190
PARTISAN REVIEW
L e voyage pour decouvrir ma geographie
ote of a madman (Paris 1907)
The las t poem of the
Flowers of Evil,
"The Journey" : "Oh dea th ,
old captain, it is time, let us weigh anchor." The last journey of the
fliin eur:
dea th. Its des tina tion: the new. "To the depths of the un–
known , there
to
find something new. " Novelty is a quality indepen–
dent of the intrinsic value of the commodity.
It
is the origin of the
illusion inseverable from the images produced by the collective uncon–
scio us.
It
is the quintessence of fa lse consciousness, whose indefa ti–
gable agent is fashion . The illusion of novelty is refl ected , like one
mirror in ano ther, in the illusion of perpetual sameness. The product
o f this refl ec tion is the phantasmagori a of "cultural history, " in which
the bourgeoisie savors its false consciousness to the las t. The art tha t
begins
to
doubt its task and ceases
to
be " inseparable from utility"
(Baudelaire) must make novelty its hi gh est value. The snob becomes its
arbiter novarum rerum.
He is to art wha t the dandy is to fashion . As in
the seventeenth century the canon of di alectical imagery came to be
allegory, in the nineteenth it is novelty. The
m agasin s de nouveaute
a re
joined by th e newspapers. The press organizes the market in intellec–
tual values, in which prices a t first soar. Nonconformists rebel against
the handing over of art to the mar ket. They gather around the banner
o f
''{'art pour l'art."
T hi s slogan prings from the con ception of the
tota l artwork , which a ttempts to isolate art from the development of
techno logy . The solemnity with which it is celebra ted is. the corrolary
to
the frivo lity tha t glorifies the commodity. Bo th abstract from the
social existence of man. Baudelaire succumbs to the infatua tion o f
Wagner.
My
good father had been in Paris.
Karl Cutzkow,
L etters fr om Paris (184 2)
Balzac was the first to speak of the ruins of the bourgeoisie. But
onl y Surrealism exposed them to view. The development o f the forces
of production reduced the wish symbols of the previo us century to
rubble even before the monuments representing them h ad crumbl ed. In
the nineteenth century thi s develo pment emancipa ted constructi ve
forms from a rt, as the sciences freed themselves from philosophy in the
sixteenth. Architecture makes a sta rt as constructiona l engineering.
T he rep roduction of na ture in pho tography fo ll ows. Fantasy crea tion
prepares itself to become practical as commercial art. Litera ture is
