New Historicism, like all the other isms of our time, has rapidly become a catchword, a label, under which the heterogeneous is repackaged and marketed as the more or less homogeneous. The intellectual reality of New Historicisms in fact discloses a variety of sins or virtues or a mix of both depending on one’s point of view (the points of view themselves of course vary in that from its inception to the present New Historicism has been an object of fierce and continuing controversy). For example, in the very fine book by Graham Bradshaw on Shakespeare,1 we find, convincingly demonstrated, fundamental differences, at least in the case of Shakespearean interpretation, between American New Historicism (as instantiated by the work of Stephen Greenblatt) and British New Historicism (as instantiated by the work of Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield). Bradshaw, quite rightly in my view, sustains a respectful dialogue with Greenblatt (whose work he simultaneously admires and disagrees with), while reserving for the British scholars a disdain verging on contempt for their willful dogmatism, polemical straw men, and, above all and paradoxically, their radical inability to think in a genuinely historical way at the very moment they speak in the name of History, for instance, by ripping speeches out of dramatic context as if they were embodiments of Shakespeare’s own views and thus perpetrating the gravest error of all: namely, systematic disregard of the elementary point that any historicizing of Shakespeare must attend to the generic and structural realities of what Bradshaw calls “dramatic thinking.” Dramatic thinking is a particular modality of thought (just as poetic and philosophical thinking are), a perspectival mode in which a dramatic speech is relativized not simply to a point of view (that of the speaking character) but also to its place in the temporal unfolding of the play. How the generic and structural temporalities of dramatic thinking relate to the conditions of a wider history is exactly the task at hand. To short-circuit that inquiry in a crude reduction of texts to symptomatic ideology is a travesty of anything that New Historicism might productively be.
It is not my intention to comment here on the details of Shakespearean scholarship. I point to this example simply to indicate that New Historicism, in presupposition, scope, and quality, is not one single thing, and so we have to be clear what precisely it is we are talking about. For myself, I want to talk about Greenblatt, not, however, the Greenblatt of the Shakespeare books but rather in terms of what in retrospect has come to be seen as one of the programmatic, founding texts of the New Historicist endeavor, namely, Greenblatt’s essay “Towards a Poetics of Culture.”2 As its title indicates, this essay is a strategic intervention in a debate about cultural theory and politics in the context of the so-called return of historical method in literary studies. I want to talk about the essay on two fronts: first, with a view to characterizing some of its principal features, claims, and arguments; second, to comment on it, in the form of some questions and problems to do with the kind of historical inquiry this version of what Greenblatt designates as cultural poetics both outlines and recommends: in short, a return to first texts and first questions
One such question that has much exercised New Historicists concerns the category of historical context, and it is there that I want to begin. What sort of intellectual endeavor is represented by the deployment of this category, and in particular what are we doing, or think we are doing, when we take a text and, as we say, put it into a context? Literally, context, con-text, means another text or body of texts that goes “with” (con) the text under scrutiny. The term “text” in the term “context” can be understood in a variety of senses: as something written (thus taking us into the sphere nowadays known as intertextuality) or, more broadly, as something in language or articulable in language (practices, beliefs, horizons of meaning, and so on, the sort of thing that Gadamer talks about and that informs certain projects of both historical and anthropological inquiry). But it also extends beyond the literal sense of the term to the nonlinguistic, the whole sphere of material and social life, such that, in one very influential model of text and context (the base/superstructure model of classical Marxism), context can include economy, the sphere of economic determinations pressing on the cultural sphere, the medium of which being ideology (though ideology of course takes us back to questions of language and text).
Context is supposed to supply a double principle of intelligibility: hermeneutic (to do with how we interpret the meanings of a text) and explanatory (to do with the conditions of the coming-into-being, or the production, of a text). Perhaps the most eloquent spokesman of this double use of the category of context, at least in the English-speaking world, has been Quentin Skinner. Skinner takes a canonical text such as Machiavelli’s The Prince and deploys a notion of context for the purpose of both interpretation (what the text means, generally specified in terms of the allegedly recoverable intentions of its author) and explanation (its production, its appearance as a practical response to a particular, historically circumscribed sociopolitical universe). However, in both these applications—hermeneutic and explanatory—context is famously unstable, and even Skinner’s attempts to stabilize it as a tool of inquiry come up against these instabilities. In the hermeneutic register, the best-known illustration of this is Wittgenstein’s in the Philosophical Investigations: the example of the word “slab.” The meaning of the utterance of this word, argues Wittgenstein, is contextually variable: it can be an imperative (the stonemason calling out “slab!” to his apprentice, meaning “bring me the slab”); a warning (the slab is about to fall on you); or an instance of definition (saying “slab” while pointing to one, as an exercise in ostensive definition). Context, in this view, is intimately bound up with what Austen called speech acts and is comprehensible, so Wittgenstein argues, only by virtue of participation in the language games and shared forms of life that make up the relevant culture. An equivalent of this in sociolinguistics is the so-called conversation postulate, a principle designating the tacit compacts and presuppositions—the context—without which intelligible exchange is not possible (the force of this principle is evident when it is willfully violated, as, for instance, in the dramatic dialogues of Samuel Beckett, which play havoc with the normal circuits of communication and exchange.3
Derrida has given an even more radical inflection to this view of the instability of context, arguing that, where written texts as well as speech are concerned, context can never settle, even provisionally, the question of meaning. What is the context that will help you determine the meaning of a word? Is it the expression in which it appears, the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter, the whole book, other books, all books, and so on, in an expansion that finally takes the form of an impossible circle (a version of the hermeneutic circle). Take, for example, the case already mentioned of Quentin Skinner’s work on Machiavelli. Skinner’s method has been described by one of his disciples (James Tully) in the following way: “Step one is to situate the text in its linguistic or ideological context: the collection of texts written or used in the same period, addressed to the same or similar issues and sharing a number of conventions.”4 But this is open to the charge of circularity: if one uses the contemporary texts to interpret The Prince, how does one interpret the contemporary texts? One way of doing so is by using The Prince. One has here therefore a chicken-and-egg problem, a relativity going round in circles that sends the mind into an intellectual spin.
Context is therefore not simply something we can take for granted. It is a conceptual and methodological problem or, rather, a set of problems. Greenblatt’s essay is, among other things, an attempt to articulate, both theoretically and operationally, a notion of context that draws in one way or another on aspects of the various features of the concept of context I have just listed, with a view to at once coping with the instabilities bound up with the concept and at the same time putting these instabilities to use in the attempt to give an account of texts, both literary and nonliterary, in historical formations.5 This is the program of what he calls the poetics of culture, to which I now turn in more detail. Broadly, the argument of “Towards a Cultural Poetics” is for a type of historical inquiry that is simultaneously dialectical (in stressing the interaction of systems of representation and practice) and nontotalizing (refusing the notion that any given historical field of representation can be made to cohere as some hierarchically stratified totality). In this double stress on the dialectical and the nontotalizable we of course immediately detect a certain relation, though a complex and ambivalent one, to the legacy of Marxism. Greenblatt says at one point that Marxism is important to him (“I’m still more uneasy with a politics and a literary perspective that is untouched by marxism”), but he also says, in the same paragraph, “It’s true that I tended to like those marxist figures who were troubled in relation to marxism.”6
What this means in substantive terms I will come to shortly. But I also want at this point to make three observations about Greenblatt’s style, his whole manner of writing, because, as I shall show, this bears importantly on the more substantive questions. First, the tone is familiar (in part to do with the fact that the paper was originally a talk); second, the arguments are often embedded in anecdotes (mainly to do with Greenblatt’s life on the Berkeley campus); third, and interrelatedly, his text is highly self-referential, geared as much to statements of subjective preference, feeling, and so on as to the purely objective statement of arguments (for example, the statement in respect of Marxism—“I tended to like those marxists …”—or the later anecdotal reference to “a student getting very angry with me,” etc.).The familiar tone has got something to do with an attractive, and specifically American, attempt to loosen up the formalities of academic discourse. But there are also other aspects of this manner more directly relevant to the actual structure of Greenblatt’s arguments: first, the investment in the anecdote is, from a methodological point of view, a key New Historicist move (its implications I shall return to later); second, it is noteworthy that all Greenblatt’s main examples of what a cultural poetics could and should be are drawn from the twentieth-century United States (principally to do with Hollywood and Ronald Reagan), and this Amerocentric bias might also have certain consequences; third, the self-referential nature of the discourse is arguably bound up with a whole culture of self that in turn inflects in several ways how history itself is conceived (broadly, as I shall demonstrate, through models and metaphors to do with the market, the social as a space of transactions or deals among players in the marketplace).
Let me, however, come back to my point of departure: the engagement with Marxism. I start here because this, along with poststructuralism, is Greenblatt’s own starting point, as an exercise in clearing the ground and setting the terms for the presentation of his own view. The first move is by way of Fredric Jameson, taking issue with some of the positions sketched in Jameson’s book, The Political Unconscious:
Thus the crucial identifying gestures made by the most distinguished American Marxist aesthetic theorist, Fredric Jameson, seems to me highly problematic. Let us take for example the following eloquent passage from The Political Unconscious:
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 reinforcement of the reification and privatization of contemporary life. Such a distinction reconfirms that structural, experiential, and conceptual gap between the public and the private, between the social and the psychological, or the political and the poetic, between history or society and the “individual” which—the tendential law of social life under capitalism—maims our existence as individual subjects and paralyzes our thinking about time and change just as surely as it alienates us from our speech itself.
Greenblatt takes issue with the argument here attributed to Jameson, namely, the argument that any attempt to separate the aesthetic sphere from others (“cultural texts that are social and political and those that are not”) is complicit with a capitalist logic of specialization that promotes a splitting of the public and private domains of experience. Greenblatt’s objection to this argument takes two forms: first, the capitalist system of private property in fact generates historically a “drastic communalization of all discourse,” his model for which—instructively—is the historical production of modern mass culture. This is already tendentious; no one within Marxism (however we understand that) disputes that this has indeed been one of the effects of capitalism, though the notion that commercially created mass culture can plausibly be described in terms of a process of “communalization” begs many questions. For example, does not the notion of community imply freedom from the commercial manipulation of public discourse? All our inherited models of community and the public sphere, most recently those of Habermas, suggest this; only a populist-capitalist version of the communal could argue what Greenblatt asserts, typically in the form of the familiar claim that the mass media supply what the people want. In any case, Jameson’s reference to the specialization and hence privatization of the aesthetic is basically a reference to the constitution of the sphere of high culture, the aesthetic as high art, where it is indeed the case that a very powerful drive to separation has been historically operative at least since the eighteenth century.
It is, however, Greenblatt’s second objection to Jameson that concern me more here, namely, the view that spheres of discourse can in fact be usefully (as distinct from ideologically) distinguished and that it is only a model of totalization that rests on a nostalgic fable of origins (according to which public and private were once indissolubly linked, as in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fantasies about the ancient Greek world) or an impossibly idealistic utopian scenario for a future unification of polity and culture beyond specialization and the division of labor that prevents us from making these distinctions. This second objection is the more relevant one for Greenblatt’s principal argument, insofar as the rest of his essay is bound up with how to make these distinctions and at the same time relate the distinguished entities in cultural description and historical analysis. This essentially is the program of what Greenblatt calls a poetics of culture.
To get to that program, however, there is one further step he has to take in the preliminary clearing of the decks, this time in connection with what he calls (a trifle misleadingly) “poststructuralism,” identified with another proper name, Jean-François Lyotard. For another road that is also closed off here, along with Marxist ideas of modern cultural division, is Lyotard’s converse account of the postmodern condition, according to which late capitalism generates the exact opposite effect to that specified by Jameson, namely, a monolithic homogeneity of culture in which, via the stratagem of grand narratives of progress and emancipation, difference and distinction are effaced in the drive, effectively totalitarian, to a kind of incarcerating totality. The difference between the approaches of Jameson and Lyotard, Marxist critique of specialization and poststructuralist critique of totalization, is summed up as follows:
The difference between Jameson’s capitalism, the perpetrator of separate discursive domains, the agent of privacy, psychology, and the individual, and Lyotard’s capitalism, the enemy of such domains and the destroyer of privacy, psychology, and the individual, may in part be traced to a difference between the Marxist and the poststructuralist projects. Jameson, seeking to expose the fallaciousness of a separate artistic sphere and to celebrate the materialist integration of all discourses, finds capitalism at the root of the false differentiation. Lyotard, seeking to celebrate the differentiation of all discourses and to expose the fallaciousness of monological unity, 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.
I won’t say any more about Greenblatt’s characterization of Jameson and Lyotard, Marxism and poststructuralism. They are deployed, somewhat tendentiously, as a negative point of departure for Greenblatt’s own view of how culture works. How culture actually works for Greenblatt is stated in the following key passage:
I propose that the general question addressed by Jameson and Lyotard—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. Or rather theoretical satisfaction here seems to depend upon a utopian vision that collapses the contradictions of history into a moral imperative. The problem is not simply the incompatibility of the two theories—marxist and poststructuralist—with one another, but the inability of either of the two theories to come to terms with the apparently contradictory historical effects of capitalism.
It will be clear therefore what Greenblatt wants and why the extended detour through Jameson and Lyotard is necessary to securing what he wants: a satisfactory account of contradictions, irreducible to either the model of repressive differentiation (Jameson) or the model of monological totalization (Lyotard). More specifically, what Greenblatt wants is basically a modified version of both Jameson and Lyotard, taking from each elements that can then be combined to produce a new account of the cultural workings and consequences of capitalism:
If capitalism is invoked not as a unitary demonic principle, but as a complex historical movement in a world without paradisal origins or chiliastic expectations, then an inquiry into the relations between art and society in capitalist cultures must address both the formation of the working distinction upon which Jameson remarks and the totalizing impulse upon which Lyotard remarks. For capitalism has characteristically generated neither regimes in which all discourses are coordinated, nor regimes in which they seem radically isolated or discontinuous, but regimes 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.
We can see from this where Greenblatt is now headed: he wants to be able to distinguish discursive practices—say, the artistic and the political—but he also wants to be able to claim that they are nevertheless interconnected and moreover—this is Greenblatt’s most important notion—that they are dynamically interconnected or, if you like, dialectically interconnected. They feed one another, are mutually constitutive in a circular process of constitution that is disoriginated, in which there is no founding moment, no overarching cause, no hierarchy of determinations. His model for this view of historical and cultural process is that of the transaction, transactions between discursive forms (i.e., a market notion, the implications of which are far-reaching and that I will come back to later).
Greenblatt gives two examples of this process, both from contemporary U.S. life: the relation between movies and politics during the Reagan presidency and the story of the convict Gary Gilmore, about whom Norman Mailer wrote a best-seller, which in turn, made into a TV miniseries, led Mailer into contact with another convict, Jack Abbott, and to another book, which led to the release of Abbott on parole, when, though through a misunderstanding, Abbott committed another murder, the story of that murder later being made into a play called In the Belly of the Beast.
Why Greenblatt chooses these particular examples to illustrate his view of the fluid interrelations of the artistic and the political (Reagan basing himself on the movies), or what he is now calling “social discourse” and “aesthetic discourse,” is overdetermined, but preeminently because he sees them as instantiating a claim to the effect that these different spheres of discourse are, precisely, different but at the same time interconnected in a manner such that each inflects the other, as cases of art imitating life and life imitating art, a dialectical circularity of text and context, the literary and the social, where the literary or the aesthetic is itself an active force in the social construction of reality. That emphasis on the literary as an active force in the social construction of reality seems to me the strongest feature of Greenblatt’s argument; it is indeed indispensable and moreover entirely consistent with the thought of a number of other cultural theoreticians unmentioned by Greenblatt (above all, perhaps, Lucien Goldmann and Raymond Williams, both of whom argued strenuously for the notion of the active role of literature in the making of cultural formations).
There is, however, a difficulty—in fact many difficulties—that arises from the choice of examples. The fact that, for example, in the dream machine of late-twentieth-century American life movies and politics could have come to articulate one another during the Reagan presidency is not necessarily susceptible to generalization to the whole history of modern cultural formation. Second, we must attend to where these examples of the imbrication of everyday life and mass culture lead Greenblatt, that is, to the decisive formulation of what he understands by a cultural poetics toward the end of his essay. This is the crux of the matter. Here Greenblatt describes his method of inquiry in terms of a sequence of metaphors. The recursive character of cultural life, the mutually constituting circularity of representations and practices, shifts from the language of dialectics (thus rooted, in however modified a form, in the Hegelian-Marxist tradition of explanation) to an openly commercial language of deal making and exchange:
The work of art is the product of a negotiation between a creator or class of creators, equipped with a complex, communally shared repertoire of conventions and the institutions and practices of society. In order to achieve the negotiation, artists need to create a currency that is valid for a meaningful, mutually profitable exchange. It is important to emphasise that the process involves not simply appropriation but exchange, since the existence of art always implies a return, a return normally measured in pleasure and interest. I should add that society’s dominant currencies, money and prestige, are invariably involved, but I am here using the term “currency” metaphorically to designate the systematic adjustments, symbolizations and lines of credit necessary to enable an exchange to take place. The terms “currency” and “negotiation” are the signs of our manipulation and adjustment of the relative systems.
It is clear from these metaphors that, although Greenblatt talks of both production and circulation, what really interests him is circulation, a circulation of representations and practices modeled as a process of exchange. These metaphors are crucial. Not only does Greenblatt draw attention to the fact that he is using metaphor here, he also emphasizes the particular kind of metaphor he is using: a stock of figures from the language of commerce. Given that Greenblatt himself foregrounds what he is doing, we too must pay particular attention to this moment of his essay. It is in fact the nub of the matter. What a poetics of culture as a form of historical inquiry involves and entails turns on the implications of those metaphors.
Where my own comments on Greenblatt’s argument are concerned, these implications spread out on two fronts: (1) what the limitations of this implied model are; and (2) what the consequences are, both methodological and ideological. I want to arrange these comments around two interrelated questions: one has to do with the medium (or the currency, as Greenblatt might put it) in which these transactions and exchanges are conducted; the second has to do with the causes of these transactions, the whole category of causation or determination.
The medium of transaction appears to be exclusively language, discourse, text, or, more generally, representation. Culture and society, in this view, are systems of interlocking representations. We understand therefore why Greenblatt attaches so much importance to the idea of a cultural poetics: culture as primarily a matter of language and text; poetics as a set of rules and procedures for analysis. In a weak version of this, I do not see that one could have any quarrel with an emphasis on the primary importance of language; this has been one of the great contributions to social analysis of structuralism and semiotics. But the stronger version—that social life is essentially a matter of language, texts, discourses, and so on—is another sort of proposition altogether. We need to remind ourselves that what Richard Rorty called the “strong textualist” position is vulnerable to the charge of being somewhat myopic. Ernest Gellner claimed, in his book Plough, Sword, and Book, that there are three fundamental forces in the making of human history: production (economy), coercion (military and other physical force), and legitimation. Legitimation is the sphere of culture, ideology, text, discourse, and so on. The other two—production of the means of life and coercion as physical force—generally require language but are not of course reducible to it. The consequence of prioritizing language inevitably entails a form of linguistic idealism in the interpretation of history; consider, for example, Edward Said’s claim (Said is cited by Greenblatt as an example of the kind of view he favors) that texts are just as important as, say, military force for understanding the history of empire.7 If you believe that, you will believe anything; I don’t think it would make much sense to the dispossessed peasants of colonial invasion and occupation.
My second question, closely related to the first, overlaps with it but at the same time can be distinguished from it. It concerns not so much the medium of the transactions of social life, as the causes, the order of determinations. I have already mentioned the view—Gellner’s—that there are different forces of determination in the making of history and that, in any given situation, some will be more fundamental than others. Determinations are thus multiple but also organized as a (variable) hierarchy. Greenblatt will have nothing to do with such a notion. His conception of social life and its historical unfolding as a circularity of interacting representations and practices is a circulation without a center, dispersed, heterogeneous, and above all disoriginated. In the Greenblattian scheme things simply circulate, like money or currency, in a circulation without locatable origin. Origin is of course a problematic category, but if the problem is allowed entirely to obliterate the principle of a hierarchy of determinations, then it is unclear what is left in any precisely specifiable sense of the idea of causality. In his talk of circulation, exchange, negotiation, and so on, Greenblatt of course continually gestures at causal processes (one thing interacting with another), but he does not himself supply a model of historical explanation with any strongly marked causal properties; for this, if only for heuristic purposes, you have to have some hierarchy of determinations or, in the now discredited term, some kind of “foundation.”
This lack has consequences for the project of cultural poetics and New Historicism (it will be recalled that I had two questions, one to do with limitations, and the second to do with consequences). Let me conclude with some of these consequences. The first is methodological, the second ideological.
I commented at the beginning on Greenblatt’s stylistic recourse to anecdote and said that this had some bearing on the more substantive issues of his essay. The anecdote is of course famously one of the privileged objects and instruments of New Historicist inquiry: petite histoire, as opposed to grand narrative (what Bradshaw describes as “all those vignettes and anecdotes which typically launch New-Historicist essays”). Equally famously, or notoriously, is the procedure whereby the petites histoires investigated by New Historicism are put together to form a larger and more coherent (though nontotalizable) picture of historical formation. More often than not the implied relation is purely one of analogy: a typical New Historicist procedure is to describe, say, a legal case, a medical case, a work of fiction, a technological invention, and so on and then to say that they are in some sense like each other. But, since without some further stipulation of relevance the relation of analogy is methodologically weak (you can ultimately compare anything with anything), an accompanying theoretical move is to convert the analogy into something called “homology”: those artifacts, practices, and so forth, are not just like each other; they display the same structural logic. But if they display the same structural logic and moreover causally interact, are we not moving back fast toward older notions of foundation and totality, in everything but name?
Certainly Greenblatt can prove exceedingly slippery on these matters. In another programmatic essay, “Resonance and Wonder,” he claims that historical connections can be made “either by analogy or causality.” That simple either/or begs questions too numerous to mention. Furthermore, where the first of these principles is concerned, there is a rapid and entirely unexamined shift in the very same sentence from analogy to homology (“a particular set of circumstances could be represented in such a way as to bring out homologies”), as if analogy and homology were the same thing. But they are, emphatically, not the same thing. Where the second, more strictly explanatory category of the causal is concerned, there is an equal lack of clarity: causality is specified as “generative forces.” This harks back to an earlier moment in the essay where it is alleged that “particular, contingent cases” (a category that, like the anecdote, is fundamental to New Historicist inquiry) are to be understood in terms of “generative rules.” This seems to imply an equation of generative rules and causality, but the relation between rule and cause is not clarified (categorically, they are no more the same thing than are analogy and homology); nor is it clear what the consequences of such a principle for making sense of the particular and the contingent might be for the category of particularity and contingency itself. If there are large causes (“generative forces”) at work in historical formations, then the contingent perforce loses much of its contingency. This looks suspiciously like an unacknowledged passage from petite histoire to grand récit.8
These, then, are some of the methodological consequences that we need to think quite hard about in connection with New Historicism. The second consequence I said was ideological. If you think of society as a circle, a circularity of representations, the models and metaphors for which are currency, investment, debt, return, and so on—i.e., mapped out on a network of commercial concepts—it is not surprising if you end up in a cultural paradigm within which the boundary lines between reality and simulacrum get decisively blurred. This indeed is the whole point of the stories Greenblatt relays from the history of contemporary America: a politics in which you do not know whether you are in or out of the cinema; a culture so dominated by images that the work of criminals and the works of writers get tangled up with one another in all kinds of curiously messy ways. But if nearly all societies have images, they are not all saturated with them in the same way as, for instance, contemporary America. I thus come back here to another remark I made at the beginning about Greenblatt’s approach: its overwhelmingly Amerocentric basis. (He speaks of the “circulatory rhythms of American politics,” of “the poetics of everyday behavior in America,” and so on, without however pausing to reflect on whether the examples of American politics and everyday life he has in mind are transferable as such to other societies. If they are not, his argument, though still interesting, becomes massively parochialized; if they are, then evidence must be produced.) Moreover, the America he has in mind here is a very particular one (there are of course other Americas): the America that conforms to Baudrillard’s account of the postmodern simulacrum devoid of a referent or otherwise specifiable reality, derealized and dematerialized precisely because it is caught up in the circulation of pure exchange values.9
It is no accident that Greenblatt’s stories involve actors and images, spectacle and violence. This too connects with a wider, though heavily specialized New Historicist interest, what I am tempted to call the “wonders” of New Historicism (it is of course a key term in the title of one of Greenblatt’s most influential essays). It is a striking historical fact of New Historicism that its interests have so often been focused on certain kinds of subject matter, essentially to do with spectacle—the specular relation with the image, the forms and technologies of the visual, the whole culture of display—and then, within this general interest, certain kinds of spectacle: violent, freakish, ghoulish. High on a checklist would come bodies, often in pain and torment, or just plain dead (the victims of sensational murders), or imitations of the dead (the simulacra of waxwork museums), or freakish bodies (the freaks and monsters of the itinerant fairs of Europe and America, dwarves, hermaphrodites, werewolves, and so on).Also high on the list come gadgets, especially those bound up with technologies of vision (the telescope, the microscope, the movies); circuits (of transportation and especially of the evacuation of waste, including, again, dead bodies, what Catherine Gallagher has called “garbage-bodies”); or the great technological creations of pure spectacle (the Panopticon, the Eiffel Tower). These are the strange objects of New Historicist desire, and, as I have suggested, the one term that we could perhaps use to sum up these various subclasses into an overarching class is “wonder.”
I do not mean that one should not be interested in such things nor that being interested in them does not yield useful forms of cultural history. Greenblatt’s riposte to Walter Cohen’s charge that New Historicists “are likely to seize on something out of the way, obscure, bizarre” was, in its own terms, entirely reasonable: namely, that the “bizarre” (which for reasons correctly stated by Greenblatt must be put in quotation marks) has as rightful a place in historical inquiry as anything else.10 But this rather coyly skirts the point that in privileging the “bizarre,” the culture of New Historicism has effectively fetichized it in a relation of obsessive specular fascination, all the more disingenuous given the ways in which the concern with the “bizarre” as an object of voracious academic consumption has been ideologically legitimated in its equation with the repressed or marginalized term of a normative and normalizing discourse.11 Above all, there is the complete absence, in what is alleged to be a resolutely historical endeavor, of appropriate forms of historical self-consciousness, reflecting the fact that the interest in these particular forms of the “bizarre” is a very particular kind of interest, one that will arise and flourish only in very determinate social conditions, let us say, those of late-twentieth-century California. Lest this be taken as another instance of Eurotrash anti-Americanism, that is not my position or my point at all. The culture of spectacle (what Guy Debord called la société du spectacle) is highly developed elsewhere, above all perhaps in France, but it is especially active on the West Coast of the United States and bound up with a whole history of the conversion of the natural and man-made worlds into commodified images put into ceaseless circulation.
“Wonder” is of course a key word in the history of the making of America. In its nineteenth-century guises, it has been investigated by Tony Tanner in a book instructively entitled The Reign of Wonder, where it is associated with myths of innocence. In its late-twentieth-century incarnations, however, a perverse transformation has occurred, from innocence to frisson, the garden of Eden modeled on the culture of the commodity and the gadget, on speed, the endless quest for novel sensation, the thrill of spectacle.12 It does therefore seem to me to be more than just a coincidence that it is above all in California that New Historicist interests have prospered. But my point is that New Historicist discourse—including Greenblatt’s in “Towards a Poetics of Culture”—rarely reflects on its own conditions of birth and possibility. Its presuppositions are tangled up in the very things it takes as objects of analysis. Given moreover that New Historicism has been vehement in denouncing the ethnocentric biases of an older totalizing model of historical inquiry, it is deeply ironic that it itself should be constrained by the very ethnocentricity it sought to unmask elsewhere.