The Reign of Anti-logos

Performance in Postmodernity

David Hawkes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030559397
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030559403
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Wirtschaftsgeschichte

The concept of 'performativity' has risen to prominence throughout the humanities.  The rise of financial derivatives reflects the power of the performative sign in the economic sphere.  As recent debates about gender identity show, the concept of performativity is also profoundly influential on people's personal lives.  Although the autonomous power of representation has been studied in disciplines ranging from economics to poetics, however, it has not yet been evaluated in ethical terms. This book supplies that deficiency, providing an ethical critique of performative representation as it is manifested in semiotics, linguistics, philosophy, poetics, theology and economics.  It constructs a moral criticism of the performative sign in two ways: first, by identifying its rise to power as a single phenomenon manifested in various different areas; and second, by locating efficacious representation in its historical context, thus connecting it to idolatry, magic, usuryand similar performative signs.  The book concludes by suggesting that earlier ethical critiques of efficacious representation might be revived in our own postmodern era.

© The Author(s) 2020

D. HawkesThe Reign of Anti-logosPalgrave Insights into Apocalypse Economicshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55940-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Usury, Sodomy and Idolatry

David Hawkes¹

(1)

Department of English, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

David Hawkes

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

ConcupiscenceIdolatrySemioticsSodomyUsury

End Abstract

1.1 Three in One, One in Three

A profound hostility to logos permeates every aspect of modern, and especially of postmodern culture. This book argues that this anti-logocentrism depends upon the attribution of efficacious power to performative signs of all kinds, including the linguistic, religious, aesthetic, erotic, and, most prominently today, the financial (the Spanish word for ‘cash,’ efectivo, eloquently conveys modern money’s performative function). But the modern era is only the latest in a long historical series of dialectical clashes between logos and eidolon. The following chapters examine a selection of such conflicts drawn from a wide variety of local contexts, from ancient Ionia to postmodern Yorubaland. They also deal with what may, at first, appear to be an unfeasibly diverse range of issues. In the course of writing the book, however, I have found that the ostensibly infinite expressions of anti-logocentrism tend, in practice, to flow into three main channels. These three manifestations of anti-logocentrism rise and fall together throughout history, although their simultaneous advance is particularly conspicuous in the twenty-first century. In fact, their association is so frequent and so intimate as to suggest that they are, in reality, different forms of appearance taken by a single essence. Before examining specific cases, it will be useful to consider these three prominent forms of rebellion against logos, to ask what they may have in common, and to raise the question of their relevance to the postmodern condition.

Anti-logocentrism has historically manifested itself in ‘usury,’ ‘idolatry,’ and non-reproductive sexuality—traditionally known as ‘sodomy.’ The early modern era often conceived of usury, sodomy, and idolatry as vices practiced by marginalized and stigmatized social groups. Usury was associated with Jews, sodomy with homosexuals, and idolatry with the natives of the colonized world. The tendency to personify such psychological tendencies, to project them onto alien groups of people, bespeaks the ideological error of ‘reification.’ Reification involves misconceiving something that is actually spiritual or abstract as if it were concrete or material. As a consequence of this error, popular opposition to usury, sodomy and idolatry has frequently been directed against particular groups of human beings, and channeled into such morally repellent dead-ends as anti-Semitism, homophobia, and racism. It is now time to consign such errors permanently to the past, and this book hopes to make a small contribution to that process. The postmodern condition proves that all human beings are equally vulnerable to the machinations of anti-logos. Today, critics of anti-logos must understand their opponent as an abstract, conceptual force capable of exerting its influence upon anybody.

The term ‘usury’ has historically referred to a vast range of economic sharp practice, including the mere intention to make illegitimate or excessive profit, and the payment as well as the taking of interest. It was once seen as a well-nigh universal temptation. By the seventeenth century, however, the demands of the early capitalist economy necessitated a redefinition. A convenient fantasy developed that usury was the exclusive preserve of pariahs—that it was a sin practiced only by others.¹ A literalist interpretation of the Deuteronomic prohibition² made it seem plausible that Jews permitted themselves to take interest from Christians. At the same time, legal restrictions effectively coerced many of Europe’s Jews into money-lending, while simultaneously limiting that profession to them in theory (though certainly not in practice). As a result, the terms ‘usurer’ and ‘Jew’ remained virtually synonymous through the century of Trollope, Marx, Dostoevsky, and Wilde and, as we shall see in Chapter 7, well into the century of Hemingway, Pound, and Eliot. During the modern age, then, usury’s true nature was concealed by its association with a specific group of people.

Usury’s influence on subjectivity has always been profound and today, as Maurizio Lazzarato concludes: ‘Debt is the technique most adequate to the production of neoliberalism’s homo economicus.’³ Economic man is not necessarily an individual agent, however, and over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the characteristics once seen as typical of individual usurers were assimilated into the wider, macro-economic structures that Bernard Dempsey called ‘institutional, or systemic usury.’⁴ Writing in 1943, Dempsey argued that usury should no longer be regarded as an aberration practiced by outcasts, but as the very essence of the modern economy. The ethical implication of Dempsey’s theory was that, in the words of D. Stephen Long, ‘our modern economic system creates the effect of usury without personal culpability.’⁵ The usurious economy remained ethically reprehensible tout court, at least according to traditional standards, but this was no longer an issue of personal morality.

The same is increasingly true of concupiscent sexuality, or ‘sodomy,’ which is no more aberrational than usury in the postmodern context. It is important to remember that ‘sodomy’ is not exclusive to homosexuality. It was not particularly associated with homosexuality until the Enlightenment. Before the eighteenth century, as we shall see in the following chapters, the term might be used of any sexual act which was not aimed at reproduction, and all such acts were deemed unnatural. In fact, ‘sodomy’ was often just as likely to denote commercial sex as homosexuality: the King James Bible (1611) gives ‘sodomitress’ as a translation of ‘whore.’⁶ If we seek a twenty-first century equivalent of ‘sodomy,’ the merged prostitution and pornography so prevalent on the internet might be the closest. The vice could involve any erotic focus on the body, regardless of gender, and it could manifest itself in any non-procreative sexual act, including masturbation. The idea that sodomy might be restricted to ‘homosexuals’ or ‘queers’ is specific to modernity⁷ and, like usury, the concept of sodomy is distorted when conceived as limited to any particular group of people.

As we shall see in the following chapters, sodomy and usury have always been closely related, in theory and in practice. The Aristotelian and Biblical traditions treat them as logically homologous as well as empirically inseparable. Furthermore, sodomy and usury are traditionally classified as sub-species of idolatry, on the grounds that both vices make fetishizes of symbols. Usury conceives of financial symbols as sexual and fertile, while sodomy prioritizes the body—which in the Platonic tradition is conceived as the sign of the soul—above its referent. The association of usury, sodomy, and idolatry has deep roots in Scripture, where St. Paul repeatedly declares that ‘covetousness is idolatry.’⁸ The Hebrew Bible warns against ‘whoring after strange gods,’⁹ and in Paul’s epistle to the Romans those who ‘changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image’ (1.23) are given over to ‘vile affections, for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another’ (1.26–27). Paul emphasizes that sodomy is an appropriate consequence of idolatry, describing the men as ‘receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet’ (1.27). Following the Platonic tradition, he conceives of the body as the sign of the soul, and of sexual concupiscence as an idolatrous fetishism of the sign to the exclusion of the referent.

The sin of sodomy thus traditionally carries a semiotic component and, as Tom Betteridge observes, ‘literary critics have viewed sodomy as a protean deconstructive category.’¹⁰ In the twelfth century, Alain de Lille’s influential Complaint of Nature presented sexual transgression as a violation of logos in language. Alain describes sodomy as working through grammar itself, so that a homosexual man ‘is both predicate and subject, he becomes likewise of two declensions, he pushes the laws of grammar too far.’¹¹ The extent, as well as the breadth, of sodomy is evident from Peter Damian’s eleventh-century Book of Gomorrah, which declares: ‘this vice cannot in any way be compared to any others, because its enormity supersedes them all.’¹² Damian lists four types of sexual vice: solo and mutual masturbation, inter-femural, and anal intercourse. The salient factor is thus not homosexuality but sterility, which is unnatural because the natural telos of sex is reproduction. Damian emphasizes that all four acts count as ‘sodomy’ because they are ‘against nature… whether one pollutes himself or another in any manner whatsoever… he is undoubtedly to be convicted of having committed the crime of Sodom’ (78). As St. Thomas Aquinas later confirmed: ‘Whoever… uses copulation for the delight that is in it, not referring the intention to the end which is intended by nature, acts against nature.’¹³

Damian also locates the sin of sodomy within the mind, when he insists that any failure to ‘tame manfully the lascivious pimping of lust’ (33) is necessarily sodomitical. Like usury and idolatry, the sin of sodomy is psychological before it is physical. The same is true of idolatry, which is yet more inclusive than either usury or sodomy because it encompasses both of those vices. The first two prohibitions of the Decalogue posit idolatry as the foundational sin, from which all other sins flow. Mankind’s incessant battle against idolatry is the literal topic of the Old Testament and the figurative topic of the New. It is treated by all monotheisms as the archetypal, paradigmatic heresy. Idolatry or shirk is Islam’s most heinous sin (closely followed by riba, or usury, and zina, or sodomy). Monotheistic religion thus concurs with rational philosophy, for idolatry is also the error committed by the prisoners in Plato’s cave. We commit idolatry whenever we worship ‘the works of men’s hands’¹⁴—as for instance when we take sense-perception, which is constructed from the categories of the human mind, for the unmediated manifestation of logos.

Like usury and sodomy, in short, idolatry incessantly (and inevitably) recurs throughout postlapsarian history. The struggle against liturgical idolatry produced centuries-long internecine conflicts throughout Christendom, from seventh-century Byzantium to seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Over this long process, however, the meaning of the term ‘idolatry’ changed. It ceased to designate a universal, ineradicable tendency of fallen humanity, and became instead a set of rituals performed by ‘idolaters.’ In the modern era it became useful to identify these idolaters as the subjugated ‘natives’ of the colonized world, and the Catholic Irish provided a convenient paradigm. Like usury and sodomy, idolatry was reified—transformed from a concept into a thing—and thus successfully disguised as a practice exclusive to specific groups of people. Throughout the modern period, usury, sodomy, and idolatry used that disguise as a way of avoiding criticism. Any critique of those vices could easily be made to look like a bigoted attack on the group of human beings with whom they were associated. My main aim in this book is to divert the ethical critique of usury, sodomy, and idolatry away fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Usury, Sodomy and Idolatry
• 2. Performativity in Postmodernity
• 3. The Commodification of Rhetoric in Classical Athens
• 4. Witchcraft and Representation in Early Modern England
• 5. Commodification and the Performative Sign in Eucharistic Ethics
• 6. The Two Usuries: Performative Representation in the City Comedies
• 7. Modernism, Inflation, and the Gold Standard
• 8. Against Financial Derivatives: Toward an Ethics of Representation
• 9. The Future-Sign: Representation in the Anglophone Yoruba Novel
• Back Matter