The Storm at Sea: Political Aesthetics in the Time of Shakespeare
Abstract
The Storm at Sea: Political Aesthetics in the Time of Shakespeare counters a tradition of cultural analysis that judges considerations of aesthetic autonomy in the early modern context to be either anachronistic or an index of political disengagement. The book argues that for a post-theocratic era in which the mise en forme of the social domain itself was for the first time at stake, the problem of the aesthetic lay at the very core of the political; it is precisely through its engagement with the question of aesthetic autonomy that the early modern work most profoundly explores its relation to matters of law, state, sovereignty and political subjectivity. The book forwards a case for the significance of a “creationist” political aesthetic—at once a discrete historical category and a phenomenon that troubles our familiar forms of historical accounting—and suggests that the fate of such an aesthetic is intimately bound up with the emergence of modern conceptions of the political sphere. Storm at Sea moves historically from Leonardo da Vinci to Thomas Hobbes, engaging political thinkers such as Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, Claude Lefort and Roberto Esposito. It focuses on Shakespeare and English drama, with chapters on Hamlet, Othello, Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, as well as sustained readings of As You Like It, King Lear, Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus.
This chapter explores how Thomas Hobbes evacuates from the imagination the participatory and transformative dimensions exemplified in earlier approaches to this mental activity. I take as representative of the participatory and transformative imagination the treatment of the image of Christ in John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 13 (“What if this present were the world’s last night”). The poem delineates a phenomenologically and hermeneutically rich, and spiritually transformative, encounter with this image by the poem’s speaker. The image of Christ in Donne’s poem is not a mere fabrication of the fancy, but rather derives from an act of the imagination which metaphysically participates in divine reality. In contrast, Hobbesian imagination rests upon a radical materialist ontology which denies all spiritual reality and reduces existence to matter in motion. This chapter explores the implications of this reductive metaphysics for imagining the divine and for how we encounter images. As we shall see, in Hobbesian thought the political sovereign and God are both constructions and projections of the human imagination, and as constructions the sovereign and God converge—and serve their chief purpose—as the site upon which political order is founded. Further, images in Hobbes are frequently depicted as being imposed upon people, with the imagination construed as a resource to be exploited for the sake of ensuring political stability. Rather than envision imagination as a site of participation, and rather than an encounter with the image being a space of spiritual transformation, Hobbes presents the imagination as raw material to be shaped and the image as a tool to achieve this shaping. Whereas the imaginative encounter with Christ in Donne is a means of knowing the self and its spiritual condition, and of experiencing the self’s integration with the source of its being, the imagination in Hobbes is indicative of an atomized self, functioning either as producer of the artifices which ground political order or as a passive resource to be shaped by images. The chapter concludes by critically examining how the Hobbesian imagination has been valorized as the triumph of literary construction and of a purely human poesis (making) of the social and political world. It questions this valorization by considering Hobbesian poesis in light of modernity’s fetishizing of narrowly conceived forms of productivity.
Closely examining the relationship between the political and the utopian in five major plays from different phases of Shakespeare's career, Hugh Grady shows the dialectical link between the earlier political dramas and the late plays or tragicomedies. Reading Julius Caesar and Macbeth from the tragic period alongside The Winter's Tale and Tempest from the utopian end of Shakespeare's career, with Antony and Cleopatra acting as a transition, Grady reveals how, in the late plays, Shakespeare introduces a transformative element of hope while never losing a sharp awareness of suffering and death. The plays presciently confront dilemmas of an emerging modernity, diagnosing and indicting instrumental politics and capitalism as largely disastrous developments leading to an empty world devoid of meaning and community. Grady persuasively argues that the utopian vision is a specific dialectical response to these fears and a necessity in worlds of injustice, madness and death.
Cognitive scientists are beginning to explore the important work our minds do when attention wanes. In particular, it seems that orientation of the individual in relation to past, present, and future may be developed and maintained during periods of distraction. Shakespeare works with the potential for productive mind-wandering in characters and in audiences. In Henry V, they and we think beyond present business into the ideologies and costs of the underlying plans and possibilities. The King himself embodies the interaction of wandering and selfhood. In Much Ado About Nothing the friends and audience of Beatrice and Benedick may not be fully absorbed by their witty exchanges; there is another story to be told, in the gaps Shakespeare creates in the action of the play, in which they end up taking their inevitable roles as lovers.
Today we live in a cinematic society governed by images and by media culture. Governmentality depends on the staging of social reality through visual dispositifs. Cinema is a significant dispositif in this context. This article first explores the relationship of cinema to modernity and spectacle and to the foundations of modern power. Besides being a governmental dispositif, cinema is also a social phenomenon. Turning social life into representation, cinema not only depicts, but also constructs social reality and shapes the social unconscious. As Bazin (2011) has argued, cinema provides its audience with tools with which to philosophize. The article compares Badiou’s and Deleuze’s approaches to cinema, which suggest that, although the cinematic thought is not reducible to the philosophical, cinema always stages a philosophical encounter, affecting new ways of thinking and being.
This article argues that, in the early seventeenth century, rhetorical devices and stage devices overlap. There has been much critical interest in the materiality of theatres like the Blackfriars, the Globe, and the Red Bull. Recent work in early modern theatre studies has made some broad gestures to the way in which poetic and verbal effects are linked with the practical theatrical work of the playhouse. Rhetoric and rhetorical styles have also been subject to renewed scholarly interest, with some suggesting the imminence of an “aesthetic turn” or “New Formalism.” Yet these two critical approaches often remain distinct. Attention to the interaction between speech and spectacle can unite ostensibly different angles of literary analysis and deliver further attention to the visual, philosophical, and intellectual complexity of seventeenth‐century playhouse spectacle.
I begin by exploring some important terms in early modern English that point to rhetoric's participation in the material world and that suggest these two approaches, when considered from an historical perspective, are complementary. I then attend to the dumb shows and to light and darkness in John Webster's The White Devil (1612) to argue for a critical approach to early modern theatre studies that combines historically minded close reading with recent revisionist considerations of spectacle and that sees rhetorical style as part of the visual and material world of the playhouse.
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