Hello Everybody,
I want to pose three questions about conversion that I hope you will weigh in on. This exercise gives me a chance to articulate some ideas I’ve been thinking about recently, and also provides a very welcome alternative to the pile of term papers that I had planned to spend the morning marking.
Question One: To what extent is the escalation in conversion-related thinking in early modern Europe connected to an emergent culture market?
This question will require some explanation:
A few weeks ago, the new President of McGill, Suzanne Fortier, paid a visit to IPLAI for a briefing on our various projects. Naturally, Paul and Leigh did most of the talking (I don’t think José Juan and I said much more than ‘hello’). When it came time to describe Early Modern Conversions, Paul said the objective of the project is to develop an understanding of early modernity as “the first great age of conversion,” a precursor of-sorts to our present era, which he characterized as “the second great age of conversion.”
“The early moderns had Shakespeare,” he noted. “We have Oprah.”
Now, Paul was obviously speaking in very general terms, and I hope he won’t mind that I have quoted him here. I bring the conversation up because I think the comparison between the two great culture-moguls, Oprah and Shakespeare, offers some perspective on how the promise of conversion—a potentiality for change in all categories of identity (religious, political, social, biological, and geographical)—might connect to a commodity culture. Like Oprah, Shakespeare traded on dreams of radical transformation. The theatre offered access to a space where the powerless could become powerful, the ugly could become beautiful, and nobodies could become somebodies.
For further clarity on the question I’m asking, please consider the following thoughts from Jean-Christophe’s Agnew’s Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought. Writing about the culture market in relation to a mode of thought that sounds very much like what we have been calling ‘conversion thinking’, Jean-Christophe Agnew identifies in early modernity the origins of “the ‘Protean Man’—the plastic, polymorphous, performative figure that is both the ideal and the nightmare of modernity […] the collective dream work of commodity culture. (14)” He characterizes the “Protean social world” as follows:
This shared sense of the shifting ground of mutuality, dependence, and exploitation gave to the local literature of complaint a commonality that transcended the particular or momentary objects of concern. Conventional metaphors and tropes no longer seemed capable of expressing the labile qualities of money or the social relations that money mediated. The formless, quality-less, characterless nature of the money form became a recurring motif in the prolonged rumination about self and society to which so much Renaissance and Reformation literature contributed. And though this tradition of thought—if we can call it that—rarely hesitated to appropriate pastoral imagery to evoke a harmonious, non-pecuniary past, it was not limited to nostalgic evocations. This tradition also included a considerable fraction of the forward-looking self-help manuals that poured forth from the presses of England’s cosmopolitan printers. Whether this literature struck a note of lament or promise, it nonetheless kept to the theme of a newly discovered, Protean social world, one in which the conventional signposts of social and individual identity had become mobile and manipulable reference points. What stands out in the ‘long-sixteenth-century’ inventory of complaints is its groping to envisage a social abstraction—commodity exchange—that was lived rather than thought. Whatever else it was, this litany of lamentation was an attempt to give practical and figurative form to the very principles of liquidity and exchangeability that were dissolving, dividing, and destroying form and that, in doing so, were confounding the character of all exchange. (8)
Note that for Agnew, the concentration of protean (or conversional?) thinking in early modernity is not merely a product of the market, but also an important factor enabling the market’s existence. Cultural products (especially theatre) made an essential contribution to the development of a market economy by providing a model for thinking through the challenges that market relations presented, and also by making new ideas related to the market manifest. I think this is an important insight, but I also think that the ‘market view’ is only part of the story…
My second question is really just a variation on the first, but also a variation on one of the questions Mark posed in his blog post from Oct. 23: What is the relationship between conversion, the culture market, and public life?
To dig into this question, I find it helpful to quote Paul yet again. Consider the following blog post (for the Making Publics project) on Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition:
We are arguing that the rapid expansion of access for people of all kinds to forms of public identity, expression, and collectivity was a consequence of the expansion of a market for cultural goods (and doubtless the growth of the culture market was also a consequence of the desire among ordinary people for an enhanced public life). That means that our period saw a massive expansion of [what Arendt refers to as] ‘the thing character of the world,’ which made it possible for people who were not otherwise in the public realm to enjoy, respond to, discuss, and create works of art and intellect.
Building on these thoughts, I suggest that the promises of conversion were implicit in “the rapid expansion of access for people of all kinds to forms of public identity.” To phrase this claim in slightly stronger terms, one might say that the increased opportunity to participate in public life brought a new elasticity to previously static categories of identity, thereby enabling the various ‘turnings’ that fall under the conversion rubric.
My third question brings me around to the specific subject of our research sub-group: In what ways did cities facilitate the culture market, participation in public life, and conversions (of various sorts)?
I have raised this question with the notion of ‘the thing character of the world’ in mind. As noted above, the idea derives from The Human Condition. Arendt identified the creation of lasting things with ‘action’, the most valuable category of human endeavour, the category that enables new relations among men and the fulfillment of personhood:
Only the existence of a public realm and the world’s subsequent transformation into a community of things which gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence. If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men. (55)
To suggest a possible answer to my own question (yet again), I propose a theory of cities and conversion that posits the early modern city as a long-lasting assemblage of things that “gathers men together and relates them to each other,” an assemblage that is inherently oriented toward the market and publicity, and therefore also oriented toward the possibility of conversion. I think I can see how this view of cities might make use of John and Lyn’s theory of cognitive ecologies (and the theory of mind it implicitly promotes), but perhaps that is a topic better left to a future blog post.
Your thoughts?