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Reserve Text, from Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body Tragic heroes have to die because in the spectacular kingdom death is in' the body. There is no 'merely' or metaphorically ethical death which does not at the same time entail the extinction of the body, and even its complete and austere destruction. That pleasure will have to wait until the modern soul has taken its place within transformed discursive relations, at the centre of the stage of writing. If we have identified in Hamlet a historical register of modernity, the Oedipal prince is, as they say, ahead of his time, when he calls on the 'too too solid flesh to melt' (I.ii. 129). His desire to refine away the insistent materiality of the body is the necessary complement to that interiority of soul which would otherwise realize itself utterly in him. As some criticism today - often with an equally ambivalent political valency - is attempting the radical deconstruction of the ground of our signification, so Hamlet admonishes the foundation of his dominant contemporary possibility for meaning. But the intense corporeality of the Jacobean |
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[41] spectacle that surrounds him and his dark, vacant mystery rejects him like an alien virus. The text-world rounds on him and is not content, finished, until by means it can only half-acknowledge it has reduced him to its own dimension. As the visible body which Fortinbras orders the four captains to carry 'to the stage' the unproductive prince is finally at one with the order of the plenum: or, in its master-language, 'most royal' (V.ii. 394-6) But this triumph - and this reduction - does not elegiacally affirm that settlements prior to the exigencies of our own were without their rigours and contradictions. Nor even that they were particularly settled, as if the spectacular plenum were unchallenged (we have seen that it is not) or its forces perfectly balanced, unnaturalized because irresistible. Desire which is the motor is forever restless, A struggle is being fought out in these texts, and this is the lot: of discourse, and of social life, in any polity organized under forms of domination. If the once-full body is so often presented as a shattered wreckage of disarticulated fragments, it is because the disintegration of this world and its signification is already upon it. As modern subjectivity begins to emerge, it turns destructively on that older body from which it struggles to free itself. If the anachronistic paradox of Hamlet, the non- homogeneity of the historical time of the soul and that of the encompassing spectacle can be deciphered (and it is only paradoxical when judged against a measure of textual unity and historical monism which should be, by now, antique), it is because the Jacobean scene, for all its dominant attachment to the old kingdom, is already touched by the marks of the gathering modern crisis on whose threshold this text-world stands.
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It is certainly an index of the depth of the crisis that these words, apart from a few lines serving as an envoi, conclude what is otherwise regarded as one of the great texts written against censorship. But that a writing which sets itself that task should end by handing discourse over to the executioner is only fully a paradox when viewed from the Idealist standpoint of a plenitude of human speech, It is skewed when seen from the perspective of the principle of rarefaction which governs the actual distribution of human discourse. A full speech stands above its ca·nnditt9ns, sufficient to itself, at: once adequately grounded in its own meanings and at the same time aspiring to, if not already extant in a universal and sacred realm of independent and discrete truths. But the discursive position which wishes to escape the antinomies (purely internal to a certain historicism) between the universal and the historical will have to recognize that even where discourse is globally implicative it is none the less locally relational, hollowed by the strategic character of its deployment. For this reason to contemplate Areopagitica as a significant document of some 'human freedom' would only be to assuage a particular restlessness in respect of the truth and then only momentarily. To the extent that it has been thought in the past that Milton conceived of liberty and censorship as antitheses, it is now necessary to take his text's will to freedom at a little less than its face value, and to exercise a critical decoding rather than the more familiar appreciative summary. Discursively, Areopagitica operates to call into being a new state-form, and to inscribe there a novel citizen- subject. And it does this despite its argument. This is not to say that its substance is beside the point; on the contrary, censorship was a decisive experience of the seventeenth century, which has even managed to cover its own traces and disappear from the standard histories of the literature of the period which are silent on the subject; none the less, [43] Areopagitica is a document which arranged its arguments, its rhetoric and its metaphors - its utterance - among and across relations which it inscribes within itself without ever making them the evident object of its arguments or the manifest content of its speech. To say that these distinctions operate behind the back of the text, or as its unconscious, would be to risk too far the temptations of a metaphysic of depth which we have been at pains to avoid so far, despite the fact that it is the history of its emergence which we are tracing here. But the transactions of the text, in the discursive register, are in a real sense unknown to the text itself ]in this sense it is similar in status to other fabular seventeenth- century script we are concerned to read here: not exhaustive; not permitting everything to be said about the new emergency; exemplary but not illustrative, a site of real inscription of the new relations and terms. While an anecdote (although in no way trivial for being such) will not by itself deprive Areopagitica of its 'literary' truth and return it to its discourse, it will serve to indicate a pathway to the issue: Milton was never opposed to censorship, in fact we know that in 1651 he served as a licenser of news books, a state censor. `If this only signals, as many have argued, that Milton was prepared to make a division in the field of discourse between those daily words too promiscuous not to come under the scrutiny of the governing authority and the graver products of 'the industry of a life-wholly dedicated to studious labours' (296) (and thus, no doubt, more docile), this is at least to have dislodged his pamphlet from its universality. This relocation can be further effected by replacing the text within the preceding development of the means of policing discourse which the office of state for which he worked inherited. From the early part of the previous century through to what was to be one of · - the last executive acts of the Caroline government, the authorities established, elaborated and : consolidated increasingly fierce and attentive measures to bring the printing and distribution of books under their direct or delegated control. The detail of this history is accessible elsewhere. But here some description of its main tendency [44] will serve to point out the structural contrast between Milton's text and the developments anterior to it. Whichever aspect of the mechanism of control we examine, whether it be the trade-off by which the Crown granted the stationers' Company a virtual monopoly on printing in return for the acceptance of overt or implicit responsibility of regulating the issue of its presses, or the more Psuma provisions for pre-publication licensing by officers of Church and state, in either case the period saw a strengthening and increasing sophistication of the censoring machine. From the Elizabethan Injunctions of 1559 to the Star Chamber decree of 11 January 1637 which provided for a largely professional censorship dealing with printed matter under separate expert categories, procedures were built up to ensure-an ever more vigilant and pervasive control: the scope of materials coming within their purview was progressively widened as were the means of enforcement, until the censorship, in these corporal times, had at its disposal an almost unlimited power to punish. By the time that the Long Parliament abolished Star Chamber and the other prerogative courts, a high wall of prohibition, surveillance and punishment had been built up around the printed word in whose supervision the government was prepared to invest enormous quantities of time, labour and expertise. It: would be wrong, however, to conclude that with the accession of Parliamentary forces this machinery was dismantled. For a period after the abolition of the Caroline executive courts there was a brief and unprecedented freedom of the press in which printing shops and their products proliferated. But within a few years, shaken by the explosion of written discourse which attended the breakdown of censorship, the same Parliament was soon enacting its own regulatory measures, including the Order of 14 June 1643, against which Milton wrote Areopagitica. The reanimated censoring machine - which was met with widespread and sometimes armed popular resistance - was, in its essential outline, identical with the Star Chamber provisions. Although the personnel was changed and Parliamentary appointees substituted for the clerics and [45] other delegates of the Caroline government, and the prerogative Crown authority to license was not re- established, the machinery itself was refined still further. Now nine categories of books were designated, and an even more precisely orgranized battery of licensers established to deal with them. A small but decisive incision in this structure and in the plenum of the old kingdom, is offered by Areopagitica. A feature common to all the preceding measures, whatever the degree of complexity of the censoring apparatus or the poignancy of its disposable violence, but which separates Milton's text from them, is that they each place the moment of state intervention before that of publication. Areopagitica, though also a call for censorship (slightly reduced in scope), places that moment in the production and distribution of discourse after it has 'come forth'. The pre-publication licensing of the Tudor, Stuart and early Parliamentary measures are those of a pre-emptive state designing to stop the publication of what were called, in a phrase surviving from the reign of Henry VIII, 'naughty books'; its powers were vengeful ones which bore down on the transgressions it had itself failed to prevent. The powers of the Miltonic 'provisions', however, are essentially deterrent (although also punitive). They offer to the discoursing subject the image of an eventuality of punishment which will occur if the offending book comes out, while she or he remains 'free' to publish it. This crucial difference between the Miltonic text and the history of censorship which goes before it (and, indeed, after it, for Areopagitica's proposals were not enacted immediately) encodes two distinctly separate versions of the state and its relation to social life. The pre-Miltonic state acknowledges its existence as state, but one could say, without investing the state with a spurious benevolence that it also assumes an essential continuity between itself and the subjects it incorporates. As we have remarked in Lear and Hamlet, the body of the king, the place of representation, and the correspondences of kinship, power and sense, are [46] coterminous, This state knows no limits because in theory nothing is outside its domain. It is permissive only in the ungenerous sense that it seeks positively to supervise the production and the contents of discourse. Its paternalism is given in the fact that it assumes the father's role of a real and metaphysical authority which is all-pervasive, backed up by the angry recompense of punishment. Bur in the Miltonic 'state' - that set of relations marked out in Areopagitica - it is already possible to detect the outline of that modern settlement which founds itself on a separation of realms between the public arena of the state apparatus and another domain of civil life. Here a new liberty is encoded, although it is but a negative one. The subject, now emerging as a private citizen although not legally named as such in a constitution` which isi to this day, unwritten, or - rather - 'inscribed elsewhere', may do as it pleases up to the point of transgression where its activity will be arrested by the agents of the apparatus who patrol the frontier between the two spaces. But lest it be thought that this is simply a step along an even and uncomplex path from the old tyranny to a new and modern freedom, it is important to emphasize the extent to which what is proposed in Areogagitica represents a fresh form of control, What is to become the meagre political insubordination of a classical liberalism can be discerned even at this stage when Milton's text defines liberty as what is in any case the basis of its own political practice: nor the positive freedom of a just order, but the ex post facto redress of grievances. And as he says, the attack on licensing is not intended to introduce licence. On the contrary all of Milton's descriptions of social life emphasize the stability, maturity and sobriety of the English nation. Far from the 'untaught and irreligious gadding rout' (336) which a pre- emptive censorship must assume the people to be, they are in fact characterized by a remarkable degree of that self- discipline which, along with other qualities associated with it, is to become the linchpin of a move articulated by the text from the unmediated and overt violence of: the older settlement to a mote indirectly ideological control implanted [47] in the new subjectivity, The text defines the principal problem for government, the 'great art', as discerning 'in what: the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work' (318-19), and in a similar way, to censure the population 'for a giddy, vitious and ungrounded people' would be 'to the disrepute of our ministers' whose 'exhortations, and the benefiting of their hearers' are to be among the central means of securing the required tranquility in what would otherwise be 'an unprinciple'd, unedify'd, and laick rabble' (328-9). The decisive moment of control is now to be not so clearly the sanction of punishment, as the inner discipline, the unwritten law, of the new subjection: for 'under pittance, and prescription, and compulsion, what were vertue but a name, what praise could be then due to welldoing, what grammercy to be sober, just or continent"' (319). The state succeeds in penetrating to the very heart of the subject, or more accurately, in pre-constituting that subject as one which is already internally disciplined, censored, and thus an effective support of the emergent pattern of domination. As Milton reminds us again and again, the new subject becomes the location of the new drama of individual conscience which 'doth make cowards of us all', or, as Hamlet might have said had he reflected in a different language on his political situation, ascertains each of us severally in obedience to a sovereignty whose head we dare not thus cut off. Conscience, assisted by that private reason, deliberation and judgement with which Areopagitica invests the bourgeois citizen, enters in the text into an essentially single battle with temptation (amongst whose 'objects of lust' (319), as Pepys discovered, are certain books) and in doing so interiorizes conflicts and dynamics which are newly encoded as belonging to subjectivity rather than to the social exterior. It would, then, be a misplaced reception of Areopagitica's separation of the aid kingdom that succumbed to a euphoria of early liberation remembered (although bourgeois culture's self-universalization doubtless accounts for the timelessness of the text's alleged pertinence). At stake in Milton's call for 'civil liberty' is a control which is in some [48] ways more profound than when such legislated or unlegislated rights are missing. In the settlement which begins to impinge here, the state secures its overall penetration on the basis of an apparent withdrawal and limitation of its pertinent domain: Milton accepts that in the realm of discourse at least, atheism and blasphemy might continue to be the state's concern, but allots the rest to the individual subject who 'searches, meditates, is industrious, and likely consults and confers with his judicious friends' (324), in short, to civil society. But by demarcating the public space of the state's competence from the private realm of individual freedoms, it has secured its domination there too, by securing the recto of its public verse. This is why Areopagitica remains the text of a new power despite its agonistic rhetoric of liberty. In addition, it is important that the essence of this power lies as much in the line of division between the public and the private (on either side of which lie - at another level to that we have been discussing - philosophical subjectivity over against an object-world) as in the substantive contents of what lies to either side of it. It is not that in the establishment of a domain of public authority and another area of private freedom, domination has been confined to one, and liberation released into the other, but that the division itself is the very form of the new power, grounded as much in the apparent freedom of even the choices allowed by Milton's benign pluralism as in its more overt controls, It is counter-intuitive and defies every instinct of common sense to insist that the inception of specific and more or less well-defined freedoms - 'free consciences and Christian liberties' (341-2) - is the effect of a powerful new dominion; but, without impugning the sacrifices of the women and men who gave their lives for these freedoms, that is the outcome. In the division between the two spheres is encoded an essential settlement which allots civil liberty to the subject only on condition that it is indeed civil, with all the well-ordered Roman and juridical connotations which seventeenth-century classicism, to be reinforced in the eighteenth century, could add to the ideological registers of that word. The horror with which [49] Milton contemplates the logical consequence of the principle of licensing books when he remarks that it would necessitate the extension of control to every area of social life, to all discourse and representation, all styles of dress, each country dance, every guitar in every bedroom (while it foreshadows the absolute disciplinary surveillance which will be consolidated later) is now counterposed to the intrinsic sobriety Of the people which argues against the need for detailed state control. That sobriety - we have noticed Pepys' somewhat equivocal use of the same notion - is the condition, in the sense both of a central feature of, and a condition of granting, even the provisional civil liberty envisaged by the text, A few moments with the Diary of Philip Henslowe show that despite the firm attachment of authors' names to Jacobean play-texts today, the actual construction of the works, in so far as it: was a commercial enterprise carried out largely by jobbing writers whose remuneration for odd additional scenes, revision and initial composition is recorded in Henslowe's accounts of payment, it was also a collaborative process. The firmness of the attachment of any author's name to text, let alone that of a single author who becomes, thus, fully and singly, the subject of that text, had then by no means an equal fixity with that which has been constructed subsequently, often by dint of elaborate and frequently wasted canonical scholarship. In Milton's discourse on discourse, however, an important step in the establishment of that fixity, and that writing subjectivity, is taken. Areopagitica twice refers approvingly to the Order of Parliament passed immediately before the licensing provisions against which it argues, which provided for the registration on. publication of the names of author and printer, and for the protection of copyright vested, for the - first time in English law, in the author. Although measures fully resembling modern copyright were only enacted by the so-called Statute of Anne at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Miltonic evocation of the early measures is of [50] great ideological significance. Areopagitica marks a shift in representative and central discourse from the performed writing of the early seventeenth-century stage to the more evidently 'written' writing of the later period: a transition from collaboration (of composition and performance) to individual production, and from visuality to script. And in the new discursivity, in which the text: is fully in place for the first time, an essential relation of the author to that text is a property relation.- Of course,- in order to preserve the idealism, of Areopagitica it is necessary to construct an imaginary division within discourse (formally identical to that opening up between body and soul) so that Truth, which Milton, goes out of his way to insist should nor be 'monopotiz'd and traded in by tickets and statutes, and standards ..., like out broad cloaths and our wooll packs' (327), can be spoken of separately from the book- commodity which is thus left free, by rhetorical sleight of hand, to enter the market-place. At the same time as the discoursing subject is newly confirmed in the domain of private liberty, the material writing of discourse also enters the 'free' exchange of civil society. Truth, the conveniently ideal form, hovers, naturally, above it. · The marks of this economy of discourse are not, however, as emphatic in the text as those defining the conditions of that discoursing subject, who mass- now - in a phrase which would have been resonant for Pepys - 'in a private condition, write' (Areopagitica, 293). Whether it be 'him who from his private house wrote that discourse to the Parlament of Athens' (296), that 'privat man' (316) to whom Plate forbade poets to read before their verse had been scrutinized by authority, or simply the phrase which adequately positions the subject in relation to the objects and the destination of discourse - 'When a man writes to the world' (324)- in each case the discursive location is clearly enunciated, and in addition the judicious and rational discrimination, imputed to the new subject in general, is the more insistently emphasized when it is overtly the subject of [51] writing (or of reading). In seeking to extract the discoursing subject from state control, 'leaving it to each ones conscience to read or to lay by' (302), the text ever more clearly hands the subject over to that deeper control which we have already evoked. In doing so it signals the more graphically the profound implication of seventeenth-century discourse in the machinery of censorship, and in particular the imbrication of the founding moment of bourgeois discursivity, articulated as a socially hegemonic form, with that machinery. That censorship was a constitutive experience for the seventeenth century - and for ourselves - needs stressing in view of the deletion of the entire problem from the history of writing. But if it is hardly possible to overemphasize its importance for the texts of the period, this should not be taken to refer only to the gross instances (although they should be identified and understood) where the censor's pen has left gaps in the text, but also to the fullness of the period's discourse. It has taken a historian writing on literature to notice what literary criticism has been studiously blind to. Christopher Hill shows that by a certain moment an entire literary mode - pastoral - could function as a set of coded symbols by which political statements could be enunciated in a form that would allow them to evade the censorship: with sufficient care in the manipulation of the stock conventions it could always be claimed that the poem was only about nymphs and shepherds after all, Axaid centuries later literary 'critics' would agree .... But this evasive coding is itself only a relatively simple and external instance of discourse being conditional on censorship not in its elisions but in its substantial articulation. In a still profounder sense, as the example of the Cartesian text will show, although it is already clear in Pepys, the very structure of all bourgeois enunciation is governed by its relation to censorship as a determinant condition. If this subjectivity is sketched in the seventeenth century, although perhaps not fully and ultimately consolidated as a phenomenon then, it is of crucial importance that its discourse, and the discourses in which it emerges, are [52] censored ones. It is an essential link between the inner being of the subject, that interiority which was beginning to open up in Hamlet but for which the pre-bourgeois polity had no role, and the outer dimension of the state. While censorship is a State function, an exterior apparatus of control, in so far as the domain it polices is the production, circulation and exchange of discourses, it is one that reaches into the subject itself It thus .has a double function here, at once representative and substantive: representative in as much as it: stands cross-sectionally for a whole ensemble of other changes brought about by the long process of the bourgeois revolution in the relationship between state and civil society, state and citizen, and for the opening-up of that division, a caesura missing from the Jacobean spectacle, or if present only soin promissory form; but substantive in as much as it is the articulating mode of the bourgeois subject in discourse, When Milton's persona replied peremptorily to an imagined opponent 'The State Sir... The State shall be my governours, but not my criticks' (326), he offered a more consequential hostage to historical fortune than he imagined. |