Some sketchy thoughts on Restoration Drama
For, say, John Webster, the decay of the old symbolic order elicited disgust, repugnance (a moral category). It was still experienced as a lack, a falling away. Moreover, in Jacobean drama calculation and cynicism are typically coded as daemonic and intrigue is in league with Evil. But by 1660 it is merely self-evident and the occasion for jaded resignation that the regulatory social forms are empty, pure and mechanical custom without Absolute (Natural or Divine) guarantee
Those agreed and almost pre-cognitive beliefs that had, before the English Revolution, secured the socio-symbolic order – the self-evidence of official religion, belief in the divinely ordained right of monarchs - have been eaten away. A carapace of social conventions remains in place nonetheless, but no one quite takes them seriously. They are ironised, often deliciously, or they are treated aesthetically rather than in terms of ethical obligation. The divinely ordained substance has migrated from these social forms, but they themselves live on as a kind of game. The rules of the social game, because emptied of commitment or belief, are now eminently malleable, entirely visible; there is nothing at stake but appearances. And one lives in the space separating forms of life from their legitimacy.
The rules are to be ironised, knowingly ‘played’ and deployed, implicitly criticized, but not in the name of a fully fledged alternative, only in the name of a corroding cynicism which believes in little other than self-interest. Thus, everyone plays the game, not because they believe it, or are committed to it, but because it is (perceived to be) the only game in town and because, after 1660, revolutionary fervor is distinctly passé.
The real regulatory principle is now, increasingly, money, monetary exchange. It is this which renders the superannuated social forms, the whole delicious comedy of ‘manners’ - a pure appearance. The old social forms of aristocratic life still, though, have both aesthetic appeal and semiotic force; it’s just that they are no longer locked into socio-economic reality. These forms no longer express but costume – all is reduced to charade and simulacra. Everyday life becomes theatre.
What differentiates this Restoration cynicism from our own is this: theirs consisted in not having an alternative to the social forms they ridiculed, or in a deliberate amnesia towards a recently defeated alternative; we, on the contrary, have at least the illusion of an infinite number of alternatives, a whole range of lifestyles and ideologies culled from the entirety of human history. At the level of actual behaviors and praxis, of course, we remain utterly paralyzed. The mere existence of alternatives is sufficient. Any attempt to bring them about will result in a Gulag. If there is an analogy between our own age and the Restoration it is perhaps that for us what has been 'restored' is capitalist Liberal Democracy. What has been exorcised is the spectre of Socialism.