Claxton Mahaley

2009 | Stage 15 of the Tour de France

I don't race bikes. Not really. Maybe the occasional commuter with full panniers, but they don't usually know it. I do, however, love watching others race their bikes, and maybe that's harder, right?

But this year Lance Armstrong was coming back. Crawling back out of retirement to race his bike again. And maybe I expected too much, but it's not like he's been sitting around eating donuts, he's been busy. 

During the Giro d'Italia he was getting his legs, I get that, but the Tour is his. 

My problem is that I am unable to see anything that he does as weakness. And this maybe largely due to the fact that he is just a bit older than me. You see, I'd like to believe that, though I may not be in the shape required to do it, it is possible for someone my age to kick the bike-peddling asses of 25-33 year olds. If anyone could do it, it's Lance. I want to believe that age isn't the killer. Turns out it is.

Lance is still going to do well. He's going to kick the bananas out of most of the peloton. He may not win, though I have to admit that I am still holding out hope that he has some superhuman plan in his head to rip this thing up, but he is still an inspiration.

Reinventing the Spectator

Audience/auditors from the Latin audiens (hearing).

Look up Robert Cecil's Hatfield House. This house is, of course, not the theater, but it does provide the modern spectator with an idea of the visual culture influencing the Early Modern theater. 

Note the furnishings and portraits.

There is an Elizabethan aesthetic. Part of the dramatic culture or not, we cannot know, but it is rather more difficult to escape one's metacultural dictums. 

**afterpieces. Investigate: the dance of death**

Thomas Haywood: theater as "true portrature" becoming "so bewitching a thing . . . that it hath the power to new mold the hearts of spectators" (Apology B4r).

To paraphrase from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, Elizabethan theater offered many sights that were to be seen, not spoken (5.2.42-43). 

The significance in that modern criticism on the Elizabethan theatre has rested on two central premises:

1. The stage was bare
2. language was primary 

In this way, I would like to establish a critical understanding of how the Elizabethan theater functioned as an aspect of London's visual culture. This, of course, relies on theater's root as "a place for seeing." 

To provide some strength to this argument, quite a number of EM tests refer to going to see plays. According to research done by Gabriel Egan, EM texts contained significantly more reference to seeing plays, as opposed to hearing them. Of course, the strength this offers—and there is more, much more in this vein—is negligible, that is just what ones says in reference to plays. Perhaps, but I think of the play as a visual art and the dramatic text as literature. Has that changed?

It is from this period that the term spectator came into wider use. (From the Latin specere, to see, spectare, to watch, and spectaculum, a play. 

Tassi notes that the "coexistence of neutral, positive, and pejorative uses of the term spectator indicates that there were conflicting early modern attitudes towards the act of seeing in the theater" (The Scandal of Images 17).

The theory of extramission: espoused by Plato and Euclid, assumed that the gaze acted upon the world, affecting objects.

The theory of intromission: espoused by medieval theorists, assumed that objects struck a mostly passive eye. 

To the Elizabethans, vision gave the objects of the world access to the mind. A polluted or corrupt object could be said to infect the eye (read: soul). Sight was potentially dangerous, erotic, and spiritually deviant, as in the medieval phrase libido videndi and the Protestant emphasis on the "idolatrous eye" emphasize.   

More thoughts on Lear

Is there any early modern play that more self-consciously engages the power of the platform stage than King Lear? All we have to do is look at how the space was transformed from scene to scene by the power of the fiction. For the most part, Shakespeare leaves out language that highlights the mimetic nature of the stage and yet the incredible scope of the action, its displacements, it wanderings, it political subplot, guarantees and inscribes the stage’s potential as a theatrical device, a device that can be used to question the theater’s art. In some instances we find that the stage moves beyond convention—insofar as we can define an early modern theatrical convention—to become the subject of direct, formal inquiry. What seems to be finally asked, and this has been examined by both A.C. Bradley and Henry Turner to some extent, is this: how does the stage allow for explorations in conceptual space that allow us to move beyond print, beyond words?

Revisiting 4.6

Granted, I’ve already talked about this at length else wear, but these exercises help me to better come to terms with areas of the text that confound or interest me. I’d like to spend some more time going over the events of Act 4 Scene 6 of King Lear. 

See Better Lear

KING LEAR

Kent, on thy life, no more.

KENT

My life I never held but as a pawn

To wage against thy enemies; nor fear to lose it,

Thy safety being the motive.

KING LEAR

Out of my sight!

KENT

See better, Lear; and let me still remain

The true blank of thine eye. (1.1.155-160)

See better Lear. I cannot stop thinking about that. See better. I hear it yelled in quite tones, enunciated slowly, eyes ablaze. See better. But isn’t it all about site? What we hear in the play cannot be trusted. See better.

Mapping Lear

King Lear contains one of the most memorable scenes of on-stage map-reading in all English Renaissance drama. In this dark tragedy, Shakespeare begins with a display of the cartographic theme that will run throughout: "Meantime we shall express our darker purpose. / Give me the map there" (1.1.38-9). This foregrounded map image should never stray far from our mind; in fact, it is this map that we are to superimpose upon the bodies of all the players as we probe the question of the King’s relationship to the land.

Incomplete Thoughts on The Winter’s Tale

My resent research suggests that early modern dramatists regarded painting as a rival art, an art that shares a fundamental element with theater—its visual nature. Conflicting attitudes toward images and image makers in early modern England produced some highly ambivalent representations of painters and paintings in the theater. Shakespeare’s ambivalence created its most negative portrayal of painting in Timon of Athens, but it was only about five years later that Shakespeare presented the painted work of art in a more complicated, positive light. 

In the Winter’s Tale, Paulina unveils a painted statue in a scene that rivals a religious ceremony; yet as a “miracle” of art rather than religion, the theatrical image and what it represents can be understood as natural. In one character’s words, “This is an art / Which does mend Nature—change it rather; but / The art itself is Nature” (4.4.95-97). Art is nature in the most literal sense, for the statue of Hermione is in fact not a statue, but rather the living Queen herself. Her devoted friend, Paulina, seeks to “mend Nature” by bringing the statue to life. Paulina’s art does, however, have a dark element to it, as is theatrically obvious by its very deceptiveness, but Paulina’s art is a response to Leonte’s even darker art, for she betrays and undermines the destructive power of Leonte’s jealous, Medusa-like gaze. The very unnaturalness of Leontes’ gaze is figured metaphorically in the petrified image of his wife. By literalizing and reversing the metaphor through the theatrical art, Paulina does indeed “mend” the worst of human nature. Through her stone she offers one more lasting rebuke of Leontes, softening his heart as his “evils [are] conjur’d to remembrance” (5.3.37, 40). 

Thoughts on Othello

In 1693 Thomas Rhymer remarked in his Short View of Tragedy that Othello’s narrative seemed do improbable as to only be able to “delude our senses, disorder our thoughts, addle our brain, pervert our affections, hair our imaginations, corrupt our appetite and fill our head with vanity, confusion, Tintamarre, and Jingle-jangle” (Rymer 2:254-5). What Rhymer finds so unbelievable is that Othello puts so much weight on the handkerchief. He goes on to say that the “handkerchief is so remote a trifle, no Booby . . . cou’d make any consequence from it” (Rymer 2:251). In using the word “trifle,” however, Rhymer is appropriating the language of Iago in an effort to rationalize and estrange the magical elements within the play. Though this instance may be extreme, it does point to a tendency among critics disregard the veracity and believability of Othello’s magical elements, elements clearly believed within the fiction of the play. Brabantio believes that Othello has used “charms,” “spells,” “medicines,” and “witchcraft” on his daughter. And Desdemona treats the handkerchief as if were a sacred object or talisman, kissing and talking to it. According to Emilia, she:

so loves the token—

for he conjured her she should ever keep it—

That she reserves it evermore about her

To kiss and talk to. (3.3 293-6)

After she misplaces it, she concludes that “sure, there’s some wonder in this handkerchief” (3.4 101). Like Othello, she asserts her belief in its magical power. The point is not that we should simply accept the napkin as potentially magic within the play, but that we understand that magic played a very different role in early modern England. 

Thoughts on Images in The Winter's Tale.

Early modern dramatists seem to have regarded painting as a rival art that shared a fundamental element with theatre—it was a visual medium. This might best be seen in the rather ambiguous ways in which painters and their images are represented within the theatre. Marguerite Tassi points out in her The Scandal of Images: Iconoclasm, Eroticism and Painting in Early Modern Drama that Shakespeare's Timon of Athens offers one of the most negative portrayals (208), which I will look at more closely at another time. 

My current interest is in The Winter's Tale, a piece which came out some 5 years after Timon but portrays the painted work in a much more positive and complex light. It is in this play that Shakespeare unveils a painted statue in a scene that radiates in ideas such as epiphany, revelation and unveiling. That may not be very clear, but suffice it to say that the scene has power and does some emotional work on the stage and in the text. This miraculous unveiling seems to stand in stark contrast to the divine origin of the conventional miracle standing as a triumph of art over nature, perhaps. The problem is that "[t]he art itself is Nature" (4.4.97). And quite literally, it is nature because the statue really is the living Queen, so Paulina's art, dark as it seems to be, is mending nature. 

It seems to me that this idea of mending is quite loaded, and this is, of course, a digression, but as it is me simply writing my thoughts I am going to allow it. What does it say that Paulina has the power to mend nature? Further what nature is she mending? And still, how is her dark power in comparison to the binding jealousy of Leontes? 

If Leontes has the Medusa-like power of petrification doesn't Paulina's truly mend that nature? 

But, more importantly (for me anyway) isn't the true power in Shakespeare's ability to deceive the spectator's eyes (nature) through the concealment of the statue, which always positions a revelation as forthcoming. 

Habitus

Working on the concept of the habitus as defined by Pierre Bourdieu.

Habitus is a complex concept, but in its simplest usage could be understood as a set of acquired patterns of thought, behavior, and taste. These patterns, or "dispositions," are the result of internalization of culture or objective social structures through the experience of an individual or group.

Bourdieu re-elaborated the concept of habitus from Marcel Mauss and extended the scope of the term to include a person's beliefs and dispositions. He used it, in a more or less systematic way, in an attempt to resolve a prominent antinomy of the human sciences: objectivism and subjectivism.

In Bourdieu's work, habitus can be defined as a system of durable and transposable[3] "dispositions” (lasting, acquired schemes of perception, thought and action). The individual agent develops these dispositions in response to the determining structures (such as class, family, and education) and external conditions (field)s they encounter. They are therefore neither wholly voluntary nor wholly involuntary.

The habitus provides the practical skills and dispositions necessary to navigate within different fields (such as sports, professional life, art) and guides the choices of the individual without ever being strictly reducible to prescribed, formal rules.[4] At the same time, the habitus is constantly remade by these navigations and choices (including the success or failure of previous actions).

Describing neither complete determination by social factors nor individual autonomy, the habitus mediates between “objective” structures of social relations and the individual “subjective” behavior of actors. In this way Bourdieu theorizes the inculcation of objective social structures into the subjective, mental experience of agents.

In Bourdieu's theory, agency is not directly observable in practices or in the habitus, but only in the experience of subjectivity. Hence, some argue that Bourdieu’s project could be said to retain an objectivist bias from structuralism. Further, some critics charge that Bourdieu's "habitus" governs so much of an individual's social makeup that it significantly limits the concept of human agency. In Bourdieu's references to "habitus" it sometimes seems as if so much of an individual's disposition is predetermined by the social habitus that such pre-dispositions cannot be altered or left behind.

Defenders of Bourdieu argue that such critics have misunderstood and exaggerated the conservative extent of "habitus" in Bourdieu. Bourdieu allows agency its location within the bounded structures of society and self. And, Bourdieu advocates a method for researchers to include diverse cultural voices in their work.[5]

Random Points:

*system of structured, structuring (unconscious) dispositions, constituted in practice and based on past experience
*the anticipations of the habitus, practical hypotheses based on past experience, give disproportionate weight to early experience
*the habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices in accordance with the schemes of history
*the habitus is the active presence of the whole past of which it is a product
*thru the habitus, a present past tends to perpetuate itself into the future by reactivation in similarly structured practices
*the habitus is not consciously mastered and contains an ‘objective intention’ which outruns the conscious intentions of its apparent author
*the members of a same group or class, being products of the same objective conditions, share a habitus
and the practices of these members are better harmonized than the agents know or wish
*the habitus is an imminent law, inscribed in bodies by identical histories, which is a precondition for coordination of practices, and mobilization

Strat: habitus entails social reproduction. Social change: habitus is both an obstacle and a prerequisite to social change. Berg/Luck (and Lefebvre): habitus is both a product and a producer of the structure.

^ English, James, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value, Harvard UP, 2005
^ Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1972
^ Calhoun, Craig (ed) Dictionary of the Social Sciences, Article: Bourdieu, Pierre, Oxford University Press, 2002
^ See Bourdieu 'Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste', Chapter 3