12agreenblatt,towardsapoeticsofculture

8/4/2019 12AGreenblatt,TowardsaPoeticsofCulture

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1Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3304 Notes 12A

STEPHEN GREENBLATT "TOWARDS A POETICS OF CULTURE" (1986)

Greenblatt, Stephen. Towards a Poetics of Culture. The New Historicism. Ed. H. Aram

Veeser. London: Routledge, 1989. 1-14.

Greenblatt begins by admitting that, though he is famous for having founded the recent

critical movement that has come to be known as new historicism (1) especially in the

area of Renaissance and, more specifically, Shakespearean studies, his work has always

been undertaken without establishing first exactly what is my theoretical position (1).

He contends that his goal here is to fill this gap without trying to define the new

historicism (1) but situate it as a practice a practice rather than a doctrine, since as far

as I can tell . . . its no doctrine at all (1).

Greenblatt argues that the new historicism is distinguished from positivist

historical scholarship (1) by an openness to the thBeoretical ferment of the last few

years (1). He cites in particular the influence on his own literary critical practice (1) of

the presence of Michel Foucault on the Berkeley campus for extended visits during the

last five or six years of his life (1), and more generally the influence in America of

European (and especially French) anthropological and social theorists (1). He also admits,

however, that many historicist critics have been on the whole unwilling to enroll

themselves in one or the other of the dominant theoretical camps (1). His goal here is to

explain this situation by situating his own work in relation to Marxism on the one hand,

and poststructuralism on the other (2). Early in his career, he recounts, he used to teach

courses devoted to Marxist theory until one day a student got furious with him because of

his reluctance to identify with one particular stream of Marxism to the exclusion of others.

From this moment, although uneasy with a politics and a literary perspective . . .

untouched by Marxist thought (2), he taught courses with titles like Cultural Poetics (2)

and in this way refused to endorse propositions or embrace a particular philosophy, politics

or rhetoric, faute de mieux (2).

This is why Greenblatt is uneasy with what he describes as the identifying gestures

of the most distinguished American Marxist aesthetic theorist, Frederic Jameson (2) madein his seminal The Political Unconscious (1981). Greenblatt takes particular exception to

Jamesons distinction between cultural texts that are social and political and those that

are not that is, an aesthetic domain that is in some way marked off from the discursive

institutions that are operative elsewhere in a culture (2). This is seen by Jameson as a

malignant symptom of privatisation (2). Greenblatt questions this distinction between

the political and the poetic (2) as well as the relationship between this and the mode of

economic organisation (2) in question. He suggests that

in print, let alone in the electronic media, private ownership has led not to

privatisation but to the drastic communalisation of all discourse, the

constitution of an ever larger mass audience, the organisation of a

commercial sphere unimagined and certainly unattained by the

comparatively modest attempts in pre-capitalist societies to organise public

discourse. (2-3)

He wonders whether it is not possible to have a communal sphere of art that is distinct

from other communal spheres (3), whether such a communal differentiation (3) is not

the dominant practice in capitalist society (3), whether the absence of a distinction

between the political and the poetic (3), as in the Chinese cultural revolution, is in fact

less alienating (3) and whether it is liberating (3) for the USA in the 1980s to be

governed by a film actor who is either cunningly or pathologically indifferent to the

traditional differentiation between fantasy and reality (3) (he is alluding here to Ronald


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Reagan).

Greenblatt questions the view of Jameson that the demarcation of the aesthetic

must be aligned with the private which is in turn aligned with the psychological, the poetic,

and the individual, as distinct from the public, the social, and the political (3). These

distinctions are laid at the door of capitalism with its power to maim and paralyse us asindividual subjects (3), even though such distinctions predate the capitalist period. This

view has the

resonance of an allegory of the fall of man: once we were whole, agile,

integrated; we were individual subjects but not individuals, we had no

psychology distinct from the shared life of the society; politics and poetry

were one. Then capitalism arose and shattered this luminous, benign

totality. The myth echoes throughout Jamesons book, though by the close

it has been eschatologically reoriented so that the totality lies not in a past

revealed to have always already fallen but in the classless future. A

philosophical claim then appeals to an absent empirical event. And literature

is invoked at once as the dark token of fallenness and the shimmering

emblem of the absent transfiguration. (3)

Poststructuralism, Greenblatt argues, has raised serious questions about such a vision,

challenging both its underlying oppositions and the primal organic unity that it posits as

either paradisal origin or utopian, eschatological end (3).

At this point, Greenblatt turns his attention to the work of the quintessential

postmodernist Jean-Franois Lyotard who is of the view that fields, territories, and

domains . . . present the same object, but . . . also make that object the stakes of

heterogeneous (or incommensurable) expectations (qtd. in Greenblatt, 4). For Lyotard,

Greenblatt argues, the role of capitalism [is] not to demarcate discursive domains but,

quite the opposite, to make such domains untenable (4): Capital is that which wants a

single language and a single network, and it never stops trying to prevent them (qtd. in

Greenblatt, 4) (in other words, in Bakhtinian terms, to elevate monologism over

heteroglossia). Lyotards views are predicated, Greenblatt argues, on Faurissons denial

of the Holocaust, and behind this denial, the Nazis attempt to obliterate the existence ofmillions of Jews and other undesirables, an attempt Lyotard characterises as the will to

strike from history and from the map entire worlds of names (4). The problem with this,

in Greenblatts view, is that the Nazis did not seem particularly interested in

exterminating names along with the persons who possessed those names (4) in that they

kept meticulous records (4) of their campaign of mass murder (4) and even anticipated

one day creating a museum dedicated to the culture of the wretches they had destroyed

(4). The problem with the Faurisson affair (4) is historical (4) in nature: what is the

evidence of mass murder? How reliable is this evidence? Are there convincing grounds for

denying or doubting the documented events? And if there are not such grounds, how may

we interpret the motives of those who seek to cast doubt upon the historical record? (4).

Moreover, the conflation of Fascist apologetics and capitalism (4) in Lyotards account

suppresses all the aspects of capitalism that are wedded to the generation and inscription

of individual identities and to the demarcation of boundaries separating those identities

(4). The capitalist emphasis on individuality may be fraudulent (4), in Greenblatts

opinion, but it remains a fact that it is capitalism, as Marx suggested that mounts the

Wests most powerful and sustained assault upon collective, communal values and

identities (5). Names themselves are forged (5) in the market place and in the state

apparatus linked to the circulation and accumulation of capital (5), proper names

appearing less the victims than the products of property they are bound up not only

with the property one has in oneself, that is, with the theory of possessive individualism,


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but quite literally with the property one possesses (5) so that the powers that be might

calculate and tax personal property (5).

These differences of opinion between Jameson and Lyotard may be traced to a

difference between the Marxist and poststructuralist projects (5). Greenblatt points out

that Jameson, seeking to expose the fallaciousness of a separate artistic sphere and tocelebrate the materialist integration of all discourses (5), sees capitalism, the perpetrator

of separate discursive domains, the agent of privacy, psychology, and the individual (5),

as at the root of a "false differentiation" (5) between art and society. Lyotard, on the other

hand, seeking to celebrate the differentiation of all discourses and to the expose the

fallaciousness of monological unity (5), views capitalism qua the enemy of such domains

and the destroyer of privacy, psychology, and the individual (5) as at the heart of a "false

integration" (5). In short, Jameson treats capitalism as the agent of repressive

differentiation (5), while Lyotard treats it as the agent of monological totalisation (5).

For Greenblatt, history functions in both cases as a convenient anecdotal ornament upon

a theoretical structure (5) and capitalism appears less as a complex social and economic

development in the West but as a malign philosophical principle (5). The general

question addressed by both Jameson and Lyotard, what is the historical relation between

art and society or between one institutionally demarcated discursive practice and another

(5), does not lend itself to a single, theoretically satisfactory answer (5) of the kind

proposed by either party. Or, rather, theoretical satisfaction on either side of the divide

seems to be predicated on an a priori "utopian vision that collapses the contradictions of

history into a moral imperative" (5) and are the logical outcome of theorys search for the

obstacle that blocks the realisation of its eschatological vision" (5). Both sides have failed

to come to terms with the apparently contradictory historical effects of capitalism (5),

even though the Marxist approach acknowledges such contradictions which it interprets as

the signs of repressed class conflicts (5), while the poststructuralists treat them as

cracks in the spurious certainties of logocentrism (5). Indeed, for Greenblatt, capitalism

has generated "regimes in which the drive towards differentiation and the drive towards

monological organisation operate simultaneously, or at least oscillate so rapidly as to

create the impression of simultaneity" (6), that is, a "complex dialectic of differentiationand identity" (7) which is "powerful precisely because it is now virtually thoughtless" (7).

Ronald Reagan's plagiarising of filmic events might have been deliberate or it might have

been symptomatic of the collapse of distinction between fantasy and reality in capitalist

America: capitalism's power resides in precisely this "circulation" (8), this "restless

oscillation" (8) between the "establishment of distinct discursive domains and the collapse

of these domains into each other" (8). By invoking capitalism less as some sort of unitary

demonic principle (6) than a complex historical movement in a world without paradisal

origins or chiliastic expectations (6), we can inquire into the relation between art and

society in capitalist cultures (6) that takes into account both Jamesons distinction (6)

and Lyotards totalising impulse (6). Capitalism has generated neither regimes in which

all discourses seem coordinated, nor regimes in which they seem radically isolated or

discontinuous, but regimes in which the drive towards differentiation and the drive towards

monological organisation operate simultaneously, or at least oscillate so rapidly as to

create the impression of simultaneity (6).

At this point, Greenblatt turns to a consideration of the number of times President

Reagan has, at critical moments in his career, quoted lines from his own or other popular

films (6), thereby projecting himself and his audience into a realm in which there is no

distinction between simulation and reality (6). Critics of Reagan, like the political

scientist and historian Michael Rogin (6), are of the view that the Presidents character

was produced from the convergence of two sets of substitutions which generated Cold War


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countersubversion in the 1940s and underlie its 1980s revival the political replacement

of Nazism by Communism, from which the national security state was born; and the

psychological shift from an embodied self to its simulacrum on film (6). His defenders,

like Anthony Dolan, a White House speech-writer (6), respond that all of us are deeply

affected by a uniquely American art form: the movies (6) which heighten reality ratherthan lessen it (6). Such a view, Greenblatt argues, seems to welcome the collapse of the

distinction between the aesthetic and the real; the aesthetic is not an alternative realm but

a way of intensifying the single realm we all inhabit (6-7). At this point, he points out,

Reagans defenders suddenly claimed that the President usually credits the films which he

quotes with the result that at the moment of appropriation, the President acknowledges

that he is borrowing from the aesthetic and hence acknowledges the existence of a

working distinction (7) that respects . . . the difference between his own presidential

discourse and the fictions in which he himself at one time took part (7). These are the

signs of the legal and economic system which he represents (7) for the capitalist

aesthetic demands acknowledgments hence the various marks of property rights that are

flashed on the screen or inscribed in a text (7). (This preoccupation with copyright and

the possibility of violating it far outweighs any concern with the fact that presidents have

historically very rarely written their own speeches.) The long and short of the controversy

is that either the President did not fully recognise that he was quoting, or alternatively

that he did realise it and chose to repress the fact (7). In one version he is a kind of

sleepwalker, in the other a plagiarist (7).

Greenblatt argues that the debate articulates the complex dialectic of

differentiation and identity (7) discussed earlier, the power of which lies in the fact that it

is by now virtually thoughtless; it takes a substantial effort to separate the boundaries of

art from the subversion of those boundaries (7). The

effect of such an effort is to remove itself from the very phenomenon it had

proposed to analyse, namely the relation between art and surrounding

discourses in capitalist culture. For the effortless invocation of two

apparently contradictory accounts of art is characteristic of American

capitalism in the late twentieth century and an outcome of long-termtendencies in the relationship of art and capital; in the same moment a

working distinction between the aesthetic and the real is established and

abrogated.

We could argue, following Jameson, that the establishment of the

distinction is the principal effect, with a view towards alienating us from our

own imaginations by isolating fantasies in a private, apolitical realm. Or we

could argue, following Lyotard, that the abrogation of the distinction is the

principal effect, with a view towards effacing or evading differences by

establishing a single, monolithic ideological structure. (7-8)

From the sixteenth century onwards, Greenblatt contends, capitalism has produced a

powerful and effective oscillation between the establishment of distinct discursive domains

and the collapse of those domains into one another. It is this restless oscillation rather

than the securing of a particular fixed position that constitutes the distinct power of

capitalism (8). Though these discursive domains exist in other economic and social

systems (8), only capitalism has managed to generate a dizzying, seemingly

inexhaustible circulation between the two (my emphasis; 8).

Greenblatt acknowledges that his use of the term circulation here is influenced by

the work of Jacques Derrida (8). However, his argument is that sensitivity to the

practical strategies of negotiation and exchange (8) has less to do with the Post-

Structuralism with which Derrida, as the founder of Deconstruction, has come to be


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identified than the circulatory rhythms of American politics (8). Moreover, it is not

politics alone but the whole structure of production and consumption the systematic

organisation of ordinary life and consciousness that generates the pattern of boundary

making and breaking, the oscillation between demarcated objects and monological totality

(8). It is an illusion (8) to attribute this state of affairs to the unique talents (8) of asingle man (8), in this case Reagan, which is tantamount to a humanist trivialisation of

power (8). Greenblatt is of the view that Reagan is

manifestly the product of a larger and more durable American structure

not only a structure of power, ideological extremism and militarism, but of

pleasure, recreation and interest, a structure that shapes the spaces we

construct for ourselves, the way we present the news, the fantasies we

daily consume on television or in the movies, the entertainments that we

characteristically make and take. (8)

In short, the oscillation between totalisation and difference, uniformity and the diversity

of names, unitary truth and a proliferation of distinct entities in short between Lyotards

capitalism and Jamesons is built into the poetics of everyday behaviour in America (8).

At this point, Greenblatt recounts a trip which he made to Yosemite National Park in

California and a walk along the popular Nevada Falls Trail where the boundaries are blurred

between civilisation (signalled by the existence of asphalt pavements to walk on, etc.) and

the wilderness (9), what is really, ironically, a publicly demarcated Nature (9). Indeed,

as one walks on, the signs of human presence are unmistakable in the form of bridges

which offer a splendid view of Nevada Falls (9), signs information about the

dimensions of the falls, warnings (9), etc., plaques inscribed with inspirational, vaguely

Wordsworthian sentiments (9) of environmentalists, and even photographs taken from

the very spot on which you stand (9). What this offers, Greenblatt believes, is an

unusually candid glimpse of the process of circulation that shapes the whole

experience of the park. The wilderness is at once secured and obliterated by

the official gestures that establish its boundaries; the natural is set over

against the artificial through means that render such oppositions

meaningless. The eye passes from the natural image of the waterfall to thealuminium image, as if to secure a different (for why else bother to go to the

park at all? Why not simply look at a book of pictures?), even as that

difference is effaced. The effacement is by no means complete on the

contrary, parks like Yosemite are one of the ways in which the distinction

between nature and artifice is constituted in our society and yet the Park

Services plaque on the Nevada Falls bridge conveniently calls attention to

the interpenetration of nature and artifice that makes the distinction

possible. (9)

Missing from this exemplary fable of capitalist aesthetics (10) thus far, Greenblatt

continues, is the question of property relations (10) which the National Parks exist

precisely to suspend or marginalise that question through the ideology of protected public

space. Everyone owns the parks (10). This ideology is, though, somewhat bruised by

the actual development of a park like Yosemite, with its expensive hotel, a restaurant that

has a dress code, fancy gift shops, and the like (10). He admits, though, that the Park

system is not entirely a Capitalist instrument, citing the reluctance by even a right wing

(10) Secretary of the Interior to permit the construction of a golf course on park grounds

and the public outrage (10) which greeted the attempt by a television company filming a

series in Yosemite to paint the rocks to make it look more realistic (10)!

Greenblatt next turns to what he considers to be a more compelling example (10)

that combines recreation or entertainment, aesthetics, the public sphere, and private


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property (10): Norman Mailers hugely successful true life novel (10), The Executioners

Song, on the execution in 1976 of a career criminal named Gary Gilmore that brilliantly

combines documentary realism with Mailers characteristic romance themes (10) (and

itself in turn transformed into a successful TV mini-series). Gilmore became something of

a cause celebre in that, having been convicted of killing two men after a turbulent life ofcrime, he himself successfully sought to have his execution carried out over the strenuous

objections (10) of various civil rights organisations. Mailers book was based, Greenblatt

points out, on extensive interviews and acquired documents, records of court proceedings,

and personal papers such as the intimate letters between Gilmore and his girlfriend (10).

Mailers book in turn prompted a meeting with another convict, Jack H. Abbott with whom

Mailer wrote another book, In the Belly of the Beast, comprising their correspondence and

which led to him being released on parole, Greenblatt points out, only to murder someone

else (itself subsequently turned into a play also called In the Belly of the Beast.

Greenblatt concludes from the foregoing that literary criticism makes use of a set of

very familiar terms for the relationship between a work of art and the historical events to

which it refers: we speak of allusion, symbolisation, allegorisation, representation, and

above all mimesis (11). Each of these has a rich history (11) and is virtually

indispensable (11) but seems curiously inadequate to the cultural phenomenon which

Mailers book and Abbotts, and the television series and the play constitute (11). This

problem is also true of the culture of the past (11). We need, Greenblatt avers, to

develop terms to describe ways in which material here official documents,

private papers, newspaper clippings, and so forth is transferred from one

discursive sphere to another and becomes aesthetic property. It would be a

mistake . . . to regard this process as uni-directional from social discourse

to aesthetic discourse not only because the aesthetic discourse in this case

is so entirely bound up capitalist venture but because the social discourse is

already charged with aesthetic energies. (11)

Not only was Gilmore explicitly and powerfully moved by the film version of One Flew

Over the Cuckoos Nest, but his entire pattern of behaviour seems to have been shaped by

the characteristic representations of American popular fiction, including Mailers own (11).Greenblatt cites Michael Baxandalls view at this point that art and society are

analytical concepts from two different kinds of categorisation of human experience,

unhomologous systematic constructions put upon interprenetrating subject-matters (qtd.

in Greenblatt, 11) for which reason any attempt to relate the two must first modify one of

the terms till it matches the other . . . (11). We must acknowledge the modification and

find a way to measure its degree, for it is only in such measurements that we can hope to

chart the relationship of between art and society (12). The new historicism in cultural

studies (12) is distinguished by such methodological self-consciousness (12); it is not a

historicism based upon faith in the transparency of signs and interpretive procedures

(12). This self-consciousness must be supplemented by an understanding that the work

is not itself a pure flame that lies at the source of our speculations (12). Rather the

work of art is itself the product of a set of manipulations, some of them our own (12),

such as works not originally conceived as art at all but rather as something else votive

objects, propaganda, prayer, and so on (12). Any work of art is the "product of a

negotiation between a creator or class of creators, equipped with a complex, communally

shared repertoire of conventions, and the institutions and practices of a society" (12). In

order to achieve this negotiation, artists need to create a currency that is valid for a

meaningful, mutually profitable exchange (12). This process involves not simply

appropriation but exchange, since the existence of art always implies a return . . .

normally measured in pleasure and interest" (12). Societys dominant currencies, money


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and prestige, are invariably involved (12), of course, but Greenblatt stresses that he is

using the term currency metaphorically to designate the systematic adjustments,

symbolisations and lines of credit necessary to enable an exchange to take place. The

terms currency and negotiation are the signs of our manipulation and adjustment of the

relative systems (12). Much recent theoretical work (12) should be understood in thecontext of a search for a new set of terms (12) to grasp this cultural phenomenon (12).

Hence, the efforts of theorists like Wolfgang Iser, Robert Weimann, and Anthony Giddons.

Each of their respective formulations (12), notwithstanding significant differences (12),

pulls away from a stable, mimetic theory of art and attempts to construct in

its stead an interpretative model that will more adequately account for the

unsettling circulation of materials and discourses that is . . . the heart of

modern aesthetic practice. It is in response to this practice that

contemporary theory must situate itself: not outside interpretation, but in

the hidden places of negotiation and exchange. (12-13)

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