Spectacle and Topophilia: Reading Early Modern and Postmodern Hispanic Cultures

Introduction: Modern Scenes/Modern Sceneries

ix u Introduction: Modern Scenes/Modern Sceneries David R. Castillo and Bradley J. Nelson The modern secularization or “disenchantment” of the social sphere that accompanies the rise of capitalism has been chronicled in classic works of social and cultural theory going back to Max Weber’s foundational treatise The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904). More recently, social historians have traced the roots of the economic and sociopolitical dynamics that we associate with modernity to the “expansive crisis” of the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. They have pointed out that some of the most significant developments of the 1400s and 1500s are the direct result of the increase in large-scale commerce and the emergence of the monetary economy. The modern city is both a consequence and a catalyst of economic, political, and social change. Urban spaces are fundamental contributors to the erosion of traditional systems of interpersonal relations allowing for the rise of the bourgeoisie (literally inhabitants of the burg), as well as the social type of the “uncoupled” or “unattached” (“desvinculado” according to José Antonio Maravall).1 The geographical discoveries of the period, including the lunar explorations of Galileo Galilei and Giordano Bruno’s speculations on the theoretical existence of the cosmic vacuum, as well as the Columbian encounter and the imperial dreams x DAVID R. CASTILLO AND BRADLEY J. NELSON and nightmares that came with it, further eroded the economic, political, and cultural structures inherited from antiquity.2 Cultural historians have tied the modern objectification of the world to the disintegration of the Aristotelian universe. For James Burke, for example, the debunking of the Scholastic-Aristotelian cosmos resulted in the de facto emergence of a de-essentialized world of objects that would be subjected to direct human control. The objectification of the natural world would find a correlate in the rationalization of the sociopolitical sphere, insofar as the political order was thought to be grounded in the natural order. Thus, the progressive acceptance of mechanistic principles would end up reshaping natural philosophy, as well as the fields of political theory and moral thought in the works of seventeenth -century thinkers such as Descartes, Bacon, Boyle, Hobbes, and Gracián, among others. The New Science’s mechanistic conception of nature as passive, inert matter is considered central to the consolidation of the structures that continue to drive the global economy today. Carolyn Merchant (1980) has referred to the seventeenth-century shift in natural philosophy as “the death of nature” (193). Teresa Brennan (1993) focuses on the intersection between natural philosophy and economics in theorizing modernity as an era defined by a fundamentally psychotic drive “to dismember nature” in order to control it. She links this social psychosis to the exploitative practices of global capitalism aligning its “exploitation and alienation of humans with that of nature” (215n11).3 Both Merchant and Brennan argue that the natural philosophers of the seventeenth century, who are considered the founders of the New Science, redefined man’s interaction with nature as a Subject-Object dialectic in which the Subject aims to achieve absolute mastery over the Object. Merchant quotes from Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum: “‘By art and the hand of man,’ nature can then be ‘forced out of her natural state and squeezed and molded.’ In this way, ‘human knowledge and human power meet as one’” (171).4 For their part, art theorists and historians have argued that the modern episteme (to use the expression coined by Foucault) is rooted in a visually oriented structure of thought that privileges the single-point perspective. This is what Martin Jay has called “Cartesian perspectivalism,” which he considers to be the dominant scopic regime of modernity. Erwin Panofsky and Philip Braunstein are also among the scholars who have underscored the role played by Renaissance perspective (the single-point perspective, in particular) in the appearance of the new sense of “self” that we associate with the modern subject . Braunstein is very explicit about this, noting that “self-consciousness is born when the individual can see himself in perspective” (536). Yet for all the INTRODUCTION xi attention scholars have paid to the primacy of the visual, as a structuring principle of modern subjectivity that is grounded in an objectifying view of the world, it is rare to find scholarly works that focus on the spectaclist dimension of modernity in connection with the “transformation of worldview from cosmos to landscape [which] came...