celebrities, who might in turn attract the bankers and hedge fund men for the VIP rooms. The general admission crowd down on the dance floor would be largely for decoration. The kinds of mixing of the classes that both troubled and thrilled Manet’s contemporaries will now be carefully vetted. Managing such intercourse calls into being new kinds of labor. Rachel Uchitel was a VIP concierge director. She was an ambassador of client desire, making sure the big names and big spenders came to her club and kept on coming. “People say ‘Oh Rachel, she’s such a star fucker,’ that I only hang out with celebs. No. I hang out with successful people. I hang out with people who matter, and I’m honored to.” Uchitel became famous in her own right for fifteen seconds in connection with a famous sporting identity. The attention was not exactly welcome. Uchitel: “I have big breasts, yes. But I’m really offended by the notion that I used my sexuality.”
Or anybody else’s. For one of the roles of a VIP concierge director is to introduce people who matter to women they may find attractive. “It’s not our job to get anybody laid,” Uchitel insists.22 But it was her job to populate the VIP rooms with women as attractive as they are discreet. Models, perhaps. Or almost-models. And it is the job of club promoters to bring these almost-models in. The contemporary nightclub, in other words, is a sophisticated machine for the highly selective mingling of money and sex. Or perhaps just the promise of sex, and sometimes just the promise of money. Whether the girls put out or the boys shell out is none of the club’s concern.
The nightclub is now a long way from the café-concert, with its only partially organized traffic between money’s desires and desire’s money. Manet glimpses the beginnings of a spectacular industry that has since been perfected. Now that the threat of the dangerous classes seems half a world away, at least from a New York nightclub, the danger to guard against is not that the rabble might reject the desires on offer, but that it might rather embrace them with too much gusto. Leisure, sex and suburbia are no longer marginal sites within which new kinds of spectacular economy grow. They are the very center and essence of that spectacular economy.
There are occupations that enjoy universal acclaim, and others that matter more but are barely visible.
Baltasar Gracián
Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) offers a different kind of leisure in Two Young Peasant Women (1892). It is a painting of the end of the French peasantry, the fixing of something passing. Not that being a peasant was all that pleasant. It was hard work, but still, shot through with utopian promise.
Valuing peasant life was a way of resisting the disenchantment of the world, but Pissarro’s painting is not an idealization of the image of the peasant as a remnant of the past. It is something more specific. Pissarro paints idleness as a moment within the field of work, as the peasant’s ability to choose the moment to be idle. He found a way of looking at the people without being disciplinary or sentimental. There are certain things Pissarro’s peasant women are not asked to be: figures of sympathy, for one. Clark rightly stresses the rarity of this as an achievement. Unlike Manet’s women, they are indifferent to the gaze.
Pissarro’s way of seeing is, in effect, anarchist. Not in the sense of painting a doctrine, but rather in working, through the act of making art, to a certain understanding of the social world. Anarchism is the theory of a freedom compatible with order. “It is the anarchist temper—vengeful, self-doubting, and serene—out of which Two Young Peasant Women comes.”1 Pissarro arrived at it through the materiality of painting itself. In this canvas, the singular and universal are no longer in opposition. It’s something Pissarro wrestled with in trying to absorb the influence of Georges Seurat, in whose distinctive paintings all dots are equal, but not the same.
For Pissarro, paintings are a way of thinking, of investigating vision and rendering it thinkable. The danger, as in Seurat, is that “Every act of submission to one’s experience could turn into a system.” But one could struggle against it, by immersion in a practice, of painting or something else, to get at the singular structure of sensation as one experiences it. Art is not an Idea cast into a few signs. It is more a matter of a singular sensation calling objects into being in its own way, with its own “folding of parts into wholes.”2 The anarchist critic Félix Fénéon, on Pissarro: “Finally a master of forms, he bathes them forever in a translucent atmosphere, and immortalizes, by means of the benign and flexible hieraticism he has just invented, their exalted interweave.”3
Pissarro matters for Clark because of a need to recover a version of the history of socialism independent of either the social democracy of the Second International (1889–1916) or the Leninism of the Third International (1919–43). The First International (1864–76), for all its squabbles, was one in which anarchism was alive and well. Socialists pay a high price for suppressing their anarchist side, first with the capitulation to militarism of the Second International, and then by the authoritarianism of the Third.4 In Pissarro’s time, the anarchists at least resisted militarism, and stood apart from the nascent bureaucratic tendencies of the organized labor movement. For Clark what matters is always the internal difference within revolutionary movements, between a people and its representatives. This was already the case with the sans-culottes and David, the proletarians and Delacroix.
Socialist culture and politics, of which anarchism was then a component, were at the height of their power at the end of the nineteenth century. But socialism “had still to devise a set of forms in which the developing nature of bourgeois society—the cultural order of capitalism as well as the economic and political ones—could be described and resisted. Anarchism possessed some of the elements needed. In closing against anarchism, socialism deprived itself of far more than fire. It deprived itself of an imagination adequate to the horror confronting it, and the worse to come.”5
The anarchists were geographers of the peasant condition. Pissarro certainly responded to the anti-urban strand in anarchism, its refusal to be seduced by labor and the machine. It was possible to read The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin together with Marx, to imagine agriculture as another route to praxis. “But at least anarchists knew already in the 1890s that fighting the state meant thinking geographically and biologically.”6 They counted among their number Elisée Reclus, veteran of the Paris Commune, acute critic of what was becoming of Marxisant socialism, and the founder of social geography. This is the space toward which Clark’s viewing of Two Young Peasant Women opens.
David’s The Death of Marat is a canvas that contains in embryo the two tendencies in modern representation. The top half points toward art’s recognition of the disenchantment of the sign. In place of its magic, art will turn inward, and succeed by representing its own failure to represent anything else. The bottom half is something else. Here art struggles, and fails, to make a claim to enact a truth that is at once political and aesthetic: Marat’s blood on the traitor’s letter. But is the failure of the bottom half aesthetic or political? Perhaps it is not art that fails in this instance, or not art alone. Perhaps the failure is in calling on art to represent a people in absentia.
One could see Delacroix, Courbet, Manet and Pissarro as attempts to make some kind of painting work in the place of the dead Marat. Delacroix tries to affirm the presence of the people, and fails. What Courbet bequeaths to Manet is the possibility of a realism that finds the gap between appearances and the ruling ideas of their time. What Pissarro offers is the possibility of picturing an actual site in which some other life could be sensed. In their successes and failures is a legacy from which to thieve in the unending struggle of peoples to present themselves to history rather than be represented by the state or the commodity. In short, from the détournement of these formative moments of the nascent spectacle can come resources for a counter-practice to the spectacle in its current form.
Or so, perhaps, was Clark’s proposition in his earlier books, up until The Painting of Modern Life (1985). In his later writing, particularly in Farewell to an Idea (1999), it’s the works that descend from the top half of The Death of Marat that interest him, by Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock. This is where modern art becomes the site of a certain kind of melancholia, the place where the impossibility of