the carbuncles and the jawbones
The Pequod and its crew are drowned, and Ishmael is left alive, alone, to tell what he knows. There are certainly parts he cannot remember; there are others, most certainly, he cannot understand. This was the end of their terrible labors. They have suffocated, these banished of air. The breath of Ishmael, the breath of his life, will be formed into their words. They will remain, neither pleasant or convenient, but always near, ready to hand.
Defoe was of the opinion that the plague resided in breath; or, through the observation of the breath, that its presence might be discerned. “It was very sad to reflect how such a person as this last…had been a walking destroyer perhaps for a week or a fortnight before that; how he had ruined those that he would have hazarded his life to save, and had been breathing death upon them, even perhaps in his tender kissing and embracings of his own children.” The breath and the air, after all, were no respecters of persons: they were the media of the will of the Lord. “‘I have come near no infection or any infected person,’” a confident reports, “‘ I am sure it is the air. We draw in death when we breathe, and therefore ’tis the hand of God; there is no withstanding it.’” How then could one know when one was in the presence of the pestilence, the air that bore the horrible disease? Perhaps by the smell, or better, upon sight: “I have heard it was the opinion of others that it might be distinguished by the party’s breathing upon a piece of glass, where, the breath condensing, there might living creatures be seen…of strange, monstrous, and frightful shapes, such as dragons, snakes, serpents, and devils, horrible to behold.” Defoe was not unconvinced of the truth of these fancies, even if, “we had no microscopes at that time, as I remember, to make the experiment….”
Could we but see, what would we find? What would we find in the breath? In the mouth? The Pestilence? The Serpent? The Horn-Crowned Magus? What lives in the breath? What do we inhale? And what do we excrete?
But besides all this, there are some branches of factory-work which have an especially injurious effect. In many rooms of the cotton and flax-spinning mills, the air is filled with fibrous dust, which produces chest affections, especially among workers in the carding and combing-rooms. Some constitutions can bear it, some cannot; but the operative has no choice. He must take the room in which he finds work, whether his chest is sound or not. The most common effects of this breathing of dust are blood-spitting, hard, noisy breathing, pains in the chest, coughs, sleeplessness – in short, all the symptoms of asthma ending in the worst cases in consumption. (Engels, 138)
The function of narrative under capitalism is closure, restitution, a negotiation of the inherent instability of the structure of the whole, the institutional procedures that portend stability but offer no such thing; or, rather, that offer the fantasy of stability at what is, in fact, far too steep a price. The literature of illness, of illness as madness, of madness and illness, holds out the hope of wellness, of the body restored, the mind regained: what Woolf as much as Shelley or Defoe or Melville offer is no such beast but the beast, of illness as endemic and irreversible, less a cluster of symptoms or aberrations than variously articulated clusters of features, only occasionally inviting the speculative fiction of diagnosis. “All that is solid melts into air,” Marx and Engels will intone in grappling with this modernity, invoking “the sobriety of the senses” as the promise of recognition, the waking from the narcotic, the narcoleptic, to some greater clarity, less a return than a realization: of “his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” If Melville gave us an elliptic theory of capitalism and death drive, of a world abandoned by the consolations of narrative, in which the only end could ever be the movement toward death and the imminence of destruction, Marx and Engels give us a raucous sociology of capitalism as infection, of capital as a body that is a blight, a body taking body among the corpuscles, invasive, parasitic. What is solid melts into air and this is the air we breathe, contaminated, rank. What we breathe is what we become, what we are, what we are never not becoming. We inhale daily our devils: we are never anything other than sick.
In contrast to the breathless prose of the Manifesto, the scintillating vitality of its air, the atmosphere in Friedrich Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England is most certainly disgusting: covered with ash and enveloped by fumes, it is a tragedy of grave exhalation, of carbon particulates and methane, of living flesh led to the pyre. First published in 1845, Condition of the Working-Class in England was, not unlike Defoe’s Journal, a furious digest of the calamities that had befallen working people in Britain under a regime of profit-driven madness, one that fixated upon the forms of physical infirmity occasioned by the transformation of men and women and children who would once have been reasonably independent farmers into brutally-conditioned proletarians, workers assigned to a task, and dedicated to a task, that could easily cause them to become ill, or leave them physically broken. While the analysis it develops shares in the urgency of its more wildly audacious, more existentially strident junior sibling, it is a studiously precise anatomization of the body under capital, of the bodies that bear the burden of labor as the standard of value and the realization of surplus. Where the object of Defoe’s weird little novel was to tell all too common stories of an all too literal plague, the illnesses Engels described were just as material, if not more common than those wrought of literal pestilence. In his descriptions of capital unbound and the “condition” of the worker, Engels traded in neither metaphorical subtlety or sociological casuistry, opting, rather, for something approaching surgical acuity.
In the Cornish mines about 19,000 men, and 11,000 women and children are employed, in part above and in part below ground. Within the mines below ground, men and boys above twelve years old are employed almost exclusively. The condition of these workers seems, according to the Children’s Employment Commission’s Report to be comparatively endurable, materially, and the English often enough boast of their strong, bold miners, who follow the veins of mineral below the bottom of the very sea. But in the matter of the health of these workers, this same Children's Employment Commission's Report judges differently. It shows in Dr. Barham's intelligent report how the inhalation of an atmosphere containing little oxygen, and mixed with dust amid the smoke of blasting powder, such as prevails in the mines, seriously affects the lungs, disturbs the action of the heart, and diminishes the activity of the digestive organs; that wearing toil, and especially the climbing up and down of ladders, upon which even vigorous young men have to spend in some mines more than an hour a day, and which precedes and follows daily work, contributes greatly to the development of these evils, so that men who begin this work in early youth are far from reaching the stature of women who work above ground; that many die young of galloping consumption, and most miners at middle age of slow consumption; that they age prematurely and become unfit for work between the thirty-fifth and forty-fifth years; that many are attacked by acute inflammations of the respiratory organs when exposed to the sudden change from the warm air of the shaft (after climbing the ladder in profuse perspiration) to the cold wind above ground; and that these acute inflammations are very frequently fatal.
Prefiguring his invocation, with Marx, in the Manifesto, of the “epidemic of overproduction” as “a famine” prefiguring the ever more scrupulous theft, by the capitalist, of labor power and its “vital force,” in the Condition of the Working Class, Engels routinely appeals to the language of illness, of disease and debility, as a means of conveying the bodily impact of industry under capitalism, a means of accounting for effects wrought of the prolonged, unmitigated toil necessary to realization of capital as commodity, to the appearance of capital in its commodity form. While mining serves here as a figuration of the miasmatic, of capital as particulate, and labor as respirant, elsewhere he refers to the enervations of millwork, of both the treadle and the loom and the production of fine cloth. These, he notes, are plagues upon digestion, disorders of the thorax, the stomach, the abdomen, the intestines, the womb.
This irregularity, the frequent night-work, the disorderly way of living consequent upon it, engender a multitude of physical and moral ills, especially early and unbridled sexual licence, upon which point all witnesses are unanimous. The work is very bad for the eyes, and although a permanent injury in the case of the threaders is not universally observable, inflammations of the eye, pain, tears, and momentary uncertainty of vision during the act of threading are engendered. For the winders, however, it is certain that their work seriously affects the eye, and produces, besides the frequent inflammations of the cornea, many cases of amaurosis and cataract. The work of the weavers themselves is very difficult, as the frames have constantly been made wider, until those now in use are almost all worked by three men in turn, each working eight hours, and the frame being kept in use the whole twenty-four. Hence it is that the winders and threaders are so often called upon during the night, and must work to prevent the frame from standing idle. The filling in of 1,800 openings with thread occupies three children at least two hours. Many frames are moved by steam-power, and the work of men thus superseded; and, as the “Children’s Employment Commission’s Report” mentions only lace factories to which the children are summoned, it seems to follow either that the work of the weavers has been removed to great factory rooms of late, or that steam-weaving has become pretty general; a forward movement of the factory system in either case. Most unwholesome of all is the work of the runners, who are usually children of seven, and even of five and four, years old. Commissioner Grainger actually found one child of two years old employed at this work. Following a thread which is to be withdrawn by a needle from an intricate texture, is very bad for the eyes, especially when, as is usually the case, the work is continued fourteen to sixteen hours. In the least unfavourable case, aggravated near-sightedness follows; in the worst case, which is frequent enough, incurable blindness from amaurosis. But, apart from that, the children, in consequence of sitting perpetually bent up, become feeble, narrow-chested, and scrofulous from bad digestion. Disordered functions of the uterus are almost universal among the girls, and curvature of the spine also, so that “all the runners may be recognised from their gait”. (Engels, 209)
Describing the irregularity of the hours kept in the Leicester mills dedicated to lace–the length of work and appointed hour of work determined solely by the length of thread on a spool and the speed with which the thread is consumed–Engels paints the punishing regime of industrial manufacturing as the condition by which the demands of fashion are met, “the price at which society purchases for the fine ladies of the bourgeoisie the pleasure of wearing lace,” as well as a jeremiad against the coming of “a sickly generation of the vile multitude bequeathing its debility to its equally ‘vile’ children and children's children.” The lame and the mangled, the sick and the blind are, he avers, the true cost of doing business, the physical manifestation of capital as surplus. Capital may have needed its laborers, it may have had a vested interest in trying to keep people alive, in trying to encourage the flourishing of life so that the substance of life–the body-in-motion, the body respirant–might be leached from the laborer and made part of the thing; but what matter if a few were maimed, or if chemicals used in production turned out to be toxic, or if the inhalation of coal dust underground in unventilated mines wrecked the lungs? As the report cited by Engels suggests, the conditions of such labor might be endurable, perhaps even beneficial; but eventually the work makes one unfit for such work, dying young of “galloping consumption,” that form of tuberculosis whereby an otherwise and apparently healthy body becomes suddenly ill and expires within days. Of course, tuberculosis, unlike black lung, was easily transmittable, highly infective, well into the mid-twentieth century, and quite certainly deadly. As opposed to the more glamorous—“chronic”—form of the disease, the one suffered by courtesans who haunted the demimonde, as well as the proper young ladies of the better classes, coughing into lace handkerchiefs, swooning before their beaus, and melting into the counterpane, this is the consumption of the scrofulous and the untouchable; this is the death of the disordered womb.
While Engels’ account of the physical impact of factory labor is exceedingly gruesome as to its empirical excess, it would be left to Marx to suggest the transmissibility of the myriad violences of capitalism, of its labor regime, of the ways in which the work of one not only exhausted his or her body, but was all too easily forwarded to the body of another. In his chapter on the working day, Marx inveighs against the outright theft of surplus-value from the worker by citing the materiality of capital as particulate. Infection and disease, wasting and breaking, are the lot of the working class as a consideration of the “‘small thefts’ of capital from the workers’ meal-times and recreation times [which are] described by the factory inspectors as a ‘petty pilfering of minutes.’” Marx goes on to link this petty pilfering by a constitutionally reprobate bourgeoisie to the myriad forms of respiratory ailments and degenerative diseases suffered by workers across a range of employments. Like Engels, in this section of Capital, he relies heavily on the reports of commissions that emerged, in the United Kingdom, in the wake of the 1850 Factory Act, which focused upon incremental variations in the length of the working day–the sum total of surplus labor stolen from workers–and its deleterious impact on overall worker health. “Within the 24 hours of the natural day a man can only expend a certain quantity of his vital force,” Marx maintained; yet it was the cruel genius of the capital to devise ever more ingenious ways of stretching that vitality to its outermost limit, demanding ever more of workers’ physical capacity, such that more and more of those so stretched, found themselves not only impoverished, but physically ruined, not merely for a moment or a day, but for the remainder of their “natural” lives. Documents of a patrician, patriarchal Victoriana, the reports upon which Marx drew veritably burst with horrid tales of the affliction of those already believe to be constitutionally infirm, if not disabled: women, and children. “William Wood, 9 years old, ‘was 7 years 10 months old when he began to work’. He ‘ran moulds’ (carried ready-moulded articles into the drying room, afterwards bringing back the empty mould) from the very beginning. He came to work eerie day in the week at 6 a.m., and left off at about 9 p.m.”
Marx cites the examples of other boys named in similar reports–a Murray, twelve years old, and a Fernyhough, ten–who work twelve to fifteen hour shifts from one afternoon at three or four, to daybreak of the next morning, wherever that may come. As a consequence, he notes, “the average life-expectancy in the pottery districts of Stoke-on-Trent and Wolstanton is extraordinarily low,” with more than half of the deaths of adult men in the first, and two-fifths in the second, attributed to “pulmonary diseases among the potters.” Quoting from the report of the Children’s Employment Commission of 1863, Marx cites a Dr J.T. Arledge, who describes “‘[the] potters as a class, both men and women, [to be] a degenerate population, both physically and morally. They are,’” he continues, “‘stunted in growth, ill-shaped, and frequently ill-formed in the chest; they become prematurely old, and are certainly short-lived; they are phlegmatic and bloodless, and exhibit their debility of constitution by obstinate attacks of dyspepsia, and disorders of the liver and kidneys…rheumatism…pneumonia, phthisis, bronchitis, anc asthma,” the range of co-presenting symptoms of which constitute something the report calls “potter’s asthma, or “potter’s consumption.” Consumption, in Marx, is the appropriately Borromean figure for the effect of capital upon the worker, the knotted relationship between capital as metaphor and materiality, the molecular and molar and physical vitality.
Marx goes on to cite further anecdotes and statistics about workers and working conditions across a range of fields, naming individuals who suffer similar ailments, many of which present–in the body of the literature of inquiry if not necessarily in the bodies of the workers’ themselves–as respiratory maladies. His reflections on the phosphorous match industry are particularly apt, given the relation between matches and flame, and the association of flame with industry, as well as the fires of judgment and everlasting damnation. “Dante would have found the worst horrors in his Inferno surpassed in this industry,” Marx writes, leaving the reader with a faint whisper of Milton, to images of fire and metallurgy, and the corruption of man. Citing still another expert, a Mr Charles Parsons, Marx is at his most uncharacteristically blunt: “He enumerates the causes of the diseases of the potters, and sums them up in the phrase ‘long hours’.” “From the children,” Marx concludes, “ we may deduce the situation of the adults, especially the girls and women, and in a branch of industry, indeed, alongside which cotton spinning appears as a very agreeable and healthy occupation.”
While the multiplication of such examples offers a mountain of evidence illustrating the relationship between workers and their work and the etiology of disease, Marx goes on to explore not just the conditions of the body and the conditions of labor, but the complex of relations between the means of production and conditions of labor, between circulation and consumption, and processes of infection, contagion, and enervation, illustrating if not disentangling this nettlesome complex of relations through a consideration of the materiality of workers’ most basic modes of subsistence. “Englishmen, with their good command of the Bible, knew well enough that man, unless by elective grace a capitalist, or a landlord, or the holder of a sinecure, is destined to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow, but they did not know that he had to eat daily in his bread a certain quantity of human perspiration mixed with the discharge of abscesses, cobwebs, dead cockroaches and putrid German yeast, not to mention alum, sand and other agreeable mineral ingredients.”
Drawn from his analysis of the working day, Marx’s description of the various unsavory and indigestible pollutants that corrupted those commercial bakeries that had pledged themselves to the sovereignty of capital offers a wholly apt image through which to consider the ways in which the circulation of labor, of goods, of producers and consumers, constitutes a circuitry of infection, serving to organize the uneven distribution of illness and health, misery and joy. Organized around the imperatives of surplus, of speed and volume and the maximization of value, as a function of their necessary imbrication with the physicality of labor, the production, distribution, and consumption of commodities knitted a reticular webbing of toxicities, a parasitic skin, growing upon, and gnawing at, the sinews of trade, of the circulatory structure of capital as a world-making project. Lingering over bread, Marx draws into evidence another in a long list of his erudite, if silent, commodity figures, one so physically laden, affectively charged, and metaphorically rank as to afford a billowing mass of complementary proofs without ever deigning to speak. Indirectly citing Genesis 3:19, Marx expands upon the nominal banality of consumable grasses and grains, calling upon the rhetorical figure of bread and its relation to cultivation and agricultural labor as a consequence of sin to evoke the literary perforation of yeast-ridden dough, as well as the densely compacted significance of breads within the ritual complex of Judeo-Christian traditions. Coincident with a long history, in the United Kingdom, of domestic agriculture in grains, the Corn Laws, tariffs and trade, bread serves as a highly condensed, if not wholly convoluted, image of a means of subsistence so basic and necessary as to seem almost trite; yet that, in analysis, that yields that most gregarious complexities. Of no small consequence in themselves, this basket of entanglements sits only adjacent to a more elemental point: the rough treatment of labor under conditions of capitalist exploitation begets a mode of adulteration and infection that is highly transmissible, such that the consumption of foods becomes becomes a vector of disease. As we eat, we are told, we are eating some portion of the physical vitality of the materiality of labor. Every meal, in this reckoning, is a vampire orgy; every dish we enjoy, a cannibal feast.
The mode of subsistence for the worker thus becomes yet another means by which the capitalist–like a thief in the night–steals away their bodily vitality; another portion by which the “petty pilfering” of the bourgeoisie from the time of the worker accrues as surplus-value at the disposal of the capitalist, the ill-health of the worker another field for the valorization of capital in the form of investments promoting health and well being, “the gospel of ‘saving’ and ‘abstinence’” and the pleasures of self-abnegation. Abstinence and denial are here presented as means of saving one’s vitality in the interest of the capitalist by forgoing the pleasures of the body, but also through the principled, willful dismissal of the mere animal needs of the body, of rest and restoration, respiration and digestion, in the interest of capital as the new holy spirit. We are thus choked on the bread of our labors. Give us this day our daily bread because this bread is the bread of life but all bread is the bread of affliction.
Marx finished his chapter on the working day while suffering a particularly nasty recurrence of the debilitating skin inflammation that he and his wife referred to, in correspondence, as “carbuncles” or “boils,” “furuncles” or “pits.” Characterized by a series of painful nodules, prompted by the infection of blocked hair follicles, Marx’s carbuncles spread from his underarms to his chest, across his face and his scalp, occasionally settling into the corners of his eyes, rendering him unable to read, write, or smoke. Unsightly and embarrassing, and mechanically debilitating, the pustules were at their most excruciating nonetheless when they appeared along areas of the body less frequently exposed to the general public: from his groin to his testes, across the perineum to his buttocks. Writing to Ludwig Kugelmann, a German gynecologist and fellow traveler, with Marx and Engels, in the social democratic cause, Marx described a late outbreak of the disease, noting that “[t]his time it was dangerous,” and agreeing that “you are right in saying that ‘dietetic sins are at the bottom of it.” Admitting his own mercurial temperament and habits of living, he continued, “I am too much given to working at night, studying by day and writing by night. That, together with all the worries, private and public, and–so long as I am working hard–the neglect of a regular diet and exercise, etc, is quite enough to disorder the blood.” Prefacing his remarks on the situation in Prussia, he explained, “I shall return to London the day after tomorrow. My doctor exiled me to this seaside place, where indeed my health has greatly improved. But once again more than two months–February, March, and half of April–have been entirely lost and the completion of my book postponed. It is enough to drive one mad.”