New Historicism and Literary Studies - Soka University Repository

You see, if there was no resistance, there would be no power relations. Because it
would simply be a matter of obedience. You have to use power relations to refer to the
situation where you're not doing what you want. So resistance comes first, and resistance
remains superior to the forces of the process; power relations are obliged to change with
the resistance. So I think that resistance is the main word, the key word, in this dynamic.77
Foucault argues against the position of individual entrapment in the politics of power; as the
individual always possesses the power to resist. Foucault, therefore, does not endorse the
containment-subversion paradigm of power, but provides a more complex argument for both
the forces of status quo containment and individual subversion or resistance.
Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature addresses the problem of ideology by
introducing heterogenous and shifting ideological "movements and tendencies both within and
beyond a specific and effective dominance."78 The constantly shifting and redefining nature of
"movements and tendencies" against dominant ideologies and against themselves provide an
ideological ground for both contestation and redefinition. Dominant ideologies are maintained
by a grouping of gender, ethnicity, class, profession or age that individuals use as cultural
producers; they are also maintained by the consumers or resisters of cultural production
(readers/resisters) and by the autonomy of the cultural medium. Williams explains that
"hegemony" as a concept goes beyond culture and encompasses a "whole social process,"
including ideology. He argues: "To say that `men' define and shape their whole lives is true
only in abstraction. In any actual society there are specific inequalities in means and therefore
in means to realize this process."79 Williams explains that specific cultures overwhelm the
individual to the extent that he cannot think or act in specific historical situations. And this
Marxist position challenges the basic premise of American cultural anthropology that
individual agencies possess the ability to act upon and change historical situations.8° An
acceptable model of culture must employ the methodology of cultural poetics to incorporate
both the dominant and subordinate ideologies that give rise to identity and difference. Williams
explains:
Essentially, all three agencies—production, consumption/appropriation and
reproduction—are involved in the ideologies of dominance, transforming and getting
transformed in the process. A dynamic model of culture involves a constant interplay of
dominant and subordinate ideological positions that create identity and difference in an
ever-shifting paradigm of cultural poetics?'
In recent years cultural politics has tried to unravel the supposedly hidden text in writers
such as Shakespeare, a text subversive of its own canonicity. The notion that subversion is
clandestinely woven in the very fabric of texts might seem maliciously historical, but it is more
formal than historical in practice. Jonathan Dollimore finds the notion of a clandestine
subversion in texts of famous canonical writers somewhat ludicrous. In the Introduction to
Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism he argues,
Nothing can be intrinsically or essentially subversive in the sense that prior to the
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