Outline of Stephen Greenblatt's "The Improvisation of Power"
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
method is improvisation
insinuate themselves into preexisting political religious and psychic structures of natives and turn structures to their advantage (227)
how its done
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)
Othello
Iago's improvisation
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
to win pity for himself.
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 greedy ear;
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
Critique
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 and Power
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)