Jimmy Page

• So proud and lofty do some people go,
• Dressing theirselves like players in a show, They patch and paint, and dress with idle stuff， As if God had not made them fine enough.
• • Watersons ‘Christmas is Now Approaching Near* (trad.) Frost and Fire (1965)

• This paper seeks to contribute to the growing field of the sociology of governance. One general feature of all forms of governance is that it involves the active discursive construction of the objects to be governed. Thus, for example, whether a social category is discursively constructed as4the poor’，‘the unemployed’ or ‘the underclass’ has a significant impact upon the subsequent practices of agencies and governments. This paper focuses on the discourses of luxury in their connection with projects directed at the regulation of consumption. Luxury provides an interesting case study because it has so often and in so many societies been a major target of moralizing discourses and projects of regulation. Then it eventually lost its moral opprobrium and remerged as a mark of distinction whose pursuit became legitimate because，as in the advertising slogan, ‘After all, we all deserve a little luxury'

• I trace the trajectory of the morallzation of luxury. Particular attention is paid to the way in which these become linked to and entwined with other projects of regulation. I will show that，without any break with the moralization of luxury, a decisive shift occurred towards modem economic discourses, in which the stimulation of domestic industries and the protectionist restraint on foreign competitors come to deploy the self-same moralization of luxury. This change is explored by means of a discussion of sumptuary law which had started life as a means of restraining luxury and ended as taxes on luxury and protective trade legislation. This essay emerges from a wider project which explores the governance of consumption through a study of the history of sumptuary laws (Hunt 1996). These laws were widespread and numerous projects directed at the regulation

• of consumption in many forms. Topical legislation included restriction on the wearing of specified materials and styles, limited the weight of precious metal ornaments, the price of wedding presents, the number of wedding guests, the amount and quality of wine to be served at baptisms, and much more.

• Sumptuaiy legislation existed in the classical civilisations of both West and East, throughout feudal Europe and in the early modem European powers, and found its way to the colonies of New England. This paper draws primarily on English sumptuary legislation which stretched in increasing intensity from 1336 to the very end of the sixteenth century.1 Its content changed over time. Starting from restrictions on the type and amount of food that could be served it shifted to the project of imposing hierarchic dress codes, epitomised by rules as to the furs that could be worn by each social status. Later came general expenditure limits on the cost of costumes and specific items of apparel. There was also a rare instance of an attempt to impose a positive dress prescription by the ‘Cap Act，of 1571 2 under which every person over the age of six, with the exception of the nobility and all gentlemen with land worth 20 marks a year, should wear, on Sundays and holidays, “a cap of wool knit, thicked and dressed in England, made within this realm.” The economic motive was made explicit as being “for the relief of divers poor decayed towns and of great multitudes of her Majesty’s poor subjects.”

• My specific focus is on the end of sumptuaiy projects. English sumptuary legislation ended abruptly in 1604 when an attempt to impose a new sumptuaiy code ended, as a result of the constitutional tension between Crown and Parliament, with the repeal of all extant statutes without securing a new sumptuary regime. In Section VI will argue against the conventional accounts which view the abandonment of efforts to impose restraints on consumption as manifestations of the wisdom of modernity which regards such efforts as foolish and doomed to failure. Rather I will propose that it is better to understand the process as one in which the moralization of luxury which provided the discursive underpinning of sumptuary legislation became transformed into providing the legitimation of the economic protectionist projects that become prominent from the mid- seventeenth century.

• From the first literate societies until high modernity the figure of Luxury has excited moral condemnation and stimulated the regulatory reflex. The moralization of luxury has exhibited remarkable persistence3. The invocation of luxury is one of the most ancient and most pervasive negative principles around and through which social criticism and regulatory activity has been articulated 4. From the Old Testament to Classical Rome, from the medieval divines down to secular Elizabethan England (and beyond) virtually every conceivable

• ill, whether personal or social，has been at one time or another laid at the door of luxury 5. My concern is not to offer a history of luxury, but rather to explore its discursive shifts and variations.

• From the vantage-point of the late twentieth century we retain a vague sense of‘luxury’ as a problematic category. For us it combines some lingering sense of censure with a positive attraction; the designation of consumables, such as hotels and motorcars as •luxury’，is both neutral, designating a segment of the market，and an advertising puff (the luxury cruise’ which we may never take, but the attraction of the idea of being pampered and indulged makes the idea a potent stimulant}. Thus, while we retain some sense of the more negative construction of luxury, it is by no means simple to retrieve an understanding of exactly what it was that was so wrong with luxury as to make it a focus of moral critique and a target for regulation.

• It is important to start with what should perhaps be treated as the material basis of the critique of luxury. It should be bom in mind that few societies outside the developed industrial sphere have freed themselves from the looming shadow of what used to be called ‘dearth’，the inability to provide for the basic conditions of social reproduction was and remained a widespread social reality. It is in such a context that there exists a tension between the negative activity of ‘squandering’ economic resources and the persistent significance of the gift relationship as a mechanism for reinforcing social bonds (Mauss 1990).

• Luxury was frequently associated with the figure of‘ruin’； a persistent strand provided by this fear of ruin in an imagery that brought together economic and moral catastrophe. 

• The concern with ruin was connected with a range of anxieties, for example，that of the old nobility unable to compete with the pressure of conspicuous consumption from the ‘nouveau riches’，but also concern with the ‘ruin’ of the lower orders trapped into competitive consumption that they could ill afford. And then there was a wider preoccupation with moral, or more specifically sexual ruin, epitomised by the link with the discourses of virginity, prostitution, and effeminacy. KrafTt-Ebing captures these linked anxieties when he refers to the view that ‘tlie material and moral ruin of the community is steadily brought about by debauchery，adultery and luxury1 (Krafft-Ebing 1922:6).

• A sense of the medieval term luxury, connotations which have today been largely lost, is secured not only by being counterposed to frugality, but also to chastit y, such that profligacy carried with it sexual as well as economic implications. Thomas Mun typifies a voice that had been commonplace for at least two centuries that captured the great chain of vice induced by luxury and which makes clear that luxury is gendered.

• The general leprosie of our piping, potting, feasting, fashion, and the mis-spending of our time in idleness and pleasure... hath made us effeminate in our bodies, weak in our knowledge, poor In our treasure, declined in our valour, unfortunate in our enterprises, and condemned by our enemies. (Mun 1664:180-81)

• But it is easy to see how the moralizing tones can abate and how ‘luxury’ shifts towards a concern with ‘profligacy’ that comes to be viewed in more explicitly ‘economic’ terms as, for example, in a Venetian law of 1360 that explicitly complained that inordinate luxury was detracting from productive investment in shipping and industiy (Miskimin 1969:156).

• The moralization of luxury had life that went far beyond the fear or the memory of dearth and famine. Luxury came to be conceived as both cause and symptom of an evil that was both personal and social. It needs to be stressed that the notion of luxury had no fixed content. There is no stable reference point of need or necessity as its counterpoint; rather the discourses of ‘luxury’ involved the construction of a system of rhetorical signs, that is of means of setting up a dichotomous discourse which operated through counterposing vices and virtues. What was distinctive about the discourses of luxury was that its counterpoints were never stable.

• Luxury has two major discursive counterpoints; in the first place it is socially divisive, it acts like a solvent, loosening and separating those social bonds conceived as necessary to sustain the community. A second，and rather different, expression of the critique of luxury involves the idea that luxury induces weakening or debility; that it undermines or weakens the individual and thus puts the group at risk. This concern with weakening, ‘enervating’，making soft and feminine, etc，involves the interplay of highly charged sets of myths and symbols. National mythology pictures the national ideal, in contrast to the ‘other’, as simple and hardy; thus Spanish sumptuary law appealed explicitly to a national image of the Spanish as a frugal and hardy people, in contrast to the luxury that typified the Moorish national enemy (Hume 1896).

• The past is imagined as a golden age involving a rural, agricultural, hard-working and simple past; thus in one of its dimensions，the construction of luxury reveals itself as a critique of modernity or，alternatively, as the expression of anxiety or apprehension of social change.

• The view ofluxuiy as debilitating deploys the powerful genderization associated with the pejorative connotations of the term effeminate. When Plato linked luxury and effeminacy he spoke not from great philosophical insight but from the standpoint of common sense of what everyone ‘knows’ to be true. Plato was joined in this view by amongst others, St. Augustine, Dante, Swift，Montesquieu and Rousseau (Veyne 1990:248).

• Luxury is the feminine, and the feminine is not only in itself weak, but - as in the Samson myth - it undermines the masculine principle of self-sufficiency and hardiness.

• The pervasive mythology of the Garden of Eden provides evidence of a significant early association of luxury, evil and the female; luxury was and remained a feminine personification. For example, the discourse surrounding Roman sumptuary measures relied heavily on images of ‘female luxury’ and ostentation and betrayed a preoccupation with the dissolution of the male economic mechanism of inheritance of patrimonies (Miles 1987). 
• • *伊甸園的pervasive神話提供了奢侈，邪惡和女性早期重要關聯的證據; 奢侈品一直是女性的化身。 例如，關於羅馬奢侈品措施的討論嚴重依賴於“女性奢侈品”和炫耀的形象，並背離了對遺傳繼承的男性經濟機制的解散的關注（Miles 1987）。

• These gendered mythologies relate back to national mythologies in which concern with weakness and debility takes on an explicitly military dimension; the nation is conceived as being put at peril when its young men are corrupted by luxury. The discursive construction of the sumptuary ethic, the necessity of subjecting private consumption to regulation, played powerfully upon both national and gender dimensions of the critique of luxury • It constructed links to military concerns (weakness and effeminacy), economic anxiety (luxury versus famine) and national myths (*us’ versus ‘them’} • It should be noted that the critique of luxury generally took a distinctive biological metaphorical form in which luxury is conceived as invasive, as a disease and infection to combat which requires either surgical or agricultural operations of amputation or weeding. 
• • *這些性別化的神話與國家神話有關，對弱點和弱點的關注具有明確的軍事維度; 當這個國家的年輕人被奢侈品腐敗時，這個國家被認為處於危險之中。 奢侈品倫理的話語建構，私人消費受到監管的必要性，對奢侈品批評的國家和性別層面都起到了有力的作用•它構建了與軍事關切（無力和無力），經濟焦慮（奢侈與飢餓） 和民族神話（*我們'對'他們'）•應該指出的是，對奢侈品的批評通常採用了一種獨特的生物隱喻形式，其中奢侈品被認為是侵入性的，作為一種需要手術或農業的疾病和感染來對抗 截肢或除草操作。

• The Christian tradition added its own distinctive inflection. Luxury was conceived as a violation of a divinely conceived necessity or natural order, and it is here that ‘necessity’ is most successfully linked to a sense of hierarchy. The conception of necessity and the natural refers to a view of the world in which God provides all we need, but an imagery in which our needs are presented as simple; a view powerfully captured in the symbol of bread. In addition the New Testament tradition added a concern with the antithesis between the harm done to the rich and the concern with the welfare of the poor. The distinctive shift in the religious critique of luxury was from a concern with personal sin to the idea of luxury as a social and political evil, because it is only then that it becomes 4a suitable case for treatment* through regulation. The two main candidates for the sins induced by luxury are the linked, but distinguishable, sins of pride and envy. A perennial criticism of preoccupation with personal appearance is that it is evidence of the sin of pride. Latimer’s sermonization that ‘excessive pride in apparel is odious’ (1584:280) was typical of a torrent of moralization, both religious and secular. An onslaught that reappears over the next two centuries is to be found in Phillip Stubbes’ attack upon that greatest of abuses, ‘the sinne of pride and excesse in apparel’ (Stubbes [1583] 1972:np) 6.

• There were theological issues between Protestantism and Catholicism over their treatment of luxury. In its simplest form, while Catholicism condemned luxury as the personal sin of pride, Protestantism was generally more concerned with the consequences

• that were attributed to this vice, that it induced immorality and dissoluteness. Puritanism added a significant inflection to the discourses of luxury. The idea that luxury was wasteful or profligate was pinned down by being contrasted with good works; what was wasted on luxury was not available for charitable works. John Wesley continued this tradition preaching against extravagance in dress in which such extravagance is condemned because it impedes the charity that is necessary that believers ‘may clothe your poor, naked, shivering fellow-creature!* (Wesley 1984 VII: 20-21).

• The linkage between luxury and immorality became secularized.

• Yet the earlier Christian concern with the idea of need or necessity continues to find expression in robust secular thinkers like Montesquieu whose view that 4the law ought to give each man only what is necessary for nature’ (Montesquieu [1748] 1900:94), was - even in the mid-eighteenth century- giving voice to one of the central tenets that had earlier motivated the sumptuary project. This notion of necessity and simplicity was readily transferable into an anti¬ capitalist critique, in rather the same way that the Christian opposition to usury had been deployed, Charles Davenant offered just such a traditionalist, anti-capitaJist critique of luxury in a form that provides a neat juxtaposition of social ills. 
• • * 但早期基督教關注需要或必要性的想法繼續在穩健中表達世俗法律思想家像孟德斯鳩的觀點,4只應該給每個人自然是必要的(孟德斯鳩[1748]1900:94)——即使是在18世紀中期表達的核心原則之一,此前禁止奢侈的項目。這個概念的必要性和簡單性是很容易轉移到一個反¬資本主義批判,在以同樣的方式,而基督教反對高利貸已經部署,查爾斯Davenant提供了這樣一個傳統主義者,anti-capitaJist批判的豪華的形式提供一個整潔的並列的社會弊病。

• A perennial feature of moralizing discourses is that they make heavy use of ‘slippeiy slope’ arguments deriving cataclysmic consequences from unprepossessing vices. Luxury came to be viewed through the metaphor of moral contagion, involving the idea that there is a sequential linkage between vices and sins which accumulatively cause social harms or bring down the wrath of God. Cicero, for example, had propounded the sequence that luxury led to avarice, avarice bred audacity, which in turn was the source of all crimes and misdeeds (Cicero 1879). 
• • *道德说教的一个长期特征是，它们大量使用“滑溜溜的斜坡”的论点，导致不受欢迎的恶习带来灾难性的后果。奢侈品是通过道德传染的隐喻来看待的，它包含了罪恶与罪恶之间有一个连续的联系，它累积起来会造成社会伤害或降低上帝的愤怒。以西塞罗为例，他提出了奢侈导致贪婪的顺序，贪婪滋生了胆大妄为，而这种胆大妄为又是所有犯罪和恶行的根源(西塞罗1879)。

• Perhaps the apex of the moralization of luxury was reached in Florence with the dramatic practices of Savonarola’s ‘bonfires of the vanities*.  
• • 或许，萨沃纳罗拉(Savonarola)的《虚荣的篝火》(bonfire of the vanities)的戏剧性实践在佛罗伦萨达到了道德教化的顶点。

• In Tudor England numerous sermons and polemics propounded versions of a ‘domino theory* or cascade effect whereby the individual sin of luxury leads to damage to the whole social fabric. Ben Jonson had his fictional character Touchstone in Eastward Ho opine that:
• • 在英国都铎王朝，无数的布道和论辩都提出了“多米诺骨牌理论”或“层叠效应”的版本，通过这种效应，奢侈品的个人罪恶会对整个社会结构造成损害。本·琼森(Ben Jonson)在《东方万岁》(east Hoopine)中虚构的人物试金石(Touchstone)说:

• What is central to all versions of the discourse of moral contagion is that from an initial attention to some widely diffused vice, ‘normal sin’，is constructed as a slippery slope to national ruin. Some targets persist, such as the moralization of prostitution, some like luxury wane, while others, such as alcohol and tobacco, become new sites of preoccupation and regulatory reflex.

• In general moralizing discourses are unleashed by feelings of social disturbance or anxiety 7. For example, Sekora suggests that the revival of the critique of luxury in eighteenth century England was fuelled by a renewed concern about a ‘dangerous insubordination’ of the lower orders (Sekora 1977:91). A good illustration of the ‘slippery slope’ version of moral contagion critique is the unrestrained polemic against the lower orders from the essayist and active Justice of the Peace, Henry Fielding.

是關於基斯洛夫斯基的Three Colors，包含他對於這位大師的懷念，以及探討到電影之外自由主義與社會主義在生命觀與幸福觀的差異的探討。我想寫下自己對這三部電影的看法，但早已包含在這篇文章裡；何況這篇文章要說的太多、太深刻了。那就用這篇文章來表達我對這三部電影的看法。

肉身的沉重，另有收錄關於十誡的文字，還有卡夫卡、昆德拉的評析。是本難得的好書，就像劉小楓說基斯洛夫斯基是這時代難得珍惜人的情感並深入探討的電影思想家，劉本身也是這時代難得針對諸多重要課題提出見解的哲學家。