SHAKSPER 2000: Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@ws.bowiestate.edu)
Date: 01/31/00 

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0194  Monday, 31 January 2000.

[1]     From:   Sean Lawrence <seanlawrence@writeme.com>
        Date:   Friday, 28 Jan 2000 09:22:31 -0800
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0184 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

[2]     From:   Clifford Stetner <cstetner@gc.cuny.edu>
        Date:   Thursday, 27 Jan 2000 19:00:49 -0500
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0164 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

[3]     From:   Clifford Stetner <cstetner@gc.cuny.edu>
        Date:   Thursday, 27 Jan 2000 19:00:49 -0500
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0164 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

[4]     From:   Clifford Stetner <cstetner@gc.cuny.edu>
        Date:   Thursday, 27 Jan 2000 19:00:49 -0500
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0164 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

[5]     From:   Clifford Stetner <cstetner@gc.cuny.edu>
        Date:   Thursday, 27 Jan 2000 19:00:49 -0500
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0164 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

[6]     From:   Judith Matthews Craig <je-mc@apex2000.net>
        Date:   Saturday, 29 Jan 2000 14:20:27 -0600
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0184 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Sean Lawrence <seanlawrence@writeme.com>
Date:           Friday, 28 Jan 2000 09:22:31 -0800
Subject: 11.0184 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0184 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

Judith Matthews Craig writes:

> 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 don't mean transcendent in the Petrarchan sense, which could just
collapse into idolatry, which is a form of self-worship.  I mean
transcendent in the sense of outside the self.  Desdemona cannot be
known or assimilated to Othello's knowing self until he declares her to
be an adulteress.  "Whore" is a label which exhaustively describes;
"wife" is not.  So long as she isn't exhaustively known, she's a
challenge to his way of seeing the world, not by virtue of anything she
does, but simply by virtue of being free.

> I always thought Othello's problems were not due to Desdemona's
> "alterity" but to his insecurity as a black man in white society.

Well yes, that's another possibility that I floated.  Still, if Othello
could treat Desdemona exhaustively as a trophy then they'd be no need to
worry about her infidelity.  As a trophy, she'd be "his" (like a
possession) not "hers", and therefore unable to pose a challenge to his
world.  One might look at the discussion between Iago and Othello about
the handkerchief, and whether it's Desdemona's to give away.

Cheers,
Seán.

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Clifford Stetner <cstetner@gc.cuny.edu>
Date:           Thursday, 27 Jan 2000 19:00:49 -0500
Subject: 11.0164 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0164 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

I have to tell you, Sean, that you sound like me critiquing patriarchal
monotheism.  Which of the following might not be said of religious
fundamentalism?

>...Such totalizing thought can't actually be disproven, since
>nothing would ever count as evidence against it, but it can be put aside
>or the issues within it can be thought differently.
>
>I see a closed system (such as the elephants all the way down idea) as a
>mechanism by which nothing ever escapes the knower's grasp.  He'll never
>be faced with the absolute failure of his world-view, only a puzzle to
>be solved by extending it.  Lear explaining completely unrelated things
>(the weather, for instance, or Tom's madness) in terms of ungrateful
>daughters comes to mind.

Or a Christian explaining every example of the pointless cruelty of
nature as "God's will."  I heard the story with turtles and aborigines,
not elephants, by the way, and I thought immediately of the arguments I
used to get in the fourth grade.  If there's no God, they'd ask me, who
made the universe?  Who made God? I retorted.  God was always here, they
concluded, apparently satisfied that it was God all the way down, and
that they had clearly won the dispute.  The universe was always here, I
answered (i.e.  materiality all the way down in a kind of ten
dimensional Klein bottle topology that twists in on itself in ways that
elude our three dimensional minds).

>...Totalitarianism is always utopian, in the sense
>that it feels there's a total answer to all human sorrows, and one
>achievable in this world.  Any amount of human misery can therefore be
>justified on the expectation of a total liberation in the future.

But isn't this just what these religions promise?  Only the liberation
is not in this world, so they never actually have to deliver.

>  It strikes me that this might be an interesting way to analyze Jack Cade's
>rebellion in H6:  sure, there's human misery in the short term, but when
>we're done the price of bread will be less than the cost of production
>and wine will flow in the pissing-troughs.

Sure, we're under the thumbs of the barbarian warlords in the short
term, but if we don't make trouble, and pay our tithes, and render unto
Caesar a fifth, a third, half our crops, or anything we're told, when
we're done, we'll go to the bosom of our lord, and they'll be cast into
the fiery pit, selah.

>It's not the
>rigour of Nazism to which one objects (the whole thing is the motive
>hunting of motiveless malignancy, as you pointed out), but it's ability
>to explain everything in terms of race or power.

Not to explain everything, (I feel that this superlative is overused in
your arguments), and not in terms of power, which does explain an awful
lot, but specifically in terms of racial history.  Like hegemonic
religions, it incorporated the mystification of material conditions into
a political agenda that served a particular power faction in its
oppression and atrocities.  What disturbs us (about Naziism and
religion) is that ideologies can be constructed and disseminated to
masses of people whose behavior can thereby be controlled.

Clifford

[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Clifford Stetner <cstetner@gc.cuny.edu>
Date:           Thursday, 27 Jan 2000 19:00:49 -0500
Subject: 11.0164 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0164 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

Abdulla Al-Dabbagh <al-dabbagh@rocketmail.com>

You have a much more optimistic view of the prospect than I that it is
possible in the public discourse for:

"...a clear distinction be made between ways of thinking and systems of
government?"

People I argue with accuse me of paranoia when I claim that information
is more tightly controlled in America than it ever was in the Soviet
Union.  When was the last time you heard a socialist speak on any
corporate owned media?  By keeping the left wing out of the discussion,
the corporations succeed in creating the impression that socialism is an
exploded theory, that it has proven itself internally flawed, and that
it is no longer a legitimate enough political orientation to warrant as
much media attention as Gary Bauer, Donald Trump or Pat Buchanan.

As Judith Craig asks: doesn't the miserable fate of the Russian people
disprove Marxist theory?  To Judith, I'd just like to suggest that fifty
years of concerted aggression, both economic and military by the most
powerful state in history might have something to do with it.  Isn't it
the capitalists, who despoiled the Russian people of a wealth which
formerly belonged collectively to them, who are responsible for their
current misery which, regardless of Reagan's promises, will surpass
anything they suffered in a socialist society?

After reading Noam Chomsky, I've come to believe that the power factions
that control media content control the collective consciousness, and, in
America, these factions are not in the least disinterested, but in fact,
work very hard to supervise the public discourse.  The larger the mass
of people, the more they behave according to bell curves with the
majority always falling between the two extremes containing small
minorities.  The trick, then, is to keep shoving the middle further to
the right, so that, what was once "liberal" now comes off as radical
leftism, and radical leftism is off the map with Grandpa Munster and the
Green party.

If socialism is invalid, then how could socialists sit in every
parliament in Europe?  Is it we or they who have developed a distorted
political discourse.  I say, it is we.  I say that it is no accident
that, while science majors in this country are starting up corporations
while still in the University, humanities majors have to go beg for
money to do research into the history of political power.

Which brings me to your next question:

"...where does Shakespeare come into all this?"

you say that he gives us not:

"...mere indications of personal inclination, but guidelines to, not a
system perhaps, but certainly definite ways of thought."

But is not only us to whom he gives them.  He was himself involved in
the construction of the public discourse of his own time.  He is a
representative of the Elizabethan mass media, and all the Chomskyan
principles of manufacturing consent apply to his art.  Whatever it may
have been internally, it was simultaneously an ideological force in the
construction of cultural realities.  One in eight Londoners visited the
theater once a week.  While you are interested in his thought, I am
interested in the thoughts that he created among his contemporaries.
For this we have to discover what they were thinking about when they got
to the theater.

Which puts me roughly in the category of:

"...the contemporary debate between the New Historicists and the
Cultural
Materialists," who you feel, "even when they bring a wealth of new
detail
and seem to make a radical break with previous
criticism, seems, to me at any rate, rather inconclusive and
unsatisfactory. I may be wrong, but to me it lacks, ironically, the
historical, and more broadly comparative framework that seems to be
needed for the study of Shakespeare and of Elizabethan and Renaissance
literature generally. "

I agree, and so some of us should set about supplying such frameworks.
Which brings me, hopefully, to my dissertation.

Clifford

[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Clifford Stetner <cstetner@gc.cuny.edu>
Date:           Thursday, 27 Jan 2000 19:00:49 -0500
Subject: 11.0164 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0164 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

Sean points out that:

>I don't have to be a Lollard to understand why they might be willing to be
>burned rather than recant.  It strikes me as profoundly wrong, however,
>to describe them as simply driven by economic forces.  It is, to use one
>of your parallels, at least as wrong as seeing them driven by daemonic
>forces ...

When heretics are accused of demonism, it is usually a backhanded way of
affirming the mystification of spirituality upon which the hegemonic
authority rests.  Martyrs are driven by their adoption of a system of
relative values which establishes a greater emotional value in religious
integrity than in self preservation.  A cultural materialist would argue
that these systems of values are created and infused by the evolution of
material conditions.

This is a subtle semantic dispute.  If Luther was first led to
Reformation by his rejection of indulgences, does this qualify as a
spiritual or a material motivation?  If the Church that holds hegemony
over a nation's spirituality is simultaneously a foreign political and
military power, is revolt spiritual or material?  It simply begs
definition (and perhaps deconstruction) of the binary terms.

>This makes all such lenses equal, which seems to be the claim that
>Marx's dictum at least appears to be avoiding.

Not avoiding, but rejecting outright.  The lens of materialism is
untinted.  It is not so reductive to claim that the material world is
material.  It is something of a tautology.  Remember, Marx did not say
that "everything" can be reduced to material relations, but that "all
history" could.  It is only necessary to take the post Cartesian step of
removing the spiritual realm to a transcendent plane outside of history.

I think this essentially represents the beginning of the end of
providentialism in the collective Western world view.  One may be
religious without believing that God's hand is moving history in a
particular direction with a particular end in view.  Marx did not so
much try to explain the motives and qualities of individuals, but to
explain the large scale processes of history, the death of princes and
the progress of worldly empire, the kind of thing that Shakespeare often
wrote about.

Milton strikes me as the swan song of providentialism.  His Adam and Eve
walk out of a garden they share with a living God into a post Cartesian
world from which God has withdrawn his face and hands.  In Cartesian
duality, God has created the laws that govern the material world, and
once having done so, he does not reach in to interfere.

When Bob Dylan said: "you don't count the dead, when God's on your
side," he expressed the impossibility for many people of ascribing
providentialist causes to the Vietname War.  It was often said that we
fought that war in the name of "freedom" and "democracy," but "freedom"
was equated with capitalism-the freedom to use capital to acquire
property, thereby restricting the freedom of those without capital.
When capitaists set out to fight a war to protect their interests, they
have to couch their motives in ideologies that can enlist the
participation of a population that does not share them.  The problem
with religion is that it can be, and often was, used in this kind of
function, and anyone that attempted to call attention to the deception
was labeled by the hegemeny as heretic, and presented to the people as a
threat to their spirituality.

>In the case of Richard with his prayer book, the implication isn't that all
>prayer is deceit for something else; if it were, there would be no irony
>in Richard's self-presentation.

The irony lies in the fact that, for Richard, the deceit is intentional,
as opposed to the naivity of those who believe that the winter of
discontent has really come to an end.

>Similarly, while Machiavelli recognizes
>that religion has a certain weight in the world of politics, he doesn't
>exhaustively desanctify religion.  He's reputed to have received extreme
>unction, in fact.

There's the rub.  We see what effect such repute can have on our
interpretation of history.  I'm afraid people made up tales like this
all the time and passed them off pretty effectively because they were
aware of the very fact you dispute: that religious matters are
essentially political.  To allow Machiavelli to die unshriven might
weaken the psychological power of the Church and its monopoly on
salvation.   There was a constant effort, therefore, to control the ways
that history got written down.

>Seeing the period as religious doesn't mean that we
>don't recognize its tie with materiality, only that we don't make
>materiality exhaustive.

I also object to the claim that Marx's dialectic materialism is
excessively "exhaustive" or "totalizing."  It is, after all, a product
of the enlightenment and attempts to apply enlightenment scientific
principles to the study of history.  To state that all A is B is not
automatically invalid, as in "all circles have 360 degrees," or "all
objects at rest remain at rest unless acted upon by forces."

Rather than saying that all history is the history of class struggle.
Marx should perhaps have said that, if we reduce history to the terms of
class struggle, we find that it follows particular causal patterns which
we can abstract as coherent systems with coherent laws.  As Abdullah
asks:

>...is there anything intrinsically wrong with a system or thinker which/who
explains a larger number of things?
>shouldn't we, in fact, aspire, in the field of the humanities, to be able
to explain as many things as possible?

To which I might add that, even if Marxist ideas about the nature of
dialectics were unsuited to contemporary real politics, this would not
necessarily unsuit them for the study of other historical texts like
Shakespeare's.

Clifford

[6]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Judith Matthews Craig <je-mc@apex2000.net>
Date:           Saturday, 29 Jan 2000 14:20:27 -0600
Subject: 11.0184 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0184 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

Sean Lawrence writes:

<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.

This argument seems to me to entertain a fallacy:  a play is not
cultural history, solely, and clearly, Shakespeare meant it so.  The
plays are set in Venice, not England, with English spiritual concerns
debated in fictional or absurd situations;  moreover, no one believes
that one can seriously calculate the effects of a  play seriously
conceived as a spiritual comment on a nowhere situation on a not-here,
historical sixteenth-century audience.  To me there is no history
implied in "historical criticism":  a play exists in history only as a
performance; it has another reality as a spiritual idea conceived in the
mind of the writer.

The statement below, "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."

I would think that a spiritual argument, clearly intended, never points
towards an ideology and that the comparison Sean makes with Marx is
therefore invalid.

<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.

The latter statement here seems to me to be untrue.  "Historical ethics"
or what happened as a result of a particular historical situation do not
apply to our response to the plays and we cannot know what response an
actual sixteenth-century audience had.  A spiritual idea demands a
spiritual response, not an intellectual abstraction based on sophistry.

<  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 don't think so:  if we betray that kind of ethical claim, we betray
all kinds of ethical claims-including the  argument below.  Sean argues
that one ethical stance, i.e. entering politics for a sincere ethical
reason, is better than another, i.e. creating ethical imperatives as a
reason to enter politics. The latter person had a previous primary
political motivation before his ethical one, and I believe this mode of
conduct is called rationalization.

Moreover, to recognize the grounds of one's theory to me does not always
imply vulnerability or obfuscation:  recognizing where one is coming
from should be the first step in a long process of defining oneself with
integrity.  Sean's last sentence leaves me confused:  "It's a mechanism
by which the drive to theorize, our actual concern with enabling the
life-affirming bits, betrays itself."

What are "life-affirming bits" and why should the desire to examine
ourselves-the first step of Socratic logic-or even Christian thought
(take the mote out of your eye first, etc) be a betrayal of thought?

Judy Craig (sorry for the long post)


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