Material figures : political economy, commercial culture, and the aesthetic sensibility of Charles Baudelaire

245 Pages·2012·1.57 MB·English

by  Baudelaire

Material Figures
FAUX TITRE
375
Etudes de langue et littérature françaises
publiées sous la direction de
Keith Busby, †M.J. Freeman,
Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans
Material Figures
Political Economy, Commercial Culture,
and the Aesthetic Sensibility of Charles Baudelaire
Margueritte S. Murphy
AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2012
Cover illustration: Industrial Exhibition. Goldware models. Design by H.
Catenacci. Musée des Familles, September 1855. Bibliothèque nationale de
France.
Cover design: Inge Baeten
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence’.
Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions
de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents -
Prescriptions pour la permanence’.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3526-3
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0801-7
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2012
Printed in The Netherlands
For Brian, Philip and Celia
Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 9

INTRODUCTION 11

CHAPTER I
Equilibrium and Utility: Measures of Desire 25

CHAPTER II
Spectacles of Consumption: Art and the Industrial Exhibitions 69

CHAPTER III
Baudelaire’s Salon de 1846 and the Education
of the Bourgeois Viewer 93

CHAPTER IV
Baudelaire after 1848: Towards a Cosmopolitan Aesthetic 121

CHAPTER V
Products of Desire in Les Fleurs du mal 159

CHAPTER VI
A Subjectivity of Things: Le Spleen de Paris 197

AFTERWORD 227

WORKS CITED 233

INDEX 245
Acknowledgements

Like most academic books, this work was a labor of love. Still I
have incurred many debts and credit is due. Among those who have
kindly offered suggestions after hearing or reading sections of this
study, I acknowledge with deep gratitude my Bentley colleagues Ruth
Spack, Louis Iandoli, Marc Stern, and George Ellenbogen; conver-
sations with Samir Dayal and Mike Frank have profoundly enriched
my understanding of all things cultural. Over the years I have pre-
sented portions of this work at numerous conferences, and I am grate-
ful for the comments and dialogues that ensued; I want to acknow-
ledge in particular Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies and
the American Comparative Literature Association for offering stimu-
lating venues in which to present this work. The wealth of knowledge
and insights of colleagues in the Pembroke Center Seminar on the
Culture of the Market at Brown University in 1999-2000 helped shape
my understanding and approach to the nexus of market and aesthetic
culture; I am especially grateful to Elizabeth Weed and Ellen Rooney,
who welcomed us and led us in this year-long discussion, and to
Christy Burns with whom I have continued these conversations now
for a dozen years.
I thank Bentley University for its generous support of this
research in the form of more than one sabbatical leave and two
summer grants for research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France
and the Archives Nationales in Paris.
Portions of some chapters have appeared previously as essays:
“Commodity aesthetics: The industrial exhibitions of Paris, 1834-
1844, reviewed,” Journal of European Studies 40.1 (March 2010);
“Pure Art, Pure Desire: Changing Definitions of l’art pour l’art from
Kant to Gautier,” Studies in Romanticism 47 (Summer/Fall 2008); and
“The Critic as Cosmopolite: Baudelaire’s International Sensibility and
the Transformation of Viewer Subjectivity” in Art and Life in Aesthe-
ticism: De-Humanizing and Re-Humanizing Art, the Artist, and the
Artistic Receptor, ed. Kelly Comfort, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. I am
grateful for permission to reprint this work.
10 Material Figures

Finally, my debts to my family are immense – to Philip and Celia
for their patience when my attention was focused on the nineteenth
century instead of the present moment and for their good humor when
tagging along with their parents on the highways and byways of aca-
demic research. My most profound debt is to Brian Cooper – for his
unstinting intellectual and emotional support from the very inception
of this project, for our many conversations about the economic and the
aesthetic, and his insights, and for his generosity and patience in
reading drafts of this work. It would not have been the same without
him.
Introduction

In sum, the aesthetic autonomy of art is only another name for its
heteronomy. The aesthetic identification of art is the principle of a
generalized disidentification.
– Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents

Le sentiment du beau dans les arts, que les progrès de notre siècle
tendent chaque jour à inspirer avantage au public, doit amener, dans les
ameublemens, dans tous les produits, le goût du bon, autrement dit du
beau; les fabricans seront bien alors forcés de se convertir et de venir
demander aux artistes le pardon et le remède de leurs erreurs.
– Unsigned review of Industrial Exhibition of 1834, L’Artiste

Le poète jouit de cet incomparable privilège, qu’il peut à sa guise être
lui-même et autrui. Comme ces âmes errantes qui cherchent un corps, il
entre, quand il veut, dans le personnage de chacun.
– Charles Baudelaire, “Les Foules”

It has been a commonplace that the idea of artistic and literary
autonomy is fundamental to modernism and its understanding of the
relationship between art and modernity. Not only literary criticism and
history, but Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory to explain the crea-
tion and functioning of the sphere of art and literature as an autono-
mous field relies on a conventional view of art and literature in moder-
nity as defined by an ideology of social autonomy. But such views,
not just belief in art’s autonomy, but the oft-told history of the idea,
are being challenged. Jacques Rancière, identifying an “aesthetic re-
gime of the arts” emerging in the late eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
tury, observes a contradiction constitutive of that regime – that art’s
status as “an autonomous form of life” set up a contradiction between
its presumed autonomy and “its identification with a moment in life’s
process of self-formation,” hence inhabiting a heterogeneous tempor-
ality that complicates the notion of modernity associated with auto-
nomous art (Politics of Aesthetics 26). Fredric Jameson, in A Singular
Modernity, argues that the doctrine of autonomy was not embraced by
major literary and artistic modernists, whose experiments remained
within the realm of semi-representation, but is a post-hoc fabrication