not understood, there remains in her some impression of a certain malaise, something that resembles fear. Without doubt, if Virginie remains in Paris and becomes enlightened [la science lui vienen], she will learn to laugh [le rire lui viendra]; we will see why. But, for the moment, we, the analyst and critic, who dare not, certainly, claim that our intelligence is superior to Virginie, observe the fear and suffering of the immaculate angel before the caricature.”

I’ll translate the second tableaux tomorrow.