New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. - Review - book review

John Brannigan. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. ix + 249 PP. $55.00 cloth; $19.95 paper.

A central theme of John Brannigan's usefully compact critical survey of new historicism and cultural materialism involves the important contributions these critical schools have made to ongoing discussions of the cultural circulation of power. Brannigan makes a convincing case that between 1980 and 1986 the "new historicism" of such American critics as Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Stephen Orgel, and D. A. Miller emerged as a fairly consolidated tradition, possessed of its own well-defined set of concerns and problematics, and even its own house journal, Representations. While highlighting the methodological distinctions among various practitioners, Brannigan nonetheless approvingly cites H. Aram Veeser's general characterization of new historicist tenets: "every expressive act" (including contemporary criticism) "is embedded in a network of material practices" and thus "literary and non-literary 'texts' circulate inseparably" (71). (Brannigan dismisses Greenblatt's preference for the term "cultural po etics" as mere posturing, although he acknowledges that the label may be more precise.) The term "cultural materialism" refers to the work of British critics including Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, and Catherine Belsey, who share many of the concerns of their Yankee counterparts, but who work by "analysing the material existence of ideology, concentrated in the study of literary texts" (12). Both schools emerged during the 1980s; both resist humanist idealism and formalist methodology and reject facile distinctions between history and representation; and both initially targeted the mobilization of ideological self-regulation and the noncoercive production of consent during the Renaissance.

Designed in large part as a pedagogical introduction for students of literary theory, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism thoroughly and effectively summarizes the distinctive features of each school, outlines their institutional and publication histories, and glosses both the founding theorists (Michael Foucault and Clifford Geertz for the new historicists, Raymond Williams for the cultural materialists) as well as the key critical texts (Brannigan appends a useful annotated bibliography of important essays and books). For Brannigan, the primary difference between the two schools hinges on the problem of "containment":

New historicists typically examine the functions and representations of power, and focus on the ways in which power contains any potential subversion. Cultural materialists, to the contrary, look for ways in which defiance, subversion, dissidence, resistance, all forms of political opposition, are articulated, represented and performed. (108)

Whatever the emphasis, new historicism and cultural materialism have not only revitalized Renaissance studies (and to some extent Victorian and American literary and cultural studies), but many of the assumptions Brannigan attributes to these schools have become almost commonsensical in journals and classrooms. Many of us now "tend to read literary texts as material products of specific historical conditions" and assume that "texts of all kinds are the vehicles of politics insofar as texts mediate the fabric of social, political and cultural formations" (3).

Yet such formulae raise as many questions as they put to rest, and new historicism in particular has generated a considerable amount of skeptical response. Brannigan cites these criticisms in passing, but his elaborations of many of the arguments are underdeveloped. A primary lament is the peculiarly disabling model of power developed by Greenblatt and his camp followers, a model according to which "there is no effective space of resistance" (8). As Brannigan notes, for example, Carolyn Porter has charged that the new historicist model of generalized power works to reduce heterogeneous historical events, texts, and performances to predictable operations of a presumably homogenous and universal power. Although new historicism rejects idealized narratives of historical progress, it supplants them with its own grand narrative of indiscriminate power and consequently erodes the very historical specificity and particularity--the "descen[t] into detail" (34)--that formed its starting point. Frank Lentricchia likew ise condemns this vision of an all-pervasive power, which structures, regulates, and commandeers its own opposition, as "'a paranoid fantasy' which is necessary 'to the sustaining, in ostensibly democratic contexts, of the illusion of totalitarianism"' (78). Thus "the work of Stephen Greenblatt seems to be a continuation of Foucault's 'totalitarian assault"' (49-50). To respond, as Geoffrey Galt Harpham did to Lentricchia, that power is for Foucault "productive" as well as repressive, settles little; totalitarian states secure their legitimacy as much by heightening productivity (military build-ups and mobilizations, five-year plans) as through instrumentalizing repression (single-party rule, state censorship, gulags and concentration camps).

More intriguing, perhaps, is Brannigan's dark implication that such conceptualizations of power comprise more than mere theoretical shortcomings; rather, they emerge from and participate in their own political predicament. Greenblatt's political pessimism may be symptomatic of a closet neoconservatism: "the fact that Reagan commanded the support of working-class and liberal America can only have confirmed the disillusionment and apathy already implicit in new historicist thinking. In some ways, then, new historicist analyses seem to be affirming the structures and forms of state ideology of 1980s America, an ironic twist to their own tale" (78). Elsewhere Brannigan weighs in with a few other challenging points of his own, many having to do with the institutional politics of professional criticism during the 1980s. For example he suggests that because "changes in literary studies resemble the world of marketing and brand names [. . .] we need to historicise the emergence of new historicism and cultural materi alism more stringently in order to examine the circumstances in which they emerged, and the pressures involved in defining and monitoring new critical practices" (22). An equally provocative point involves the failure of "radical interpretations and dissident readings manoeuvred into place by left-wing critics [...]to have any material effect on the reactionary discourses even in education" (116). Given the Thatcherite decimation of British higher education and other social institutions in the 80s, "the question must be asked [. . .] how effective cultural materialism can be, or could have been, as a political strategy, and perhaps, more gloomily, what effect any form of cultural criticism can have in countering reactionary tendencies" (116). Again, however, the book provides no answer, sadly little historicization of the shifting social location of professional criticism, and insufficient discussion of either of these points. As both schools claim to highlight their own participation in the field of cultural politics, such discussions seem appropriate, and might go a long way towards addressing the current crises in the humanities on both sides of the Atlantic.

More of these meditations would be welcome. A major shortcoming of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism is its reluctance to take up the discussion between these critical schools and other cultural developments inside and outside the academy. The briefest and most disappointing chapter, "New Historicism and Cultural Materialism Today" promises, by emphasizing their concentration on historical and cultural difference, to elaborate on how this criticism resonates with the work of "postcolonial critics, feminists, gay theorists and race theorists" (119). Both Dollimore and Sinfield, for example, might be considered important queer theorists, but Brannigan is chary of this aspect of their work and reluctant to examine how it compares to the ongoing investigations of Judith Butler, say, or Leo Bersani. Too much of the chapter is characteristically vague. A typical sentence reads: "Each of these books deals with issues of empire, gender and sexuality" (122). But how, exactly? Brannigan says little about the in terface between new historicism and cultural materialism with other critical considerations of power and its cultural reproduction. How does this work gel with other developments in feminist thought, critical theory, cultural anthropology? How does it compare to other Marxist and post-Marxist criticism (Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Slavoj Zizek)? Staggeringly, cultural studies is given no mention at all. (Scott Wilson's Cultural Materialism: Theory and Practice, which brings Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, and the philosophy of Georges Bataille into the mix, is much more satisfying in this regard). A minor annoyance, by the way, is the book's incomplete index, which cites neither Eve Kosofky Sedgwick nor Hayden White, for example, though both critics are mentioned in passing in the text, and both have involved themselves in important ways in the discussion. Sedgwick's stellar reading of Adam Bede and Henry Esmond, which Veeser saw fit to include in his 1994 The New Historicism Reader, is glibly dis missed for not following "the classic new historicist formula" (228). The picture we are left with is of a rather narrow, even inbred group of scholars, a rendering that may have less to do with the insularity of the cultural materialism and new historicism than with Brannigan's own limited approach. Either way, however, these limitations serve to undermine his initial claims for the importance of cultural materialism and new historicism to the entire realm of cultural investigation.

Brannigan's focus is relentlessly literary, though his sample applied readings (of Heart of Darkness, "The Yellow Wall-paper," Tennyson's poetry, and Yeats's "Easter 1916") consider contemporaneous nonliterary texts, and his treatment of Yeats engages the postcolonial theory of Homi Bhabha. These readings (which constitute the second half of the book) are compelling and to the point, if somewhat brief. Yet even here his method is a bit curious. Rather than singling out, say, a key text like Alan Sinfield's Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading for a detailed critique, Brannigan provides his own new historicist and cultural materialist readings in order to highlight their potentials and expose their shortcomings. By reading so conservative and classic a poet as Tennyson "against the grain," for instance, Brannigan demonstrates the capacity of a cultural materialist approach to unleash dissident desires (the implicit defense of homoeroticism in "In Memoriam," for example) that both Tennyson's poetry and its secure establishment within a national literary tradition strive to disavow. For Brannigan, however, the problem with this approach is that, by structuring the reading according to an either/or logic of consent and dissent, of containment and subversion, cultural materialism short-shrifts the radical polyvocality of the poems (and he enlists Mikhail Bakhtin and Jaques Derrida to prove his point): "cultural materialism constructs an alternative 'knowledge' of the text that is potentially as reductive as the reading which it is contesting" (180). This may or may not he the case (in all fairness to Sinfield and Dollimore, I think it isn't the case). Earlier Brannigan had interrogated their work at length; yet all we have to go on here is Brannigan's own example, which might well have been set up as a sort of straw man.

Brannigan's most sustained and compelling criticism of new historicism targets Greenblatt's somewhat reductive understanding of Foucault. For his part, Brannigan accentuates Foucault's devotion to the singularity and uniqueness of the historical event, which "is characterized by the transformation of the discourse" (209). Foucault emerges then, not as a dismal theoretician of power's structural capacity to regulate dissent, but as a proponent of counter-memory, of "the alternative scenarios, the histories which didn't actually happen but which were nevertheless possible" (209). Consequently, two tensions or contradictions can be traced in Foucault's thinking. The first is between the putatively objective existence of the object of study (criminality, homosexuality, etc.) and Foucault's paradoxical insistence that discourse itself brings its own object into existence. A second, related tension "concerns the relationship between discursive time and chronological time [...] between events and discourses" (213). Thus for Foucault "statements and texts function in discursive formations which are not at all coterminous with their ostensible chronological positions" (213-14). In each case, Brannigan argues, the "contradiction in Foucault's work is not so much a logical flaw as a theoretical, and strategic, necessity" (214), and the brilliance of his work resides in Foucault's capacity to have it both ways: "He rides the tension rather than resolving it, and thereby theorises a space in which critical histories can be generated" (211). To my mind, Brannigan has pinpointed precisely what makes Foucault's work so enticing, and new historicism does indeed look somewhat crude in comparison.

Which raises perhaps the most important, if muted, question that Brannigan's book poses: why bother? That is, to what extent is new historicism a closed chapter, for Brannigan, or for us? Brannigan wraps up his book by conceding there is much to be carried over from new historicism and titles his closing remarks "The Importance of Not Concluding." Yet he insists on a future for criticism that opens up the "capacity of texts to speak back" (220), that is capable of reading "as if for the first time" (221, author's italics). And why not? While I feel his sallies into cultural materialism are less thorough, less generous, and less compelling, his hashing out the legacy of new historicism at least clears a space in which this might be possible.

Arthur Redding (afredding@mindspring.com), visiting assistant professor of English at Oklahoma State University, is the author of Raids on Human Consciousness: Writing, Anarchism, and Violence (1998).

Other Works Cited

Sinfield, Alan. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.

Veeser, H. Aram, ed. The New Historicism Reader. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Wilson, Scott. Cultural Materialism: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

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