IT MAKES NOT the least difference whether shoemakers sing in their shops or join choruses at popular festivals. The songs that lend rhythm to their work or occupy their leisure time help to maintain that semblance of love which, more than skill, keeps the worker at his post. And aesthetes in any case are not obliged to go and listen to them.
But in a scene from Die Meistersinger Hans Sachs does something else. He proposes that the people be allowed to judge music once a year. And, by this method, the first singer he wants to name as one of the masters is a knight.
The first of these mistakes is the more excusable since it is deemed natural that manual laborers reflect their judgments about the Beautiful in the clapping of their hands, confusing, in so doing, the unity of the Idea with the multitude of forms and voices. And it matters little if this is only a question of judging artisans’ songs for the benefit of their fellow tradesmen.
But Hans Sachs does not indulge in that confusion. It is not his apprentice that he proposes for anointing by the multitude, but a knight. It is not a singer that he supports, but a poet. And with this poet-knight introduced by a shoemaker to the artisans of Nuremberg, everything seems to get scrambled: weapons, tools, and meters; trade, science, and inspiration; gold, silver, and iron.
The confusion does not stem from a composer’s Gothic imagination. The Festival of St. John (Midsummer’s Day) staged by Richard Wagner in 1868 at the Munich Opera illustrates one of the themes that for several decades haunted the minds of experts as far as the philosophical, artistic, and political orders were concerned: the invasion of shoemakers into domains reserved for learned connoisseurs of the Idea of the Good and inspired lovers of beautiful forms.
The police, of course, have long been used to the fact that in the streets of Paris as in those of Nuremberg, apprentice shoemakers and tailors-in-training are the first to raise a ruckus. Which is in keeping with their concept, that of being the multitude par excellence: motley and boisterous number. The theater owners know this, too, and employ them as paid applauders.
There, perhaps, is the error, for the police are shrewd not to want such applauders in the theater. The greatest evil lies not in the mass as such but in its decomposition. For it is evident that these workers are acquiring a taste for the fancy dress in which they are decked out; for the aristocratic romances which they are paid to applaud; and for the theatrical illusion which they are invited to attend. As a consequence these workers are also flocking to secret societies where they dress themselves up in the hats and titles of the Republic, and to Saint-Simonian meetings where people of high society fraternize with the working class. And some are not afraid to continue ascending to the divine pleasures of the poet and the philosopher.
An insurrection of the shoemakers: the sociological orientation of historians would like to see in that the advancement of shoemaker virtue. The fierce pride of these skilled workers and their uneasiness over the new world of unskilled labor would strengthen the spirit and arms of the shoemakers as well as their inseparable acolytes, the tailors.
But the shoemakers, and indeed all workers, know very well that there is no shoemaker virtue. Or, to put it another way, theirs is a virtue that has not changed since Plato’s day: the shoemaker is someone who may not do anything else than shoemaking.
This link between “status” and prohibition, which has become obscure to experts [aux savants], is no secret to workers for the simple reason that they are the ones who have inherited it. The link has become over centuries the rule of their internal hierarchy, their way of fulfilling their destiny and denying it simultaneously by dumping it off on a pariah, the shoemaker.
“Let no one enter here who is not a geometer.”1 Fellow journeymen have found their geometer-king in the carpenter, first in dignity among the offspring of those who built Solomon’s temple. It was this carpenter who organized a universe of workers in which everyone—smith or cooper, locksmith or leather worker—finds his place and dedicates his life to the interminable apprenticeship of his art. These monotechnicians have no liking for imitators or for the mixing of metals. Hoffmann took revenge on behalf of poets by depicting Master Martin the cooper, who considers barrel making the supreme art and wants neither painter in his shop nor knight for his daughter.2
A world, then, of prohibition and hierarchy. After the geometer par excellence (the carpenter), one descends by degrees to lower levels where skill becomes increasingly crude and geometry increasingly superfluous, until one reaches finally the hell of the shoemaker. In the nineteenth century the shoemaker had not yet finished paying for his crimes against Plato’s order. He is the dwarfish man ridiculed in journeymen songs for his huge apron, crude tools, and smelly pitch. He is the usurping slave fraudulently initiated into the secrets of the guild. The law of the carpenters orders every journeyman conscientious of his duties to kill the sabourin found wearing the guild’s insignia.
By the middle of the nineteenth century this order was on its way out. But here and there one could still encounter the corpses of shoemakers punished for their audacity. In any case, the reality of the order of estates extends the prohibitions of the symbolic order. Shoemaking remains at the very bottom of the trades. If we find shoemakers in the first rank where workers of any kind should not be, the reason is that they are the most numerous, the least busy with their work, and the least deluded about the glory of the artisan. The insurrection of the shoemakers is not a battle for their status but a battle against it. A typical image of this rejection is the adolescent poet whose father, employed by a school, wanted to force him into the shoemaker’s trade. Notes his biographer: “He resisted his father like a saint, broke the tools of a trade for which he had not been made, and became free again and his own man.”3
There is the heart of the matter. Now anyone can make edicts about nature and judge for himself, independently of the external constraints that may compel him, whether or not he is made for the shoemaker’s trade or for any other. The “nothing else” that had guaranteed the order of estates is contested here on two sides. There are workmen who discover in their migrations that it does not take much time at all to acquire a new skill, and that there is no harm in passing from one trade to another.4 And there are workmen who perceive skilfulness itself as the other side of a prohibition and decide, rather, to appropriate for themselves the pleasures of appearance and the leisures of the dialectic. One joiner, for example, offers the following excuse for failing to pursue his work: “If I catch sight of Socrates at a distance, I suddenly let my duties go to hell and run after him, so that we may discourse together (often for a whole day) about the true goods of existence.”5
We have here the routing of nature, the mixing of functions and metals, the passage of monotechnicians into the motley world of imitators where they encounter knights inspired by divine art and philosophers who hand over their secrets to the people. The proponents of order and of inspiration are equally disturbed by this disorder, and always put the same archetype at the center of their denunciations. In 1841 a Professor Lerminier, an early Saint-Simonian who saw the heresy at its birth, rebels against the homage being paid to these worker poets, in which he detects the symbolic presence of the shoemaker Savinien Lapointe. Opposing the republicans who celebrate them, he affirms the counsels of the father of the modern Republic: “I absolutely want Émile to learn a trade … I do not want him to be a musician, an actor, or someone who writes books … I prefer that he be a shoemaker to a poet.”6 All these things go together: aesthetic disorder, political disorder, symbolic disorder, real disorder. In a republic that would give the poet’s palm to shoemakers, “the supreme power would have thousands of candidates and the law would have not one obedient subject.”7
From the opposite perspective, the politically progressive editors of L’Artiste become disturbed, at the time of the Salon of 1845, by the democracy that is invading the arts. They, too, do not mistake the target: “Nature has not permitted everyone to have genius. It said to some, ‘Make poems.’ It said to others, ‘Make shoes.’”8 The rights of the inspired thus rejoin without constraint and inflect without violence the arguments of order’s proponents. No petty fear animates the gentle Charles Nodier, who is bothered by these shoemakers writing tragedies like those by Corneille and offers his own diagnosis of the origin of this evil: the irrational democracy of writing which, having become the people’s print-shop and means of instruction, is everywhere turning “useful manual laborers and decent artisans” into “thieves, impostors, and forgers.”9 He then enunciates the solution that will satisfy simultaneously the government, the people, and the poets: return popular culture to the people, return to them the rationality of the myth first confiscated and then abolished by the philosophers. Halfway between the counterrevolution’s anti-philosophical rancor and materialism’s vigorous attacks on ideology, Nodier expresses in all its purity the return of a Platonism in which popular sentiment denounces a philosophy now identified with writing’s dead letter.
All of which occurs as if the destiny of the modern republic were still representable in terms of this symbolic division, as if there should exist in it a class of individuals whose trade symbolizes the necessity for all tradesmen to do nothing else than their own business—a trade that recapitulates the necessity of labor insofar as it excludes the privileges, even the most ascetic, of leisure. Order is menaced wherever a shoemaker does something else than make shoes. By the same token, anyone who upsets the order of estates can be called a shoemaker. Thus the learned editor of the Journal des économistes has no hesitation about the identity of the German communist expelled by the French government for his incendiary writings. Mr. Karl Marx, he informs his readers, is a shoemaker.
It is in this context that Richard Wagner imagines in 1845 the fable of the shoemaker and the knight, a fable intended, first of all, to refute his detractors. But when he stages this tale twenty-three years later, it is also meant to signal that the game is over. If Die Meistersinger is a unique opera in the repertory of the composer, the reason is that it is, precisely, a farewell performance. The insurrection of the shoemakers is finished. The artist is taking back full possession of the attributes of nature and genius which, in the turmoil of the 1840s, he entrusted to the people’s care. Eva can always take the crown from Walter’s head in order to crown Hans Sachs, but no one will be misled by that, and the outcome is exactly the opposite. The triumph of the shoemaker-poet is at the same time his abdication. It is the popular baptism through which the representative of St. John consecrates the inspired artist, returning to him the crown of the aristocratic Minnesänger that the artisans previously usurped. The alliance of shoemaker and poet in the cult of the people and of woman is over as soon as it began. It was power for a single day, the royalty of carnival exercised just long enough to restore the supremacy of genius over technique, inspiration over mnemonics. Only one intermediary is needed—Beckmesser, the town clerk and the mastersingers’ “marker,” the man with the overly punctilious memory. He is the sophist of modern times. Or rather, he is less than a sophist since he can neither learn something correctly by heart nor make his own shoes. This discount sophist is now called a petty bourgeois.
As an aesthetic and progressive refinement of the new dream of “popular culture,” this “Gothic” opera represents one of the dominant forms of our modernity. Between Tannhaüser and Die Meistersinger, between the singing contests of Wartburg and those of Nuremberg, a shift takes place in the Saint-Simonian and Feuerbachian homage paid to the people and to woman. The positivizing of artisanal virtue is accompanied by a game of tit for tat [prêté et rendu] in which the inspired artist attributes to the popular ethos a genius, a daïmon, that the people immediately cede back to him, thereby consecrating the artist of the people, worker and knight, in his difference from the mechanical imitator. This consecration of the artist is then proposed in turn as a model for the politician and expert. Where the old Platonic order asserted itself in the horror of ragout and motley jumble, the Nuremberg carnival embodies a modern kind of mixture that abrades the colors of metals and the visible contours of the old orders, offering the guardians and those inspired by the modern age a new legitimacy based on the only powers that now are said to matter, the ones from below.
Ironically, the one critic who sensed better than anyone else the scope of this operation was the young revolutionary, Richard Wagner. In Opera and Drama (1851), he offered the most felicitous analysis of these round-trips to the heart of the popular spirit that injected new life into opera: Auber’s mad gallop through the display stalls of Neapolitan fishermen; his rival Rossini’s promenades to the sound of Alpine flutes; the promotion of the masses on Meyerbeer’s stage.10 To be sure, these are simple cookbook recipes compared with the representative machine set in motion by the shoemaker Hans Sachs and his apprentice.
There are at least two philosophers whose classical tastes find this sort of popular culture repugnant—Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx. Nietzsche submitted for a while to the popular charm of the St. John’s Day celebrations. It took him some time to arrive at a diagnosis that strangely recalled old Plato: the theatrical resolution of the shoemaker insurrection is still the triumph of the shoemakers, for the simple reason that it is theater. Theatrocracy, exactly echoing the Laws, is the concept used by Nietzsche to settle the “case of Wagner.” It matters little that the fable of the shoemaker serves only the consecration of the artist. For it is precisely the power of the imitator-artist—of the actor [comédien], says Nietzsche—that inaugurates decadence so far as music and hence philosophy and politics are concerned. To subject the rules of music to the judgment of artists is, in the short term, to have them fall back into the hands of the people. “The theater is a revolt of the masses.”11 The figures of the Platonic phantasm find their echo in the images used by Nietzsche to pummel Wagner’s theater in Bayreuth: it is an enchanter’s cave where highborn youth are corrupted. But it is also an “institute for hydrotherapy,” its contemptible hygiene reminding us of the public bath where the fugitive slave had been grooming himself. The result scarcely differs from Plato’s diagnosis that the actor’s reign can issue only in the destruction of the “instincts by virtue of which the worker becomes possible as a class.”12 Against which there is hardly any other recourse but the circle of cicadas in the midday sun.
South against north: a certain geography of the defense of thinking against the simultaneous advent of the imitators and the masses. But the Marxian landscape is organized differently. For the native of Trier and inhabitant of London, the south does not represent civilization as opposed to northern barbarism. Barbarism makes all territories equivalent, and civilization is only the stream of exchanges that flows from them. Nuremberg is the south, the land of cramped little towns, antiquated junk, and south German sentimentality as opposed to the large estates, militarism, and bureaucracy of the north. An immobile contradiction reflected for Marx in the comedy of the German revolution, which is summed up perfectly in the complementary characters of the two “heroes” of 1848, Marx’s twin bêtes noires: the adventurist militarism of Lieutenant August Willich and the sentimental grandiloquence of the poet Gottfried Kinkel.
Just after the revolution Marx finds himself talking about Nuremberg and its shoemaker-poet in a review of a book by Friedrich Daumer called The Religion of the New Age.13 Against the decadence of the “culture” now under siege by contemporary barbarism, Daumer proposes a new human religion based on nature and woman. To his hostile reviewer, this “nature” is merely the inane idyll of the small-minded citizen reciting Klopstock odes to embellish his Sunday strolls, and the rehabilitation of woman simply follows the model of women of letters from the preceding century. But Daumer’s complaints about decadence indicate a rather different source:
The “culture” whose decay Mr. Daumer laments is that of the time in which Nuremberg flourished as a free Reichsstadt, in which Nuremberg’s industry—that bastard (Zwitterding) of art and craftsmanship (Handwerk)—played an important role as German petty-bourgeois culture perished along with the petty bourgeoisie. Where the decline of former classes such as knighthood could provide material for great tragic works of art, philistinism (Spießbürgertum) can achieve nothing but impotent expressions of fanatical malice and a collection of maxims and precepts in the style of Sancho Panza. Mr. Daumer is the continuation of Hans Sachs, but dried out and stripped of all humor. German philosophy wringing its hands and weeping on the deathbed of its foster-father, German philistinism: such is the touching scene unfolded to us by The Religion of the New Age.14
The judgment appears to be simple and returns us to two major themes in Marxian thought. First is the critique of ideology as the inability to comprehend the development of productive forces. What follows is the opposition between two theatrical figures of history: the tragic, authentic expression of the struggle between the old world and the new, and the comic, derisory repetition of a history already played out and of values already dead. Daumer thus becomes the representative of those ideologues who go “no further” in their thinking than the petty bourgeoisie go in their practical life, who are just as incapable as the petty bourgeoisie of perceiving the liberating element in the ruptures of the industrial age, and who, like the petty bourgeoisie, have nothing to oppose to those ruptures but the dream of an impossible return from this side of capitalism. In short, a grotesque repetition of a fight against history that knighthood had already lost in the days of Don Quixote.
A simple reading, but Marx is never stingy with false openings. We all know from him that 1848 was a farcical repetition of the tragedy of the great Revolution that had used ancient disguises to free the new bourgeois world from its feudal shackles. But here the matter is different. The comedy of philistinism is not a repetition of the tragic; it is a repetition of itself. Daumer is grotesque because he repeats, in degrading it, an already ridiculous social figure. And that ridiculous figure is not the futile struggle of knights errant, but the productive activity of Nuremberg industry in its golden age.
Marx’s target here, in effect, is neither the caste system of the corporations nor the narrow-mindedness of trade idiocy. It is the flourishing industry of one of those free cities of the Middle Ages in which progressive historians customarily locate the first seeds of the new world of bourgeois domination and popular emancipation. For these historians, only one thing caused the downfall of this metropolis of nascent capitalism: its unfortunate geographical position, far from the great rivers and sea lanes but right in the path of devastating armies.
Curiously, however, the father of historical materialism reasons otherwise. For him this obsolete industry had been stillborn—a double thing, a hybrid, a bastard. It was the mixture of two contradictory natures, industrial activity with artistic creation. But in his own time this union is not exclusively the dream of now-outmoded artisans; it is also to be found among social and industrial innovators, promoters of industrial art. Even the moribund culture of Nuremberg can still interest progressive men. At the World Exposition of 1867, the worker delegates, bowing in admiration before Nuremberg’s mechanical toys, opposed the scientific education such toys can provide to the silly dolls that teach French children the softness and corruption of the declining classes.15 In short, the industrial arts and toys of Nuremberg could offer more convincing models to the “polytechnic” education of the future communist world than the ironic variations on ambiguous pastoral themes to which Marx at times abandons himself: a world where there no longer will be painters but merely individuals who, among other things, paint; a world where the individual can be, at his pleasure, a fisherman, a hunter, a shepherd, a critical critic. . .
But Marx interprets progress differently. For him the overcoming of the Platonic prohibition is neither the shoemaker-poet, nor industrial art, nor the mechanical toy. The future of bourgeois liberty and popular emancipation did not lie, in the days of Hans Sachs, with the flourishing industry of the free cities of the Empire. It began in England or the Netherlands in the purifying hell of the textile mills set up on the shores of the sea of exchange. There we have the anticipation of the revolutionary marriage of fire and water, a union finally realized when the inventions of the watchmaker Watt and the jeweler Fulton opened the way for large-scale industry and the world market: “Ne sutor ultra crepidam! Let the shoemaker stick to his last! This nec plus ultra of handicraft wisdom became sheer madness and a curse from the moment the watchmaker Watt invented the steam engine, the barber Arkwright the throstle, and the jeweler Fulton the steamship.”16
It is not, then, by becoming a poet or industrial artist that the shoemaker escapes his curse, but by inventing the machine. The paradox, of course, is that now the shoemaker, far from making more than his footwear, has every chance of making even less. The machine revolution means that the worker in a trade or in manufacturing, performing a limited task, now performs an even more restricted one. In short, madness and curses can outstrip the old wisdom only if these now apply to everyone. A curse for the bourgeoisie, to whom these ingenious artisans bring prosperity in the short term and death in the long term, because large-scale industry itself shall, “under pain of death,” replace the fragmented with the complete individual, and it can do that only by first stepping on the bodies of the bourgeoisie. A curse for the proletarians, who will achieve this world of complete individuals only at the price of abandoning their competence and freedom as artisans for the frenzy of the bourgeois factory. The artisan inventors free their brothers by forcing them to commit suicide. The artisan must consent to be stripped of all his positivity in dragging the bourgeoisie into the infernal cycle of his suicide.
This history of deathbed lamentations may have been only a trompe l’oeil. For history “advances” precisely where it confronts death, and where there are no longer wringing hands or jeremiads but madness and cursing. The death of Hans Sachs or of Nuremberg industry is, on the contrary, merely a comedy, a caricature of death. After all, philistine Nuremberg is just at the dawn of its industrial heyday, and the “sentimental ass” Liebknecht will turn it into one of the strongholds of the Marxist worker party. That is precisely what characterizes backwardness: it has a hardy life. Thirty years later Engels will remind Bernstein: “We have always done our utmost to combat the narrow petty-bourgeois philistine mentality within the party because, having developed since the Thirty Years’ War, it has infected all classes in Germany. … It prevails on the throne no less frequently than in a cobbler’s dwelling.”17 Backwardness is not a history that has become obsolete but one that has gotten off on the wrong foot. It is bad history, the sordid or wayward kind that doubles legitimate history. Bastardy is the bad figure of Two, that which does not split itself apart but contents itself with its duplication—as if it found, in the mixture that constitutes its indignity, strength to survive in escaping the fire of contradiction. The baseness of this history is its false nobility: its mixture of art and craftsmanship, fabrication and imitation, usefulness and leisure, base and precious metals. Bastardy is as much the skill of the copper workers of old Nuremberg, who perfected a way of imitating goldwork, as it is the triviality of the worker-philosopher Proudhon, who desires useful works of art. For his own part, Doctor Marx is in favor of separation. He loves Greek art and the classical masterpieces. His daughters have dolls rather than mechanical toys—and to amuse them, he plays horse on his hands and knees and tells them Hoffmann’s tale of a magician who could not pay his debts, had to sell to the Devil the marvelous objects he made but always ended up recovering them.18 As for his naïve pastoral about the communist of the future, perhaps it, like the eschatology of the Phaedrus, is most important, finally, for what it excludes: there is in it neither industrial fabrication nor artistic imitation, which is certainly the most radical way of not mixing the two together.
Bastardy, on the other hand, is the force of the lie at the very heart of production, and on that point the theorist of productive forces agrees with Hoffmann’s fantastic stories. Nuremberg industry can always be modeled on the workshop of Master Martin which, unbeknownst to him, is peopled with journeymen who—all the more perfect—simply pretend to be coopers: the painter Reinhold, the sculptor Friedrich, and the knight Conrad. A closed world, locked up in the repetitive games of same and other—a world of fabricator and imitator, artisan and ideologue. If Nuremberg culture is decadent, it is not because it is old but because it is of minimal value and always has been so. If today it seems shabby juxtaposed to the factory world of Manchester, the truth is that it already was so, even in its prime, when compared with lost battles of knighthood in decline and the “great tragic works” that reflect them.
Good history is on the side of tragedy, there where the tragic hero fights against history. Here is where Marx, despite his reference to Hegel, sharply distinguishes himself from him. For Hegel tragedy has to do not with decline but with the ascending phase of the world order. The tragedy par excellence, that of the Greeks, marks the moment when the powers of nature clash with those of the law of the state, when Antigone opposes Creon or Athena absolves Orestes for a crime against his mother’s blood that is justified by his desire to avenge the paternal order of the family.
For Hegel, knighthood in decline is the subject matter of the novel. Or rather, it is the very subject of the novel as a historical genre, the tale of the wanderings of Christian subjectivity in a world that escapes it on all sides. The Romantic hero par excellence is surely Don Quixote; the champion of a world in decline, he is doubled by a servant called upon to become the master of the future—Sancho Panza, the man who represents the prose of the new bourgeois world.
For Marx, however, the novel changes meaning in becoming tragic history. It embodies the opposition between history’s tragic grandeur and comic pettiness. The distance between Marx and Hegel is best indicated by something too often disregarded despite its strangeness: in Marx’s work it is Sancho Panza who battles windmills. Here, as in The German Ideology, the ideologue of hollow dreams—of backward illusions, empty phrases, and imaginary battles—is not Don Quixote but Sancho Panza, the ploughman’s son who thinks only of his stomach and speaks in proverbs. The ideologue is precisely someone who seemed fully to incarnate, like Hans Sachs or the free Nuremberg artisans, the world of the productive and prosaic future as opposed to the knightly reveries that justified the feudal order of castes. In The German Ideology, in fact, Sancho has become the master of his master. The ideologue is not the chimerical dreamer but the strong spirit who “demystifies” knightly illusions. And perhaps that is why he understands nothing about history—whether about the tragic struggles of his masters, or the hellish and progressive work of the artisan inventors of large-scale industry, or the foolishness of workers launching “an assault on heaven,” or Doctor Marx sacrificing everything to the great book of their liberation.
Marx’s critique of Sancho Panza approaches the insurrection of the shoemakers the other way round. It sees in their poetic dreams only the pettiness of artisanal duplicity. For Marx, the shoemaker-poet is the man of bad history, the man of the double as opposed to the man of contradiction, the worker who wants to improve his status when he must sacrifice it—the man who, in the world of manufacturing, makes prosaic the great pastoral dream of the poet Antipatros, in which working girls take their leisure while Nymphs turn the water wheel.19 On the contrary, workers for Marx must leave behind in the “archaic” distance the divine life of leisure in order to recover that life through the sacrifice of machine, science, and combat.
The clear genesis and simple evaluation of political and ideological forms, with their basis in the history of productive forces, double themselves here in a discrete but implacable genealogy of values close to that of Nietzsche, at least in the division [partage] that opposes the artisans of comic decadence to the knights of tragic decline. Tragedy is the grandeur of life in death, comedy the pettiness of death in life. For Marx, as for Nietzsche and Plato, there are two ways to be born and to die, and history’s apparently unique direction lies similarly in the imbrication of two movements. Plato’s Statesman offered the myth of the opposing rotations of a world sometimes governed by the law of the One and sometimes left to the neglect of the Many. Marx’s text shows us the imbrication of two modes of the Many, two cycles of life and death: the corruption of mixture and the incandescence of contraries. In the face of those who denigrate decadence, the supposed optimism of the theory of productive forces is immediately ripped to pieces by the play of two contrary powers: the grand tragedy of water and fire, of production and destruction, and the low comedy of earth and air, of fabrication and imitation. One may talk as much as one likes about Marx’s “Promethean” theory, but the body of Prometheus is fragmented from the outset. The materialism of history and the dialectics of revolution run the risk of never encountering each other in it.