Page 55 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 46

Contemporary Cultural Theory

As to the first, the issue hinges on how to read and apply
Foucault (as a theorist of incorporation or of disruption), and
on how to understand in/subordination (as always already neces-
sarily contained or as at least potentially resistive). Just as for
Foucault the apparently autonomous self had been a socio-discur-
sive effect of quite specific forms of social power, so for the
Greenblatt of Renaissance Self-Fashioning the texts and perform-
ances of Renaissance literature and drama are actively productive
of the new forms of self. In new historicism, as in Foucault, this
simultaneous stress on the discursivity of power and on the
power of discourse easily leads to an overly ‘functional’ under-
standing of the self as effectively subordinated to and integrated
within the social formation. So in much of Greenblatt’s work the
apparently subversive moment in apparently subversive texts is
read as ultimately affirmative of and complicit with the dominant
discursive formation. The obvious instance here is the essay
included in Political Shakespeare, and much reprinted elsewhere,
which reads the subversive perceptions in Shakespeare’s history
plays as ultimately supportive of the kingly authority they appear
to question (Greenblatt, 1994).
For Sinfield, this new historicist insistence on the affirmative
properties of apparently subversive texts amounts to an ‘entrap-
ment model’ of ideology and power. Entrapment is indeed
important, he concedes, as a way of theorising the dominant
ideology, but it is much more important to theorise the scope for
effective dissidence: ‘This, centrally, is what Raymond Williams
was concerned with in his later work’ (Sinfield, 1994a, p. 24).
Hence Sinfield’s interest in Williams’ accounts of the alternative
and the oppositional, the residual and the emergent. For cultural
materialism, Sinfield continues to argue that ‘dissident potential
derives...from conflict and contradiction that the social order
inevitably produces within itself, even as it attempts to sustain
itself’ (Sinfield, 1992, p. 41). Gallagher argues that cultural
materialist readings of the literary text as disruptive actually
replicate the literary-critical consensus as to the disturbing, desta-
bilising and estranging functions of art. New historicism’s break
with that consensus is thus ‘an attempt to de-moralize our
relationship to literature, to interrupt the moral narrative of

46