process of “individualization,” and privatization of “nature,” that the Michel Foucault of Discipline and Punish as much as the early Marx has seen as a site of abjection rather than the freedom with which it is associated in the liberal tradition. To be sure, Norwood, who died a land – and slave – owner in Bermuda, was not one of the great oppressed of history. My point is a different one: I am enumerating the cost to everyone in a world where the “common” has been suppressed, though not, of course, to everyone in just the same way.
In “Traveling Theory,” Edward Said traced the consequences for the theorization of subjectivity in a movement from Lukacs to Lucien Goldman through Raymond Williams and, finally, Foucault. His goal had been not only to demonstrate that theory “travels,” which is, after all, pretty obvious, as he himself notes, but, rather to examine how it changes as it moves, and, especially, to warn that, once institutionalized, “a breakthrough can become a trap if it is used uncritically, repetitively, limitlessly” (239). In other words, the current global rapid transit of theories by no means prevents – it instead seems to encourage – a “hermeticism” that attenuates their power (237). The antidote to a theory that has “drawn a circle around itself,” Said asserts, returning to Lukacs, is “critical consciousness”: “It is the critic’s job,” he insists, “to provide resistances to theory, to open it up toward historical reality, toward society, toward human needs and interests” (245, 242). His essay, thus, repeatedly associates the movement of theory with a paradoxical tendency toward its “enclosing” and offers critical consciousness as a corrective to direct us toward new social possibilities and a common world (230, 242). In Norwood’s writings we can see similar processes at work at the level of the subject: circulation and enclosure; citation and conversion. Rewriting Augustine, he enacts his own enclosure, and transforms autobiography from an expression of identification with the generally human to an expression of alienation from it. At the heart of Norwood’s subjective alienation, however, is not only the textual travel to which Said called our attention but also travail – the increasing abstraction of labor and thus its growing anonymous circulation in everyday life at the expense of the common. In response to this alienation, Norwood transforms Augustine, but also the history of Bermuda, suppressing the common in it, as in his person. Through an exercise in “Travailing Theory” I have been attempting to reopen these texts, this history, “modern” subjectivity, to globally collective “human needs and interests,” and interrupt habits of textual and historical enclosure.
NOTES
1 1 See Wood for a good summary of the debate by a Marxist with an “England first” perspective. Linebaugh and Rediker, alternatively, have attempted to present what might be called an “oceanic” Marxist view of the emergence of capitalism (see note 8).
2 2 This description of the importance of “geography” appears at the opening of Smith’s Bermuda chapter (Book V) in the Generall History of Virginia, 338–391, but he lifts it, as the bulk of the volume, from other period travel writing. See, for example, Purchas, 44.
3 3 See Bewes for a discussion of the continued relevance of “reification” as a concept of social analysis.
4 4 In the early modern period, the increasing alienation and dislocation imposed by the commodification of labor are complicated by the ties of personal debt that emerge in a cash-poor society such as England without credit cards or banks, but the implications of these ties are not the same, affectively or materially, as a “commons.” On debt, see Muldrew.
5 5 The literature on vagrancy is rich – and expanding. See, for example, Beier, Dionne and Mentz, Fumerton, and Woodbridge.
6 6 On Norwood, see Bach (on colonial mapping), chapter 2, especially 99–106, and Skura (on spiritual autobiography), as well as the Dictionary of National Biography.
7 7 One must use care in comparing peoples in different times and places so as not to fall into the “Time and the Other” dilemma (Fabian). I am not suggesting that the “Devil” that emerges in the situations Taussig describes are the same as the Satan of primitive accumulation in England, but it is certainly worth seeing that the imposition of the market has the devil in it to many peoples confronted with it for the first time, since this is a useful corrective to the widespread assumption today that the market is simply “normal.”
8 8 Linebaugh and Rediker track the emergence of an Atlantic economy in this way; even more expansively, Balasopoulos, 122–156, has imported the concept of the “oceanic” into early modern studies and usefully deployed it in a study of More’s Utopia. I build on his insights here.
9 9 Linebaugh and Rediker, too, use the example of the wreck of the Sea Venture as the core of their first chapter, and I extend their excellent work here.
10 10 See Marx (1976, 931–940) for other illustrations of the ways that colonialism could teach ordinary Europeans how unequal property relations worked to their disadvantage (he does not take into account here, alas, the lessons it might offer to native peoples).
11 11 I have used the Sheed translation of Augustine because I like it, but also given page numbers for the Latin.
12 12 On “weapons of the weak,” see Scott.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
1 Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised. London: Verso, 1991.
2 Augustine. Confessions. Ed. James J. O’Donnell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
3 Augustine. Confessions. Trans. F. J. Sheed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993.
4 Bach, Rebecca. Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
5 Balasopoulos, Antonis. “‘Suffer a Sea Change’: Spatial Crisis, Maritime Modernity, and the Politics of Utopia.” Cultural Critique 63 (2006): 122–156.
6 Bartolovich, Crystal. “Learning from Crab: Primitive Accumulation, Migration, Species Being,” in The Routledge Handbook on Shakespeare and Animals. Eds. Holly Dugan and Karen Raber. New York: Routledge, 2020.
7 Beier, A. L. Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640. London: Methuen, 1985.
8 Bewes, Anthony. Reification, or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 2002.
9 Dionne, Craig and Steve Mentz, Eds. Rogues and Early Modern English Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.
10 Fabian, Johannas. Time and the Other. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
11 Fumerton, Patricia. Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
12 Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971.
13 Hiltner, Ken. “Early Modern Ecocriticism,” in Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, Vol. 2. Eds. Paul Cefalu, Gary Kuchar and Bryan Reynolds. London: Palgrave, 2014.
14 Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977.
15 Lewis, Simon and Mark Maslin. The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene. London: Penguin, 2018.
16 Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.
17 Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1952.
18 Lukacs, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971.
19 Marx, Karl. Critique of the Gotha Program. New York: International Publishers, 1966.
20 Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books, 1976.
21 Moore,