Helen and Alexander seem to come alive, while reality is reduced to a succession of empty signs. “What means this show?” Faust asks Mephistopheles, receiving the inevitable reply: “Nothing, Faustus, but to delight thy mind withal / And to show thee what magic can perform.”1 It is the sale of the soul that deprives life of significance, as signs become performative, and essential reality disappears behind a screen of sensory experience and unsubstantial images. The play suggests that this loss of meaning is the direct consequence of commodification. The Faust myth tells us what happens when the world is ruled by the eidola of exchange value: we lose sight of logos and we forfeit ousia. By deprioritizing commodification in favor of a more general rise of aesthetics, Pye deprives this process of a plausible cause. Why should Western Europeans have felt the burgeoning influence of autonomous representation at this particular historical juncture? One does not have to be an economic determinist to see that the growth of a symbolic economy stimulated parallel developments in the psyche and throughout culture as a whole. It is true that the novel power of representation was felt simultaneously in what we call the economic, political, religious, and aesthetic areas. The people of early modern Europe would have found it absurd to cordon off these spheres from each other. While Pye’s criticism of dogmatic economic determinism is apt, however, the terms in which his challenge is framed risk replacing the economic with the aesthetic as the ultimate determining factor. Yet that does not detract from his essential point, which is that the early modern period witnessed the emergence of “[l]ines, circles, letters, and characters”—of representation, in short—as a practical, worldly power. If we are to understand the consequences of that process, which dominate life in the twenty-first century, we will first need to investigate its origins in Renaissance culture. The Storm at Sea provides some indispensable tools for the task.

中文翻译：

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莎士比亚的威尔士亲王 by Marisa R. Cull

海伦和亚历山大似乎活了过来，而现实则沦为一连串空洞的符号。“这个节目是什么意思？” 浮士德问梅菲斯托费勒斯，得到不可避免的回答：“浮士德，别无他法，只是为了让你的心灵愉悦/并向你展示魔法的作用。”1 正是灵魂的出售剥夺了生命的意义，因为符号变成了表演，本质的现实消失在感官体验和非实体图像的屏幕后面。该剧表明，这种意义的丧失是商品化的直接后果。浮士德神话告诉我们，当世界被交换价值的 eidola 统治时会发生什么：我们失去了 logos 的视线，我们失去了 ousia。通过优先考虑商品化以支持更普遍的美学兴起，Pye 剥夺了这一过程的合理原因。为什么西欧人会在这个特定的历史时刻感受到自治代表的新兴影响？不必是经济决定论者，就可以看到象征经济的增长刺激了心理和整个文化的平行发展。的确，在我们所谓的经济、政治、宗教和美学领域同时感受到了表现的新力量。早期现代欧洲的人们会发现将这些领域彼此隔离开来是荒谬的。然而，虽然 Pye 对教条经济决定论的批评是恰当的，但他提出挑战的术语有可能用美学取代经济作为最终决定因素。但这并没有减损他的本质，也就是说，近代早期见证了“线、圆、字母和字符”——简而言之——作为一种实用的、世俗的力量的出现。如果我们要了解这个主导 21 世纪生活的过程的后果，我们首先需要调查它在文艺复兴时期文化中的起源。海上风暴为这项任务提供了一些不可或缺的工具。