A Companion to the Global Renaissance

I was very shy and sparing in declaring the worst things, supposing that never any true Christian was in that case. The fearful blasphemies and annoyances of Satan I did but lightly touch upon, concealing my greatest grievances and fears, supposing that if I should lay open all I should be rejected of Christians as a reprobate, a man forsaken of God and given over to Satan.

(101)

The autobiography concludes, in fact, with a page-long prayer that calls attention to his isolation by using a collective pronoun only once. In contrast, Augustine concludes with: “Of you we must ask, in you we must seek, at you we must knock. Thus, only shall we receive, thus shall we find, thus will it be opened to us” (Sheed, 286; O’Donnell, 205). The prayer that constitutes the entire latter part of the Confessions – several chapters – takes collective pronouns (e.g., “nos”) and verb conjugations as the norm, only very occasionally displaced with an “ego” (“I”) or a “meum” (“my”).

If the pronouns and Norwood’s meticulously documented “alienation” suggest a ambiguity in his own sense of belonging to a collective, “Satan” is identified as the agent of this isolation:

Sometimes he seemed to lean on my back or arms or shoulder, sometimes hanging on my cloak or gown. Sometimes it seemed in my feeling as if he had stricken me in sundry places, sometimes as if he were handling my heart and working withal a wonderful hardness therein, accompanied with many strange passions, affections, lusts, and blasphemies.

(93)

While this kind of thing is quite common in spiritual autobiographies in the seventeenth century, there is nothing at all like it in Augustine, who never imagines himself as engaged in a direct struggle with Satan. For Norwood, however, the fight with Satan is personal and physical : in bed, on the street, at any time or place – “almost continual” – he could be subjected thus. What is particularly striking about Norwood’s narrative of these dramatic experiences – as with the others in the genre – is the highly refined “self” consciousness that they illustrate; Norwood’s sense of the “social” when it emerges at all, seems comparatively remote, alien; he is hyper aware of his body, his anxieties, the peril of his soul. The self is assumed to be isolated, pre-social, and, except for grace, ultimately alone in its fight with “Satan.” Even Norwood’s attempts at explicit social connection are impeded by a sense of threat and isolation: walking down the street “all things seemed in their kinds to be my enemies” (99). It is not, of course, that he never describes meetings with, or comforts of, family, friends, and ministers but rather that these are always narrated at a remove from the immediate site of battle between his soul and “Satan.”

“Satan” assaults Norwood, not only rendering his body a battleground but also calling attention to its enclosure and his subjective alienation. However, “Satan,” too, as we have already seen, is a battleground in the period, a cultural sign through which personal and interpersonal relations and change are being experienced and understood, though not always in the same way. Strachey, for his part, associated “devilish disquiets” with disruption of traditional social hierarchy. The Diggers, for their part, viewed “the serpent” as a figure for the “imagination” that gives rise to private property and exploitation, and such “division” as Norwood experiences: “the serpent that deceives the man [so that] mankind falls from single simplicity to be full of division.” Norwood interprets Satan another way, as a threat to his individual self, revealing the costs of emergent capital even to someone becoming what Gramsci would later call its “organic intellectual” – an adept and theorist of one of its enabling practices. Later, in his chapters on “primitive accumulation,” Marx calls this alienating “Satan” by its social name – capitalism – to free it from the constraints of the individualizing narrative into which Norwood helps insert it – a narrative through which inequality will be justified as an effect of an earlier historical moment when the “diligent, intelligent and above all frugal elite” were separated from the “lazy rascals spending their substance, and more, in riotous living.” When this “nursery tale” becomes accepted as “history,” exploitation, alienation, and the individual, all become normalized in it (873). The Diggers – with their insistence on the “common” – mounted a resistance to the conditions that later conjure up this tale, suggesting an alternative path to modernity, but they – and the radical commons – were defeated. In enclosing his “self” and land as emergent capitalism demanded, while obscuring other possibilities, Norwood helps to write the history of the victors in a global idiom, in which domestic and colonial practices are allied.

This global history insinuates itself as affirmative, or, at least, necessary, such that any ensuing symptoms at the level of the subject are assumed to be mere personal pathology. Indeed, it is easy enough to transcode Norwood’s affliction from a religious to a psychological idiom, as, for example, Meredith Skura does, but in so doing she moves from one individual-normalizing narrative to another. Michael Taussig, alternatively, has read Devil tales as social: “a stunningly apt symbol of … alienation,” in the Marxist sense of being detached from one’s proper social being by the objectification of the market (xi). Understood in these terms, Norwood’s affliction can be viewed as not only “personal” spiritual anguish, nor psychic dissonance alone, but as symptoms of the social cost extracted by the 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.