Any Material Way

Abstract

IT is an honor to have the chance to discuss publicly Elaine Freedgood’s work and its effects—“incalculably diffusive,” as they say in Middlemarch—in the world. George Eliot is an idealist and Elaine a materialist, which means that tracing Elaine’s work and its work in the world, unlike that of the more pious and boring Dorothea Brooke, is possible. You can touch it. To do this labor of tracing will require thinking about Elaine’s commitment to the category of the material, against the ideal and the idealized; it will also require thinking about the place that the conceptual or theoretical, but also the affective and communal, occupy for her, in relation to what Raymond Williams used to call concrete social processes. If Dorothea has a “finely tuned spirit,” with “many fine issues,” Elaine’s allegiances push her away from finery, away too from “spirit.” Away, as she says in her reading of this very passage, from “mysterious, quietist, and . . . deeply sentimental form[s]” of consolation and toward “larger historical processes that cannot be domesticated.” For all its conceptual ambition and plainspoken bravado, Elaine’s intellectual practice is concerned ultimately with vulnerable things: the predicaments of bodies in space. Bodies arranged in power relations, inhabiting physical situations. This commitment to the concrete conditions of actual people and things—call it the historical—I admire with my entire self. At our event in September I tried to honor it with a prop. It’s just a cup (fig. 1). Beautiful, in its way—though cracked, like Henry James’s bowl. It is thin-lipped, which I like in a sipping cup, and gilt-edged. It says “Wedgwood” on the bottom, “Etruria, England” (fig. 2). As antiquarians know, these marks indicate by code the origin, maker, and— after deciphering—the date of the piece. This ghostly language tells us that the cup I passed on to Elaine was made between 1891 and 1900, in Etruria, one of the six towns now comprising Stoke-on-Trent, epicenter of the Staffordshire trade and the site of Wedgwood’s most important factory. The whiteness of the cup, its translucency, and the fact that it won’t break when you pour hot liquid into it all follow from its composition: