POSTPONED Old Materialism

*** Please note: this seminar has been cancelled due to the heat. A new date will be announced as soon as possible. ***

This paper examines three episodes in the civic histories of two late Medieval port cities to shed light on gold’s pliability as money and as encultured, aestheticized substance. Addressing moments of political instability and of mercantile expansion, it attends to forces of production as much as to the interests of elites in exploiting the capacity of gold/the golden to enchant. The visual-material-financial nexus called gold was often staged as a ‘natural’ agent of sacralised power, and in each instance (from civic performances to ‘paye the prince’, to a gilded wood ceiling financed by a confraternity) gold is transformed to accommodate novel as well as time-honoured forms for leveraging or asserting political power. Both cities see an inflation in the aesthetic and mercantile economies of gold with implications for hidden labour. In conclusion, the paper questions the adequacy of new materialist ethics in the face of the all-too-human assertion and coercion at play in ‘making’ gold.

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Image caption: Detail from the post 1460 gilded wood ceiling of the Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice, once the Chapter Hall of the Scuola Grande di S. Maria della Carità.

The Marxism in Culture seminar series was conceived in 2002 to provide a forum for those committed to the continuing relevance of Marxism for cultural analysis. Both "Marxism" and "culture" are conceived here in a broad sense.  We understand Marxism as an ongoing self-critical tradition, and correspondingly the critique of Marxism's own history and premises is part of the agenda. "Culture" is intended to comprehend not only the traditional fine arts, but also aspects of popular culture such as film, popular music, and fashion.  From this perspective, conventional distinctions between the avant-garde and the popular, the elite and the mass, the critical and the commercial are very much open for scrutiny.  All historical inquiry is theoretically grounded, self-consciously or not, and theoretical work in the Marxist tradition demands empirical verification.