Category Archives: Merced Seminar in the Humanities

Borderlands, Humor, Literature, Merced Seminar in the Humanities, Movement, Politics

Troubadours and the Production of Early Chicano Literature

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by Dorie Perez

Pulling from a historically oral tradition, Chicano Literature sought to create and analyze texts of the Chicano cultural output that advanced during the social movements of the 1960s and into the 21st Century. Attempts to codify the literature of Chicano Studies into its own canon often sought to legitimize its study by turning oral tradition into the written word, the medium used most by the Humanities. This process of making “legible” work from Chicano scholars previously unrecognized by the academy framed such work as both cultural expertise and political argument.

The Center for Humanities’ final seminar for the Fall 2014 semester was led by Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez who presented his paper “Of Modern Troubadours and Tricksters: the Upside-Down World of José Inés García”. Martín-Rodríguez writes of the work of Chicano scholars in the 1980s to reclaim their discipline’s written past by doing literary “recovery,” looking for the beginnings of a Chicano movement found in works previously ignored in the development of the canon. Thus, literary histories of previous scholarship are vital to work to shift the analysis of academic literature away from its Eurocentric focus. The medium of such critique was the novel and social history, yet other genres such as poetry, letters and humor are where social commentary from the fringes are best received.

Understanding poetry as a medium – short pieces with big impact – is central to the analysis of José Inés García, whose work has been virtually ignored by Chicano scholars. In the vein of recovery and through the poetry, Garcia’s work is identified by Martín-Rodríguez as significant to the development of Chicano literature, voicing issues of identity and social tension that would serve as the core ideas of subsequent Chicano authors. This recovered history is remarkable – very few copies of García’s work exist. Other poets like Bartolo Ortiz and José Díaz from the same time frame (early 20th Century) often used self-publishing to produce their work, sold door-to-door by authors eager to seek an audience within their own community. The entrepreneurial schemes to get their work read and published show the innovative ways in which this early cohort sought recognition. Calling himself “El trovador moderno,” or the modern troubadour, García’s writing extended to journalism. He edited El Progreso and La Cronica, local Spanish-language newspapers in the American South West.

The inversions that make José Inés García’s work so compelling are contextual as well as literary; García suffered an accident in mid-life, leading to permanent blindness that did not hinder his work as editor, translator and poet in New Mexico. He was also raised Protestant in an ethnic enclave of New Mexico, something of an outlier in traditionally Catholic Hispanic circles. His winking inversions continue in his focus on trickster figures, a literary trope used often to make light of intercultural tensions and difference. The transformation of gender roles happening during a time of social upheaval also captured his attention, producing several works that play on themes of gender. Given such topics, the early date of such work remains significant in its analysis of social change. Martín-Rodríguez was able to capture this recovery, adding to scholarship on forgotten figures central to Chicano Literature’s literary corpus and style.

Language, Merced Seminar in the Humanities

Rethinking The Patient-Doctor Dialogic

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by Dorie Perez

The interaction between a patient seeking medical care and a doctor seeking to understand both the biomedical and human-emotional imperative behind a sick person’s quest for help is no small thing. For the second-to-last seminar in our series, Dalia Magaña presented her linguistic study of the doctor-patient interview. 23 Spanish interviews in the United States between a doctor and patients seeking to address the problem of mental illness were used as her data.

These medical encounters are compounded by issues of cultural competency, agency, and the creation of identity around health diagnoses. Magaña applies linguistic analysis to these encounters on two fronts: 1) language that reflects interpersonal shifts in the medical interviews and 2) trans-cultural strategies utilized to accommodate or fill in the gaps of non-English speaking patients. The cultural context and social expectations of the patient are central to the medical experience, especially as previous studies have shown that patients seeking care with providers in their primary language almost always get a better quality of care. Such documented disparities in care are also compounded by the specific health needs that the larger Latino population in the U.S. face, such as diabetes and high blood pressure and the issues of accessibility that such medical care necessitates.

The situational dynamics of the interview itself must also be considered within its cultural context. Magaña focuses her analysis in this chapter on register – the field, tenor and mode of interactive language. The language’s utility itself, explicitly as the practical use of particular words and phrases, is the other fundamental part of her analysis. She argues that it is this situational analysis of language, not just the cultural context specific to the biomedical encounter, that can lead to an increased understanding of what makes a more efficient, situationally-attuned medical visit and thus, better health outcomes overall.

As there are no book-length linguistic works on doctor-patient interactions on Spanish spoken in the U.S., this paper offered a detailed description of the language (using Register Theory), with a significant emphasis on trans-cultural interactions. Jargon-heavy discussion mystifies treatment for patients afraid to seek clarification and reinforces the social differences between patients and the doctor. The burden is placed on the doctor to make discussion of their work less technical, removing the trappings of specialized technological discourse that are so celebrated in the biomedical field. The social agency of the doctor bears the responsibility for creating, through language, an informal atmosphere. According to linguistic and social theory literature, fostering such an engaged exchange encourages patients to speak freely. In this moment, the dynamics of the dialogue between patient and doctor privileges the patient.

In these interviews, the subversion of traditional hierarchies of power, reflected in the social status of medical doctors and the specialized medical knowledge they embody, happens due to the fact that patients spend the majority of the medical encounter talking about their own experiences. This emphasis on the patient’s lived experience is significant and necessitates the employment of trans-cultural strategies by the doctors. Each encounter is timed, and most of the encounter spent talking is done by the patient who uses this interaction to clarify their positionality by expressing what’s important to them in a time of medical crisis. The interview is bounded in other ways, with limited interruptions by the doctor as well as informal language used to put patients at ease add to the strategic component of such encounters. Magaña’s use of register theory is helpful here as it is topsy-turvy in the variables it considers important in an interview, identifying how linguistic choices that both patient and doctor make to convey their experiences and knowledge can be empowering.

Anthropology, Global, Merced Seminar in the Humanities

Ritual Spaces: the Caves of Belize

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by Dorie Perez

In the Maya tradition, caves were believed to be the entrance to the underworld, where people could make offerings to gods for rain, better harvests and health. Building on advancements in archeological scholarship on the Maya that had archeologists shifting focus away from large-scale built monuments to smaller areas of ritual practice in the 1990s, Marieka Arksey, a 2014-2015 Center for the Humanities Graduate Fellow, centered her study on three years’ worth of empirical fieldwork in the jungles of Belize. A fourth-year doctoral student in the World Cultures graduate group, she has focused on the ritual practices of the Terminal Classic Maya outside of the entrances of caves as a way of creating a more naturalized sacred site than the monumental temple structures being erected in the same time period.

Cave mouth

 

 

Mouth of cave site at Las Cuervas, Belize where Arksey did her work (2014).

 

The built environments of large-scale civic centers were translated to the spaces outside of caves as exceptionally potent places for communion with the forces that were thought to give life to ancient Maya societies. Arksey’s study shows that the discovery of man-made modifications to the areas directly outside of caves made them look more ordered and utilitarian. These modifications were created to look natural and occurring spontaneously, as though stemming from the cave itself, making clear the importance of the naturalistic aesthetics of the cave even as they are reformed through human interaction. Using fragments of ceramics, obsidian, chert, quartz, jute, and speleothems  to show that ancient rituals did indeed occur here, and type-variety analysis of the ceramics to place the age of modifications to the Terminal Late Classic period (between 700 and 950 CE), she is able to make an argument that these spaces have been created specifically for an extension of the rituals  taking place inside the caves.

Cave site map Belize(1)Map of archeological sites in Arksey’s doctoral research (2014).

Arksey argues that the ‘collapse’ of the Terminal Classic Maya in the Southern Lowlands likely involved a loss of faith in the ruling elite and led to the adaptation of rituals in and around caves to offset that loss of faith.  If rituals taking place within caves were failing to provide sought after results, elites would begin to use open spaces outside of caves for the first time in order to allow for much more public observation.  This adaptation of ritual may have allowed them to better appease their followers. Arksey showcased visual evidence of modern rituals still occurring outside some sites by modern Maya in Belize, reinforcing her argument that these sites are still recognized as cosmologically and historically significant and adding to the literature on the Maya response to cultural disruption.

Site shovel map

Arkesy’s presentation touched on interdisciplinary questions about cultural conception, the use of physical space and the significance of such academic work in relation to the history of the field of archeology itself. Sholeh Quinn, Associate Professor of Iranian History, added a layer of nuance in her role as discussant – the cultural output of the Maya and the significance of the work on cave rituals understudied in that area of Central America was emphasized as an important point of analysis that furthers the understanding of ancient cultures as systematized human reaction to a changing world.

 

Global, Humor, Merced Seminar in the Humanities, Performance, Politics, Religion

Humor and Transgression in Mexican Stand Up

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By Dorie Perez

Dr. Raquel García, a newly minted doctoral graduate visiting Merced from our sister UC campus, UC Davis, presented work that was part of her recent doctoral defense and long-standing research project. She writes about the political nature of Mexican comedy as something transgressive, a newly popular form of entertainment that comes to Mexico by way of the traditional North American comic’s role as entertainer-come-social commentator. Yet the tropes of stand-up comedy that many American audiences are familiar with – the Jerry Seinfeld-style routine of humorous critique offered up to a crowd looking for both commonality and shocking amusement- are new to Mexican audiences, even in the boundary-pushing performance arts community within Mexico’s cosmopolitan districts. It is a testament to cultural diffusion and the growing space for social critique in a country with strict rules about private and public spheres that stand-up’s popularity as a medium is growing.

García identifies several key elements at play in her analysis. García discusses the role of performance as its own manifestation of transgression from socially-accepted norms in Mexican society. The play-acting, the “just kidding!” qualifiers that comedians add to their politically astute analysis of historical inequities in Mexican society are indeed played for laughs, but their meaning is clear. A strong critique of the role of political and governmental corruption in everyday life, including the dominant power regimes of the narcotic-trafficking cartels that run great swaths of Mexico’s countryside are main targets, even as the comedians themselves equivocate their jokes as mere humor. Comedians Horacio Almada, Manuel Nava and Jürgen Scritto are included in García’s analysis, and her observation of their practice adds an ethnographic layer of analysis to the discourse they have created that reads as a new modality of resistance. All three comedians are centered in Mexico City, and they maintain a social media presence as a way to both reach out to transnational audiences and re-inscribe their work as social commentary meant for both the Twittersphere and the political landscape they live in as Mexican citizens.

In a heavily Catholic country, Almada’s humor that centers on the dogma of the Church and its frequent hypocrisies is a high wire act, yet the responsive nature of his audiences (seen as Youtube footage in García’s presentation) shows that he’s struck a vein of truth that many share and are even eager to have deconstructed. In a passionate fury, he acts out both the argument of the devoted and that of the priest admonishing his flock, asking about heaven and hell and wondering where he will go if he refuses to commit murder but misses Sunday mass. García includes this bit as a moment signifying the comic’s role as arbiter of truth, or rather, a shared frustration, that many social-media savvy, contemporary Mexicans enact within the confines of a more traditional society. Through comedy, García  argues, the pressure valves of duty and propriety are released for both Mexican audiences and a socially-aware comic eager to showcase his vision of the world gone topsy-turvy.

Fashion, Gender, Merced Seminar in the Humanities, Movement, Politics, Religion, Shakespeare

“Unquiet Women” and the Act of Subversion

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by Dorie Perez

The subtle differences between the terms inversion, subversion and perversion, presented by seminar discussant Matthew Kaiser, are usually glossed over in speech, terms used interchangeably to mean “othering” or change as a process of fragmentation. The idea of inversion as a movement, often smaller-scale acts than violent political upheaval, is an interesting take on social change and something Susan Amussen presented in her analysis of Early Modern historical works in late September 2014.

Amussen presented what will be one chapter of a book tentatively called “Turning the World Upside Down: Gender, Culture and Politics in Early Modern England,” which builds on the work of her late husband, the historian David Underdown. Continuing the topsy-turvy theme of the Merced Seminar in the Humanities series for Fall semester 2014, she writes of “unruly women” and other deviants who dared to challenge convention in Elizabethan England. “Mannish-women and womanish-men,” patriarchs that failed to uphold their place as lord and master, among other kinds of usurpation of male authority were targets of John Swetnam, a pamphleteer in 1640s England whose social critique often morphed into full-scale misogyny. Pamphlets were the blog post of their era, read and responded to by intellectuals of all stripes; Swetnam’s back and forth argument with other writers, including quite a few female intellectuals, has held up as an example of the transhistorical tension between idealized expectations of womanhood and the subversive play of gender politics in an increasingly changing world, continuing today unabated.

The global social politics of the Early Modern era were present in the Shakespearean play The Taming of The Shrew (1592), a prime example used in Amussen’s analysis of subtle inversions of gender roles that fueled a discourse of inversion from within a dichotomized world of male/female, rich/poor, and young/old – dichotomies first discussed by Mikhail Bahktin in Rabelais and His World (1965). A royal (or rather, royal-adjacent) sex scandal involving the dissolution of Frances Howard’s marriage to the Earl of Essex in 1613 and subsequent remarriage to the Earl of Somerset fueled fears of subversive female comportment, especially when the perversions of witchcraft were said to be involved. Witchcraft, excessive interest in fashion and makeup, as well as sexual desire, were acts by women to subvert their roles at home, in the streets and at Court. Dress was the process by which identity was encoded, and through that signification, the inscription of idealized roles and behaviors. Any subversive activities strayed into the grey area between the normative and empirical Woman, according to a Foucauldian analysis, destabilizing social norms by way of inversion, perversion and subversion.

Dress, and therefore, womanhood, came under intense scrutiny in the Jacobean literary landscape, where any sense of otherness – foreign silks, mystical allusions, ostentatious luxury- was regulated by social stratification. Yellow hoods, and the color itself, were the sign of prostitutes and other fallen women, using the identifiers of the day as an inverted ladder to another social role available to them. The gender boundaries Amussen analyzes are clearly bounded entities regulated by social interaction and royal decree, yet somehow simultaneously inverted on a daily basis in regular acts of autonomy. They, in turn, set the stage for social relationships and tensions that then spill into the geopolitical arena. Amussen’s analysis ultimately concerns these genre-crossing “disorderly women” and their “failed patriarchs,” by whom social norms were transgressed, even as they worked to upkeep them.

Borderlands, Global, Literature, Merced Seminar in the Humanities

Nikkei and the Novel: Hybridity in 21st-Century Brazil

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by Dorie Perez

Ignacio López-Calvo’s research on literary works of the Japanese immigrant experience in Latin America shows how traditional models of cultural transitivity between mainstream and ethnic minorities are disrupted. The novels he studies reflect changing values in 1970s Brazil and how people remake trajectories of assimilation; this is where his work co-aligns with the Center for the Humanities’ 2013-2015 two-year theme of “The World Upside Down: Topsy Turvy.” The Nikkei community maintained its opposition to cultural assimilation in Brazil, insistent that they were a model to be followed rather than an ethnic minority to be subsumed into the larger dominant culture. This reconfiguring of the classic shift from “yellow peril” to “model minority” is inverted in the Brazilian context.

harper's image
Image: Harper’s Weekly image depicting Europe’s need to protect the world from “yellow peril.” This was a term attributed to Kaiser Wilhelm, who dreamed of a fiery Buddha threatening the Occident. Source: http://aaww.org/yellow-peril-scapegoating/

López-Calvo places his scholarship in a framework of decolonial theory by selecting two fictional pieces as examples of personal testimony and instruments of empowerment for comparative analysis of larger themes of cultural development and inclusion. Yawara!, Julio Miyazawa’s first novel, examines the immigrant experience as an ongoing search for inclusion that encompasses acts of emplacement, place-making and what makes a person “Brazilian.” The book Uma Rosa para Yumi provided context to a fictionalized account of the Nisei involvement in revolutionary youth activity during the 1970s. These novels offer a truth within fiction, a “new, hybrid Nikkei third space” of cultural celebration, historical memory and claim to place.

ignacio seminar

Faculty, graduate students, and post-doctoral fellows contributed to a lively discussion focused on the cultural output of Japanese immigration to Brazil that stemmed from issues of belonging, power, and self-identity. Questions were asked about the ways in which this real experience was fictionalized to tell a greater truth that exceeded the bounds of a community seeking to reinforce its model minority status, and whether resistance to cultural fusion came from its own place of hierarchical racialized thinking.

Ignacio presentation image

Humor, Literature, Merced Seminar in the Humanities, Politics

The Wisdom of Farts: Ethics and Politics, Carnival and Festive Drama in Late Medieval and Early Modern France

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Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin: Theater, Farce, 1907
Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin: Theater, Farce, 1907

by Paola Di Giuseppantonio Di Franco

On December 4th, Noah Guynn shared his preliminary work on farce in late medieval and early modern France. This presentation is the first semester of seminars on our two-year research theme: “The World Upside Down: Topsy-Turvy.” In fact, Guynn’s essay, which is the introductory chapter from his book on politics and ethics in medieval and early modern French farce, impeccably shows how both literary works and theater have the power to challenge, change, deliberately reverse, and undermine expected order. In his essay, Guynn aims to theorize and historicize festive comedy, by demonstrating how farce confronts controversies of the day over ethics, politics, and power. Guynn’s exploration of farce questions the prevalent idea that festive misrule is a temporary inversion of social power and hierarchies, responding to a large body of criticism on Bakhtin’s work. Bakhtin describes Carnival as the “the second life of the people, who for a time entered the utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance” (9), standing in contrast with official feasts. Critics of Bakhtin see Carnival purely as an instrument of mass-control; this can be summarized by Eco’s words: “The prerequisites of a ‘good’ carnival are: (i) the law must be so pervasively and profoundly introjected as to be overwhelmingly present at the moment of its violation, [and] (ii) the moment of carnivalization must be very short, and allowed only once a year.” (6) Guynn finds a middle ground between Bakhtin and Eco, demonstrating how farce is open to plural readings that attempt to recognize all tensions, negotiations, and dialogues that were mediated by comic theater. Plural reading seems inferred in these plays by the fact that they were often performed in public spaces and accessible to large and diverse audiences (i.e., diverse in terms of age, gender, wealth, social status, education, vocation, etc.) (10).

In exploring this middle ground, Guynn engages with James Scott and his theories of infrapolitics and hidden scripts. Central to Guynn’s work is not only the analysis of scripts – which can only partially reveal the realities of performance and were probably censored before being printed – but, also, archival sources (e.g., formal bans on performance, writs of censorship, and legal records documenting investigations and prosecutions of actors), which give us insight on performers and show how all performances were subject to scrutiny from the elites, thus indicating that the ruling elites perceived theatre, farces, and more broadly festive comedies a potential threat to civic order. These archival sources also show how elites sponsored farces for propaganda in different ways. For example, while Louis XII understood the importance of farce to obtain information on social dissent, Francis I, who was also a patron of farce, controlled scripts, plays, and actors much more than his predecessor through censorship.

Here are a few of the questions I posed to Noah: 1. I would ask you to give us more information on your book project. Will you mainly focus on your archival study or also provide an analysis of some of the most representative scripts of that period? 2. How different were farces that were performed in other periods of the year from carnivalesque farces? 3. How many farces do we know of that were produced in late medieval and early modern France? Can they be grouped based on plot and social, political, gender issues they addressed? 4. Is there a difference between 15th-century farces and 16th-century farces? 5. How much does this genre retain of its ancestor, that is, the Latin atellan farce? Can we recognize in late medieval farce stereotypical traits that date back to the Latin masks of atellan farce? What is really original and innovative in this farce that makes it so contextual? 6. I found your focus on archival sources amazing. I am wondering if iconography can also tell us about the places where these plays were enacted and their audiences.

Global, History, Memory, Merced Seminar in the Humanities, Politics

89@25: Views of the Chinese Pro-Democracy Movement as Experience, Event, Myth, Materials and Memory

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by Robin DeLugan

Ed Lanfranco, a graduate student in the World Cultures Graduate Group and a 2013-2014 Center for the Humanities Graduate Fellow, shared his intellectual journey to design and frame a particular research project concerning the pro-Democracy movement in China—centered on the events surrounding the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square, Beijing protest—which next year will reach a 25-year anniversary. Ed has a unique connection to this particular history because between 1988-2009 he lived in China. While still a relative newcomer, he directly experienced the June 4, 1989 events—one of the most visible contemporary uprisings of citizens against the Chinese government. The government of China sent tanks and troops to restore order. The brutal dispersion resulted in death and injury. The world at large learned about efforts to squash China’s pro-democracy movement; meanwhile the Chinese government enforced a national ban on information about the event and its aftermath.  Ed, acting much as an ethnographer in the field, collected flyers, posters and other ephemera surrounding “June 4.”  Ed is researching official efforts within the People’s Republic of China to efface the 1989 Pro-Democracy Movement.  While desiring to write the history of 1989, the topic of the past in the present is central to his project.  When Ed inquires, “…are the Chinese aspirations in 1989 Beijing dead and gone, best forgotten there and by outsiders?”, he draws attention to the 25 years that have since transpired. The dynamics on the ground in China and elsewhere invite an examination of official silences; memories and counter-memories; and the forgetting that can surrounding the politics of the past.

Ed is responding to the milestone of the 25th anniversary of the events at Tiananmen Square through a series of activities that will bring scholarly and public attention to China’s past.  In addition to writing the history of 1989, Ed plans to develop the following: a UC Merced Kolligian Library exhibition “89@25”, a book for popular audiences, and a digital archive of the memorabilia he collected while in China. He also plans to travel in California and engage the pubic about the anniversary.

As a scholar who studies the role of academicians in memory work, in particular in memory work that challenges official silence about state violence and as someone who sees herself as one protagonist among others in the historical struggle for inclusion, human rights, and social justice, I pose to Ed the following questions:

a) To what extent do academics figure in your research?

b) What role do you see for yourself as a memory catalyst?

c) Beyond academicians, have you identified other collaborators or interlocutors inside or outside of China that are committed to commemorating the 25th anniversary? 

d) Are there networked domestic or international efforts taking place?  

e) Lastly, have you identified other collections or archives pertaining to 1989 that can be compared or contrasted with your own personal archives?

Ed’s research interests complement my own and I will look forward to learning more about this important and unique project as it continues to develop.  Important to the research will be what next year’s 25th anniversary commemorations reveal about memory and nation; about states and citizens; about memory and democracy; about China’s post-democracy aspirations; and about the global interest in this important anniversary.

Literature, Merced Seminar in the Humanities, Music, Performance, Philosophy, Religion, Shakespeare

Music and Religious Change in Shakespeare’s Tempest

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by Peter Vanderschraaf

Katie Brokaw’s essay is the culminating part of her overall book project Staging Harmony, that focuses on important contributions to English drama from 1450-1611. For me, studying Brokaw’s essay is proving both a special treat and a formidable but valuable challenge, coming from philosophy (with scant background in literature) and specializing in branches of moral and political philosophy with roots in the early modern philosophical era that begins almost immediately after the composition of The Tempest (with Grotius’ Free Sea).  Brokaw argues that in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest Shakespeare’s writes in a “spirit of finding amicable [and not merely peaceful] coexistence between word, art and ritual (p. 4)”. The discussion here focuses on the role of music (and sometimes dance) in The Tempest.

Some questions/comments for consideration:

  1. This essay discusses primarily The Tempest, written in 1610-1611. Is there a special reason for ending the analysis at 1611 (beyond perhaps the fact that The Tempest is one is Shakespeare’s late plays and Shakespeare is the greatest playwright of his and maybe any era to write in the English language)? Staging Harmony will discuss important contributions to English drama from 1450-1611. Historical tidbit: The London Puritans succeed in having the theaters closed in 1642 until the Restoration.
  2. I agree with Brokaw that interpreting The Tempest as a work arguing for accepting a certain diversity of religious belief and practice makes very good sense. I’m wondering about a possible outlier: the Puritans. My impression is that Shakespeare makes no attempt to “bring the Puritans to the table” in The Tempest. If that’s right, a dull explanation is that Shakespeare may have thought there was little point in trying to appeal to this part of his English culture (since the Puritans would at best ignore his art form anyway). But (again if I am right) could there be a more interesting explanation, namely, that Shakespeare is taking a stance regarding the (now old) question of “tolerating the intolerant”? (I think we face this problem all the time.)
  3. Very quick comment/question: As Brokaw observes, James I was fairly tolerant of religious nonconformism even in his own court. But (as I recently discovered) James had quite interesting ideas about sovereignty. Here’s a quote: “The state of monarchy is the supremest thing on earth. For kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called gods. . . .” Does Shakespeare express a view about sovereignty in The Tempest? (If not it certainly is not a problem for Brokaw’s project but I thought it might be interesting to know about.)
  4. I found Brokaw’s discussion of how people of the time viewed music and its power particularly striking. As Brokaw observes, they connected music with science (”music of the spheres”) and the occult in ways we’re not used to in our time. Just an observation: I wonder if this is another way in which The Tempest reflects what I keep calling the pre-modern tradition (because unlike in the pre-modern tradition, specific discussion of music is largely absent among the early modern philosophers and my impression is that these days, aesthetics is thought of as a “luxury” specialization.)
  5. Ditto for the short but very interesting discussion of sympathy. In Shakespeare’s time sympathy apparently had a wider meaning than in our time, reflecting harmony between music and the natural world as well as harmony between people. For reasons I don’t know (and maybe Brokaw does), in the English-speaking world I think the scope of our thinking about sympathy became narrower (roughly, for the moderns and maybe for us, to sympathize is to mentally put oneself in the place of another) as it started to make a more explicit and important role in English moral philosophy (such as Hume’s “judicious spectator” and Smith’s “impartial spectator”).
  6. Why bother raising the earlier insubstantial question about time period? Comment: My impression is that Brokaw’s interpretation can be thought of as representing a culmination in England of thought regarding relative toleration of diverse religious belief and practice (and maybe artistic practice)? (For example, as Brokaw observes recusants in James’ time were common and Roman Catholics were able to practice their faith — my impression is that places where Catholics could participate in the mass were like “speakeasies.”) From Brokaw’s essay (which I find compelling) I think one can conclude that Shakespeare advocated what one might call a “great society” view (plug for my philosophy colleague Jerry Gaus) whose members not merely accept but appreciate and learn from their differences (as opposed to a modus vivendi view of pluralism decried by Alasdair MacIntyre). The contemporary counterpart is modern politically liberal society (if you approve of it) or “the degenerate West” (if you don’t). Anyway if this is right so far, then what follows and the philosophical response (and you knew I would try to smuggle in some philosophy) are an interesting contrast. The Thirty Years War begins two years after Shakespeare’s death, the English Civil War starts in 1642 and the early modern philosophical era starts around this time. I wonder if Shakespeare’s The Tempest foreshadows a period of terrible disillusionment (especially among philosophers), Leibniz being a possible exception. We get figures like Grotius and Hobbes trying to develop a natural law that in principle could be detached from religion, Hobbes arguing that religious diversity and freedom of expression are neither desirable for civil peace nor necessary for personal salvation, and later Hume hinting that in the end we don’t need anything like religious belief to explain or to justify government and moral practice. (Leibniz tries maybe for the last time before the 20th century to develop a creed that he thinks all Christians can accept and that can reconcile the various Christian churches.)

 

Literature, Merced Seminar in the Humanities, Philosophy, Shakespeare

Personification and the Political Imagination of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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by Eli Jelly-Schapiro

Amanda Bailey visited our seminar to discuss her work on the philosophic and political imagination of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Through her reading of the play, Bailey illuminates forms of agency and consent that arise out of the fluid intermingling of human and nonhuman entities rather than the embodied and self-contained sovereign subject. Offering a “glimpse of community beyond the semantics of proprium,” Bailey suggests, A Midsummer Night’s Dream gestures toward “an alternative to dominion and the violence it inspires” (3).

Bailey elaborates this fundamental claim through two interwoven threads. First, she examines how metamorphosis functions in the play—not as a process whereby one autonomous and stable ontological entity is transformed into another, but rather as a moment or space of perpetual becoming wherein a series of binary distinctions—subject–object, self–other, man-beast, being-in-itself and being-for-itself—dissolve: a space of “mutability and assemblage” rather than fixity and individuation.

Second and relatedly, Bailey advances—via a close engagement with early modern political thought and early modern contract law—a nuanced critique of how the play figures the conjoined philosophic problems of personhood and consent. The “space of persona” opened up in A Midsummer Night’s Dream reveals the mutability of the human as an ontological category and challenges the political and philosophic ascendancy of the willful sovereign subject—and by extension the structures of state or market dominance with which it is bound.

Central to Bailey’s argument is a lucid exegesis of John Locke’s “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” Bailey uses Locke’s meditations on non-corporeal personhood to evince the ways in which, as she puts it, “personification is an enabling condition of the collective rather than a crisis of the individual” (6). It’s worth noting, though, that in other texts, most notably the chapter “Of Property” in his Second Treatise of Government, Locke articulates personhood and consent in the context of a robust defense of primitive accumulation. His famous claim that “every Man has a property in his own person” prefaces an extended reflection on the virtues of enclosure, in England as in the New World (116; ch. 5). And in testifying to the emancipatory powers of money, Locke intimates that when by universal consent money is endowed with value, universal consent is also bestowed upon the inequality that money inevitably produces (Ince 35).

Locke’s philosophic treatment of concepts such as personhood and consent, in other words, was complicit in the naturalization of capitalist and colonial processes. Bailey’s summoning of Locke alongside Shakespeare in the service of imagining an “alternative to dominion and the violence it inspires” is thus somewhat paradoxical. But this contrapuntal application of Locke is precisely what lends her argument its power. She enacts a dialectical move that salvages Locke’s notion of the disembodied person from the uses to which political systems founded on the logic of perpetual accumulation have put it. If Locke’s thought provides philosophic support for capitalist social relations it also, Bailey conveys, contains conceptual tools that might be wielded in the service of alternative social formations.

In this, Bailey affirms an important insight of Stuart Hall’s. The moment of economic determinism, Hall contends in “The Problem of Ideology,” is in the first instance, not the last. Even if our ideas of freedom, equality, personhood, the individual, consent, etc. “derive from the categories we use in our practical, commonsense thinking about the market economy,” what this conceptual vocabulary signifies is never fixed, is always open to contestation and transformation (34).

The contest over what concepts such as “personhood” and “consent” describe, however, is today being won by the ideology of the market. If one lineage of disembodied personhood leads to radical social formations beyond the logic of dominion another finds its terminus in the heart of our own neoliberal moment, wherein a legal fiction, the corporation, is afforded the First Amendment right to free speech. This is not to contradict the anticipatory tenor of Bailey’s account, but rather to highlight its urgency.

Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx observed that the universalization of commodity rationality makes “definite social relations between men . . . [assume] the fantastic form of a relation between things” (165; ch. 1).  Today as then, the “personification of things” and the “thingification of persons”—the commoditization of human life itself—are two sides of the same coin. Bailey’s vibrant contribution is to shed light upon alternative cultures of personification that might counter rather than express the alienation of human bodies and human communities.