If we are to believe his letters, Flaubert, the so-called realist, was never very happy with realism. Like Marx, his work registers the same historical disjunctions, but unlike Marx he more consciously feeds the seismic disturbances into the work of art, producing a fictional text that looks and feels like realism, but actually undermines and subverts it at every point. He too, like Marx, is a modernist of sorts. Their sort of modernism bears a family resemblance to one of the new arts of capitalist industrialism, photography, and its first exemplar, the daguerreotype. The photochemical rendering of reality, in shades of gray and black punctuated by luminous pools of light, quickly gets naturalized as a kind of concentrated visual realism. But, as all theorists of photography have noted, at every point the photochemical and mechanical mode of production casts its shadow across the variegated surface of the photograph's performance of reality. The uncanny mirror effect of the photograph, even this earliest type, seduces the uncritical viewer by its alleged reflection of the real world, as opposed, at the time, to a “reality” built up by strokes of paint bent towards a vanishing point. Its realism vanishes the instant you notice the photograph's rhetoric of light and shade, in precisely the same way that the conceptual calm of Eighteenth Brumaire disappears when you begin to hear the gibing, artful, desperate voice.