Opaque Origin

In the hustle of italian city-states vying for power at the turn of the fourteenth century, Jacob Burckhardt thought he could make out 'the modern political spirit of Europe, surrendered freely to its own instincts, often displaying the worst features of an unbridled egotism, outraging every right, and killing every germ of a healthier culture. But, wherever this vicious tendency is overcome or in any way compensated, a new fact appears in history – the state as the outcome of reflection and calculation, the state as a work of art.'¹ Middlemore's rather bureaucratic translation muffles some of the significance Burckhardt attributes to this event. What appears on the scene is ein neues Lebendiges, nothing less than a new form of life – perhaps itself in some sense living, touched by the creative spark of this reflective, calculative Sch€opfung. Burckhardt is scandalously vague on just how the artwork of the state is related to the violence from which it emerges, but it is hard not to understand this relationship dialectically: read aufgehoben for aufgewogen, 'sublated' for 'compensated', and the apparent poles of this antithesis disclose a sudden proximity to one another. The swerve that initiates the Renaissance is for Burckhardt the infinitesimally slight transition from rampant violence to the state-as-artwork. Through the exercise of overwhelming force, the prince wins a momentary suspension of violence in which to found a new kind of state in his own image; and in the sphere of artistic activity he recognises a correspondence with his own political creation, however instrumental it may appear. This is the secret of patronage, Burckhardt suggests. With no grounds for his sovereignty except sheer talent, the prince surrounds himself with his fellows: 'In the company of the poet and the scholar he felt himself in a new position, almost, indeed, in possession of a new legitimacy'.²

The drift of Burckhardt's argument has opened his account to the suspicion that, in harmonising the internal antagonisms of the early modern state, he aestheticised politics; more recent criticism has replied by politicising art. According to these extremes, the aesthetic is everywhere or nowhere, the encompassing category of the Renaissance or an anachronistic retrojection designed to neutralise its historical contradictions. This critical antinomy is where Christopher Pye begins the first chapter of his latest book, a stunningly ambitious and challenging study of the relationship between the political and the aesthetic in what Pye terms (with some flexibility) 'the time of Shakespeare'. Chief among this book's virtues is the dialectical shrewdness with which it proceeds, showing in this chapter how, by excluding Burckhardt's interpretation without working through it, an apparently progressive criticism repeats his worst mistakes, and regresses behind his greatest insights. In the work of the New Historicists – for whom the aesthetic was at best anachronistic, at worst mystifying – Pye exposes the return of the repressed, not just in the seductive brio of their famously anecdotal delivery, but in the rhetorical figure on which their investigations relied, the synecdochal part-for-whole 'that allows the practitioner a rapid-fire passage from anecdotal detail to larger cultural claim' (p. 11). The same figure blights the big-data method used by critics like Douglas Bruster, which presupposes in advance the 'limitable character of the field of analysis' (p. 12). No less than the New Historicism, this approach collects and orders its material in relation to an implied horizon without which it would not be collectable at all. Whatever multiple and antagonistic currents they identify, these critical methods orient themselves towards a notional unified domain not so unlike the Burckhardtian Kulturgeschichte. What constitutes this domain, who decides on it, and how it comes about, are the questions of Pye's book. It spans what he sees as an interval 'between theocentric institutions and the appearance of the formal state' (p. 5); this interval is characterised by a general crisis of grounds, triggered by the loss of transcendent referents on which the polis can...