Storm at Sea
The Tempest , Cultural Materialism and the Early Modern Political Aesthetic
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8865302 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christopher Pye (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 94 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 331-345 |
| Publication date | 2013-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | English Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-838X • E-ISSN: 1744-4217 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0013838x.2013.778626 |
| OpenAlex | W2041562373 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 17 |
Critical reception of The Tempest has shifted over time from broadly aesthetic matters—the sublimating passage of matter into spirit, the work's self-conscious artfulness—to a concern with material context, particularly its status as colonial encounter. In fact, that division of critical attention has foreclosed engagement with the work's deepest political stakes. For it is precisely in its preoccupation with the problem of the aesthetic, and particularly with aesthetic autonomy, that the play encounters the most radical dimensions of its material and historical causation, this essay argues. In that sense, The Tempest is an important corrective to forms of cultural materialist analysis that have sought to historicize early modern works by bracketing the problem of the aesthetic altogether. Notes1Bruster, 29–62.2See Derrida, 128–35.3Or might not, insofar as such attention reinforces the familiar subject/object binarism that has always underwritten the idealist subject. The symmetry of that supposed opposition is evident enough in accounts that seek to displace a subject orientation by reference to the quasi-biographical "life" or "career" of the object.4Harris, "The New New Historicism's Wunderkammer"; Pye, The Vanishing, 2–4; Bruster, 198–203. Although I balk at his historical equation of contemporary materialism tout court with capitalist commodification, David Hawkes offers a deft summary of the materialist orientation in the long view and in early modern studies.5Harris and Korda, 24; and Harris, Untimely Matter, 9, 7.6Reynolds and West, 9, 15.7See ibid., 9.8Ibid., 12–14.9Ibid., 10.10Reynolds, Becoming Criminal, 18.11Ibid., 13.12Ibid., 18.13Hulse, 31–5.14On Renaissance imitatio and the construction of the modern political sphere, see Lacoue-Labarthe, 78; and Lefort, 270–1.15See Redfield, 25.16On the mixture of compression and pleonastic iteration in the play, see McDonald, 218–19. For a beautiful account of the lability of character and language in the play and its social implications, see Palfrey, 25–7, 144, 230.17Palfrey, 26.18Benjamin, Origin, 66–71. See Weber, 187–90.19Shakespeare, King Lear, 2.2.246–7.20Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1.2.258. All further references in the text to The Tempest are to this edition.21On imprinting as cultural, pedagogical and sexual reproduction in the play, see Goldberg, 124–8. Joan Pong Linton emphasizes the mimetological contradictions internal to the play's gendered forms of cultural imprinting (155–70).22Orgel, 50. Jeffrey Knapp considers distraction in the play more broadly as both the impediment to and the vehicle for the cultivation of a colonialism based on "temperate homebodiedness" (220–42).23Freud. For the classic analysis of the intransitive scene, see Laplanche.24Lacan, 76.25The structural relation between reflexive reason and revenge is apparent in the passage from Michael Montaigne whose phrases echo through Prospero's articulation of forgiveness. Montaigne speaks of the distinction between goodness and the higher order of virtue: He that through a natural facility and genuine mildness should neglect or condemn injuries received, should no doubt perform a rare action and worthy commendation; but he who being stung to the quick with any wrong or offence received, should arm himself with reason against this furiously blind desire of revenge, and in the end after a great conflict yield himself master over it, should doubtless do much more. (211)The difference involves more than the intensity of the affront; it's a distinction between goodness as natural inclination and a virtue founded on the capacity to reflexively recognize one's blind, reiterative inclination. On the relation between the passage and The Tempest, see Yachnin, 169–70; and Prosser.26On the relation between cannibalism and humanism's "threatened ideal of incorporative reading"—a matter of European readers' relation to "their own kind," see Yachnin, 164. On the reflexivity of the European preoccupation with the cannibal generally, see Greene, 121; and Pye, "To throw out our eyes," 434.27Agamben, 38.28Ibid., 29, 107.29More broadly, Caliban reformulates the question of sovereignty, focusing it not on what lies beyond the structure of the sovereign ban—Giorgio Agamben's antinomian preoccupation—but on whether the movement of the ban does or doesn't belong to the sovereign. The continuation of Caliban's ditty—"Ban, ban, Cacaliban / Has a new master—get a new man"—seems to offer the promise of an entire miniature political genealogy from the originative self-banning ban to mastery to the getting of a man indistinguishable from that new subjection. But the question is precisely the genealogical one, how one passes from the reiterative, backward and forward, doing and undoing of the first line—the figuration in small of all those dispersive voices that may or may not have inhabited the island before the magician's arrival—and the conversion of that into a developmental form. The political aesthetic instance, and the instance of sovereignty, is the force that manages that conversion. Insofar as such force amounts to an ambiguously reiterative banning of banning, it will always be an uncertain gesture, a force that calls for no end of force. My account here contrasts with Julia Lupton's suggestive Agambenian analysis of Caliban as protosymbolic creaturely ground (161–80).30"A true repertory of the wreck and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates," cited in Orgel, Appendix B; in Shakespeare, The Tempest, 209, 211.31Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," 253–64
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Autonomy · Bracketing (phenomenology · Causation · Context (archaeology · Cultural materialism (cultural studies · Epistemology · Literature · Materialism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Tempest · Classical Antiquity Studies · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Visual Culture and Art Theory · History · Law · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |