‘I’m not against the asocial, you know; I’m against the non-social.’ (Bertolt Brecht, on Baudelaire)

‘Let us do him the duty, which is the duty of every historian, of taking him not at his word, but at his work.’ (Louis Althusser, on Montesquieu)

The revolution and the bohème

It may at first seem as surprising that Walter Benjamin wrote about Charles Baudelaire as that Bernard Shaw wrote a study of Richard Wagner. Popular misconception has it that Baudelaire was immoral and decadent, and that Wagner was a reactionary Germanophile. That both of these judgements are far from the truth can best be discovered by direct experience of their work, and Benjamin’s and Shaw’s studies can help us to approach it.

It is not, for instance, generally known that both Baudelaire and Wagner were committed to the Revolution in 1848, and took an active part in it. Baudelaire associated with Blanqui and was active in socialist journalism, Wagner was on the barricades with Bakunin in Dresden. Both had become receptive to revolutionary socialist ideas, particularly Proudhonism, largely through their material and artistic sufferings in the heyday of capitalist commodity production, when art itself was becoming a market commodity, and the satisfaction of ‘taste’ and fashion was beginning to replace the expression or representation of ideas as the mark of an artist’s esteem. Their reactions to the failure of the 1848 revolution were also similar: it turned both into non-political but by no means apolitical artists. Both Baudelaire and Wagner were men of the post-absolutist, post-classical age, when there were no longer hard and fast rules either of artistic practice or of what constituted a legitimate artistic subject. They had gravitated from similar middle-class backgrounds to the revolutionary side in the 1840s, and made the cause of the outcast and the poor – of the masses – their main moral and aesthetic focus. When that cause appeared to have failed, they reacted by turning their backs on direct political commitment, creating separate artistic worlds, each with its own frame of reference, which, though pessimistic, to a great extent preserved and even deepened the same negation of bourgeois capitalist society as had been expressed in the Revolution itself. It was in this spirit that Wagner transformed his concept of the ‘total work of art’ – inspired by the social role and the unity of the arts in Ancient Greece – virtually into a religious rite, changing his operatic cycle, The Ring, from a political allegory with a positive outcome into a credo of human helplessness, and that Baudelaire poetically consecrated the Romantic, mystical theory of the ‘correspondence’ of the senses, changing the name and nature of his poetry cycle from the partly Fourierist and socially-inspired Les limbes to the ‘perverse’ and asocial Flowers of evil. It is therefore not surprising that he wrote one of the first appreciations of Wagner’s music and quoted his own poem ‘Correspondances’ to communicate the sensation it gave him, and that the grateful Wagner sought him out in Paris and invited him to join his circle.

Both Baudelaire and Wagner, then, turned to a deep aestheticism, but in Baudelaire’s case this must not be confused with an ivory-tower, art for art’s sake position: his work continued to be infused with sympathy for and identification with the poor (he referred to the ‘puerile utopia of “art for art’s sake” which excluded morality’) and even Wagner’s attempts to express a whole philosophy, not to say religion, of life goes beyond pure aesthetics.

The fact that Europe has since experienced a century of capitalist commodity production par excellence explains why these two artists, who were among the first consciously to react against the commercialization of art in capitalist society, have excercised such an enormous aesthetic influence in it. That that influence has been mainly one of form both reflects the personal nature of their artistic solutions, and reminds us that it was the failure of the revolution which set them on such an inner course. That the ‘avant-garde’ movement ever since has often only blindly repeated their original formal innovations and discoveries should also remind us that it too is linked to the destiny of the revolution and, as in the early Soviet period, can only reach its full fruition in conjunction with its victory.

It is the prime virtue of Benjamin’s study that it raises questions of aesthetics and politics, the avant-garde and the revolution, in this way.

Charles Baudelaire is – as its full title suggests – no ordinary biography, nor is it a conventional literary study. What Benjamin originally set out to produce was a socio-cultural study of nineteenth-century Paris, but because of the war and his resulting early death, this work was never completed. He had collected material on Baudelaire as the outstanding representative literary figure of this period. This book therefore consists of the following: a synopsis of the unfinished Paris project as a whole, two very different versions of the Baudelaire study, and a short, and highly concentrated and rich methodological introduction.

The two different versions of the Baudelaire material were written because, on completing the first, Benjamin received a thorough-going critique of it from his friend Theodor Adorno.[1] Adorno’s criticism was basically that Benjamin had collected much interesting material on Baudelaire’s social and cultural milieu, but that the study was ‘without a theoretical interpretation’. This criticism was largely justified, and threw Benjamin so badly off balance that his revised version is a far less attractive, discursive text in which his attempts to theorize lead him far afield, to Freud, Bergson and Proust, and a confused theory of memory. Adorno seems in fact to have misjudged Benjamin’s purpose, which was to ‘construct’ (Benjamin uses the word) a dense, layered collage of socio-cultural material in which Baudelaire and his contemporaries could come to life and his poetry be set. This first version, entitled ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, includes passages on the history of the newspaper (especially reviewing and advertising), the history of Saint Simonism, the condition of the new Paris lumpenproletariat, the origins of café-life and of bourgeois drinking-habits, the rise of the serial novel, the origins of the detective story, the numbering as opposed to the naming of houses in towns, and the incidence of workers’ suicides. All this is related to Baudelaire’s work, and is used to illuminate and analyse his poetry. Also included are some little-known, and remarkable, quotations from Marx, on the underground world of police spies, agents provocateurs and ‘alchemists of the revolution’, who flourished in this bohemian Paris where experiment and revolutionary action were detonated alike, as it were, by the twin fuse of spiritual alienation and material deprivation.

It is in this context that, though Benjamin points out that there is ’little point in trying to include the position of a Baudelaire in the fabric of the most advanced position of mankind’s struggle for liberation’, he nevertheless sees him as a counterpart to Auguste Blanqui – the revolutionary conspirator of the word, and the revolutionary conspirator of the deed.

Modernism

In one of the most striking passages of the book, Benjamin shows how the growing importance of artistic ‘taste’ and fashion, and the resulting development of one kind of modernism – the school of art for art’s sake and of artistic formalism – was causally linked to the growth of capitalist commodity production.
He writes (pp. 104 ff.):
‘Taste develops with the definite preponderance of commodity production over any other kind of production. … Its [taste’s] value to the manufacturer is a fresh stimulus to consumption … it is precisely this development which literature reflects in ‘art for art’s sake’. This doctrine and its corresponding practice for the first time gives taste its dominant position in poetry. In ‘art for art’s sake’ the poet for the first time faces language the way a buyer faces the commodity on the open market … They [such poets] have nothing to formulate with such urgency that it could determine the coining of their words. Rather they have to choose their words. The poet’s taste guides him in his choice of words.’

As the ultimate outcome of this process, Benjamin instances Mallarmé, the poet whose descendants are today’s modernist writers of abstract concrete poetry and music.

In contrast to this is Baudelaire’s own conception of modernism, which Benjamin discusses in the last chapter of the first version. The epitome of modernism for Baudelaire was the combination of classical or traditional form on the one hand, and the strength of subjective expression on the other. Baudelaire himself described this modernism as best exemplified in Wagner and in artists like Constantin Guys and Eugène Delacroix, and Benjamin shows how such a definition of modernism is also the best description of Baudelaire’s own poetry, which often expresses violent alienation and social breakdown in verses of classical purity. It is significant that it is this modernism, not that of art for art’s sake, which has produced some of the greatest works of modern art – the paintings of the early Picasso, for example, some of Brecht’s poetry, Eliot, and Attila Jozsef.

Marxism and art

In his criticism of Benjamin’s text, Adorno complains that the criticism of art as a commodity in the name of its use-value leads to a functionalism which he associated with Brecht. In his opinion this is retrogressive, and ‘only leads back to a stage prior to the division of labour’. Whether Adorno is here referring to the fact that art was once a devotional object (before which, as John Berger recently pointed out, the worshipper would close his eyes), or was referring to a yet earlier stage when primitive man drew functional pictures to evoke the animals he was seeking to hunt down, his strictures pose a problem for Benjamin and for all Marxist writers on art. They send us back to Plato’s utilitarian views on art as expressed in The republic, and discussed by Benjamin in Understanding Brecht (cf. the review in Artery, no. 6: here) There, in ‘The author as producer’ (written in Paris at the time of his work on the Baudelaire material), Benjamin adopted an extreme functionalism but extricated himself from its prescriptive implications by arguing that an artist’s chief function was, through formal innovation, to provide the appropriate new means of artistic production to serve the revolutionary cause. Such a strict functionalism, which forced Benjamin into this over-emphasis on form, forced others – the social realists at times, for instance – into the over-prescription of content, and sometimes led Brecht to a crude acceptance or rejection of past works according to their propagandist potential for the present. Such a position is of no use in assessing or even reaching an understanding of Baudelaire; it is therefore not surprising that Benjamin seems to have abandoned it here.

Baudelaire himself once wrote that ‘art was inseperable from both morality and utility’; but despite his identification with the workers and with the poor, he never championed or practised a directly political poetry. His theories are in this respect perhaps surpnsingly close to those of Marx and Engels, in that he thought that a poet’s or a writer’s moral attitude and message should be immanent and not explicit in his work. He wrote in a letter to Swinburne, for instance – and there are other such passages in his articles on his friend, the socialist poet Pierre Dupont – ‘I believe simply (as you do, no doubt) that any poem, any work of art, well made, suggests naturally and inevitably a moral. It is a matter for the reader. I even have a very marked hatred for any exclusive moral intention in a poem.’ Such sentiments recall to mind Engels’s famous letter to Margaret Harkness, in which he says: ‘I am far from finding fault with you for not having written a point-blank socialist novel. … The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art.’ And they both account for and are exemplified in Marx’s and Engels’s preference for Balzac over Zola.

Not that such views should be set against Lenin’s appeal – and those of others since him – for propagandist or even agitational art at specific periods of revolution, nor against our appreciation of such art. What is important is the distinction between understanding and culturally appropriating the art of the past, critically assessing the different artistic products of the present, and making demands of artists in accordance with the particular stage of the struggle for socialism at a given time.

In the context of the Marxist debate on art, it should be remembered that, unlike some bourgeois philosophies, Marxism is not a substitute for religion which can be made to provide a priori solutions to all problems, but a theory of history which emphasizes that its motive force is human action in the class struggle. Marxism cannot, therefore, as it is often forced into doing by its protagonists and accused of doing by its opponents, make prescriptive or didactic pronouncements on artistic production, which must in large measure be determined by that struggle, any more than purely intellectual solutions can be provided to any other problems whose answers ultimately lie in practice and not in theory; otherwise it would be precisely like all other philosophies which it claims to transcend.

This book is important because it is written by a Marxist who never makes that mistake, and who is constantly aware of the profound interactive links between theory and practice, art and social life, even when, and especially when, they appear to be farthest apart.

Note:
1. Adorno’s critique and Benjamin’s letters in reply have been translated and published in New Left Review, no 81, 1973.


[ Artery, no. 7, 1974 ]