that art has been deprived of its recently acquired purposelessness is repeatedly presented as a commendable progress: ‘as salt is to food, so are the arts to technical science. We want from art only enough to insure that our handicraft will remain in good taste’, writes the Abbé to Wilhelm;44 ‘the rigorous arts’—stonecutters, masons, carpenters, roofers, locksmiths . . . —adds another leader of the Province, ‘must set an example for the free arts, and seek to put them to shame’.45 And then, if necessary, the punitive, anti-aesthetic side of Utopia makes its appearance: if he sees no theatres around, Wilhelm’s guide curtly informs him, it’s because ‘we found such impostures thoroughly dangerous . . . and could in no way reconcile them with our serious purpose’.46 So, drama is banned from the Province. And that’s it.
‘The Renunciants’, reads the subtitle of the Wanderjahre, indicating with that word the sacrifice of human fullness imposed by the modern division of labour. Thirty years earlier, in the Apprenticeship, the theme had been presented as a painful mutilation of bourgeois existence;47 but in the later novel, pain has disappeared: ‘the day for specialization has come’, Wilhelm is immediately told by one of his old associates; ‘fortunate is he who comprehends it and labors in this spirit’.48 The day has come, and falling in step is a ‘fortune’. ‘Happy the man whose vocation becomes his favorite pastime’, exclaims a farmer who has gathered a collection of agricultural tools, ‘so that he takes pleasure in that which his station also makes a duty’.49 A museum of tools, to celebrate the division of labour. ‘All activity, all art . . . can only be acquired through limitation. To know one thing properly . . . results in higher cultivation than half-competence in a hundred different fields’, says one of Wilhelm’s interlocutors.50 ‘Where I am useful, there is my fatherland!’,51 adds another and then goes on: ‘If I now say, “let each strive to be useful to himself and others in all ways”, it is neither a doctrine nor advice, but the maxim of life itself.’
There is a word that would have been perfect for the Wanderjahre—had it only existed at the time Goethe was writing: efficiency. Or better, the word did exist, but it still indicated what it had for centuries: ‘the fact of being an operative agent or efficient cause’, as the OED puts it: efficiency as causation, and nothing more. Then, around the mid nineteenth century, the shift: ‘fitness or power to accomplish, or success in accomplishing, the purpose intended; adequate power, effectiveness, efficacy.’52 Adequate power: no longer the mere capacity to do something, but to do it without any waste, and in the most economic way. If the useful had turned the world into a collection of tools, the division of labour steps in to calibrate the tools towards their ends (‘the purpose intended’)—and ‘efficiency’ is the result. They are three consecutive steps in the history of capitalist rationalization.
Of capitalist rationalization—and of European colonialism. ‘These chaps were not much account, really’, says Marlow, dismissively, of the Romans in Britain; ‘they were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force’.53 Brute force; by contrast, ‘what saves’ British rule in the colonies is ‘efficiency—the devotion to efficiency’.54 Two mentions, in crescendo, within a single sentence; then the word disappears from Heart of Darkness; in its place, a stunningly in-efficient world where machines are left to rust and disintegrate, workers gather water with pails that have holes at the bottom, bricks lack the crucial ingredient, and Marlow’s own work is halted for lack of rivets (though ‘there were cases of them down at the coast—cases—piled up—burst—split!’55). And the reason for all this waste is simple: slavery. Slavery was never ‘ordered around the idea of efficiency’, writes Roberto Schwarz about the Brazilian plantations of Conrad’s time, because it could always rely ‘on violence and military discipline’; therefore, ‘the rational study and continuous modernization of the processes of production’ made literally ‘no sense’. In such cases, as in the Congo of the ‘company’, the ‘brute force’ of the Romans may turn out to be more perversely ‘efficient’ than efficiency itself.
Strange experiment, Heart of Darkness: sending a clear-sighted bourgeois engineer to witness the fact that one of the most profitable ventures of fin-de-siècle capitalism was the opposite of industrial efficiency: ‘the opposite of what was modern’, to quote Schwarz one more time. ‘Acquisition by force’ survived side by side with modern rationality, I wrote a few pages ago, and Conrad’s novella—where the ethical bourgeois is sent to rescue the irrational adventurer—is the perfect example of that jarring cohabitation. Surrounded by a crowd with whom he has nothing in common, Marlow’s only moment of empathy is with an anonymous pamphlet he finds in an abandoned station along the river; ‘humble pages’, he writes, made ‘luminous’ by their ‘honest concern for the right way of going to work’. The right way: work ethic, in the midst of colonial pillage. ‘Luminous’, versus the ‘darkness’ of the title: religious associations, like those of the ‘calling’ in The Protestant Ethic, or that initial ‘ devotion to efficiency’, which has its own Weberian echo in the ‘devotion to the task’ of ‘Science as a Profession’. But . . . devotion to efficiency—in the Congo Free State? Nothing in common, I said, between Marlow and the plunderers around him: nothing in common, that is, except for the fact that he works for them. The greater his devotion to efficiency, the easier their looting.
The creation of a culture of work has been, arguably, the greatest symbolic achievement of the bourgeoisie as a class: the useful, the division of labour, ‘industry’, efficiency, the ‘calling’, the ‘seriousness’ of the next chapter—all these, and more, bear witness to the enormous significance acquired by what used to be merely a hard necessity or a brutal duty; that Max Weber could use exactly the same concepts to describe manual labour (in The Protestant Ethic) and great science (in ‘Science as a Profession’) is itself a further, indirect sign of the new symbolic value of bourgeois work. But when Marlow’s wholehearted devotion to his task turns into the instrument of bloody oppression—a fact so patent, in Heart of Darkness, as to be almost invisible—the fundamental antinomy of bourgeois work comes to the surface: the same self-referential absorption that is the source of its greatness—unknown tribes hiding ashore, foolish and frightened murderers on board, and Marlow, oblivious to all, keeping the steamer on course—is the source of its servitude, too. Marlow’s work ethic impels him to do his work well; to what end, is not its concern. Like the ‘blinders’ so memorably evoked in ‘Science as a Profession’, the legitimacy and productivity of modern work are not just intensified, but established by their blindness to what lies around it. It is truly, as Weber writes in The Protestant Ethic, an ‘irrational sort of life . . . where a man exists for the sake of his business, instead of the reverse’, and where the only result of one’s ceaseless activity is ‘the irrational sense of having done his job well’.56
An irrational sort of life, that dominated by Zweckrationalität. But instrumental reason, as we have seen, is also one of the underlying principles of modern prose. In a few pages, the consequences of this association will become visible.
Christian asceticism, we read in The Protestant Ethic,
had already ruled the world which it had renounced from the monastery and through the Church. But it had, on the whole, left the naturally spontaneous character of daily life in the world untouched. Now it strode into the market-place of life, slammed the door of the monastery behind it, and undertook to penetrate just that daily routine of life with its methodicalness, to fashion it into a life in the world, but neither of nor for this world.57
A life in the world, but neither of nor for the world. Just like Robinson’s life: ‘in’ the island, but neither ‘of’ nor ‘for’ the island. And yet, we never have the impression that he ‘gets nothing out of [his activity] except the irrational sense of having done his job
