Renaissance Syntax and Subjectivity

Ideological Contents of Latin and the Vernacular in Scottish Prose Chronicles

John C. Leeds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351904339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

The relationship between Latin and the Scots vernacular in the chronicle literature of 16th-century Scotland provides the topic for this study. John Leeds here shows how the disposition of grammatical subjects, in the radically dissimilar syntactic systems of humanist neo-Latin and Scots, conditions the way in which "the subject" (i.e., the human individual) and its actions are conceived in the writing of history. In doing so, he extends the boundaries of existing critical literature on early modern "subjectivity" to include the subject of grammar, analyzing its incorporation into narrative sentences and illuminating the ideological contents of different systems for its deployment. Though focused on the chronicles of Renaissance Scotland, the argument can in principle be applied to the entire range of Latin-vernacular relations during the early modern period. While examining the intellectual culture of early modernity, Leeds also takes aim, at every stage of his argument, at the semiotic and social-constructionist orthodoxies that dominate the humanities today. Against the notion that human subjects are "discursive constructs, " he argues for the subordination of discourse to realities, both material and immaterial, that are external to language. As part of this argument, he proposes a view of neo-Latin humanism as a resistance to the onset of modernity, arguing that Latin prose provides options (at once syntactic, ideological, and ontological) that vernacular culture has, to its considerable detriment, foreclosed. In sum, Leeds advocates a renewed and theoretically-informed commitment to the humanism that the humanities themselves have been at such pains, during the last scholarly generation, to depreciate.

Chapter 1

Sleeping Beauty: Accusative Case, Passive Voice, and the Subject of Production

The topics I wish to pursue are the relation of human subjectivity to historical agency and the ways in which these two elements, the subject and its activity, were encoded, during the sixteenth century, in two quite different grammatical systems: humanist neo-Latin and the Scots-English vernacular. “Activity” is the broadest of terms, but I make no apology on that account. For the epistemological tradition, to which I refer early in this essay, activity means perception and thought, mental process. For the Marxist tradition, to which I will turn later on, activity means labor, manual production. For Hegel, the key figure in my argument, the mental and manual, ideal and material, succeed each other as “moments” in a dialectical totality. More concretely, for the sixteenth-century Scottish chroniclers whose texts I will examine below, activity almost invariably means political endeavor. For my present purposes, however, such distinctions matter less than the tendency, common to all these strains of thought, to identify subjectivity with some sort of activity and the subject with whatever it does. This tendency pervades not only the philosophical tradition but our casual discourse as well, as when one asks a high-school senior, shortly before her graduation, “What do you want to be?” One means, of course, “How are you going to support yourself?” or, better yet, “What productive function do you plan to assume in the economic apparatus?” Like the unwelcome fairy in the fable, we insist that, having come of age, she take up the spindle, to toil and to spin. Even so, confusing activity with ontology, we ask the hapless young person what she might wish to be, as if she were not something already but must become something by, of all the unlikely means, getting a job.

Exactly because I mean to challenge this pervasive error, I will allow “activity” to remain broad and inclusive. “The subject,” on the other hand, requires a much higher degree of definition. Three senses of that term concern me here. By “the subject” I mean, first, the one who is subordinate and obedient to political authority: in short, the subject of the king, or of some other considerable power that stands in the king’s stead. Second, I designate by “subject” the philosophical (or more precisely Kantian) Subject, a meaning I will signal, as here, by using the upper case. The Subject is that autonomous person who stands above the imperatives both of nature and of culture; as the bearer of a universally valid human conceptual apparatus, the Subject imposes upon its objects the binding conditions (spatial, temporal, causal, and logical) of their objectivity. It follows that, in practical and political rather than epistemological terms, the Subject is the one who wills, initiates, and determines. Third, I mean by “subject” that logical and grammatical element, the subject of a proposition or sentence.¹ The subject is that about which a statement is made, the verbal postulate upon which qualities or actions may be predicated. Those who still honor the memory of an exacting “grammar school” teacher, as I do, encountered this during childhood as our first formal definition of the term. So much the more surprising, then, to find this third “subject” (while the first two now enjoy the status of learned commonplaces) almost completely omitted from contemporary academic discourse about human subjectivity. In support of this statement I will not offer a general review of the extensive literature on early modern subjectivity, because the reader’s own experience of that literature will surely bear me out. I could not, in any case, improve on one recent such review, the introduction to Hugh Grady’s volume on subjectivity in Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne.² Grady handily summarizes a number of the approaches to subjectivity (those of Foucault, Althusser, Lacan, the Frankfurt School) that have dominated academic discourse on this topic for the last few decades. That he does so without even a nod to the grammatical subject is not a fault of Grady’s exposition but a virtue, an accurate reflection of the present consensus: discussions of “the subject” can proceed without any concern for one of the principal meanings of that term, since no relation obtains between the grammatical subject and its ontological referent. With this consensus I disagree: to accord the grammatical subject its rightful place in the theory of subjectivity is therefore my academic motive, to deny the equivalence of subjectivity with activity my philosophical aim, and to scrutinize the Scottish Renaissance chronicles my literary and philological means.

An obvious question, and a standard topos for discourse in the humanities, presents itself once more: How and when did the obedient subject of the king become the willing and determining Subject of modernity? Early modernity would seem the likeliest era to search, and such efforts have often identified, as a precursor of the Kantian Subject, the Cartesian cogito, the subject of methodical and disembodied thought. I take, as a particularly clear and closely reasoned representative of such discourse, Timothy Reiss’s essay on “Montaigne and the Subject of Polity.” While admitting that today “our concept of the subject still remains in a line stemming directly from Cartesianism,” Reiss denies the claim that Montaigne’s version of subjectivity was also effectively modern.³ Because Montaigne did not conceive “a self that is always and everywhere the same and constant in itself,” Reiss declares, “this Cartesian idea of the subject is not to be found” in his essays (133). Reiss instead extracts from Montaigne’s essays a conviction that the individual, by himself, knows only “movement and inconstancy,” that his inner life consists of “thought in process that is not yet reason since it is by definition disordered” (133, 134). “In the private realm,” it follows, “the ‘individual’ is not properly speaking a subject, nothing but this inconstant motion” (140). The establishment of a stable identity, therefore, requires some external point of fixity. This need was especially acute since, as Reiss demonstrates, Montaigne considered the private lives of men far too mercurial to supply the political stability so plainly wanting during the Wars of Religion. For Montaigne, Reiss concludes, “it is … only the state in the power of a single individual which can guarantee a certain constancy” (135). Public harmony demands of each person “a public subjectivity” that “receives its being from its relationship to a sovereignty incarnate in the person of the prince” (135, 139–40). Thus, as Reiss sees it, the subject in Montaigne, as of the late sixteenth century, remains “the one subjected,” the social/political person as constituted by relationship to sovereign authority.

In effect, Reiss contends that Montaigne’s conception of the human subject remained largely medieval and Catholic. A king determines the identities of his subjects because, unlike them, he “partakes to a certain degree of both divine permanence and reason” (132); the obedient subject acquires, through the mediation of the king, the constancy that he cannot supply for himself. “The law and the order of the state thus rest,” Reiss says, “on the king’s unique sovereignty … whose guarantor is God himself and God’s reason” (131). This conception of political authority has been articulated with great clarity by Walter Ullmann, who titles it the “descending thesis” of government. Ullmann argues, in a number of works, that the chief tenet of medieval political theory (which he distinguishes sharply from medieval political practice) was the divine origin of earthly authority as embodied in princes and prelates, the appointed deputies of God. While acknowledging a Roman imperial basis for this doctrine, Ullmann regards the Pauline epistles as its chief source. Paul’s insistence on the divine sanction of worldly authority and his injunctions to strict obedience imply “an unadulterated conception of the subject, of the subditus,” who “not only had no rights but also had no autonomous standing within the Church itself or within society.”⁴ As for “the function and status of the individual” within this theoretical construct, Ullmann maintains that “only by identifying himself with the law and government of the superior, that is, by active obedience,” could the faithful Christian enjoy individuality at all.⁵ “As a subject,” to return to Timothy Reiss’s account, “one becomes in some sense the ‘function’ of the prince.”⁶ To be a subject was thus to be subditus (“placed under,” the usual term in Latin political discourse, of which subjectus is a variant), and to have achieved subjectivity meant, without paradox, to have become the object of another’s sovereign will. The subject subsists, in Ullmann’s phrase, by active obedience, at once the object of sovereign behest and the subject of effective agency.

While Reiss has plenty of company in citing Descartes as an inventor of modern subjectivity, Etienne Balibar has argued, in dissent, that even the Cartesian subject must be identified with the simultaneous subject/object of the “descending thesis.” From his certainty as to the cogito, the thinking self (Discourse on Method, Chapter 4), Descartes turns directly to proofs of the existence and perfection of the Creator, since, in Balibar’s words, “the reality of finite things could not be understood outside of a specific dependence ‘according to which all things are subject to God.’”⁷ Nature, that is to say, cannot be described mathematically unless it remains constant, and this constancy can have no source but original perfection; in Balibar’s account, unlike Reiss’s, Descartes attributes constancy not so much to the subject as to the natural objects of its comprehension. Far from imposing the conditions of objectivity, “the ‘thinking thing’ that I am,” in the Cartesian system, has its own appointed place within “a nexus that is both hierarchical and causal” (35, 34). Thus one must acknowledge that in this system too “the human individual, composed of a soul, a body, and their unity, is the ‘subject’ (subjectus) of a divine sovereignty,” and moreover that Descartes makes “my subjection to God into the origin of my mastery over and possession of nature” (35, 36). This subjectus, Balibar reminds us, “is the other name of the subditus,” of “the individual submitted to the ditio, to the sovereign authority of a prince” (36). The Cartesian subject, Balibar concludes, “is thus still (more than ever) the subjectus” of the theocratic polity (36). Moreover, “it is this very dependence that constitutes him,” since “in obeying the law of the prince he obeys God” (36, 41). Or, to consider this relationship from above rather than from below, the creative power of God continues to operate through the subject-constituting function of the prince.

For Balibar, then, the precise point of origin for the modern, Kantian Subject is to be found no earlier than, well, Kant himself. The Kantian Subject, who “inscribes freedom in nature,” has been retrojected upon Cartesianism by recent thinkers who cannot conceive the subject in any other way (37). This act of anachronism, however, as Balibar points out, ignores “the anteriority of the question of the subjectus,” of the “person submitted to the exercise of a power, whose model is, first of all, political” (38). Such erasure of the political subject is especially misleading since, on Balibar’s account, the philosophical Subject emerged at a specific political juncture, namely the French Revolution. “The moment,” Balibar writes, “at which Kant produces (and retrospectively projects) the transcendental ‘subject’ is precisely that moment at which politics destroys the ‘subject’ of the prince, in order to replace him with the republican citizen” (39). At that time the citizen, “a man in enjoyment of all his ‘natural’ rights, completely realizing his individual humanity, a free man simply because he is equal to every other man,” established himself through “the ‘surpassing’ or ‘negation’ of the subject,” the subjectus of the theocratic state (45, 40). “If we should ever speak of sublation (relève),” Balibar declares with the appropriate fervor, “it is now: the citizen is a subject who rises up (qui se relève)!” (40).

In these last remarks, Balibar’s philosophical vocabulary (negation, sublation) points directly toward the unacknowledged preceptor of his discourse: Hegel. Nowhere does the Hegelian cast of Balibar’s thought appear more clearly than in his argument that the French Revolution was not the only historical matrix for the citizen. The citizen, he maintains, always follows the subject, not just in late eighteenth-century France but “at whatever time this ‘event’ may take place or might have taken place” (37–8). That is to say, the supersession of subjects by citizens at any given historical moment exemplifies a necessary conceptual progression that has been, and will be, concretized at other times as well. The grounds for this argument are both empirical and ideal. Ullmann (to take the empirical side first) traces the emergence of citizens to the thirteenth century, placing particular emphasis on Aristotelianism in Christian philosophy: “It was—in doctrine anyway—Aristotle’s and Thomas’ definition of a citizen as one partaking in government which supplied the solvent that was to release the inferior subject, the sub/ditus, from the superior’s tutelage.”⁸ Hegel (to take the idealist position next) interprets history as a rational process in which unique events represent persistent conceptual forms. Dissatisfied with the more static tendencies of the Kantian system, Hegel set the relation between categorical opposites into dialectical, and thus diachronic, motion. Accordingly, for Hegel, the constitution of political subjects as the objects of an alien will (as in the theocratic state) would only confirm the general truth that any category contains, and develops through, its own contradictions. The very shape of Balibar’s argument, its alternating appeals to historical facts and conceptual oppositions, bears the unmistakable imprint of Hegelianism. Timothy Reiss, for one, states flatly that current thinking about the human subject “has not yet found a way to move beyond Hegel,” and I agree.⁹ Any discussion of the conceptual genesis of modern subjectivity must come to terms, either openly or silently, with Hegelian dialectics, and mine is no exception.

Because my argument begins with the subjectus, the simultaneous subject/object of the “descending thesis,” I turn directly to what is perhaps the best-known passage in all of Hegel, the reflections on lordship and bondage in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1806). In the early stages of this book, Hegel describes the process by which consciousness moves from mere sensual awareness of the external world to awareness of itself as the source of perception. Consciousness, he argues, becomes self-conscious when subjectivity acquires the capacity to regard itself as an object; the two “moments” of self-consciousness, subjective and objective, reside as yet in the same individual. In order for this capacity to develop, each individual must encounter another, since, for each, “self-certainty” can only be achieved once “its own being-for-self ha[s] confronted it as an independent object.”¹⁰ A knowledge of oneself as person, in other words, requires contact with other people. The initial result of such an encounter, however, will be conflict. Each individual resists the imputation, when confronted by another, of its own objectivity, and each wishes “to become certain of itself as the essential being” (111). The effect of this struggle will be to divide subjectivity and objectivity, the two “moments” that were unified in self-consciousness, and to assign them to two separate individuals. The one who prevails in this struggle will thus become Subject, “the ind...