Muck Rake Marx

Charlie Bond
Social and Cultural Analysis PhD program
Concordia University

15 June 2022

By means of an ingenious system of concealed plumbing, all the lavatories of London empty their physical refuse into the Thames. In the same way every day the capital of the world spews out all its social refuse through a system of goose quills, and it pours out into a great central paper cloaca – the Daily Telegraph … At the entrance which leads to the sewer, the following words are written in sombre colours: ‘Hic quisquam faxit oletum!’, or as Byron translated it so poetically, ‘Wanderer, stop and – piss!’¹

– Marx (quoted in Wheen, 2000: 242)

No one should ever have to justify dragging The Telegraph through the shit. The circumstances of Marx’s invective, though, are peculiar. Marx’s own name had just been shit-dragged by Carl Vogt who, in turn, was responding to being shit-dragged by Marx. Except, Marx hadn’t shit-dragged Vogt at all. The drag Vogt experienced had actually been the work of the also-German, also-writer, also-based-in-London, also-called-Karl, Karl Blind. So, now we have three Karls, and a whole lot of shit.

It’s a fun/weird story from Marx’s fun/weird book, Herr Vogt, a text that makes for “a spectacular, pointless feud” cum “absurd interlude”, in the words of one of Marx’s biographers. (Ibid., 238) Rather than stop (and piss?) to tell it, however, I want instead to use Marx’s description of the Telegraph above as a way of thinking about the press, the law, and the senses. More precisely, I want to treat it as a way of parsing Jacques Ranciere’s influential concept, ‘the distribution of the sensible’.  Divya Tolia-Kelly supplies the following gloss,

The social world is defined by Rancière as one which is maintained by an established set of possible modes of perception that foreground any action […] The ‘distribution of the sensible’ refers to a regime of what is possible and acknowledged: the felt, heard, seen and perceived within this space, implicated in particular familiar patterns, inclusions and exclusions. The sensibilities of the social order discipline and determine the boundaries of what is visible and invisible, the sayable and unsayable, audible and inaudible, defining the parameters of what can be thought, made or done. (Toila Kelly,  2019: 127)

Marx’s relationship to the press inflects two key aspects of this distribution. First, how newsprint is always an object of the law, always printed or not printed insofar as law puts it within or beyond the “parameters of what can be thought, made or done”. Hence, the printed always names a relationship to criminalisation. Second, Marx draws out the ways in which law censures sensorially, how it requires, enables, and/or suppresses  possible modes of sensory perception.

*

Return to Marx’s description of The Telegraph – “A system of concealed plumbing”. Marx’s London is a literal shit-dragging; furtively, the metropole redistributes shit away from its citizens and into its river. There is a boundary, in other words, that polices the senses from shit, or more specifically, that unevenly regulates the presence of shit within the city. Worth pointing out here is that Marx’s description came only twelve months after ‘The Great Stink of London’. Although the Thames had reeked for decades, it wasn’t until the hot weather in the summer of 1858 spread the funk to the Houses of Parliament at Westminster.  As The Times reported,

The intense heat had driven our legislators from those portions of their buildings which overlook the river. A few members, indeed, bent upon investigating the matter to its very depth, ventured into the library, but they were instantaneously driven to retreat, each man with a handkerchief to his nose. (Bibby, n.d.)

Repeated cholera outbreaks across the city had not been enough for “our legislators”. Looking for a quick fix, they doused “the curtains of the Houses of Parliament in chloride of lime” and poured tonnes of “chalk lime, chloride of lime and carbolic acid directly into the water”. (Ibid.) This – to put it generously – very local response inevitably failed. Realising the necessity of legislative intervention, Prime Minister Disreali decried the state of the Thames and, incidentally, gave us what may serve as another Marxist description of the The Telegraph: “a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors.” (Mann, 2016)

One month after Disreali’s address, Parliament passed the Metropolis Local Management Amendment Bill (in a record eighteen days, no less). Among its clauses, the Bill demanded that, “as far as may be possible”, sewage outlets should not be within the boundaries of London. (Ibid.) Furthermore, it granted the Metropolitan Board of Works (a public body responsible for much of the city’s infrastructure) the power to borrow £3 million from the Treasury. The sum, to be repaid from a three-penny levy on all London households for the next forty years, enabled the Board’s chief engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, to design and construct a 1200 mile long citywide nexus of sewers. (Ibid.)

It is tempting to understand the sewer as a ‘distribution of the sensible’. However, I consider it more productive, albeit less literal, to instead grasp the Metropolis Local Management Amendment Bill as such a distribution – or more accurately, a re-distribution. Indeed, only upon the stench of shit meeting the noses of those for whom its scent meant an “ineffable horror”, only upon the Great Stink reaching well-refined, parliamentary noses, did Parliament articulate the ‘Stink’ as an object of legislative intervention. I am suggesting, in other words, not only that shit and its stink were quantitatively re-distributed across the City, but that the Bill altered the qualitative kind of thing that the ‘stink’ was. ‘Stink’ could all of a sudden fall foul of law, ‘stink’ was a legal affront to noses, ‘stink’ was legally “acknowledged” and “disciplined”, and ‘stink’ had a banishment fee of £3 million. In a word, the Great Stink was criminalised.

I want now to consider the politics implied by this distribution of the sensible. Whose nose, in short, determines what smells others must put up with? And more broadly, whose senses determine what may be sensed or go un-sensed by others?

Recall Marx’s description of the Telegraph as “the great central paper cloaca”. Marx’s admonition followed the newspaper’s reprint of an article that had featured in Berlin’s National Zeitung. The article in question was a summary of Carl Vogt’s new book, My Lawsuit Against the Allgemeine Zeitung, in which Vogt shit-drags a putatively drunk, hateful, and soulless Marx:

After the red wine he [Marx] was completely drunk […] In spite of his condition Marx dominated the conversation up to the last moment […] He gave the impression not only of rare intellectual superiority but also of outstanding personality. If he had had as much heart as intellect and love as hate, I should have gone through fire for him, even if he had not just occasionally hinted at his complete contempt for me, which he finally expressed quite openly […] In view of our aims, I regret that this man, with his fine intellect, is lacking in nobility of soul. I am convinced that the most dangerous personal ambition has eaten away at all the good in him […] The only people he respects are the aristocrats, the genuine ones who are well aware of it. In order to drive them from government, he needs a source of strength, which he can find only in the proletariat. Accordingly, he has tailored his system to them. […] I took away with me the impression that the acquisition of personal power was the aim of all his endeavours. (Wheen, 206)

I want to suggest that Vogt’s polemic implicates a (re)distribution of the sensible on two counts. First, the portrait of Marx that Vogt offers his readers – including the National Zeitung’s and Telegraph’s by extension – draws upon all manner of sensory details. Marx drinks too much. Marx is loud. Marx will also speak openly – for better or for worse. Marx’s ambition has eaten away all the good in him.  Marx is hungry for power. He’s a body without a soul. In other words, Vogt foregrounds a public perception of Marx according to how Marx offended his personal sensibilities.

Secondly, Vogt’s polemic was protected in law. After Marx spent a considerable amount of time and money attempting to sue the National Zeitung for libel, the Royal Prussian High Tribunal’s rejected the complaint, declaring, “the [Zeitung’s] articles did not exceed the limits of allowed criticism and did not constitute an offence”. (Musto, 2018: 120) In this light, law functions to discipline what is sayable and unsayable, what is printable and unprintable. What Marx claimed to have “felt, heard, seen and perceived” within the National Zeitung, the law overruled as a misperception.

I want now to move away from libel and towards a consideration of censorship – something that Marx was also no stranger to, particularly in his younger years. In March 1842, the official government paper Preussische Allgemeine Staats-Zeitung [Prussian General State Newspaper] ran a series of articles supporting censorship “in order to enlighten the public concerning the true intentions of the Government.” (Marx, 2000: 2) Marx’s response is below:

The sensuous quality of the child is the first link that connects it with the world. The practical organs of senses, primarily the nose and mouth, are the first organs by means of which it judges the world. Hence the childish Preussische Staats-Zeitung judges the value of newspapers, and therefore its own value, by means of its nose.(Ibid. 7)

Nose = unthinking organ = child =  the Staats-Zeitung. It is not the slickest put-down. The young Marx seems fond enough, mind. He continues,

If a Greek thinker held that dry souls were the best, the Staats-Zeitung holds that “pleasant-smelling” newspapers are “good” newspapers. It cannot praise too highly the “literary fragrance” of the Augsburg Allgemeine and the journal des Débats. Rare, praiseworthy naivety!  (Ibid. 7)

The one about the Staats-Zeitung’s nose; the gag must count among Marx’s first as a writer, being published on his 24th birthday, May 5th, 1842, in the Rheinische Zeitung (Rhenish Newspaper). It thereafter seems to become something of a running joke for Marx, who, made the paper’s editor that same year, complains to a friend;

Our newspaper has to be presented to the police to be sniffed at and if the police-nose smells anything un-Christian or un-Prussian, the newspaper is not allowed to appear. (Marx, quoted in Mehring, 1935: 50)

The “blockhead” police-nose did not consider Marx’s paper “pleasant-smelling”, and neither did Tsar Nicholas I, who requested its termination. In response, the Prussian government demanded that each edition was to be vetted by a censor, before finally revoking the Rheinische Zeitung’s licence in early 1843. (Ibid. 50) Marx’s critique of the legal grounds for censorship is outrageous: “According to this law,” namely, Article II, “the censorship should not prevent serious and modest investigation of truth, nor impose undue constraint on writers, or hinder the book trade from operating freely.” (Marx, 2000: 50)

“Serious and modest!”, scolds Marx:

What fluctuating, relative concepts! Where does seriousness cease and jocularity begin? Where does modesty cease and immodesty begin? We are dependent on the temperament of the censor. It would be as wrong to prescribe temperament for the censor as to prescribe style for the writer. If you want to be consistent in your aesthetic criticism, then forbid also a too serious and too modest investigation of the truth, for too great seriousness is the most ludicrous thing of all, and too great modesty is the bitterest irony. (Ibid. 51)

Notice that the object of the law is no more specific than the ‘sensibilities’ of a writer. To parse this in terms of Ranciere’s ‘distribution of the sensible’, we may say that law disciplines the boundaries of what may be publically “thought, made, or done”, according to the private temperament of a censor. A private sensibility, in a word,  disciplines a public one through a state nexus of criminalisation.

Note too the kind of politics in play here. Imprecise legal definitions supply officials with an array of possible interpretations, and make for an effective mechanism of power. They enable what Marx might call a ‘temperamental’application of legal standards, that is, an arbitrariness with which one may prosecute one’s political opponents without, at the same time, applying such standards to one’s allies. As such, the legal “parameters of what can be thought, made or done” are elastic and unevenly distributed. (Think of an “ingenious system of concealed plumbing” whose pipes are constantly being re-organised by an all powerful sewage agency.)

What, then, did these legal parameters look like? What was actually involved in the censorship of Marx and his colleagues at Rheinische Zeitung?

In Prussia censorship was preventive: texts intended for publication needed to be submitted to the censor for approval. But censorship was controversial. Especially the movements for democracy found the practice offensive. Nor was being a censor a coveted occupation. The Prussian authorities had great difficulty finding the right people for this work. Editors of all newspapers became skilled at ‘writing between the lines.’ Since the Rheinische Zeitungwas a morning paper, the copy had to be delivered to the censor in the evening. The editors would wait for the copy marked in red pencil to return and might work on the definitive newspaper into the wee hours. The Rheinische Zeitung wore out four censors over the course of its existence. (Sanders, 2009)

Here, censorship – and, as such, the criminalisation of certain discourses – has an obvious sensory quality. It requires a censor with a well-honed, visual skill, one that must be on the lookout for what editors write ‘between the lines’. Note, however, the way in which this positions the visual, or rather, the eyes, as a potentially defective organ. Given the uneven distribution of literacy, the Prussian government requires that its censors’ eyes see more clearly than the average citizen’s. As such, we may position the editor and censor as constantly negotiating the distribution of the sensible on behalf of the sensibilities of others. That is, the editor wants to publish that which will appear to one audience as critique, and to another (namely, the censor), nothing but a very above board, “modest” and “serious” investigation. The censor, by contrast, is there on behalf of government sensibilities. They are sieving the paper for what they imagine the government to consider ‘immodest’ and ‘jocular’.

“The senses of the social man are other senses than those of the non-social man”, Marx writes in the 1844 Manuscripts. He continues, “the forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present”. (Marx, 2000a: 47) Recall our cast; police noses and parliamentary noses, un-Christian and un-Prussian smells, great stinks and shit-drags. The aim of drawing together such a motley crew is to connect the registers of, on the one hand, the sensory, and on the other, the social and legal, and to show how the latter programmes the former. What something is ‘sniffable’ as, be it critique or shit, is form-determined by a network of legislative and judicial authorities. The Great Stink, for this reason, was ‘Great’ because it was, prior to the British parliament’s intervention, legal stink. Vogt’s shit-dragging of Marx in the Telegraph was legal critique, while Marx and his fellow journalists’ critiques of the Prussian Government in the Rheinische Zeitung was a criminal one. These form determinations radically contour not only how the sensible is quantitatively distributed, but the qualitative nature of what is available to sense and to whom.

 

Notes:

[1] Marx follows this diatribe with a series of antisemetic insults towards the Telegraph’s editor, Joseph Moses Levy. For a brief discussion of Marxism and anti-semitism, see Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, 2012, 185-191.

Charlie is enrolled in the social and cultural analysis PhD programme at Concordia. His research interests include Marxian value form theory, queer theory, and political economy.

References:

Bibby,. M. “London’s Great Stink”, [online resource, accessed 08.03.22]

https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Londons-Great-Stink/

Heinrich, Michael, 2012, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, London: Verso

Marx, (2000) “On the Freedom of the Press”, [online resource, accessed Feb. 2022] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1842/free-press/

– (2000a) Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, available at marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts [accessed Feb. 2022]

Mann, E., “Story of cities #14: London’s Great Stink heralds a wonder of the industrial world”, 4th April 2016, The Guardian [online resource, accessed 05.03.22] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/04/story-cities-14-london-great-stink-river-thames-joseph-bazalgette-sewage-system

Mehring, F., (1935), Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, New York: Covici [trans. Edward Fitzgerald]

Sanders, H., (2009), “Prussian censorship and Karl Marx’s brief career as an editor for the Rheinische Zeitung, [online resource, accessed 06.03.22] http://www.iisg.nl/collections/rheinischezeitung/history.php

Tolia-Kelly, DP. (2019) “Rancière and the re-distribution of the sensible: The artist Rosanna Raymond, dissensus and postcolonial sensibilities within the spaces of the museum”, Progress in Human Geography, 43(1):123-140

Wheen, F.  (2000), Karl Marx: A Life, London: Fourth Estate