THE FAILURE OF the revolution puts science back in its time. The secret of the revolution conjured away may be that it was, itself, a bit of conjuring. After all, the Parisian revolution of February 1848 was nothing more than a “coup de main” against a society that was on the verge of overcoming its economic crisis.1 And so, with the return of prosperity, it could only move backward. But as in the Platonic myth of the Statesman, this backward movement is also a rejuvenation, time moving in reverse from old age to birth and clearing a place for the return of the normal order in which generations are born, die, and transform the forces of production. The conjuring away of class struggle by the prestidigitator Louis Napoleon returns the world to the normal temporality of economic cycles and crises. The triumph of the backward underworld over bourgeois political rationality permits France to make up for its economic belatedness in comparison with England. Similarly, in 1866, the unexpected triumph of the old Prussian “roguery” over Austrian civilization will force squire Bismarck to unleash, in turn, the bourgeois forces of production with their proletarian double. The French imperial parody and the German nationalist comedy are, for these two countries, the means of access to the normal “English” march of history.
In its exile in London, which is the center of this development, the singularity of science follows the movement that transforms, in universalizing production, the singularity of economic interests and political intrigues. It makes use of “the ghastly period of peace” for its own accumulation.2 It observes the signs of the future, the expansion of production and destruction that is to offer the revolution a theater worthy of it.
First, there is Marx’s and Engels’s great dream, the expansion of production and exchange in the new world being born on the shores of the Pacific. Drawing up his balance sheet from the 1848 farce, Marx does not forget to hail the birth of his publisher’s son: “Good luck to the new world citizen! There is no more splendid time to enter the world than the present. Come the day when people can travel from London to Calcutta in a week, both our heads will long since have rolled or started to roll. And Australia and California and the Pacific Ocean! The new world citizens will be unable to comprehend how small our world once was.”3 But the narrowness that had always oppressed our two citizens of the Rhineland is already being overcome: “In six months’ time the circumnavigation of the world by steam will be fully under way and our predictions concerning the supremacy of the Pacific Ocean will be fulfilled even more quickly than we could have anticipated.”4
There is also the fever of the great means of communication and fascination with the linking of the oceans that are to be the motor of the great destruction: “Russia is importing capital and speculation and, given these distances, these hundreds of miles of railways, the gamble may well develop in such a way as to come to an early and sticky end. Once we hear THE GRAND IRKUTSK TRUNK LINE WITH BRANCHES TO PEKIN, etc., etc., that will be the moment for us to pack up. This time the crash will be quite unprecedented; all the elements are there: intensity, universal scope, and the involvement of all properties and ruling social elements.”5
But the water of exchange and the fire of destruction do not let themselves be given away so easily in marriage. Speculation hesitates to plunge headlong into the routes of the Pacific; those who do plunge in bear on their backs all the old rubbish of peasants and lumpenproletarians. On the banks of the Pacific we find not only the intoxication of the new world and the hybris of crisis but also the magic of gold and the riffraff of prospectors. The rationality of economics, as with any political representation, has its own roguery that both doubles and gnaws away at it. The conqueror of the new world finds his caricature in the California prospector, and the latter his caricature in the Australian convict.
“California and Australia are two cases which were not foreseen in the Manifesto.”6 This lack of foresight takes two forms. First, it is a countertendency to the logic of crisis. Australian gold rids the European population of its surplus and establishes a new market eager for the products of the Old World. It also prompts the population to neglect the sheep whose wool had been inundating Europe. But this countertendency to normal historical development is also the production of a caricature history ensuring the triumph of the lumpen instead of global conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat: “our predictions concerning the supremacy of the Pacific Ocean will be fulfilled even more quickly than we could have anticipated. When this happens the British will be thrown out and the united states of deported murderers, burglars, rapists and pickpockets will startle the world by demonstrating what wonders can be performed by a state consisting of undisguised rascals. … But whereas in California rascals are still lynched, in Australia they’ll lynch the honnêtes gens, and Carlyle will see his aristocracy of rogues established in all its glory.”7
So the fire and water of economic modernity are subsumed within the same process of degeneration that affects the earth and air of political decrepitude. The backwards march, the comedy of the lumpen also parasitize the “royal road” of the “last instance.” The Beggars’ Opera plays on the stage of the theater of the Universal. And there, too, the rogues’ apotheosis is made into a metaphor that takes us from periphery to center. The phantasm of the Bonapartist underworld became a metaphor for the decadence of the bourgeoisie, for its decomposition into simple individuals who bear bourgeois material interests. The image of the Australian underworld, in turn, becomes a metaphor for the decomposition of the working class. This decomposition is not to be understood as its simple dispersion but as its possible compaction into a sum of individuals united by “common” interests that they also share with the bourgeoisie.
In effect, the corruption of the European working class takes two forms. First, there is the betrayal of the militants attracted by the New World’s gold. The matter seems important enough to warrant discussion in the Inaugural Address of the International. But these deserters are also the trees that hide the forest. The truly radical corruption is the integration, the unilateral constitution into a class, of precisely those British workers who were supposed to carry out the task of leading the worldwide revolution. Relieved of its excess population and benefiting from the new markets, the British working class becomes a willing party to the bourgeois order: “the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would appear to be the possession, alongside the bourgeoisie, of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat. In the case of a nation which exploits the entire world this is, of course, justified to some extent. Only a couple of thoroughly bad years might help here, but after the discoveries of gold these are no longer so easy to engineer. For the rest it is a complete mystery to me how the massive overproduction which caused the crisis has been absorbed; never before has such heavy flooding drained away so rapidly.”8
So it all fits together. The working class has become too bourgeois to seize the crisis in a revolutionary way, and the crisis that should have radicalized it has been reabsorbed more or less equivocally. The Justice of the crisis, too, is the domain of mixture. Its logic of destruction is parasited equally by a logic of conjuring. Here again we can identify the same features as in the political conjuring away of the revolution. Speculation becomes frightened in the face of the economic equivalent of the confrontation of June 1848: the great, suicidal Trans-Siberian venture. The nearby stock exchanges and markets step in to take the place of defaulters the way the classes took on the task of their neighbor.9 The creation of “fictitious markets” corresponds to the “artificial classes” of state parasitism. And at the center, at this development’s point of departure and return, conjuring once again triumphs. There is not, there cannot possibly be, a revolutionary proletariat in England: “You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly what they think of any policy—the same as what the middle classes think. There is, after all, no labour party here, only conservatives and liberal-radicals, and the workers cheerfully go snacks in England’s monopoly of the world market and colonies.”10
The insularity that puts England at the center of exchange simultaneously isolates it from the fire of revolution. The sea of exchange, too, becomes a swamp into which are deceitfully dumped commodities whose accumulation should have been explosive, and in which the class in charge of destruction “flounders” in the “shallow waters” of preservation. England is a center only for the decentering of science. As for the proletariat, it must happen elsewhere.
Science and revolution are decidedly in league with backwardness. This truth of 1844 is still a truth in 1884, the year Engels will explain to Bebel and Kautsky the new form taken by the German paradox. In France and England the industrial revolution has been accomplished for the most part. The break between industry, handicrafts, and agriculture has taken place. The proletariat’s living conditions have stabilized in a setting in which capitalist development is stronger than the counterpressure of labor. So there is no opportunity or moment to be seized by revolutionary surprise. If this chance exists at all for Germany, it is because it experienced its industrial revolution in the most unfavorable circumstances. In Germany modern conditions ran head first into the disjointed limbs of the old handicraft and peasant orders, the result being a disequilibrium affecting every social identity and plunging them all into a general imbroglio. Domestic handicraft workers are now fighting against machines; bankrupt small peasants are launching themselves into domestic handicrafts; and to round out their income, day laborers are going in for the cultivation of potatoes. But to this imbroglio, which recalls classic images of backwardness, Engels gives a wholly different name: for him it is a “direct revolution of all the conditions of life.” Through it the whole of Germany finds itself swept into a “social revolution” that “ultimately leads to the expropriation of the peasants and artisans.” To this German structure always corresponds the same paradoxical chance. This revolution is taking place “at the very time when a German … was destined to elucidate the whole nature … of capitalist production.”11
But how exactly is this coincidence to be understood? What is the place of science caught between the corruption of development and these occasions of backwardness? “If I were merely to consult my own private inclinations, I would wish for another few years of superficial calm. There could, at any rate, be no better time [than the present] for scholarly undertakings.”12 The ambiguous knowledge of the revolutionary responds to this desire of the scientist [savant]. Economic or political crisis provides an opportunity to resolve cases in which the classes have not yet stabilized: “I think that in a fortnight the storm will break in Prussia. If this opportunity passes without being used, and if the people allow that to happen, we then can calmly pack up our revolutionary paraphernalia and devote ourselves to pure theory.”13
In this case there was little need to pack because the expected opportunity—Prussia’s defeat by Austria—came out backwards on the battlefield of Sadowa. And Marx could speak ironically about the irony of any theory of kairos: “Beside a great Prussian defeat, which perhaps (oh but those Berliners!) might have led to a revolution, there could have been no better outcome than their stupendous victory.”14
But interpretation of that victory lends itself to ambiguity. Marx sees in it the ironic but indisputable confirmation of materialist theory. It was the Prussian needle-gun that brought victory: “Is there any sphere in which our theory that the organization of labor is determined by the means of production more dazzlingly vindicated than in the industry for human slaughter?”15 Marx urges Engels, as a specialist in military matters, to write an appendix on this topic for Capital. Engels promises “to do that thing on the massacre industry.” But he takes a curious interest in a different aspect of the issue: the loading of guns through the breech. And almost in passing he completely muddles the materialist theory that pairs progress in armaments with the decline of chivalry. Engels predicts: “When breech-loading becomes general, the cavalry will come into its own again.”16
A hidden polemic between Marx the scientist and Engels the horseman [cavalier], one that poses at the same time a question of science and ethics. The scientist is quick to reproach his friend for his riding prowess because he hardly thinks that horsemanship is the “specialty” in which Engels will be “of greatest service to Germany.”17 Engels replies to this twice—on the level of doxa, that it is Bonaparte’s reputation as a horseman that accounts for his prestige (even though he does not jump as well as Engels himself ); and on the level of science, that horsemanship is “the material basis for all my military studies.”18
War certainly is not the scientist’s strong suit. His passion for the necessities of geology is the antidote for his friend’s pleasure in equestrian risks. While Engels is studying the causes and effects of the Prussian military victory, Marx develops a passion for a book by Pierre Trémaux that had been published recently in Paris, Origine et transformation de l’homme et des autres êtres [Origin and Transformation of Mankind and Other Beings]. As Marx sees it, Trémaux’s work provides the scientific basis for Darwin’s theory: it is the difference in soil composition that explains differentiations in the evolution of animal species and human races. In vain does Engels object that Trémaux “knows nothing about geology, and is incapable of even the most common-or-garden literary-historical critique.”19 Marx takes no account of this demurral: “Trémaux’s basic idea about the influence of the soil … is, in my opinion, an idea which needs only to be formulated to acquire permanent scientific status.”20
This may be the right moment to suggest that Sartre and some others have been quite unfair in claiming that Marx’s historical dialectic was corrupted by Engels’s scientism. As regards the science of nature, Engels is often more circumspect than his friend Marx precisely because he believes less in science and more in history. His impatience as a horseman creates the patience of the scientist. One can put off deciding about evolution if the decision is a question of terrain. And there is no paradox in the fact that this reserve is accompanied by the risk of creating a Dialectics of Nature. For that, first and foremost, is a military operation designed to preserve for revolutionary action the terrain menaced by the incursions of science. The “naïve” lover of the science of nature is Marx, not Engels. Marx’s geological materialism is a way of seeking to exorcize the comedy that gnaws away at history. Here it is the revolutionary’s doubt that creates the scientist’s impatience. The geological theory of races must prevail over their theory of Darwinian warfare—just as the party “everywhere springing up naturally out of the soil of modern society” must reduce to nothingness respectable workers’ associations and little bands of knights errant.21 Just as the earthquakes of the mode of production must bring justice to the revolutionary comedy. And for the disabused scientist, the science of the soil must provide the unambiguous testimony of history’s stormy weather.
For the basic risk that menaces revolutionary action is not the threat of defeat or death in combat but the threat of comedy. As Hegel showed so well, in dialectics ridicule kills. Lucian’s satires brought the Greek gods to their tomb. As for the modern revolution, it is being attacked from within by the comedians who serve as its actors.
In principle, revolutionary action is one that “arises from the class struggle itself.”22 But a different rationality imposes itself on this terrain. The revolution by definition does not obey social laws, and neither does it obey the simple rules of military strategy. The rationality of revolution belongs to physics, the spectacular physics of whirlwinds instead of the chemistry of soils: “A revolution is a purely natural phenomenon which is subject to physical laws rather than to the rules that determine the development of society in ordinary times.”23 Into this whirlwind, notes Engels, representatives of the party may be dragged despite themselves. It is better in such situations to preserve the freedom of those without a party, but that is reflection after the fact [après coup]. On the terrain of the German revolution in 1848, as in the preparatory stages accompanying every crisis that offers revolutionary hope, we find indeed that the opposite appears to be the case. It is in vain that scientists and strategists try to be “objectively” more revolutionary than “phrase-mongers,” because the latter are already on the scene.24 Objectivity always comes too late. A mixture of Prussian brutality and south German histrionics is—more than the civility of Rhenish science—the virtue needed to seize the revolutionary opportunity by the hair, even if it means transforming it into a mere occasion for putting on a comedy. The comedian-kings, always and again: men who spend their lives rehearsing and waiting for the right moment to step on stage, strike a pose, raise their voice, or brandish their banner. Thus in 1858, the crucial year that swells the exiles’ hopes, Marx observes a little trick that has every chance of submerging once again the voice of science: “All these people sense that there is something moving again. And, of course, are pushing their way onto the stage bearing banners of liberty. … Moreover, my wife is quite right when she says that, after all the misère she has had to endure, the revolution will only make things worse and afford her the gratification of seeing all the humbugs from here celebrating their victories on the continent. … She says, à la guerre comme à la guerre. But there is no guerre. Everything is bourgeois [Alles bürgerlich].”25
Neither the development of production nor the outbreak of war can, by itself, produce difference in a universe where everything is bourgeois. The whole of difference must be concentrated in the science of the party to come, for science alone entails the negation of the bourgeois world. Science is at once the absolute leisure of the philosopher and the total dedication of the militant.
The time of science is not only the interval between two crises that allows one to dedicate oneself to research and writing. It is also the absolute distance, taken in the very midst of poverty, from the occupations of the multitude: “what has happened over the last ten years must have increased any rational being’s contempt for the masses as for individuals to such a degree that odi profanum vulgus et arceo has almost become an inescapable maxim.” The brutality of this statement is, to be sure, immediately corrected: “However all these are themselves philistine ruminations that will be swept away by the first storm.”26 But this correction is not just the revolutionary’s repentance in the face of the philosopher’s secret demons. In the Century of Production, leisure is work [oeuvre], and work is the absolute sacrifice of the author.
There are two men at least, one on either side of the English Channel, who ponder this absolute of the work-sacrifice [l’oeuvresacrifice] that absolves its author from all participation in the bourgeois comedy. The two men are infinitely remote from one another and yet very close. One is the reactionary rentier Flaubert, securely shut away at Croisset. The other is the freelance journalist Marx, living in his two-room flat in Chelsea and grappling with his crowded family, dying children, creditors to be repulsed day after day, and recurring illness. But both men are equally convinced by the revolutionary farce that there is only one thing left to do: the work that will be the total negation of the reigning baseness, the bourgeois world denied by its reproduction.
This proximity is exorcized throughout the many pages in which Sartre attempts to mark an agreement between Flaubertian nihilism and the desire of the bourgeoisie, contemplated in the confrontation of June 1848, to put proletarian and revolutionary subjectivity to death.27 But how can one not be struck by the way that these two lovers of Cervantes engage themselves, at the same time, in the quixotic project of the absolute work, which requires the absolute sacrifice of its author? To be sure, the project of Marxian science goes beyond Flaubert’s nihilism which, through the sacrifice of the author, brings the work into existence as the negation of the bourgeois world. Marx’s sacrifice aims to bring into existence not only the work but the party, the reality of division in actu. But Flaubert’s counterexample shows clearly what the Marxian sacrifice is not. It is not, as good souls believe, a matter of simple devotion to produce the science destined to arm the proletariat with knowledge of the “objective conditions” of their struggle. The proletariat does not need the science of capital to become educated. It needs it to exist. The proletariat exists only by virtue of its inscription in the Book of Science, and that inscription is, first of all, the account of a journey into hell: “Among the motley crowd of labourers of all callings, ages, sexes, that press on us more busily than the souls of the slain on Ulysses, on whom—without referring to the Blue Books under their arms—we see at a glance the mark of over-work, let us take two more figures whose striking contrast proves that before capital all men are alike—a milliner and a blacksmith.”28
An astonishing vision. Evidence suggests that the dead souls of the capitalist hell do not carry Blue Books under their arms. On the contrary, it is Marx who found their faces in the Blue Books of investigators and factory inspectors. And the overwork he recognizes at a glance is also his own. As Marx confides to Engels, these lengthy pages on the descent into proletarian hells are the fruit of the infernal hours when illness and fatigue do not permit him to pursue his scientific investigations.29 They are not, for all that, mere padding designed to give the author and his public rest from the aridities of science. Rather, they present the myth of science. The latter is the work of absolute sacrifice, of the descent into hell required to give to the voiceless mass of dead souls the Book that will redeem it from oblivion, ushering in the Proletariat subject in place of the motley crowd of laborers. Science is, first of all, reminiscence in the strongest sense of the word.
To put the proletariat in the place of dead souls is essentially to make Capital the inscription of contradiction. In that sense the book has only one thing to say: that capitalist production and even simple commodity production carry in themselves the explosive power of the identity of opposites. This proof is given right at the start in the early passages on the market. The crucial thing here is not the exposé of surplus value; everyone knows that secret, and scrupulous distinctions between the value of labor and the value of labor power have no importance in this context. The crucial thing is destroying in advance Proudhon’s solution to surplus value, which is the free and equal exchange of labor between producers. Economic heresy, perhaps, but above all the collapse of the great logic of production and destruction into the baseness of the economy of labor. In that sense, everything is played out in chapter 1, where “the relative form and the equivalent form are two intimately connected, mutually dependent and inseparable elements of the expression of value; but, at the same time, are mutually exclusive, antagonistic extremes—i.e., poles of the same expression.”30 Once he has established that the equivalent form of the commodity is an exclusive form, the game is over. Proudhonism is impossible. In a sense, then, what Marx wants to demonstrate in the book is achieved already in the very first chapter.
But the book is also the inscription of the proletariat—or, what amounts to the same thing, the party—in science. And that makes the work infinite. For this alone is the cutting edge of the party and must be unassailable. And it can be that only if it examines, from crisis to crisis and from document to document, the form that capital takes in each instance to escape its death. The death notice inscribed in the first chapter of book I must be suspended so long as capital finds ways to escape its destiny. For capital, it seems, is more Leibnizian than Hegelian; it will not move on until it has exhausted all its possibilities. And the scientist who has sacrificed his life to the science of the proletariat must keep returning to work to achieve his sacrifice at the end.
An interminable work. There are several ways to take it. The physician’s viewpoint is simple. Doctor Kugelmann never ceases to be irritated: why does Marx allow himself to be distracted constantly from the only important work in this century of science triumphant—the completion of Capital? If he is sick, then let him get well once and for all!
The Marx family does not like these moral lessons. Her honor as the patient’s nurse affected, young Jenny replies dryly: “In truth, it is the book that precludes any thorough cure.”31 Marx will not abandon it to take care of himself. A pure sacrifice to the “noble cause of the proletariat”—such is the second volume of a work, “the first volume of which the great German nation has not deigned to read.”
Marx himself likes to recall that point. He makes light of the so-called “practical” men who turn their backs on the sufferings of humanity and look after their own skins. He understands “practical” in a different sense: “But I should really have thought myself impractical if I had pegged out without finally completing my book, at least in manuscript.”32 But there is more than one way to conciliate everyone, Engels suggests many times. It really may not be necessary to have read all the materials on ground rent in every country to publish his study of the reproduction of capital. Why not print his results in fascicles as he goes along? To this Marx must reply with a different reason. His Capital is not a scientific book like others: “Whatever shortcomings they may have, the advantage of my writings is that they are an artistic whole, and this can only be achieved through my practice of never having things printed until I have them in front of me in their entirety. This is impossible with Jacob Grimm’s method which is in general better with writings that have no dialectical structure.”33 A word to the wise, then! The artist Karl Marx does not work the way philologists and authors of dictionaries do; he is not a hack.
On, then, with the painstaking examination of ground rent! And for that, Doctor Marx has found accomplices hard to beat: the Russians. Before he can disentangle the agrarian question in Russia, the artist must take his time—and the Russians are not miserly about documents. Then there is the Russian language to be learned. Indeed, he confides that “the bulk of materials I have received not only from Russia but from the United States, etc., make it pleasant for me to have a ‘pretext’ of continuing my studies, instead of winding them up finally for the public.”34
“Folly consists in wanting to conclude”: it is, again, Flaubert who said this. Marx, of course, is much more inclined to refer to Balzac. Is it because Balzac, “even though reactionary,” succeeded in demonstrating the class struggle? The matter may be a bit more devious. It is not Les Paysans [The Peasants] that Marx recommends to Engels but Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu [The Unknown Masterpiece], the story of an absolute work concealed from every jealous gaze and destined to perish with its creator as soon as anyone’s glance might pierce its secret—not because it is naked like the king but because it is invisible by virtue of its enhancement with the true forms and colors of nature.35
The book that is to give the party its identity is a work of the same sort, a work held back indefinitely because its author does not want to deliver it to the public. Engels will have confirmation of that fact after Marx’s death; he discovers that the work is almost completed, but also left systematically incomplete.36 Without which it would not be the absolute sacrifice. Without which, too, it would become imitable, repeatable, prostituted: a Marxist work.
Marx, as we know, is not a Marxist—which does not mean that he is not “dogmatic.” It means he is not a member of his own party. Engels will make the same point to Bernstein: he is not his “comrade.” Every member of a party imitates, repeats, transforms the work of art into a comedy and a technique. Which is another reason why this “undogmatic” scientist is so touchy about his formulations. Why does he invest such maniacal care in correcting the Gotha Programme? Because the class struggle often might turn on a misunderstood word, and errors in theory might have “serious” practical consequences? To think that would be to believe that politics in the nineteenth century was still a part of the art of breeding, and Marx has no illusions on that score. Even if the program is irreproachable, Liebknecht will apply it the wrong way. And if the program of the French party must be dictated to Lafargue and Guesde, the purpose is not to guarantee its strict application; the purpose is strictly to guarantee the program through all “applications.” The program is there for reminiscence. The text must be scrupulously respected for its own sake, even to the point of simply copying what one does not understand.37 For the text in itself is the thing that appeals to the future, to a revolution that will make a mockery of the “right” or “wrong” actions of the clowns who are party leaders. And the text makes this appeal insofar as it is an inimitable work of art.
To say art—and this, too, marks a change since the days of the shepherd-kings—is to say anti-technique, anti-imitation, antilabor. Among the “theoretical errors” with “serious” practical consequences that irritate Marx the most are always those involving the word “labor.” Thus in his Critique of the Gotha Programme he fiercely opposes the paragraph that, in overlooking nature, proclaims that work is “the source of all wealth.” He is vigilant lest any abuse of language transform the “value of labor power” into the “value of labor.” In practice, to be sure, no one makes a mistake on this subject. The whole question is one of principle, of ontological dignity, and no one will confuse a commodity with a principle. Pure production calling out for revolutionary destruction possesses the same character that distinguishes art from labor: it is priceless. A work of art, a work of nature. Marx tells us this himself in that curious passage of his Theories of Surplus-Value that uses seemingly disconcerting examples of productive work: “Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason as a silkworm produces silk. It was an expression of his own nature. Later on he sold the product for £5. But the Leipzig proletarian of literature (Litteraturproletarier) who assembles books (such as compendia of political economy) under the direction of his publisher is a productive worker, for his production is from the outset subsumed under capital, and only takes place so that capital may valorise itself.”38
We see in what sense Capital is a “critique of political economy.” It is a critique of productive labor. True production lies with Milton and the silkworm, with those who produce without bosses or calculation. This quixotic work finds its exact counterpart in the Parisian revolution of 1871: a revolutionary scaling of heaven, a government of “simple workingmen” replacing the “richly paid sycophants” of the state and doing their work, “as Milton did his Paradise Lost,” for a few pounds.39 Paradise lost and regained, the paradise of the anti-wage earner whose leisure-work is to produce reminiscence in the interval, in the other time, that separates singular moments of revolutionary irruption.
A singular relationship between the time of the work [l’oeuvre] and that of revolution, far beyond all rationality of economic development and the constitution of class. There is no political art that makes the blade of science coincide with the cuttings of social history. German poverty, which gives the science of capital its chance to be produced in London, also seals its erratic destiny. This science is not the mastery of any object or the formation of any subject. By proclaiming the primacy of production, it paradoxically shuts itself up in the solitude of an art henceforth situated at an infinite distance from all technique. The materialist “reversal,” the return from heaven to earth, has the unexpected result of destroying the space of practice. No more right opinion there, where every circumstance depends by right on science but where science is condemned always to interpret, after the fact, the reversal of circumstance. No more political art capable of effecting the happy intertwining of social characters. It would certainly be strange to find a weaver-king in the new age inaugurated by the mechanical loom, but it is even stranger that the radicalness of the revolutionary future is presented here under the archaic image of the silkworm revolution.
The silkworm is indeed the unity of two opposites. On the one hand, it represents the nobility of free nature, the activity of the poet, unconcerned about wage earnings. On the other, the silkworm represents the inverted image of the mechanical worker, and lacks only the latter’s speech. This hieroglyph of the identity of opposites is a figure for the destiny of a science whose power is remanded to the absolute risk of art confronted with the density of the bourgeois world.
“Everything is bourgeois.” One need not take this to mean that bourgeois prosperity puts consciousness to sleep or that “bourgeois ideology” clouds it. As I have tried to show, this “ideology” about which there has been so much fuss is only the banality of the laboring order. “Everything is bourgeois” means there is no outside. There is no other place from which to raise another army, an army for which science would provide the training. Everything takes place within the sublime and grotesque tragicomedy of the bourgeois era. And revolutionary justice can come about only as the product of a double annulment, of a perpetual reversal between the normality of historical development and the pathology of its decomposition. In this play of reversals science by itself does not have the power of decision. It is pointless to ask of science whether we should place our confidence in the god of productive forces and the spontaneity of the soil from which will spring the party of destruction, or risk it all in the dice-throw of revolutionary decision.
The fact is that nothing could be more ridiculous than trying to extract from Marx’s writings arguments to justify the reformist approach or the revolutionary approach. Science does not teach its usage. Its point of arrival resembles its point of departure, the time when the philosophy student Karl Marx submitted to his examining committee the following thesis: the physics of Epicurus, which is regarded as the simple continuation of the physics of Democritus, is actually its opposite. And in this opposition must be seen two antagonistic visions of the world. On the one hand the man of science, on the other the man of practice. The one in love with the science of the true, to the point, we are told, of blinding himself in order to escape the sensory illusions fatal to physics. The other was satisfied, for the practice of philosophy, with any explanation that chases away myth and saves phenomena. The one was impassioned by the scientific observation of a sensible world he regarded as pure illusion; the other was unconcerned with exploring this world, which he regarded nonetheless as the sole truth. In this century of technological royalty and the destruction of what Nietzsche in the Zarathustra called the Hinterwelt,40 the uses of science may well be even more undecidable than in the days of Greek philosophy. One can always write out Capital on note cards, as does the self-taught bookbinder Most. But one will never have anything more than external marks without life, written discourse, dead discourse—”incapable of helping itself,” as the old lesson of the Phaedrus put it—but susceptible to rambling all over the place and causing the heads of those not made for science to drift from one side to the other. So Most and his bunch are kept flung around by the text, which is mute to them, between wait-and-see scientism and anarchistic outbursts. The sanction of a knowledge lacking the science of ends.
But the science of ends is not taught now any more than it was in the age of Plato—or rather, it is taught even less. There are no more academies or banquets for it. In the age of demystification it has paradoxically become pure miracle. Strange as this may seem to us after decades of Marxism, we must state the facts as they stood for its founders: everything is a matter of individuals. Marx’s theory is not a guide for any sort of action, be it violent or peaceful. None of the theses of science teach us whether we should study in our room, stand instead for elections, or prepare weapons for an insurrection. Science teaches only one thing, not knowledge but a way of being. It teaches those who study it to be equal to the new world. As with the work of genius in Kant’s aesthetics, the work of science does not offer laws, only models. They must be copied, not in the manner of mnemotechnicians but in that of apprentice painters who train their gaze and hand by reproducing the works of those chosen by nature to impose on art the rules that distinguish it from the routine of technique. The work of art entitled Capital can teach people to judge whether they should act as a scientist or general, poet or diplomat, because it is the reminiscence of the great revolution, the only one worthy of the name, that was effected in the sixteenth century by a handful of men—of giants, rather, who were all that at once: “It was the greatest progressive revolution that mankind had so far experienced, a time which called for giants and produced giants: giants in power of thought, passion and character, in universality and learning. … Leonardo da Vinci was not only a great painter but also a great mathematician, mechanician, and engineer. … Albrecht Dürer was painter, engraver, sculptor, and architect, and in addition invented a system of fortification. … Machiavelli was statesman, historian, poet, and at the same time the first notable military author of modern times.”41
And so the stage and play are set. Everything is resolutely played out in the land of paradox and advanced backwardness—in that Germany which, since Luther, has always been a hundred years ahead of the thinking of other countries and a hundred years behind their practice. Everything is played out on the stage of Nuremberg between the descendants of the shoemaker-philosopher Hans Sachs and those of the artist-scientist Albrecht Dürer, between the dwarves and the giants. But to represent the missing giants, to train new humans fit to be diplomats or horsemen, scientists or artists, there is only the work of art and reminiscence: the musical score with which to “make petrified relations … dance”; the fantastic tale “to teach the people to be terrified at itself in order to give itself courage”;42 the monument of science, on the model of which one must exercise one’s eye and pen to cure philistines of scientistic demystification and the comfortable criticism of “utopias”; the dramatic masterpiece that one must learn to interpret to thwart the comedians and to play one’s proper role in the tragedy of the future.
The application of science can only be this: learning to interpret the work on the stage of revolution. There is no escaping from the theater. One must do it better than the comedians, and even take their place. In the Marx family, where one learns to recite Shakespeare from early childhood, the head of the family has a favorite prose writer: Diderot, author of the Paradoxe sur le comédien [The Actor’s Paradox].
One must train actors who are anti-actors. Another man of the theater, Brecht, will dwell on this problem for a long time: where is one to find the “grand method”—the art of learning to play, on the stage of the theater as on that of the revolution, not only their opposition but also their identity? Brecht, too, will need to go into exile to see the root of the problem: the question of the actor does not revolve around the art of showing but the art of living. It concerns the public only insofar as it concerns the actor himself. For in the final analysis, the pedagogy that “raises consciousness” by unveiling exploitation and its mystifications is a very impoverished virtue. The great virtue that must be learned by the public with the actor is humor, the art of performing on stage where opposites never cease to interchange themselves.
The art of becoming historical agents. No longer the simple “bearers” of social relations, whose misfortune is not being unaware of real conditions but of not being equal to what they bear. “Everything is bourgeois.” Let us remember that to stage Shakespearean drama there are as yet only comedians like those whom Prince Hamlet engages: uncivilized boors, hams from provincial troupes, performers of bourgeois comedy for whom the alliance of the sublime and the grotesque comes down to an alternation between Schillerian tirade and vaudevillian buffoonery. That is why, to save the play, there is no solution but to recall each time the old bit part that captures the quintessence of bourgeois theater—the old Hegelian handmaid known as “the irony of history.”
History will be ironic until we see the birth of the new actor, the anti-comedian, the historical character who alone is worthy of the modernity of the big-budget production: the young proletarian who, endowed with humor, can send into retirement the old handmaid with her whole cast of extras.
Humor is the art of distance that is learned at a distance. So it is pointless to try to know if Marx and Engels are truly prohibited from residing in Germany, where, after all, they would be in a far better position to preserve the Party from deviations of all sorts. It is pointless to ask whether it is really Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws that oblige the Party to have its central organ in Zurich after the German section of the International had had its office in Geneva. Science, in any case, can act only at a distance. And as long as the new actor is not yet on the scene, it operates as his proxy. It replaces the absent hero, occupying the interval of time needed for his arrival. But it also makes use of the waiting time and a whole system of substitutions to constitute the elements of his “education.”
This mise en scène is very precisely regulated by the elder Engels when Marx’s death makes him the heir of the science of the future. First he must put together the monument of the work, making books II and III of Capital out of the formless mass of hieroglyphics left by the author of the Unknown Masterpiece, which is to say, consuming both his eyesight and the time allotted him to achieve the sacrifice. Then he must teach the reading of these hieroglyphics to two scribes, Bernstein and Kautsky, endowed with the necessary qualities and defects needed to play the flattering and sacrificial role of the two Marxists (no more than two of them are needed). Then he must publish widely those works of self-popularization (e.g., the Communist Manifesto) that are fine for copying as long as they cannot be understood. He must prevent any comedian from coming along and altering the text of the actors of the future. But he must also hold the stage and prevent any other text from taking its place there, even if that means pursuing Dühring and his gang onto the shaky grounds where they discourse upon every knowable thing and a few others besides.
Preserving the purity of the text for the actors of the future also means consolidating the double power of science and class. It means profiting from Bismarck’s repression to set up in Zurich the board of the Sozialdemokrat and its theoretician Bernstein as representatives, among the German militants, of the science preserved in London and as critics of their parliamentary representation. But it also means sharpening the dialectical—humorous—capacity of German workers by means of the very gap between their political representation in Germany and their literary representation in Zurich. It does this by means, moreover, of the criticism that the Marxist writer Bernstein makes of the transgressions of the Social Democrat parliamentarian Liebknecht, as well as through the criticism that the worker-organizer Bebel makes of the Marxist scribe Bernstein.
The art of contradictions. The last lesson of the pedagogue Engels will be his curious preface to the new edition of Marx’s Class Struggles in France, glorifying the legal and parliamentary victories of socialism (to please the party leaders) but reminding them (to make them gnash their teeth) that this legal approach is merely one of the ironic forms of revolutionary art.
A lesson lost? The heirs definitely have no humor. They proceed to act the same way that the scientist Marx reproached the worker-philosopher Proudhon for acting. They hold onto the good side of Engels’s preface and suppress its bad side.
One can say, of course, that these little acts of cowardice are of no consequence. The conclusion of Engels’s preface denounces in advance the ridiculous fears of these pusillanimous spirits in the face of the anti-socialist laws. These laws will be about as effective as Diocletian’s fierce persecution of socialism’s ancestor, the Christian revolution: “It was so effective that seventeen years later the army consisted overwhelmingly of Christians, and the succeeding autocrat of the whole Roman Empire, Constantine, called the Great by the priests, proclaimed Christianity as the state religion.”43
What is he thinking of ? A new autocrat? A new state religion? He says these things only in passing, but nothing follows except for his final period. Thus was completed the theoretical testament of Marx’s legatee. For Friedrich Engels, suffering from cancer of the throat, it is time to think of retirement. It is time for the artist to withdraw from his creation. Cleanly and without a trace. On 27 August 1895, four people—Eleanor Marx, her false husband Edward Aveling, the Marxist scribe Eduard Bernstein, and the old Straubinger Friedrich Lessner—will take Friedrich Engels’s ashes on their boat. The urn will rest at the bottom of the sea, below the cliffs of Eastbourne.
The final fusion of fire and water, imitating in reverse the fate of the poet Shelley some seventy years earlier, who was washed up by the sea and cremated by his friend Byron on the beach of Viareggio. Even as Engels, whom all his dear friends called “the General,” would have us know in parting that he was, first of all, a poet.
There remains in Highgate Cemetery the other tomb, built out of stone and adorned by proletarian posterity with the bust of the prophet. Artists do not escape the power of comedians.