a retourn to history the new historicism and its agenda

A Return to History? The New Historicism and Its AgendaAuthor(s): Peter Uwe HohendahlSource: New German Critique, No. 55 (Winter, 1992), pp. 87-104Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488291 .Accessed: 09/09/2013 10:16

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A Return to History? The New Historicism and Its Agenda

Peter Uwe Hohendahl

The history of literary criticism, particularly any attempt to draw a map of the present situation, cannot quite do without labels in order to characterize theoretical positions, groups, and camps. One of these labels that suddenly emerged in the critical discourse during the 1980s is that of the New History or, more properly, the New Historicism. The New Historicism has been referred to as a new movement or position that would replace the old historicism but also, and more important, su- persede the prominent critical positions of the 1970s, notably decon- structionism and Marxism. Its proponents, among them Stephen Green- blatt and Louis Montrose, have hailed the New Historicism as a methodological Kehre steering literary criticism away from the formalism of the deconstructive approach and the positivism of the old historicism. Its critics have charged the New History with theoretical eclecticism that will ultimately lead to a position that is rather close to traditional historicism. Among the critical voices is that of Dominick LaCapra, who discusses the New Historians as a minor movement of small consequence. In Soundings in Critical Theory he argues that the New Historians tend to share much of the problems of traditional historicism, for instance, a flair for overcontextualization and theoretical relativism. "There is a tendency to extend Clifford Geertz' valuable stress upon 'thick description' into the indiscriminate, unqualified rule: the thicker the description, the better."' To this LaCapra adds the somewhat unflattering statement: "One may

1. Dominick LaCapra, Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1989) 191.

87


88 The New Historicism and Its Agenda

also find a relatively weak theoretical overlay in the invocation of the concept of power, which itself threatens to become a universal solvent in explanation and interpretation."2 LaCapra, as biased as his judgment may sound, is not too far from the mark when he suggests that the New Historians, especially the group around the journal Representa- tions, owe their agenda to Foucault on the one hand and the reformula- tion of Parsonian System Theory on the other.

To be sure, LaCapra is ready to admit that his characterization of the movement is rather general and therefore possibly not applicable to all its proponents. Indeed, the label "New Historicism" has been used rather indiscriminately in the last decade - bringing all those critics together under one name who are engaged in revising a historical approach to literature. Their revisionist agenda has a number of polemical components that sometimes supplement and sometimes con- front each other. Among them we' find antiformalism, antiessentia- lism, antiuniversalism, and antielitism. In any case, the New Histo- rians claim to have returned to histy without relying on the worn-out cliches of traditional historical scholarship. In other words, their claim is to offer critical history - a way of thinking about literature and history that rejects the narrative structure of conventional literary history. Of course, this preliminary characterization leaves many questions open, first and foremost the veracity of this claim. Does the New His- toricism offer a better, more fruitful approach to literary texts and literature in general? Does it avoid the pitfalls and shortcomings of traditional historicism? Yet, before I even attempt to respond to these questions, I have to address another problem, namely the definition of the fundamental category of history. To put it differently: if the New His- toricism implies a return to history, what is meant by history? And, second, what is the critical moment in this return?

Almost exactly half a century ago, Walter Benjamin offered a scath- ing critique of the historicist position in his "Theses on History," written under the impression of the Stalin-Ribbentrop pact. It is worth- while to keep their polemical force in mind when we try to assess the critical potential of the New History. What makes Benjamin's attack particularly interesting and relevant in our context is its double-edged nature: he assaults both traditional nineteenth-century historicism and the orthodox Marxist position, as it was developed during the Second

2. LaCapra 191.


Peter Uwe Hohendahl 89

International. For Benjamin both positions, seemingly opposed to each other, are grounded in a shared consensus that is hidden from the warring factions because the political use that bourgeois historians and orthodox socialists make of history are obviously incompatible with one another. The affirmative and the revolutionary functions seem to contradict each other. Yet Benjamin argues that this opposition is less radical than it seems; its validity is limited, so to speak, to the nineteenth century when the bourgeoisie and the working class relied on a specific, but partly unacknowledged idea of history.

The eighth thesis defines the new task of the contemporary historian: "We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism."3 Hence Benjamin replaces the idea of continuity and progress, on which the Party relied, with the image of Triimmer (wreckage), piled up by the catastrophe. This reversal leads him to a radically different concept of history based on the idea ofJetzt- zeit: "History is the subject of ?a

structure whose site is not homoge- neous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [letzt- zeit]."4Jetztzeit cancels the temporal transition from the past to the fu- ture; it blocks out and reconfigures. Critical history (materialism), Ben- jamin postulates, is an act of construction in which the object is not woven together through narrative techniques; rather, it is isolated as a monad. Benjamin's seventeenth thesis suggests that only an immanent critique can bring out and preserve the historical truth. Theodor Ador- no was later to develop this conception in Aesthetic Theory (1970), using negative dialectics as a way to undermine the notion of history as an affirmative narrative. I shall come back to this question at the end.

Before that, I want to present the agenda of the New Historians, particularly of the group around Representations, although they are by no means the only revisionist literary historians. First, I want to look at the critique of traditional forms of historical explanation; second, I want to characterize the method and theory; and, finally, I mean to situate the New Historicism on the map of American criticism and thereby define its agenda. It should be mentioned, by the way, that the New History is at home in American literature departments rather than in history

3. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) 257. 4. Benjamin 261.



departments for fairly obvious reasons: the problem that the New His- torians address is that of inter- and contextualization of literary texts - a question that is only of marginal interest to professional historians, especially social historians.

Both explicitly and implicitly, that is, through their practice, the New Historians have distanced themselves from traditional historicism, its conservative variety as well as orthodox Marxism. By and large the critical dialogue with various strands of Marxist theory has been more significant for the project of the New Historians. This is particularly true for the British revisionists such as Jonathan Dollimo- re,5 whereas the Berkeley group has been more in a polemical exchange with formalist theories - sometimes, however, mediated through the perspective of the New Left. As Catherine Gallagher has pointed out in a recent essay,6 the New Historians of the 1980s picked up part of the radical agenda of the New Left. Among other things, they inherited the shift from orthodox Marxism to neo-Marxism, which emphasized culture as the site of political struggle. As critical theory (Marcuse/Adorno) prepared the way for the reception of French Marxism and poststructuralism among American oppositional critics, the revisionist critique of traditional Marxism and historicism took over the arguments of critical theory. In other words, in its polemic against the "old" methods, the New Historicism is hardly original; nor, for that matter, does it pretend to be original. Many of the arguments presented have the character of received ideas that are applied, however, in a modified context.

A common element in the divergent writings of the New Historians is their antihumanism, a clearly polemical attitude directed against the narratives of classical historicism, which relied on the concept of Geist, or Hegelian Marxism, with its stress on totality (Lukfics). The mostly unacknowledged common epistemological ground of the opponents is the assumption that history can be presented as the acts of individual subjects who are related to and dominated by an absolute subject. This assumption allows the historian to reconstruct past events as meaningful since they come together in a unified narrative called history. The anti- historicism of the New Historians challenges the underlying notion both of subjectivity (following Althusser and Foucault) and of totality

5. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy (U of Chicago P: Chicago, 1984). 6. Catherine Gallagher, "Marxism and the New Historicism," The New Historicism,

ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York and London: Routledge, 1989) 37-48.



(following Foucault and Derrida). The New Historicism, as we will see, foregrounds the constructed, that is, the ideological character of subjectivity, a move that also challenges the notion of an overarching humanist project. The question then arises: Does the New Historicism attempt to fill this gap? Do its proponents assign meaning to history? While they clearly do not believe in a spirit that unfolds during the course of history or assume that the past can be reconstructed as single process, even as a dialectical process that includes negative moments, they tend to look for meaning, especially those critics who are under the influence of Clifford Geertz and cultural anthropology. To put it differently, unlike the American Foucauldians, they are at least partial- ly involved in a hermeneutic project. This search for meaning and the strong antihumanist bias of those critics who are more indebted to structuralist Marxism (like Dollimore) create an interesting tension within the camp. Also, it makes it more difficult, certainly, to define the theoretical foundation of the New History.

There have been a number of attempts to conceptualize the New His- toricism in theoretical terms, but these approaches have not been altogether successful since there is no master text on which all pronounce- ments of the group are based. In this respect, the New Historians are rather eclectic, borrowing suitable tools wherever they can find them. The more sensible approach, therefore, is to look at the question of method and strategy. It is at this level that the New Historians have been most productive, boldly revitalizing the practice of literary history and historical studies in general. Against the background of the old historicism, the task can be defined as finding, first, a better solution for the problem of contextualizing and, second, a more persuasive answer to the question of constructing a narrative. It goes without saying, however, that a discussion of the method or methods cannot proceed without some basic understanding of the subject matter and the goal. Richard Terdiman suggested in a recent essay that the common concern of the New Historians is the function of power - instead of ideas.7 Although this characterization is, I believe, somewhat narrow, it certainly throws light on the methodological problems embedded in this concern. While traditional intellectual history wanted to connect ideas, the New Histori- cism means to probe and investigate relationships - relationships between texts, between texts and institutions, between discourses embedded

7. Richard Terdiman, "Is There Class in This Class?" The New Historicism 225-30.



in institutions. I shall return to this question at the end, after I have discussed the two methodological aspects I mentioned previously.

First, how do we define the text-context relationship? In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson distinguished between causal and expressive determination.8 In the first case, events and facts are supposed to have an impact on the production or reception of the text; in the second case, the literary text stands in for and is representative of an essence. The New Historicism is dissatisfied with either method, particularly, however, with any notion of expressive causality A la Hegel - which seemingly demotes the literary work, however, only in order to reinforce its ultimate importance as the embodiment of the universal. Instead, the New Historian, for instance Stephen Greenblatt, insists on deliberately diffusing the categorical differences between text and context, that is, the work of art and its historical environment. In his 1986 essay "Loudun and London," Greenblatt remarks: "Elizabethan theater does not simply reflect the official policy towards the demoniac, it is in part constituted by it and it contributes in its turn to the concrete shaping of the spiritual and political discourse upon which it draws."9 It is possible (and taken out of context probably quite persuasive) to read this passage as a dialectical definition of the text-context relationship, a definition fairly dose to West- ern Marxism - as Frank Lentricchia's commentary on this passage suggests.'0 But I feel that Lentricchia is mistaken when he believes that Greenblatt's method is still close to the Marxist paradigm. By and large Greenblatt and the New Historians avoid the restricting form of a dialectical process (which would still end up in a formal narrative). Greenblatt has argued most eloquently in his recent book, Shakespearean Negotiations, in favor of culture as circulation of social energy.

For anyone familiar with the Marxist tradition, for example with LukAcs, Greenblatt's opening question sounds familiar enough: "[H]ow did so much life get into the textual traces? Shakespeare's plays, it see- med, had precipitated out of a sublime confrontation between a total ar- tist and a totalizing society."" Greenblatt assumes that there is not

8. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981).

9. Stephen Greenblatt, "Loudon and London," Critical Inquiry 12 (Winter 1986): 342. 10. Frank Lentricchia, "Foucault's Legacy: A New Historicism?" The New Histori-

cism 246-47. 11. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of

California P, 1988) 2. Page references for further quotations from this book are given in parentheses.



only a link between Elizabethan English society and Shakespeare's plays but also something like a corresponding configuration at the center of which we find the concept of power. Yet at the same time Green- blatt explicitly resists the classical move to integrate the various elements of these two configurations into a structure around a predetermined center, for instance, state power. For two reasons he rejects the traditional notion of representation as reflection. First of all, Green- blatt no longer believes in the possibility of unifying the context (the historical background) under a dominant category (the economic); second, he has lost the formalist belief that the "text itself" is available to the critic as a pure source for interpretation. In other words, both text and context have been destabilized in such a way that the traditional formulation of the task, as it is still noticeable in Jameson's project, is no longer available. Instead of order Greenblatt perceives contingency (3). For this reason he suggests that a different model has to be developed to cope with the many loose ends on either side. Representation, Greenblatt argues, can be best conceptualized, at least in the case of the European Renaissance, as circulation of social energy or as exchange. This means: the power of the text as well as that of the prince is not the origin but the result of negotiations. To put it differently, for Greenblatt the aesthetic autonomy of the text is just as much a fiction as the sovereign power of the prince - yet both are necessary and powerful fictions.

Under these circumstances, the task of historical reconstruction that the New Historicism wants to enact takes on the form of tracing contin- gent moments - links, similarities, and repetitions. "In place of a blaz- ing genesis, one begins to glimpse something that seems at first far less spectacular: a subtle, elusive set of exchanges, a network of trades and trade-offs, a jostling competing of representations, a negotiation between joint-stock companies" (7). Obviously, the model that Greenblatt invokes is historically grounded in early European capitalism - the transition from a fixed theological order to a multicentered economic structure. It is precisely this lack of a unified center of the postmedieval world that encourages certain features of the New Historicism, for instance, the preference for stitching and association over-causal linking; in other words, the pursuit of configurations that are unique but at the same time exemplary. Texts, literary and nonliterary, are always part of a network; they cannot be isolated without reducing their meaning. In this respect the New Historicism is especially opposed to the formalist



interest in isolation and textual fetishism; but also to any notion of ar- tistic creation as it was present in the formalist credo. According to Greenblatt, "there is no originary moment, no pure act of untramme- led creation" (7).

How, then, do we understand the intertextual and contextual dimen- sion of literature? Greenblatt suggests the category of exchange as the key concept that allows the critic to trace the configurative elements. Yet we have to note that exchange comes in various forms - as appropriation, purchase, and symbolic acquisition. The third subcategory is again sub- divided, so that Greenblatt can talk about acquisition through simula- tion (10), metaphorical acquisition, and acquisition through metony- my. Through these various categories links can be explored without - and this is the important point - any recourse to a single, unified pat- tern (causality). In any case, however, the connection (between the social and the literary) is established as exchange: something is given in return for something else. The market is taken to be the most general paradigm without being explored in regard to its genesis and structure. This limitation may be the price for a significant gain in conceptualizing contextuality. Greenblatt and the New Historians are no longer bound to the category of reflection that guided much of literary sociology, where the literary and the social realm were conceived as separate and autonomous spheres that somehow had to be compared.

From what I have said about the method so far, it may have become apparent that we should not expect to find sharply defined principles and strict guidelines in the New Historicism. Greenblatt's severe war- nings (12) are not specific enough to foreground the difference between the New Historicism and other more recent approaches. Most of his points could be shared by Western Marxists or Foucauldians. For this reason I want to turn to a specific "case" in order to elucidate the approach. In the chapter "Invisible Bullets," for example, Greenblatt brings together a number of discourses and institutions that seem to be far removed from each other, the theological discourse on atheism, the new colonial discourse involved with non-European culture, and finally a political discussion on disorder and subversion. It is through these discourses that Greenblatt approaches Shakespeare's historical plays (Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V). These overlapping and competing discourses are seen as the energies that bring about Elizabethan drama. "Elizabethan playing companies contrived to absorb, refashion, and exploit some of the fundamental energies of a political authority that



was itself already committed to histrionic display and hence was ripe for appropriation" (40). Shakespeare in particular appears as the play- wright who appropriates these discourses for his historical plays.

Yet it is not enough to mention these discourses. Unlike traditional intellectual history, Greenblatt's method of linking and weaving is specific and concrete. He turns to the Elizabethan scientist Harriot, who was suspected of being an atheist, to trace the connection between the religious discourse and the new colonial discourse. By bringing together and then collapsing Harriot's report about the Algonquin Indians and Machiavelli's Prince, Greenblatt sets the stage for his reading of Shakespeare's plays. Harriot's report, according to Greenblatt, articu- lates the very dialectic of authority and subversion that Shakespeare's plays unfold. "In the Virginia colony, the radical undermining of Christian order is not the negative limit but the positive condition for the establishment of that order" (30). To put it differently, Harriot's report, although affirming the truth and effectiveness of Christianity in strong terms, also undercuts this belief system by suggesting that it helped to stabilize the political order in the colony.

Greenblatt's reading of Henry IV makes extensive use of this ambi- valence, especially in his understanding of the figure of Hal, the de- ceiver who raises hopes in men only to disappoint them. Yet the re- semblance between Harriot's and Shakespeare's texts goes beyond a single figure. For Greenblatt the connection operates at the level of re- cording, that is, a language that is used to document things as well as to dominate. In terms of Greenblatt's categories, the link between the tract and the play would be metaphysical acquisition, which works "by teasing out latent homologies, similitudes, systems of likeness" (11). Shakespeare's plays do not operate outside the structure of power; rather, they are part of it, just as much as Harriot's report, the spies who watch over powerful aristocrats, or the institution of the theater. "Royal power is manifested to its subjects as in a theater, and the subjects are at once absorbed by the instructive, delightful, or terrible spectacles and forbidden intervention or deep intimacy" (65).

Reconstructing the historical configuration of a single literary text or a group of texts (and this is more frequently the case) involves a number of simultaneous moves and strategies that traditional historians will find disturbing if not outright scandalous, since they result in a performance that seems to point in various directions. The point is this: the New Historian, typically, does not produce a one-dimensional



narrative, or even a set of narratives that parallel each other. For the New Historian neither chronology nor causality or teleology are ultimate principles, although these concepts certainly play a role in the presentation of the textual configuration. Traditional narrative is reduced to the anecdote, with which Greenblatt, for instance, likes to open a chapter. Still, not a great deal of weight is attributed to the event referred to in the presentation; it functions as an Auflunger, a way of get- ting into the web. The method of tracing links and exchanges results in a nonlinear presentation where frequent shifts from one level to another are the norm (let us say from the literary to the economic back to the political, and from there to the religious). Since these moves do not claim that these levels are related to each other in a fixed and predetermined manner (as orthodox Marxist criticism would assume), these shifts do not create significant methodological and theoretical problems. Problems of mediation, for example, which are crucial to Marx- ist theory, do not play a major role. Theoretical issues in general - in contrast to deconstruction, hermeneutics, and Marxism - seem not to be of central importance.

This posttheoretical attitude makes it sometimes difficult to situate the New Historicism within the present debate. Is it an extension of Western Marxism or a variety of poststructuralism? Or is it more appropriate to describe the New Historicism as cultural anhropology? Arguments in favor of either position have been presented by critics writing about the New Historicism. It is indeed quite possible to argue either way, for the influence of Marxist theory, Foucault, and Clifford Geertz can be docu- mented. Most observers seem to agree that Foucault's agenda in particular left its imprint on the writings of the New Historians. The bias against humanism and the presupposition of a free subject, as well as the almost relentless concern with power, would point to Foucault. Yet the antihumanist bias is equally strong in post-Althusserian Marxism and comes out very strongly for instance in the work of the English critic Dollimore, who is frequently mentioned as part of the New Historicism. Finally, the obvious delight of the New Historians in detailed description of concrete objects and moments is a preference they share with Geertzean cultural anthropology where history turns into a cultural map.'2 In short, while it may be not too difficult to define the method of the New Historicism, it is considerably more difficult to determine the theoretical position and

12. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973).



the agenda in positive terms. This is, I suspect, one of the reasons why hostile critics have not been able to agree on the deficiencies of the New Historians.

In terms of their theoretical ancestors, the New Historians have more than once been labeled as neo-Foucauldians. The debts to the work of Foucault are obvious - antihumanism, critique of the subject, the centrality of power for the understanding of history. At the same time, however, there are other, ultimately conflicting influences, among them cultural anthropology and Marxism. Since both their theoretical positions on history and their agendas are not compatible, the recovery of history by the New Historians contains a good deal of strain and tension. From the point of view of Foucault, the New Histo- ricism is dangerously close to an approach to history based on hermeneutics; from the perspective of Geertz and James Clifford,'3 in spite of their use of thick descriptions, the New Historians do not care enough about the meaning of culture. To this we could add the objections of the Marxist critic who feels that the category of exchange or linking is much too loose to account for the structure of historical processes. How, then, do we characterize the new historical agenda? And how does it stand up in the present critical debate?

To begin with, it may be safe to say that most New Historians would disagree with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's assumption that history can be divided into a "body of knowledge - in the sense of reliable information about the past that historians have discovered and assemb- led,"'4 on the one hand, and events as well as social relations, on the other. To eliminate the traditional dichotomy of text and fact is clearly a significant element of the agenda. More important than facts and events, which are never available as such, is the moment of representation, that is to say the processing of social and cultural practice through institutions and texts. But Fox-Genovese is probably correct when she points out that the New Historians are not interested in a systematic structure, for example a mode of production, which governs the writing and reading of literary texts.'5 They clearly evade an ontological commitment to history - a commitment that always informed (explicitly

13. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California P, 1986).

14. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Literary Criticism and the Politics of the New Histori- cism," The New Historicism 216.

15. Fox-Genovese 218.



or implicitly) older versions of historicism. But they also distance themselves from the formalist variety of deconstruction, as it is articu- lated in the work of Hillis Miller. In a recent position paper, Louis A. Montrose clearly states his opposition to Miller's dichotomy of reading and cultural critique - a dichotomy that is modeled on the old intrinsic/extrinsic opposition of New Criticism.'6 Montrose's attack on Mil- ler certainly helps to clarify the agenda of the New Historians. In particular, Montrose rejects the classical move of erecting theory above history, that is, truth above ideology - a strategy that is indeed closer to Plato than to Derrida. He underlines instead the entwinement of theory and ideology, as well as the category of critique through "ideological analysis." "Representations of the world in written discourse," he argues, "are engaged in constructing the world, in shaping the modalities of social reality, and in accommodating their writers, per- formers, readers, and audiences to multiple and shifting subject positions within the world they both constitute and inhabit.""7 In this context, Montrose retrieves ideology critique in its post-Althusserian form, that is, with its emphasis on the social formation of the subject.

This claim to have a critical approach is (for Montrose at least) the only common denominator of the New Historians. In other words, he denies that there is a common project. Still, his paper leaves no doubt that the practitioners of the New History share concerns and points of view that do coalesce into an agenda. The critical moment is the "shift from history to histories."'8 This provisional definition would include Lentricchia but exclude the Marxism ofJameson and - by extension - the theories of Lukdcs, Benjamin, and Adorno. It is less clear how these histories fit into history, however, since Montrose continues to use the latter concept for his argument, especially when he addresses the questions of subjectivity and ideology. This is not altogether surprising because Montrose frequently invokes Marxist critics like Raymond Williams, or Perry Anderson, for whom the category of general history is indispensable. Hence the shift to histories reflects a methodological rather than a theoretical preference, namely a strong resistance to de- ductive arguments.

Still, the question remains: What is the critic supposed to do with

16. Louis A. Montrose, "Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture," The New Historicism 15-36.

17. Montrose 16. 18. Montrose 20.



these histories or the "textuality of history" (23)? Montrose's answer to this question reveals the hidden tension of the agenda. He tells us:

Integral to such a collective project of historical criticism must be a realization and acknowledgement that our analyses and our understandings necessarily proceed from our own historically, socially and institutionally shaped vantage points; the histories we reconstruct are the textual constructs of critics who are, ourselves, historical subjects. If scholarship actively constructs and delimits its object of study, and if the scholar is historically positioned vis- A-vis that object, it follows that the quest of an older historical criticism to recover meanings that are in any final or absolute sense authentic, correct, and complete is illusory.'9

To put it differently, Montrose describes the agenda of the New Histo- rians as a hermeneutic project, in which the critic is seen as locally situ- ated, without absolute access to the truth, but at the same time motiva- ted by his or her social and political concerns.

In the case of Montrose, this emphasis on the historicity of the critic leads to a political criticism of the Renaissance that sharply disagrees with the idealized image of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries drawn by traditional humanists. Montrose argues: "Critical research and teaching in the Humanities may be either a merely academic dis- placement or a genuine academic instantiation of oppositional social and political praxis."20 His polemic against William Bennett and Allan Bloom makes it quite clear where he stands in the present debate. But this is a personal commitment that does not necessarily follow from a hermeneutic project. In the same way, Greenblatt describes his own position as something that evolved out of his earlier commitment to Marx- ist theory. Cultural poetics, as he likes to call the project of the New His- torians, can be defined, then, as an agenda that is clearly distinguished from Jameson's Marxism with its emphasis on the political. The target of Greenblatt's polemic is the centrality of capitalism as an explanatory category for culture. Hence, Greenblatt would hardly assume that the collapse of capitalism would make an essential difference - significant, yes, but not essential. The following statement summarizes his position vis-A-vis both Marxism and poststructuralism:

19. Montrose 23. 20. Montrose 26.



I propose that the general question addressed byJameson and Lyo- tard - what is the historical relation between art and society or between one institutionally demarcated discursive practice and another? - does not lend itself to a single, theoretically satisfactory answer of the kind that Jameson and Lyotard are trying to provide.21

What seems to bother Greenblatt in particular - and in this respect he speaks for the 1980s - is the "utopian vision" in both Jameson's and Lyotard's work, a vision that he wants to replace with a more realistic and differentiated program.

What does this program look like? Greenblatt's contribution consists of an attempt to redefine capitalism in terms of circulation and the "cir- culatory rhythm of American politics."22 What I find interesting and revealing about this answer is the focus on contemporary America. The study of Renaissance England is related to the situation of the critic in an extraordinary way, which would certainly shock traditional historians. For Greenblatt it is Reagan's America, its entwinement of fantasy and the real, that enables the critic to unravel and decode Renaissance drama. What impresses Greenblatt most about contemporary America is its - he himself does not use the term - postmodern character, that is, its lack of a clear distinction between fiction and social reality, between factual and literary texts. Greenblatt's programmatic statement does not elaborate on the link between today's America and Elizabethan Eng- land. Nevertheless, he seems to suggest that there are significant paral- lels between early modem and postmodern culture. What they have in common, among other things, is a lack of concern for the autonomy of art that preoccupied theorists of modernism and the avant-garde. In terms of a theoretical position, it means that the present is the only gate to the past. Hence it is the attitude to this present that determines the critical agenda of the New Historicism.

This agenda is much more difficult to establish than the method of inquiry for two reasons: first, it is rarely explicit in the critical texts of the group; second, it seems to be more a reaction toward previous positions than a clear-cut position shared by those who have called themselves New Historians. The most adequate formulation might be to say that the agenda of the New Historians is not to have a predetermined position, to embrace heterogeneity, and to allow conflicting

21. Stephen Greenblatt, "Towards a Poetics of Culture," The New Historicism 5. 22. Greenblatt, "Poetics of Culture" 8.



readings. Still, we would have to admit that this aversion to anything predetermined was also an important aspect of traditional historicism in its battle with systematic philosophy of history (Hegel).

Obviously the term new is relative; it cannot be used in a meaningful way without a contextual reference point. In the case of the group around Representations, this point of reference actually is less traditional historicism than the Marxist tradition on the one hand, and poststructuralism on the other. To put it differently, the return to history is an escape from the overarching project of Marxist criticism and the poststructuralist depleting of history. This is the reason why Geertz becomes so important. His "thick description" celebrates detail, it enriches the fabric of the many histories with meaning; it also deflects our attention, as Vincent Pecora has shown,23 from "crude" politics.

This brings me to the inevitable final question: How critical is this celebration of the detail, the deliberately unsystematic linking and weaving? On one level, this return to history, that is, to the full array of texts and documents, the removal of reified boundaries, has turned out to be tremendously fruitful; our historical map has certainly become more interesting during the last decade, at least in those fields of literary criticism that have been touched by the New Historicism. It would suffice to compare English and German Renaissance studies to understand this point. While German scholarship on sixteenth- and seventeenth- century German literature has been immensely learned, it has almost completely failed to transcend the narrow field of specialists. On another level, the record of the New Historians is considerably more ambigu- ous. As Aram Veeser has noted,24 the New Historicism has come under attack not only from the right but also from the left, although clearly for different reasons. Granted that the New Historicism claims to be oppositional and subversive, what, we have to ask, does the opposition con- sist of, and what does the subversion amount to?

Questions of this kind tend to invite a negative answer because the agenda invoked by these questions is so big that it is virtually impossi- ble to fulfill all of its requirements. It may be prudent, therefore, to distinguish between the oppositional force within the institution of literary criticism and outside of the academy. The claim that the New Historicism has had a significant impact on our life-worlds would be

23. Vincent P. Pecora, "The Limits of Local Knowledge," The New Histoicism 243-76. 24. H. Aram Veeser, Introduction, The New Histoficism, ix-xvi.



difficult to demonstrate. Unlike the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, the work of the New Historians has been confined to accepted and le- gitimate institutional spaces. It has developed a critical dialogue, sometimes polemical, with a number of theoretical camps, undermining preconceived ideas and concepts. Hence the New Historicism can ef- fectively be described as "co-opted" from the point of view of a radical political agenda. As far as I can see, the New Historicism has not insis- ted on or even suggested revolutionary changes in this country. Obvi- ously, such demands would hardly fit the conservative political climate of the 1980s. Attempts to transcend the institutional space would have found little resonance outside. In this respect the New Historians' conception of a critical theory would be closer to the 1950s than to the 1960s and 1970s. Given the conservative mood of the 1980s, it would be highly ahistorical to impose on them a radical political strategy.

In fact, the critical agenda of the New Historians (if one can speak of such a thing at all) has to be understood as a response to the unreali- zed and unrealistic expectations of the New Left. The New Left expec- ted to change things through theoretical models and their political ap- plication by radical groups. One possible answer to the failure of this model would be to deny the effectiveness of opposition and subversion - a pragmatic positive that argues (in a revisionist Foucauldian manner) against well-known dichotomies like hegemonic/counterhe- gemonic or center/margin. For this position the politics of a particular theoretical model is a matter of the social and political context. In this version, for instance in the writings of Walter Benn Michaels,25 the historical approach undermines the oppositional force of the critic since opposition cannot be conceived of as theoretically grounded but only as relative and situational. But it would be misleading to argue that all New Historians have come out in favor of a pragmatist position that then can be co-opted by mainstream criticism.

25. Walter Benn Michaels, for example, in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Natural- ism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (1987), polemicizes against any tendency to examine the political ambitions of the novelist since the writer and his or her text are always part of the social matrix that they supposedly defy. Indeed, this insight rei- terates the Marxist insight that autonomy of art is a historical category but it is not, as Michaels seems to assume, an argument against the possibility of the critical opposition of the artwork to capitalism. For it is quite possible to argue that the work of art is both autonomous and afait social. The oppositional and subversive force of the artwork by no means depends on the intention of the author. This leads us to question whether an immanent critique is possible at all or whether universal values and general norms have to be invented to articulate opposition.



My own reservations concern another aspect of the program, namely the systematic downgrading of the aesthetic element. Initially, this downgrading has, in my opinion, helped literature to regain its historical texture. In the long run, however, the New Historians' approach can result in a flattening of the texture in which the moment of aesthetic difference is lost - and with it the oppositional force of criticism. In no way do I want to suggest that aesthetic appreciation or formal analysis are per se critical or oppositional. We know too well how hegemonic mainstream criticism has used aesthetic and formal concerns as a way of affirming cultural patterns and institutions that in turn support the existing social structure. I do not assume, in other words, that there is an absolute difference between the historical and the aesthetic; rather, I would argue that the aesthetic aspect of the literary text is historical in itself - with respect to origin and impact. Therefore I disagree with Lent- ricchia when he emphasizes the humanist element in the New Histori- cism: "The literary historicist (old and new) grants literature precisely what historicist theory (especially new-historicist theory, with its emphasis on the constitutive presence of the historical reader) is not supposed to grant to any distinct cultural form."26 While it is not too difficult to find statements in Greenblatt's work that would prove this objection, the general tendency points in a different direction - a direction much closer to Foucault than to the New Criticism. The New Historians' determinism, as much as it avoids reductive analysis, de-emphasizes aesthetic difference through thick description of cultural details. Since the artwork is no longer granted a special status (aesthetic theory has been dis- carded as ideology), it can be rescued from indifference only through linking and weaving. By a method of radical contextualizing (which alienates the familiar) the New Historicism assigns meaning to the literary text: the meaning of the literary text may turn out to be critical, though in the case of Greenblatt it is rarely that simple. Yet the act of assigning cultural meaning comes close to a celebration of the material at hand - clearly not a humanist celebration of freedom and order, but a celebration after all, one in which the darker colors prevail, where the self-fashioning of the historical figures rests on an illusion, and where ultimately the critic him or herself must submit to the illusion of an individual, original voice. This is the moment where Geertzian hermeneutics and Foucault's determinism merge in a strange way.

26. Lentricchia 233.



It may be time to reread an essay written a generation ago by Theo- dor W. Adorno. In "Cultural Criticism and Society" Adorno warned against a form of criticism that fancies itself superior to its object, that assumes a position outside compromised mass culture by invoking an idea of pure high culture. The affirmation of high culture, for example its literary canon, as a standard for judgment and a source for "eternal values," blissfully overlooks the material embeddedness of culture and its own dependence or the material texture of culture. "Cultural criticism shares the blindness of its object. It is incapable of allowing the recognition of its frailty to arise, a frailty set in the division of mental and physical work."27 This statement may strike New Historians as familiar, since they also object to a fetishized concept of high culture, but I feel that Adorno's concept of critique goes beyond the acknow- ledgment of the materiality of culture. Through its dialectical structure it can do justice to what is traditionally called the historical context and the oppositional force of the aesthetic, since it is the impurity of the artwork, the dependence of its own material texture on external processes, that brings out the critical aspect. To put it differently, for Ador- no the opposition of ideology and critical force is located in the literary text itself as a necessary contradiction. The one cannot exist without the other. Hence critical theory cannot rely on two familiar strategies - nor can it simply call culture into question from the outside (ideology critique), nor simply use the standards of the cultural system to judge its achievement. More important, for Adorno critical theory itself is always in a precarious position and cannot comfortably rest on its dialectical method, because that method would reflect the very reifi- cation of culture which the critic means to subvert.

It is this third aspect that is, I feel, underdeveloped in the New His- toricism. While the New Historians are in agreement with Adorno that cultural criticism cannot be reduced to either ideology critique or aesthetic appreciation, they are less inclined to problematize their own position within the historical process. In this respect they are very much part of the academy and its intrinsic rules and norms. The institutional basis remains largely unquestioned. Consequently, literary criticism, as it functions within the university, remains shielded from cultural analysis. This, of course, is also true for American deconstruc- tionism and much of academic Marxism.

27. Theodor W. Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society," Prisms, Adorno (Cam- bridge: MIT P, 1967) 27.


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Issue Table of ContentsNew German Critique, No. 55 (Winter, 1992), pp. 1-190Front Matter [pp. 1-86]Spreading Myths about Fairy Tales: A Critical Commentary on Robert Bly's Iron John [pp. 3-19]Philosophy and the Fairy Tale: Ernst Bloch as Narrator [pp. 21-44]Notes on the Constellation of Gender and Cultural Identity in Contemporary Germany [pp. 45-50]The Mother-Daughter Plot in History: Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother [pp. 51-70]Modern and Postmodern Transformations of the Metropolitan Narrative [pp. 71-85]A Return to History? The New Historicism and Its Agenda [pp. 87-104]Ludwig Brne's Visit to the Anatomical Cabinet: The Writing of Jewish Emancipation[pp. 105-126]The Tenacity of Utopia: The Role of Intellectuals in Cultural Shifts within the Federal Republic of Germany [pp. 127-138]ReviewsHistory according to Theweleit [pp. 139-158]A Weakness for Heidegger: The German Root of Il Pensiero Debole [pp. 159-172]Time Present and Time Past: The Historikerstreit and German Reunification [pp. 173-190]

Back Matter

a retourn to history the new historicism and its agenda

Documents

new historicism

new history

new movement

new historians

new formsof scholarship

old historicism

new german critiquestable

jstor terms