Friday, October 23, 2020

The Invention of the Underworld by Dominique Kalifa


 

We will not seek traces of tangible experiences of poverty or crime in these tales of the underworld. Of course these realities arise incidentally because places and human stories may allow glimpses of the realities; some historians have endeavored to gather data from them, notably with respect to organized criminality. But the lower depths are essentially a representation in which are intermingled the fears, desires, and phantasms of all those who are interested in these places. “It is a confused heap of residual elements of all kinds and of all origins,’ wrote the Argentinian psychologist and criminologist Francisco de Veyga in 1903. It is an ‘imposture’ added Henry James in The American Scene in 1907: in his account of a trip along the Atlantic Coast of the United States, James lingers in New York City’s Lower East Side and criticizes stories that invent an artificial and sinister world. And that is how the underworld has to be taken, as ‘an aggregate of figures and scenes issuing from the urban imagination, a place where a thousand images are entangled: a thousand literary references, social inquiries, studies of public hygiene, news snippets, the moral and political sciences, songs, and films. Historians of culture have proved to be more interested in representations that express disquiet and anxieties among the elites, and substantial studies have been devoted to the consequent figures of repulsion, of crime, of danger, and to the practice of ‘slumming.’ However, no one has considered the lower depths as a whole to be a social imaginary that is subject to an overall reading, and this is what I intend to provide.

The notion of a social imaginary merits more precision at this stage, particularly because it has scarcely been a subject examined in detail,. And it also suffers from the strongly ahistoric dimension that philosophers and anthropologists have given to the imaginary. Here I define it, in accordance with work in historical anthropology, as a ‘coherent and dynamic system of representations of the social world,’ a sort of repertoire of collective figures and identities that every society assembles at given moments in its history. Social imaginaries describe the way in which societies perceive their components – groups, classes and categories- and hierarchize their divisions and elaborate their evolutions. Thus they produce and institute the social more than they reflect it. To do this, social imaginaries need to be incarnated in plots and recounted in stories so that they are heard, read and seen. The social imaginary is above all (as Pierre Popovic suggests) an ‘interactive ensemble of correlated representations, organized into latent fictions.’

Here, the lower depths and underworld offered for exploration arise from such a conception of the imaginary. Produced by troubled societies at times of crisis or turbulence, they offer at their margins a series of tales that aim to qualify or disqualify, so they speak of the intolerable as well as the tolerable in order to conceive and formulate possible lines of escape from the abyss. But no overseer has the upper hand in the elaboration of these tales; they are collective only by default and sometimes these tales take roads back. The plurality of their inspiration and especially of their uses accounts for their complexity as well as for their richness. .  .  .

These [imagery of] the lower depths were never immutable. Profound changes effect them too. However, they can be recognized as an incontestable transnational reality. Nothing resembles a Polish outcast more than an English vagabond or an Italian beggar. The iconography shows the same deformed bodies, the same grimacing faces, the same repugnant rags. At a time when the construction of national types was accelerating, poverty and crime proclaimed their transversal dimension. The circulation of texts, images, and motifs  (at least in the Western world) contributed strongly to this phenomena, to the point that we might consider the imaginary of the lower depths as the prime grand fact of cultural globalization. Thee fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were foundational, but the new sources of printing networks for spreading rumors, and an extended readership’s lively interest in these questions all increased the imaginary’s circulation, exchanges and transfers. Distinctions and nuances appeared but a Europe of gueuserie (roguery) indisputably emerged . . .

The distinction between ‘good’; and ‘bad’ poor people, which soon corresponded to a distinction between true and false poor, was one of the principal force lines that structured representations of the lower depths. The idea that countless indigents were fully responsible for a state they had chosen out of vice, laziness, or aptitude commanded a major share of the representations. By permitting a linkage of poverty with immorality, of indulgence with crime, this combination can be found at the very source of the phenomena. Until the thirteenth century (more or less)  the dominant opinion valorized poverty (even sometimes exalted it) as a sanctifying virtue . . .the decisive rupture took place between the end of the 12th  and the middle of the 13th centuries, dictated in part by economic and social evolution. Until then poverty had been collective and universal; precariousness was widespread and affected a large majority of the population, and it could be attenuated by charity from the village, the parish, the seigneury. But the context changed: demographic growth, transformations in agricultural structures, urban growth, and the spread of the money economy all tended to complicate and to stratify society.* The rising merchant capitalists did not want to be encumbered with people who were useless to the world’ and they insisted on the cardinal value of ‘work’. Poverty ceased to be a positive value and became the product of degradation. First in the Italian communes and then rapidly spreading throughout Christian Europe, the figure of the  ‘shameful poor’ emerged, someone who did not exhibit him- or herself and certainly did not beg. In counterpoint, this figure high-lighted the rise of another antithetical category, the ‘undeserving poor’, who were beginning to be described as ugly, dirty, infirm, nasty, ragged, contemptable, and rootless. This was the decisive moment. There at the beginning of the 14th century was born the category of the ‘dangerous classes . . .starting from this split, witness a continuous and irreversible decline of the ‘good poor,’ who became less and less numerous, in favor of the ‘bad poor’ who were more and more rejected. Reformation beliefs in predestination and the valorization of work accentuated these trends, Protestants no longer glorified poverty but instead wanted to eradicate it. . . .

One of the principal effects of these changing representations was to create an ample European library on ‘roguery’ whose motifs and themes would durably structure the imaginary of transgression. Texts that relied on lists of false beggars and people pretending to be poor dating back to end of the Middle Ages now gradually enlarged their nature and scope. There was a shift from inventories drawn up by magistrates or chancelleries to the literary treatise, from the judiciary to fiction and the imaginary, which was a sign of growing public interest in these descriptions . . .. the idea of a society below taking root as the inverted double of society above, in both its structuring and its hierarchies. “Beggars have their magnificence and delights, as well as do the rich, and, ‘tis said, their dignities and politics,’ noted Montaigne in his Essays. . . these texts, which dramatized transgressive acts or milieu, obeyed an obvious moralizing intention. Again, the normative design was paramount: it is always a question of reinforcing political authority, religious allegiance, familial and social hierarchies. But national or cultural nuances are also perceptible: the Germans and the Swiss concentrate on the victims, the English and French more on the criminals. Sometimes there is a search for contradictory sensations and ambivalent emotions that could arouse a paradoxical admiration for transgressors . . .**

This stigmatization of the ‘inferior classes’ was not limited to the discourse of conservative elites. At the same time, Marx and Engels were forging the concept of the Lumpenproletariat, the ragged proletariat, defining a fringe of impoverished workers composed of downgrade elements who were without class consciousness and were easily put to use by the bourgeoisie, for whom they served as a backup force. During his stay in Manchester, where he settled in 1841, Engels discovered the realities of a sub-proletariat that he often identified with the Irish, whom he defined as ‘excess’ and ‘superfluous’ people. In 1846 in a homage to the poet Karl Beck, Engels was the first to use the expression Lumpen to depict the milieu of beggars and thieves. In a passage from the Communist Manifesto, Marx similarly mentions ‘the passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layer of old society,’ and he sees this as one of the keys to the repression of the European revolutions from 1848-18950. The ‘Lumpenproletariat, this scum of the depraved elements of all classes, which established headquarters in the big cities, is the worst of all possible allies. This rabble is absolutely venal and absolutely brazen.’ Engels again returns to them in the 1870 preface to The Peasant War in Germany: ‘Every leaders of the workers who uses these scoundrels as guards or relies on them for support proves himself by this action alone a traitor to the movement.’ Marx, meanwhile, uses the expression in a slightly different sense to depict the declasses of all kinds who were found backing Napoleon III: ‘vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pick-pockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars- in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term la boheme.’ What is striking about this enumeration is it similarity to the ones filling the newspapers or the ‘physiologies of reprobates.’ It must be the sign of social reality in a mid-nineteenth century Europe that was in the full throes of an economic crisis and undergoing the effects of unfettered liberalism. But this sign also speaks to the force of dominant representations. In any case, we understand and why the advent of the underworld is inseparable from the fears  (or hopes) of a radical overthrow of the political order.

After changing religious views- the secularization of Hell as the Underworld-, the second phenomena was the emergence of a new cultural system based on the commodification and mass production of culture. Everything converged to make the decade from 1830 to 1840 that of the Underworld - and 1836 was ‘Year One of its Media Era.’ Newspapers, books, images, and stage shows were gradually absorbed into modes of production that tried to make them consumables destined to be sold at the highest number and at the lowest price. So, of course, the underworld lay at the heart of this mass culture enterprise. The revolution of serialized novels that many saw as a swamp favored texts that exploited the world of social outcasts. The extraordinary success- and more important, the seminal influence- of Les mysteries de Paris (serialized in 1842-43) remains undisputed . . .The Mysteries no doubt constituted the first great phenomena of cultural globalization. . .

The underworld was at the heart of mass culture as it arose in the nineteenth century and as it grew from there. The reasons for its centrality are numerous. Whatever the type of plot or narrative device, most ‘media stories’ love to dramatize a sociology of extremes that are strongly polarized. Opposite the pole of high society, aristocratic, and social elite figures who were traditionally the characters of fiction, the gangster and other inhabitants of the underworld appeared to play the obvious counterpoint role.  . .the underworld acquired a decisive function: to accentuate the social gap, but also to blur ordinary certainties by showing that pure as well as perverse beings existing both worlds, and to produce, by tales of fall and decline (or conversely of ascension), a strong fictional dynamic. . .a final reason relates to the need for ‘sensation’ - for horror, spine-tingling emotions, and thrills – which the media favors for both dramatic reasons and commercial. We know that the underworld – the ideal backdrop for incest, rape, murder, vice, material and moral filthy, obscenity and pornography – is  a reliable purveyor of these representations. This becomes even more valid as consumer’s standard of living rises above actual poverty, encouraging him or her to experience social fears as in the form of a spectacle. This explains why, despite long-standing criticism of the unhealthy exploitation of the audiences ‘base instincts’, the plunge into the  underbelly of society was – and remains- a major theme of the cultural industries. . .

* see:
https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2020/05/social-disturbances-in-14th-century-by.html
https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2018/11/power-in-12th-century-by-thomas-n-bisson.html

** ‘. . . then here is the desire to lose yourself, to go to the limit of debauchery, to descend, to encounter the obscure part of yourself that you habitually try to elude; to face up to evil, the dirty, the perverse, the damned, which the gradual secularization of our society is pulling toward a secular hell and which at the same time becomes a powerful motif, even a cultural myth. The Victorians, confronted more than others by both the realities and the imaginary of the underworld, whose insidious presence disturbed any certainty about social progress, were particularly sensitive to this dimension. An exemplary incarnation of bourgeois respectability, the good Dr. Jekyll arouses from within himself his evil double . . .this is also what Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Grey was seeking . . .these desires, this attraction to the most sordid of social margins, appeared all the more powerful because for more than five centuries our cultural arrangements has constantly stimulated them. Just like its partner violence, the underworld sells well, and its gradual insertion into the channels of industrial and media culture has only multiplied the supply. . .The media have known all along how to manage it, to justify and reactivate it at will. And done so even more effectively because this theme excels at working in various registers – information, emotion, drama, suspense, horror, eroticism, poetry – just as it excels at migrating from one genre to another, from one medium to another . . . These undeniable qualities have enabled the underworld to prevail as a sort of total spectacle that is simultaneously moral and transgressive, serious and entertaining, ethnographic and stereotyped . . .’ 

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