Donald E. Pease
The new materialism arose in part as a reaction to the inattention to the problematic treatment of matter in the heyday of the so-called linguistic turn, and in particular to what new materialists perceive as the overstatement of poststructuralist and social constructivist approaches. New materialism includes numerous perspectives under its banner, including speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, actor–network theory, and speculative realism. The premise these materialists share is the collapse of the human/nature binary that underpins modernist conceptions of a passive nature (or inert matter) awaiting masterful representations devised by active human agents.1 What is new in the new materialism exerts the force of the materially real in that it cannot be defined exclusively in terms of the relationship between signs. To ideologues who assign language a constitutive world-making role, the new materialists respond that language can affect how we understand the ontological but does not constitute it.2
The neglect of the agency of matter is considered one of the most perplexing features of the preoccupation with language and signification characterizing the linguistic turn. Efforts to rectify this neglect have led new materialists to concoct ways of theorizing the complicated interdependencies of the discursive and the material, the scientific and the humanistic, the natural and the cultural, the human and the nonhuman in biological as well as social formations. With these concerted efforts, they have illuminated the agency of what Jane Bennett, a prominent figure in the movement, calls “vibrant matter”: “the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans, but also to act as quasi-agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.”3
In Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Bennett theorizes a new form of materialism where natural objects and events are dispersed processes and complexly articulated sites whereon the quasi agency of nonhuman assemblages is brought into play. When suffused with what Bennett calls “vibrant materiality,” the entire nonhuman world of things itself becomes creative and constitutive. Even apparently inert inorganic entities such as metals and minerals become sufficiently active to produce mobile connections. The remarkable agency Bennett attributes to “thing-power” discloses the strange ability of things “to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence or aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience . . . a liveliness intrinsic to the materiality of the thing formerly known as an object” (xvi). Bennett wrote Vibrant Matter at a time when humanity’s purported right to exercise mastery over nature had resulted in so much damage to the earth’s ecosystems as to render imaginable a renegotiation of what Michel Serres has conceptualized as a centuries-old “natural contract.”4 In Serres’s account of the contract’s terms, it was nature itself that recognized each member of the species Homo sapiens as an autonomous individual, in possession of the natural right to exercise control over nature. Because this position of human mastery was understood to come from nature itself, any effort to co-opt or displace it was presumed unnatural. As it happens, nature has also provided the agency empowered to renegotiate the terms of this imagined contract. One recognizable personification of this agency is the vibrant matter that Bennett hails as capable of radically undermining any residual claims to human mastery.5
Rather than remaining an inanimate backdrop and setting for mankind’s ecocidal and suicidal proclivities, the biotic and abiotic things animated by the vibrant matter described in Bennett’s manifesto possess a quasi-agential power humanity can neither dominate nor control without doing tremendous violence to itself. In light of such a decisive reorientation in the relationship between human and nonhuman things, one might expect Bennett to align Vibrant Matter with environmental-activist initiatives. However, Bennett refuses to align her new materialist practices with a definitive interpretive protocol or activist movement. To explain the grounds for her nonalignment, Bennett has pointedly remarked on the disparity between the reformist educational agenda of environmentalists who recommend learning better ways to “live on earth” and the radical disposition of vital materialists “who live as earth” (111; emphasis added). Bennett describes her political stratagems as indirect because they target not the macrolevel politics of law, policy, or institutional change but rather the micropolitics of sensibility formation.
Materialism, as Bennett is well aware, takes on a different valence within the disciplines of political theory and history. When political theorists and historians link specific material questions to historical agents or political movements, they customarily attach the qualifier “historical.” The distinction between “historical” and “new” materialism is significant. In contrast to new materialism, historical materialism is observant of the historically specific material conditions under which objects are produced and the usages to which they are put within social orders. Historical materialists are less concerned with investigating the agency of matter than with interrogating the historically specific material conditions of human productions, including the material conditions for the emergence of new materialism as an interdisciplinary movement. Historical materialists who have responded to Bennett’s work home in on what Bennett’s concept metaphor “the dispersal of agency” ignores.6
Among other matters, Bennett’s attentiveness to the wide distribution of agency across human and nonhuman actants conceals the existence of enduring structures of power that tend to confine human interactions with nonhumans to expressions of domination and exploitation. Moreover, Bennett’s refusal to spell out which actants are endowed with sufficient agency to be considered causative operators in a specific situation makes it difficult to know how to redress an imbalance of power or prevent a deleterious chain reaction. Indeed, in its emphasis on relations of contingency, change, openness, and becoming, Bennett’s new materialism simply leaves us “without the resources to analyze and resist asymmetrical power relations.”7
Rather than addressing the specific merits of such arguments, Bennett characterizes historical materialist critics as limited by their anthropocentric disposition toward ecological matters. Unlike her critics, Bennett is quite skeptical of the role politics can play in altering historically sedimented relations between human and nonhuman. “Because politics is itself often construed as an exclusively human domain, what registers on it is a set of material constraints on or a context for human action” (xvi). She defends her insistence on the wide distribution of agency across an assemblage of actants by arguing that it resists the temptations of “moral condemnation” and the identification of a “guilty party” (38).
Despite such reservations, however, toward the end of Vibrant Matter Bennett adds a “recognition scene” to her exposition, a scene designed to indicate the potential impact of her project on historically specific sociopolitical arrangements. Among other actants in this moment of anagnorisis, Bennett uses her “‘own’ body” to exemplify what distinguishes the peculiar agency she attributes to vibrant matter from the agency that political traditions describe as a capability restricted to human beings. In the following passage, Bennett intimates the potential impact of this distinction on core tenets of the US social contract—a bounded self-interested individual and a cohesive body politic—when she depicts “swarms of foreigners” inhabiting the human body as exemplifications of the forces of vital materiality capable of disrupting the coherence of both notions:
Vital materiality better captures an “alien” quality of our own flesh, and in so doing reminds humans of the very radical character of the (fractious) kinship between the human and the nonhuman. My “own” body is material, and yet this vital materiality is not fully or exclusively human. My flesh is populated and constituted by different swarms of foreigners. The crook of my elbow, for example, is “a special ecosystem, a bountiful home to no fewer than six tribes of bacteria” [Nicholas Wade]. . . . The bacteria in the human microbiome collectively possess at least 100 times as many genes as the mere 20,000 or so in the human genome. The its outnumber the mes. In a world of vibrant matter, it is not enough to say that we are “embodied.” We are, rather, an array of bodies, many different kinds of them in a nested set of microbiomes . . . [and] if we were more attentive to the indispensable foreignness that we are . . . this truism, and the cultivated talent for remembering it, forms a key part of the newish self that needs to emerge, the self of a new self-interest. (112–13)
Bennett does not spell out the specific changes in human norms such an alteration of perspective would bring about, but this passage does set in play an assemblage of interconnected mutations that culminates in the necessary emergence of a starkly different orientation in the relationships between humans and nonhumans. The arousal of the awareness “that the human is not exclusively human” and that we are made up of diverse tribes and populations of “its” and “mes” sets this relay of adjustments into operation. However, it is the recognition of “the (fractious) kinship between the human and the nonhuman” that instigates the life-changing experience marked in the shift of the figure in and through whom this series takes place from “my ‘own’ body” to “we are, rather, an array of bodies.” This transvaluation of Homo sapiens’ historically accustomed understanding of self-interest in turn conjures the recognition that an utterly different genre of the human “needs to emerge.” This newish self’s vigilant “attentiveness to the indispensable foreignness that we are” would, according to Bennett, bring an end to the “violently reckless ways” humans have behaved across millennia (112–13).
Because they work with altogether different epistemological, ontological, and (bio)political assumptions, practitioners of materialist methods of historical inquiry rarely enter into productive interchanges with Bennett’s work. However, in his 2015 Tanner Lectures, The Weight of All Flesh: The Subject Matter of Political Economy, the literary theorist Eric Santner cites this passage as an occasion to figure out the “fractious kinship” between the “vital materiality” motivating Bennett’s newish self and what Santner calls the “spectral materiality” suffusing the “enfleshed” bond Captain Ahab forges with the crew on board the Pequod.8 The Weight of All Flesh builds on Santner’s effort to render Ernst Kantorowicz’s analysis of medieval political theology presented in The King’s Two Bodies applicable to modern, constitutional states.9 Santner specifically argues that in the wake of democratic revolutions, “the king’s glorious body—the virtually real supplement to his empirical, mortal body—was in some sense dispersed into new locations as a spectral materiality,” and as a result of this dissemination “a surplus of immanence” came to “surcharge” the “life of the People” (23).
We might get at the heart of the difference between spectral and vital materiality by posing questions that Santner believes crucial to understanding the historical consequences of the momentous transition Bennett has imagined. What is it that binds human beings together at times of profound social transformation? How can human beings undergo such a radical transformation in their foundational orientation to the world without feeling the traumatizing loss of a whole way of life? More specifically, how can possessive individuals, sharing the twin foundational convictions that they have sole ownership of their bodies and that humans are utterly unrelated to nonhumans, accept the “truism” that swarms of foreign bacteria far outnumber the microbes in the human genome in their flesh without experiencing this matter of fact as the loss of the bodily integrity they believe necessary to human flourishing?
For reasons that I am about to elaborate, Santner would describe spectral materiality as what remains after the newish self utterly supplants the possessive individual’s prior lived experience of vital materiality. Before doing so, I need to mention what Bennett has left out of this recognition scene. Although Bennett celebrates vital materiality for awakening the newish self to the awareness of its “indispensable foreignness,” the vibrant matter that is in fact generating the need for this newish self’s expansion of interest is the very real fear of humanity’s extinction.
Santner is especially attuned to the radical alteration in normative assumptions—what he calls “subject-matter”—that Bennett’s newish self would effect. Santner is unlike Bennett in that he believes that human beings invest libidinal energies in a socioeconomic order’s norms and rules. This libidinal investment surcharges the order’s normativity with what Santner calls “spectral materiality” at, or rather as, the “jointure” through which humans incarnate normativity.
The weightiness of this surplus flesh indexes the contingency and ultimate groundlessness of the norms in question. Human subjects’ individual and collective experience of this uncannily surplus flesh renders it the subject matter through which they subjectivize their social ties with a historical form of life.
Somatic life lived under normative pressure is a life answerable to questions of what we owe to others, to society, and to ourselves. The new materialists, on the other hand, adopt “animist” traditions and habits of thought that disperse the normativity proper to human orders of purpose and meaning “into self-perpetuating patterns of organized matter” (Santner, 82). Santner considers Bennett a representative example of the new materialists who would dispense altogether with the “subject-matter” comprising the materiality proper to human subjectivity. The prospect of this privation leads Santner to propose that it is only by “assuming our responsibility for this subject-matter and for the ways in which we serve to sustain its current configurations, that we can begin to become truly responsive to the multiple forms of vibrant matter that border on and move through the human” (64).
In The Weight of All Flesh, Santner turns his fidelity to such subject matter into the basis for a fresh perspective on the characters and actions in Chapter 36 of Moby-Dick, “The Quarter-Deck.” In his interpretation of Captain Ahab’s dialogic intercourse with the crew, Santner draws a decisive distinction between the “busybodiedness” inciting the crew’s delirium from Bennett’s vibrant matter. In Santner’s reading of their encounters, the white whale comes to figure for Ahab and the crew as the paradigmatic instance of the void, the lack of foundation for human norms, that insistently remains at the enigmatic jointure of the somatic and the normative (253). Santner also specifies what distinguishes spectral materiality from Bennett’s vibrant iteration by adding what he considers missing or inexactly explained in her project. Bennett inverts the relationship between the material and the symbolic so as to reinstate the agency of matter. In Santner’s view, symbolic fabrications like jointure exert materially real effects. New materialists who fail to recognize the spectral materiality of the imagined joint sinewing Ahab’s bond with the crew would also perforce ignore the way this carnal suture generates the “busybodiedness” of the crew.
Santner faults Bennett in particular for overlooking the peculiar materiality that Moby-Dick brings into spectacular visibility. Discontented with what he considers the political quietism inherent in Bennett’s conceptualization of vibrant matter, Santner puts spectral materiality to the work of explaining what emerges when Ahab and the crew break their contractual ties to the Nantucket shipowners. The surplus of immanence surging through Ahab’s empirical, mortal body at this decisive moment, as Santner explains, is in some sense injected into the crew members as the stuff innervating their commitment to hunt and kill Moby Dick.
Bennett has not yet countered Santner’s criticisms with a contrary reading of Moby-Dick. Yet throughout Vibrant Matter, she has nonetheless formulated statements that make such a response imaginable. For example, her account of the potentially transformative power of the teeming multiplicity of often contradictory actants inherent in everything supplies readers a warrant to recognize the potential agential power in the artifacts, places, and tools on the Pequod that Santner regards as de-animated things. Moreover, throughout Vibrant Matter, Bennett takes pains to explain why the vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans cannot be contained in biopolitical apparatuses like the jointure tacking Ahab’s vendetta to the crew members’ flesh. Indeed, Bennett proposes stratagems for breaking Ahab’s biopolitical bond with the crew, a bond that Santner considers intractable when, toward the end of Vibrant Matter, she asks, “What if we loosened the tie between participation and human language use, encountering the world as a swarm of vibrant materials entering and leaving agentic assemblages?” (107). Bennett explicitly insists that such assemblages be considered not a biopolitical production but an ontological framework from below in which objects appear “as things, that is, as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics” (5).
In “Melville’s Ontology” and in the introduction to this volume, Meredith Farmer has proposed that Herman Melville’s knowledge of the emergent science of electrical biology is the basis for his production of an “ontological framework from below.” The framework expressly distinguishes the quasi-agentic forces animating the body electric that Ahab generates with the crew from the surplus libidinality that Santner finds generated at the site of the jointure connecting the crew’s soma to Ahab’s extralegal norms. Unlike Santner, who casts the quarterdeck scene after the political model of an assemblage of persons at a public ritual of symbolic investiture, Farmer persuasively argues that Melville presents the activities that take place in “The Quarter-Deck” in the model of a scientific laboratory’s staging of an experiment in electrobiology.10
When Farmer reads activities taking place on “The Quarter-Deck” from the perspective of electrobiology, she explains that Ahab has devised an experimental apparatus that links Ahab’s magnetizing interlocutory question-and-response interchange with the crew at the opening of the scene (where Ahab responds with atypical “wild approval” to the “hearty animation” into which his “question[s] had so magnetically thrown them”) to his attempt to magnetize the mates’ axis of crossed lances at the scene’s conclusion (“it seemed as though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life”), with the gold doubloon nailed to the masthead and the metallic physiognomies of crew members serving as conductors that relay the charge in an ongoing feedback loop.11
Santner’s Ahab channels the spectral materiality generated at the site of the jointure connecting the crew’s soma to Ahab’s extralegal norms into the motive force needed to hunt the white whale, but Farmer discerns electromagnetic currents as the quasi-agentic energies interconnecting Ahab and the crew. “The Quarter-Deck” is customarily interpreted as the representation of an unfolding drama wherein Ahab nullifies the crew’s contractual agreement with the Pequod’s Nantucket shipowners and subjugates the crew to his protototalitarian will to blood vengeance against Moby Dick. With a few notable exceptions, commentators on “The Quarter-Deck” focus on Ahab’s overbearing will, framing him as a near-dictatorial controlling agent.12
Although he has added significant variations, Santner’s interpretation ratifies this account. “The force of Ahab’s will and charisma,” Santner decisively asserts, “allows him to seduce the crew into believing, at least at a ‘lower layer’ of psychic life, that the killing of this Leviathan will eliminate, offer a sort of ‘final solution’ to, what does not work in human life, what remains recalcitrant to human purpose” (253; emphasis in original). Farmer intends her description of the quarterdeck as an experiment in electrobiology to contravene customary understandings of Ahab’s monomania as a political disposition that informs his coercive dictatorial will.
Remarking that Melville’s relationship to science surprisingly remains unexamined, Farmer goes about correcting this scholarly lapse with the claim that an understanding of Melville’s scientific orientation would radically transform, among other important topics, settled scholarly accounts of Ahab’s character. With findings in electrobiology as sanction, Farmer diagnoses Ahab’s monomania as a nervous disorder caused by an excess of the electromagnetic charges “accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life” that Ahab attempts to cure when he translates this excess into the basis for the electromagnetic relationships he forges with the crew.13
Santner’s interpretation of “The Quarter-Deck” presupposes that the Pequod’s crew is an aggregation of deracinated life forms surcharged with an excess vitality emerging on the site at which they contract a bond with Ahab. However, were Ahab’s interlocutory transaction with the crew to be regarded as an experiment in electrobiology, as Farmer says it should, that perspective would allow a significantly different understanding of the interaction between Ahab and the crew. The conceptualization of Ahab as an electrobiologist intent on conducting a scientific experiment in an effort to bring an alternative demos into existence contravenes the representation of Ahab as a totalitarian despot armed with the “biopower,” as Foucault named this matter, “to administer, optimize, and multiply [life], subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.”14 Regarded from Farmer’s perspective, the image of Ahab as imperious dictator gives way to an understanding of Captain Ahab as the representative of and spokesperson for the body electric that he cogenerates with the assemblage of shipmates on the Pequod. According to Farmer, the electromagnetic matter animating Ahab’s apparent coercion interconnects the Leyden jar, lightning, the gold doubloon, numerous other quasi-agentic things, and Ahab himself in a relationship of radical interdependency with the crew.
I have introduced Farmer’s perspective because it permits me to elaborate a reading of Moby-Dick that is formally compatible with Bennett’s understanding of the workings of active matter as predicated on an ontology from below. Farmer’s perspective on the quarterdeck scene also permits an assessment of the disagreements between Santner and Bennett in terms of the distinctively different portrayals they afford of Captain Ahab’s interactions with the crew. For Santner, Ahab’s violent tethering of the crew to his revenge quest generates an undead “busybodiedness” interconnecting them to the sovereign “super-egoic” powers surcharging his resolve, but the energies Farmer discerns circulating within the whalemen on the Pequod resemble the vibrant matter Bennett describes as intractable to such biopolitical constraints.
However, when Ishmael, the virtual narrator of the action unfolding on the quarterdeck, describes the energies animating Ahab’s call-and-response experiment with the crew as a display of electromagnetism, he specifies what makes them identical neither to Bennett’s vibrant things nor to Santner’s busybodies. Moreover, the discourses through which electromagnetism circulates in Ishmael’s narration exceed the reach of the science of electrobiology. Electromagnetism is a hybrid phenomenon in Bruno Latour’s sense that it crosses the divide between exact scientific knowledge and different pursuits of knowledge power. In contrast to electrobiology, electromagnetism is enmeshed in multiple discourses, including pseudoscience and the occult, religion and magic, political theology, and mythology.15 While the term “electromagnetism” is commonly used to identify a property of technicity in the natural world, it also names a relationship of continued subjection to signifying forces that lie outside the person. Electromagnetism is, like Bennett’s vibrant matter, of nonhuman origin; like Santner’s spectral materiality, it is also narrated, historical, and cultural. Possessing a scientifically observable, empirically verifiable existence that is separable from its phenomenological and discursive manifestation, electromagnetism can be described as at once mediated yet also materially, or rather, vibrantly, real.
To afford the electromagnetism circulating through the men and things assembled on the quarterdeck the significance it warrants, I intend to argue that Ahab’s electromagnetic transactions with the crew accomplish the cultural work that Latour calls the forging of a “Full” or “Complete Constitution.” In the new materialist manifesto titled We Have Never Been Modern, Latour examines the origins and possibilities of the Complete Constitution through an extended meditation on the contractual foundations of politics and science. To achieve that aim, he uses the dispute between Robert Boyle, the “founder” of modern science, and Thomas Hobbes, the inventor of the modern social contract, to exemplify the defects of what he calls the “Modern Constitution.” According to Latour, Boyle devised a scientific method of speaking about natural processes and things purified of any trace of human society, and Hobbes theorized distinctively human conflicts and agreements voided of any trace of natural matter. It is because they purified the discourses of nature and society by expunging from each the traces of the other that Latour holds Boyle and Hobbes jointly responsible for writing the Modern Constitution. In Latour’s estimation, the distinction Boyle and Hobbes demarcated between science and politics is not simply a trait of modernity; it establishes the foundational premise of the Modern Constitution that defines modernity. As Latour argues, “They [Boyle and Hobbes] are inventing our modern world, a world in which the representation of things through the intermediary of the laboratory is forever dissociated from the representation of citizens through the intermediary of the social contract.”16
The exclusionary work of the Modern Constitution is also demonstrably at work in the disagreement between Santner and Bennett over the appropriate distribution of agency to human and nonhuman things. To exemplify the nonhuman vibrant matter penetrating human things, Bennett must deactivate the obstructive agency of Santner’s self-bounded humans; to secure human bodies to biopolitical bindings, Santner must de-animate the agency of Bennett’s nonhuman actants. Latour would describe both nullifying acts as symptomatic of the foundational defect—the installment of a nontraversable separation between nonhuman nature and human culture—of the Modern Constitution.
The concept metaphor of electromagnetism that Ishmael uses to explain Ahab’s transactions in “The Quarter-Deck” does the work of the Complete Constitution by undoing the epistemological dilemmas setting Santner’s historical subject matter and Bennett’s vital materialism in a relationship of mutual exclusion. Santner is able to describe the somatic energies suturing the crew to Ahab’s vendetta, but he cannot explain why the energies Ahab animates in the crew should be understood as confined to the spectral materiality of this jointure.17 Bennett’s discourse can disclose how the vibrant matter that Ahab arouses in the crew members is able to release them from preexisting significative and biopolitical constraints, but she cannot explain what alternative political disposition these animated forms might assume. However, the electromagnetic relay of communication that Ahab instigates with the crew is a hybrid phenomenon in that it motivates Ahab and the crew to commingle the human subject matter that Santner finds missing in Bennett’s self-organizing matter with the vibrant power circulating through the network’s nonhuman things that Bennett faults historical materialists for ignoring.
In one of its genealogies, electromagnetism references the quasi-divine stuff falling out of the king’s second or immortal body. The electromagnetic currents passing through the human and nonhuman things that Ahab assembles on the quarterdeck typify Bennett’s vibrant matter; they also permeate the spectral materiality comprising what Santner refers to as Ahab’s glorious “Second Body.” As I hope to explain, the electromagnetic constitution Ahab cogenerates with the crew is also able to release both the things in Bennett’s agentic assemblages and the humans in Santner’s biopolitical orders from the epistemological blindfolds forestalling recognition of their interimplication. Latour faults the Modern Constitution for having instituted a total separation between the scientific power charged with representing things and the political power charged with representing subjects. However, the electromagnetic constitution Ahab forges with the crew throughout the quarterdeck scene evidences the workings of the Complete Constitution in that it subverts and deforms the rigorous segregation of human and nonhuman ontologies upon which the Modern Constitution is founded. As a hybrid of archaic mythology, political theology, and modern science, Ahab is uniquely empowered to perform the work of recognizing, negotiating with, identifying as, and adding to the disparate population of hybrids that the Modern Constitution rejects.
Contributors to the voluminous archive of scholarly commentary on “The Quarter-Deck” usually restrict the focus of their scholarly attention to the argument between Ahab and the Pequod’s first mate, Starbuck, over Ahab’s decision to change the Pequod’s mission to a hunt for Moby Dick. However, this dispute all but eclipses the electromagnetic constitution Ahab cocreates with the crew. In order to afford the specifics of this prolonged and reciprocal negotiation long-overdue attention, I intend to situate Ahab’s altercation with Starbuck within an encompassing drama of political representation that Latour terms a “trial of force.”
According to Latour, the credibility of modern scientists and politicians alike depend on trials of force, which Latour says consist in “designing devious plots and careful staging that make an actant [by which he means either a modern politician’s constituency or an item in a scientific experiment] participate in new and unexpected situations that will actively define it.”18 Because it is incumbent on politicians, no less than scientists, to stage the forces for which they claim to speak, the trial of force includes the political matters that the Modern Constitution perforce excludes from scientific experiment. Considered from this perspective, the demos, like an experimental phenomenon, is what Isabelle Stengers calls a “fact of art.”19
The sign of the success of a trial of force is that it stages an effect rather than merely causes or produces one. If a scientific experiment succeeds, it transforms “a phenomenon into an experimental fact,” a reliable witness, “authorizing and supporting the thesis of the one who speaks in its name” (Stengers, 138). In political terms one can say that a successful experiment endows a phenomenon with the capacity to elect a spokesperson to represent it—not speaking for an interest but speaking of a phenomenon as an interest. By one reading, it permits an account of “The Quarter-Deck” as an experimental apparatus that presents a trial of force insofar as it stages an electromagnetic assemblage whose members acclaim Ahab as the representative of and spokesperson for their will. To explain the dynamics of Ahab’s trial of force, in the remarks that follow I intend to examine “The Quarter-Deck” as a drama divided into seven separate scenes, and I will address the following interrelated matters: (1) how Ahab engages quandaries that require the perspectives of both historical and vital materialists; (2) why Ahab stages an electromagnetic constitution with the crew on the quarterdeck; (3) how, why, whether, and for how long Ahab successfully represents the crew’s interests.
Before taking up these questions, I need to briefly situate the crew’s breach of contract with the Nantucket shipowners within a broader historical context. Moby-Dick was composed against the historical backdrop of a generalized crisis in the binding power of contractual agreements. As the characters, actions, and plot of Moby-Dick were taking shape in Melville’s mind, the dispute over race and slavery precipitated a crisis that reached its tipping point in 1850. Following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, the portion of the American people who believed slavery violated the nation’s foundational principles regarded the enforcement of this law as evidence that the social contract was entirely broken. American citizens who supported slavery viewed the government’s failure to seek out and punish violators of the Fugitive Slave Act as grounds for the nullification of their contractual relations to the Union. Following their reciprocal abrogation of the ties binding them to the US Constitution, the antagonistic parties entered a de jure state of civil war.
“King Ahab,” as politicians in the 1850s referred to him, was allegorized as a prefiguration of the slaveholder by abolitionists; to secessionists in the South he was considered a guardian of the Union; writers who were opposed to James Polk’s declaration of war with Mexico and critical of westward expansion cast Ahab as the embodiment of an imperializing will to power that would bring the entirety of the continental United States within the provenance of the idol Baal.20
“The Quarter-Deck” unfolds as a metamorphic happening that takes place on different spatial scales and in nonsynchronous temporal registers and seems to have the eventfulness of the entire novel circling within it. Ishmael, the chapter’s narrator, distinguishes what takes place from narrative proprieties by casting it in the form of a drama. He also alienates from the person who initially participated in the unfolding action. He does so because the Ishmael who played a part in the quarterdeck activities also, as he attests in the following passage, swore an oath of fealty to Ahab’s mission to hunt and kill Moby Dick in the ceremony depicted at the conclusion of the chapter: “I, Ishmael, was one of the crew, my shouts had gone up with the rest, my oath had gone up with the rest, my oath had been welded to theirs, and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul” (179). Ishmael thereby installs the division between the part of himself that participated in the action and the witness who now narrates it to safeguard himself from being pulled back into the orbit of the oath ceremony at the chapter’s conclusion.21
In Ishmael’s telling, the entirety of Ahab’s drama seems not only presaged but condensed in “The Quarter-Deck.” Ahab returned from his initial encounter with Moby Dick as a broken and porous body open to disaggregation and reassemblage. Upon severing Ahab’s leg, the white whale brings it into relays of relationality interconnecting Ahab with marine, aqueous, geological, and meteorological actants that permanently alter his way of being in the world.22
This chapter also marks Ahab’s first official encounter with the crew. Prior to its inception, the crew looks on in bewilderment at the sight of Ahab walking in circles around the captain’s watch on the quarterdeck. In the course of each circuit Ahab appears to be taken hold of by energies that Melville later describes as comparable to being continuously struck by lightning. The intensifying force that has overtaken this electrocuted man becomes all but palpable with each turn of his cycling, so much that it seemed “the inward mould of every outer movement” (160–61).
In the midst of struggling with this alien thing, Ahab abruptly orders Starbuck, the first mate, to “Send everybody aft!” (161). This order interrupts the crew’s workaday activities, positioning the ship and everyone on it in a state of exception that suspends the rules and laws that normally govern the transactions between captain and crew. Ahab and the crew will remain within this anomalous space throughout all the subsequent scenes until the Oath Ceremony.
When an emergency is announced on a whaler, it is customarily in order to ready a crew to escape a pirate attack, evade ramming by an incoming craft, or navigate an impending storm. Yet when the whalemen gather on the quarterdeck as ordered, they discover “with curious and not wholly unapprehensive faces” that it is Ahab himself “who looked not unlike the weather horizon when a storm is coming up.” Astonishingly, in the course of their transactions with Ahab, the assembled crew members themselves acquire the features of a meteorological event that Ahab will later represent in his argument with Starbuck as a hurricane force not even his brave first mate can withstand. “Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck!” (164)
When a ship’s captain calls a state of emergency, this unusual condition grants him the sovereign power to issue extrajudicial commands and perform extralegal activities. At this first official encounter with their captain, the amassed crew members may have expected Ahab to take command by spelling out special assignments he wanted carried out. Ahab does not behave as anticipated. When he addresses the crew from within this space of exception, Ahab does not merely suspend the norms and rules that previously regulated the exchanges between captain and crew. Remarkably, Ahab also suspends his identification with the sovereign authority of the captaincy along with the maritime laws rendering the members of the Pequod’s crew wholly subject to his sovereign authority. This dual suspension—of the captain’s sovereignty and the crew’s subjugation—inaugurates Ahab’s trial of force with an experiment that places actionable sovereign power in a condition of undecidability that remains in effect until the crew members choose whether they want to depose Ahab as their captain or acclaim him as their leader.
The person who stands in the rift between the captain’s sovereignty and the crew is not wholly identifiable with Ahab’s empirical body. Before Ahab begins his official remarks, the first mate and the rest of the crew look on as whatever is possessing him seems to want to find a way out. “‘D’ye mark him, Flask?’ whispered Stubb; ‘the chick that’s in him pecks the shell. ’Twill soon be out’” (160). With his bone leg inserted into an auger hole, and with one hand grasping a shroud, Ahab displays his dysfunctional incarnation of what Santner, after Kantorowicz, calls the “King’s Second Body,” whose sovereignty has been demeaned if not mutilated by Moby Dick (161). As Slavoj Žižek has concisely written apropos the disjunction between a kingly person’s empirical, mortal “body” and his sublime, immortal one, “What is at stake is . . . not simply the split between the empirical person of the king and his symbolic function. The point is rather that this symbolic function redoubles his very body, introducing a split between the visible, material, transient body and another, sublime body, a body made of a special, immaterial stuff.”23
The wound Moby Dick inflicted on Ahab impedes what could be called the symbolic efficiency—the capacity to successfully perform its functions within the symbolic order—of this Second Body. According to Santner, such problems with Second Body proprieties get further exacerbated once the king no longer serves as the principal bearer of sovereignty. As a consequence of the revolutions that took place across Europe between 1789 and 1849, the leaky surplus of the sovereign stuff immanent to a monarch’s Second Body was transferred to the Second Body of the People. After Moby Dick’s crooked jaw tears off a limb, Ahab’s Second Body needs the transfusion of the sovereign power of the crew for its replenishment.
To restore the sovereign matter that Moby Dick extorted, Ahab must devise an entirely unique relationship with the crew. He does so by initiating a reciprocal relationship to the libidinal body onto which sovereign power was supposed to have been transferred when multitudinous peoples unseated tyrants and kings across Europe and the Americas. Quite obviously, the men who signed on as members of the Pequod’s crew and agreed to conform to the rules of the ship’s line of command cannot provide to Ahab the sovereign power he needs. Or rather, they can invest him with this power only if they activate the People’s Second Body by mounting a revolt on board the Pequod. In this experiment, Ahab must risk the crew’s complete overthrow of his rule as the precondition for the replenishment of his sovereign carnalities.
This extraordinary transaction begins once Ahab “vehemently” poses a sequence of questions concerning what the men say and do when they spot a whale:
“What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?”
“Sing out for him!” was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed voices.
“Good!” cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them.
“And what do ye next, men?”
“Lower away, and after him!”
“And what tune is it ye pull to, men?”
“A dead whale or a stove boat!” (161)
From the inception of this interlocutory experiment onward, an unregulatable excess of affect characterizes the relationship between Ahab and the crew. The intensity of the men’s libidinal relationship to Ahab exceeds the disciplinary technologies to which they were previously subjected. Ahab directs his vehement excitations at what might be called the crew’s libidinal body—the locus for the drives impelling one and all to take up, as their singular calling, life-and-death encounters with whales on the open sea. With each surcharged response, the crew members give voice to a collective craving for such confrontations. When Ahab yells, “What do ye do when ye see a whale?,” the members of the crew do not conform their response to the protocols of rational deliberation. Neither interlocutor takes the question-and-response experiment to involve a sign relation to be rendered meaningful; Ahab and the crew turn these intense give-and-takes as a felt inducement that directly affects the libidinal body. The libidinal body differs from the anatomical body in that it is at the service of drives that cannot be controlled by a regulatory technology. Incomprehensible and unpredictable, the libidinal body does not function by way of inhibitions; it activates the unconscious and is discernible only in affective excesses.24
Moreover, as the following passage attests, Ahab and crew alike spontaneously respond to an ongoing incitation to partake in a field of intense vocal energies animated through the colloquy itself:
“Sing out for him!” was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed voices.
“Good!” cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them. (161)
The surplus of immanence, as Santner might describe this matter, in Ahab’s vehement questions is in some sense getting injected into the crew throughout this speech experiment. As he shouts into this animated gathering, Ahab is himself seized by a “wild approval” that interfuses with the “hearty animation” in the crew’s “magnetically” charged response to the force of his reciprocally receptive question. The intense vocality suffusing Ahab’s responsive questions is received by the crew as an intensifying energy sufficiently reversible to make questioner and respondent alike feel simultaneously affected by this energy field of questions and answers. Charged-up coparticipants, Ahab and the crew are simultaneously immersed in the sonic boom this interlocutory experiment has materialized.
Throughout this interlocutory experiment, it is the libidinal aspect of Ahab’s Second Body that enters into communication with the vital matter of the crew’s libidinality. Throughout the ensuing experiment, Ahab and crew forgo deliberation over the appropriate rules and norms to govern their activities and communicate primarily by way of the incalculable energies of their libidinal bodies.
In an essay that provides a useful perspective on what drives this energetic transaction, Jean-François Lyotard coined the term “sign-tensor” to describe the vocal impulses through which Ahab and the crew communicate.25 According to Lyotard, tensors should be understood as the intense excitants through which signs are transmitted to the libidinal body. Tensors are what get released at a sign’s reception. At that instant, signs divide into the affectively separable regions of sensational intensities and intelligible intentions. The reception of the sign’s tensors effects a nonsignifiable “auto-affection” that precedes the conversion of their “recipient” into the “addressee of a sign-representation” (Lyotard, 6). Understood as the sensational effects that signs produce within the libidinal body of these co-respondents, tensors are the paths of impulse that split off from Ahab’s questions and the crew’s responses and supply the libidinal body with “new opportunities to intensify itself” (Lyotard, 13–14).
By undertaking this opening interchange with the crew, Ahab has placed what Santner would call his Kingly Second Body in jeopardy. Indeed, once Ahab becomes a coparticipant in this soundscape, it is difficult to establish and sustain firmly held distinctions between Ahab’s agency, the crew’s actions, and the nonhuman forces—the impending storm, the emergency powers—with which Ahab and the crew are interimplicated. Ahab may have intended his forceful questions to magnetically charge the crew with the vibrant matter emanating from his encounter with Moby Dick. Nevertheless, each time the crew responds to one of his interrogatives with excessive force, the storm he has activated within the crew discharges its gale force in ways he could not have anticipated. More ominously, inasmuch as Ahab’s intensifying speech acts have allowed the crew to give expression to potentially revolutionary emergency powers, he has also made it possible for crew members to join their “clubbed voices” in a mutiny against him.
In light of this ambivalence, the relationship the crew configures with Ahab might be regarded as a hybrid of Santner’s spectral materiality and Bennett’s vibrant matter. On the one hand, the increase in energy accompanying the crew’s outcries might seem to impersonate the intensifying gusts of wind at the onset of an electromagnetic storm. On the other hand, these “clubbed voices” have also brought on board the Pequod echoes of the cacophonous sonorities vocalized by the insurgent revolutionaries storming across Europe at this historical conjuncture, revolutionaries whose toppling of kings and despots transferred regal powers to the sovereign power of the people.
The forces to which Captain Ahab and his renegade mariners herein abandon themselves will eventually entangle all the persons and things Ahab has assembled on the quarterdeck—crew, whaleboats, shroud, charts, topmast, gold doubloon, compass, tarpaulins, Ahab, harpoons, whalebones, gale winds—in the seawater’s processes of dissolution.
Even though materially imaginable, however, this fate has not yet taken hold of the Pequod’s captain and crew. At this point in the action, the crew members’ vivifyingly expressive responses may have aroused a desire to overthrow Captain Ahab, but they have not yet decided to act upon it. The affecting matter that will inform this decision is the crew members’ response to the event elided from the phrase “A dead whale or a stove boat!” For what takes place in this effacement is the crew members’ own confrontation with the void, the terrifying contingency at the heart of their calling that is normally covered over either by what Santner calls the undead “busybodiedness” of their activities or by the contract that provides an economic rationale for their actions or by the captain’s rules and orders.
The strife elided from the phrase “A dead whale or a stove boat!” also renders imaginable Ahab’s near-lethal encounter with what seemed the sovereign agency of nature itself empowered to break the law in Genesis that granted mankind the antediluvian power to exercise dominion over all the creatures on land and sea (161). That revenant haunts this entire scene with the as yet unasked questions that impel Ahab to call everybody aft: Will the crew agree to join Ahab’s quest to reexperience the event that he cannot materialize without their participation? Will the crew decide instead to overthrow and kill the leader who dares ask this?
Ahab’s opening speech experiment with the crew is the first of a series of scenes in “The Quarter-Deck” trial of force. Each assemblage situates Ahab and the crew within a differently configured field of energy. The discussion of the first scene has drawn attention to the double focus—the drive to hunt and kill whales, possible mutiny against Ahab—of the fierce libidinal energies Ahab awakens in the crew. As a frame with which to understand what takes place in the second scene, I need to return briefly to the topic of the King’s Two Bodies. Throughout the opening scene Captain Ahab addresses the drives interanimating the connection between what I referred to as their “libidinal” Second Bodies. In placing the libidinal aspect of his Second Body into relationship with the crew, Ahab risks eclipsing the regal value of the quintessentially glorious substance immanent to what Santner calls the “flesh” of his sublime Second Body. Before he can reencounter the Leviathan, Ahab needs the crew to want to supplement his sublime body with what Antonio Negri calls the comparably resplendent “constituent” powers the people acquired through their revolutionary overthrow of tyrants and kings.26
In the first scene, Ahab successfully released the crew’s impassioned response to the question “What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?” The response brought the men into touch with the tempestuous libidinal drives they discharge into hunting and killing whales. In the second scene, Ahab strives to contact an aspect of the crew’s libidinal body that sets to vibrating the surplus constituent power condensed within each whaleman’s innermost vitality. To do so Ahab draws the crew’s attention to the practices in and through which the men assess the value of their activities on board the Pequod. At the outset of the second scene, Ahab introduces the first of a series of shifts in the speaking positions that Ahab and the crew take up. This alteration begins when Ahab adds the command phrase “Look ye!” to the interrogative “d’ye see” and changes the crew’s field of attention from sound to sight. This sudden shift in sensory registers also sublimates the intense auditory energies suffusing Ahab and the crew’s earlier interchange onto a radiant visual field. Then, like a priest elevating the Host at High Mass, Ahab quite literally lifts the focus of each whaleman’s attention by holding up to the rays of the sun a “broad bright” gold doubloon:
“All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white whale. Look ye! d’ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?”—holding up a broad bright coin to the sun—“it is a sixteen dollar piece, men. D’ye see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul . . . look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!” (161–62)
When Ahab holds up the gold coin before the crew’s eyes, he wants the men to behold the difference in the valuation of the white whale and normal whales. He is simultaneously asking the crew members not to do what they customarily do when they see ordinary sperm whales. The command “Look ye!” interrupts the relay of interconnected activities—sing out, lower away, “A dead whale or a stove boat!”—the crew members perform when they spot a whale. Ahab pledges this piece of gold to the sailor whose vigilant look first raises the white whale because he wants to arouse each crew member’s desire to look watchfully and to conjoin that desire with a resplendent wonder—the white whale—that, as a glorious thing to behold, will do more than gratify this desire. Ahab’s appeal to the visionary capability inherent in each sailor is of a piece with his effort to align the emergent sovereign power of the crew with an extraordinary event capable of educing the deepest value of the men’s whale work (161–62).
In 1850 gold was the standard for the valuation of all other forms of US currency. The gold in Ahab’s doubloon stands as the objective correlative for all the extraordinary things in Moby-Dick that exceed, exist apart from, mark exceptions to, yet set the measure for the valuation of everything else on the Pequod. It is through the mediation of the gold doubloon that Ahab aspires to put what remains of his effulgent Second Body to the work of setting into vibration what each whaleman values most dearly in his whale work. Ahab’s lifting their eyes to this glorious prize brings each sailor into a personal relationship with the gold that is itself in relation to what they regard as most valuable in their labor, and in relationship as well with Ahab’s Second Body and what Ahab most values in his relationship with the white whale (Santner, 109–13).
Although it can neither be assessed nor compensated according to the rules and calculations regulating the crew’s other whaling activities, Ahab’s evocation of the anticipated encounter with the white whale brings each whaleman in touch with the potential to perform a truly extraordinary act. In Chapters 26, “Knights and Squires,” Ishmael celebrates what Ahab strives to contact as the “valor” that “meanest mariners and castaways” “feel within” when called to perform “exalted” deeds as an “abounding dignity” more deserving of reverence than “robed investiture[s]”:
But this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! (117)
As the exception to the norm of the whalemen’s other activities, valor exemplifies the standard for the valuation of all their other labor practices (Santner, 111–13). The liturgical ceremony Ahab performs before the crew members correlates this valorized activity with the pursuit of a white whale that, like gold, is the exception in whom nature has inscribed the universal cetological principle of whaleness itself.27 The gold in Ahab’s doubloon marks the crew’s valor as an equivalent surplus value. In saying “Look ye!” while lifting the crew’s eyes to a gold coin whose dazzling radiance is enhanced by the sun’s rays, Ahab enjoins each crew member’s innermost valor to find visionary eyes to behold its outward manifestation in a radiant portion of the glorious deed that is theirs to actualize.
Although he introduces it as a standard of valuation, however, Ahab does not as yet propose that the gold doubloon replace the means of compensation the crew members agreed to accept in their joint-stock-company arrangement with the Nantucket shipowners. Nor does Ahab proffer it as payment for extra work. Ahab has not added another task to their labor; he has disclosed the valor that imbues all their activities with vibrant dignity. It might appear as if Ahab intends his offer of the gold coin to turn each crew member into a competitor for the prize. As Ahab will soon make evident in his argument with Starbuck, however, the valor an encounter with Moby Dick calls forth in captain and crew cannot be compensated.
Ahab continues this liturgical rite with a quasi-ritualistic expression of the desire to interconnect the singular carnality of the crew’s Second Body with his own. As the crew looks on, Ahab asks Starbuck to hand him the top-maul. Then to project Second Body “lustre” onto the coin, Ahab, while mumbling the “wheels of his vitality” into it, rubs the gold piece against his outer vestments (162). Lifting the top-maul with one hand and exhibiting the gold doubloon with the other, Ahab places a theatrical frame around his nailing the gold coin into the masthead so as to make himself publicly accountable for what he pledges:
Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the mainmast with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: “Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!” (162)
Ahab may not have yet proposed gold as a replacement for the method of compensation laid out in the joint-stock-company agreement he and the crew cosigned with the Nantucket shipowners. Nevertheless, Ahab’s pounding the gold coin into the Pequod’s mainmast does sound a potentially criminal variation on the “A dead whale or a stove boat!” refrain from the opening scene. By marking the Pequod as itself a material agent in the pursuit of the white whale, Ahab replaces the antagonists in the crew’s tune with Moby Dick and the Pequod, respectively. When he conjures an image of Moby Dick’s staving the Pequod as an acceptable risk, Ahab also tacitly places himself as the leader of a potential revolt who would break the contractual agreement with the Pequod’s owners and usurp the ship for a mission of his own.
With this symbolic enactment of a deed capable of providing the crew with a glorious revolutionary mission, Ahab initiates a process of collective self-reflexivity among “my boys” that fosters the crew’s awareness of itself as a group capable of making a decision. However, it is important to recognize that at this juncture of his experiment, Ahab does not explicitly announce his intention, and he does not impose his rebellious disposition on the crew.
Given the import of this ceremony to the fate of Ahab’s Second Body, it is even more crucial to recognize the significance of the crew’s response to his actions. In The Weight of All Flesh, Santner calls attention to how essential the people’s acclamations are to the constitution of the king’s sublime body. What Santner calls the “flesh” of that body should be understood as the sublimate of the people’s acclamations, praise, pledges, and oaths of fealty in and through which the sovereign is constituted and sustained as sovereign (Santner, 91–99). Throughout this scene, Ahab has been struggling to activate the vibrant matter in the crew’s libidinal vocalities as the constituent power needed to reanimate what remains of the sovereign in his Second Body. However, the crew is not yet ready to shout out the acclamations Ahab so desperately needs. Indeed, Ahab’s use of the anaphora “Whosoever of ye raises me” a white whale, along with the punctuation of his third entreaty with the special pleading “Look ye . . . my boys!” suggests that Ahab is struggling mightily to win what turns out to be the crew’s highly restricted expression of approval:
“Huzza! huzza!” cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast. (162)
Ahab’s “act of nailing the gold to the mast” solicits numerous interpretations. The huzzahs with which the crew greet Ahab’s performing this labor recall Ishmael’s paean to the “democratic dignity” that he envisions “shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike.” Ahab may have taken their shouted approval at the sight of him doing the labor of a common sailor as an expression of their delight at his democratic comradery. Or he might have taken the cheering to mean the crew is having fun at King Ahab performing such a menial activity. At the most basic level, the crew members’ acclamations indicate that they approve of Ahab’s public offer of a gold coin for the sighting of a white whale, and they like the look of the mast decked out in gold. That the crew members confine the extent of their approbation to this particular act means that they remain undecided as to what to do with the extraordinary energy that has surcharged their previous interactions with Ahab.
By the time Ahab swings the top-maul onto the nail that fastens the gold coin to the masthead, the coin has become for him at once a piece of shining matter, an outward manifestation of the crew’s innermost valor, a radiant portion of the virtual materiality of Ahab’s sublime Second Body, a radiance of the splendid shining of sun, an emanation of the resplendent deed that awaits, and a pledge to set the Pequod on a glorious mission. The crew members are signally less charged up by the shining matters Ahab sets before their eyes than they had been to his interlocutory experiment. Ahab may have wanted the gold doubloon to recircuit the crew’s libidinal interests to a higher aim; however, except for the three harpooners, the crew members do not express that much interest.
Pointedly, the harpooners turn Ahab’s entreaty into an opportunity to reverse the crew members’ position from respondents to questioners. The agitated questions they direct at him transform Ahab into the recipient of one or another of the albino whale’s body parts:
“Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?” said the Gay-Header deliberately.
“And has he a curious spout, too,” said Daggoo, “very bushy, even for a parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?”
“And he have one, two, tree—oh! good many iron in him hide, too, Captain,” cried Queequeg disjointedly, “all twiske-tee be-twisk, like him—him—” faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and round as though uncorking a bottle—“like him—him—.” (162)
All the white-whale-things that the harpooners recollect—the crooked jaw that bit off Ahab’s leg, the fantail that can split apart whale boats, the spout that can upend ships, the twisted lances of the whalemen who died trying to kill him—belong to an extraordinarily lethal creature.
Taking up the position of respondent to the harpooners’ queries brings about a significant mutation in Ahab’s psychic disposition. Ahab evidences this alteration most clearly when he invests his answers to the harpooners’ barrage of questions with libidinal intensities comparable to the crew’s earlier retorts to his questions:
“Corkscrew!” cried Ahab, “aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after the great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen—Moby Dick—Moby Dick!” (162–63)
After gifting the word “corkscrew!” that Queequeg was looking to affix to the whale’s spindled hide, Ahab connects each whale part to a relay of political economies—agricultural (spout as wheat), mercantile (spout as wool), industrial (harpoon, fantail as jib)—through which Moby Dick circulates.28 But the excitations saturating Ahab’s responses transfigure these word images into exercitives that convey the aftershocks of Ahab’s previous encounters with the white whale.
The composite of Ahab’s responses makes the white whale palpably visible to captain and crew and thereby tacitly designates Ahab as the crew member who first “raises me that same white whale.” As he manically shouts rejoinders to the harpooners’ questions, Ahab stands beside himself in a state of ecstatic wonder as the white whale seemingly snatches the word images of its dismembered body parts out of Ahab’s mouth and reassembles them in a startlingly wondrous monstration of the thing itself: “it is Moby Dick ye have seen—Moby Dick—Moby Dick!”
At the very instant Ahab exclaims his enthralled wonder at the apparition of Moby Dick newly reassembled on the quarterdeck, Starbuck, the Pequod’s first mate, disrupts the proceedings by asking a question that, unlike the harpooners’, brings Ahab’s interlocutory experiment to an abrupt conclusion: “Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick—but it was not Moby Dick that took off thy leg?” (163). Prior to this question, Starbuck has stood a silent, watchful bystander to Ahab’s aberrant behavior. However, when Ahab seems ready to interpose a mission that Starbuck, the first mate, believes will endanger the Pequod and its crew, he feels duty-bound to intervene. In an accusatory voice that challenges the legality of the entirety of Ahab’s transactions with the crew, Starbuck asks Ahab whether he has private reasons for affixing the crew’s attention onto Moby Dick.
The first mate’s question concerning the motive for Ahab’s preoccupation with Moby Dick conveys a threat along with an implicit “Come to order!” command. The implied order bids Ahab to submit to protocols that require him to carry out his contractual obligations to the Nantucket shipowners. Ahab knows that Starbuck can enforce this order by threatening to lead the crew in mutiny.
In singling out Moby Dick as his monstrous predilection, Ahab has violated the terms of his agreement with the Pequod’s owners; he has also broken “the Whalers’ law, which says that any healthy whale encountered must be hunted, without choosing one over another.”29 Ishmael explains the legal basis for Starbuck’s mutiny in Chapter 46, “Surmises”: “Having . . . revealed the prime but private purpose of the Pequod’s voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing, he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and legal,” Starbuck, “if so disposed, and to that end competent,” could lead the crew in a revolt that “would refuse all further obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command” (213).
It was Starbuck who issued the “everybody aft!” order that brought everyone on board the Pequod within a state of exception that suspended the norms and rules that normally regulate the relationship between captain and crew (161). As we have seen, Ahab’s dual suspension of the captain’s sovereignty and the crew’s subjugation also placed all actionable sovereign power on board the Pequod in a condition of undecidability. This condition of undecidability had remained in effect throughout the previous three scenes. Starbuck’s question now makes it necessary for the crew members to decide on the beneficiary of their sovereign power.
To comprehend the significance of Starbuck’s question for Ahab’s trial of force, it is necessary to briefly explain the nature of the activities the first mate’s query disrupted. When Ahab screams “Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen—Moby Dick—Moby Dick!,” he discharges onto the crew the full force of the shocking event that has never ceased taking place in him. The apparition “Moby Dick!” carries an electromagnetic energy polar opposite to the surcharged relay of interlocutory energies circulating through the libidinal body that Ahab has cogenerated with the crew. Starbuck’s question grounds this force field by, quite literally, emptying it of voltage.
As we have seen, Ahab has initiated his extraordinary relationship with the Pequod’s crew because its members hail from the multitudinous peoples onto whom sovereign power was supposed to have been transferred after they toppled tyrants and kings. Ahab experienced the whale’s dismasting as directed against the immortal sovereign body of the office of captain. In response to the white whale’s damage to the sovereign status of his captaincy, Ahab has devised an anomalous relationship with the crew. To reaffirm the position of the sovereign that Moby Dick demeaned, Ahab needs to awaken the crew members to their revolutionary sovereign power to make Ahab their kingly captain. The Pequod’s crew members cannot act upon the sovereign power he needs as long as they are subjugated to the rules of the ship’s line of command.
Up to now Ahab’s reciprocal activities with the crew have not jeopardized his de facto standing as the ship’s captain. Upon hearing the first mate’s question, however, Ahab and the crew members know that Starbuck has threatened Ahab with a ship’s revolt. Inasmuch as it carries the threat of a mutiny, Starbuck’s question also endows the crew with the sovereign power to decide on the target of the revolt. Will the crew join Starbuck’s effort to overthrow Ahab as the ship’s commanding officer, or will the crew agree to join Ahab in his usurpation of the Pequod to hunt and kill Moby Dick?
Starbuck differs from other members of the crew in that he remains utterly faithful to the contractual agreement with the Nantucket shipowners and to the regulatory norms of the social order that would hold the crew to the terms of that agreement. In contrast to the quarterdeckers who have thrown themselves into Ahab’s interlocutory and scopic experiments, Starbuck regards the unruly forces Ahab has aroused to be potential threats to the rules binding the crew members to the work they are contractually obliged to carry out. When he asks his disruptive question, Starbuck has also made it evident to the crew members that he thinks their unruly behavior with Ahab violates the order of regulations underwriting maritime law (163).
The specific offense for which Starbuck holds Ahab accountable is barratry, which maritime law defines as “an act of gross misconduct committed by a master or crew of a vessel which damages the vessel or its cargo. These activities may include desertion, illegal scuttling, theft of the ship or cargo, and committing any actions which may not be in the shipowner’s best interests.”30 Maritime law presupposes that an individual will choose to obey its statutes or suffer the consequences, which in the case of barratry is capital punishment. From the moment he fastened the gold doubloon to the masthead, Ahab has designated his willingness to sacrifice everything, including his life, in exchange for the death of Moby Dick.
Starbuck’s question does not merely recall Ahab to his encounter with Moby Dick. In disjoining Ahab’s personal empirical body from the impersonal symbolic function of his sublime Second Body, Starbuck’s inquiry reperforms the white whale’s injury. Ahab experienced the wound Moby Dick inflicted as a nullification of the symbolic effectiveness—the capacity to successfully perform its functions within the symbolic order—of Ahab’s Second Body. When he first hears Starbuck’s question, Ahab feels compelled to ask a countering question: “Who told thee that?” But Ahab quickly abandons a defensive posture that would have obliged him to conform to the rules spelled out in the Nantucket contract and enforced by maritime law.
When he continues his response, Ahab does not adopt his accuser’s discursive norms, nor does he address his answer solely to Starbuck. Starbuck’s question sticks Ahab in the breach between his peg-legged mortal body and his Second Body, whose sovereign powers need the crew’s acclamations to be potentiated. In the course of giving his response, Ahab will change the persona of the respondent from Ahab the hobbled empirical person to Ahab the wounded Second Body:
“Who told thee that?” cried Ahab; then pausing, “Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now.” (163)
The Ahab who initially says “Aye” to Starbuck is the private empirical person who treats the question as a simple request for the hard facts. He replies with the matter of fact affirmations that Moby Dick did indeed dismember him and that his injury did in truth necessitate the prosthetic limb he now stands on. With the second “aye” Ahab invites “my hearties” to gather in a circle round him. He does so to make them aware of their constitutive part in what is about to take place.
Whereas Starbuck expects Ahab to submit the remainder of his explanation to the norms of communicative rationality, Ahab abruptly turns Starbuck into the secondary addressee of his subsequent responses. He makes his primary addressees the crew members whose previous communications with him have mostly bypassed the order of signification for the affecting idiom of the libidinal drives. After the other members of the crew encircle him, Ahab draws upon the vibrant power of the force field of “hearty animation” he has cogenerated with them. Ahab then leans on the libidinal drives that he has aroused in the crew to act out on the quarterdeck the traumatizing impact of the Leviathan on the sovereign perpetuities of the office of captain:
“Aye, aye,” he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose; “Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me forever and a day!” (163)
“Aye, aye” is a reply a crew member normally makes to a commanding officer to indicate that an order has been received, is understood, and will be carried out immediately. Ahab’s first “Aye, aye” means that he takes Starbuck’s question as an order to report on the horrifyingly painful moment when he felt the impact of Moby Dick’s razor-like teeth shearing off his leg. However, the person who initially shouts “Aye, aye!” is no longer wholly identical to the occupant of Ahab’s empirical body. Recalled to the scene of the white whale’s predation, Ahab feels such desperately hopeless creaturely rage that he appears to undergo a theriomorphic mutation. The person who experienced Moby Dick’s forcible disseverance of Ahab the mortal human animal from Ahab the holder of an immortal sovereign office makes “Aye, aye” sound like the monstrous sobs of a kingly animal of the North American forests at the instant hunters’ arrows pierce its heart (163).
It is clear that the recollection of this slashing will not let Ahab go. Ahab simultaneously feels his sobs of pain affecting the crew. In his second response to Starbuck’s question, Ahab exits the disciplinary order under whose authority Starbuck issues his command and reactivates his libidinal transactions with the crew to transpose Starbuck’s command words into what Gilles Deleuze calls “passwords.”31 From the time Ahab first undertakes his interlocutory experiments with the crew, the resultant libidinal intensities remove their communications from the control of a disciplinary order. Vivified by the crew’s excitations, Ahab’s unregulatable verbal intensities circumvent Starbuck’s discursive norms.
The person who bellows, “Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me forever and a day!” turns Starbuck’s implicit command into an occasion to improvise on his initial account. The word “razeed” is customarily used to describe a ship that has had its top deck sheared off. The phrase “that accursed white whale that razeed me” recalls the “dead whale or stove boat” lyric the crew members shouted when Ahab asked for the song they pulled to when they spotted a whale. The whale that “razeed” Captain Ahab recognized no distinction between the boat it staved in and the whaleman it dismembered. This depiction brings the crew to a reckoning with the void—the possibility of their own inexistence—as the event taking place in between “a dead whale or a stove boat!”
That the Ahab who narrates the line “it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me forever and a day!” now stands before the men as their official captain gives the reader pause. Does he intend the clause “made a poor pegging lubber of me forever and a day!” to mean he presently bears a closer resemblance to the mere existence of a one-legged, clumsy sailor than to the captain of a potentially razeed ship? Does Ahab want to call attention to the accursed whale’s splitting what’s left of the sovereign ship captain from the diminished form of life now in their midst? Does Ahab want to prepare his onlookers for the frenzied usages to which Ahab will put his razeed ship in the sentences that follow?
No matter the meaning we attribute to these independent clauses, it is clear that Ahab’s retelling of his experience as a particular case of a wrong breaks it from the immediate context of his encounter with Moby Dick. Having made the white whale the stand-in for the accursed worldly powers that make humans feel wretched on land and sea, Ahab universalizes his experience of being wronged. In this second telling, the factual matters from his initial account of the event assume the scale and magnitude of a quasi-biblical encounter with what seems the sovereign, malign agency of nature itself empowered to break the Genesis promise granting mankind dominion over all the creatures on land and sea. In this quasi-sacred allegory, Moby Dick turns into an “accursed” agent that has disjoined Ahab’s hobbled existence—and by extension humanity’s—from the sovereign calling that exalts existence. Overwhelmed with indignation, Ahab pledges to avenge this ignominious wrong.
Having undergone the outrageous defilement of mutating into a heart-stricken moose, razeed ship, stump-legged landlubber, Ahab resolves to reverse his condition from abject prey to bloodthirsty predator. Visualizing himself in a frenzied cyclical whirlwind chase that resembles a vortex in its intensity, he swears revenge with the invective of an unjustly deposed sovereign:
Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up.” (163)
Ahab’s utter immersion in this vindictive whirlpool indexes an alternative actuality immanent to the world he and the crew presently occupy. As if in the voice of the whirlpool encircling him, Ahab hails this as itself the crew’s genuine mission:
And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. (163)
Ahab’s absorption in the pursuit of his dismemberer might make it appear as if the deictic in “this is what ye have shipped for” has swallowed up the entirety of the crew’s reality. And yet from the moment he entreats the crew members to circle round him, Ahab begins invoking their potential support. Moreover, throughout his response, Ahab has used the threat posed by Starbuck’s question to affirm the truthfulness of the alternative energy field that he has co-constructed with the crew. In the preceding three scenes the objective cause of the crew’s desire mutates from “a dead whale or stove boat” (161), to the gold doubloon (162), to part objects of Moby Dick (162), to “Moby Dick—Moby Dick!” (163). The deictic “this” condenses the entire image repertoire of the preceding three scenes into a resonant index.
When he shouts “And this is what ye have shipped for, men!” Ahab entreats the crew members to interconnect the libidinal energies animating the intense reciprocities in their previous interchanges to the vibrant forces saturating every cycle in this vortex of revenge. After Ahab positions Moby Dick as a surcharged energy antagonistic to the energies he generates with the crew, he points to this whirlpool of a chase as the trigger for the electromagnetic storm they have been gathering since the opening scene. Before he can pull this trigger, as it were, the crew must decide to acclaim this as their reality. The deictic in “this is what ye have shipped for, men!” also hollows out the space for the crew’s decision.
Whereas Starbuck’s question has taken Ahab’s revenge quest as Ahab’s private obsession, Ahab’s response declares it the fulfillment of the crew’s desire. Ahab intends this declaration as an act of defiance against Starbuck’s threat to unseat Ahab from his captaincy. The crew members know that a decision to take up Ahab’s quest would constitute a ship’s revolt against both the Nantucket shipowners and the first mate who represents their interests. They also know that a decision to reject Ahab’s mission would commit them to joining Starbuck in a mutiny against Ahab.
For his part, Ahab knows that before he can assume the status of the Pequod’s sovereign commanding officer, he must ask the crew members to decide whether to acclaim his declaration of their mission as the truth of their desire or reject it as the ravings of a madman. “What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave” (163). In presenting the crew with the pursuit of Moby Dick as a possible outlet for their intense desirings, Ahab incites an act of collective self-reflexivity that makes the crew members aware of themselves as a potentially revolutionary power capable of deciding on what to do with what they want. Up to this point, the men did not know how to act on the immense reservoir of vitality they cogenerated. In deciding to join Ahab’s revolt against the Nantucket shipowners, the crew surcharge the energies circulating throughout the previous reciprocal interchanges with this newly forged revolutionary power. The interfusing of these forces generates a king-creating power of a special sort:
“Aye, aye!” shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited old man: “A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick.”
Their collective “Aye, aye!” marks the first time any crew member has answered Ahab with the official reply a crew member is expected to give their commanding officer. As such, it demarcates the moment in which the whalemen position Ahab as their captain and themselves as his crew. It also marks the occasion on which they retroactively offer their official acceptance of Ahab’s pledge of the gold doubloon for their “sharp eyes.” They now add the commitment of their lances and their lives. Before the crew “splice hands” with Ahab, they must put down the clubs in their voices, or rather, reserve the usage of their clubbed voices for the pursuit of the target at which they also project lances and harpoons.
Ahab does not want the crew members merely to recognize him as the commanding officer of a factor in Nantucket’s whaling industry. He wants them to use the revolutionary forces informing their decision to liberate themselves from their bonds to Starbuck’s disciplinary order so as to make Ahab their sovereign kingly captain. Ahab could not have had access to the sovereign powers of his kingly Second Body if it were not constituted out of, or rather constituted as, the revolutionary desire of the crew.
If, as Santner suggests, the vibrant matter of Ahab’s Second Body is ultimately composed of the resonant acclamatory energies that the crew’s “Aye, ayes!” have projected onto it, then this intermingling of currents raises the crew’s electric libidinal body to a higher frequency. The crew’s “Aye, ayes’!” and the accompanying laudations thereby become what Santner calls “king-creating powers of a special sort” (98). They “flesh” out and “gloriously secure” Ahab’s Second Body, with the sublime electromagnetic energies now coursing through what might be called the corpus electromagneticum, interconnecting Ahab’s libidinal body to the crew’s.
The crew members’ answering acclamations have in effect channeled their vibrant electromagnetic energies into the libidinal Second Body they have been cocreating with Ahab from the opening scene. However, the sovereign electromagnetic powers of the second body are positioned in relations of reciprocal violence to two different antagonists—Starbuck and Moby Dick—and circulate in restricted as well as expansive venues. In its restricted form, the crew’s reciprocal violence is set in relation to Starbuck’s counterrevolutionary violence. Quite paradoxically, for the remainder of their time on board the Pequod, crew members will perform their labor as a revolt against the whaling industry that commissioned it. In its expansive form, the crew’s revolutionary violence is directed against the prodigious sovereign agency of the Leviathan that dismembered Ahab.
Ahab hails the coproduction of this electromagnetic constitution as a conclusion to his trial of force that is deserving of a celebration:
“God bless ye,” he seemed to half sob and half shout. “God bless ye, men. Steward! go draw the great measure of grog.” (163)
Although this marks the formal conclusion to his trial of force, Ahab still must engage the crew member whose countersubversive energies can precipitate a restricted electromagnetic field that would divert from the fiery hunt.
“But what’s this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale! art not game for Moby Dick?” (163)
At this juncture, Ahab has turned the quarterdeck into the setting for a political assemblage and a scientist’s experiment. To accommodate these different regimens Ahab divides himself into two figures. He is the author of the scientific experiment and the chosen spokesperson or representative for the political assemblage that takes shape throughout the course of the experiment. In his contestation with Starbuck, he has not imposed the representation of the Pequod’s purpose as an order; he has staged the conditions that facilitate it as the collective desire of the crew, a desire that, throughout the quarterdeck drama, he assumes dual responsibility for constituting, like a politician, and producing, like a scientist.
When he staged this experiment, Ahab did not know how the action would unfold. Rather than controlling the crew’s energies, Ahab has incited the crew’s desire to replace a commercial exchange—dead whales for oil—with a fervid hunt for Moby Dick, whose uninsurable risk violates the conditions for which the crew signed up. Ahab does know that the success of the mission depends on the unanimity of the crew’s resolve. But at the very moment that he would appear to have obtained the crew’s universal acclamation, Starbuck’s dissenting voice jeopardizes the success of the entire experiment.
As we have seen, Starbuck’s grounds for refusing to offer his assent to Ahab’s formulation of the Pequod’s mission are rooted in his fidelity to the contract with the Nantucket shipowners. The hostility Starbuck directs at Ahab draws its power from the maritime laws enforcing that contract. Starbuck’s denunciation of Ahab for the vengeance he directs against Moby Dick carries with it the veiled threat of mutiny discussed earlier:
“I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.” (163)
The defiance in Starbuck’s dissent inspires Ahab to deliver what a century of commentators, including myself, have taken to be the most significant of his declamations. Santner has deftly recapitulated this hegemonic reading with the observation that in his argument with Starbuck Ahab takes on the cast of “the charismatic and potentially totalitarian leader of ‘mass politics,’ a figure belonging to the historical space of the modern demos to which equally modern modes and relations of production belong” (251).
However, it is not Ahab but Starbuck who assumes the persona of the Western imperial man, eager to dominate the dangerous natural world through courageous violence and a disproportionate dream of control (“I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too”). Starbuck’s belief in the rules and laws of industrial capitalism requires him to restrict his killings to the whales he can convert into profits in the Nantucket whale oil market.
In the preceding scene, the crew members expressly rejected the Nantucket contract for which Starbuck stands in as a representative when they unanimously acclaimed Ahab’s change of mission. When he counters Starbuck’s argument, Ahab assumes the demeanor not of a tyrannical dictator but of a spokesperson for the alternative demos he has constituted with the crew.
Ahab’s retort is divisible into three separate portions, which take on different stances toward Starbuck’s dissent. He begins his reply as a comic refusal to be held to the contractual terms of the Nantucket whaling industry, whose profit motive he holds in contempt:
Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest a little lower layer. If money’s to be the measurer, man, and the accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium here! (163–64)
Ahab believes there must be some additional pretext for the crew’s risking of life than rendering whale flesh into oil. As a Quaker, Starbuck should share this belief. The comic dimension of Ahab’s riposte begins with the pun on “lay” in the phrase “thou requirest a little lower layer” from the first sentence. The crew members had reason to complain about the scandalous inequities built into the use of the lay (a share of the trip’s profit, paid instead of wages) as the determining measure for each seaman’s percentage of the profit. Since the first mate’s lower lay already places him at the highest level of the pay scale, Ahab’s recasting Starbuck’s dissent as a demand for still more pay is designed to direct the crew’s economic discontent at his greed.32
Ahab continues to treat his argument with Starbuck as a comic skit that he performs for the pleasure of the crew when he takes quite literally Starbuck’s rhetorical question, “How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it?” Then, in a slapstick gesture intended to rouse the crew’s derisive laughter, Ahab sounds the depth of the incalculable wrong he suffered in his encounter with Moby Dick by thumping his chest. Ishmael, the narrator, underscores the importance of the crew’s response to Ahab’s aggressively humorous retort when he shifts attention to Stubb whispering his bemused admiration of the bodily burlesque in Ahab’s chest-thumping. “‘He smites his chest,’ whispered Stubb, ‘what’s that for? methinks it rings most vast, but hollow’” (163).
It is clear that Ahab is monitoring the crew’s reception of his performance. Indeed, Ahab fashions his entire response to Starbuck as the public persona the crew has empowered to convert their righteous indignation at the malign indignities they suffered at the hands of the Nantucket whaling industry into aggressive ridicule.
Despite the crew’s approval of Ahab’s derision of the economic grounds of his first mate’s dissent, Starbuck remains adamant in his resolve and proceeds to offer theological grounds, Ahab’s blasphemy, for his refusal to join the hunt for Moby-Dick and psychological grounds, Ahab’s madness, for the legal case he’s putting together against the captain.
“Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.” (163–64)
Starbuck’s second rejoinder insists on the division between human and nonhuman ontologies that would reinstall human exceptionalism and the self-bounded intentional subject that Ahab dismantles. Starbuck’s need to enforce the divisions that Ahab is intent on overcoming indicates the differences between a representative of the Modern Constitution and a figure bent on tearing down its epistemological and ontological divisions. Perhaps it is because Starbuck remains tethered to the rules and norms of Latour’s Modern Constitution that he feels no affinity with Ahab’s alternative.
In response Ahab deforms and subverts Starbuck’s mode of reasoning, which is predicated on the division between nature and culture and which insists on the absolute distinction between human and nonhuman ontologies. In previous readings of this portion of Ahab’s argument with Starbuck, I corroborated the hegemonic interpretation of Ahab as a dictator, intent on subjecting the crew to his totalitarian will to power. I specifically argued that Ahab’s response to Starbuck introduced a scene of persuasion that enabled Ahab to appropriate the logics of mutiny and convert them into preconditions for articulating his own rebellion against the universe. I assumed that in harkening to Starbuck’s additional accusation of madness as a legal rationale for replacing Ahab as commanding officer of the Pequod, Ahab needed to wrest rhetorical control of the rebellious impulse.33 It is no longer clear to me that this is what the following lines do and say:
Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike though the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. (164)
To explain why Starbuck should not consider his hate-filled hunt blasphemous, Ahab casts his reply as a description of the foundational assumption (“the little lower layer”) that motivates his ongoing antagonism to Moby Dick. Ahab, who does not acknowledge any wall of division between nature and culture, begins his response by refusing to affirm the distinction Starbuck adduces between human and nonhuman ontologies. Once Ahab invests the entirety of his now-electromagnetic Second Body in ongoing reciprocal violence with Moby Dick, all visible objects turn into pasteboard masks for the electromagnetized polarities animating all things. While this thingly power is ordinarily concealed by such masks, it manifests itself whenever an extraordinary event—what we have called the encounter with the void—spontaneously tears apart the pasteboard cover. While such an event cannot be fathomed, it can awaken a correspondent thing-power, or polarizing force, in whoever truly comes to grips with it.
Now the problem with the measureless, reciprocal violence animating the electromagnetic field in this expansive form is that it circulates outside the restricted economy of calculable loss and gain and by way of an agency of reversibility that remains external to the subjectivity (Ahab–Moby Dick) through which it is borne. Insofar as it animates the electromagnetic field with Ahab and Moby Dick as opposed yet interanimating polarities, the reciprocal violence in which Ahab is immersed cannot be stably attached to the subject who ostensibly executes it. As part of this electromagnetic circuit, the Ahab through whom the reciprocal violence takes place is perforce displaced by the violence passing through this outlet, and this agency of reversibility gets projected onto the force—Moby Dick—facilitating its return.
When reciprocal violence appears, the subject through whom it is expended disappears into the electromagnetic currents through which reciprocal violence executes itself. The ongoing reversibility of this vibrant matter might explain the series of radical shifts in the position in, through, and as which Ahab engages the inscrutable thing itself. The ostensibly human speaker begins with a description of a “living act” that momentarily reveals an unknowable thing behind its mask. The next speech act, “if man will strike, strike though the mask!,” expresses the motivating antagonistic force that would impel humans to strike though the mask—apparently from an external position—so as to release the thing concealed within. However, the interrogative in the next sentence, “How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?,” suggests that the speaker is indistinguishable from the thing imprisoned within the mask. The mask in the meantime has mutated into a wall segregating an imprisoning inside from an apparently free “outside” that can be reached only by striking through this wall. However, when the speaker’s wall then turns into the white whale, the speaker’s effort to smash through this wall would require the speaker to match yet exceed the white whale’s violence. It is the apprehended reversibility of their reciprocating violence that interimplicates the speaker and the white whale in this electromagnetic circuit. Moreover, it is this inscrutable thing—the reciprocal violence mattering through this electromagnetic field—that moves the speaker outside any form that can contain it.
Ahab has not explained what drives his need to remain attached to this overwhelmingly powerful thing. He has instead acted out his vigorous commitment to sustain a relationship of polarizing violence. Ahab would be answerable to the charge of blasphemy—a sin against the obligation to attest to the truth of a moral conviction—only if he refused wholly to commit himself to the polarizing attitude this still-living “undoubted deed” perpetually demands. When Ahab goes on to say he’d strike the sun if it insulted him, he affirms the cosmological magnitude of his polarizing relation to Moby Dick. In saying this, Ahab affirms his belief in the fair play or reciprocal violence in both cases. If this moral code does not line up with Starbuck’s Christian principles, so be it.
Ahab’s apologia evokes in Starbuck no response other than a hopelessly vacuous stare. When Ahab looks into Starbuck’s eyes, he sees the unspent anger that Starbuck can neither express nor abandon. Ahab manifests his desire to deactivate Starbuck’s anger in the third and final portion of his response:
Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends’ glarings is a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go. . . . Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak!—Aye, aye! thy silence, then, that voices thee. (164)
Starbuck does not respond for four interrelated reasons: (1) he knows that nothing he can say will change Ahab’s mind; (2) he recognizes that Ahab’s fierce enactment of the truth of his encounter has awakened Starbuck’s own aggressive instinct; (3) he realizes that such aggression would mirror Ahab’s; (4) he sees that the rest of the crew have taken Ahab’s side in the dispute.
This portion of Ahab’s response differs from his previous rejoinders to Starbuck in that Ahab no longer purports to speak as the representative of the crew’s desire. Speaking viva voce without the persona of the crew’s political representative, Ahab does not order Starbuck to obey. When he sees that Starbuck does not want to give voice to his aggression, Ahab invites Starbuck to take up a peaceful place among the other crew members assembled on the quarterdeck.
Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn—living, breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan leopards—the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel! The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. ’Tis but to help strike a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone. Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak!—Aye, aye! thy silence, then, that voices thee. (164)
Ahab’s description of this tableau vivant is remarkable for its interweaving of the processes of humans becoming naturalized (“Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn—living, breathing pictures painted by the sun”) and of nature becoming humanized (“the Pagan leopards—the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel”). In this passage the crew and the natural things to which the social and natural contracts declare them opposed enter into a zone wherein figures from within both regimes undergo metamorphoses and acquire traits of the other.
Ahab’s warning, “Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck!,” references this electromagnetic storm to let Starbuck know that he cannot withstand the whalemen’s electric affinities to Ahab’s reciprocal violence with Moby Dick.
Ahab initially proposed this meteorological metaphor in the opening scene to describe the cumulative effect of his call-and-response transactions with the crew. Starbuck, who understands the force of the storm that his continued opposition to Ahab’s mission would bring down upon him, agrees to take a place among the crew members assembled on the quarterdeck.
Having set the stage for the crew members to arrive at the unanimous resolve to hunt and kill Moby Dick, Ahab’s trial of force would appear to have accomplished its work. However, with Starbuck as an example of a crew member who is not charged up at the prospect of killing the albino whale, Ahab becomes concerned that the electromagnetic field will degenerate into a passing storm. As a consequence Ahab must add an element to perpetuate the crew’s commitments.
The action unfolding in the seventh and final scene of the quarterdeck drama recalls the unfinished business adumbrated in the call-and-response experiment in the opening scene. Ahab’s attempt to magnetize the mates’ axis of crossed lances at the drama’s conclusion (“it seemed as though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life”) generates an electromagnetic feedback loop with the “hearty animation” surcharging Ahab’s call-and-response experiment with the crew at the outset of the quarterdeck drama. The crew’s electrifyingly expressive responses to Ahab’s round-robin questions may have released them from their contractual ties to the Nantucket shipowners, but Ahab’s interlocutory exercise did not replace these bonds of attachment. Ahab hopes that an oath ceremony will seal the crew’s attachment to the electromagnetic constitution setting them in polarizing relationship of perpetual antagonism to Moby Dick (165).
In Leviathan, whose specter haunts Moby-Dick, Thomas Hobbes describes how the swearing of oaths might be just what Ahab needs:
The force of Words being . . . too weak to hold men to the performance of their Covenants . . . there is nothing can strengthen a Covenant of Peace agreed on . . . but the feare of that Invisible Power, which they everyone Worship as God. . . . All therefore that can be done . . . is to put one another to swear by the God he feareth: Which Swearing, or OATH, is a Forme of speech, added to a Promise; by which he that promiseth signifieth, that unless he performe, he renounceth the mercy of his God, or calleth to him for vengeance on himself.34
An oath differs from a contract in the duration of the obligation it entails. A freely undertaken contract is supposed to expire after the contracting parties fulfill their commitments. An oath secures timeless obligations. Giorgio Agamben describes an oath as an archaic “anthropogenic operator by means of which the living being . . . has decided to be responsible for his words.”35 To make clear his interest in this timeless quality, Ahab conjures an archaic setting for the oath-taking activities in which the oath speaker and the magnetic circle of oath takers participate.
Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this capstan; and ye mates, flank me with your lances; and ye harpooneers, stand there with your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring me in, that I may in some sort revive a noble custom of my fishermen fathers before me. (165)
Björn Quiring ascribes the symbolic effectiveness of such an oath-taking ritual to its ability to restore a time-immemorial setting inhabited by ancestral figures (“my fishermen fathers before me”) who would oblige oath takers to commit themselves to do what they swear. The archaic past of the oath presumes to exercise its dominion over the present by overdetermining the future as an eternal recurrence of this scene.36
In addition to this uncanny temporality, an insuperable double bind compels the one swearing an oath to accept the obligation it enjoins voluntarily. By subordinating himself to the oath, an oath taker suspends his own subjectivity and at the same time assumes a subjectivity in which the imagined wrath of God can do its work.
Ahab wants the chalices, lances, harpoons, grog, and other elements at work in his oath ceremony to encroach upon each individual crew member’s interiority.
“Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league. Ha! Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits to sit upon it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat’s bow—Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!” The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished pewter went the rounds among the frantic crew; when, waving his free hand to them, they all dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin. (166)
With God and the ratifying sun as witness, the oath taking binds the crew to the subject matter of their contractual bonds through the electromagnetic currents circulating through them. When suffused with the phatic power of Ahab’s voice, the fiery grog circulating through and around the crew members’ swearing bodies binds their inner vitality to the pledge to kill Moby Dick—under the threat of their becoming targets of God the hunter if they do not.
However, the deed that the oath taking apparatus apparently demands does not involve simply hunting and killing Moby Dick; it constitutes itself through the mimetic doubling of a prior event. To hunt and kill Moby Dick, Ahab and the crew must reverse and replicate Moby Dick’s prior act of hunting and nearly killing Ahab.
Ahab returned from his initial encounter with Moby Dick as something like a lightning rod. The encounter converted his electrocuted body into a superb conductor for the electromagnetic constitution that sets the persons and things assembled on the deck of the Pequod in a polarizing relationship with Moby Dick. The oath Ahab swears with the crew to hunt and kill Moby Dick binds Moby Dick and the entirety of the Pequod in an electromagnetic connection. The oath requires that Ahab and the crew enact a practice of mimetic reciprocal violence that is regulated solely by the replication and reversal of the charged activities of Moby Dick, with whom the Pequod is now in a perpetually polarized electromagnetic relationship.
This oath-taking ceremony also instigates a weird temporality. Throughout the oath-taking scene, Ahab’s wish to achieve his reciprocal violence gets crossed by an apprehension expressed in the execration “God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!” In the instant Ahab and the crew enunciate the oath, each oath taker is taken up by a curse (“God hunt us all”). When Ahab calls upon God the hunter as the agency responsible for enforcing the oath, it makes the wrath Moby Dick brought down on Ahab indistinguishable from the punishment God would visit on whoever fails to hunt and kill Moby Dick. The oath thereby instigates multiple, intertwined temporalities: the event that has already happened to Ahab (God the hunter has already hunted him) is taken up in the now of the oath taker’s enunciation of the oath as what will happen to the crew and Ahab in the future, as what is happening to them now, and as what will have happened in the ongoing future perfect.
The whirligig cataclysmic event that already has happened in Ahab’s past and that will happen in the Pequod’s future will have happened at the moment the oath-taking ceremony renders Ahab’s and the crew’s bonds to the electromagnetic constitution indissoluble.
At the conclusion to this oath ceremony, Ahab speaks as a channel for the electromagnetic currents emanating from Moby Dick and animating every particle of his electromagnetic constitution. The operative words in Ahab’s oath ceremony thereby make the subject matter that Santner finds missing in Bennett’s vital materiality indistinguishable from the energetic stuff circulating through the things that Bennett faults historical materialists for ignoring. This conjoining of historical and new materialisms enables us to recognize that the material efficacy of Ahab’s electromagnetic constitution rests on its power to tear up the Modern Constitution that legislated and enforced their division.
Captain Ahab never was modern.
1. Susan Hekman provides a detailed discussion of critiques of the linguistic turn from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophies of science, social theories concerned with political representation, postcolonial studies, and queer theory in The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
2. A useful discussion of these issues can be found in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–46, and Susan Hekman, “Constructing the Ballast: An Ontology for Feminism,” in Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 85–119.
3. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), viii. Further citations in the text.
4. Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
5. Here is how Bruno Latour glosses Serres’s conceptualization of the natural contract: “The book’s title notwithstanding, the natural contract is not a deal between two parties, humanity and nature, two figures that cannot be unified in any case, but rather a series of transactions in which one can see how, all along and in the sciences themselves, the various types of entities mobilized by geo-history have exchanged various traits that define their agency.” Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (Medford, Mass.: Polity Press, 2017), 64.
6. Although she might not describe herself as a historical materialist, Kyla Wazana Tompkins provides an incisive discussion of the challenges and promise of the new materialism. See Tompkins, “On the Limits and Promise of New Materialist Philosophy,” Lateral 5, no. 1 (2016), https://doi.org/10.25158/L5.1.8.
7. Simon Choat, “Science, Agency, and Ontology: A Historical Materialist Response to New Materialism,” Political Studies 66, no. 4 (2018): 1036; Choat articulates a useful distillation of historical materialist critiques of new materialisms. See also Eric L. Santner, The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy, ed. Kevis Goodman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), esp. 237–82. Further citations in the text.
8. See Santner, The Weight of All Flesh, esp. 237–82.
9. See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
10. Meredith Farmer, “Melville’s Ontology” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016), 115–34.
11. Farmer, “Melville’s Ontology,” 120; Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1988), 165; emphasis added. Citations hereafter are in-line and to this edition.
12. For notable exceptions, see Simon Schleusener, “Sovereignty at Sea: Moby-Dick and the Politics of Desire,” REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 27 (2011): 121–42; C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2001); Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
13. Farmer, “Melville’s Ontology,” 1–2.
14. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 137.
15. For a useful discussion of the hybrid nature of electromagnetism, see the chapter “The Electric Incitement of Eros: Electromagnetism, Sexuality and Modernism,” in Lara Vetter, Modernist Writings and Religio-Scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 31–66.
16. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 27, 14.
17. For a related critique, see Bonnie Honig’s contribution to this volume, and Honig’s response to Santner, “Charged: Debt, Power, and the Politics of the Flesh in Shakespeare’s Merchant, Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Eric Santner’s The Weight of All Flesh,” in The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy, ed. Kevis Goodman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 131–82.
18. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 123.
19. Isabelle Stengers, Power and Invention: Situating Science, trans. Paul Bains (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 163. Further citations in the text. For a nuanced discussion of the ramifications of a trial of force for representative democracies, see Lisa J. Disch, “‘Faitiche’-izing the People: What Representative Democracy Might Learn from Science,” in Studies in Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life, ed. Bruce Braun and Sarah J. Whatmore (Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 267–96.
20. For a discussion of the implications of these contradictory usages for the political rhetoric in the 1850s, see Donald E. Pease, Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 248–55. Indispensable discussions of the novel’s political context can be found in Alan Heimert, “Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism,” American Quarterly 15, no. 4 (Winter 1963): 498–534, and the chapter “Moby-Dick and the American 1848” in Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Knopf, 1983), 102–53.
21. Eyal Peretz’s description of Ishmael as a witnessing figure opens up an important dimension of the novel. Peretz, Literature, Disaster and the Enigma of Power: A Reading of “Moby Dick” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
22. See Philip Armstrong’s eloquent, well-documented, and suggestive account of the novel’s intermixing of human and nonhuman realms in “‘Leviathan Is a Skein of Networks’: Translations of Nature and Culture in Moby-Dick,” English Literary History 71, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 1039–63.
23. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), 255.
24. For a wide-ranging discussion of the libidinal body, see John Rajchman, In Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan and the Question of Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 36–43.
25. See Jean-François Lyotard, “The Tensor,” in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew S. Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 1–18. Further citation in the text.
26. According to Antonio Negri, constituent power is, quite simply, revolutionary power. It precedes and cannot be included in the order it constitutes but remains a spontaneous, horizontal movement driven by “an ethical impulse and a constructive passion.” See Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 22.
27. The exceptional position Moby Dick occupies become imaginable when reconceptualized in terms of the paradoxes of set theory. The genus, as Žižek observes, must exclude itself, as either a surplus or a deficiency, from all the members of the species that it encompasses. If there is always this empty point that holds the place of the set itself among its elements, this empty point must be occupied by a surplus element—a totality that comprises a particular element embodying its universal structuring principle. Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 43–46.
28. Cesare Casarino discusses the redefinition of the relationship between labor and capitalism that came about in the epochal shift from mercantile to industrial capitalism. Casarino, Modernity at Sea, 73–75.
29. See Kathryn Mudgett, “‘I Stand Alone Here upon an Open Sea’: Starbuck and the Limits of Positive Law,” in Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on Moby-Dick, ed. John Bryant, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, and Timothy Marr (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2006).
30. The Law Dictionary, s.v. “barratry,” https://thelawdictionary.org/barratry/.
31. According to Deleuze, every order word has a password lying dormant beneath it. Passwords unlock order words. Rather than simply reacting to the commands embedded in the order of things, passwords “transform the compositions of order into components of passage.” See Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 110.
32. For a thoroughgoing and thoroughly enjoyable reading of this scene, see John Bryant, Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 218–20.
33. See, for example, my essays “Moby-Dick and the Cold War,” in The American Renaissance Reconsidered, ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 113–55; “C. L. R. James, Moby-Dick, and the Emergence of Transnational American Studies,” Arizona Quarterly 56, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 93–123; and “Pip, Moby-Dick, Melville’s Governmentality,” Novel 45, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 327–42.
34. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 99.
35. Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 69.
36. Björn Quiring, Shakespeare’s Curse: The Aporias of Ritual Exclusion in Early Modern Royal Drama (New York: Routledge, 2014), 1–2. Subsequent reference will appear as parenthetical citations.