#7.1: You're Gonna Need A Newer Historicism

Jameson on Immanence and Transcendence

Hey what's up. This is part 7 of my ongoing series summarizing Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. To see previous entries in this series, check out the archive.

gold…love to see this

Chapter 7: Immanence and Nominalism in Postmodern Theoretical Discourse

Part 1: Immanence and the New Historicism

New Historicism

So okay we have finally arrived at what Jameson teased in his introduction as the "lengthy and disproportionate" (xvi) chapter on theory, and it's a bit of a tricky one, as it's both deep in the weeds of a fairly narrow meta-theoretical debate from the early 90s, but also drops some really solid and clarifying insights about how theory and criticism operate under postmodernism more generally.

So I think this week I'm just going to break down Jameson's take on New Historicism, which is the main thrust of this chapter's first half. There's also a pretty cool reading of Walter Benn Michaels' The Gold Standard that I'm going to skip over for now, but I might circle back to it in a few weeks when we get to the chapter on economics.

In a nut's shell: New Historicism names a critical tendency that emerged as part of the broader “poststructural turn,” which aimed to position the literary text as inextricable from the historical context in which it was created.

It's main guy is probably Stephen Greenblatt, whose book Renaissance Self-Fashioning is usually pointed to as like the urtext of the New Historicist movement. I'm honestly not super familiar with Greenblatt, but he does have a pretty fun essay called "Invisible Bullets" that reads Shakespeare's history plays against renaissance police reports, Machiavelli, and early North American colonialism.

It's a neat piece of scholarship, but it's less interested in the typical "theoretical" project of building an argument than it is in what Jameson describes as a "montage of historical attractions" (190).

This "montage" approach to literary analysis is the basic move of New Historicism more generally: a scholar will assemble a literary work alongside a bunch of other "texts” (in the broadly expanded poststructuralist sense of the term) from a particular historical moment, to basically say “here’s what this historical moment was like.”

The underlying assumption here is that history itself is a bunch of discrete and disjointed moments with no fundamental relationship to what came before or what will come after, and whose “meaning” can only be inferred by the literary artifacts it leaves behind.

To really drive this home, here's some excerpts of a nice little critique of the New Historicist movement by D.G. Myers in which he boils it down to its basic contentions:

1. Literature is historical, which means (in this exhibition) that a literary work is not primarily the record of one mind’s attempt to solve certain formal problems and the need to find something to say; it is a social and cultural construct shaped by more than one consciousness. The proper way to understand it, therefore, is through the culture and society that produced it.

2. Literature, then, is not a distinct category of human activity. It must be assimilated to history, which means a particular vision of history.

3. Like works of literature, man himself is a social construct, the sloppy composition of social and political forces—there is no such thing as a human nature that transcends history. Renaissance man belongs inescapably and irretrievably to the Renaissance. There is no continuity between him and us; history is a series of "ruptures" between ages and men.

4. As a consequence, the historian/ critic is trapped in his own "historicity." No one can rise above his own social formations, his own ideological upbringing, in order to understand the past on its terms. A modern reader can never experience a text as its contemporaries experienced it.

Immanence and Transcendence

The relevance of this particular style of cultural criticism to the broader discussion of Postmodernism should probably be obvious: For Jameson, New Historicism's rejection of even the possibility of transgressing one's own historical situation amounts to an acceptance of the cultural logic of late capitalism: Its "montage of historical attractions" is basically the English department's version of that annoying AlienNATION video we talked about in the chapter on TV. It just kind of washes over you without really suggesting any kind of broader argument or structure.

Jameson usefully describes this approach to scholarly work as an investment in "immanence" over "transcendence." This sort of follows from what Myers identifies above as the New Historicist's claims about the fundamental rupture between historical moments: if the literatures and texts of any given historical moment are inescapably tethered to their moment, then they can only be deployed as a means of talking about the immanent, immediate features of that moment.

What this focus on immanence forecloses on is transcendence, or the building of generalizable claims, categories, and structures out of those immediate particulars. This, of course, has huge implications for the practice of "theory." Here's Jameson: "It follows, to take only the most dramatic examples of such denial of the transcendent, the social classes do not exist, or that, in literary history, concepts like 'modernism' are crude substitutes for that very different and qualitatively discriminate experience of reading an individual text" (185). If everything needs to be beheld in its irreducible particularity, then there's not really room for anything else, any of the "externalities" from which you might have previously been able to build a more robust theoretical structure.

Empty Hands

So that's obviously a huge problem for the kind of work that gets described as New Historicist. But as Jameson points out, even naming these guys as a coherent "movement" or "school of thought" or whatever would be helping ourselves to a notion of a transcendental category that their own basic contentions would seem to disallow.

As Jameson points out, this is an unavoidable dilemma of any effort to identify an irreducibly individual thing: "a crucial component of my particular situation as a unique individual is always the general category to which I am condemned by other people which I must therefore comes to terms with (Sartre said, assume) in any way I like— shame, pride, avoidance behaviour— but which I cannot expect to have removed just because I'm somebody special" (185).

Moreover, once you reject the idea of the generalized category, what you’re left with is basically just a really annoying style, or what Jameson usefully calls a "writing practice":

Elegance here consists in constructing bridge passages between the various concrete analyses, transitions or modulations inventive enough to preclude the posing of theoretical or interpretive questions...Whence, in the most successful of such artifacts, that sense of breathlessness, of admiration for the brilliance of the performance, but yet bewilderment, at the conclusion of the essay, which which one seems to emerge with empty hands— without ideas and interpretations to carry away with us (188).

Get their ass dude!

What's really important to drive home here is the extent to which this notion of the transcendental, or the generalizable ideas and structures of thought that can be carried away from the particular, is really what "theory" has historically been all about. "Doing theory" in the broadest sense is about deploying the particular as a means toward the general or transcendental.

If you disallow yourself access to that transcendental, or write it off as an externality, you're effectively kneecapping your own capacity to derive anything from your own work besides a kind of reflexive cataloguing of the immediate features of whatever particular thing you're talking about.

You're also, incidentally, severely hampering your ability to defend yourself against guys like Jameson, who is obviously deeply invested in theory and the interplay of immanence and transcendence, and it’s why he's able to spend an entire chapter both immanently and transcendentally kicking the shit out of the New Historicists.

More broadly, though, if you've spent enough time in grad school you've definitely encountered exactly this New Historical approach to scholarship, if perhaps by some other name. Someone who is just going to show you a bunch of discrete, historically bounded curiosities all loosely organized by a kind of general thematic, and go, "look, all of these things were going on at the same time. They're related." And all you can do is nod your head and go, "wow. I hadn't seen these things arranged quite like that before."

As a style of scholarship, it can be extremely, seductively compelling, in the way any good montage can be compelling. But you have to ask yourself: What is this actually doing? What actual argument is being developed here? What am I meant to be taking away from this series historical curiosities?

Okay that’s all for now, see you next week.