Karl’s Coat and Carbuncles
Shom Dasgupta
"You correctly observed from my last letter that the state of my health has improved although it fluctuates up and down from one day to another… Unfortunately I am continuously interrupted by social troubles and lose a lot of time…even my stock of paper will have run out by Saturday."
London, 7 August 1866, letter from Karl Marx to Friederich Engels (Raddatz 1980)
Introduction: Theory sans thought; citations sans suffering
Just as in clinical medicine, I have noticed a tendency in myself and in my fellow social scientists in training to hack at immense, often overwhelming, volumes of information with reductionist scalpels: just as “jaundice” prompts me to reflexively scan a medical text’s table of contents for “hematology” and “hepatology,” I have found myself cataloguing salient social theoretical concepts according to author, book title and school of thought. Perhaps this is not problematic in and of itself and, indeed, represents a necessary step towards deeper engagement and understanding. The fact remains, however, that these “buzz words” are referenced and deployed in abstraction from their social context. Whatever the reason for this frugality of thought (at best, convenience, more probably, laziness), the concepts and their expositors become reified, metonymic pellets of language. This is not uniformly the case, of course, and at times we are attentive to the impact of contemporaneous interlocutors or the political-economic context on a particular thinker. Even in these cases, however, the charge of alienation holds fast, I think, as we rarely investigate the local moral experiences and the material, phenomenological worlds that were constructed, inhabited and transited by the person who wrote the text under consideration.
Peter Stallybrass (1998), in his essay, “Marx’s coat,” reflects on this alienation of concepts from the human thought, intellectual labor and material resources required to communicate them, recounting Hans Christian Andersen’s story, “The Shirt Collar.” In the story, the reader learns of an unhappy shirt collar who, after several proposals to fellow garments and appliances at the laundry, decides to foresake dreams of vestuary marriage, submitting himself at the papermill to become the very page on which the story is printed. As Stallybrass notes, this twist restores “the literal matter of the book” to what is increasingly an “‘invisible’ medium joining the immaterial ideas of the writer to the immaterial mind of the reader.” (Stallybrass 1998)
This lesson is particularly striking in the case of Karl Marx, whose legacy to contemporary social science, as we learn in the social anthropology Proseminar, is a thoroughgoing materialist approach to understanding society and history. I, for one, have discovered that I am guilty of reifying the printed record of his philosophy: I assumed an expansive tome like Das Kapital could not have been researched and written without a great deal of financial security. As evidenced by the citation that introduced this essay, however, Marx’s household was often on the brink of bankruptcy, and, in fact, Marx expressed concern that he would soon be out of writing paper during the very months in 1866 during which he was finalizing the manuscript of the first volume of Das Kapital. (Raddatz 1980) How do we ignore the fact, as noted wryly by both Marx and his mother, that these intense reflections on money were written by a man who regularly ran out of it?
In any case, my objective here is not to demonstrate that Marx’s philosophy was ideological superstructure erected on the basis of his experience of financial instability. Often, it seems that such investigations have the unsympathetic objective of mobilizing social construvist arguments to make a political point about the mutability of Marxian political-economic critiques. For me, it is primarily admiration for his intellectual legacy that has drawn my attention to Marx’s lived experience. Not only am I interested in what I stand to learn from Marx’s life about “muddling through” my own moral experience (Kleinman 2006; Kleinman 1988), but I was also astonished to learn of the chronic poverty and suffering that seem to have characterized the Marxes’ life as refugees in London. My investigation, then, represents a very personal endeavor, as Lévinas exhorted, to “acknowledge and affirm” (Kleinman 2006) the Other in the form of a thinker whose ideas I find useful and engaging.
However, lest the primacy of the ethical proscribe any epistemological production whatsoever, and lest acknowledgment and affirmation devolve into shallow sympathy or voyeurism, it behooves us to establish a theoretical framework for understanding moral experience and local moral worlds before contemplating the details of Karl Marx’s lived experience of financial hardship, illness and suffering.
Theory:Grotesque ideas more wonderful than “table-turning”
The misfortune, instability and suffering that permeate accounts of Marx’s adult life exemplify Kleinman’s (2006) position “that dangers and uncertainties are an inescapable dimension of life.” Moreover, it is in the face of danger and uncertainty that meaning is produced and experienced, and that moral lives are made. Situations that threaten what really matters to an individual or a community pose difficult questions about how to life a moral life. Such threatening situations are a routine occurrence in most people’s moral experience but can become particularly acute or critical in certain instances.
Immediate threats can take on unparalleled acuity when they become manifest at the intimate level of the body. (Kleinman 2006) The experience of illness, both acute and chronic, demonstrates poignantly the intimate inseparability of corporal and moral experience. We discover and monitor both our bodies and inner worlds, not through given or a priori mechanisms, but via social constructs based on previous empirical experiences. Illness and other bodily phenomena are interpreted and imbued with meanings that respond to both strong emotions and interests. Indeed, the experience of chronic illness comes to be so intimately intertwined with the patient’s life that her illness narrative becomes a means of narrating her life history. (Kleinman 1988)
Through multiple exacerbations of chronic illness, the patient begins to lose her unexpressed trust in the continuity and resiliency of her body. This feeling of vulnerability, of diminishment, is only intensified by the incredible time, energy and financial resources that are absorbed by medical tests and interventions, the maintenance of remission, and intermittent illness episodes. The sufferer of chronic illness becomes hypervigilant, continuously reading the signals of her body and environment in order to prevent or prepare for an exacerbation. (Kleinman 1988) The daily struggle to cope with chronic illness can be described as “anti-heroic.” (Kleinman 2006)
The understandable exhaustion and frustration that result can lead to resigned pessimism about the possibility of controlling the illness. On the other hand, the patient may turn to moral, religious or medicalized perspectives and/or embody ritual behaviors supplied by her culture in order to make sense of the new situation. Often, patients will experience their illness in dichotomous ways: as illness experience qua experience or as the experience of an observing self, in which the body-self is alienated, or becomes a vehicle for transcendence or a source of embarrassment and grief. These two modes of illness experience generate a secondary, unresolved and dynamic tension between immense self-knowledge, and myth-making via cultural mechanisms, the latter of which serve to fill the void of alienation between the observing self and body-self. Ritual behaviors and culturally informed myth-making integrate feeling, thought and bodily process. (Kleinman 1988)
The aforementioned integration of “subjective” (feeling, thought) and “objective” (bodily process) aspects of illness experience supersedes what has been termed the “representationalist flaw” in past understandings of the body. According to Descartes’ duality, the mind is subject and the body is relegated to the status of object: ontologically, the body is a thing upon which worldly phenomena can be inscribed; anthropologically, it is a thing to observe and represent. (Csordas 1994) While Foucault’s conception of bio-power proves useful in capturing the immanent and generative modes of modern ordering and discipling of bodies, it fails to concede agency and subjectivity to the body. (Turner 1994) Taylor, Ricouer and Jackson all reinvest the body with agency. Csordas suggests the phenomenological term “being-in-the-world” to describe the existential, conditional immediacy that distinguishes a methodological focus on “lived experience” as opposed to representation. (Csordas 1994) Lyon and Barbalet have suggested another, perhaps more directive methodology of concentrating on emotion as both social and embodied phenomenon: affect is conceived as the interpersonal, public manifestation of emotion; and the body is conceived of as “haptic,” engaging in active sentience of the world by integrating voluntary movement and touch-temperature-pain-proprioception. (1994)
In addition to illness, another instance that can force a particularly acute and critical reevaluation in the individual’s moral life occurs when she becomes aware of something ethically wrong in the moral environment. A sense of responsibility for broad social-historical trajectories raises the stakes in the already opaque struggle to live a moral life. (Kleinman 2006)
Ultimately, the inherent danger and uncertainty of the world make for an unequal struggle that can be “fierce and desperate.” Nonetheless, the individual can create or imagine mechanisms to avoid fatalism, and these mechanisms become particularly salient in the careful negotiation of “gray zones” where the difference between sustaining and jeopardizing a moral life becomes exceedingly thin. The creativity and imagination of the individual in gray zones are crucial to legitimating new, “anti-heroic” ways of living in the world, regardless of whether large-scale social change results. (Kleinman 2006)
Thus, living a moral life entails a passionate anxiety arising from the aspiration to remake oneself and one’s moral world in response to convictions about what should really matter. Kleinman posits that the requisite interrogation of one’s moral life can provide a kind of “quiet liberation.” (2006) It is also worth noting, however, that this self-induced interrogation of one’s moral experience and moral environment is circumscribed at some point to ensure self-preservation and to avoid the paralysis of nihilism or excessive relativism. (Kleinman 2006)
Implicit in the foregoing outline of the moral experience is a degree of individual agency, however constrained by regnant social structures. This in turn implies a relative social constructivism according to which a dialectical relationship obtains between social structure and individual agency. Bourdieu’s concepts of social space and symbolic power illuminate this dialectic further: structures are somewhat arbitrary and historically contingent, and individuals have some capacity for shaping structures. Nonetheless, “this in no way means that one can construct anything anyhow, either in theory or in practice.” (Bourdieu 1989)
This last point has some important implications. The social space maps to geographic space, and symbolic capital, when acknowledged, corresponds to cultural or economic capital. That is, although there exists a plurality of possible structures, there is an elective affinity between permutations of symbolic hierarchies and material reality. Furthermore, the particular structure obtaining in a particular society at a particular moment is presented as “commonsense” and can come to powerfully shape an individual’s schemes of perception and appreciation. The individual’s habitus, including her cognitive structures, is essentially the internalization of structures from the world. (Bourdieu 1989) Put slightly differently, perception, the basic mode of gathering data for living a moral life, is “apperception.” (Boas 1889) The official currency of particular symbolic structures renders language into discourse, categorization (kathegorein: to accuse publicly) into symbolic violence. (Bourdieu 1989)
The appearance of an official, static “commonsense,” is, however, just an appearance. The potential for symbolic violence should not obscure “the objective element of uncertainty,” or the semantic, temporal elasticity and interchangeability of the characteristics of official “commonsense.” Symbolic struggle, then, can occur, and does so via either the reappropriation and deployment of components of “commonsense” (“the objective side”) or the direct contestation of those components (“the subjective side,” which amounts, in Bourdieu’s phrasing, to “a struggle over the legitimate exercise of…the ‘theory effect’). The symbolic effectiveness of any attempt at “world-making” through symbolic struggle is mediated by the “power of constitution” (which depends on access to symbolic capital) and the “power of consecration/revelation” (which depends on the homology between symbolic and material reality). (Bourdieu 1989)
Bourdieu’s contribution to Kleinman’s conception of moral experience and moral worlds assumes relative stability and continuity in a society’s structures. As previously described, in this framework, symbolic struggle can attack regnant components of commonsense but will depend on symbolic capital and/or symbolic-material homology. A less conservative alternative to Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the “theory effect” is suggested by Weber’s notion of “charisma.” Charisma emerges in extraordinary situations to meet extraordinary needs. Its scope and longevity are self-determined (in that it is entirely dependent on the enactor of charismatic authority and does not harden into an iron cage), and its effectiveness is attributed to “the virtue of the mission.” (Roth 1978)
As with Bourdieu’s description of the process by which symbolic capital is accumulated (and symbolic power thereby deployable), charismatic authority requires both that the charismatic leader prove himself to his followers and that the followers recognize the leader’s charismatic authority. The accumulation of symbolic capital, however, is described as a relatively long process of gradual institutionalization of authority; this more closely resembles Weber’s bureaucratic authority. Charismatic authority is, by definition, extra-institutional and arises spontaneously. It exists in the material world but is decidedly not of it; that is, it is inherently anti-economic, and, indeed, its continued appearance of authenticity and vitality depends on genuinely communist, non-individualist relations to material resources. It is naturally unstable and revolutionary: it can dissipate as quickly as it emerged, and its radical restructuring of society occurs not from without (e.g., as with rational bureaucratic organization) but from within individuals (e.g., via “central ‘metanoia’ of the followers’ attitudes”). Charismatic authority can become more stable and permanent through institutionalization; the flexibility and fluidity of charismatic authority facilitates the blending into an amalgam of extant institutions of traditional authority. The instability of charismatic authority means that it often co-exists, or potentially co-exists, with a more stable patriarchy or bureaucracy that carries out ordinary functions of society. (Roth 1978)
Exposition: The carbuncles and the coat
In the post-revolutionary years as a semi-permanent refugee in London, Marx’s experiences of illness, financial hardship, political research and writing, and domestic tension were all embedded in rich, interconnecting webs of significance.
Of the several illnesses that plagued him intermittently at this time, the one that most severely interfered with his normal daily functioning was what he and his physicians referred to as, “boils, furuncles, and carbuncles.” These lesions erupted continuously, distributed in the axillae, inguinal, genital, perianal and suprapubic areas, with at least one particularly severe, acute episode per year. The eruptions formed into painful inflammatory nodules and suppurative sinus tracts. This illness persisted for at least twelve years, beginning as early as 1862 and continuing through his most intense period of research for Das Kapital. (Shuster 2007) He received treatment from a number of physicians and underwent therapy at spas, as well. He was most commonly treated with oral arsenic preparations, topical compresses and surgery as needed. Concurrent with these carbuncles, Marx began to experience an inflammatory condition of the eyes that at times forced him to curtail his reading and writing. (Raddatz 1980)
Marx’s illness would leave him bedridden, as he would lament to Engels in letters written from a supine position because he found it to painful to sit up. (Raddatz 1980) He himself noted an impact both on his output and the quality of his writing, and Engels noted a stylistic sharpness when he was in the midst of a relapse. (Shuster 2007) Although these repeated episodes were debilitating, and although its relentless progression was accompanied by a growing disillusionment with himself and the world (for its failure to fulfill his revolutionary predictions), he struggled through pain and even avoided his arsenic preparations, which he felt made him temporarily dull, in order to complete his book. (Siegel 1978)
The progressive nature of the disease certainly caused Marx to wonder, “Why me?” His explanation was that his proletarian life in a proletarian country debilitated him through physical fatigue, malnutrition and inadequate sanitation. Both his mistrust in his evidently incompetent physicians and his inability to turn to religion required a moral explanatory perspective on his illness. This was a “proletarian disease,” and the only way to cure and prevent it would be to end his “night work,” so crucial to his endeavor to finish his book. Indeed, he, his family members and other interlocutors all understood his persistence as a sacrifice of his body for a greater cause. (Siegel 2007) His illness experience, then, became one with the narrative of his life history.
It appears that Marx did experience his illness dichotomously. Above, we saw that his experience of the carbuncles qua experience was one of sacrifice requiring moral fortitude. Nonetheless, in a letter addressed to Engels, he wrote:
"…I picked up a sharp razor, a memento from our dear Lupus, and cute the swine with my own hand…The rotten blood flowed, or rather squirted up high, and I now regard this carbuncle as buried even though it still wants some nursing." (Raddatz 1980)
The comparison of the carbuncle, still a part of his body, to an animal is evidence of a sense of alienation of the observing self from the body-self. His self-adjudicated sacrificial persistence despite his illness, at other times, becomes a corporal performance of his sense of self, an immanent “being-in-the-world.” (Csordas 1994)
Jerrold Siegel, in his psychohistory of Marx, draws suggestive parallels between his subject’s emotional state and his bouts of carbuncles. He posits that this disease was a somatic manifestation of self-directed hatred and anxiety over what Marx perceived as a failed enterprise, Das Kapital, and over the failure of his predictions about the future course of social change. (1978)
While many of Siegel’s analyses are insightful and responsive to Marx’s local moral world, this particular explanation, with which Siegel concludes his final chapter as a kind of victorious flourish, seems more like the product of literary fantasy, at best, and tendentious, unsympathetic and dishonest posturing, at worst. Indeed, a recent investigation by dermatologists revealed that, on the basis of a historical reconstruction of Marx’s clinical scenario from his correspondence with friends and family, he most likely suffered from hidradenitis suppurativa. (Shuster 2007) This debilitating condition is exceedingly difficult to treat, requiring a number of interventions that were not yet available in the mid-19th century, and is recognized for causing self-loathing, low self-esteem and depressed mood. (Shuster 2007; Klaus and Johnson 2005)
In any case, besides slowing his progress on Das Kapital, Marx’s chronic illness was also directly related to his family’s financial hardship. On several occasions, he spent several weeks sleeping at the homes of close friends to avoid his physicians when they would visit his family’s flat in Soho to collect a debt. (McLellan 1973) Ironically, despite numerous spies’ reports of his family’s quarters as “proletarian” or “subproletarian”, Marx and his wife Jenny accumulated annual gifts, loans and donations of cash from friends, family and supporters that should have been enough to provide them with a very comfortable lower middle class lifestyle. (Stallybrass 1998; McLellan 1973) Engels, for one, responded promptly to Marx’s constant requests—and even demands—for financial support, which were usually expressed in the urgent tones of a man hiding from bill collectors. In fact, when Engels sold his share in his cotton mill, he apportioned £350 from his pension as an annual stipend to Marx, continuing to supplement this generous amount upon request. (Raddatz 1980)
Nonetheless, the Marxes habitually fell into debt, and not entirely without consequences. Jenny Marx, in letters to a friend, told of an occasion when her husband was arrested for suspicion of theft upon trying to pawn her heirloom silver, emblazoned with the noble Argyll family crest. On another occasion, she describes, clearly mortified, the entire family’s unceremonious eviction from the flat they had been renting. (McLellan 1973) In letters following the death of their newborn daughter, Jenny lamented that had they not been utterly penniless at the time, they might have been able to afford either the physician’s fees or the therapeutic holiday to the seaside that would have saved the child. (Siegel 1978)
Of particular importance to Marx, too, their financial instability required him to put his coat in and out of pawn frequently; without his coat, however, he would not be granted access to the reading room at the British National Museum, where he conducted his daily researches for Das Kapital. In fact, on at least two occasions, he wrote to Engels that he was forced to pawn his coat in order to purchase writing paper for his articles for the New York Daily Tribune, the remuneration from which he would use to begin to pay debts, such as a cumulative doctor’s bill of £26, the equivalent of several months’ rent in their flat at the time. (Raddatz 1980; Stallybrass 1998; McLellan 1973)
An insidious flow of coats, carbuncles and cash seemed to whirl around Marx and his family during these chaotic years. Beyond the simplistic explanation of poor budgeting, what was behind this perpetual, indeed extremely harmful, overspending and indebtedness? What, exactly, was at stake? And moreover, why did Engels continue to rescue Marx from his family’s financial misadventures, even after Marx proved himself unable to respond compassionately (or draft a convincing apology, for that matter) to his “greatest friend” after the death of his partner of many years, Mary Burns? (Raddatz 1980)
With respect to the Marxes’ motivations, a number of possibilities have been suggested. In order to appear trustworthy and receive sufficient credit with the butcher, the baker, the cheesemonger, the grocer, and others, a certain level of outward bourgeois appearances and accoutrements were required. (McLellan 1973) That is, the family adopted or performed, through clothing and objects, a habitus identifiable as bourgeois, thereby conferring upon themselves a level of symbolic capital consonant with the credit they needed to maintain a bourgeois lifestyle. This line of argumentation is not as tautological as it appears: a diachronic shift in the family’s standard of living, coincident with a string of small inheritances, can be identified between their residence in Soho and North London. So the Marxes used temporary injections of money to permanently raise their average monthly expenditures. (McLellan 1973) According to Marx, his family life had him “up to the crown” in “this bourgeois crap,” and he often complained to Engels that his wife was not as resistant as he, and that she frequently became bedridden for “social” or “bourgeois” reasons. (Raddatz 1980) Marx’s complaints notwithstanding, the family moved shortly after each death of a child, and their extravagant spending may have represented an attempt to achieve progressively more salutary standards of living. (McLellan 1973)
Siegel provides a much more intriguing explanation. The maintenance of outward appearances was absolutely necessary to mask internal strife. While Jenny commented on occasion that she enjoyed the relative anonymity of London, her family was prominent among the French and German émigres/refugees, and her husband’s ascension as a polemical political figure made them an object of the scrutiny of spies, reporters, politicians and others. Marx was publicly attacked by enemies on the left and the right, in England, Germany, France and the United States. (Siegel 1978) But why would the Marxes go to such lengths in their dissimilation? Siegel proposes, albeit without extremely compelling evidence, that the maintenance of appearances became especially pressing in the context of public rumors—and Jenny’s discovery—that the newborn child of Helene Demuth, the Marxes’ servant, was the son of Karl Marx.
Putting aside the conspiratorial nature of Siegel’s hypothesis, and recognizing the fact that this possibility fits well into his broader project of demonstrating Marx’s irrationality and corruptibility, this consideration does bring up an interesting point. In the close quarters that they sometimes inhabited in London, how did Marx feel when it became evident that his wife had discovered his illicit relationship with Helene, who lived in their flat and had worked as a younger woman in the von Westphalen’s house before Jenny’s betrothal? Given the evidence, it is clear that Engels, Marx and his daughters made great efforts to suppress this embarrassing secret; for example, the collection of Marx and Engels’ correspondence to one another contains no letters dated between two weeks before and two weeks after Helene Demuth gave birth to her son. (Siegel 1978) To what degree can we understand Jenny’s overspending as an effort to sublimate her disappointment with the life she had been forced to leave by the man she fell in love with as a young woman? And might we understand Marx’s increasingly neurotic and strangely unproductive obsession with his research and writing as an attempted escape from a historical reality and moral environment so at odds with the ineluctable world whose evolution he had so confidently predicted only a few years before? To what extent was his “bookworming” (Wheen 2000) a return to the safer, rarefied philosophizing with which he had begun his career as a scholar? Did Marx see in his book the potential to redeem himself and regain some of symbolic and economic capital he had squandered since 1848?
With respect to Engels’ motivations for continuing to rescue Marx from bankruptcy, it is noteworthy that although the former, heir to a wealthy mercantile family, may have identified an opportunity to accumulate symbolic capital among the international left through his friendship and collaboration with the latter, Engels nonetheless distanced himself repeatedly from Marx’s publications. He commented that he considered it silly to keep his name on The Holy Family, which Marx had singlehandedly exploded Engel’s brief treatise of twenty pages into a monstrosity; similarly, Engels was very reluctant to write reviews to advertise Marx’s essays and books. Nonetheless, he obsequiously supported Marx, tolerating his at times personally offensive behavior.
To understand the Marx-Engels dialectic, it is helpful to recall the stunning presence that Marx supposedly had about him. Indeed, members of the Young Hegelian’s Doctor’s Club expressed relief when Marx began his rebellion against Hegelian philosophical spiritualism: they felt that they could think for themselves again, no longer overwhelmed by that “ox’s head” that was the domineering genius of Marx. Engels wrote superbly, true, but he originated the detailed historical-materialist analysis that would cause future generations to invoke Marx’s name and not his own. How did Marx, having produced only a few minimally circulated pieces of writing and having isolated himself in later years from many on the international left, become such a singularly infamous and feared figure?
Marx’s power over others—whether inspiring awed admiration or fear or anger—was, I believe, Weber’s charisma. Indeed, Marx and Engels represented opposite, complementary poles of authority: the former charismatic, revolutionary and incapable of establishing any stability in his life; the latter bureaucratic, succeeding within the regnant economic system and maintaining enough order to permit Marx’s boistorous creativity to flourish. Ultimately, it is noteworthy that Marx’s intensity and presence were characteristics noted by his family members from very early in his life. Perhaps, despite the long and established traditions of semiotic and phenomenological approaches in sociocultural anthropology, fine-grained attempts to achieve a deep knowledge of another person must rely on the biological and ontogenetic insights of fields whose methods and objectives that we have been to hasty to regard with scorn.
Bibliography:
Boas, Franz.
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Bourdieu, Pierre.
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Csordas, Thomas.
“Introduction: the body as representation and being- in-the-world.” In: 1994 Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Kleinman, Arthur.
1988 Illness Narratives. USA: Basic Books.
2006 What Really Matters. Oxford: OUP.
Lyon, M.L. and Barbalet, J.M.
“Society’s body: emotion and the ‘somatization’ of social theory.” In: 1994 Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
McLellan, David.
1973 Karl Marx: His Life and Thought. NY: Harper & Row.
Parsons, Howard.
1964 “The prohetic mission of Marx.” The Journal of Religion 44(52):52-72.
Raddatz, Fritz.
1980 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Selected Letters: The Personal Correspondence, 1844-1877. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
Roth, Guenther, ed.
“Charisma and its transformation.” In: 1978 Max Weber: Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Seigel, Jerrold.
1978 Marx’s Fate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Shuster, Sam.
2007 “The nature and consequence of Karl Marx’s skin disease.” British Journal of Dermatology 158(1):1-3.
Stallybrass, Peter.
“Marx’s coat.” In: 1998 Border Fetishisms. NY: Routledge.
Turner, Terrence.
“Bodies and anti-bodies: flesh and fetish in contemporary social theory.” In: 1994 Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Wheen, Francis.
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Wolff, Klaus, and Johnson, Richard Allen.
2005 Fitzpatrick’s Color Atlas and Synopsis of Clinical Dermatology: Fifth Edition. NY: McGraw Hill.
Theory:Grotesque ideas more wonderful than “table-turning”
The misfortune, instability and suffering that permeate accounts of Marx’s adult life exemplify Kleinman’s (2006) position “that dangers and uncertainties are an inescapable dimension of life.” Moreover, it is in the face of danger and uncertainty that meaning is produced and experienced, and that moral lives are made. Situations that threaten what really matters to an individual or a community pose difficult questions about how to life a moral life. Such threatening situations are a routine occurrence in most people’s moral experience but can become particularly acute or critical in certain instances.
Immediate threats can take on unparalleled acuity when they become manifest at the intimate level of the body. (Kleinman 2006) The experience of illness, both acute and chronic, demonstrates poignantly the intimate inseparability of corporal and moral experience. We discover and monitor both our bodies and inner worlds, not through given or a priori mechanisms, but via social constructs based on previous empirical experiences. Illness and other bodily phenomena are interpreted and imbued with meanings that respond to both strong emotions and interests. Indeed, the experience of chronic illness comes to be so intimately intertwined with the patient’s life that her illness narrative becomes a means of narrating her life history. (Kleinman 1988)
Through multiple exacerbations of chronic illness, the patient begins to lose her unexpressed trust in the continuity and resiliency of her body. This feeling of vulnerability, of diminishment, is only intensified by the incredible time, energy and financial resources that are absorbed by medical tests and interventions, the maintenance of remission, and intermittent illness episodes. The sufferer of chronic illness becomes hypervigilant, continuously reading the signals of her body and environment in order to prevent or prepare for an exacerbation. (Kleinman 1988) The daily struggle to cope with chronic illness can be described as “anti-heroic.” (Kleinman 2006)
The understandable exhaustion and frustration that result can lead to resigned pessimism about the possibility of controlling the illness. On the other hand, the patient may turn to moral, religious or medicalized perspectives and/or embody ritual behaviors supplied by her culture in order to make sense of the new situation. Often, patients will experience their illness in dichotomous ways: as illness experience qua experience or as the experience of an observing self, in which the body-self is alienated, or becomes a vehicle for transcendence or a source of embarrassment and grief. These two modes of illness experience generate a secondary, unresolved and dynamic tension between immense self-knowledge, and myth-making via cultural mechanisms, the latter of which serve to fill the void of alienation between the observing self and body-self. Ritual behaviors and culturally informed myth-making integrate feeling, thought and bodily process. (Kleinman 1988)
The aforementioned integration of “subjective” (feeling, thought) and “objective” (bodily process) aspects of illness experience supersedes what has been termed the “representationalist flaw” in past understandings of the body. According to Descartes’ duality, the mind is subject and the body is relegated to the status of object: ontologically, the body is a thing upon which worldly phenomena can be inscribed; anthropologically, it is a thing to observe and represent. (Csordas 1994) While Foucault’s conception of bio-power proves useful in capturing the immanent and generative modes of modern ordering and discipling of bodies, it fails to concede agency and subjectivity to the body. (Turner 1994) Taylor, Ricouer and Jackson all reinvest the body with agency. Csordas suggests the phenomenological term “being-in-the-world” to describe the existential, conditional immediacy that distinguishes a methodological focus on “lived experience” as opposed to representation. (Csordas 1994) Lyon and Barbalet have suggested another, perhaps more directive methodology of concentrating on emotion as both social and embodied phenomenon: affect is conceived as the interpersonal, public manifestation of emotion; and the body is conceived of as “haptic,” engaging in active sentience of the world by integrating voluntary movement and touch-temperature-pain-proprioception. (1994)
In addition to illness, another instance that can force a particularly acute and critical reevaluation in the individual’s moral life occurs when she becomes aware of something ethically wrong in the moral environment. A sense of responsibility for broad social-historical trajectories raises the stakes in the already opaque struggle to live a moral life. (Kleinman 2006)
Ultimately, the inherent danger and uncertainty of the world make for an unequal struggle that can be “fierce and desperate.” Nonetheless, the individual can create or imagine mechanisms to avoid fatalism, and these mechanisms become particularly salient in the careful negotiation of “gray zones” where the difference between sustaining and jeopardizing a moral life becomes exceedingly thin. The creativity and imagination of the individual in gray zones are crucial to legitimating new, “anti-heroic” ways of living in the world, regardless of whether large-scale social change results. (Kleinman 2006)
Thus, living a moral life entails a passionate anxiety arising from the aspiration to remake oneself and one’s moral world in response to convictions about what should really matter. Kleinman posits that the requisite interrogation of one’s moral life can provide a kind of “quiet liberation.” (2006) It is also worth noting, however, that this self-induced interrogation of one’s moral experience and moral environment is circumscribed at some point to ensure self-preservation and to avoid the paralysis of nihilism or excessive relativism. (Kleinman 2006)
Implicit in the foregoing outline of the moral experience is a degree of individual agency, however constrained by regnant social structures. This in turn implies a relative social constructivism according to which a dialectical relationship obtains between social structure and individual agency. Bourdieu’s concepts of social space and symbolic power illuminate this dialectic further: structures are somewhat arbitrary and historically contingent, and individuals have some capacity for shaping structures. Nonetheless, “this in no way means that one can construct anything anyhow, either in theory or in practice.” (Bourdieu 1989)
This last point has some important implications. The social space maps to geographic space, and symbolic capital, when acknowledged, corresponds to cultural or economic capital. That is, although there exists a plurality of possible structures, there is an elective affinity between permutations of symbolic hierarchies and material reality. Furthermore, the particular structure obtaining in a particular society at a particular moment is presented as “commonsense” and can come to powerfully shape an individual’s schemes of perception and appreciation. The individual’s habitus, including her cognitive structures, is essentially the internalization of structures from the world. (Bourdieu 1989) Put slightly differently, perception, the basic mode of gathering data for living a moral life, is “apperception.” (Boas 1889) The official currency of particular symbolic structures renders language into discourse, categorization (kathegorein: to accuse publicly) into symbolic violence. (Bourdieu 1989)
The appearance of an official, static “commonsense,” is, however, just an appearance. The potential for symbolic violence should not obscure “the objective element of uncertainty,” or the semantic, temporal elasticity and interchangeability of the characteristics of official “commonsense.” Symbolic struggle, then, can occur, and does so via either the reappropriation and deployment of components of “commonsense” (“the objective side”) or the direct contestation of those components (“the subjective side,” which amounts, in Bourdieu’s phrasing, to “a struggle over the legitimate exercise of…the ‘theory effect’). The symbolic effectiveness of any attempt at “world-making” through symbolic struggle is mediated by the “power of constitution” (which depends on access to symbolic capital) and the “power of consecration/revelation” (which depends on the homology between symbolic and material reality). (Bourdieu 1989)
Bourdieu’s contribution to Kleinman’s conception of moral experience and moral worlds assumes relative stability and continuity in a society’s structures. As previously described, in this framework, symbolic struggle can attack regnant components of commonsense but will depend on symbolic capital and/or symbolic-material homology. A less conservative alternative to Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the “theory effect” is suggested by Weber’s notion of “charisma.” Charisma emerges in extraordinary situations to meet extraordinary needs. Its scope and longevity are self-determined (in that it is entirely dependent on the enactor of charismatic authority and does not harden into an iron cage), and its effectiveness is attributed to “the virtue of the mission.” (Roth 1978)
As with Bourdieu’s description of the process by which symbolic capital is accumulated (and symbolic power thereby deployable), charismatic authority requires both that the charismatic leader prove himself to his followers and that the followers recognize the leader’s charismatic authority. The accumulation of symbolic capital, however, is described as a relatively long process of gradual institutionalization of authority; this more closely resembles Weber’s bureaucratic authority. Charismatic authority is, by definition, extra-institutional and arises spontaneously. It exists in the material world but is decidedly not of it; that is, it is inherently anti-economic, and, indeed, its continued appearance of authenticity and vitality depends on genuinely communist, non-individualist relations to material resources. It is naturally unstable and revolutionary: it can dissipate as quickly as it emerged, and its radical restructuring of society occurs not from without (e.g., as with rational bureaucratic organization) but from within individuals (e.g., via “central ‘metanoia’ of the followers’ attitudes”). Charismatic authority can become more stable and permanent through institutionalization; the flexibility and fluidity of charismatic authority facilitates the blending into an amalgam of extant institutions of traditional authority. The instability of charismatic authority means that it often co-exists, or potentially co-exists, with a more stable patriarchy or bureaucracy that carries out ordinary functions of society. (Roth 1978)
Exposition: The carbuncles and the coat
In the post-revolutionary years as a semi-permanent refugee in London, Marx’s experiences of illness, financial hardship, political research and writing, and domestic tension were all embedded in rich, interconnecting webs of significance.
Of the several illnesses that plagued him intermittently at this time, the one that most severely interfered with his normal daily functioning was what he and his physicians referred to as, “boils, furuncles, and carbuncles.” These lesions erupted continuously, distributed in the axillae, inguinal, genital, perianal and suprapubic areas, with at least one particularly severe, acute episode per year. The eruptions formed into painful inflammatory nodules and suppurative sinus tracts. This illness persisted for at least twelve years, beginning as early as 1862 and continuing through his most intense period of research for Das Kapital. (Shuster 2007) He received treatment from a number of physicians and underwent therapy at spas, as well. He was most commonly treated with oral arsenic preparations, topical compresses and surgery as needed. Concurrent with these carbuncles, Marx began to experience an inflammatory condition of the eyes that at times forced him to curtail his reading and writing. (Raddatz 1980)
Marx’s illness would leave him bedridden, as he would lament to Engels in letters written from a supine position because he found it to painful to sit up. (Raddatz 1980) He himself noted an impact both on his output and the quality of his writing, and Engels noted a stylistic sharpness when he was in the midst of a relapse. (Shuster 2007) Although these repeated episodes were debilitating, and although its relentless progression was accompanied by a growing disillusionment with himself and the world (for its failure to fulfill his revolutionary predictions), he struggled through pain and even avoided his arsenic preparations, which he felt made him temporarily dull, in order to complete his book. (Siegel 1978)
The progressive nature of the disease certainly caused Marx to wonder, “Why me?” His explanation was that his proletarian life in a proletarian country debilitated him through physical fatigue, malnutrition and inadequate sanitation. Both his mistrust in his evidently incompetent physicians and his inability to turn to religion required a moral explanatory perspective on his illness. This was a “proletarian disease,” and the only way to cure and prevent it would be to end his “night work,” so crucial to his endeavor to finish his book. Indeed, he, his family members and other interlocutors all understood his persistence as a sacrifice of his body for a greater cause. (Siegel 2007) His illness experience, then, became one with the narrative of his life history.
It appears that Marx did experience his illness dichotomously. Above, we saw that his experience of the carbuncles qua experience was one of sacrifice requiring moral fortitude. Nonetheless, in a letter addressed to Engels, he wrote:
"…I picked up a sharp razor, a memento from our dear Lupus, and cute the swine with my own hand…The rotten blood flowed, or rather squirted up high, and I now regard this carbuncle as buried even though it still wants some nursing." (Raddatz 1980)
The comparison of the carbuncle, still a part of his body, to an animal is evidence of a sense of alienation of the observing self from the body-self. His self-adjudicated sacrificial persistence despite his illness, at other times, becomes a corporal performance of his sense of self, an immanent “being-in-the-world.” (Csordas 1994)
Jerrold Siegel, in his psychohistory of Marx, draws suggestive parallels between his subject’s emotional state and his bouts of carbuncles. He posits that this disease was a somatic manifestation of self-directed hatred and anxiety over what Marx perceived as a failed enterprise, Das Kapital, and over the failure of his predictions about the future course of social change. (1978)
While many of Siegel’s analyses are insightful and responsive to Marx’s local moral world, this particular explanation, with which Siegel concludes his final chapter as a kind of victorious flourish, seems more like the product of literary fantasy, at best, and tendentious, unsympathetic and dishonest posturing, at worst. Indeed, a recent investigation by dermatologists revealed that, on the basis of a historical reconstruction of Marx’s clinical scenario from his correspondence with friends and family, he most likely suffered from hidradenitis suppurativa. (Shuster 2007) This debilitating condition is exceedingly difficult to treat, requiring a number of interventions that were not yet available in the mid-19th century, and is recognized for causing self-loathing, low self-esteem and depressed mood. (Shuster 2007; Klaus and Johnson 2005)
In any case, besides slowing his progress on Das Kapital, Marx’s chronic illness was also directly related to his family’s financial hardship. On several occasions, he spent several weeks sleeping at the homes of close friends to avoid his physicians when they would visit his family’s flat in Soho to collect a debt. (McLellan 1973) Ironically, despite numerous spies’ reports of his family’s quarters as “proletarian” or “subproletarian”, Marx and his wife Jenny accumulated annual gifts, loans and donations of cash from friends, family and supporters that should have been enough to provide them with a very comfortable lower middle class lifestyle. (Stallybrass 1998; McLellan 1973) Engels, for one, responded promptly to Marx’s constant requests—and even demands—for financial support, which were usually expressed in the urgent tones of a man hiding from bill collectors. In fact, when Engels sold his share in his cotton mill, he apportioned £350 from his pension as an annual stipend to Marx, continuing to supplement this generous amount upon request. (Raddatz 1980)
Nonetheless, the Marxes habitually fell into debt, and not entirely without consequences. Jenny Marx, in letters to a friend, told of an occasion when her husband was arrested for suspicion of theft upon trying to pawn her heirloom silver, emblazoned with the noble Argyll family crest. On another occasion, she describes, clearly mortified, the entire family’s unceremonious eviction from the flat they had been renting. (McLellan 1973) In letters following the death of their newborn daughter, Jenny lamented that had they not been utterly penniless at the time, they might have been able to afford either the physician’s fees or the therapeutic holiday to the seaside that would have saved the child. (Siegel 1978)
Of particular importance to Marx, too, their financial instability required him to put his coat in and out of pawn frequently; without his coat, however, he would not be granted access to the reading room at the British National Museum, where he conducted his daily researches for Das Kapital. In fact, on at least two occasions, he wrote to Engels that he was forced to pawn his coat in order to purchase writing paper for his articles for the New York Daily Tribune, the remuneration from which he would use to begin to pay debts, such as a cumulative doctor’s bill of £26, the equivalent of several months’ rent in their flat at the time. (Raddatz 1980; Stallybrass 1998; McLellan 1973)
An insidious flow of coats, carbuncles and cash seemed to whirl around Marx and his family during these chaotic years. Beyond the simplistic explanation of poor budgeting, what was behind this perpetual, indeed extremely harmful, overspending and indebtedness? What, exactly, was at stake? And moreover, why did Engels continue to rescue Marx from his family’s financial misadventures, even after Marx proved himself unable to respond compassionately (or draft a convincing apology, for that matter) to his “greatest friend” after the death of his partner of many years, Mary Burns? (Raddatz 1980)
With respect to the Marxes’ motivations, a number of possibilities have been suggested. In order to appear trustworthy and receive sufficient credit with the butcher, the baker, the cheesemonger, the grocer, and others, a certain level of outward bourgeois appearances and accoutrements were required. (McLellan 1973) That is, the family adopted or performed, through clothing and objects, a habitus identifiable as bourgeois, thereby conferring upon themselves a level of symbolic capital consonant with the credit they needed to maintain a bourgeois lifestyle. This line of argumentation is not as tautological as it appears: a diachronic shift in the family’s standard of living, coincident with a string of small inheritances, can be identified between their residence in Soho and North London. So the Marxes used temporary injections of money to permanently raise their average monthly expenditures. (McLellan 1973) According to Marx, his family life had him “up to the crown” in “this bourgeois crap,” and he often complained to Engels that his wife was not as resistant as he, and that she frequently became bedridden for “social” or “bourgeois” reasons. (Raddatz 1980) Marx’s complaints notwithstanding, the family moved shortly after each death of a child, and their extravagant spending may have represented an attempt to achieve progressively more salutary standards of living. (McLellan 1973)
Siegel provides a much more intriguing explanation. The maintenance of outward appearances was absolutely necessary to mask internal strife. While Jenny commented on occasion that she enjoyed the relative anonymity of London, her family was prominent among the French and German émigres/refugees, and her husband’s ascension as a polemical political figure made them an object of the scrutiny of spies, reporters, politicians and others. Marx was publicly attacked by enemies on the left and the right, in England, Germany, France and the United States. (Siegel 1978) But why would the Marxes go to such lengths in their dissimilation? Siegel proposes, albeit without extremely compelling evidence, that the maintenance of appearances became especially pressing in the context of public rumors—and Jenny’s discovery—that the newborn child of Helene Demuth, the Marxes’ servant, was the son of Karl Marx.
Putting aside the conspiratorial nature of Siegel’s hypothesis, and recognizing the fact that this possibility fits well into his broader project of demonstrating Marx’s irrationality and corruptibility, this consideration does bring up an interesting point. In the close quarters that they sometimes inhabited in London, how did Marx feel when it became evident that his wife had discovered his illicit relationship with Helene, who lived in their flat and had worked as a younger woman in the von Westphalen’s house before Jenny’s betrothal? Given the evidence, it is clear that Engels, Marx and his daughters made great efforts to suppress this embarrassing secret; for example, the collection of Marx and Engels’ correspondence to one another contains no letters dated between two weeks before and two weeks after Helene Demuth gave birth to her son. (Siegel 1978) To what degree can we understand Jenny’s overspending as an effort to sublimate her disappointment with the life she had been forced to leave by the man she fell in love with as a young woman? And might we understand Marx’s increasingly neurotic and strangely unproductive obsession with his research and writing as an attempted escape from a historical reality and moral environment so at odds with the ineluctable world whose evolution he had so confidently predicted only a few years before? To what extent was his “bookworming” (Wheen 2000) a return to the safer, rarefied philosophizing with which he had begun his career as a scholar? Did Marx see in his book the potential to redeem himself and regain some of symbolic and economic capital he had squandered since 1848?
With respect to Engels’ motivations for continuing to rescue Marx from bankruptcy, it is noteworthy that although the former, heir to a wealthy mercantile family, may have identified an opportunity to accumulate symbolic capital among the international left through his friendship and collaboration with the latter, Engels nonetheless distanced himself repeatedly from Marx’s publications. He commented that he considered it silly to keep his name on The Holy Family, which Marx had singlehandedly exploded Engel’s brief treatise of twenty pages into a monstrosity; similarly, Engels was very reluctant to write reviews to advertise Marx’s essays and books. Nonetheless, he obsequiously supported Marx, tolerating his at times personally offensive behavior.
To understand the Marx-Engels dialectic, it is helpful to recall the stunning presence that Marx supposedly had about him. Indeed, members of the Young Hegelian’s Doctor’s Club expressed relief when Marx began his rebellion against Hegelian philosophical spiritualism: they felt that they could think for themselves again, no longer overwhelmed by that “ox’s head” that was the domineering genius of Marx. Engels wrote superbly, true, but he originated the detailed historical-materialist analysis that would cause future generations to invoke Marx’s name and not his own. How did Marx, having produced only a few minimally circulated pieces of writing and having isolated himself in later years from many on the international left, become such a singularly infamous and feared figure?
Marx’s power over others—whether inspiring awed admiration or fear or anger—was, I believe, Weber’s charisma. Indeed, Marx and Engels represented opposite, complementary poles of authority: the former charismatic, revolutionary and incapable of establishing any stability in his life; the latter bureaucratic, succeeding within the regnant economic system and maintaining enough order to permit Marx’s boistorous creativity to flourish. Ultimately, it is noteworthy that Marx’s intensity and presence were characteristics noted by his family members from very early in his life. Perhaps, despite the long and established traditions of semiotic and phenomenological approaches in sociocultural anthropology, fine-grained attempts to achieve a deep knowledge of another person must rely on the biological and ontogenetic insights of fields whose methods and objectives that we have been to hasty to regard with scorn.
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