Writing in Pain: Baudelaire, Benjamin, Haussmann

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Writing in Pain: Baudelaire, Benjamin, Haussmann

Vaheed K. Ramazani

1. The Body of the City Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have argued that "the body cannot

be thought separately from the social formation, symbolic topography and the constitution of the subject. The body is neither a purely natural given nor is it merely a textual metaphor."1 Elaine Scarry, in The Body in Pain, is similarly attentive to what she calls "the socialization of sentience."2 Locating the body's capacities and needs at the origin of material culture, Scarry con- tends that human sentience is inevitably restructured by the very objects it produces. In other words, those objectifications of the body that comprise the made world-from the minutest physical or verbal artifact to that vast collective artifact called "civilization" -return as percepts and concepts to

I would like to thank Ross Chambers and Donald E. Pease for their insightful and encour- aging readings of an earlier draft of this essay. 1. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 192. 2. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 255. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as BP.

boundary 2 23:2, 1996. Copyright ? 1996 by Duke University Press.

200 boundary 2 / Summer 1996

their source in the body, where they reside as the fundamental constituents of somatic (self-)experience.

In the book-length project from which this largely theoretical essay derives, I focus on a historically recent sublimation of the body-the modern city-as it is articulated through Baudelaire's collected prose poems, Le Spleen de Paris. And here, as in my longer study, I would like to begin with the premise that urban space in Le Spleen de Paris is best understood as Walter Benjamin understood the presence of the metropolitan crowd in much of Baudelaire's poetry: as a "hidden figure" whose inference is essen- tial to the text's meaning.3 It is, after all, well known that, at the beginning of Le Spleen de Paris, in a dedicatory note to Arsene Houssaye, Baudelaire invokes "the experience of great cities" as the very condition of possibility of an aesthetics of the prose poem. The new poetic form would be "musical without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and abrupt enough to adapt to the lyrical movements of the soul, to the undulations of reverie, to the paroxysms of consciousness."4

Yet, as Leo Bersani has wryly remarked, "lyrical movements of the soul" and "undulations of reverie" are "not the best terms to describe the allegories of brutality and perversion in Le Spleen de Paris."5 It can be inferred from Bersani's statement that Baudelaire's descriptive terms abrupt and paroxysms do a better job of conveying something of the violence and trauma that emerge from the collection as the dominant motif of a distinctly urban genre. And while there is evidence that Baudelaire may have con- sidered such nervous jolts as the simultaneously pleasurable and painful complement to every arousal of artistic inspiration,6 I wish to suggest that it

3. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana/Collins, 1973), 167. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as Motifs. See also Ross Chambers, "Are Baudelaire's 'Tableaux parisiens' about Paris?" in On Referring in Literature, ed. Anna Whiteside and Michael Issacharoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 95-110. In reference to the "Tableaux parisiens," Chambers notes that Paris is the "illocutionary context, or code, .... metaphoric of the modern," that gives "point" to the poetic utterance (102, 99). 4. Charles Baudelaire, (Euvres compl6tes, ed. Claude Pichois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothbque de la Pl6iade, 1975-76), 1:275-76. Unless otherwise indicated, all transla- tions of French texts are my own. 5. Leo Bersani, "Boundaries of Time and Being: Benjamin, Baudelaire, Nietzsche," in his The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 85. 6. See, for example, in "Le Peintre de la vie moderne": "I would even assert that inspiration has something in common with convulsion, and that every sublime thought is accompanied by a nervous shock, more or less violent, that reverberates deep within

Ramazani / Writing in Pain 201

is above all the experience of physical aversiveness that is "spoken" through the symbolic topography of the city in Le Spleen de Paris. For if, as the title's medical metaphor (Spleen) implies, the hidden figure of the city (de Paris) mediates the symptoms of a social body afflicted by alienated relations of class, gender, and race, it can be said that that city is in pain.

Such an assertion presupposes that the poems encode a body at once individual and collective, biological and artifactual; a body whose urban identity is not only a construction but also a precondition of the text's images of social and political malaise. On this view, the ontology of pain intervenes in the space of passage between biography, history, and poetics, linking thematic, modal, and figural effects of the prose poems to the sentient experience of an author and of the bodies (those of the laboring poor, the prostitute, the middle-class city dweller, and so on) among which he circulates and by which he is deeply inscribed.

I want to propose that this interpenetration between private body, public body, and urban geography becomes readable, in the prose poems, as a negative version of Baudelaire's famous dialectic of the vaporization and centralization of the self--that is, as a dialectic enacted and ultimately undone by the "pure physical experience of negation" (BP, 52). Founding instance and final referent of the text, a historical pain can be seen to project its disruptive effects through the framing signifier of the city, dissolving di- chotomies such as vaporization and centralization, self and other, weapon and wound.

Thus lifted out of the invisible interior of the body into language, physical negation finds its linguistic correlative in irony. Verbal and situa- tional ironies in Le Spleen de Paris mediate, and mediate between, scenes of violence and domination on the one hand and narrative (or narratorial) strategies of radical self-disempowerment on the other. More specifically, the "allegories of brutality and perversion" alluded to by Bersani in the quotation above are also allegories of the text's irony7--allegories, then, of the

the brain" (Baudelaire, CEuvres compl6tes, 2:690). But Baudelaire is well aware that pain also threatens creativity, for he fears "seeing used up, depleted, and disappear-in this horrible existence full of shocks-the admirable poetic faculty, the clarity of thought, and the power of hope that in fact constitute my capital" (Charles Baudelaire, Correspon- dance, ed. Claude Pichois, 2 vols. [Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothbque de la Pleiade, 1973], 1:327). See also the discussion of pleasure and pain in Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), and "Boundaries," 71-73. 7. Although limitations of space do not allow me to theorize extensively the concepts of irony and allegory nor to investigate thoroughly the complex relations between them, I


homology between the trope of negation and acts of hurting. Yet, irony in the prose poems also seeks to express pain, to give voice to an experi-

should mention here that both tropes engage the reader in a continual substitution and deferral of psychofigural "place," in an impossible quest for stable meaning or for autono- mous being. What is rarely seen, however, is the extent to which irony is implicated in allegory. If allegory mediates not a single, natural (which is to say, naturalized) meaning but a multiplicity of partial (in both senses of the term) meanings, that is because allegorical semiosis tends to be motivated by ironic lack. In Paul de Man's phrase, irony is "the undoing of the deconstructive allegory of all tropological cognitions, the systematic undoing, in other words, of understanding. As such, far from closing off the tropological system, irony enforces the repetition of its aberration" (Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979], 301). In my reading of Le Spleen de Paris, irony (the irony in and of allegory) is "presented" as a painful tension between allegorical meaning and the ironic negation of all meaning. In other words, the allegorization of irony/pain requires, as its very condition of possibility, the "vaporization" of allegorical understanding in (or by) the aversiveness that it mediates. Vaporization and concentration, allegory and irony, stand in a relation of ironic-or metaironic--irresolution.

But what, then, is the difference (in theory at least) between the infinite regressiveness of irony and the ongoing interpretability of allegory? In an influential essay that builds on Benjamin's insights regarding allegory, de Man explains the difference between allegory and irony in terms that would seem to lend legitimacy to my assimilation of irony to physical pain (see Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2d ed. [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983], 187-228; and Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne [London: NLB, 1977]). What distinguishes the recurrent self-dispossession of irony from that of a demystified allegory is, according to de Man, the violence (the "brevity," the "rapidity," or the "synchronic structure") of the ironic negation. Indeed, it is no "accident" that, in order to illustrate the dominant features of ironic consciousness, de Man, after Baudelaire, invokes the physical event of a man tripping and falling-the Fall is both literal and ontological ("Rhetoric of Temporality," 213-14). So whereas allegory tends to produce slow, meditative, and melancholic divagations, irony enacts sudden, radical, and vertiginous disjunctions-a violence of figure that figures the violence of pain. On the illocutionary violence of irony in aesthetic, psychoanalytic, and political-historical contexts, see my previous works, "Historical ClichB: Irony and the Sublime in L'Education sentimentale," PMLA 108, no. 1 (Jan. 1993): 121-35; "Lacan/Flaubert: Towards a Psychopoetics of Irony," Romanic Review 80 (1989): 548-59; and The Free Indirect Mode: Flaubert and the Poetics of Irony (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988). For suggestive studies of the interaction between irony and allegory in Baudelaire's verse poetry, see Ross Chambers, "Memory and Melancholy," in his The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism, trans. Mary Seidman Trouille (Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 1993), 153-73; and Nathaniel Wing, "The Danaides Vessel: On Reading Baudelaire's Allegories," in his The Limits of Narrative: Essays on Baudelaire,


ence that is defined in part by its very ability to resist and even to destroy language.8

Since, as these observations are meant to suggest, the irony of power, the irony of loss, and the allegories of irony are interdependent in Le Spleen de Paris, any inquiry into the figural continuities between pain and Baudelairean writing (between a historically specific pain and a specific re/writing of history) will unfold within a symbolic field (those "allegories of brutality") that is always in some sense about, precisely, the ways in which figures and modes can extend, or impinge upon, the material world. Such is the kind of reading that the following brief essay will attempt to open up. For corporal violence, before being a thing that some people do to others, is a way of conceiving the other, an unconscious and dehumanizing rhetorical operation. That Baudelaire's textualization of violence, and of the violence of pain, is necessarily an ethical and political gesture may be inferred from Scarry's axiom that "the successful expression of pain"--the objectification of pain's attributes and of the body as the sole origin of those attributes- "will always work to expose and make impossible" the appropriation of pain in the interests of "debased forms of power" (BP, 14).9

2. Parrying Power In his influential essay "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Walter Benja-

min establishes a relation of near synonymy between the modern city and the "figure of shock" in Baudelaire's life and poetry (Motifs, 167). Describ- ing changes in the physical circumstances of life in Second-Empire Paris, Benjamin notes, in particular, the commercial newspaper, with its disjunctive layout and unassimilable barrage of information; the turbulence of traffic; and the experience of being continually jostled by the big-city crowd. "Thus," he says, "technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind

Flaubert, Rimbaud and Mallarm6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 8-18. Clari- fying work on allegory in Le Spleen de Paris has been done by Marie Maclean, Narrative as Performance: The Baudelairean Experiment (New York: Routledge, 1988). 8. On the inaccessibility or hostility of pain to language, see Scarry, Body in Pain, 3-11. 9. We must keep in mind that, for Scarry, both the recognition and the expression of pain necessarily involve empathetic identification with the suffering body. If empathy is absent, then what has been represented (or apprehended) is not pain but something else. The power, the immediacy, and the factual certainty of pain have been used to substantiate (to make "real," "immediate," "certain," etc.) a cultural construct that would otherwise lack credibility.


of training" (Motifs, 177). According to Benjamin, this training of perception by the material conditions of urban and industrial life entails a heightening of consciousness, a "shock defense," whose primary effect is to fragment the lived experience of time into discrete segments discontinuous with the past: "The greater the share of the shock factor in particular impressions, the more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen against stimuli; the more efficiently it does so, the less do these impressions enter experience (Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour in one's life (Erlebnis)" (Motifs, 165). So Erlebnis, roughly translatable as "in- authentic experience," would seem to designate the inevitably fallen state of modern consciousness: in order to achieve self-protective insensibility, the mind must empty the present of its potentially meaningful connections with an individual and collective history, tradition, or memory (Erfahrung).10

What I want to emphasize here, however, is Benjamin's assumption that the reflective consciousness can protect itself from shock only by, in some sense, reproducing shock, that is, by seizing upon each aversive or potentially aversive moment ("every second finds consciousness ready to intercept its shock" [Motifs, 186]) and parrying it--in effect, by responding to violence with violence: "Baudelaire made it his business to parry the shocks, no matter where they might come from, with his spiritual and his physical self" (Motifs, 165). Whatever its particular implications for Benjamin's metaphysics,"1 the integration here (via the copula "and") of body and spirit (Geist) points to the final impossibility of thinking psyche and soma as dis- tinct categories of being. If the experience of shock is a "complex kind of training," it is because its transformative effects reach deep into (sentient) personhood. Benjamin goes on to adduce biographical evidence to illustrate the determinative status of the trope of shock in the details of Baudelaire's

10. On the meaning and etymology of the terms Erlebnis and Erfahrung, see Jonathan Arac, "Walter Benjamin and Materialist Historiography," in his Critical Genealogies: His- torical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 182. As Bersani points out, Benjamin's historicization of Freud's theory of the relation between perception, unconscious memory, and traumatic dreams gives to the unreflective an emphasis and a value that are not found in Freud's discussion. Yet Freud's argument (in Beyond the Pleasure Principle) is "not invulnerable to a certain historical translation" (Bersani, "Boundaries," 52). 11. For a review of the critical and philosophical issues arising from Benjamin's attempt to fuse dialectical materialism with mystical theology, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialec- tics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 216-52.


physical appearance and demeanor: in the "cutting quality" of his speech and gestures, or in his "jerky gait," for example (Motifs, 165).12

No doubt such evidence should be approached with circumspec- tion, but if we allow that modern alienation is at bottom physical, then we might reasonably expect that Baudelaire's prose poems will tell us something about the interior structure of that alienation and, ultimately, about the relation between the somatogenic features of modern consciousness and the broader system of social and political representations in which they are necessarily enmeshed. We should start, then, by circling a little closer to the concept of Erlebnis, trying to understand from within, as it were, its equivocal status as both experience of shock and experience as shock.

In the "Motifs" essay, that indeterminacy becomes manifest in Benja- min's terminology itself and can, I think, be summed up by the verb parry (in German, parieren), which Benjamin uses twice (and quotes once in Baudelaire) to describe the reaction of consciousness to the assault of potentially traumatic stimuli (Motifs, 164, 165, 166). The term is, of course, appropriate to the artist-as-fencer metaphor that Benjamin finds repeatedly in Baudelaire's criticism and poetry; but in itself, the idea of the parry distills a tension (what, in the present context, we should perhaps call an antagonism) that operates throughout the essay and that Benjamin himself does not note. I am referring to a confrontation between words suggesting adaptive self-defense ("protection," "shield," "preserve," "reception," "cush- ioned," "screen," "intercept," "incorporated," "acceptance," "registers") and words expressing martial aggressivity ("combat," "duel," "cutting," "stabs," "blows") (Motifs, 163-66).13 As I have said, the shock defense meets violence with counterviolence. Yet, Benjamin's vocabulary suggests ways in which the counterviolence of consciousness is both similar to and different from the violence it opposes: similar because consciousness com- bats violence-like a weapon, it moves outward to make contact with the threatening other; similar, too, because consciousness absorbs and so, in

12. Similarly, though to significantly different ends, Jean-Paul Sartre notes the defensive attitude conveyed by Baudelaire's "cramped, stiff, abrupt gait" and by his clothing, which, in its "aggressiveness," becomes "almost an act" (Baudelaire, trans. Martin Turnell [Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1950], 110, 113, 151). 13. In the case of what I am calling expressions of "adaptive self-defense," the English translation sometimes uses synonyms to render a single term that is repeated in the Ger- man original (or originals, since Benjamin not only refers to but also quotes Freud). I am grateful to Rebecca Karoff for her generous assistance in checking the English translation against the relevant passages from the German text.


yet another manner, duplicates the violence of the other-like a wound, it records the impact of the shocks; different, however, because, like weapon and wound together, yet like neither weapon nor wound altogether, consciousness simultaneously includes and excludes, repeats and repels-in short, parries the shocks. Thus, insofar as a blow cannot be deflected without first being received, or, more precisely, insofar as the tactic of the parry cannot succeed without emulating the gesture and internalizing the energy of the weapon that it opposes, it can be said of modern consciousness that it is continually becoming what it parries and parrying what it has always already become.

Here then, at the elementary site of the coming-into-being of modern subjectivity, the sign of the weapon and the sign of the wound map the path of exchange between the body and the global network of social objects and relations. The conditioning of human sentience by the artifact of culture may be read as an act of wounding. Yet since the wound of Erleb- nis in turn conditions the artifact, the wound, by virtue of its complicity in the artifact's wounding activity, crosses into the referential sphere of the weapon. And since the wound makes the artifact in its own image-that is, since the artifact-as-weapon is itself a projection of the wound that it has caused-the sign of the weapon always encloses within its figural borders its (therefore equally unstable) other, the sign of the wound.

We should not, however, let the apparent abstractness of these semiotic shifts and displacements obscure the referent at their center. The loss invoked by Benjamin, whether of Erfahrung or of aura,14 is a loss of body, an alienation of the body through the commodity structure of society. For as those technological mediations of the economic system that Benjamin identifies with the city (newspapers, traffic, the crowd, the machine) imprint themselves on consciousness, severing each passing moment from every other, a shock-saturated sentience mimes the violent rhythm of production, circulation, and consumption governing commodity exchange in "the age of mechanical reproduction." It is not surprising, then, that Benjamin and critics influenced by him should be fond of pointing out that Baudelaire viewed himself as "seller and commodity in one" (this is Benjamin's aphorism for the prostitute).15 Indeed, in this connection, one might note the formal re-

14. This is not to say that these two concepts are inherently uncompromised. On the complicity of the aura with traditional structures of power and with the capitalistic values to which it seems to be opposed, see Bersani, "Boundaries," 60-63. 15. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973), 171.


semblance between Baudelaire's prose poems and the newspaper articles with which they were originally published, or between the commercially dictated fragmentariness of the newspaper's layout and the apparently random ordering of the prose poems, as collected in Le Spleen de Paris.16 But whatever these structural similarities might suggest regarding the coloni- zation of the artist's mind by the expanding socioeconomic institutions and practices of which the daily paper (as the first mass medium) had become emblematic, neither the prose poems nor the sentient identity they mediate can be reduced to their social condition(ing) as commodities. For if, as Foucault has shown, power is not only inescapable and limiting but also diffuse and enabling, then the commodification of sentience can never be complete; the poem remains a benign, or potentially benign, artifact precisely to the extent that its status as weapon or as wound is undecidable. So while Baudelaire understood that his physical, intellectual, and imagina- tive energies were of necessity salable goods on the literary market, and that he was consequently complicit with the very mechanisms of power that oppressed him, his prose poems nevertheless gesture beyond complicity toward opposition,17 beyond commodified writing (writing as weapon or as wound) toward artifice as an agent of healing.

The occasion for opposition arises, then, in the interval between weapon and wound. There, the system of power inscribes a margin of difference from itself, a space for change (from) within wounding and wounded social being. For as the etymology of parry (from parare, to prepare) in-

16. Regarding the influence of the newspaper on Baudelaire, see, in addition to Benja- min ("On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," and Charles Baudelaire, 27-34), Richard Terdi- man, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 117-46; Jonathan Monroe, A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 96-97; and Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 147-48. 17. My understanding of opposition as an appropriative practice arising from and within power itself is informed by Michel Foucault (see especially Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Random House, 1979]; The His- tory of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley [New York: Random House, 1978], 92-102; and Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper [New York: Random House, 1980]); by Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); and by Ross Chambers's brilliant theoretical extension and critical implementation of both Foucault and Certeau in Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).


dicates, the referential ambiguity of the signifiers weapon and wound pre- pares the ground--the ubiquitous but permeable ground of power that they comprise-for mutations in the structure of the social body, for (to con- tinue the fencing metaphor) deflections of the desire of/for power toward the production of counterrepressive (i.e., relatively pain-less) social forms and practices. The parry therefore figures that moment of slippage that ensures the mobility or adaptability of the modern apparatus of power and that, at the same time, sponsors the multiple points where social habits and institutions can be "made" (influenced or re-formed) to fulfill their original purpose as artifacts.

As artifacts, cultural objects, structures, and norms exist for the purpose of reciprocating (by magnifying) the sentient powers of those whose labor produced or helped to produce them. "The presence of the body in the realm of artifice," notes Scarry, "has as its counterpart the presence of artifice in the body, the recognition that in making the world, man remakes himself" (BP, 251).18 Yet, our study of Benjamin indicates that modern identity is a self-deconstructing artifact, that in "making the world," the subject not only makes but also unmakes itself. Broadly speaking, the economic system, in becoming a kind of extended shock effect, betrays its makers at all levels of the social hierarchy; for everyday life (traffic, crowds, commodity exchange, labor, etc.) does not alleviate but instead intensifies the stress and limitations of human embodiment. More accurately, it alleviates some of those pressures while intensifying others. And of course, it alleviates them primarily for some (for a privileged and relatively small class) while intensifying them primarily for others (for the many low "others"). That is to say, the economic infrastructure not only ensures the dissemination of the mute discomfort of the shock experience throughout the social fabric; it pushes bodily alienation much further by "making" an artificer (indeed, an artifact) such as Charles Baudelaire vulnerable to severe physical pain. Just as the wage laborer suffers from occupational disease, from the risk of accident, from fatigue, malnutrition, or lack of shelter, so Baudelaire suffers from financial hardship and venereal disease (the latter being an occupational hazard, perhaps, for the poet, whose pronouncements on art and prostitution are well known!).19

18. My present discussion of the purpose of the artifact and of the reversion of the system of production from artifact into weapon is influenced by Scarry's interpretation of Marx's philosophy of work in Body in Pain, 243-77. 19. On Baudelaire's "decadent" rhetoric of sickness and of convalescence, see Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to DAn-


It is, then, by acknowledging the social and historical mediations of an urban shock effect that we can best appreciate Baudelaire's statement that he was "physically depoliticized" by Louis-Napoleon's coup d'etat.20 Particularly during the last decade of Baudelaire's life, at precisely the time that he was writing the majority of his prose poems, politics and pain con- verged in the Baron Haussmann's violent reconfiguration of the urban body. Indeed, it can be shown that for a diseased and financially destitute Baude- laire as for the urban poor who were, in the cultural imagination, society's disease,21 the simultaneously physical and political realities of pain and spatial dispossession were produced by a system of conventional discourses; by disciplinary codes that included not only the weapon/wound opposition but related constructions, such as self and other, public and private-even disease and cure, the binary whose very rationale was the eradication of pain. But if the prose poems imply a relatively compassionate version of cure, it is because, I would argue, they seek to ex-press pain, to expel pain by miming it.22

nunzio (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 33-104; for another, more biographical interpretation of the relation between venereal disease, art, and politics in Baudelaire, see Michel Butor, Histoire Extraordinaire: Essay on a Dream of Baudelaire's, trans. Richard Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), 40-47, 74-84,136. For useful social and psychological insights into Baudelaire's aesthetics of prostitution, see Jonathan Arac, "Charles Baudelaire," in The Romantic Century: Charles Baudelaire to the Well-Made Play, vol. 7 of European Writers, ed. Jacques Barzun and George Stade (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985), 1332; Lloyd Spencer, "Allegory in the World of the Commodity: The Impor- tance of Central Park," New German Critique 34 (Winter 1985): 66-68; Charles Bern- heimer, Figures of III Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1, 71-74; Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud, 8-15; Bersani, "Boundaries," 69-86; Walter Benjamin, Central Park, trans. Lloyd Spencer with the help of Mark Harrington, New German Critique 34 (winter 1985): 40-41, 52-53; and Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 55-57, 166, 171. 20. "LE 2 DECEMBRE m'a physiquement ddpolitique" [THE 2ND OF DECEMBER physically depoliticized me] (Baudelaire, Correspondance, 1:188). Baudelaire coins the verb d6politiqu6 instead of using the usual (but less vituperative sounding) d6politis6. 21. This perception is discussed by Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 131-36; Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 36-37; Louis Chevalier, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses a Paris pendant la premiere moiti6 du XIXe si6cle (Paris: Plon, 1958); and Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth- Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). 22. Compare Scarry, Body in Pain, 17: "Some forms of pain therapy explicitly invite the patient to conceptualize a weapon or object inside the body and then mentally push it


3. The Sublime Commodity In his study of Haussmann's renovation of Paris, Sigfried Giedion

remarks:

The huge scale of Haussmann's work is genuinely overwhelming. He dared to change the entire aspect of a great city, a city which had been revered for hundreds of years as the center of the civilized world. To build a new Paris-attacking all aspects of the problem simultaneously-was an operation still unequaled in scale. The in- domitable courage of the Prefet de la Seine has also remained unequaled. Haussmann allowed no group to block his schemes: in his transformation of Paris he cut directly into the body of the city.23

While elsewhere in his essay Giedion indicates the various social problems (especially that of workers' housing conditions) that were exacerbated by the rebuilding of Paris, his prose here celebrates, through the insistent use of superlatives, both the immensity of the project and the relentlessness with which it was carried out. Indeed, the enthusiasm of Giedion's utterance would seem to suggest that to reflect on Haussmann's renewal of Paris is, inevitably, both to feel awe and to merge imaginatively with the power for which awe is the sign. The sublimation of awe as exaltation (Haussmann's work is "overwhelming") repeats the classic gesture of the sublime.24 What is particularly interesting about the passage, however, is that much of its rhetorical force derives from its use of a language appropriate to medicine and warfare-two disciplines whose explicit field of intervention is the body. If Haussmann must "cut" into the city's "body," it is because he is "attacking" an urban enemy, or ailment, performing a simultaneously military and medical "operation" with strategic skill ("schemes") and with authority (he cuts "directly"). Thus, Giedion evokes those "ideas of pain"25 that are the condition of possibility for the reader's experience of the sublime.

out-a process that has precedents in much older remedies that often entailed a shaman or doctor mimetically 'pulling' the pain out of the body with some appropriately shaped object." 23. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 5th ed. (Cambridge: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1967), 275. 24. In psychoanalytic terms, the sublime is often described as a kind of reaction-formation, a countercathexis whose governing trope is metaphor: the subject overcomes anxiety- transforms or translates ideas of pain into joy-by identifying with the (power of the) threat. 25. The expression "ideas of pain" comes from Edmund Burke, but the provision that the expression underscores--that the subject who experiences the sublime must imagine


Yet, given that sublimity of the sort that we encounter in Giedion's passage is atypical neither of historical accounts of Haussmann's accom- plishments nor of Haussmann's autobiography, we might wonder why Le Spleen de Paris-a poetry whose writing belongs to the same historical moment as the transformation of Paris, and whose avowed inspiration is precisely that modern (or suddenly modernized) city--consistently privi- leges irony over sublimity.26 If Baudelaire's urban poetics may be said to turn on a series of binaries akin to the dialectic of creation and destruction ("to build a new Paris"/"attacking," "he cut") set in play by Giedion's martial and medical metaphors, why, then, do the ideas of pain aroused by Baudelaire's prose poems, unlike those implied by Giedion's text, tend to subvert rather than affirm the sublime? The answer, I would suggest, lies in the proximity of Baudelaire's writing to the topographical event that it narrates, in the temporal and modal "place" of the text with respect to the social drama of dis-placement that is its enunciatory moment and its hidden figure. For if pain is, precisely, an ontological dislocation-the divorce of consciousness from its objects, or from its self-objectification in artifacts (BP, esp. 243-77)--then a language seeking to express pain as pain, and not as a sublime effect of power, will map its idea of pain through the trope of error and errancy, through the figural geography of contingency and loss, that is irony.

Irony in the prose poems will attempt, then, to mediate an idea of pain that is more sensation than idea-not pain "at certain distances and with certain modifications" (Edmund Burke's terms for the type of pain that is conducive to sublimity), but instead "danger or pain" that "press too

rather than feel (that is, rather than feel with genuine urgency) fear, pain, or threat of

danger--is an important feature both of Burke's and of Kant's theory of the sublime. See

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London: Routledge, 1958), 39-40; and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (London: Hafner, 1951), 98-101,103,109. 26. The consensus among critics-from Suzanne Bernard, Le Poeme en prose de Baude- lairejusqu'a nos jours (Paris: Nizet, 1959), to Barbara Johnson, D6figurations du langage po6tique: la seconde r6volution baudelairienne (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), to J. A. Hiddle- ston, Baudelaire and "Le Spleen de Paris" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)- would seem to be that the encounter in Le Spleen de Paris between irony and lyricism only yields more irony. Of course, these critics' conceptions of irony differ, and Barbara John- son even avoids using the term irony. Yet her deconstruction of the boundary between lyricism and cliche constitutes both an ironic reading and, implicitly at least, a reading of irony. Indeed, broadly speaking, Johnson's notion of "disfiguration" corresponds to the view of irony that emerges from my analysis, in a separate essay, of "Les Yeux des pauvres."


nearly" to occasion the sublime.27 Of course, the expression "idea of pain" (my emphasis) suggests a certain disembodiment of sensation, and the distanced nature of the pain described by Burke reminds us that, whether as the negative moment of the sublime or as the structuring principle of modern consciousness, pain has been parried by the discourse of power. (This is not to disclaim the oppositional potential of the parry but to suggest that the parry as a tactic of resistance- i.e., as an expression of pain-can be neither thought nor performed apart from the parry as a technique of power-i.e., as an exclusion of pain and as an expression of violence.) So the question that arises is this: How can the body-the body of worker and of bourgeois alike, though to drastically different degrees-be shown to be in pain if its pain is a priori in (inside of) power? If pain is the repressed hori- zon from and against which power is produced, can the repressive effects of the social space-effects ranging from the jolts of urban existence to the extremes of physical suffering-be spoken at all?

It is the epistemological wager of Le Spleen de Paris that pain can be rescued for experience (Erfahrung) if it is written in, that is, if a personal and collective pain (the pain one is perforce "in") is written in (into) one's text in a manner that reveals pain's ontological dimensions. The method of this writing will therefore be a rewriting: a repetition, but also a reconfiguration (a recontextualization), of the pain that is already embedded in the discourse of the dominant. In other words, if to write in pain is inevitably to reiterate the signifying strategies in and through which pain is sublimated, it is also to trace the work of ideology back through its founding signifiers, to rediscover the "shape" of pain by subjecting conventional hierarchies of meaning to a kind of textual torture. Baudelaire puts pain in writing by putting writing in pain, that is, by miming textually both the structure of physical aggression and the destructive effects of grave sentient distress.28 For, again, what is at stake in Baudelaire's use of irony is the possibility of presenting an idea of pain that can be not only read but felt, and felt in such a way (which is to say, read in such a context) that it cannot, or most likely will not, be translated into a sublime fiction of power.

Let us return for a moment to the quotation from Giedion, which expresses an idea of pain that very clearly serves an idea of power, par-

27. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 40. 28. Elsewhere, I discuss "Les Yeux des pauvres" in relation to the structure of torture, but other of Baudelaire's prose poems ("Le Gdteau" and "Assommons les pauvres!" to name only the most obvious) might usefully be analyzed in the light of the structure of war.


ticularly in the statement that Haussmann "cut directly into the body of the city." Here, Giedion's transformation of an act of violence into a triumphant cure relies on rhetorical suppression of the reader's capacity to identify with the pain that the "cure" implies. For such empathetic identification might, like pain itself, disrupt the conceptual boundary between wound and cure, casting doubt on the value of both the wound as means and the cure as end. What Giedion's evacuation of sentience from a scene of violence dem- onstrates, then, is the mechanism whereby power creates and sustains its effects of truth. Effects of truth, we might say, are manufactured by disavow- ing the effects of pain, that is, by distributing the inherently unstable terms of the weapon/wound dyad into fixed social, economic, and rhetorical hierarchies that deny the pain that produced them and that they produce in turn (the pain that they are "in").

As we have seen, pain is both present in and absent from the discourse of the parry. Pain is at once registered and dispelled by a hyperalert psychical system: registered not just as wound but as weapon and wound, as neither weapon nor wound but the shock in between them; dispelled not just by the weapon but, once again, by the inarticulate turn between signs. Yet, the hesitation of the psyche between the aggressive posture of the weapon and the defensive posture of the wound has as its objective not the expression but the avoidance of pain. And it is this desire for decreased sentience-for immunity or, to put it more suggestively, for insensitivity- that can give rise to a kind of cruel self-parody in its "higher" cultural per- mutations: just as pain is "not there" in the discourse of the dominant, so it is "not there" in the bodies of the poor.

Implicitly, in Giedion's text, the subaltern body is both written and written on by the surgical instrument and the military arm. And though, as potential vehicles for pain, these objects are identifiable as weapons, they are, on a more affective level, intelligible mainly as tools: they seem to express creation rather than destruction; work rather than pain.29 But how exactly does the text disguise (and thereby repeat) the violence to which it refers? How does the sublime naturalize (which is to say, anesthetize) the Baron's alterations? What is the relation here between weapon, wound, and text-between historical pain and the writing of history, or between the writing of history and the reading of pain?

29. Or not primarily pain. On the ambiguity of work as a synonym both for pain (specifically, for "controlled discomfort") and for the pleasure of creation, see Scarry, Body in Pain, 169-71.


That which was external to "the body of the city"--the boulevard- is made internal, while that which was internal or

closed--the quartier, the slum-is laid open. The collapse of the boundary between inside and outside being a salient feature of the experience of pain (BP, 52-53), we might expect that the trope of cutting, as a tacit inversion of inside and out, would express with special immediacy the sensation whose structure it mirrors. What the reference to cutting articulates, though, is not the confusion of inside and outside but the translation of inside into outside, not an exchange between body and weapon but an exchange of body for weapon--of the sentience of the body for the nonsentience of the weapon.

By this I do not mean simply that Haussmann's cutting, whether as act or as active verb, can be read as a forcible "foregrounding" of the weapon over the wound. Obviously it can. But, as Scarry has shown, the sign of the weapon, no less than the sign of the wound, functions as a metaphor for the experience of pain (BP, 15-16). The problem, here, is that the sign of the weapon (and with it, the pain that the sign implies) is appropriated and transformed by a rhetoric of the weapon.

The rhetoric of the weapon works by conflating the sublime mood with power and power with strength. It literalizes, in effect, the sign of the weapon, reducing the sign to the weapon "itself," to the invulnerability of an insensate surface. Indeed, as boulevard-from bollwerk, meaning bulwark--suggests, that "surface" (that mood of toughness) obstructs the reading of pain (of the pain that the boulevard, as weapon, presupposes). So it is not because it expresses pain but precisely because it does not that the sign of the weapon becomes a kind of weapon, a rhetorical destitution of the sentience of the text.

All of this is not to deny a certain referential accuracy to Giedion's portrayal of the boulevard as cure, but neither is it to overlook the role of the boulevard in the political construction of the very concept of the cure. Haussmann's spectacular surgery removes workers from the center of Paris to quarters and suburbs at the city's northern and eastern peripheries, while at the same time concentrating the middle class in the western districts: the "cure," it would seem, segregates the city into zones of privilege and zones of neglect. On the one hand, it quarantines the poor, sending them away or simply hiding their dilapidated tenements behind stately new fagades; on the other hand, it exposes the dissident underclass-to government surveillance and military control. As Haussmann himself notes, the wide, rectilinear avenues combined "l'utilite strategique" (inhospitableness to barricades; accessibility to the policing eye) with sanitary utility (openness to


air and light).30 What I want to suggest is that, in the Baron's memoirs, strategic utility is sanitary utility.

Assainir (to clean up, purify, decontaminate) is the verb Haussmann uses to describe his architectural incursions into working-class strongholds. In his retelling, those "operations" assume all the grotesque glamour of a medico-military evisceration: "C'etait I'eventrement du Vieux Paris, du quartier des emeutes, des barricades, par une large voie centrale, per- gant, de part en part, ce dedale presque impraticable."31 Remembering his success in persuading the city council of the necessity of the proposed renovations, Haussmann remarks:

Je me sentis, des lors, fermement en selle, pour aller a la conquete du vieux Paris, avec une armee qui se prenait de confiance pour son nouveau Chef, et dont le concours, de plus en plus assure, me per- mattait d'entreprendre I'eventrement des quartiers de ce centre de ville aux rues enchevetrees, presque impraticables a la circulation des voitures; aux habitations resserrees, sordides, malsaines, qui etaient, pour la plupart, autant de foyers de misere et de maladie, et de sujets de honte pour un grand pays comme la France.32

We can discern in these quotations the same grandiloquent conflation of the scalpel and the sword that appears, as if by intertextual contagion, in Giedion's own writing.

But then, contagion is precisely what Haussmann is writing about. "Of the boulevard," says Jeanne Gaillard, the Second Empire "requires above all the prevention of any coalition of the quartiers, any contagion of disorder."33 Though it apparently does so unintentionally, Gaillard's statement recalls the position of the boulevard within a nineteenth-century dis-

30. Georges Haussmann, M6moires du Baron Haussmann, 3 vols., 3d ed. (Paris: Victor- Havard, 1890-93), 3:54-55. 31. Old Paris, the district of riots, of barricades, was gutted by a wide, central thorough- fare that pierced from one end to the other this almost impenetrable maze (Haussmann, M6moires, 54). 32. I felt, from that moment on, firmly in the saddle, ready to embark upon the conquest of the old Paris, with an army that was starting to have faith in its leader, and whose support, ever more certain, allowed me to begin tearing open the neighborhoods of this city center with its tangled streets, almost impassable to traffic; its cramped, squalid, unhealthy dwellings that were, for the most part, nothing but hotbeds of sickness and disease, and a disgrace to a great nation such as France (Haussmann, M6moires, 2:257). 33. Jeanne Gaillard, Paris, la ville, 1852-1870: I'urbanisme parisien 6 I'heure d'Hauss- mann (Paris: Champion, 1977), 39.


ciplinary code equating hygiene, morality, and visibility. It is not just that the transgression of boundaries, whether by disease or by civil disorder, was perceived to occur when bodies were mixed together in a dark and huddled maze ("ce dedale presque impraticable"). In the economy of a nineteenth- century medical discourse on crowd behavior, the contagion of disorder and the disorder of contagion constituted the same pathology, insofar as they both "belonged" to a class whose biological inferiority they were called upon to authenticate.34 To the "misere morale" of a growing population of "nomades" and "declasses,"35 Haussmann responds with the fabrication of an open space permitting the "circulation" of air, light-and troops!

So the boulevard is a space produced by, and for, essentialist metaphor. It is a site where linguistic "traffic" circulates between the social and the organic-between the masses as a threat to property and disease as a trespass upon the body. Authorized by competing codes of sameness and difference, such metaphors are blindly divided against themselves: they seek to consolidate social difference by appealing to biological difference; yet, if they can "establish" biological difference on one level, it is only by simultaneously canceling it on another. The myth of difference, of innate inferiority, is predicated on a myth of in-difference, of ontological identity between the dangerous classes and (their) dangerous pathogens.

In a Haussmannian architectonics, the master word for this kind of rhetorical procedure-a t(r)opology of metaphorical equivalence and of hierarchical difference--is "regularization." 36 The meaning of regularization as a spatial practice may be inferred, on the one hand, from Haussmann's classification of his new roads in a hierarchy of systems and subsystems; on the other hand, from the coercive elimination of topographical difference- the leveling--required for the installation of each one of the roads. True, in the Memoires, "leveling" (nivellement) generally refers to the mathemati-

34. For a study of late nineteenth-century medical, psychological, and anthropological theories about the crowd, see Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors. Barrows shows that theorists perceived the crowd-which they associated with women, alcoholics, and the underclass-as ruled by, and ultimately as being, a form of "contagion," "illness," "infec- tious malady," "fever," "epidemic," or "germ." 35. Haussmann, Mdmoires, 2:257, 2:200-201. 36. Compare Foucault on the dual structure of normalization: "Within a homogeneity that is the rule, the norm introduces, as a useful imperative and as a result of measurement, all the shading of individual differences" (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 184). To the extent that such measurement is used to determine value, one is reminded, inevitably, of the function of money as universal equivalent.


cal procedure of surveying; but this fact merely underscores the connection between gazing and razing, measuring and surveillance. Enacted in the "percee," the "trouee,"37 and (as we saw) the "eventrement," the magis- tral line neither deviates from nor tolerates deviation (deviance) within its unified trajectory. It subsumes the unruly heterogeneity of everyday life to an implicit ideal of the sanitary void, to a totalizing desire for clean, open spaces-spaces laid out, says Frangoise Choay, "simply for the negative reason that they are not to be filled in."38 The straight line becomes a space "a plein voyant"39-empty, yet full (plein) of the panoptic gaze.

The rearticulation of Paris proceeds, then, through a syntax of axes and poles, rings and nodes, through discursive patterns whose very claim to intelligibility (to the perfect coherence of geometric abstraction) rests on their normalization of violence, their misrecognition of pain. Pain has no "place" in a regularized landscape, for its uncanny inversions of inside and outside, center and periphery, would upset the linear/lineal structures of social paternalism. That is, in the text of the city as in the textual sublime, pain is an inadmissible disturbance of the clear delineation -of the decisive hierarchization-of worker and bourgeois, public and private, family and anomie. Indeed, as rhetorical analysis of Baudelaire's prose poems would show, to make pain readable (to represent it as pain) would be to subvert the officially sanctioned lineage descending from the means of production to the labor of the producer (of the proletariat, or proles-the offspring of the system).

As the primary signifier of a new economic Law, the boulevard itself is a sublime commodity. It is, after all, both massive and (in terms of historical precedent, at least) mass produced. And whether as an instrument or as a product of commercial and industrial culture, it can generate mass profits.40 It is, hence, an emblem not only of the imperial regime but of the form and force of capital: just as Haussmann's streets break through the quartier, so they break the quartier economy. In the boulevard-in the length and breadth of its surface, in the monotonous repetition of its per- spectives and fagades-we witness both the agent and the allegory of a

37. Either term might be translated as "cut," "opening," or "breach." 38. Frangoise Choay, The Modern City: Planning in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Mar- guerite Hugo and George R. Collins (New York: George Braziller, 1969), 18. 39. Haussmann, M6moires, 2:318. 40. On the rebuilding of Paris as profitable industry, see T. J. Clark, The Painting of Mod- ern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 54; and Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 767.


"wider," more impersonal market, of processes of production and exchange at once atomized and homogenized.

But how can one speak of Haussmann's roads (or indeed of any material artifact) as a sublime commodity? Does not such an expression fail to distinguish sublime feelings from the objects that provoke them? Does it not conflate, moreover, the profitable and contingent (market) value with the absolute power of the (moral) Idea? Absolute power (if there is such a thing) cannot, after all, be contained in an object, cannot belong to the object that suggests it. But my point is, precisely, that it is because the sublime is a negative presentation -a presentation of the unpresentable by means of its very unpresentability41-that it is embroiled in the question of value, of what political, ethical, or economic forms might be assigned to its "formless" Idea. And, correlatively, it is because the Idea is signified by its absence (by the very inadequation between signifier and referent) that "sublime objects" appear to embody, in effect, the power to which they merely allude. That an aesthetics of the sublime depends on the failure of representation makes it no less a representation; a semiotic mediation of the idea of presentation, in short, a rhetoric of presentation.42

It is, then, as rhetoric-as mediated communication--that the sublime is homologous with the commodity form: it posits an essence lying beyondthe phenomenal world, yet abolishes the distance between essence and thing; fills in the gap with metaphysical presence; resurrects inadequation as transcendental surplus. Sublimity disguises, as does commercial aura, the fetishistic nature of its irresistible "appeal," denying that Value (like presentation itself) is but the naturalized product of a system of exchange. And exchange, for both forms (the commercial and the metaphysical), is a

41. Kant puts it this way: "We need not fear that the feeling of the sublime will lose by so abstract a mode of presentation--which is quite negative in respect of what is sensible-for the imagination, although it finds nothing beyond the sensible to which it can attach itself, yet feels itself unbounded by this removal of its limitations; and thus that very abstraction is a presentation of the Infinite, which can be nothing but a mere negative presentation, but which yet expands the soul." Or, more succinctly: "Although no adequate presentation [of the ideas of reason] is possible ..., by this inadequateness that admits of sensible presentation [they] are aroused and summoned into the mind" (Kant, Critique of Judgement, 115, 84). 42. See Chambers, Room for Maneuver, 185: "Recourse to sublimity is not an escape from representation and rhetoric but itself a rhetorical device, another form of representation .... [T]here is no communication that is not mediated; and the denial of mediation is itself a mediated communication, not 'sublimity' but a representation of the sublime."


specular structure-the abstract and unifying "transport" of metaphor: the sensible attributes of the object are projected onto a Law that exceeds it (in economic terms, the laws of the market), while the incommensurability of the absolute Law is conferred, in turn, on the material object (now an Object). In the vocabulary of Lacanian analysis, Symbolic equivalence enacts Imaginary value. Thus liberated by metaphor from the knowledge of pain, the sublime object (like the commodity) is able to "circulate," to trans- fer its "uniqueness," its authority, and its meaning, through a substitutive chain yielding ontological profit. For as signs of a single, universal Idea, sublime objects inevitably reflect one another, like commodities seeking their "objective" value in the specular and speculative medium of money.43

Of course, sublimity and commodity are not the same thing; but to the extent that every commodity "presents" the general equivalent, there is something of the sublime in every commodity. The rationalized uniformity and the perpetual transmissibility of the physical matter of money function (in the social unconscious) as metaphors for an Idea of money-not, says Slavoj Ziek, "the empirical . . stuff money is made of" but a "sublime

43. As Karl Marx has shown in volume 1 of Capital (trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling [New York: International Publishers, 1967]), the commodity refers not to the physical labor of the producer but to other commodities; not to its own material properties but to the general equivalence of the money form; not to use-value but to price. In other words, the significance of commodities-the pain that they preempt (in the consumer) as well as the pain out of which they are born (in the producer)-is always elsewhere. The violence of commodities, therefore, is double: on the one hand, they "forget" the body of the producer; on the other hand, they displace the self-awareness of the consumer from the sentient experience of shock to inorganic objects, objects that function as the mirror of a permanently new-infinitely renewable-body. The "illusion of novelty," says Benjamin, "is reflected, like one mirror in another, in the illusion of infinite sameness. The product of this reflection is the phantasmagoria of 'cultural history' in which the bourgeoisie enjoyed its false consciousness to the full" (Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 172). Modern renewal-whether the ritualistic renewal of money and fashion or Hauss- mann's renewal of the capital of fashion--suppresses difference (the otherness of pain) beneath a structure of specular repetition. Novelty, then, is the bourgeoisie's complacent belief that there will never be anything new, that each new turn in history will bring only the return of the same class interests and control. On the relation between novelty and history, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Ar- cades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989); and Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (New York: Verso, 1981). On the etymological, psychological, and economic connections between specularity and speculation, see David F. Bell, Models of Power: Politics and Economics in Zola's "Rougon-Macquart" (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 59-61, 73-74.


material" (Ziek's emphasis) persisting "beyond the corruption of the body physical," a "body-within-the body exempted from ... wear and tear."44

It is this timeless and immutable commodity-body that Haussmann wants to construct, that Paris ("a huge consumer market; an immense work- shop," he calls it45) would be, become, present. Boulevards and railways, department stores and exhibition halls would "contain" the uncontainable: in their prodigious dimensions and their sudden proliferation, their voluminous traffic and their boundless inventories, these architectural signs (and many others like them) seem permeated by their referent, by an indestructible "substance"--the very inside of money.

But what does this body itself embody? What idea does the Idea of money evoke? A myth of progress, perhaps, or of national grandeur; infinite wealth; or the mastery of knowledge. The question must be asked (and such answers tried out); for though the sublime is the experience of a negative relation (that of sensuous things to ineffable Thing), still the inadequation is a successful mediation, the (negative) presentation of a positive Idea (of a conceptual entity positively given).46

The "true sublime feeling," as Lyotard puts it, is the sense of "jubi-

44. Slavoj Zitek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 18-19. 45. Haussmann, Mdmoires, 2:200. 46. In

2i.ek's reading of Hegel's critique of Kant, Kant "remains a prisoner of the field

of representation" precisely because he "presupposes that the Thing-in-itself exists as something positively given beyond ... representation." In the Kantian dialectic of Idea and phenomena, says 2itek, the notion of the unpresentable "remains the extreme point of the logic of representation," its "negative limit." "Hegel's position is, in contrast, that there is nothing beyond phenomenality, beyond the field of representation. The experience of radical negativity, of the radical inadequacy of all phenomena to the Idea,... is already Idea itself as 'pure', radical negativity. Where Kant thinks that he is still dealing only with a negative presentation of the Thing, we are already in the midst of the Thing-in-itself-- for this Thing-in-itself is nothing but this radical negativity. In other words--in a some- what overused Hegelian speculative twist-the negative experience of the Thing must change into the experience of the Thing-in-itself as radical negativity. The experience of the Sublime thus remains the same: all we have to do is to subtract its transcendent presupposition-the presupposition that this experience indicates, in a negative way, some transcendent Thing-in-itself persisting in its positivity beyond it. In short, we must limit our- selves to what is strictly immanent to this experience, to pure negativity, to the negative self-relationship of the representation" (Ziiek, Sublime Object, 205-6; Ziek's emphasis). It seems to me, however, that with this experience of an unreifiable negativity-and with the concomitant possibility, in Hegel, of experiencing absolute negativity in some small and contingent fragment of the real - we are dealing no longer with the sublime per se but with irony.


lation," the "extension of being," that comes from "inventing new rules of the game."47 Yet on this view sublimity would realize itself-the pleasure, the joy, that is its "truest" of features-only by sacrificing (considering less "true") precisely that feature which would distinguish it, in principle, from commodity aura. For what separates the sublime from mere commercial novelty--"new presentations" from "the cynicism of innovation"--is, says Lyotard, the defeat of the will, the "privation of the spirit," the terrifying "occurrence" (ein Ereignis, after Heidegger).48

It is, I dare say, not just the faculties of the subject of the sublime that are in contradiction here. But how, then, should we interpret the sublime's negativity in the context of its pleasure (the "true sublime feeling")? If the sublime is a mixture of pleasure and pain, if it "refuses ... consolation" and "nostalgia for presence,"49 taking violent pleasure in the pain of the unknown, still its pain is pleasure, enthusiasm, and joy; still absence is presence, consolation, and power. That is why I cannot agree that the sublime event "has nothing to do with the petit frisson, the cheap thrill, the profitable pathos, that accompanies an innovation." o50 Even the most masochistic ("avant-gardist") sublime ends up in metaphor, in a metaphysics of profit. And with the rising conditions of competitive capitalism, as sublimity and the aura tend to function in concert, their structural affinities increasingly exploited, profit is not compensation for pain but a denial of its existence- an advertisement for Power.

4. Reading Pain

Let me emphasize, by way of summary, how much is at stake in the context in which irony is read. For at one level there is no distinction to be made between the negative status of irony and that of the sublime; indeed, as I have suggested elsewhere, the sublime may be said to begin in, or as, irony, irony being the unsettling recognition against which the compensa- tory energies of the sublime assert themselves. On this view, irony would

47. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, trans. Don Barry et al. (Minne- apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 13. 48. Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, 15. See also Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The In- human: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 106, 101, 90. 49. Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, 15, 13. 50. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 106.


name the cognition of pain, or of what I have called, in a different thematic context (that of Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale), death:

Up to this point, I have discussed death as a leitmotiv in the novel's thematics of universal violence and erosion. But what I now call death is not merely a theme (implicit, here, in the invocation of a lost historical ideal), nor is it simply a referent situated outside the reader or the text. Death inhabits the sign itself, as the irreducible difference that enables the confluence and disjunction (again, the struggle) of ironic and lyric readings. But beyond being the condition of those readings, death is their product. It is the sensation of self-loss, the sudden ontological insecurity felt by the subject in response to the foregrounded discontinuity of signifier and signified.51

The kinship between pain and death has been well observed by Scarry (BP, 31, 49, 53). But the concept that I would like to hold on to for the moment is that of metairony, which may be described, paraphrasing the terms of the passage above, as the shock of irony and the sublime-the contradiction, the paradox, the logical or conceptual violence that, as the initiating instance in the figural economy of the metasublime, "hurries the mind into fear and the counterviolence of transcendence."52 Now Baudelaire's irony, like Flau- bert's, must, I believe, be understood as metairony-the ironic relation and, at the same time, the ironization of the relation between irony and the sublime. But the crucial difference between Le Spleen de Paris and L'Education sentimentale is this: in the absence of that magisterial asyndeton and epic vision of history that can transmute Flaubert's metairony into a higher-or "meta"--sublime, Baudelaire's metairony remains aporetic, painful, pained.

I certainly do not mean to imply that some pure, unmediated experience of pain is available in Baudelaire's text, or that (to put the same thing in a slightly different way) irony cannot be read as a violent mode of knowledge/power; on the contrary, it is precisely because irony is inside of power (is complicit, as we know, with the very structures it opposes) that it has some real chance of producing melioristic effects. Of course, no one can predict just how a particular text will be read, how its insights and sensibili- ties might (or might not) be interpreted or (mis)used. But one can, I think, hazard the proposition that, in the symbolic economy of many of Baude- laire's prose poems, the severe pain of the disenfranchised (of, for example,

51. Ramazani, "Historical Cliche," 126. 52. Ramazani, "Historical Cliche," 125.


the widow and the poor, the saltimbanque and the glazier, the beggar and the prostitute, the fool and the poet) is linked, through irony, to more mod- erate pains, to the everyday shock that traverses class lines, fissuring all consciousness into permanent distraction.

So the reading of pain would be the radical desublimation of that uncanny sensation that "power" has repressed. But it would be an oppositional reading-a reading that allows us to feel the other's pain, to feel it as our own, and to desire to suspend it-only insofar as the suspension of pain is not a forgetting of pain's aversiveness, not a conflation of the relative absence of pain with the presence (the "presentation") of sheer invulnerability. Oppositionality in Le Spleen de Paris consists neither in textual violence nor in the reader's interpretation of that violence as pain but in the resistance of the idea of pain thus constructed to appropriation as an idea of absolute power.

It may seem, on the face of it, audacious to suggest that the dispas- sionate, even cruel voice that narrates the prose poems might in fact be read as a call for empathy. But if one considers the rigorous interchangeability of victime and bourreau within the Baudelairean aesthetic, together with the propensity of irony for endless self-"interrogation" (the infinite regress of a kind of torture and/as self-torture), then my claim would seem to bear more than a little validity. Admittedly, nothing ensures the oppositionality of Baudelaire's irony, just as nothing guarantees the sublime's inimicalness to healing. But to the extent that an awareness of precisely such interpre- tive uncertainties can be said to be instantiated by Baudelaire's text, what those "allegories of brutality and perversion" present is a disquietingly familiar sensation that resists (thematically, stylistically--as Flaubert's writing sometimes does not) the flight into an illusion of unmediated freedom.

One might well argue-astutely, I think-that my very postulation of a readerly turn from the experience of pain to the desire for healing merely duplicates the structure of the sublime. To this I would say only that a desire to alleviate suffering is not the same thing as an exultant sense of power. Such a desire remains too close to pain to dispel the awareness of its own vulnerability (to pain, to error, to a lapse of insensitivity). My point is quite simply that irony's mimesis of forms of social violence is not, in the prose poems, the mimesis of the ends of that violence, not the symbolic retort of counterforce to force. The reversal of subject positions within the structure of power only succeeds, after all, in maintaining that structure as is. What Baudelaire's irony seeks, instead, is a certain kind of authority-an authority that would enable it to transform, from within, the same effects of power to


which it is necessarily subject. And it derives that authority less from the violence that it shares with power than from the figural projection of the loss of authority (the pain) that that violence invariably causes. Of course, the violence/pain distinction is a matter of reading, and I am making my argument here without the benefit of demonstration, without the close reading of Baudelaire's poetry that would, I believe, lend support to my claim. But if one only looks at the history of concepts of irony, say from Socrates to Fried- rich Schlegel to Paul de Man, it is apparent that irony tends to signal the precariousness of its communicative function, to subvert repeatedly--"for an incredibly long time" 53--its own will to power (to intellectual superiority). By foregrounding the interdependence of ironizing and ironized voices- in Baudelaire's text, of irony and the sublime-irony (metairony) converts power into pain, into an epistemological and ontological feeling of fragility.

To anyone acquainted with recent discussions of "the body image" in neurobiology and in the philosophy of consciousness,54 it will come as no surprise that what I presuppose here is that we always read "with," or through, a phantasmal body; for the creation of meaning depends on a unity of consciousness that is nothing more nor less than a sense of the body, a dynamic correlation of sensations and perceptions with-and by means of-the image of the body (the unconscious image that one has of one's body). Could we not find in this "figure"-on whose coherence the very structure of memory depends-the neuroscientist's version of Benjamin's Erfahrung? It is, after all, the temporal and spatial continuity of precisely this image that irony/pain threatens and that sublimity exaggerates. But to what extent does the integrity of the body image reinscribe an ideology of the au- tonomous narrative subject? To what extent, indeed, is the historical depth of Erfahrung ever really "there" behind the shallowness of Erlebnis? The capacity for feeling behind sociosomatic complacency? To answer these questions is the burden of reading, that ongoing self-interrogation of the body of the text.

53. Friedrich Schlegel, cited and translated by Ross Chambers in his review of my The Free Indirect Mode: Flaubert and the Poetics of Irony, Romanic Review 81 (Nov. 1990): 505-6. 54. Of the numerous sources on the subject, the most helpful to me have been Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994); Gerald M. Edelman, The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 1989); Israel Rosenfield, The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten: An Anatomy of Consciousness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992); and John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).

Writing in Pain: Baudelaire, Benjamin, Haussmann

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