Eugene W. Holland

Department of French Language and Literature
The Ohio State University
eugeneh@humanities1.cohums.ohio-state.edu

 

Whether Deleuze and Guattari were actually “doing philosophy” in the Anti-Oedipus or not, their last collaborative work Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?) may shed some light on the status of the concepts operating in that early work.¹ Unlike scientific concepts, which aim to stabilize and identify specific domains within the real, philosophical concepts operate according to Deleuze and Guattari as what we might call “transformers”: they intervene in established philosophical problematics in order to de-stabilize them, reworking old concepts and forging new connections among the distinctive features composing them.² What is distinctive about the Anti-Oedipus, in this light (and perhaps this is what makes its mode of intervention seem more than just philosophical), is that its de-stabilization of established problematics involves making new connections with historical context, as well as re- aligning concepts into new constellations.³ A term such as “de-coding,” then, will best be understood not in terms of any content of its own, but in relation to the concepts it transforms in the course of producing schizoanalysis out of the problematics of historical materialism and psychoanalysis in the wake of the events of 1968 in France, and–for the purposes of this essay–how it illuminates the transformative force of the works of that great 19th- century figure of transition, Charles Baudelaire.⁴ My aim here will thus be not so much to explain what de-coding means as to show how it works and what it can do in the way of textual and socio-historical analysis of Baudelaire.

 

Since concepts as transformers intervene in other contexts instead of governing domains of their own, they have no independent, autonomous content, and depend instead on their use for whatever content we can ascribe to them. In other words, what makes philosophical concepts “user- friendly” for Deleuze and Guattari is also what makes them so challenging: they are strategically underdetermined, and thus only take shape–to borrow one of Deleuze’s favorite polyvocal expressions–“au milieu”: in context and in between their point of departure and a point of arrival or connection with some other phenomenon or event.⁵ Connecting schizoanalysis with Baudelaire for one thing endows the notion of de-coding with features– notably the linguistic or rhetorical tools of metaphor and metonymy for close analysis of poetic texts–it does not obviously possess in the Anti-Oedipus itself; and at the same time it in turn situates the evolution of Baudelairean poetics in the broader cultural and historical context of the emergence of market society, which is ultimately responsible for de-coding in the first place. The de-coding of modernism in Baudelaire will, in this context, turn out to be not only what happens to an earlier romanticism he puts behind him with the invention of modernism, but also what happens to that modernism itself, especially in the late prose poems. By repositioning Baudelaire in relation to and somehow already beyond the very modernism he contributed so much to inventing, a schizoanalytic reading can help situate Baudelaire in postmodern context. But first, a few words about de-coding.

 

De-coding is, in the first place, Deleuze and Guattari’s translation into semiotic terms of the concepts of rationalization and reification, by which Weber and Lukacs designated the historical replacement of meaning by abstract calculation as the basis of social order. More in agreement with Lukacs than with Weber, they explain this process as a function of the capitalist market and the predominance of exchange-value. To be more specific, de-coding is linked to axiomatization, the process central to capitalism whereby streams of quantified factors of production (such as raw materials, skills, and knowledges) are conjoined in order to extract a differential surplus; de-coding both supports and results from axiomatization, transforming meaningful qualities into calculable quantities. Deleuze and Guattari disagree radically with both Weber and Lukacs, however, in considering de-coding not as sterile disenchantment or hopeless fragmentation, but as the positive moment in the dialectic of capitalist development: as the potential for freedom and permanent revolution, opposed by the forces of re-coding and capitalist authoritarianism.

 

At the same time, however, that de-coding transforms rationalization and reification into semiotic terms, it translates the semiotics of Lacanian psychoanalysis into historical terms. Of central importance here is the pair of concepts that parallel de-coding and re-coding in the Anti- Oedipus: de-territorialization and re-territorialization. Derived from Lacanian usage–where “territorialization” designates the mapping of the infant’s polymorphous erogenous zones by parental care-giving–these terms come to designate a crucial dynamic of the capitalist market: the disconnection and reconnection of bodies and environments (e.g. the disconnection of peasants from common land by the Enclosure Acts in England, and their re-territorialization as wage-labor onto textile looms in the nascent garment industry). The primary difference between these parallel conceptual pairs is that de-territorialization and re- territorialization operate on physical bodies and involve material investments of energy (as in production and consumption), while de-coding and re-coding operate on symbolic representations and involve investments of mental energy (as in cognition and fantasy). This dual transformation of concepts serves to hinge together labor- power and libido (called social and desiring production in the Anti-Oedipus), and produces a revolutionary historical-materialist-semiotic psychiatry: schizoanalysis. I should note that the distinction between material and symbolic investments virtually disappears in Deleuze and Guattari’s later works. But the benefits of retaining the term “de-coding”–for cultural and literary studies at least–are threefold: it designates semiotic processes that are legible as such in texts and cultural artifacts; it construes those semiotic processes in psychoanalytic or psychodynamic terms (following Lacan); and it at the same time connects both texts and psychodynamics with history and political economy–attributing them ultimately to the spread of the market and the rhythms of capitalist development.

 

The translation of Lacanian psychoanalysis into historical materialist terms depends on an ambiguity inherited from Levi-Strauss as to the status of the Symbolic Order–an ambiguity crucial to Lacanian therapy: is the “Symbolic Order” a purely abstract, logical structure, or is it historical and concrete? For Deleuze and Guattari, the answer is clear: the Symbolic Order is historical; it is the actual ensemble of codes governing meaning and action in a given social formation. But for Lacanian therapy, the Symbolic Order entails the following paradox: On one hand, the Symbolic Order is the basis of human identity-formation: in saying “I” and accepting a proper name derived from the Name-of-the-Father, the organism becomes a human subject spoken by the language-system, forever alienated from his or her “true” pre-linguistic being and dependent for any sense of self on the Symbolic Other. On the other hand, the Symbolic Order is an illusion, and the Symbolic Other is not a person but a place: the place occupied by the “sujet- suppose-savoir” (the subject who is presumed to know, to possess authoritative knowledge)–and this is an empty place, occupied by the Lacanian therapist only in order to refuse the imputation and indeed deny the very possibility of such knowledge and authority. To put this paradox in other terms, the Symbolic Order is lived in two different registers: from the perspective of the Imaginary register, the Symbolic Order is centered on and governed by a Symbolic Other who possesses the phallus as sign of authority and from whom the individual derives his or her sense of fixed identity and meaning; from the perspective of the Symbolic register, the Symbolic Order is a realm of fluid rather than fixed identities, the phallus is a sign of infinite semiosis rather than of stable meaning, and the Other is a fictional persona in an empty place. Following Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari designate the Symbolic register’s radically fluid form of semiosis free from identity-fixations as “schizophrenia”–but they will ultimately locate and define it historically rather than clinically.

 

For although they acknowledge the radical implications this paradox of the Symbolic perspective on the Symbolic Order entails for therapy, Deleuze and Guattari nonetheless insist that it has specific historical conditions of possibility. And insisting that the Symbolic Order is historical means exposing it irrevocably to difference, contingency, and change: by examining different social formations (in Part III of the Anti-Oedipus), they are able to show that the fiction of a centered Symbolic Order belongs to another, older social formation based on stable codes, and that capitalism by contrast thrives on and indeed fosters through de-coding the meaningless and identity-free “schizophrenic” semiosis characteristic of the Symbolic register; hence the subtitle of the Anti- Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The intervention of de-coding in Lacanian psychoanalysis thus transforms a paradox lying at the heart of radical therapy into a recognition of historical difference, and produces the strong claim that the Lacanian perspective is made possible by market de-coding under capitalism.

 

The crux of that historical difference is this: Social relations in a coded Symbolic Order are qualitative and significant: women in tribal societies, for example, are valued as the source of life and the very cornerstone of meta-familial social relations in a kinship system fully charged with symbolic meanings. The basic social relations in the de-coded Symbolic order of capitalism, by contrast, are quantitative and strictly meaningless: workers (of whatever gender) are equated as abstract, calculable amounts of labor-power within the cash nexus of the market. In this regard (though without using the term de-coding, of course), Marx had already discerned an illuminating parallel between Martin Luther and Adam Smith: for Luther, the essence of religion was not found in objects of religious devotion, but in subjective religiosity in general; and for Smith, the essence of wealth was not found in objects of economic value, but in abstract productive activity in general. And Smith’s insight, Marx argues, was made possible by the practice under capitalism of measuring value in terms of abstract labor-power.

 

To this parallel, Deleuze and Guattari add a third term: Sigmund Freud, whom they call “the Luther and the Adam Smith of psychiatry.”⁶ For Freud, the essence of libidinal value is found not in the objects of desire, but in desire itself as an abstract subjective essence, as objectively-underdetermined, de-coded libido. Freud’s insight, too, Deleuze and Guattari argue, was made possible dialectically by the capitalist subsumption of all social relations under the market and exchange-value–except the relations of reproduction, which restrict desire to the abstract poles of the nuclear family. So between the extremes of Daddy as Oedipal agent of castration and object of identification and Mommy as forbidden object of desire, market de-coding makes “all that is solid melt into air,” as Marx put it: the market “mobilizes” desire, in other words, by freeing it from capture by any stable, all-embracing code–only to recapture it, it must be said, via the re-coding of advertising, for example, which re-territorializes it onto the objects of the latest administered consumer fad.⁷

 

Within the framework of psychoanalysis, meanwhile, Lacan takes the de-coding of desire one important step further than Freud: it is not the actual persons of Mommy and Daddy that shape desire in the family, but rather the functions of the metonymic search for mother-substitutes as objects of desire and metaphoric identifications made in the father’s name. And when such metaphoric identifications break down or are refused (“foreclosed”), according to Lacan, the result is a predominantly metonymic form of desire no longer structured by the nuclear family or any other stable code, but mobilized by the infinite semiosis of language as a purely abstract signifying system devoid of meaning: schizophrenia. From the perspective of schizoanalysis, however, such a radically unstructured form of desire constitutes not a clinical case or exception to the norm, but the very historical rule or tendency of capitalism; schizophrenia becomes the absolute horizon (or “limit”) of social (dis)order and psychic functioning, produced by the de-coding processes of the market.⁸

 

My claim is that Baudelaire can be added as a fourth term in the series of parallels linking Freud with Luther and Adam Smith: because for Baudelairean modernism, aesthetic value is found not in the objects of poetic appropriation, but in the activity of poetic appropriation itself–whence the oxymoron in the title of his major collection The Flowers of Evil) and his claim to be able to extract modernist poetry from absolutely anything–from Evil, from sheer boredom (spleen), or even from mud (as he says).⁹ Abandoning and indeed actively rejecting the fixed values imposed in the Symbolic Order, Baudelaire opts instead for a metonymic poetics that approaches the infinite semiosis of a completely de-coded Symbolic register. In the modernity that Baudelaire was among the first to diagnose, value–religious, economic, libidinal, poetic value– does not inhere in objects, but is subjectively (and even schizophrenically) bestowed. Baudelaire is thus in an important sense the Martin Luther-Adam Smith-Sigmund Freud of poetry, an early champion of de-coding within poetry and aesthetics, and one representative of a world-historical transformation in this field just as Luther, Smith, and Freud were in theirs. (There is another, less flattering sense in which Baudelaire represents the Luther-Smith-Freud of poetry, however, to which I will return below.)

 

It is this figure of Baudelaire as epitomizing a crucial turning-point in the history of Western culture at the emergence of modernism that the notion of de-coding enables us to recover from the so-called “rhetorical” school of deconstructive criticism. Members of this school–I am thinking in particular of Barbara Johnson, and her ground- breaking readings of matched pairs of Baudelaire poems¹⁰— were among the first to see important epistemological or ideological implications in the Jakobsonian distinction between metaphor and metonymy, when one or the other aspect of discourse predominates in a given literary text. In comparing verse and prose versions of the same poem, Johnson argued that metaphoric discourse–predominating in the verse poems–represents delusory adherence to the metaphysics of identity, while metonymic discourse– predominating in the prose poems–entails heroic acknowledgment of uncertainty, contingency, and flux. But this seminal insight is then immediately recontained as an undecidable binary opposition–metaphor and metonymy are legible in both verse and prose, she insists–lest it open onto the historical conclusion that Baudelaire’s poetics evolved from predominantly metaphoric to predominantly metonymic, and that this evolution aligns with his rejection of romanticism and the turn to modernism.

 

This strategy of containment is based on a misreading of Jakobson–who would surely have been very unhappy to hear the rigorous distinction he proposed between metaphor and metonymy considered “undecidable.” According to Jakobson, the metaphoric axis of discourse is based on the identity or equivalence among terms as defined by the storehouse of the language-system functioning “in absentia” (as Saussure put it) “outside” the linear time of utterance. The metonymic axis, by contrast, sustains the process of combining different terms contiguously to form a chain of signification “within” time–that is, in the duration of utterance. The metaphoric axis is thus a function of the language-system, and appears to exist as a given, outside of time, in contrast to the metonymic axis which is precisely the sequentiality of actual discourse as it is produced in context and through time. Jakobson thus concludes that every sign used in discourse has “two sets of interpretants . . . the code and the context.”¹¹ And we may surmise that when one set of interpretants diminishes in strength or importance, the other set will come to the fore.

 

This is precisely what happens in Baudelaire: metaphoric poetics predominates in the early poetry, but gives way to metonymic poetics in the later poetry. The single Baudelaire poem everyone is likely to be most familiar with–“Correspondences”–is, ironically enough, the very poem against which nearly everything he later wrote is directed; it sums up a metaphoric poetics of romanticism expressing the harmonies enveloping man in nature outside of society and time–and it is this romantic poetics that is virulently rejected by Baudelairean modernism, where metonymic reference to the present moment and context prevail, instead.

 

“Correspondences” appears in an introductory group of poems that treat the relation between the misunderstood artist and his philistine society: the ungainly poet is cruelly taunted by uncomprehending humanity in “The Albatross,” while in “Elevation” he soars high above the mortifying world of earthly existence and “effortlessly understands/ The language of flowers and all silent things” (lines 19-20). Such inspired communion with nature becomes the subject of the well-known fourth poem of the cycle, “Correspondences,” whose title and first phrase (“Nature is a temple . . .”) depict nature as a realm of equivalences between the divine and the human, a realm where everything ultimately appears to be just like everything else. The poem’s insistent use of metaphor and simile promotes a poetic vision able to unite interior and exterior, essence and appearance into an organic whole.

 

In the opening poem of the following cycle, “Beauty,” things are very different. Where “Correspondences” abounds in metaphorical figures of equivalence, transparency, and wholeness, “Beauty” insists instead on metonymical figures of exteriority, mechanical causality, and comparisons of degree. The temptations of metaphor and simile are proferred, but ultimately refused, as the poem dictates a very different form of poetic investigation. The simile of the poem’s first line (“I am beautiful, o mortals, like a dream of stone”) is a case in point: a resemblance is proposed, but in terms so bewildering as to obscure the comparison they are supposed to serve. For what is so beautiful about a dream made of stone, or a dream about stone? We may be tempted to posit statuary as an interpretant for this opening simile: but then why does Beauty-as-statue inspire in poets a love that is “eternally mute, like matter” (line 4), as the closing simile of the first stanza puts it? A poetically fruitful comparison would surely not silence poets, who of all people should be able to give it voice.

 

The opening simile of the second stanza reinforces these perplexities, by comparing beauty with a sphinx that is “incomprehensible” (line 5). And the strange juxtaposition in the next line (“I combine a heart of snow with the whiteness of swans” line 6) demonstrates how misleading external appearances may be: the swans’ whiteness, suggesting innocence and purity, covers a snowy-white heart of coldness and cruelty. By the time we reach the third stanza, correspondences between inside and outside have become completely undeterminable and appearances evidently deceiving: the poets remain transfixed by what Beauty calls her “grand poses” (grandes attitudes, line 9), but are completely unable to determine their authenticity. She appears, she says (line 10), to have borrowed them from the proudest monuments: if she has borrowed them, are they really hers? And if she hasn’t borrowed them, then why is she pretending to? No wonder the poets’ love remains eternally mute: their metaphors prove unable to determine Beauty’s true inner nature.

 

Yet it turns out that the inaccessibility of Beauty’s essence enables her actual effectivity in the last stanza of the poem:

 

For I have, to fascinate those docile admirers, Pure mirrors that render everything more beautiful: My eyes, my immense eyes of eternal light!(12-14)

 
Her identity lost in questionable comparisons of metaphorical equivalence, Beauty’s effects on things are henceforth measured in metonymical comparisons of degree: she renders things more beautiful. It is not through essences that Beauty reaches poets, but through things; not by relations of interiority and transparency, but of exteriority and mechanical causality. Denied access by the “pure mirrors [of] her eyes” to Beauty’s essence, the poets remain fascinated by proliferating images of the more and more beautiful things illuminated by them.¹²

 

Defying metaphoric appropriation and totalizing expression, Beauty is henceforth to be appreciated through her incremental effects on the external world. And indeed, in the subsequent poems of the cycle (especially “The Mask” and “Hymne to Beauty,” which Baudelaire added to the second edition of the collection), Beauty appears only in fragments and random images, valued not for her (or as an essence), but for her contingent impact on the poet. This metonymic poetics intensifies in the “Spleen” poems at the end of the first section of the collection, and reaches its zenith in the “Parisian Tableaus” section, with its insistent reference to scenes of Second Empire Paris, despite the agonizing inability to confer meaning on those scenes. The de-coding of metaphor, meaning, and identity thus fosters not sheer meaninglessness, “undecidability,” or the abyss, but rather metonymic reference to context–even if such reference must at the limit forgo any claim to stable meaning.¹³

 

The poetics of metaphor and metonymy in Baudelaire therefore do not represent the poles of an undecidable binary opposition, but terms in an historical evolution from romanticism to modernism. Moreover, Baudelaire’s poetry does not merely reflect the processes of de-coding characteristic of modern capitalist society, it actively participates in them. It is true, of course, that Baudelaire’s life-span corresponds to the take-off period of modern French capitalism, with the banking elite coming to power in 1830, followed by the influx of Californian and Australian gold in 1849, and the founding of the first investment banks and the unification of markets by the rail system under Napoleon III in the 1850s and 60s. But even more important was Baudelaire’s personal investment in romantic-socialist hopes for the Revolution of 1848, which was to crown the revolutionary tradition by finally bringing true workers’ democracy to France. For when the radical- democratic ideals of 1848 are crushed by the coup d’etat of Napoleon in 1851, Baudelaire (among many others) responds by actively repudiating his adherence to those ideals and adopting instead a stance of cynical disdain for modern culture and society. Baudelaire’s modernism emerges here, as defensive repudiation of the romantic enthusiasm he once shared for the figures of nature, woman, and the people. So in this literary-critical context, the introduction of the notion of de-coding transforms the deconstructive binary opposition metaphor/metonymy into a historical matrix for understanding the emergence of modernism in Baudelaire as the metonymic de-coding of romantic metaphoricity in revenge for the shattered hopes and ideals of 1848.

 

Central to Baudelaire’s evolution from romanticism to modernism is his notorious masochism, about which so much has been written (mostly from various psychoanalytic perspectives).¹⁴ Schizoanalysis will insist upon transforming masochism from a psychological into a socio- historical category, situating it in the period following the failures of the 1848 revolutions, when the literary works and essays of the “original” masochist, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, were so popular throughout Europe. Here I refer to Deleuze’s study of Masoch, although it predates schizoanalysis and uses the discipline-bound terms “de- sexualization” and “re-sexualization” in place of de-coding and re-coding.¹⁵ To derive the specificity of real masochism from Masoch’s own literary oeuvre, Deleuze draws on the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which explores the relationship between pleasure and repetition: what lies “beyond” the pleasure principle is not so much exceptions to it, but rather its grounding in repetition and the death instinct. Under the influence of the death instinct, even the pleasure-principle becomes, as Freud put it, “innately conservative”: repetition grounds the stimulus-binding energy that links present perception with memory-traces of past gratification, thus enabling the pleasure-principle to operate and govern behavior. Usually, repetition and pleasure work hand-in-glove: we repeat what has previously been found pleasurable, which is to say that present perception is eroticized or “sexualized” and governed “conservatively” by memories of gratifications past.

 

But the relation of pleasure and repetition can vary: less usually, as in the case of trauma dreams, for instance, repetition operates independently of the pleasure-principle, “de-sexualizing” perception and repeating something not pleasurable, but extremely displeasurable, something traumatic. Here repetition is severed from drive- gratification, and serves instead as an ego-defense to reduce anxiety, by developing ex post facto the stimulus- binding recognition-function whose absence occasioned the trauma in the first place. Still less usually, as in the case of perversion, the de-sexualization of perception is accompanied by the re-sexualization of repetition itself: instead of repeating what was initially found pleasurable, pleasure is derived from whatever is repeated. Now we might well expect desperate measures for reducing anxiety to proliferate in a de-coded Symbolic Order, which no longer protects the psyche from traumatic stimuli by binding them according to established codes of meaning. But the question remains: how can the repetition of pain, of all things– and especially one’s own pain–reduce anxiety and procure pleasure? Here, Deleuze invokes the conclusion of Reik’s clinical study of masochism: accepting punishment for the desired act before it occurs effectively resolves guilt and anxiety about the act, thereby sanctioning its consummation.¹⁶ But he then goes on to ask, why would preliminary punishment serve the end of obtaining pleasure? Under what conditions does this masochistic narrative-kernel (punishment-before -> pleasure-after) become effective? This is where analysis of Masoch’s fiction proves illuminating.

 

Masoch’s hero typically arranges a mock contract according to which he willingly suffers regular and systematic domination and punishment at the hands of a beautiful woman. The functions of this fantasy-contract are several: first of all, it reduces anxiety about punishment by meticulously specifying when, where, and how such punishment is to be carried out; secondly, it explicitly excludes the Father, the usual authority-figure, and transfers his Symbolic authority to the woman; then, by actively soliciting punishment, the contract invalidates the Symbolic authority responsible for the suffering incurred: since the punishment is undeserved, blame falls on the figure meting it out, instead. With the Father-figure excluded and his authority denied, the masochist hero ends up enjoying relations with the woman which the Father normally prohibits. In the context of mid-19th century France, this fantasy-scenario presents an allegory of the anti-authoritarian ideals of 1848, with the de-coding of the Father-figure in Louis-Philippe accompanied by re-coding on the Mother-figure of Marianne and the Second Republic.

 

Yet, in a way Deleuze does not fully appreciate, the masochistic scenario just described is in Masoch’s fiction embedded within a narrative that produces results very different from the utopian ideal projected by the contract. In Masoch’s stories, the Father-figure supposedly excluded from the fantasy-contract suddenly re-appears, and is in fact joined by the woman in administering new forms of torture that exceed and thus break the terms of the contract. So at the end of Masoch’s stories, the masochistic fantasy-scenario crumbles, leaving the hero with a galling sense of having been duped and a bitter desire for revenge. And the ex-masochist hero in Masoch’s stories indeed takes his revenge, with a ferocity bordering on sadism. The conclusion of Masochian narrative thus represents not the anti-authoritarian utopia of idealized relations with the ideal Mother-figure, as pictured in the masochistic scenario, but rather a vitriolic and often violent cynic who now despises anyone (even or most of all himself) foolish enough to have taken his ideals and desires for reality. Such is the story that Masoch told–and that his innumerable readers throughout late-19th century Europe read–over and over and over again: as in a trauma-dream, this compulsion to repeat represents defensive preparation for a cataclysmic event…that has already occurred. And for Baudelaire, as for so many of his French contemporaries, the real event that represents as it were the return of the Father ruining the Mother-and-son’s anti- authoritarian utopia, is the incredible rise to power and coup d’etat of Napoleon III, the founding of the authoritarian Second Empire on the ruins of the democratic Second Republic.

 

What’s more, anyone familiar with biographies of Baudelaire will recognize this story of the return-of-the- Father destroying the Mother-and-son’s idyllic utopia as a repetition, from Baudelaire’s own childhood, of his mother’s remarriage to an ambitious young military officer several years after the death of Baudelaire’s real father: this uncanny “coincidence” is for schizoanalysis what made Baudelaire the lyric poet of his age, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin. In schizoanalytic terms, then, “masochism” is not the name of a psychological category, but a historical strategy for de-coding social authority while transforming romantic idealism into the disillusioned cynicism of modernism.

 

This is not to say that the evolution from romanticism to modernism in Baudelaire can be understood as some kind of linear progression from metaphor to metonymy: metaphor doesn’t simply disappear, but reappears in Baudelairean modernism transformed by metonymization into a corrosive irony.¹⁷ Our account of the de-coding of modernism in Baudelaire, meanwhile, remains still too abstract as long as metonymy as a free form of desire induced by the market and metonymization as a formal development of Baudelairean poetics are linked by mere parallelism: Lacan’s and Johnson’s quite different transformations of Jakobson’s concept of metonymy must be completed and brought to bear on the evolution of Baudelairean poetics as a whole (not restricted to individual poems or pairs of poems, as in Johnson and in Jakobson himself). Here, Walter Benjamin’s own historicization of psychoanalysis via a reading of Baudelaire constitutes an invaluable point of departure. What Benjamin saw was that Baudelaire’s best poetry was formulated as a defense against the traumatic shocks typical of urban life in the de-coded Symbolic Order of nascent capitalism. Baudelaire’s shock-defense takes two forms, which correspond to the title of the well-known first section of The Flowers of Evil, “Spleen and Ideal.” “Ideal” designates a metaphoric defense that re-codes potentially traumatic experience in the nostalgic terms of a lost yet rememorable harmony with nature outside of time (as in “Former Life,” for example); “Spleen” designates a metonymic defense that defuses potential trauma simply by locating an experience as precisely as possible in time (see “The Clock”)–though at the cost, Benjamin suggests, of robbing it of any lyric content.¹⁸

 

As invaluable as it is, Benjamin’s reading overlooks the importance of the prose poem collection and even of the “Tableaux Parisiens” section added after “Spleen and Ideal” to the second edition of The Flowers of Evil–where a very different form of poetics and response to market de- coding prevail. What Benjamin didn’t see is that cycles of protective re-coding alternate with cycles of exhilarated de-coding in the verse collection, as the poet alternately seeks out and then withdraws from contact with the Real. Nor was he able to appreciate the way in which the predominance of metonymic poetics transforms the cycles of de-coding and re-coding in the verse collection into simultaneous re-coding and de-coding in the individual poems of the prose collection, as the high-anxiety trauma and shock-defenses of earlier work give way in the later work to a very different defense based on psychic splitting.

 

Historically speaking, once ambient de-coding reaches a certain threshold of intensity, whatever stability and coherence the ego may have possessed dis-integrate, and the unstable, split subjectivity of so-called borderline conditions replaces oedipal neurosis as the predominant form of psychological disturbance–as nearly all the post- Freudian psychoanalytic literature from Fenichel to Kristeva and Kernberg attests.¹⁹ But in the case of Baudelaire, who after all experienced de-coding at a considerably earlier stage of capitalist development, there had to have been a precipitating cause for severe splitting: it was, as I have suggested, his experience of Napoleon’s coup d’etat, which shook Baudelaire’s psychic structure to its foundations and propelled him from a relatively stable romanticism, through masochism, and into the supremely flexible, if not indeed self-contradictory, borderline condition characteristic of his modernism.²⁰ Borderline conditions by themselves, however (and regardless of the degree to which Baudelaire “actually” lived or “merely” staged them in his poetry²¹), are not sufficient to account for Baudelairean modernism; there had to have been some figure to serve as ego-ideal around which a new, post- romantic personality could form, in order to sustain and sanction the enduring ambitions of Baudelaire the writer: this figure, it turns out, was Edgar Allan Poe. Identification with Poe as a fellow writer shunned by contemporary society fosters a narcissistic reaction to the underlying borderline condition, so that the extreme instability and psychic splitting characteristic of the latter become a new form of defense.

 

This is the stance that emerges in the “Parisian Tableaus” section of the second edition of The Flowers of Evil; it is epitomized in “The Game” (“Le Jeu”), in which the poet sees himself in a dream sitting off in a corner at a gambling-house, silently watching the players and whores feverishly pursuing their ends, and is shocked that he actually envies them their “tenacious passion”:

 

I saw myself, off in a corner of the grim gambling-den,
Leaning on my elbows, silent, cold, and envious,
Envying the gamblers their tenacious passion,
The old whores their dismal gaiety.
And all of them cheerfully selling, right in front of me,
One, his long-held honor, the other her good looks!
 
And my heart was alarmed at my envy of these poor souls
Racing zealously toward the gaping abyss,
Who, drunk with their own passion, in the end all liked
Pain better than death and hell better than nothingness!(15-24)

 
Not only is the poet only an observer within the dream (lines 15-16), but he then takes his distance from this dream-self, cynically demystifying in waking consciousness the very passions he envied in the dream (lines 21-24).

 

Such splitting appears even more starkly in the figure of the prose poem narrator, for whom it serves to establish a more or less comfortable distance from scenes of former selves in degraded commercial context–former selves (romantic idealists, most notably) who have been split off from the observing narrator yet retain a certain fascination as objects of his rapt attention and of poetic depiction.²² This narrative stance is most clearly illustrated in “Loss of a halo,” where the de-coding of romantic views of the poet’s vocation, already accomplished on the level of poetics in “Beauty,” has become an explicit prose theme. In a brothel, the narrator runs into an acquaintance who expresses surprise at finding the illustrious poet in such a mauvais lieu. The poet immediately launches into a long explanation of why he is there: while dodging on-coming traffic on his way across the boulevard, his halo dropped in the mud; not having the courage to retrieve it, he decided it would be better to lose his insignia than to break his neck. Then, looking on the bright side, he realized he could now “stroll about incognito, do nasty things, and indulge in vulgar behavior just like ordinary mortals.” The acquaintance expects him to advertise to get his halo back, but the poet will have none of it: dignity bores him, and now he gets to enjoy himself. Besides, he imagines the fun he will have if some scribbler picks it up and dares to put it on: “What a pleasure to make someone happy!–especially someone who would make me laugh! Think of X, or Z! Wouldn’t that be droll!” Here we see the narrator exercising an invidious superiority over his interlocutor and other writers who still believe in the “aura” of an older, romantic version of the poet, one the narrator has left behind.

 

But this sense of superiority, it turns out, was not a given but an achievement, and was in fact achieved at the expense of Baudelaire himself in an earlier incarnation. For the journal anecdote on which the poem is based reads very differently from the published version: here, the narrator does recover the halo, and still values it highly enough to consider even its momentary loss a bad omen.²³ The lost halo, in this light, would be precisely the one awarded the romantic poet of “Benediction” for his suffering at the beginning of The Flowers of Evil. This idealistic self has in the final version completely disappeared beneath the narrator’s cynicism, having been projected onto X, Z, and the interlocutor, all of whom continue to value the outmoded ideal. Moreover, the loss of the halo is now not merely the subject of a story: it is an event recounted by a narrator to a listener within the poem; it has become an occasion for the narrator to attain a position of superiority over his fictional audience. And he is now at one remove from the experience: Baudelaire has transmuted the original account and the uneasy feeling it provoked into the snide banter of a world-weary and slightly sullied roue, and in the process utterly rejected the romantic ideal of the poet he himself once espoused, if not embodied. Such a position of serene indifference or actual disdain for cultural ideals characterizes Baudelairean modernism at its apogee. And yet…and yet….

 

And yet there are at least two senses in which Baudelaire’s prose poem collection goes far beyond the split stance of the modernism adumbrated in the “Tableaux Parisiens”–far enough, perhaps, to attain a certain postmodernism. For one thing, although Baudelaire’s identification with Poe as martyr to a philistine society was supposed to elevate him above the crass world of commerce and mass-democratic society, the modernist poetics he developed turned out to be strictly complicitous with the capitalist market. By locating aesthetic value solely in the activity of poetic appropriation and distancing himself from the objects of that appropriation, Baudelaire comes to occupy the position of what Jacques Attali calls the “designer” or “programmer,” whose basic function within capitalism is to endow more or less worthless objects (such as “designer-jeans”) with semiotic surplus-value in order to enable the realization of economic surplus-value by promoting their purchase by consumers; the most familiar form of programming, in other words, is advertising.²⁴ This is the second sense in which Baudelaire can be considered the Martin Luther/Adam Smith/Sigmund Freud of poetry, for each of these figures, too, re-imposed a moment of re-coding on the radical indeterminacy of de-coding, according to Deleuze and Guattari: Luther re-codes pure religiosity onto Scripture; Adam Smith re-codes abstract labor-power onto capital; Freud re-codes polymorphous libido onto the Oedipus complex. Baudelaire, similarly, re-codes an increasingly metonymic poetics onto the prose poem narrator-as-programmer.

 

Inasmuch as Baudelaire’s mature poetics functions in this way to valorize from the re-coded perspective of the borderline-narcissist narrator various forms of de-coded experience that have been distanced or rendered virtually meaningless in themselves, it acts in complicity with and even as a prototype for the kinds of debased commercial activity modernism was to have rejected and risen above. And this is a complicity that Baudelaire himself acknowledges in the prose poem entitled “The Cake,” where inflated rhetoric endows a nearly worthless scrap of bread with so much semiotic surplus-value that it becomes the prized object of a fratricidal war.²⁵ Such recognition of the ultimate inseparability of high and low culture, of aesthetics and marketing, has become a hallmark of what we today call the postmodern condition–in large part because modernist “defamiliarization” has indeed become the all too familiar marketing strategy Baudelaire “foresaw” it could, now used for selling everything from standard-brand beer to haute couture perfume.

 

And yet it must be said at the same time that Baudelaire never whole-heartedly adopts the aloof and superior position of the modernist programmer: an abiding sympathy for his idealistic former selves remains a central feature of the prose poem collection, visible in the narrator’s recurring shock of recognition that the poor victims of commerce and philistinism he has been watching from a distance are none other than the poet himself. Nowhere in the prose poem collection is this more poignantly depicted than in “The Old Clown,” in which the narrator happens across an aged carnival clown sitting alone, ignored by the joyous throngs surrounding him. While observing him, the narrator suddenly “feels his throat wrung by the terrible hand of hysteria,” and when he tries to “analyze [his] sudden grief,” he realizes he has just seen an image of “the aging man of letters who has outlived the generation he had so brilliantly amused; [an image] of the old poet bereft of friends, family, children, worn out by poverty and the public’s ingratitude”–an image, that is to say, of his very self. Whereas the narrator of poems such as “Loss of a halo” (and “The Projects”) manages to retain or quickly regain his composure in the face of former selves, defensive splitting in many other poems (including “A Heroic Death” as well as “The Old Clown”) fails abruptly, putting the narrator back into agonzing contact with romantic ideals that are alive in memory despite their historical defeat (which is the theme of the prose poem entitled “Which one is the true one?”).²⁶

 

To be sure, there is a tendency in Baudelaire to repudiate the romantic narrative of French history as progress toward social democracy in the name of modernism, a tendency to transform erstwhile idealism into pure cynicism. What could be more cynical than to capitalize on the defeat of one’s ideals by adopting the position of programmer and contributing to the realization of surplus-value, including and especially one’s own? Such borderline-narcissist cynicism, incidentally, is precisely the stance of Baudelaire’s current-day, American avatar, Madonna, who acts out degraded split-off selves who she knows will shock and sell, but always from an ironic distance that leaves her integrity as programmer and her command of a share of the profits intact.²⁷ But Baudelaire, it seems to me, never quite occupies such a position. And this is not just because (as Bataille reminds us²⁸) he represents in material terms a colossal failure as the “lyric poet of high capitalism”–unlike Madonna. It is because, however much Baudelaire repudiates narrative and history, he never manages to completely hide his profound sympathy and lasting identification with the victims of the capitalist market: he never fully occupies the modernism he himself invented.

 

Is such identification with the victims on Baudelaire’s part a mere vestige of his erstwhile romanticism? Biographically speaking, perhaps so. But I would argue that it becomes available or interesting to us under specifically postmodern conditions, when we become willing or able to see more in Baudelaire than the invention of modernism for which he has been canonized. Surely his recognition of the potential of modernist poetry for market programming has little enough to do with romanticism, and everything to do with postmodernism today. In any case, the anti- universalizing and anti-individualist principles of schizoanalysis suggest a version of literary reception theory (akin to Benjamin’s “redemptive” literary history) according to which a process of socio-historical rather than narrowly psychological transference will make certain features of a literary work become visible when changed circumstances bring one historical moment into unexpected alignment with another.²⁹ In this light, as our postmodernism rejoins Baudelaire’s pre- and/or post- modernism by means of such historical transference, modernism appears in between as an attempt to capitalize on market reification itself, with its segregation of formal innovation in the restricted sphere of high culture from homogenizing repetition in the general cultural sphere, as a vehicle or opportunity for aesthetic development.³⁰ And it would appear by now that this attempt has, if not failed in some simple and total way, then certainly run its course, accomplished all that it can–and is therefore being surpassed.

 

Antonio Negri has, to my mind, proposed the most acute way to situate this historical reconstruction of the relation between the premodern, modern, and postmodern in a figure such as Baudelaire: in terms of the difference between merely formal subsumption and real subsumption of labor by capital.³¹ If, as Marx said, society sets itself only the tasks it is able to accomplish, then we may understand the kinds of formal freedom and equality associated with romanticism, the sovereign individual, and representative democracy, along with the kinds of formal innovation associated with modernism, as historically necessary and indeed fruitful stages in the development of modern culture, but stages which have by now been superceded, as the full socialization of production under conditions of real subsumption renders the individual romantic subject obsolete, and calls for new developments in collective freedom, substantive equality, and general cultural innovation alike. In this light, “The Voyage” (the concluding poem of the second edition of The Flowers of Evil) might be understood to prefigure, in its insistence on the value of unending travel for its own sake, the notion of permanent revolution as it appears on the historical horizon once capitalism has exhausted all of its positive potential–and more specifically to prefigure, in its strategic use of the anti-lyrical, plural personal pronoun “we” throughout, the kind of collective nomadism on a new earth that Deleuze and Guattari envisage in the Anti- Oedipus as the next stage of social development.³²

 

Notes

 

1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus (New York: Viking, 1977) and Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991).

 

2. On the differences between philosophical concepts and scientific “functives” (fonctifs), see Chapter 5 of Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?. While not Deleuze and Guattari’s own, I have found the term “transformers” useful for capturing the operational value of Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts; so has Reda Bensma, in “Les transformateurs- Deleuze ou le cinema comme automate spirituel,” forthcoming.

 

3. This would be the “utopian” dimension of the philosophical concepts deployed in the Anti-Oedipus, according to Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (95).

 

4. On the relations of the Anti-Oedipus to May 68, see my “Schizoanalysis: the Postmodern Contextualization of Psychoanalysis” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Nelson and Grossberg, eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 405-416, esp. 415. For a fuller treatment than is possible here of the evolution of Baudelairean poetics from the perspective of schizoanalysis, see my Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: the Sociopoetics of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

 

5. On the concept of friend and concepts as friends, see Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, 8-10 and Chapter 3, “Les personnages conceptuels”. On “milieu,” see Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), 69 and passim; and Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, 94-96.

 

6. The Anti-Oedipus, 271.

 

7. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto” in Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, Lewis Feuer, ed. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959) 6-41; the quotation is from p.10.

 

8. The Anti-Oedipus, 176-77; for a similar discussion of the relation between philosophy and the limits of capitalism, see Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, 92-97.

 

9. “I have kneaded mud and made it into gold” (my translation), Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 763.

 

10. Barbara Johnson, Defigurations du langage poetique: la seconde revolution baudelairienne (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 31-55; and The Critical Difference (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 23-48.

 

11. Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbance” in Fundamentals of Language (with Morris Halle) (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), 67-96; the quotation is from page 75.

 

12. For a more complete comparison of the poetics of “Correspondences” and “Beauty,” see Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis, Chapter 2.

 

13. On the metonymic poetics of the “spleen” poems and the “Parisian Tableaus,” see Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis, Chapters 3 and 5. On metonymic or “indexical” reference to context in Baudelairean modernism, see Ross Chambers, Melancolie et opposition: les debuts du modernisme en France (Paris: Jose Corti, 1987).

 

14. On Baudelaire’s masochism, see Rene Laforgue, The Defeat of Baudelaire (London: Hogarth, 1932); Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1947); and Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).

 

15. Gilles Deleuze, Presentation de Sacher-Masoch (Paris: Minuit, 1967).

 

16. Theodor Reik, Masochism in Modern Man (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1941).

 

17. For another, quite different account of metaphor in modernism, see David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1977); Lodge draws exclusively on Jakobson for his understanding of metaphor and metonymy, and not at all on Lacan.

 

18. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso/New Left Books, 1973).

 

19. Otto Fenichel, “Ego-Disturbances and their Treatment,” in Collected Papers, 2 Vols. (New York: Norton, 1953-54), Vol. 2, 109-28; Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (New York: Jason Aronson, 1975); Julia Kristeva, “Within the Microcosm of ‘The Talking Cure’,” in Interpreting Lacan, Smith and Kerrigan, eds., Psychiatry and the Humanities Vol. 6 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 33-48.

 

20. “With all the talk of rights these days, there’s one that everyone has forgotten about . . . the right to contradict oneself” (my translation) Oeuvres Completes, 291. On the contradictory nature of modernism, see Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

 

21. As Leo Bersani put it, “I don’t mean that Baudelaire was psychotic when he wrote these poems; he does, however, seem to have represented in them a psychotic relation to the world.” Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 128.

 

22. For a fuller discussion of narrative splitting in a broader range of prose poems, see Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis, Chapters 6 and 7.

 

23. The anecdote is found in “Fusees” #11, Oeuvres Completes, 627.

 

24. Jacques Attali, Noise: the Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), esp. 128-32.

 

25. For a more complete reading of “The Cake,” see Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis, Chapter 7.

 

26. For discussions of “Which one is the true one?” “A Heroic Death,” and “The Projects” along these lines, see Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis, Chapter 6.

 

27. See David Tetzlaff, “Metatextual Girl: patriarchy -> postmodernism -> power -> money -> Madonna,” forthcoming; and my “Baudelaire’s Madonna and Ours,” forthcoming.

 

28. See his essay on Baudelaire in Literature and Evil (London: Calder and Boyars, 1973).

 

29. On “historical transference” of this kind, see Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed. (New York: Schocken, 1969), 253-64; Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Dominick LaCapra, Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); and the preface to Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis.

 

30. On the general and restricted spheres of culture, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

 

31. See Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1984); and The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century (London: Polity Press [Basil Blackwell], 1989), especially Chapter 3, “From the mass worker to the socialized worker–and beyond” and Chapter 13, “Postmodern.”

 

32. On the “new earth,” see the Anti-Oedipus, 35, 131, 318-22, 367-82; and Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, 95; on nomadism as permanent revolution, see my “Schizoanalysis: the Postmodern Contextualization of Psychoanalysis,” esp. 407.