The Bard of Enron: From Shakespace to Noir Humanism

The recent surge of popular appropriations of Shakespeare's works for managerial workshops and book-length manuals for the business world foreshadows complex changes in the Bourdieuian "literary field." Analysis of several manuals reveals a trajectory of sophistication in using Shakespeare, paralleling Nietzsche's categories for uses of history. "Inspirational" manuals merely offer "universal" nuggets of conventional wisdom, on "Estate Managing" or "PR." "Professional managerial" manuals go further in literary-style analysis of characters and scenes, praising Petruchio or Claudius for a virtual war against workers and decisive downsizing as the greatest talent. A third kind of manual, one co-written by a CEO and a Shakespeare theater's artistic director, periodically enters "Shakespace," a place for the "transversal" movement of business subjectivity going outside itself. This manual verges on self-critique, acknowledging the increasing ruthlessness and corruption we know from contemporary corporate scandal, fearing corporate "Hamlets" most as potential revenger-terrorists, in effect questioning the morality of the entire corporate enterprise, explicitly described as anti-democratic. A newly implied, paradoxical role for the literary humanist in late capitalism is the complicit investigator, a film noir detective, perhaps fascinated by and even benefiting from and the commercial/criminal sphere under investigation, as Shakespeare becomes Los Angeles.