New Historicism and Literary Studies - Soka University Repository

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rather late.73
The Politics of Culture
In the 1980s, as "the problem of ideology" gained wider acceptance in American
academia, there was a marked shift in cultural and sociological analysis. From themes of
sameness, cooperation and acceptance, the emphasis shifted to themes dealing with difference,
hegemony. This led to resistance causing national debates in the United States about the future
direction of English and American Studies and the humanities at large. Literary canons, that did
not privilege a wide variety of political, racial, ethnic and sexual identities and literatures, were
passionately contested on campuses and in the media leading to a reprioritizing of funding in
the humanities by government agencies, private funding bodies and the universities themselves.
Since then, a new politics of culture has emerged displacing other dominant modes of cultural
practices and ideologies. Within this climate, bounded by the extremes of containment and
subversion, new historicism constructs its practices and locates itself in the environment . It is
possible to see a clear divide emerging between those who campaign for individual agencies
fighting domination, assimilation and exclusion and those who valorize early modern state and
its capacity to contain dissent, even if it in some cases actually produced, subversive forms of
domination.
Greenblatt in his essay, "Invisible bullets: Renaissance authority and its subversion, Henry
IV and Henry V," argues that the ability of the status quo to generate subversion so as to use it
to its own benefit highlights "the very condition of power."74 Analyzing the subversive nature
of Shakespeare's dramas, Greenblatt argues,
It is precisely because of the English form of absolutist theatricality that
Shakespeare's drama, written for a theater subject to State censorship can be so relentlessly
subversive: the form itself, as a primary expression of Renaissance power, contains the
radical doubts it continually provokes.75
Producing and containing subversion, the status quo or the modern state organized under a
ruling monarch, mocks at the ability of individual subjects to counter state domination. But
liberal humanists and cultural critics are alarmed by the containment-subversion approach.
The liberal humanists, on the one hand, fear that if a dominant ideology operates in this
devious and subversive fashion, then it might in the final run circumvent efforts at individual
self-determination. The cultural critics, on the other hand, worry about their discursive
effectiveness to intervene in ideological practices. An extreme containment approach might
wish to read a Foucauldian historical discontinuity and control of subjects as offering no hope
for contestation or change.
Frank Lentricchia in "Foucault's Legacy: A New Historicism?" finds that a "monolithic
agency" produces "opposition" as political delusion.76 But Foucault draws a more complex
argument. He does not see power as monolithic but multiple. And therefore he sees resistance
to power as many and varying in its intensity and effectiveness. In "Sex, Power and the Politics
of Identity," Foucault explains this in the following manner: