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Modernity Sea (changes)
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Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis
- “Doubles” keep being produced in the heterotopia of the ship
- Secret homosexual relations
- Sea narrative in 19th century stages debates about sexuality
- Marx, Bersani, Foucault, D & G
- Ship space = multiple cultural practices
- “all-male disciplinary heterotopia”
- Trying to imagine a time before capital
- “Crisis of pleasure” as counter-attack on capitalism
- Ship is the space of modernity at crisis
- In Conrad, ship as “Closeted space” with “dialectical economy of desire”
- Conrad, Youth: “This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate”
- Thesis
- “The nineteenth-century sea narrative constituted a crucial laboratory for that crisis that goes by the name of modernity…in which a new historical era was problematized, that is, was turned into a problem for thought.”
- Two experiments: creating representations of modernity; conceptual constellations “that resisted both modernity and representation.” The sea narrative is a result of both of these
- Modernity as crisis b/c it is capitalist
- Takes from Hardt and Negri, rather than say Marx or Berman: “Modernity is the history of a permanent and permanently incomplete revolution: a contradictory development in which there has always been an alternative between the development of free productive forces and the domination of capitalist relations of production.” Liberation of productive forces has occurred since Renaissance, at the expense of transcendent interpretations of life, and is split between human cooperation and the reproduction of life on the one and, on the other, hierarchy, organization, and power. Modernity as struggle between these two forces: “Freedom and subjugation” in form of “collective constituent power of the masses” versus “constituted power.” And the dialectic itself is merely a sublimated form of this primary struggle. qtd 2
- “nineteenth-century sea narrative not only as an engagement with the multifarious manifestations of this dialectic [capital and labor] but also as an anticipation of the breakdown of this dialectic in our time and as a foreshadowing of that historical-materialist affirmation of crisis…a real state of emergency” 3
- Economic context: industrial capitalism emerging from “cocoon” of mercantile capitalism b/c free labor (people not tied to land) and free capital (not vested in land or in state) both appear, symbolized by 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws
- The sea becomes more turbulent b/c it was central in mercantile capital (b/c exchange is what ruled, it was the central site for the mode of production…wow for me that means I can argue that the cruise ship acts like a sign of nostalgia, a laugh by industrialists on the part of colonizing the old ruler of the economy by using it for its leisure space); and now it’s crucial, but NOT CENTRAL, for industrial capital to create global economy 4
- obsolescence: whaling, sail shipping… I’ll make the comparison here to agricultural revolution which had happened a few decades before, where they had to innovate and adapt
- Political economy of the sea
- had anticipated the next form of capitalism:
- 1) wage labor is invented at sea, also making them the prototype for organized labor associations
- 2) “first international, multiethnic, multilingual, and also increasingly multiracial labor force since at least the Renaissance” 5
- during the mid nineteenth century, the ship is a site of multiple capitalisms: “the persistence of mercantile capitalism as one of the cogs in the machinic assemblage of industrial economy was largely articulated through the continued and contradictory importance of the world of the sea: these two modes of production met and interpenetrated at sea” 5
- And the sea narrative? it was itself “an archaic form of representation that suddenly began to perform according to new narrative structures and to fulfill new cultural imperatives, and that, hence, played a direct role in the production of the emergent cultures of modernity” 6
- My reactions?
- His ship is all-male, but mine is emphatically not.
Intro
Revised on January 4, 2009 06:47:28
by
shawna?
(71.58.67.97)