One of Rockwell Kent’s illustrations. Courtesy of Biblioklept
One of the more famous passages in the novel Moby-Dick arrives with the revelation of the Pequod’s true mission: vengeance. Ahab acknowledges that his desire for retribution on the white whale is what has gathered the extraordinary platoon of talented harpooners and has launched the rest of the crew on its implacable hunt. After the revelation, Ahab continues, fulminating about the metaphysical dimension of their voyage:
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.
Ahab uses a commercial metaphor to describe his ambivalence about the white whale’s ultimate reality: Moby Dick may be the thing itself that has wronged him, or the whale may be merely the instrument—the agent—of some cosmic force condemning Ahab to his fate.
That metaphor is not accidental. Ahab’s words are spoken in rejoinder to Starbuck, his first mate. Starbuck has objected to Ahab’s thirst for vengeance both because it is “blasphemous” to treat a “dumb brute” as if it maliciously lamed Ahab and also because it is contrary to the plain business sense of the profession of whaling. “I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance,” he says. “How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.” Ahab replies, “Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest a little lower layer. If money’s to be the measurer, man, and the accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium here!” (Ahab strikes his chest.)
My reading of this rather opaque passage makes the “little lower layer” (a phrase Ahab repeats a moment later) equivalent to what lies behind the “pasteboard mask”—i.e., when Ahab tells Starbuck that he “requirest” a little lower layer, he is telling him he needs to think beyond the cash value of the whale. (Perhaps that equation is obvious, but I initially was unsure what the “little lower layer” signified—the money or the “unknown but still reasoning thing.”)
One might be forgiven for hanging “Thou requirest a little lower layer” as a badge on the enterprise of cultural history. Emerging in the midst of postmodernism’s fetishism of surfaces and superficiality, cultural history displayed a marked avidity for depth and verticality: Geertzian thick description, Foucauldian genealogies, microhistories that drilled miles deep into the bedrock of an individual life. I am guessing here, but I assume it is from cultural history that we derive some of our by now standard metaphors of historical analysis: we “unpack” this, we “make an intervention” there. (Intervention—to come between—implies that we are driving downward from above to separate two ideas or to puncture some ostensibly unified interpretive frame.) We use “complicate”—to fold together—as a compliment for our own ability to create layers and wrinkles out of the smoothness of official stories. On the other hand, two of the verbs which indicate our derision betray a preference for depth: we say of someone with whom we disagree that they “conflate” or “elide”—verbs that suggest an operation on a single plane of analysis. They “blow together” or “strike out/cross out” something which we insist needs to be understood in a more complex multidimensionality.
This enormous investment in depth and layering is part of any historian’s academic training, and it is surely not only due to cultural history that we talk and think in this way. However, cultural history played a special role in the recent evolution of the discipline because of the way it thought about layers, and more particularly because of the way it thought about layers and “the market,” which for the most part in practice meant “capitalism.”
The following may be rough: I have not fully thought it through. But what I’m reaching after is a continuation of what I was writing about last week: how the new history of capitalism has come to occupy some of the same intellectual space as cultural history did, but often doing so with very different premises. Here, I want to focus mainly on building up an idea of what cultural history was doing with layers and the market—with the little lower layer and the pasteboard masks—and I’ll only briefly touch on the way I think the new history of capitalism has both slid into the disciplinary space where cultural history was operating while rejecting one of its most crucial presuppositions.
***
The odd thing about cultural history’s zeal for depth was—as I already gestured toward—the unfashionableness of that passion. Postmodern literature, art, and architecture affected a kind of flatness that smirked at the idea of “inner reality,” eschewing layers of meaning for the arrangement of numerous fragments on a single plane.
That cultural history retained this commitment to depth and layers was significant, for cultural history was obviously the principal point of contact between history and and other, more archly sophisticated disciplines. Cultural history therefore absorbed capital-T Theory more selectively, I think, than other disciplines. It gravitated to thinkers whose general concerns were in line with postmodernism—holding a rough suspicion of “master narratives,” celebrating popular culture and the carnivalesque—while not entirely sharing postmodernism’s incorrigibly empty ironizing of all and sundry. The cultural studies approach of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall was, for many, just right—a Goldilocks of theoretical sophistication and earnest purposefulness. Clifford Geertz was located nearby—more playful, but still quite sincere.[1]
Perhaps separately or perhaps as a consequence of this dispreference for ironic superficiality, cultural historians also remained at something of a distance from the more unbounded notions of textuality. Rather than the world as a text, cultural historians more often gravitated toward seeing the world as a theater. Action as performance (rather than text) allowed for some of the same clever “readings” of fragmentary moments or tropes that were the bread and butter of literary critics, but it also reserved the possibility of that deeper level of reality which those literary critics were so at pains to deny. (“Il n’y a pas d’hors texte!”) Performances were performances of something, while texts were texts… connected to more texts.
This choice of the theater—or, to be more precise, the stage—over the text would have important consequences for the way cultural history would conceptualize and treat capitalism. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the way cultural historians wanted to conceptualize and treat capitalism validated their preference for the stage over the text. Looking back at much of the scholarship that would fall under the “culture of consumption” paradigm from the early to mid 1980s or that consolidated under the general rubric of the “market revolution” between the 1980s and 1990s, one is struck by how determined these historians are to “strike through the mask” and reach the authentic or original or folk or vernacular culture that lies just on the other side of the performance of market society. Capitalism disrupted old ways of life, but it also dropped over those older ways like so many layers of sediment, slowly burying “the world we have lost” beneath a hundred thousand tiny transactions, each the equivalent of a speck of dirt, each achieved by a successful performance of market society.[2]
***
The capitalism in the new history of capitalism is still more performative—more stage-based—than it is textual: this, I think the new history of capitalism has carried over from cultural history. Certainly, historians of capitalism will from time to time parse some crucial document in a manner that illuminates how vital texts are to the construction of capitalist relations. (Contracts are, after all, one of its cornerstones.) More often, however, it is the completion of an act—making the right gesture at a certain moment, standing in a certain place, gathering in a certain room, making a shipment, walking to work, and on and on—that knits together the innumerable threads of a capitalist society.
What no longer obtains, however, is any certainty that there is a “little lower layer” beneath capitalism’s pasteboard mask. In fact, in most cases there is not even that Melvillean or Ahabian ambivalence about whether such a layer is there or not. The new history of capitalism takes as its challenge the emphatic vastness of the pasteboard—which to be fair is work enough. And, to be even more fair, while there is something exhilarating about the historian as an Ahab, it is perhaps not so unwise for some to try to be a Starbuck too.
Notes
[1] I am generalizing here. Certainly some historians jumped with both feet into the postmodern camp, yet I think the standard account of Peter Novick and others has tended to overstate the degree to which the discipline fell into either epistemological or professional confusion as a result of exposure to late twentieth-century ideas.
[2] There are, again, exceptions to this approach. James Livingston’s work is an obvious one: he is, I feel, much more ambivalent about the possibility of retrieving something—some pre-capitalist society—from behind the pasteboard mask. But I would also add that one of the most sustained investigations into the co-evolution of the market and the theater in the early modern period also eschews any simplistic before-and-after narrative—that work is Jean-Christophe Agnew’s Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750. (And, in full disclosure, Professor Agnew was my dissertation advisor.)
5 Thoughts on this Post
S-USIH Comment Policy
We ask that those who participate in the discussions generated in the Comments section do so with the same decorum as they would in any other academic setting or context. Since the USIH bloggers write under our real names, we would prefer that our commenters also identify themselves by their real name. As our primary goal is to stimulate and engage in fruitful and productive discussion, ad hominem attacks (personal or professional), unnecessary insults, and/or mean-spiritedness have no place in the USIH Blog’s Comments section. Therefore, we reserve the right to remove any comments that contain any of the above and/or are not intended to further the discussion of the topic of the post. We welcome suggestions for corrections to any of our posts. As the official blog of the Society of US Intellectual History, we hope to foster a diverse community of scholars and readers who engage with one another in discussions of US intellectual history, broadly understood.
Watching one of R.P. Wolff’s lectures on Marx on YouTube some months ago reminded me of this passage in Capital vol. 1, toward the end of chap. 6 (quoted here in the B. Fowkes translation; emphasis added):
“The process of the consumption of labor-power [by the capitalist] is at the same time the production process of commodities and of surplus-value. The consumption of labor-power is completed, as in the case of every other commodity, outside the market or the sphere of circulation. Let us therefore, in company with the owner of money [the capitalist] and the owner of labor-power [the worker], leave this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone, and follow them into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there hangs the notice ‘No admittance except on business.’ Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is itself produced. The secret of profit-making must at last be laid bare.”
Even if one thinks that Marx’s particular explanation of “the secret of profit-making” is wrong, the broader (or more metaphorical) import of this passage, namely that something important is happening “below the surface” of market transactions, i.e. in the locales of production, and that it is necessary to investigate these to understand capitalism, seems relevant to some of the issues discussed in the post.
Putting it briefly, it seems to me that the focuses of both capitalism-as-text and capitalism-as-stage tend to overlook some of the forces, whether “hidden” or otherwise, that determine how the global capitalist economy operates and affects lives, both in the present and in the past. The conditions of production in garment factories in Bangladesh, say, or cell phone assembly plants in China, or more broadly how global supply chains operate, don’t seem well very captured by either the “text” or “stage” metaphors. And insofar as these conditions only enter the consciousness of many Western consumers when a big catastrophe occurs (such as the Rana Plaza fire), they are somewhat hidden. Going behind the “mask” in these instances is not hard, but one has to be motivated to do it. (This may be veering off the main point, I guess, so I’ll stop.)
Louis,
This is a great comment, and really helps me think through what’s going on here.
I agree that Marx makes a similar kind of move in that passage, but for Marx this descent into the hidden abode is about two layers of materialist analysis. It’s not that the world above the hidden abode is less material, just that it isn’t complete.
For some cultural historians, however, I have often gotten the feeling that there is a kind of idealist residue that they can’t quite shake off–and probably don’t want to. It is not enough for them to catalogue the dispositions of material interests, nor is it much better to demonstrate a constant interplay between base and superstructure. They seem to feel that there is a more fundamental reality below both base and superstructure, some ur- or echt-culture or code, a moral economy that has been suppressed and pulverized by the wheels of the market revolution, but that persists on the margins or interstices of society.
I think where we see this idea is typically in moments where cultural historians drew from either E. P. Thompson (for “moral economy”) or from the republican tradition; either source gave them a plausible framework for asserting the existence of some anterior and more ultimate ideal. And I think it is notable that we see relatively little of either source in the new history of capitalism: there is just not that same desire to locate a moral economy or concept of virtue persisting in the teeth of capitalist development. That, I think, is one of the chief differences between cultural history and the new history of capitalism.
Thanks Andy, that’s helpful. However, what I was trying to point up in my comment, and probably didn’t say clearly, is that I sense a contrast between, on the one hand, Marx’s going down into the “hidden abode” and, on the other hand, both the methods of cultural history and new history of capitalism as described in your post, both of which seem to stay pretty much on the surface of things, one concentrating on texts and the other on performative actions.
Now judging from your reply, I might have mis-read the post (and I should probably re-read it, more slowly than I did the first time). Also I can’t claim to be well versed in most of the literature you’re discussing in the post. So maybe I have misconstrued the post and/or simply don’t know enough about the relevant literatures, and the result, which would be mostly my fault, is that we aren’t communicating as well as we might. But this is the internet, and these things happen. 😉
Andy,
This is, as usual, an extremely thoughtful post. I would just quarrel with a few points, purely out of respect for your extremely incisive analysis.
I think that you may be yoking together so-called “postmodernism”, the new history of capitalism, and the turn to cultural history too closely. They cohere temporally in the 1980s, to be sure. What’s more, I deeply appreciate your circumspection of certain historiographical buzz-words that seemed to emerge more aggressively during the 1980s and 90s, like “complicate,” “elide,” etc. I realize that I may be out of line in linking these terms to the cultural turn. Though, admittedly, it seems to me that this may have come about as the result of a certain lazy complacence with the intellectual superiority”of the cultural turn as a form of academic “progress”.
With that said, I do think your analysis rests, perhaps, too closely on certain canonical “postmodern” texts and tropes: Lyotard’s skepticism of meta-narratives, Jameson’s lamentation of the loss of the temporal and historical sensibility. What I find interesting about the periodization of the 80s in the scant historical literature that exists is that it, also, adheres to these sort of tropes. Jameson and Rorty are somehow reflective of the de-regulation of the financial system that began with Jimmy Carter; Critical Race Theory is reduced to the metaphor of the market. It all seems to boil down to a matter of some prior sense of depth or unity that was upended, both metaphorically and literally, by a certain ‘lateralization’ of culture that resulted from de-regulation, de-industrialization., etc.
In an important sense, I think this fails to get at some of the nuances of the intellectual culture of the 1980s (though, admittedly, I am referring primarily to academic culture). Alongside a seemingly pervasive skepticism of narratives during that decade, there also emerged, simultaneously, a genuinely inter-disciplinary conversation about the centrality of narratives to human understanding. This was not just the stuff of Hayden White and Richard Rorty, mind you. You can find this intellectual turn in the fields of sociology, psychology, history, comparative literature, philosophy (to a degree), and even legal studies. I don’t see this as a shirking of depth. Nor, I think, was it a mere dismissal of staid norms and ideas based on some realization that cultural practices and ideas are somehow “constructed,” as a conclusion of a grand realization that knowledge is often tied to narrative or custom. I see this moment, rather, as one in which the metaphors of depth versus surface were fundamentally challenged. There is no doubt that the major intellectual figures of that decade (Foucualt, Lyotard, Rorty, Geertz) played an enormous role in the rise of cultural history and, in turn, the new history of capitalism. But I do think that we should resist the metaphors of depth and surface left in their wake if we’re to try and make sense of the recent cultural and intellectual history of the U.S. It’s a refrain that, it seems to me, elides (yeah, I know…) more than it elucidates.
Thanks so much for this comment, Erik. I am being far too glib in my characterization of postmodern culture, you’re absolutely right. I’m not sure how much a richer, more accurate and more fair characterization of postmodernism as an intellectual project would change the story of cultural history, because as I see it, many cultural historians *resisted* that postmodern deconstruction of the surface-depth dyad.
What I meant to argue was that someone like Jackson Lears–a key figure in the “culture of consumption” school–never really dropped the belief that there was some superordinate force operating beneath the surface of things, and especially below the level of market activity. He has been primarily interested, in my mind, in how people have tried to pierce through that uppermost superficial layer of economic behavior and tap into something deeper. Or take Miles Orvell’s The Real Thing: although he acknowledges that the meaning people gave to “real” itself changed over time, it’s difficult to come away from that book without thinking that Orvell himself has some thoughts about what “real” really ought to mean.
At any rate, I certainly take your point about the cribsheet nature of my definition of postmodernism–and thank you for pointing it out!