Materialism and Reification in Renaissance Studies

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and Reification in Renaissance Studies JONATHAN GIL HARRIS and NATASHA KORDA eds., Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 358 pp. $70.00VALENTINE GROEBNER, Liquid Assets, Dangerous Gifts:Presents and Politics at the End of the Middle Ages, trans. Pamela E. SelwynPhiladelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 248 pp. $49.95NATASHA KORDA, Shakespeare's Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern EnglandPhiladelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 276 pp. $49.95VICTORIA SILVER, Imperfect Sense: Predicament of Milton's IronyPrinceton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 409 pp. $60.00CERI SULLIVAN, Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern WritingLondon: Associated University Presses, 2002. 217pp. $42.50The relationship between the and literary representation has always been a source of theoretical controversy. In the twentieth century, those critics most interested in the question usually defined themselves as materialists, and argued that the economic mode of production in some sense determines aesthetic modes of representation. novel, for example, might express or reflect the rise to economic and political prominence of the bourgeoisie. But such an can be called only on the supposition that the is a material phenomenon. When it becomes clear that large elements of the economy itself take the form of representation, economic determinism ceases to be materialist. What is more, in a development unremarked by most literary critics, over the last two decades both economic determinism and have shed their wonted associations with the political Left.Today, the application of microeconomics to the human sciences as practiced by such thinkers as Gary Becker, and the ultra-materialist approach to subjectivity advocated by the followers of Richard Dawkins, are abetted by allegedly radical theorists such as Donna Haraway and Judith Butler, whose insistence on the materiality of the human subject chimes perfectly with market ideology. cumulative effect has been to establish an orthodoxy that is materialist in a wider, deeper sense than the Leftist of the last century. Not only does the determine our ideas; ideas themselves are material, neurological, and chemical reactions in the brain. Not only are the actions of human beings driven by material factors; human beings are themselves material, performative, desiring machines.Literary and cultural critics now tend to gloss over the pseudo-Marxist heritage of the word materialism, but this has not weakened their fidelity to the concept. overwhelming orthodoxy continues to assume that matter is the only reality, and that the realm of ideas is a vaguely pernicious delusion. Materialism is still sometimes used as a more or less open substitute for Marxism-for example Natasha Korda's discussion of Heidi Hartmann's 1981 essay The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism concludes by advocating a compromise method that utilizes both materialist and feminist modes of analysis (38, emphases added). One explanation for the adulatory references to materialism in early modern cultural studies is that it provides a useful cipher for critics who may be squeamish about identifying themselves with the other, less fashionable, M-word.But something else is happening to the term materialism, something peculiar, portentous, and profoundly expressive of the spirit of our age. Early modern cultural studies seem to be developing an ethical and political commitment to things, and that is what materialism is coming to mean in this context. One of the most lucid expositions of this kind of is the introduction to the 1996 collection of essays entitled Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, edited by Margreta de Grazia, Peter Stallybrass, and Maureen Quilligan. …