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

8/12/2019 On Lumpen, Nihilism and Unemployed Negativity. Marx, Benjamin and Bataille

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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 Lumpenbe 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

EighteenthBrumaireof 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


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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 post-

operaist 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 TheThreepenny 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


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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 Lumpen-

petit-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


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be sacrificed but killed without punishment, should be supplemented by its political-

economic 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 nonproductiveexpenditure

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


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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-end-

relations 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 nothingto do, neither creates

through destruction, nor destroys through creation. But how are we to conceive of this

practice without practice, this employment of unemployability.


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III. Benjamin: The Destructive Character

The peculiar figure who has nothingto do, nothing more than doingnothing, is maybe

best described by Benjamins thought image of theDestructive 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 Charactermarks 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


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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.

TheDestructive Characterdoes 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

DestructiveCharacterembodies the employment of pure and non-violent destruction,


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the Lumpen are radically unemployed they present unemployed negativity at work,

the unworking of the works of the bourgeois life-form itself.

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

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