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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.
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