Outline
of Stephen Greenblatt's "The Improvisation of Power" from Renaissance
Self-Fashioning, (University of Chicago Press, 1980)
- Spenser's Arthur
and Marlowe's Tamburlaine are two faces of Renaissance power
- principle
of social order and moral restraint; principle of individual energy and lustful
desire
- face
shown toward subjects and face shown toward enemies
- Power (= Authority,
the State, Patriarchy, the Establishment) in the West is characterized by psychic
mobility
- Machiavelli's
Prince uses beast and man--a centaur
- Daniel
Lerner defines western consciousness as Mobile; possessed with empathy
- empathy is
psychic mobility; ability to see oneself in other's situation; detachment from
tradition and stability
- Iago
represents Shakespeare's vision of empathy; the cultural trait of empathy underlying
western power that originated in the Renaissance (225)
- this
equation planted like a seed, dropped and returned to, in Iago-like fashion
- empathy in
operation: conning the Indians
- Spanish
learned Indian myth of afterlife in other islands; deceived them into travelling
to gold mines of Hispaniola in search of it; enslaved them; they died
- sensational
fact of genocide
- insinuate
themselves into preexisting political religious and psychic structures of natives
and turn structures to their advantage (227)
- role
playing; accept disguise; transform oneself into another and another's reality
into a manipulable fiction
- perceive
another's belief system as an ideology
- perceive
another's belief system as analogous to one's own, without perceiving one's own
as ideology (229)
- conceal
the fact that you "own someone else's labor"; that you exploit them, and convince
them they are acting freely for you
- other
elements of improvisation and empathy used by power--translating self into other
- displacement
and absorption [jargon]
- example:
Anglican church absorbs Catholic-roman ritual for its own purposes
- the
sacred vestal virgins and madonna
- symbolic
system displaced from Goddess to queen and humility before the sacred absorbed
into sanctifying the queen
- rhetorical
education of humanists cultivates pyschic mobility; argue on both sides of question
(231)
- presented
as such 1.3.390
- his
denial of the ability reveals it 2.1.125, while revelling in doing it to everyone
- like
tricking Indians 1.1.45
- another
seed--ambiguity of "his" in "too familiar with his wife"
- Iago colonizes
Othello with ideology; O. doesn't know it (233)
- disguised
and rendered ambiguous by I's servant status and by Othello's ambivalent relation
to Xtian society
- Iago's
method: narrative self fashioning
- telling
stories--based on comic possibilities [=gossip?]
- seeing
his way into other people's stories
- seeing
the way they interpret discourse, the signals to which they respond and which
they ignore (235)
- has
his own sentensitous theory of self-fashioning 1.3.320
- understanding
the stories others tell themselves
- making
himself transparent, in order to displace and absorb the others
- Iago
himself is a creation of his own narratives; he has no motives, only the stories
of motives he tells us and others
- Othello's
narrative is colonized also by Desdemona
- All
characters create themselves--their identities--with stories of their lives; "submit
to narrativity." [instead of just being themselves, like Montaigne]
- conception
of one's life as story submitted to public inquiry
- Othello has submitted
his story to Brabantio, Desdemona, the Senate
- Narrative
identity is vulnerable to consumption, refashioning, reinterpretation
- Male identity
is fashioning of one's own story; female is submission to the male's.
- Desdemona's
submission is not total but threatening
- Desdemona's obedience
to Othello is disobedience to father
- she
devours Othello's discourse in her submission
- in
her responses to his narrative of sexuality (243)
- his
account is of peaceful tranquility after stormy voyage of passion
- hers
is of unabating increase
- his
identity depends on embrace and perpetual reiteration of Christianity through
narrative confession of his sins (245)
- he
demands she confess her sexual sins
- The revelation:
What is the narrative of Othello that Iago inserts himself into?
- that married
sex is itself adulterous
- this
is the ideology that has colonized Othello; and that Iago uses to colonize him
(247)
- evidence
of Power: institutional hostility to desire since it is a release from dogma and
constraint (Marcuse and Freud)
- Desdemona's
excessive experience of pleasure awakens deep current of sexual anxiety in Othello
(250)
- Iago
shares this deep-seated sexual revulsion
- the
concealed identification of lusts stains and lusts blood is revealed in 5.1.36
Think on thy sins/ they are loves I bear to you/ And for that thou diest"
- necrophilia
is the final solution along with suicide; he punishes both her and himself for
their transgression--this is the concluding submission to narrative; reaffirmation
of himself
- What's
left out and needs filling in--how Othello's imagination as heroic storyteller
is prone to generate tragic stories of lost identity--cuckoldry as story; loss
of place; the army bedding her; his profession gone; throwing away the pearl of
great price; killing the Turk; his life's ending and Desdemona's staged as spectacle
of punishment for transgression; of justification; and finally of romantic union,
like Antony and Cleopatra's.
- Shakespeare's
empathy and improvisation is like Iago's
- Counter
to Montaigne, who eschewed narrative and became private, Shakespeare pursued power
as maker of mass media--that which colonizes with ideology
- His submission
to his culture--his absorption and love of it is perhaps like Desdemona's, subversive
in its very obedience. (254)