The Riddle of the Commune: Subjectivity and Style in Karl Marx’s The Civil War in France A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Matthew Wesley Bost IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Ronald Walter Greene July 2013 © Matthew Wesley Bost 2013 Acknowledgements The debts and connections to others that make up this project far exceed the space I have here, so I will focus on a few of the most central. First and foremost, my parents, Debra and Melton Bost, have been inexpressibly loving, caring and supportive. They have done an immense amount for me, and I am grateful to them first and foremost for their love. Over the course of my time at Minnesota, I have been incredibly lucky on a number of levels. First of all, I have had some great mentors, many of whom agreed to serve on my committee. Ron Greene is the person most responsible for instilling a passion for intellectual work in me early in my graduate career, and provided one of the central points of orientation for how I think about scholarship and what I am interested in studying. Cesare Casarino has taught me an incredible amount, most centrally the power and adventure that philosophical thinking can carry with it. He has also contributed to my approach to teaching and, through the example of his work, has taught me that academic work can be every bit as playful, fun and creative as the most literary endeavor. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell has been an invaluable source of feedback from the time she read one of my first graduate assignments based on the first research presentation I gave. She has taught me what it means to be a good rhetorical critic, has made me a more rigorous and disciplined scholar, and a much better writer than I would have otherwise been. Edward Schiappa has been a great source of advice for professional development and, through some admittedly probably tangential directions I took discussion in his Burke seminar, has given me a useful map of 19th and 20th century philosophy as it intersects i with rhetorical studies. Lastly, though they were not on my committee, I owe Art Walzer and Kirt Wilson both a great debt. Art has been a valuable mentor and a source of support and insightful feedback throughout my graduate career. Kirt taught my first graduate seminar, and pushed me to be a better thinker and scholar as well as instilling much of the discipline to succeed in grad school. Both have played a major, positive role in my graduate education. Throughout my time at Minnesota, I have frequently thought that the peers whom I’ve shared work with, talked with, laughed with, and had drinks with through good times and bad, have been one of my favorite parts of being here. The members of the writing group I was a part of over the past year, Heather Hayes, Kate Ranachan and Scott Maksteniks, have been wonderful resources for feedback on work as well as for great reading, and have made my own work better and easier. David Tucker, Al Hiland, Shelby Bell and Allison Prasch have been supportive friends and incisive partners in conversation about rhetoric and about my project. Mark Martinez read a number of parts of this project, especially in its early stages, and asked many questions that ended up informing the final shape it took, as well as being a great friend and occasional philosophical sparring partner. Matthew May has been a good friend throughout graduate school, and informed my choice of topic and some of my responses to it,. Jason Weidemann has become one of my best friends here, and has been an invaluable source of moral support, especially through the stresses of the job market, as well as a source of great intellectual and professional advice. Lastly, Heather Hayes has read almost everything, from scratch to finish, as well as many of my job-related materials, and ii throughout has given feedback that fundamentally shaped and improved the questions I asked in the project as well as my view of scholarship, the discipline of rhetoric, and the academy more generally. She has also been an eminently generous, supportive, and all- around great colleague and friend, and the debt I owe her is unrepayable. Finally, I am lucky to have gone through the past couple of years with a great partner. Kaitlyn Patia has been amazingly supportive and caring, whether listening to parts of drafts, helping me think through professional decisions, or just generally making the day-to-day stresses of grad school a little lighter. I am enormously grateful for her love and support, and I couldn’t ask for a better partner iii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated aux morts de Commune and to those who repeat (with whatever difference) its project in various times and places. It is also dedicated to my parents, teachers and everyone else who has had a hand, large or small, in shaping this project. iv Abstract This project reads Karl Marx’s The Civil War in France, a speech and pamphlet in which Marx treats the political experience of the Paris Commune. Reading the pamphlet through literature on rhetoric and aesthetics, I argue that Marx’s speech performs a political style—a set of tropes which structure thought, political responses, and collective desires—that stands in productive tension with many of the ways his work has been taken up by scholars and activists alike. Over the course of my dissertation I highlight three key concepts in The Civil War in France—debt, history, and community—which, I argue, are both central to the speech’s address of its own historical context and useful resources for those seeking to make Marx’s work productive in the present. First, Marx highlights the degree to which punitive debt policies directed by the French government at France’s poor and disenfranchised contributed to the violence of the Commune and its aftermath, while also asserting a “debt of gratitude” to the Commune that he argues should lead a diversity of French political constituencies to support it. Engaging with Andrew King’s research on the rhetoric of power maintenance and with contemporary scholarship on the politics of debt, I argue that Marx’s address responds to the propaganda leveled against the Commune by the French national government of the period, while also constituting a set of tropes that are useful for analyzing discussions of debt by regulators and activists in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Second, reading Marx’s eulogy of the Commune’s failure alongside his attempt to draw lessons from it for future political practice, I argue that The Civil War in France provides a compelling case study for scholars concerned with how “failed” social movements may v become subject to a type of collective memory work that primes them to be rescued as impetuses for future political action. I argue that Marx develops a rhetoric of history that enables a productive rethinking of the current political moment in light of past revolutionary experiences. Finally, engaging with recent debates in rhetorical studies and in the critical humanities on the concept of community, I argue that Marx’s speech proleptically critiques the politics of community that goes by the name of neoliberalism, and provides an alternative ethics of community, of which the Commune is a central example. Taken together, I show that these concepts provide a useful set of tools for thinking the economic and political crises attendant on current global capitalism. vi Table of Contents Chapter 1: Style and Historical Materialism 1 Chapter 2: The Legacy of the Paris Commune 43 Chapter 3: Debt and Synecdochic Subjectivity 81 Chapter 4: A Rhetoric of Lost Causes 117 Chapter 5: Crisis, Community and Revolutionary Epideictic 155 Conclusion 196 Notes 205 Bibliography 226 Appendix A: Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus 235 Appendix B: Diego Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads 236 vii Chapter 1: Style and Historical Materialism One of the many cultural phenomena to emerge in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis is a marked increase in the invocation, by academic and popular publications alike, of the name and ideas of Karl Marx. From editorials in newspapers around the country to a not-so-ironic image of Lenin gracing the cover of a January 2012 issue of The Economist, political and social commentators seem newly curious about whether Marx’s thought (or the tradition he inspired) can usefully explain why the crisis happened or suggest solutions. This curiosity, though, has very clear ideological boundaries. Writing about Marx’s portrayal in mass culture more generally, Richard Dienst remarks that pieces dealing with Marx’s “surprisingly contemporary relevance” usually argue, in a “bemused and condescending tone” that “Marx actually admired capitalism in some ways, which means that he might have been right about a few things; meanwhile, his trenchant criticisms of it will be treated as the quaintly perceptive observations of an awkward crank. The moral of the story is always the same: Marx has a great deal to teach us about capitalism, but only if we remember he was wrong”.1 One way of specifying this observation further is to say that widely circulated popular discussions of Marx adopt a few of his observations about capitalism’s implications, but tear them out of the conceptual context of his thought. Instead, Marx’s observations are translated into the terms of whatever the debate of the moment is in US or European politics.