Sami Khatib, sami.khatib@fu-berlin.

de, Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht | Freie Universitt Berlin PAPER AT HISTORICAL MATERIALISM ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2012, LONDON/UK

On Lumpen, Nihilism, and Unemployed Negativity. Marx, Benjamin, and Bataille

I. Marx: Lumpen and Waste The German word Lumpen is a pejorative term, normally translated as rag. It designates an old and rotten cloth, mostly worn by beggars or homeless people. As an adjective, to be dressed in a lumpige way means that you are looking shabby. As a noun, the Lumpen can refer to a group of people or to the materiality of the Lumpencloth itself. If not worn out of poverty, the Lumpen is a useless remainder of useful textiles. And in this sense, it belongs to another order of things than the more famous linen and coat that Marx mentions in his value-form-analysis in the beginning of Capital, vol. 1. Unfolding the category of the money-form, Marx introduces the well known equation of use-values: 10 yards of linen equals a coat. Although the material, of which the Lumpen is made, has the same origin as the linen and the coat, the Lumpen-cloth seems to escape the logic of measurement, quantity, and

commensurability. In its material indeterminacy it lacks intrinsic attributes. In the cycle of capitalist production and consumption Lumpen are constantly exuded like superfluous excrements. As unemployed matter, they seem to designate a zero-level of utility. However, Lumpen and other amorphous waste are not merely negative elements; they can be employed in capital accumulation. In Capital III, Marx writes:

The capitalist mode of production extends the utilisation of the excretions of production and consumption. By the former we mean the waste of industry and 1

agriculture, slid by the latter partly the excretions produced by the natural exchange of matter in the human body and partly the form of objects that remains after their consumption. [] Excretions of consumption are the natural waste matter discharged by the human body, remains of clothing in the form of rags, etc. (Marx, Capital III, Chapter 5, Economy in the Employment of Constant Capital)

Since capitalism is based on value production, the material usefulness of capitalist commodities is secondary. Capital is indifferent to its use-value dimension as long it produces use-values at all, whatever their material or symbolic use-value may be. Therefore, within capitalism, waste, excretions, and Lumpen cannot be intrinsically qualified (according to their specific materiality or aesthetic purposiveness) but only functionally: Can waste be the material bearer of value? Can Lumpen be employed in value production? If one takes the Lumpen as a pars pro toto for a Lumpen-group of people the Lumpenproletariat its potentially capitalist employability and functionality becomes apparent. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Marx ascribes a political function to the Lumpen. The Lumpen-people, to which the notorious German compound word Lumpenproletariat refers, can gain political importance when it is aligned with or employed by state power. For Marx, this was the lesson of the farcical Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the self-declared Napoleon III who enforced his coup dtat in 1851 with the help of an armed faction of the so-called Lumpenproletariat. Although deprived of bourgeois means of production, the Lumpenproletariat does not belong to the proletariat proper. Marxs dismissive characterization of these ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie is well 2

known: the Lumpen-group of people is comprised of vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars. In other words, for Marx these characters were asocial elements that weakened, if not endangered the class struggle of the proletariat. Unlike the older Hegelian term Pbel, rabble, or the more recent postoperaist multitude, in traditional Marxism the Lumpenproletariat was often associated with reactionary forces. However, as a lawless and an-archic element of society, the Lumpenproletariat attracted more positive appreciations by later Western Marxist theorists such as Walter Benjamin. Like the Bohme, the Lumpenproletariat seemed to escape any totalitarian view of society precisely because it cannot fully be accounted for: It has no proper place within the political-economic stratification. It somehow stands in between, blurs clear lines and subverts the logic of proper places within organistic concepts of society. As a modern threshold figure the Lumpenproletariat, however, is not intrinsically subversive. Benjamin confines himself to a correction of Marxs negative take on it insofar as the Lumpenproletariat can acquire a destructive function, capable of undermining prescriptive forms of socio-political domination. In other words, it is only the negative fact that the Lumpenproletariat is collective subjectivity stripped off its proper (class) form and lacks a defined social practice, a determined class-consciousness, which makes it a potential subversive factor. This negative capacity made the Lumpen an object of interest for Benjamins friend Bertolt Brecht. His plays, one might think of The Threepenny Opera, stage criminals, gangsters, and social outsiders. In his characterization of Brecht, Benjamin even claimed that Brecht saw in the hooligan the virtual revolutionary that actually the 3

hooligan is the hollow form in which some day, with a better material, the image of the classless human will be casted (GS III, 183). However, this prophecy remained a prophecy and has not been fulfilled so far. Moreover, as recent history has shown, factions of the original Lumpenproletariat have become an integral part of capitalism. The Lumpen business, although it always tends to break the law, belongs to its legalized flipside. The difference between the Lumpenproletariat and newly arisen forms of Lumpenbourgeoisie, a precarious bourgeoisie that pursues its business interests in a wild and, even according to bourgeois standards, immoral style, has become a merely formal one. With the decline if the industrial proletariat and the rise of new, more individualized forms of exploitation (one might think of the term precariat), the new Lumpen are to be found among the unemployed, or more precisely: the unemployable. Those who are living and working in a precarious environment, in an openly violent and unruled grey zone of market economy, have no links anymore to the old employed or unemployed labour force, the proletariat, because they were never considered suitable as employable workers in the first place. The new Lumpen-bourgeoisie or Lumpenpetit-bourgeoisie are mostly illegalized by state power and forced to pursue their precariously bourgeois forms of life and business under post-bourgeois circumstances. It is not necessarily the nature of their businesses that excludes the new contemporary Lumpen from a proper bourgeois life-form endowed with certain civil rights, but the bio-political control and denial of its very physical existence that constitutes the Lumpen life-form a paradoxical form of life deprived of its proper form. In other words, there is no Lumpen business that is too lumpig to be capitalist; it is only the Lumpen people who are threatened, harassed and, ultimately, killed by state power regulated by mythic violence, caught up in the dialectics of law and its exception. Maybe Agambens famous appropriation of the Latin homo sacer, the one that cannot 4

be sacrificed but killed without punishment, should be supplemented by its politicaleconomic face: the homo Lumpig, the Lumpen one whose physical (bare) existence is precarious and is not eligible to be the regular bearer of labour power (for instance illegalized migrants, sans papiers).

II. Bataille: Unemployed Negativity However, this new Lumpen people, these contemporary ragpickers and their rags, do not contradict the economic logic of waste and recycling unless they break with the form of capitalist utilizability. If there is no thing, no rag the materiality of which inherently resists its capitalist employability, its valorization, the question of this paper thus is: Can we conceive of a Lumpen and a political-economic practice attached to it that cannot be employed by the capitalist mode of production? Is there a radical nihilism of productivity und utility? Against the economic productivism of Liberalism and vulgar-Marxism, Georges Bataille introduced the notion of expenditure a profoundly nonproductive expenditure that exceeds capitalist expenditure (i.e. the calculated expenditure of labour force and its immanent excess, that is surplus value). Consequently, he conceived of expenditure in a strict anti-teleological way: expenditure is an unproductive consumption insofar as it does not serve as a means to the end of production. Taken aside Batailles essentialist examples of unproductive expenditure, that is to say, luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity etc., his deeply anti-liberal question remains intriguing: Is there a form of expenditure that can cut itself loose from the means of teleological pleasure and utility? Understood in a radical way, unproductive expenditure does not simply designate a negative activity. If it were merely a form of consumption, the negation of production, it 5

would remain part of its immanent dialectic and attached to the nexus of waste and value. Bataille thus does not look for excrements of the chain of production and consumption but for a certain social practice that derails teleological means-endrelations within these spheres. Instead of negating utility symmetrically by uselessness, he alludes to an asymmetric negation that might be called nihilistic. If there is an indeterminate negation of utility, applicability, and employment, which escapes its inscription into cycles of valorization, this negation cannot be based on any specific material or determinate social attitudes like reluctance, refusal, or resistance. Beyond the binary oppositions of activity and passivity, position and negation, Bataille conceived of a non-dialectical negativity, too inert to be employed in a dialectical movement. In 1937 he asked in a note: If action is as Hegel says negativity, the question arises as to whether the negativity of one who has 'nothing more to do' disappears or remains in a state of 'unemployed negativity'. Unemployed negativity, a non-symmetrical and, ultimately, non-sublatable negativity, cannot be employed within the Hegelian dialectic of position and negation. It designates a negativity beyond action and employment, which is neither something nor nothing, zero. It persists in a status of unemployment: a negative nothingness that is excreted within the dialectics of action and retraction, production and destruction. Understood in this way, unemployed negativity is not destructive as opposed to constructive; it does not add up to a Schumpeterian creative destruction, which is an integral part of capitalisms productive revolutions. The practice of the one, who has nothing to do, neither creates through destruction, nor destroys through creation. But how are we to conceive of this practice without practice, this employment of unemployability.

III. Benjamin: The Destructive Character The peculiar figure who has nothing to do, nothing more than doing nothing, is maybe best described by Benjamins thought image of the Destructive Character (1931). The destructive character destroys without productive ends in a non-creative way. Benjamin writes:

The destructive character envisions nothing. He has few needs, least of all to know what will take the place of the destroyed. At first, for a moment at least, the empty space, the place where the object stood, the victim lived. Someone will turn up who needs it without occupying it. The destructive character does his job. It is only creative work that he avoids. Just as the creator seeks out solitude for himself, the destroyer must continuously surround himself with people, with witnesses to his efficacy.

The destruction caused by the Destructive Character marks the zero-level of creative destruction. The destruction at stake here is non-creative. It is not bound to the destructive means and ends, deeds and purposes of an economic or artistic individual but to the activity of someone whose destructivity becomes operative in the strict sense only once it is performed in public. In other words, the destructive character is a political figure. His actions cannot be defined inherently, with reference to their concrete quality, but only relationally to the public space they intervene in. In this sense, the destructiveness of the Destructive Character is non-violent. Violence, if we recall Benjamins earlier essay on The Critique of Violence (1921), is not defined in and by itself, in an essentialist way with regard to certain actions or measures, but in a 7

negative and strictly relational way. An action can only become violent once it is attached to or employed by a means-end-relation. Consequently, violence occurs when actions are executed as a means to a violent end or as a violent means to an end. In other words, for Benjamin violence is defined relationally with regard to its mode of legitimization as a just means or just end. Instead of following the basic dogma of bourgeois theories of violence, that is: just ends can be attained by justified means, justified means used for just ends, Benjamin conceives of unalloyed or pure means. Pure means, however destructive they may be, are non-violent precisely because they have cut themselves loose from means-ends-relations. (The most extreme form of this pure or non-instrumental violence is divine violence: a tautologically violent violence that immediately coincides with its paradoxical opposite, a non-violent violence. The highest manifestation of pure violence by man, as Benjamin concludes his famous essay, is revolutionary violence, that is the revolutionary de-posing of the law, the unconditional abolishment of state power.) The destructiveness of the Destructive Character is of this kind: It is non-violent because it is neither an end nor it serves any end as a means. Furthermore, this peculiar form of destruction is anti-utopian, non-creative, and non-productive. Nonetheless, the destructive character does his job the job of the jobless, the work of the unworking. Paraphrasing Bataille, one might characterize the paradoxical work of the destructive character as the employment of an unemployed nothingness. The nihilism of the destructive character dissolves, dismantles, inoperates the operations of creative activity without simply negating the latter. Another quote from Benjamins Destructive Character might demonstrate that:

The destructive character's only watchword is: Make room; his only activity: clearing out. His need for fresh air and free space is stronger than any hatred. [] The destructive character is a tireless worker. It is nature that dictates his tempo, at least indirectly: he has to forestall it. Otherwise it will itself take over the destruction.

The action of making room, voiding does not serve any goal. The pursuit of emptying the space has no end; it is a destructive means in itself a pure means. The destructive movement of clearing out neither designates active creativity nor passive inertia, but the inoperative operation of annihilating something to nothing. However, the arrival at the nothingness of creation is not the goal of the Destructive Character. It is only the way, the itinerary he takes, what he is interested in. The unemployable surplus of this sort of employed destruction is not excessive or ferociously violent at all. Therefore, destruction as a pure, that is, non-violent means is not to be conflated with destruction for its own sake, destruction as an end in itself. The Destructive Character does not destroy out of rage or hatred. Rather, as Benjamin writes, he is young and cheerful; he is fully self-content, immersed into his own activity. In this sense, the clearing activity of the destructive character presents, as Benjamin puts it, the Apollonian version of the destroyer. Apollonian destruction is a forming destruction without a forming, creative principle. Its un-formed, un-forming or, to keep the terminology, Dionysian flipside can be found in the unemployable Lumpen, the superfluous useless. Ultimately, the Lumpen do not destroy, they do not clear out the space. Rather, as an amorphous and un-cleared, dirty agency, they do their unbinding, derailing work from within the creative destruction of capitalism. While the Destructive Character embodies the employment of pure and non-violent destruction, 9

the Lumpen are radically unemployed they present unemployed negativity at work, the unworking of the works of the bourgeois life-form itself.

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