(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)
14 The Father's House: Samson Agonistes in its Historical Moment*
JOHN GUILLORY
The following essay is one half of a diptych, the other half of which is entitled 'Dalila's House: Samson Agonistes and the Sexual Division of Labor' (published in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Division of Labor, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson et al, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986). The two essays set out from a simple observation about the narrative structure of Milton's drama, the fact that Samson's crisis takes the form of a choice between several different houses in the poem. When Dalila offers Samson the option of returning with her to her house, she seems to stand for a domestic alternative to Samson's vocation, the possibility of withdrawal from his public role as Judge and scourge of the Philistines to the private domain of the household. Milton's drama stages this choice as the conflict between Samson's marriage and his vocation, a conflict which is only resolved by Samson's rejection of the former on behalf of the latter. In the essay on 'Dalila's House', I saw this resolution as making a kind of oblique argument for the legitimacy of divorce, potentially a new social practice corresponding to changes in the institution of marriage itself. In the essay on 'The Father's House' , I attempted to look more closely at how Milton conceived of Samson's 'vocation' as a public practice, and here too I discovered the choice between two houses: between Manoa's house, to which Samson would return if he were to accept his father's ransom plan, and God's house, the 'father's house' to which Samson really does return when he once again takes up his divine vocation. Both essays on the houses in the poem provided me with an occasion for understanding the historical specificity of the 'vocation', a concept which is grounded in Protestant conceptions of the religious life, but
* Reprinted from Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York and London: Methuen, 1987).
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Samson Agonistes in its Historical Moment which is mutating into something more like our concept of the' career' , a kind of working life. It seemed to me that the historical moment of tension between these meanings of vocation was registered in the drama as the choice between Manoa's house and the father God's house. In both essays, then, I hoped to be able to read Milton's redaction of the biblical narrative of Samson in such a way as to demonstrate that Milton's drama expressed historical tensions for which no conceptual vocabulary yet existed in Milton's own time.
Life-narratives
The argument of this essay takes as its point of entry the long-standing conviction of Milton's readers that the narrative of Samson Agonistes does not yield to interpretation unless it can be made to stand quasiallegorically for some other story whose constituent concerns and characters belong to the time and place of the drama's composition. The difficulty of producing this other narrative raises in an acute form the most general of theoretical questions concerning the historical specificity of any literary text; yet it may be that the very resistance to this specificity thrown up by the code-like narrative of Samson (extending even to the date of composition, which has never been fixed) is an interesting arena upon which to engage the theoretical question. I propose to read the narrative in its historical moment, but I do not mean that I shall decode the drama by establishing once again, or for the first time, its proper historical context. I intend rather to argue that the relation of text to contexts (as though to bring the historical 'background' a little closer) is a false problematic and has produced in this instance an illusion of narrative intelligibility. The problematic I would advance in its stead recognizes the text as itself a historical event, in the sense that Milton's choice of the Samson story is a determinate choice, not the neutral vehicle of meaning but an event whose significance is enabled and conditioned by a particular configuration of the total social formation.
The difference such a reading would make can be suggested by glancing briefly at the three contextual decodings of the narrative heretofore governing criticism. These are, first, a political context, in which Milton's redaction of the Samson story records a certain response to the failure of the Commonwealth and the restoration of the monarchy. Second, an autobiographical context, in which the life of Samson is identified with the professional, literary, or domestic life of Milton. And third, a theological context (currently the most favored), in which the narrative recapitulates the stages leading up to the 'regeneration' of the 'elect' Protestant.1 None of these contextual readings, or their many
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variant or combined forms, is without explanatory power, nor are they mutually exclusive. Yet they produce their intelligible translations of the Samson story at the cost of isolating the dyad of text and context from the social formation within which both text and context are significant events. Here I would pose the question not to context but of mediation (scarcely a new concept, but one seldom enough employed in Renaissance criticism). The problematic of mediation, which addresses the relation between a field of cultural production and the whole of social life, has been developed most rigorously within a materialist concept of history and it is ultimately a materialist reading I shall attempt.
Nevertheless it will be necessary to begin with a rather more limited and specific hypothesis about mediation between social levels in the early modern period: Max Weber's still crucial argument in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber differs on some significant points with what would presumably be a thoroughly materialist account of the relation between religion and economy, but his work has provided the terms and evidence for virtually every concept of mediation specific to the early modem period and to Protestant Europe. For Weber the hinge of the social levels represented by Protestantism and capitalism is the practice of 'vocation,' which operates both as a focus of theological controversy and as a discourse on the working life. Weber traces this polyvalence to the early Reformation of 'good works' and the later emergence of a doctrine of election, a doctrine which in practice imposed a structure upon life itself. Calvin's God demanded 'not single good works but a life of good works combined into a unified system.'2 Thus the Catholic organization of everyday life, wherein every moment is referred to eternity as the potential moment of death, is replaced by a narratable life, a structured life determined as 'elect' or 'reprobate' only as a whole. There is good prima-facie evidence for situating Samson as an intervention into this history in the very fact that current contextual decodings of the narrative have invariably sought out a context in which a life-narrative is at issue. Even the political reading of the drama is contingent upon the conventional figuring of the nation's history as the life of the heroic individual. 3
At certain points Milton more openly attaches the life of Samson to the history of Protestant election or vocation, as when the Chorus, addressing God, says that Samson is
Such as thou hast solemnly elected,
With gifts and graces eminently adorned
To some great work, thy glory ( 678-80)
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Samson Agonistes in its Historical Moment Yet we know that in fact the sense of election in such a passage cannot be strictly Calvinist because Milton himself was a believer in the Arminian revision of Calvinist doctrine, which affirmed the freedom of the will over predestination. If at this moment the history of election appears in the margin of the drama merely as a problem of definition, or of the theological context, that impression will be dispelled as soon as we measure what is at stake in Milton's deployment of the received discourse. Such interventions take their place and have their effects within the long sequence of discursive practices by which the vocation is dislocated from the medieval ecclesiastical lexicon in order first to be identified with the radical Protestant concept of election, and later, in equally critical circumstances, to be extracted from its theological matrix. By the later eighteenth century the vocation functions as the key term in the bourgeois ideology of industriousness Weber finds exemplified in the writings of Benjamin Franklin. The current sense of vocation is therefore not the lineal descendant of some original discourse but the fossil record of successive upheavals. Its very sedimentation makes it capable of inflecting the working life both positively and negatively, as the declasse 'vocational training,' or as the vocation which transcends the venal motives of careerism.
From works of law to works of faith: the Pauline doctrine enables for Calvinism the transformation of religious practice into a psychic economy, a spiritual accounting that constitutes the individual in a new way, over against the juridical constraints of the social, the 'law.' Clearly the homeostatic psychic economy of Calvinism permitted the achievements of the working life, in a fatal slippage from 'works' to 'work,' to be entered as credits in the ledger of the soul. Weber's study documents the emergence of this psychic economy, which he calls an 'ethic,' and which for him mediates between the major social structures of Protestantism and capitalism. I shall argue that the putative homeostasis of the individual psyche is geared to a general economy of social relations, an economy in which the vocation (in the sense of 'working life') is not merely a redundant conformation of a purely interior certainty, nor the state of faith merely the warm glow of material success. If the historical problem of the vocation can be conceived alternatively as the relation between an inaccessible inner state and a narratable life, then the problematic of mediation underlying Weber's study can be addressed as the question of how certain narratives 'accounts' of individual lives - emerge and function within a specific historical conjuncture.
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In the final section of this paper I hope to move on to the ground of materialism by locating the point at which the homeostatic economy of the psyche disintegrates and the vista of the general economy appears beyond the life of the individual. With reference to the narrative of Samson, this point is the moment of Samson's death, when his life becomes fully narratable, or when that life-narrative begins to circulate. From this retrospective vantage, it can be shown that the psychic economy generating the serial episodes of the life-narrative has all along been determined by a contradiction between the demands emanating from the poem's two fathers, Yahweh and Manoa; the distinction between these two fathers marks the difference between the psychic and the social. The Hebrew God demands a 'great work,' while the earthly father demands, as I shall show, 'labor in a calling.' Both demands can be identified with the concept of vocation, but this is no longer an instance of polyvalence so much as a contradiction. Samson arranges the disposition of his resources - the psychic, symbolic, or material capital represented by 'strength' - in order to satisfy the demands of both fathers; and this he is able to do not by a labor of production, but by a single, fantasmatic 'great work' of destruction.
Extraordinary Calling
To begin with Weber's question, then, is to set before us the task of fixing the typical thematization of the Samson story in Judges within the field of Protestant writings. Consider, for example, this text by the wellknown theologian William Perkins, from A Treatise of the Vocations, or Callings of Men:
And if we marke it well, the work of God shewes evidently to what dangers they are subject, that doe anything either without or against their callings. Sampson's strength lay not in his haire (as men commonly thinke) but because hee went out of his calling; by breaking the vow of a Nazarite, when he gave occasion to Dalilah to cut off his Haire, therefore he lost his strength; for God promised strength but with a commaundement, that hee should be a Nazarite to the end. 4
Judges provides an illustrative tale of what happens when a man falls away from his calling; indeed, the calling is defined here by what diverges from it, just as it would seem to be defined in Milton's redaction of the story. Yet this definition does not distinguish Samson from any other follower in the Nazarite path; he was called to much more than obedience to vows. In Perkins's text the story is partially depleted of its meaning in order that the situation of Samson might be read as normative. The same tactic of normalization is adopted by the marginal
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annotators of the Geneva Bible, who also interpret the narrative from Judges as a moral fable of 'vocation.' Such an allegory is developed during Samson's final moments, as here the uniqueness of his situation tends to escape the net of circumscriptive thematization. Hence, Samson's coerced 'sport' before the Philistine lords (16:25) calls forth this comment: 'Thus by Gods just judgements they are made slaves to infidels, which neglect their vocation in defending the faithfu1.' Not quite consistently, Samson between the pillars (16:29) is glossed: 'According to my vocation, which is to execute Gods judgements upon the wicked,' a statement that would seem to acknowledge a specific rather than a general concept of Samson's task. The more disturbing suicidal exclamation ('Let me die with the Philistines') is accompanied by a somewhat evasive return to a normative theme: 'He speaketh not this of despaire, but humbling himself for neglecting his office and the offense thereby given.' Samson's 'suicide,' which is conventionally explained away, is least of all compatible with a 'vocational' reading. The texts from Perkins and the Geneva commentators, with which Milton would have been familiar, record an incapacity to fix a boundary between the two senses of vocation, as calling and as work. Yet such a distinction was frequently attempted, and it usually took the form adopted by Perkins in the following passage:
The generall calling is the calling of Christianity, which is common to all that live in the Church of God. The particular, is that special calling that belongs to some particular men: as the calling of a Magistrate, the calling of a Minister, the calling of a father, of a childe, of a seruant, of a subiect, or any other calling that is common to all. (1:752)
Perkins' category of the special calling is scarcely exclusive, but it is evident from the remainder of the treatise that he is primarily interested in those callings which we would call 'occupations.' The relative poverty of Perkins' vocabulary reproduces the same paronomasia that is the subject of Weber's researches in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The discursive problem to which Milton's version of the Samson story responds can now be more narrowly defined and examined: it concerns the distinction between general and particular vocation, as that unstable distinction conditions subsequent deviations from Calvinism.
Weber initially addresses this problem by tracing the emergence of the modern sense of Beruf, 'which undoubtedly goes linguistically back to Bible translations by Protestants' (207). His major example is Luther's translation of the apocryphal book of Jesus Sirach 11:20 as 'bleibe in deinem Beruf,' where the Vulgate has 'opus.' German Bibles had,
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formerly, 'Werk,' or 'Arbeit.' The Latin term synonymous with Beruf was of course vocatio, but that had referred to the religious life, particularly to the life of the cloister. Luther also translates a similar crucial verse, I Corinthians 7:20, as 'Let each man abide in that calling wherein he was called' (translating the New Testament deesis as Beruf). More accurate translations would be, for the Latin, status, and the German, Stand. The alterations are small volleys in the polemics of Protestantism, aimed specifically at the consilia evangelica of the monks. The latter is replaced by a new 'valuation of the fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs' (80).
According to Weber, the sanctification of work did not necessarily imply its rationalization, which he associates with Calvinist rather than Lutheran forms of Reformation. In fact, Luther's sense of labor is in some ways thoroughly traditional; he believed, as Weber remarks, that 'the individual should remain once and for all in the station and calling in which God had placed him, and should restrain his worldly activity within the limits imposed by his established station in life' (85). Along with its newer resonances, Beruf retained the meaning of status. Luther's innovation might be simply irrelevant to any post-Calvinist conception of labor, were it not for the fact that he uses Beruf frequently also to mean 'the call to eternal salvation through God.' Calvin's sense of a 'call to eternal salvation' is only too clear; yet the machinery of predestination yields another distinction authorized by the cryptic final sentence of the marriage parable in Matthew: 'For many are called (klektos) but few are chosen (eklektos).' This is the text by which Calvin expounds his distinction between a general and a special calling.
Whereas Luther had defined a special calling as the particular employment or labor of an individual life, Calvin identifies the same structural category with the elect. It might be supposed that the more radical and powerful Calvinist scheme would simply displace the Lutheran distinction, but that is not what happens. Weber shows that precisely the problem engendered by the discrimination of the elect from the reprobate is responsible for the retention of Luther's pun on Beruf: 'It was only as a result of the development which brought the interest in proof of salvation to the fore that Luther's concept was taken over and then strongly emphasized by [the Calvinists]' (210).
After Calvin, then, 'calling' and 'vocation' continue to be used indiscriminately on both sides of the distinction between vocati and electi. The indeterminacy of this conceptual complex is the condition for the semantic link between Calvin's election, which has nothing to do, after all, with labor per se, and Luther's Beruf. Milton inherits these distinctions, along with their instability. An irresolvable ambiguity of terms is especially characteristic of the Arminian heresy, whose aim is
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scarcely to discard the technical apparatus of Calvinism; on the contrary, the terms remain in place, but their relations are altered, and another bifurcation appears. For Milton, as an Arminian, the distinction between vocati and electi cannot have quite the same force as it must for the Calvinist, since he no longer accepts a decree of reprobation. More than that, De Doctrina undertakes to remove election completely from its context of predestination; but then what content might it have? Would it not simply be absorbed by the secondary meanings of vocation, because, against its now conventional meaning, it would refer to choosing rather than being chosen? 'Whence I infer,' Milton writes, 'that "the elect" are the same as "believers", that the terms are synonymous' (VI:180). God chooses those who choose themselves. Milton has no need for a purely soteriological distinction between a general and a special election. All election is general: 'It seems, then, that predestination and election are not particular but only general: that is, they belong to all who believe in their hearts and persist in their belief' (VI:176). Finally Milton is careful to distinguish the general election from the idea of the particular, individual task: 'nor do I mean the election by which he chooses an individual for some employment [ad munus]' (VI:172).
But is the latter notion in any other way an example of election? Elsewhere in De Dodrina Milton refers to a similar idea as special vocation:
Special vocation means that God, whenever he chooses, invites certain select individuals, either from the so-called elect or from the reprobate [sive electos quos vocant sive reprobos], more clearly and more insistently than is normal. (VI:455)
A distinction between election and vocation is very difficult to maintain, both here and in the chapter on 'Predestination.' Samson is unquestionably an example of 'special vocation,' like Abraham, called out of his house [domo sua evocavit] to do the work of God; but a much larger point emerges from this analysis: Milton's concept of special vocation is the return of election, the return of being chosen rather than choosing.
Unprofitable Servant
Samson, Manoa, and the Chorus allude frequently to Samson's unique calling, and it is these passages I hope to have located precisely within the region of theological controversy. I would now like to consider in
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greater detail the key passage from Samson, with the intention of probing the limits of Weber's conceptualization of the Protestant vocation:
Nor do I name of men the common rout,
That wandering loose about
Grow up and perish, as the summer fly,
Heads without name no more remembered,
But such as thou has solemnly elected,
With gifts and graces eminently adorned
To some great work, thy glory,
And people's safety, which in part they effect:
Yet toward these, thus dignified, thou oft,
Amidst their height of noon,
Changest thy countenance and thy hand, with no regard
Of highest favours past
From thee on them, or them to thee of service. (674-86)
If election seems here to be an ironic predestination it is in this and several other ways a transformation rather than a transcendence of the Calvinist scheme. As a 'solemnly elected' individual, Samson stands against not a spiritually reprobate majority but the nameless, 'the common rout. . . Heads without name no more remembered.' The antinomies of election and reprobation are redefined as election and obscurity - the 'invisible' church has become, precisely, the most visible. These 'elect' can be figured as visibility itself; they are most conspicuous at 'their height of noon.' The pressure of Milton's own obsession is evident here; certainly he feared obscurity more than any discredited reprobation, but then he has gone a long way toward identifying the one with the other. The obsession of the drama with fame, itself an ethically suspect motive, compounds with the Calvinist soteriology to produce a socially advanced valuation of individual fate.
The homology of election and fame suggests a modification of election to respond to a newly defined elite, one which emerged from the Calvinist elect. Hence Milton is intent to dissociate Samson from a hereditary nobility (171) just as much as from the common rout. In the biblical text these discriminations are not made. At the same time, it is rather difficult to specify any group to which Samson might belong as a representative figure. It is easier to locate a referent for the obscure multitude in the egregious interjection, 'That wandering loose about.' Such wandering is not entailed by the distinction between those who are elected to a conspicuous fame and those who are not. 'Wandering loose' implies a hypothetical antithesis, a quality of fixity in the character of Samson, but
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that idea is not to be found in the passage itself. Rather it generates a series of oppositions from beneath, operating as a covert thematic which is elsewhere openly acknowledged in the phallic narrative of Samson's castration by Dalila, signifying among other things a slackening of vocational rigidity. Resolute application to an ordained task is demanded by the 'special vocation' that Milton distinguishes from mere labor on the one hand, and predestination on the other.
‘Special vocation' in the sense of the 'working life' is signalled by what is probably the most active subtext in the drama, the parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14-30). Milton has already linked both his blindness and his 'one talent' to this parable in Sonnet XIX, and it is unsurprisingly evoked by Samson, who possesses the singular talent of strength. Just as critical is an unmistakable affinity with the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16); both parables conceive of the relation between God and man as that of a master-employer to a servant-employee. In Samson, any recollection of the parable of the workers in the vineyard would seem to cancel the elective assurance of the parable of the talents. Yet we hear in the protest of the Chorus against the (apparently) arbitrary master who remunerates his servants with ironic evenhandedness ('just and unjust, alike seem miserable') the complaint of the workers in the vineyard. The contest of the two parables occurs more familiarly in Sonnet XIX: 'Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?' When Samson's' one talent which is death to hide' does not yield a profit, his labor is mere wage-labor; he merely gets what he deserves. And getting what one deserves is of course the economic formula for reprobation, which can only be transcended by the absolute gift of election, the absolute transcendence of economy itself. The lament of the Chorus, '[Thou] throwest them lower than thou didst exalt them high,' is thus heavily charged with the same Calvinist irony that retroactively contaminates the parable of the workers in the vineyard: 'So the last will be first, and the first last.' The psychic economy governing Samson's 'special vocation' can be described as an attempt to affirm the economy of the parable of the talents against the economy of the parable of the workers in the vineyard (as though the economic form of talent/profit were not in fact mediated in the real world by the form of wage-labor). 5
The logic of Milton's economy requires not the equal remuneration of labor but the production of a profit. We will see that for Samson, if that profit does not appear 'in the close,' labor is degraded to 'day-labour, light denied,' or worse, to 'idleness,' the condition of the 'common rout . . . wandering loose about.' That is to say, Samson will have no vocation. In its contempt of 'wandering,' the Chorus speaks in unison with Perkins and his colleagues, when they condemn 'rogues, beggars, vagabonds' for idleness, for not taking up a vocation in life. 6 Their
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vagrancy is of course a consequence of their mass expropriation, but the social fact of vagrancy is volatilized in the crucible of Puritan ethics and rematerializes as a schematic counterpart to the valorization of labor undertaken by all those theologians from Perkins to Baxter who imported the categories of election and vocation into the representation of everyday working life. Hence Samson prefers even a degraded form of labor, the 'servile toil' of the Philistine mill, to the idleness that is the antinomy of calling:
To what can I be useful, wherein serve
My nation, and the work from Heaven imposed,
But to sit idle on the household hearth,
A burdenous drone. (564-7)
Such a 'drone' could not be distinguished from the' summer flies' dismissed by the Chorus. Samson's calling, which has consisted hitherto of isolated acts of destruction, is nevertheless an occupation. His vocational failure leaves him with nothing to do, an 'unprofitable servant' (Matt. 25:30) who has fallen out of his class and into the horde of the socially reprobate, the expropriated, the unemployed.
Intimate Impulse
Labor is the shadow cast by all of Samson's actions; yet the objective form of his vocation, his apparently random acts of destruction, prevents us from finally assimilating his narrative to a normative ideology. This problem, which is not accessible to a Weberian analysis, can be approached from another direction as the problem of the discrepancy between the demands of Samson's two fathers, God and Manoa. If Manoa disapproves of Samson's 'nuptial choices,' he also remains skeptical of those divinely inspired 'intimate impulses' which we know to be both the justification of Samson's object choices and the form taken by his calling. What does Manoa want of and for his son? The question might be rephrased to highlight Manoa's contemporaneity with Milton: 'What might the seventeenth-century middle-class father want of his male child?' Many things, of course, but at the least he might claim the right to control both marital and occupational choices. In his divorce tracts, Milton rejects the coerced choice of marriage partners as a 'savage inhumanity' (II:275). As for the second 'right,' the evidence (for example, of 'Ad Patrem') points to its rejection as well. On this point Milton was as
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usual advanced for his time. The period of transition is epitomized by one historian of the family, Jean-Louis Flandrin, as follows:
In the sixteenth century, the only recognized vocation had been the religious one; apart from that, parents were left free to choose the occupations of their children. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, every estate had become a 'profession' and required a 'vocation,' which parents were forbidden to thwart.
It would be very difficult to believe that this reversal was effected without trauma; we know that Milton's own father was perplexed by the occupational vagueness of his son's life. If Samson's activity scarcely has the appearance of an occupation, its structurally 'vocational' features are determined by the father's demand for a certain regular activity, for rational labor. At the same time, this activity must answer to the demand of the Father God, which Milton rather coyly implies is quite beyond Manoa's comprehension. This contradiction is focused (if not resolved) by the repetition of the 'intimate impulse,' a paradoxical rationalization of an act itself anarchic and eruptive.
In the antinomies governing the drama, the father, the law, rationality, and iterability must be ranged against God, transgression, irrationality, and a convulsive mode of action. Narrative repetition in Samson appears as singular, unstructured acts of impulsion, or as a 'compulsion to repeat.' Samson's marriages, his failures to contain his several secrets, his acts of destruction; everything must be done at least twice. Milton would have been sensitized to this pattern even by the current etymology of Samson's name, 'there the second time.' The narrative invokes a pervasive polarity between the law, as representative of social relations, and the impulse, as representative of an overruling psychic economy. '
I would like to set this relation in apposition to several texts of Freud, with the intention of reconstructing that recurrent structure of ideology by which psychic economies, whether Calvinist, Freudian, or anything in between appropriate and displace the mechanism of the economic per se. A hypothetical 'psychic economy' governing the internal narrative of Samson therefore does not leave behind the prehistory of election, its complicity with Calvinist ideologies of labor, but rather follows the track of that ideology as it displaces the scene of action to the 'mind.' If Manoa can be seen to represent the familial interests of the contemporary bourgeoisie, it is Samson who refuses the representative function, who offers instead a unique and interesting internal drama. It will also be helpful to observe in the typical strategies of psychoanalysis the analogue of Samson's private justification of his public actions (founded upon a
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communication between himself and God); election is here performing quasi-analytic function of inducing introspection, of displacing ...to a domain of interiority. Samson exhibits what Freud calls a Schicksalszwang, a 'fate compulsion,' described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as 'being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some "demonic" power.' The mythological terms are then smoothly translated into analytic language: 'but psychoanalysis has always taken the view that their fate is for the most part arranged by themselves and determined by early infantile experiences' (XVIII:21). In order to translate daemon into Zwang, Freud overleaps several centuries, the whole period of the 'disenchantment of the world,' in which neither the daemon nor the Zwang are available terms of explanation. For Milton's Samson, it is an open question whether his fate is determined by an external agency arranged by himself ('Whether prompted by God or by his own will'). 8 Fixing upon one or the other alternative will depend, precisely, on whether and how external agencies are internalized, that is upon a theologizing move. In his metapsychology, Freud attempts to demonstrate that the external Zwang is so transformed by the psychic anomy as to become virtually supernumerary to its operation, reduced, as it were, from an agency of predestination to an impotent shadowing. I propose, then, something more than an analogy to this metapsychology: that if late Calvinist theology derides a psychic economy, the relation of economy to psyche, or of labor to election, can theorized in a preliminary way as the relation of (external) Zwang to (internal) Schicksal.
Consider, for example, the analytic account of that external compulsion known as the 'law' given in The Future of an Illusion. In place of the Hebraic etiology of law as God-given, Freud posits as the founding institutions of civilization two forms of social coercion: 'But with the recognition that every civilization rests upon a compulsion to work [Arbeitszwang] and a renunciation of instinct [Triebverzicht],
it has become if that civilization cannot consist principally and solely in wealth itself is the means of acquiring it and the arrangement for its distribution' U:10). The Arbeitszwang is soon left aside, since it is a universal necessity, and (at least at this point in the argument) does not undergo internalization. Freud is concerned only to explain the renunciation of instinct, and it is that 'external compulsion' (Ausserer Zwang) which gradually becomes internalized' (XXXIII).
In the major study to follow, Civilization and its Discontents, work appears again as a result mainly of the 'stress of necessity,' but in initiation an attempt is made to articulate the two founding coercions of civilization in relation to a single defense mechanism, sublimation. Still, ! most significant comment is relegated to a footnote:
Samson Agonistes in its Historical Moment.
It is not possible, within the limits of short survey, to discuss adequately the significance of work for the economics of the libido. No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensable to the preservation and justification of existence in society. Professional activity is a source of special satisfaction if it is a freely chosen one - if, that is to say, by means of sublimation, it makes possible the use of existing inclinations, of persisting or constitutionally reinforced instinctual principles.
(XXI:80)
It is only rarely in Freud's work that the 'economics of the libido' touches upon the economy in the restricted sense, here as the re-entrance of libido into economy. Freud's note does not argue that work actually absorbs a considerable quantum of frustrated erotic libido - he only adds a tentative 'even erotic' to his list of possible sublimations. In this formulation, certain kinds of work, 'freely chosen activity,' provide the opportunity of sublimating aggression.9 The activity resulting from such a sublimation can again be described as Arbeitszwang, but this would mean something new, an internalized compulsion. Joan Riviere, the translator of this work in the Standard Edition, gives us 'professional work' for the word Berufsarbeit, which should make very clear, historically, what kind of work Freud has in mind. The history sedimented in the word Freud employs recalls the same contradiction discovered in the Protestant Beruf, work as 'freely chosen activity' (vocation) and as being chosen (election).
Nevertheless the implications of this sedimented history are only ancillary to Freud's argument, which is concerned in the body of the text with accounting for the 'discontent' of that instinctual renunciation which is a consequence of aggression, the major derivative of the' death drive.' The subtleties of the theory are less pertinent at the moment than the central thesis of an aggressivity placed in the service of the superego, which becomes a kind of breeder-reactor of renunciation and further aggression. It would seem that in this context the question of work would no longer be problematic, that the compulsion to repeat (Wiederholungszwang), as the major representative of the death-drive, would sum up every lesser example of compulsion. Nevertheless, the 'compulsion to work' does reappear later in the book, having ascended from the footnotes to a very prominent place in the argument - this time as a mythological complement to the sexual drive: 'The communal life of
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human beings had, therefore, a twofold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love. . . . Eros and Ananke have become the parents of human civilization too' (XXI:101). The identification of Ananke with the 'compulsion to work' (der Zwang zur Arbeit) is surprising; why is there no theoretical relation between this external necessity and the internal aggression that is everywhere else in Freud's later work the complement to Eros? Elsewhere the dyad is, as we know, Eros and Thanatos, the death-drive. The relation between Thanatos and Ananke can be brought to the fore by reconnecting the ligaments of the argument as follows: An internalized Arbeitszwang is the sublimation of aggression, which is a derivative of the death-drive, whose representative is the Wiederholungszwang. If work is indeed the sublimation of aggression according to the later theory of the drives, it is unfortunately also true that sublimation was never successfully integrated into the economic scheme of the metapsychology. It is just this failure of integration that allows Freud to idealize a certain kind of labor, the Berufsarbeit, and in fact to model the psychic economy of labor on two quite atypical examples, 'intellectual work' and 'artistic creation' (XXI:79). In this kind of labor, an impossible psychic economy obtains, one in which nothing is lost in expending energy.
If Calvinist theology can be said to function as a psychology, a system for inducing and representing psychic events, this psychology, like Freud's, also fails to represent labor except in idealized form, as extraeconomic, as a sublimation or internalized Ananke. Indeed it is the conception of a Zwang subtending the ideology of the bourgeois vocation - a compulsion to work which is attested in myriad documents of the early modem bourgeoisie - that allows us to reconstruct something like a psychic economy of Calvinism. The Berufsarbeit of the Calvinist is also a sublimation of aggression (competition), which is a derivative of his fate (election), whose representative is the compulsion to repeat (as we shall see, accumulation of profit). Samson acts out the psychic economy of the Calvinist, but in a deviant form: his vocation is a desublimation of aggression, a crucial difference marking the discrepancy between the divine and earthly father's demands as the recto and verso of destruction and production. 10
Like the bourgeois vocation, Samson's acts seem to escape the stress of necessity when they are no longer compelled from the outside, and this is to say that the individual is constituted as such ('Samson hath quit himself like Samson') at the moment when the vocation is proven, election confirmed. Of course the constitution of the individual as an autotelic mind, free in its interiority, completes a process of identification that is for Freud the original determinism of psychogenesis.
'Individuality' is a dialectical successor to the law of the Father, and it is
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Samson Agonistes in its Historical Moment
asserted (as we know in Milton's case as well as Samson's) most conspicuously when the choice of vocation comes into conflict with the will of the Father. Clearly the choice of vocation can be made the terrain of renewed Oedipal conflict, but it is scarcely surprising that Freud has so little to say about this second battle between fathers and sons. The Berufsarbeit is always removed from the reductive reach of the metapsychology.
If the crucial point for Milton in placing Samson between the pillars is precisely his freedom ('Now of my own accord such other trial/I mean to show you of my strength, yet greater'), that freedom might nevertheless be read by the demystifying theory of either Calvin or Freud as the internalization of the law, the will of the Father. Milton is finally as undecided as Freud about the extent to which he will permit such a demystification, and thus the source of the 'rousing motions' is itself left undecided: 'And eyes fast fixed he stood, as one who prayed, for some great matter in his mind revolved.' The distance that produces the indeterminable option produces a fully privatized individual, who therefore acts of his 'own accord,' that is, in accord with his interiority. The Arminian heresy assumes a larger ideological function of identifying freedom with individuality. Such an identification is an unforeseen consequence of the very theology that administered so apparently final a rebuke to human volition. Late Calvinism, which typically weakens the doctrine of predestination to an ethic of self-determination, is locked into place as one possible ideological buttress of the bourgeois vocation. God wants us to do what we want to do.
We confront immediately what appears to be a contradiction, as the foregoing analysis would lead us to suppose that Samson's final act of freedom should be interpreted as internalization of the law, whereas by analogy with his marriage choices we may also regard the same moment between the pillars as a dispensation. Of course any declaration of freedom can be understood as, and reduced to, an internalized necessity, but I am inclined to take seriously the insertion of Samson's act into a category of dispensation. For once Milton has not defined freedom trivially as the alternative of obeying or disobeying the law, but rather located it in those hypothetical moments when the law is set aside. With this hypothesis in mind, we can be properly impressed that Samson is dispensed first from the law of endogamy (marriage within the tribe), and last from the corresponding prohibition in the ritual sphere, of participation in extra-tribal worship. He is dispensed from the constituting prohibitions of Hebraic culture. Milton poses, in heterodox theological terms, a radical question about the founding coercions of culture. It will not do, therefore, to recuperate the law wholly as an internalized necessity, by however sophisticated an articulation of an intervening
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'third term.' a primal or symbolic father. There is an irreducible contradiction between the possible meanings of Samson's final act, as a determinate compulsion to repeat, and as the 'free' indulgence in the absence of the law, of what the law forbids to the individual- violence.
By the latter alternative I mean to confront the fact of aggression directly; it has for the most part been evaded in criticism of the drama, or reduced to the merely contingent circumstances of Samson's regeneration.11 If the fact of legitimated aggression is as central to Samson Agonistes as it is to any revenge drama, that assumption of legitimacy must be read in the framework of a psychic economy as a fantasy of desublimation.12 Such a fantasy is an exact inversion of the bourgeois ideology in which the Berufsarbeit is the sublimation of aggression. The concept of desublimation brings into focus that contradiction by virtue of which Samson's acts become the labor of violence, that is, both rational and dispensed from what will prove to be not the economics of the libido but a specific class rationality.
Symbolic Capital
The destruction of the Philistine lords serves the immediate purpose of seeming to overturn a relation of domination that has become structural in the perception of the dominated. As Milton knew, Philistia continued to rule until the period of the Kings. No national victory is claimed at the end of Samson. Rather Milton asserts the exemplary status of Samson's life and death, valued above even the providential history of the Israelites. The disappointed millennialism of the major works is thus countered by the consolation of the 'one just man,' a theme frequently enough evoked by collective failures. But what kind of consolation is this? How can it be said that an image of destruction compensates for the renewal of domination? The effective redress (an imaginary revenge) is possible because the image is an image of excess, of what would be called in the lexicon of contemporary ideology, 'terrorism.' The political allegory in Samson Agonistes mistakes the particular forms of domination (whatever they may be at the time of the play's composition) for an immutable structural domination from which there is no release except in fantasy. What emerges at the end of Samson is thus an intersubjective exchange, bypassing the polis, between Samson and the Hebrew youth who 'inflame their breasts to matchless valour, and adventures high' with the memory of Samson's deed. The political has the status of an 'occasion' for the individual agon, a narrative condition which has successfully frustrated political interpretation of the drama, or opened it to the most facile of allegories. The historical moment of the drama, if it
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is indeed bounded by the failure of the Commonwealth, is also the moment of that class victory consolidated by the alliance of aristocratic and bourgeois property, when Weber's 'ethic' of individual success establishes ideological hegemony.
The narrative of Samson Agonistes acknowledges the victory of this class rationality by negating it in the fantasy of de sublimation, of 'terrorism.' which is nothing other than an image of the abolition of all structural domination, the whole of political economy, in the face of its actual continuance.13 Hence the law is dispensed, not abrogated. Milton's first and still in some respects his subtlest critic, Andrew Marvell, recognized just this terrorist hyperbole in his sly identification of Milton with the Samson of Samson Agonistes: '(So Sampson grop'd the Temple's Posts in spite of the World o'erwhelming to revenge his sight'). Samson's act of destruction extends beyond the Philistine temple to the world itself. 'Disestablishment' proceeds unchecked; all temples are demolished, all states, all societies.
That this complementary fantasy of destruction is itself a function of the social economy is attested by the final lines of the drama, where the 'servants' of the lord are dismissed, having drunk in the scene of destruction, with a greater accumulation ('acquist') of 'experience,' that is to say, a kind of usable talent as well as a vocational paradigm:
His servants he with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event
With peace and consolation hath dismissed,
And calm of mind, all passion spent. (1755-8)
The closing of the psychic account with both a surplus and an absolute expenditure argues that Milton's deepest protest was not against the Philistines (or the Stuarts) but against the very law of rational calculation, against the ceaseless counting of profit and loss. That protest is voiced by Peter in the first gospel: 'We have forsaken all, and followed thee; what shall we have therefore?' (Matt. 19:27). Calvin believed that Jesus answered Peter's question with the parable of the workers in the vineyard. This is of course not the answer that Milton would have wanted; he would surely have replied with the parable of the talents, by which he answered his own version of Peter's question, 'Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?' And it is surely the parable of the talents to which Milton returns in the Chorus's final speech. I propose now to translate the concept of de sublimation into a more historically specific economic cognate, which would comprehend Milton's transformation of Matthew's 'talent' into what Pierre Bourdieu calls 'symbolic capital'
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(preeminently, 'honour' or 'fame').14 Such a translation is intended not to reduce talent to capital but to recognize the specificity of that capital which goes by the name of talent.
The concept of 'symbolic capital' acknowledges the distance that has opened up in theory between the 'economy' in the restricted sense, and the general economy of such practices as the religious, the erotic, the aesthetic. Bourdieu does not describe the latter practices by analogy to the economy of production and exchange; on the contrary, he argues that 'a restricted definition of economic interest. . . is the historical product of capitalism' (177). There are important consequences in thus shifting the perspective upon economic interest from a restricted to a general 'economy of practices,' not the least of which is that the practice of Protestant vocation studied by Weber can be made more fully legible as a practice. For Bourdieu, a general theory of economic practice yields a concept of 'symbolic capital,' which is defined as 'credit, in the widest sense of the word, i.e. a sort of advance which the group alone can grant those who give it the best material and symbolic guarantees' (181). The problem of the Calvinist certitudo salutis, of justification by faith, in so far as it is 'surreptitiously appropriated' in the agon of Samson's election, is expressed as an operation of symbolic capital: his final act is the conspicuous guarantee of that 'credit' which his group had been holding in abeyance, and which confirms the meaning of the sign of his election, his physical strength. Samson's symbolic capital is thus a complex structure of reciprocal interests (or 'credit') flowing between himself, his society, and his two fathers, Manoa and God. The restoration of credit, the actual 'regeneration' in the narrative, produces an immediate (posthumous) profit of 'honor' and 'fame,' and this profit is returned with Samson's body 'to his father's house.' As a form of symbolic capital, this honor or prestige might well be converted at some point into material capita1. The interconvertibility of capital is attested in the narrative, although in the mode of denial, by a belated shadow plot of material capital, Manoa's plan to ransom Samson. Another kind of expenditure completes the circuit of exchange, the expenditure not of money but of the body itself ('dearly bought revenge').
The signal feature of the transaction derided by the sacrifice of the body can be identified, in Bourdieu's words, as 'the exhibition of symbolic capital. . . one of the mechanisms which (no doubt universally) make capital go to capital' (181). As an economic practice, Calvinist election is organized in exactly this way; it has its mystery of primitive accumulation, a primal decree of election, which is nothing other than the arrogation of symbolic capital. Such capital is 'exhibited' by the further accumulation of symbolic or material capital. Calvin's God declares, like the master of Matthew's parable, 'For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance' (25:29). Samson's
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Samson Agonistes in its Historical Moment
election shares this much with its Calvinist precursor: strength returns to strength, election cannot be withdrawn. Nevertheless, the formula 'capital goes to capital' leaves out of the accounting the 'great work' itself, or the particular form of symbolic capital's exhibition. The distinction of Milton's redaction of Matthew's parable is not that it conforms to an economic paradigm but rather that it makes of the denial of rational calculation the most profitable of economic practices. As an economic figure for Samson's violent end, the image of the phoenix expresses this impossibly calculating denial of calculation: everything is sacrificed and everything is returned. More precisely, the phoenix represents an unlimited return (fame) upon an absolute investment (the body): 'though the body dies, the fame survives.' Here finally de sublimation can be named for what it is, spending, the expenditure of 'energy' or 'libido' or 'capital.' Milton is able to acknowledge this. expenditure by invoking its negative reflection in the stream of the narrative, the theory of tragic catharsis ('all passion spent'). Nevertheless the phoenix image, as the embodiment of that cathartic expenditure, does not tell us why we need not count the loss of the body as an absolute loss; rather, the infinitude of expenditure works a kind of mathematical magic: spending everything is getting everything.
At this point it becomes difficult, if also quite necessary, to distinguish categorically between desublimation and sublimation, especially as the latter is for Freud the patient, disciplined investment (Besetzung) of psychic capital in the form of desexualized libido. Investment, of material or symbolic capital, is also a mode of spending. The significance of spending as such in the history of economic exchange has been well established by Mauss and Bataille; primitive economic exchange is founded on 'expenditures,' gifts, sacrifices, ritual destructions. Hence it is possible to figure the transcendence of economic motives by recurring to the practice of the gift or the sacrifice, but this entails repressing the fact that these are economic transactions. The rational economy of capital accumulation is shadowed always by another, atavistic system of exchange. In Milton's Samson, the atavistic economy appears in the form of the narrative-itself, the narrative of sacrifice, while the rational economy falls to the level of subtext and figuration. Samson's sacrifice is then both the repayment of a debt, his original 'credit,' and the overpayment of that debt. Only as such does it have the power to produce a profit, either for himself or the creditor.
Like desublimation, expenditure occupies a realm of fantasy set against the reality of rational calculation. The discipline of spending in the practice of investment makes all the difference historically; it has made a different world. That is not to say, however, that the fantasy of expenditure cannot be acted out, or that the acting out does not have real economic
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consequences. The transcendent economy of expenditure is not the survival of primitive exchange within an uncolonized territory of the capitalist economy; it is an atavism functionally integrated into the same economy. Just as investment seeks to conceal the labor that transforms capital into profit (in such 'surplus labor,' energy is absolutely expended), 'sacrifice' denies that what is absolutely lost or ritually destroyed can be expressed as an economic value. Hence the very body that Manoa intended to purchase from the Philistine is, when sacrificed, the occasion for no grief at all, no accounting of loss ('Nothing is here for tears'). Manoa's position is that of spokesman for the restricted economy. He will not recognize the secret table by which material and symbolic capital are converted into one another, the body converted into fame, or Matthew's 'talent' into Milton's. In this he makes possible a certain mystification Bourdieu describes as follows:
Economic calculation has hitherto managed to appropriate the territory objectively surrendered to the remorseless logic of what Marx calls 'naked self-interest' only by setting aside a 'sacred' island miraculously spared by the 'icy waters of egotistical calculation' and left as a sanctuary for the priceless or worthless things it cannot assess. (178)
That island has been for several hundred years the domain of art, but its appearance was prepared for by the segregation of the sacred itself, the religious life that Protestantism claimed to set apart not from everyday life but from the economic domain of legitimate self-interest. In the doctrine of election, the soul itself is beyond price, beyond any human effort to redeem it, and so relegated logically to the domain of the priceless or the worthless. At the same time Calvinism established a most rigorous program of psychic accounting, which, if it did not institute the discipline of everyday life, provided that discipline with its system of symbolic book-keeping. 15 In retrospect, it would seem that the logical relation between the priceless and the worthless is the mechanism by which the concept of vocation is reduced historically to the legitimation of the bourgeois vocation, the end of which is the constant accumulation of material or symbolic capital. Milton enacts this peculiar derivation not by idealizing productive labor, but by indulging a fantasy of release from the calculus of economic rationality, a fantasy taking the narrative form of violent expenditure or ritual destruction.
Self-sacrifice, exceeding the motive of revenge, is no less the meaning of Milton's identification with Samson than the ressentiment of blindness or defeat. The suicide of Samson is the proto-typical self-sacrifice of the artist, a fantasy capable of realization when there comes to prevail in late
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capitalism a relentless distinction between the worthlessness of the artist's life and the pricelessness of art. Post-artisanal 'artistic labor' is neither undervalued nor overvalued, but rather unvalued. In the life and death of Samson a paradigmatic life-narrative emerges, founded no doubt on the 'Christus Patiens' Milton never wrote, but sliding over that narrative, mutating into a new story, 'the life of the poet.' In this important sense, as Milton's readers have rightly intuited, Samson is a type not of Christ but of Milton, the Milton who, in Marx's famous phrase, 'produced Paradise Lost as the silkworm produces silk,' the inverted image of the figure who destroys the Philistines 'as an Eagle.'
Lodged between the narratives of saint and artist, the narrative of Samson's life records for Milton the transformation of the father's talents, the money-lender's material capital ('Fathers are wont to lay up for their sons'), into 'talent,' symbolic capital. The narrative that enacts this transformation has its historical moment on the threshold of the new order; no other story will do. In the determinate choice of the Samson story, the distinction between material and symbolic capital is magnified, projected onto the largest possible screen, the distinction between the conflicting demands of the two fathers, earthly and heavenly. So Milton himself scorns the material capital by which his career is made possible, while taking up as the deep paradigm of his poetic calling that relation between investment and profit which was his father's business. The poet reappears in his own narrative as the vocational double of the rational investor, the very figure with whom he is thought to have nothing in common. But 'relation stands': the poet is the 'son' of the scrivener, the life of expenditure and sacrifice is the complement of investment and accumulation. Like Samson, Milton makes a return, with interest, upon his father's investment: 'to himself and Father's house eternal fame.' But within the drama, with its fantasmatic doubling of paternal figures, the final recognition of 'talent' is reserved for the heavenly father, whose function is to foreshadow the accounting of those 'sacrifices' constitutive of the artist's life-narrative as he once reckoned the value of the saint's. Such value is supposed to be beyond measure, whether or not the products of the sacred island are exchanged in an antithetical mainland economy, at whatever price. By means of such narrative fictions, capital marks off the boundaries of an aesthetic kingdom, within which it reappears disguised as the opposite of itself.
Notes
1. De Doctrina Christiana defines regeneration as follows: 'Regeneration means that the old man is destroyed and that the inner man is regenerated through
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the word and the spirit so that his whole mind is restored to the image of God, as if he were a new creature. Moreover, the whole man, both soul and body, is sanctified to God's service and to good works' (YP: 461). The linking of this passage to Samson Agonistes was made by William Riley Parker in Milton's Debt to Greek Tragedy in Samson Agonistes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1937), 235 ff., and elaborated in an essay by Arthur Barker, 'Structural and Doctrinal Pattern in Milton's Later Poems' in Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age, ed. Millar MacLure and F. W. Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), pp. 169-94. In the last several decades, Samson's 'regeneration' has become a given of criticism; it is assumed to structure the narrative event where the context of De Doctrina is only distantly invoked. .
2. MAX WEBER, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner's, 1958), p. 117. The distinction Weber is making is crucial to his argument and should defuse the misunderstanding of his position on the question of the specific relation between Protestantism and capitalism. The 'structured life' is first of all an ideological practice, a retrospective or prospective working up of a life narrative out of life-experience. At the same time such a narrative represents a genuinely material practice, since it comes to constitute a condition (not a cause) for other practices as well. For an extended discussion of the Weber controversy, see GORDON MARSHALL, In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism: An Essay on Max Weber's Protestant Ethic Thesis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
3. This is Milton's typical use of the Samson figure in his polemical prose, for example in the First Defense (IV:402), in Areopagitica (ll:558) and the Reason of Church-Government (1:858).
4. WILLIAM PERKINS, The Works of that Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ, 3 vols (London: John Legatt, 1612), 1:751.
5. Milton works out of such a poetic economy in the Preface to Book II of The Reason of Church-Government (1:801£f.), again founding his economy on the parable of the talents: 'remembering also that God even to a strictness requires the improvement of these his entrusted gifts'.
6. PERKINS, op. cit., 1:757: 'it is a Foule disorder in any Common-wealth, that there should be suffered rogues, beggars, vagabonds. . . . Againe, to wander up and downe from yeare to yeare to this end, to seeke & procure bodily maintenance, is no calling, but the life of a beast.'
7. JEAN-LOUIS FLANDRIN, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household, and Sexuality, tr. Richard Southern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p.139.
8. The quotation is from the First Defense and reads in full: '[Samson] still made war single-handed on his masters, and, whether prompted by God or by his own valour, slew at one stroke not one but a host of his country's tyrants, having first made prayer to God for his aid' (IV:402).
9. All quotations from Freud are cited from the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74). Freud is speaking rather loosely in equating the narcissistic, the aggressive, and the erotic as libidinal components, and 1 am both criticizing and following this. loose procedure in proposing a theoretical 'sublimation of aggression'. As the concept of sublimation is worked out in the earlier theory of the drives, it is always closely allied to a process of 'desexualization' in which, nevertheless, libidinal instincts are satisfied. The deficiency of that theory from an economic point of view is manifest and has been frequently remarked (for example by Jean Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis in The Language of Psychoanalysis, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), pp. 431-3; and by Jacques Lacan in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, tr. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), pp. 165-6).
10. In the following argument I extrapolate from Marcuse's concept of 'repressive desublimation', elaborated in One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), and Jean Baudrillard's similar use of the term in The Mirror of Production (St Louis: Telos Press, 1975).
11. On this subject Kenneth Burke's discussion of the drama redresses the balance of criticism. See A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 3ff. It should finally be possible to take up the question of why aggression, self or other directed, is so crucial to the drama as a motivated act of writing (language for use, as Burke would say).
12. In deploying the concept of de sublimation, 1 do not mean conversely to credit the theoretical validity of sublimation in the Freudian metapsychology. On the contrary, sublimation names the same specifically ideological assemblage as Weber's 'rationalization'; sublimation names the disciplining of the drives in the service of what is 'finer and higher'. The theory of sublimation is therefore perfectly adequate to its ideological function, which is to prevent any form of the Berufsarbeit from being assimilated into the critique of culture-asrepression.
13. See BAUDRILLARD, op. cit., p. 41: 'Although the concept of non-labor can thus be fantasized as the abolition of political economy, it is bound to fall back into the sphere of political economy as the sign, and only the sign, of its abolition.'
14. PIERRE BOURDIEU, Outline of a Theory of Practice, tr. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 171ff.
15. The 'spiritual accounting' metaphor is conventional, if also extremely popular with Protestant writers. My argument is intended to show that such accounting is not merely an economic metaphor - it represents an actual economic practice, the disposition of symbolic capital. The 'final account' to which Perkins refers, when 'the bill of our receipts and expenses' is drawn out (1:777), thus has its referent in practice not only in the Last Judgment, but also the everyday accounting to which Protestants subjected their souls in those diaries that were kept as faithfully as business ledgers. In The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), William Haller quotes the typical diary of John Beadle, published in 1656: The godly man should 'keep a strict account of his effectual calling' (p. 96).
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