Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis The Socio Poetics of Modernism

This new study of Baudelaire's writings is the first book to
apply the principles of schizoanalysis to literary history
and cultural studies. By resituating psychoanalysis in its
socioeconomic and cultural context, this framework provides a new and illuminating approach to the poetry and
art criticism of the foremost French modernist. Professor
Holland's book draws upon and transforms virtually the
entire spectrum of recent Baudelaire scholarship, and
demonstrates the impact of the capitalist market and
Second Empire authoritarianism (as well as Baudelaire's
much-discussed family circumstances) on the psychology
and poetics of the writer, who abandoned his romantic
idealism in favour of a modernist cynicism that has
characterized modern culture ever since.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN FRENCH 4 5

BAUDELAIRE AND SCHIZOANALYSIS

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN FRENCH

General editor: Malcolm Bowie (All Souls College, Oxford)

Editorial Board: R. Howard Bloch (University of California, Berkeley),
Ross Chambers (University of Michigan), Antoine Gompagnon
(Columbia University), Peter France (University of Edinburgh),
Toril Moi (Duke University), Naomi Schor (Duke University)
Recent titles in this series include
33.

LAWRENCE D. KRITZMAN

The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French
Renaissance
34. JERRY G. NASH

The Love Aesthetics of Maurice Sceve: Poetry and Struggle
35.

PETER FRANCE

Politeness and its Discontents: Problems in French Classical
Culture

36.

MITCHELL GREENBERG

Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century Drama
and Prose: The Family Romance of French Classicism
37.

TOM CONLEY

38.

MARGERY EVANS

The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing
Baudelaire and Intertextuality: Poetry at the Crossroads
39. JUDITH STILL

Justice and Difference in the Works of Rousseau: Bienfaisance
and Pudeur

40.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida
41. CAROL A. MOSSMAN

Politics and Narratives of Birth: Gynocolonization from
Rousseau to Zola
42.

DANIEL BREWER

The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century
France: Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing
43. ROBERTA L. KRUEGER

Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French
Verse Romance
44. JAMES H. REID

Narration and Description in the French Realist Novel: The
Temporality of Lying and Forgetting
A complete list of books in the series is given at the end of the volume.

BAUDELAIRE AND
SCHIZOANALYSIS
The Sociopoetics of Modernism

EUGENE W. HOLLAND
Department of French and Italian, The Ohio State University

CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521419802
© Cambridge University Press 1993
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1993
This digitally printed first paperback version 2006
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Holland, Eugene W.
Baudelaire and schizoanalysis: the sociopoetics of modernism / Eugene W. Holland,
p.
cm. - (Cambridge studies in French: 45)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 41980 8 (hardback)
1. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821—
1867 — Criticism and interpretation.
2. Literature and society - France - History - 19th century.

3. Modernism (Literature) - France. 4. Psychoanalysis and literature. I. Title.
II. Series.
PQ2191.Z5H65 1993
841'.8-dc20 92-35913 CIP
ISBN-13 978-0-521-41980-2 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-41980-8 hardback
ISBN-13 978-0-521-03134-9 paperback
ISBN-10 0-521-03134-6 paperback

To the memory of my father

Contents

page xi
xvii

Preface
Acknowledgments
i

Introduction

i

Social decoding
Psychological decoding
Textual decoding

PART I

2

11
17
30

POETICS

Correspondences versus beauty
The romantic cycle

The beauty cycle
Metonymy prevails

3

43
53
67

Spleen and evil

80

"Spleen and Ideal"
The spleen cycle
The cycle of evil

PART II

4

43

80
86
96

PSYGHOPOETIGS

Romantic temperament and "Spleen and Ideal"
The psychodynamics of experience
The early art criticism
The psychopoetics of "Spleen and Ideal"

IX

111
111
116
124

Contents

Modernist imagination and the "Tableaux
Parisiens"
The
The
The
The

PART III

6

7

later art criticism
introductory poems
street scenes
domestic scenes

139
148
157
166

SOGIOPOETICS

Decoding and recoding in the prose poems

177

Historical Others
" Moral masochism "
Historical masochism
Borderline decoding
Narcissistic recoding

177
186
190
197
209

The prose poem narrator

221

Historicizing borderline narcissism
Super-ego failure
Ego disintegration
Bohemia at the heart of bourgeois society
Modernity as prostitution
The prose poem narrator as borderline narcissist
The prose poem narrator as programmer

8

137

Conclusion
The metonymy of real reference and desire
The historical emergence and dispersion of the
imaginary
The split structure of social life in modernity

Motes
Select bibliography
Index

221
222
230
236
242
248
251

258
266
267
274

278
296
303

Preface

A Klee painting named " Angelus Novus" shows an angel
looking as though he is about to move away from
something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring,
his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one
pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the
past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one
single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would
like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has
been smashed. But a storm is blowing... and has got
caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can
no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him
into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile
of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we
call progress.
Walter Benjamin1
Perdu dans ce vilain monde, coudoye par les foules, je suis
comme un homme lasse dont Poeil ne voit en arriere, dans
les annees profondes, que desabusement et amertume, et
devant lui qu'un orage ou rien de neuf n'est contenu, ni
enseignement, ni douleur.
Lost in a wasteland, jostled by the crowds, I am like a
weary man who sees in the depths of the past behind him
nothing but disappointment and bitterness, and before
him a storm that contains nothing new, neither insight,
nor grief.
Charles Baudelaire2

Charles Baudelaire, c'est moil For I, too, feel like someone who
sees little but bitter disappointment in the past, like someone
being blown irresistibly backwards into the future, who can
xi

xii

Preface

only look aghast at the mounting piles of toxic waste and the
growing numbers of homeless children that "progress" hurls at
his feet. I, too, am someone who has witnessed authoritarian
capitalism in the Reagan/Bush/Thatcher era crush the Utopian
promise of a more democratic society under its boot-heel, just as
Napoleon III destroyed the democratic ideals Baudelaire shared
in the 1840s, and Hitler those Benjamin shared in the 1930s.
This recurring nightmare is no historical accident: within the
cyclical, boom-and-bust rhythm of capital accumulation, it
recurs at the moment that democratic potential once again
succumbs to the authoritarian realities of capitalism. Benjamin
speaks of "wish[ing] to retain that image of the past which
unexpectedly appears to a man singled out by history at a
moment of danger " ;3 for him, as for me, the figure of Baudelaire
provides such an image: Charles Baudelaire, c'est nousl
Baudelaire's historical "moment of danger," as this study
will show, revolved around Napoleon's coup d'etat of December
1851: the romantic-socialist hopes fueling the Revolution of
1848 seemed on the verge of becoming reality in the Second
Republic, only to be dashed by the founding of the Second
Empire and the authoritarian reign of Napoleon III. Our own
"moment of danger" did not arrive so punctually. Its corresponding dates might be 1968, the height of the antiauthoritarian counter-cultural "revolution"; and 1981, the
culmination of the oil crisis begun in 1974. World War II had
generated a tremendous concentration of highly productive
capital which the outbreak of peace risked leaving idle. So a
period of liberal largesse followed, sponsoring waves of social
innovation in the civil rights, anti-war, and counter-culture
movements while bankrolling "consumer society" in order to
keep the wheels of industry turning. But this liberalizing phase
of "capital ^-accumulation" was soon reversed in the subsequent, authoritarian phase of "capital /^-accumulation,"
triggered by the oil crises of 1974-81: funding for social,
cultural, and political innovation was ruthlessly cut off in order
to be reinvested in instruments of capital's self-expansion,
including the high-tech military-industrial complex, more
aggressive state action against labor, curtailment of women's

Preface

xiii

and civil rights, and so on. Though the transformation itself was
not as dramatic as the coup d'etat of Baudelaire's day, the
contrast between the two phases is strikingly similar, and
equally dispiriting, in the two cases. That similarity made this
schizoanalytic study of Baudelaire possible.4
Schizoanalysis insists on restoring the full range of social and
historical factors to psychoanalytic explanations of psychic
structure and proclivities. From this perspective, the claim that
"Charles Baudelaire, c'est moi" is not a statement of identification with Baudelaire as an individual (with whom I
personally have very little in common: I did not lose my father
at the age of five, but at twenty-seven; I am not a destitute poete
maudit, but a professional cultural historian; not a melancholic
bachelor, but a happily married husband and father, and so
on). Rather than a statement of personal identification, it is a
recognition of our shared socio-historical situation and the
resulting psychological configuration (here designated as "borderline narcissism") —a configuration that is epitomized in his
works, but which is more or less characteristic of everyone living
in market society. Hence Baudelaire's lasting acclaim as the
"lyric poet in the era of high capitalism" (as Benjamin put it).
For he was among the first to diagnose the conditions of
existence typical of modernity, and to suffer the emergence of a
specifically capitalist form of authoritarianism. That those
conditions still exist and capitalist authoritarianism has not
ceased recurring enables us, in Benjamin's words, to "grasp the
constellation which [our] own era has formed with a specific
earlier one," Baudelaire's own.
At the same time, schizoanalysis insists on including psychodynamic factors in historical materialist explanations of social
structure and cultural change. This inclusion is possible largely
because of a certain notion of temporality that is shared by
Marx - for whom " the anatomy of the human is the key to the
anatomy of the ape " - and by Freud - for whom there exist not
memories from childhood, but only memories of childhood.
This is the form of temporality emphasized by Lacan in the
notion of "deferred action" (Freud's Nachtrdglichkeit), and by
Benjamin in his critique of historicism:

xiv

Preface

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection
between the various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is
for that reason alone historical. It became historical posthumously, as
it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of
years. An historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling
the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the
constellation which his own era has formed with a specific earlier one.5
This form of temporality is crucial to schizoanalysis, as well,
although the present study explores its psychodynamic more
than its socio-historical implications. In focusing on Baudelaire,
I have been unable to do justice here to all the complexities of
schizoanalysis; that is the aim of my next book. Let me say in
passing that the point of schizoanalysis is not to enter (much less
settle) disputes among competing schools of psychoanalytic
therapy or doctrine, but to extract what is useful for the
purposes of historical analysis and social change. The Lacanian
school is a special case: schizoanalysis draws heavily on Lacan,
yet insists that even a stance conducive to profoundly radical
(not to say revolutionary) therapy nonetheless risks appearing
profoundly and " tragically" reactionary if transported into the
domain of historical study unchanged. In focusing on Baudelaire alone, I have also, against my best intentions, unavoidably
made him appear to be more of a special case historically
speaking than he really is, however canonical he has become: it
will take yet another book to show why the cultural masochism
he shared with Masoch himself was not exceptional, but part of
a larger pattern in late nineteenth-century history; and to show
indeed that masochism, sadism, and narcissism are all fundamentally historical and cultural phenomena, before being
treated as psychological ones.
What a schizoanalytic study focusing on Baudelaire is able to
demonstrate, nonetheless, is that authoritarianism recurs in
modernity, and that it does so not merely because of "man's
eternal inhumanity to man," but because of historical dynamics
specific to capitalism. Historical recurrence never amounts to
sheer repetition, however: it always entails repetition with a
difference. Merely to draw parallels between 1848/51 and

Preface

xv

1968/81 would be no better than noting similarities in myth
criticism or establishing causal connections in historicism. The
point of doing schizoanalysis is not just to interpret history, but
to change it. Hence the explicitly narrative cast of my reading
of Baudelaire and his modernist repudiation of narrative.
However out of favor it may be in some circles of high modernist
criticism today, and however complex our understanding of it
has become (thanks in part to that very criticism), narrative
remains a fundamental form of human thought, one that is
simply indispensable for thinking through historical change:
things looked a certain way before; how do they look after suchand-such occurs? How, then, does the modernity we still share
with Baudelaire look after modernism?
At the very emergence of market society in France, Baudelaire
formulated his distinctive modernism in repudiation of romanticism ; after more than a century of market rule, we are
now struggling to repudiate modernism in the name of
something called the "postmodern." In repudiating romanticism, Baudelaire rejected the romantic commitment to nature
and woman in favor of misogyny and urban artifice; inasmuch
as modernism has roots in Baudelaire, any postmodernism
worthy of more than the mere name will have to be feminist and
environmentalist, or amount to nothing at all.6 Repudiating
modernism is not easy; real postmodernism will not occur by
fiat, for most of the institutions reflecting and supporting
modernism are still very much in force today, having had more
than a century since Baudelaire's time to consolidate themselves.
Within the academy, for example, modern (ist) disciplines are
still organized to produce knowledge of literature for literature's
sake, of art for art's sake, of history for history's sake, and so on.
As a postmodern intervention, this schizoanalytic study aims
instead to produce a resolutely anti-historicist, anti-aestheticist
reading of Baudelaire, one that in the face of historical
contingency willingly assumes the risk of appearing "partial"
or "dated." This is not to say that I do not appreciate the
lasting beauty of Baudelaire's poetry, for personally I do. But I
am someone who feels that in moments of danger, there are

xvi

Preface

more important things to talk about - and I am convinced that
Baudelaire was, too.
Some may consider that, intending to talk about
Baudelaire, I have succeeded only in talking about myself.
It would certainly mean more to say that it is Baudelaire
who was talking about me. He is talking about you.
Michel Butor7

Acknowledgments

The ideas for this book first took shape in independent study
with Chuck Wiz and Brenda Thompson at the University of
California at San Diego; it is a pleasure to recall their
enthusiasm and contributions. I am most grateful for generous
support and encouragement in those early stages from Gilles
Deleuze in Paris and Michel de Certeau in La Jolla. Several
valuable secondary sources were recommended by my mother,
Faith M. Holland, whose bibliographic input over the years I
am pleased to acknowledge. My thanks for research assistance
go to Medha Karmarkar of Ohio State, and to the W. T. Bandy
Center for Baudelaire Studies at Vanderbilt University.
Dick Bjornson and Vassilis Lambropoulos read the manuscript early on, giving sound advice and much-appreciated
encouragement. Ross Chambers, Dick Terdiman, and Fred
Jameson deserve special recognition for their careful readings,
expert advice, and/or welcome encouragement at various later
stages of the writing process: I cannot thank them enough.
Nancy Armstrong and Sabra Webber provided shrewd insights
into the publishing process, and I would like to thank Charles
G. S. Williams, too, for all his help as chairperson and senior
colleague.
Most deserving of thanks and acknowledgment are my wife,
Eliza Segura-Holland, whose clinical and political insights into
schizophrenia and capitalism, and whose spirited intellectual
companionship and unstinting support were crucial to writing
this book; and our daughter, Lauren Louise Holland, who
showed consideration far beyond her years: I thank them both
with all my heart.
xvn

CHAPTER I

Introduction

" Au fond de l'lnconnu pour trouver du nouveau!" To the depths
of the unknown to find something new: is this the battle cry of
modernism or an advertising slogan? Could it be both? What
reading procedures would distinguish absolutely between the
t w o ? - A n d what would be the cost to our historical understanding of Baudelaire and modernism, were such procedures to
succeed?
However scandalous the alleged identity of high and low, of
elite and mass culture may once have seemed, it has by now
become commonplace. The modernist attempt to salvage or
forge some domain of authenticity over and against the
wasteland of commercial culture has been swallowed whole by
commercialism itself: " defamiliarization," as the Russian
Formalists termed the renewal of perception through aesthetic
innovation and willed distance from the ordinary, is now a wellworn advertising technique, used to confer an aura of novelty
and exoticism on the most familiar and banal of commodities,
from standard-brand beer to haute couture perfume. For us (and
this realization surely counts as one signal of our postmodern
condition), the techniques of modernism and advertising are
one and the same.
But can the same be said for Baudelaire himself? In one sense,
no: advertising and modernism were only in their infancy in
Baudelaire's day; their merger presupposes a degree of commercial oversaturation and sophistication on the part of
consumers, a measure of sophistication and sheer desperation
on the part of advertisers, the assimilation of modernism itself
into mainstream culture — conditions that were not met in mid

2

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

nineteenth-century France. Yet in another sense, reflections on
the relations between modernism and commercial culture
appear throughout Baudelaire's writings. The call to explore
the unknown in search of the new concludes the second of
Baudelaire's three published collections of poetry (comprising
the first and second editions of Les Fleurs du Mai and the
posthumous edition of the Petits Poemes en prose): seen as the
culmination of Baudelaire's work in verse, it may well appear as
a purely modernist gesture. Read in light of his later work,
however, it appears quite differently, for Baudelaire became
acutely aware of the complicity between his modernist poetics
and the very market society that modernism had set out to baffle
and surpass; the prose poems in particular are highly selfconscious of their inextricable relations with the commercial
context. My claim, then, is that the emergence of modernism for Baudelaire himself as well as for us - was and is incomprehensible apart from the transformation of culture and lived
experience by the rapid installation of market society in SecondEmpire France.
This is not an entirely new claim about Baudelaire, nor about
modernism. Walter Benjamin characterized Baudelaire as the
quintessential "lyric poet in the era of high capitalism. ' 5l Georg
Lukacs, in studies of somewhat broader scope, has condemned
modernism as a " reified " cultural form characteristic of market
society under bourgeois rule.2 Both provide crucial insights into
the relations between Baudelairean modernism and market
capitalism as they emerged in mid nineteenth-century France.
Yet in some important ways, Baudelaire's poetics defies these
readings, for despite the notoriously varied and often contradictory positions taken by Baudelaire himself, the development of Baudelairean modernism entails an unmistakable
evolution away from the poetics of metaphor in the direction of
metonymy, and this modernist poetics ultimately diagnoses
both Benjamin's and Lukacs's critical perspectives as premodern: as metaphysical rather than ironic; based on epistemologies of identity rather than difference; embodied in discourses that are, in the terms of this study, metaphoric rather
than metonymic in form.

Introduction

3

Benjamin's study nonetheless constitutes an indispensable
point of departure. He construes Baudelaire as a transitional
figure who managed to salvage lyric poetry from market
society's implacable erosion of shared culture and collective
memory, by recourse to strictly personal recollection. By
bringing Freud's theories of perception and memory into
contact with the material circumstances of Second-Empire
Paris, Benjamin shows how the development of a hyperconscious defense against the shocks of modern city life served
Baudelaire as a resource for generating specifically modernist
lyric poetry from modern urban experience itself.
But the characteristic Baudelairean defense mechanism, as it
appears in the "Tableaux Parisiens" section of the second
edition of Les Fleurs du Mai and throughout the Petits Poemes en
prose, evolves beyond Benjamin's shock-defense toward splitting,
a quite distinct defense mechanism with very different psychodynamics. One result will be the exploration of an explicitly
anti-lyric poetry, especially evident in the prose poem collection.
Baudelaire's own shift from high-anxiety hyperconsciousness to
psychic splitting, I will argue, happened to occur in reaction to
Napoleon Ill's founding of the Second Empire on the ruins of
the Second Republic, but such splitting thereafter conforms to
and illuminates one of the basic structures of capitalist society:
the radical split between production and consumption that pits
buyers against sellers in market transactions. One of Benjamin's
central insights, that Baudelaire as lyric poet of high capitalism
viscerally identified with the melancholic commodity seeking
buyers on the open market, thus turns out to be right, but only
half right: the Baudelairean poet, and particularly the narrator
in the prose poem collection, occupies the split positions of
buyer and seller in turn, without ever completely identifying
with either. Such psychic splitting and the disintegration of
experience epitomized in Baudelaire's writings are basic configurations of postromantic, modern personality in market
society. This helps make sense of the bewildering disparity of
opinion found in Baudelaire - and in Baudelaire criticism. It
also explains why, as Benjamin put it, Baudelaire was bound to
"find the reader at whom his work was aimed" (p. 109): the

4

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

split "structure of experience" (p. 110) conveyed in the work of
this exceptional poet has become the rule in modern capitalist
society.
In overlooking the distinction between shock-defense and
psychic splitting, Benjamin conflates distinct stages in Baudelaire's evolution from romanticism to modernism; he situates
the early sonnet " Correspondances," for example, in the same
historical framework as the poetically very different, later prose
poem "Perte d'aureole." Lukacs, by contrast, distinguishes
very sharply between modernism and movements such as
romanticism and realism that preceded it. Some such periodization is indispensable for understanding Baudelaire, even if we
discount Lukacs's visceral dislike of modernism and his preference for prose fiction over poetry as irrelevant for our purposes.
With his key concept of " reification," Lukacs diagnoses the
impact of the market on social activity and cognition: market
society is characterized by the predominance of exchange-value
over use-value. For Benjamin, the triumph of exchange-value
meant that buyers lose all shared "organic" connections to
goods and must rely instead on personal "taste," which
promptly falls prey to advertising in nascent market culture.
The melancholy of the poet's identification with the commodity
in search of buyers reflects his loss of connection with an
increasingly anonymous public of consumers. In studying the
novel, Lukacs is more interested in the effects of reification on
cognition, since the vocation of the realist novel he champions is
to represent the totality of historical development in a given
period for the purpose of understanding.
Exchange-based social relations fragment and specialize
social activity and cognition, with only a hope that the
"invisible hand" of the market will knit specialized work and
partial perspectives back together to produce a superior
outcome. In addition to its deleterious results in the economic
sphere, Lukacs concludes that the impact of exchange and
specialization on cognition is disastrous: the cognitive use-value
of cultural instruments such as the novel deteriorates sharply;
the direct and total representation of history characteristic of
realism drops away, abandoning the genre to evolve auto-

Introduction

5

nomously in accordance with strictly internal, primarily aesthetic laws of development. The thorough-going overhaul of
European society by the market changes the very texture of
prose fiction: the author shifts from the position of participant
(for whom narrating history has use-value) to that of observer
(whose relation both to historical content and to narrative itself
is mediated by exchange-value); the dominant textual mode
shifts from narration to description. Modernism for Lukacs
represents the epitome of reification in high culture.
For all its explanatory breadth and illumination of market
culture, Lukacs's account of the emergence of modernism
construes authors as passive occupants of positions determined
by economic processes alone. So for Lukacs, the reactionary
political views of a Balzac have absolutely no bearing on the
cognitive use-value of his realism (just as the progressive views
of a Zola have no redeeming impact on his naturalism). But
Baudelairean modernism does not involve a passive loss of
cognitive access to reality, but the active repudiation of any
direct representation of the historical process. The declared
intention of an early version of the verse collection that became
Les Fleurs du Mai had in fact been to "trace the history of the
spiritual agitations of modern youth"; this narrative design is
more and more firmly suppressed in the successive editions of
the verse collection; ultimately, linear narrative is explicitly and
utterly repudiated, at the start of the prose poem collection.
The repudiation of historical narration belongs to a set of
disavowals of youthful enthusiasm that, taken together, define
the emergence of Baudelairean modernism: the repudiation of
romanticism, of nature, and of any supposed "harmony" with
nature in favor of the artificial (which is one reason Benjamin is
so wrong to locate " Correspondances" in the same historical
field as "Perte d'aureole"); the repudiation of woman as
"natural" and of passion, inspiration, spontaneity associated
with the feminine, in favor of a virulent if inconsistent misogyny;
the repudiation of democratic aspirations, political engagement, and hope for a better future, in favor of pseudoaristocratic cynicism and disdain. In Baudelaire, these disavowals amount to a repudiation of history itself: of the

6

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

revolutionary hopes of 1848 he shared with so many romantics,
and especially of the coup d'etat that finally dashed those hopes
and led directly to the Second Empire. Of all the many
disappointments in Baudelaire's life, the rise to power of
Napoleon III resonates most fully in the public texts (including
the journals and notebooks); it finds an uncanny echo in the
other major disappointment of his life, which fills the private
correspondence: the loss of his paternal inheritance to a
trusteeship imposed by his stepfather and mother.
This singular coincidence makes Baudelaire the preeminent poet of

modernity. Financial dispossession - a constant threat to all
under capitalism - acquaints him intimately with the contradictory extremes of market existence: once a consummate
buyer (as dandy), he is now forced to sell himself (as prostitute).
This private humiliation at the hands of his stepfather is
compounded by the virtually simultaneous public humiliation
of the democratic ideals of the Second Republic at the hands of
Emperor Napoleon III. Utter dismay at the mass-authoritarian
outcome of a purportedly democratic revolutionary tradition
(1789, 1830, 1848) prompts the repudiation of that tradition
and of romanticism as its penultimate cultural expression.
Modernism is constituted on that repudiation; and it continues
to inform our "modern structure of experience " as long as the
contradiction remains between the democratic promise and the
authoritarian realities of capitalist society.
Benjamin's and Lukacs's insights, valuable as they may be,
are vitiated by an overweening emphasis on identity. Benjamin
identifies Baudelaire in terms of a unified personality-type (the
melancholic), and collapses very different stages of development
into the unity of a single historical period. In a very revealing
phrase, Benjamin at one point says that "the shock experience
which the passer-by has in the crowd corresponds to what the
worker 'experiences' at his machine" (p. 134, my emphasis).
But he thereby privileges in the Baudelairean corpus and in
his own mode of analysis the very poetic mode associated
with romanticism that Baudelaire ultimately rejects.3
Similarly, Lukacs identifies writers with their position in an
economic process (reification), and functionalizes the unity of

Introduction

7

the literary text as representing the coherence of historical
development.
These identifications are not so much wrong as necessarily
incomplete, requiringfurther differentiation. The name "Baudelaire" designates not a single personality or personality-type,
but a split subject occupying or manifesting a number of
different "personalities" and traversing two or more moments
of historical development. Such psychic splitting does not simply
"correspond" to the social conditions Benjamin cites in
explanation of the shock-defense, any more than it merely
reflects the process of reification to which Lukacs attributes
modernism: it also includes a complex of reactions to specific
historical experience and developments —the sting of poverty
and the lure of advertising in an increasingly commercial
culture, the auspicious overthrow of Louis-Philippe and the
scandalous rise to power of Napoleon III in a nascent
democracy, the rapid transformation of Paris and the dynamics
of modern urban life - whose effects are legible throughout the
Baudelairean corpus, even though history itself is nowhere
represented as such in the poetic works themselves. This study
thus answers the deconstructive challenge to produce a literary
history that is truly responsive to historical events, without
presuming that literary discourse faithfully represents a history
which takes place outside the text itself.4 Baudelaire's texts,
finally, are not unified but dispersed; the series of three
published poetry collections does not directly represent history,
but will be read in relation to and as part of a larger historical
development to be reconstructed - one of whose results is
precisely the modernist repudiation of linear-progressive historical narration.
My aim, in a word, is to read the texts of Baudelaire in a
relation to their historical contexts that is metonymic rather
than metaphoric in nature, that seeks differences rather than
presupposing identity between them, that constructs an " absent
cause" (to invoke Althusser's term) - i.e. historical developments not represented in the texts - to account for changes
(relations of difference) within the texts.5 To this end I will focus
on the differences between the first and second editions of Les

8

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

Fleurs du Mai and on the differences between them and the prose
collection.6 These differences are not random: in response to a
host of personal and historical circumstances, specific changes
were made for the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai (including
but not limited to the removal of the six poems banned from the
first edition by the state); the Petits Po'emes en prose differentiates
itself from the verse collection by taking some of the same titles
and themes, but giving them very different treatment in prose:
the prose collection, to paraphrase Baudelaire, was to be the
Fleurs du Mai all over again - only different. And the orientation
given to these differences is a sometimes halting but nonetheless
insistent shift in Baudelairean poetics away from metaphor
toward metonymy.
Ever since Barbey d'Aurevilly's famous remark attributing a
"secret architecture" to Les Fleurs du Mai, Baudelaire scholarship has explored the question of the supposed structure of the
verse collection.7 Baudelaire's own characterization may be
more revealing: he spoke not of a structure with a secret
architecture but of a book "with a beginning and an end." 8
And it is a book whose final poem issues a ringing challenge to
explore the unknown in search of the new, to travel via the
medium of poetry. The figure of "The Voyage" (the title of the
final poem of the collection) combines two basic poetic
principles explored in the course of Les Fleurs du Mai: the
metonymy of time and the metonymy of space.
At the end of the "Spleen and Ideal" section, the entropic
gloom of "Spleen" culminates in "The Clock" ("L'Horloge"
LXXXVII), where unremitting time counts down "thirty-six
hundred times an hour" the meaningless seconds leading to
death. Time is depicted here metonymically, as a purely linear
succession of isolated moments, each signaling the poet's
imminent demise, unconjoined by any life-project, unredeemed
by any prospect of salvation. The " Tableaux Parisiens " section,
by contrast, situates the poet spatially, in metonymic proximity
to modern Paris. Poetry here depends on the chance encounters
that befall the poet who maintains unflinching contact with the
turbulent urban milieu. Traveling, of course, combines the

Introduction

9

temporal succession of moments with the spatial succession of
places: following Baudelaire, it would (via Rimbaud and Gide,
in Beckett, Butor, Robbe-Grillet) become one of the few
remaining touchstones of modernist narrative, a kind of lastditch, zero-degree plot structure when any more elaborate
pretext for narration would appear contrived and therefore
undesirable.
It is significant that all of these poems - " L e Voyage,"
"L'Horloge," and the "Tableaux Parisiens" section itselfwere added to the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai. They serve
to reinforce the predominance of metonymy that is already
legible in the rhetoric and organization of poems in the first
edition; or more accurately, they add a thematics of metonymy
for the second edition to the poetics of metonymy that already, if
somewhat more obscurely, informs the first. Important scholarship on the predominance of metonymy over metaphor in
Baudelaire's work has tended to distribute this opposition over
his two major collections, opposing the romantic, metaphoric
poetics of the verse collection to the modernist, metonymic
poetics of the prose collection.9 By focusing attention on the
changes Baudelaire made for the second edition of verse, I aim
to show that the departure from romanticism is already legible
in early poems of Les Fleurs du Mai, and that the move from the
stable oppositions of romanticism into the exhilarating uncertainties of modernity is as central to the verse collection as it
is characteristic of the latter's relation to the prose collection.10
While the concept of metonymy enables us to trace the
development of Baudelairean poetics across the three major
collections, explanation of this trajectory depends on a concept
of "decoding" derived from the work of Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari. 11 The range and power of this term arise from
their transcription of diverse social, psychological, and cultural
phenomena into a historical, poststructuralist semiotics they
call "schizoanalysis." According to Deleuze and Guattari,
decoding is a basic feature of capitalism; the aim here is to
demonstrate its operation in texts and other cultural artifacts, in
individual psychodynamics, and in the socio-economic and

io

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

cultural dynamics of market society, simultaneously. This
introductory chapter outlines the functioning of decoding in
these three domains: the social, the psychological, and the
textual. The succeeding parts of the book then examine
Baudelaire's works in each of these domains, moving from the
textual (Part I: Poetics), through the psychological (Part II:
Psychopoetics), to the socio-historical (Part III: Sociopoetics).
At the same time, for the sake of exposition, our analysis will
move through the verse collection (Parts I and II) to the prose
collection (Part III) - even though both collections are marked
by historical context and equally affected by the metonymy of
decoding. In order to make intensive analysis of individual
poems manageable in an extensive treatment of the historical
evolution of Baudelairean poetics, I focus in Les Fleurs du Mai
almost exclusively (though not exhaustively) on the revisions
Baudelaire made for the second (1861) edition: the additions to
the cycle of poems devoted to beauty; the additions and rearrangement of poems at the end of the "Spleen and Ideal"
section; the inclusion of a new section entitled "Tableaux
Parisiens." From the Petits Poemes en prose, I have selected poems
that most clearly register the psychic splitting produced by
metonymic decoding in its characteristically modernist form. I
leave to the concluding chapter some methodological reflections
on another schizoanalytic category I have found especially
useful; there I reconsider the work of Baudelaire as an
" apparatus of registration " for the processes of decoding characteristic of capitalist society at the emergence of modernism.
Decoding, in the sense it is used here, has nothing to do with
the process of translating an incomprehensible, "encoded"
message into a more familiar code so as to enable or improve
comprehension. It refers instead to processes which disrupt and
subvert the very functioning of codes altogether. Although
Deleuze and Guattari almost never employ the term "metonymy," I have found it useful in bringing their notion of
"decoding" into simultaneous contact with the poetics and the
psychodynamics of Baudelaire's texts. Like "decoding," the
concept of metonymy cuts across various domains: I draw most
directly on the linguistic and psychoanalytic uses of the term

Introduction

11

developed in the work of Roman Jakobson and Jacques Lacan.
As the figure of travel in "Le Voyage" suggests, metonymy
proves useful in this regard because it involves both time and
space, both duration and context, both desire and reference.
As a poststructuralist semiotics, schizoanalysis accepts many
of the basic tenets of structuralism: the importance of languagelike codes of behavior and signification, the general priority of
social conditioning over individual expression (of langue over
parole) and of code/structure over message/substance. Its
jfro^structuralism lies in the denial that various codes ever "add
up " to compose a stable signifying structure or social order. The
point is not that behavior and practices are no longer
understood to be governed by structure, but that structures are
heterogeneous - de-centered and multiple. For poststructuralism, codes are not only internally conflicted and ultimately
incomplete, they also conflict among themselves, overlap and
leave interstices. For schizoanalysis, decoding is important
because it magnifies the interstices, illuminating and aggravating the non-cumulative, unstable nature of social codes.
Schizoanalysis is at the same time a resolutely historical
semiotics: it does not merely participate in poststructuralism, it
also proposes to account for its emergence historically. Codes
are not always equally unstable or "undecidable": rather, they
are relatively unstable, and their degree of instability varies
historically. It is especially under capitalism, according to
schizoanalysis, that social codes become widely unstable,
enabling trajectories of decoding such as Baudelaire's to
intensify and proliferate.
SOCIAL DECODING

The inherent instability of codes is magnified under capitalism
because its social organization depends not on codes, but on the
"cash nexus" of the market. Codes are central to other modes
of production, where they serve as the very basis of social order.
They are of secondary importance under capitalism, because
here differentials between abstract, measurable quantities - the
basis of surplus-value —count for more than similarities between

12

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

sensible qualities - the basis of metaphor and of codes. Hence
the predilection for difference and metonymy in poststructuralism, which is a critical perspective derived in large part from
the modernist and avant-garde cultural movements of nascent
market society to begin with. With the predominance of
exchange-value, decoded difference prevails over coded identity, as market society in Marx's phrase "strips the halo" from
previous forms of social intercourse, reducing them to more
strictly calculable, commercial concerns.12
Social decoding, as Fredric Jameson has remarked, has
certain affinities with what Max Weber called "rationali z a t i o n " - t h e process, epitomized in the Enlightenment, by
which the familiar world of experience is subjected to " rational"
explanation (science) and administration (bureaucracy), where
reason replaces superstition, induction and deduction replace
story-telling, quantity replaces quality, and so forth.13 The
distinction drawn by the English Enlightenment philosopher
John Locke between "primary" and "secondary" qualities
illustrates the process of decoding very aptly. The sensual
experience of the color called " r e d " has become in Locke's
empiricist view a mere "secondary " quality. The corresponding
"primary quality" is (in our sense of the term) not a quality at
all, but an abstract quantity: a range of the color-spectrum
determined by measuring the wave-lengths of the light reflected.
Operating in this case in the sphere of empirical science,
decoding replaces the experience of sensible qualities with
measurable quantities. As Weber suggests, while there may be a
gain in manipulability of the empirical world to be had through
"rationalized" attention to "primary" rather than "secondary" qualities, the price to be paid for such rationalization is the
"disenchantment" of the world we inhabit as sentient human
beings, which is rendered strictly meaningless in the process.
There are, however, two important differences between
rationalization and decoding. First of all, and in line with
Lukacs's similar rewriting of rationalization as " reification,"
decoding does not inhere in some properly sociological development peculiar to institutions or culture, but in the allpervasive role of the market under capitalism. It is the market,

Introduction

13

as the very matrix of social organization under capitalism and
through its systematic subordination of use-value to exchangevalue, that fosters decoding by "constantly revolutionizing
production [and consumption] " in the pursuit of surplus-value.
In their analysis of the dynamics of the market, Deleuze and
Guattari distinguish three moments within the process named
by the single terms "rationalization" and "reification." Decoding designates the "de-mystifying" operations entailed in
rationalization, the bracketing or subordination of meaning so
as to enable calculation. "Recoding" designates an attendant
process of re-endowing experience stripped of its "original"
meaning with some semblance of significance, whether that
take the form of rational explanation or something else.
(Recoding is a term Deleuze and Guattari rarely use themselves,
since they consider capitalism to be at bottom completely
meaningless; it proves indispensable, however, for the analysis
of literature and culture.) Underlying both decoding and
recoding lies the process of " axiomatization," which orchestrates decoding and sponsors recoding according to the logic of
the capitalist economy.14
The first and still most fundamental forms of capitalist
decoding bear on labor and wealth. Industrial capitalism
presupposes a critical mass of workers divorced from any means
of gainful employment and a critical mass of wealth available
for gainful investment; it emerges when the basic capitalist
axiom conjoins the one decoded mass, of labor power needing
work, with the other: the mass of wealth to be invested as capital
in means of production. In the course of expansion, other
axioms are added: those of empirical science, linking technology
to continual improvement in efficiency of the means of
production; those of state policy and the judicial systems,
defining the legal status and relations offeree obtaining between
workers and private property; and so forth.
In Baudelaire's lifetime-the "take-off" period of French
industrial capitalism - decoding, axiomatization, and recoding
pervade the cultural sphere: the synthetic perspective of the
subscription newspaper written for a homogeneous audience of
like-minded subscribers, for instance, is decoded by the "ob-

14

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

jective" reporting of isolated facts in the mass-circulation
newspapers produced for the market and sold indiscriminately
to anonymous readers on the street.15 At the same time (with
textile manufacturing among the first sectors of the French
economy to become capitalist), fashion becomes a veritable
industry: henceforth advertising must continually recode consumer preferences to stimulate retail trade and absorb increasing quantities of mass-produced merchandise - what Baudelaire referred to as the "damaged goods of a good-for-nothing
age" ("produitsavariesd'unsiecle vaurien" "L'Ideal" [xvm],
1-2).
Due to contingent historical circumstances, the impact of the
market on mid nineteenth-century French society is particularly
sudden and severe. Napoleon's mass-levy armies not only
revolutionized early modern European warfare, they also
comprised the first proto-mass market for military suppliers and
outfitters (notably for uniforms). But the defeat of Napoleon of
course dispersed that market, and the Bourbon Restoration
then succeeded in slowing the conversion of military markets to
broader civilian ones in its efforts to restore landed wealth to its
former position of privilege over manufacturing and the
bourgeoisie. When the July Revolution installed the "Bourgeois
Monarchy" of Louis-Philippe in 1830, however, market forces
stifled under the Restoration burst forth and ran rampant:
"Henceforth, the bankers shall rule!" cried one new minister.16
The reaction of the French cultural elite to the rule of the
market is correspondingly acute: Flaubert remarks that "all of
society has been prostituted" (adding ironically, "but the
prostitutes themselves least of all"); before him, Balzac had
already made prostitution the general figure for emergent
capitalist social relations, as documented in La Come'die humaine.
Baudelaire's relations to the market are considerably more
complex than the reactionary Balzac's straightforward condemnation. For Baudelaire, the implacable subversion of an
older social order by the forces of the market registers as the
valorization of prostitution over and against all morality and
convention. This may amount simply to making the best of a
bad situation; but to the modernist, whether "The Voyage"

Introduction

15

leads through heaven or hell no longer matters - " Enfer ou
Ciel, qu'importe? / Au fond de l'lnconnu pour trouver du
nouveauV (cxxvi, 11. 143-44) - a s long as it leads to novelty
forever.
The second major difference between the concepts of rationalization/reification and decodi