The Circulation of Social Energy

“simulations are undertaken in full awareness of the absence of the life they contrive to represent, and hence they may skillfully anticipate and compensate for the vanishing of the actual life that has empowered them” (2A).

“Shakespeare’s plays, it seemed, had precipitated out of a sublime confrontation between a total artist and a totalizing society. By a total artist I mean one who, through training, resourcefulness, and talent, is at the moment of creation complete unto himself; by a totalizing society I mean one that posits an occult network linking all human, natural, and cosmic powers and that claims on behalf of its ruling elite a privileged place in this network” (2A).

BUT came to question “total artist” and “totalizing society”

Offers “insight into the half-hidden cultural transactions throughout which great works of art are empowered” (3A).

“The Shakespearean theatre depends upon a felt community: there is no dimming of lights, no attempt to isolate and awaken the sensibilities of each individual member of the audience, no sense of the disappearance of the crowd” (3A).

“If the textual traces in which we take interest and pleasure are not sources of numinous authority, if they are the signs of contingent social practices, then the questions we ask of them cannot profitably centre on a search for their untranslatable essence. Instead we can ask how collective beliefs and experiences were shaped, moved from one medium to another, concentrated in manageable aesthetic form, offered for consumption” (3A).

“The idea is not to strip away and discard the enchanted impression of aesthetic autonomy but to inquire into the objective conditions of the enchantment, to discover how the traces of social circulation are effaced” (3A).

the poetics of culture: “the study of the collective making of distinct cultural practices and inquiry into the relations among these practices” (3B).

“drawing on the Greek rhetorical tradition, they call it energia. This is the origin in our language of the term ‘energy’, a term I propose we use, provided we understand that its origins lie in rhetoric rather than physics and that its significance is social and historical” (3B).

social energy: seems to be the capacity to move, sort of like Benjamin’s aura, but more specifically theatre here

modes of exchange [of social energy]: 

1. Appropriation: taking things like language which are “indifferent”
2. Purchase: properties, costumes, books bought as source material

3. Symbolic Acquisition: no payment but the things acquired are not indifferent

4. Through Simulation: Simulation of theatrical representation
5. Metaphorical Acquisition: A practice (or set of social energies) acquired indirectly
6. Through Synecdoche or Metonymy: Isolating or performing one part or attribute of a practice

To engage with social energies of Renaissance work we must renounce the ideas (5B):

1. That there can be no appeals to genius as the sole origin of the energies of great art
2. There can be no motiveless creation
3. There can be no transcendent or timeless or unchanging representation
4. There can be no autonomous artifacts
5. There can be no expression without an origin and an object, a from and a for
6. There can be no art without social energy
7. There can be no spontaneous generation of social energy

Some general principles (5B):

1. Mimesis is always accompanied by—indeed is always produced by—negotiation and exchange
2. The exchanges to which art is a party may involve money, but they may involve other currencies as well. Money is only one kind of cultural capital.
3. The agents of exchange may appear to be individuals (most often, an isolated artist is imagined in relation to a faceless, amorphous entity designated society or culture), but individuals are themselves the products of collective exchange.

“art does not simply exist in all cultures; it is made up along with other products, practices, discourses of a given culture” (6A).

“Through its representational means, each play carries charges of social energy onto the stage; the stage in its turn revises the energy and returns it to the audience” (6B).

“What then is the social energy that is being circulated? Power, charisma, sexual excitement, collective dreams, wonder, desire, anxiety, religious awe free-floating intensities of experience. . . . there can be no single method, no overall picture, no exhaustive and definitive cultural poetics” (8A).