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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