Torn Halves: Political Conflict in Literary and Cultural Theory

Torn Halves: Political Conflict in Literary and
CulturalTheory
(1996)
RobertJ.C.Young
Chapter7
NewHistoricism:HistoryandtheCounterCulture
SometimeagoIwassentaposterforaHigherEducation
Teachers of English (HETE) conference, the topic for
which was boldly proclaimed as The End of the Grand
Narratives.Iputtheposterupoutsidemyofficedoor,and
after a few days noticed that someone, no doubt a post
modern pedant, had scored out the final s of the title,
correctingittoTheEndoftheGrandNarrative.Thegraffiti
writers point was presumably that for the Grand
Narrative to be plural is by definition a contradiction in
terms. I assumed at first that correcting the typo
concluded the matter. But on reading more closely I
realizedthatthatextraswasasymptomaticslip.Forthe
blurb for the conference read as follows: The shift of
English to Literature and/or Cultural Studies
signals just one grand narrative, one totalizing
discourse, which has been fragmented in the course of
the last two decades. If the grand narrative of English
hasshiftedtoLiteratureand/orCulturalStudies,thenall
that has happened is that there are now simply two

www.robertjcyoung.com
2007 Robert J C Young

255
narratives instead of one, each if anything even grander
thanthelastexceptthatifitisindeedaquestionofjust
one grand narrative, one totalizing discourse, which
hasbeenfragmentedthen,ifitwasmerelyoneofthem,it
cant have been that grand or that totalizing in the first
place. This contradiction, which had seeped into the title
of the conference, is not just a question of semantics:
rather it touches upon a characteristic difficulty in the
contemporary theorization of culture whereby
totalization or fragmentation apparently cannot be
thought,celebratedordenounced,withouttheadmission
that their opposite also simultaneously holds true. The
poster presented a perfect example of the synchronous
oscillation of subversion and containment within the
institution, whereby subversive texts simultaneously
generate (or repeat) the orthodox positions that they are
supposed to disrupt but which continue to contain them
safelya structure which in turn calls into question the
usefulness of the distinction between subversive and
orthodoxtexts.
The culturalinstitutional motif of subversion and
containment is most often identified with New
Historicism, already yesterdays vogue literary theory.
Why should this be the particular narrative that it tells?
New Historicism proclaims a return to history, and with
it, therefore, comes the end of the long imagined
antithesis between history and theory. As if history had
not always been theoretical, or theory was not always
historical: but their opposition has been a necessary
critical fiction of our times. Institutionally, at least, New
Historicism has shown that theory need not be anti
historical:indeeditsgreatattractionliesinthefactthatit


256
seems to have avoided the problems of historicity
altogether, achieving an apparently effortless movement
fromthewritingsubjecttothehistoricaldomainoutside.
As a form of historical criticism, its focus has been upon
the articulation of history and culture, a new kind of
culturalpoliticsthatresituatescanonicalliteraryworksin
relation to other, nonliterary, writings of their historical
period and also to the practices of contemporary social
andpoliticalinstitutions.Ratherthanassuminghistoryto
be a somehow selfevident background for literature,
new historicists consider literary texts to be embedded
within the cultural system. The question remains,
however, of New Historicisms relation to history. For
some, it seems, any mention of history is enough to
count someone as a new historicistbut as Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak notes, when people talk about
history,thatpropernameisgenerallynotopenedup.
1
The problem begins with the name, New

Historicism. Historicism as a term has a complex range
of meanings and historical references; the diversity of
definitionsoftheNewHistoricismobviouslyarisesfrom
different assumptions as to what historicism signifies.
Sometimesitisusedsimplyasawayofemphasizingthe
importance of history in the understanding of events or
texts,withtheimplicitpresuppositionthatsucheventsor
texts must therefore be to some extent historically
determined. But more usually, Historicism implies a
theory in which history itself is considered to be
governed by general laws, and involves a philosophical
scheme imposed as an underlying form upon events.
Condorcet, Herder, Hegel, and Marx, for example, are
some of the more notable philosophers of history who


257
saw history as a teleological narrative of a progressive
emergenceofcivilization,nation,reasonorsocialism.The
termNewHistoricistmightthenseemtosetupareturn
to a historicist legacy in this second sense of the term,
comparable to its current limited versions in the
Frankfurt School and Cultural Materialism. The latter,
although often associated and sometimes even identified
with New Historicism, is concerned to trace examples of
the conflict between hegemonic and subversive forces in
historical texts, identifiable as parallel to the forms of
political struggle in our own day. It can therefore
represent a new version of the long tradition of Marxist
reflection theory, although at its most radical cultural
materialistswouldseehistoryas,inErnstBlochsphrase,
the persistently indicated, inciting and inspiring the
politicalobjectivesofthepresent.
Given the sustained theoretical critique of
historicism since the end of the nineteenth century, and
the low standing of the historicism of twentiethcentury
historians such as Spengler or Toynbee, its apparent
reaffirmation by the latest mode of criticism might seem
surprising. In this respect, the term new historicist may
be misleading, for in many ways the critical movement
continues the antihistoricist tradition, eschewing grand
causal or narrative schemas in favour of the tracing of
synchronic links between different cultural practices,
showing the processes of circulation and exchange
between them, and emphasizing in particular the
intricate, though not simply causal, relation between
capitalism and aesthetic production. In the background
here is the Foucault of The Order of Things, who argues
that knowledge is constructed according to certain


258
historical limits, and that rather than progressing and
evolving it is simply transformed from episteme to
episteme. This brings us to the third meaning of
historicism, in which it amounts to a claim for historical
enquiry as an understanding of events in their unique
particularity, as in the radical historicism of Ranke and
Droyson. The German historicists, often linked to
nineteenthcentury positivism, combined a new cultural
relativismwithanidentificationofhistorywithfreedom.
It has been argued that by eschewing any totalizing
theory of history, they remained passive before its
incomprehensibility, and thus sustained a certain
conservatism.
2
Foucault himself is sometimes described
asaradicalpositivist,soitisinevitablethatthepassivity
oftenallegedinhisaccountsofbothepistemesandpower
should be compared to the inertia of historicism in this
thirdsense.CriticssuchasDavidNorbrookhaveaskedto
what extent New Historicism, in which history is
presented as a plurality of moments, with no theory of
change or of transitions, endorses the same resignation.
3
It is certainly the case that New Historicism frequently

espouses history as a series of punctual incidents, a
succession of modernities, and tends to see culture and
history in synchronic terms, setting aside its relation to
any linear processual schemas, and eschewing meaning
except in so far as it is made in each instantor in the
analogiesdrawnbythenewhistoricistsownanalyses.
The dissonance in the term historicism operates
in the different positions taken by the New Historicists
themselves, in which some return to Greenblatts more
Foucauldian or anthropological account of the historical
relationofliteraturetootherculturalpracticesandothers


259
to the historicism of cultural materialism.
4
In practice,
therefore, New Historicism hovers uncertainly, if
productively, between being a return to history in its
positivistic singularity and particularity, and a return to
the long tradition in which history is formulated as an
overall narrative with its own meaning and necessary
development.
The complex theoretical and political problems
involved in historicism have not, however, for the most
partbeenaddressedbyNewHistoricists,whichisnotto
saythattheachievementsofindividualanalyseshavenot
been remarkable. What is unusual is that with New
Historicismthetheoryhasfollowedratherthanpreceded
the examplesitself a good indication of the kind of
thinking that distinguishes it from certain precepts of
structuralism and many a tedious theoryandpractice
textbook. As H. Aram Veeser remarks, while new
historicists show a characteristic tendency to critical
selfscrutiny,therehasbeenlittlesystematicdiscussionof
their methodology. Veesers anthology, entitled The New
Historicism, might therefore have been expected to
provide a substantial theorization of the new historical
method, but in fact it does not, despite its promise to do
so. A number of contributors voice various forms of
anxiety with respect to its complex and productive
relationship to Marxism and poststructuralism; of these,
theaccountbyStephenGreenblatt,whocanjustlybesaid
tobe thefounderofNewHistoricism,istheoutstanding
example. Greenblatt makes much of the disinclination of
new historicists to establish a theoretical position before
proceeding with their analyses. New historicists dont
theorizehistory,sothesayinggoes,theyprefertodoit


260
a position which silently (and tellingly) repeats the anti
propositional theories of New Criticism such as poetry
isntaboutexperience,itisexperience,orapoemshould
not mean, but be. This substantiates Fredric Jamesons
claim that New Historicism is a form of immanent
criticism.
5
But as Hayden White observes, to embrace a
historical approach to the study of anything entails or
implies a distinctive philosophy of history.
6
If the
implicit politics of New Criticism are anything to go by,
these silent presuppositions of New Historicism about
historyoughtbearticulatedsothattheycanbeexamined
critically. What is it, therefore, that the New Historicists
do?Andwhatisnewaboutit?
Greenblatt characterizes New Historicisms
difference from positivist historical scholarship by its
openness to theory, while admitting at the same time
that its relation to Marxism and poststructuralism
(though not, apparently, to anthropology) is unresolved
anddisingenuous.HeseekstosituateNewHistoricisms
theoretical position by specifying its critical relation to
thesetwodominanttheoreticalcamps,whichheanalyses
through the metonymic device of ananalysisof Jameson
(Marxism) and Lyotard (poststructuralism). The
positing of the two theorists in this antithetical way
allows Greenblatt to assume a separation between them
which he then proceeds to undo. He begins by citing
Jamesonsargumentthatprivatizationconstitutesoneof
capitalismsmostenervatingeffects:

the convenient working distinction between
cultural texts that are social and political and
those that are not becomes something worse
than an error: namely, a symptom and a


261
reinforcement of the reification and
privatizationofcontemporarylife.
7
Atypical instanceof thissortofprocesswouldbeKants

account of the aesthetic in which art is defined as
everything that the market is not. Such a demarcation,
Greenblatt argues, is not specific to capitalism as such:
the separation of cultural from social and political
discourses can be found in European society before the
seventeenthcentury,andinmanyothersocietiesbesides.
For Jameson, however, the enforcement of this division
represents the specific maiming force of capitalism, an
argumentwhichGreenblattsuggests

has the resonance of an allegory of the fall of
man: once we were whole, agile, integrated ...
politics and poetry were one. Then capitalism
arose and shattered this luminous, benign
totality. The myth echoes throughout Jamesons
book, though by the close it has been
eschatologically reoriented so that the totality
lies not in a past revealed to have always
already fallen but in the classless future. A
philosophical claim then appeals to an absent
empiricalevent.(3)
As Greenblatt observes, this Biblical vision, so

fundamental to a Marxist teleology, has been a prime
focus of questioning by poststructuralism which has
shown how such an argument must work by a
supplementary, always deferring structure which posits
theabsentplenitudeofbothanoriginandendinorderto
provide the basis for its own dialectical materialist


262
schema. But if this has been the basis of the
poststructuralistchallengetoMarxism,Greenblattargues
that, in his example of JeanFranois Lyotard, dis
agreementsimplytakestheformofanexactreversal.
Onceagain,asinJameson,thequestionfocuseson
the differences between the discursive realms of the
aestheticandthepolitical.ForLyotardtheproblemrather
amountstothewayinwhichcapitalismhasbrokendown
the distinctions between them, creating a homogeneous
totality which no longer allows differentiation and
disparity. Greenblatt cites Lyotards claim that Capital is
thatwhichwantsasinglelanguageandasinglenetwork,
and it never stops trying to present them.
8
Yet this,
Greenblatt argues, now apparently more sympathetic to
Jamesons argument, is a monologic description of
capitalismfor it is also capitalism that so insistently
inscribes individual identities and demarcates the
boundaries that separate them; it is capitalism that
undoes the collective identities and values of the
community. Both Jameson and Lyotard, he concludes,
present monologic descriptions of capitalism, which, in
their different ways, amount to equally totalizing
argumentsofabsolutedetotalizationandtotalization:
Jameson ... finds capitalism at the root of the

false differentiation; Lyotard ... finds capitalism
at the root of the false integration. History
functions in both cases as a convenient
anecdotal ornament upon a theoretical
structure, and capitalism appears not as a
complex social and economic development in
the West but as a malign philosophical
principle.(5)


263
Both theorists, therefore, are necessarily oversimplifying,

andthequestionthattheyask,whichamountstowhatis
thehistoricalrelationbetweenartandsociety?,cannotbe
answeredbyasingletheoreticalformulaofthekindthat
theyprovide.Theclearinferenceisthatempiricalhistory
ismorecomplexthantheory.Itcannotbecollapsedintoa
moralphilosophicalimperative.
And yet Greenblatts response is not to attempt
himself a mapping of that historical complexity, but
rathertoprovideadialecticalresolutionofsuchMarxism
and poststructuralism in strictly theoretical terms. For
Greenblatt the problem is not so much the
incompatibility of the two theories as their inability to
come to terms with the contradictions of capitalism.
Although he concedes that in principle both theories
define themselves by their focus on such contradictions,
he argues that in practice they nevertheless efface it
through their production of monological principles,
themselves the result of theorys search for the obstacle
thatblockstherealizationofitseschatologicalvision(5).
A new historicist enquiry into the relation of art and
society, free of both Marxist nostalgia and post
structuralist paranoia, would, Greenblatt suggests, be
able to address the terms of both the contradictory
paradigms, of totalization and detotalization, through
whichcapitalismoperates.Socapitalismscomplexsocial
and economic development has been characterized not
through empirical history but through a more
complicatedmodel.
There is a further disingenuousness at work here
in so far as Greenblatt implies that the individual


264
monolithicstanceoftwoparticularargumentsofJameson
and Lyotard accurately describes the positions of
Marxism and poststructuralismwhen both are in their
different ways dialectical forms of thought. The
combined movements of totalization and detotalization
thathedelineatesasnewhistoricistcaneasilybefoundin
both Marxism and poststructuralism, and the
theorizationoftheirrelationtoeachotheriscertainlynot
exclusive to New Historicism as such. Indeed all
philosophies of history have been riven by such tensions
between since at least the end of the eighteenth century,
vacillating between a Rousseauistic pessimism in which
history constitutes the force of fragmentation and
alienation and a HegelianMarxist optimism in which it
comprisesanemancipatoryforceforprogress.Itisworth
noting the salutary fact in this regard that while
philosophersof freedomproducepessimisticaccountsof
history, determinists are also generally optimists. In the
termsoftheoppositionhesetsup,Greenblattclaimsthat
New Historicism is distinguished from all its
predecessors by its ability to see that the two processes
operatesynchronously.Hecomments:
For capitalism has characteristically generated

neither regimes in which all discourses seem
coordinated, nor regimes in which they seem
radicallyisolatedordiscontinuous,butregimes
in which the drive towards differentiation and
the drive towards monological organization
operate simultaneously, or at least oscillate so
rapidly as to create the impression of
simultaneity.(6)


265
This antithetical whirling, he suggests, provides a better
foundation for an analysis of the relation between art
and surrounding discourses in contemporary capitalist
culture which plays upon a complex dialectic of
differentiationandidentity(7).ForGreenblattthiscashes
outinademonstrationofthewaysinwhichaestheticand
capitalistic discourses intermingle and flow from one to
the other, a circulation that takes the form of a continual
movement of flows and blockage, an unending and
unresolved struggle between subversion and
containment.SotheallegedtotalizationsofMarxismand
poststructuralismaresetagainstaNietzscheanschemaof
an irresolvable oscillation between immanent and
transcendentforces.
Greenblatt himself in effect produces a third
modelhere,awhirlofcontrarieswhichinvokesBakhtins
paradigm of a continuous warring between centripetal
and centrifugal forces. It omits, however, the
destabilizingenergyofdifferentiationthattobefoundin
the dialectical doubleness of Bakhtins dialogic principle.
Although,ashedemonstrates,Greenblattavoidsthetrap
ofidentifyingexclusivelywithoneofthetornhalvesthat
aretheproductofcapitalistsociety,hismoveisrestricted
to that: he stands above contemplating and
comprehending the two antithetical processes without
reversingandreinscribingthemasAdornodoestoenable
the development of a new form of cultural criticism of
society. To the extent that they are presented as
antithetical, the crucial difference is that for Greenblatt
the two are complementary: they add up. For Greenblatt,
capitalistsocietyisultimatelyone,atpeacewithitself.


266
In Greenblatts historical criticism, it might have
beenexpectedthatanycriticalmovewouldinvolvetime.
What distinguishes Greenblatts melodramatic polarities
ofabsoluteautonomyorabsolutedissolutionfromother
binaries with which they might be comparedArnolds
Hebraic and Hellenic forces, Freuds clash between Eros
and Thanatos, or even Derridas account of history as a
form of supplementary excess, is indicated by his
description ofhow theprocesseswork simultaneously.
9
There is only a homogeneous empty time here, with no

dislocating delay between the drives towards
differentiation and identity, or between subversion and
containment.
10
There is difference, but not deferral. Such
simultaneity means that the forces of centralization and
decentralization must necessarily be complementary; as
perfectly matching ambivalent halves, there can only be
anendlessoscillationofsubversionandcontainment.The
problem with Greenblatts account therefore is that he
follows the Nietzschean assumption that these agonistic
forcesworkinarelationofbinaryoppositionofattraction
and repulsion to each other, or, as in Bakhtins primary
schema, an unceasing antithesis of monoglossia and
heteroglossia.Inshort,Greenblattsaccountofhistoryhas
written out the disjunction of time. Its dialectic is
simultaneous, at a standstill in an eternal return. This
suggests the possibility that a certain dislocating time
interval needs to be allowed into the New Historicist
account of the subversioncontainment process which
wouldthenopenupbynotaddingupitsassumption
of a static (if dynamic) totality and at that point
paradoxically reintroduce history, temporality, and
thereforechange.


267
Yet however much temporality may be missing,
Greenblattstillproposesahistoricismofsortsafterall,in
the sense of a philosophical schema imposed as an
underlying form upon events, even if the model for
history is that of the oscillating dynamics of the market
place rather than one of progressive evolutionary
struggle.
HistoryasanEgg
Let us leave Greenblatt with his simultaneous, perfectly

matched antithetical forces whirling on the spot for the
moment,toturntotheotheressayinTheNewHistoricism
whichdiscussesNewHistoricismstheoreticalbasisthat
byJoelFineman.
11
Finemansessayisdistinguishedbythe
fact that he makes a genuine effort to address the
theoretical paradox implied in New Historicisms own
name.Inthecourseofasomewhatlabouredopening,he
describes how he wishes to establish a more
philosophical placing of the theoretical position of New
Historicism through an enquiry into what might appear
to be its most trivial aspect, its fondness for anecdote.
Finemansinvestigationistobe
concerned both with the formal operation of the

anecdote, understood as a specific literary genre, with
peculiar literary properties, and also with a practical
literary history of the anecdote in so far as the formal
operation of the anecdote bears on the history of


268
historiography, i.e. on the history of the writing of
history.(50)
Here at last the question of New Historicisms formal

relationtohistoricismisbroached,albeitanecdotally.
Fineman argues that it is possible to relate the
apparently disordered and amorphous practice of New
Historicism to an historical tradition of historicity or
historicizingwithinwhich...theNewHistoricismcanbe
understoodtooccupyacoherenttimeandplace(52).He
specifiesitsinterventionintermsofwhatamountstothe
majorconceptualproblemforanytheorizationofhistory,
aversionofthemoregeneralquestionofhowtoproduce
a concept that can conceptualize the nonconceptual, to
include the nonconceptual within the concept
(Adorno), or the outside in the inside without its losing
its identity as outside: for history this becomes the
question of the relation between the historical
particularity, the singular event, and the overall
framework of a concept of history as a metahistory, in
Hayden Whites term. If it is through its affiliationtothe
latter that the particular takes on meaning and historical
significance, the same process also necessarily has the
effect of usurping and undoing its singularity. Fineman
characterizesthetroubledinterrelationofeventtohistory
in terms of the opposition of the this to the meta.
12
He
argues that the anecdote can play a special part in the
continuing philosophical labour that has ensued in the
face of the dominance of Hegels philosophy of history.
ForHegel,becausethepurposefulunfoldingoftheSpirit
canletnothinghappenbychance,becauseHistoryis,ina
sense, already written, then paradoxically history cannot


269
be historical. Fineman suggests that the question ever
sincehasbeenhow:
to find some way to introduce into the

ahistorical historicality of Hegelian philosophy
of history some break or interruption of the
fullness and repletion of the Spirits self
reflection, so as thereby to introduce to history
thetemporalityoftime.(57)
He charts the history of such attempts, from Dilthey to

Husserl,fromHeideggertoDerrida,asalabourinwhich
theselfcompletingselfreflectingofHegelianhistoricity
has been turned around, prized open, shifted out of the
precepts of identity thinking, so as to reintroduce into it
the punctual moment of the temporality of time. The
history of philosophy thus becomes the history of
endeavours to insert an opening into the totality of the
selfenclosedcircleofHegelianhistory.
13
It is in the context of this scenario that, according

to Fineman, New Historicism makes its theoretical
intervention:
The oxymoron, if that is the right word for it,

embeddedintherubricthecheeryenthusiasm
with which the New Historicism, as a catchy
termorphrase,proposestointroduceanovelty
or an innovation, something New, into the
closed and closing historiography of successive
innovation, Historicism ... this oxymoron is
witness to or earnest of an impulse to discover
or to disclose some wrinkling and historicizing
interruption, a breaking and a realizing
interjection, within the encyclopedically


270
enclosed circle of Hegelian historical self
reflection.... As a title, the New Historicism
strives to perform and thereby to enable the
project it effectively entitles, and thus to earn
thereby its accesstotherealthroughtheexcess
ofitsname.
14
For Fineman, it is the anecdote that can open up history

insofarasitamountstothenarrationofasingularevent
which uniquely exceeds its literary status and any
narrative schema, and so achieves a referential access to
the real. The anecdote introduces an aperture into the
schema of history, by establishing an event as an event
within and yet without the framing context of historical
successivity, i.e. it does so only in so far as its narration
both comprises and refracts the narration it reports (61).
Finemans anecdote thus succeeds in breaking down the
inside/outside duality of concept and event, and opens
up the potential for a form of history that is able to do
justice to both. As long, that is, as it maintains its
somewhat precarious status as anecdotewhich lasts
only so long as it avoids sliding into the metonymic
status of the example (as in Greenblatts use of Jameson
and Lyotard, or indeed my use of Greenblatt and
Fineman),inwhichtherelationofthepartistoillustrate
andcomprisethewhole.ForFinemantheanecdotemust
work in a nonmetonymic excessive relation to a history
formulatedasahistoricisttotality.NewHistoricismsuse
ofanecdote,heargues,bespeaksnotmethodologicaland
theoretical indifference but is itself a means by which to
open historys selfenclosed immediacy. Finemans
antithesis of anecdotal event to metahistory therefore
assumeswithoutquestionthattheHegelianselfenclosed


271
historyisindeedselfenclosed:heconcludesthathistask
istopuncturethetotalityofHistory,tomakeanopening
withthecanopeneroftime.Indoingso,however,hehas
shiftedfromaproblemoftherelationofeventtoconcept
tothemodelofanoutsidetoatotality.Althoughhecould
besaidtobeseekingtoreintroducetimeintoGreenblatts
selfenclosed dialectical immobilization, he has, like
Greenblatt, produced a spatial model where in this case
all that is required is that the egglike history be
punctured by an outside agent in the name of retrieving
thesingularityoftheevent.
And yet, again like Greenblatt, despite the
attempted cracking of the egg, there is a failure to relate
this move to any critical, as opposed to philosophical,
intervention. Here Finemans argument contrasts to
Walter Benjamins account of history, where all
developmentalschemas,includingthatofMarxismitself,
are associated with totalization and domination.
Benjamins emphasis on moments that break and blast
open historys continuity is designed not to reintroduce
time as such but rather toopenuphistorysoasto effect
theworkofculturalandpoliticaltransformation.
15
ImmanenceandTranscendence
GiventhattheybothoffertheoreticaldescriptionsofNew
Historicism, what is the relation is between Greenblatts
subsumption of Marxism and poststructuralism into a
dialectical irresolution of centripetal and centrifugal
forces and Finemans anecdote which chisels into the
global totality of history so as to prize it open? The


272
difference between the two would be that for Fineman
the totality is closed and it is a question of the anecdotal
eventleveringitopen;whereasforGreenblattthepointis
that the antithetical totalizations of Marxism and
poststructuralism are never actually achievedwhat he
offers instead is an irresolvable oscillation of the two
which New Historicism is somehow uniquely able to
comprehendinanewtotality.
Are these models reconcilable? They involve two
modes of thinking incommensurability dynamically.
Finemans prizing open the totality involves an injection
oftimeandchanceintotheory,andisthusantitotalizing
and antihistoricizing. With respect to historicism, he is,
therefore, subversive. By contrast, Greenblatt projects a
new totalizing model, albeit of a nontotalizing process,
in a strategy of containment. The two thus reproduce
exactly the dialectic of subversion and containment, the
dissolving forces of Thanatos and the binding forces of
Eros, that they find operating within and between
historical texts.
16
These two positions complement each
other, indeed require each other to function in their
bizarreeconomyoflifeanddeath.Greenblattsargument,
that New Historicism contains both Marxism and
poststructuralismandthereforeconstitutesahigherform,
itself declares a totalization which goes counter to the
whole new historicist emphasis on the discrete
fragmented moments of history and which according to
his own logic should be impossiblefor, in the terms of
his own argument, how can New Historicism
comprehend and definitively encompass the other two
throughanothersingleschema?Greenblattassertssucha
totalizing claim via the classic speculative formula of


273
transcendencewherebyanoutsideispositedfromwhich
the observer can comprehend the totality of the
phenomenonunderdiscussionforHegelthepositionof
the philosopher, or, as also for Arnold, of the State; for
orthodox Marxism the dialectic as the law of nature; for
Lukcs the collective subject of history; for Gramsci, the
party, etc. Fineman, despite the differences of his model,
also positions himself in this way when he posits New
Historicism as standing outside history in ordertobreak
into the totality of historicism. Despite the emphasis on
temporality, this remains an essentially static, spatial
model. Paradoxically, as with Greenblatts argument, it
also reproduces the totalizing gesture itself, for Fineman
totalizes history in order to supplement it with the one
thing that he has left outby chance, himself. As Sartre
discovered, in theory and in history, there can be no
totalizationwithoutatotalizer.Inbothcasesherethenew
historicists own enunciative position contradicts his or
her antitotalizing stance by producing totalization. To
put it another way, despite the apparent immanence of
the new historical method, both new historicists theorize
theirownpositionintermsofmodelsoftranscendence.
New Historicism itself has always been
distinguished by its awareness of the difficulty of the
writers role in the writing of history. Whereas historicist
analysis tended to gravitate towards the most grandiose
of objective sounding schemas, new historicists are
almost painfully alert to their own relative limitations
and introduce such qualifications explicitly into their
writing. This selfconsciousness, often amounting to a
selfdeprecatoryadvertisementofonekindoranother,an
excuse for a certain selfindulgent subjectivism, does


274
touchuponasubstantialtheoreticaldifficulty,namely,the
position of the writing subject. This is not, however,
theorized as a technical difficulty as it is in Hegel or
Sartre. The problem of New Historicism is that although
it recognizes the need to consider the position of the
writingsubject, its hesitance towards theorization in
generalmeansthatitdoesnottheorizeitsownpositionof
enunciationand therefore finds itself repeating the
totalizinggesturesitseekstoundo.
Both Greenblatt and Fineman produce a position
of exteriority, an outside to an inside, which rather than
taking subjectivity into account in the manner of Sartre
totalizes the very history that they seek to detotalize. At
this point it becomes clear that the apparent
irresolvability of the totalization/detotalization structure
exactly repeats the paradigm of subversion and
containment which is proposed as the interpretive
political insight of New Historicism. The questions of
subversion and containment, of agency and domination,
that New Historicism likes to raise as a historical and
textual problem reenact the theoretical problematic
determinedbyitsownmodel.
The historicist schema of New Historicism
therefore has specific consequences. Both Greenblatt and
FinemanwhentheorizingNewHistoricismmoveintoan
inside/outsidestructure,andthisinturnimpliesaduality
ofdisempowermentandempowerment.Intheseterms,if
the subject is outside the totality then it seems
empowered, but if its inside, then it seems
disempowered. This inside/outside structure also stages
the position of those subjects inside the institution, and,
in Stallybrass and Whites terms, reproduces the


275
institutionalpositionoftheacademicsubject,assertingan
identitybylookingoutattheworldbeyond.Giventhatit
is the production of the point of exteriority which
conventionally empowers the transcendent critique, it
might be expected that New Historicism posit the
possibilityofeffectiveinterventionintheprocesseswhich
it analyses. Why then do new historicist texts
characteristicallyimplydisempowerment?Foritisonlyif
the subject cannot control and intervene, that the
processesofcultureandofhistorythemselvesassumean
autonomousformWebersironcage,orthealienforces
of domination described in the cultural critique of
Simmel, theAdorno of the culture industry, or Foucault.
Greenblattrefusesthismonologicalviewbypositingthe
antimonyoftotalizationanddetotalization.Butitisonly
thehistorianwhoisempoweredbybeingontheoutside,
while the historical subject is disempowered by being
caught inside, his or her actions always containable by
the historical schema into which he or she is placed by
thehistorian.
At the same time, such a schema repeats the
dissonance within historicism as such, another improper
name set against itself. So in its first meaning, it implies
the existence of immanent laws through which history
progresses and according to which its future can be
predicted. Here both history, and the historian as
knowing subject, can assume the position of exteriority.
In the second, historicism becomes the very degree to
which knowledge is itself entrenched in historical
frameworks, culturally limited and, necessarily, relative.
Hereknowledgeandthehistoricalsubjectareconstituted
withinaframeworkthathasnooutside.Thereisnopoint


276
ofobjectivity.Therearethustwomodesinoperation:one
of history containing everything and making it
meaningful, the other of history constantly threatening
nonmeaning, or subverting any meaning that had been
madethe two modes, in other words, of transcendence
andimmanence.
SubversionandContainment
Letustakeacloserlookatthenotionofsubversionand
containment. The New Historicists are concerned to
trackthecirculatingrelationsbetweenaestheticandother
cultural forms of discursive production, assuming, it
seems, that it is possible to take a kind of essential
section across societys discursive productions at any
particular historical moment in what Laclau calls pure
relationsofinteriority.
17
Theythuschallengedirectlythe
cultural materialists practice of looking at an historical
text for todays political meanings. Greenblatt, in
particular,arguesthatthisisaselfconfirmingratherthan
inanywayradicalactivity:

subversive is for us a term used to designate those
elements in Renaissance culture that contemporary
authorities tried to contain or, when containment
seemedimpossible,todestroyandthatnowconformto
ourownsenseoftruthandreality.Thatis,welocateas
subversive in the past precisely those things that are
notsubversivetoourselves.
By contrast, those elements which we identify with

Renaissance principles of order would, if we took them


277
seriously, undermine our own contemporary
assumptions(absolutism,hierarchiesofclassandgender,
religious intolerance, etc.). They are not threatening,
however, because our own values are strong enough for
us not to regard them as real alternatives. Greenblatt
suggests that exactly the same holds for the subversive
elements of Renaissance textswhich could be
articulated only because they could be effortlessly
contained:thesubversivenessthatisgenuineandradical
... is at the same time contained by the power it would
appeartothreaten(30).Thistroubles,aswillbeobvious,
the possibility of any radical reading; as Greenblatt puts
it, adapting Kafka, there is subversion, no end of
subversion,onlynotforus.
Subversions radical Gramscian origins have thus
themselves been subverted by New Historicism.
Greenblatts argument sets up a significant general
characterization of the function of literature and of
culture within our society: at a textual level the
radicalismofatext,whetherliterary,critical,orwhatever,
canonlyinstituteaformofsubversiontotheextentthatit
can already be accommodatedbecause it is not
subversive. It is for this reason that Greenblatt
emphasizes the ease with which the institution absorbs
and contains whatever subversion radicalism can throw
at it. Such as New Historicism itself, perhaps, for
Greenblatt and Finemans theorizations of their own
activity,ashistoriansgazinguponthewhirligigoreggof
history, have placed themselves in the position of
producing the containing gestures of totalization.
Greenblatt and Fineman thus reproduce the antithesis
which we have been charting in this book of immanent


278
and transcendent critiques. But whereasAdorno showed
how it was possible to use this antithesis as a critical
instrument, the new historicists separate it into the
singularity of history set against the containing move of
the historical analyst, and thus claim transcendence over
all other forms of history and cultural criticism. In the
same way, the way in which the new historicists use the
paradigm of subversion and containment discounts the
possibility of a dialectical criticism which can, in
Bakhtins terms, posit an organic and an intentional
hybridizationthatworkagainsteachother.
An objection to the conservatism of the new
historicist position has been made by Edward Said,
Gerald Graff and Jerome McGann, among others, who
complain that since every form of culture is destined to
be coopted, the very notion of oppositional criticism is
nonsense.
18
Iwanttosuggestthatthispositionisbecause
NewHistoricismisitselfanexampleofwhatitdescribes.
The New Historicism represents not only a theoretical
but also an institutional repetitionposing as a form of
cultural analysisof the very failure that it portrays as
inevitable.
CounterCulture
On 21st October 1967 a collection of antiwar protestors,

students,hippies,pacifists,intellectuals,NormanMailers,
as well as, according toareportinTheEastVillageOther,
contingents of witches, warlocks, holy men, seers,
prophets, mystics, saints, sorcerers, shamans,
troubadours, minstrels, bards, roadmen, and madmen,


279
besieged the Pentagon.
19
After the march, the speeches,
and the protests, the shamans performed an exorcism,
casting mighty words of white light against the demon
controlled structure, which, they hoped, would effect a
levitation,andliftthewholeofthePentagonrightoffthe
groundintotheair.
Itdidntbudge.Butnosingleincidentofprotestof
this time better illustrates the style and inherent
presuppositions of the politics of the late sixties.
Ostensibly, at least, we have moved a long way today
from trusting in magic and psychedelia for our political
futures.Butdespitetherelianceonshamanism,whatisin
retrospectremarkableaboutthiseventisitsfocusnoton
theconventionalmodeofpoliticalintervention,Congress
ortheHouseofRepresentatives,butontheinstitutionof
war. What was most characteristic of the politics of this
time was its insistence that the political front line
operated at the level of the institution as much as, if not
more than, the technical seat of democratic control.
Althoughcertainaspectsofthestylemayhavechanged,I
want to pause to consider the concept that was used to
describe the mode of unrest of this period: counter
culture.
Despite its laughable unfashionableness, many of
the tenets of the counter culture survive today. The
distrustoftechnocracy couldbesaidtohavebecomethe
global paranoia of postmodernism; the ecological
sympathy has developed into the Green movement; the
relativism and accompanying interest in other cultures
hasbecomeourcontemporaryespousalofthevalidityof
cultural difference; and, as I shall be arguing, the
distrust of all institutional forms of organization, the


280
attempt to deschool society, has been mediated into
forms of theory and practice of how to subvert the
institution, founded on the work of institutional analysis
produced by Althusser and, particularly, Foucault. The
Laingianadvocacyofthetruthofexperienceovertheory,
theinsideovertheoutside,hasreemergedintheformof
identity politics. Only the mysticism, the shameless
espousal of shamanism, has gone, its traces surviving
onlywiththeNewAgetravellers.
The roots of the counter culture could be, and
indeedwere,tracedbacktoRomanticism.Adislikeofthe
global and controlling networks of technocracy, a
sympathy with nature and hostility to those human
forces which degraded it, a religious emphasis on
changingtheworldthroughavisionaryimaginationsuch
as to be found in the poetry of Blake that takes radical
issue with the scientific world view, an interest in the
religion and cultures of nonWestern societies, an
anarchist (in its technical sense) distrust of all
institutionseven those proclaiming a radical politics
andabeliefinthejusticeofminimal,localformsofsocial
organization. What interests me in the present context,
however,isthesensethatdespitethewidediversityboth
of style and substance, it was widely accepted that there
was a hegemonic unit, the singular counterculture,
which was opposed to the dominant forms of orthodoxy
andinstitutionalpower.
This antithetical structure is very different from
the circulating selfundermining structures of power
traced in the work of Greenblatt. The accompanying
suggestionthatsubversioncanneverbestrongenoughto
effect substantial change, that it can always be


281
recuperated, can be traced to the keen awareness at this
timeofthepossibilityofwhatMarcusecalledrepressive
desublimationthat, as Theodor Rozsak put it, the
technocracy does indeed seem capable of anabolizing
every form of discontent into its system (14). The
constantMarcusiancryatthattimewasthewarningthat
everything can be coopted (702). This fear of
assimilation was doubtless the result of the fact that the
counter culture itself coopted the methods and
oppositional stance of the Civil Rights movement which
startedon1stDecember1955,whenMrsRosaParkswas
arrestedinMontgomery,Alabama,forrefusingtogiveup
her seat on a bus for a white man. The campaign of
peaceful civil disobedience developed with the demand
for integrated classes in schools at Little Rock,Arkansas,
and the first sitin movement which sought to achieve
integratedlunchcounters inWoolworthstores.
20
Thelast
great campaign, the War on Poverty of 1968, during
which King was assassinated, was structured round the
march on Washington (starting symbolically from the
poorest town in America, the appropriately named
Marks, Mississippi). King had now moved the agenda
from racial injustice to include the social injustice of
poverty and inequality of wealth. The counter culture in
many respects consisted of the appropriation by middle
classstudentsofoneaspectofthispoliticalcampaign,the
protest against the Vietnam War; its extension of the
campaign of the Civil Rights Movement into a more
general civil disobedience no doubt contributed to the
narrowDemocraticdefeatin1968andtheendoftheCivil
Rights movement itself. Despite its widespread
achievements, immediately apparent in the integration


282
within the educational system, much of the social
injusticetowhichthatmovementdrewattentionremains.
Today the political emphasis has moved away from
Kings ideal of social integration, it often being claimed
that it always had to take place on the terms of the
dominant white culture. The drive now is for equal
rights,socialjustice,andjusticebeforethelaw,combined
withtherecognitionandcontinuanceofsocialandethnic
difference. The heterogeneity emphasized by modern
theoryisareflectionofthatsocialideal.Inthiscontextit
is important to recall that other contemporary political
movement, the rise of Black nationalism associated with
the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther movement,
was specifically excluded from the counterculture on
accountofitsorthodoxrevolutionarypolitics.Todaythe
muslim Malcolm X has become a more central cultural
figure than the Christian Martin Luther King. The
idolization of Malcolm X, the Franz Fanon of Black
America, suggests that a new revolutionary militancy
may be on the horizon, already reflected in the return to
popularity of the Nation of Islam. Unless, that is, that
idolization of Malcolm X has really been a process of
aestheticizationandassimilation.
The current academic assimilation of the counter
culturemarkstheverystructureofincorporationthatthe
counter culture decried but itself acted out and which
today the new historicists warn of (or perhaps
celebrate)without acknowledging that they themselves
could also be the very agents of such institutional
recuperation. David Norbrook has pointed out how the
context for New Historicism is that of a period of
disillusion after one of political turmoil, a phase of


283
political conservatism combined with economic
liberalism, a combination which repeats that which
followed the alleged failures of the counter culture as a
revolutionary movement (if indeed it did fail), and of
May68.
Thosewhowere,say,eighteenin1968aretodayin
the 1990s in their forties. The students of that era
participated in what must have been one of the most
serious attacks on the university system in the whole of
its history: the Campus War.
21
Where are those students
now?Wehavecoloursupplementarticlestellinguswhat
has happened to CohnBendit; we can see Tariq Ali on
Channel 4 virtually any day of the week. But a certain
numberofthosestudentsbecameacademics,carryingon
from the heady days of student power to become
lecturers and professors. It was this generation of
academics who were to lead the inquiry into the
institution, and who were to proclaim a general shift
towards cultural studies and cultural politics. They
achieved nothing more, and nothing less, than the
institutionalization of the counter culture. At the same
time, the paranoia that seems to accompany the
preoccupationwithpostmodernismisnothingmorethan
a reflexive anxiety that the counter culture has indeed
been incorporated into the processes of the technocracy
and its institutions.
22
Pushed back and repressed,
incarceratedwithinandfinallyabletodischargeandvent
itself only on itself:
23
in a gesture of ressentiment, New
Historicism relates its own hidden story of the cooption
of the Great Refusal of the sixties and its culture of
disaffiliation.


284
That process goes on: if deconstruction and post
structuralism have been associated with the Reagan and
Thatcher years by commentators, is it significant that
withthedismantlingofMarxismintheSovietUnion,the
decolonization of Eastern Europe, and the consequent
removal of the Communist threat, that Marxism is
increasing its influence in the American academy? Here
we might recall Greenblatts argument that subversion is
onlyadmissiblewhentheculturefeelsthatitisnotunder
threat. At the same time, it is worth recalling that
however absurd the political project of levitating the
Pentagon may appear to us now, it did form one of the
decisive series of protestthe campus war constituted
another, the development of feminism anotherwhich
helpedtobringabouttheendoftheVietnamWar.Sothe
counter culture did achieve political successes before its
subsequentassimilation,justasthereweremanypolitical
andinstitutionalchangesinitiatedinWesternEuropeasa
responsetoMay68.
In any case the levitation of the Pentagon is a
perfect example of Greenblatts category of something
that current ideology can contain so effortlessly that it
doesnt appear to us today to be subversive at all. What
has become equally unthinkable, in our contemporary
world of subcultures,ofthemarginal,thesubalternand
thedeviant,inouraffirmationoftheincommensurability
of cultural difference, is the very concept of a general
counterculturethemostsustained,butalreadydevalued
andalmostforgotten,recentexampleoftheproductionof
a politically effective counterhegemony in Western
society.Itsnoticeablethatthecountercultureachievedits
political effects to a large extent by challenging the


285
conventionalformsandmodesofpoliticalintervention.If
the political argument of New Historicism is that the
radically subversive can be exactly what we no longer
recognize as subversive, then what has been
institutionally assimilated is less the effectiveness of the
counter cultures political intervention than the lesson of
itseffectiveness.
(1990)

2007 Robert JC Young
Notes

1. GayatriChakravortySpivak,TheNewHistoricism:
Political Commitment and the Postmodern Critic, in
Veeser,TheNewHistoricism,281.
2. Grumley,HistoryandTotality.
3. Norbrook,LifeandDeathofRenaissanceMan,89
93.
4. See the various contributions to Veeser, The New
Historicism.
5. Graff, Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma; Jameson,
Postmodernism,188.
6. White,inVeeser,TheNewHistoricism,302.
7. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 20, cited by
Greenblatt, Towards a Poetics of Culture, in Veeser, The
New Historicism, 2. Further references to this essay will be
citedinthetext.
8. Lyotard, cited by Greenblatt, Towards a Poetics of
Culture,4.
9. Norbrook,LifeandDeathofRenaissanceMan,108.
Onhistoryasexcess,seemyWhiteMythologies,19,66.
10. Benjamin,Illuminations,263.


11. Joel Fineman, The History of the Anecdote: Fiction
and Fiction, in Veeser, The New Historicism, 4976
(reprinted in Fineman, The Subjectivity Effect in Western
LiteraryTradition,5987).Furtherreferenceswillbecitedin
thetext.
12. Here I pass over the problem that ensues when
Fineman redescribes this as the relation of event to
contextwhichisaltogetheradifferentmatter.
13. Cf. DAmico, Historicism and Knowledge, Grumley,
HistoryandTotality.
14. 60.Finemancontinues:Inthissense,ifonlyinname
only, the New Historicism amounts to a gesture which is
the very opposite of Fredric Jamesons essentially
ahistoricalinjunctioninThePoliticalUnconscioustoalways
historicize.
15. Cf.Arato,FrankfurtSchoolReader,2056.
16. We may make a comparison with Bakhtin here
accordingtowhichtheseprocessremainundialogizeduntil
theyenter thenovel,i.e.theyneedafurthertotalizationto
bedetotalizing.
17. Laclau,HegemonyandSocialistStrategy,16.
18. Gerald Graff, Cooptation, in The New Historicism,
16981.
19. Cited by Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture,
124.Thisbookisbasedonarticlesthatoriginallyappeared


intheSpringof1968.Furtherreferenceswillbecitedinthe
text. For analyses of the alleged failure of the counter
culture in the United States and Britain, see Bell, The
CulturalContradictionsofCapitalism,andMartin,ASociology
ofContemporaryCulturalChange.
20. Segal,TheRaceWar,2469.
21. See Roszak, The Dissenting Academy; Searle, The
CampusWar.
22. Of course you could argue that the counter culture
always was part of the culture to which it was nominally
opposed. Its significant, for example, that Roszak, of all
contemporary radical phenomena, excepts the Black
Panthermovementfromthecounterculture.
23. DeleuzeandGuattari,AntiOedipus,214.


Publication history

Original publication: New Historicism and the Counter Culture, in
Robert J .C. Young, Torn Halves: Political Conflict in Literary and
Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, New York:
St Martins Press, 1996) 163-83.
Web version published 2007
Robert J .C. Young 1996, 2007
all rights reserved

To cite this version:
MLA Style: Robert J .C. Young, New Historicism and the Counter
Culture, Torn Halves: Political Conflict in Literary and Cultural
Theory (1996). 1 J une 2007 [access date]
http://robertjcyoung.com/THchapter7.pdf

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Torn Halves: Political Conflict in Literary and

The problem begins with the name, New

It is certainly the case that New Historicism frequently

Atypical instanceof thissortofprocesswouldbeKants

As Greenblatt observes, this Biblical vision, so

Jameson ... finds capitalism at the root of the

Both theorists, therefore, are necessarily oversimplifying,

For capitalism has characteristically generated

There is only a homogeneous empty time here, with no

Let us leave Greenblatt with his simultaneous, perfectly

concerned both with the formal operation of the

Here at last the question of New Historicisms formal

to find some way to introduce into the

He charts the history of such attempts, from Dilthey to

It is in the context of this scenario that, according

The oxymoron, if that is the right word for it,

For Fineman, it is the anecdote that can open up history

By contrast, those elements which we identify with

On 21st October 1967 a collection of antiwar protestors,

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