Baudelaire and schizoanalysis the socio poetics of modernism

Modernist imagination and the "TableauxParisiens" 137 The later art criticism 139 The introductory poems 148 The street scenes 157 The domestic scenes 166 PART III SOGIOPOETICS 6 Decodin

apply the principles of schizoanalysis to literary historyand cultural studies By resituating psychoanalysis in itssocioeconomic and cultural context, this framework pro-vides a new and illuminating approach to the poetry andart criticism of the foremost French modernist ProfessorHolland's book draws upon and transforms virtually theentire spectrum of recent Baudelaire scholarship, anddemonstrates the impact of the capitalist market andSecond Empire authoritarianism (as well as Baudelaire'smuch-discussed family circumstances) on the psychologyand poetics of the writer, who abandoned his romanticidealism in favour of a modernist cynicism that hascharacterized modern culture ever since.

BAUDELAIRE AND SCHIZOANALYSIS

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

The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century

France: Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing

BAUDELAIRE AND SCHIZOANALYSIS

The Sociopoetics of Modernism

EUGENE W HOLLAND

Department of French and Italian, The Ohio State University

CAMBRIDGEUNIVERSITY 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

Preface page xi Acknowledgments xvii

i Introduction i

Social decoding 11 Psychological decoding 17 Textual decoding 30

PART I POETICS

2 Correspondences versus beauty 43

The romantic cycle 43 The beauty cycle 53 Metonymy prevails 67

3 Spleen and evil 80

"Spleen and Ideal" 80 The spleen cycle 86 The cycle of evil 96

PART II PSYGHOPOETIGS

4 Romantic temperament and "Spleen and Ideal" 111

The psychodynamics of experience 111 The early art criticism 116 The psychopoetics of "Spleen and Ideal" 124

IX

Modernist imagination and the "Tableaux

Parisiens" 137

The later art criticism 139 The introductory poems 148 The street scenes 157 The domestic scenes 166

PART III SOGIOPOETICS

6 Decoding and recoding in the prose poems 177

Historical Others 177

" Moral masochism " 186 Historical masochism 190 Borderline decoding 197 Narcissistic recoding 209

7 The prose poem narrator 221

Historicizing borderline narcissism 221 Super-ego failure 222 Ego disintegration 230 Bohemia at the heart of bourgeois society 236 Modernity as prostitution 242 The prose poem narrator as borderline narcissist 248 The prose poem narrator as programmer 251

8 Conclusion 258

The metonymy of real reference and desire 266 The historical emergence and dispersion of the

imaginary 267 The split structure of social life in modernity 274

Motes 278 Select bibliography 296 Index 303

A Klee painting named " Angelus Novus" shows an angellooking as though he is about to move away fromsomething he is fixedly contemplating His eyes are staring,his mouth is open, his wings are spread This is how onepictures the angel of history His face is turned toward thepast Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees onesingle catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage uponwreckage and hurls it in front of his feet The angel wouldlike to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what hasbeen smashed But a storm is blowing and has gotcaught in his wings with such violence that the angel can

no longer close them This storm irresistibly propels himinto the future to which his back is turned, while the pile

of debris before him grows skyward This storm is what wecall progress

Walter Benjamin1

Perdu dans ce vilain monde, coudoye par les foules, je suiscomme un homme lasse dont Poeil ne voit en arriere, dansles annees profondes, que desabusement et amertume, etdevant lui qu'un orage ou rien de neuf n'est contenu, nienseignement, ni douleur

Lost in a wasteland, jostled by the crowds, I am like aweary man who sees in the depths of the past behind himnothing but disappointment and bitterness, and beforehim 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 someonebeing blown irresistibly backwards into the future, who can

xi

only look aghast at the mounting piles of toxic waste and thegrowing numbers of homeless children that "progress" hurls athis feet I, too, am someone who has witnessed authoritariancapitalism in the Reagan/Bush/Thatcher era crush the Utopianpromise of a more democratic society under its boot-heel, just asNapoleon 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 thecyclical, boom-and-bust rhythm of capital accumulation, itrecurs at the moment that democratic potential once againsuccumbs to the authoritarian realities of capitalism Benjaminspeaks of "wish[ing] to retain that image of the past whichunexpectedly appears to a man singled out by history at amoment 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 SecondRepublic, only to be dashed by the founding of the SecondEmpire and the authoritarian reign of Napoleon III Our own

"moment of danger" did not arrive so punctually Its responding dates might be 1968, the height of the anti-authoritarian counter-cultural "revolution"; and 1981, theculmination of the oil crisis begun in 1974 World War II hadgenerated a tremendous concentration of highly productivecapital which the outbreak of peace risked leaving idle So aperiod of liberal largesse followed, sponsoring waves of socialinnovation in the civil rights, anti-war, and counter-culturemovements while bankrolling "consumer society" in order tokeep the wheels of industry turning But this liberalizing phase

cor-of "capital ^-accumulation" was soon reversed in the sequent, 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

sub-to be reinvested in instruments of capital's self-expansion,including the high-tech military-industrial complex, moreaggressive state action against labor, curtailment of women's

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, andequally dispiriting, in the two cases That similarity made thisschizoanalytic study of Baudelaire possible.4

Schizoanalysis insists on restoring the full range of social andhistorical factors to psychoanalytic explanations of psychicstructure and proclivities From this perspective, the claim that

"Charles Baudelaire, c'est moi" is not a statement of fication with Baudelaire as an individual (with whom Ipersonally have very little in common: I did not lose my father

identi-at the age of five, but identi-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 soon) Rather than a statement of personal identification, it is arecognition of our shared socio-historical situation and theresulting psychological configuration (here designated as "bor-derline 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 ofexistence typical of modernity, and to suffer the emergence of aspecifically capitalist form of authoritarianism That thoseconditions still exist and capitalist authoritarianism has notceased recurring enables us, in Benjamin's words, to "grasp theconstellation which [our] own era has formed with a specificearlier one," Baudelaire's own

At the same time, schizoanalysis insists on including dynamic factors in historical materialist explanations of socialstructure and cultural change This inclusion is possible largelybecause of a certain notion of temporality that is shared byMarx - for whom " the anatomy of the human is the key to theanatomy of the ape " - and by Freud - for whom there exist not

psycho-memories from childhood, but only psycho-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:

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connectionbetween the various moments in history But no fact that is a cause isfor that reason alone historical It became historical posthumously, as

it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands ofyears An historian who takes this as his point of departure stops tellingthe sequence of events like the beads of a rosary Instead, he grasps theconstellation 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 morethan its socio-historical implications In focusing on Baudelaire,

I have been unable to do justice here to all the complexities ofschizoanalysis; that is the aim of my next book Let me say inpassing that the point of schizoanalysis is not to enter (much lesssettle) disputes among competing schools of psychoanalytictherapy or doctrine, but to extract what is useful for thepurposes of historical analysis and social change The Lacanianschool 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 appearingprofoundly and " tragically" reactionary if transported into thedomain of historical study unchanged In focusing on Baude-laire alone, I have also, against my best intentions, unavoidablymade him appear to be more of a special case historicallyspeaking than he really is, however canonical he has become: itwill 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

funda-mentally historical and cultural phenomena, before beingtreated as psychological ones

What a schizoanalytic study focusing on Baudelaire is able todemonstrate, nonetheless, is that authoritarianism recurs inmodernity, and that it does so not merely because of "man'seternal inhumanity to man," but because of historical dynamicsspecific to capitalism Historical recurrence never amounts tosheer repetition, however: it always entails repetition with adifference Merely to draw parallels between 1848/51 and

1968/81 would be no better than noting similarities in mythcriticism or establishing causal connections in historicism Thepoint 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 modernistcriticism today, and however complex our understanding of ithas become (thanks in part to that very criticism), narrativeremains a fundamental form of human thought, one that issimply indispensable for thinking through historical change:

things looked a certain way before; how do they look after

such-and-such occurs? How, then, does the modernity we still share

with Baudelaire look after modernism?

At the very emergence of market society in France, Baudelaireformulated his distinctive modernism in repudiation of ro-manticism ; after more than a century of market rule, we arenow struggling to repudiate modernism in the name ofsomething called the "postmodern." In repudiating roman-ticism, Baudelaire rejected the romantic commitment to natureand woman in favor of misogyny and urban artifice; inasmuch

as modernism has roots in Baudelaire, any postmodernismworthy of more than the mere name will have to be feminist andenvironmentalist, or amount to nothing at all.6 Repudiatingmodernism is not easy; real postmodernism will not occur byfiat, for most of the institutions reflecting and supportingmodernism are still very much in force today, having had morethan a century since Baudelaire's time to consolidate themselves.Within the academy, for example, modern (ist) disciplines arestill organized to produce knowledge of literature for literature'ssake, of art for art's sake, of history for history's sake, and so on

As a postmodern intervention, this schizoanalytic study aimsinstead to produce a resolutely anti-historicist, anti-aestheticistreading of Baudelaire, one that in the face of historicalcontingency willingly assumes the risk of appearing "partial"

or "dated." This is not to say that I do not appreciate thelasting beauty of Baudelaire's poetry, for personally I do But I

am someone who feels that in moments of danger, there are

more important things to talk about - and I am convinced thatBaudelaire was, too.

Some may consider that, intending to talk aboutBaudelaire, I have succeeded only in talking about myself

It would certainly mean more to say that it is Baudelairewho was talking about me He is talking about you

Michel Butor7

The ideas for this book first took shape in independent studywith Chuck Wiz and Brenda Thompson at the University ofCalifornia at San Diego; it is a pleasure to recall theirenthusiasm and contributions I am most grateful for generoussupport and encouragement in those early stages from GillesDeleuze in Paris and Michel de Certeau in La Jolla Severalvaluable 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 BandyCenter for Baudelaire Studies at Vanderbilt University.Dick Bjornson and Vassilis Lambropoulos read the manu-script early on, giving sound advice and much-appreciatedencouragement Ross Chambers, Dick Terdiman, and FredJameson deserve special recognition for their careful readings,expert advice, and/or welcome encouragement at various laterstages of the writing process: I cannot thank them enough.Nancy Armstrong and Sabra Webber provided shrewd insightsinto the publishing process, and I would like to thank Charles

G S Williams, too, for all his help as chairperson and seniorcolleague

Most deserving of thanks and acknowledgment are my wife,Eliza Segura-Holland, whose clinical and political insights intoschizophrenia and capitalism, and whose spirited intellectualcompanionship and unstinting support were crucial to writingthis book; and our daughter, Lauren Louise Holland, whoshowed consideration far beyond her years: I thank them bothwith all my heart

xvn

" Au fond de l'lnconnu pour trouver du nouveau!" To the depths

of the unknown to find something new: is this the battle cry ofmodernism or an advertising slogan? Could it be both? Whatreading procedures would distinguish absolutely between thetwo?-And what would be the cost to our historical under-standing of Baudelaire and modernism, were such procedures tosucceed?

However scandalous the alleged identity of high and low, ofelite and mass culture may once have seemed, it has by nowbecome commonplace The modernist attempt to salvage orforge some domain of authenticity over and against thewasteland of commercial culture has been swallowed whole bycommercialism itself: " defamiliarization," as the RussianFormalists termed the renewal of perception through aestheticinnovation and willed distance from the ordinary, is now a well-worn advertising technique, used to confer an aura of noveltyand 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 postmoderncondition), the techniques of modernism and advertising areone and the same

But can the same be said for Baudelaire himself? In one sense,no: advertising and modernism were only in their infancy inBaudelaire's day; their merger presupposes a degree of com-mercial oversaturation and sophistication on the part ofconsumers, a measure of sophistication and sheer desperation

on the part of advertisers, the assimilation of modernism itselfinto mainstream culture — conditions that were not met in mid

nineteenth-century France Yet in another sense, reflections onthe relations between modernism and commercial cultureappear throughout Baudelaire's writings The call to explorethe unknown in search of the new concludes the second ofBaudelaire'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 becameacutely aware of the complicity between his modernist poeticsand the very market society that modernism had set out to baffleand surpass; the prose poems in particular are highly self-conscious of their inextricable relations with the commercialcontext My claim, then, is that the emergence of modernism -for Baudelaire himself as well as for us - was and is incom-prehensible apart from the transformation of culture and livedexperience by the rapid installation of market society in Second-Empire France

This is not an entirely new claim about Baudelaire, nor aboutmodernism Walter Benjamin characterized Baudelaire as thequintessential "lyric poet in the era of high capitalism '5l GeorgLukacs, in studies of somewhat broader scope, has condemnedmodernism as a " reified " cultural form characteristic of marketsociety under bourgeois rule.2 Both provide crucial insights intothe relations between Baudelairean modernism and marketcapitalism as they emerged in mid nineteenth-century France.Yet in some important ways, Baudelaire's poetics defies thesereadings, for despite the notoriously varied and often con-tradictory positions taken by Baudelaire himself, the devel-opment of Baudelairean modernism entails an unmistakableevolution away from the poetics of metaphor in the direction ofmetonymy, and this modernist poetics ultimately diagnosesboth Benjamin's and Lukacs's critical perspectives as pre-modern: as metaphysical rather than ironic; based on epistem-ologies of identity rather than difference; embodied in dis-courses that are, in the terms of this study, metaphoric ratherthan metonymic in form

Benjamin's study nonetheless constitutes an indispensablepoint of departure He construes Baudelaire as a transitionalfigure who managed to salvage lyric poetry from marketsociety's implacable erosion of shared culture and collectivememory, by recourse to strictly personal recollection Bybringing Freud's theories of perception and memory intocontact with the material circumstances of Second-EmpireParis, Benjamin shows how the development of a hyper-conscious defense against the shocks of modern city life servedBaudelaire as a resource for generating specifically modernistlyric poetry from modern urban experience itself.

But the characteristic Baudelairean defense mechanism, as itappears 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 dynamics One result will be the exploration of an explicitly

psycho-anti-lyric poetry, especially evident in the prose poem collection.

Baudelaire's own shift from high-anxiety hyperconsciousness topsychic splitting, I will argue, happened to occur in reaction toNapoleon Ill's founding of the Second Empire on the ruins ofthe Second Republic, but such splitting thereafter conforms toand illuminates one of the basic structures of capitalist society:the radical split between production and consumption that pitsbuyers against sellers in market transactions One of Benjamin'scentral insights, that Baudelaire as lyric poet of high capitalismviscerally identified with the melancholic commodity seekingbuyers on the open market, thus turns out to be right, but onlyhalf 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 ofexperience epitomized in Baudelaire's writings are basic con-figurations of postromantic, modern personality in marketsociety This helps make sense of the bewildering disparity ofopinion found in Baudelaire - and in Baudelaire criticism Italso explains why, as Benjamin put it, Baudelaire was bound to

"find the reader at whom his work was aimed" (p 109): the

split "structure of experience" (p 110) conveyed in the work ofthis exceptional poet has become the rule in modern capitalistsociety.

In overlooking the distinction between shock-defense andpsychic splitting, Benjamin conflates distinct stages in Baude-laire's evolution from romanticism to modernism; he situatesthe early sonnet " Correspondances," for example, in the samehistorical framework as the poetically very different, later prosepoem "Perte d'aureole." Lukacs, by contrast, distinguishesvery sharply between modernism and movements such asromanticism and realism that preceded it Some such periodi-zation is indispensable for understanding Baudelaire, even if wediscount Lukacs's visceral dislike of modernism and his prefer-ence for prose fiction over poetry as irrelevant for our purposes.With his key concept of " reification," Lukacs diagnoses theimpact of the market on social activity and cognition: marketsociety is characterized by the predominance of exchange-valueover use-value For Benjamin, the triumph of exchange-valuemeant that buyers lose all shared "organic" connections togoods and must rely instead on personal "taste," whichpromptly 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 anincreasingly anonymous public of consumers In studying thenovel, Lukacs is more interested in the effects of reification oncognition, since the vocation of the realist novel he champions is

to represent the totality of historical development in a givenperiod for the purpose of understanding

Exchange-based social relations fragment and specializesocial activity and cognition, with only a hope that the

"invisible hand" of the market will knit specialized work andpartial perspectives back together to produce a superioroutcome In addition to its deleterious results in the economicsphere, Lukacs concludes that the impact of exchange andspecialization 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 ofrealism drops away, abandoning the genre to evolve auto-

nomously in accordance with strictly internal, primarily thetic laws of development The thorough-going overhaul ofEuropean society by the market changes the very texture ofprose 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

aes-is mediated by exchange-value); the dominant textual modeshifts from narration to description Modernism for Lukacsrepresents the epitome of reification in high culture

For all its explanatory breadth and illumination of marketculture, Lukacs's account of the emergence of modernismconstrues authors as passive occupants of positions determined

by economic processes alone So for Lukacs, the reactionarypolitical views of a Balzac have absolutely no bearing on thecognitive use-value of his realism (just as the progressive views

of a Zola have no redeeming impact on his naturalism) ButBaudelairean modernism does not involve a passive loss ofcognitive access to reality, but the active repudiation of anydirect representation of the historical process The declaredintention 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 ismore and more firmly suppressed in the successive editions ofthe verse collection; ultimately, linear narrative is explicitly andutterly repudiated, at the start of the prose poem collection.The repudiation of historical narration belongs to a set ofdisavowals of youthful enthusiasm that, taken together, definethe emergence of Baudelairean modernism: the repudiation ofromanticism, of nature, and of any supposed "harmony" withnature in favor of the artificial (which is one reason Benjamin is

so wrong to locate " Correspondances" in the same historicalfield as "Perte d'aureole"); the repudiation of woman as

"natural" and of passion, inspiration, spontaneity associatedwith the feminine, in favor of a virulent if inconsistent misogyny;the repudiation of democratic aspirations, political engage-ment, and hope for a better future, in favor of pseudo-aristocratic cynicism and disdain In Baudelaire, these dis-avowals amount to a repudiation of history itself: of the

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 manydisappointments in Baudelaire's life, the rise to power ofNapoleon III resonates most fully in the public texts (includingthe journals and notebooks); it finds an uncanny echo in theother major disappointment of his life, which fills the privatecorrespondence: the loss of his paternal inheritance to atrusteeship 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 tradictory extremes of market existence: once a consummatebuyer (as dandy), he is now forced to sell himself (as prostitute).This private humiliation at the hands of his stepfather iscompounded by the virtually simultaneous public humiliation

con-of the democratic ideals con-of the Second Republic at the hands con-ofEmperor Napoleon III Utter dismay at the mass-authoritarianoutcome of a purportedly democratic revolutionary tradition(1789, 1830, 1848) prompts the repudiation of that traditionand 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 thecontradiction remains between the democratic promise and theauthoritarian realities of capitalist society

Benjamin's and Lukacs's insights, valuable as they may be,are vitiated by an overweening emphasis on identity Benjaminidentifies Baudelaire in terms of a unified personality-type (themelancholic), and collapses very different stages of developmentinto the unity of a single historical period In a very revealingphrase, 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 inhis own mode of analysis the very poetic mode associatedwith romanticism that Baudelaire ultimately rejects.3

Similarly, Lukacs identifies writers with their position in aneconomic process (reification), and functionalizes the unity of

the literary text as representing the coherence of historicaldevelopment.

These identifications are not so much wrong as necessarilyincomplete, requiringfurther differentiation The name "Baude-laire" designates not a single personality or personality-type,but a split subject occupying or manifesting a number ofdifferent "personalities" and traversing two or more moments

of historical development Such psychic splitting does not simply

"correspond" to the social conditions Benjamin cites inexplanation of the shock-defense, any more than it merelyreflects the process of reification to which Lukacs attributesmodernism: it also includes a complex of reactions to specifichistorical experience and developments — the sting of povertyand the lure of advertising in an increasingly commercialculture, the auspicious overthrow of Louis-Philippe and thescandalous rise to power of Napoleon III in a nascentdemocracy, the rapid transformation of Paris and the dynamics

of modern urban life - whose effects are legible throughout theBaudelairean corpus, even though history itself is nowhererepresented as such in the poetic works themselves This studythus answers the deconstructive challenge to produce a literaryhistory that is truly responsive to historical events, withoutpresuming that literary discourse faithfully represents a historywhich takes place outside the text itself.4 Baudelaire's texts,finally, are not unified but dispersed; the series of threepublished poetry collections does not directly represent history,but will be read in relation to and as part of a larger historicaldevelopment to be reconstructed - one of whose results isprecisely the modernist repudiation of linear-progressive his-torical narration

My aim, in a word, is to read the texts of Baudelaire in arelation to their historical contexts that is metonymic ratherthan metaphoric in nature, that seeks differences rather thanpresupposing identity between them, that constructs an " absentcause" (to invoke Althusser's term) - i.e historical develop-ments 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

Fleurs du Mai and on the differences between them and the prose

collection.6 These differences are not random: in response to ahost 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 titlesand 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 nonethelessinsistent shift in Baudelairean poetics away from metaphortoward metonymy

Ever since Barbey d'Aurevilly's famous remark attributing a

"secret architecture" to Les Fleurs du Mai, Baudelaire

schol-arship has explored the question of the supposed structure of theverse collection.7 Baudelaire's own characterization may bemore revealing: he spoke not of a structure with a secretarchitecture but of a book "with a beginning and an end."8

And it is a book whose final poem issues a ringing challenge toexplore the unknown in search of the new, to travel via themedium of poetry The figure of "The Voyage" (the title of thefinal 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 entropicgloom of "Spleen" culminates in "The Clock" ("L'Horloge"

LXXXVII), where unremitting time counts down "thirty-sixhundred times an hour" the meaningless seconds leading todeath Time is depicted here metonymically, as a purely linearsuccession of isolated moments, each signaling the poet'simminent 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 encountersthat befall the poet who maintains unflinching contact with theturbulent urban milieu Traveling, of course, combines the

temporal succession of moments with the spatial succession ofplaces: following Baudelaire, it would (via Rimbaud and Gide,

in Beckett, Butor, Robbe-Grillet) become one of the fewremaining touchstones of modernist narrative, a kind of last-ditch, zero-degree plot structure when any more elaboratepretext for narration would appear contrived and thereforeundesirable

It is significant that all of these poems - " L e Voyage,"

"L'Horloge," and the "Tableaux Parisiens" section

itself-were added to the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai They serve

to reinforce the predominance of metonymy that is alreadylegible 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 arship on the predominance of metonymy over metaphor inBaudelaire's work has tended to distribute this opposition overhis two major collections, opposing the romantic, metaphoricpoetics of the verse collection to the modernist, metonymicpoetics of the prose collection.9 By focusing attention on thechanges Baudelaire made for the second edition of verse, I aim

schol-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 certainties of modernity is as central to the verse collection as it

un-is characterun-istic of the latter's relation to the prose collection.10

While the concept of metonymy enables us to trace thedevelopment of Baudelairean poetics across the three majorcollections, explanation of this trajectory depends on a concept

of "decoding" derived from the work of Gilles Deleuze andFelix Guattari.11 The range and power of this term arise fromtheir transcription of diverse social, psychological, and culturalphenomena into a historical, poststructuralist semiotics theycall "schizoanalysis." According to Deleuze and Guattari,decoding is a basic feature of capitalism; the aim here is todemonstrate its operation in texts and other cultural artifacts, inindividual psychodynamics, and in the socio-economic and

cultural dynamics of market society, simultaneously Thisintroductory chapter outlines the functioning of decoding inthese three domains: the social, the psychological, and thetextual The succeeding parts of the book then examineBaudelaire's works in each of these domains, moving from thetextual (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 willmove through the verse collection (Parts I and II) to the prosecollection (Part III) - even though both collections are marked

by historical context and equally affected by the metonymy ofdecoding In order to make intensive analysis of individualpoems 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 revisionsBaudelaire made for the second (1861) edition: the additions tothe cycle of poems devoted to beauty; the additions and re-arrangement 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 bymetonymic decoding in its characteristically modernist form Ileave to the concluding chapter some methodological reflections

on another schizoanalytic category I have found especiallyuseful; there I reconsider the work of Baudelaire as an

" apparatus of registration " for the processes of decoding teristic of capitalist society at the emergence of modernism.Decoding, in the sense it is used here, has nothing to do withthe process of translating an incomprehensible, "encoded"message into a more familiar code so as to enable or improvecomprehension It refers instead to processes which disrupt andsubvert the very functioning of codes altogether AlthoughDeleuze and Guattari almost never employ the term "meton-ymy," I have found it useful in bringing their notion of

charac-"decoding" into simultaneous contact with the poetics and thepsychodynamics of Baudelaire's texts Like "decoding," theconcept of metonymy cuts across various domains: I draw mostdirectly on the linguistic and psychoanalytic uses of the term

developed in the work of Roman Jakobson and Jacques Lacan.

As the figure of travel in "Le Voyage" suggests, metonymyproves useful in this regard because it involves both time andspace, both duration and context, both desire and reference

As a poststructuralist semiotics, schizoanalysis accepts many

of the basic tenets of structuralism: the importance of like codes of behavior and signification, the general priority of

language-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 Thepoint is not that behavior and practices are no longerunderstood to be governed by structure, but that structures areheterogeneous - de-centered and multiple For poststructural-ism, codes are not only internally conflicted and ultimatelyincomplete, they also conflict among themselves, overlap andleave interstices For schizoanalysis, decoding is importantbecause it magnifies the interstices, illuminating and aggra-vating 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, italso proposes to account for its emergence historically Codesare not always equally unstable or "undecidable": rather, theyare relatively unstable, and their degree of instability varieshistorically It is especially under capitalism, according toschizoanalysis, that social codes become widely unstable,enabling trajectories of decoding such as Baudelaire's tointensify and proliferate

SOCIAL DECODING

The inherent instability of codes is magnified under capitalismbecause 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, becausehere differentials between abstract, measurable quantities - thebasis of surplus-value — count for more than similarities between

sensible qualities - the basis of metaphor and of codes Hencethe predilection for difference and metonymy in poststructu-ralism, which is a critical perspective derived in large part fromthe modernist and avant-garde cultural movements of nascentmarket society to begin with With the predominance ofexchange-value, decoded difference prevails over coded ident-ity, as market society in Marx's phrase "strips the halo" fromprevious forms of social intercourse, reducing them to morestrictly calculable, commercial concerns.12

Social decoding, as Fredric Jameson has remarked, hascertain affinities with what Max Weber called "rational-ization"-the process, epitomized in the Enlightenment, bywhich the familiar world of experience is subjected to " rational"explanation (science) and administration (bureaucracy), wherereason replaces superstition, induction and deduction replacestory-telling, quantity replaces quality, and so forth.13 Thedistinction drawn by the English Enlightenment philosopherJohn Locke between "primary" and "secondary" qualitiesillustrates the process of decoding very aptly The sensualexperience of the color called "red" has become in Locke'sempiricist view a mere "secondary " quality The corresponding

"primary quality" is (in our sense of the term) not a quality atall, but an abstract quantity: a range of the color-spectrumdetermined 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 withmeasurable quantities As Weber suggests, while there may be again in manipulability of the empirical world to be had through

"rationalized" attention to "primary" rather than ary" qualities, the price to be paid for such rationalization is the

"second-"disenchantment" of the world we inhabit as sentient humanbeings, which is rendered strictly meaningless in the process.There are, however, two important differences betweenrationalization and decoding First of all, and in line withLukacs's similar rewriting of rationalization as " reification,"decoding does not inhere in some properly sociological de-velopment peculiar to institutions or culture, but in the all-pervasive role of the market under capitalism It is the market,

as the very matrix of social organization under capitalism andthrough its systematic subordination of use-value to exchange-value, that fosters decoding by "constantly revolutionizingproduction [and consumption] " in the pursuit of surplus-value.

In their analysis of the dynamics of the market, Deleuze andGuattari distinguish three moments within the process named

by the single terms "rationalization" and "reification." coding designates the "de-mystifying" operations entailed inrationalization, the bracketing or subordination of meaning so

De-as to enable calculation "Recoding" designates an attendantprocess of re-endowing experience stripped of its "original"meaning with some semblance of significance, whether thattake 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 completelymeaningless; it proves indispensable, however, for the analysis

of literature and culture.) Underlying both decoding andrecoding lies the process of " axiomatization," which orches-trates decoding and sponsors recoding according to the logic ofthe capitalist economy.14

The first and still most fundamental forms of capitalistdecoding bear on labor and wealth Industrial capitalismpresupposes a critical mass of workers divorced from any means

of gainful employment and a critical mass of wealth availablefor gainful investment; it emerges when the basic capitalistaxiom conjoins the one decoded mass, of labor power needingwork, with the other: the mass of wealth to be invested as capital

in means of production In the course of expansion, otheraxioms are added: those of empirical science, linking technology

to continual improvement in efficiency of the means ofproduction; those of state policy and the judicial systems,defining the legal status and relations offeree obtaining betweenworkers and private property; and so forth

In Baudelaire's lifetime-the "take-off" period of Frenchindustrial capitalism - decoding, axiomatization, and recodingpervade the cultural sphere: the synthetic perspective of thesubscription newspaper written for a homogeneous audience oflike-minded subscribers, for instance, is decoded by the "ob-

jective" reporting of isolated facts in the mass-circulationnewspapers produced for the market and sold indiscriminately

to anonymous readers on the street.15 At the same time (withtextile manufacturing among the first sectors of the Frencheconomy to become capitalist), fashion becomes a veritableindustry: henceforth advertising must continually recode con-sumer preferences to stimulate retail trade and absorb in-creasing quantities of mass-produced merchandise - what Bau-delaire referred to as the "damaged goods of a good-for-nothingage" ("produitsavariesd'unsiecle vaurien" "L'Ideal" [xvm],1-2)

Due to contingent historical circumstances, the impact of themarket on mid nineteenth-century French society is particularlysudden and severe Napoleon's mass-levy armies not onlyrevolutionized early modern European warfare, they alsocomprised the first proto-mass market for military suppliers andoutfitters (notably for uniforms) But the defeat of Napoleon ofcourse dispersed that market, and the Bourbon Restorationthen succeeded in slowing the conversion of military markets tobroader civilian ones in its efforts to restore landed wealth to itsformer position of privilege over manufacturing and thebourgeoisie When the July Revolution installed the "BourgeoisMonarchy" of Louis-Philippe in 1830, however, market forcesstifled 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 themarket is correspondingly acute: Flaubert remarks that "all ofsociety has been prostituted" (adding ironically, "but theprostitutes themselves least of all"); before him, Balzac hadalready 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 morecomplex than the reactionary Balzac's straightforward con-demnation For Baudelaire, the implacable subversion of anolder 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 abad situation; but to the modernist, whether "The Voyage"

leads through heaven or hell no longer matters - " Enfer ouCiel, 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 alization/reification and decoding/recoding is that the latterconstrue the process not thematically, as does Weber, norepistemologically, as does the Lukacs of " Reification and ClassConsciousness," but semiotically Although the basic axioms ofcapitalism are a-semiotic — they involve a calculus of dif-ferentials among pure quantities — axiomatization is imbricated

ration-on both sides with sign-systems: the ration-ones it subverts in theprocess of decoding, and the ones fabricated in moments ofrecoding A major advantage of using semiotic terms ratherthan rationalization/reification is that they do not refer tobureaucratic or economic processes alone: culture, too, is alocus of decoding and recoding, and they are thereforedetectable in the psyche and in literary texts as well as in socialinstitutions And while rationalization/reification does accountwell for the tendency of the arts in market society to becomeautonomous and progress each according to its own formal laws

of development, it does not account for the modernist pudiation of modernity which gives force and direction to thatdevelopment Such repudiation can best be understood as acultural ramification of the decoding inherent in modernityitself: the aim of modernist formal innovation would in this light

re-be to accelerate the decoding unleashed by market forces soradically as to prevent its ever being axiomatized and recoded

in the service of capital accumulation (That capital has largelysucceeded in recuperating this gambit, and modernism to thatextent has failed, is as I have suggested a telling sign of ourpostmodern condition.) One aim of the present study, in anycase, is to show how the notion of decoding can serve todesignate and explore the interrelations among phenomenaranging from socio-economic processes, to psychodynamics, toforms of textuality and poetics

Once a critical threshold of decoding has been crossed, as it is

in the case of Baudelaire, the system of codes (or

"socio-symbolic order") comprising a culture implodes, and the binaryoppositions that once structured and sustained it no longerhold: good and evil, base and noble, nature and culture, manand woman, sacred and profane - all lose their stability andhenceforth float freely, subject to dizzying reversals and perverseappropriations Taking leave of movements such as roman-ticism and realism, Baudelaire rails against the "esprit desysteme" and proudly claims the right of self-contradiction; themodernist will try to make the most of modern instability: hisworks both exploit and aggravate it.17

Baudelaire's case epitomizes one important effect of thecollapse of socio-symbolic order: the referential function ofdiscourse becomes less completely mediated by a relativelycoherent set of codes In a perfectly organized symbolic order(were such a thing possible), all reference would pass throughthe defiles of the established grid of signification or master-code;all events, phenomena, experience would be understood ac-cording to the accepted definitions of good and evil, real andfictitious, and so forth For better and for worse, decoding fostersreference to reality against the grain or through the cracks ofsocial master-codes A premodernist like Balzac bemoans theloss of stable signification resulting from decoding (and inretrospect appears on this issue to be, if not downrightreactionary, at least hopelessly out-dated); the receptionaccorded modernists illustrates the obverse: the censorshiptrials of Flaubert and Baudelaire himself, like the publicexecration of works by Courbet and Manet, disclose thegenerally hostile reaction to reference outside the acceptedaesthetic codes of Second-Empire France.18

Of course, completely unmediated contact with reality would

be just as unproductive as a perfectly organized code isimpossible Yet the goal of unmediated contact with reality isthe informing principle of positivism, which emerges notcoincidentally at just the same moment as literary modernism inFrance.19 Though in a conventionally opposed sphere of culture,and aiming crucially for poetic rather than cognitive effects,Baudelaire, too, eschews established aesthetic codes to makereference to modern realities in some of his most charac-

teristically modern works The poetics of real reference in the

second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai will be examined in Parts 1

and 11, as it develops from the beauty cycle, through "Spleenand Ideal," and into the "Tableaux Parisiens." Given themodernist repudiation of direct historical representation, theshifting dynamics of real reference in the poetry are considerablyilluminated by consideration (in Part 11) of the more pro-grammatic statements Baudelaire made about reference andmodernity in his art criticism

PSYCHOLOGICAL DECODING

The second major effect of the collapse of socio-symbolic order

is psychological rather than referential As the coherence of thesocio-symbolic order succumbs to decoding, the elaboration ofpersonal codes in its place becomes possible and necessary; thisexplains the importance of the term "recoding" for culturalstudy, inasmuch as individuals (and groups) are forced orenabled to compensate for the demise of comprehensive publiccodes with local, private codes of their own devising Baudelaire(one among many) will thus place individual "temperament"

at the center of his understanding of contemporary art andcriticism In the same vein, Michel Foucault takes the heroicinvention of self through its relation to the present moment ofhistory to be the characteristically modern attitude towardmodernity, citing Baudelaire precisely as a prime example.20

The analysis of psychodynamics in market society in terms ofdecoding and recoding draws on the work of Jacques Lacan andespecially on Deleuze and Guattari's critique of orthodox

psychoanalysis in the Anti-Oedipus For our purposes, two

moments of their dialogue with Lacan are particularly portant First of all, their translation of Lacan's structural-linguistic version of psychoanalysis into fully semiotic termsenables us to discuss socio-economic and psychological processes

im-in a sim-ingle termim-inology, as we have said, im-inasmuch as Weber andLukacs have been translated into semiotic terms as well Lacan's

linguistic symbolic order is ruled by a law of signification

governing opposition, equivalence, and substitution: its

fun-damental opposition is the difference between the sexes; the law

of equivalence prescribes identification with the parent of thesame sex, while that of substitution proscribes the parent of theopposite sex, launching the subject on an endless search forsubstitute objects, which Lacan calls the " metonymy of desire."This symbolic structure and its operations are "guaranteed" bythe "nom/non-du-pere," (Lacan's intentional pun for thename and the interdiction of the father), which establishes thesocial bond by forcing desire away from the body of the mothertoward others and simultaneously translating the entire com-plex governing desire into the realm of social signification Incases where the law of signification fails, particularly when the

"nom/non-du-pere" is denied (or "foreclosed"), the resultaccording to Lacan is "schizophrenia," a purely metonymicform of desire not governed by the metaphoric grammar,syntax, and lexicon of the symbolic order, linguistically con-ceived Operating outside the law, "schizophrenic" desirewould invest anything and everything, including the personsforbidden by the incest taboo expressed in the laws ofequivalence, substitution, and opposition.21

Borrowed initially from the structural anthropology of Strauss, the notion of a symbolic order once implied a matrix ofconcrete social determinations.22 There exists, however, atension (if not an evolution) between the anthropologicalconnotations of the term and an increasingly mathematical orpurely logical use of it, in Levi-Strauss as well as in Lacan.Deleuze and Guattari, at any rate, insist on retaining theconcrete, historical and anthropological sense of the "symbolicorder"; here, I use the term "socio-symbolic order" todistinguish this sense from Lacan's own

Levi-A socio-symbolic order, semiotically conceived, comprises a

more or less coherent set of social codes that govern opposition,equivalence, and substitution, establish social bonds of variouskinds, and also affect social relations and communication,behavior, and cognition Socio-symbolic orders are not (or notusually) guaranteed by the name-of-the-father, but by what wemight call various " figures-of-the-despot," ranging from totemanimals, to high priests and gods, to heads of state such as

presidents and prime ministers.23 Schizophrenia, on this view,derives from the failure of the set of codes comprising a socio-symbolic order to maintain coherent rule over social relations,behavior, and cognition Operating outside or in betweensocially established codes, with no fixed rules governingequivalence or even metaphorical resemblance, the puremetonymy of schizophrenic desire moves from one object to thenext, free to invest anything and everything, indiscriminately.Schizophrenic desire may arise on occasion from the demise of

a certain figure-of-the-despot, but it becomes really widespreadonly with the systematic decoding of social codes by thecapitalist market: hence the subtitle of Deleuze and Guattari's

two-volume study, Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

The logico-linguistic and socio-semiotic accounts of phrenia do not necessarily contradict one another: presumably,inhabiting a socio-symbolic order riddled by decoding wouldmake it more likely and far easier for individuals to denysuccessfully the name and law of their fathers; conversely,denial of one's father's law in a socio-symbolic order firmlycentered on a strong figure-of-the-despot would be unlikely tofree desire from the law to any significant extent.24 At any rate,the second moment of Deleuze and Guattari's dialogue withLacan makes the priority of socio-historical over familialdeterminations of the psyche absolutely clear Lacan himselfhad already insisted on the importance of Freud's concept of

schizo-Nachtraglichkeit, or deferred action On this view, the child is not

"father to the man"; childhood events do not unilaterallydetermine adult complexes: memories of childhood become

psychologically effective only ex post facto or "apres coup," as

Lacan says, in light of later experiences which alone endowthem with meaning From this rejection of "infantile de-terminism," Deleuze and Guattari conclude that it is not mere

"family romance," but the full socio-historical context thatultimately determines psychic life

To stipulate that a socio-symbolic order entails concretesocial determinations means that it is subject to historicalchange: in this light, the case of Baudelaire is significant as anexample of the psychological impact of market decoding in mid-

nineteenth-century France At issue are the disintegration of theego, of its various modes of processing everyday experience interms of both cultural and personal memory, and an attendantopenness to and/or threat of engulfment by the forces of theunconscious and the real Second-generation psychoanalystOtto Fenichel already adverted to the generalized "degener-ation of the bourgeois personality" in the modern period, buthad no properly psychoanalytic means of explaining it.25

Granting the importance ascribed by Lacan to the mirror stageand the ego's dependence on the Other, generalized ego-disintegration as a historical trend must be understood in terms

of the disintegration of the socio-symbolic order itself

One function of the symbolic Other or "master signifier"within the psyche is to anchor the metaphoric axis of identi-fications that constitute the sense of self and individualpersonality by assigning meanings to things - especially, as inthe process of conventional therapy, to the events of one's life.The ego is always constructed or "integrated," according toLacan, in line with and dependent on such an Other orsignifier: this is one way he defines neurosis, and the ego as aneurotic formation (Here, I mean the term "disintegration"

to designate the failure or reversal of this constitutive process ofego-integration, not as some cataclysm befalling an originallysolid entity from without.) In Lacan's Oedipal-family meta-phor, of course, it is with respect to the "name-of-the-father"that the ego is constituted; for us, however, the figure-of-the-despot fulfills such a function - but does so only under certainhistorical conditions For the modern period, the so-called

"death of God" - or better still, concrete events like the actualdeath of Louis XVI during the Great Revolution (1793), or thesacking of the royal palace and the destruction of the throneduring the Revolution of 1848 - these imply the collapse of thesocio-symbolic order whose center the despot occupied orsymbolized, and a corollary weakening of the socio-symbolicbasis for ego-integration

Ego-integration is socially reinforced, according to Lacan, byentry into language and the symbolic order, which overlays ontop of the recognition-scene of the mirror stage another, quite

different (though equally alienating) form of identification: theduplication of self-recognition in the universe of social sig-nification via investment of the first-person pronoun-shifter " I "and the imprimatur of a proper name " I am CharlesBaudelaire" is in principle a fundamental assertion of self-identification, as metaphoric equivalence is (im) posed betweenthe two terms by the copulative predicate " to be " in the presentindicative Certainly the statement " I am King Louis XVI, son

of Louis XV, legitimate heir to the throne of France" — with thecopulative predicate linking the shifter to a proper namemagnified by a title and followed by additional metaphoricappositives - constitutes an individual identity in fixed relation

to a certain form of socio-symbolic order, indeed at its verycenter Here the symbolic construction of personal identity isdefinitive and lends it supreme stability.26

In modern society with its decoded symbolic order, however,individual personality is largely imaginary, based not on firmsocio-symbolic coordinates, but on the "private" fixations ofthe neurotic ego Imagine Baudelaire speaking in place of LouisXVI: " I am Charles Baudelaire, son of Caroline Defayis,stepson of Jacques Aupick, son of long-dead Joseph-FrancoisBaudelaire (and recently deprived of his legacy by my step-father!), heir apparent to the mantle of Victor Hugo, poet-laureate of France?" It is not clear what kinds of metaphoricidentifications are possible in such circumstances, nor whetherdiverse identifications will add up, come into conflict, or cancelone another out

The impact on individual psychology of the absence of astable symbolic Other and the dissolution of codes in marketsociety can be assessed in terms of decoding and recoding Inmost cases, severe decoding produces trauma, for codes not onlyconstrain, they also protect the psyche As their coherencewanes, the psyche suffers contact with a decoded, completelymeaningless "real" — Lacan's term for what lies completelyoutside all codes and signification, whether socio-centric (thesymbolic register) or ego-centric (the imaginary register).Taken in an absolute sense, any attempt to represent the real assuch is of course doomed to failure: representation inevitably

endows its object with meaning Nevertheless, much of laire's literary work, as Benjamin was the first to recognize, is anattempt to develop poetic vehicles suited to registering theshock-experience of the real that is characteristic of modernmarket society — the moment at which, for example, the poet

Baude-"stumbles upon words as upon paving-stones" ("Trebuch[e]sur les mots comme sur les paves," "Le Soleil" [LXXXVII], 1 7).Benjamin identified "Spleen" hyperconsciousness as one suchvehicle, but Baudelaire experiments with at least two others,whose evolution we will trace through his art criticism, in the

"Tableaux Parisiens" and in the Petits Poemes en prose If a body

of poetry can in this context be considered to be, like an

extended dream, an attempt to develop ex post facto the defenses

required to protect the psyche from some traumatic real event,

the trauma in Baudelaire's case was the coup d'etat of Napoleon

III, around which his published collections may be said torevolve in a desperate attempt to exorcise its dismaying shock-value

Far more common than poetry, however, as a means ofmanaging decoded contact with the real, is the process ofrecoding, which provides defense against the real through theconstitution of personality in the imaginary register Hereagain, Benjamin has identified one such personality: theromantic poet-personality of the "Ideal." But there are others

- the poet of lacerating evil, the poet of cynical distantiation, and so forth - whose evolution we will also tracethrough the series of published collections The differencesamong these various figures are important because they showthat the imaginary personalities compensating for the decodedsymbolic Other in market society are themselves alwayssusceptible to decoding in turn: the heroic invention of self inmodernity is a Sisyphean task, a perpetual reinvention of self asprevious "styles" of self become outmoded and are abandoned

self-We will see that Baudelaire's evolution from romanticism tomodernism is comprised of cycles of decoding accompanied byintense contact with the real, alternating with cycles of recodingaccompanied by withdrawal from the real into the construction

of personality