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04 Dec 07

Peter Stallybrass: "The Value of Culture and the Disavowal of Things"

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economics materiality peter shakespeare stallybrass things value

But
these materializations had to confront a contradictory system
of valuation: Christianity. Christianity was, of course, throughout
Europe a state religion. But it began as Nietzsche perceptively
noted, as a slave religion. And its valuations were bizarre from
the perspective of aristocratic materializations. For Christianity,
whatever it did in the real, praised poverty. And it practiced
a metaphorics of the valueless, of social and material "waste."
Indeed, it narrated a series of outrageous transvaluations of
value
When the codex (the form of
the modern book) emerged in the second century C.E., it was immediately
seized on by Christians as the material support for their religion
13 more annotations...
- But in so far as the codex already existed as a pagan and Jewish
  form, it was as a low prestige notebook, associated in visual
  depictions with women and slaves rather than with citizens. God
  as flesh and god as word, then, inhabited the waste parts of
  the material world, fragments of bread, the "mere"
  notebooks of the codex.
- ts own powerful
  economics
- ult of relics
- Christianity,
  in other words, while preserving its radical potential as a transvaluation
  of value became also, and with more or less apology, a self-consciously
  economic cultural system, its priceless/valueless relics were
  the motors of trade and exchange, its waste objects were preserved
  and staged in boxes and statues and buildings of great cost.
- With
  capitalism, though, the spiritual and the economic go in antithetical
  directions.
- So let me turn to two objects that, with capitalism, become increasingly
  spiritual, even, one might say, invisible: paintings and books.
- The value
  of medieval paintings was directly related to the price of the
  materials out of which they were made, and above all to the money
  spent on gold leaf and on lapis lazuli and on the material supports.
- piritual worth was defined unabashedly in the economic value
  of the paints
- he Virgin will be depicted in the most costly
  lapis lazuli and the lesser saints and commoners will be depicted
  in correspondingly cheaper blues.
- The
  development of an art market for connoisseurs in the early seventeenth
  century produced a transformation of the "value" of
  art, which less and less was materialized in the paint and the
  frame.
- The value of a Rembrandt resided in the invisible presence
  of Rembrandt himself.
- But how could one relate the value of the mechanically
  printed book to the hand of an author, a hand manifest only in
  its absence (note the attempt to undo this split with presentation
  manuscripts)?
- One learns now to read through a book, no longer conscious
  of its material surface. What is a "page-turner" if
  not an invisible book that turns its own pages? The book becomes
  the immaterial support where the mind of the reader communes
  with the mind of the author. And the author becomes a transcendental
  value who has no place in the material world. In this cultural
  regime, Byron will insist that he never be painted with books
  or pens around him. For inspiration is immaterial.

Gazette: Making the Most of the Material Past (Mar/Apr 2002)

www.upenn.edu/...kephart3.html - Preview

book history materiality peter reading stallybrass

A few beats later, he’ll disclose his work on the “elaborate bookmarking
systems” that are repeatedly depicted in 15th- and 16th-century paintings
and which he lovingly describes as “each made of two small pieces of vellum,
glued onto both sides of the edge of a leaf, knotted where they meet,
then covered with silk thread worked around the wire … it is amazing how
small the heads of these bookmarks are, and how complicated they must
have been to make.”
Renaissance Clothing and The Materials of Memory
2 more annotations...
- Their goal was to explore the ways in which clothes are “involved
  with memory,” particularly during the Renaissance era, when clothes were
  passed on from master to servant, friend to friend, and were central to
  the making of that culture.
- If most of
  what has been written about clothing relates to fashion—the constant introduction
  of new styles and materials—Stallybrass and Jones were concerned with
  just the opposite, with the way that memories “haunt the materials we
  touch, handle, and wear,” he says.

Gazette: Making the Most of the Material Past (Mar/Apr 2002)

www.upenn.edu/...kephart2.html - Preview

book history material materiality peter reading shakespeare stallybrass

It was a book
he read in manuscript form—“Shakespeare Verbatim” by Margreta de Grazia,
a professor of English at Penn—that threw Stallybrass headlong into this
new discipline. “If Margreta’s work is right,” Stallybrass explains, “it
means that most of our work on Shakespeare is quite simply wrong.
Wrong because we have transferred a wide range of our assumptions to a
period which resists those very assumptions—about the individual and his/her
detachment from ‘mere’ objects; about authorship and print culture; about
originality and intellectual property; about the relations between identity,
sexuality, and economic property.”