The Arcades Project - Operi

understanding its Baroque form. He writes in Das Kapital (Hamburg, 1922), vol.
1, p. 344: "The collective machine ... becomes more and more perfect, the more
the process as a whole becomes a continuous one-that is, the less the raw
material is interrupted in its passage from its first phase to its last; in other words,
the more its passage from one phase to another is effected not only by the hand
of man but by the machinery itself. In manufacture, the isolation of each detail
process is a condition imposed by the nature of division of labor, but in the fully
developed factory the continuity of those processes is, on the contrary, impera­
tive." ."" Here may be found the key to the Baroque procedure whereby meanings
are conferred on the set of fragments, on the pieces into which not so much the
whole as the process of its production has disintegrated. Baroque emblems may
be conceived as half-finished products which, from the phases of a production
processl have been converted into monuments to the process of destruction.
During the Tbirty Years' War, which, now at one point and now at another,
inll110bilized
production, the "intenuption " that, according to Marx, charac­
terizes each particular stage of this labor process could be protracted almost
indefinitely. But the real triumph of the Baroque emblematic, the chief exhibit of
which becomes the death's head, is the integration of man himself into the
operation. The death's head of Baroque allegory is a half-finished product of
the history of salvation, that process interrupted-so far as this is given him to
realize-by Satan. [J78,4]
The financial ruin of Baudelaire is the consequence of a quixotic struggle against
the circumstances that, in his day, detennined consumption. Ine individual con­
sumer, who vis-a.-vis the artisan commissions work, figures in the marketplace as
customer. There he does his part in the clearance of a stock of commodities
which his particular wishes have had no influence whatsoever in producing.
Baudelaire wanted to have such particular wishes reflected not only in his choice
of clothing-the tailor's was, of all the branches of business, the one that had to
reckon longest with the consumer who conunissions work-but also in his furni­
ture and in other objects of his daily use. He thus became dependent on an
antiquary who was less than honest, and who procured for him paintings and
antique furniture that in some cases proved to be fakes. The debts which he
incurred through these dealings weighed on hun for the rest of his life. [J78a,l]
In the final analysis, the image of' petrified unrest called up by allegory is a
historical image. It shows the forces of antiquity and of Christianity suddenly
arrested in their contest, turned to stone amid unallayed hostilities. In his poem
on the sick muse, with its masterful verse that hetrays nothing of the chimerical
nature of the poet's wish, Baudelaire has devised, as ideal image of the muse's
health, what is really a formula for her distress: "I'd wish . .. / Your Christian
blood to flow in waves that scan / With varied sounds of ancient syllables;'434
[J78a,2]