The Arcades Project - Operi

exploited, we would be spared the inauthentic talk of an exploitation of nature.
This talk reinforces the semblance of "value;' which accrues to raw materials
only by virtue of an order of production founded on the exploitation of hnman
labor. Were this exploitation to come to a halt, work, in turn, could no longer be
characterized as d,e exploitation of nature by man. It would henceforth be con­
ducted on the model of children's play, which in Fourier forms the basis of the
"mpassioned work" of the Harmonians. To have instituted play as the canon of
a labor no longer rooted in exploitation is one of the great merits of Fourier. Such
work inspirited by play aims not at the propagation of values but at the anleliora­
tion of nature. For it, too, the Fourierist utopia furnishes a model, of a sort to be
found realized in the games of children. It is the mage of an earth on which every
place has become an inn. The double meaning of the word < Wirtschaft> blossoms
here: all places are worked by human hands, made useful and beautiful thereby;
all, however, stand, like a roadside inn, open to all. An earth that was cultivated
according to such an mage would cease to be part of "a world where action is
never d,e sister of dream.""23 On that earth, the act would be kin to the dream.
[]75,2]
Fashion determines, in each case, the acceptable linut of empathy. []75,3]
The unfolding of work in play presupposes highly developed forces of produc­
tion, such as only today stand at the disposal of humanity, and stand mobilized in
a direction contrary to their possibilities-that is, they are poised for an emer­
gency. Nevertheless, even in tmes of relatively undeveloped productivity, the
murderous idea of the exploitation of nature, which has ruled over things since
the nineteenth century, was in no sense detenninative. Certainly dUs idea could
have no place so long as the prevailing mage of nature was that of the minister­
ing mother, as reflected in Bachofen's conception of matriarchal societies. In the
figure of the mother, dUs inlage has survived the inconstancies of history, though
it obviously has grown more blurred during d,ose periods in which mothers
themselves become agents of the class that risks the life of their sons for its
commercial interests. There is much to suggest that the second marriage of
Baudelaire's mother was not madc any more bearable for him by the fact that she
elected to marry a general. This marriage evidendy has a share in d,e evolution
of the poet's libido; if the whore became the mastering image of the latter, this
ll1arriage plays its part. Of course, the whore is, fundamentally, the incarnation of
a nature suffused with commodity appearance. She has even intensified its power
of delusion insofar as, in commerce with her, an always fictive pleasure arises,
one that is supposed to corresond to the pleasure of her partner. In other words,
the capacity for pleasure itself now figures as a value in dUs commerce-as the
object of an exploitation perpetrated no less by her than by her partner. On the
other hand, one sees here the distorted, more than life-size mage of an availabil­
ity that holds for everyone and is discouraged by none. The unworldly ecstatic
lasciviousness of the Baroque poet Lohenstein has stamped dus mage in a man­
ner that is highly renriniscent of Baudelaire: "A beautiful woman, yes, arrayed in