Marxist Shakespeares

Jean E. Howard, Scott Cutler Shershow, Jean E. Howard, Scott Cutler Shershow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134633043
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Marxist Shakespeares uses the rich analytic resources of the Marxist tradition to look at Shakespeare's plays afresh. The book offers new insights into the historical conditions within which Shakespeare's representations of class and gender emerged, and into Shakespeare's role in the global culture industry stretching from Hollywood to the Globe Theatre. A vital resource for students of Shakespeare which includes Marx's own readings of Shakespeare, Derrida on Marx, and also Bourdieu, Bataillle, Negri and Alice Clark.

1
Introduction:

Marxism now, Shakespeare now

JEAN E. HOWARD AND SCOTT CUTLER SHERSHOW

In one account of his intellectual trajectory as a member of the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, Stuart Hall talks of his own personal and the group’s collective struggle, over a number of years, with Marxism (Hall 1992). He came to Marxism, he insists, unwillingly. Like many of his generation, he early on experienced the profound revulsion from Soviet state communism occasioned among other things by the movement of Soviet tanks into Budapest in 1956. If Marxism meant Soviet totalitarianism, he wanted nothing to do with it. Nor did Marxism easily satisfy Hall’s requirements for a subtle and comprehensive mode of cultural analysis. Its rigidities and vulgarities, the Eurocentricism of its historical account of the development of capitalism, its status as a metanarrative, its alternating indifference to or reductive absorption of feminist and race-based political agendas – all of this made him, he says, sees Marxism as “a problem, as trouble, as danger, not as a solution” (Hall 1992: 279).

Yet his account of Marxism’s troublesomeness is inseparable from his account of its usefulness – to him and to the collective work of the Birmingham Centre. How could such an irritant also seem so necessary? Hall’s essay, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” indirectly attempts to answer that question, and we believe it became urgent for Hall to do so when in the early 1990s he confronted what he says he did not fully understand, but clearly found disquieting: namely, the theoretically fluent but to him insufficiently political nature of American cultural studies. The existence of that form of cultural work crystalized for him his indebtedness to the Marxist legacy that had enabled him to think of his intellectual work in political terms and had provided a serious if imperfect set of tools and concepts for addressing questions he found urgent.

Like other sophisticated systems of thought, Marxism is the bene-ficiary of the intellectual labor of many people. It is less a science than an evolving and varied tradition of thought and practice aimed both at understanding the world, and, in its activist dimension, at transforming it. For Hall, the pull of Marxism lay in part in its persistent attention to issues he found pressing, namely:

the power, the global reach and history-making capacities of capital; the question of class; the complex relationships between power, which is an easier term to establish in the discourses of culture than exploitation, and exploitation; the question of a general theory which could, in a critical way, connect together in a critical reflection different domains of life, politics and theory, theory and practice, economic, political and ideological questions, and so on; the notion of critical knowledge itself and the production of critical knowledge as a practice. These important, central questions are what one meant by working within shouting distance of Marxism, working on Marxism, working against Marxism, working with it, working to try to develop Marxism.

(Hall 1992: 279)

Like most professors in the Humanities, Hall presents himself primarily as a critic of cultural texts, and in that role Marxism played a particular role for him in the theoretical conflicts of the 1980s. In the wake, especially, of the poststructuralist emphasis on textuality and the nonreferentiality of language, which Hall took on board, he found in Marxism the irritating imperative to remember the worldliness of the text, its affiliations with what lies outside it, its effects in history. The emphasis within poststructuralism on discursivity, representation, and textuality rendered difficult and complex the passage between the world and the text, challenging residual elements of reflectionism in Marxist thought. Nonetheless, the legacy of Marxism pushed Hall to find tools, such as symptomatic reading, that would enable him to negotiate that passage, however imperfectly, even when working in the area of displacement called culture, where the relation between text and world is never direct. In short, Hall presents his relationship to Marxism as both vexed and productive and as constantly in tension with other political and intellectual developments such as poststructuralism, feminism, and race studies. His description of working on, with, against, and within shouting distance of Marxism captures something of the productive tension he envisioned between it and related knowledge projects. This could mean, for example, letting materialist feminist work on the sexual division of labor and on production and reproduction pressure purely class-based accounts of exploitation; and it could also mean letting Marxist ideas about the interconnections of economics, politics, and culture challenge the adequacy of examining literary texts in isolation from state and economic formations.

We invoke the name of Stuart Hall in the introduction to Marxist Shakespeares in part because while he articulates a profound and continuing debt to Marxism, the cultural studies agenda he helped to inaugurate ranges far beyond the topics and modes of analysis associated with traditional Marxism. This volume is produced in the year 2000, at greater remove from the theory wars of the 1980s to which Hall was in part reacting, but it too attempts at once to utilize the analytical and political resources of Marxism and to push the boundaries of Marxist thought by ongoing engagement with feminism, cultural studies, and non-Marxist forms of historicism. In fact, if in the 1980s Marxism recalled the wordiness of texts in the teeth of poststructuralism’s emphasis on self-generating and self-sustaining textuality, it has particular usefulness at this moment, at least in early modern studies, in the alternatives it poses to more fragmentary and unanchored forms of historical inquiry. The postmodern critique of master narratives has spawned its own demon fry – forms of criticism that fetishize the local, the particular, and the unmediated materiality of books, objects, and “things” at the expense of considering the “big picture,” or at least the bigger picture, that is, arguments about historical change; about the interconnections between past and present or between different spheres of the social formation; about what the local has to do with the national and the national with the transnational; about the social processes that invest mute objects with value, meaning, and exchangeability (Fraser and Nicholson 1988).

In the States, at least, in early modern studies we now find ourselves at one end of a twenty-year explosion of historical and political criticism. But much of it seems an active evasion of Marxist modes of inquiry even when Marxism’s conceptual tools could prove of use. The reasons for this have much to do with the red-baiting legacy of American culture and an almost obsessive fear in 1980s and early 1990s criticism that one might fall sway to a “master narrative.” Recent work has often aspired to a cultural poetics involving a quasi-Marxist methodology: the discovery of interpretive similarities or homologies between otherwise incongruous materials such as plays and legal documents. Yet frequently there is an evasion of the specifically Marxist roots of these avowedly “materialist” or “political” projects. As Fredric Jameson has argued, recent Shakespeare scholarship seems determined to retain its “discursive conquest of a range of heterogeneous materials while quietly abandoning the theoretical component that once justified that enlargement” (Jameson 1991: 188). Consequently, one frequently reads accounts of the circulation of cultural energy that ironically celebrate the vigor of nascent capitalism even while overtly condemning its social consequences.

Even when contemporary scholars do mention Marxism, it is often to relegate it to the dustbin of the history of ideas. In particular, critics commonly invoke two specific objections to the Marxist project. It is argued, first, that Marx predicted that the economic condition of the working class would steadily decline whereas, in fact, in the century or so that followed Marx’s career, the condition of the working class in the West improved. But only a curious collective amnesia about our own history makes it necessary to point out that such improvement came via a century of bitter labor struggle largely inspired by Marxism. It was organized labor and collective bargaining, not the good intentions of corporate capitalism, that gave us safety rules, the eight-hour day, pension plans, and the like. To then cite such social improvements as evidence against the Marxist project is (to adapt the words of Bernard Shaw) really to exceed all limits of impudence and hypocrisy. Marx, moreover, never claimed to be a soothsayer; rather, he argued that capital’s inherent “drive” to maximize the surplus value extracted from production would always tend to produce a net increase in human misery. And how far does one have to look to see such misery – in the sweatshops and maquiladora factories of borderland “free trade” zones in the developing world, and in new two-tier wage systems, service jobs, and temporary employment arrangements in the developed nations – where capital continues to appear just as it did in Shakespeare’s day: “reeking from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Marx 1976: 926).

Second, it is commonly claimed that in Capital Marx explicitly grounds the concept of economic exploitation in the labor theory of value, which has been “proven wrong” by subsequent economists in the mainstream or neoclassical tradition. This critique has the virtue of raising issues of theoretical substance; and, indeed, even some Marxists have preferred the more flexible and open-ended exposition of Marx’s unfinished Grundrisse to the steely logic of Capital. But as Richard Halpern (1991) argues with regard to “primitive accumulation,” the Marx of Capital works in a double register, simultaneously parodying the strategies of conventional economic theory and producing a positive vision of his own. In this case, he appropriated the theory of value employed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo precisely because it was the prevailing orthodoxy of economic thought in the time. He says to the apologists of capital, in effect: I will use your economics, your system of accounting, in order to demonstrate the existence of exploitation. Thus, from a Marxist perspective, to say that the labor theory of value is “wrong” is finally to say little. At most, such an assertion simply means that the so-called “neoclassical synthesis” in economic theory – which adds the consumption-based concept of “marginal utility” to the production-based labor theory of classical economics – is a more accurate predictor of the movement of prices in a market economy. But Marx’s goal was precisely to unveil the structures of domination that underlie the supposed freedom and equality of market-based social relations, and to reveal classical economic theory as ideology.

Typically, however, in the popular press, the by now reflexive dismissal of Marxism precludes any serious engagement with the tenets of Marxist thought. Instead, it relies on a simplistic equation of the collapse of Soviet-style communism with the “death” of Marxism. Marxism was used by repressive regimes; and there is no dodging that part of its complex history. But the sclerotic form of state socialism developed by the Soviet Union is not equivalent to the varied body of Marxist thought, an intellectual tradition that not only provides the most trenchant analysis of the operation of capital that we have, but also a highly developed body of work on issues such as the operation of ideology, the constitution of class societies, nationalism, historical periodization, and the historicity of literary forms and genres. The collapse of authoritarian communist regimes offers a perfect opportunity for a fresh examination of Marxist writings on a host of often neglected topics.

In fact, a decade after the destruction of the Berlin Wall it is time to put aside narratives of Marxism’s demise and put its resources to use in new forms of intellectual production. This book attempts to do just that – to use Marx and Marxist-inflected theory to forge fresh narratives about Shakespeare and about the histories and institutions in which his texts have been implicated. In this, we are attempting to make possible new ways of seeing and to produce kinds of knowledge not available within other analytic traditions. This goal seems very much in line with Marx’s own project. Consider his writings on political economy. One way to view them – a perspective he himself encouraged – is as an alternative to the readings of the world produced by the bourgeois political economists of his own time. While they accepted private property and wage labor as the natural “facts” from which economic interpretation proceeded, Marx saw these as the unnatural phenomena whose genealogy had to be constructed to produce an alternative understanding of what is natural, good, and desirable. Where others saw a coat for sale in a shop, Marx saw value in the form of congealed labor power. Where others saw profit, he saw the surplus value that had been extracted from alienated wage labor. Such power to “re-see” the world, to challenge the common sense that so often constitutes the dominant ideology of the powerful, is a key element in social struggles, even if its tangible consequences cannot be easily calculated or predicted.

Rather than a natural act, reading, then, is a learned activity and a site of contestation. The essays in this volume undertake acts of rereading that re-situate, conceptually, the cultural artifacts of early modern England and re-examine their historical afterlives. Collectively, they model the many ways in which contemporary Marxist scholarship can be in productive conversation with feminist, anti-racist, and post-structuralist work. In fact, with the help of postructuralism, we perhaps see more clearly than Marx himself the continuing effects of the unholy alliance between the Enlightenment will to knowledge and the continuing global “drive” of capitalist exploitation even as capitalism’s apologists within the Academy now cheerfully attest to such an alliance, defending conservative disciplinary values in the name of the “free market” of ideas.

Richard Halpern, however, in chapter 3, makes the trenchant point that some engagements with Marxism are too attenuated to be productive. For Halpern, this is the case with Derrida’s account of his indebtedness to Marxism in Specters of Marx. He argues that once Derrida has disavowed the utility of most of Marx’s central analytic categories, there is little reason to lay claim to a Marxist genealogy. The editors agree that the tent of historical materialism is not infinitely expandable or Marxism would lose its specificity as a situated knowledge project. The essays in this book explicitly locate themselves in relation to ongoing debates within Marxism and in relation to Marxist categories of analysis while nonetheless opening in a variety of ways to affiliated knowledge-making paradigms. This project of working in interstitial spaces to expand the resources of Marxism is well exemplified in Halpern’s own earlier book, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation (Halpern 1991). There he took up the relatively undertheorized concept of primitive accumulation in Marxist thought and did so in full conversation with non-Marxist critics such as Foucault. In the process he showed that the process of primitive accumulation involves both the amassing of capital through transformations in the mode of production and the emergence of a broad-based wage-labor class, and also the production of certain kinds of skilled subjects with capacities and psyches suited for managing and facilitating the world that was coming into being. Arguing that economic changes need not be completed before the emergence of the political and cultural phenomena we associate with capitalism, Halpern looked at such things as humanist pedagogy or sixteenth-century poetic styles as instruments in the production of differently skilled and socialized subjects. His argument illustrates the continuing capacity of self-identified Marxist criticism to grow beyond its nineteenth-century assumptions and to be transformed by engagement with other knowledge-making paradigms.

It is said Marx himself once irritably stipulated that “I am not a Marxist.” The remark must be taken seriously, as a constant reminder that Marxism, across its entire history and in the present volume, cannot be taken as a set of fixed doctrines and beliefs, nor as a simple methodological focus on the analytic category of “class” as opposed to race, gender, or ethnicity. As Fredric Jameson has argued, Marxism is “a problematic: that is to say, it can be identified, not by specific positions . . . but rather by the allegiance to a specific complex of problems, whose formulations are always in movement.” Thus the famous metaphor of the economic “base” and the cultural “superstructure” is not “a solution and a concept,” but “a problem and a dilemma,” and materialism itself is not a “philosophical position” but rather “the general signal for a process (better known as de-idealization), a process that can never be successfully brought to conclusion” ( Jameson 1993a: 175).

We thus would argue, as against what some may think of as “orthodox” Marxism, that “class” relations cannot be considered to possess a priority in the colloquial sense, a greater immediacy or practical relevance to any and all human situations. Such a conclusion remains faithful to what Althusser calls the “immense theoretical revolution” of Marxism, which begins by insisting that neither the economic base nor the cultural superstructure, and neither theory nor practice, can serve as the singular and univocal determinant of the other. Marxist theory strives neither to privilege what Althusser mockingly calls the “green leaves of practice over the poverty of gray theory,” nor to allow theory itself, even materialist theory, to split itself wholly off from practice, because to do so “necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, one of which is superior to society” (Marx 1978: 144). Rejecting the pure gaze of Enlightenment knowledge, Marxism argues for continuing attention to the conditions under which knowledge, including its own, is produced. Therefore, to insist that the category “class” is of more universal importance than other categories such as “race” or “gender” is either to fall into old-fashioned economic determinism in a more or less mechanical sense or into an endless and sterile cycle of subjectivism (more important to whom and for what?). But if economic determinism is typically framed as the characteristic pitfall of Marxism, contemporary cultural studies is more often threatened, by contrast, by a slippage back to idealist formations. Thus a whole range of scholarship tends to privilege some particular instance of culture – religion, nationalism, state power, or especially, the aesthetic itself – as the master key to the whole.

The work assembled in this volume finds new ways to avoid such pitfalls, renewing the resources of Marxism by drawing on categories long central to Marxist analysis and incorporating new ones. The work of Pierre Bourdieu, Negri and Hardt, Heidi Hartmann, Slojak Žižek, Alice Clark, Georges Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy, Gayatri Spivak, and Fredric Jameson is here absorbed into the ongoing process of working with and against classical Marxism to produce more adequate accounts of past and present worlds. In this volume as in earlier Marxist undertakings, work, labor, and economic processes as they bear on cultural production are given considerable attention. But a number of essays also focus attention on the gendered nature of work, on new definitions of labor, and on emergent forms of cultural production. Traditional Marxist concerns with history and with periodization also thread through this volume, especially in those essays that self-consciously deal with the economic and cultural formations that in the early modern period accompany the transition to capitalism. But this is coupled with a newer insistence on the relative autonomy of superstructural elements and the subsequent move away from a base-driven, bottom-up model of historical development.

Particularly striking is the emphasis in a number of essays on the utopian, future-oriented aspects of Marxist thought. Kiernan Ryan, for example, calls for renewed attention to the utopian writings of thinkers such as Bloch, Benjamin, and Marcuse and invites contemporary critics to take up the task of imagining and enabling less oppressive futures (chapter 11). We find such initiatives in Barbara Bo...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• ACCENTS ON SHAKESPEARE
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Marxism now, Shakespeare now
• 2 “Well grubbed, old mole”: Marx, Hamlet, and the (un)fixing of representation
• 3 An impure history of ghosts: Derrida, Marx, Shakespeare
• 4 Looking well to linens: women and cultural production in Othello and Shakespeare’s England
• 5 “Judicious oeillades”: supervising marital property in The Merry Wives of Windsor
• 6 The rape of Jesus: Aemilia Lanyer’s Lucrece
• 7 The undiscovered country: Shakespeare and mercantile geography
• 8 The management of mirth: Shakespeare via Bourdieu
• 9 Shakespeare’s Globe?
• 10 The Shakespeare film and the Americanization of culture
• 11 Measure for Measure : Marxism before Marx
• 12 Shakespeare beyond Shakespeare
• Bibliography
• index