Melissa,
I suppose seeing from the middle is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern again. As
Auerbach observes, in Shakespeare, Everyman is still not allowed to be
properly tragic but the little people are allowed a tinge of melancholy just
as the middle people begin to fall into tragic mode, as Malvolio does; the
great ones remain in zones as baffling and mysterious in their power as
production & capitalism, but beneath them an observable, over-determined
tragedy - The play at the heart of it all, Coriolanus, could be gone
through speech by speech to construct the argument.
As you cheekily mentioned Braudel, his emphasis - in C&C 15-17:The Wheels of
Commerce - is on the middle, the networks & spheres of trade which make
larger scale societies possible, the market economy or "the fateful
threshold of exchange value" which lies below the sphere of production & the
deployment of capital & between working and eating. S, I think, nearly
always traverses these 3 layers of the economy, delighting in the regimes of
signs present on all three strata, as it were.
E.
_________________________________________________________________
MSN Hotmail is evolving – check out the new Windows Live Mail
http://ideas.live.com
|