SHAKSPER 2000: Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@ws.bowiestate.edu)
Date: 01/28/00 

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0184  Friday, 28 January 2000.

[1]     From:   Sean Lawrence <seanlawrence@writeme.com>
        Date:   Thursday, 27 Jan 2000 09:51:55 -0800
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0176 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

[2]     From:   Judith Matthews Craig <je-mc@apex2000.net>
        Date:   Thursday, 27 Jan 2000 19:21:54 -0600
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0176 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Sean Lawrence <seanlawrence@writeme.com>
Date:           Thursday, 27 Jan 2000 09:51:55 -0800
Subject: 11.0176 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0176 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

Patrick Dolan writes:

> I'd probably be interested too, depending on where the "aren't material"
> "shouldn't be" come from. If they come from your twentieth century
> Christianity or my spirituality whatever it may be, then the article may
> take its interest from its illumination of the spiritual, but I don't
> think it would be very interested in a scholarly discussion of
> Shakespeare.
>
> On the other hand, if they come from an understanding of the cultural
> and social standing of love and friendship in Shakespeare's culture and
> the discourse(s) of the play then we may have (scholarly) gold.

The problem with an historicist argument, though, is that it can melt
the "shouldn't be" back into cultural history, which itself is
materially determined.  I think that this is the problem Marx gets
himself into.  He's clearly driven by a moral imperative, but then
considers moral imperatives to all be matters of class consciousness.
So his argument betrays its ultimate grounds.

Historicist arguments always strike me as undertaking a similar risk, or
rather, always subtly betraying themselves.  We want to find a
historical ground for the various concerns we project unto the past.  On
the other hand, if we actually succeed, we turn them into being just
historically determined.  To return to the example:  if we show that the
sixteenth-century would be critical of the Christians in Merchant of
Venice for turning things like friendship into material, then we might
just be pointing towards Renaissance ideology, which, in turn, we
explain in material terms, much as the Christians in the play explain
friendship in material terms.  This is all sort of convoluted, but the
upshot is that we can study historical ethics without actually escaping
the elephants-all-the-way-down syndrome.  We can still betray the
ethical claim which drew us to make a criticism of the play, or the
characters, or sixteenth-century society in the first place.

> I hope
> you'll agree, Sean, that love and friendship aren't and can't be
> entirely divorced from materiality‹I think that's one of the things the
> play encourages us to think through‹and certainly not in a culture in
> which love and friendship were extremely crucial to economic and
> political advantage.

Yes, I agree entirely, and so, incidentally, would the Protestant
polemicists, who argue that a "lively faith" is one that finds
expression in works, i.e., in the material, economic and political.  We
might, I think, fruitfully compare More's debate about whether a good
person should enter into political life.  The real question, as you've
pointed out, is whether we can "enable the life affirming bits as best
we can".  I'd put this slightly differently and ask whether, given the
relation between material life and the ethical, we enter into engagement
in the political, material world from an ethical imperative, or whether
we create our ethical imperative to justify our (more primary) ethical
and political motivation.  In the first case, there is an "other than
politics" which makes us take up politics, whereas in the second, it's
politics all the way down.

> Now, I don't for a moment think that they're
> transient froth on the socioeconomic waves. If you have me confused with
> someone who thinks it's material "all the way down," Sean, you're
> misreading me (I hope‹maybe I'm being opaque). But I do think that love,
> friendship and religion are deeply implicated in economic and social
> history and that it's our job (as scholars) to work out how and (as
> humans) enable the life affirming bits as best we can.

No, I don't think that you're treating love or friendship as "transient
froth on the socioeconomic waves".  Nor do I think that most
contemporary scholars would say that, if they were really pushed.  They
do, after all, have friends and fall in love.  But strangely, they don't
seem to push themselves.  Ask a Marxist why one would care about the
working classes at all, and you'll get some answer dealing with class
consciousness or an obfuscation about how no answer is necessary, or
self-righteous rhetoric about how accusations of moral relativism are
insulting.  Similarly, if you ask a Foucauldian whether (say) the Duke's
decision to save Barnardine in Measure for Measure might mean that power
isn't all-encompassing, you'll get some variation on the fact that
conscientious worry about the state of his soul is itself historically
imbricated, or that posing the question shows that the interloccutor is
being driven by concerns of power.  In other words, it's a variation on
the elephants-all-the-way-down theme.  It's as frustrating as arguing
with a Freudian about the primacy of the id, or, for that matter,
arguing with a Catholic about birth control.

I'm not saying, of course, that the elephants-all-the-way-down logic
exhausts the value of any of these ways of thinking, or that Christians
can't be equally maddening to argue with (I've been there!).  I am say,
though, that it's an insufficient defense against the vulnerability
which comes from recognizing the grounds of the theory in the first
place.  It's a mechanism by which the drive to theorize, our actual
concern with enabling the life-affirming bits, betrays itself.

> I hope you're having as much fun with this as I am,

Yes, actually, I am.

Cheers,
Seán.

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Judith Matthews Craig <je-mc@apex2000.net>
Date:           Thursday, 27 Jan 2000 19:21:54 -0600
Subject: 11.0176 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0176 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

Sean Lawrence writes:

<The second possibility, is that Othello might be breaking <with his own
<closed system, recognizing someone as really <transcendent to him.

I am having a hard time understanding the intricacies of love and
pornography as reflected in recent discussions, but I REALLY have hard
time here-does love make the woman "transcendent" to him?  Is she some
kind of Petrarchan unattainable goddess?  It seems to me that the whole
drift of Shakespeare's characterization of women is anti-Petrarchan and
if they err, it is on the side of grim reality rather than as
goddesses.  Desdemona strikes me as a very fine woman who goes through
hell to marry a man that she perceives as equally fine and "worth it."
I always thought Othello's problems were not due to Desdemona's
"alterity" but to his insecurity as a black man in white society.

Judy Craig


about SHAKSPER | current postings | submitted papers | browse SHAKSPER | search SHAKSPER
  
Copyright © 2002, Hardy M. Cook, design by Eric Luhrs. All rights reserved.