The Bourgeois by Franco Moretti

Author:Franco Moretti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2013-05-10T04:00:00+00:00

3

Fog

1. NAKED, SHAMELESS, AND DIRECT

The modern bourgeoisie, reads the famous encomium in the Communist Manifesto, ‘has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions . . . agglomerated population, centralized means of production . . . conjured whole peoples out of the ground’.1 Pyramids, aqueducts, cathedrals, conducted, agglomerated, centralized . . . Clearly, for Marx and Engels, the ‘revolutionary role’ of the bourgeoisie lies in what this class has done. But there is also another, more intangible reason for their praise:

Wherever it has got the upper hand, the bourgeoisie has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation . . . For exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe . . . The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation . . . All fi xed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.2

Three distinct semantic fields are interwoven in these feverish paragraphs. The first evokes the period that preceded the advent of the bourgeoisie, when the nature of social relations was concealed by a variety of deceptions: a world of ‘idylls’, ‘veils’, ‘ecstasies’, ‘enthusiasms’, ‘holies’, ‘fervours’, ‘sentimentalisms’, and ‘prejudices’. Once in power, however—second passage—the new ruling class has ruthlessly scattered all these shadows: it has ‘put an end to idyllic relations’, ‘torn asunder’, ‘drowned’, ‘stripped’, ‘reduced’, ‘swept away’, and ‘profaned’. Whence—finally—the new episteme so typical of the bourgeois age: ‘naked self-interest’, ‘icy calculation’, ‘sober senses’, ‘facing one’s real conditions’, ‘naked, shameless, and direct exploitation’. Instead of hiding its rule behind a host of symbolic delusions, the bourgeoisie forces all of society to face the truth about itself. It is the first realistic class of human history.

Naked self-interest. The masterpiece of the bourgeois century (Figure 8), ‘looks at the viewer’, writes T. J. Clark, ‘in a way which obliges him to imagine a whole fabric . . . of offers, places, payments, particular powers, and status which is still open to negotiation’.3 Negotiation: the perfect word. Though Olympia is lying down, indolent, and as if doing nothing, she is actually working: she has raised her head, and has turned around to assess a potential customer—the viewer of the painting—with that intent gaze that is so hard to hold.

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