Fiction and Economy Edited by
Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner
Fiction and Economy
Also by Susan Bruce SHAKESPEARE: King Lear (editor) THREE EARLY MODERN UTOPIAS (editor)
Also by Valeria Wagner BOUND TO ACT: Models of Action, Dramas of Inaction Literatura y vida cotidiana. Ficción e imaginario en las Américas
Fiction and Economy Edited by
Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner
Introduction, Selection and editorial matter © Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner 2007; Individual chapters © contributors 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–00524–2 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–00524–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 16
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne
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For Simone Oettli
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Table of Contents Acknowledgements
ix
Notes on Contributors
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Introduction: Fiction and Economy Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner
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1 Supreme Fictions: Money and Words as Commodifying Signifiers Richard Waswo
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2 Trafficking Words Margaret Bridges
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3 The Stain of the Signature Peter de Bolla
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4 Semiotics and Economics Giulia Colaizzi and Jenaro Talens
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5 ‘Parties in Converse’ Literary and Economic Dialogue in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet Mark Thornton Burnett 6 The Fabric of Society: Money, Cloth, and Symbolic Exchanges in Njal’s saga Fabienne L. Michelet 7 ‘There’s none / Can truly say he gives, if he receives’: Timon of Athens and the Possibilities of Generosity Or The Gift of a Stranger Susan Bruce 8 Spend, Spend, Spend: Expenditure and Waste in Hegel, Bataille, Derrida Roy Sellars
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9 Towards a General Economics of Cinema Bruce Bennett
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Index
187 vii
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Acknowledgements A number of people and institutions have played a part in the genesis of this volume. Fred Botting, of the University of Lancaster, and Ann Hughes, of Keele University, offered very useful comments and suggestions on our initial proposal for the collection; we thank them for their time, interest and support. The idea for the project originated during a colloquium at the University of Geneva, held to mark the retirement of Rick Waswo. We thank the University of Geneva for hosting that event and the Faculty of Letters, the Rectorate of the University, the English Department, the ASSH (Académie suisse des sciences humaines et sociales) and the Société académique de Genève for their generous funding, as well as Ancilla Stefani and Clare Tierque for their tireless help on that occasion. We thank Paula Kennedy, Palgrave's commissioning editor, for her support throughout the project, and Palgrave's anonymous reader for his or her constructive suggestions for improvement. Susan would like to thank successive years of students at the Keele, for their animated discussions of possibilities of generosity. Marguerite Palmer ought to know just what Susan owes her, but she would never think about it that way. And Daniel and Luke Lustig-Bruce have, over the past few years, reminded Susan not only of the early manifestation of the pleasures of giving, but also of the irritation that can ensue when you find that you’ve spent all your pocket money on someone else, and now have none left over to buy anything for yourself. Seeing their names in print might (Susan hopes) help redress some of that maternally inflicted balance, but she also hopes that in years to come they’ll agree that generosity always generates imperfect and incomplete economies – and that’s a good thing, by and large. Valeria would like to thank Saba Bahar once again, for her help with this project and with countless others over the years they worked together. Wonderful Clara was good natured about the various deprivations she suffered at the final stages of the book, and is hereby publicly acclaimed for her patience. Finally, Simone Oettli. Anyone who knows Simone knows also that she is a person of extraordinary, larger-than-life, warmth, generosity and courage. Our respective debts to her, as well as our recognition of those qualities in her, we mark in the dedication to the present volume. ix
Notes on Contributors Bruce Bennett (BA, Leeds; MA, Cardiff; PhD, Lancaster) is a lecturer in film studies at the Institute for Cultural Research of the University of Lancaster. He has interests in science fiction cinema, Chinese and Japanese cinema, and early cinema, as well as in Bataille and the economics of film production. Margaret Bridges has taught medieval English literature at various universities in Switzerland, especially Geneva (where she also received her PhD) and Berne (where she is a professor in the Department of English Languages and Literatures). Originally an Anglo-Saxonist working on the Old English poetic saints’ lives, she has since extended her research interests and publications to Middle and Early Modern English, foregrounding questions of closure, self-reflexivity, cross-cultural exchange and gender, in works as diverse as dream-visions, founding legends, medieval travel narratives and renaissance discourses of discovery. She is currently working on a book project (Embedding Literature) which explores discursive configurations linking literature to beds, whether in the form of commonplaces (such as that of abandoned lovers addressing their personified and fetishized beds) or in the form of the bed as locus of literary inspiration and production. Susan Bruce (BA, Cantab; MA and PhD, Cornell) is Senior Lecturer at Keele University (email:
[email protected]). She is the editor of Three Early Modern Utopias (Oxford University Press, 1999) and of Shakespeare: King Lear (Palgrave, 1997), as well as the author of articles on various subjects, from More to Harper Lee, published in academic and more popular fora. She is currently embarking on a project with colleagues in English and Education departments at several UK universities, to try to ascertain what people think they are doing – and how they do it – when they ‘teach’ English literature, the concerns of which, in her view, are not unconnected with her written contributions to this volume. Mark Thornton Burnett is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is the author of Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1997) and Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean x
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Drama and Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) and is the editor or co-editor of numerous other works. Giulia Colaizzi (MA in English, University of Bari; MA in Romance Languages, University of Valencia; ABD in Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota) obtained a PhD in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the University of Valencia, where she is currently Associate Professor of Communication and Gender Studies. She has widely published on Film Theory and Feminism in Spanish, Italian, Swiss and US Journals, and authored, among other books, Feminismo y teoría del discurso and La pasión del significante. Peter de Bolla is Reader in Cultural History and Aesthetics at the University of Cambridge and the author most recently of Art Matters (Harvard, 2001) and The Education of the Eye (Stanford, 2003). His Fourth of July and the Founding of America will appear from Profile Press in 2007. Fabienne L. Michelet completed her ‘licence’ at the University of Geneva, after which she studied at the Vatican Library in Rome, and in Oxford, where she undertook graduate studies on the Berrow Scholarship (1997–9) and on the Fellowship for Prospective Researchers of the Swiss National Science Foundation (2001–3). She did her doctorate at the University of Geneva, specializing in Old English literature. She is presently teaching medieval English literature both at the University of Geneva and at the University of Fribourg. Her research focuses primarily on Old English literature, exploring questions of space, place and geography. Her work in progress includes an interest in questions of heroism and agency, gender studies and historiography. She is the author of Creation, Migration, and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and the co-editor of Cultures in Contact, Past and Present: Studies in Honor of Paul Beekman Taylor. Multilingua 18 (1999). Roy Sellars is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Danish, University of Southern Denmark, Kolding, Denmark (e-mail
[email protected]); in 2005–6 he is in residence at the Kierkegaard Library, St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN, USA. A graduate of Oxford University, he previously worked at the Department of English, National University of Singapore; the Department of Comparative Literature and the Society for Humanities, Cornell University; the Department of English, Geneva
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University and the Department of English, Marburg University. His current research projects include Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Adorno, Derrida and Bloom, as well as Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth and Beckett. He is co-editor (with Graham Allen) of Figures of Bloom: The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom (Cambridge: Salt, forthcoming) and (with Per Krogh Hansen) of Glossing Glas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming). ‘Educational Remains: Back to School with Hegel (and Adorno)’, a companion to the present essay, appears in Parallax. Jenaro Talens is Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature and European Studies at the University of Geneva. He has published 15 books of poetry, both in Spanish and Catalan and translated into Spanish, among others, Shakespeare, Hölderlin, Goethe, Novalis, Trakl, Brecht, Pound, Walcott, Heaney, Judice and Petrarca. He has authored numerous books on Literary and Film History and Theory. Some of those available in English are Through the Shattering Glass: Cervantes and the Self-Made World (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), The Branded Eye (University of Minnesota Press, 1993) and, as co-editor, Modes of Representation in Spanish Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Valeria Wagner is maître d’enseignement et de recherche at the Faculty of Letters, University of Geneva, where she teaches in the Hispanic literature and Comparative literature programmes. She has published Literatura y vida cotidiana. Ficción e imaginario en las Américas (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2005), Bound to Act: Models of Action, Dramas of Inaction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), as well as various articles in English and French, bearing mainly on the imaginary of the Americas, the constitution of political imaginaries, and the historicity of the notion of action. Richard Waswo is professor emeritus of English, Université de Genève. A.B. Stanford, 1961; MA and PhD, Harvard, 1962 and 1970. He taught at San Francisco and San José State Colleges and the University of Virginia before coming to Geneva in 1976. He is the author of Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1987), The Founding Legend of Western Civilization (Wesleyan, 1997), and various articles on British writers from Chaucer to Scott. Nothing in professional life became him like the leaving it: some of the contributions in this volume were first presented at a conference in Geneva on his current research interest in the manifold relations between words and money.
Introduction: Fiction and Economy Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner
1. ‘A textbook case’ Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis. George Bernard Shaw, preface to The Irrational Knot. In Money to Burn, a recent narrative of a real historical event by the Argentinean writer Ricardo Piglia,1 a group of men steal seven million pesos (the equivalent of almost six hundred thousand US dollars in 1965, when the story takes place) from the Provincial Bank of Buenos Aires. After their initial plans of escape fail, they cross the border to Montevideo, where they end up besieged in an apartment previously bugged by the police. Sustained by an arsenal of weapons, a good provision of various drugs, their faith in their leader’s capacity to come up with a plan to rescue them and a deep hatred for the armed forces, the men resist increasingly violent attacks from the police force, scoring several ‘victories’ (deaths) in the process. According to a journalist’s account, ‘every victory achieved under such impossible conditions increased their capacity to resist. . . . This was why what followed had the aspect of a tragic ritual that no one who was there that night could ever forget’ (Piglia 2003b, 155). In the episode from which the narrative takes its title, the men’s resistance reaches its climax when they set fire to the stolen money and throw the burning 1000-peso bills out of the window, one by one, ‘in a move that left the city and the country horror-struck, and which lasted precisely fifteen interminable minutes, which is exactly how long it takes to burn such an astronomical quantity of money . . .’ (ibid., 157). 1
2
Introduction
This act elicits strong reactions from the surrounding crowd: ‘they should be hanged’, some say; ‘they should be left to die slowly, burnt to a crisp’ (ibid., 158). The enormity of the crime is explained as follows: If the money were the sole justification for the murders they committed, and if what they did, they did for the money they were now burning, that had to mean they had no morals nor motives, that they acted and killed gratuitously, out of a taste for evil, out of pure evil, that they were born assassins, insensate criminals, degenerates. . . . If they had given away the money, if they had thrown it out of the window at the people gathered on the street, if they agreed with the police to hand it over to a charitable foundation, everything would have gone differently for them. . . . As it was, everyone understood perfectly well that this was a declaration of war, a direct attack, a textbook case, waged on society as whole. (ibid., 157–8) Piglia’s narration of the scene of this ‘declaration of war’ can itself be read as a ‘textbook case’ for its deconstruction of the crucial role money plays in the stories society tells about itself, and of the smoke-screen these stories throw on the operations of capitalism. At first, for the crowd and other important social actors, money appears to be the guarantor of rationality, the last bastion of reason when human actions appear devoid of any reasonable motivations; devoid, in short, of any reasons. Underpinning this perception is reason’s intimate relation to a specific economic system, namely capitalism, in whose legitimation its service is invoked. Thus, an act appears rational – and hence, to the onlookers, moral – if it respects basic economic principles, and can be inscribed within a logic of gain (or loss). As long as the thieves behave like thieves, defending their loot, they still belong to society, and, indeed, shore up that social system to which they appear to stand in opposition. For, as Marx once famously remarked, the criminal operates as ‘one of the “natural counterweights” which bring about a correct balance and open up a whole perspective of “useful” occupations’:2 criminals produce crime, as well as criminal law and the professor who lectures on it, the police force, criminal justice, lawyers and so on, besides reducing unemployment and breaking the counter-productive monotony of everyday bourgeois life. These ‘criminals’, however, refuse to cooperate, disregarding the options left open to them to remain within the reasonable realm of society, some of which, as we have seen, are voiced by various members of
Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner 3
the watching community: to save, with the money, the lives of orphaned children; to throw it out of the window to the crowd; to donate it to charity; to use it to improve conditions in the prisons in which ‘they themselves are going to be held’ (Piglia 2003b, 158). Rejecting both the possibilities of a Robin Hoodian redistribution of the money and the use of it as a rational investment in their incarcerated future, they instead destroy it, thereby rendering their crimes unproductive, gratuitous and incomprehensible. This gesture, as the narration of Piglia’s text makes clear, disarms the police, who are forced to watch ‘in stupefaction, for what could they do with criminals capable of such nonsense?’ (ibid., 157).3 With this ‘non-sense’ the ‘criminals’ invalidate the rationalizing powers of money as well as their status as ‘criminals’, relinquishing at the same time their last rational human trait: from then on they are for the crowd complete social outcasts – ‘degenerates’, ‘born assassins’, evil itself. In incinerating the pesos, the criminals have also, as it were, burnt the social bridges connecting them to others, their action serving to place them in the starkest of opposition to the idealized subject of capitalism, homo economicus. The crowd’s presupposition that in burning the money the criminals have effectively abdicated from society generates in this text a complex and suggestive account of why burning money should end up carrying the moral weight which the onlookers and commentators on the episode ascribe to it. Television stations, we are told, transmit day-long repeats of the ‘rite’, within which one TV commentator proclaims that ‘burning innocent money is an act of cannibalism’ (ibid., 158). The implicit suggestion here (that, by opposition, there might exist such a thing as ‘guilty’ money, deserving of its own, unproductive, destruction) may not be lost on the reader of Piglia’s text, but it is on the witnesses, who, deaf to the implications of ‘guilty’ money, decide instead that ‘money is innocent, even when acquired as a consequence of death and crime. It couldn’t be considered culpable, but rather it should be viewed as a neutral symbol, as a symbol that comes in useful depending on how one wants to use it’ (ibid., 158). Money here appears innocent because it is an instrument, and even more precisely, a blunt instrument, a neutral symbol, presumably symbolizing the potentialities of whatever it is used to do. But what happens, then, when it is put to no use? And even more radically, what happens when it is not only withdrawn from use – or exchange – but simply destroyed? What does money come to symbolize then? For the crowd, who react with such horror to money’s immolation, the destruction of money is the very figure of an anarchic rejection of
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all social value, ‘an act of nihilism and an example of pure terrorism’, according to the dailies reporting on the incident, ‘worse than all the crimes [the gang] had committed’ (ibid., 159). Thus, as it disappears into smoke, money appears to be what is most valuable in society, representing, beyond its exchange value, the values upheld by society and even the sheer fact that a society has such values: that, in short, there is value and that there is society. Destroying money consequently becomes tantamount to the destruction of value itself, and hence of the conditions that enable social relationships and exchanges: of the social ‘anima’ in general. The money, indeed, acquires a soul in this text as it is animated by the flames, burning like ‘butterflies’ or like ‘flaming birds’ before ‘transforming into a heap of charcoal, a funeral pyre of society’s values (as declared an eye-witness on television)’ (ibid., 159).4 Finally, it turns into a ‘wonderfully beautiful column of azure ash . . . resembling the calcified remains of the dead that get scattered across the ocean, or over the mountains and woods, only not over the filthy city streets, for ash must never drift onto the stone floor of our concrete jungles’ (ibid., 159–60). As the bills metamorphose into ash, money is gradually divested of its function of guarantor of rationality, revealing its unacknowledged transcendental status and the religious feelings with which it is invested until, in its consumed state, it comes to stand for the dead that the ‘concrete jungle’ of capitalism does not admit in the accounts of itself. This is apparent in the robbers’ understanding of what they are doing: ‘burning money is ugly, it’s a sin. E peccato’ (ibid., 156), one of the besieged men is recorded to have said, falling back into the language of his European ancestors to mark his recognition that what he is doing transgresses the prescriptions (and proscriptions) of the economy and of the Church. But he then qualifies the ‘sin’ (or perhaps more properly, the ‘pity’, the ‘shame’ or even the ‘waste’)5 with examples of what money amounts to: ‘just think: to earn a bill this size, a security guard, . . . would have to work for a fortnight . . . and a bank-clerk, . . . would have to work at least a month . . . as he whiles away his life counting other people’s money’ (ibid.). Now money is pragmatically traced back to the salary a worker earns, and hence to the work it represents, to the time it takes in a worker’s life and to the surplus-value of the man’s labour, which he does not get in return for his toils, but which contributes to keep him working and to keep him needing to work, counting his life out in other people’s money. Here the robber’s observations function as a commentary to Brecht’s ironic question, which figures as the epigraph to Piglia’s text: ‘After all, what is robbing a bank
Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner 5
compared to founding one?’ In other words, what is a singular act of robbery compared to an institutionalized form of robbery? In the light of this question, the fact that the money that the gang steal and burn is the cash that would have been used to pay the municipal wages bill appears to fulfil a certain poetic justice, the suggestion being that the original theft is the salaries themselves, by means of which the bank fills its coffers. Thus the waste, the shame and perhaps also the sin would ultimately be the conversion of the worker’s life into money. But the robbers’ comment does more than refer the reader to the system of exploitation money would ‘really’ stand for. Rather, as the crowd’s reactions testify, burning money is a ‘sin’ because it constitutes a breach of the faith in social institutions and fellow citizens that its value presupposes. As such, it is not just tantamount to rejecting the social contract, it also questions the model of a ‘reality’ that can be unselfconsciously referred to, which is clearly distinguishable from the imaginary. Burnt, money is reduced to its ultimate materiality, ashes, the illusion of its intrinsic value shattered and with it its referential status with regard to all that it measures (time, work, commodities). Thus what is destroyed with the bills exceeds their material existence, and affects the entire imaginary make-up of the crowd, its actual perception of what is ‘the real’. One might argue, in fact, that the different levels at which money functions at this point in the text correspond loosely to two of the three functions of money discussed by Jean-Joseph Goux in Symbolic Economies (Goux 1990), that is, its ‘real’ and its ‘imaginary’ functions. The remaining function is the ‘symbolic’, by which money is a medium of circulation and a means of payment. To the extent that Goux’s distinctions recall Lacan’s ‘real’, ‘symbolic’ and ‘imaginary’, the symbolic function of money can be considered akin to that of the sign, and the burning pesos thrown out of the window, as so many signs, undetermined messages to the crowd, destined to reach its social unconscious. Thus the transfiguration of the ashes into butterflies and flaming birds, and their final transformation into a funerary pyre of social values, acts to put pressure on the crowd to acknowledge the emotional investment that money represents and the imaginary realm that it articulates, as well as the ‘reality’ that this imaginary organizes. In the ashes of the burnt money the real and the imaginary collapse into one another, a collapse which challenges the crowd’s understanding of what it is that it is witnessing. The fundamental nature of that challenge, as well as the depth of the crowd’s resistance to its acknowledgement, is measured in the horror of their reaction to the event. But the objectifying stance of Piglia’s purportedly ‘documentary’ prose here
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prohibits the reader from inhabiting that ‘natural’ horror, opening up instead a space where an alternative understanding of this moment becomes available. Clearly, then, in this seminal (and central) episode of Money to Burn Piglia isolates instances wherein the roles that money and the economies (ethical as well as pragmatic) within which it functions transcend their apprehension in the social imaginary to achieve a degree of social acknowledgement, an acknowledgement which may be repressed or denied by the watching crowd, but which is registered, albeit transiently, by others whose voices are transcribed in the narrative (as well as, perhaps, by the reader). The burning of the pesos is, for instance, repeatedly described in this narrative as a kind of rite or ritual: cannibalistic, tragic (Piglia 2003b, 155), even sacrificial. The latter claim is lodged in the text by a Uruguayan philosopher, Washington Andrada,6 who claims to the magazine Marcha that the action is ‘a kind of innocent potlatch let loose on a society with no memory of such a ritual, an act absolute and free in itself, a gesture of sheer waste and sheer outpouring . . .’ (ibid., 159). In other societies, he maintains, the act would have been understood as a ‘sacrifice made to the gods because only what is most valuable is worthy of sacrifice and there is nothing more valuable among ourselves than money ...’ (ibid.).7 With this intervention, Washington Andrada does himself no favours: he is ‘at once summoned by the magistrate’, presumably because his theory is at once too sympathetic to the ‘criminals’, and too explicit in its statement of what remains, essentially, a social taboo: that is, that money is what society most values, above, even, human life. More generally, the philosopher’s account of the robbers’ ‘nonsensical’ act as ritual confers upon the burning of the money a social meaning, thus re-inscribing both the crime and the ‘criminals’ within the social sphere from which the society which has produced them wishes to banish them. In so doing, it recalls the imaginary articulation of society that capitalism, with its claims to rationality, purports to have eliminated from its mode of functioning. Even though the likening of the burning of the pesos to a sacrificial ritual situates the crime and the criminals within a pre-capitalistic logic and society, the comparison ultimately foregrounds the irrationality of capitalist societies, which value money more than human lives, and shows value itself to be a production of the imaginary. If the philosopher’s analysis is unacceptable to the authorities (at least in Piglia’s version of these events), it is precisely because it recognizes (albeit only partially) the imaginary dimension of the economy and its ultimate irreducibility to what is purely utilitarian, rationalistic and controlled.
Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner 7
The intersection, in the figure of sacrifice, of pre-capitalist and capitalist logic, moreover, displaces the image that society might have of itself, raising the question of how its own practices might be understood, of what they are and of how events in general can be assimilated within a society’s sense of the real. Here, of course, the burning, immolation, destruction or ritual sacrifice of the pesos constitutes the kind of event that cannot be integrated unequivocally and coherently in the social order of things. This questioning of the visible, of the real, of events and of their significance is pursued at the level of the narrative in the tension underlying Piglia’s claim that ‘[t]his novel tells a true story’, with which apparent contradiction in terms opens the epilogue to Money to Burn (Piglia 2003b, 204), the concluding account of the genesis of the narrative. In this epilogue, Piglia details the sources – the transcripts of interviews and interrogations, the psychiatric reports, the witness statements, the newspaper archives and the court records – which, he tells us, he has ‘freely reproduced’ in Money To Burn, and without which, he maintains, ‘it would have been impossible to obtain an exact reconstruction of the facts narrated in this book’ or to ‘orchestrate the different versions of this same story’ (ibid., 207). Such claims to ‘truth’, of course, beg the very questions which are simultaneously raised by the peculiar genre of which Money to Burn forms a part. Truman Capote, whose In Cold Blood lodged similar claims to veracity (its subtitle being A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences), intended to contribute with that text to the ‘establishment of a serious new literary form: the Nonfiction Novel’, as the cover copy to the first edition of the text tells us (Capote 1965). Piglia also refers to his text as a ‘non-fictional account’ (Piglia 2003b, 207), although elsewhere his language suggests that the boundaries between what is ‘fact’ and what is ‘fiction’ (or what is ‘true’ and what is ‘false’) are more porous and malleable than that simplistic opposition would imply: he describes ‘facts’ and ‘events’ as, for instance, ‘resembling the last memories of a lived experience’ and analogizes them to ‘the account of a dream’, a dream which, moreover, ‘opens with an image’ (ibid., 209). Piglia’s ‘true story’ consists, technically, in an exploration of the multiple and non-exclusive relations between fact and fiction, falsity and truth. Accordingly, the ‘orchestration’ of the ‘different versions’ of the ‘same story’ proceeds not so much by way of an editorial exclusion of one ‘version’ in favour of another, of the verificatory authorial adjudication, as it were, between competing and sometimes contradictory accounts of the same event, but, instead, through a refusal so to choose, and rather, the representation of each of those competing accounts as
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somehow equally ‘true’. Take, for instance, the moment where the gangsters are interrupted in a game of cards by the voice of the police: Mereles emerged from the kitchen with some packs of cards and a jar of chickpeas . . . ‘I found some packs of cards, let’s play three-handed poker.’ ‘Let’s go . . . every chickpea is worth ten grand, I’ll deal . . . Let’s see what we can get . . .’ At that point they heard a buzzer, perhaps they even heard it before it sounded, an instant before they first heard the metallic buzz and then the voice calling up to them. They’d been playing cards for a little while, on the wicker table covered with a white kitchen cloth, ... when they heard the metallic buzzer, sounding like a rat squealing, ... a microphone making a metallic hum as it’s first connected and then the voice warning them to give themselves up. (Piglia 2003b, 121) These accounts cannot all be literally ‘true’: either the gangsters had begun their game of cards when the buzzer sounds, or they had not; similarly, they cannot in reality have heard the buzzer before it sounded (a hypothetical impossibility inserted by Piglia between two more overtly credible versions of events). Yet there is a sense in the prose here that every account negotiates its own truthful path between the action remembered and the relation of that action; that no single account is more true, or more false, than any other; that each deserves an uncontested place in the relation of the event. The reader of this text is not asked to choose between the variant accounts, or to establish a hierarchy of truth-value. Rather, to the extent that the narrative features all of them, without authorizing any one of them above the others, the reader is confronted with equally valid accounts from which a single ‘truth’ could only be sorted out arbitrarily. ‘When, precisely, did the buzzer sound?’ is just the wrong question here, a question which would not help to generate a ‘true’ account of this particular event, any more than the questions asked of the police by the journalist Emilio Renzi later in the narrative can guarantee that he will be able to produce for El Mundo the ‘accurate account of what’s going on’ (ibid., 164) that he seeks. ‘Throughout the book’, Piglia tells us, he has ‘attempted to maintain the stylistic register and “metaphorical gesture” (as Brecht called it) of the social reports whose theme remains illegal violence’ (ibid., 205). Like the phrase ‘innocent money’, the phrase ‘illegal violence’ implies its
Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner 9
converse: Piglia may maintain the stylistic register of the ‘social report’ but his arrangement of the material from which he constructs his narrative generates ‘themes’ that are rather different from those underlying the documents which constitute his source material. Using a fictional form (the novel) to relate a ‘true’ story, Piglia deconstructs, among other things, the very notion of an ‘accurate account’ u0nderstood as unequivocal, or one that reproduces an ideal (though unverifiable) one-to-one relation between language and what it refers to as well as a clear distinction between the real and the imaginary. Instead, Piglia’s suggestion is that an accurate account is one that conveys precisely the equivocal nature of any report of events, and of all circumscriptions of the real and the imaginary. Employing what Michael McKeon described so elegantly in The Origins of the English Novel as the novel’s ‘claims to truth’ (McKeon 1987), Piglia suggests, perhaps, that a ‘fictionalized’ account of a ‘real’ event may encompass more veracity than the journalist’s prose, or the stenographer’s record of court proceedings, and that it may do so precisely because fiction can unsettle the distinction between the imaginary and the real. It is to that more general claim that we now wish to turn.
2. ‘This is not about money’ Words are the tokens current and accepted for conceits, as moneys are for values. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, xvi.3. ‘This is not about money’ (Piglia 2003b, 153), one of the robbers in Piglia’s text tells the police, in a moment of telling insight and lucidity. For money itself is never only what is at stake in such conflicts, or never just in itself. Rather, as the early Marx had already intuited, what is at stake in critiques of the capitalist economic system is its increasing autonomization, the loss of grasp on the actual articulation of social relations that the abstraction of labour entails. Money plays a part in the abstraction of social relations, and in its own, perfect, abstraction, may even symbolize that abstraction, as Simmel argued (Simmel 1990). But it is not the whole, or the only, story. According to Marx this loss of grasp on the articulation of social relations is eventually what happens in bourgeois societies, where the process of production reaches such a degree of autonomization that it effectively masters man, in spite of the latter’s persistent belief in his own mastery over the economy (and the world in general). Social relations are shrouded in mystery as a result, no longer considered in personal terms, but rather perceived as relations
10
Introduction
between things – or alternately, relations between things take on the significance of relations between people, whereupon things are endowed with the attributes of human, even divine, agency. This point has been fruitfully developed by contemporary thinkers such as Cornelius Castoriadis, for whom the economy is the domain of capitalist societies in which the imaginary reigns most completely and most unquestioned, presenting itself as the rationale for the entire society, but itself bordering on a ‘systematic delirium’ (Castoriadis 1987), and cognate issues are addressed by Goux, whose distinctions between the ‘real’, ‘imaginary’ and ‘symbolic’ functions of money we have already touched upon above. The scene that Piglia narrates in Money to Burn stages a sort of counterdelirium, as the robbers’ excessive behaviour first divests money of its rationale, then shows its religious connotations and finally points to its anchorage in human life and relations. As money can make more apparently concrete the workings of the economy, so fiction can offer tangible form to the imaginary foundations of society. In fiction, those imaginary foundations of society are given to be read, if not seen, and the social relations they cover up are given in turn concrete embodiments. Fiction (to borrow a formulation from Raymond Williams) offers structures of feeling through which we can make sense of the contradictions that beset us in our lived experiences (Williams 1973). Or, as Simmel claimed, the great advantage of art over philosophy, is that it sets itself a single, narrowly defined problem every time: a person, a landscape, a mood. Every extension of these to the general, every addition of bold touches of feeling for the world is made to appear an enrichment, a gift, an undeserved benefit. (Simmel 1990, 55) Giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name, fiction offers ways of shaping and embodying the social relations which the economy works to mystify and obscure; in so doing, it explores the implications of, and often implicitly contests, that imaginary association between (economic) wealth and (social) value, which, as in Money to Burn, can be experienced as so profound and self-evident that the destruction of money is comprehended as ‘a taste for evil, . . . pure evil’. The ‘delirious’ discourse of the (dominant) economy is deployed in the mode of fiction, with which it entertains a tense relationship, because fiction is also the mode in which the domination of the economic over the imaginary can be given to be read, acquiring concrete embodiments that may undergo critical scrutiny. In this light, the interest of literary
Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner 11
studies in economic discourses is understandable, as is the now widely established axiom that the discourse and the functioning of the economy can be enlightened, however controversially, by the study of literature, in the re-editing of early literary writings on economics, for example,8 or in attempts to teach economics through literary exempla, wherein selections of literary fragments through which economic concepts and mechanisms are explained to non-economists accompany the enticing introduction of ‘literature’ to economists.9 For many years now, literary studies have integrated in their basic bibliographies the works of the ‘founders’ of political economy, most obviously, Karl Marx, but also of succeeding theorists who have investigated the economic paradigms that govern contemporary thought in general as well as literary thought in particular. Most notably, for Jacques Derrida – whose work on the gift is discussed by Susan Bruce in Chapter 7 – the operations and the mode of thinking known as deconstruction would not be possible, or thinkable, without money and capital, while money is itself – as Piglia’s robbers seem to have understood – a deconstructive principle of the capitalist form of organization we live in.10 So too, for Michel Foucault (whose 1969 essay ‘What is an Author’ is one of the most widely read articles by students of letters), the notion of the author is a category which regulates the economy of meaning.11 In engaging with such theorists literary studies have begun to describe and interrogate the analogic functioning of economic and literary imaginaries, and have also, perhaps most importantly, traced the social relations that, to adopt Richard Waswo’s terms, the ‘supreme fictions’ of the economy at once plot and obscure (see Waswo, Chapter 1, this volume). More recent years have witnessed an upsurge of interest in the work of such writers as Marc Shell (1978, 1982, 1995), Kurt Heinzelman (1980) and, perhaps particularly, Georg Simmel, and have seen a marked return to the interrogation of the relationship between literary studies and economics, as is evidenced by the number of international conferences, graduate courses and publications that investigate the connections between the two disciplines; and also by the affording of a name (the ‘New Economic Criticism’) to a growing body of work that seeks to revisit the intersections of the two (Woodmansee and Osteen 1999; Osteen, 2002; Woodbridge 2003; Bigelow 2004). Quite what has caused this upsurge of interest in the relationship between literary productions and economics is uncertain: it may be symptomatic of the current crisis of the humanities and of a further expansion of the hegemony of the economic, or it may be a healthy (if generally tacit, in this respect)
12
Introduction
response to the increasing predominance of the economic over the social and the political in this era of globalization and of the marketization of higher education (Readings 1996; Shumar 1997; Brantlinger 2001). Whatever the answer to that question, the literary focus on the economy is productive of its own tensions and sets of questions. As evidence of this we might, for instance, cite the debates which have issued from the tendency of the New Economic Criticism to appeal to an intellectual tradition embedded in (say) Simmel rather than (say) Marx. In fact, this debate over the ‘politics’ of the New Economic Criticism rehearses, to some extent, a more established one on the relation between Marx and Simmel, where the latter’s contribution is understood to be less radical and more ‘metaphysical’ than the former’s.12 For Bottomore, Simmel’s translator, Lukács was probably right in claiming that any vestiges of historical materialism present in Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money are ‘embedded in an idealist metaphysics of culture’ (Bottomore, introduction to Simmel 1990, 23). For Bottomore, moreover, Simmel’s acquaintance with Marx was patchy (ibid., 24) and his attack on the labour theory of value at once obfuscatory (ibid., 25), inadequate (ibid., 26) and universalist, rather than properly anchored in a concrete historicism that pays due attention to ‘the consequences of a specific mode of the division of labour as resulting from the nature of capitalist society’ (ibid., 28). Consequently, still according to Bottomore, Simmel’s writings are ultimately unable to come to the aid of the victims of capitalism’s rapacious operations: they fail to allow those victims to ‘confront a social class that stands in opposition to them’ (ibid., 28). Yet for others, Simmel’s relation to Marx is less radically oppositional, and more complementary: Goldscheid, for instance, whom Bottomore quotes, claims that The Philosophy of Money ‘contains a supplementation of Marx’s life work such as has hitherto not existed in social science’ (Goldscheid, quoted in Bottomore’s introduction to Simmel 1990, 11); and Bryan S. Turner credits Simmel, not Lukács, with the ‘reconstruc[tion] of Marx’s analysis of money as alienation from the 1844 manuscripts’, arguing that ‘Simmel’s philosophical inquiry into the development of an abstract and universal system of money as the measure of all human activity provided a fundamental model of the cultural manifestations of an underlying process of rationalisation in Western societies’ (Turner 1986, 104–5). So if the jury is still wavering on the relation between Simmel and Marx and on the ways in which readings of Simmel might or might not be politically inflected (and politically effectual), it seems to us that it can only be more undecided on the political engagement (or potential
Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner 13
thereof) of the New Economic Criticism, fledgling field that it still is. That said, this brief excursion into a part of that field’s intellectual background is intended neither as an attack nor as a defence; the field itself is new, not yet defined, and certainly few, if any, of our contributors here would label themselves as part of its number, ‘New Economic Critics’. But we ourselves are pleased to see signs of a return to the interrogation of the relation between the literary and the economic. We think the influence of economic thought on the social imaginary should be questioned in all its manifestations, and that considerations on the relationship between fiction and economy should be encouraged, especially now, when globalizing processes tend, more than ever before, to make the economy appear to be a fact of nature rather than an elaborate fictional construct (that has, doubtless, a very concrete and determining impact on the real). Thus, besides contributing to the current investigation of the intersections of literary and economic studies, this particular collection of essays focusses on the ways in which literary and artistic thought can question the economy’s grasp on our imaginary, illuminating its fictional foldings and unfoldings.13
3. Dissonant exchanges Cash is so twentieth century. Slogan in advertising campaign for credit/debit card, 2006. The present collection covers aspects of the nexus of interconnections between the literary and the economic, which cannot be subsumed under any single heading or disciplinary category. Accordingly, we have resisted the temptation to present the essays following the chronological order of the period they bear upon, not merely because we do not pretend to offer a ‘history’ of the relations between the literary and the economic, but also, and more importantly, because we do not believe these relations follow a linear pattern. Michelet’s essay, on Old Norse sagas, for instance, speaks to Bruce’s on Timon of Athens despite the centuries separating the texts they discuss. Similarly, we have chosen not to group the essays according to thematic criteria, because however focussed the issues they address are, they all, ultimately, address each other, in a chorus (not necessarily harmonic) of exchanges that echoes, in our view, the dissonances produced by the allegiances and conflicts between fiction and economy which are far, yet, from being adequately understood. Order, however, there must be, and the one we have imposed on
14
Introduction
the essays is intended to highlight some of their interconnections by proposing, through juxtaposition, an argumentative thread leading from one to the other. Not altogether arbitrary, this imagined exchange between the essays suggests some of the ways they can be read in relation to each other. The first essay is the most wide ranging of all, summarizing and innovating on the tradition of philosophical thought on fiction and economy from Aristotle to Jean-François Lyotard. Richard Waswo’s article invites us to consider how the process of production of meaning and value are interrelated, focussing in particular on the functional nature shared, historically, by the systems of language and of money. As Waswo makes clear, it has long been recognized that both systems engender meaning and value by usage, exchange and comparison, rather than by anything intrinsic to the words or currencies they employ. Elaborating this fundamental analogy, Waswo argues that the money system bears the characteristic traits of what Wallace Stevens defined as those of the supreme fiction (‘it must be abstract’; ‘it must change’; ‘it must give pleasure’). Money is pure symbol, absolute functionality; capitalism, linked as it is to the system of money (especially in its many textual forms as credit), is for Waswo ‘the supreme fiction become dynamic, fuelled by the energy and pleasure of infinite will’. It is this compulsive play and the pleasure it affords which gives capitalism its extraordinary power to overcome all resistance, profiting from its own contradictions, its energy exponentially self-proliferating and seductive. Emblematic of these energies, for Waswo, is Jonson’s Volpone, which (like other city comedies), exposes the compulsive pleasures of playing the proto-capitalist game, delighting in the very improvizations which its author simultaneously deplores. The next essay compiles ‘raw material’ on which the relations between fiction, language and the economy developed by Waswo are exemplarily inscribed. Set at the early stages of European colonialism and of the expansion of its markets – whose importance to the instantiation of modernity is signalled, in this collection, by several other essays which take as their foci or exempla early modern texts – Bridges’s ‘Trafficking Words’ examines the bilingual lists of words and phrases that appear frequently in the travel narratives of the early modern period, most notably Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations. As Bridges argues, these lists are early examples of the commodification, and even fetishization, of language, for, detached from the narratives of discovery, adventure and trade that generate their meaning, words take on a life of their own as worthy curiosities. At the same time, the very fragmentary
Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner 15
form of these lists evokes ‘the rudiments of a scenario of exchange’, and more specifically, of unequal exchange, while their very lack of syntax raises questions about the social practices accompanying the ‘trafficking’. Thus, even as they offer us an insight into the ‘real and imagined exchanges of words and commodities’ that they are intended to facilitate, these word-lists also indicate that the scene of trade is always already invested with discursive fictions serving specific ideologies and interests – witness to that effect Bridges’s discussion of the particular interest naked bodies awaken, because they anticipated an as yet imaginary market for the textiles of the Old World. Bridges’s essay suggests that the rise of capitalism and its particular inflexion of language not only entails profit, but also has unsettling effects on the parties that seem to benefit from it. This is further apparent in Peter de Bolla’s essay, which discusses the conceptual and social ‘side-effects’ of what might be considered to be capitalism’s main enabling logistics, namely, the various textual forms (bonds, accounts etc.) that money can take. These forms permit, as Waswo shows in his essay, the ‘divisible multiplication of ownership into negotiable paper that constitutes and obtains credit’, but so also do they enable the discrediting practice of counterfeit. Counterfeit thus emerges as one of the main threats not only to society, but also, as de Bolla convincingly demonstrates in ‘The Stain of the Signature’, to the philosophical model that articulates its self-understanding. In particular, as de Bolla argues, counterfeit affects the notion of a person’s identity (self-identicality), which is as much certified by the credit the person undersigns, as credit is backed by the person’s signature. De Bolla’s article examines the case of the Perreau identical twin brothers, tried and hanged in the eighteenth century for forgery. Reading through the complex and various textual narratives of the Perreau affair (the police and court reports, the testimony of the two brothers, newspaper accounts and the protestation of innocence by the principal suspect in the case, Margaret Rudd), de Bolla shows how the enormous public interest in the case was generated by the strange power and magic of the signature and its relationship to paper money. For de Bolla, that relationship is radically destabilized not merely by forgery, but in this case, by the fact that the counterfeiter is not just one person, but twins. What fascinated and horrified the eighteenth-century commonweal, de Bolla argues, was the possibility of a signature being authentic in respect of not one, but two persons; and it is this challenge to the notion of the necessary singularity of authentification which, de Bolla argues, comes in this case to frame the moment at which the stain of the signature authenticates and authorises
16
Introduction
money. For de Bolla, anxiety over identity crystallizes in the need to punish those that challenge the authenticating powers of the signature. This has as a side effect the reinforcement of the belief in the voice as the expression of a single authentic self – precisely the model of identity that is not at work in an economy based on credit and reliant on writing to function properly. Shifting modes of economic organization, in short, will affect conceptions of the self, and force us to re-articulate our understanding of identity, what a person or a subject is, at the same time as they reinforce, against all pragmatics, the models that are being belied by changes. This pattern of change in conceptions of the self is also discussed in Giulia Colaizzi’s and Jenaro Talens’ essay on ‘Semiotics and Economics’, which begins with a discussion of the homology between language and the capitalist system of value that complements that undertaken by Waswo. Taking as a starting point the work of the Italian semiotician Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, the authors discuss the interrelatedness of the principles underlying Marx’s political economy and those of a semiotics of culture. They conclude that it is possible to consider medium and message as commodities, and hence to consider language as a kind of capital, while capital becomes a kind of language. Language emerges from this re-organization as a social product (because it is produced), but also as a process implying work, and as a space where commodities and messages circulate. The subject, in turn, becomes, following Rossi-Landi’s analysis, primarily a speaking subject, ‘hired in the service of the society in which he is born’, and defined by his belonging to it. We have, then, a similar turn to the voice, the fact of speaking, as the mark of subjecthood, to which is added what was, according to the authors, a still-valid conception at the time Rossi-Landi wrote, of the national rooting of individuals’ identities. Colaizzi and Talens argue, however, that in the present context of globalization, this model of the subject, tributary of the Cartesian cogito, does not hold. Thus they set out to extend RossiLandi’s insights through a discussion of Donna Haraway’s analysis of social relations and reality as an ‘integrated circuit’, taking up her proposal to consider the cyborg as an emblematic and more adequate model of identity and subjecthood for our present. The next essay also dwells on the context of globalization, but rather than arguing for new models to understand how we live in it, it addresses the ways in which the literary can assist us in the identification of, and hence in the resistance to, tensions which inhabit the dominant economy. In the new millennium, Mark Thornton Burnett
Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner 17
suggests, the literary can generate positions for a critical gaze to resist the apparatus of surveillance embedded in the economy, the ways in which, as it were, that dominant economy gazes at its subjects. In ‘“Parties in Converse”: Literary and Economic Dialogue in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet’, Burnett discusses how Almereyda’s film negotiates, through signifiers of consumption and particularized forms of representation, with a world of product placement and the corporate image. Inside this system, the individual subject is discovered as displaced and disoriented, at the mercy of a late capitalist ethos, robbed of linguistic ability and integrity. But, in contradistinction to the dominance of the realm of the economic, Almereyda’s Hamlet simultaneously makes available sites of resistance, including modes of amateur filmmaking, images, snapshots and shards of memory. In particular, a reliance upon the category of the literary – which is variously and capaciously understood – allows for anticorporate positions and for a questioning of a culture of inspection and introspection, a culture systematically shaped by gazes of various kinds, from the inscrutable eye of global business to the surveillant scrutiny of the contemporary cityscape. As it explores the economic face of the millennium, Burnett argues, Almereyda’s Hamlet makes visible, and takes as a subject of enquiry, the economic practices that bring literary originals, filmic reincarnations and visual disciplines into an uneasy proximity, while it dialogizes with its future and rehearses the possibility of enduring the changes modernity has undergone. Although it bears on a completely different – albeit not altogether incomparable – historical context, Fabienne Michelet’s essay, ‘The Fabric of Society: Money, Cloth, and Symbolic Exchanges in Njals’ saga’, also considers a given textual practice as a site where the tensions of the economy can be identified. The essay explores the intricacies of the social, the symbolic and the economic fabric as it crystallizes in key moments of the narrative of Njals’ saga around pieces of cloth – cloaks, tapestries and the like. Those key moments serve to pinpoint a tension between two concurrent economies, or mediums of exchange and the systems of justice associated with each of them. As Michelet shows, textiles in the saga possess both economic value – they function as currency alongside silver – and symbolic value, the former appearing to be subordinated to the latter. Evoking the metaphor of weaving as the consolidation and narrative of social bonds, textiles refer to kinship systems of justice and to the specific obligations imposed by social bonds. These obligations and bonds are overruled, or neglected, when conflicts and grievances are arranged via monetary compensation. It is at such (but not
18
Introduction
all of these) moments, Michelet argues, that the appearance of a textile signals the resistance of the kinship system to the system of justice implied by the money-economy, in which crimes can be equated among themselves and are treated indifferently. Thus Michelet argues that with money and cloth, two different economies seem to be competing, each imagining the social relationships uniting its members in different ways. If in Burnett’s essay the literary dimension of Hamlet sets limits to the operations of the economy and provides a critical stance from which to resist it, and in Michelet’s essay, the text of textiles disrupts the monetary economy, in Susan Bruce’s we find the suggestion that the literary can be the mode in which that which exceeds, and yet pertains to, the dominant economy can find articulation. Most accounts of Timon of Athens, Bruce argues, have understood the text to communicate a conservative warning against excess, coupled with a tacit injunction to conform to the demands of the ‘commonsensical’ (or rational) economies of exchange within which we all co-exist. Yet to take seriously Timon’s assertion that ‘there’s none, / Can truly say he gives, if he receives’ is to realize that in this play, Shakespeare is raising many of the questions which have found a more extended interrogation in twentieth-century gift theory. Bruce argues that Mauss’s Essay on the Gift and Derrida’s Given Time, two of the most influential theories of the gift and its relation to the economy, share with each other an implicit or explicit negation of the possibility of generosity, writing the gift into an economy which is always already one of reciprocity. Yet, Bruce argues, almost all of us, at some point in our lives, want to give without necessary return, and this desire is neither necessarily impossible to fulfil, nor merely a wayward expression of the logic of reciprocity. Timon of Athens, according to Bruce, aesthetically deploys this desire for the possibility of a generosity untrammelled by notions of ‘return’ or ‘desert’. In so doing, the text momentarily transcends the logic of profit and of reciprocity; lodges an implicit critique of the rational, economistic world which it challenges in Timon’s counter-ethos of giving; and articulates instead a utopian desire for a society governed by considerations of the ‘general’ as well as the individual good, which we dismiss as irrational – or indeed impossible – at our peril. Roy Sellars’s essay, ‘Spend, Spend, Spend’, develops another series of transfigurations of economic categories, which in this case affect the making and unmaking of philosophical discourse and are manifest in the excessive, and contingent, activities of reading and writing. Sellars begins his essay by showing how Hegel integrates into his philosophical system the historical and economic contingencies to which his own philosophical production is subject. Mainly, as stated in one of the
Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner 19
philosopher’s aphorisms, money is ‘the abbreviation of all external necessity’, but as Sellars argues, it fails to account for all contingency, the unaccounted forms of which appear in Hegel’s system in the guise of waste and risk, and crystallize in the philosopher’s life in his inclination to play the lottery. Sellars shows how the figure of gambling spreads across Hegel’s philosophy, threatening the scriptural ‘I’, which is constantly at risk of being divided and lost, and more generally, the relation between particulars and universals. ‘Post-Hegelian’ philosophy, Sellars then suggests, ultimately picks up the thread of gambling and risk in Hegel’s work to attempt to resist the drive of the ‘omnivorous pseudoHegelian dialectic of globalisation’. Discussing Georges Bataille’s work, Sellars argues that the Hegelian drive of globalization (where capital has replaced spirit) easily recuperates attempts to counter it through a logic of non-production (waste, non-consumption etc.). Following Derrida’s reading of both Hegel and Bataille, Sellars argues instead that if the Hegelian dialectics that organizes both economy and thought cannot be avoided, it can be ‘imploded’, at times, by sheer repetition – an excess or waste in signifying rather than in the actual economic circuit of goods. Sellars concludes by tracing the operations of gambling and of spending in the activity of reading, which remains, for him, something which is always exorbitant in relation to any theory of it, and most importantly, a practice which can be ‘a spectacular waste of money’. The volume concludes with Bruce Bennett’s ‘Towards a General Economics of Cinema’, which, like Roy Sellars’s essay, addresses the notion of excess and of expenditure, this time in relation to contemporary ‘commercial’ cinema and to film theory. The essay takes as its primary case study James Cameron’s $200m blockbuster Titanic, a film notable for its phenomenal scale and expense as well as for its massive commercial success. But, as Bennett points out, film critics have tended to dismiss it as sentimental, nostalgic, simplistic, incoherent, anachronistic and bombastic, a rejection which is in accordance with the more general failure of film criticism to account for cinematic spectacle as anything other than a reprehensible device for audience manipulation. This, however, excludes popular cultural objects from an academic discourse of film criticism, and also it reveals a simplistic model of the spectatorial interaction with films and, more generally, the lack of a critical model capable of reconciling the economic and aesthetic functions of cinema. According to Bennett, Georges Bataille’s work on economics and excess, and in particular his formulation of the critical concept of ‘general economy’, constitutes a productive frame to elaborate such a critical model of cinema. Within this frame, the economic
20
Introduction
‘waste’ of excessive productions such as Titanic can be read as ritual spectacles, sacrifices, that reflect back unto the audience’s imaginary in much the same way as the immolation of the stolen money did unto its spectators in Piglia’s Money to Burn. For Piglia, as we noted earlier in this introduction, facts are like ‘the account of a dream’, a dream which ‘opens with an image’. Essays, perhaps, especially literary critical ones, can bear a similar analogy. The essays in this volume are clearly ‘not about money’ (Piglia), nor, we hope, will reading them be ‘a spectacular waste’ of it (Sellars). But to the extent that they interrogate, through multiple perspectives, the fictional basis of our imagined economy, and expose its rhetorical and narrative articulations, the essays in this collection sometimes gesture towards alternative economies, different dreams. In addressing the economy’s ‘supreme fictions’, we must also sometimes confront its contradictions and nightmares. And in so doing, we may begin to imagine relations whose operation – through excess, non-pertinence or sheer extravagance – is not limited to the service of profit, but open to other narratives of social intercourse. This, at least, is our desire.
Notes 1. We have used Amanda Hopkinson’s translation (Piglia 2003b) from the Spanish, Plata quemada (Piglia 2003a). On a few occasions we have adopted Valeria Wagner’s translation instead. We have clearly indicated all such amendments in notes to our text. 2. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part I. Cited in Mandel 1984, 11. 3. Hopkinson translates ‘despropósito’ (Piglia 2003a, 150) as ‘outrageous behaviour’ (which is indeed implied). ‘Nonsense’ is, however, more accurate here, for its denotation of a rejection of any system of rationality. 4. Hopkinson renders this passage as ‘a funeral pyre to our social values’ (emphasis ours). This suggests that the ashes of the burnt money perform a rite of mourning for particular, local, social values (‘ours’). The Spanish, however (‘una pila funeraria de los valores de la sociedad’ – Piglia 2003a, 151), refers rather to ‘society’ in general, and also suggests that it is those values themselves which burn in the pyre. Money is those social values; it does not merely represent or symbolize them. Quite what this ceremony mourns is thus left open: it could be society, or value or even, as the text suggests, the bodies of those society sacrifices in the name of its values. 5. As Hopkinson points out, the Italian ‘e peccato’ carries both secular and sacred connotations: it means both ‘it’s a pity’ or ‘it’s a shame’ and ‘it’s a sin’. Less immediately, perhaps, it also connotes ‘waste’. 6. It is unclear whether Piglia invents the name of the philosopher or takes up the ‘real name’ from the journals’ accounts. But it is worth noting that there are at least two famous Andrades in Brazilian literary history, both of whom are related to the ‘anthropophagist movement’, which called for the ‘ingestion’
Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner 21
7. 8.
9. 10.
11. 12.
13.
and the ‘digestion’ of First World culture in order to produce authentic ‘Third World’ culture: Oswald Andrade, author of an ‘Anthropophagist Manifesto’ (1928), and Mário de Andrade, author of Macunaíma (1928). Hopkinson adopts ‘valiant’ for ‘valioso’ (Piglia 2003a, 151); we consider ‘valuable’ more accurate. Witness for instance Economics as Literature – Microsoft Reader eBooks, which compiles texts by authors such as Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Martineau and Jane Marcet. See for instance Michael Watts’s The Literary Book of Economics (Watts 2003). ‘. . . je crois que la possibilité de l’argent porte en elle des effets potentiels de déconstruction. Je crois qu’il n’y aurait pas de déconstruction sans la possibilité de l’abstraction, de la neutralisation, du signe monétaire, de l’arbitraire, du langage. Ce qu’on appelle couramment déconstruction ne serait pas possible s’il n’y avait pas d’argent et de capital’; but also, if deconstruction is contingent on the presence of money and capital, so too money deconstructs itself: ‘. . . l’argent déconstruit l’argent d’une certaine manière; l’argent introduit dans la calculabilité monétaire un principe de l’ incalculabilité’ (Derrida 2004, 228). [‘. . . I think that the possibility of money bears in itself potential effects of deconstruction. I think that there would not be deconstruction without the possibility of abstraction, of neutralization, of the monetary sign, of the arbitrary, of language. What is currently called deconstruction would not be possible if there were no money and no capital’; ‘. . . money deconstructs money in a certain sense; money introduces in monetary calculability a principle of incalculability’] (our translation). See Foucault 1977. See Lawrence 1980, who argues that Simmel tends to ‘dethrone industrialisation as the determining force of modern society’ (ibid., 183), the ‘paratypical phenomenon of [his] conceptual world [being] the metropolis (Grosstadt), not the industrial corporation’ (ibid., 186). Vincent B. Leitch has a thought-provoking discussion (‘The Rise of the Lilliputians’) of the New Economic Criticism in his Theory Matters (Leitch 2003), which, unfortunately, we came upon too late to incorporate into this introduction. We thank him, nevertheless, for his collegiality in sending us, at late notice, the essay. The interventions in this volume, of course, derive from the perspective of literary (and film) scholars rather than from that of economists. But it is worth noting too that the imaginary dimension of the economy has also recently been perceived as a problem for economists, who have been accused, as Uskali Mäki points out in his introduction to Fact and Fiction in Economics. Models, Realism and Social Construction (Mäki 2002), of working with entirely fictitious models and of having lost touch with reality.
References de Andrade, Mário. 1985. Macunaíma. Trans. E. A. Goodland. London: Quartet. de Andrade, Oswald. 1972. Obras completas. In convênio com o Instituto Nacional do Livro, MEC. Vol. 6, Do Pau-Brasil à Antropofagia e às Utopias: Manifestos, teses de concursos e ensaios. Rio de Janeiro: Civilisação brasileira.
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Bacon, Francis. 2000. The Advancement of Learning. Ed. Michael Kiernan. Oxford : Clarendon. Bigelow, Gordon. 2004. Fiction, Famine and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brantlinger, Patrick. 2001. Who Killed Shakespeare? What’s Happened to English Since the Radical Sixties. New York and London: Routledge. Capote, Truman. 1965. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences. New York: Random House. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge: Polity Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2004. L’esprit de l’argent. Autour des écrits de Jacques Derrida sur l’argent. In L’argent. Croyance, mesure, spéculation. Ed. Marcel Drach. 193–234. Paris: La Découverte. Foucault, Michel. 1977. What is an Author? Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald F Bouchard. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Goux, Jean-Joseph. 1990. Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud. Trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Heinzelman, Kurt. 1980. The Economics of the Imagination. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Lawrence, Peter A. 1980. Radicalism and the Cash Nexus. American Journal of Sociology 86(1): 182–6. Leitch, Vincent B. 2003. Theory Matters. New York and London: Routledge. Mäki, Uskali. 2002. Fact and Fiction in Economics. Models, Realism and Social Construction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mandel, Ernest. 1984. Delightful Murder. A Social History of the Crime Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McKeon, Michael. 1987. The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740. Baltimore: John’s Hopkins University Press. Osteen, Mark. Ed. 2002. The Question of the Gift. London: Routledge. Piglia, Ricardo. 2003a. Money to Burn. Trans. Amanda Hopkinson. London: Granta Books. —. 2003b. Plata quemada. Buenos Aires: Seix Barral. Readings, Bill. 1996. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Shaw, George Bernard. 1950. The Irrational Knot. London: Constable. Shell, Marc. 1995. Art and Money. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. —. 1982. Money, Language and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. —. 1978. The Economy of Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Shumar, Wesley. 1997. College for Sale. London: Falmer. Simmel, Georg. 1990. The Philosophy of Money. Ed. David Frisby, 2nd enlarged edition. Trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby from a first draft by Kaethe Mengelberg. London: Routledge. Turner, Bryan S. 1986. Simmel, rationalisation and the sociology of money. Sociological Review 34: 93–114.
Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner 23 Watts, Michael. Ed. 2003. The Literary Book of Economics. Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books. Williams, Raymond. 1973. Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. Penguin: Harmondsworth. Woodbridge, Linda. Ed. 2003. Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism. Basingstoke: New York, Palgrave. Woodmansee, Martha and Osteen, Mark. Eds. 1999. The New Economic Criticism. London: Routledge.
1 Supreme Fictions: Money and Words as Commodifying Signifiers Richard Waswo
Language, as both speech and writing, and money, as both coinage and credit, each constitute highly organized and conventional systems of exchange (of goods, other currencies, information, innuendo, amusement, and any possible emotional attitude). And each system is material and symbolic at once: sounds or letters, metal or paper (and now, in both, electric impulses on a screen) – the material stuff (or energy) conveys intangible, symbolic meanings, and values, which, in turn, form conceptions of that stuff. Things that do exist can project in our imagination things that don’t – fictions, business plans, dividend estimates, moneys of account. I shall try here to elucidate the functional nature shared by these systems, and then suggest that it helps to account for the (so far) unstoppable force of capitalism, which, if we count its origins in banking, commerce, and corporate equity, seems co-extensive with modernity.1
I Let’s start with money, which has been historically somewhat less well understood than language. By the functions it performs and the way it performs them, money can create material (i.e. behavioural) forms of unity by becoming a more widely shared symbolic measure of value. Money is an undeniable fact that, I shall argue, fulfils the three main criteria – abstraction, change, and pleasure – of what Wallace Stevens adumbrates in his major poem, ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’. He deliberately avoided defining this fiction more specifically either in the poem or in letters and interviews, where he sometimes referred to it as a replacement for God, sometimes as an idea, like ‘heaven’, that is but an extension of reality, other times as a form of cultural production like 24
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‘poetry’ (Rehder 1988, 220–1). And of course, the standard denunciation of money, from Aristotle’s analysis (Aristotle 1947, 1.10) down to the entertaining, hostile account of it as Frozen Desire (Buchan 1997), is precisely that it substitutes itself for these worthier aims or objects: the real wealth of the householder, God, happiness, friendship, and so forth. The ease with which money can thus insinuate itself into these otherwise honorific places was identified by the great thinker who most deplored it, Karl Marx, as a consequence of just the symbolic function that money performs.
‘It must be abstract’ Like all writers on the subject from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century, Marx worries at length over the supposedly ‘intrinsic’ value of money, its actual content of precious metal. But when he comes to consider the circulation of money as a total process of one exchange after another (C for M and M for C), it occurs to him that a fake pound does the job as well as a real one. From this he infers that even the real pound is ‘nothing more than a symbol’, which, as representative of all commodity prices, is ‘but the symbol of itself.’ That is, ‘in the act of circulation’, the material of money, ‘gold and silver, is irrelevant’ (Marx 1993, 210–1). Hence, for the purposes of circulation (i.e. exchange), money is, precisely, ‘a material symbol’, which needn’t be precious at all. Fake money will do the same job: thus ‘symbolic money can replace the real, because material money as mere medium of exchange is itself symbolic’ (ibid., 212). The next step in this chain of reasoning will not be taken until the early twentieth century, and its material proof will not occur until 1971. Marx, however, refused to generalize these observations. He remained insistent on precious metals for other monetary purposes, such as realizing prices and storing treasure; and also on regarding the various, often-enumerated functions of money – means of payment, medium of exchange, measure of value, store of wealth2 – as ‘contradictions’ (ibid., 213). But these are rather merely paradoxes, as Marx’s own analysis of the material that is itself symbolic suggests. But for Marx, the symbolism, dependent wholly on abstraction – that is, a principle tied to no particular, concrete embodiment, but capable of defining all relative quantities – was but a description of money as the ‘universal equivalent’ of everything, and hence responsible for the ease with which both money and all it buys get fetishized, usurping what are supposed to be social relations. Marx did not see that the very
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functioning of money as he himself analyzed it depended on, was itself, a form of social relation. This perception is part of the next step in the chain of reasoning about the symbolic abstraction of money taken in the second edition (1907) of Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money. Simmel begins his investigation by developing a highly original axiology, or theory of value. His first chapter presents value not as something that objects ‘have’ a priori, not any inherent quality or property, but rather something projected onto them by human communities (Simmel 1978, 60). Valuation is a psychological process that makes a ‘claim’ of significance and recognition (ibid., 68) that is intersubjective, necessarily social. The source of value (monetary, erotic, religious, and aesthetic) is neither supply and demand, which are merely its particular conditions (ibid., 72), nor ‘utility’, except insofar as this assumes ‘desire’ (ibid., 91); but rather, any kind of ‘distance’ which requires ‘sacrifice or renunciation’ to overcome and which presupposes that the object of any individual’s demand ‘is, simultaneously, the object of someone else’s demand’ (ibid., 77–8). The process of measuring and overcoming this distance is that of exchange: gain for surrender, what we must give for what we get. It is precisely in and by exchange that value is created; it’s not something that objects have prior to exchange, but rather their ability to be exchanged that constitutes their value (ibid., 86). This ability is social, requiring ‘someone else’s demand’. Value, in short, is what other people want – nothing less than collective, shared desire. For Simmel, the operation and nature of money is ‘the autonomous manifestation of the exchange relation, . . . the substance that embodies abstract economic value’ (ibid., 119). Price is the ‘degree of exchangeability’ between any one and all other commodities. As an abstract but substantivized value, money ‘expresses nothing but the relativity of things that constitute value’ (ibid., 121). In sum: the philosophical significance of money is that it represents within the practical world the most certain image and the clearest embodiment of the formula of all being, according to which things receive their meaning through each other, and have their being determined by their mutual relations. (ibid., 128–9) Money is but the supreme abstraction that measures the relative desirability of objects, thus recording both what they mean and what they are. And for money to perform what is now seen as its central function of exchange,
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‘It must change’ How money has changed over time is the basis of the careful argument of Simmel’s second chapter that logically, money need have no intrinsic value at all. Paper money requires no backing of precious metal and may be established by nothing more than governmental fiat, or may be replaced by various forms of credit (ibid., 143). Money is pure quantity symbolized, so any substance will do; gold and silver merely handy for a transitional stage: ‘money has to pass through this incarnation in order to achieve its greatest effects, and it seems unlikely that it will escape from it in the foreseeable future’ (ibid., 151). Unlikely, perhaps; but Simmel’s analysis proved prophetic and, so far as I know, unique. Money, he continues, strives to emancipate itself from the material and become pure symbol, though it hasn’t made it yet because: it is not technically feasible to accomplish what is conceptually correct, namely to transform the money function into a pure token money, and to detach it completely from every substantial value that limits the quantity of money, even though the actual development of money suggests that this will be the final outcome. (ibid., 165) And so indeed it was, in gradual stages occurring through the second half of the last century. As a child, I myself spent coins that contained at least a little shiny silver and earned bills that sometimes announced their convertibility into metal. Today, of course, our pockets and wallets contain nothing but ‘token money’ whose material (still necessary for daily transactions) bears no relation to the numbers inscribed on it, is entirely irrelevant to its value. Simmel’s logic was enacted in 1971, when President Nixon annulled the convertibility of US dollars into gold (by then only possible for central banks), and completed in 1973, when, having unpegged the dollar from gold, the USA removed it as the standard of other First-World currencies, allowing it to float as now it does. Perhaps we need reminding that these events were traumatic at the time, and remained so until recently – in the same way and for the same reason that the introduction of paper money was attended by anxiety, reluctance, and ridicule since Marco Polo first described to Europeans how it circulated in Cathay. The idea that values aren’t intrinsic or stable has never been welcome in western thought; it is remarkable that Simmel should have figured this out in 1907. But Simmel was simply able to take the long view: money, he observed, had moved from substance – at first
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in its crudest form as measured by weight – to function, and so was poised to arrive where it is today: as substanceless as electronic impulses, pure instrumentality or tool. As ‘absolute means’ (ibid., 236), money doesn’t just have a function, it is one. Or rather, several, most others being corollaries of its primary role as the ultimate facilitator. As such,
‘It must give pleasure’ Stevens, a highly sophisticated rhetorician, offers a paradox as the pleasure provided by the supreme fiction: ‘To be stripped of every fiction except one, / The fiction of an absolute –’ (Stevens 1964, vii, 18). That might describe God – or Simmel’s notion of money. In a Modernist, post-Nietzschean universe where disillusion reigns and all fictions have been seen through, there may still be – what? nostalgic comfort, poetic need? – some satisfaction in willed belief, an embrace of the unreal. In Simmel’s utterly relativist and social world, where money is naked, unmasked, and the values it records ever changing, there may still be some satisfaction in perceiving its ‘absolute’ functionality. Simmel himself drew a related analogy between God’s creation of the world and ours of money: as He allows the world to run by its own laws, so we invest objects with value, and they run according to the mechanisms of exchange and return whence they began, in the pleasure of our experience of them (Simmel 1978, 78). Toward the end of his poem, Stevens offers a further identification of pleasure: The irrational Distortion, however fragrant, however dear, That’s it: the more than rational distortion, The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that. They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. (Stevens 1964, x, 12) The feeling could easily be the collective desire that is value, and the resulting ‘more than rational distortion’ would be the operation of the exchange mechanism called the market, which is subject to all sorts of emotional fluctuations and to no rational reduction or understanding such as universities (or economists) might seek to formulate. The recent and epoch-making introduction (in January 2002) of the euro illustrates some of the lessons, poetic and sociological, suggested by these meditations. Going in reverse order, let’s continue considering
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pleasure – first, of a lower, far more mundane kind, described thus by Gertrude Stein: ‘But there was the pleasure of spending money and there is no doubt about it there is no pleasure like it, the sudden splendid spending of money and we spent it’ (Stein 1993, 48). And how much more splendid is it, for individual travellers, to be able to spend it in different countries without losing some of it (by having to change it) every time a border is crossed. These net individual gains in time and money realizable by a single currency depend on the very nature of money as understood by Marx and Simmel: all it has to be is spendable, that is, accepted in a community. Social assent – not any form of intrinsic, representative, or convertible value – makes money money, what one of Simmel’s commentators calls a ‘pure social mediation’ (Orléan 1992, 91). Orléan goes on to stress Simmel’s recognition that utilitarian theories of ‘instrumental rationality’ cannot account for the operation of money as a ‘social bond’ whose legitimacy is more affective, dependent on notions of trust, faith, credit, confidence, and so forth. Given these feelings, Marx’s counterfeit pound, fictional in the worst sense of fake, works just as well as the real, factual note issued by the Bank of England. Something like Stevens’s ‘pleasure’ is surely provided by the paradox that in terms of function, which are the defining terms of what money is (it is simply what it does), there is no difference between real and fake, fiction and fact. That money is constituted, not by an object, but by a ‘social bond’, the trust required to make it spendable, is apparent throughout the history of currencies and finance. Until the formation of nation-states in modernity, innumerable currencies chaotically competed and made the fortunes of merchants who understood how to manipulate them – mainly those people the English and French called ‘Lombards’ (i.e. any northern Italian banker). So great did the chaos occasionally become that merchants resorted to the creation of purely fictional (never, or no longer, coined) monies of account, in order to calculate real prices and balance their books (de Roover 1953, 78–9; Spufford 1988, 411). And after the rise of nation-states, all four major modern revolutions, according to J. K. Galbraith, were largely financed by unsecured, worthless paper notes (like Continental dollars and assignats), which their users mutually agreed to accept if only for the duration of the conflict (Galbraith 1975, 61–2). And for what became the most powerful, imperial nations, their currencies (the pound until the Great War and the dollar after it) as a result of their success became the property of everybody (much like the English language, whose grammar and usage is no longer exclusively determined by Brits or Yanks).
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There is one other pleasurable consequence of the simplest form of the affective bond: I pay you for goods or services and trust you’ll give me the correct change. That I can now do this with the same currency in Fiesole, Helsinki, Athens, and Madeira does not require me to share any cultural presupposition (except the practice of spending money) or political association or even language with the person who counts out my change. A purely instrumental politeness – expressed in smiles and gestures if words are wanting – will suffice. Nor is the transaction basely dehumanizing, for we are not engaged in a personal relationship but a social one. We spend the same money, for very similar products. This is shared, if tacit, knowledge, a broad field of common interest, a kind of community. Far from reducing the human to the status of object (fetishized or not), the act of spending money is precisely the contrary: an act so completely social that it is unique to humanity, as Sohn-Rethel noted some time ago: the ‘abstract paradox’ of money, he claimed, might define humanity better than the criteria of speech and reason, since no animal has yet been found that uses or comprehends it (Sohn-Rethel 1978, 45).
‘It must change’ Once the closely fixed exchange rates established in Bretton Woods in 1946 were abandoned by the great float in 1973 that enacted (however inadvertently) Simmel’s logic of money, all currencies have done nothing but change in relation to each other. The euro, in relation to its major and immediate rivals (dollars, yen, pounds, Swiss francs), sank slightly below its initial equivalents during the first month of its existence, but has since climbed steadily. From the January 2002 until April 2007, the euro gained about 48 per cent against the dollar, 32 per cent against the yen, 10 per cent against the pound, and 10 per cent against the franc.3
‘It must be abstract’ Since all money is a symbolic abstraction, the use of a single currency in different nations – or across large areas of space, as in America, Russia, and China – is a further abstraction, which, by the usual paradox, is also perfectly material and concrete. The abstract is an agent of unity; the concrete the guarantee of possibility. This is why the introduction of a common currency could, in defiance of all received opinion, precede the establishment of any form of common and real political power. The history of
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the EU already suggested this. The wisdom of its founders – Monnet, Schuman, and Spaak – was precisely to begin with something concrete, specific, and therefore feasible: the production of coal and steel – from there to the Common Market and thence to Euroland. If all these gradual and highly contested achievements had had to await the foundation of some single European government, nothing would have occurred. By proceeding with specific activities, much has occurred, and nothing so potentially unifying as the money that has already defined the geography of ‘Europe’ more precisely than ever before: it’s wherever euros can be spent. The power of money has been more often deplored than celebrated – as has the power of fiction. Since antiquity, the same accusations have been repeated against each: the love of money is the root of all evil; stories of sex and violence mislead youth and waste everyone else’s time. But, to adapt an excellent question from a great critic of Renaissance literature: ‘Why should fiction be potent to corrupt and powerless to edify?’ (Lewis 1954, 346). If money makes people compete with each other for its possession, why should it not also link them in tacit recognition of shared desires? By the Renaissance, Europe had learned to distinguish fiction from history on the one hand and lying on the other. But it hasn’t yet fully learned that money is the supreme fiction, enabling the community that uses it to evaluate, embody, and exchange its desires. The euro should help us figure this out.
II It is the basis of the pure functionality of money in social assent that makes it homologous to language, according to various observers since Quintilian, who wrote: ‘Custom indeed is the indisputable mistress of speaking, and language is to be employed just like currency, as having the public stamp’.4 The comparison made its way through Renaissance rhetoric to the Enlightenment, when it was echoed by the Marquis de Mirabeau and David Hume, after being repeated by John Locke: ‘For words, especially of languages already framed, being no man’s private possession, but the common measure of commerce and communication, it is not for any one at pleasure to change the stamp they are current in, nor alter the ideas they are affixed to’ (Locke 2002, 3.11.11). As a contemporary scholar reminds us, the same connection had been made before in one of the oldest and most versatile gods in the ancient Greek pantheon. Taking his name from a stone heap that marked distances and was associated with fertility, Hermes became the messenger of the Olympians; the god of exchange and the alphabet, of merchants, thieves,
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travellers, and gamblers; gave ‘his name to the business of interpretation’, (hermeneutics) and is ‘the mythological intersection of the central means of western socialization: writing and money’ (Lauer 1994, 43).5 The most seminal development of the homology was that of Ferdinand de Saussure, whose discussion of linguistic value (Saussure 1983, 2.4.2) makes explicit the identical way that words and coins work, being exchanged for something dissimilar (ideas or goods), and compared to something similar (other words or currencies). For Saussure, these processes establish values, determine them. He thus arrived about the same time as Simmel at the same revolutionary notion that both linguistic and monetary values – meaning and worth – are not intrinsic but differential, depending not on any fixed characteristic of the objects (the word’s referent, the coin’s content of precious metal), but on the process of exchanging and comparing them, on their relations with what is like and unlike them. Values are established in and by usage, as Quintilian declared. Custom – what Saussure called the ‘social fact’ – rules, gives the currency to both words and coins. Jean-François Lyotard made the most radical contemporary statement of the relation in a postscript to his diagnosis of postmodernity. There, he describes capitalism as ‘infinite will’, and finds it to be invading language itself, transforming it into a ‘productive commodity’ by means of computerized treatment and exchanges of ‘information’. On this basis, he offers a warning that updates the ancient homology between words and money: Under the guise of an extension of markets and a new industrial strategy, the coming century is that of the investment of the desire for infinity, according to the criterion of optimum performance, in matters of language. Language is the whole social bond (money is only an aspect of language, the accountable aspect, payment and credit, at any rate a play on differences of place or time). This investment of the desire for the infinite in language is thus going to destabilize the living creations of social life; itself. (Lyotard 1993, 27) Assuming the Saussurean description of semantics as a ‘play on differences’, Lyotard subsumes the operations of currency and credit under those of language itself, as Saussure’s ‘social fact’. Lyotard’s parenthesis thus reduces both social facts to one. We need not go quite so far in order to grasp the cogency of the traditional observation of similar or identical function between words and money. However, both the
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homology and the effects that Lyotard attributes to computerization and describes as destabilization have a rather longer history. Capitalism, according to Lyotard, consists in commodification, or the determination of values by the ‘indifferent’ mechanisms of exchange, the ‘commensurability’ of all things (Readings 1991, 102). Reflection on this process dates back to Aristotle, who certainly found it to ‘destabilize’ properly ‘social’ life. For him, exchange was legitimate only to secure the material welfare of the household (); whereas exchange for the sake of profit (i.e. commerce,) is unnatural, because things are made to be used and consumed, which fixes a limit to their acquisition (no point in buying more bread than the family can eat); and wrong, because acquiring things merely to sell them (Marx’s M-C-M) has no limit: money may be thus accumulated forever. Hence Aristotle condemns the trade of merchants, second in iniquity only to that of moneylenders: the reproduction of money by taking interest is the most ‘unnatural’, therefore immoral, activity of all (Aristotle 1947, 1.9–10). Such attitudes, formed in the largely self-sufficient economies of classical Greece, were endlessly repeated in the burgeoning commercial economies of late medieval and early modern Europe, to which they were increasingly irrelevant.6 Aristotle also noted the other ‘artificial’ feature of money: that it is merely ‘conventional . . . because, if the users substitute another commodity for it, it is worthless’, thus observing the arbitrariness of the material of money and its dependence on social assent, but only further to condemn it as ‘unnatural’. Computerization merely accelerates (with unpredictable consequences) the process of making language a ‘productive commodity’ which is, according to economic historians (Spufford 1988; Day 1987), coterminous with, perhaps definitive of, capitalism itself as Lyotard regards it. For what got commodified, and monetarized, by Tuscan bankers in ways that made the commercial revolution of the thirteenthcentury possible was written text: signifiers (certificates, bills, letters) of debt, deposit, equity, and exchange. Negotiable paper, functioning as money came to provide the credit essential to long-distance exchange of cheap, bulk commodities in the specie-poor economy that Europe remained even after the influx of bullion from the western hemisphere. ‘The birth of capitalism coincides with the emergence of an organized market for short-term credit based on foreign exchange’ (Day 1987, 142). The textual commodity that began as payment orders in foreign currencies gradually became a (covert) way of making loans (at interest), via a fictitious or ‘dry’ exchange, and finally evolved into an endorsable note that constituted credit and circulated just like money. These ‘letters
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of exchange’, as they came to be called, were complex in operation – partly because cunningly devised to evade the prohibition of usury – but simple in principle: they were paper money, they generated their own market (of sale at discount) just as, by the sixteenth century, did coinages.7 As for destabilization, even more of it was observed during the late Renaissance. In the fifteenth century the word ‘commodity’ (in English and in French) began to shift from designating the useful qualities of an object (how ‘commodious’ it was) to objects produced exclusively for sale. The fact that in the mid-sixteenth century centre of mercantile finance, Lyon, there was a money market (specialists whose business was to profit from foreign exchange), was horrifying to most commentators, since what was supposed to be some fixed standard of value had itself become a commodity, whose value fluctuated in the course of trade. By early modernity not only had these forms of paper, textual credit, become commodities, but so too, in the new mass market provided by the technology of print, had fiction. Only on the scale permitted by print did linguistic products begin to generate their own market. The printing of books, or rather of sheets to be cut and sent to the binder to be sewn into whatever covers the buyer could afford, was also the first model of assembly-line production, the fabrication of objects consisting of (nearly – given the vagaries of sixteenth-century print shops and practices) identical and interchangeable parts. At the same time, perhaps the most telling example of the commodification of language in the form of fiction was occurring in the first industry of mass entertainment, the public theatres of Elizabethan and Jacobean London (industry, of course, in the new sense of manufacture, here performance, for private profit). What is more, this commodification of fiction was but the second activity to be organized as a modern corporation – a joint-stock company whose shares were themselves commodities; the first was long-distance trade and colonization. So accepting Lyotard’s description of capitalism as commodification, and tracing its origins to the written credit instruments of the late middle ages offers a newly concrete, historical illustration of the homologous signifying systems of language and money. And, considering the present economy, we also have a new suggestion of the power of capitalism thus conceived. For ‘almost anything can be turned into a commodity’, observes a financial journalist as praise for Enron’s discovery of new commodities and new markets: electric power, bandwidth, credit risk, advertising space, weather derivatives. All that could be traded would be, and Enron would get its cut (Surowiecki 2001, 39). Despite its crash, Surowiecki finds a convincing analogy between
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Enron’s ideas and those of Michael Milken (the 1980s inventor of junk bonds – which are still practiced, despite Milken’s jail sentence), which is simply the invention of new markets – for anything, including the wholly intangible factor of risk. These are but the more notorious examples of the enormous expansion of all the financial products called ‘derivatives’ during the last quarter century. Warrants, puts and calls – despite the jargon and proliferating complexities, all this paper does is to place bets on the future, promising to buy something (usually other paper) under specified conditions, within a certain range of price and date. What is at stake is just that ‘play on differences of place or time’ that Lyotard designated as the monetary aspect of language. Seen as the simple wager that it is, what is being traded in these transactions is, of course, hope. Other things, commodified even more recently, are now also traded, in what is called (and often excoriated as) ‘outsourcing.’ The (now defunct) airline Swissair was much criticized some years ago when it eliminated its accounting division, and hired a firm in Bombay to do it. According to one reporter, ‘almost twenty per cent of the jobs on Wall Street have disappeared in the last three years’, including such sophisticated services as ‘equity analysis, legal research, and accounting’ (Boo 2004, 58). Here is an initial consequence of transmitting language by computers, without which such outsourcings would be impossible. The removal of high-level jobs from the USA has become a political hot potato, in a neat backlash of globalization: only blue-collar jobs were lost when American companies exported production to wherever the price of labour was lowest and the tax breaks most favourable; but with the exportation of these services, and others in telecommunications, insurance, and stock-broking, almost no white-collar job is safe. So destabilizing is this, that the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers was lately attacked for offering the traditional defence of outsourcing as but a perfect manifestation of the division of labour and the freedom of trade preached by Adam Smith: ‘More things are tradable than were tradable in the past and that’s a good thing’ (Cassidy 2004, 26). Whether good or not, and for whom, this defence states the fact: more things – material and/or symbolic: objects, energy, skills, services, space, hope, fictions, performances – are commodities than ever before. The ‘extension of markets’ and the multiplication of things that can be exchanged in them have been going on for over five hundred years. But there is more here, more power in the practice of late capitalism, than the unstoppable fact of commodification alone. It’s not merely that anything can be bought and sold, but rather the manner of the transaction: once the resulting ownership (equity) is divisible in negotiable
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shares (the principle of stock certificates and futures contracts that, like the old bill of exchange, can be discounted before term) – presto, another commodity, another market, is born. Corporate equity is selfpropagating: as Aristotle deplored, it has no ascertainable limit. Words signifying money (stock certificates, bonds, any tradable paper) beget words promising to signify money (futures, options), which may (I think, but my comprehension of derivatives is very defective) beget words promising to promise to signify money. In any case, it doesn’t require a new product to produce a new market; old products will do fine when differences in time, place, and outcome are played with in new ways. This is self-propagation more awesome even than that of money alone, by lending it at interest, so repugnant and denounced (even while necessarily practiced) for so long. The fundamental offence, to Aristotle, of being without limit usefully recalls the more original part of Lyotard’s description of capitalism, as ‘infinite will’. Or, more precisely, as both a ‘system’ deriving its force from ‘energy in general’, and a ‘figure’ deriving ‘its force from the Idea of infinity’ (Lyotard 1993, 26). These terms are capacious enough to suggest the abstraction, adaptability, and pleasure of Wallace Stevens’s supreme fiction. This vague analogy, or blasphemous implied comparison, of God and money is meant as neither judgmental nor provocative, merely as explanatory. What it explains is the success of capitalism, its ability to co-opt or overcome all resistance (so often observed, especially since 1991, whether in tones of despair or triumph). In the words of Lyotard’s translator, ‘capitalism does not suffer from contradictions so much as profit from them’ (ibid., xiv). Linked to the pure symbol, the absolute functionality, of money, and especially to all its textual forms (paper or electronic impulses) as credit, capitalism is the supreme fiction become dynamic, fuelled by the energy and pleasure of infinite will. Reduced to less philosophical terms, this diagnosis boils down to something already evoked: the pleasure is simply that of gambling, of ‘play’ in all senses of the word.
III Let me, to conclude, trace this diagnosis to a class of fictions – ‘plays’ – generated in the place, time, and milieu of the formation of the early modern economy: city comedies produced on London’s public stages in the first few decades of the seventeenth century.8 All share what one critic calls a ‘master-structure’ of ‘gulling’ (Leinwand 1986, 53); they’re about confidence games, and the perpetrators are the heroes. They are
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the fictional, artistic branch of another, putatively factual, genre of texts produced in the same era: the ‘rogue literature’ (Agnew 1986) or ‘conny-catching’ pamphlets that purported to expose the real con games that proliferated around the bear-baiting dens, leaping houses, taverns, fairs, and playhouses of London’s suburbs. Extra-mural London, particularly the south bank (where the Globe was after 1599), was the site for simultaneously material and symbolic, real and fictional, forms of carnival and criminality. The poet laureate of this place, who thoroughly disapproves of it, but who portrays its energies on its stages time and again, is Ben Jonson. No fewer than five comedies, including his best and most frequently performed, produced between 1606 and 1616, exhibit the genre’s ‘masterstructure’ of ‘gulling’ and present various forms of con men as protagonists (Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair, and The Devil Is an Ass). The first of these is sufficient to manifest the nascent power of capitalism as unstoppable self-propagation and the compulsive pleasures of playing the game. Volpone derives from Roman comedy satirizing social types (misers, misanthropes, climbers, and legacy-hunters), often by means of their being outwitted by a tricky slave, who manages a plot designed to get both girl and fortune for the young hero (sometimes earning thereby his own freedom). Jonson transfers the legacy-hunting plot to his own time, sets it in Venice, identifies the gulls with predatory or noxious animals, and has everyone punished at the end. From the outset, however, the noble Fox and his tricky parasite, the Fly, manage a plot of whirling complexity by promising Volpone’s estate to (thus implicitly wheedling expensive gifts from) four different people, meanwhile attempting to seduce the young wife of one of them. The villains are the sole protagonists; the virtuous are present only to be victimized, along with the gulls. Volpone’s initial address to his gold praises it with blasphemous, erotic hyperbole: Thy looks when they [poets] to Venus did ascribe, They should have given her twenty thousand Cupids; Such are thy beauties, and our loves! Dear saint, Riches, the dumb god, that giv’st all men tongues; That canst do naught, and yet mak’st men do all things; … Thou art virtue, fame, Honour, and all things else! (1.1.21f.)
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Sainthood excepted, all this might have been spoken in antiquity. But what follows is a remarkable denial of actual, contemporary ways of making money; having or spending it is nothing to Volpone: Yet I glory More in the cunning purchase of my wealth Than in the glad possession, since I gain No common way; I use no trade, no venture; I wound no earth with ploughshares; fat no beasts To feed the shambles; have no mills for iron, Oil, corn, or men, to grind ‘em into powder; I blow no subtle glass; expose no ships To threatenings of the furrow-facèd sea; I turn no moneys in the public bank; Nor usure private – (1.1.30f.) This catalogue is comprehensive and up-to-date: Volpone does not engage in commerce, investment, farming, herding, industrial manufacture (hydraulic ‘mills’ were a major technological innovation of the Middle Ages), food processing, artistic manufacture (Murano glass had been famous since the thirteenth century), shipping, banking, or money-lending. He is perfectly unproductive, and, as Mosca interrupts to emphasize, benevolent (he imprisons no one for debt), and generous – spending, as Mosca begs and receives a bit of gold, merely for his ‘pleasure’. ‘That’s it, the more than rational distortion’, as Stevens said (we’ll see shortly how compulsively it operates). This wonderful disavowal of the capitalist objective (rational utility, profit-making) is at the same time a revelation of the capitalist motive. Volpone’s pleasure is not having, but getting: ‘cunning purchase’. It’s the game, the process, that excites. Volpone is the first in a long line of capitalist figures in fact and fiction who, when asked why, when they’re already so rich, they keep on dealing, reply: ‘money’s just the way we keep score’. It’s playing and winning the game (not amassing superfluous wealth) that’s fun. Here in the play’s first scene Volpone dedicates himself to pleasure – Call forth my dwarf, my eunuch, and my fool, And let ‘em make me sport. What should I do, But cocker up my genius and live free To all delights my fortune calls me to? (1.1.70f.)
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– and explains how he gets it, by flattering the greed of those who would become his sole heir, furthering their competition, letting them: Contend in gifts, as they would seem, in love. All which I suffer, playing with their hopes, And am content to coin ‘em into profit, And look upon their kindness, and take more, And look on that; still bearing them in hand [assuring them falsely], Letting the cherry knock against their lips, And draw it by their mouths, and back again. (1.1.84f.) This is a game of tantalizing, which has no structural limit; it’s indeed a form of Lyotard’s ‘infinite will’. The next scene begins the hilarious merry-go-round of improvised impositions on the gulls, with Volpone first feigning terminal illness; then in act two disguising himself as a mountebank selling a cure-all elixir. This is carnivalesque metadrama, the staging of a play consisting of staged deceptions of most of the characters, fiction about the production of fictions, the two producers reassuring each other throughout on the quality of their disguises and performance. Mosca asks for the good actor’s reward: ‘And, as I prosper, so applaud my art’ (2.4.38) and begins the third act with a soliloquy of self-congratulation: I fear I shall begin to grow in love With my dear self, and my most prosperous parts, They do so spring and burgeon; I can feel A whimsy i’ my blood: I know not how, Success hath made me wanton. I could skip Out of my skin now, like a subtle snake, I am so limber. (3.1.1f.) All the improvised impositions culminate in the trial of the fourth act, wherein two gulls aid the heroes to invert the course of justice: the innocent young couple are found guilty of the con-men’s own attempted debaucheries. Volpone and Mosca begin act five with an antiphonal litany of gloating: ‘How now, sir? . . . / Are we recovered? . . . / Is our trade free, once more?’ To which Volpone replies, ‘Exquisite Mosca!’ but offers no further praise, prompting Mosca to initiate this exchange: You were not taken with it enough, methinks? Vol. Oh, more than if I had enjoyed the wench;
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The pleasure of all womankind’s not like it. Mos. Why, now you speak, sir. We must here be fixed; Here we must rest; this is our masterpiece: We cannot think to go beyond this. Vol. True, Thou’st played thy prize, my precious Mosca. (5.2.4 f.) They recapitulate their accomplishment: gulling the court, convicting the innocent, marvelling at the credulity of the gulls. Mosca finds their profession more profitable than commerce or landowning: Merchants may talk of trade, and your great signiors Of land that yields well; but if Italy Have any glebe more fruitful than these fellows, I am deceived. (5.2.29 f.) Further appreciation of the lawyer’s performance and hypocrisy leads Volpone to sudden inspiration: ‘I will begin e’en now to vex ‘em all: / This very instant’ (56). He instructs the dwarf and eunuch to announce his death from ‘the grief / Of this late slander’ (62). Mosca’s astonishment is dissipated by Volpone’s invoking the instant arrival of all four gulls: To peck for carrion, my she-wolf and all, Greedy, and full of expectation – Mos. And then to have it ravished from their mouths? (66) Mosca recognizes the game of tantalizing raised to a higher pitch, as Volpone elaborates his inspiration: Mosca will pretend to be sole heir and Volpone will watch from concealment his arrogant treatment of the gulls – ‘a rare meal of laughter’ (87). And so it proves for the rest of the play, as this scheme is enacted more furiously than ever. Not content with witnessing the gulls’ discomfiture, Volpone disguises himself as bailiff further to torment them, especially the lawyer, which stings him into recanting before the court. The upshot is that after Mosca tries to keep Volpone’s fortune by maintaining the fiction of his death, the Fox must ‘uncase’ (5.12.85) and be sentenced to lose it all anyway, though with the satisfaction that Mosca
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is made a galley slave for life. When Volpone first gets the bad news that the lawyer is recanting, he summarizes the situation thus: To make a snare for mine own neck! and run My head into it, wilfully! with laughter! When I had newly ‘scaped, was free and clear! Out of mere wantonness! (5.11.1 f.) But there’s nothing ‘mere’ about ‘wantonness’: this pleasure is compulsive, irresistible, better than sex, a kind of Schadenfreude. These latter two qualities raise fascinating connections necessarily excluded from this essay, but the first two capture the exponentially self-proliferating energy of capitalism. Volpone and Mosca just can’t stop, even when they agree to. No authority in their society can make them stop; they have hoodwinked the law court, and nearly prevail over it again. They’re stopped only by themselves; they go too far, outsmarting each other. Only they make possible their punishment. Enron and Drexel (Milken’s investment bank) also went too far, and only then got punished. But their business practices still flourish. It’s not just individuals (or single corporations), but the whole capitalist economy cannot stop either. As we so often hear, productivity must always increase; if there’s no growth, there’s stagnation. The economy is the only thing in nature in which limitless growth is health – in everything else, it’s cancer. And it is also, like the markets that compose it, ‘not rational’, in the words of a Swiss banker who ought to know (Galliker 1988, 11). Volpone and Mosca enjoy mocking the gulls for not having the sense to see the obvious, being blinded by hope. But they themselves are equally blinded by ‘wantonness’, and no matter how cleverly they plan, nothing goes quite according to their calculation. Their real intelligence lies in spur-of-the-moment improvisation – and this is also the appeal and brilliance of the play itself. Not that they spend much time calculating, anyway: there’s no announcement, let alone deliberation, of Volpone’s final scheme; he just does it, and then works out the details with the enthusiastic participation of Mosca, who’s just rationally suggested resting. But the show must go on (until it gets dark); the economy must expand (though it often contracts); pleasure must be sought (though it become its opposite). And some writers, like Jonson, must compulsively repeat what they disapprove of, joyously dramatizing at length the operation of energies that must be punished at the end.
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Taking Volpone as emblematic of capitalism’s energies allows us to see how they reside, at least in part, in the functional nature of the supreme fictions of money and words. Capitalism is not only the ownership of the means of production; nor motivated only by greed. It is rather the (endlessly?) divisible multiplication of ownership into negotiable paper that constitutes and obtains credit, the equivalent of money. As social creations, both language and money can be socially changed – but ‘social facts’ like these are collective and historical in ways that no conscious, rational program (an academy to regulate linguistic usage, a political revolution) can control. Marx wanted, famously, to understand the world in order to change it. Perhaps, if we understand it differently, we may see how it might be changed. At least we’ll have a better idea of what we’re up against. The challenge would be to find a way to replace (the patent inequalities and injustices of) capitalism with a system that would also harness the energies of supreme fictions, that would be as generalizable (abstract), as adaptable (changeable), and as much fun.
Notes 1. Parts of this essay consist of shreds and patches torn from two earlier articles noted in the references, ‘Shakespeare and the Formation of the Modern Economy’ (Waswo 1996a) and ‘The Fact (and Figures) of the Supreme Fiction’ (Waswo 2003). 2. One of the latest mathematical modelling theorists gives variants of these: ‘1) numéraire, 2) means of exchange, 3) store of value, 4) source of liquidity’, with the useful remark that the first two are usually combined and do not require to be the third (Shubik 1999, 365). 3. These, and many other, rates are kept track of at: www.ecb.int/stats/eurofxref 4. ‘Consuetudo vero certissima loquendi magistra, utendumque plane sermone ut nummo, cui publica forma est’ (Institutio Oratoria 1.6.3). 5. Of other contemporary observers of these connections, the widest-ranging (and the farthest fetched) is Jean-Joseph Goux (1990); the most intelligent are Marc Shell (1978 and 1982) and Kurt Heinzelman (1980). The first chapter of Florian Coulmas (1992) surveys the homology from Locke to Simmel and Saussure. Two recent books both confirm and extend the sketch offered here: Mark C. Taylor, Confidence Games (2004), Jochen Hörisch, Heads or Tails: The Poetics of Money (2000). For a demonstration that capital itself is constituted in and by the symbolic, see Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital (2000). 6. See Waswo 1996b, 404–11. 7. See, The best explanation and still standard history of their operation is de Roover 1953. 8. See Gibbons 1968, and Waswo 2004.
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References Agnew, Jean-Christophe. 1986. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aristotle. 1947. Politics. In Introduction to Aristotle, ed. R. McKeon, trans. B. Jowett. New York: Modern Library. Boo, Katherine. 2004. The Best Job in Town. The New Yorker, July 5, 56–69. Buchan, James. 1997. Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money. London: Picador. Cassidy, John. 2004. Winners and Losers. The New Yorker, August 2, 26–30. Coulmas, Florian. 1992. Language and Economy. Oxford: Blackwell. Day, John. 1987. The Medieval Market Economy. Oxford: Blackwell. de Roover, Raymond. 1953. L’Evolution de la Lettre de Change XIVème-XVIIIème siécles. Paris: Armand Colin. De Soto, Hernando. 2000. The Mystery of Capital. New York: Basic Books. Galbraith, J. K. 1975. Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Galliker, Franz. 1988. The Banking Business after the Crash. Switzerland: Swiss Bank Corporation. Gibbons, Brian. 1968. Jacobean City Comedy: A Study of Satiric Plays by Jonson, Marston, and Middleton. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. Goux, Jean-Joseph. 1990. Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Heinzelman, Kurt. 1980. The Economics of the Imagination. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Hörisch, Jochen. 2000. Heads or Tails: The Poetics of Money, trans. Amy Horning Marschall. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Jonson, Ben. 1985. Volpone. In Ben Jonson (The Oxford Authors), ed. Ian Donaldson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lauer, Erik. 1994. Literarischer Monetarismus: Studien zur Homologie von Sinn und Geld. St. Ingbert: Röhrig University Press. Leinwand, Theodore B. 1986. The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy, 1603–1613. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Lewis, C.S. 1954. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Locke, John. 2002. Essay Concerning Human Understanding. http://www. szymona.net/philosophy/texts/locke/understanding/book3/ch11.html Lyotard, Jean-François. 1993. Political Writings. Trans. Bill Readings and Kevin P Geiman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marx, Karl. 1993. Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Orléan, André. 1992. La Monnaie comme lien social. Genèses, 8: 86–107. Quintilian. 1920. Instituto Oraria, ed. and trans. H. E. Butler. Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann. Rehder, Robert. 1988. The Poetry of Wallace Stevens. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Readings, Bill. 1991. Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics. London: Routledge. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1983. Course in General Linguistics, eds. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, Albert Riedlinger, trans. Roy Harris. London: Duckworth. Shell, Marc. 1978. The Economy of Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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—. 1982. Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shubik, Martin. 1999. The Theory of Money and Financial Institutions. Vol. I. Boston: MIT Press. Simmel, Georg. 1978. The Philosophy of Money, trans. T. Bottomore and D. Frisby. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. 1978. Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Episte- mology. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Spufford, Peter. 1988. Money and its Use in Medieval Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stein, Gertrude. 1993. Everybody’s Autobiography. Cambridge: Exact Change. Stevens, Wallace. 1964. Collected Poems. New York: Knopf. Surowiecki, James. 2001. Drexel 2.0. The New Yorker, December 17, 39. Taylor, Mark C. 2004. Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Waswo, Richard. 1996a. Shakespeare and the Formation of the Modern Economy. Surfaces 6, www.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces/vol6/waswo —. 1996b. Shifting Values: Words, Money, and Credit in the Sixteenth Century. In Italy and Europe in Renaissance Linguistics, ed. Mirko Tavoni, II: 401–13. Ferrara: Panini. —. 2003. The Fact (and Figures) of the Supreme Fiction. In Images and Myths of Europe, ed. Luisa Passerini, 147–57. Bruxelles: Peter Lang. —. 2004. Crises of Credit: Monetary and Erotic Economies in the Jacobean Theatre. In Plotting Early Modern London, eds. Dieter Mehl, Angela Stock, and Anne-Julia Zwierlein, 55–73. Aldershot: Ashgate.
2 Trafficking Words Margaret Bridges
As recently as 1977, British Airways published a tiny French phrasebook ‘for visitors to Belgium, France and Switzerland’. The editor’s foreword is explicit about the purpose of its ‘carefully compiled’ lists, which should provide ‘the tourist and businessman [sic]’ with ‘the appropriate phrase for every situation’ (Harvard 1977, v). Needless to say, its bilingual lists of commodities and ‘useful phrases’ speak volumes about the commercial activity in which non-francophone British travellers were expected to engage. Items of clothing, fabrics and haberdashery not only construct a scenario in which the visitor desires to acquire ‘nylon stockings, gloves, scarf’ (des bas de nylon, des gants, un foulard) but also imply that this acquisition is negotiated in terms of linguistic politeness: ‘may I try this on?’ (puis-je l’essayer?) They moreover assume that the buyer is in a position to determine which commodity is desirable – ‘have you anything more sophisticated, more floral toned?’ (avez-vous quelque chose de plus raffiné, d’un ton plus naturel?) – and to state, politely of course, the amount of money he or she is prepared to spend: ‘This is too dear. Have you anything cheaper?’ (C’est trop cher. N’avez-vous rien de meilleur marché?) The ‘visitor’ is constructed here as being in control of the fictional exchange, and in spite of the four centuries separating them, this is just one feature that the late twentieth-century tourists’ lexicon shares with its precursors: the word lists of early modern travel writings which I want to examine in this essay. Although these are less explicit about the purposes they were made to serve, they too yield information about the economic fictions attending the nascent ideology of ‘traffiquing’. Virtually devoid both of syntax and of context, these word lists resist interpretation by virtue of their typology. Yet the emergent text type of 45
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the foreign word or phrase list can also be inscribed in a history that is at once economic and literary. The rudimentary texts, or text fragments, that I interrogate here are part of the long literary and linguistic history of European trade with natives of those territories which hover between the uncertainly charted space of travellers’ reports and the fictive space of imaginary geography. One of the earliest chapters in that history is found in book four of Herodotus’s Histories. Here the Carthaginians’ report of their trade ‘with a race of men who live in part of Libya, beyond the Pillars of Hercules’ involves a silent scenario on a beach, on which the Carthaginians place their wares, but are not themselves present when the natives ‘place on the ground a certain quantity of gold in exchange for the goods’. Both parties have to be satisfied that the exchange is fair before it can be concluded, but in this utopian scene there is no need for language, no opportunity for bargaining or dispute. The fairness of the exchange seems guaranteed by the linguistic vacuum in which it takes place: ‘There is perfect honesty on both sides’, Herodotus admiringly relates, for ‘the Carthaginians never touch the gold until it equals in value what they have offered for sale, and the natives never touch the goods until the gold has been taken away’.1 The culture that designated speakers of a language other than its own as ‘barbarians’ could also imagine them as perfect trading partners operating with shared ideals of ‘fairness’ or ‘honesty’. A much later episode in the literary history of trade, promoting and reflecting the discovery and colonization of New Spain, Antarctic France, New France, and so forth, was to be marked by the representation of linguistic problems encountered by Europeans in their attempts to negotiate grossly unfair conditions of exchange. These problems – such as the process by which natives speaking languages ‘neither known nor understood of any’ were kidnapped as potential translators – have been admirably and repeatedly studied (see for example Greenblatt 1991, 1992). But Elizabethan and Jacobean travel narratives of early modern England, premised on the Portuguese, Spanish and French literature of discovery (see Hart 2001), have their own particular contribution to make to the literary and linguistic history of trade. That contribution is only just beginning to be studied by a handful of scholars working on Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations, and its continuation, Hakluytus Posthumus, by the aptly named clergyman Samuel Purchas in 1625. As indicated by the addition of the word ‘traffiques’ to the title page of the second (1599) edition of the Principall Navigations, Hakluyt’s collation of texts (which includes diplomatic documents, logbooks, medieval and contemporary travel narratives) unabashedly serves the interests of
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national trade and traffic. Although the history of that word in its various grammatical forms suggests that it does not take long after its first attested use (1506) for negative connotations to appear,2 there is every reason to believe that in the works under scrutiny here ‘traffiquing’ evoked an ideal proudly to be pursued. This is nowhere more apparent than in Purchas’s work, where we find one of the more winning formulations of the conviction that commerce and traffiquing are divinely ordained human activities, as anyone who can read the semiotic system informing God’s Book of Nature ought to know: God hath therefore encompassed the Earth with the Sea [. . .] adding so many inlets, bayes, havens and other naturall inducements and opportunities to invite men to this mutuall commerce. Therefore hath he also diversified the Windes, which in their shifting quarrels conspire to humaine trafficke. (Purchas 1905–7, 1: 11) More encompassed with sea than most stretches of earth, this blessed isle called England is perhaps better predisposed to commerce and trafficking than its European rivals. Be that as it may, sixteenth-century merchants returned from their expeditions not just with exotic and precious merchandise, but also with specimens of strange language. These reached English ports not just in the outlandish form of kidnapped natives, but also in the less spectacular form of lists of foreign words and phrases, which have received scarce critical attention, perhaps because of their apparent inability to tell a tale: some editions of the Principall Navigations (such as Beeching’s for Penguin) Hakluyt (1972) simply elide these lists, and such attention as they have received is largely from linguists seeking to map, say, early West-African languages (see for instance Hair 1970; Dalby and Hair 1967). These non-narrative text-fragments belong to what Frank Lestringant (1999) has called the ‘inventaire’ (itemizing the contents of the newly discovered territory while divorcing them from their narrative context) as opposed to the ‘aventure’ (narrativizing the voyages). Lestringant’s dichotomy, in fact, seems to be anticipated in the Principall Navigations, where the Table of Contents indicates Hakluyt’s own sense that his compilation comprises two fundamental text types: ‘The Voyages ...’ and ‘The Ambassages, letters, Privileges, and other necessarie matters of circumstance appertaining to the voyages ...’. Two distinct types of word or phrase lists inform this emergent national discourse of traffiquing and trading. The first is constituted by monolingual lists of commodities, objects potentially or really exchanged; the items in
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these inventories are attributed to clearly identified owners, donors or recipients and serve an explicitly articulated economic principle. Together they constitute a heterogeneous set of texts, ranging from lists of diplomatic gifts exchanged between rulers through ambassadors to versified enumerations of exported commodities (as in the fifteenth-century Libelle of Englyshe Polycye).3 The bilingual lists of words or phrases are sometimes introduced as anthropological curiosities, though more often for their usefulness to the future merchant-traveller. This text type is both more comprehensive and more elusive than that of the monolingual inventories. Its lexicon may include local commodities for export or consumption in situ, but the rudiments of a scenario of exchange, or traffique, are conveyed without syntax, potentially confusing speaker and addressee, donor and recipient, subject and object. Both text types are informed by the contradictory objectives of maintaining and erasing cultural difference, and both embody the fantasy that the culture that possessed writing could accurately present to itself and manipulate the culture without writing (Greenblatt 1991, 9–12). It is the second text type, the list of ‘foreign words and phrases’, that I interrogate here for what it might tell us of real and imagined exchanges of words and commodities in that space on the threshold of the unknown/always already known.
The word lists in Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations In the most recent complete edition of the Principall Navigations4 there are nine such typographically distinct sequences of words and phrases set off from the main body of text as a mark of alterity. That applies both to their typographical arrangement in columns5 and to the fact that the foreign lexical items are italicized, or otherwise distinguished from the Gothic fount of the main body of the narrative. Like the Hebrew, Arabic and other ‘exotic’ alphabets found in many versions of Mandeville’s Travels,6 these lists are in and of themselves ‘maps of difference’. The activities of glossing and translating can of course be seen as a form of cultural dispossession, as can the process of anthologizing, with its levelling of difference. The following nine Elizabethan and pre-Elizabethan word lists were incorporated in the second edition of the Principall Navigations. Two of them add the insult of theft (from a rival colonizing nation) to the injury of dispossession, for two French word lists brought back by Jacques Cartier from New France in the 1530s were translated into English in 1580 by John Florio with Hakluyt’s aid. The first of these, consisting of
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57 items of ‘the language that is spoken in the Land newly discovered’, contains a number of blanks (marked by an extended dash) where the scribe apparently expected to record, but was unable to do so, the native words for ‘God’, ‘the Day’, ‘Flesh’ and a ‘Bow’. These blanks might reflect European expectations that the natives are without ‘proper’ language. Three of these blanks are filled, and the fourth (for ‘the Day’) elided, in the later, longer list (111 items) brought back in 1536 from the kingdoms of Hochelaga and Canada (‘of us called New France’). The language now captured in neat columns and boxes seems better to reflect the worldorder its transcriber perceived. The earliest of the ‘English’ word lists were brought back by the merchant William Towerson from his first (1555–6) trading venture along the Guinea coast: eleven ‘words of speach’ record the language of a ‘wilde and idle’ people dwelling by the St Vincent river, while eight specimens of the language of Don John’s town follow Towerson’s report of trade with an informant, a former captive, who ‘could speake a little Portuguise’ (Hakluyt 1927, 4: 85). These two vocabularies have been associated with the Guinea dialects of Vai and Twi, respectively (see Hakluyt 1965, 967). And at about the time that Towerson was bringing gold and words back from his third voyage to Guinea (1557), Stephen Burrough brought back to England news of the loss of the North-East bound Bona Confidentia (which Burrough had been sent to seek) and 95 items of a language he identified as that of the ‘Lappians’, with whom he was apparently able to communicate because ‘some of them could speake the Russe tongue’ (Hakluyt 1927, 1: 372). Most of the words in this vocabulary have been associated with two dialects of the Kola-Lapp languages: Kildin and Ter (see Hakluyt 1589, Index 968). Captain Martin Frobisher, best known for having brought back, from his search for a North-West Passage to the riches of Cathay, gold-that-was-none, and for the dubious distinction of having kidnapped a savage ‘whose language was neyther knowne nor understoode of anye’ (Beste 1578, 74), also reached the port of Harwich in 1576 with 17 items of the language of Meta Incognita, recorded, like the rest of the narrative of his first voyage, by a certain Cristopher Hall, master of The Gabriel.7 Linguists have associated this lexis with four present-day Eskimo dialects: Caribou, Cumberland Sound, Labrador and West Greenland (Hakluyt 1589, Index 968). Some ten years after the ‘accidents unlooked for’ that had marked Frobisher’s voyages, John Davis resumed the attempt to discover a new North-West passage to Cathay. A word list obtained from an unidentifiable group of ‘theevish miscreants’, of ‘vile’ but ‘simple’ nature, encountered
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by Davis during his second voyage in 1586, yields 40 lexical items. These presumably reflect the course of an acquaintance that oscillated between ‘courtesie’ and animosity and that involved numerous occasions for barter and exchange. The narrator mentions that the English acquired red and black copper from these people, but the list contains no word for any metal except iron (‘Aoh’), which ‘they could in no wise forebeare stealing’ from the English.8 The introduction to this word list suggests a parallel between the appropriation of metal and language, which emerges from the depths of the throat as ore emerges from the depths of the earth: ‘We had among them copper oare, black copper and red copper: they pronounce their language very hollow, and deep in the throat: these words following we learned from them’ (Hakluyt 1927, 5, 296). Only a handful of these lexical items have confidently been linked with present-day Eskimo dialects (Hakluyt 1589, Index 967). The remaining two lists in Hakluyt are associated with texts that show how inferior were the rewards of barter and trade to the spectacular gains to be had from robbing the Spanish ships and raiding their not-so-strong holds in the colonies. During the 3-year circumnavigation of Sir Francis Drake (1577–80), thirteen Spanish ships moored off the coast of Chile, and another in the bay of San Francisco, afforded the English more ready wealth than did his prospecting of the Moluccas and of Java. Of all the peoples visited by Drake, only the population of Java yielded a list of its six ‘Kings or Princes’ (‘Rajas’) as well as of ‘certaine wordes’ – thirty two, to be precise – of their ‘naturall language, as learned and observed by [his] men’ (Hakluyt 1927, 8: 74).9 Finally, when the dashing Robert Dudley junior returned from Trinidad in 1595, he wrote a contribution to the second edition of the Principall Navigations at Hakluyt’s request (Quinn 1974, 449). The word list appended to Dudley’s first-person narrative itemizes 67 ‘wordes of the language of Trinidad which I obserued at my being there’. As with the other lists, only a few of these items arranged in double columns are found emplotted in the preceding adventure, a narrative containing propagandistic descriptions of an island of plenty – except gold. Intelligence of the ‘fine shaped and gentle’ natives and their language was the only booty Dudley earned on a journey marked by singular failures: to acquire the gold he had sent fourteen of his men to fetch from the empire of Guyana, to meet up with Sir Walter Raleigh, to sell the ‘prize’ taken north of Grenada, to plunder the nine Spanish ships, which were sunk and lost. A Spanish-speaking Indian is mentioned in connexion with the information he provides about the great wealth of gold to be had on the mainland of Guyana, opposite Trinidad: the ‘private interpreter’,
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‘Balthazar my Indian’, as Dudley calls him, finally runs away, leaving the men without gold and without provisions (Hakluyt 1927, 7: 164–70). But whereas the riches promised by the native interpreter remain unverifiable, the lesser commodities evoked in the English gentleman’s word list take on their own value for having been personally observed and symbolically appropriated. What follows is neither a systematic linguistic or cultural analysis of these word lists, nor an attempt to detect their ordering principles. I focus instead on some of the features that the lists have in common, and speculate on ways in which these common features may reflect the various forms of fictive or real traffiquing in which English travellers and their ‘strange’ interlocutors engaged.
Numbers The liminary tags afforded by the report of Cartier’s second expedition highlight some of the most common features of this text type. There we see that numbers occupy a prominent place, as though they were of a different order, over and above language: ‘Here followeth the language of the country and kingdoms of Hochelaga and Canada, of us called New France. But first the names of their numbers’ (Hakluyt 1927, 9: 438). The numbers one to ten follow, glossed by Arabic numerals rather than the corresponding English words. In view of the indisputable usefulness of numbers in trading situations, it is perhaps surprising that they are only present in three of the nine word lists. In addition to this list by Cartier, there is one by Burrough, postfixed to his list of ‘Lappian’. Drake’s Javanese word list on the other hand incorporates words for ten and for twenty. Not only, then, was the positioning of numbers variable, but their very inclusion in the word lists would not seem to have been a prerequisite of the ‘genre’, in spite of the precedent set by Andrew Boorde’s 1542 Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge. Words for numbers there had systematically preceded glossed phrases of imaginary dialogues between Englishmen and natives of the (European) country to whose geography, customs, money and language the reader was introduced.10 In the Hakluytian word lists we are as likely to find, instead of numbers, expressions like ‘much’ or ‘enough’, which bring in the notion of quantity assessment by a controlling subject: the narratives reporting trade similarly alternate between numeric representation of exchanged merchandise and adjectives or adverbs assessing the (un)fairness of the exchange. Frobisher’s lexicon from Meta Incognita contains neither words for numbers nor quantitative adverbs. It does, however, list
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five different words for the five fingers of the hand (in addition to words for other parts of the body).
The body and its parts The possibility that the fingers were associated with the activity of counting comes to mind in connection with narratives like Jean de Léry’s 1578 Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil. Chapter 22 cites the Tupi words for the numbers one to five within a bilingual imaginary dialogue not between two traders engaged in exchange, but between a newly disembarked Frenchman and two ‘sauvages’. When the Tupi asks the Frenchman how many pieces of luggage he has with him, the latter is taught (by an intrusive author) to reply, as the case may require, by the word for one, two, three, four or five; the traveller is advised, should he have more than five pieces of luggage, to count them on his own fingers and on the fingers of those standing near him (de Léry 1994, 481). Léry’s colloquy comprises both a lexicon and a grammar: the conversation between the Tupi and the Frenchman is followed by a list of the parts not of the body and its organs, visible and invisible, but of the first-person singular’s body and soul (Che-eneg ‘mon âme ou ma pensée’; che-enc gouere ‘mon âme après qu’elle est sortie de mon corps’). This in turn is followed by the untranslated Tupi words for those parts of the body ‘qui ne sont honnestes à nommer’, that is, the male and female genitals (ibid., 495).11 The body of this Tupi colloquy, unlike that of the Hakluytian vocabularies, exists as whole. Strangely, there seems to be no word for the body as such in any of the nine word lists under scrutiny, although its itemized parts occur fairly regularly and the gendered, socialized body (‘man’/‘woman’/‘boy’/‘wench’/‘daughter’, etc.) is also a frequent feature. Cartier’s 1535 listing of native words for numbers is, like de Léry’s, followed by ‘the names of the chiefest partes of man, and other words necessary to be knowen’ (Hakluyt 1927, 9: 438). The chiefest parts of man itemize twenty-four parts of the body from the head to the feet. The resulting top-heavy, grotesque body has ten visible features associated with the head, from which the nose is missing – a nose which is present in the other emblazoned bodies of the word lists.12 The blazon here as elsewhere culminates in the naming of the male and female genitals. There are a lot of questions that need to be asked of this and of other features of these grotesque and minimalist versions of the emblazoned body which deploy none of the metaphors, similes and comparisons that we associate with our favourite early modern representations of the
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body as territory, ‘an (as yet) undiscovered country [. . .] which demanded from its explorers skills [that] seemed analogous to those displayed by the heroic voyagers across the terrestrial globe’ (Sawday 1995, 23). We are familiar with the Elizabethan courtier’s and the Caroline anatomist’s dissection of the body and with its reconstruction as ‘a fantasy of male consumption and pleasure’ on the one hand, and as ‘fantasy object of knowledge from which flowed control and mastery’ on the other (Sawday 1995, 211). We now need to interrogate the dissective gaze of the traveller compiling his beginner’s lexicon, and to ask ourselves what fantasy its rearticulated body obeys. Given one explicit purpose of these lists – to initiate future travellers to the language of those distant peoples with whom they engage in trade (see Burrough in Hakluyt 1927, I: 372) – a more pragmatic reflection on the role played by the body in language acquisition situations may be appropriate.
Clothing as commodity The travellers’ lexical blazons cannot but remind us of the languagelearning problems of Princess Catherine of France in Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth in a scene which was italicized throughout in the Folio edition. The francophone Lady13 learns from her nurse the words for de hand, de fingres, de nails, de arm, de elbow, de nick, de chin, de foot and de coun – for the gown, an item of clothing which also follows the enumeration of body parts in Cartier’s list of ‘words necessary to be knowen’. Catherine’s horrified refusal to pronounce in public these words ‘corruptibles, gros et impudiques’ is prompted by their phonological resemblance with a six-lettered word (foutre) and a three-lettered one (con) that were the stuff of French farces and fabliaux – as indeed were the ladies’ horrified refusals to pronounce them. The last word learned in the course of this language lesson, then, collapses the distinction between the body and its extension, the clothes through which it is both perceived and with which it is (here comically) identified. It is intriguing to speculate on the nature of the relationship between the language lessons of travel literature, of Elizabethan drama and of the classroom, but a vast corpus of sixteenth-century classroom materials still awaits further scrutiny before such a question can seriously be addressed. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to surmise that the body and its parts – like numbers – enjoyed something of the status of a cultural universal, as opposed to the items of clothing, whose cultural variability was abundantly underscored both in travel literature and in social satire.
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The question of whose language these vocabularies really represent – as opposed to purport to represent – would therefore seem to be a simple matter when we consider items of clothing rather than body parts. The latter must have been common to speakers of both languages represented in the glossed vocabularies, even though the writings of Pliny and Mandeville may have suggested otherwise.14 By contrast ‘the doublet’ is no more likely to have been an autochthonous item of clothing than ‘grapes’ can have been widespread in Cartier’s Canada, and yet there are words in his 1535 vocabulary for both. It would be naive to assume that the vocabularies are reliable anthropological informants, capable of representing indigenous cultures. The presence in the lists of words for items foreign to the cultures in question may darkly mirror traffiquing and its attendant mirages. For items of clothing and the materials from which they were made, in the word lists from New France, Lapland and sundry Northern islands (where they most abound),15 reflect not only what the traveller might have observed the natives wear and name, but also the adventurers’ hopes of finding a vent – or outlet – for national products, especially wool. The absence of words for clothing in Dudley’s Trinidadian lexicon implies a naked native body adorned only with a bracelet (techir). This extensive list juxtaposes words for desirable local commodities – silver, copper, iron or steel, and the (problematically glossed)16 word for gold – with words for the vegetables, fish and bread that would have sustained the company during their presence on board ship. Within an emergent mercantile system that has been analysed in terms of promotional literature’s fundamental linkage of economics and the environment, these two categories of terms identify the natural commodities that constitute new sources of input (Sweet 1999, 402–3). The list also suggests that Trinidad’s environment is one of plenitude, contrasting with earlier Humanist fantasies of colonizing void and vacant land. From the perspective of English traffiquing, the indigenous inhabitants are regarded less as people to be conquered than as prospective trading partners – no matter how unequal the exchange (Sweet 1999, 405). Dudley’s list therefore unsurprisingly yields terms for the trifles that served the Englishmen as local currency: glass, buttons, beads and bells. The exchange that is implied by the terse lexical items of this inventaire clearly duplicates the exchange emplotted in Dudley’s aventure: About 3 leagues to the Eastwards of [Pelicans Bay] we found a mine of Marcazites which glister like golde (but all is not gold that glistereth) for so we found the same nothing worth, though the Indians
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did assure us it was Calvori, which signifieth gold with them. These Indians are a fine shaped and gentle people, all naked and painted red [. . .]. [They] did often resort unto my ship, & brought us hennes, hogs, plantans, potatoes, pinos, tobacco, & many other pretie commodities, which they exchanged with us for hatchets, knives, hookes, belles, and glasse buttons. (Hakluyt 1927, 7: 166)
Predecessors and pidgins Robert Dudley returned home later that year after his fleet ‘tooke, sunke and burned nine Spanish ships; which was loss to them, though I got nothing’ (Hakluyt 1927, 7: 170). If Trinidad produced a worthless simulacrum of gold, the Spanish ships transported the real thing, and Dudley’s narrative is haunted by their elusive presence. It is they whom he fears, their cargo he desires. The words glossed as ‘hat’ (sambolers) and as ‘pappe’ (carotta) as well as the expressions denoting a cognitive impasse (non yuo/non quapa) raise the question of the extent to which Dudley’s Hispanic predecessors have left their trace on this lexicon, and of whether we are in presence of an emergent trading pidgin. The entries molta, bassina, crocow afoye and cowrte in the list brought back by Towerson in 1555 betray the presence of the Englishman’s Portuguese predecessor, who throughout the narrative constitutes a threat to traffiquing: the adventure proper abounds in moments when the ‘Portugals’ interfere with the English merchants’ trading ventures by rendering the natives indisposed to and incapable of trade. In addition to suggesting that a West-African Portuguese pidgin emerged not long after the first Lusitanian trading ventures on the Gold-coast and in Guinea, lexical items like these raise tantalizing questions. The expression beggecome might well combine Portuguese comer (‘to eat’), with English ‘beg’; in this case the item identified by Towerson as a phrase meaning ‘give me bread’ reflects the presence of two competing traffiquing nations. Did the English merchants not recognize these traces of their rivals’ and their own presence, and, if not, what blind hope could make them close their eyes to linguistic evidence that they were capable of negotiating in other contexts (Spanish, Portuguese and French, after all, held few secrets for Hakluyt and his contemporaries)? Were the natives of Guinea not speaking a ‘foreign’ language when engaging in trade?17 These specific questions in turn lead us once again to the major question begged by all of these word lists: whose language is this anyway?
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Linguistic exchange Because of its syntax, which may or may not be able to tell a story that the terse lexical items are silent about, ‘Give me bread’ is one of many phrases that seem to reproduce or construct relations between natives and their visitors or among the natives themselves. All of the nine lists (except Frobisher’s) include such instances of social exchange, and three of them mimic communicative opening moves by beginning with phrases of salutation (Towerson’s, for example, where the salutation is reduplicated – once for each speaker perhaps) or with a question inviting the addressee to engage in a language-learning process: ‘what call you this?’ (Burrough in Hakluyt 1927, 1: 372). One list mimics the inability to continue the language-learning process by concluding with the phrases ‘I know not, I cannot tell’ (Dudley in Hakluyt 1927, 7: 172). I will conclude by addressing a set of open questions to these phrases, most of which seem to be scattered randomly throughout the lists. Can we distinguish formulas of linguistic politeness representing a fictive or real relation of reciprocity from formulas that suggest asymmetrical relationships of domination and subordination? Does the juxtaposition of verbal salutations with expressions of thanks construct or reflect a scenario of mutual satisfaction governing the exchange of gold for trifles emplotted in the ‘adventures’ as commodities that natives desire? A cluster of similar phrases followed by the word for ‘a friend’ constructs a vision of civil behaviour among equals in the ‘Lappian’ phrases glossed by Burrough as ‘farewell’, ‘good morrowe’, and ‘I thanke you’. Expressions such as these sit uneasily with the representation of these natives in the narrative to which the list is appended as wild scavengers who search the crevices of rocks by the sea for raw meat, ‘foules egges rawe and the yong birdes also that were in the egges’ and seaweed which they devour ‘as a cow doeth grasse when shee is hungrie’ (Hakluyt 1927, 1: 372). Asymmetrical relations between the traffiquing travellers and the natives are clearly implied by expressions like ‘come hither’ and ‘get thee hence’, as well as by the commands ‘hold your peace’ (in both Towerson and Cartier) and ‘give me my supper’ (Cartier). And yet the vexed question of identity of the implied speaker – visitor or native – remains an open one in the accusatory phrase ‘ye lye’ (Towerson). Whoever we imagine as uttering them, these phrases confirm that Towerson thought little good of this particular indigenous community. They also reduplicate the explicit condemnation emplotted in his narrative: I could not perceive that here was any gold, or any other good thing: for the people be so wilde and idle, that they give themselves to seeke
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out nothing: if they would take paines they might gather great store of graines, but in this place I could not perceive two Tunne. There are many foules in the Countrey, but the people will not take the paines to take them. (Hakluyt 1927, 4: 74–5) But would the learning by rote of such phrases be useful, inasmuch as it would allow the European traveller to put these ineffectual traders in their place? Would the future travellers’ recognition of these phrases serve to confirm Towerson’s view of the speaking natives as uncivil brutes, or would the collecting of fragments of strange languages serve yet another purpose to which no amount of sociolinguistic inference – no amount of filling in the gaps – can do justice? My hypothesis that, when prodded, even the most terse and rudimentary of word lists will yield a scenario of trade in the service of an ideology of traffiquing is not without risks. Las Casas is said to have objected indignantly to the biased and falsified stories of what early Indian interpreters actually said during their complex negotiations with the Spaniards: he reminded us that they communicated essentially with rudimentary phrases like ‘gimme food’, ‘gimme bread’, ‘take this’ and ‘give me that’ – the very phrases we have just seen in word lists from other climes – and that the coherent European narratives which these encounters proceeded to produce were at best wishful thinking, and at worst deliberate falsification (see Greenblatt 1991, 95 and 181, n. 23). There is no denying the fragmentary nature of the exotic verbal cargo with which the captains returned, or, indeed, the inability of these lists to familiarize their readers with the values, beliefs and cultural practices of remote trading partners. Rather they articulate the failure of the project of naming an other, extralinguistic world. Captured and displaced, the foreign lexical items that set out to speak the other can only ‘speak us’. Although the declared purpose of their compiler-translators is to subordinate them to a useful purpose – the common good of traffiquing – they tend to take on a life of their own, like so many commodity fetishes. Some fine recent criticism, emphasizing the homology between economic and literary semiotics, has theorized the predicament at the heart of all sign systems tending to towards the autonomy of the signifier. David Hawkes (2001) has further analyzed the accusations of idolatry that late sixteenthcentury/early seventeenth-century Protestant Englishmen directed at perceived processes of commodification. The raw materials presented in this chapter may afford more matter for the discussion of these theoretical issues. For, like so many ‘idols of the marketplace’, the inventories represented by these wordlists exemplify the process of fetishization by
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detaching themselves from the narratives of adventure, encounter and the culturally sanctioned practice of commodity exchange. I would, however, like to give the Elizabethan editor/author/compiler/ translator Richard Hakluyt the last word. Although they beg restoration and completion, exotic fragments constitute a prime exhibit in the early modern aesthetics of the curiosity cabinet; at the same time they are, however, subordinated to the antiquarian collector’s unifying impulse which participates in the process of collective (national) identity formation. In his abundant prefatory matter, Hakluyt articulates his concept of the author as ‘traffiquer’ whose travail/travel partakes in the colonial activity of the colonizer, providing commodities for the reader who occupies the position of the consumer: ‘Good Reader’ he says, ‘it remaineth that thou take the profite and the pleasure of the worke: which I wish to bee as great to thee, as my paines and labour have bene in bringing these rawe fruits unto this ripenesse, and, in reducing these loose papers into this order’ (Hakluyt 1927, 1: 12). He also relates to the materials he has collected, collated, revised, corrected and reconstituted as an affluent and laborious antiquarian might relate to the fragments of the distant culture that he lovingly contemplates in his museum or curiosity cabinet. The cultural historian’s task, as Hakluyt sees it, is to restore a culture to itself by uniting its scattered fragments in an extended metaphor of embodiment. The culture thus reconstituted and resurrected is not, however, the foreign one, but that of Hakluyt’s native Britain (see further Fuller 1995, 141–74)18: Having for the benefit and honour of my Countrey zealously bestowed so many yeres, so much traveile and cost, to bringe Antiquities smothered and buried in dark silence, to light, and to preserve certain memorable exploits of late yeeres by our English nation atchieved, from the greedy and devouring jawes of oblivion: to gather likewise and as it were to incorporate into one body the torn and scattered limmes of our ancient and late Navigations by Sea [. . .] and traffiques of merchandise [. . .]and having [. . .] restored each particular member, being before displaced, to their true joynts and ligaments; I meane by the helpe of Geographie and Chronologie (which I may call [. . .] the right eye and the left of all history)[. . .] I do this second time [. . .] presume to offer unto thy view this first part of my three-fold discourse. (Hakluyt 1927, 1: 19) At the same time as it constructs a national identity, the entangled discourse of objectivity has here practically written the subject out of its
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self-representation. In this convoluted period, the natural historian’s object (or corpus) is indistinguishable from the body (or fragmented discipline of history) that subjects it to scrutiny, and the discourse of historical recovery turns out itself to be subject to fragmentation. Just so, the fragments of language of uncertain attribution which this essay has scrutinized as so many curiosities that might be made to speak of the commodification of language in an age of emerging capitalism, the colonization of the locus of exchange with discursive fictions, and the cultural dispossession inherent in traffiquing may only spell out, in the end, the aporias and dangers of discovery. In this connexion, it is no small irony that a much later stage of discovery and empire was to be marked by native belief that the linguistic cargo of British missionaries spelled out the promise of material goods (Romaine 1992). The investment in literacy has been fraught with dangers of a different kind for twentieth-century Papua New Guineans, whose commodification of language has effectively led to loss of land and other forms of disenfranchisement. So the tables must turn on those who invest in words as a form of wealth, as legendary scenarios of silent trading have long been suggesting.
Notes 1. Herodotus 1972, 336. The importance of this episode for the enduring myth of silent trade is pointed out by Sundström (Sundström 1965, 22–31), who in turn is referred to by Stephen Greenblatt in a footnote to his chapter on ‘Kidnapping Language’ (Greenblatt 1991, 182, n. 34). 2. This is especially true when the term ‘traffiquing’ refers to illicit or secret commerce and is used in the sense of ‘conspiring’, which is already apparent in 1567, even though the OED does not record the term’s sinister and evil connotations or its ‘disparaging sense’ before the mid-seventeenth century. 3. Included in the second edition of the Principall Navigations, 1: 187–207. 4. Hakluyt 1927. 5. The disposition of the columns and the sequence in which words are listed are not always accurately reproduced in modern editions. 6. Kathleen Biddick (1998, 279 et passim) analyzes medieval and early modern practices of inclusion and exclusion through alphabets, which she sees as cartographic codes. 7. The narrative of the second journey (1577) was reprinted from Dionyse Settle, and Frobisher’s third and last journey (1578) reached Hakluyt via Thomas Ellis. A pre-Hakluytian narrative of Frobisher’s three voyages, by George Beste, in his True discourse of the late voyages of discouerie, for the finding of a passage to Cathaya, by the Northweast, under the conduct of Martin Frobisher Generall (1578) does include the report of Frobisher’s kidnapping of a native, but not of his language. Indeed, Beste relates how, ‘for very choller and disdain [at being lured into captivity], [the captive] bit his tongue in
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8.
9. 10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
Trafficking Words twayne within his mouth’ (Beste 1963, 74) – an image, if ever there was one, of communicative impasse. Quotations from John Davis are from 5: 281–98 of the 1927 edition of the Principal Navigations. The writer of Davis’s first and third voyages, reported in the first person plural, is given in Hakluyt’s captions as John Janes. The caption for Davis’s second voyage, related in the first-person singular, does not mention a writer. Davis subsequently wrote The worldes hydrographical discription (1595), part of which was included in The Principall Navigations. The narrative, in the first person plural throughout, contains no indication of authorship, although Drake is there referred to as ‘our generall’. Parallels with Hakluyt’s word lists include: the intention to ‘teache a man to speake part of all maner of languages’; the assumption that commercial activity motivates all travel and intercultural contact; the importance of notions of ‘civility’. I thank Margaret Tudeau-Clayton for drawing my attention to this work. Lestringant notes that there are many other versions of this type of ‘colloque’, which circulated on board the ships headed for Brazil, and that this chapter may not have originated with de Léry (1994, 479–80, n. 3). Latin translations of the Tupi words for the genitals are found in Latin translations of the Histoire d’un voyage de Léry (1994, 496, n. 1). Only two lists – those brought back by William Towerson from Guinea – fail to refer to body parts. John Davis has words for the nose, the eye and the beard scattered in apparently random order throughout his list. Frobisher’s seventeen lexical items only include four words that are not body parts. Burrough lists fourteen body parts immediately after his enumeration of five social categories of person: friend, man, woman, son and ‘daughter or yonge wenche’. Dudley’s sixteen body parts form a sequence from the ‘heare of one’s head’ to the feet, and constitute the only blazon to mention the calf and the wrist. Drake’s Javanese refers only to a woman and to the head. In 1534 Cartier had listed twelve body parts (in two clusters of seven and five, in addition to ‘the privy members’, inserted between the lexical items for gold and an arrow), besides a woman and a man (and his social variants – a sick man, a dead man – as well as the grammatical variant ‘that’ man). For reasons I cannot explain, this scene is repeatedly perceived by critics as an embarrassment: examples are Norwich 1999, 212; Taylor 1982, 176 and Walter 1991, 69. A version of Mandeville’s Travels was included in the first edition of the Principall Navigations; so were numerous references to Plinian monstrous races, some of which were extended into the second edition (e.g. in ‘The Second Voyage to Guinea [. . .] the Captaine whereof was M. John Lok’, Hakluyt 1927, 4: 47–66). Items of clothing worn by the French, such as a shirt or a pair of trousers, figure in one of the earliest Tupi vocabularies, dated before the mid-1540s by Dalby and Hair (1967, 49–50). Rather than suggesting that the word is polysemous – calvori meaning one thing to the Trinidadians (‘gold’) and another to the English (‘marcazite’) – the list constitutes an implicit condemnation of native ignorance by insisting on the lexical equivalence of calvori and gold. The asterisk preceding the item
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*calcouri draws attention to a spelling variant (‘it is before in this voyage called calvorie’) as though the discrepancy between the spellings of the glossed and the emplotted words constituted a parallel to the discrepancy between the word’s nominal and real values. The name can be revealed as a fiction only in the narrative of the adventure. 17. I am indebted to Gustav Ungerer for a reference to the ‘fala da Guiné’, a variety of Portuguese which served as a vehicle of communication between slaves imported from Africa and the Portuguese population before being appropriated by Portuguese and Spanish dramatists as a sign of racial difference and cultural inferiority. 18. I am indebted to Natalie Zemon Davis for having drawn my attention to Fuller’s work.
References Beste, George. 1963 [1578]. The True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discouerie, for the Finding of a Passage to Cathaya, by the Northweast, Under the Conduct of Martin Frobisher Generall. In The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, in Search of a Passage to Cathaia and India by the North-West, A.D. 1576–8. New York: B. Franklin. Biddick, Kathleen. 1998. The ABC of Ptolemy: Mapping the World with the Alphabet. In Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, eds. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles, 268–93. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Boorde, Andrew. 1870. The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge, ed. F. J. Furnivall. London: Early English Text Society e. s. 10. Dalby, David and Hair, P. E. H. 1967. ‘Le langaige du Brésil’: A Tupi Vocabulary of the 1540s. Transactions of the Philological Society 1966/1967: 42–66. de Léry, Jean. 1994. Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil, ed. Frank Lestringant. Paris: Librairie générale française. Fuller, Mary C. 1995. Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576–1627. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1991. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Oxford: Clarendon. —. 1992. Learning to Curse. New York: Routledge. Hair, P. E. H. 1970. The Contribution of Early Linguistic Material to the History of West Africa. In Language and History in Africa, ed. David Dalby, 50–63. New York: Africana Publishing Corporation. Hakluyt, Richard. 1598–1600. The Principall Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation. 3 vols. London: G. Bishop, R. Newberie and C. Barker. —. 1927. Richard Hakluyt: The Principal Navigations Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation. n. ed., 8 vols. London: Dent. —. 1965 [1589]. The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation by Richard Hakluyt, eds. D. B. Quinn and R. A. Skelton, index by Alison Quinn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1972. Richard Hakluyt: Voyages and Discoveries, ed. Jack Beeching. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Hart, Jonathan Locke. 2001. Representing the New World: The English and French Uses of the Example of Spain. New York: Palgrave. Harvard, Joseph. 1977. British Airways French Phrasebook. For Visitors to Belgium, France and Switzerland, ed. Frances R. Harper. London: Harper (Holloway) Ltd. Hawkes, David. 2001. Idols of the Marketplace. Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680. London: Palgrave. Herodotus. 1972. Herodotus: The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt, ed. A. R. Burn. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lestringant, Frank. 1999. Jean de Léry ou l’Invention du Sauvage: Essai sur l’Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil. Paris: Champion. Norwich, John Julius. 1999. Shakespeare’s Kings: The Great Plays and the History of England in the Middle Ages 1337–1485. New York: Scribner. Purchas, Samuel. 1905–7. Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes. [1625] 20 vols. Glasgow: James Maclehose. Quinn, D. B., ed. 1974. The Hakluyt Handbook. 2 vols. London: The Hakluyt Society. Romaine, Susanne. 1992. Literacy as Cargo in Papua New Guinea. Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature. 6: 13–31. Sawday, Jonathan. 1995. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge. Shakespeare, William. 1982. Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 1991. Henry V, ed. John Henry Walter. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Routledge. Sundström, Lars. 1965. The Trade of Guinea. Studiae Ethnographica Upsaliensia 24. Lund: Hakan Ohlsson. Sweet, Timothy. 1999. Economy, Ecology, and Utopia in Early Colonial Promotional Literature. American Literature. 71: 399–427. Taylor, Gary, ed. 1982. Henry V. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walter, John Henry, ed. 1991. Henry V. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Routledge.
3 The Stain of the Signature Peter de Bolla
On Wednesday 17 January 1776 Robert and Daniel Perreau were removed from Newgate Prison and taken by carriage to Tyburn Cross – the site of modern day Marble Arch – where the gallows awaited their execution. They had been convicted of forgery, and London had been obsessed by their stories for nearly a year. Thirty thousand spectators turned up to see them swing. Their case was tied up with another, that of Mrs Margaret Caroline Rudd who, the brothers claimed, had duped them and was the real perpetrator of the crime. Mrs Rudd walked free. I want to open this, one of the most famous forgery cases in the eighteenth century, to a set of speculations regarding the fate of the Perreau brothers – as to why they had to hang, why their fate was so caught up with the mono-zygotic stain of the printed bank note’s signature, and the work this – the signature – does in respect of the complex, concatenated ensemble of cultural practices that inform, construct and perform the concept ‘person’. Here I mean to invoke terms such as character, psyche, authenticity, originality, personality, temperament and identity, and to place these within the orbit of another complex conceptual form: writing. Essentially I want to highlight the connections that may be perceived between writing as a form of self-fashioning, writing (the) self, and writing credit, since these connections bring into focus the extent to which any writing activity – writing person or writing money – depends on trust. In the era that witnessed this trial, the mid-eighteenth century, it was still possible literally to write money, in the sense of carry out transactions through the medium of the bill of exchange, so that the mark or seal of trust, of fiduciary probity, had especial power. That mark was, of course, the signature. I am particularly interested in the fact that both the hand that signs the bill of exchange, and the stain of the signature are deeply embedded in the set of fictions that create the singularity 63
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of person. As we shall see, both voice and hand are supposed to provide an indelible stain that acts as a marker to and for identity. But what if more than one voice or hand exhibits an identical stain? What if ‘person’ may be either replicated exactly or alternatively fragmented, split into multiple selves with the same markers? In opening the case to forensic inquiry some serious problems arise. Problems of fact in the simple sense: who did what and when? And problems of fabulation: how are ‘facts’ enmeshed in the counters of narrative? Although I do not mean to suggest that it will become evident who actually carried out the fraud there are nevertheless some elements to the intertwined stories that enable a clearer sense of what was at stake in this celebrated case. Here is the Annual Register for 1775: On Saturday evening, March 11th, a gentleman came to the Public Office, in Bow street, . . . with a woman elegantly dressed, and inquired for one of the Magistrates, William Addington, Esq., being then in the parlour, the parties were introduced, when the man, after a short preface in which he acquainted the Justice that his name was Robert Perreau, and that he had lived as an apothecary, for some time in Golden Square, in great reputation, said he was come to do himself justice, by producing the person who had given him a bond for 7.500L, which was a forgery.1 Robert Perreau was a respected gentleman, well connected and known about town. He had been born on St Kitts in the West Indies on 22 July 1733. His parents had thought his chances in life would be improved by being sent to England, so they apprenticed him to an apothecary called Mr Tribe in London. Perreau learnt his trade well and took over the business in Pall Mall after Tribe died. He married Henrietta Alice Thomas and fathered seven children, four of whom died in infancy. His clients included many well to do gentlemen, including one of the actors in the drama that will shortly unfold. The woman was Margaret Caroline Rudd, an altogether different character, good looking and by many accounts something of a society lady. Her story is a complicated one; it has encrustations of detail, contradiction and downright fabrication which make it hard to be sure about much. But let us start with this. On 11 March 1775 she went by the name of Mrs Daniel Perreau, the wife of Robert’s twin brother.2 In the furore of publicity that surrounded the court case that was to engross the inhabitants of London much was claimed, both for and
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against the three main protagonists; these claims being reproduced, often verbatim, in the monthlies and other less frequent publications. The Gentleman’s Magazine, for example, provided a compilation of the various accounts that had appeared in the newspapers or in pamphlet publication, and we can glean from its version some of the uncontested facts of the case. The entry for Friday, 10 March reads: A discovery was made of a very uncommon . . . forgery, carried on for some time past, by Robert and Daniel Perreau, twins, the former an apothecary . . .; the other living in genteel life in Pall Mall. These two, in confederacy with a Mrs Rudd, who cohabited with Daniel, and generally passed for his wife, have . . . raised considerable sums by means of bonds forged in the name of the well-known agent, William Adair, Esq. which they have imposed upon several gentlemen . . . as collateral securities with their own notes for the payment of said sums. The occasion that led to the discovery was as follows: Robert Perreau, the apothecary, who bore an irreproachable character, applied to Mr Drummond, the banker, for the loan of 5000L and offered a bond, which he said Mr Adair had given to his brother for 7500L as a pledge for the payment. . . . [T]o give colour to these bonds, it had been artfully given out, that Mrs Rudd . . . was nearly connected with Mr Adair, and even insinuated that she was his natural daughter; but Mr Drummond, who was well acquainted with the hand writing of Mr Adair, on examining the signature, doubted the authenticity of it, and . . . asked Mr Perreau if he had seen Mr Adair sign it, who frankly answered that he had not, but added, that he could not entertain the least doubt considering the connection, but that it was authentic. Mr Drummond replyed, that he could not . . . advance so large a sum without consulting his brother, and therefore desired him to leave the bond, with a promise of either returning it the next morning, or supplying him with the sum he wanted to borrow upon it. With this answer Mr Perreau departed, leaving the bond as requested, and next morning called as directed.3 So the story that remained uncontested goes like this: on Tuesday 7 March Robert Perreau presents a bond for £7,500 (calculated at about £300,000 in today’s money) to Mr Drummond in payment of an earlier loan for £5,000. This bond, signed by a Mr William Adair and witnessed by his solicitor, Mr Jones, and his servant was to be used in identical ways to earlier bonds presented in payment for earlier loans. Drummond, acquainted with Adair, does not recognize the signature and suspects
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foul play. Perreau claims that it is bona fide and agrees to leave the bond overnight, promising to return in the morning. Drummond, however, thinks it wise to get another opinion. The Gentleman’s Magazine continues: In the mean time Mr Drummond had more narrowly examined the bond, and Mr Stephens, of the Admiralty, calling in, was asked his opinion of it, who having letters of a recent date from Mr Adair in his pocket, on comparison, gave it as his opinion that the bond was a forgery. Being now confirmed in his suspicion, Mr Drummond . . . told Mr Perreau frankly, that he believed he had been imposed upon; but added, that, to remove all doubt, if he would go with him to Mr Adair, and procure . . . an acknowledgement of its validity; he would then immediately advance the money: to this Mr Perreau readily consented. They went, found Mr Adair at home, asked the question, and were answered in the negative: on which Mr Perreau put on an affected smile, and told him he jested. But Mr Adair . . . told him it was no jesting matter, and that it behoved him to clear it up. Mr Perreau then said, if that was the fact, he had been sent upon a fine errand indeed! He desired to have the bond, and added that he should make the proper enquiries. This request, however, was refused and it was thought advisable not to lose sight of Robert, till he had produced Daniel and his pretended wife.4 The two Drummond brothers (Henry’s brother Robert had turned up) threatened to call a constable; Robert exclaiming, ‘You are either the greatest fool, or the greatest rogue, that I ever saw; I do not know what to make of you’.5 A servant was dispatched to find Caroline and Daniel Perreau. They were duly arraigned and the inquisition took place. At first Caroline asked to speak to Robert Perreau alone but this was denied. Then she requested a private interview with William Adair but he said there was nothing she could say that could not be said in front of the others: ‘You are quite a stranger to me’, Adair protested.6 Daniel, for his part, denied knowing anything about the scam and Robert kept to his story that Caroline would explain all. Caroline went off to speak to the Drummonds in private and it seems that she confessed to being the forger. Moving from fact to hypothesis, the Gentleman’s Magazine states: On his return home, it is probable that he had acquainted the parties with what had happened, and that, in their first agitation, it had been consulted either to make their escape, or, in case that should be
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found impracticable, that Mrs Rudd should acknowledge the signature, as most likely to escape punishment, and procure for the two brothers their liberty . . . Instead, however, . . . an information was laid against them, and they were obliged to appear before Sir John Fielding, by whom they were committed to different prisons for further examination.7 In fact, as we know, on 11 March Robert Perreau decided to bring the matter to the attention of the magistrate, and it was Mr Addington, not Sir John Fielding, who first thought the stories from the two parties were so conflictual that both should be held over. Addington committed them both to Tothill-Fields, Bridewell and, since he had also learnt of the involvement of Robert’s twin, Daniel, in the affair he instructed that Daniel also be detained when he turned up at Tothill-Fields to pay his brother a visit. At this point the story becomes rather more complex. The brothers appear to have clung to the hope that Caroline’s confession to the crime would enable them to walk free. Moreover they also seem to have believed that Caroline would also be set free on account of her particular skills in gaining sympathy from her interlocutors. But events did not transpire this way and the three protagonists became locked in a war of assertion and counter-assertion about the facts of the case, played out in public through the mechanism of the press. While Daniel and Robert languished in prison Caroline began to publish, in serial form, her own story of what had transpired. Each installment in the Morning Post was eagerly awaited by her curious public who seemed partisan to her cause. By 21 March the case was so celebrated that the paper was able to comment on the affair to date in rather gushing terms. These forgeries were: the most remarkable . . . that ever appeared in this country, or perhaps in the whole world. . . . All other forgeries were commonly a grand stroke at raising money and running away with it, but these adventurers appear to have forged one bond to pay off another, and raised it at last to something like a regular branch of trade; how their profit or advantage was at last to arise from this trade is difficult to conceive, for their lives were at stake.8 Forgery at this time was a capital offence. According to Blackstone: ‘It may with us be defined (at common law) to be, “the fraudulent making or alteration of a writing to the prejudice of another man’s right”’ (Blackstone 1979, IV: 245). The statute of 5 Eliz c. 14 details the punishment as ‘a
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forfeiture to the party grieved of double costs and damages; by standing in the pillory, and having both his ears cut off, and his nostrils slit, and seared; by forfeiture to the crown of the profits of his lands, and by perpetual imprisonment’ (ibid.). More recent statutes had made the punishment even tougher: Besides this general act, a multitude of others, since the revolution (when paper credit was first established) have inflicted capital punishment on the forging or altering of bank bills or notes, or other securities; of bills of credit issued from the exchequer; of south sea bonds, &; of lottery orders; of army or navy debentures; of east India bonds; of writings under seal of London, or Royal exchange, assurance, of a letter of attorney or other power to receive or transfer stock or annuities, or for the personating a proprietor thereof, to receive or transfer such annuities, stock or dividends. (ibid., 246) And, the last statute that will be decisive in this case, 7 Geo II. c. 22: ‘it is equally penal to forge or utter a counterfeit acceptance of a bill of exchange, or the number of any accountable receipt for any note, bill, or any other security for money’ (ibid., 247). Blackstone concludes: ‘So that, I believe, through the number of these general and special provisions, there is now hardly a case possible to be conceived, wherein forgery, that tends to defraud, whether in the name of a real or fictitious person, is not made a capital crime’ (ibid.). On Monday, 13 March Caroline and Robert appeared again at Bow Street in front of the magistrates – this time the completely blind Sir John Fielding was presiding. By now Caroline was beginning to change her story, claiming that she had not in fact forged the bond, she had merely wished to save Robert’s life by faking a confession. According to this new account it was Robert who had been the originator of the false bond. Robert, for his part, stuck to his guns. He repeated his claim that Caroline was to blame for this and for previously forged bonds now held by Sir Thomas Frankland. Daniel was now implicated – since he had passed these bonds on – and he too was held captive until the next stage of the hearing scheduled for two days later. The Gentleman’s Magazine picks up the story: [T]heir story had taken air, and, as they were all three well known, the concourse of people was so great on the day appointed for hearing them, that the justices were obliged to adjourn from Bow-Street to Guildhall, Westminster; where the facts already related were
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attested by Mr Adair, Mr Drummond, and others, with several additional charges, particularly by Admiral Sir Thomas Frankland, from whom they had obtained 4000L on the first application, which they honestly repaid before the money became due; afterwards 5000L and lastly 4000L upon similar bonds, all signed with the name of Mr Adair; of which bonds a Mr Watson, money-scrivener, said, he had drawn to the number of eight, all of them by order of one or other of the brothers, but which he could not, he said, be certain, they were both so much alike. Being pressed to make a positive declaration, he at last fixed upon Daniel.9 What next transpired was controversial. Caroline took the stand and for a day and a half entranced the court. The magistrates were, according to the Morning Post, struck by ‘the plaintive tone of Mrs Rudd’s voice, the artless manner in which she told her story, and the decency of her whole deportment’.10 While the hand may dissemble, the voice, it appears, tells its own truth. Commenting on the hearing The Morning Post concluded that her tale ‘produced a scene so truly pathetic, as drew tears from many of the spectators’ (18 March 1775). The story she told, and re-told in a series of publications, claimed that she had been put up to signing the bond, first by Robert, and then, after she refused, by Daniel. The Gentleman’s Magazine elaborates: The facts being made appear, the brothers were remanded to prison, and the parties bound to prosecute. But Mrs Rudd, being advised by her counsel to become King’s evidence, was afterwards admitted to bail. On her future examination, she declared, that she was the daughter of a nobleman in Scotland; that she married, when young, a Mr Rudd, an officer in the army, against her friends consent; that she had a very considerable fortune; and that . . . when her husband and she determined to part, she made a reserve of money, jewels, and effects to the amount of 13,000L all of which she gave to Daniel Perreau, whom she loved, she said, with the tenderness of a wife; that she had had three children by him; that he had returned her kindness in every respect till lately, when having been unfortunate in gaming in the alley, he had become uneasy, peevish, and much altered towards her; that he cruelly constrained her to sign the bond now in question, by holding a knife to her throat, and swearing he would murder her if she did not comply; that, being struck with remorse, she had acquainted Mr Adair with what she had done, and that she was now willing to declare every transaction with which she was acquainted, whenever she should be called upon by law to do so.11
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Things were not all plain sailing from here on. A further hearing was required to ascertain the legality of granting Mrs Rudd immunity: the ruling was three to two in her favour. But the consequence of this strategy was that Caroline maintained her freedom right up to the trial of Robert which began on June 1. These months were spent in a public war to discredit the twins and gain sympathy for her own story. If the story so far has moved in and out of ‘fact’ it now begins to enter an Alice world in which the ground of certainty no longer supports any statements made by the protagonists. This is her story – at least one version of it and it is as forceful a piece of self-fashioning, of fabulation of person, or writing the subject as undertaken by any Clarissa, Moll or Evelina. ‘Mrs Rudd’ was born Margaret Caroline Youngson in 1744 or 1745 in Lurgan, near Belfast. Her father was an apothecary and her mother, Isabella Stewart, apparently had noble connections. After an unsettled childhood she met Lieutenant Valentine Rudd and after ten days of courtship married him on 4 February 1762. Life with Rudd was unsteady – they had moved to St Albans, which bored Caroline, and then to London at her request – and four and a half years into the marriage Caroline started an affair with another soldier, Benjamin Bowen Read, who lived above them in the same building. In November 1766 she left her husband and ran away with Read. She gaily spent money on whatever she pleased and managed to run up debts on the accounts of both Read and Rudd. The latter, her husband, attempted to find her but the level of debt she was incurring on his behalf resulted in his being imprisoned. Eventually Rudd found his way back to Ireland while Caroline made her way in London life. She was to meet Daniel Perreau in April 1770. According to the book length account Caroline published under the title Authentic Anecdotes of the Life and Transactions of Mrs Margaret Rudd, the attraction was immediate and compelling. The day following their first acquaintance they went to a masquerade and adjourned to ‘a certain retreat in Leicester Fields, always open for the reception of both sexes’,12 and so began their affair. The story of their meeting is given more interesting bones in Genuine Memoirs of the Messieurs Perreau. By a Gentleman Very Intimate with the Unfortunate Families (London, 1775). Here we learn that Daniel turned up ‘in an extraordinary garb, one side of which represented a skeleton, the other a proper handsome figure’.13 The account continues: ‘Everyone was struck with the oddity, and the cry of “it is he”, “it is he” was at length re-echoed by some dozens, males and females, from all quarters of the room, who were too well acquainted with his voice and abilities to be mistaken’.14 Once again the voice is taken as the
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authentic index to identity. Caroline, dressed in ‘an elegant domino’ followed him for a while before challenging him as to his identity (the custom of the masquerade), saying: ‘One half of you seems no ineligible acquaintance, but the horrid memento of mortality you bear about you on the other, is an insuperable impediment to my gratifying a curiosity I own your expressions have excited’.15 If he wished to speak to her, she said, he should ‘assume a less terrible shape’. Daniel accordingly divested himself of his skeleton and began to whisper ‘such things in the lady’s ear as were best calculated to win her heart’.16 By the end of May they were living together as a married couple; Caroline later claiming that from that moment, ‘I considered myself in every sense his wife’.17 According to Daniel he was unaware of the fact that she was still married to Rudd – having been first under the impression that she was Mrs Gore (the name she claimed to have taken in order to prevent her detection by her husband). Daniel claimed that she had given him the impression that she hailed from a wealthy background, connected, she said, to a Mr James Adair, who subsequently became a kind of benefactor. As Daniel explained, throughout the early years of their connection money appeared, as if from some legacy, courtesy of this Mr Adair. So in 1771 they went to Paris courtesy of this benefaction. On their return they settled into a house in Pall Mall, had three children and lived a life of some ease. Now, to be even handed, Daniel’s version of events has it that in late 1773 Caroline announced that James Adair wanted to give them a large capital sum to start them off in business. The only problem was that the money would have to be routed indirectly since he did not want to arouse the suspicions of his wife. Thus, again according to Daniel’s story, he arranged for his cousin, William Adair, to make the payments. Whether or not this was so, money started to come in – first £150.00 in cash, then £800.00. Then, in 1774, Daniel was told that serious capital sums were to come to their way, only not in the form of cash since James and William did not have the immediate wherewithal, but in the form of bonds which, Daniel was informed, they could then use to raise cash. It was also alleged that William Adair wanted to set the two Perreau brothers up in the banking business, and, perhaps most unbelievably, that the Adairs would arrange for Daniel to be made a Baronet. Neither happened. According to Daniel, his repeated requests to meet their generous benefactor, William Adair, were all refused. The money continued to flow in and in December 1774 they bought a £4,000 house at the Cavendish Square end of Harley Street, moving in January 1775. So when another bond appeared, this time the one for £7,500 that was to
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cause all the trouble, Daniel simply put it down to just one more example of his benefactor’s largesse. Caroline told a different story. The tale I have just told was, according to her, Daniel’s fantasy. She was the wronged party, forced into forging the bond at knifepoint. In a series of letters to the Morning Post she gave her own side (or sides) of the story. The papers began to fill up with the intrigue. Correspondents wrote in. One claimed that Caroline’s story lacked credibility since, ‘as she was no wife to Perreau, she was subject to no controul’18 and therefore would not have felt it necessary to forge the bond. But the real fascination lay in Rudd’s ability to appear credit worthy, credible whatever she said: It seems she has always been remarkable for her great powers in moving the passions, therefore it is not the least object of admiration, that the tone of her voice, the artless manner in which she related her story, and the decency of her whole deportment was so truly pathetic, as to lull the wisdom of the Magistracy that examined her, and make them give credit to all she said and unsaid. (Morning Post, 29 March 1775) She was, in other words, a living embodiment of the principle that grounds paper money: the continuing belief in the credit worthiness of the signature which authenticates paper as money. As long as the paper instruments remain fiduciary all is well and the circulation of credit continues. And what gave the stamp of authenticity to her story was the grain of her voice, the voice that cannot lie. The affective power of her verbal presentation beguiled her listeners into giving credit to her story. Not everyone, however, was taken in and some correspondents resisted this siren’s voice; one, for example, put another side of the story in a barely disguised set of accusations: [Did she] not elope ... with an officer who frequented the house where she and her husband lodged? ... [Did she] not as a foreign Princess submit herself to the embraces of a noted amorous son of Levi, and get from him the many thousands mentioned in her case? . . . [Did she] not afterwards personate the sister of the Princess, and again impose upon the Levite? ... [Did she] not, in conjunction with Mr D.P who ... passed for her husband, under pretence of crim con extort a further large sum from him? ... [Did she] not pretend to be with child by this Jew, go through the farce of a mock lying-in, actually hire a child for the purpose, and under these pretences get large sums for child-bed linen,
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nurse, &? ... [Has she] not ... personated many . . . Ladies of the first quality . . . and in their names prostituted herself? And, . . . [has she] not . . . procured persons to pass for her mother, aunt, and other relations, in order to give colour to such impositions, and the better to carry on such intrigues?19 This takes us to the real meat of the case, and the reasons for it having such importance for a speculative society. It comes down to the singularity of person, or, to put it another way, the deeply disturbing possibility of personation – the fabrication of person. If fictions of the self are procurable, then so are fictions of the other. Forgery, at its most insidious, contagious level, inserts the possibility of multiple personality, or no identity at all, into the paper-thin circulation of trust in a speculative society. Forgery – or at least duplicity, the hall of mirrors that is the real for the Perreau twins – creates the possibility for the destabilization of self, society and certainty. Once personation is in the system – let loose like a virus – it begins to infect all it comes into contact with. So we find a letter sent to The Morning Post by one John Stewart, claiming to be Caroline’s uncle. The editor, however, infected by the virus of suspect person, refused to publish it until he had met its signatory, since he suspected it – and him – to be a fake. They met, he was satisfied, the letter was subsequently published. But other persons were not so bona fide: another correspondent, also self styled John Stewart but now of Balimoran, County of Down Ireland, currently resident in London was widely tipped off to be, in fact, Caroline writing in an alternate persona, with a different hand. This kind of speculation as to the identity of various correspondents began to rip through the media: for what can a correspondent correspond to if not the hand that signs the signature? What basis for truth – for correspondence in this sense – remains once fiction enters the house of identity? Once the hand is disguised in and by print, and the witness to the hand potentially fictitious? And what does the signature sign? Or, to put it another way, what is the sign of the signature? If the signature is not the sign or site of the hand, then what is it? Why do we require that each individual has but one signature, our true seal of self? If two persons look alike – their deportment, even their voices are indistinguishable – why should their signatures be distinct? What personality disorder is it that leads to a variable signature, what psychic disorder caused by variant signature syndrome? What solvent removes the stain of a forged signature if not the voice? These questions return again and again as the fascination of the trials, first of the Perreau brothers and then of Mrs Rudd, begins to exert its force.
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The trials Caroline had turned state’s evidence, so she was to be the major witness in the trial of the two brothers, which began on 1 June 1775. Sir Richard Ashton was presiding; he opened the case by dismissing Mrs Rudd, arguing that the magistrates had no authority to grant her immunity and that she had no legal protection. Indeed she was to be prosecuted by Sir Thomas Frankland for the forgeries conducted against him. At this point she was removed to Newgate Prison, next door to the court. The trial began with the first witness, Henry Drummond. He told the court how he had known Robert as an apothecary for some years and that he had lent him £4000 for a short period in January 1775. The loan was supposed to be for ten days but Robert did not repay it until 7 March, when he came with a bond signed by William Adair and asked to borrow a further £5000 saying that he would repay the original loan out of this new loan. There follows an account of the suspicion aroused, and Henry’s summons to his brother, Robert, so that his opinion of the validity of the bond might be expressed. All of this corresponds well enough to The Gentleman’s Magazine report. Then Robert took the stand, beginning his defence with an hour and half peroration, claiming his credit thus: There are many respectable witnesses at hand, and many more . . . to be found, if it had been necessary to have summoned them upon a point of such notoriety, who will inform . . . the court, how I have appeared to them to act in the course of my calling, what trust they reposed in me and what credit I had in their opinion for my diligence, honesty and punctuality.20 He then states that his only crime was gullibility: ‘My Lord, and Gentlemen of the jury, men . . . unpracticed in deceit, will . . . credit others for that sincerity which they themselves possess’,21 outlining how he was asked to act as an agent and raise money on behalf of his brother and his wife (claiming no knowledge that they were unmarried). An agent, he says: . . . is a deputy, a substitute, a representative for the Principal, and it is, . . . natural for an Agent to speak of whatever appertains to his Employer or Principal as of things belonging to himself . . . for he himself is to transact business . . . as if no third person were concerned – So Mr Perreau had said ‘I have a house in Harley Street; although he
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himself knew, and Mssrs Drummond must also know afterward by the writings that this house was not actually his OWN, but in reality his brother’s’.22 And in explaining how he, Robert, got involved in the scam he says: Thus influenced, he ventured . . . to become collateral security for sums raised upon Mr Adair’s bonds, which he believed . . . genuine. If this be literally true, then Mr Robert Perreau was really Principal as well as Agent, and the conclusion of the note seems to confirm . . . his saying, that Mr Adair was in his debt.23 So person here is doubled, may simultaneously perform the function of both Principal and Agent. Of course, in the case of identical twins distinguishing the Agent from the Principal is conceptually problematic. The defence lawyers then had their turn. How, they wondered, could Robert Perreau have known that the bond was forged since, as became clear, the handwriting precisely matched that of the letters he had seen from William Adair. It is rather strange, that Mrs Rudd never obtained any signature of Mr William Adair to copy from it some similitude: but tho a circumstance so essentially necessary to Forgery escaped her thought, or was not it the reach of her single endeavours, yet it could be wonderful indeed if the two brothers had been privy to the forgery, that they, among all their acquaintance or pretences, should never find . . . something that might give an idea of the style of the handwriting. It adds still to the wonder, that they should utter Bonds with such confidence, if they were not certain there was some likeness – But suppose them innocent, and they were in their deceived imaginations not only certain that there was perfect similarity, but also that the signatures were really genuine.24 And of course they were genuine. They were Rudd’s signatures only in her hand personating William Adair. Here the concept personation begins to take on disturbing features since what is a ‘true’ personation, in the sense of impersonation – alleged or fabricated person, pretended subject-hood – if not a successful dupe? And that includes duping one’s self. The signatures on the bonds were genuine: we know this from the authenticity test held at Adair’s house. At that point Drummond exclaimed that he could not believe Rudd’s confession because the writing
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was ‘so different from a woman’s hand’.25 Nothing would convince him otherwise unless she could write that sort of hand now in front of him: He said he did not want to ensnare her, and would immediately threw the writing into the fire. She wrote upon a bit of paper, William Adair, or part of the name, so extremely like the signature to the bond, that it satisfied him, and he burnt the paper.26 And, at this moment when the evidence is neatly destroyed in front of all the accused parties, it sends up in smoke the self-sameness of the signature. Here is a woman whose hand is both male and female, whose masculine stain is not an imitation or copy of another’s. It is hers. A self-forgery, a self-impersonation. But what does Drummond’s satisfaction consist in? If Rudd could do one manly hand why not others, why not fake bonds from a whole cast of unknown but credit worthy characters? This point is made, in defence of Robert, by one of his lawyers: There can surely be nothing extraordinary in an honest man’s going to a scrivener to have a Bond filled up; but it would be rather very extraordinary if a guilty person, that could write himself, should transact his frauds so publicly with the same person, not only once but several times for such capital sums, and all the Bonds to be executed by the same person.27 If Robert was in on the fraud, it is suggested, it was either very bold or very stupid. Of course the possibility presents itself that it was not the same person at all. Since Daniel and Robert were only distinguishable from their clothing no one could be sure who was perpetrating the fraud. Their problem is precisely the opposite of Caroline’s. Where she seems to have a multiple person, a whole string of aliases, Daniel and Robert have a shared identity. They inhabit the same person. And this is why they must swing. The multiple personalities of Caroline became one of the themes of her own trial. During the cross examination of Daniel’s footman we learn that she could write as more than one person: ‘The witness (Caroline) wrote two very different hands. In one hand, she wrote letters to his master, as coming from Mr William Adair, and in the other, the ordinary business of the family’.28 But who is Mrs Rudd? This is the question that reverberates through her own trial, in which she faced Sir Thomas Frankland, the defrauded friend of Robert Perreau. Frankland was on the stand accused of removing effects to the value of his loans once he had learnt of the forgery. And under question the problematic
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of identity, of self-sameness leaks like a spreading stain into the courtroom. He is being grilled on the propriety of his hasty recovery of his money in the form of goods. The lawyer asks: By whom did you suppose the gowns and petticoats and other womens apparel were worn, by the two Perreaus or by whom? – They might go in masquerade. As this man was your apothecary for seventeen years, and you and he were acquaintance, you best know his manner of dressing; therefore you suppose he might go to the masquerade in these cloaths? – I suppose as they were womens cloaths she wore them.29 He is on the ropes since it is evident he has improperly removed goods belonging to someone – Mrs Rudd – who has yet to be convicted of any fraudulent activity at all. He is, nevertheless, convinced that she is a con artist. The cross examination continues: Do you know a Mrs Potter or Porter of Hackney – I wrote to Lord Northington about it. Are you the prosecutor of this indictment? – Yes, I was bound over to prosecute. Are you at the expense of it? – I do expect to pay it. Then I ask you, whether you have prosecuted this woman as and believing her to be a Mrs Potter or Porter of Hackney? – I know nothing at all about that. I don’t know that she is, but I believe she is. Do you know one Jane Williams? – I do not know whether I do. Take time and consider. I saw several people at Hackney, she might be one of them. Have you enquired of one George Downe, whether this prisoner was that Mrs Porter or Potter that had lived at Hackney? – I did. Did you enquire of any woman? I believe there were two women. Of Mrs Elizabeth Pendellow? – I know nothing of her. Or Catherine Peake? – Catherine Peake called at my house one afternoon, and I did not speak two words to her. But they might be very significant words; were they concerning Mrs Potter of Hackney? – They were. Might there not be two more Mrs Rudds and Mrs Potters? – Yes, there might. That Mrs Rudd might be this Mrs Potter; even that the subject of your evening with her? – She came to my house, I asked her if Mrs Rudd was not the same woman that was Mrs Potter at Hackney.
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. . . Then, though you had given no authority to any one to enquire whether Mrs Rudd was Mrs Porter of Hackney, yet this woman found out your house, and came to you, and knew all the business without being told now what answer did you make? – I told her, I thought Mrs Rudd was Mrs Porter of Hackney. Why did you believe so? Why did you tell her, and by what information was you enabled to tell her, that you believed Mrs Rudd to be Mrs Porter or Potter of Hackney? – I had seen Madam Grosenbergs writing. Was that the same woman you believed to be Mrs Rudd and Mrs Porter? – Yes.30 This line of questioning did little to sway the jury. They were entranced by Caroline’s personality. She sat demurely through the trial – writing over 500 notes to her lawyers – well dressed, well spoken, creditable. Following the judgment ‘there were the loudest applauses at this acquittal almost ever known in a court of justice’.31 The twins were not so lucky and even though petitions were made to the king from Henrietta, Robert’s wife and thirty or so bankers, they received no clemency. Both went to the gallows still protesting their innocence. Why was the crime so capital, deemed to be so heinous it required the death penalty? We can gauge the tenor of the times by looking at Stephen Roe’s account of the execution of John Ayliffe, hanged for forgery in 1759: [forgery is] . . . a complicated falsehood and injustice, confounding the distinction of true and false, right and wrong; . . . one of the . . . most dangerous kinds of theft, bereaving a person of his nearest and most undoubted property, even his hand-writing, which is the key of all he possesses.32 So the real threat is property in one’s self – the distinguishing feature of identity. This is why the twins’ story is so important since they are, in effect, mono-zygotic forgeries of each other, the living embodiment of the confusion that arises when one can no longer tell one hand from another. They spell out the fear that credit will collapse the moment it becomes impossible to tell the original from the copy: one side a skeleton, the other a proper handsome figure. This is why bank notes at this period are signed, since the signature legitimates in its singular act of staining. Bank tellers kept ledgers recording the time and date at which
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each note was signed, with an identical signature, in order to facilitate its continuing legitimacy and aid in the detection of forgeries. The brothers hang because, as is clear from the police reports, they are to all intents and purposes interchangeable. They have the same signature. Its stain is mono-zygotic. The credit of one – say Robert – can be used by the other as collateral. As such they pose a threat to the foundations of paper credit – a threat that will disappear with the introduction of the printed bank note, which nevertheless to this day still carries the stain of the signature, though it is no longer this which proves its authenticity. They hang because of the weird warping of our collective investments in the symbolic realm of representation that is paper money, which occurs when the signature is no longer the sole preserve of person. They hang because identity is precisely discernible in the case of identical twins as sameness; identity, in the sense of person, is indistinguishable, ‘uncernable’. On Wednesday, 17 January 1776, a crowd gathered outside Newgate and lined the streets from the prison to Tyburn Cross. The brothers were given the dignity of a carriage to themselves – three others were to be executed alongside them – and were accompanied by the Ordinary, John Villette, who had overseen their last hours in the prison. On reaching the gallows they were prepared for the hanging – the ropes removed from their wrists, nooses placed around their necks. Villette asked them – as was customary – to acknowledge the justice of their sentence: both said nothing, preferring instead to hand their executioner written statements, carefully folded, in which each had given their own account of what had happened. Daniel then placed his hand over his heart and swore that he was innocent. Robert followed suit. The clergyman took his leave, which Robert and Daniel returned by bowing, and immediately embraced and saluted each other in a most tender and affectionate manner. They then took hold of each other’s hands, the caps having been drawn over their faces, and in this manner, the cart driving away, they launched into eternity. Their hands remained clinched together about half a minute after the cart was driven away; when, by the motion of their bodies, they separated.33 It was a moving moment, commented upon in the Annual Register: ‘Not the least fear of death was discernible in either of their countenances . . . they both behaved with a firmness and resolution rarely to
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be met with in men at the hour of death. . . . Thus two brothers, in the same moment quitted that world which they had entered together’.34 We will never know the truth of this case – immediately following the execution many commentators, moved by the dignity with which the brothers faced their demise, began to wonder if, in fact, justice had miscarried. But the reason for Margaret Rudd’s freedom lay not in the powers of detection held by the court, but in the requirement that a speculative society, founded on fiduciary probity, must insist on the singularity of the subject. Forgery – the adoption of another person in the guise of a fraudulent signature – opens up the possibility of mistaking identity. Or, even worse, of a mobile and protean identity. And, to make things even more worrying for a society that was increasingly faced with the conundrum of how to maintain credit in an economy and society based on speculation, if the possibility of two persons, identical twins, having the same signature arose then the entire pack of cards was in danger of collapsing. Mrs Rudd walked free because she represented the singularity of the voice, the stamp or mark of person which, at all costs, had to be subscribed to. The stain of the signature, its capacity for personation, had to be constrained, brought to law.
Notes 1. The Annual Register, 222. 2. Two recent books on this very famous case have told this story. See Sarah Bakewell (2001), The Smart and Donna T. Andrew and Randall McGowen (2001), The Perreaus & Mrs Rudd. 3. Gentleman’s Magazine, 45: 148–9. 4. Gentleman’s Magazine, 45: 149. 5. The Trials of Robert and Daniel Perreau’s, 52. 6. Ibid. 7. Gentleman’s Magazine, 45:149. 8. Morning Post, 21 March 1775. 9. Gentleman’s Magazine, 45: 149. 10. Morning Post, 18 March 1775. 11. Gentleman’s Magazine, 45: 149–50. 12. Authentic Anecdotes of the Life and Transactions of Mrs Margaret Rudd, 2: 36. 13. Genuine Memoirs of the Messieurs Perreau. By a Gentleman very intimate with the Unfortunate Families, 121. 14. Ibid., 11. 15. Ibid., 122. 16. Ibid., 124. 17. Margaret Caroline Rudd, 1775. Facts, or, a Plain and Explicit Narrative of the Case of Mrs Rudd, Published from Her Own Manuscript, 9. 18. Morning Post, 29 March 1775. 19. Morning Post, 30 March 1775.
Peter de Bolla 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.
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Observations on the Trial of Mr Robt. Perreau, 44. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 30. The Annals of Newgate or Malefaction Register, 4: 401. Ibid., 401. Observations on the Trial of Mr Robt. Perreau, 5. The Whole Trials, at Large of Robert Perreau, Daniel Perreau and Margaret Carolina Rudd, 47. Ibid., 52. The Trial of Margaret Caroline Rudd, 14–15. Annual Register, 18: 231. The Ordinary of Newgate’s Account . . . of John Ayliffe, 19–20. Annual Register, 18: 235. Morning Post, 18 January 1776.
References Andrew, Donna T., and McGowen, Randall. 2001. The Perreaus & Mrs Rudd. Berkeley: University of California Press. The Annals of Newgate or Malefaction Register. 4 vols. London, 1776. The Annual Register. London, 1775. Authentic Anecdotes of the Life and Transactions of Mrs Margaret Rudd. 2 vols. London, 1776. Bakewell, Sarah. 2001. The Smart. London: Chatto and Windus. Blackstone, William. 1979. Commentaries on the Laws of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Genuine Memoirs of the Messieurs Perreau. By a Gentleman very intimate with the Unfortunate Families. London, 1775. Gentleman’s Magazine. London, 1776. Morning Post. 1775–6. Observations on the Trial of Mr Robt. Perreau. London, 1775. The Ordinary of Newgate’s Account . . . of John Ayliffe. London, 1759. Rudd, Margaret Caroline. 1775. Facts, or, a Plain and Explicit Narrative of the Case of Mrs Rudd, Published from Her Own Manuscript. London. The Trial of Margaret Caroline Rudd. London, 1786. The Trials of Robert and Daniel Perreau’s. London, 1775. The Whole Trials, at Large of Robert Perreau, Daniel Perreau and Margaret Carolina Rudd. London, 1776.
4 Semiotics and Economics Giulia Colaizzi and Jenaro Talens
[La storia del denaro] è la storia del rapporto fra uomo e Tecnologia (o, se si preferisce, fra uomo e Cultura), dove finiamo immancabilmente per essere soggiogati dai meccanismi che abbiamo creato, ragni prigioneri della propria tela. (Massimo Fini, Il denaro, ‘sterco del demonio’ ) [The History of money] is the history of the relation between man and technology (or, if one prefers, between man and culture), within which we ineluctably end up enslaved by the very mechanisms which we ourselves created, like spiders imprisoned in their very own webs. (Editors’ translation) In this essay we offer a series of considerations about the way in which new technologies have already changed, and might further change, our cultural, artistic and philosophical geography and practices; and some suggestions about how we might deal with such changes. At a moment in which postmodernity seems to be giving way to what Fredric Jameson has called a ‘geo-political aesthetic’ (Jameson 1992), two modes of analysis are particularly useful, in our opinion, to account for the complexity of contemporary changes: semiotics and poststructural feminism. Together, these two modes of analysis can radically undo the presuppositions of the modern aesthetic by installing a critical awareness of what life in the ‘global village’ implies. To inhabit the technological polis, we shall see, situates us at the crossroad between old and new conflicts, tensions and problems, but it means, above all, to take a 82
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critical standing vis-à-vis modernity’s underpinnings: the notion of the subject, the idea of objective knowledge, the logic of realism, authorship, identity, the subject/object split and so on. Nowadays, when the ‘web’ seems to be displacing the ‘world’ and constituting a world of its own, when the subject of writing can exist in the circuit as a totally inauthentic fiction, as pure virtuality and multiplicity, and while the Western culture of literacy comes into full crisis, it is crucial to continue, and to widen, discussion of the multiple and complex functions that language performs. As Wlad Godzich has pointed out, language’s foremost feature is ‘the ability to code and transcode experience’: it is in and through language, therefore, that we can find ‘cultural directions for [the] interpretation, handling and elaboration’ of the present crisis (Godzich 1994, 5). In his book Il linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato, Italian semiotician Ferruccio Rossi-Landi analyzes the relationships between economy and language and, by taking as starting point the Hegelian notion of the anthropogenic nature of work and the idea that human beings communicate with the whole of the social structure, affirms his ‘principle of homology’: the different modes and typologies of human communication are interconnected, there are no ‘natural’ divisions between them that would justify their being considered as different areas of social signification; furthermore, there is a correspondence between economic and semiotic production. The labor of manipulation and transformation through which we produce physical objects is analogous at every moment to linguistic labor; we must, therefore, speak of ‘commodities/ messages’ and of ‘messages/commodities’ as well as acknowledge the linguistic alienation and exploitation inherent in the production, circulation and consumption of messages. The economic model of commodity production and the semiotic model of message production and circulation are homologous, they refer back and forth to each other; in the same way, there is an analogy between the individual speaker and the worker. The individual speaker is also part of a system, he is ‘employed at the service of the society in which he is born’ (Rossi-Landi 1968, 333; our translation), whose production process he does not control. His work helps to reproduce the existing system and the power position of hegemonic class, which is the class that controls the modalities of codification/decodification/ interpretation of the messages and of their channels of circulation/ distribution (in this sense, and only in this sense, we can talk of private property when talking of language). In the text to which we refer (as well as in Semiotica ed ideologia), Rossi-Landi proposes a general theory of the semiotics of social codes
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as a theory of society, thus allowing a re-articulation of the Marxian distinction between basis and superstructure in a new and productive way; a way that also allows us to consider the medium per se as a commodity. The medium is a commodity/message and the message/commodity is a medium: language is a kind of capital, and capital is a kind of language; language does not have only the status of an object: it is a social product in the sense that it is produced and it is a process at the same time, it implies work and is the place where commodities and messages circulate (it is an instrument for communication, but, especially, it is also the material and the space where the trade of commodities and messages takes place). Language, that is, is not simply words, but a structure and a logic of exchange that applies both to verbal and nonverbal languages. In his texts Rossi-Landi writes of the exploitation, alienation and gradual territorialization of the speaking subject that, through the mastering of what Rossi-Landi calls ‘logotechnics’, finds itself subjected more and more to the signifiers of dominant ideology and says, therefore, always, more or less, what he wants to say, but never exactly what he really wants to say (because both the ‘wanting’ and the ‘saying’ in themselves are defined, structured and determined by the codes of language). On the other hand, although Rossi-Landi thinks of language and the social space as market and as the place where the human being’s alienation takes place, he also, as Massimo Bonfantine underlines, espouses a conviction of belonging, of identity (as, for instance, in his reference to the speaking subject as a subject that is ‘hired in the service of the society in which he is born’ (Bonfantini 1996, 75; our translation). At the time in which Rossi-Landi wrote, the 1960s and 70s, in Italy as much as in other countries, it was still possible to think – and to think in critical terms – of the possibility of being ‘employed’, and employed by and at the service of the society in which one was born. Italy was a national State with a national market, a national and State TV, national and traditional parties that did integrate its citizens in spite of various contradictions. Now, in the dawn of the twenty-first century, after the debacle of the traditional parties, with a regional party that in 1996 declared the independence of the so-called Republic of the North, in a country troubled by unemployment and increasing racial tensions, would it be possible to have the same expectations, the same feeling of identity and belonging? If the answer is ‘no’, a look at the multiple conflicts of racial and nationalistic tension that surround us at all levels makes it clear that the problem is global, and that this question can be generalized.
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The end of the Cold War and the fall of State socialism in Eastern Europe; the crisis of national States; the emergence of Japan and the European Community as competing Super States; the reassumption by the US of a ‘refurbished vocation as global policeman’, to adopt Jameson’s phrase (Jameson 1992); the telematic revolution and the subsequent globalization of the economy and communication: all these have triggered a complex process of generalized transformation which is necessary to analyze, and which the traditional means of critical analysis fail to understand. Let’s go back to Rossi-Landi’s work as an example of a critical enterprise which is informed by a Marxist point of view and which attempts a project of socio-ideological criticism inserted in the theoretical horizon of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’. Rossi-Landi uses and applies to the model of both economic and semiotic production the Marxian concepts of ‘exploitation’, ‘surplus’, ‘alienation’; he speaks of ‘ideology’, of ‘dialectic process’, of ‘praxis’, of ‘alienated work’, of how the individual’s exploitation/alienation begins with this ‘being employed at the service of the society in which one is born’ (op. cit.). But what happens in a society of huge and continuous migrations (from the East, the South), in a society which refuses to employ us, and in which work – precisely the kind of alienated and alienating work which is the starting point of Marxian analysis – turns into a luxury; a society in which ever increasing numbers of young people try desperately and unsuccessfully to be initiated into the rite of exploitation/alienation? How can we even conceive of class struggle in a society in which, with the increasing automatization of production, the classical places of exploitation – the factories – are closing down, and in which to be a proletarian has become a luxury? How can we organize social praxis, or even conceive of the polis, in a society which is becoming more and more a society of unemployment and which pushes to the margins, away from the place of productivity, larger and larger sections of the population? (This is what Jacques Delors’s White Book admits by starting with the question: ‘Why this book? One reason contained in one word: “unemployment”’ – in Commissione della Comunitá Europea 1994). The problem of global communication and economy, of what has been called the problem of the relation between economy and culture in the phase of late capitalism, or postmodernism, is a serious and complex one; it requires an individual, collective and necessary effort of reflection and critique. Globalization does not mean global integration, integration for everyone, but ‘greater interrelation between national and international economies at the level of capital and commercial interchange’
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(Chomsky and Ramonet 1995; our translation), that is, integration according to the logic of market economy. This logic implies growth, competitiveness and, necessarily, an increase in the polarization of the developed and the underdeveloped, and of the distance between rich and poor areas of the world’s surface. In a world in which the logic of capital affirms itself as the only and true logic that can govern and regulate society, globalization means, finally, as Augusto Ponzio has stated, the ‘extension of the market as universal market in the sense of planetary expansion, and in the sense of the total extension of commodification, that is, the transformation of everything into a commodity’ (Ponzio 1996, 12). The affirmation of the logic of capital as the only and universal logic produces appalling data: if in 1960 in the US 1 per cent of the population owned 22 per cent of the country’s wealth, in 1993 the same percentage of population owned 39 per cent. And while unemployment increases dramatically, the capital mobilized by private companies multiplies and can now be compared to the wealth of national States: the multinational Ford is richer than South Africa, Toyota is richer than Norway. In this context it is not possible, in our opinion, to nourish the hope of cutting off for oneself a peaceful and quiet life within the McLuhnian ‘global village’, to enjoy the de-centralization allowed and facilitated by the technological revolution, and to play at being an unconcerned villager able to connect in an instantaneous way, thanks to his multi-media system, with a world that is supposed to be out there at his disposal – something that McLuhan’s enthusiasm about the electronic media may have authorized us to expect. If it is true that there seem to be a generalized feeling of confusion, we have to be aware of what the ‘global village’ implies already in McLuhan’s analysis: the ‘closing of the whole human family in one planetary family’, the ‘return to Africa within us’ (McLuhan 1976, 30). A family living in ‘one space that is filled with the sound of tribal drums’ is something that might be attractive for the religious spirit of the ‘oracle of the electronic age’ (ibid. 75). But it may not be so compelling to those who, in suffering the degradation of the urban space, cannot find exoticism, the idealization of the Other or the widening and strengthening of family relationships at a universal level, to be adequate or satisfactory answers to the problems they face, and who seek instead political answers to political questions. McLuhan was quite right when he pointed out that the development of new technologies of information would determine changes in human forms of perception, inter-relation and subjectivity. For McLuhan, the invention of print, which translated the voice into repetitions and
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homogeneous spatial segments, brought about the primacy of vision, linearity, perspective and abstraction, the individualism of modern man; now a change of similar proportion is to be expected in the ‘new electric galaxy’, because the media, extensions of man, are also ‘the message’. This well-known statement/slogan (‘The medium is the message’) seems to bring McLuhan close to Rossi-Landi’s conclusion (the medium is a commodity, the commodity a message), but there are substantial differences between these two positions, differences which are important to underline. What is missing from the notion of the ‘global village’ structured by the media as extensions of man is a rigorous pondering about the function of language (language as a medium per se, the medium par excellence, Rossi-Landi’s starting point), with the subsequent lack of politicization both of the presuppositions and of the consequences of McLuhan’s discourse (we could say with Derrida that he does not question the ethno- and logo-centrism of Western metaphysics). McLuhan talks of the Greek alphabet and of print technology as psycho-technologies that organize perception and knowledge in Western societies, and that are capable of creating a mental space that adapts to an outside that it reflects and interprets. For McLuhan writing is the process through which we translate and give representation to the contents and meanings of an experience which is supposed to be intrinsically meaningful and which precedes the act of writing; language is, therefore, just a symbolic system within which meanings originate from reality in a direct, unmediated way, as closed concepts which are possessed and entirely controlled by the subject of knowledge. In our age, after a century of the ‘hypertrophy of the unconscious’ (which is conceived of as direct product of print technology) the new media return the human word to the ‘unified field of being’ to the ‘daylight of consciousness’ and hence undo the ‘hiatus between appearance and reality’ which was created by writing. Or, as Derrik de Kerchhove, a disciple of McLuhan’s, has written more recently, the ‘ecumenism’ that characterizes the electronic media poses the question of a ‘collective consciousness’ (de Kerchhove 1995, 212) as a substitute for Freud’s personal unconscious and Jung’s collective one. In short, McLuhan’s ‘global village’, being founded on a messianic notion of technology, does not return us to language and the polis; rather, it returns us to the nostalgia and the dream of a pre-alphabetized, tribalized world behind which, in spite – in fact, precisely because of – its ‘inclusivity’ we find the ominous presence of the Cartesian Cogito: the presence of a totalizing conscience and rationality destined to erase all differences. What we think is crucial in the whole question of globalization and of
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communication as parts and consequences of the technological revolution of the last decades is the impossibility of disengaging the problem of communication, the media, language, from a political-ideological horizon, and this was Rossi-Landi’s lesson, the most direct consequence of his principle of homology. Technological effectiveness is not a value per se, technology is not intrinsically good or bad, since it is developed and used not in a vacuum, but in the market, that is, in a concrete historical and socio-cultural context. Its status in other words, depends on the socio-economic structures from which it emerges and on the power games in which it is inserted. In this sense we have to reject both demonological points of view, which end up proposing an antiscience metaphysics, as much as we do a technological determinism incapable of analyzing the supposedly innovative developments of technology in the light of theoretical foundations that do not give in to the fascination of the ‘impossible made possible’. If we are interested in a project of cultural criticism and want to be able to articulate sites for resistance and rebellion to the system, we can be neither ‘apocalyptic’ nor ‘integrated’, to use Umberto Eco’s (1965) terms; we must neither endorse the apocalyptic vision of the end of history, nor participate in the anthropocentrism and neo-liberalism of the supporters of the ‘global village’. In fact, if we look at the complex ensemble of phenomena that are identified with the term ‘globalization’ we shall find a variety of elements that are both homogeneous and contradictory, new and old, and which, rather than pointing to the ‘empathy’ of the ‘whole human family’ kept together in the ‘one planetary tribe’ to which McLuhan refers, indicate instead a social organization that Donna Haraway, has called an ‘integrated circuit’. This model’s implications, far from eliminating all differences, have consequences from the point of view of gender, race and for the whole of social relationships. According to Haraway, among the consequences and implications of globalization we find the formation of a new working class and of new sexualities and ethnicities. The huge mobilization of capital and the growing division of labor at an international scale is intertwined with the emergence of new communities, the weakening of familiar groupings and the disappearance of public life. The growing disappearance of stable jobs, previously held, in general, by white men, has issued in the emergence of a homework economy, originally connected to electronics assembling. Connected to the crisis of the Welfare State and facilitated – but not triggered, according to Haraway – by the new technologies, this new socio-economic configuration has brought about new relations between the factory, the household and the market which
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undo the opposition between public/productive space (the factory, the market) and private/reproductive space (the household); it also implies a re-articulation of working and existential relationships between human beings. In fact, strictly connected with the homework economy is the new phenomenon of the ‘feminization of work’. This notion is twofold: on the one hand it indicates the massive access of women to production, both in the First and Third Worlds, which has allowed US black women, for example, to escape barely remunerated work in the house and to hold office jobs as a consequence of the war industry development. It has also allowed Third World women who work in the electronic industry (or in prostitution) increasingly to become the only source of income for their families. According to Haraway, the process of the integration of women into the world of production will gradually affect their relationship with the environment, their personal lives, their self-esteem, their attitudes and expectations and ‘must have major consequences in the psychodynamics and politics of gender and race’ (Haraway 1991, 167). At the same time the ‘feminization of work’ means that work itself is re-defined, and that more and more men have jobs that have the characteristics of jobs held earlier only by women: jobs that imply lack of security, de-centralization, isolation, vulnerability. Another phenomenon that pushes us away from the ‘empathy’ of the McLuhnian family or tribe is the ‘feminization of poverty’, connected to crucial changes in the model of the nuclear, bourgeois family (constituted by a father working in the sphere of production, a mother that stays home and takes care of the household and of reproduction, and one salary which satisfies the needs of both parents and children). The family structure is increasingly a single parent one, and one which subsists on a non stable income; and in general, it is the mother who is in charge of the care, sustenance and education of the offspring, sometimes of subsequent marriages: divorces and separations thus worsen the living conditions of the new, mono-parental family. According to Haraway, one consequence of the feminization of poverty and of work will be the existence of more and more women and men struggling in similar circumstances for survival. This will necessitate the development of new forms of solidarity, support and social cooperation that might enable individual and collective survival in the isolation and increasing lack of security that characterize the integrated circuit; contending with such situations ‘will make cross-gender and race alliances on issues of basic life support (with or without jobs) necessary, not just nice’ (Haraway 1991, 168). An example of this development are the women of Silicon Valley, whose lives have been organized around their jobs in
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the electronic industry and whose private realities include, Haraway points out, serial heterosexual monogamy, negotiation of their children’s medical care, distance from their families, high level of loneliness and increase of their social and economic vulnerability as they grow old. But building from this common situation, these women have constituted nets of solidarity and interrelated microcosms, characterized and marked by conflictive differences in culture, religion, education and language. Haraway outlines a map of the historical positions of women in the integrated circuit, underlining how that map should be understood not as a conglomeration of separated elements, but as a holographic photograph, for each aspect of it is profoundly imbricated and implicated with the others. By taking into account the new configurations of key areas in the integrated circuit – the household, the market, the work place, the State, the school, the hospital and the church – Haraway takes into account both structural and superstructural elements (technological, medical, sexual, cultural, ideological) at the same time. These elements outline a political-cognitive map, we could say with Jameson, of the present situation (characterized, among many other things, by an increase of control, by the privatization of life, by the reciprocal invisibility of social groups, by the erosion of the Welfare State, by the relative scientific illiteracy among white women and people of color and by the renegotiation of the public metaphors that articulate the body’s experience). As Haraway states, it is not possible to read this map from the position of a unitary ‘I’. The multiplicity of levels, the ambivalence of the processes, the plurality of tensions, connections, points of view, prompt the question: what is, who is, the integrated subject, and how do we define that subject? In fact, what is the materiality of a holographic image? And from where might we define it? What Haraway’s political-cognitive map makes evident is that the shift we are experiencing from an organic and industrial society to a polymorphous informatic system can constitute a passage from democracy to technocracy, towards what she calls the ‘informatics of domination’ (Haraway 1991, 163), which can make us think almost with nostalgia of the ‘old and comfortable forms of domination’ of industrial, white and patriarchal capitalism. This makes even more urgent to ask the question, implicitly present throughout Haraway’s text, about how we articulate a critical practice, a reply, to the present global system of production/reproduction and of communication. That is, how can we think of an ‘I’, or a ‘we’ (of the concept of agency) or of an ideological and social change in an age in which the increase of communication can mean at the same time an increase of isolation, and
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which seems to transform oppositional movements into something which, although necessary for survival, are also difficult to imagine. Haraway’s answer to these questions entails an understanding of the insufficiencies of feminist analysis and practice, both of socialist feminism, which assumed from Marxism the notion of labor as an ‘ontological category’, and of radical feminism, with its direct expression of Western theories of identity as its foundation of praxis. For Haraway both kinds of feminisms have been constituted as totality, ontologies, and have therefore revealed themselves as unable to include their own Others, as was evinced by the silence of socialist and radical feminisms about the racial question during the 1960s and 70s. In the age of integrated circuits, identities are radically put into question and it is not possible any longer to think in terms of totality. Reality is a reality of fractured, contradictory, partial and strategic identities, and woman’s identity, the illusionary bedrock of the feminist struggles of the 1960s and 70s is no exception to this rule. In the age of the integrated circuits, the borders between the physical and the non physical are radically questioned, both machines and biological organisms are to be understood as coded texts, which are decoded by information technology, biology, medicine. But this, far from being a tragedy, the end of history, opens the path for a notion of the world in terms of reading and writing: what is (and thinks of itself) as partial, contingent, can be re-articulated; what is coded is codifiable and can be re-coded; what can be ‘read’ can be re-written differently. According to Haraway, the route to the construction of oppositional practices has to undergo a process of generalized rethinking about possible readings and writings of the world by taking as its starting point the awareness of the political and social dimension of technology and of the myths and the meaning systems that constitute our imaginary. At that point, her arguments meet semiotics by proposing the figure of the cyborg, an ‘ironic myth faithful to feminism, socialism and materialism’ (Haraway 1991, 149), as the model for an auspicial form of subjectivity in the present techno-political configuration, one which is personal, postmodern and collective, as well as de-assembled and reassembled. The word ‘cyborg’, short for ‘cybernetic organism’, indicates a body, an organism made of heterogeneous parts: it is a mixture of human and machine, animal and machine, animal and human which questions the limits between the physical and the non-physical (what we see represented in mass-culture representations like Blade Runner or Robocop and also in the work of artists like Cindy Sherman, Valie Export, Orlan o Stelarc). The cyborg is a hybrid based on the non-identity of its body, the partiality of
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parts and functions, constant fragmentation, a kind of consciousness that never loses touch with unconsciousness. This organism reminds us of those other constructed bodies who inaugurated Romanticism, inscribing, in its artificiality, both a feminist and a political metaphor for a re-construction of a new world within the old one. This is, in our view, the special meaning of Frankenstein’s creature, someone ‘different’, forced to become a ‘monster’ by the perceptions of others, in a society where, in order to survive, difference must be destroyed. The cyborg is a body inscribed by technology which points at every moment to the impossibility of an individual subject coinciding with a biological and personal organism. It is a body inserted in the local and in multiplicity, which opens to the other’s word while it inscribes it and is traversed by it, intersected by social practices of which it is the subject but to which it is subjected to at the same time. It rejects all master narratives and constantly exceeds its own limits: it is not; rather, it emerges as a subject in constant process of becoming, in a relentless tension between ‘being’ and ‘not being’. It makes us lose the fear of technology and turns technology into the potential propeller of mixtures and experiments between the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’, the human being, animal and machine. Aware that the ‘Other’ is not outside but inside, the cyborg prompts us to cross the frontiers, to propose and think of ‘blasphemous alliances’, unions that emerge on the basis of heterogeneity, not identity, and in the name of effectiveness and of concrete political projects. It is a dialogical body, identical and other at the same time, consequent and unstable, a body structured by and in language, as an articulation of discourses and differences. The cyborg is the figure/metaphor through which Haraway articulates her radical anti-essentialism and her political commitment in accordance, on the one hand, with semiotics, and, on the other, with poststructural feminism and its preoccupation with language, and with the problematization of the subject, and its rejection of universalism and rationalism. The cyborg radically undoes both the ontology of the subject and the phenomenology of the object, and opens the horizon for a new notion of reality: in the virtual space of the circuit, what is real cannot be identified anymore with what is visible, empirically perceptible or tangible. It also forces us to think of a different notion of materiality, which cannot be coterminous with physicality, but should rather be understood as awareness of the historico-political and ideological (techno-linguistic) determinations that constitute us. By defying all fixity and identity, the cyborg cannot be reified, and can never be reduced to a fetish, to a thing, one thing, it radically challenges referentiality.
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The Cartesian notion of the subject is thus radically questioned, since the subject of knowledge cannot be understood as pure ‘being’, a stable and self-sufficient entity, the origin of meaning which is capable of revealing the essence of what exists by means of an unmediated, unobstructed view of ‘reality’. In our age – an advanced phase of mechanical reproduction – in which the human hand, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, has been replaced by the ‘apparatus’ (Benjamin 1969, 233), the world is not revealed to the subject as truth or authenticity, but as multiplicity, a multiplicity of copies that lack an original – a simulacrum. As cinema proves, it is the extreme sophistication and pervasiveness of technology (not the lack thereof), the high degree of mediation required for the production of the finished product, and the finished product’s undeniable constructedness, which creates the perfection of the image. The presupposed realism of the filmic image, its ‘natural’ quality, are – as Benjamin pointed out – the result of a maximum of artifice (of shooting and editing techniques, among others) which seduces us, making us believe in the coherency and reliability of the image because such image is perfectly constructed, that is, twice as ‘illusionary’: the apparatus is an integral part of reality, even – in fact, especially – when reality appears as the ‘naked truth’, free of any kind of manipulation. In the same way, medical discourse points to the radical de-humanization of human beings in our times, that is, it does away with the illusion and mystification of bourgeois humanism. The surgeon relates to the patient in an indirect, highly mediated manner, by means of an apparatus: his vision is quite different from the natural and purely physiological vision of the object, as in the ‘endonasal perspective’ (reverse image) of otorhinolaryngology or surgery on cataracts, in which ‘there is virtually a debate of steel with nearly fluid tissue’. The image of the painter – like that of the magician – is ocular, apparently natural and total; the surgeon’s – like the camera operator’s – is artificial, fragmented, but not less ‘real’ and effective because of that. Filmic and medical discourses show us – if we follow Benjamin’s reasoning – the impossibility of reducing the real to the visible and to ‘natural’ vision. They make us confront the ‘optical unconscious’ (Benjamin 1969, 234), the network of relationships and microstructures invisible to the human eye, which exist below the apparent and deceiving unity, naturality and coherence of each object, text or context. This entails our becoming aware of the relational nature of every value and vision, of their constitutive partiality, their intrinsic virtuality; it also means we must confront the fact that every gaze, every
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image, – including, and especially, the image of the ‘I’ of the subject’ – is a construct, a representation that emerges between being and not being, presence and absence, as the result of a process of historical construction. In the field of art – Benjamin’s initial preoccupation in the essay – this means that modern art ‘has left the realm of ‘beautiful semblance’ (Benjamin 1969, 230), and cannot be understood by reference purely to aesthetic categories, but only through a comprehension of its inscription in the material and public space of the polis and of the market: in the socio-historical fabric of relations of power and of (economic, linguistic, ideological) constituencies. We live and circulate today not in an idyllic global village, but in a ‘Popmart’, to take the cue from another mass-culture phenomenon, the latest concert tour of U2: we live, that is, in a global market in which popular culture makes us confront the gigantic impulse of ‘the phony spell of commodity’ and in which the real, as Benjamin pointed out, is radically ‘satellized’ (Benjamin 1969, 240). The U2 Popmart concert tour – presented publicly in a New York Wal-Mart store and whose omnipresent logo was a Wal-Mart cart – travelled to 22 countries, including Bosnia, Israel and Egypt, in just over two months after the US tour. It presented the viewers with a 100-meter stage, a 56-by-170-meter screen, a 100-meter golden arch evoking the M of McDonald’s, a 100-meter toothpick holding a 12-meter-wide stuffed olive. The 150-pixels-1-million LED screen, transparent and extremely light, connected to a video and a computer, showed images from the concert itself – long- and medium-shots to extreme closeup of the artists – mixed at times with computer-generated landscapes, documentary images of historical, cultural icons such as Martin Luther King and Jimmy Hendrix and the works of pop artists like Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein. The effect of this overload of stimuli – a huge accumulation of ‘shock effects’, in Benjamin’s terminology – was interesting: in order to enjoy as much as possible both of the concert and of the (huge, impressive) images on the screen, the spectator was better situated at a considerable distance from the stage where the live event was taking place (this is in fact what we and many other spectators did during the Barcelona concert). It was from the distance that the spectator could better appreciate the show-within-the-show being represented, the mixture of documentary, virtual and ‘live’ elements together with the sensuous interplay of lights, colors and shapes framing and crossing the huge stage and screen at different times (sometimes, depending on the colors of the images being projected, one could also see the tall buildings behind the screen
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outside the stadium through the screen itself). Thus, to have full experience of the ‘live’ show – a ‘real’ event taking place under one’s eyes – implied moving away from the ‘real’ people on the stage, dividing the attention between the performers and the images on the screen showing details of the performers themselves (like the inside of Bono’s mouth, for example, an instance of hyper-reality) unreachable for the ‘natural’ vision of the spectator. In a way, the image on the screen – the object re-presented by technological means – seemed to be more ‘real’ (it was closer, revealed more details) than the ‘real’ itself. To enjoy the Popmart event implied turning the ‘real’ people on the stage – the artists producing an event in real time – into elements inserted into a larger image, a larger (albeit fragmented) narrative: it was ‘reception in a state of distraction’, in Benjamin’s terms. This way, a real, aesthetic (i.e. perceptual, sensuous) experience, was transformed into and perceived, at the same time, as a highly mediated event, an event in which both real and fictitious (reproduced, virtual, computer generated) elements were equally important in creating the effect of an experience, of an event taking place at multiple and distinct levels. (As part of this experience we also find, projected on the huge screen, the image of a female body, the face covered, moving mechanically at the sound of the music just before the huge olive over the stage turns into an egg-shaped space-ship which opens up and from which the band comes out: once more, femaleness embodies the ‘uncanny’, the ominous, faceless threat of both the body and the machine). But ‘reception in a state of distraction’ means, as Benjamin pointed out, ‘tactile’ and optical apperception, that is, that the object is appropriated (‘notic[ed]’, Benjamin says) in an ‘incidental fashion’ (which can ‘in certain circumstances acquire canonical value’ [Benjamin 1969, 240, italics ours]). This implies perception and use: consumption, which, Benjamin notes, is what occurs typically with buildings and films, is now an integral part of the contemporary mode of reception of what we have called ‘art’. Consumption, mass consumption, rather than being the opposite of ‘art’, should be considered as part of the changed status and function of art: ‘the mass is the matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form’. In the epoch in which we witness the radical ‘decay of the aura’, in which the cult value of the work of art is substituted by the exhibition value, permanence by transitoriness, uniqueness and originality by multiplicity and reproducibility, the question is not a moral or aesthetic judgment on this or that work, but how it ‘mobilize[s] the masses’, something which Benjamin saw as the crucial problem in the process of
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increasing totalitarianism and ‘growing proletarization of modern man’ of his times (Benjamin 1969). At the moment in which we witness a considerable erosion of the public and social space, with new information technologies bringing production back into the homes and making us face the virtuality of reality, the Popmart event tells us that we need to go beyond the phenomenality of the signifier and invent new ways to question the signification of the world, in the world and through the world in order to create connectivity and collectivity. If popular culture is, as Gramsci pointed out, the field in which political power and socio-political hegemony are negotiated and legitimated, it is vital to de-aestheticize art, to politicize it, to prevent it from producing ‘ritual values’: the goal is not simply expression or communication (the illusion of democracy: ‘Fascism sees its salvation in giving the masses not their right [to change property relations], but instead a chance to express themselves’ [Benjamin 1969, 241]), but criticism of the established order, the implementation of a change. What the radical ‘phony-ness’ of the ‘spell of commodity’ indicates us is that with and behind each object, each image, we find not the truth, or das Ding an sich, but a process and relations of production, that is, finally, social antagonism, inevitably and incessantly mediated by language’s logic of visibility and presence. But, if ‘the last foundation of the Law’s authority lies in its process of enunciation’ (ZB izBek 1989, 37) and if the auto-referentiality of language creates belief that ‘supports the fantasy which regulates social reality’ (ibid. 36), art, by mobilizing fantasy, can push us to seek new ways to articulate new demands; it can empower us to give visibility, presence and sense to what is (always) left to be said, what is (always) left to be changed. If reality is virtuality, art can help us to turn virtuality – the fantasy of a possible, different world – into reality, one where, after the fall of the Berlin wall, Marx’s theories, as re-appropriated and elaborated by Rossi-Landi can still be useful to question, understand, analyze, and transform the world we live in.
References Benjamin, Walter. 1969. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books. Bonfantini, Massimo. 1996. Gli inganni del villaggio globale. In Comunicazione, comunitá, informazione, ed. Augusto Ponzio. Lecce: Pietro Manni. Chomsky, Noam and Ramonet, Ignacio. 1995. Cómo nos venden la moto. Barcelona: Icaria, 1995.
Giulia Colaizzi and Jenaro Talens 97 Commissione della Comunitá Europea. 1994. Crescita, competitivitá, occupazione. Il libro bianco di Jacques Delors. Milan: Il Saggiatore. de Kerchhove, Derrik. 1990. La civilisation vidéo-chretienne. Paris and Retz: Alpha Blue. —. 1995. La civilizzazione video-cristiana. Trans. Claire Peltier. Milan: Feltrinelli. Eco, Umberto. 1965. Apocalittici ed integrati. Milano: Bompiani. Godzich, Wlad. 1994. The Culture of Literacy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Haraway, Donna. 1991(1985). A Manifesto for Cyborgs. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 149–81. New York: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric. 1992. The Geo-Political Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy. The Making of the Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. —. 1976. La galassia Gutenberg. Trans. Stefano Rizzo. Roma: Armando. Ponzio, Augusto. 1996. La rivoluzione bachtiniana. Il pensiero di Bachtin e l’ideologia contemporanea. Bari: Levante. Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio. 1968. Il linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato. Milan: Bompiani. —. 1972. Semiotica e ideologia. Milan: Bompiani. ZB izBek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York: Verso.
5 ‘Parties in Converse’: Literary and Economic Dialogue in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet Mark Thornton Burnett
In his magisterial study of the interrelations that make up the literary text, Gérard Genette introduces the term ‘paratextuality’, which encompasses the ‘peritext’ (internal ‘devices and conventions’ such as forewords, dedications and prefaces) and the ‘epitext’ (external features such as publishers’ announcements, ‘authorial correspondence’ and ‘oral confidences’ [Genette 1997, 1, 5; Macksey 1997, xviii]). Unconnected to ‘the text within the same volume’, the ‘epitext’ circulates ‘freely, in a virtually limitless physical and social space’ (Genette 1997, 344). But this does not mean, Genette argues, that the ‘epitext’ is ideologically divorced from the host ‘text’; rather, the two inhabit a ‘zone of transition [and] . . . translation’ – they are in constant dialogue, with the claims of the one informing the other, and the tendencies of the other fashioning the one (ibid., 2). ‘Paratexts’ as a whole are among the elements of culture that prevent the ‘text’ from enjoying a hermetically sealed existence and ‘immutable identity’, and ensure that it partakes of the ‘empirical (sociohistorical) reality of . . . public [life]’, conversing with its environment and reaching out beyond itself in negotiations with its own meaning and reflections upon its dynamic potential (ibid., 408). Beginning from the outside in, as opposed to the inside out, I would like briefly to consider the ‘paratextual’ dimensions of Michael Almereyda’s 2000 screen realization of Hamlet – which, as its central conceit, updates Shakespeare’s tragedy to millennial New York and remodels Elsinore as a multi-national global corporation – in order to go on to explore the broader ‘literary’ and ‘economic’ dialogues of which the film forms a part. In common with almost all of the Shakespeare films that marked the ‘boom of the Bard’ over the course of the 1990s, Almereyda’s Hamlet was accompanied by a host of ‘epitexts’ – issued, in Genette’s words, according to a logic of ‘prior (public) production’ – that 98
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dictated how the film was to be viewed and affected the ways in which it was ultimately apprehended. The film’s trailer, for instance, comprises a series of shots of eyes and looks, from the Ghost’s (Sam Shepard) staring and Hamlet’s (Ethan Hawke) impassive scanning to Laertes’ (Liev Schreiber) quasi-incestuous visual survey of Ophelia (Julia Styles) and Claudius’ (Kyle MacLachlan) vigil over his own image.1 Together, these ‘epitextual’ forerunners to Hamlet function to sensitize consumers to the film’s chief motifs and concerns, not least a culture of inspection, a system shaped by gazes of various kinds, and a world in thrall to introspection and examination. Moreover, in part because the trailer is joined by a simultaneous on-screen statement of the plot, one is also urged, at a micro-level, to contemplate the ‘literary’ source text – Hamlet – that furnished the film’s possibility and, at a macro-level, the ‘economic’ processes undergone by Shakespeare’s play as it was transformed into the cinematic idiom. ‘Epitextually’, then, the trailer is integral to the film’s overall effect, as is the poster for Hamlet, which, reproduced on countless marketing tieins, similarly works to elaborate a discourse of looking and being looked at, even being spied upon and spying, and the wider cultural and ‘economic’ praxes that underpin those activities.2 The poster displays a close-up of Ethan Hawke’s head: his hands are held aloft, brushing back his hair, and to each side there appear blurred images of skyscraper windows. On the right, they firmly occupy the background, but, on the left, the windows are placed in the foreground and superimpose themselves upon the face of the Hamletian protagonist. Douglas M. Lanier insightfully remarks that the conjured ‘corporate mediascape’ is ‘window and screen’, while Carolyn Jess usefully notes that ‘the skyscraper windows’ operate as ‘frames of observation and … incarcerating dioramas’ (Lanier 2002, 172; Jess 2004, 94). Certainly, ideas of filming and imprisonment, as we will see, are interlinked in the poster and the film that it ‘paratextually’ advertises, but, no less importantly, the marketing product introduces notions of subordination and control, since the image of Hamlet both dominates (overlays) the signs of urban America and is dominated by them (skyscrapers displace and invade his countenance). In this sense, Hamlet the poster plays variations upon expectations about authentic, ‘human’ subjects capable of managing their environments, and anxieties about inauthentic, non-‘human’ forces that the ‘economic’ commerce of the postmodern cityscape produces, with the skyscrapers that penetrate the face suggesting a robotic, or cyborg-like, identity. Such an ambiguity in the representation of Hamlet is reinforced via the clothes that the poster makes barely visible: Ethan Hawke
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wears a black shirt and a blue, semi-fluorescent tie. Via these accoutrements, Hamlet is envisaged both as the traditional creature of melancholy, who, despite isolation and tragedy, endeavours to overcome corruption, and as the stereotypical modern executive, who accepts and promotes the social and ‘economic’ inequities of the system in which he is implicated. Casting a glance at James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984), the poster is here enlivened by emphasizing the mechanistic orientation of the context that is one of the film’s key considerations. In the same moment, because Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) is recalled and the eyes of the protagonist are prioritized, a preoccupation with visual scrutiny is introduced in the ‘epitextual’ work that the advertisement performs. For, if the trailer draws attention to looks and stares, the poster stresses the phenomenon with which they are most commonly associated in the contemporary mindset – surveillance. ‘The globe’, write Kirstie Ball and Frank Webster, ‘is increasingly engulfed in media which report, expose and inflect issues from around the world, these surveillance activities having important yet paradoxical consequences on actions and our states of mind’, and, in its discovery of the vexed interconnections between Hamlet as subject and the global, technology-driven culture that defines him, the ‘epitext’ of the ‘text’ of Almereyda’s film powerfully articulates some of the fundamental tendencies and preoccupations of modernity (Ball and Webster 2003, 2). Both trailer and poster come together in the ‘(sociohistorical) reality’ that precedes the film as indicators of the field of interpretation within which Hamlet can be understood, and both function in such a way as to illuminate the ‘economic’ practices that bring ‘literary’ originals, filmic ‘fictions’ and visual disciplines into an uneasy proximity. A ‘text’ and ‘epitext’ composed of multiple elements, Almereyda’s Hamlet is marked by a constant and changing relation with its contexts, with ‘transition’ and ‘translation’ constitutive of the ‘film’ as a whole. Beyond itself, it begins to explore the paradoxically constricted and enabled condition of the postmodern subject; inside itself, it performs an associated operation, assessing applications of the ‘economic’ so as to raise questions about the status of the ‘literary’ in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century culture. Both ‘literary’ and ‘economic’ signifiers are in dialogue in Almereyda’s Hamlet and bear out Mikhail Bakhtin’s contention that any ‘utterance’ is ‘but one link in a continuous chain of speech performances’ (Bakhtin 1986, 72). Or, to put it another way, as does the philosopher Martin Buber, ‘Every It is bounded by others; It exists only through being bounded by others’ (Buber 1947, 4). Nevertheless, although the ‘economic’ – which manifests itself in part through acts of
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surveillance – invariably takes precedence over the ‘literary’, space is reserved in Almereyda’s vision for counter-hegemonic practices – including filmmaking and oppositional surveillance activities – which, at one and the same time, make available utopian alternatives and prompt reflection upon the construction of the ‘Shakespearean’ at the present historical juncture. No dialogue initiated by the film is straightforward, therefore, and, in this connection, Bakhtin once again is brought to mind, particularly his argument that ‘every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear’ (Bakhtin 1981, 272). Michael Holquist clarifies the point when he conceptualizes Bakhtin’s theory of dialogue as ‘a ceaseless battle between centrifugal forces that seek to keep things apart, and centripetal forces that strive to make things cohere’ (Holquist 1981, xviii). Almereyda’s Hamlet answers well to this description, initiating conversations that proceed unproblematically and have a dissonant outcome, elaborating exchanges and relations that are pursued only to be ultimately resisted. At an immediate level, Almereyda’s Hamlet is characterized by its engagement with ‘economic’ determinants. Thus, Hamlet is seen striding past a supermarket displaying discounted goods, while Claudius is perceived against the backdrop of neon share indexes: the contrast points up both the physical distance between the two and the prevalence of a monetary imperative. More generally, the film abounds in logos and advertisements, with the prominence of ‘Marlboro’ and ‘Panasonic’ functioning to indicate a moment defined by the need for product placement. Because of the dominance of signs of the corporate world, and the fact that actual commodities are rarely seen (it is never clarified what Claudius’ empire trades in), Almereyda’s Hamlet works as a notable instance of Guy Debord’s thesis that ‘the image has become the final form of commodity reification’ (Debord 1983, paragraphs 34 and 36). It is as if the visual paraphernalia have a greater exchange value than the materials they supposedly represent. Even the Ghost participates in the process. When he appears before Hamlet, an accompanying television image of burning oilfields activates recollections of the Gulf War, a global conflict precipitated by the disputed ownership of one of capitalism’s most precious commodities and an apocalyptic realization of ‘capitalist implosion’ (Almereyda 2000, 29–30; Edwards 2000, 179). If the Ghost is caught up in late capitalism at his appearance, he is also defined by it at his disappearance – into a ‘Pepsi One Calorie’ dispensing machine. The implication is that the dissolution is also a consumption: Hamlet’s father is engulfed by the very energies that, as President of the Denmark Corporation, he had earlier commanded.
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Such is the dominance of the ‘economic’ that language itself is affected. Language fragments, and exchanges become terminally discontinuous. For example, Hamlet’s ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ speech is divided up between a direct address and a message on Ophelia’s answering machine (Almereyda 2000, 64). More disturbingly, Hamlet obsesses not only about the ‘linguistic fragmentation of social life’, as Fredric Jameson describes it, but also entertains the prospect of language escaping as the property of the individual subject: it can be taken over by technology and ventriloquized (Jameson 1991, 17). Linguistic dispossession is emphasized in the scene where a Vietnamese guru explains in a television programme his concept of ‘inter-be’ (Almereyda 2000, 37). Initial impressions suggest that the screen inset delivers a precise anticipation of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ dilemma. Yet, in retrospect, it is clear that the monk’s cogitations only serve to underscore Hamlet’s distance from any sense of communal interaction. At an intertextual level, moreover, the protagonist is robbed of the monopoly of Shakespeare’s most celebrated intellectual deliberation: the famous speech, in this multi-national universe, has been both ethnically pluralized and philosophically transformed by the technological sphere of the new media establishment. With language adversely affected by the ‘economic’ domain, vision quickly follows suit; or, rather, a crisis of visual and linguistic faculties and facilities is discovered as a mutually unfolding development. The trailer prefaces its conception of Hamlet via a montage of eyes; the film takes up the suggestion and lends a particular stress to references to seeing and sight. Invariably, however, such references are compromised in the very moment of their utterance, as in Gertrude’s plea to Hamlet to ‘let [his] eye look like a friend on Denmark’: not only does Diane Venora, who plays the Queen, sport impenetrable sunglasses at this point, but her delivery of the line is accompanied by the action of winding down a blacked-out limousine window (Almereyda 2000, 14). The request for a kindly transparency from one whose own gaze appears purposefully concealed sounds warning bells, suggesting that the film imagines vision as inhabiting a state of epistemological duplicity and uncertainty. Given these emphases, it seems entirely apposite that, during the ‘closet scene’, the prime question Hamlet directs at his mother is ‘Have you eyes?’ (ibid., 81). The arraignment ironically reprises the earlier mother–son encounter and, taking energy from the film’s conception, draws a heightened attention to the need for clarification and illumination. In fact, what allows these – and other such lines – to reverberate is the context of surveillance within which they are placed, Hamlet reacting
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not so much to his mother’s failure to see as her willing and subsequently unwitting involvement in the technological spy-games of Claudius’s regime. According to Anthony Giddens, surveillance ‘refers to the supervision of the activities of subject populations in the political sphere – although its importance as a basis of administrative power is by no means confined to that sphere’ (Giddens 1990, 58). Supervision, he continues, ‘may be direct . . . but more characteristically it is indirect and based upon the control of information’ (ibid., 58). In whatever form surveillance is manifested, he concludes, the practice represents a defining ‘institutional dimension [of] ... capitalism and ... modernity’ (ibid., 57). Almeredya’s Hamlet teases out the implications of this discussion, constructing surveillance as an administrative undertaking that has political import, and pursuing connections between the late capitalist ethos and the control of the individual subject. It is no accident, for example, that Rosencrantz (Steve Zahn) and Guildenstern (Dechen Thurman) are discovered as comically creeping up on an unaware Hamlet (he represents a surveilled, while they function as surveillers), or that the protagonist’s playing of his ‘vicious mole of nature’ soliloquy should be captured on the CCTV system of the Elsinore Corporation. Both moments are gathered into, and overshadowed by, the opening shot of, in Barbara Hodgdon’s words, ‘Manhattan’s canyon of skyscrapers at deep twilight’: although the camera POV looks up, it is clear that the bank of faceless buildings looks down, the implication being that an anonymous institutional gaze is as omnipresent as it is invisible (Hodgdon 2003, 200). Invariably in the film, acts of looking and recording, which are symptomatic of the information-gathering tendencies of surveillance, are elaborated as unwelcome and invasive. Typical is the way in which Hamlet shrinks from the paparazzi at the première in a scene that is returned to in the glimpse of a row of photographers at the duel: the glare of the camera outlaws claims to privacy and frames every social interaction as a public event. The film’s prioritization of the media reminds us that, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, surveillance all too often has a corporate face or, at least, to adopt the formulation of sociologist David Lyon, is deployed by large-scale ‘companies’ and ‘organizations’ aiming to ‘influence [and] manage ... certain persons or groups’ (Lyon 2003, 5). Little wonder, then, that the logo of the Elsinore Corporation is both a camera shutter and a species of eye that snaps open and circles shut, freezing activity and collecting data in the interests of administration and categorization. The spiral-like motion of the camera shutter, which is represented on two occasions, forms an alliance with related circular
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structures, from the hotel rooms the characters inhabit to the crescentshaped galleries of the Guggenheim Museum, which, no less powerfully, are imaged as surveillance mechanisms. Christopher Dandeker writes that contemporary forms of surveillance are intimately dependent upon ‘the physical design of the . . . built environment’, and his statement accords with Hamlet in the extent to which the film depicts all of its spaces, both corporate and non-corporate, as available for inspection and centred upon the visibility of the occupant (Dandeker 1990, 37). In fact, what Hamlet demonstrates is that the open, plate-glass interiors and exteriors that punctuate the narrative are as much prisons as they are the architectural manifestations of a surveillance culture; as Samuel Crowl notes, commenting upon the film’s ‘description of the world’, all of the major players are ‘trapped in the prisonhouse of those enormous skyscrapers’ (Crowl 2003, 190). The inescapable impression, in this millennial version of Elsinore, is that the subject must fail to control his or her social existence, that the role of the individual is assessed as a function of the collective, and that release from the ‘carceral’ gaol is prevented by the ‘surveillant nodes’ of which it is constituted.3 Arguably as a response to the imperfect condition of the ‘linguistic’, and in reaction to the ways in which the operations of the eye are placed at the service of an inscrutable order, Hamlet and Ophelia are represented as, on the one hand, retreating into the ‘literary’ and communicating via conventional methods, and, on the other, taking up the accoutrements of contemporary visual technology as a means of demarcating personal domains. Theirs, then, is an ironically doubled understanding of their circumstances: it embraces the forms of modernity even as it seeks to situate them at several removes. Within a ‘literary’ context, the film’s matching of Ophelia’s picture of the waterfall (this turns out to the fountain of New York’s RCA Building), sketched on a notepad, with Hamlet’s love poem, executed on filepaper, is abundantly pertinent. Interestingly, in episodes such as these, the prince and the politician’s daughter inhabit a mode of symbolic exchange and trade in gifts rather than commodities, the significance of their transactions residing in a nostalgic yearning for a pre-capitalist order of experience. Within a ‘visual’ context, Ophelia and Hamlet are brought further together via, in Alessandro Abbate’s words, a shared predilection for ‘objects of mechanical reproduction’; thus, she takes a photograph of Laertes’s leave-taking, while he films Claudius’s inauguration (Abbate 2004, 84). The technological parallel signals, in fact, a deeper subjective connection, with Hamlet and Ophelia being tied at psychological as well as practical levels. Both have three bids at suicide, and, at the second attempt, Ophelia’s diving
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into the swimming pool is explicitly dovetailed with Hamlet’s placing of a gun next to his head in the film’s editing of events. Whether withdrawing from capitalist products or deploying them self-consciously, the film’s doom-laden lovers appear equally ensnared by the workings of their world. Commenting on the particular inflections of Almeredya’s Hamlet, Sarah Hatchuel writes that ‘the eyes are poisoned by modern technologies’, and it is within such a context that the protagonist’s brand of filmic experiment makes a logistical sense (Hatchuel 2004, 30). As an ‘indie’-style filmmaker, Hamlet functions as playwright, cognitively mapping a screenplay and either fast-forwarding or rewinding (endlessly rehearsing) on his video-diary cultural fragments and traces of lived experience. In particular, he stops and starts in an endeavour to pinpoint the ‘mystery’ of things, and it is here that the image of a stealthbomber from the Bosnian crisis, which we see on Hamlet’s monitor, underscores a crucial narrative point (Almereyda 2000, 31). Brief as it is, the suggestion of an instrument of covert destruction brings to mind the movement of Claudius as he ‘stole / With juice of cursed hebona in a vial, / And in the porches of [Old Hamlet’s] ears did pour / The leprous distillment’.4 Poison and vision, and stealth and death, join in an unsettling arrangement in the protagonist’s laptop performance. An individually strategic use of technology, in short, is the means whereby Hamlet will root out the rotten core at the heart of Elsinore, the suggestion being that the portable PC serves the role of the postmodern ‘prophetic soul’ (Shakespeare 1987, I.v.41). But Hamlet also screens clips from his own history in order, as Courtney Lehmann observes, ‘to locate an image that will unify his internal and external reality’ (Lehmann 2002, 97). One such image discovers Old Hamlet ice-skating and placing his hand over the camera lens, suggesting not only that the former CEO is more media-shy than his fraternal replacement but that Hamlet’s will to know and revivify through film is ultimately inefficacious. In this sense, Hamlet’s surveillance system falls singularly short of adequately situating his experience, and coheres with Kirstie Ball and Frank Webster’s argument that ‘the construction of files on persons does not mean that one “knows” them in any conventional sense’. ‘Faced with an expansion of surveillance’, they write, ‘it is as well to remember’ that we are not necessarily granted ‘access to the inner workings of the mind . . . surveillance can … set the surveiller still further apart from the surveilled’ (Ball and Webster 2003, 13–14). Yet Hamlet’s seeming failures in personal representation need to be offset against the effects of the hybridized methods he utilizes. In a recent discussion of postmodernism, Angela
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McRobbie observes that ‘the ransacking and recycling of culture, and the direct invocation to other texts and other images, can create a vibrant critique’ (McRobbie 1986, 57). These dissident potentialities are what we are invited to recognize, I suggest, in Hamlet’s unique combination of stock footage and family home movie, and it is in his film-within-a-film, Almeredya’s reinvention of Shakespeare’s play-within-a-play, that the protagonist’s critical method comes to the fore. Certainly, The Mousetrap is interrogatively characterized. Gesturing beyond itself, the scratch video commences with an image of a turning globe, which might be read as a comment from Almereyda on the ways in which a filmmaker’s idealism is invariably in conflict with the demands of multi-national consumerism and the ascendancy of a global Hollywood industry. Within its own interstices, The Mousetrap continues in an oppositional vein and, as Katherine Rowe states, endorses ‘resistance to the official’ narratives of ‘the corporate-media-advertising-complex’ (Rowe 2003, 51). Hence, it proceeds by pressing into service footage from the 1950s of an idyllic family at leisure: because this is presented as a home movie, the implication is that the Elsinore of the millennium can provide no equivalent example of a functional familial unit. Among other extracts severed from their contexts, The Mousetrap also yields a shot of falling soldiers (these are significantly disindividuated, like the faceless supporters who supported Claudius’s ascent to power) and a scene from Gerard Damiano’s infamous porn production of 1972, Deep Throat. On the one hand, the film sparked off a crisis in the culture of censorship, which had as a consequence a decline in prosecutions against sexual explicitness in the cinema and the quasiinstitutionalization of free speech jurisprudence (Downs 1989, 16, 40). On the other hand, partly because the ‘star’, Linda Marchiano, described how she was coerced into appearing in the film, Deep Throat was seen as a species of cinematic terrorism whose net effect was to oppress women’s minds and bodies (Segal 1993, 16). Notions of emancipation, repression and exploitation are thereby inscribed in the Deep Throat citation, helping to bolster both the construction of Claudius as a type of obscenity enslaving his wife and the realization of Hamlet as straining at the bounds of permissiveness, testing out what is and is not representationally possible within corporate parameters. Unmoored from their original points of reference, Hamlet’s filmic snippets become a collage with which he challenges Elsinore’s authority at the level of its covert body politics and its public disciplinary régimes. Nor is The Mousetrap confined only to its cinematic in-house performance, for, in what amounts to a
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post-production appendix, Hamlet is glimpsed against a shopfront (against which we see the word ‘mania’ emblazoned), while Claudius is discovered watching on his limousine TV a cartoon of a skeleton drinking. The image reprises the theme of a poisoned consumption even as it anticipates the death of Claudius at the hands of a Hamlet who, it is feared, is guided by less by his rational apprehension than his ‘wit diseased’ (Almereyda 2000, 72). The critical edge displayed in The Mousetrap forms a bridge to numerous related sites of transgressive energy in Hamlet. The photo montages favoured by both Hamlet and Ophelia on their display boards are a case in point: the former has posted a picture of a husband and wife with flowers, and the latter has pinned up an image of women exchanging an embrace. While not interrogative in and of themselves, these snapshots of emotional intimacy take on a charged force in an environment conspicuously lacking in affective relations. Other images occupy a privileged niche because of their anti-capitalist flavour. First, visual flashes of Che Guevara and Malcolm X work to implicate the protagonist in revolutionary discourses and to liken him to a liberating yet doom-laden saviour. Networks of radical implication are comparably teased out as the relationship between Hamlet and the Dublin-accented Horatio (Karl Geary) unfolds. Indeed, as the film progresses, it is Ireland (a map of Ireland is posted beside Hamlet’s film equipment) that seems to be reified over and above Manhattan/Denmark into a utopian alternative. In an arguably unsophisticated political parallel, Almereyda ties Wittenberg, the sixteenth-century breeding-ground for radical religion, with Dublin, a twentieth-century seat of radical politics. By implication, Hamlet becomes a displaced spokesperson for a history of spiritual strife and national struggle. The question, of course, is whether these scraps of counter-movements amount to a coherent philosophy. Alan Sinfield has remarked that through ‘involvement in . . . a subculture . . . one may learn to inhabit plausible oppositional . . . forms . . . and hence develop a plausible oppositional selfhood’ (Sinfield 1992, 37). The Hamlet film, however, despite its idealized ideological yearnings, falls singularly short of making available a shared agenda. This is because its representatives survive merely in partial allusions, fragments, memories and nostalgically inspired signs of, to adopt Jameson’s formulation, ‘stylistic connotation’ (Jameson 1991, 19). The film’s political heroes stand for quite different imperatives and speak to a past narrative that has already been concluded: Hamlet’s role models, with whom he is connected but imperfectly, are outdated.
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Consequently, even as it strives to gesture to new possibilities, Almereyda’s Hamlet recognizes that late capitalist society has ruled out as implausible either authentic revolution or genuine social change. Whatever political negativity circulates in Hamlet, however, is transcended by the film’s finale. In death, Hamlet is discovered reviewing in an accelerated montage the key events both of the film and his life. There is no need for iconic equivalents now that Hamlet has found in himself and his autobiography a personalized role model, suggesting that, at the close, he recuperates the dispersal of subjectivity, becomes through a felt nostalgia a sub-culture of one, and is able to claim what Michel Foucault has termed a ‘heterotopia’ of his own mortality (Foucault 1986, 22–7). Earlier in the film, we were granted a glimpse of a photograph of a teenage Hamlet surrounded by clothes, the suggestion being that an impersonation of others or a penchant for dressing up were favourite pursuits, yet here there is no ambiguation of identity, or continued donning of an ‘antic disposition’, only the visual declaration of a definitive ‘I’ (Shakespeare 1987, I.v.180). The ‘story’ that the protagonist is empowered to tell is also one that is framed by looks of mutual gazing between Hamlet and Ophelia, which implies reconciliation after death or at least some species of romantic affirmation. In short, Hamlet puts his ‘sights’ into a coherent narrative, seeing properly and communing successfully with his new-found sense of self. This, of course, is patently unlike the improper, surveillant seeing of Polonius (Bill Murray), who, at his death, is represented placing a hand over one eye in a composition that is identically replicated in a later shot of a cover picture of Fortinbras on Wired magazine. The grim joke is that in a culture in which the majority of the players are at some point or another wired – either Laertes via the electronic score counter at the duel, or Ophelia through the bugging mechanism, the ‘wiretap’ being one of the most eagerly deployed ‘communicational measures’ of contemporary surveillance systems – Hamlet, in expiration, is finally unwired, becoming the master of a ‘natural’ technology (Lyon 2003, 68). This is one of the first times in the film that we see him unharnessed, in Michael Anderegg’s words, from ‘the world of electronic reproduction’ and free of his filmic devices (Anderegg 2004, 179). It is a feeling, physical body with which an audience is left, not a cyborg machine. Yet, if Hamlet is centred and central, in terms of a dialogue, his ‘I’ is unthinkable: the ‘I’, as Michael Holquist observes, is never a ‘lonely event’, always ‘part of a larger whole’ (Holquist 1990, 38). Accordingly, Almereyda does not allow his audience to linger over the illusion of a unified protagonist; rather, Hamlet is
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figured as still dictated to, riven and subjected. He is yet to assume control over his own show. More specifically, he is sidelined at the end by ‘literary’ and ‘economic’ significations. Although Almereyda does not explicitly rehearse Hamlet’s ‘literary’ after-life, the director provides a version of it in the concluding shot of an anchorman reading from an autocue a composite statement of Hamletian moralities (Almereyda 2000, 127). The dissemination of Shakespeare’s language among a number of original speakers – the Player King, Fortinbras and the English Ambassador – means that unresolved questions about narrative dominion and the possession of speech are here ventilated. Moreover, one of the newscaster’s lines – ‘Our thoughts are ours; their ends none of our own’ – raises related concerns touching upon fictional communities (‘ours’) and symbolic or cultural capital (‘own’), suggesting that the singular Hamlet is unable ultimately to lay claim to a discrete interpretation of, or an individual place in, his world (Almereyda 2000, 143). Because a multiplicity of voices is endorsed, we are in fact situated in the terrain that Jameson has characterized as being inhabited by ‘partial subjects’ and ‘schizoid constellations’ (Jameson 1992, 5). Hamlet, the isolated director manqué, is crushed in a jigsaw of technological surfaces and machinery, defeated by an inscrutable representative of a media affairs programme, and placed in thrall to a bricolage more powerful than his own. By contrast, it is an ‘economic’ frame of reference within which we are invited to read the film’s penultimate shot of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s gilt and bronze sculpture of General William Sherman, located in New York’s Grand Army Plaza.5 In that Sherman is best known for his ‘Atlanta Campaign’, which involved a vengeful march through Georgia, disciplined destruction and a regimented living off the land, the Civil War commander stands in for the absent Fortinbras, the aspiringly single-minded Norwegian soldier-statesman only hinted at in Almereyda’s film (Johnson and Wish 1966, 702). The identification is reinforced via the angel Nike’s leftwards-pointing finger, which both subliminally directs the eye to the actual image of Fortinbras displayed in the final newsroom shot and indicates the slick transition from one mode of corporate materialism to another. If Hamlet on the film’s poster is singled out by the filaments of technology, Fortinbras is identified by the associations of a classical goddess who grants him legitimation, victory and authority. But Nike is a complex figure in her various incarnations, being inseparable in contemporary culture from the global giant, ‘Nike’, manufacturer of footwear, employer par excellence of icons and logos, and infamous ‘economic’ exploiter of
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‘unskilled labourers’ in ‘impoverished’ third-world ‘nations’ (Goldman and Papson 1998, 7, 10). Old Hamlet, we remember, was absorbed by Pepsi; now, in being displaced by Nike, the suggestion is that his son is forced to follow suit. ‘Just do it!’ was until recently Nike’s trademark maxim, a formulation that Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson gloss as ‘no more rationalizations and justifications – it’s time to act’ (ibid., 20). The parallel with Hamlet is unavoidable, with the Shakespearean protagonist being belittled via the invocation of a more assertive and worldly wise opponent. In the light of the various points of reference that constitute the layered ending of Hamlet, however, one might want finally to suggest that it is not so much corporate authority that the director debates as Shakespearean authority. For this is a millennial movie marked, above all, by its negotiation of Shakespeare as a cultural icon and a multifaceted ‘literary’ signifier, with Almereyda reflecting upon a lineage of Shakespearean filmmaking and the current status of the Bard as an endlessly reproducing and reproducible cultural phenomenon. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is clear that Shakespeare, too, is in dialogue with the consumer industry as a corporate ‘economic’ product, since his name is used in television advertising, newspaper announcements and, inevitably, cinema. In this sense, returning to Almereyda’s Hamlet from the outside in, one is forcefully reminded of any film’s after-life or, to cite Gérard Genette, the fact that texts inevitably possess ‘certain paratextual elements’ that are ‘delayed . . . posthumous’ (Genette 1997, 5–6). For Hamlet, these might embrace the video and DVD versions of the film, the processes whereby it is deployed to refocus attention on Shakespeare’s ‘literary’ text at institutional levels, and the academic industry, of which this essay is an example, that has flowered in the wake of the ‘boom of the Bard’ revival. Or, to put the point more broadly, the subsequent ‘epitextual’ story of Hamlet is integral to the ways in which the film is continually understood through history. Jurij Lotman writes that ‘dialogue’ that is ‘internal (between an earlier and a later self)’ can be distinguished as a ‘temporal communication act’, while Bakhtin, putting the point rather differently, argues that the ‘authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives and takes shape, is dialogized heteroglossia’ (Lotman 1977, 9; Bakhtin 1981, 272). By ‘heteroglossia’ Bakhtin aims to signify the time-specific potential for any articulation to say what is other to it; as Michael Holquist writes, heteroglossia ‘can refract, add to, or, in some cases, even subtract from the amount and kind of meaning the utterance may be said to have when it is conceived only as a systematic manifestation independent of context’ (Holquist 1981, xix).
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As an instance of the relevance of Almereyda’s Hamlet to these discussions one might cite the film’s preoccupation with metaphors of, and allusions to travel, as in Hamlet’s boarding of a plane for England, Horatio’s summoning of ‘flights of angels’ to sing the prince to his ‘rest’, and the penultimate shot’s inclusion of a jet-trail moving downwards towards the Sherman statue (Almereyda 2000, 127). Post-2000, this composition brings to mind both the human tragedies of 9/11 and the ‘surveillance surge’ that ensued in the wake of the crumbling of the two towers (Wood, Konvitz and Ball 2003, 141). Part of that ‘surge’ involved the installation of measures such as the ‘Pentagon’s Terrorism Information Awareness Project (TIA)’, which, announced in 2002, was, according to Kirstie Ball and Frank Webster, ‘driven by a conviction that . . . order will be assured if all is known’. ‘If only everything can be observed’, they write, ‘then, goes the reasoning, everything may be controlled . . . if surveillance can be thorough enough, then disturbances, [including] . . . the break-up of families . . . can be anticipated and the appropriate action taken to remove . . . them’ (Ball and Webster 2003, 4). In terms of its ‘paratextual’ operations, Almereyda’s Hamlet is uncannily predictive of such developments, playing up the supposed virtues of corporate knowledge, drawing parallels between personal and institutional worlds, and rehearsing ‘fictions’ about, and the ‘realities’ of, the technological apparatus. At the same time, the film occupies a uniquely critical stance in relation to these and other responses to 9/11 and chimes with the extent to which, since that cataclysmic event, surveillance, according to David Lyon, has been speeded up and intensified ‘in ways that bode ill for democracy, personal liberties, social trust, and mutual care’ (Lyon 2003, 5). A reincarnation of a ‘literary’ original, Hamlet may be a film of and about the ‘economic’ face of the millennium, but it is simultaneously a body of work that dialogizes with its future and ‘paratextually’ rehearses both the possibilities of and the limitations attached to modernity.
Notes 1. The trailer features as an ‘extra’ on the DVD version of the film released in 2003 by Cinema Club/FilmFour. 2. See, for instance, the Bloomsbury edition of Hamlet (Shakespeare 2000), released prior to the film, which features a cropped version of the poster on its cover. 3. I am adapting here the discussion of Soja (1995, 29). 4. The quotation is from Hamlet, III.ii.357 (Shakespeare 1987). 5. See Bogart (1989, 86).
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References Abbate, Alessandro. 2004. ‘To Be or Inter-Be’: Almereyda’s end-of-millennium Hamlet. Literature/Film Quarterly 32.2. Almereyda, Michael. 2000. William Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’: A Screenplay Adaptation. London: Faber. Anderegg, Michael. 2004. Cinematic Shakespeare. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. —. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. ed. and trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1986. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. Ladislaw Matejka and I R Titunik. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Ball, Kirstie and Webster, Frank. 2003. The Intensification of Surveillance. In The Intensification of Surveillance: Crime, Terrorism and Warfare in the Information Age, eds. Kirstie Ball and Frank Webster. London: Pluto. Bogart, Michele H. 1989. Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890–1930. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Buber, Martin. 1947. I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith. Edinburgh: Clark. Crowl, Samuel. 2003. Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era. Athens: Ohio University Press. Dandeker, Christopher. 1990. Surveillance, Power and Modernity: Bureaucracy and Discipline from 1700 to the Present Day. Oxford: Polity. Debord, Guy. 1983. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red. Downs, Donald A. 1989. The New Politics of Pornography. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Edwards, Tim. 2000. Contradictions of Consumption: Concepts, Practices and Politics in Consumer Society. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1986. Of Other Spaces. Diacritics, 16. 3. Genette, Gérard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Oxford: Polity. Goldman, Robert and Papson, Stephen. 1998. Nike Culture: The Sign of the Swoosh. London: Sage. Hatchuel, Sarah. 2004. Shakespeare, from Stage to Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodgdon, Barbara. 2003. Re-Incarnations. In Remaking Shakespeare: Performance Across Media, Genres, and Cultures, eds. Pascale Aebischer, Edward J. Esche and Nigel Wheale. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Holquist, Michael. 1981. Introduction. In Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. Austin: University of Texas Press. —.1990. Dialogism: Mikhail Bakhtin and his World. London and New York: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London and New York: Verso. —. 1992. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. London: BFI Publishing. Jess, Carolyn. 2004. The Promethean Apparatus: Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet as Cinematic Allegory. Literature/Film Quarterly. 32. 2. Johnson, Thomas H. and Wish, Harvey, eds. 1966. The Oxford Companion to American History. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mark Thornton Burnett 113 Lanier, Douglas M. 2002. Shakescorp Noir. Shakespeare Quarterly. 53. 2. Lehmann, Courtney. 2002. Shakespeare Remains: Theatre to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Lotman, Jurij. 1977. The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. R. Vroon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lyon, David. 2003. Surveillance after September 11. Oxford: Polity. Macksey, Richard. 1997. Foreword to Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McRobbie, Angela. 1986. Postmodernism and Popular Culture. In Postmodernism: ICA Documents 5, ed. Lisa Appignanesi. London: ICA. Rowe, Katherine. 2003. ‘Remember me’: Technologies of memory in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet. In Shakespeare, the Movie, II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video, and DVD, eds. Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose. London and New York: Routledge. Segal, Lynne. 1993. Does Pornography Cause Violence? The Search for Evidence. In Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography, Power, eds. Pamela Church Gibson and Roma Gibson. London: BFI. Shakespeare, William. 1987. Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins. London and New York: Methuen. —. 2000. Hamlet. London: Bloomsbury. Sinfield, Alan. 1992. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Oxford: Clarendon. Soja, Edward W. 1995. Heterotopologies: A Remembrance of Other Spaces in the Citadel-LA. In Postmodern Cities and Spaces, eds. Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson. Oxford: Blackwell. Wood, David, Konvitz, Eli and Ball, Kirstie. 2003. The Constant State of Emergency?: Surveillance after 9/11. In The Intensification of Surveillance: Crime, Terrorism and Warfare in the Information Age, eds. Kirstie Ball and Frank Webster. London: Pluto.
6 The Fabric of Society: Money, Cloth, and Symbolic Exchanges in Njal’s saga Fabienne L. Michelet
In Chapter 77 of Njal’s saga, Gunnar of Hlidarendi, the heroic figure who dominates the first half of the saga, is ambushed at home in the middle of the night by his enemies. An outstanding bowman, he barricades himself inside his farm and repels the assault keeping his attackers at bay by shooting arrows at them. Thus, when one of his opponents slashes his bowstring, Gunnar is deprived of a very significant advantage. And he is well aware of this fact: he knows that he cannot be overcome as long as he can use his bow. He therefore asks his wife Hallgerd for help: ‘Give me two locks of your hair, and you and my mother twist them into a bowstring for me’ (Njal’s saga 1997, 89).1 Before answering, Hallgerd wants to know whether anything depends on it. Her husband assures her that his life is at stake and that he needs his bow to defend himself.2 Upon hearing this, Hallgerd refuses to cooperate. Gunnar keeps on fighting courageously but is eventually overcome and dies. The motif of the severed bowstring and of the makeshift cord to be woven with Hallgerd’s hair is remarkable. Gunnar needs two threads, two woven threads to save his life. By refusing to plait the strings that would prolong the hero’s life, Hallgerd recalls the figure of the Norns, the three powerful and mysterious figures who spin the fates of men. Often present at the birth of great men, they embody the idea prevalent in Old Norse mythology that an individual’s destiny is woven.3 The two locks of hair, and consequently the life-saving bowstring Hallgerd refuses Gunnar, figure the hero’s tragic destiny. Had Hallgerd been willing to weave her hair, Gunnar’s life would have been saved, or at least prolonged. But why is this power granted to Hallgerd, Gunnar’s wife, and not to Rannveig, his mother, also present in this scene? Rannveig, upon hearing 114
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her daughter-in-law spurning Gunnar’s demand, reviles Hallgerd. She tells her: ‘you are evil, and your shame will live long’ (Njal’s saga 1997, 90).4 Why then does she not offer her own hair to her son? A tentative answer to this question could be sought in the implications inherent in the very act of plaiting. My interest in this scene goes beyond the bowstring and its mythical echoes, and focuses on the intertwining of the two locks of hair. For that intertwining gestures toward a pervasive motif in Njal’s saga, namely the presence of textile and cloth at key moments of the narrative. Weaving is an activity loaded with metaphorical import: it represents the creation or the re-assertion of important personal or social relationships. The meanings attached to weaving and cloth are complex and numerous, and they can, among other things, signal conjugal union. This could explain why the only person with whom Gunnar is able – or allowed? – to weave bonds is his wife. It also sheds light on Hallgerd’s refusal. Her marriage to Gunnar, which the saga author presents as resulting from a mutual and powerful infatuation, has deteriorated over the years. Hallgerd, at this point in the saga, might therefore no longer be willing metaphorically to renew her conjugal bond with Gunnar. But Hallgerd invokes another reason for denying Gunnar the two locks of hair he needs – and here I am introducing the second point around which my reflection revolves: she pays him back for a blow he gave her earlier in the saga. She accompanies her refusal with the following words: ‘Then I’ll remind you […] of the slap on my face, and I don’t care whether you hold out for a long or a short time’ (Njal’s saga 1997, 89).5 In so doing, she is true to her word, for she had indeed promised her husband to requite him for the blow at the very moment he hit her: ‘Hallgerd said that she would remember this slap and pay it back if she could’ (ibid., 57).6 Thus, when she refuses to help Gunnar repairing his bowstring, Hallgerd gets her revenge and inscribes her action in a movement of payment and repayment. This dynamics of exchange has complex ramifications in the saga. Let us look in more detail at the scene in which Hallgerd and Gunnar fight. Gunnar slaps his wife because she engineered a theft of food during a great famine. In these difficult times, Gunnar, free and generous, distributes his own supplies to everyone who comes and asks for it, until he and his household find themselves short of food. He tries to buy some from a certain Otkel Skarfsson who, although he has enough provisions, refuses to sell or to give him any. And yet, Gunnar does not leave empty handed: he is talked into buying a slave, Melkolf. It is this Melkolf who will carry out Hallgerd’s order to go back to Otkel, to steal
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from him, and then to set fire to his storehouses. Gunnar is eventually helped by his friend Njal who gives him the food and hay he needs. The scene in which Gunnar and his men negotiate with Otkel has been studied carefully by William Ian Miller7 who demonstrates that buying and selling are hostile actions, ‘purport[ing] to relate only goods to each other, not people, and as such … a denial of continuing social relations’ (Miller 1986, 23). Buying and selling were thus something done with people at a distance, and it is indeed significant that Gunnar does not turn to his good friend Njal in time of need. In fact, in any kind of exchange prestige is involved and this explains Otkel’s choice not to sell goods to Gunnar: by refusing to transfer food, he transfers insult instead. Hallgerd repays the offence with the theft of food and the destruction of the storehouses (ibid., 28). Gunnar slaps her because of her despicable actions, and she eventually pays him back for this blow when denying him her life-saving hair. The scene of Gunnar’s death therefore crystallizes various forms of economic exchanges: selling and buying, stealing, giving, and repaying. And it articulates them with the motif of cloth and weaving. The intertwining of these two elements in the saga, that is, weaving and symbolic or economic exchanges, will be at the heart of the present reflection. My aim is to rethink the metaphor of weaving and cloth in the light of Njal’s saga, and to investigate the role cloth plays in representing symbolic exchanges, be they interpersonal obligations or monetary dealings.8 The widespread and plastic metaphor of weaving has, according to John Scheid and Jesper Svenbro’s now classic study of this issue, three possible fields of application: it may tell us something of political, conjugal, or poetical circumstances (Scheid and Svenbro 1994, 8). Characterizing the ‘myth of weaving’ as a socially prevalent idée fixe through which reality is organized and explored in the classical world, Scheid and Svenbro argue that such a myth allows one to conceive of the city and that it lays the ground for political thought. For, at the heart of the metaphor lies the pacifying gesture that unites contraries, the weft and the warp. Weaving is thus precisely that which creates peace, that which unites what should be united. It intertwines the different, contrary, and perhaps even hostile forces that exist within the city. It masters and tames them before they ruin the fabric of society, and a harmonious social cloth is produced as a result. Pervasive in the sagas of the Icelanders, and more particularly in Njal’s saga, the metaphor of weaving lends itself to dynamic reconfigurations. Strikingly, cloth – which, when put to political uses, figures social peace and order in the Graeco-Roman world – is endowed with a powerfully
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disruptive force in Njal’s saga. It appears most conspicuously at crucial moments when attempts to settle feuds with money fail. It is paradoxically a cloak, this very materialization of the intertwining and binding of different threads, which twice prevents money settlements in the saga. Money and cloth are strange bedfellows in the world of the sagas of the Icelanders. These sagas, also called family sagas, are historical fictions written down in manuscript form during the thirteenth century. They recount Iceland’s early days, from its settlement (which began around 860) to sometimes after its conversion to Christianity in the year 1000. They are thus retrospective narratives memorializing events which occurred some 300 years earlier.9 At the time they were written, both money and cloth were valuable items in Iceland, and homespun was the island’s most important export. Cloth had gradually displaced silver (which was to be had by looting and eventually became scarce) as the standard commodity. Both a precious export and a lawful currency, cloth was adopted as a unit of value, probably around 1200.10 And yet, despite the economic role homespun played in medieval Iceland, a close reading of crucial scenes in Njal’s saga suggests that cloth and textile on the one hand, and money on the other, fulfil different functions in the world of the sagas. For, if money and cloth are both endowed with an economic capital, they do not share the same symbolic capital. There is a distinct hostility to selling and buying in saga narratives11 and, ignoring the monetary value of cloth, the saga author foregrounds other aspects of its symbolic capital. Playing down a purely economic discourse, he brings out the manifold meanings attached to cloth and textile. I am thus reading the saga in terms of a ‘poetic economics’, that is, observing ‘the way in which literary writers use this fictive economic discourse … as an ordering principle in their work’.12 Sagas tend to privilege a logic of the debt over that of the gift: in the world they construct, one cannot escape economic cycles and circles.13 With money and cloth, two different economies are competing, two representations of value which imagine the social relationships uniting its members in different ways. The fact that cloth did indeed have an intrinsic monetary value makes it a fascinating site wherein to observe the complex interplay of the various types of exchanges which are represented in the saga. Chapter 116 recounts another famous scene in Njal’s saga.14 The beautiful and ruthless Hildigunn, recently widowed, goads her uncle Flosi into action so that he avenges the death of her husband Hoskuld. This episode is part of the second movement of the saga, after the first one
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ending with Gunnar’s demise. It sees the killing of Hoskuld and its aftermath, a chain of events completed with Njal’s death, burnt alive in his farm with his family. Cloth is omnipresent during this interview between niece and uncle, an interview structured, as Carol Clover observes, around five elements: the high seat (to which I add the tapestries), the torn towel, Hildigunn’s weeping, the bloody cloak, and Hildigunn’s speech (Clover 1986, 145–6). In what follows, I will comment on the material supports (the high seat, the tapestries, the towel, and the cloak) which the bereaved widow uses to get what she wants from her uncle. First, Hildigunn, waiting outside her home for Flosi’s arrival, orders the women working for her to prepare the house to welcome their visitor: ‘the women are to clean the house and put up the hangings and make the high seat ready for Flosi’ (Njal’s saga 1997, 136).15 The tapestries and the high seat are meant to honour and welcome the guest. But because weaving evokes social and political circumstances, the hangings also remind Flosi of a certain collective order that Hildigunn would like to see respected, of obligations that bonds between individuals create. In the present case, the tapestries would, quite obviously, expose under Flosi’s very eyes his duty, as Hildigunn’s closest male relative, to avenge the death of her husband. For, as it has often been observed, the entire set up and progress of this interview is masterminded by Hildigunn to serve one particular end, namely to force her uncle into violent action.16 These tapestries, together with the mention of a high seat, recall another scene taking place early in the saga: the encounter between Gunnhild and Hrut. Hrut leaves Iceland with Ozur to recover his inheritance following the death of his brother in Norway. As soon as Gunnhild, mother of the king of Norway, hears of their arrival, she wants to befriend them and she sends her squire to invite the two Icelanders to spend the winter with her. She promises them that, with her help, they shall get the king’s favours. The two men agree and go into town where they receive another message from the queen mother ordering them to go and see the king first, lest people start talking about her dealings with the Icelanders. The messenger also brings Hrut a robe that he is to wear when appearing before the king. The Icelander meets King Harald and asks to be made his retainer. He is told to come back a fortnight later, a time that he and his companion will spend at Gunnhild’s house and during which Hrut will become the queen’s lover. As the two Icelanders arrive at Gunnhild’s palace, they are shown into a room which, interestingly, is hung with beautiful tapestries and which contains the queen’s high seat (Njal’s saga 1997, 6).17 The hangings and the seat indicate
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that the two visitors are Gunnhild’s honoured guests. But in view of the subsequent relationship developing between Gunnhild and Hrut, and of the complete control the queen takes of the Icelander, the tapestries also signal the influence she will exert over her lover. Hrut is in fact faced from the first with Gunnhild’s plans for him while in Norway. She decides what their relationship will be and how the Icelander will be received by the king: the threads of Hrut’s fortunes have already been woven.18 Gunnhild is in charge throughout this episode; for instance, she is clearly the one who starts the love affair. When she bluntly tells Hrut that he shall spend the night with her, he merely answers: ‘That’s for you to decide’ (Njal’s saga 1997, 6).19 This female ascendancy is again foregrounded at the end of their relationship, when Hrut is returning to Iceland. Gunnhild asks him whether he has a woman waiting for him back home. Hrut answers in the negative when, in fact, his betrothed Unn is waiting for him. The queen mother, guessing that her lover is lying to her, puts a spell on him. She starts her magic with these words: ‘If I have as much power over you as I think I have . . .’ (ibid., 9).20 Gunnhild has taken complete control of her lover,21 and this control is mirrored in the various textiles in which she successively ‘enfolds’ him, namely the robe, the tapestries, and implicitly her bed. Similarly, Hildigunn, clearly wanting her uncle to do her will, surrounds him with tapestries first, and then, as we shall see, with a cloak. Flosi, aware of his niece’s wishes, objects to the set up she creates and resists as long as he can. For he would undoubtedly prefer to settle the case over Hoskuld’s death without resorting to blood and violence, a course he tries to follow until the money settlement advised by arbitrators fails and no other course of action remains open for him. The next step in the confrontation opposing Flosi to his niece centres around the torn towel that she offers him when he washes his hands before eating. This towel, upon examination, is full of holes and one of its ends has been ripped off: it functions here as an analogy of the torn fabric of Hildigunn’s family (Clover 1986, 176). Putting the tattered cloth into Flosi’s hands, the widow reminds him that it is his family too which has been rent apart by Hoskuld’s murder. Furthermore, the towel contrasts with the tapestries that adorn the room. For, if the hangings recall an ideal social order, the towel represents the actual state of interpersonal relationships, that is, the conjugal and social order that must be mended following Hoskuld’s despicable killing. Looking at the tapestries, Flosi contemplates a perfect social fabric, and drying his hands with the torn towel, he is forced to acknowledge its present ragged state.
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At this point, Flosi, still resisting his niece’s promptings, refuses to use the towel she offers him. The scene between niece and uncle culminates with the celebrated account of the bloody cloak. For, after she has ascertained that Flosi intends to conclude a settlement over her husband’s death, Hildigunn straightforwardly asks for blood and taunts Flosi with the memory of the lethal vengeance his brothers exacted from their father’s killers.22 She then goes to a chest where she keeps the cloak that her husband was wearing when he was killed. In a horrifying gesture, she places the bloody garment on Flosi’s shoulders and ritually charges him: ‘to avenge all the wounds which he [Hoskuld] received in dying – or else suffer the contempt of all men’ (Njal’s saga 1997, 137).23 Hildigunn’s gesture has been recognized as a ritual and irresistible call for blood vengeance,24 for the bloody token conjures up Hoskuld’s dead body.25 But bearing in mind the symbolic power with which cloth is endowed, the flaunting of the bloody cloak is also an implicit statement about social relationships at this point in the narrative. Flosi in Hildigunn’s house, just as Hrut in the queen’s palace in Norway, is clothed by his host: in both cases, a man is made to wear a cloak given to him by a woman. Hildigunn actually places the garment on her uncle’s shoulders, whereas Gunnhild ‘clothes’ her lover at a distance. She sends him a robe that Hrut is to wear when meeting the king. And King Harald notices it when the Icelander appears before him: the saga author specifies that ‘the king took a close look at this man, who was well dressed’ (ibid., 5).26 The robe that Hrut is wearing at that moment announces his change of status in Norway: it foreshadows his acceptance as a member of the king’s court. Similarly, Flosi wrapped in Hoskuld’s cloak symbolically becomes an image of the dead man, a wounded body crying out for vengeance. Flosi, a man of peace,27 would have been content to atone for the death of his niece’s husband with a private settlement. But this course of action becomes impossible once Hildigunn dresses him up, albeit briefly, with her dead husband’s clothes. The words that Hildigunn utters at this crucial moment of the saga evoke once more the motif of exchange and repayment. Before calling for blood vengeance, Hildigunn says: ‘This cloak, Flosi, was your gift to Hoskuld, and now I give it back to you. He was slain in it’ (ibid., 137).28 In two sentences, she summarizes the story of the cloak, specifying that it was indeed Flosi’s gift to Hoskuld29 and that Hoskuld was wearing it when he was killed. Hildigunn also says that she is giving it back to Flosi. Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, in his reflections on exchanges of gifts or others (words, challenges, or even women), always to ‘prendre en
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compte le fait que chacun de ces actes inauguraux peut tomber à faux et qu’il reçoit son sens, en tout cas, de la réplique qu’il déclenche’.30 In this scene therefore, Hildigunn repays the initial gift of the cloak, thus re-evaluating the terms of the exchanges which united Hoskuld and Flosi. In returning the same item that Flosi had previously given to Hoskuld, she redefines their relationship. Her counter-gift, which consists in fact of the gift which first initiated the exchange, amounts to a refusal and a negation of the ties of reciprocity that existed between the two men. But there is more to Hildigunn’s gesture. For, by putting Hoskuld’s cloak on her uncle’s shoulders, she not only denies bonds of friendship and annuls a gift; she adds insult to it. Bourdieu again observes that a counter-gift, ‘sous peine de constituer une offense [. . .] doit être différé et différent, la restitution immédiate d’un objet exactement identique équivalant de toute évidence à un refus’.31 The restitution is not immediate here, but the item that is returned is exactly the same present that was instrumental in creating special bonds of friendship between two men. Hildigunn no doubt intends to offend Flosi here. And yet, does Hildigunn really return the very same gift that Flosi first gave Hoskuld? Not really, since the cloak is now stained by the dead man’s blood. The saga author clearly emphasizes this element, for he graphically specifies that when Flosi has the cloak on his shoulders, ‘the dried blood poured down all over him’ (Njal’s saga 1997, 137).32 Blood has been added to the first gift which gains increased value in the process. Having ‘witnessed’ and bearing the traces of its owner’s killing, the cloak is granted a new significance. Hildigunn does not therefore merely annul Flosi’s present to Hoskuld; she also offers him an original – and bloody – gift. She insists that in giving her uncle the cloak back, she is initiating a new round of exchanges, the cycle of reciprocity to which Flosi was trying to put an end with money. In this scene between Flosi and Hildigunn, money and cloth serve as two different means of exchange; for, the cloak definitively prevents Hoskuld’s death from being settled with money. To get what she wants, namely blood vengeance, Hildigunn uses various forms of cloth and textile to ‘wrap’ her uncle in a tightly knit network of familial and social relationships which rule out money settlement. The love affair between Hrut and Gunnhild also revolves around money and cloth, but the two terms are not so stringently opposed. The dealings between the queen mother and the Icelander consist in a series of exchanges. After the first night he spends with Gunnhild, Hrut ‘repays’ her by giving her ‘a hundred ells of woven cloth and twelve homespun cloaks’ (ibid., 6; italics in the original).33 These presents may signal his willingness to start an affair
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with the queen mother – his consent being represented by the cloaks and cloth he gives her. When Hrut is about to return to Iceland, Gunnhild offers him a parting gift, but we are not told that Hrut reciprocates. The circumstances surrounding Hrut’s departure from Norway, namely his lie to Gunnhild and his denial that he has a bride waiting for him in Iceland, anger the queen. She requites her lover’s lack of trust with a gold bracelet and a spell.34 The bracelet is a traditional gift in saga narratives; and yet, contrary to the textiles which previously circulated between the two protagonists, it signals the end of reciprocity, metaphorically closing the cycle of exchanges. Just as Gunnhild takes all the initiatives at the beginning of their relationship, it is also she who formally signals its end. She indicates, with the bracelet, that any dealing between them is over, that it has come full circle. But Hrut and Gunnhild are not only lovers, they are also business partners, and money plays an important role in their relationship. For, Hrut travels to Norway to claim his inheritance and it is in fact Gunnhild who gets it back for him. Soti, (the man who has seized Hrut’s money) has sailed to Denmark. Hrut goes after him but, in the meantime, Soti makes his way back to Norway. Informed of his return on Norwegian soil, Gunnhild orders her son to kill him and to take the money. She subsequently returns it to Hrut, who ‘thanked her and gave her half of it’ (ibid., 8).35 Hrut is grateful; he divides his inheritance, gives half of it to his mistress, and that’s the end of it. Money, it seems, is not as contentious as cloth: it is not invested with the same symbolic import. Interpersonal relationships, be they individual, conjugal, social, or political, are inscribed in the woven fabric of cloth and are made visible in the saga’s numerous allusions to textile and cloth. During her confrontation with Flosi, Hildigun’s position and her desires are clear. As Hoskuld’s widow, she wants to see his death avenged with bloodshed. A few chapters later, however, another character also produces a cloak with dramatic effects and terrible consequences, but this time his motives are less obvious. I am talking here of the failed settlement between Njal and Flosi over the death of Hoskuld. When Flosi and his supporters present their case against the killers, Njal’s sons, before the Althing (the annual national assembly of Iceland with legislative and judicial powers), the lawsuit is invalidated because of a flaw in the procedure.36 The legal channels having reached a deadlock, Njal is offered the opportunity to plead for a settlement to be decided by arbitrators. Flosi accepts, and the arbitrators, after due deliberation, decide to ask for a huge fine: triple compensation, to be paid immediately. This decision to have the money paid on the spot means that all present will
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have to contribute. Flosi accepts this solution, and the money is gathered. When not a penny is lacking, Njal steps forward and ‘took a silk cloak and a pair of boots and placed them on top of the pile’ (Njal’s saga 1997, 148).37 He adds these two items to the money collected for the fine. Flosi arrives and he immediately spots the cloak. Upset, he picks it up, asks who has given it, and then engages in an exchange of insults with Skarphedin, Njal’s eldest son. This scene between Flosi and Njal is puzzling. It is usually understood that Flosi is offended by the cloak, because the garment implicitly questions Flosi’s manhood: ‘the silk cloak seems given with the best of intentions, as an extra expression of goodwill. But Flosi is taken aback by the gift, since the delicate garment has a feminine implication, and thus contains the covert insult which Skarpheðinn so overtly expresses in the ensuing wrangle’ (Sørensen 1983, 10). This explanation, supported by the insults that Flosi and Skarphedin subsequently exchange, accounts for Flosi’s angry reaction. But it leaves one question unanswered, namely, why would Njal add the cloak in the first place? Njal is constantly depicted as a wise man: when he is first introduced in the saga, the author says that he is the best of lawyers: ‘he was so well versed in the law that he had no equal’ (Njal’s saga 1997, 25).38 He is wise (ibid., 25)39 and, even more important, he has the gift of prophecy: the saga author characterizes him as ‘prophetic’ and ‘able to see far into the future’ (ibid.).40 Of all people, Njal should have been aware that adding the cloak onto the pile of money would offend Flosi and lead to disaster. Moreover, early in the saga, a series of chapters recount the enmity opposing Bergthora and Hallgerd, respectively, Njal’s and Gunnar’s wives.41 Following a quarrel on a question of precedence, the two women give vent to their reciprocal hostility, arranging an escalating chain of killings that threaten the peace between the two households. But Gunnar and Njal, who are great friends, manage to defuse this explosive situation by atoning for each successive killing with money. This series of early conflicts therefore demonstrates that the two men know how to contain violence and settle feuds by paying compensation. Thus, if Njal, by adding a cloak to the pile of money compensating Hoskuld’s killing, insults Flosi, his gesture may well be deliberate. Let us consider this precious cloak as part of the dynamic tension opposing money and cloth in the saga. At this point, Njal is negotiating a peace settlement between his sons and Flosi over the death of Hoskuld. Now, Hoskuld is not only linked to Flosi (he is married to Hildigunn, Flosi’s niece); crucially, he is also linked to Njal (he is Njal’s foster-son). Njal strikingly and movingly voices his attachment to Hoskuld when, asking for
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arbitrators to name the terms of compensation, he says before the Althing: ‘I want you to know that I loved Hoskuld more than my own sons, and when I heard that he had been slain I felt that the sweetest light of my eyes had been put out, and I would rather have lost all my sons to have him live’ (Njal’s saga 1997, 146).42 But the relationship between Hoskuld and Njal did not start off under such promising auspices. Early in the saga, Skarphedin, Njal’s son, kills Hoskuld’s father. Njal compensates for this death, and when he meets Hoskuld, who is still a child, he offers him a gold ring, which the young boy accepts. The ring here may again symbolize the end of a first series of (hostile) exchanges between Hoskuld and Njal: the son of the dead man, accepting the ring, proves that as far as he is concerned, the feud opposing him to Skarphedin has come to an end. Njal then addresses Hoskuld and makes sure that the boy is acting with full knowledge of the facts. Njal says: ‘Do you know […] what caused the death of your father?’; to which Hoskuld answers: ‘I know that Skarphedin killed him, but we don’t have to remind ourselves of that, since the matter was settled and full compensation was paid’ (ibid., 114).43 The settlement with money is confirmed and strengthened by the words the two men exchange. The ensuing fosterage marks the beginning of a new relationship between Njal and Hoskuld. And immediately after this scene, the saga author introduces Flosi,44 who will of course be the ‘other’ party in the conflict over Hoskuld’s killing, the party related to the dead man through marriage ties. The relationship uniting Hoskuld and Njal is thus juxtaposed to the relationship uniting Hoskuld, Flosi, and Hildigunn. All the actors of the feud appear together here. Njal placing the cloak on top of the pile of money gathered at the Althing echoes what happened between Flosi and Hildigunn.45 If the bloody garment that Flosi is made to wear forces him to avenge Hoskuld with blood, what then is the function of the cloak Njal adds to the settlement money? The complex symbolic values attached to cloth invite us to see in this garment more than a mere taunt on Flosi’s manhood. Like Hoskuld’s bloody cloak, the silk mantle Njal produces in this climactic moment is a powerful reminder of the various family ties uniting the protagonists at this point in the saga. As such, it interrupts the monetary dealings and calls out for blood vengeance, a vengeance that Njal cannot exact in person since he would have to avenge Hoskuld’s death on his own sons. He is caught at this juncture in conflicting loyalties; for, even though he would benefit from a peaceful money settlement (his sons getting out of this predicament uninjured), he cannot accept it because of the ties that he has woven with his foster-son Hoskuld.
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The cloak Hildigunn flaunts at her uncle evoked the conjugal bonds uniting her – and by implication Flosi – to Hoskuld. Similarly, Njal’s garment reminds Flosi of his family ties with Hoskuld, while at the same time conjuring up the ties uniting Njal and Hoskuld, foster-father and foster-son. From Njal’s point of view, Hoskuld’s death calls for two different reactions: a money settlement that would protect the lives of his killers, Njal’s sons, on the one hand, and on the other a blood vengeance that Njal would like to see exacted over the death of his foster-son. Njal cannot explicitly voice this latter wish, but he expresses it with the cloak he puts on the money: he silently urges Flosi to act. Physically juxtaposing cloth and money, the scene of the failed settlement at the Althing sharply contrasts these two modes of exchange. For, into the purely economic transaction advocated by the twelve arbitrators, Njal introduces another symbolic token which ‘re-members’ the woven fabric of kinship ties – both for Flosi and for Njal himself. Njal’s ambiguous position in the network of conflicting kinship ties crystallizing around Hoskuld’s death is again foregrounded at the moment of his death. After the settlement collapses at the Althing, Flosi and his supporters plan an attack on Njal and his family at the end of the summer. When time comes, the men gather and ride to Njal’s farm. Seeing his enemies arrive, Njal orders everyone to go inside the house. Flosi and his men surround the building but quickly realize that they cannot overcome the people inside with weapons. And they decide to burn down the farm. When they start the fire, Njal goes to the door and negotiates for the women and children inside the house to be allowed to leave unmolested. Flosi agrees and extends the offer to Njal and to his wife, Bergthora. He says: ‘I want to offer you the chance to come out, for you do not deserve to be burned’ (Njal’s saga 1997, 156).46 Njal refuses to leave the burning house, explaining that he cannot survive his sons because he is too old now to avenge their deaths. The words Flosi and Njal exchange at this point testify that the feud is not between these two men but between Flosi and Njal’s sons. Flosi and Njal might in fact agree on the horror of Hoskuld’s killing. After Njal decides to remain inside his burning farm, he waits for the end lying on his bed with his wife and his grandson Thord. He orders his steward to take note of where they are, so that he can locate their remains once it is all over, and Njal also asks the servant to cover them with an ox-hide. The steward obeys and then leaves the house: ‘the foreman took the hide and spread it over them and then went out of the house’ (ibid., 156).47 A few chapters later, we learn that the corpses lying under it are retrieved intact from the ashes, except for Thord, one of whose
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fingers was burned because it was not covered by the hide: ‘one of his fingers, which he had stuck out from under the hide, was burned off’ (ibid., 162).48 The hide thus protects the bodies, and the unscathed remains, undamaged by the fire, of course lend a hagiographic colouring to Njal’s death. The hide figures prominently in the protagonist’s last moments and although it functions as a blanket, it is not a woven piece of cloth. Covering Njal, it isolates him from the familial and social bonds clashing around him at that point. Lying under an ox-pelt could be Njal’s way of abstracting himself from a quarrel in which he cannot take sides, a quarrel opposing his late foster-son to his own offspring. Dead but unburned, Njal, his wife, and his grandson lying under the hide have placed themselves outside the interweaving social and personal ties that make up the fabric of Njal’s extended family. Njal under the ox-hide recalls and contrasts with another saga character appearing a few chapters earlier: Thorgeir the Priest, who spreads a cloak over his head in Chapter 105. This is the moment in which the saga author recounts Iceland’s conversion to Christianity. As tensions increase between supporters of the old religion and newly converted Christians, Thorgeir is called upon to resolve the situation and to proclaim the law. He accepts, but before speaking, he ‘lay for a whole day with a cloak spread over his head, and no one spoke to him’ (ibid., 127).49 Thorgeir, pulling a cloak over his head, is acting like an oracle communicating with supernatural spirits.50 But in the context of the present discussion, another interpretation may be given to Thorgeir’s cloak. For, at that moment and even though no one talks to him, Thorgeir may not necessarily want to abstract himself from the network of social relationships (as was the case for Njal). Quite on the contrary, he may be attempting to mend the fabric of Icelandic society, damaged by the conflicts arising from the practice of two different religions on the island. Not outside social ties, but enfolded in them, Thorgeir restores the peace. Before concluding, I will consider two more instances in which cloaks conspicuously appear in the saga: Gunnar’s expedition to Hrutsstadir to retrieve Unn’s dowry, and the mockery targeted at Thorhall Njalsson because of the coarse mantle he is wearing. After he leaves Norway and Queen Gunnhild to sail back to Iceland, Hrut marries Unn, a good match and a handsome woman. But because of the spell Gunnhild put on him, Hrut is unable to consummate their marriage. This impels Unn to divorce her husband, but her father is unable to get her dowry back from his son-in-law. When she runs out of money, Unn turns to her cousin Gunnar for help. She refuses his offer of financial help, but asks
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him instead to recover her dowry from her former husband. Gunnar accepts and asks his friend Njal for advice on how best to go about it. Njal devises the following plan: Gunnar should go to Hrut and, as Njal expressly tells his friend: ‘You must be wearing a hooded cloak on the outside and striped homespun underneath, and underneath this you must wear your good clothes’ (Njal’s saga 1997, 26; italics in the original).51 Disguised as a peddler, Gunnar will not awake suspicions. Njal also tells him to behave outrageously, insulting and assaulting potential buyers, and therefore cancelling many sales. This should gain him access to Hrut who, hearing about this peddler, will ask to see Gunnar and will find him entertaining. Once received by Hrut, Gunnar will trick him into reviving Unn’s lawsuit about her dowry. This episode is in keeping with the general contempt attached to money exchanges. But in this scene, the sale is a sham since Gunnar never intends to start a business relationship with Hrut, a relationship in which goods are bought or sold. This transaction is nothing more than a trick, a smokescreen hiding the real exchange Gunnar is entering into with Hrut. This exchange seems at first sight to be yet another monetary arrangement, the retrieval of Unn’s dowry. But the true nature of the transaction is revealed later, in Chapter 24, when the saga author recounts how Gunnar brings up the case at the Althing. For, in the middle of the procedure, Gunnar suddenly gives up the law-suit and challenges Hrut to a single combat. He is spurred on to this course of action by the memory of how Hrut, when he first refused to hand back the money, humiliated Mord, Unn’s father and Gunnar’s kinsman. On this occasion, Hrut publicly challenged his former father-in-law, Mord, to a duel which the old man had to refuse. Thus, when he revives the case, Gunnar says: ‘I will give Hrut the same choice that he gave to my kinsman Mord’ (ibid., 29).52 Here, Gunnar is repaying Hrut for the insult suffered by Mord. The exchange between Gunnar and Hrut does not merely revolve around a question of money, but around a symbolic wrong that needs to be atoned for. And the clothes that Gunnar wears when first riding to Hrut announce the multi-layered nature of the dealings between the two men. Gunnar’s deeper motivation (to avenge an insulted kinsman) appears only in a second moment, just as the nice cloak that Gunnar hides under his simple overcoat becomes visible and noticed only once the masquerade of the failed sale is over. The selling and the coarse cloak paradoxically both hide and reveal the complex nature of the exchange. They divert Hrut’s attention away from what is really at stake: the gold lace and red cloth showing under the low-quality mantle,53 or a kinsman’s honour to be redeemed. And yet, at the same time, they indicate that
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monetary transactions between the two men are a side issue and that what matters here are the kinship ties uniting Gunnar and Mord – ties that have been sullied but whose value and eminence will be restored. In the middle of the feud opposing Njal’s family to Flosi, the saga author mentions in passing that Njal’s sons make fun of their fosterbrother Thorhall, because of the way he is dressed: ‘the Njalssons laughed at him because he was wearing a coarse brown-striped cloak, and they asked him how long he intended to have it on’ (ibid., 139).54 Thorhall replies: ‘I will have thrown it away by the time I have to take action for the slaying of my foster-father’ (ibid., 139).55 This answer foreshadows the next step in the saga, namely the burning of Njal’s family in its farm. Thorhall and his cloak, mocked by the Njalssons, echo the figure of Flosi wearing Hoskuld’s bloody mantle, for Flosi is also potentially an object of scorn – unless he takes action. Both moments augur vengeance, for Thorhall’s answer to the mockery heralds his own future actions. He links his cloak to Njal and to the loyalty he will show his foster-father. After Njal’s death, Thorhall is first active in court, masterminding the lawsuit against the burners. As the proceedings drag on and the suit is about to collapse, Thorhall is the first to resort to violent action. Thus, his response to the joke is proleptic, indicating that despite the fact that he is an excellent lawyer, he will not retaliate against the burners in court.56 For, strikingly, it is Thorhall who starts the violence at the Althing: he is the first to slay an enemy, one of Flosi’s kinsmen.57 This initial killing spirals out of control and results in a general battle at the Althing. Thorhall’s mantle announces what is to come because it exhibits, for those who can perceive it, the relationship uniting him to his foster-father. At the same time, the garment’s coarseness also hides from Njal’s sons the essence of the exchange to come, that is, all the blood that will be shed because of the burning of Njal and his family. Njal’s sons laugh at the cloak because they do not understand its true meaning. This is not the case of Thorhall, a wise man can foresee the future and who can predict where the network of interweaving social and familial bonds will lead: to more deaths, more vengeance, more violence. Thorhall’s awareness of the far-reaching consequences entailed by the intricate interpersonal ties clashing over Hoskuld’s death is materialized in the cloak he is wearing. Together with Njal, who stands by his foster-son when he is made fun of, Thorhall assigns to his coarse cloak its correct meaning. Omnipresent in Njal’s saga, cloth and textile represent a certain type of interaction taking place among the characters. Based on the ethic of the feud, these exchanges run counter to dealings involving money. To represent interpersonal and social relationships with cloth, and to
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oppose them to money, is perplexing, for the item was endowed with monetary value in medieval Icelandic society. But in Njal’s saga, the author silences the economic value of cloth and the part it played in commercial dealings. In the world of the saga, cloaks or textiles are significant because characters ‘read’ them and find in them meanings that language seems unable to express. I have shown how the cloak that Njal adds to the settlement paid to Flosi gives voice to the unspeakable. Similarly, it is Hoskuld’s bloody garment, and not Hildigunn’s words, that finally decides Flosi to exact vengeance. Derrida underlines the importance of the address when giving: ‘ce qui est donné […] est-ce le contenu, à savoir la chose “réelle” qu’on offre ou dont on parle ? N’est-ce pas plutôt l’acte de l’adresse à l’intention de l’autre […]?’58 The presence of cloth underlines the (often tacit) exchanges taking place between the characters, and scenarios of communication are embedded in textiles. Let us remember that weaving, in addition to being conjugal and political, can also be poetical, according to Scheid and Svenbro. An image of the linguistic act, it uses the intertwining of the warp and the woof as a metaphor of how letters combine into syllables and syllables into words (Scheid and Svenbro 1994, 131). Paradoxically therefore, weaving undoes the precarious peace tentatively created by socially dis-invested monetary dealings; it reiterates the demands of kinship ties and exhibits the latent violence they entail. With money and cloth, two economies are competing, each conceiving of social relationships in its own way. If money offers an ‘economic(al)’ way of ending social disruption (money is exchanged and the cycle of reciprocal deaths is brought to an end), cloth is always more powerful. Imagining the political as interpersonal and familial, it materializes the very fabric of society and its inherent, potentially violent, obligations.
Notes 1. ‘Fá mér leppa tvá ór hári þínu, ok snúið þit móðir mín saman til bogastrengs mér’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 189). 2. Njal’s saga 1997, 89; Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 189. 3. Orchard 1997, 267; Larrington 1992, 137–61, especially 155; Turville-Petre 1964, 279–80. Toward the end of Njal’s saga, the author includes ‘Darradarljod’, a poem which describes a battle identified with the Battle of Clontarf, fought in Ireland in 1014. On the morning of the battle, a man called Dorrud and living in Scotland sees 12 women building a loom with human entrails and skulls. The women start working and recite the poem. When they are done, probably when the battle is over, they tear to pieces the cloth they have produced. The poem here draws an analogy between working on a loom and fighting on a battlefield. The women who weave and sing the poem recall both the figure of the Valkyries (‘the choosers of the slain’)
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4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
9. 10. 11. 12.
13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.
23. 24. 25. 26. 27.
and that of the Norns. The analogy between weaving and a man’s life is also foregrounded in Chapter 49 of The Saga of the People of Laxardal 1997; Laxdæla saga 1934. ‘Illa ferr þér, ok mun þín skömm lengi uppi’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 189). ‘Þá skal ek nú […] muna þér kinnhestinn, ok hirði ek aldri, hvárt þú verr þik lengr eða skemr’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 189). ‘Hon kvazk þann hest muna skyldu ok launa, ef hon mætti’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 124). See Miller 1986, 18–50 (esp. 25–35). The scope of the present paper does not allow me to engage in an exhaustive analysis of all the manifestations of cloth and textiles in Njal’s saga. Although I have selected the most conspicuous episodes in the narrative (with the notable exception of ‘Darradarljod’), a complete study of this motif remains to be done. Please note also that I do not undertake a detailed lexical analysis of all the terms used by the saga author to designate textiles and clothing, such as tignar-klæðl, borði, váskufl, feldr, tjalda, silkislœðr, skikkja. Jenny Jochens comments on the richness of the Icelandic vocabulary and observes that it cannot be matched in English (Jochens 1995, 142–3). Kellogg 1997, I, xxix–lv (esp. xxix–xxx); O’Donoghue 2004, 22–4. On this point, see Jochens 1995, 134 and 147–56 and Damsholt 1984, 75–90 (esp. 81). See also Jóhannesson 1974, 331. Miller 1986, 46–7. For a slightly different view, see Ingimundarson 1992, 217–30 (esp. 227–8) and Þorláksson 1992, 231–45. K. Heinzelman, The Economics of Imagination (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 11–12, quoted in Woodmansee and Osteen 1999, 4. On this point, see Derrida 1991, 17–19. On this scene, see especially Clover 1986, 141–83. See also Sørensen 1983, 10–11; Jesch 1992, 64–82 (esp. 64–5) and O’Donoghue 1992, 83–92 (esp. 89–90). ‘konur skulu ræsta húsin ok tjalda ok búa Flosa öndvegi’(Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 289). Miller 1983, 159–204 (esp. 182–5). ‘It was hung with very beautiful tapestries’; ‘þar var tjaldat inum fegrsta borða’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 14). Dronke reads in this episode ‘echoes of the taboo of the supernatural mistress’ (Dronke 1980, 7). ‘þér skuluð slíku ráða’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 15). ‘Ef ek á svá mikit vald á þér sem ek ætla …’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 21). See Dronke 1980, 6. She says: ‘Arnor Ornolfsson from Fossarskogar did less to Thord Frey’s Godi, your father, and yet your brothers Kolbein and Egil killed him at the Skaftafell Assembly’ (Njal’s saga 1997, 137; Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 291). ‘at þú hefnir allra sára þeira, er hann hafði á sér dauðum, eða heit hvers manns níðingr ella’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 291). Miller 1983, esp. 187–8. See also Clover 1986, 178–9. Clover 1986, 143. Miller 1983, 185. ‘konungr hugði vandliga at manninum, er vel var búinn’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 13). Judith Jesch notices that Flosi is ‘the first major character in the saga to hold to the terms of a settlement’ (Jesch 1992, 75). See also Sørensen 1983, 11.
Fabienne L. Michelet 131 28. ‘þessa skikkju gaft þú, Flosi, Höskuldi, ok gef ek þér nú aptr. Var hann ok í þessi veginn’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 291). 29. See Chapters 109, 111, and 12. 30. To ‘take into account that each of these inaugural acts may come at the wrong moment and that it gets its meaning, at any rate, from the reply it triggers’ (Bourdieu 1972, 222, my translation). 31. A counter-gift ‘must, for fear of being an offence […] be deferred and different, the immediate return of an exactly identical object being obviously equivalent to a refusal’ (Bourdieu 1972, 222, my translation). 32. ‘dunði þá blóðit um hann allan’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 291). 33. ‘hundrað álna hafnarváðar ok tólf vararfeldi’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 15). 34. The recurrence of the gift of a gold bracelet would be another motif worth analyzing in the saga. 35. Hrut ‘þakkaði henni ok gaf henni allt hálft við sik’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 19). 36. The case is invalidated because Mord, the man who starts the proceedings over the death of Hoskuld, was in fact involved in the killing. See Njal’s saga, Chapter 121. 37. Njal ‘tók silkislœður ok bóta ok lagði á ofan á hrúguna’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 312). 38. ‘hann var lögmaðr svá mikill, at engi fannsk hans jafningi’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 57). 39. ‘vitr var hann’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 57). 40. ‘forspár’ and ‘langsýnn’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 57). 41. Chapters 35–45. 42. ‘Ek vil yðr kunnigt gera, at ek unna meira Höskuldi en sonum mínum, ok er ek spurða, at hann var veginn, þótti mér sløkkt it sœtasta ljós augna minna, ok heldr vilda ek misst hafa allra sona minna ok lifði hann’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 309). 43. ‘Veiztú […] hvat föður þínum varð at bana?’; ‘Veit ek, at Skarpheðinn vá hann, ok þurfu vit ekki á þat at minnask, er sætzk hefir á verit ok fullar bœtr hafa fyrir komit’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 236–7). 44. Chapter 95 starts with these words: ‘There was a man named Flosi’ (Njal’s saga 1997, 114); ‘Maðr er nefndr Flosi’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 237). 45. See Sørensen 1983, 10–11; Jesch 1992, 73. 46. ‘Útgöngu vil ek þér bjóða, því at þú brennr ómakligr inni’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 330). 47. ‘Þá tók brytinn húðina ok breiddi yfir þau ok gekk út síðan’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 331). 48. ‘var af honum brunninn fingrinn, er hann hafði rétt upp undan húðinni’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 342). 49. Thorgeir ‘lá svá dag allan, at hann breiddi feld á höfuð sér, ok mælti engi maðr við hann’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 271). 50. Aðalsteinsson 1978, 122. 51. ‘skalt þú hafa váskufl yztan klæða ok undir söluváðarkyrtil mórendan; þar skalt þú hafa undir in góðu klæði þín’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 59). 52. ‘ek skal gera Hrúti slíkan sem hann gerði Merði, frænda mínum’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 66). 53. Njal’s saga 1997, 28; Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 64. 54. ‘Þeir Njálssynir hlógu at honum, er hann var í kasti mórendu, ok spurðu, hvé lengi hann ætlaði at hafa þat’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 295).
132 The Fabric of Society 55. ‘Kastat skal ek því hafa, þá er ek á at mæla eptir fóstra minn’ (Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 295). 56. See the various instances mentioning that Thorhall is an excellent lawyer: Njal’s saga 1997, 32, 131–2, 170, and 185; Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 74, 279, 359, and 388. 57. Njal’s saga 1997, 191; Brennu-Njáls saga 1954, 402. 58. ‘What is given [. . .] is it the content, that is to say the ‘real’ thing that we give or about which we speak? Isn’t it rather the act of address to the other […]?’ (Derrida 1991, 79, my translation).
References Aðalsteinsson, Jón Hnefill. 1978. Under the Cloak. Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksell. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1972. Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique: précédé de trois études d’ethnologie kabyle. Genève: Droz. Clover, Carol J. 1986. Hildigunn’s Lament. In Structure and Meaning in Old Norse Literature, eds. J. Lindow, L. Lönnroth, and G. W. Weber, 141–83. Odense: Odense University Press. Damsholt, Nanna. 1984. The Role of Icelandic Women in the Sagas and in the Production of Homespun Cloth. Scandinavian Journal of History. 9. 2: 75–90. Derrida, Jacques. 1991. Donner le temps: 1. La fausse monnaie. Paris: Galilée. Dronke, Ursula. 1980. The Role of Sexual Themes in Njáls saga. The Dorothea Coke Memorial Lecture in Northern Studies, delivered 27 May 1980 at University College London. London: Viking Society for Northern Research. Ingimundarson, Jón Haukur. 1992. Spinning Goods and Tales: Market, Subsistence and Literary Productions. In From Sagas to Society: Comparative Approaches to Early Iceland, ed. G. Pálsson, 217–30. Enfield Lock: Hisarlik Press. Jesch, Judith. 1992. ‘Good Men’ and Peace in Njáls saga. In Introductory Essays on Egils saga and Njáls saga, eds. John Hines and Desmond Slay, 64–82. London: Viking Society for Northern Research. Jochens, Jenny. 1995. Women in Old Norse Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jóhannesson, Jón. 1974. A History of the Old Icelandic Commonwealth, trans. H. Bessason. University of Manitoba Icelandic Studies, 2. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Kellogg, Robert. 1997. Introduction. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders: Including 49 Tales, gen. ed. V. Hreinsson, 5 vols. Reykjavík: Leifur Eiríksson. Larrington, Carolyne, ed. 1992. The Woman’s Companion to Mythology. London: Pandora. Laxdæla saga. 1934, ed. Einar Ó. Sveinsson, Íslenzk Fornrit, 5. Reykjavík: Hið Íslenska Fornritfélag. [Laxdæla Saga]. 1997. The Saga of the People of Laxardal, trans. K. Kunz. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders: Including 49 Tales, gen. ed. Viðar Hreinsson, 5 vols., V: 1–120. Reykjavík: Leifur Eiríksson Publishing. Miller, William Ian. 1983. Choosing the Avenger: Some Aspects of the Bloodfeud in Medieval Iceland and England. Law and History Review 1: 159–204. —. 1986. Gift, Sale, Payment, Raid: Case Studies in the Negotiation and Classification of Exchange in Medieval Iceland. Speculum. 61: 18–50.
Fabienne L. Michelet 133 [Njal’s saga] Brennu-Njáls saga. 1954, ed. Einar Ó. Sveinsson, Íslenzk Fornrit, 12. Reykjavík: Hið Íslenska Fornritfélag. Njal’s saga. 1997, trans. Robert Cook. In The Complete Sagas of Icelanders: Including 49 Tales, gen. ed. Viðar Hreinsson, 5 vols., III: 1–220. Reykjavík: Leifur Eiríksson Publishing. O’Donoghue, Heather. 1992. Women in Njáls saga. In Introductory Essays on Egils saga and Njáls saga, eds. John Hines and Desmond Slay, 83–92. London: Viking Society for Northern Research. —. 2004. Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Orchard, Andy. 1997. Cassell’s Dictionary of Norse Myth and Legend. London: Cassell. Þorláksson, Helgi. 1992. Social Ideals and the Concept of Profit in ThirteenthCentury Iceland. In From Sagas to Society: Comparative Approaches to Early Iceland, ed. G. Pálsson, 231–45. Enfield Lock: Hisarlik Press. Scheid, John and Svenbro, Jesper. 1994. Le Métier de Zeus. Mythe du tissage et du tissu dans le monde gréco-romain. Paris: La Découverte. Sørensen, Preben Meulegracht. 1983. The Unmanly Man. Concepts of Sexual Defamation in Early Northern Society, trans. Joan Turville-Petre. Odense: Odense University Press. Turville-Petre, Gabriel. 1964. Myth and Religion of the North. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Woodmansee, Martha and Osteen, Mark, eds. 1999. The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. London: Routledge.
7 ‘There’s none/Can truly say he gives, if he receives’: Timon of Athens and the Possibilities of Generosity Or The Gift of a Stranger Susan Bruce Timon of Athens, like King Lear, charts a man’s tragic trajectory from largesse to misanthropy. Faced with his daughters’ ingratitude, Lear experiences what one of the most sensitive of contemporary readers of Shakespeare, Stanley Cavell, has described as a classically Shakespearean reaction to loss: a ‘self-consuming disappointment that seeks worldconsuming revenge’ (Cavell 1987, 6) a phrase which just as aptly describes Timon’s reaction to the apprehension, into which the play compels him, of the failure of his own generosity. The disappointment that he feels is nothing if not self-consuming; the revenge he seeks encompasses the consumption of his world: the sack of Athens. Indiscriminate and absolute philanthropy metamorphoses into its opposite, as the very figure of friendship becomes that of absolute enmity: ‘I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind’ (4.3.54). Timon includes no sub-plot, no comic relief, nothing that would dilute or detract from the absolute contrast established by the action of the drama: it is, as Wilson Knight noted in 1930, a play whose ‘tragic movement [is] more precipitous and unimpeded than any other in Shakespeare’ (Wilson Knight 1930, 207). The aesthetic economy of the text works to juxtapose, in the sharpest of possible ways, Timon’s worldconsuming anger with the generosity he indulges in the opening act of the play. That economy – the efficiency of this juxtaposition of the impulse of generosity with the disappointment which replaces it in the face of ingratitude – is, in part, responsible for a peculiar phenomenon in the critical response to Timon of Athens, in which Timon himself, as we will shortly see, is almost universally found culpable for the events which lead to his destruction. That phenomenon is, I want to suggest, 134
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a function of the degree to which generosity is thinkable to successive generations of critics. I wish to defend the conviction that in order properly to understand the problems that the play throws up, we must pay due and serious attention to the definitive philosophical claim about the essence of generosity that Timon utters in Act One: that none can truly give if he receives. The truth of this stark claim, as well as its relation to the sense of ingratitude Timon later experiences, is fundamental to the meaning of the drama, and to what it says about our experience of, and attitudes to, economies of reciprocity. For many years now, readers of this play have had some difficulty with the question of how we are supposed to understand Timon’s extraordinary generosity. J W Draper, in 1934, felt that while ‘Shakespeare [clearly] intended his audience to admire Timon’s very prodigality’ he himself found the prodigal Timon ‘rather a fool’ (Draper 1934, 21, quoted also in Shakespeare 1959, xv). In my experience, his misgivings about Timon’s generosity are widely shared by more contemporary audiences, both sophisticated and less so. My students, for instance, almost all initially approach the play by finding Timon at best naïve and foolish in his generosity, and at worst manipulative, self-deceptive and self-serving, assuming, as most of them do, that Timon gives because he desires something back, not in kind, but in prestige, or affection, or the more private pleasures simply of feeling good about himself. Most critics also read Timon within these two poles, either attributing to him a misplaced trust in an intrinsically selfish ‘human nature’ (thus unconsciously adopting, in the content of their assumptions if not in their tone, the perspective of the play’s cynic, Apemantus);1 or assuming that he has something to gain from giving. This last assumption is especially prevalent among theoretically informed critics of the text, who interpret Timon’s generosity under the weight of the conviction that gifts are ineluctably embedded within an economy of exchange. Thus Coppélia Kahn compares Timon’s gift-giving with the patronage practices of Renaissance monarchs: gift-giving, Kahn argues, is a way of maintaining power, binding donee to donor, a claim with which Maria Prendergast agrees: ‘Timon’, she claims, ‘seems to be emulating James ... in his generosity’, whose function is to express Timon’s ‘need to supplement his lack of a coherent self by surrounding himself with the kinds of flatterers, dependents and slaves that he claims to abhor’ (Kahn 1987; Prendergast 2000, 211). Other psychoanalytic readings of the play, from Stephen A. Reid in 1969 to Janet Adelman in 1992, take Timon’s generosity as the mirror image of his misanthropy, and proceed by pathologising both,
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reading his largesse as, for instance, an indicator of an ‘unmediated fantasy of an infinite male nurturance’ (Adelman 1992, 166). Somewhat more sympathetically, Michael Chorost reads the play as ‘a critique of money and money-oriented economies’, the indictment of which, according to him, is the central theme of the play. But even he reads Timon’s giving as embedded in a competitive economy of prestige and power: for Chorost, Timon is a potlatcher, because he continually ‘contrives to give far more than he gets’. ‘Although Timon sounds generous’, Chorost argues, ‘he wants only the theoretical possibility of reciprocation, since the real thing would diminish the accumulated sense of obligation built up in his courtiers’ (Chorost 1991, 351).2 In short, the history of criticism of Timon of Athens indicates that the play has lent itself most generously to critics who feel impelled, one way or another, to annihilate Timon’s impulse of generosity, either by writing it into a psychic pathology, or by assuming that it is subsumed in the play into an economy of thwarted reciprocity, or a trajectory of selfgratification and self-empowerment. The latter claim, of course, mirrors the twentieth-century history of gift theory, which, post Marcel Mauss, tends, in Mark Osteen’s words, either to ‘[explain gifts] away as disguised self interest or [to sentimentalize them] as a remnant of a golden age of pure generosity’ (Osteen 2002, 1). Mauss himself did both, writing the gift into a threefold structure of giving, receiving and reciprocating and concluding with a nostalgic invocation of an unfallen world in which the gift is not attendant on its return. For Mauss gifts, in practice, always operate within an economy of reciprocity, and from that observation, it is a short step to the most influential recent literary theorist of the gift, Jacques Derrida, for whom the encounter with the reciprocity in which the gift is always-already embedded renders the gift ‘the impossible’ (Derrida 1992, 7). ‘The conditions of possibility [of the gift] define or produce the annulment, the annihilation, the destruction of the gift’ (ibid., 12) Derrida claims, and for him, this annihilation is produced in several ways. In practice (though unlike Mauss, Derrida does not really talk about practices) the appearance of a counter-gift at some later date will always, for Derrida, annul the gift. But the subsequent prestation of a counter-gift is not necessary to annul the gift, for the gift is sufficiently annulled even in the recognition of a gift as a gift, as in recognizing a gift as such, the donee also recognizes the fact that he should not return it, and is thereby already bound by an obligation (the obligation not to give back,) which is ‘the mark of a duty, a debt owed’. Moreover, recognition of the gift generates, for Derrida, a return
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on the part of the donor as well: ‘it gives back, in the place, let us say, of the thing itself, a symbolic equivalent’ (Derrida 1992, 13). In recognizing his own gift as such, the donor: begins, at the threshold, as soon as he intends to give, to pay himself with a symbolic recognition, to praise himself, to approve of himself, to gratify himself, to congratulate himself, to give back to himself the value of what he thinks he has given or what he is preparing to give. (Derrida 1992, 14) Consequently, for Derrida: for there to be a gift, not only must the donor or donee not perceive or receive the gift as such, have no consciousness of it, no memory, no recognition; he or she must also forget it right away [a l’instant] and moreover this forgetting must be so radical that it exceeds even the psychoanalytic category of forgetting. (Derrida 1992, 16) The nature of the ‘forgetting’ on which the possibility of the gift is contingent would be, I take Derrida to mean here, more radical even than repression; it is also, although he does not say this explicitly, a further marker of the gift being ‘the impossible’ (since it would seem difficult to be able to forget something of which one has never been conscious in the first place). But in fact, this forgetting, like the subsequent prestation of a counter-gift, is not really necessary to Derrida’s argument here either, and nor is recognition of the gift as gift, since for Derrida, recognition even of the intention to give annihilates the gift, as recognition of that intention itself automatically involves the donor in the same structure of reciprocity, wherein the donor rewards himself with the ‘symbolic equivalent’ of the intention to give: ‘a sort of auto-recognition, self-approval, and narcissistic gratitude’ (Derrida 1992, 23). For Derrida, the gift is not merely the impossible, but the very figure of the impossible. Other, more utopian impulses towards alternative ways of imagining the possibilities of generosity may underlie Given Time: as Antonio Callari points out, Derrida’s solution to the problem that he sets up in Given Time is the interpellation of responsibility: ‘What responsibility do people have to use well (that is, to “return”) the gifts that nature has given them?’ But as Callari goes on to remark, that ‘responsibility’ is itself ‘a form of reciprocity’ (Callari 2002, 256–7). Mauss too saw the gift
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as a social bond, the obligation to reciprocity he believed it to entail enabling (desirable) social cohesion. And lest I be misunderstood, I should make it clear that it is certainly not my intention here to cast doubt on the degree to which responsibility – and reciprocity – may operate as social goods, but rather, to examine whether the gift must always operate within the confines of reciprocity. For the concept of the gift remains haunted in Derrida, as it is in Mauss, by the spectre of economism, the ‘land mine’, in Osteen’s words, ‘of gift theory’ (Osteen, 2002). The gift is impossible because there is always a return of a counter-gift, either in material practice (Mauss) or in the ‘symbolic equivalent’ of the thing given (Derrida), a symbolic equivalent which, for Derrida, comes into play even before the putative gift is actually given. In arguing that all gifts, however apparently ‘free’, are in reality embedded in an economy, however attenuated, mystified, or internal, of reciprocity, twentieth-century theories of the gift offer a dispiriting prognosis for human progress, wherein altruism (of which the gift is the material distillation) is by extension never possible either, except as tacitly coerced or enforced – by the state; by the social world; by the family; or by whatever ideological apparatus or cultural process you will. Progress towards a better world is possible under such conditions, but only within the parameters imposed by, say, a utopia such as Thomas More’s, which takes as its point of departure the conviction of a human nature whose predisposition to selfishness needs always to be governed and checked. But at the risk of naïvete, it seems to me that such a conclusion – that altruism is impossible – is overly pessimistic. Were it true, (to take just one example) the outpourings of worldwide public protest against wars and invasions that we have witnessed in recent years would have been (at least) less likely to have taken place. Presumably a Derridean answer to this claim for the possibility of altruism would be that all of those individuals who took to the streets in the cause of a people whom most had never met and could get nothing back from, paid themselves back for that expenditure with a symbolic equivalent of the time and money they expended on their demonstrations; in this case, self-congratulation, or warm feelings of participating in a protest of which they could be proud. But it is also worth observing that you only need one person amongst those many millions who did not pat himself on the back for the edifice of Given Time, predicated as it is on the belief that ‘as soon as he intends to give’ the donor begins to ‘pay himself with a symbolic recognition’, (Derrida 1992, 14) to begin to crumble.
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Derrida’s assertion of the impossibility of the gift has recently come under attack in various ways. Mark Osteen, for example, has argued that in Given Time Derrida ‘seems to equate intention and calculation’: ‘one may decide to give a gift’, Osteen argues, ‘and even reason carefully about the selection, without also calculating expected rewards’ (Osteen 2002, 16). This claim, however, does not seem substantively to mediate the bind Derrida puts us into, as once again, Derrida would presumably reply that such calculation is not necessary to annul the gift, since narcissistic gratitude and self-approval is all that is necessary, and that that persists, even in the absence of any calculation of reward. A better objection is Osteen’s claim that Derrida’s premise is based on the straw man of ‘a subject who chooses rationally and unconstrainedly’ (Osteen 2002, 16). There does appear to be something awry with Derrida’s notion of intention here. Derrida speaks of ‘the simple intention to give’ (Derrida 1992, 23) and of ‘the intentional meaning of the gift’ which would appear on the face of it to pre-suppose a rather singular (and remarkably un-Derridean) conception of human motivation. Is the intention to give ever so unmixed and unitary as this formulation would appear to suggest? And is ‘intention to give’ identical to that impulse to generosity which most of us have at one time or another experienced? ‘Tis yours, because you liked it’ says Timon to a lord of a bay courser that he rode upon (1.2.210): it seems at least debatable that this kind of giving can be described as ‘intentional’; it is certainly not rational, considered or thought through. Derrida’s equation of impulse with intention is mirrored in his insistence that the pleasure of generosity is reducible to the narcissistic rewards of self-gratification. In Given Time Derrida takes account of no pleasure in giving apart from this selfish one. It seems unlikely that he would not have recognized the existence of such pleasures, so perhaps that kind of pleasure is a kind of excess, and as such, irrelevant. But wouldn’t in other circumstances, such excess be the place where economies begin to unravel? And if we admit of the existence of any pleasure in giving which is unconstrained by self-interest, pleasure, that is, in another’s pleasure (such as that which you might take in the look of delight on your sons’ faces when you give them the freebie satchels you purloined from the conference you attended the week before) – if we admit of the existence of such pleasure – or, conversely, of our capacity to feel pain in another’s suffering, might its existence not qualify the economy into which Derrida insists we must write the gift, the economy which, demanding reciprocity, renders altruism impossible? It is of course possible that pleasure itself, of any kind, is encompassed in the concept
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of the ‘symbolic equivalent’. But to the concept of the symbolic equivalent I will return later in this essay.
Taking Timon seriously ‘One of the primary challenges for gift theory’, Osteen remarks, ‘has been to distinguish gift exchanges from market exchanges, and thereby to discriminate between gifts and economies’ (Osteen 2002, 229). The dichotomies attendant on that distinction within different theories of the gift are many: the oikos versus the agora, or domestic versus the public; the ‘social’ bond created by the gift versus the economic alienation embedded in commodity exchange; the inalienable nature of the gift object as opposed to the alienable character of the commodity within the marketplace. Timon of Athens is self-consciously aware of many of these distinctions, juxtaposing as it does oikos (Timon’s home, emblematized most obviously in his table and the hospitality he affords his guests at it) with the agora which marks every Athenian space outside Timon’s home, from the discussions between poet, painter, jeweller and merchant at the play’s opening to the Senators busily engaged in usurious lending practices at its centre.3 Yet even as it engages this dichotomy, the play deconstructs it, Timon’s house becoming a parodic version of a fantasized marketplace, the absolute space of miraculous profit with minimal expenditure on the part of those who invest in it. ‘If I want gold, steal but a beggar’s dog / And give it Timon’, says a Senator, even in the very act of totting up the debts incurred to him by Timon to pay for that gold; ‘why, the dog coins gold; / If I would sell my horse and buy twenty moe / Better than he – why give my horse to Timon; / Ask nothing, give it him, it foals me straight / And able horses’ (2.2.5–10). ‘The dog coins gold’: this is profit without labour, without contract, without obligation, without loss (except, one might observe, on the part of the poor beggar).4 And as oikos metamorphoses into marketplace, so the realm of the agora is confronted by social obligations whose character is more akin to gift relations than commodity ones, as Alcibiades challenges the Athenian blood for blood, eye for an eye, eminently economistic version of justice with a different discourse, irreducible to exchange. ‘I have kept back their foes’, rages Alcibiades, ‘While they have told their money, and let out / Their coin upon large interest; I myself / Rich only in large hurts’ (3.5.107–10); his friend too ‘h’as done fair service, / And slain in fight many of your enemies, / How full of valour did he bear himself / In the last conflict, and made plenteous wounds’ (3.5.64–8). Here is a sphere where at least according to Alcibiades, the currency is
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inalienable, not open to exchange, expressed instead in a kind of countereconomy, a Coriolanean nexus of bodies, deeds and wounds. The Senate’s market ethos, wherein everything is alienable, is here confronted with the very figure of the inalienable: not bodies, for the play shows itself perfectly cognisant of the alienability of bodies in the figures of its prostitutes, Phrynia and Timandra, but wounds, which unlike bodies, have neither use nor exchange value. One trajectory which this observation about the play’s internal deconstruction of the opposition between oikos and agora – the realm of the gift and the realm of exchange – might take would be to read the collapse of these initially separate spheres as the text’s own acknowledgement of the inevitable failure of the impulse to generosity, a trajectory which would return us to the two poles of Timon criticism which I want to attack, wherein Timon is either pathologically naïve and irresponsible or driven by impulses which are ultimately self-serving, the potlatch chief. The play undoubtedly offers internal evidence for both of these interpretations, in Timon’s refusal to listen to the warnings of Apemantus and Flavius, for instance; or, alternatively, in his inability to receive: we hear repeatedly that Timon inevitably repays the gifts he gets over and above their value. Moreover, (and this is possibly the most testing case for Timon) despite his refusal early in the play to let Ventidius repay him the five talents (with interest) that Timon has given him to free him from debtor’s prison, Timon does later on ask for that gift back. This writes at least one instance of Timon’s generosity into an ethos of direct reciprocity; more seriously, it is precisely that very gift whose attempted restitution initially prompts Timon’s assertion that ‘I gave it freely ever, and there’s none / Can truly say he gives, if he receives’ (1.2.10–12). So the evidence is stacking up against Timon here, and seems to be becoming uncomfortably weighted on the side of those – critics, students, gift theorists – who would argue that a true gift is impossible. But although almost every treatment of the text has reached this conclusion, it is a reduction of the complexity both of the play, and of the motivations attendant on most human actions. It is, for one thing, a profound denial of the aesthetic qualities of the text. ‘Unwisely, not ignobly, have I given’, claims Timon (2.2.178), an assertion which we must take seriously, not least because it is embedded in a scene in which the ruined Timon, still clinging to a misplaced faith in the love of his friends, turns his attention not to his own state and losses, but to his weeping steward, Flavius, who has nothing to lose here but his job (and is not weeping for that). Further, the play prohibits the endorsement either of Timon’s misanthropy or of
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Apemantus’s cynicism. Timon has himself to qualify his own misanthropy with the recognition that he must exempt Flavius from his diagnosis of general depravity when Flavius, in another role reversal, and in a moment to which I will return in my conclusion, shares what little gold he has remaining with his two fellow servants before wandering off to find Timon in the woods to offer him what he has left in order to allow Timon to spend it on paying Flavius to be his steward again – an extraordinary moment in an extraordinary play, which turns on its head the very basis of the fiduciary relations that more conventionally obtain between masters and servants: ‘whilst I have gold, I’ll be his steward still’ says Flavius (4.2.20ff). The play then, offers what appears to be internally contradictory evidence on the question of Timon’s generosity, showing Timon to request (once, in its exactitude,) a gift back, and also fixing his giving as ‘unwise’; but ‘not ignoble’. This litotic formulation –‘not ignoble’ – is worthy of More’s Utopia (see McCutcheon 1985), a coincidental congruence of rhetoric, perhaps, but one which might also encourage us to explore the presence of a utopian subtext to the play’s representation of giving, its gestures towards what, in another play, Coriolanus longingly describes as ‘a world elsewhere’ (Coriolanus, 3.3.144, in Shakespeare, 1997a). But to arrive at this subtext, we must first follow through the implications of another avenue. I want now to turn to the question of what Timon gives, and to consider why that matters. We hear of a number of different items in the course of the play that are given by Timon to his ‘friends’: dogs and horses, plate and silver, food and jewels. But most of all, we hear of money. ‘The dog coins gold’: Timon gives, that is, ultimately alienable gifts (though he accepts the notionally inalienable, at least from him: the poet’s poem, the painter’s painting). Why should the play establish this dichotomy between what Timon gives and what he receives, and why does that difference in kind matter? These questions have no single answer, depending as they do both on the way that gifts function in the world of the play, and on the significations of money in the text. The gifts of others, of the poet, especially, and the painter, serve in an obvious sense to indicate their hypocrisy, poet (certainly) and painter (probably) including in the items they offer to Timon representations of Timon himself. This does not, contrary to the assumption of many readers, indicate primarily Timon’s susceptibility to flattery (although it may do that too); rather, it points to the misuse of the gift by those thus giving it. According to Georg Simmel, ‘the gift of a specific object, . . . always, through its content, its choice and its use, retains an element of the person who has given it’
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(Simmel 1990: 376); for some contemporary gift theorists, that retention of an element of the donee is fundamental to the purpose and meaning of the gift, which is to express an emotional relationship between donor and donee. Thus for example, Lee Anne Fennell argues that ‘a gift is not intended to confer wealth on the other party in the manner of an ordinary commodity. Instead, the intent is to add richness and depth to the recipient’s life, and by extension, to the donor’s life as well’ (Lee Anne Fennell 2002, 90). In embedding such representations of Timon in their respective works of art, the poet and the painter purport to express in their gift a personal meaning or value in an exchange which masquerades as gift-giving, but ought in reality to be a purely commercial exchange. These gifts thus operate in the play as a parodic representation of the gift, trading as they do on the notion of a personal relation between giver and receiver which is false. This is relatively obvious, but the case becomes more complex when we consider the nature of Timon’s gifts. For those who believe that the gift ought to be inalienable, expressing something of the relationship between donor and donee, the gift of money is unsatisfactory.5 Simmel for instance, writes that ‘the natural gift’ (by which he means the inalienable one): can be returned in kind whereas the money gift very rapidly becomes not ‘the same’, but only equal in value. Thus the emotional relationship that might have continued between the gift and the giver . . . is weakened or negated. A gift in the form of money distances and estranges the gift from the giver much more definitely. (Simmel 1990, 333) And Viviana A. Zelizer likewise holds that money is an inadequate gift because, being alienable, it cannot display that knowledge of recipient and relationship which inalienable objects almost always do in gift-giving practice in most societies (Zelizer, 1994). But for others, the alienable gift is the more perfect for that very reason, since the fact that you are intended to buy something else with it renders it immune to the ‘keeping while giving’ characteristic of most gifts, wherein the donor invests something of himself in the object which he gives away. Put slightly differently, if, as Simmel had it, gifts of money such as Timon’s, being alienable, can never constitute an ‘adequate mediator of personal relationships’ (Simmel, quoted in Osteen 2002, 237), we might proceed to the question of whether that mediation of personal relations ought to carry the morally positive weight that Simmel accords it. Should the
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ideal gift be imagined as necessarily embedded in the context of a personal relation between two people, (or, by extension, a clan, a tribe, or even a nation) only operative in a social world imagined as constructed primarily, at least insofar as gift-giving is concerned, as a network of relations between discrete individuals who are linked by certain fundamental ties? And we might also ask whether Timon, play and character, see ideal generosity as functioning in this way. ‘The difference between a word and a piece of money’, says James Buchan in Frozen Desire: An Enquiry into the Meaning of Money: is that money … will always symbolize different things to different people: a banknote may describe to one person a drink in a pub, a fairground ride to another, to a third a diamond ring, an act of charity to a fourth, relief from prosecution to a fifth and, to a sixth, simply the sensations of comfort or security. For money is incarnate desire. (Buchan 1997, 19) For Ventidius, money indeed symbolizes relief from prosecution, for the other lords, it represents the ability to buy a pack of greyhounds or, in the perverse economy attendant on Timon’s generosity, wealth itself: for them, a dog coins gold. In other words, money is, for these characters, the ‘symbolic equivalent’ of what they desire, for that, of course is what money is: it is a symbol of value, which ensures the capacity of all commodities to achieve, in appropriate measure, equivalence with any other commodity. I have grave doubts whether either of the poles of this term – the ‘symbolic equivalent’ can hold with such satisfactory accuracy to less material and more internalized properties – such as the pleasures of generosity, for instance. ‘Symbolic’ – of what? ‘Equivalent’ – to what? I suspect that only money can be the ‘symbolic equivalent’ of anything; that feelings and emotions, can be neither adequately symbolic, nor appropriately equivalent, to any material object, nor, even, to words, or to language, as King Lear found out to his cost in another play (Shakespeare 1977b). The term certainly becomes very difficult to apply to Timon, even in so far as money is concerned. His desire is for friendship, but he conceptualizes the relation between money and friendship quite differently from the way in which his courtiers conceptualize the relation between money and the objects they desire. For Timon, money offers him not the ability to buy friends but to express friendship; his wish is that he might be poorer so that he might allow his ‘friends’ to express their goodwill, as he, rich, can express his. It is that (generous) impulse which underlies
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his comfort to Flavius when Timon realizes he has lost all, which Flavius, apparently more wordly wise, comments upon later when he marvels at the capacity of men ‘to live / but in a dream of friendship’ (4.2.33–4). And whereas for the courtiers money can and does operate as the symbolic equivalent of their desire, for Timon, it cannot, not merely because unlike his friends’ desire, his own is not for commodities, but also because his intention in giving is not one of exchange. With Ventidius’s five talents, Ventidius buys release from prison; for money to have the same ideal operation for Timon, he would have to conceive it as buying friendship. The point here is not the failure of this transaction – money, or gifts, for friendship: a bad deal in any circumstances – but rather its attenuation in Timon’s imagination, wherein ‘friendship’ is constructed in terms of a rather different economy. ‘O you gods’, says Timon: What need we have any friends, if we should ne’er have need of ‘em? They were the most needless creatures living should we ne’er have use for ‘em, and would most resemble sweet instruments hung up in cases, that keeps their sounds to themselves. Why, I have often wish’d myself poorer that I might come nearer to you. We are born to do benefits; and what better or properer can we call our own than the riches of our friends? (1.2.92–103) Timon’s ‘dream of friendship’ that is, is constructed on an ethics of need which involves the ideal of donation that others may in turn donate, without (pace Mauss) the obligation on the part of the non-needy to receive. Within this imagined economy, wants become blessings (2.2.178) because need allows others to indulge in generosity. The operation of this imagined economy is thus predicated on the alienability of the gift, so that the donee can, in time, give the gift away again. The more alienable the gift, the less operative such an economy (were Timon to give his friends portraits of themselves, for instance, such gifts would be useless for the purpose he thinks that gifts should serve). The alienable quality of Timon’s gifts, then, engages with the play’s interrogation of generosity more fundamentally than may at first be apparent, and it also throws up certain problems for simple conceptions of reciprocity. ‘Reciprocity’, Marshall Sahlins wrote, ‘is contract pure and mainly secular, sanctioned perhaps by a mixture of considerations of which a carefully calculated self-interest is not the least’; ‘every exchange’ he goes on some pages later, ‘as it embodies some coefficient of sociability, cannot be understood in its material terms
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apart from its social terms’ (Sahlins 1974, 180 and 183). Sahlins, of course, has a complex conception of reciprocity which for him is not a ‘one-for-one exchange’, but ‘a whole class of exchanges, a continuum of forms’ (ibid., 190). The spectrum of reciprocity he proposes ranges from what he calls ‘negative reciprocity’, unsociable in the extreme, encompassing self-interested seizure of the property of others; through ‘balanced reciprocity’, which is more or less direct exchange; to ‘generalized reciprocity’ – the gift – (which might also, he acknowledges, be better characterized as ‘indefinite reciprocity’), wherein the ‘time and worth of reciprocation are not alone conditional on what was given by the donor, but also upon what he will need, and when’ (ibid., 194–5). The weak claim that I would wish to make here is that within this spectrum, Timon’s ideal of generosity best approximates, at the very least, an extreme form of Sahlin’s ‘generalized reciprocity’, although ‘generalized and indefinite reciprocity’ would be a better characterisation of the matter insofar as the play is concerned, expressing as it does the implicit interest in the operation of generosity in time which is embodied in the pronunciation of Timon’s name.6 And in this sense, Timon’s ‘dream of friendship’ – or ideal of a very generalized and indefinite reciprocity whose operation is conditional on what the donor needs, and when – is tacitly endorsed in the play in Flavius’s own act of generosity. ‘Whilst I have gold I’ll be his steward still’ is an impulse, and an intended action, which offers the play’s audience one material instance of an individual who is not immediately implicated in the play’s main gift-giving action attempting to put into practice, later, and in his own way, the ethos of Timon’s desire: to give, that others may (continue to) give. It is this, too, which would explain the problem with talents in the play, whose value otherwise appears to inflate in a manner accountable otherwise only by recourse to the unfinished nature of the text.7 ‘Generalized reciprocity’ – and ‘indefinite reciprocity’ – are useful concepts, but they do beg the question of their own limits, social or temporal. ‘Generalized reciprocity’ must, by definition, be operative only within the confines of given social groups; ‘indefinite reciprocity’ similarly embodies the presupposition that you get something back, from someone you gave to, at some time, even if that return prestation arrives many years later. But what if you never did, or didn’t want to? What if you gave to people who had nothing to do with you, no intrinsic connection to your family, to your social class, to your nationality, race, or creed? What, in other words, if you gave, like Timon does, to everyone and to anybody: ‘all that pass by’ Timon’s gates, according to the Steward, are invited in (2.1.11). I’d like, then, to lodge a second, stronger claim.
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In inviting ‘all that pass by’ into his home, Timon’s ‘dream of friendship’ shows itself to be a dream that is not attached to the particularities of the relationship between two individuals. And in situating Timon’s generosity, however momentarily, in a context of such indiscrimination, the play gestures towards a sense of the self and its relations to others which is almost-but-not-quite unimaginable, at least on a grand scale, to us in our particular moment of history (see Osteen 2002, 243). This ideal self is not defined through the relation between the self and another, single, individual but in the relation between the self and a broad, and unspecific, sense of a community of human need. The courtiers are morally contemptible in their refusal to help Timon when he needs them to, and that the play unequivocally condemns them for their ingratitude goes without saying: some gifts, if ‘freely given’ can and do entail an obligation to reciprocity, and that’s not a bad thing. But neither is it the only thing, the end of the story. To me (am I alone in this?) no return prestation from any one of those courtiers would satisfy the aesthetic economy of this drama. Flavius’s gift does, partially, because he has nothing, and because he is a servant, so his impulse to generosity is more unexpected and, precisely and importantly, not demanded: he gives, or tries to, freely ever, and has received nothing from Timon but a job. But the play also generates a more utopian desire, for a different generosity, one unimpeded by any clear sense of reciprocity. Two ‘strangers’ appear, briefly, at the absolute centre of the play, to comment on Lucius’s failure to observe the obligations of reciprocity. Both lament that failure, and the first stranger ends the scene by commenting that ‘had his necessity made use of me, / I would have put my wealth into donation, / And the best half should have return’d to him, / So much I love his heart’ (3.2.84–7).8 One legitimate response to this sentiment would be to ask of the stranger: ‘why don’t you donate, anyway then, without being asked?’ Or, in other terms, ‘reason not the need’ – not Timon’s own, which demands recognition, but the need to be asked, either directly, or within a culture of reciprocity. It doesn’t really matter whether the stranger’s comment is read as a comment on Athens, or yet another instance of hypocrisy: neither reading compromises the comment’s capacity to generate that different desire in the audience. The play might have played its way to a tragi-comic conclusion (for want of a better generic phrase) had it invoked the actuality of the gift of a stranger. It doesn’t. But its possible worlds – its worlds elsewhere – inhere in the desires that it is capable of provoking, desires for a better way, a different outcome. It is that impulse which underlies the play’s final, strange figure of speech: the injunction to ‘make each / Prescribe to
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other, as each other’s leech’ (5.4.83–4). What economy is at work in this simile? It ostensibly invokes, I suppose, a kind of reciprocity, but it comes to rest in the notion of the general rather than the individual good. ‘As each other’s leech’: here the boundaries between the natures of taking and giving become so fluid, the temporal and social delimitations of reciprocity so amorphous, as to challenge the notion of reciprocity itself. In this context, the last words I will quote in this essay from the play are Flavius’s who, in parting from his fellow servants and sharing with them his meagre portion, tells them: ‘Good fellows all, / The latest of my wealth I’ll share amongst you, / Wherever we shall meet, for Timon’s sake / Let’s yet be fellows . . . Let each take some; / Nay, put out all your hands (4.2.22–9, emphasis mine). On that tacit, but so deft and so subtle, allusion to he who does not want to take from one who has so little I – almost – rest my case. But we need a different ethos of the gift. And in that spirit, I conclude with an anecdote from the ‘real’ world. Some years ago, I went out for a drink with a friend. She asked me whether I had any money to invest, telling me that her brother, who worked in the Stock Market, was advising her to invest in a particular company. I did have a couple of thousand pounds sitting in the bank, but being a coward in such matters, couldn’t bring myself to do any dabbling, though in the pub I hummed and ha’d before concluding that I was too timid to take a flutter. So I didn’t do anything about it. Some months later, we went out again, and she said to me that the shares she had invested were doing incredibly well. ‘So yours are too’, she then said; ‘your hundred pounds’ worth of shares are now worth 1050’. ‘What shares?’ I replied: ‘I didn’t buy any.’ ‘No’, she said, ‘but I invested 100 pounds’ worth in your name, so now you have to decide what to do with it. Do you want to leave the money in the account, or do you want to take it now?’ I said, ‘Look, you can’t do this, you can’t just give me that much money.’ ‘Why not?’ she said, ‘it’s yours: I took the original hundred pounds out that I had put in; the profit, 950 pounds, belongs to you’. ‘What would you have done if the share price had crashed?’ I asked her; ‘oh in that case’, she said, ‘I would never have told you’. In the end I took about half of it, she came over to my house with 450 quid in her hand, and I spent a substantial part of on taking her and a bunch of friends out to dinner on my birthday, and, I’m ashamed to say, to her considerable embarrassment, explained to the collected company where the price of the meal had come from. Clearly, I felt the need to write this event into some kind of reciprocity but isn’t that my
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fault, or misconception, or lack of imagination? (That certainly was not what she wanted.) And, as I told her after I wrote this concluding paragraph, her final (and absolutely unintended, even unimagined) prestation was the conclusion to this essay, which neither of us recognized at the time. Now, that was a gift. Wasn’t it?9
Notes 1. For instance Rasmussen (1985): ‘Timon must come to an awareness of this aspect of human nature on his own’. Katherine Duncan-Jones comes just short of associating Shakespeare himself with Timon the misanthropist (Duncan-Jones 2001, 30–1). 2. In some respects, the closest reading to my own is Ken Jackson’s, who juxtaposes the text, as do I, with Derrida’s Given Time. In Timon’s claim that he ‘there’s none/Can truly say he gives, if he receives’ Timon, according to Jackson, ‘voices the Derridean desire for the true gift’ (Jackson 2001, 49). Jackson is one of the few critics who takes Timon’s desire for the possibility of generosity serious, and who focusses his account on Timon’s giving per se, rather than on the figure of Timon himself. For Jackson, Timon’s belief in a ‘bond in men’ does not contradict his desire to break free from an economy of exchange’ (Jackson 2001, 53). But because Jackson accepts Derrida’s formulation of the impossibility of the gift he is unable to locate in Timon of Athens any fulfillment of the utopian impulse towards a better world. For Jackson, Shakespeare reveals that ‘in Timon’s renunciation of the economy of exchange . . . lies the religious movement of his misanthropy’ ( Jackson 2001, 59); and the play itself exhibits and demonstrates the truth of Derrida’s assertion of the impossibility of the gift. This is one of the points at which our two readings of the play diverge. 3. On usury in the play, see Draper, who argues that it is the ‘key’ to the text (Draper 1934, 29). 4. But not without risk, as ingratitude generates the sack of Athens. 5. Mauss claimed that ‘the spirit of gift-exchange is characteristic of societies which have ... not yet reached the stage of pure individual contract, the money market, sale proper, fixed price, and weighed and coined money’ (Mauss 1967, 43). There remains more to say about Timon’s appearance at this particular juncture of history, which sees the emergence of an economy increasingly based not only on coined money, but more pertinently, on systems of credit. (See Waswo, Chapter 1 in the present volume.) 6. Many thanks to Gordon Campbell of the University of Leicester for his help in confirming the correct pronunciation of Timon (to rhyme with ‘Simon’). 7. Monetary inflation in the text, according to H. J. Oliver, its 1959 Arden editor ‘probably clinches the case for incompleteness’ (Shakespeare 1959, xxvii). ‘The author of Timon’, he writes, ‘apparently did not know the value of the Attic talent’ of which ‘contradictory ideas remain in the play’. The talent gets hugely inflated over the course of the drama. Timon gives three to his servant, and five to Ventidius, (already a very considerable amount) but later sends to
150 The Gift of a Stranger individual Lords for 50 talents each and to the Senate for a thousand. ‘One might like to think’ says Oliver, ‘that the dramatist was emphasising the sheer irresponsibility of Timon in all matters financial, and perhaps that was the intention, but the sums in question are almost too absurd even for that’ (ibid.). It may well be the case, as Oliver suggests here, that the confusion over the number of talents reflects the incompleteness of the text: in at least one case, as Oliver remarks, the wording of the text has ‘so many talents’, suggesting, he claims (Shakespeare 1959, xxviii), that the author had not yet made up his mind about the precise quantity he wished to assert. But inflation may also be germane to the meaning of the text here, a necessary corollary to the play’s meditation on the nature of giving. For what such inflation does is tacitly to deny the principle of approximate ‘equivalence’, symbolic or actual, that lies at the heart of every account of the gift that would insist on its embeddedness in an economy of reciprocity. Inflation, indeed, is in some respects embedded in (one) logic of the gift, as the potlatch indicates. But for Timon to ask for much more than he has given out, (and an amount he cannot hope to repay) is, surely, for Timon to ask his fellow Athenians to give him something, as much as he needs, at this particular moment in the history of his life, irrespective of the amount he has given them? (And if he is indeed asking for more than he has given out, incidentally, he can be no potlatch chief). 8. My understanding of these lines is the precise opposite of Jackson’s (see Jackson 2001, 56). 9. I would like to thank the Early Modern Group at Keele University for the opportunity to deliver an earlier version of this paper, and especially Jim McLaverty for arguing with me about whether or not I was asking the right question. Karen Britland, Roger Pooley, and Lucy Munro, all of Keele, were all generous with their time and comments. Another version of the paper was delivered at the Third Ralahine Conference on Utopian Studies held at the University of Limerick; I thank Alexis Kirshbaum of Peter Lang publishers, and Thomas Karshan of the University of Oxford for coming to listen, and for their excellent company afterwards.
References Adelman, Janet. 1992. Suffocating Mothers. New York: London: Routledge. Buchan, James. 1997. Frozen Desire: An Enquiry into the Meaning of Money. London: Picador. Callari, Antonio. 2002. The Ghost of the Gift. The Unlikelihood of Economics. In The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines, ed. Mark Osteen, 249–65. London and New York: Routledge. Cavell, Stanley. 1987. Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chorost, Michael. 1991. Biological Finance in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. English Literary Renaissance. 21. 3: 349–70. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. Given Time I: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Draper, J. W. 1934. The Theme of Timon of Athens. M. L. R. 2: 20–31.
Susan Bruce 151 Duncan-Jones, Katherine. 2001. Shakespeare, Scrooge of Stratford. New Statesman, 26 March, 30–1. Fennell, Lee Anne. 2002. Unpacking the Gift: Illiquid good and empathetic dialogue. In The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines, ed. Mark Osteen, 85–101. London and New York: Routledge. Jackson, Ken. 2001. ‘One wish’: or, The possibility of the Impossible: Derrida, the gift, and God in Timon of Athens. Shakespeare Quarterly. 52. 1: 34–66. Kahn, Coppélia. 1987. ‘Magic of Bounty’: Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage and Maternal Power. Shakespeare Quarterly. 38. 1: 34–57. Mauss, Marcel. 1967. The Gift, trans. Ian Cunnison, intro E. E. Evans Pritchard. New York and London: Norton. McCutcheon, Elizabeth. 1985. The Language of Utopian Negation: Book II of More’s Utopia. In Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Bononiensis, ed. Schoeck, Richard J. Binghamton. New York: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies. Osteen, Mark. 2002. Questions of the Gift. In The Question of the Gift: Essays Across Disciplines, ed. Mark Osteen, 1–41. London and New York: Routledge. Prendergast, Maria Teresa Michaela. 2000. ‘Unmanly Melancholy’: Lack, Fetishism and Abuse in Timon of Athens. Criticism. 42. 2: 207–27. Rasmussen, Eric. 1985. Shakespeare’s Use of Everyman in Timon of Athens. AN&Q May/June. Reid, Stephen A. 1969. ‘I am Misanthropos’: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. Psychoanalytic Review 56: 274–93. Sahlins, Marshall David. 1974. Stone Age Economics. London: Tavistock. Shakespeare, William. 1959. Timon of Athens, ed. H. J. Oliver. London: Arden. —. 1997a. Coriolanus. In The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington. New York: Longman. —. 1997b. King Lear. In The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington. New York: Longman. Simmel, Georg. 1990. The Philosophy of Money. London and New York: Routledge. Wilson Knight, G. 1930. The Wheel of Fire. London: Methuen. Zelizer, Viviana A. Rotman. 1994. The Social Meaning of Money. New York: Basic Books.
8 Spend, Spend, Spend: Expenditure and Waste in Hegel, Bataille, Derrida Roy Sellars
And I said, ‘I’m going to spend, spend, spend, that’s what I’m going to do.’ It was just an off the cuff sort of thing. — Vivian Nicholson, describing her response to the press on arriving in London after her husband Keith had won the football pools, 1961 (Nicholson 1977, 89)1 Today, for example, we drove to an abattoir, i.e., a slaughterhouse [einem Abattoir, d. h. Schlachthaus]. In what city in the whole world would I go visit a slaughterhouse? But this is one of the noteworthy things that Paris still owes Napoleon – like a hundred other great things. . . . We had already visited the bourse – likewise set up by Napoleon. What a temple [welcher Tempel]! — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, to his wife Marie, 30 September 1827 (Hegel 1984, 660, corrected; Hegel 1969–81, 3: 197–8)2 O know, sweet love, I always write of you, And you and love are still my argument. So all my best is dressing old words new, Spending again what is already spent. . . . — William Shakespeare, Sonnet 76.9–12 (Shakespeare 1977) For much of his adult life, G. W. F. Hegel complained of lacking funds. Disdainful as he was of Brotgelehrte, students preoccupied by the merely 152
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vocational and remunerative (Pinkard 2000, 364 and 504), Hegel himself was not free of the necessity to earn his own bread. As if subject to all the contingencies of the wage slave, he associates working with cursing: ‘To work is to destroy or to curse [fluchen] the world,’ he writes, cursing, in one of the fragments labelled by his editors as being from Hegel’s ‘Wastebook’ (in German) since the fragments fall extravagantly outside his work production as such (Hegel 2002, 247; Hegel 1969–79, 2: 547, 591–2). Given this concept of labour as a postlapsarian, violent and sweaty process, resentment was bound to be a risk. At times he seemed to fear that his ‘whole work’ would be ‘begun, continued, and ended, under . . . a great want of money’, as the hack narrator of Swift’s Tale of a Tub puts it (Swift 1984, 81; though unlike the hack, Hegel does not insist that his reader duplicate such penurious conditions in order to be able to read his work). Hegel’s wife was 21 years younger than he, and as he got older, he worried increasingly about pension funds (see Pinkard 2000, 413–14, on the terms of his move to Berlin). Even the fact that in 1818 he finally became Professor Ordinarius at the recently founded University of Berlin could not settle these financial worries, for a widow’s pension was only guaranteed if he were to die in his Chair – which, given the prevailing political instabilities, could not be taken for granted (Pinkard 2000, 506; see Hegel 1984, 576). It had been a long path to Berlin, repeatedly marked if not marred by potentially wasteful contingency, and indeed only a path at all with the benefits of hindsight. After his studies in Tübingen, Hegel had begun to work as Hofmeister (a live-in private tutor) to a wealthy family in Berne, where he found himself caught in a non-dialectical opposition between the family and the servants, barely able to earn the respect of either. Disgusted with what he saw as the corruption of the Bernese oligarchy, the young Hegel took a kind of revenge. His very first publication is a translation of and commentary on a pamphlet (the Vertrauliche Briefe) attacking Berne and promoting the rights of the oppressed inhabitants of Vaud, who were subject to Berne. They paid very low taxes (Abgaben), but tax relief, Hegel comments sharply, is no compensation for the Vaudois’ loss of freedom; the very prevalence of such a calculation shows, to his grief, ‘how much less importance was attached to the fact that one enjoyed no civil laws at all than to the possibility of the loss of a few thalers yearly’ (Hegel 2002, 127; Hegel 1969–79, 1: 258, 629). Hegel was already preoccupied with the tensions between wealth and freedom, and what he saw in Berne in this respect left him deeply dissatisfied (Pinkard 2000, 55–7). So did the Bernese Alps, when he took a holiday there in 1796. The eye finds no resting point, the imagination no play, and the
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reason nothing to admire, he complains in his diary of the trip; in contrast to the effusions of Romantic tourists for whom the mountains are sublime, regarding these ‘eternally dead masses’ gives Hegel nothing but the tedious idea that ‘it is so [es ist so]’ (Hegel 1969–79, 1: 618, my translation; see Harris 1972, 159–61). The Alps remain the Alps, inertly positive, and such mere natural actuality offers no return on Hegel’s investment as a tourist spectator or philosopher. One may speculate that he is so bored by the Alps because they spectacularly lack exchange value or surplus value, their positivity remaining beyond speculation. Somewhat later, Wallace Stevens’s Alpine botanist laments that ‘Marx has ruined Nature, / For the moment’ (‘Botanist on Alp [No. 1]’ 4–5, Stevens 1954). But Hegel’s moment came before that of Marx. Hegel published his anti-Bernese tract anonymously, in Frankfurt, where he had obtained another position as Hofmeister, this time in the family of a wine merchant. During this period his father died and he thus came into a substantial inheritance which might have established him for some time, were it not for the effects of inflation (Pinkard 2000, 83 and 676 n. 80, explaining the value of a thaler). As it was, he moved to Jena and then to Bamberg before becoming Rector of the Nuremberg Gymnasium and marrying into a patrician family, the von Tuchers; Hegel himself remained a non-von (Pinkard 2000, 300). At last, in 1816, two years before moving to Berlin, he received the Ruf (call) to become a university professor, in Heidelberg – but he continued to worry about money. After all, doing speculative philosophy was a very costly business (that at any rate was one line of pleading he pursued). Francis Bacon, in ‘Of Expense’, had warned: ‘A man ought warily to begin charges which once begun will continue: but in matters that return not he may be more magnificent’ (Bacon 1996, 397, the last sentence of this essay). Hegel allowed himself to be quite ‘magnificent’ with regard to card-playing (L’Hombre and, later, Whist), the Lottery, and the consumption of wine, for example: all matters which might ‘return not’ but which in fact do tend to ‘continue’ because of their addictive power. He argues that it is habit (Gewohnheit), the learned force of domestication, which should control the wastefulness of such caprices and help the Spirit, living with itself, to recognize its self-determination and to think purely (see Gasché 1994, 171–5). But it is not an easy matter, as habit becomes habit, to recognize the difference between vital expenditure and waste. Even when a second nature is thus established, its daily operations are never without risk. Hegel attached such importance to wine that he continued to take charge of ordering it (by the bottle and the barrel) after he was married, and
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the surviving household accounts show that the outlay involved was significant, sometimes excessively so.3 In a letter of 18 August 1806, we glimpse ‘Professor Hegel’ promising to pay his wine merchants with expected royalties from The Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel 1984, 702–3). Quality as well as quantity was at stake here (Pinkard 2000, 116–17 and 433–4). For the three hundredth anniversary of the Augsburg Confession, in 1830, Hegel was called upon to write a speech (Pinkard 2000, 627–31). He took the opportunity to attack the inversion of freedom he found in Catholicism, to praise the Reformation, and in particular to highlight the Protestant values of industry and enterprise. He had a friend to help him with his Latin for the occasion (if help were needed), and to help him down several bottles of Lacrima Christi, a fine Neapolitan wine grown on ground that was supposedly watered by Christ’s tear at the fall of Lucifer from heaven. No doubt such Catholic superstition, combined with the spirit of the wine itself, was inspirational in effect.4 Hegel loved to play cards (Pinkard 2000, 27 and 463), and to gamble in the state Lottery (Zahlenlotto) of both Bavaria and Prussia (ibid., 434 and 506). We can truly speak of Lottery fever in this period, the widespread nature of which was one reason for its being banned in 1800.5 What does one do with Lottery fever if one cannot participate in a state Lottery? For the sake of his philosophical career, or rather in order to have a chance of a career, Hegel had to gamble on writing a book. He had promised one, and in 1806 he finally delivered: The Phenomenology of Spirit. At the time he was working in Jena; Napoleon’s army was working just outside Jena. This was awkward. On the one hand, Napoleon’s army had seemed to be in the vanguard of Spirit, and Hegel retained a deep admiration for the figure of Napoleon, whom he glimpsed the day before the climactic battle. On the other hand, the proximity of foreign and hostile troops was not conducive to finishing a book on schedule, nor to sending mail; he worried about the contract with his publisher, on which he was financially dependent (see Hegel 1984, 97–100 and 113; Pinkard 2000, 227–30). When he returned after a brief evacuation, then, his feelings were mixed, and he found that the Napoleonic soldiers had rifled through his manuscripts. From a local friend’s house, he wrote to Niethammer, his long-suffering supporter: The money I am to receive [from the publisher of the Phenomenology] will fully enable me to get through the winter without hardship. If one of the packages of the manuscript is completely lost, my presence [in Bamberg, with his publisher and Niethammer] will be imperative. The knaves have, to be sure, messed up my papers like
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lottery tickets [wie Lotterielose],6 so that it will cause me the greatest trouble to dig out what is necessary. How ardently I hope for some news about the matter! I am compelled, however, to ask you to send me money without fail. I need it most urgently. (Hegel 1984, 116; Hegel 1969–81, 1: 124) Hegel evidently did manage to dig out what was necessary, and the Phenomenology can be read as a systematic attempt to recuperate mess, waste, scattering and chance into itself. My suggestion, then, is that Hegel’s writings are precisely Lotterielose, lottery tickets. ‘Hegel’ is the name not just for a system of concepts but also for a lottery, in so far as he is a writer, unable fully to master the writing from which the concepts are abstracted. Furthermore, his writing continues to be habit-forming for countless hopeful readers after him. It could be you (as the advertising slogan for the current UK National Lottery had it), as long as you participate (see Reith 2002, 98–104). My telling a story about Hegel aims to make palpable some specific forms of contingency which, if they register in the order of the conceptual at all, do so in the monstrous guise of risk or waste. My aim is certainly not to present a pseudo-Hegelian triadic progress from Hegel to Bataille to Derrida. Contrary to what may be read in introductory betting guides to modern theory, Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida do not proffer concepts opposing Hegelian concepts, for the concept of the concept (Begriff) is already Hegelian and has them and us in its grasp (Griff). It is futile to attempt to oppose the idealism of the Spirit when Hegelian idealism incorporates such opposition as a structuring principle of its own. Nor can it be a matter of questioning Hegel in the global marketplace of ideas, for Hegel helped to write the rules of that marketplace. It is rather a matter of the matter of Hegel’s writings as so many Lose, tickets that have always already been entered and that may or may not pay off – not just on the level of the Satz (the ‘sentence’ or ‘thesis’) but also of the clause, the subordinate clause, the phrase, the word, the syllable, the phoneme, the grapheme, and the letter in its very divisibility. Money plays a very important role in the Hegelian system. Hegel’s concept, in abbreviated form, is that money is ‘the abbreviation of all external necessity’, as one of his Berlin aphorisms has it (Hegel 1969–79, 11: 565, my translation; see Shell 1993, Chapter 5). To undo this abbreviation would demand a good deal of textual labour. Some years before arriving at his Chair in Berlin, Hegel in Jena had noted in his Wastebook
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(the collection of fragments from which I recycled a quotation above) a rather less refined view of money: It is a beautiful trait that in Germany one has and shows such contempt for money [das Geld]. The Germans invent an origin for it which could not be more contemptible and base. One represents it for the eye in figures which are called Money-sh–rs [Geldsch–r, sic]. A mythological connection is supposed to lie at the base of it. (Hegel 1969–79, 2: 548, my translation; Hegel’s emphasis)7 Whether or not his professed admiration for the beauty of such Germanic contempt is genuine, it is clear that the mythological figures represented are shitters (Scheisser) of money. Hegel adds that even a sausage, a Bratwurst, could not be imagined as having such a base origin – surely an ironic image in context, given that Wurst in German can also be used to describe the excrement of dogs or children.8 However, if this second aphorism appears to be a contemptuous rejoinder to the first, on money as the abbreviation of external necessity, it must be stressed that Hegel’s work thrives and prospers on such contradiction. His theory of excretion, in the second part of the Encyclopaedia, gives us a beautiful example of overcoming contradiction while recuperating loss and waste to the ultimate profit of Spirit. Excretion turns out to be a figure of the dialectic at work (Hegel 1970, 402–6). Excrement for Hegel is nothing but recognized error, such that the organism concerned, ‘recognizing its error, gets rid of [wegwirft] its entanglement with outside things’ which appear to contradict it (Hegel 1970, 405; Hegel 1969–79, 9: 492); own-ness or possession is thereby redefined and the organism acquires the vital potential to develop by overcoming its own process. Excretion is highly educational.9 Such a process of overcoming process naturally has to be repeated, but Hegel, as a habitual gambler, remains prepared to face the entanglement and risk at stake. Even to say or write I, as I just did, entails a performative gamble, Hegel famously argues in the Phenomenology: The ‘I’ [Ich] is this particular ‘I’ – but equally the universal ‘I’; its manifesting is also at once the externalization and vanishing of this particular ‘I’ [dieses Ichs], and as a result the ‘I’ remains in its universality. The ‘I’ that utters itself is heard or perceived; it is an infection [eine Ansteckung] in which it has immediately passed into unity with those for whom it is a real existence [für welche es da ist], and is a universal
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self-consciousness. That it is perceived or heard means that its real existence dies away [darin ist sein Dasein selbst unmittelbar verhallt]; this its otherness [dies sein Anderssein] has been taken back into itself; and its real existence is just this: that as a self-conscious Now, as a real existence, it is not a real existence, and through this vanishing it is a real existence. (Hegel 1977, 308–9; Hegel 1969–79, 3: 376)10 Now you hear it, now you don’t; Hegel risks writing nonsense literature too. As soon as the I appears, in language, it finds itself divided, alienated, remaining only in so far as its own specific this-ness disappears. In order for it to be saved, as Spirit, it must risk being utterly lost. The particular ticket has been entered, but how could one calculate its chances of really existing? This monstrous form of incalculability suggests why Hegel was so cautious, sometimes contemptuous, about irony – as in the Introduction to his lectures on aesthetics (Hegel 1975a, 1: 63–9; Hegel 1969–79, 13: 92–9).11 He recognizes the infectious power of the (ironic) negative, and indeed sets out to harness it for energy production, in the dialectic of the I and elsewhere (e.g. Hegel 1977, 18–19; Hegel 1969–79, 3: 35–6); yet at the same time Hegel fears that, once at work, irony might no longer be accommodated by the teleology of speculative philosophy at all. Put more simply, irony at work spreads, and risks defeating work as such. ‘Irony’ is another name for an unavoidable risk of infection and loss without end: the economy of the I, for instance, as based on expenditure which may prove hopelessly wasteful. If I am making myself heard or perceived, I am also spreading the infection.12 It transpires that gambling with signs is no personal foible but rather a structural necessity. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel outlines three forms of taking possession (Hegel 1942, 46; Hegel 1969–79, 7: 119), of which the third, he writes, is the most perfect, namely possession through designation – that is, planting a sign of some sort in order to indicate the presence of personal possession. However, this designated form of possession is also risky, ambiguous and ‘very indeterminate [sehr unbestimmt]’; and Hegel reminds us that the particular, again, is an accident that disappears (Hegel 1942, 49 and 239; Hegel 1969–79, 7: 126–8). Not only can you not take it with you, you never simply had it in the first place. A few pages later, Hegel – if the writer can still be identified as possessing himself by means of this familiar metonymy – makes an explicit comparison between signs and money, systems of particulars that point us to the level of universality where value is located (Hegel 1942, 240; Hegel 1969–79, 7: 136–7).
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How is distribution of wealth to be determined? The Phenomenology had ventured a dialectic between state power and wealth, and at one moment wealth there appears to the individual as ‘the Good’.13 If wealth now ‘refuses a particular benefit and does not choose to satisfy every need, this is accidental [eine Zufälligkeit] and does not detract from its universal and necessary nature of imparting itself to all and being a universal provider’ (Hegel 1977, 303; Hegel 1969–79, 3: 370). However, this apparent eulogy of plutocracy is by no means un-ironic. Hegel makes a rare admission of defeat in a related section of the Philosophy of Right: for all his labour on the theory of possession, wealth and value, apparently intractable poverty remains – and even grows. When a critical ‘mass’ of people finds it has fallen below the poverty line, and wealth has become concentrated in the hands of a few, Hegel sees ‘the creation of a rabble of paupers [des Pöbels]’, an abject and dangerous underclass, as the inevitable result (Hegel 1942, 150; Hegel 1969–79, 7: 389). He has no solution to the disaster he describes, except to add lamely: ‘The important question of how poverty is to be abolished [wie der Armut abzuhelfen sei] is one of the most disturbing problems which agitate modern society’ (Hegel 1942, 278; Hegel 1969–79, 7: 390). It is as if, for once, we confront the limits of his system and the human cost of what falls outside it. This particular cost becomes palpable, in and through Hegel. The globalising process of Aufhebung, with capital usurping the place of Hegelian Spirit, continues apace in the twenty-first century as more and more of ‘the world’ accedes to the status of universalized commodification. How can this omnivorous pseudo-Hegelian dialectic of globalisation, accelerating under the sign of the already not yet, be resisted? Given the pressure to answer such a question with an inspiring slogan, it would be tempting simply to defer to Georges Bataille: throw things away, buy nothing, burn banknotes, cultivate non-productive expenditure, study matter as non-logical difference that has the force of a crime,14 and so forth. Gerda Reith, in her survey The Age of Chance, straightforwardly applies Bataille’s notion of wasteful expenditure to gambling, where, she claims, people play ‘for self-realisation, status and pure enjoyment’ (Reith 2002, 151): all eminently Hegelian concepts, however.15 It is not so easy to establish or maintain what she calls here a ‘non-capitalist disregard for money’. If Bataille had had a credit line at a casino to play with or a credit card to max out, it is a safe bet that global capitalism would not have been unduly troubled. Bataille writes enthusiastically of the messy sacrifice to be found at the abattoir, which had become abject for those moderns obsessed with their ‘own [propre]’
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property and ‘cleanliness [ propreté ]’ (‘Abattoir’, in Bataille 1970, 1: 205, my translations; see Hollier 1989, xi–xv). Yet the polemical force of Bataille’s intervention is somewhat muted when we recollect that Hegel himself had also visited, approvingly, the Napoleonic abattoir of Paris (see my second epigraph above). In ways too numerous and diverse to recount here, Bataille delves into base material and materialism, as if seeking an antidote to Hegelian idealism. As Allan Stoekl points out, though, Bataille runs the risk of performing a series of inversions which would leave the fluid conceptual dialectics of Hegel intact, and if Bataille manages to overcome this risk, it is by virtue not of reasoning, transcendence, or evasion, but rather of a perversely affirmative and persistent repetitiveness (Introduction to Bataille 1985, xiii–xiv).16 Hence a slogan slowly arrives after all: spend, spend, spend. It had been there all along, but it needs to be repeated – instead of paraphrasing, and thus betraying, Bataille’s argument. To put it as economically as possible, the stumbling block as far as reconceptualisation is concerned is that, as Jacques Derrida wagers in his essay on economy in Bataille and Hegel: ‘There is only one discourse, it is significative, and here one cannot get around Hegel [Hegel est ici incontournable]’ (Derrida 1967, 383; Derrida 1978, 261). Bataille, in Derrida’s detailed and sympathetic account, is doomed to an instructive kind of frustration. Derrida defers to the master of the intellectual property at stake – in so far as there is any – in a preliminary move with which his precursor Bataille could hardly have disagreed: ‘Taken one by one and immobilized outside their syntax [et immobilisés hors de leur syntaxe], all of Bataille’s concepts are Hegelian’ (Derrida 1978, 253, my emphasis; Derrida 1978, 373). If on the one hand this is a judgement of frustration or failure, on the other hand the negative ‘immobilized’ allows us a glimpse, by way of what Theodor W. Adorno calls determinate negation,17 of a mobility that syntax has always already introduced. In other words, this is not the end of the story (although it is almost the end of my abbreviation of it). As Derrida puts it, Hegel bets ‘against chance’ (Derrida 1967, 381; Derrida 1978, 260); my title, ‘Spend, Spend, Spend’, which I borrowed from Vivian Nicholson, is a gamble of a different kind. Despite the syntax of my subtitle, the main title does not designate three discrete concepts of expenditure and waste proper to Hegel, Bataille and Derrida respectively; nor should I look to Derrida for a synthesis or teleology that would provide criteria for future investments.18 My teasing title merely performs a repetition, which might be an intensification, whether of excitement or desperation; the repetition might also phrase a kind of tautologous stutter, a syntactic collapse, or what
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Derrida on the margin of a different but equally Hegelian context describes as ‘little successive jerks [secousses]’ (Derrida 1974, 11a insert; Derrida 1986, 5a insert). Such ‘jerks’ briefly interrupt context and thus reading, as if working up to an imminent spending (OED sense 15c) that would be the ejaculation of sperm. Here comes another slogan to mark this spaced-out slump, this time an apparently preposterous aphorism from Bataille’s precursor, Oscar Wilde: ‘Time is waste of money’ (Wilde 1969, 434). Wilde does not tell us whether his aphorism, in ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young’, is a philosophy or merely a phrase, and the defensive conceptualisation that often passes for reading is thereby suspended. In the meantime, there will have been waste. Expenditure and speculation are not just concepts, in a philosophical or economic sense; they also rely on the contingent sounds that the words ‘expenditure’ and ‘speculation’ themselves articulate, spout and expend in time. If the boundary between concept and word, philosophy and phrase, becomes spurious or invisible, and moreover if the potential to sprout invisible inverted commas can also infect any word with the irony that Hegel wanted to limit and direct, then from a Hegelian perspective, attention to such contingency risks being highly wasteful. In the name of infection and waste, I would like to end, more or less abruptly, by returning to the Shakespeare sonnet on love, repetition and spending from which I quoted for my third epigraph above, if indeed I have left it in the interim. My ending should preferably be read aloud. Shakespeare’s sonnets inspire love, and repetition; Shakespeare also has a role to play in the formation of the modern economy.19 The speaker of Sonnet 76 cannot but repeat himself. As Helen Vendler notes, the young man to whom the sonnet is addressed ‘is a reader who reads only for theme’, and the exhaustion of theme and argument is on prominent display; but Shakespeare ‘is a writer whose eye is on style’ (Vendler 1997, 345). The speaker laments the repetitiveness of his poetic invention, but at the same time stylishly revels in that very repetitiveness: ‘So all my best is dressing old words new, / Spending again what is already spent’ (11–12, my emphases). Rhetorical copia in the poem appears to differ fundamentally from capital: once spent, this copia is not exhausted (OED ‘spend’, sense 5) but can be spent again, anew and unaccountably, while male sexual copia, too, threatens to climax, in copious sperm, at least as often as the line is read. The next time it can be read faster, more excitedly, as the inverted stress of the opening iamb encourages: ‘Spénding | agáin. . . .’. The line also features striking alliteration: ‘Spending . . . spent’. Identifying alliteration is work almost guaranteed to lift the spirits of a literary critic – but does ‘alliteration’ designate
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a body of critical knowledge? Alliteration is often assumed to be meaningful and constructive, but can we know what it means, or rather, what it does? Instead of tying the line together and eliminating waste for the profit of a New Critical reader, the repetition of the sp may rather interrupt the syntax of the line, make it spin and prevent it from coinciding with itself. Interpretation of the line does not help much either, as even Stephen Booth acknowledges, drawing a blank for once in his meticulous editorial commentary on the sonnet (Shakespeare 1977, 265–6). Instead of being signposts for the phenomenology of Spirit, perhaps the various instances of sp (and there may well be more than one kind of sp) remain here keeping each other company in a sibilant-plosive soup or sump – more spit than spirit.20 This specific Shakespearean extravagance urges the reader to spend, spend, spend: expenditure as spectacle. I believe that reading can be a spectacular waste of money, ideally, and that is why I value it. I would like to leave you, then, with an infectious literary gift: the expense of spirit in a waste of sp.21
Notes 1. This moving autobiography was made into a BBC play of the same name, by the late Jack Rosenthal, and then into a musical (see http://www.nmpft.org.uk/ television/tvdetails.asp?id=539 and http://www.vivnicholson.co.uk). The main title of my essay is thus already a quotation, borrowed capital with which I intend to gamble. 2. In Paris as a tourist, Hegel was enthusiastically Francophile but had difficulty reading the menus and succumbed to an upset stomach (Pinkard 2000, 551–4). 3. With some professional assistance from Hegel’s editor, the accounts can be audited in Hegel 1969–81, 4. 1: 181–226 and 349–61. 4. Hegel had already got into trouble with the Catholic church for questioning their doctrine of the Eucharist; in one of his lectures he had allegedly asked what would happen if a mouse were to eat the body of the wafer (see his formal response to a charge of blasphemy, Hegel 1969–79, 11: 68–71 and 577–8; Pinkard 2000, 529–30). Hegelian Lutheranism aimed to overcome such risky entanglement in the matter of bread and wine. 5. On German attitudes to the Lottery in Hegel’s time, and for a survey of relevant historical research, see Wolfgang Weber, who does his best to explain how the game was actually played (Weber 1987, 122–3). Manfred Zollinger, in his Geschichte des Glücksspiels, comments on the massive popularity of Lotto in the period (Zollinger 1997, 24–5) and on official ambivalence to it (ibid., 252–4; see 124–5 and 302 for a different form of the game). 6. A Los is a lot or ticket, the adjective los meaning ‘gone’, ‘off’. On the etymology and history of lots, see Reith 2002, 54–60, and Brenner 1990, 1–12. 7. This aphorism is omitted from the translation now collected in Miscellaneous Writings of G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel’s ‘mythological connection’ has become recognized currency largely thanks to Sigmund Freud: see his essay ‘Character and
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8.
9. 10.
11.
12. 13. 14.
15.
16. 17. 18.
19.
Anal Erotism’ (Freud 1959; Scanlan 2005, 15–16), section two of ‘Dreams in Folklore’ (Freud and Oppenheim 1958), and ‘On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Erotism’ (Freud 1955). Freud’s main concern, in brief, was with the human cost of establishing and maintaining such currency. The same is true of the Danish pølse (‘sausage’), which helps to explain why the contemporary university system in Denmark is familiarly known as a pølsefabrik (‘sausage factory’); but the fortunes of the Denmark Corporation are a story for another occasion. (On the recent film adaptation of Hamlet that foregrounds the role of capital by moving Elsinore to Manhattan, see Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘“Parties in Converse”: Literary and Economic Dialogue in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet’, Chapter 6 in the present volume.) See my ‘Educational Remains: Back to School with Hegel (and Adorno)’, 2006, Parallax 12.3: 43–50. Compare the famous section A1 of the Phenomenology, on the dialectic of sense-certainty (Hegel 1977, 61–3; Hegel 1969–79, 3: 86–8), or Section 20 of the Logic that constitutes the first part of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia (Hegel 1975b, 29–31; Hegel 1969–79, 8: 72–5). On the dialectical economy of the this in Hegel, see Agamben 1991, 10–15. Irony is also thematized, with manifest ambivalence, in the Philosophy of Right (Hegel 1942, 101–3 and 256–8; Hegel 1969–79, 7: 277–81); but to select examples like this is to let Hegel off too lightly, since thematisation is just the kind of sanitary limitation that irony tends to disable. Sorry. The dialectic of the infected I is found in the same section of the Phenomenology, devoted to alienation and Bildung (‘education’ or ‘culture’). This last proposal, already too long-winded to be a slogan, paraphrases part of the conclusion to Bataille’s classic essay ‘The Notion of Expenditure’ (Bataille 1970, 1: 319; Bataille 1985, 129). On the role of expenditure in Bataille, see Piel, ‘Bataille and the World’ (1995). Modern sociologists of gambling often seem curiously uninterested in the existence of Hegel or in the possibility that they are rehearsing arguments and problems already current in his day. For an overview of socio-cultural approaches to modern gambling, see McMillen, ‘Understanding Gambling’ (1996); for a throwaway but all the more suggestive essay on gambling as waste, see Scanlan, ‘Combustion’ (Scanlan 2003). I am indebted to Scanlan, whose recent book On Garbage demonstrates that a new academic field has emerged in which investment will be wasted but thereby educational in the best sense (Scanlan 2005). See Botting and Wilson 1997, Introduction 16–27, and, for a sensitive reading of Bataille and Derrida on expenditure, see Blood 2002, 842–6. On determinate negation in the work of this other assiduous student of Hegel, see Jarvis 1998, 100–5. Even to paraphrase the argument of ‘From Restricted to General Economy’, as I inevitably began to do, risks immobilising its syntax. In my reading, paraphrase needs to be subjected to its own waste products. His dramatisation of the modern linkage between money and signs as systems of value is explored by Richard Waswo (Waswo 1996), whose manifold generosity it is my pleasure here to acknowledge. On the complex economy of the gift in the Sonnets, see West (1996).
164 Spend, Spend, Spend 20. I defer to the splendid feminist manifesto of Carla Lonzi entitled ‘Let’s Spit on Hegel’ (1996). There is in fact no sputum in her text, though, at least in the (abbreviated) English version of it; spit may be lost in translation. The Sanskrit sphota, meanwhile, is the undifferentiated from which linguistic meaning can spontaneously burst forth in speech (according to Nagler 1974, 13–14); I am grateful to Neil Forsyth for bringing this point up. 21. Compare Shakespeare, Sonnet 129.1–2: ‘Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action. . . .’.
References Agamben, Giorgio. 1991. Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. Trans. Karen E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt. Theory and History of Literature 78. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bacon, Francis. 1996. The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral. In Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers, 341–456. Oxford Authors. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bataille, Georges. 1970. Oeuvres complètes. Vol. 1, ed. Denis Hollier. Paris: Gallimard. —. 1985. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Trans. and ed. Allan Stoekl. Theory and History of Literature 14. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Blood, Susan. 2002. The Poetics of Expenditure. Modern Language Notes 117: 836–57. Botting, Fred and Scott Wilson. 1997. Introduction: From Experience to Economy. In The Bataille Reader, ed. Botting and Wilson, 1–34. Blackwell Readers. Oxford: Blackwell. Brenner, Reuven and Gabrielle A. Brenner. 1990. Gambling and Speculation: A Theory, a History, and a Future of Some Human Decisions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1967. De l’économie restreinte à l’économie générale: Un hegelianisme sans réserve. In L’écriture et la différence, 369–407. Tel Quel. Paris: Seuil. —. 1974. Glas. Digraphe. Paris: Galilée. —. 1978. From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve. In Writing and Difference, trans. and ed. Alan Bass, 251–77. London: Routledge. —. 1986. Glas. Trans. John P Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1955. On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Erotism. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 17: 125–33. London: Hogarth. — and David Ernst Oppenheim. 1958. Dreams in Folklore. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 12: 175–203. London: Hogarth. —. 1959. Character and Anal Erotism. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al., 9: 167–75. London: Hogarth. Gasché, Rodolphe. 1994. Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harris, H. S. 1972. Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight, 1770–1801. Oxford: Clarendon.
Roy Sellars 165 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1942. Philosophy of Right. Trans. and ed. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon. —. 1969–79. Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. 20 vols. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. —. 1969–81. Briefe von und an Hegel, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister and Friedhelm Nicolin. 4 vols. 3rd edn Philosophische Bibliothek, 235–38. Hamburg: Meiner. —. 1970. Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon. —. 1975a. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. and ed. T. M. Knox. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon. —. 1975b. Logic, trans. William Wallace, ed. J. N. Findlay. 3rd edn Oxford: Clarendon. —. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, ed. J. N. Findlay. Oxford: Clarendon. —. 1984. The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler, ed. Clark Butler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —. 2002. Miscellaneous Writings of G. W. F. Hegel, ed. Jon Stewart. SPEP Studies in Historical Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Hollier, Denis. 1989. Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge, MA: October, MIT Press. Jarvis, Simon. 1998. Adorno: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge. Lonzi, Carla. 1996. Let’s Spit on Hegel, trans. Giovanna Bellesia and Elaine Maclachlan. In Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel, ed. Patricia Jagentowicz Mills, 275–97. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. McMillen, Jan. 1996. Understanding Gambling: History, Concepts and Theories. In Gambling Cultures: Studies in History and Interpretation, ed. McMillen, 6–42. Culture: Policies and Politics. London: Routledge. Nagler, Michael N. 1974. Spontaneity and Tradition: A Study in the Oral Art of Homer. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nicholson, Vivian and Stephen Smith. 1977. Spend, Spend, Spend. London: Cape. Piel, Jean. 1995. Bataille and the World: From ‘The Notion of Expenditure’ to The Accursed Share, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons. In On Bataille: Critical Essays, ed. Boldt-Irons, 95–106. Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory. Albany: SUNY Press. Pinkard, Terry. 2000. Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reith, Gerda. 2002. The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture. 1999. Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought 22. London: Routledge. Scanlan, John. 2003. Combustion: An Essay on the Value of Gambling. In Gambling: Who Wins? Who Loses?, ed. Gerda Reith, 348–54. Contemporary Issues. Amherst, NY: Prometheus. —. 2005. On Garbage. London: Reaktion. Shakespeare, William. 1977. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shell, Marc. 1993. Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era. Rev. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Stevens, Wallace. 1954. Collected Poems. New York: Knopf. Swift, Jonathan. 1984. A Tale of a Tub. In Jonathan Swift, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley, 62–164. Oxford Authors. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
166 Spend, Spend, Spend Vendler, Helen. 1997. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Waswo, Richard. 1996. Shakespeare and the Formation of the Modern Economy. Surfaces 6. 217: 32. http://www.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces/vol6/ waswo.html Weber, Wolfgang. 1987. Zwischen gesellschaftlichem Ideal und politischem Interesse: Das Zahlenlotto in der Einschätzung des deutschen Bürgertums im späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert. Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 69: 116–49. West, William N. 1996. Nothing as Given: Economies of the Gift in Derrida and Shakespeare. Comparative Literature 48. 1: 1–18. Wilde, Oscar. 1969. Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young. In The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann, 433–4. New York: Random House. Zollinger, Manfred. 1997. Geschichte des Glücksspiels: Vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg. Vienna: Böhlau.
9 Towards a General Economics of Cinema Bruce Bennett
‘We’re doing spectacle. Spectacle costs money.’ James Cameron, interviewed during the production of Titanic (Parisi 1998, 137) James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster, Titanic, constitutes a problem for critical writing on cinema, offering to film theorists an implicit challenge to account for its exceptional status. The film warrants consideration simply because of its enormous commercial success, but the excessive scale of its production and reception also presents certain interesting obstacles to its critical or aesthetic appreciation. Critics and reviewers have claimed to be mystified by the attraction of ‘a special effects romp with laughable dialogue’ and this essay will explore this shortfall in critical response, since it highlights a blind spot in academic and journalistic discourses of film which are unable to account for the cinematic spectacle of Titanic as anything other than a reprehensible device for audience manipulation ( Jones 1998, 10). José Arroyo’s account of the film, for instance, published shortly after its release, treats Titanic as representative of the decadence of contemporary commercial cinema that emphasises motion and spectacle at the expense of character and story. Thus, while Arroyo judges Titanic to be ‘among the best big-budget films of the past year’, he also asserts that it is nevertheless a bad film: Character and stories are now most often the domain of lower-budget films [...] Generally [...] the only thing big-budget Hollywood currently does well is action and effects – that is, only through action and effects does big-budget Hollywood have anything to say. It is because of its 167
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lack of story-telling skills and its execrable character delineation that Titanic is exemplary of contemporary Hollywood action/spectacle – it is also because of this that it is not a good film. (Arroyo 1998, 19) While more considered, less evaluative, critical writing on Titanic has emerged since the film’s release, the tendency has been to regard the phenomenon of the film and its success with some anxiety, as a problem, an anomaly that must be ‘accounted for’ and explained in order to return it to its correct place on the critical balance sheet.1 Vivian Sobchack, for example, opens an essay on the thematics of depth in Titanic with the question, ‘How can we possibly account in a truly compelling way for the monumental popularity and emotional impact of James Cameron’s Titanic?’ (Sobchack 1999, 189). I want here not to propose a definitive answer to that question, but rather to consider how it might be approached from a different angle, one that does not require us to assess the film in terms of conventional measures of value. I want to suggest instead that a reading of Georges Bataille’s work on economics, expenditure and excess offers a way of thinking about cinema that does not return us to problematic oppositions between, for instance, ‘spectacle’ on the one hand, and ‘story-telling’ or narrative on the other, or to dubious evaluative models. Bataille’s concept of general economy, which takes as its central premise the assumption that cultural, social and biological systems are organized by a principle of excess or non-productive expenditure, suggests a way of ‘accounting’ for the commercial success of the film. It also provides the basis for the formulation of a different critical model of cinema, which can reconcile its economic and aesthetic functions, rather than holding them irrevocably apart. I make murals, not paintings. It’s my responsibility to be the throttle. It’s the studio’s to be the brakes. James Cameron (Cameron 1998) This $200 million film is shot through with excess. It is reckoned to be the most expensive film ever made, and such excess permeates every stage of the film’s production, distribution and reception.2 It is one of the most commercially successful films ever, having grossed $1,835.4 million in worldwide box office takings,3 making it the fifth highest earning film of all time.4 The story of its production, distribution and marketing can be told as a string of superlatives and firsts, all of which have been enthusiastically relayed by commentators. The film’s
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production occasioned the building of the first new film studio constructed by a Hollywood major since the 1930s (the 40-acre Fox Studios Baja in Mexico), incorporated into which is the largest open-air water tank in the world, holding 17 million gallons (Parisi 1998, 116) and which housed the reconstruction of the ship, ‘the largest set in motion picture history’ (Marsh 1997, 49). Overhead shots were filmed from the ‘world’s largest crane dolly’, a modified construction crane (Marsh 1997, 126), while a unique titanium camera housing was devised to allow Cameron to take a 35 mm camera to an unprecedented depth to shoot footage of the wreck. The film contained ‘more digital effects than any film, ever’ (Parisi 1998, 154), requiring Cameron’s effects company, Digital Domain, to ‘create more digital people – up to 1,000 – than ever before’ (Richardson 1997, 126). One 40-second CGI shot of the ship heading out to sea cost $1.1 million to produce, making it the most expensive single shot ever produced for a film (Parisi 1998a). The film received 14 Academy Award nominations, equalling the record previously set by All About Eve (Mankiewicz, 1950), and won eleven, equalling the record held by Ben-Hur (Wyler, 1959). The US television audience for the Academy Awards ceremony broadcast ‘ranked the highest in history [sic] of the A C Nielsen ratings’ (Wyatt and Vlesmas 1999, 39), with 55 per cent of US televisions tuned in (Ryan, 1998). Gross takings on Titanic’s opening weekend were exceeded by box office takings on subsequent weekends so that ‘amazingly, the four-day fifth weekend then saw a significant increase to over $30 million, which is unprecedented in Hollywood history’ (Krämer 1999, 123). The film’s theme song, My Heart Will Go On, sung by Céline Dion over the closing credits, was the biggest-selling single in the U.K. in 1998. It also ‘broke [U.S.] broadcasting records by racking up the largest number of radio performances . . . in one week’, and consequently, ‘with the song reaching some 105 million listeners, “My Heart Will Go On” also broke the record for the largest [U.S.] radio audience ever monitored by B.D.S.’ (Smith 1999, 53–4). The soundtrack album, which topped album sales charts in 21 countries, sold 17 million copies worldwide making it the biggest selling soundtrack album ever. The production history, James Cameron’s Titanic by Ed W. Marsh, was the second biggest selling book of the year in the U.K., and when the film was released on videotape, it had taken ‘such a grip on its audience that American video stores opened 48 hours straight’ ( Jones 1998, 10). Consideration of Titanic in other words, demands a critical approach to cinema that recognizes the spectacular and excessive effects or qualities of a film as intrinsic to its appeal and to its meaning.
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General economy We can ignore the fact that the ground we live on is little other than a field of multiple destructions. Our ignorance only has this incontestable effect: It causes us to undergo what we could bring about in our own way, if we understood. It deprives us of the chance of an exudation that might suit us. (Bataille 1991a, 23–4) This passage identifies a central premise of Georges Bataille’s concept of ‘general economy’: that in the industrialized West we have been blinded to the violent dynamics of the cultural and economic systems that organize our lives. This blindness derives from our tendency to understand such systems in terms of the limited rational frameworks of classical economic thought. Bataille argues that a general economic model provides us with a far more accurate historical descriptor of the unstable basis of social and cultural systems than does classical economics. For Bataille the consequences of thinking outside conventional critical frameworks are multiple, extending as far as the practice of international politics; among the implications of the quotation above is the suggestion that wars are extreme instances of a general systemic tendency towards the destruction of excess resources, and that recognition of this principle might enable us to avoid such devastating events by better management of resource-consumption. Such a rethinking offers an interesting new critical perspective for thinking about cinema: it enables us to think of its function not only in terms of the generation of profits, but also in terms of the often massive and sometimes utterly catastrophic, dissipation of resources. For a classical economist ‘the economic problem arises because individuals’ wants are virtually unlimited, whilst the resources available to satisfy those wants are scarce’ (Hardwick, Langmead and Khan 1999, 4). In contrast with this premise, Bataille argues that the key question for the study and management of any social, biological or, by implication, textual system is not resource-scarcity but how the system disposes of an excess of resources. His three-volume work The Accursed Share (La Part Maudite) addresses how and why an excess of resources should be regarded as an urgent problem for contemporary society. In the preface to the first volume Bataille claims that, in considering the problem of excessive resources, the book engages with: a problem that still has not been framed as it should be, one that may hold the key to all the problems posed by every discipline concerned
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with the movement of energy on the earth – from geophysics to political economy, by way of sociology, history and biology. Moreover, neither psychology nor, in general, philosophy can be considered free of this primary question of economy. Even what can be said of art, of literature, or poetry, has an essential connection with the movement I study, that of excess energy translated into the effervescence of life. (Bataille 1991a, 10) The reversal undertaken by Bataille in substituting the term ‘excess’ for ‘scarcity’ is highly suggestive since, in proposing an alternative general economic metaphor, it highlights the centrality of classical economic metaphors to a wide range of disciplines. Outlining the field of relevance for this work, Bataille writes that general economy offers a broad framework for criticism, claiming that ‘what can be said of art, of literature, or poetry, has an essential connection with the movement I study, that of excess energy translated into the effervescence of life’ (ibid.). This essay will consider whether cinema can instructively be added to that list of practices. We might tend to assume that the fundamental economic problems facing us are those of how basic needs, such as the need for food or shelter, might be satisfied by amassing resources. However, Bataille insists that the more pressing economic problem is how we ‘spend’ or consume an excess of resources: ‘it is not necessity but its contrary, “luxury,” that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems’ (Bataille 1991a, 12). He argues that the centrality of this problem, how to dispose of an excess of resources, is revealed through a shift of perspective away from the ‘restricted’ view of classical economics to the universal perspective of a general economics. For example, he contends that: the economy is never considered in general [. . .] Economic science merely generalizes the isolated situation; it restricts its object to operations carried out with a view to a limited end, that of economic man. It does not take into consideration a play of energy that no particular end limits: the play of living matter in general, involved in the movement of light of which it is the result. (ibid., 23) Behind this critique of economic science’s narrowly anthropocentric perspective is not simply a challenge to the methodological assumptions of economics but a proposal for a radically different ethical perspective on economics. Bataille claims that: ‘Changing from the principles
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of restrictive economy to those of general economy actually accomplishes a Copernican transformation: a reversal of thinking – and of ethics’ (ibid., 25). He thus proposes an ethics of excess that would not only re-orient critical systems from a range of academic fields, but could also serve as a guiding principle for individuals and institutions, for the disposal of excess resources. The most urgent question for Bataille is how to manage a constant excess of energy and resources, since periodically there comes a point in the cycle of any biological/economic/social system when pressure from the accumulation of this excess must be vented. He explains this with the example of an organism in constant receipt of energy, which fuels its growth. When it reaches the limits of its growth, or if it receives more energy than is necessary to drive its growth, the excess energy, or ‘wealth’, is necessarily wasted. As Bataille notes, ‘if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically’ (ibid., 21). This suggests, somewhat counter-intuitively, that the central function of economic exchange is not necessarily to get a return, but may be the ‘wastage’ of resources. As he acknowledges, it is understandable that conventional economic thought should have misunderstood the importance of waste: Why would [classical economy] have thought that in the beginning a mode of acquisition such as exchange had not answered the need to acquire, but rather the contrary need to lose or squander? (ibid., 67) Among the many implications of Bataille’s argument is that recognizing the necessity of squander enables the employment of a more ethical and desirable means of ‘waste-management’. ‘[T]he present state of the world,’ Bataille asserts, ‘is defined by the unevenness of the [. . .] pressure exerted by human life’ and the consequent inequitable distribution of resources around the globe (ibid., 39–40). He argues that general economy suggests this imbalance should be corrected through the transfer of wealth from the ‘developed world’ to developing countries with no expectation of a return on this expenditure. The principles of general economy thus have a directly political function for Bataille, as well as perhaps altering the way we understand the mechanisms and subjective experience of contemporary capitalism. His argument implies, compellingly, continuity from the institutionalized or conventionalized
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squander of sacrifice and potlatch in previous societies, to contemporary equivalent acts or practices. The connection between ritual destruction and the ‘creative’ arts is made more explicitly in an essay on expenditure from the early 1930s where Bataille is beginning to formulate general economic principles, and identifies the following examples of: so-called unproductive expenditure: luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activities (i.e., deflected from genital finality) – all these represent activities which, at least in primitive circumstances, have no end beyond themselves. (Bataille 1991b, 118) This assertion that sacrifice, war, the building of vast monuments, grief, eroticism and art all serve a similar function, invites us to think about the functions and attractions of cultural activity and, in particular, cinema, in relation to a general economic logic. This is not to say that cinema is equivalent to, or continuous with these other practices, but it is to suggest that there may be similarities in terms of their social function. Human sacrifice is perhaps the most intense (or disturbing) example of ritualistic consumption or ‘so-called unproductive expenditure’.5 As Bataille, writes, ‘One could not go further in the desire to consume the life substance. Indeed, one could not go more recklessly than this’ (Bataille 1992, 61). Human sacrifice is an important figure for him since it exemplifies the way in which an act of apparently senseless destruction can assume sacred significance through ritual practices and, more generally, the way in which such squandering of a community’s own (most valuable human) resources can paradoxically become the point around which that community coheres: ‘and if I thus consume immoderately, I reveal to my fellow beings that which I am intimately. Consumption is the way in which separate beings communicate’ (Bataille 1991a, 58).6 In other words, a destructive act such as sacrifice is ritualized through its framing by a legitimating mythic narrative (and vice versa), and this myth then functions as the articulation of cultural identity and a common frame of reference for members of that community. Bataille understands sacrifice here as a representation, the visual spectacle of death or destruction, so that sacrifice is at once an act of killing and also the public performance of that action that forces an awareness of the imminence of her/his own death upon the spectator. Thus for Bataille, it is essential to the meaning of such acts of apparently unproductive consumption as sacrifice and potlatch that they
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are viewed. Without a spectator such acts remain senseless. He identifies parallels between these acts and literature and drama, ‘the classic subterfuges, performances, or books, to which the masses have recourse’ (Bataille 1990, 20). These texts allow us repeatedly to observe and (imaginatively) experience death by ‘identifying with some character who dies, and [. . .] believing that we die, although we are alive’ (ibid.). He regards this cultural activity, the participation in rites and performances, as that which defines us as human. Bataille’s conceptualization of sacred rites, then, holds that such acts are arresting spectacular performances for an audience on a large scale. Such performances involve an identificatory relationship with the viewer who is invited to identify with a character or object within the performance. Thus, sacrifice and popular cultural texts and events have equivalent functions as narrative performances that invite the spectator’s identification through the shocking, transgressive or sensually pleasurable spectacle of death or consumption. There is, in other words, a structural similarity between the experience of witnessing a sacrifice, in Bataille’s account, and the experience of viewing of a film. I would argue that an acknowledgement of this similarity allows us to rethink the experience and function of contemporary cinema, and that cinema, in turn, serves as a particularly illuminating figure for exploring the adaptability of Bataille’s concept of general economy as a critical model. His work does suggest parallels between the increasing orientation of the twentieth century towards convenience and leisure through the growth of the tertiary or service industries: ‘Ancient societies found relief in festivals; some erected admirable monuments that had no useful purpose; we use the excess to multiply “services” that make life smoother’ (Bataille 1991a, 24). However, he is reluctant to trace a trajectory from earlier societies of consumption through to the present, because of his assumption that industrialization and the establishment of the bourgeoisie constitutes a radical historical break. This break is constituted by the formation of a society of production formed around the rational values of utility. The problem with this argument, as Jean-Joseph Goux argues in his essay, ‘General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism’, is the extent of the success Bataille ascribes to capitalism in banishing unproductive expenditure from contemporary experience (even if it cannot totally free itself from the principles of general economy) (Goux, 1990). Bataille buys into the myth of capitalism’s ability to appropriate and process everything it comes into contact with. This serves the purposes of an argument
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that attacks the ethical basis of capitalism, but perhaps disregards Bataille’s own acknowledgement of the necessary inseparability of wasteful and productive expenditure wherein: real life, composed of all sorts of expenditures, knows nothing of purely productive expenditure; in actuality, it knows nothing of purely non-productive expenditure either. (Bataille 1991a, 12) Thus, while Goux accepts that the opposition between the sacred and the profane, which Bataille identifies as the structuring force in societies of consumption such as that of the Aztecs, no longer holds in contemporary (Western) society, he also observes that ‘advanced capitalism seems to exceed the principle of restricted economy and utility that presided at its beginning. No society has “wasted” as much as contemporary capitalism’ (Goux 1990, 210). In this respect, the concept of general economy is thoroughly appropriate as a tool for thinking about the status and attractions of contemporary cinema. Considered in relation to general economy, we might conclude that Titanic consists of a series of expenditures oriented primarily around the spectacle of destruction at various levels rather than simply a project that was mis-handled by Fox and Paramount studios, and which over-ran its initial budget by 66 per cent due to the unprecedented scale and technical complexity of the undertaking. What is at stake in this reading of Bataille is a critical reorientation, a shift of focus away from a restricted critical perspective on cinema, which is underpinned by certain ideological and economic assumptions, towards an expanded or general perspective in which cinema, from avant-garde film-making through to major studio productions, is understood as a field of wasteful and non-productive expenditure. As with any field of critical thought, (classical) economic metaphors abound in discussions of films as a means of articulating concepts: references to narrative economies, aesthetic economies, economies of desire, fields of excess and extravagance, and the notion of cinema as a machine for efficiently delivering the pleasurable experience of identification are common within film studies, as are assumptions about the causal relationship between the industrial character of much film production and the form of its products. Film theory has tended to understand the formal and ideological structure of films in terms of an opposition between narrative and ‘excess’,7 holding that excessive components such as obtrusive cinematography,
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direct address or the casting of a star against type, function to disrupt the flow of the narrative. The formal and ideological unity of the film text is disturbed, and this interferes with our identification with, or absorption in, the narrative.8 Film theorists have conventionally assumed that such excessive elements are contained by the formal systems of classical cinema such as continuity editing, or are consigned to supposedly ‘minor’ genres of film such as the musical, the women’s picture, fantasy or horror cinema, or avant-garde films that consciously disregard formal conventions in order to subvert them. A critical approach to film prompted by a reading of general economy, however, involves an inversion of these oppositional terms, treating excess as central to the formal systems of cinema, rather than as antagonistic or degrading, and understands it not merely in terms of literal expenditure but also in terms of formal expenditures. The value of Titanic as an illustration, then, is its hyper-visibility. Both in its historical ‘visibility’ and its foregrounding of spectacular and excessive images, it makes particularly visible the relationship between film production as excessive expenditure, and the formal excesses of a film text. While Bataille’s influence on recent European critical thought has been such that Annette Michelsen referred disparagingly in 1999 to ‘a veritable Bataille industry, developing over the past decade’, his ideas have had little impact within the field of film theory (Michelsen 1999). While some writers have attempted to put these ideas to work in the service of film analysis – most notably in Steven Shaviro’s work on the spectatorial experience of cinema9 – in general, reference to Bataille’s thought has been restricted to work on ‘extreme’ or ‘transgressive’ genres of film: surrealist and avant-garde cinema, horror and pornography. This is a surprising omission, perhaps, but, other than a few passing generalizations about American cinema and a handful of marginal references to Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalì, Bataille’s own writing makes barely any reference to cinema. Jean-François Lyotard’s 1973 essay ‘Acinema’ is one of the earliest examples of film theory that attempts to engage with general economy, although it does so without any mention either of Bataille or of the term. Lyotard conceptualizes a dissipated alternative cinema of inaction and play, of movement and intensities, consisting of films that are ‘fortuitous, dirty, confused, unsteady, unclear, poorly framed, overexposed’ (Lyotard 1989, 169). He suggests, in terms resembling Bataille’s, that the pleasure of film-viewing is akin to a simple aesthetic delight in destruction. For Lyotard, the spectator’s pleasure is derived from the spectacle of the waste or non-productive expenditure of resources.
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Lyotard places emphasis on the abstract formal qualities of a film and insists upon the economic function of these formal elements in a very broad sense as well as in a restricted, commercial sense. In this analysis, a mainstream or narrative film operates according to (and supports) a productive régime, rather than a régime of consumption, both at the level of textual organization, and at the closely related level of the film’s commercial viability. Noting the root meaning of the term, ‘cinematography’ as ‘the inscription of movement, a writing with movement, a writing with movements’, Lyotard suggests that a commercial film is constructed through the careful, sequential organization of certain movements selected from among countless others. Within this narrative structure, no movement registers merely as motion (in so far as this is possible), ‘a simple sterile difference in an audio-visual field’ (ibid., 170). Instead, all movements have a productive function within a linear narrative sequence, with one movement causing or introducing another. The function or value of such movements within the film’s narrative economy is that they produce a steady narrative progression and consequently, Lyotard concludes, ‘The only genuine movement with which cinema is written is that of value’ (ibid., 170). Lyotard employs an expanded notion of economy and, like Bataille, is concerned with exploring an economic logic of consumption or ‘sterile motion’, which he associates with a cinema of off-cuts and accident, rather than a productive logic. He explains the concept of ‘sterile motion’ with an example that serves as a metaphor both for film-making and film-viewing: A match once struck is consumed. If you use the match to light the gas that heats the water for the coffee which keeps you alert on your way to work, the consumption is not sterile, for it is a movement belonging to the circuit of capital: merchandise-match → merchandise-labour → power → money-wages → merchandise-match. But when a child strikes the match-head to see what happens – just for the fun of it – he enjoys the movement itself, the changing colours, the light flashing at the height of the blaze, the death of the tiny piece of wood, the hissing of the tiny flame. He enjoys these sterile differences leading nowhere, these uncompensated losses; what the physicist calls the dissipation of energy. (ibid., 170–1) Here sterile motion is framed as the consumption or dissipation of energy, a movement that deviates from, or breaks out of, the circuit of
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capital. In the example above, this transgression is presented as a pleasurable movement. Lyotard goes on to link the child’s aesthetic delight in the (taboo) spectacle of destruction to sexual pleasure ( jouissance). Referring to Freud’s writing on ‘“normal” genital sexuality’, Lyotard observes that jouissance, like other intense enjoyments, might be characterized as perverse insofar as it is not solely tied to procreation but may be sought for its own sake, sex as mis-spent or unproductively consumed energy/labour (ibid., 171). And so, the child fascinated by fire is presented as an agent of nonproductive consumption. In this light, the (male) child also represents, for Lyotard, an archetypal artist. The act of lighting a match is read by Lyotard as the production of a (decomposing) representation of destruction and crucially it is a representation that is not commodified, that is removed from the circuit of capital: He produces, in his own movement, a simulacrum of pleasure in its so-called ‘death-instinct’ component. Thus if he is assuredly an artist by producing a simulacrum, he is one most of all because this simulacrum is not an object of worth valued for another object [. . .] On the contrary, it is essential that the entire erotic force invested in the simulacrum be promoted, raised, displayed and burned in vain. (ibid., 171) While Lyotard’s essay is concerned with artistic practice and, in particular, with film-making, this account of a child’s pleasure at the spectacle of destruction also offers an account of the spectatorial pleasures of cinema: the child ignites the match in order to watch it burn, ‘to see what happens’ (ibid., 170). This account lends itself well to thinking about the structural logic and aesthetics of a wide range of cinematic genres, demonstrating a way in which the concept of general economy may be put to work critically. Lyotard’s essay is primarily concerned with commercially resistant forms of cinema, drawing a distinction between commercial cinema and experimental cinema that is treated as so self-evident that it does not require any further elaboration or qualification. However, from the perspective of general economic theory, and by the logic Lyotard himself employs, this distinction becomes unsustainable. While a work of art (or anti-art) might be understood as resistant to commodification, it nevertheless retains an economic function in general terms. A successfully non-commercial film, for example, which guarantees minimal or no returns, can be considered to be the trace/result of a non-productive expenditure of energy and
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resources. It is a luxury item, removed from the circuit of capital (due primarily to its ‘difficulty’, but also to its practical inaccessibility), with little ‘useful’ function. It is an instance of over-production, an item made with a more or less deliberate disregard for demand. In this respect, an avant-garde film serves a more or less identical function to a commercially oriented film produced on a multi-million dollar budget. As Goux notes above, industrial and cultural production in a postmodern capitalist economy may be characterized by over-production and the superabundance of products that have no use. Therefore, in general economic terms, what distinguishes an experimental film from an action film produced by a major Hollywood studio at the cost of scores of millions of dollars is primarily the scale of the expenditure of resources involved in their production. As potlatch on a grand scale, Hollywood films offer us high-impact examples of pyrotechnic cinema at its most visible and culturally significant. To return to Titanic, the value of this film as a case study in cinema as ‘non-productive expenditure’ is redoubled by the subject matter of the film. It recounts a story of pointless but tragically inevitable waste. ‘The shipwreck of the Titanic’, Slavoj Zizek has observed, made such a tremendous impact, not because of the immediate material dimensions of the catastrophe, but because of its symbolic overdetermination, because of the ideological meaning invested in it. It was read as a ‘symbol,’ as a condensed, metaphorical representation of the approaching catastrophe of European civilisation. (ZB izBek 1991, 203) The readiness to attribute such meaning to the event stemmed, ZB izBek suggests, from the fact that the disastrous sinking had already been rehearsed. As evidence, ZB izBek cites a passage from the foreword of Walter Lord’s factual account of the events of 14 April 1912, A Night to Remember, wherein Lord discusses Morgan Robertson’s 1898 novel, Futility, which, incredibly, concerns the sinking of the Titan, the largest and most luxurious liner that had ever been constructed, after it hit an iceberg in the Atlantic one night in April. As Lord explains, the coincidences between real and fictional events are remarkable. The Titanic: was 66,000 tons displacement; Robertson’s was 70,000. The real ship was 882.5 feet long; the fictional one was 800 feet. Both vessels were triple screw and could make 24–25 knots. Both could carry about 3000 people, and both had enough lifeboats for only a fraction of
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this number. But, then, this didn’t seem to matter because both were labelled ‘unsinkable’. (Lord 1997, xi–xii) The sinking of the Titan is figured in Robertson’s novel as a symbolic disaster, perhaps articulating fin-de-siècle anxiety about the demise of civilized Victorian society in a similar way to the manner in which Cameron’s Titanic articulates millennial disenchantment with grand narratives of emancipation through progress. The Titan is the sign of arrogant and misplaced faith in technology and a metaphor for (or symptom of) the untenability of a nineteenth century image of a stable, well-ordered and hierarchized society. The fictional event then, already has an allegorical dimension, one that is replayed in the sinking of the real ship. The sinking of the Titanic was, therefore, already a repetition. ZB izBek uses this example to illustrate the paradoxical character of the symptom, the real meaning or truth of which is only determined retrospectively. In other words, the symptom, which is the effect of a traumatic experience, precedes the cause, since it is only later, in analysis, that the traumatic event is excavated, constructed and inserted into a narrative. Thus, he notes, while ‘it is already a commonplace to read the Titanic disaster as a symptom in the sense of a “knot of meanings”’, the shocking event is symptomatic in a more specific sense: the point is that precisely as a shock, this sinking arrived at its proper time – ‘the time was waiting for it,’ even before it actually happened, there was already a place opened, reserved for it in fantasy-space. It had such a terrific impact upon the ‘social imaginary’ precisely because it was expected. (ZB izBek 1991, 202) The sinking confirmed a sense that an inevitable crisis was approaching, but to return to a general economic framework, one of the most significant features in ZB izBek’s mapping of a psychoanalytic schema onto historical events, is the emphasis upon repetition. Reframing the representations of the Titanic’s sinking in terms of general economy, we might understand the sinking as a moment of spectacularly excessive and wasteful expenditure. As ZB izBek notes, the sinking was almost preplanned, rehearsed or scripted, and in this sense we might understand it as an event that corresponds to the rituals of spectacular expenditure discussed by Bataille in relation to cultures of consumption. Moreover, we might understand the film itself, as a further repetition of this
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repeatedly restaged event, as having a ritual dimension in relaying or transmitting a mythic narrative, one that resonates beyond cinematic genres. Since a ritual typically consists of a mythic narrative that recounts some originary event, the ritual is thus structured as a restaging or repetition of this event. There are clear and significant structural correspondences between the social function of rituals and mythic narratives and the film’s embodiment and thematization of expenditure. Thus, the restaging or re-presentation of the sinking constituted by Cameron’s film can be understood as akin to a ritual repetition, with Titanic situated as one further entry in a series of ritual expenditures. His subsequent large-format documentary films seem to confirm the serial status of the film, as if Cameron is constantly remaking the same film with minor differences, such as the technical extravagances of Imax or 3D. Ghosts of the Abyss (2002) documents a series of further dives to investigate the wrecked ship, while Expedition: Bismarck (2002) records a similar expedition to study the carcass of the German battleship. Aliens of the Deep (2005) dispenses with the pretext of a wreck in order to explore sea-floor hydrothermal vents. Using as a base the Russian oceanographic research ship that features in Titanic, the films return us again and again to the abyssal site of the event, immersing us repeatedly in the unearthly depths. Titanic (following the many other films of the disaster) may, then, be read as a successive re-staging of a sacrificial event. The emphasis on the immensity of the project in the publicity and promotional material accompanying the film’s release, prepares the audience for Cameron’s film to witness a splendidly wasteful moment. Although the film was marketed as a melodrama with a classical class-transgressing, heterosexual romance narrative (with allusions to the Bette Davis vehicle, Now, Voyager, [Rapper, 1942]), this is outweighed by the narrative emphasis on the sinking of the ship and also by public knowledge of the historical events, both apparent in the teaser poster which publicized the film’s release (a close-up of the ship’s riveted hull with the film’s title painted on the metal and the caption ‘Collide With Destiny’). We know that the ship sank, but even supposing we didn’t, the film opens with a present-day salvage attempt on the ship as a prologue, and throughout the body of the narrative (presented in flashback) we are reminded repeatedly by various characters that it is unsinkable. Most of the film is spent introducing us to the ship in exquisitely authentic detail and then taking us through the ship’s destruction with a similarly loving attention to detail. This emphasis on intricate and authentic detail prepares the audience for the splendour of its imminent destruction and
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heightens the pleasure of that spectacle. Thus the anticipation of the sinking overwhelms and frames all other events within the narrative. It is also consistent that the film positions itself as melodrama due to the expressive and symbolic primacy of mise-en-scène that is particular to this genre. In film melodrama locations, sets, costumes and props all function as exteriorizations of the characters’ internal turbulence and desires, and so, as melodrama, Titanic foregrounds precisely those elements of the image and diegetic space whose function is to be destroyed. The authenticity of the film’s production design has been much publicized and a great deal of promotional material and pre-release magazine and television features stressed the pains taken to produce a convincing replica of the ship. The effect is that the spectator’s attention is redirected towards the film’s splendid and sensuous ornamentation in its staging of the Titanic’s opulent and extravagant microcosmic Edwardian society. According to Cameron: A rigorous philosophy of absolute correctness permeated every department, from Set design and Construction through Decorating, Props, Wardrobe, Hairdressing and Visual Effects. In addition to how things looked, every nuance of behaviour had to be examined. How people moved, how they spoke, their etiquette, how the ship’s crew would have performed its routine and emergency duties . . . all these things had to be known before a single scene could be staged. (Cameron 1997, xii) A particularly telling example of such gratuitous intricacy is found in the manufacture of the ashtrays for the first class smoking room, and china for the first class dining tables, all of which are decorated with the White Star Line logo, which is, of course, invisible on screen. The conventions of ‘realist’ film-making require no such assiduousness since plausibility is an effect produced by the employment of familiar conventions of staging. Few people in any audience would be able to identify macroscopic (let alone microscopic) historical inaccuracies or minor omissions in the mise-en-scène, and so commissioning the reproduction dining room carpets from their original manufacturer, is, in this regard, superfluous. More important than historical accuracy in rendering the mise-en-scène of Edwardian society – described by the film’s costume designer, Deborah Scott, as ‘an explosion of excess’ – is the extravagance of the cinematic mise-en-scène. The ‘wasted’ effort and expense of the design principle of absolute fidelity in constructing and dressing these sets and costuming and choreographing the actors seems to confirm that the principal
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economic function of this film is expenditure. It follows, too, that these fabulous studio constructions, like the ship whose operational life was only four days, were destroyed on their completion. Dedication to authenticity is motivated here not purely by a general concern for historical accuracy, verisimilitude or diegetic plausibility, but also by a concern with heightening the aesthetic splendour of destruction, a specific concern with the accurate appearance of the mise-en-scène as it is being destroyed. Paula Parisi notes, for instance, that the walls of the grand staircase, which is destroyed in a spectacular single take as 90,000 gallons of water are dumped through the glass-domed roof, were constructed from hardwood rather than plaster as it was found that plaster didn’t splinter but simply collapsed when it was pounded by a large volume of water. Consequently, ‘The ornately carved wall paneling on the grand staircase is not typical movieland plaster of paris but oak. Real oak. Acres and acres of it, deck after deck’ (Parisi 1998, 127). Similarly, the chandeliers throughout the ship’s interior were made from crystal rather than plastic or Lucite, ‘so they would tinkle and tilt just so during the ship’s demise’ (Parisi 1998, 127). One way of thinking about the production of Titanic in order to frame it in terms of historical traditions, which can account for it, is as a ritual event, a repetition or re-enactment (albeit at the service of cinematic representation) of the ship’s destruction. The effort devoted to the construction of the sets suggests that the film is an attempt to repeat the event itself, to approach the dimensions of the disaster by building a set from the original plans and equal in size to the original ship. Our familiarity with the circumstances of the film’s production means that Cameron’s film becomes almost a document of this event, the restaged sinking of the Titanic.10 A key spectatorial pleasure is that of savouring the wrecking of this splendid construction on the Mexican coast, a pleasure inseparable from, and perhaps enhancing, the various pleasures derived from viewing the narrative representation of the original sinking. Whether or not a combination of miniatures, process shots, CGI shots and full-scale mock-ups could have been employed to render a plausible representation of the sinking ship, the resulting images would have lacked the dimension added by the knowledge, however fanciful, that the ship we watch being destroyed was actually destroyed (at least twice – once on a film set and once in the Atlantic in 1912). I have mapped out briefly some of the ways that excess cuts across this film at every stage and level of its production and the ways this excess is made visible throughout the film both in the form of the film’s mise-en-scène and also in the narrative logic of the film. Titanic
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provides us with a rich and instructive case study of excess and its value here is in the ways it makes excess hyper-visible. However, the argument made here about expenditure and cinema might be made with reference to films from other cinemas and from other historical periods. Titanic offers us a particularly clear example of modes of excess in technically complex, highly costly mainstream Hollywood cinema, and while this film is exceptional in some ways – in the extent to which it ‘exceeds’ certain boundaries or terminations – it is, at the same time, this excess that makes it representative: like other films, but only more so. This paper undertakes a reading of Georges Bataille’s critical concept of an inverse, expanded or ‘general economy’ in order to reconsider the attractions, pleasures and structural logic of this film, however, Bataille’s work on general economy, which constitutes a small area of his published work, constitutes a critical resource for the academic study of film, and culture more generally, that is far from exhausted. Indeed, it is a resource that demands, according to its own logic, to be overspent.
Notes 1. See Lubin (1999), Sandler and Studlar (1999), and Bergfelder and Street (2004), for examples. 2. The claim, or boast, that Titanic is uniquely expensive rarely acknowledges that this does not take into account inflation; Cleopatra (Mankiewicz, 1963), for example, cost $270 m in today’s terms (Simpson 2001, 77). More important than the accuracy of this claim, however, is the importance attributed to the excessive costs, which themselves constitute an attraction for audiences. 3. It grossed $600.8 m in the U.S. and $1,234.6 m outside the U.S. (http://www.worldwideboxoffice.com/). 4. Box Office Report ranks Titanic fifth after Gone With The Wind (Fleming, 1939), Star Wars (Lucas, 1977), The Sound of Music (Wise, 1965) and E.T.: The ExtraTerrestrial (Spielberg, 1982). See http://www.boxofficereport.com/atbon/ adjusted.shtml 5. Human sacrifice is a theme that held a particular fascination for Bataille, to the point where the short-lived Secret Society of Acéphale he belonged to in the 1930s is rumoured to have planned a sacrifice. For anecdotal detail see Caillois in Bataille, Lebel and Waldberg, 1995, 15. 6. ‘Communication’ is understood in Bataille’s work not as the simple, functional transmission of information but as the intense and non-productive experience of the rupture of boundaries between individuals, and the loss of an individual’s subjectivity. At the same time it is central to human identity: ‘communication is a phenomenon which is in no way added on to Dasein, but constitutes it’ (Bataille 1988, 24). 7. See Thompson (1986), for a systematic definition of cinematic excess. 8. See Comolli and Narboni (1992), for a systematic ideological analysis of cinematic excess.
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9. See Shaviro (1993), in which he conflates film with sacrifice in order to argue that ‘film offers its viewers [. . .] a Bataillean ecstasy of expenditure, of automutilation and self-abandonment – neither Imaginary plenitude nor Symbolic articulation, but the blinding intoxication of contact with the Real’ (Shaviro 1993, 54). 10. However, since it is the entire production process of Titanic that constitutes the wasteful event, the film is not merely a record of this, but may also be understood as a trace or remnant of this process.
References Arroyo, José. 1998. Massive Attack. Sight and Sound 9 (2): 16–19. Bataille, Georges. 1988. Inner Experience, trans. L. A. Boldt. New York: State University of New York Press. —. 1990. Hegel, Death and Sacrifice, trans. J. Strauss, ed. A. Stoekl. In Yale French Studies: On Bataille 78: 9–28. —. 1991a. The Accursed Share. Vol. 1, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Zone Books. —. 1991b. Visions of Excess. Selected Writings 1927–1939, ed. and trans. A. Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 1992. Theory of Religion, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Zone Books. Bataille, Georges, Lebel, Robert and Waldberg, Isabella, eds. 1995. Encyclopædia Acephalica, trans. I. White. London: Atlas Press. Bergfelder, Tim and Street, Sarah, eds. 2004. The Titanic in Myth and Memory: Representations in Visual and Literary Culture. London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Cameron, James. 1997. Foreword. In ed. W. Marsh, James Cameron’s Titanic. London and Basingstoke: Boxtree. —. 1998. Interview. Empire (U.S. edition) No. 104, February, 95. Comolli, Jean-Louis, Narboni, Jean. 1992. Cinema/Ideology/Criticism. In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy. 4th edition, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Goux, Jean-Joseph. 1990. General Economy and Postmodern Capitalism, trans. K. Ascheim and R. Garelick, ed. A. Stoekl. In Yale French Studies: On Bataille 78: 206–24. Hardwick, Philip, Langmead, John and Khan, Bahadur. 1999. An Introduction to Modern Economics. 5th edn. Essex: Longman. Jones, Jonathan. 1998. Something happens to me when I walk into the theatre labelled Titanic. . . . The Guardian, G2 section, 9 October 98, 10–11. Krämer, Peter. 1999. Women First: Titanic, Action-Adventure Films, And Hollywood’s Female Audience. In Titanic: Anatomy of A Blockbuster, eds. Kevin S. Sandler and Gaylyn Studlar, 108–31. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Lord, Walter. 1997. A Night to Remember. New York: Bantam Books. Lubin, David M. 1999. Titanic. London: BFI Publishing. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1989. Acinema. In The Lyotard Reader, ed. A. Benjamin, 169–80. Oxford: Blackwell. Marsh, Ed. W. 1997. James Cameron’s Titanic. London and Basingstoke: Boxtree. Michelsen, Annette. 1999. Eisenstein at 100: Recent Reception and Coming Attractions. October 88 (Spring): 69–87.
186 Towards a General Economics of Cinema Parisi, Paula. 1998. Titanic and the Making of James Cameron: The Inside Story of the Three-Year Adventure that Rewrote Motion Picture History. London: Orion. —. 1998a. The Money Shot. Wired 6. 10, October 1998. http://www.wired.com/ wired/archive/6.10/hollywood_pr.html Richardson, J. H. 1997. Magnificent Obsession, Premiere (U.S. edition), 11(4): 124–31. Ryan, Joel. 1998. All Eyes on Oscar. Eonline, 24 March 1998. http://www. eonline.com/ News/Items/0,1,2733,00.html Sandler, Kevin and Studlar, Gaylyn, eds. 1999. Titanic: Anatomy of A Blockbuster. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Shaviro, Steven, 1993. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Simpson, Paul, ed. 2001. The Rough Guide to Cult Movies. London: Penguin Books. Smith, Jeff. 1999. Selling My Heart: Music and Cross-Promotion in Titanic. In Titanic: Anatomy of A Blockbuster, eds. Kevin S Sandler and Gaylyn Studlar, 46–63. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 1999. Bathos and the Bathysphere: On Submersion, Longing and History in Titanic. In Titanic: Anatomy of A Blockbuster, eds. Kevin S. Sandler and Gaylyn Studlar, 189–204. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Thompson, Kristin. 1986. The Concept of Cinematic Excess. In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen, 130–42. New York: Columbia University Press. Wyatt, Justin and Vlesmas, Katherine. 1999. The Drama of Recoupment: On the Mass Media Negotiation of Titanic. In Titanic: Anatomy of A Blockbuster, eds. Kevin S. Sandler and Gaylyn Studlar, 29–45. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. ZB izBek, Slavoj. 1991. The Truth Arises from Misrecognition. In Lacan and the Subject of Language, eds. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher, 188–212. New York and London: Routledge.
Index Abbate, Alessando, 104 abattoir, 152, 159–60 abstraction, 9, 21 n10, 24, 25–6, 30–1, 36, 87 accounts, 15, 70, 155, 162 n3 ‘Acinema’ (Lyotard), 176 Adelman, Janet, 135–6 Adair, William, 65–6, 69, 71, 74–6 Adorno, T W, 160, 163 n9 adventure/aventure, 14, 47, 50, 54, 55, 56, 58, 61 n16, 67, 185, 186 Addington, William, 64, 67 aesthetic, xi, 18, 19, 26, 58, 82, 94–6, 97, 112, 134, 141, 147, 158, 165, 167, 168, 175, 176, 178, 183 agent, 30, 65, 74–5, 178 Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 37 agora, 140–1 Alchemist, The, (Jonson, 1610), 37 Aliens of the Deep (Cameron, 2005), 181 alienation, 12, 83, 84, 85, 140, 163, n13 All About Eve (Mankiewicz, 1950), 169 Almereyda, Michael, 17, 98, 100–1, 102, 105, 106, 107, 108–9, 110, 111, 163 n8 altruism, 138, 139 America, 30, 35, 61, 99, 169, 176 anality, 163 n7 anarchic, 3 Anderegg, Michael, 108 Andrada, Washington, 6 Andrade, Mário de, 20–1 n6 Andrade, Oswald, 20–1 n6 Antarctic France, 46 annuities, 68 Arabic, 48, 51 Aristotle, 14, 25, 33, 36 Arroyo, José, 167–8 Ashton, Sir Richard, 74 assignats, 29 Atlanta Campaign, 109
authorship, 60 n9, 83 axiology, 26 Ayliffe, John, 78 Bacon, Francis, 9, 154 Ball Kirstie and Webster, Frank, 100, 105, 111 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 100, 101, 110 Bamberg, 154, 155 bank bills, 1, 4, 5, 27, 33, 68 banking, 24, 38, 43, 71 banknotes, 29, 76, 159 Bank of England, 29 barbarians, 46 Barcelona, 94 bargaining, 46 Bartholomew Fair; (Jonson, 1614), 37 basis and superstructure, 84 Bataille, Georges, 19, 156, 159, 160, 161, 163 n14, 168, 170–5, 176, 177, 180, 184, n4, n6, 185 n9; on excess, 19, 170–1; on general economy, 19, 168, 170–1, 174, 184; on sacrifice, human, 159–160, 173, 184 n5, 185 n9; on waste/‘unproductive expenditure’, 19, 159, 160–1, 175 Beeching, Jack, 47 Benjamin, Walter, 93–6 Ben Hur (Wyler, 1959), 169 Bergfelder, Tim and Street, Sarah, 184 n1 Bergthora, 123, 125 Berlin, 153, 154, 156 Berlin Wall, 96 Berne, 153, 154 Beste, George, 49, 59–60 n7 Biddick, Kathleen, 59 n6 Bigelow, Gordon, 11 bills of credit, 68, Blackstone, William, 67–8 Blade Runner (Scott, 1982), 91 blazon, 52, 53, 60 n12 187
188 Index Blood, Susan, 163 n16 Bogart, Michele H., 111 n5 Bona Confidentia, 49 bonds, bank, 15, 35, 36, 64, 65–6, 67, 68–9, 71, 72, 74–6 social, 17, 29–30, 32, 115, 118, 121, 125, 126, 128, 138, 140, 149 n2 Bonfantine, Massimo, 84 Bono, 95 Boo, Katherine, 35 Boorde, Andrew, 51 Booth, Stephen, 162 Bosnia, 94, 105 Botting, Fred, 163 n16 Bottomore, 12, 22, 43 Bourdieu, Pierre, 120–1, 131 n30, n31 bourse, 152 Brantlinger, Patrick, 12 Brecht, Bertolt, xii, 4, 8 Bretton Woods, 30 British travellers, 45 Buber, Martin, 100 Buchan, James, 25, 144 Buenos Aires, Provincial Bank of, 1 Buñuel, Luis, 176 Burnett, Mark Thornton, 16–17, 18, 163 n8 Burrough, Stephen, 49, 51, 53, 56, 60 n12 buying, 33, 115, 116, 117, 145 see also selling Caillois, Roger, 184 n5 Callari, Antonio, 137 Cameron, James, 19, 100, 167, 168, 169, 180, 181, 182, 183; Aliens of the Deep (2005), 181; Expedition: Bismarck (2002), 181; Ghosts of the Abyss (2002), 181; Terminator, The (1984), 100; Titanic (1997), 19–20, 167–9, 175, 176, 179, 180–184, 184 n2, n4, 185 n10 Campbell, Gordon, 149 n6 Canada, 49, 51, 54 capital, 11, 16, 19, 21 n10, 42 n5,43, 71, 76, 84, 85–6, 88, 109, 117, 159, 161, 162 n1, 163 n8, 177–8, 179 capital crime/punishment, 67, 68, 78
capitalism, 2–3, 4, 6–7, 9–10, 11, 12, 14–5, 16, 17, 24, 32–3, 34–6, 37, 38, 41–42, 59, 85, 90, 101, 103, 105–5, 108, 159, 172, 174–5, anti-capitalism, 107 Capote, Truman, 7 Caribou, 49 Carthaginians, 46 Cartier, Jacques, 48, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 60 n12 Cassidy, John, 35 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 10 Cathay, 27, 49, 59 n7 Cavell, Stanley, 134 change, 24; in art, 95; monetary, 27–8, 29, 30, 42; social, 42, 89, 90; technological, 82, 86–7 Chile, 50 China, 30 Chomsky, Noam, 85–6 Chorost, Michael, 136 cinema, 19, 167–85, 93, 99, 106, 110 Cinema, avant–garde, 175–6, 179 Cinema, Hollywood, 106, 167–8, 169, 179, 184 cinematography, 175, 177 circulation, 5, 25, 72, 73, 83 city comedies, 14, 36 Cleopatra (Mankiewicz, 1963), 184 n2 cloth, clothing, 8, 17–18, 45, 53–4, 60 n15, 76, 99, 108, 114–30, see textile Clover, Carol, 118, 119 cogito, 16, 87 coinage, 24, 34 Cold War, 85 colonialism, 14, 34, 46, 48, 50, 54, 58–9 commerce, 24, 31, 33, 38, 40, 47, 59 n2, 99 commodification, 14, 33, 34, 35, 57, 59, 86, 159, 178 commodity, 25, 32–4, 36, 45, 53, 57–8, 83–4, 86, 87, 94, 96, 101, 117, 140, 143, 144 Common Market, 31 communication, 31, 35, 49, 56–7, 59 n7, 61 n17, 83–5, 88, 90, 96, 104, 108, 110, 126, 129, 173, 184 n6 Comolli, Jean-Louis and Narboni, Jean, 184 n8
Index confidence, 29, 75, 98 confidence games, 36 ‘conny-catching,’ 37 consumption, 17, 19, 48, 53, 83, 95, 101, 107, 134, 154, 170, 173–5, 177, 178, 180 Continental dollars, 29 contract, 36, 41, 140, 145, 149 n5, 155; social, 5 copia, 161 copper, 50, 54 Coriolanus, (Shakespeare, 1608–9) Coulmas, Florian, 42 n5 counterfeit, 15, 29, 68 credit, 13, 14, 15–16, 24, 27, 29, 32, 33–4, 36, 42, 63, 68, 70, 72, 74, 78, 79, 80, 149 n5, 159 Crowl, Samuel, 104 Cumberland Sound, 49 currencies, 14, 24, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33 cyborg, 16, 91–2, 99, 108 Dalby, David and Hair, P. E. H., 47, 60 n15 Dalì, Salvador, 176 Damiano, Gerard, 106 Damsholt, Nanna, 130 n10 Dandeker, Christopher, 104 Davis, Bette, 181 Davis, John, 49–50, 60 n8, n12 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 61 n18 Day, John, 33 Debord, Guy, 101 debt, 33, 38, 70, 75, 117, 136, 140, 141 debentures, army/navy, 68 deconstruction, 2, 11, 21 n10, 141 Deep Throat (Damiano, 1972), 106 De Léry, Jean, 52, 60 n11 Delors, Jacques, 85 Denmark, 101, 102, 107, 122, 163 n8, deposit, 33 derivatives, 34–5, 36 Derrida, Jacques, 11, 18, 19, 21 n10, 87, 129, 130 n13, 132 n58, 136–9, 149 n2, 156, 160–1, 163 n16 desire, 18, 20, 25–6, 28, 31, 32, 55, 56, 65, 66, 122, 135, 144–5, 146, 147, 149 n2, 173, 175, 182
189
Devil is an Ass, The; (Jonson, 1616), 37 dialectical process, 19, 85, 153, 157, 158, 159, 160, 160 n10, 160 n13 Dion, Céline, 169 discovery, 14, 34, 46, 59, 65, 100 dividends, 24, 68 dollar, 1, 27, 29, 30, 179 dowry, 126–7 Drake, Sir Francis, 50, 51, 60 n9, n12 Draper, J.W., 135, 149 n3 dream, 7, 20, 145–7, 162 n7, 87 Drexel, 41 Dronke Ursula, 130 n18, Drummond, Robert, 65–6, 69, 75, 76 Dublin, 107 Dudley, Robert, junior, 50–1, 54, 55, 56, 60 n12 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 149 n1 east India bonds, 68 economy, 1–21, 26, 27, 33, 34, 35, 36, 41, 45–6, 48, 54, 57, 80, 82–98, 102, 109, 110, 111, 116, 117, 125, 129, 134–6, 138–9, 140–1, 144–5, 147, 148, 149 n2, n5, n7, 158, 160, 161, 163 n10, n19, 167–84 Eco, Umberto, 88 Edwards, Tim, 101 Egypt, 94 Eisenstein, Sergei, 176 Ellis, Thomas, 59 n7 England, 46–7, 49, 64, 111 English, 29, 34, 48–51, 54, 55, 58, 60 n16, 109, 130 n8, 164 n20 Enron, 34–5, 41 Epicoene (Jonson, 1616), 37 equity, 24, 33, 35–6 Eskimo, 49–50 E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Spielberg, 1982), 184 n4 euro, 28, 30, 31 European, 4, 14, 27, 46, 47, 49, 51, 57, 176, 179 European Union, 85, 31 excess, 18, 19, 20, 139, 168, 170–2, 174, 175–6, 180, 182, 183–4, 184 n2, n7, n8
190 Index excess and Titanic, 19, 168, 179–82, 185 n10 exchange(s), 3, 4, 13–20, 24, 25–6, 28, 30, 31–4 35–6, 42 n2, 46, 47–8, 50, 51, 52, 54–5, 63, 68, 84, 101, 102, 114–129, 135, 140–1, 143, 145–6, 149 n2, 172; fictional, 45, 101, 145; gift exchanges, 48, 140, 143, 149 n5; linguistic, 39, 45–59, 84; market, 140; symbolic, 104, 114–129 exchange value, 101, 154 exchequer, 68 excretion, 157 Expedition: Bismarck (Cameron, 2002), 181 expenditure, 19, 138, 140, 152–62, 163 n16, 168, 172–3, 174–5, 176, 178–81, 183, 184, 185 n9 exploitation, 5, 83, 84, 85, 106, 109 Export, Valie, 91 Fabrics, 17, 45, 94, 116, 119, 122, 125, 126, 129 fact, 7, 13, 16, 20, 24, 29, 32, 35, 37, 38, 42, 42 n1, 64–5, 66, 67, 68–9, 70, 80 n17, 114, 121, 124, 179 Fennell, Lee Anne, 143 fetish, 14, 25, 30, 57, 92 fiction, 7, 9, 10–11, 13–15, 20, 24, 28, 29, 31, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 45, 59, 60–1 n16, 63, 73, 83, 100, 109, 111, 117 and economy, 11, 13–14 Fielding, Sir John, 67, 68 film studios, 168, 169, 175, 179, 183; Fox, 169, 175; Paramount, 175 film theory, 19, 175, 176 Fini, Massimo, 82 Florio, John, 48 Flosi, 117–25, 128–9, 130 n27, 131 n28, n44 Ford, 86 forgery, 15, 63–8, 72–3, 74–80 forgetting, 137 Forsyth, Neil, 164 n20 Foucault, Michel, 11, 21 n11, 108 fragment, 11, 14–15, 47, 57, 58, 59, 64, 92, 93, 102, 105, 107, 153
Frankenstein, 92 Frankfurt, 154 Frankland, Sir Thomas, 68–9, 74, 76 French, 34, 45, 46, 48, 53, 55 Freud, Sigmund, 87, 162 n7, 178 Frobisher, Captain Martin, 49, 51, 56, 59 n7, 60 n12 Fuller, Mary, 58 futures contracts, 36 Gabriel, The, 49 Galbraith, J.K., 29 Galliker, Franz, 41 gambling, 19, 32, 36, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162 n1, 163 n15 Geary, Karl, 107 generosity, 18, 38, 71, 115, 134–49, 149 n2 Genette, Gérard, 98, 110 Ghosts of the Abyss (Cameron, 2002), 181 Gibbons, Brian, 42 n8 Giddens, Anthony, 103 gift, 10, 11, 18, 37, 39, 48, 104, 117, 120–3, 134–49, 149 n2, n5, n7, 162, 163 n19; alienable/inalienable, 140–5 globalization, 12, 13, 16, 19, 35, 85–6, 87–8, 159, global village, 82, 86, 87, 88, 94 Globe, the, 37 God, 24, 25, 28, 31, 36, 37, 47, 49 Godzich, Wlad, 83 gold, 25, 27, 37, 38, 46, 49, 50–1, 54, 55, 56, 60 n12, n16, 140, 142, 144, 146, 122, 124, 131 n34 Gold-coast, 55 Goldman Robert and Papson, Stephen, 110 Goldscheid, Rudolf, 12 Gone With the Wind (Fleming, 1939), 184 n4 goods, 19, 24, 30, 32, 46, 59, 77, 101, 116, 127, 138 Goux, Jean Joseph, 5, 10, 42 n5, 174–5, 179 Gramsci, Antonio, 96 Greenblatt, Stephen, 46, 48, 57, 59 n1 Grenada, 50
Index guarantor, 2, 4 Guevara, Che, 107 Guinea, 49, 55, 59, 60 n12, n14 Gunnhild, queen of Norway, 118–19, 120, 121–2, 126 Gunnar, 114–16, 118, 123, 126–8 Guyana, 50 Hakluyt, Richard, 14, 46, 47, 48–51, 52–3, 54–5, 56–7, 58, 59 n4, n7, 60 n8, n10, n14 Hair, P.E.H., 47, 60 n15 Hall, Cristopher, 49 Hallgerd, 114–16, 123 hand-writing, 65, 73, 75, 76, 78 Harald, king of Norway, 118, 120 Haraway, Donna, 16, 88–92 Hardwick, Philip, 170 Haring, Keith, 94 Hart, Jonathan Locke, 46 Harwich, 49 Hatchuel, Sarah, 105 Hawke, Ethan, 99 Hebrew, 48 Hegel, G.W.F., 18–19, 83, 152–61, 162 n2–5, n7, 163 n10, n11, n15, n17, 164 n20 hegemony, 11, 83, 96, 101; hegemonic class, 83 Heidelberg, 154 Heinzelman, Kurt, 11, 130 n12, 42 n5 Hendrix, Jimmy, 94 Hermes, 31 Herodotus: The Histories, 46 heteroglossia, 110 heterotopia, 108 Hildigunn, 117–18, 119–21, 122, 123, 124–5, 129, 132 Hitchcock, Alfred, 100 Hochelaga, 49, 51 Hodgdon, Barbara, 103 Holquist, Michael, 101, 108, 110 homework economy, 89 homo economicus, 3 honesty, 46, 74 Hörisch, Jochen, 42 n5 Hoskuld, 117–8, 119–21, 122, 123–5, 128, 129, 131 n36 Hrut, 118–20, 121–2, 126–7
191
Hume, David, 31 hybrid, 91, 105 I , 19, 90, 92, 94, 108, 157–8 Iceland, 116–17, 118, 119, 122, 126, 129, 130 n8 identity, 15–16, 56, 58, 63–4, 70–1, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 91–2, 98, 99, 108, 173, 184 n6 ideology, 45, 57, 84, 85 imaginary, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 15, 20, 21 n13, 46, 51, 52, 91, 180, 185 n9 imagined, 14, 15, 20, 48, 144, 145, 149, 157 Indian, 50–1, 57 inflation, 149 n7, 154, 184 n2 informatics of domination, 90 information, 24, 32, 45, 50, 67, 78, 86, 91, 96, 103, 111, 184 n6 information technologies, 91, 96 Ingimundarson, Jón Haukur, 130 n11 insult, 48, 116, 121, 123, 127 integrated circuit, women in, 16, 88, 89–90, 91 interest, 33, 36, 140, 141 inventory/ inventaire, 47, 48, 54, 57 Ireland, 70, 73, 107, 129 n3 iron, 38, 50, 54 irony, 4, 59, 91, 102, 104, 157, 158, 159, 161, 163 n11 Israel, 94 Italian, 16, 20 n5, 83 Italy, 40, 84 Jackson, Ken, 149 n2, 150 n8 Jameson, Fredric, 82, 85, 90, 102, 107, 109 Java, 50 Javanese, 51, 60 n12 Jena, 154, 155, 156 Jesch, Judith, 130 n14, n27, 131, n45 Jess, Carolyn, 99 Jochens, Jenny, 130 n8, n10 Jóhannesson, Jón, 130 n10 Johnson, Thomas H. and Wish, Harvey, 109 Jones, Jonathan, 167, 169
192 Index Jonson, Ben, 14, 37, 41, see also Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair, Devil is an Ass, Epicoene, Volpone jouissance, 178 Jung, Carl, 87 Kahn, Coppélia, 135 Kellogg, Robert, 130 n9 Kerchhove, Derrik de, 87 Kildin, 49 King Lear, 134, 144 King, Martin Luther, 94 Knight, Wilson, 134 Kola-Lapp, 49 Krämer, Peter, 169 labour, 4, 9, 12, 35, 58, 110, 140, 153, 156, 159, 177, 178 Labrador, 49 Langmead, Philip, 170 language, 4, 7, 9, 14–15, 16, 17, 21 n10, 24, 29–30, 31–2, 33, 34, 35, 42, 45–50, 51, 53–4, 55, 56–7, 59 n1, n7, 60 n10, 83–4, 85, 87–8, 90, 92, 94, 96, 102, 104, 109, 129, 144, 158, 164 n20 Lanier, Douglas M., 99 Lapland, 54 Lappian, 49, 51, 56 Larrington, Carolyne, 129 n3 Las Casas, 57 Lehmann, Courtney, 105 Leitch, Vincent B., 21 n12 Lestringant, Frank, 47, 60 n11 Lewis, C.S., 31 lexicon,45, 48, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56 Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, 48 Libya, 46 Lichtenstein, Roy, 94 Locke, John, 31, 42 n5 Lombards, 29 London, 34, 36, 37, 63, 64, 68, 70, 73, 152 Lonzi, Carla, 164 n20 Lord, Walter, 179–80 Lotman, Jurij, 110 lottery, 19, 154, 155–6, 162 n5
lottery orders, 68 Lubin, David M., 184 n1 Lukács, Georg, 12 Lyon, David, 103, 108, 111 Lyotard, Jean-François, 14, 32–3, 34, 35, 36, 39, 176–8 Macksey, Richard, 98 MacLachlan, Kyle, 99 Mäki, Uksali, 21 n13 Malcolm X, 107 Mandel, Ernest, 20 n2 Mandeville, John, 48, 54, 60 n14 Manhattan, 103, 107, 163 n8 Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 169, 184 n2 Marchiano, Linda, 106 McCutcheon, Elizabeth, 142 McDonalds, 94 McKeon, Michael, 9, McLuhan, Marshall, 86–9 McMillen, Jan, 163 n15 McRobbie, Angela, 106 market/ marketplace,14, 15, 28, 32, 33, 34–6, 41, 57, 84, 86, 88–9, 94, 101, 140, 141, 149; market economy, 86; Stock Market, 148 Marsh, Ed W., 169 Marx, Karl, 2, 9, 11, 12, 16, 20 n2, 25, 29, 33, 42, 84, 85, 91, 96, 154 masses, 95, 96, 154, 174 material, 25, 33, 54, 58, 94, 117, 118, 128, 129 materialism, 12, 91, 109, 160 materiality, 5, 24, 27, 30, 35, 37, 59, 90, 92, 138, 144, 145, 179 Mauss, Marcel, 18, 136, 137, 138, 145, 149 n5 Melkolf, 115 messages, 5, 16, 83, 84, 87, 102, 118 Meta Incognita, 49, 51 metaphor, 8, 17, 52, 58, 90, 92, 111, 115–16, 122, 129, 171, 175, 177, 179, 180 Mexico, 169 Michelsen, Annette, 176 Milken, Michael, 35, 41 Miller, William Ian, 116, 130 n7, n11, n16, n24, n25 Mirabeau, Marquis de, 30
Index modernity, 14, 17, 24, 29, 34, 100, 103, 104, 111, 83 Moluccas, 50 money, 1–12, 14–16, 18–20, 20 n4, 21 n10, 24–34, 36, 38, 42, 45, 51, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71–2, 74, 77, 79, 82, 117, 119, 121–5, 126–7, 128–9, 136, 138, 140, 142, 143–4, 144–5, 148, 149 n5, 153, 156–7, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163 n19, 167, 177, destruction of, 1–6, 20 n4 Money to Burn, 1–7, 10, 20 Monnet, Jean, 31 Mord, 127–8, 131 n36 More, Thomas, 138, 142 Murray, Bill, 108 Nagler, Michael N., 160 n20, narrative, 1, 6, 7, 8–9, 14, 15, 17, 20, 46, 47, 48–9, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56, 57–8, 59 n7, 60 n9, n16, 64, 92, 95, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 115, 117, 122, 130 n8, 168, 173, 174, 175–6, 177, 180–2, 183 narrative, cinematic, 177 nation states, formation of, 29 native, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56–7, 58, 59, n7, 60 n16 New Economic Critics, 11–13, 21 n12 New France, 46, 48–9, 51, 54 Newgate Prison, 63, 74, 79 New Spain, 46 Nicholson, Vivian, 152, 160 Night to Remember, A (Lord, 1997), 179 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 28 Nixon, President Richard, 27 Njal, 116, 122–7, 128–9 Njal’s saga, 17, 114–29 Nonfiction Novel, 7 Norns, 114, 129 n3 Norway, 86, 118–19, 120, 122, 126 Norwich, John Julius, 60 n13 nostalgia, 19, 28, 87, 90, 104, 107–8, 136 Now, Voyager (Rapper, 1942), 181 Nuremberg, 154
193
O’Donoghue, Heather, 130 n9 oikos, 140–1 Old Norse, 13, 114 Oliver, H.J., 149 n7 ontology of work, 91, 92 optical unconscious, 93 Orchard, Andy, 129 n3 Orléan, André, 29 Osteen, Mark, 11, 130 n12, 136, 138, 139, 140, 143, 147 Otkel, 115–16 outsourcing, 35 paper credit, 68, 79 Parisi, Paula, 167, 169, 183 payment, 5, 25, 32, 33, 65, 71, 115, 120, 122, 124, 129, 138, 153 Pepsi, 101, 110 Perreau twins, 15, 63–80 person, 10, 16, 60 n12, 63–4, 70, 73, 73, 75, 79, 80, 138, 142 phrase list, 46, 47 pidgin, 55 Piel, 163 n14 Piglia, Ricardo, 1–11, 20, 20 n6, Money to Burn, 1–7, 10, 20 Pinkard, Terry, 153, 154, 155, 162 n2, n4 pleasure, 14, 24, 28–30, 31, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 53, 58, 135, 139, 144, 176, 178, 182, 183, 184 Pliny, 54 polis, 82, 85, 87, 94 Polo, Marco, 27 Ponzio, Augusto, 86 Popmart, 94–5, 96 Þorláksson, Helgi 130 n11 Portuguese, 46, 55, 61 n17 postmodernism, 85, 91, 105, 179 postmodernity, 32, 82, 100, 105 postructural feminism, 82, 92 potlatch, 6, 141, 149 n7, 173, 179 potlatcher, 136 pound, 25, 29, 30, 148, 183 poverty, 159; feminization of, 89 praxis, 85, 91 Prendergast, Maria, 135 print, 34, 73, 86–7 prodigality, 135
194 Index product placement, 17, 101 profit, 14, 15, 18, 20, 33, 34, 36, 38, 39, 40, 58, 67, 68, 140, 148, 157, 162, 170, 172 proletarian, 85 proletarization, 96 psychoanalytic, 135, 137, 180 Purchas, Samuel, 46–7 Quinn, D.B., 49, 50 Quintilian, Marcus Fabius, 31, 32 ‘Rajas,’ 50 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 50 Ramonet, Ignacio, 86 Rannveig, 114 Rapper, Irving, 181 Rasmussen, Eric, 149 n1 Readings, Bill, 12, 33 realism, 83, 93, 182 Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954), 100 reception, 70, 95, 167, 168 reciprocity, 18, 56, 90, 121, 122, 123, 129, 135, 136, 137–8, 139, 141, 145-8, 150 n7 referentiality, 5, 93, 96, 32 Rehder, Robert, 25 Reid, Stephen A., 135 reification, 92, 101, 107 renunciation, 26, 149 n2 Reith, Gerda, 156, 159, 162 n6, 163 n15 Renzi, Emilio, 8 repayment, 69, 74, 115, 116, 120, 121, 127, 141, 149 n7 repetition, 3, 6, 19, 31, 33, 41, 46, 60 n13, 68, 71, 86, 141, 153, 157, 160–1, 162, 174, 180–1, 183 repression, 6, 106, 137 Richardson, J.H., 169 Robertson, Morgan, 179–80 Robocop (Verhoeven, 1987), 91 Roe, Stephen, 78 rogue literature, 37 Romanticism, 92 de Roover, Raymond, 29 Rosenthal, Jack, 162 n1 Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio, 16, 83–4, 85, 87, 88, 96
Rowe, Katherine, 106 Royal exchange, 68 Rudd, Margaret Caroline, 15, 63, 64, 65, 67, 69–78, 80 Russia, 31, 181 Ryan, Joel, 169 sacrifice, 6–7, 20, 26, 159, 173, 174, 184 n5, 185 n9 Sahlins, Marshall David, 145–6 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 109 Sandler Kevin S,. and Studlar, Gaylyn, 184 n1 San Francisco, 50 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 32, 42 n5 Sawday, Jonathan, 53 Scanlan John, 162 n7, 163 n15 Scheid, John and Jesper Svenbro, 116, 129 Schreiber, Liev, 99 Schuman, Robert, 31 Scott, Deborah, 182 securities, 65, 68, 75 Segal, Lynne, 106 selling, 33, 39, 50, 115–16, 117, 127, 140, 169, see also buying semiotics, 16, 47, 57, 82–96 Settle, Dionyse, 59 n7 Shakespeare, William, 18, 42 n1, 98, 101, 102, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 134, 135, 142, 149 n1, n2, n7, 161, 162, 164 n21; Sonnet 76, 152, 161; Henry V., 53; Hamlet, 17, 18, 98–9, 111 n2, n4, 163 n8, 98–111 share indexes, 101 Shaviro, Steven, 176, 185 n9 Shaw, George Bernard, 1 Shell, Marc, 11, 156, 42 n5 Shepard, Sam, 99 Sherman, Cindy, 91 Sherman, General William, 109, 111 Shubik, Martin, 42 n2 Shumar, Wesley, 12 sign, 5, 21 n10, 57, 61 n17, 73, 99, 107, 158, 159, 162, 163 n19, 180 signature, 15–16, 63, 65, 67, 72, 73, 75–6, 78–80 silver, 17, 25, 27, 54, 117, 142
Index Simmel, Georg, 9–10, 11–12, 21 n12, 26, 27, 28–9, 30, 32, 42 n5, 142–3 Simpson, Paul, 184 n2 simulacrum, 55, 93, 178 Sinfield, Alan, 107 single parent, 89 Skarphedin, 123–4 Smith, Jeff, 169 Smith, Adam, 35 Sobchack, Vivian, 168 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 30 Sørensen, Preben Meulegracht: 123, 130 n14, n27, 131 n45 Soto, Hernando de, 42 n5 Sound of Music, The (Wise, 1965), 184 n4 South Africa, 86 south sea bonds, 68 Spaak, Paul-Henri, 31 Spanish, 20 n1, n4, 46, 50, 55, 61 n17 speculation, 63, 73, 80, 154, 161 speech, 24, 30, 100, 102, 106, 109, 118, 147, 155, 164 n20 sperm, 161 spit, 162, 164 n20 Spufford, Peter, 29, 33 Star Wars (Lucas, 1977), 184 n4 State socialism, 85 steel, 31, 54, 93 Stein, Gertrude, 29 Stelarc, Orlan O., 91 Stevens, Wallace, 14, 24, 28–9, 36, 38, 154 Styles, Julia, 99 St Kitts, West Indies, 64 stock, 34, 35, 68, 148 stock certificates, 36 stranger, 66, 147 subject, 16–17, 18, 48, 51, 58–9, 70, 75, 77, 80, 83, 84, 90, 92, 93, 94, 139, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 109 subjectivity, 26, 86, 91, 104, 108, 172, 184 n6 Sundström, Lars, 59 Surowiecki, James, 34 surplus, 85 surplus value, 4, 154
195
surveillance, 17, 100–1, 102–4, 105, 108, 111 Sweet, Timothy, 54 Swift, Jonathan, 153 Swissair, 35 Swiss francs, 30 symbolic, 5, 10, 17, 24, 25–6, 30, 35, 37, 51, 79, 87, 104, 109, 116, 117, 120, 122, 124, 125, 127, 137, 144–5, 150, 179, 180, 182, 185 n9 symbolic equivalent; 137–8, 140 144–5 syntax, 15, 160, 162, 163 n18, 45, 48, 56 tax, 35, 153 Taylor, Gary, 60 n13 Taylor, Mark C., 42 n5 Ter, 49 technologies, 34, 82, 86, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 96, 100, 102, 104, 105, 108, 109, 180 Terminator, The (Cameron, 1984), 100 Textiles, 15, 17–18, 115, 117, 119, 121, 122, 128–9, 130 n8 thalers,153 theft, 5, 48, 78, 115, 116 ‘the real’, 5, 7, 9, 13, 25, 73, 93, 94, 185 n9 Thompson, Kristin, 184 n7 Thorgeir the Priest: 126 Thorhall Njalsson: 126, 128, 132 n56 Thurman, Dechen, 103 Timon of Athens, 13, 18, 134–149 Titanic (Cameron, 1999), 19–20, 167; production and marketing of, 167, 169, 176, 179; as sacrificial event, 183; production design, authenticity of, 181–2, 183 Titanic, R.M.S., 179, 180, 182 totalitarianism, 96 Towerson, William, 49, 55, 56–7, 60 n12 Toyota, 86 trade, 14–15, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 57, 59 n1, 64, 67, 84, 101, 104, 110 traffique/traffiquing, 14–15, 45, 46–7, 48, 51, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, n2
196 Index
U2, 94 unconscious, 5, 87, 92, 93, 135 unemployment, 2, 84, 85–6 Ungerer, Gustav, 61 n17 Unn, 119, 126 United States, 85, 86, 89, 94, 169, use, 3, 33, 47, 88, 95, 105, 114, 116, 120, 137, 141, 142, 145, 147, 161, 174, 177, 179 utopia, 138, 142 utopian, 18, 46, 101, 107, 137, 147, 149 n2, 150 n9 Vai, 49 value, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 17, 20 n4, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 42 n2, 46, 51, 57, 60 n16, 76, 88, 93, 95, 96, 117, 121, 124, 128, 129, 137, 141, 143, 144, 146, 149 n7, 154, 155, 158, 159, 162, 163 n19, 168, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179, 184, see also exchange value, surplus value Vaud, 153 Vendler, Helen, 161 vengeance, 120, 121, 124–5, 128, 129 Venora, Diane, 102 Villette, John, 79 virtuality, 83, 93, 96 Vlesmas, Katherine, 169 Volpone, 14, 37–42 Wal-Mart, 94 Walter, John Henry, 60 n13
Warhol, Andy, 94 waste, 4, 5, 6, 19, 20, n5, 31, 152–162, 163 n15, n18, 164 n21, 172, 175, 176, 179, 180, 181, 182, 185 n10 Waswo, Richard, 11, 14–15, 16, 149 n5, 163 n19 Watts, Michael, 21 wealth, 10, 25, 38, 50, 59, 71, 86, 143, 144, 147, 148, 153, 159, 172 weaving, 17, 115, 116, 118, 126, 128, 129, 129 n3 Weber, Wolfang, 162 n5 West, William N., 163 n19 West Greenland, 49 Wilde, Oscar, 161 Williams, Raymond, 10 Wilson, Scott, 163 n16 wine, 154–5, 162 n4 Wittenberg, 107 Wood, David, Konvitz, Eli, and Ball, Kirstie, 111 Woodbridge, Linda, 11 Woodmansee Martha and Osteen, Mark, 11, 130 n12 women, 77, 89, 90, 106, 107, 118, 120, 123, 125, 129 n3, 176; in the integrated circuit, 16, 88, 89, 90, 91 word list, 15, 45, 48–51, 52, 54, 55, 57, 60 n10; bilingual, 14, 45, 48, 52 work, 4–5, 10, 11, 12, 16, 58, 83, 84, 85, 89, 90, 95, 118, 129 n3, 153, 155, 157, 158, feminization of, 89 writing, 16, 18, 24, 32, 48, 63, 65, 67, 68, 70, 75, 76, 78, 83, 87, 91, 136, 155, 156, 158, 177 Wyler, William, 169 yen, 30 Zahn, Steve, 103 Zelizer, Viviana A., 143 Zizek, Slavoj, 96, 179, 180, on the symptom, 180 Zollinger, Manfred, 162 n5 ˆ ˆ
travel narratives, Elizabethan/Jacobean, 14, 46 Trinidad, 50, 54, 55, 60 n16 trust, 29, 30, 63, 73, 74, 122, 111, 135 Tübingen, 153 Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret, 60 n10 Tupi, 52, 60 n11 Turner, Bryan S., 12 Turville-Petre, Gabriel, 129 n3 Twi, 49 typology, 45
