4 - Artisanal dispossession

Summary

Patrimonial and artisanal claims

When Nashe uses artisanal metaphors to represent his labor of writing and his mastery over the fashioning of the text, he gains a means of claiming his work as his own, its marketplace dissemination notwithstanding. In so doing, he does not differ from others, especially other learned men, who invoke such metaphors. To the extent that Nashe also represents the dissemination of his work in the marketplace and represents it as a problematic dispossession, his claim of mastery is momentarily strengthened. He achieves a tenuous position between the patrimonial and fraternal world of learned men and the potential chaos of proliferating texts in the marketplace. The figure of the artisan assumes a cohesive fraternity of producers, united around a certain quality and kind of product and the processes of its fashioning. For Nashe, as for Harvey, that fraternity was emphatically not artisanal. That is, the use of artisanal metaphors precipitates various contradictions. Insofar as they offer images of mastery, they function defensively, protecting writers and their skills from the generalized access and availability that the marketplace implies. But such a defense is adopted at a cost, for it threatens the patrimony by making technical mastery the criterion of recognition. Thus the defense is finally unsuccessful against the original threat because artisanal models also imply an access that, while not general, is nonetheless open and permeable relative to patrimonial models. It is no surprise, then, that Nashe would alternately be seen as a traitor or transgressor from the perspective of learned men, and as a model for emulation by others excluded from that elite fraternity.