Erotic Politics

The Dynamics of Desire in the Renaissance Theatre

Susan Zimmerman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134919833
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Identifying the stage as a primary site for erotic display, these essays take eroticism in Renaissance culture as a paradigm for issues of sexuality and identity in early modern culture. Contributors examine how the Renaissance stage functioned as a decoder for erotic experience, both reinforcing and subverting expected sexual behaviour. They argue that the dynamics of theatrical eroticism served to deconstruct gender definitions, leaving conventional categories of sexuality blurred, confused - or absent. In seeking to reposition the conventions and subversions of gender and desire in terms of one another, these essays open up an attractive and distinctive perspective in cultural debate.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Erotic politics: the dynamics of desire on the English Renaissance stage

Susan Zimmerman

The title of this collection might be viewed as a conundrum: what does it mean to speak of erotic politics, and what is the relationship between politics and desire? There are theoretical assumptions in these juxtapositions: that the inter-subjective realm of desire connects to the public, political domain; that the English Renaissance stage foregrounds the multiple possibilities of this conjunction, shapes each in terms of a ‘dynamics’ that is available to critical scrutiny. These premises, in turn, suggest a larger problem concerning the production of eroticism, one with particular relevance to the cultural criticism represented in this volume. The crux of this problem may be stated in terms of two related issues: whether it is possible to historicize Renaissance eroticism—or Renaissance sexuality, the larger category of analysis to which eroticism is obliquely but interdependently related¹–in a wholly synchronic manner; and whether eroticism itself may be anatomized without recourse to psychoanalytic theory.

One influential theoretical formulation of recent date, that of cultural materialism, suggests the dimensions of the problem. Deployed with great effectiveness in the dismantling of liberal humanism and in legitimating a focus on the political context of cultural production, cultural materialism has sought to undermine universal, essentialist notions of human nature; to establish material forces and material relations as the basis for social productions and practices (with particular focus on those of literature and theatre); and to displace the concept of history as a linear, diachronic continuum with the concept of culture-specific, synchronic histories. Thus, although it borrows from Marxist economic theory, cultural materialism eschews all totalizing narratives, including the narrative of classical Marxism, emphasizing rather the discontinuities and heterogeneity of Foucault’s historical ‘epistemes’. In this context, any teleology, whether that of the Marxist dialectic or the Christian metaphysics, is seen to reify those transhistorical or transcendental notions that serve the interests of hegemonic structures in their exercise of power.²

Not surprisingly, therefore, the status of psychoanalytic theory among adherents of cultural materialism has been exceedingly suspect. Yet, ironi cally, any materialist theory which insists on a radical historical contingency inevitably establishes a set of binary oppositions (transhistorical/contingent, essential/ existential) which not only psychoanalytic theory but also post-modern linguistic theory is distinctively enabled to deconstruct. Moreover, a rigidly synchronic approach to cultural analysis precludes the development of a theory of human sexuality because any theory of sexuality must recognize the interdependence of the material and the representational, and account for the relationship between collective social formations and inter-subjective phenomena.

It is then in the arena of sexuality and erotic desire that the problem I have identified is most clearly manifest, as recent cultural criticism focusing on these subjects demonstrates. It would seem that the very terms in which such criticism represents culturally specific constructions of sexuality depend on psychoanalytic terminology and paradigms. Consequently, some scholars of Renaissance sexuality, including cultural materialists, are now attempting to mediate the tension between psychoanalytic and materialist theory. For example, in his ground-breaking study of Sexual Dissidence (1991), Jonathan Dollimore, acknowledging that neither materialism nor psychoanalysis, in isolation from each other, can generate an adequate ‘account of social struggle and change’, positions his own analysis at ‘the point where [they] converge with, but also contest each other’ (1991:34).³

Dollimore freely acknowledges what appear to be inconsistencies in such a positioning because he recognizes the theoretical (as well as the sociopolitical) dead-end of a narrowly defined materialism. Without some form of mediation between seemingly incompatible discourses, any materialist attempt to historicize sexuality is inevitably vitiated by a reductionist view of materiality itself. If, as postmodern linguistic theory would have it, language (words, sounds, notations) is a material process of signification, then a theory inscribed in the operation of language, such as that of psychoanalysis, is also a theory of the material. More fundamentally, if phenomenology is a delusion and consciousness does not constitute meaning; if signs are determined by their differences from other signs so that meaning derives from absence (what the sign is not); and if a linguistic system of signs (one that does not reflect but produces meaning) is a social formation that pre-exists the human subject, then the disjunction between matter and consciousness is not complete, and the relationship between them is a necessary problematic for any materialist philosophy.

By appropriating postmodern linguistic theory in an elucidation of Freud, and thus recasting psychoanalysis in a materialist framework, Jacques Lacan has served as the catalyst for the reformulation of other materialist theories as well. His influence has been especially marked in such neo-Marxists as Louis Althusser and Fredric Jameson, who have worked to position the Freudian-Lacanian theory of the unconscious within Marxist historical materialism. The legitimation of the unconscious in a material theory of history is of course highly relevant to cultural materialism as well, although here it is not used in the service of a teleological paradigm of historical ‘progress’. Indeed, in the end the materiality of the Lacanian unconscious and its centrality in the operation of desire must be accommodated by all postmodern cultural criticism, particularly as such criticism focuses on the study of sexuality and erotic desire.

For Lacan, language, sexuality and subjectivity are inextricably connected in a single developmental process, one marked by absence, difference, division and desire. Language is difference and absence: the meaning of the sign depends on what it is not; a sign can only signify by alluding to what is absent (Freud’s fort/da game). The human subject enters into consciousness from the undifferentiated pre-linguistic state through the agency of language, and in so doing experiences a fundamental split or division: subject and object (I/you) are defined by difference, absence and a sense of loss.

The division is also sexual: the induction of the subject into language coincides with an induction into culturally coded sexuality through the intervention of a third term—the ‘paternal metaphor’, the Phallus, or the Law. All the mental impulses prohibited by language and the Law, or what Lacan terms the symbolic order, must be repressed: thus consciousness and the unconscious come into being simultaneously in the human subject. Further, in the fissure or gap of the subject’s radical split, desire is born. According to the Lacanian paradigm, desire aspires to possess that which is always absent, repressed, or unattainable—the imagined wholeness of the pre-linguistic condition, the misrecognized lost plenitude; it is ‘the unuttered residue which exceeds any act that would display it’ (Belsey 1992: 93). Originating in the constitution of the human being as a social subject, desire is an endless process of deferment.

By anatomizing desire as the effect of a psychic split in the subject produced by the symbolic order, and by reifying the symbolic order as a material, causal agent in the development of the unconscious, Lacan provided historical materialism with the means to develop what Fredric Jameson calls the concept of a ‘political unconscious’ (my emphasis). For Jameson, Lacan provides—as LaCapra puts it—‘a means of linking the apparently individual and private processes studied by Freud to the social and collective phenomena treated by Marx’ (1987:245–6). Further, Jameson reinforces Althusser in identifying ideology as ‘the means by which the subject attempts to close [this] gap’ (ibid.).

Althusser’s influential essay on ideology remains the touchstone for the postmodern revaluation of this classical Marxist concept. In ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’ (1971a) and what might be considered a companion piece, ‘Freud and Lacan’ (1971b), Althusser attempts to do for Marx what Althusser claims Lacan did for Freud.⁴ That is, Lacan undergirded Freudian technique and practice by providing a theory of the unconscious; similarly, Althusser sets out to supply a theory for the Marxist concept of ideology. Further, Althusser’s reconfiguration of Marx’s ‘superstructure’ comes by way of Lacan. In appropriating Lacan’s theory of the unconscious to his theory of ideology, Althusser has two objectives: to rescue historical materialism from a discredited positivism and simultaneously to demonstrate that psychoanalytic theory inheres in historical materialism. The rescue operation is in effect a takeover.

Althusser links ideology and ‘the discourse of the unconscious’ (1971b: 212) through the operation of language and the Lacanian symbolic order: ‘you and I are always already subjects, and as such constantly practice the rituals of ideological recognition’ (1971a:172). This ‘recognition’ is, of course, illusory, a misrecognition, providing a false but practically effective sense of personal coherence: ‘ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (ibid: 162). The imaginary relationship, the fantasy, is instantiated in the lived relations that subjects have with collective formations, and Althusser contends that these relations are themselves one of the most striking manifestations of the materiality of ideology. Indeed, Althusser’s ‘interpellated subject’ cannot exist outside these formations; thus ‘no theory of psychoanalysis can be produced without basing it in historical materialism’ (1971b:190).

For both Althusser and Jameson, the construction of the subject is thus accomplished by unconscious processes which are constituted by social phenomena. Jameson borrows from Althusser in his own conceptualization of ‘the ideological representation…as that indispensable mapping fantasy or narrative by which the individual subject invents a “lived” relationship with collective systems which otherwise by definition exclude him insofar as he or she is born into a pre-existent social form and its pre-existent language’ (1985:394). In such a formulation the Lacanian process of desire is made to inhere in the operation of ideology.

The Marxist ideological paradigm has been justly criticized as reductive of Lacan’s theory of desire.⁵ But Althusser and his adherents none the less succeed in laying the foundation for a postmodern rapprochement between psychoanalytic and materialist theory, one with an undeniable challenge for cultural criticism. If, in Terry Eagleton’s succinct summation of Althusser, ‘the fundamental mechanisms of the psychical life are the structural devices of ideology as well’ (1991:185); and if psychoanalytic theory is part of any materialist analysis, does not this linkage revalorize the transhistorical, the universal, the essential? To be sure, such terms would apply to pre-existing structures and not to their contents: the ‘unconscious’ as a structure need not imply an organization of particular meanings. But if structures may be constants, then how are they compatible with the notion of synchronic change?

There is, then, a negotiation to be transacted between the subject’s preexisting structures—if language, of the unconscious, of ideology—and the phenomenon of historical change; as well as between individual and collective agency. In a fundamental sense, the transformational process of social change—what LaCapra calls ‘creation from contestatio’ is a central concern of most postmodern cultural criticism, which assumes that change occurs as a result of social struggle, but that the process of social change cannot be abstracted into a theory of historical linearity. At the same time, the process is not wholly random, as a radically deconstructive theory of history would maintain. If, then, such a transformational process is not random, it should be possible to construct a theory for it, one that encompasses these delicately balanced propositions and that also accommodates the ‘pre-existing structures’ or ‘transhistorical categories’ of post-modern linguistic and psychoanalytic theory. The construction of this theory is the challenge that confronts cultural criticism today, a challenge to which studies in sexuality and eroticism, such as those in this volume, have lent a new urgency.

To be sure, the problem of historical change is basic to postmodernism itself, and the conceptual crossfertilization that distinguishes the larger philosophical field is symptomatic of the need for continual reformulation of individual theories in terms of one another. For example, Julia Kristeva and Hayden White address the historical dynamic differently, but in related ways. Kristeva links Marx and Freud in terms of the semiotic concept of production (products and dreams), which ‘replaces the concept of linear historicity with the necessity of establishing a typology of signifying practices from…the particular models of the production of meaning’ (1986: 85). White, also focusing on semiotic systems, describes a related concept — and without hesitating to use the term ‘universal’: what is universal is not the meaning content of a cultural system, but ‘the process of meaning production’ (1982:307). Thus it might be said that ‘pre-existing structures’, ‘transhistorical categories’, ‘typologies of signifying practices’, and universal ‘process(es) of meaning production’ all represent strategies for repositioning the synchronic and the diachronic in terms of each other, and that to some degree these strategies are related. In seeking to establish a theoretical framework in which sexuality and eroticism—as inter-subjective and social phenomena—may be studied historically, this volume provides a compelling rearticulation of the postmodern problematic.

The essays in this volume are concerned specifically with the dynamic of desire on the English Renaissance stage, and with the social and political implications of this dynamic. As Raymond Williams has pointed out, the ‘sociology of drama’ provides a complex study in material process through its institutions (theatres, their predecessors and successors), its formations (groups of dramatists, dramatic and theatrical movements), its formed relations (audiences within the theatre, and their wider social formations), and its forms (modes of speaking, moving, representing). The function and effects of the theatre—its social significance—lie in the complex interrelationships among these phenomena (1977:139).

Representations of eroticism on the English Renaissance stage serve well as the nexus for the study of such interrelationships. The drama of the period was heavily occupied—one might say preoccupied—with sexual desire, and the production of eroticism involved every aspect of theatrical production, including the casting and composition of the companies (the transvestite acting convention providing an inescapable and distinctive erotic element); staging, costuming and the use of props and other theatrical apparatus; language, gesture and interpretation. The responses of spectators to the performers and to the plays were also constituent parts of the erotic dynamic, and the composition of the audience an important factor in this interaction, especially with respect to women.

The relationship of theatrical representations of eroticism to ‘official’ hegemonic discourses on the subject—for example, those of law, medicine, politics and religion—is part of a larger social dynamics that is extremely difficult to analyse. This is chiefly because these formal discourses do not collectively represent a homogeneous cultural coding, nor are the social practices of the period consistent with the proscriptions of the discourses. For example, there is considerable scholarly debate today over what activities constituted ‘sodomy’ in the Renaissance. Legal definitions vary and court records indicate comparatively few instances of prosecution for this crime, yet religious discourses inveigh heavily against it. Such contradictions are hardly surprising. Since ‘the hegemony’ in any society—particularly one as economically and socially conflicted as that of the English Renaissance— is a plurality, ideological domination by ruling groups is not likely to be uniform, but rather an organization of disparate meanings which may themselves be internally contestatory.

It is then in contradistinction to a variety of social formations that Renaissance theatre presents what in a Bakhtinian context are carnivalesque representations of eroticism. Unlike the theatrical traditions in England prior and subsequent to the Renaissance, the Renaissance stage, at the juncture between ‘emblematic and realist modes’ (Belsey 1985:26) was transgressively carnivalesque in the sense of calling attention to its own artifice. That is, it disrupted the metaphysical fixities of unity, identity and causality by licensing a plurality of contestatory perspectives through the agencies of role reversal, dialogic interactions and experimental sexual fantasy. Such subversion of the symbolic order is pleasurable and revitalizing, an energizing phenomenon difficult to channel and control by official means.

This is not to say that all Renaissance drama challenged some aspect of hegemonic social discourse, nor that transgressive drama was not internally constructed so as to ‘contain’ its own fantasies. But the theatre itself, inscribed in the mode of the carnivalesque and situated, at least in terms of its public amphitheatres, outside the city’s regulatory sanctions, was powerfully enabled to explore the limits of sexual categories and proscriptions. It seems probable that among the many contestatory discourses in the Renaissance concerned with sexuality and eroticism, only theatrical representations provide Bakhtin’s ‘doubles’ or ‘parodies’ of hegemonic attitudes, and thus theatrical representations should serve as the primary decoders of these attitudes. In the interests, then, of reconstructing the cultural complexity of Renaissance eroticism, the criticism of this volume focuses on the privileged site of the Renaissance stage.

Studies of the English Renaissance theatre, including many postmodern ones, have traditionally foregrounded the dramatic canon of Shakespeare. Notwithstanding the importance of Shakespeare to his time and ours, such a skew, particularly in cultural criticism, is badly in need of correction. Neither the social function of the theatre nor the production of eroticism within it can be anatomized in terms of the oeuvre a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 The subtexts of The Roaring Girl
• Chapter 3 Twins and travesties
• Chapter 4 Disruptive desire
• Chapter 5 Transvestism and the ‘body beneath’
• Chapter 6 Desire’s excess and the English Renaissance theatre
• Chapter 7 ‘Lawless desires well tempered’
• Chapter 8 Making a difference
• Chapter 9 The (in)significance of lesbian’ desire in early modern England
• Chapter 10 Sex and social conflict