Abstract
One of the signal achievements of recent work on questions of embodiment in Renaissance studies has been the adoption of network-based models of description in order to approach the variety of “ensouled bodies” or “embodied souls” whose traces we encounter in Renaissance texts. Increasingly, critics deploy the figure of an “embodied” or “extended mind,” the figure of a “network,” “ecology,” or some other associative grid to distribute metaphysical singularities such as affect, agency, emotion or memory across the subject/object divide.2 Boundaries between person and environment blur. We discover that we are all “hybrids” or, as one cognitive scientist puts it, “natural-born cyborgs.”3This network-based model offers a descriptive language that appears closer to how Renaissance persons understood or experienced their own bodies as ongoing transactions with a world that possessed them as much as they strove to possess it.4 Ecology makes us more effective readers of Renaissance texts. We recognize the (now true) strangeness of the past even as that strangeness is remediated by a superior interpretive model.
Political ecology has nothing at all to do with ”nature”—that blend of Greek politics, French Cartesianism, and American parks. Let me put it bluntly: political ecology has nothing to do with nature.… Political ecology has to do with associations of beings that take complicated forms—rules, apparatuses, consumers, institutions, mores, calves, cows, pigs, broods—and that it is completely superfluous to include in an inhuman and ahistorical nature. Nature is not in question in ecology: on the contrary, ecology dissolves nature’s contours and redistributes its agents.
Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature (2004)1
This chapter began life as a paper for a conference titled “Inhabiting the Body/Inhabiting the World) organized by Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett Sullivan at UNC, Chapel Hill, in March 2004. I am especially grateful to both Mary and Garrett for their comments on this chapter along the way.
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Notes
Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 4–5 and 21.
John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)
Andy Clark, Natural Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
Tom Cohen, Ideology and Inscription: “Cultural Studies” After Benjamin, De Man, and Bakhtin (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 135–136.
Niran Abbas, “Introduction,” Mapping Michel Serres, ed. Niran Abbas (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 2.
Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 304.
Key texts with regard to a re-articulation of Descartes are John Sutton’s Philosophy and Memory Traces, and Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 469–487.
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–186.
The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, eds, Edward Surtz S. J. and J. H. Hexter (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965), vol. 4, 1. All subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.
Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).
Quentin Skinner, “Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 123–158, esp. 125.
Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2: 213–244.
Frederic Jameson, “Of Islands and Trenches: Naturalization and the Production of Utopian Discourse” Diacritics 7: 2 (Summer 1977): 2–21, esp. 21.
Louis Marin, Utopics: the Semiological Play of Textual Spaces, trans. Robert A. Vollrath (Atalntic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1984), 3.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 11–73
Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 136–175.
Elizabeth McCutcheon, “(Eco) Utopian Fictions in Early Modern England,” in Critical Approaches to English Prose Fiction, 1520–1640, ed. Donald Beecher (Ottowa, Canada: Dovehouse Editions, 1998),
Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self” in Technologies of the Self, eds, Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (London: Tavistock, 1988), 16–49.
Marina Leslie, Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 14.
Jane Schneider, “The Anthropology of Cloth,” Annual Review of Anthropology 16 (1987): 409–448, esp. 419.
Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 93.
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 63.
William Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More in Two Early Tudor Lives, eds, Richard S. Sylvester and Davis P. Harding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 198.
Michel Jeanneret, A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance, trans. Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes (Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1991), 114.
Jeanneret, A Feast of Words, 112. Jeaneret quotes Erasmus, Convivium fabulosum in Colloquies, trans. C. R. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 257.
Brian Vickers, “Leisure and Idleness in the Renaissance: The Ambivalence of otium (Part I),” Renaissance Studies 4: 1 (March, 1990): 1–31, esp. 5–6.
Jacques Derrida” in Who Comes After the Subject, eds, Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 115.
Jacques Derrida’s “The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28: 2 (Winter, 2002): 369–418, esp. 374–375.
Vinciane Despret, “Sheep Do Have Opinions” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, eds, Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 360–368.
Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 5–6.
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© 2007 Julian Yates
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Yates, J. (2007). Humanist Habitats; Or, “Eating Well” with Thomas More’s Utopia. In: Floyd-Wilson, M., Sullivan, G.A. (eds) Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593022_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593022_12
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