“It is impossible to remain in a large German city where hunger forces the most wretched to live on the banknotes with which passers-by seek to cover an exposure that wounds them.” – Walter Benjamin[1]
“I could eat a horse.” A phrase once expressing hunger has recently been transformed into a contemplation you may mumble to yourself while considering what to pick up from the supermarket for dinner. Such a thought resounds with disgust, yet that disgust has, over the last weeks, remained unanalysed, or perhaps unsynthesised. It has remained merely an outburst. Where it has been thought about, the usual conclusion has been that it has something to do with the domestication of horses, the fact that they are the sort of animals we give names to, and that under the conditions of their domestication they are often treated by their owners as if they offer some kind of emotionally reciprocal relationship. Against this, I would like to suggest that the disgust that is felt at eating horses actually has rather less to do with the fact that they are pets than it has to do with feelings about the history of class, the production of food, and the experience of contemporary conditions of labour. In this sense, the feeling of disgust must be retained in its material specificity, but its texture must be understood as nebulous as it is abstracted through the history of concepts, only to find them insufficient, breaking apart, spiritually refracting, to return once again to whatever material they do not capture.
Hunger
From hour to hour the sting of hunger was increasing, and horse-flesh had become a delicacy. Dogs, cats, and rats were eagerly devoured. The women waited for hours in the cold and mud for a starvation allowance. For bread they got black grout, that tortured the stomach. Children died on their mothers’ empty breasts. […] At the end of December their privations began to open the eyes of the people.[2]
Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray’s stomach-churning words, written only a few years after his first-hand experience of the events, describe the conditions of life in Paris during the siege of 1870. The government, he tells us, had, “far from evacuating the superfluous mouths, crowded the 200,000 inhabitants of the suburbs into the town” before the whole of Paris was to be cut off by Bismarck’s troops.
The passage, in its images of misery and horror, expresses the proximity of hunger to the historic eating of horse. It is with the word “delicacy” that we shudder most, for it poses an unusual question: what can we find beautiful under the duress of starvation? Today, hunger remains proximate to this feeling of disgust, about which we have read so often in the last weeks. Horse has been found only in in frozen and processed meats. It has been discovered in food used to feed prisoners, and in school dinners produced for a pittance and available free to poorer families, in hospital food but also in value-ranges in supermarkets. Horse is held at once in opposition to hunger and to choice of eating something else which is unaffordable; horse has come to occupy that narrow ground of necessity.
Abstraction and Money / Disjecti Membra Poetae
“I hasten to reply to this appeal by sending you a fifty franc bank note drawn on the Bank of Zurich, which I received from a compatriot living in Switzerland and who claims to have borrowed fifty francs from me twenty years ago. I would like to rid myself of this bill as quickly as possible, and here’s why: it smells bad. It gives off an odour of donkey that makes me nauseous.” – Heinrich Heine[3]
Much of the news coverage of the horse-lasagne-scandal has focused on tracing the path of the horse into the food through farms and factories, dealers and suppliers, throughout the whole continent of Europe. Many in the media have expressed shock that the food they eat each day is the product of a highly complex division of labour. This shock is, of course, not shared by any of the many millions of workers who labour each day producing feed for livestock, or feeding them, scraping up bits of meat hosed on to abattoir floors, or working in food factories, or transporting food to supermarkets, or stacking the shelves. No. This is a shock specific only to a media class who need not concern themselves with that production process in their everyday lives, and for the most part won’t be concerned with horsemeat being all they can afford to eat. But they will be disgusted, that is they will express their disgust and outrage in public, by tracing the paths of the horses through that complex division of labour.
While the most sensationalist articles, which incidently describe the least sensation, express merely disgust for what we are eating, others are concerned with how it is manufactured, and how it is that we don’t know about these manufacturing processes. Upon closer inspection these two aspects become indivisible: what is disgusting is not just “eating horse” but rather the whole set of social mediations that make this simultaneously both possible and unknowable. The disgust is the occurrence of something concretely identifiable as horse out of undifferentiated processed meat. But what does it mean to get to grips with these mediations, to understand the social processing of food such that it becomes so unknowable only to reveal its true contents to us at some later date? To answer these questions, it becomes necessary to think more carefully about the division of labour and its history.
There was a double irony when, in 2007, the Bank of England emblazoned upon the new twenty pound note the face of 18th century political economist Adam Smith gazing over a set of images of a pin factory, with the caption, “The division of labour in pin manufacturing (and the great increase in the quantity of work that results.)” It’s a small piece of text that those of us whose fortune still allows us access to liquidity see often, but about which rarely we think. Adam Smith’s theory is misrepresented here, as he wasn’t (apparently) interested in an increase in work, but instead that the division of labour led to an increase in output.[4] Indeed, where Smith does discuss the “great increase of the quantity of work”[5] he is concerned merely with the production of commodities that arise from these technical innovations.
The parataxis introduced by this paraphrasing embarrasses Smith’s theory of the division of labour, which he considered labour-saving, because indeed this new industrial organisation of labour was precisely what led to two centuries of a true “increase of work”, to unimaginable exploitation, suffering, and death, as the industrial revolution imposed new conditions of unfreedom on those who laboured around the world. The diurnal circadian cycles and sidereal calendars of agriculture were replaced by the subjection of human bodies and natural resources to the perpetual motion and the new economics of the factory. The claim of this history is not to promote the “romantic anticapitalist” notion, to borrow Lukács’ phrase, of a utopian state of nature disrupted by the technical and technological developments of industrial capitalism, but to understand that these developments instantiated new mediations of nature – both external nature, and what is natural in humans – by “culture”. These new industrial processes, the history of ever greater divisions of labour processes, and their concomitant new temporalities had increased the capacity for a new society to mediate the conjoined twins of exploitation and profit. It was with this thought that Marx was to introduce his hundred-page litany of suffering, a meditation on the misery imposed by Smith’s “increase in the quantity of work” that became Chapter 10 of Das Kapital:
We see then, that, apart from extremely elastic bounds, the nature of the exchange of commodities itself imposes no limit to the working-day, no limit to surplus-labour. The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working-day as long as possible, and to make, whenever possible, two working-days out of one. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the labourer maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the working-day to one of definite normal duration.[6]
Or perhaps with more relevance to our discussion here, Marx just writes:
But why a double irony? The point of Smith’s theory was to increase production of useful goods, that is to increase “wealth”, and yet its image today has become familiar by its pictorial representation only on one particular good, a commodity with a peculiar use: money. As Marx wrote in Volume I of Das Kapital,
The notion of a “formal use-value” is strange; use normally refers to content of a commodity. It is stranger still, when we realise that this is not to be merely one form among many in society, but rather a total form through which all other commodities may be mediated. That is, it does not serve humans as other commodities do, but instead money serves to relate commodities to one another, and in turn, allows humans to relate to other commodities through the transformation of their activity, labour, into a commodity. Wealth can only be expressed in money insofar as money is nothing but a capacity of other commodities to exchange, and where that is not possible, money ceases to be an expression of wealth.
This thought was well expressed by Marx 20 years earlier, and here we can return to horses. In his manuscript on ‘The Power of Money’ of 1844 he quotes Mephistopheles from Goethe’s Faust:
Was Henker! Freilich Händ’ und Füße
Und Kopf und Hintre, die sind dein!
Doch alles, was ich frisch genieße,
Ist des drum weniger mein?
Wenn ich sechs Hengste zahlen kann
Sind ihre Kräfte nicht die meine?
Ich renne zu und bin ein rechter Mann
Als hätt’ ich vierundzwanzig Beine.““What, man! confound it, hands and feet
And head and backside, all are yours!
And what we take while life is sweet,
Is that to be declared not ours?
Six stallions, say, I can afford,
Is not their strength my property?
I tear along, a sporting lord,
As if their legs belonged to me.”[9]
It is worthwhile preserving all that is most gruesome in this imagery before considering Marx’s exegesis. In order for any exchange to take place, both the human and the horse must be dismembered, split into their component parts (hands and feet and head and backside) before they can be recomposed into the fantastic chimera of a man with the 24 legs of a horse.
Marx continues:
That which is for me through the medium of money – that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy) – that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. […] I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame.[10]
Each person, under these conditions of exchange is made inhuman. Their attributes are constituted by this gruesome exchange. Marx is to summarise this idea:
If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation? It is the coin that really separates as well as the real binding agent – the […] chemical power of society.[11]
Just as money might bond us to the world of things, so too it separates us from ourselves as natural, and indeed all nature, and instead enforces a self-relation mediated by this new social form. We can here return to this total “formal use value” of money, as the means by which what is organic in the human becomes inorganic through this mediation, what is natural becomes unnatural, what is real becomes phantastic. During the twentieth century, Alfred Sohn-Rethel was to return to the problem of the coin, which in 1867 Marx had claimed sustained a “two-fold” use value, by claiming that in fact its second “formal use value” comes to dominate its other use. This change occurs under the seal of authority:
In coinage the previous relationship by which the value status of a commodity serving as money was subordinated to, and covered up by, its material status is reversed. A coin has it stamped upon its body that it is to serve as a means of exchange and not as an object of use. Its weight and metallic purity are guaranteed by the issuing authority so that, if by the wear and tear of circulation it has lost weight, full replacement is provided. Its physical matter has visibly become a mere carrier of its social function. A coin, therefore, is a thing which conforms to the postulates of the exchange abstraction and is supposed, among other things, to consist of an immutable substance, a substance over which time has no power, and which stands in antithetic contrast to any matter found in nature.”[12]
Here we can see, perhaps, the establishment of the most fundamental claim to identity of capital: that of the temporality of moto perpetuo of factory work, and the temporality of the immutability of the form of value. What might be the deepest irony of the twenty pound note is that its seal of authority is nothing but the representation of the form of division of labour, of alienation, of abstraction of what is human into the form of value. This money is too honest. As Benjamin wrote, shortly after the crisis and hyperinflation in Germany in the early 1920s:
A descriptive analysis of banknotes is needed. The unlimited satirical force of such a book would be equalled only by its objectivity. For nowhere more naively than in these documents does capitalism display itself in solemn earnest. The innocent cupids frolicking about numbers, the goddesses holding tablets of the law, the stalwart heroes sheathing their swords before monetary units are a world of their own: ornamenting a façade of hell.[13]
The supposed identity of the temporalities of work and value, of the inorganic constitution of the human, so that she may assemble herself in the phantastic form of capital without rest is false. For in every attempt to reproduce that identity, some non-identical remainder is carried forth: that of used up people, that of people whose lives have been exhausted by work, and who cannot work any longer. While today, all death is murder by capital’s newest technologies, human death is all that is left of nature, or rather all that is recognisable as natural in its sublation into capital. That is the power of the concept of capital as “dead labour”, for there in death, in used up people that are present in our every exchange, remains the most violent of memories. We might, with this thought, read Marx and Benjamin together:
There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides. Hence is it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class.[14]
The Social Democrats preferred to cast the working class in the role of a redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This indoctrination made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than by the ideal of liberated grandchildren.[15]
Aesthetically manifest nature and metabolism
This image of the having cut the sinews [Sie durchschnitt ihr damit die Sehne…] brings to my mind an excellent essay by Keston Sutherland, ‘Marx in Jargon’, which explores the metaphorics and poetics of Marx’s thought. There he analyses Marx’s use of the word ‘Gallerte’, which appears in the analysis of the commodity in Chapter 1 of Das Kapital in Marx’s description of “abstract human labour”. Sutherland explains,
Gallerte is not an abstract noun. Gallerte is now, and was when Marx used it, the name not of a process like freezing or coagulating, but of a specific commodity. Marx’s German readers will not only have bought Gallerte, they will have eaten it; and in using the name of this particular commodity to describe not “homogeneous” but, on the contrary, “unterschiedslose,” that is, “undifferentiated” human labour, Marx’s intention is not simply to educate his readers but also to disgust them.
The image of human labour reduced to Gallerte is disgusting. Gallerte is not ice, the natural and primordial, solid and cold mass that can be transformed back into its original condition by application of (e.g. human) warmth; it is a “halbfeste, zitternde,” that is, a “semisolid, tremulous” comestible mass, inconvertible back into the “meat, bone[and] connective tissue” of the various animals used indifferently to produce it.[16]
For Sutherland, and indeed for Marx before him, the point of this sort of writing is to attempt to make explicit the conditions of the perpetual ruination of what is human by capital. That is, to show the very texture of human suffering and death that results, and has resulted from, the relations and techniques of capitalist accumulation. It is an important historical move, but one which is perhaps not expansive enough: the question to which it leads us is, is there no critical value in the image of nature, or in the image of the end of nature, beyond that which is human? This is a question that has been taken up by some of the better critical theoretical and artistic thinking of the twentieth century, perhaps most significantly in Adorno’s late thought on the aesthetics of animals.
There is nothing so expressive as the eyes of animals – especially apes – which seem objectively to mourn that they are not human.[17]
The song of birds is found beautiful by everyone; no feeling person in whom something of the European tradition survives fails to be moved by the sound of a robin after a rain shower. Yet something frightening lurks in the song of birds precisely because it is not a song but obeys the spell in which it is enmeshed. The fright appears as well in the threat of migratory flocks, which bespeak ancient divinations, forever presaging ill fortune. With regard to its content, the ambiguity of natural beauty has its origin in mythical ambiguity.[18]
Those are difficult sentences, that I can’t expand upon at length here, but they may at least begin to help to begin an analysis of the disgust that is apparent in the image that is brought to mind of a horse in a lasagne. For is it not that same “European tradition” that Adorno talks about, that at the same time as preserving the mythic significance of birdsong, has reduced all sociality to the inorganic, has suppressed any expression of nature altogether? And is the problem of the disgust at the horse, contrary to the thought that these animals were too socialised or too domesticated to eat, not in fact based on a though that they are too natural to be found in “processed meat”? For this is what the friendliness of their domestic socialisation seeks to preserve.
For Marx, the point, although centering on the human, was at the same time a problem of nature as such. In a speech of 1856 Marx made the point that, “at the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy.”[19] In his later works, Marx was to describe this process, the human interaction with nature through various forms of appropriation or domination, as “metabolism.” [Stoffwechsel][20]
Different use-values contain very different proportions of labour and natural products, but use-value always comprises a natural element. As useful activity directed to the appropriation of natural factors in one form or another, labour is a natural condition of human existence, a condition of material interchange [Stoffwechsel] between man and nature, quite independent of the form of society. On the other hand, the labour which posits exchange-value is a specific social form of labour.[21]
It has often been noted that this word, Stoffwechsel, when broken down into its component parts, can mean merely “material interchange” or the “exchange of matter”, but it does retain also a bodily meaning, and Marx’s use of the term cannot and ought not straightforwardly be removed from its metaphoric meaning vis-à-vis eating, digestion, and conversion into energy. Indeed, alongside the more famous “obstetric metaphors” of Marx, the digestive metaphors have been often ignored, and they include not only the production of food as noted by Sutherland, or its consumption in metabolism, but also of excrement, in order to produce a new nature in which the process may begin again.
"The use of the excrements of production and consumption extends along with the capitalist branches of production. By excrements of production we mean its waste products, whether those of industry or of agriculture (such as manure, etc.). By excrements of consumption we mean in part the excrements proceeding from the natural reproduction process (faeces, urine, etc., of human beings), in part the form in which the articles of consumption remain behind after they have been consumed (such as rags, etc.). In a chemical factory, for example, the subsidiary products which are lost in the case of small-scale production again form in the case of mass production the raw material for other branches of chemical production.[22]
I move to excrement here not merely to explain the habitus mentis of the capitalist ouroboros, but because in material terms, this too has a place in the hermeneutics of horsemeat today. The reason that horsemeat is cheap is that it is essentially a waste product of other modes of production. If it has become necessary for the poor to eat, that necessity finds itself in the material of the excrement of capital’s body.
Gebt, O gebt mir nur auf einen Augenblick die Gegenwart zurück / Fragments on Crisis
1. It is impossible to think through the horsemeat scandal, which has now expanded from Britain all across Europe, just as industrial capitalism had two hundred years earlier, without also thinking about the meaning of the current economic crisis. This is a crisis that has already become, for many, a crisis of starvation, most notably in Greece. But also the analysis of disgust at horsemeat must open a space, or a time, for understanding those last two hundred years of history, particularly those crises past, those periods of long decline and hunger. I find again an example from the last crisis – that of Germany in the 1970s, which was as much a political crisis as an economic one. In a set piece from Fassbinder’s In a Year with Thirteen Moons that strange constellation, of gold, of animal slaughter, of financial capitalism, and Goethe, returns.
This time it is not Faust, but fragments from Torquato Tasso. There is a moment of synergy between ostensibly diverse image and words:
Als Opfertier vor den Altar zu führen!
So lockte man mir noch am letzten Tage
Mein einzig Eigentum, mir mein Gedicht
Mit glatten Worten ab, und hielt es fest!
Mein einzig Gut ist nun in euren Händen,
Das mich an jedem Ort empfohlen hätte,
Das mir noch blieb, vom Hunger mich zu retten!“To lead me to an altar, like a sacrificial beast, so on the final day, they lured from me, my poem which was my sole possession, gained it with flattery, and held it fast. Now my only wealth is in your hands, which was my commendation to the world: all that remained to save me from starvation.”[23]
But the synergy is jarring precisely because the conditions described are not one of normal sacrifice – of the animal that is killed but not eaten, instead to be offered to god, but rather it is a synergy of the necessity of the actions of the animal before its death, and the necessity for that same animal for food, to save one from starvation. That animal finds the poem, a beautiful delicacy that is at the same time awful in that necessity. Perhaps this is close to what Benjamin meant when he referred to the ‘spirit of sacrifice’ [Opferwillen] of the working class.
2. The Guardian publishes a picture with the caption: “Athenians reach out for a bag of oranges during a free distribution of fruit and vegetables by farmers outside the Agriculture Ministry. The farmers are staging the event to protest against high production costs, including rising fuel prices.”[24]
Photograph: Louisa Gouliamaki/ AFP/Getty Images
I can’t help but notice that this picture is not one of people but of weak and disembodied hands, each one not attached to any body, grasping at food. I want to know if this kind of disembodiment, this taking apart of the body as the unconscious expression of the greatest hunger and the greatest need displays, for once, the type of ruination that is never seen explicitly in the grand division of labour, that instead is displayed by maps on TV screens tracing the path of bits of horse. I want to know if that disgust at horsemeat is separable from the disgust at the conditions under which today we can be expected, and will be expected, to continue living.
Complexity theorists produce a graph of the food price index, mapping the cost of food against popular protest and revolution. The revolutions seem to drip like blood from the peaks.
3. The disgust at horse meat is spiritually complex, it is a set of thoughts and feelings overlaid upon one another. It becomes impossible to remove one part: the bodily social memory of crises past, the suffering of those in Paris in 1870, whose memory today in London appears as startled factoids: “the French eat horse you know” as if these phenomena weren’t part of our own history; or the using up of capital’s waste products; or the strange image of something natural in the midst of something processed, which was supposed to be natural in the first place; or in the ever-present images of finance that run between screens; or the quiet knowledge of the current proximity of horsemeat to hunger that no-one quite seems able to acknowlege. There is a feeling that all of this heavy history has already rolled over into our future. Against this, in sticking with disgust, we must side with Tasso: Give, o give us back the present.
[9] Goethe, Faust (Mephisto) – Siehe Goethes Faust. Ersten Teil. 4. Szene: Studierzimmer.
[13] Benjamin, One Way Street, SW v. 1, p. 481. (Thanks to Sam Dolbear for reminding me about this!)
[16] Keston Sutherland, ‘Marx in Jargon’, in World Picture 1, p. 7. Also published in Sutherland’s book Stupefaction: A Radical Anatomy of Phantoms
[19] Speech to the people’s paper http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1856/04/14.htm
[20] For the best discussion of the genesis and history of this terminology, see the Chapter 2 of Alfred Schmidt’s sorely underrated “The Concept of Nature in Marx”.
[21] A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch01.htm