Counterfeit Capital: Poetic Labor and Revolutionary Irony

By Jennifer Bajorek

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Oct 30, 2008
• ISBN: 9780804786805

Book preview

Introduction: Swindlers and Prophets

1. Lost and Transmitted

If Baudelaire and Marx can still be considered our ancestors, the coiners and first critics of a modernity we still, every now and then, claim to inherit, it is not in the sense that this modernity has come to be glossed, as knowledge of a net loss in possibility: To be modern is to know what is no longer possible (Barthes 211). It is true that interpretations of Baudelaire have claimed to discover just such a loss, finding it more or less metonymically expressed in the type of the melancholic poet, pié-tinant through his perennially fractured mourning of Paris. (Metonymically because he does not remember anything, and transmits only what he cannot remember.) Interpretations of Marx of every stripe—classical, orthodox, post-Marxist—have, by contrast, staked their claims on the production of new possibilities from what must in fact have only seemed a loss. For all their apparent differences, both interpretations mimic the hocus-pocus whereby capital pretends to produce something from out of nothing, like a rabbit from a hat, even as it drags all that was once valued, apart from value, into its disappearing act. Marx on occasion refers to this as swindling, a word that, in German, preserves a clear relation to the dizziness caused in the mind of the presdigitator’s subject (C 96; W 23: 19).¹ Capital, or so this story goes, that condition of possibility of modernity.

But since when has it been possible to mark, to measure, or in some other way to register either a loss or a gain in possibility? This modernity seems to think, or at least to want to believe, that both past and future can be measured; that they can be lost and therefore saved or saved up, kept or left intact, accounted for—as if time itself could be exchanged for something; as if possibility acquired the power, in time, to transform its own conditions of production, its own conditions of possibility. Once possibility is drawn in this way into the web of economic thinking, it starts to look like capital. Who can ever really know that the lost thing will not return, that what is now no longer possible will not someday be possible again?

This possibility, that capital secretly rummages through the past even as it whispers to us seductively about the future, is, of course, one of the themes of Capital. Hence the leap of faith that, as Marx remarks, carves a mad love of possibility in capital’s heart. Here, to be modern, or better, to be a subject of capital, is not so much to know anything—neither is it to remember or to forget anything—as it is to start calculating with this leap of faith. If Baudelaire and Marx can still be considered our ancestors—the coiners of the words we still use (modernity, for example) and our loudest critics—it is because they uncovered this mad love of possibility within capital, and because they recognized in it both the ugliest possibilities of economic thinking and, all tangled up with them, a potentially interruptive force.

Marx himself was not deaf to the revolutionary overtones of this analysis—for example, when he theorizes the links between capital and a different future in volume 3. In the chapter on The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production, Marx explains that credit gets rid of capital without actually getting rid of it: it revolutionizes the relation of capital to labor from within, such that "the opposition between capital and labor is abolished [aufgehoben]" (C3 571; W 25: 456). As the credit system develops the motive of capitalist production into the purest and most colossal system of gambling and swindling, he writes, the associated workers become their own capitalist (C3 571). The end of capital is not the end of capital, at least in part, Marx suggests in his discussion of the development of credit, because capital always has the power to (re)make itself (as) possible. He calls the proponents of credit not only swindlers but also prophets (C3 572–73).

Seen from the angle of this development, the revolution—not even the one that Marx himself prophesied—will not and cannot ever be a revolution against capital. And it is no longer possible to speak of a future that would not just be a repetition of the present possibilities without a heady dose of ironic vertigo slipping in. No wonder so many of the stories Baudelaire and Marx tell us about capital’s future are marked by a manifest investment in this vertigo.

This book began when I noticed that Marx and Baudelaire posited, at strange places in their texts, a relationship between irony and capital. This relationship was, it seemed to me, at once unexpected and essential. For a short while, I persisted in the delusion that my reading might be neatly tied up with a question. For example, why does the belief in a different future call out for ironic expression under capital? It seemed possible to start with a reflection on the connections between elements of literature or literary language and a critical and deeply political response to capital. Like the man said: beware all who enter here. No sooner had I committed myself to this task than other questions gathered, some looking suspiciously like versions of the questions that Marx and Baudelaire had been asking. How to conceive of revolution under conditions dictating the infinite production and reproduction of the same? How to account for the long-standing dismissal of the idea that irony, which is always connected with infinitude and repetition, could have political pertinence or be connected in some way with the critique of capital? What if irony cannot be confined to literature or to language, but rather comes to inflect the production or circulation of all meaning or value under capital?

In the pages that follow, I have tried to formalize at the level of the individual readings what Baudelaire and Marx were thinking or wanted us to consider when they asked us to reflect on capital in an ironic way. In many, but not all, of the texts I read, this reflection is carried out in a language that would be considered by many to be ironic in a literary or rhetorical sense; in many but not all of these texts, Marx and Baudelaire actually use the word irony. With and through these texts, I have tried to track what an entire critical tradition has neglected or repressed when it has mistaken irony for something purely negative, in the sense of destructive, nihilistic, and even antipolitical. Negation and reversal are not always, or not only, destructive. The most unexpected and most unprecedented actions are not always the worst. Nor, for that matter, is destruction always a bad thing. In still other texts, the word irony does not appear on the page, and I have been concerned to explore the consequences of capital’s imbrication with the technical yet noninstrumental dimensions of human labor for its history and future, and for our ability even to imagine a different world.

2. Irony, Allegory, and Capital

Irony has typically been defined, in the history of its theories, as a rhetorical device or figure of speech, with the Renaissance marking its first renaissance and Cicero and Quintilian acting as its most celebrated theorists. In other definitions, it has been treated as a more extended figure, in which its duplicity and complexity are understood to characterize a person (Socrates), an idea, the complicity of an entire community, or even the sensibility of an entire epoch. The figure of speech is, in these definitions, said to be extended to a figure of thought. In some accounts, this extension allows irony to transcend the baseness of rhetoric and become more sublime or philosophical. In other accounts, it only debases it further. In both cases, irony is persistently associated with double-voicedness, reflexivity, and vertigo. Hence the common thread, running through all of these definitions, of a copresence or mutual interference of two voices, two meanings, or two events, standing in an infinitely reversible relationship. One of the most commonly cited definitions says that irony is saying one thing and meaning another or saying the contrary of what is meant.

I am not certain which of these definitions comes closest to the irony that interests me, nor would I want to suggest that it is the same one every time. Given my attention to the political nature of Baudelaire’s and Marx’s statements and my concern, above all, to explore the consequences of irony for their critiques of capital, we might imagine that the irony connected with a community comes closest, but only if community is not reduced to a monoplanar encounter between subjects. This was, I think, already Baudelaire’s lesson, in passages such as this one from the late notebooks:

Yes! Long live the Revolution!

still! and despite everything!

But me, I am no fool! I have never been a fool! I say "Long live the Revolution! as I would say Long live Destruction! Long live Expiation! Long live Punishment! Long live Death! "

Not only would I be happy to be the victim, but I wouldn’t object to being the executioner—so as to feel the Revolution in two different ways!

We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like we have syphilis in our bones. We have all contracted democracy and syphilis. (OC 2: 961)²

Witness the complexities that ensue when irony names, or comes in some other way to be connected with, the event or decision that would precede or prepare the effective instance or act of anticapitalist resistance. No sooner does Baudelaire say revolution than this saying troubles the very categories of effectivity and resistance. This passage has the added virtue of underscoring the poet’s preoccupation with transmission.

Speaking of old questions coming back, and questions about transmission in particular, I should say something about my debt to Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s first and most monumental intervention was to argue—most explicitly, in the so-called Baudelaire book but also elsewhere ³—that Marx’s and Baudelaire’s texts registered traces of the same event: capital conceived as a change in the nature and mechanisms of transmission of experience; the mechanization of production (be it of meaning or of value), or of human labor (manual or intellectual, virtual or embodied); the still-unfolding consequences of these changes for our conception of history. I have been inspired by Benjamin’s decision to think the material(ity) of capital’s history as a matter for poetry. I have been particularly preoccupied with Benjamin’s interpretation of Baudelaire’s poetry as a new technology of historical inscription and cultural transmission specifically adapted to capital. Part of what I have tried to show, and what I think a reflection on irony opens up after Benjamin, are the connections between the conception of history that emerges in his texts on Baudelaire and his more general or thematic statements about materialist history. I have suggested that these more general statements clearly draw inspiration from a conception of history that is, in direct proportion as it is materialist, both textual and ironic. In my readings of Capital (above all, the discussions of primitive accumulation and capitalist accumulation in Chapter 3), I have tried to show that this textual history directly cites Marx’s.⁴

My debt is even greater when it comes to Benjamin’s second intervention, which was his theory of Baudelairean allegory. If, as Benjamin essentially argues, Baudelaire’s texts can be understood to speak allegorically by speaking with and through the commodity, it follows that the political-economic dimensions of circulation and exchange cannot be distinguished from more general problems of linguistic and historical transmission. Benjamin never gives us a full-blown theory of language’s economic principles, but his decision to write a materialist history of the nineteenth century through the lens of an interpretation of Baudelaire’s poetry is deeply rooted in key ideas about language’s material and economic nature.⁵ Nowhere is this clearer than in his theoretical pronouncements about allegory. Even if these pronouncements can seem a little cryptic (Majesty of the allegorical intention: destruction of the organic and the living—extinguishing of appearances [SW 4: 172]; The devaluation of the world of things in allegory is surpassed within the world of things itself by the commodity [SW 4: 164]), Benjamin is able to illuminate, through his theory of allegory, the broader social, political, and historical consequences of capital more lucidly than we might expect. In much the same way that Marx describes the realm of production as standing in a secret yet not-so-secret or repressed relation to circulation, Benjamin encourages us to imagine a kind of material underworld of language from which everything else bubbles up: meaning, reference, the value that enters infinitely into circulation, and which is (or so it is promised) infinitely capitalizable. Only once we grasp the weird brilliance of Benjamin’s interpretation of allegory as the linguistic equivalent of the commodity can we appreciate his statements about the peculiar prospects for historical and cultural transmission under capital.

If, as Benjamin teaches, Baudelaire’s insights as a critic of capital are intimately bound up with all that is most original about his lyric work (the taboo on the future, the skillful management of the alexandrine, the appropriation and transposition of allegory from the baroque period to the modern), my aim is to show they cannot be confined to it. Whereas Benjamin sets out from the hypothesis that with Baudelaire we reach a crisis of the lyric and that the poet’s texts render the possibility of lyric poetry problematic,⁶ I argue that there remain lessons to be drawn from their power to move through this crisis. Irony also names this situation of impossible transmission.⁷

3. Poetry and Prose

The term Baudelairean irony is a familiar one in the criticism. Although irony crops up most frequently with reference to the prose poetry project Spleen de Paris (Petits poèmes en prose) and to the critical prose works, it is crucial to note—as has Jean Starobinski—that the word and concept irony already make an appearance in Les Fleurs du mal.⁸ If this occurrence is noteworthy from the standpoint of the definition of irony, it is even more so from the standpoint of generic definition, for irony has frequently been considered the special province of narrative and has come to be associated, at least in European literary traditions, almost exclusively with the novel.⁹ In fact, the discovery of a lyric irony already in the verse poetry can be traced even further back, to the poet’s own famous remark in Au Lecteur (To the Reader, the collection’s dedicatory) that the poetry is destined to engage a reader who is either too bored—or too hypocritical—to read it. There is, the poetry itself suggests, a kind of irony in the very fact of the modern lyric’s existence.

Benjamin only extends this line when he suggests that the true irony of Baudelaire’s self-situation in the dedicatory stems from the success of his poetic production under capital: Baudelaire wrote a book which from the very beginning had little prospect of becoming an immediate popular success, and yet, Benjamin goes on to emphasize, [T]here has been no success on a mass scale in lyric poetry since Baudelaire (SW 4: 313–14). If we follow this reading, the verse poetry posits itself as a kind of prototype and baseline measurement of every future irony and, in this sense, prefigures the theory of irony (really it is something closer to a manifesto) that is given in the famous preface to the prose poems.

By invoking the verse-prose distinction, I want less to offer a commentary on genre than to point out the ways that this distinction has traditionally been invoked, and then displaced or shifted, in order to produce artificial separations within Baudelaire’s corpus. Even if we could subscribe to the distinction between a theory and a practice of irony, or between those texts that use irony and those that only mention it, it would be possible to argue that both practices (the practice of theorizing and the practice of practicing irony) are sustained by the same reflection on the seriously compromised prospects for aesthetic and poetic production under capital. Some of the passages in Baudelaire that are most often interpreted as ironic precisely in connection with a critique of capital are found in the art criticism—for example, in the Salon of 1846, which opens with the scathing dedication to the bourgeoisie, and in the well-known text on laughter, De l’essence