Epic, Tragedy, Novel, Melodrama

Which genre are you? Just Kidding...this is not about you or me

I’ve been thinking a lot about try to produce a sense of human culture and history through something I called ‘epic historical materialism’ at the conference on The Future of Capitalism and Neofeudalism at the University of Chicago last week. I still, lamely want the study of literature, history and political economy to gel into the something beyond the scope of Humanities and social science specializations.

At the conference, there was some debate about the term Neofeudalism — and feudalism itself and from the quarter of European Medieval scholarship, I heard a familiar argument — feudalism is so complex, it lasted a thousand, we don’t really know what it is or modernists will make feudalism a straw man but in fact it was a wonderful age of cultural diversity, various forms of contract labor not simple serfdom or vassalage, yadda yadda yadda. This is academic gatekeeping at its best and keeps people from thinking seriously about absolutely other forms of life and production and how they rose and fell.

Did feudalism — not exist? Was it always already postmodern?

Can we at least say that in Europe a primarily agricultural economy ruled over by a nobility that used physical domination of peasants to extract wealth from their labor did actually exist? And then stronger and stronger monarchs learned to use the Church and the court to concentrate their power through the extraction of taxes and rents on noble wealth, separating the nobility from their seats of strength and creating one single system of currency — as happened in France in the 17th century under Louis XIV. Couldn’t we safely say that the destruction of feudalism by absolute monarchy paved the way for capitalism to emerge in the next (18th) century.

Sorry for the pedantry, now to the thought experiment.