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This book explores key critical debates in the humanities in recent times in the context of the legitimation crisis widely felt to be facing academic institutions, using Derrida's idea of leverage in the university. In particular, it concerns an account for the malaise in the university by linking critical developments, discourses and debates in the modern humanities to a problem of the institution itself. The book finds within these discourses and debates the very dimensions of the institution's predicament: economic, political, ideological, but also, inseparably, intellectual. It looks at some of the recurring themes arising in the early key texts of new historicism and cultural materialism. The book also argues that these approaches in a number of ways orient their critical strategies according to certain kinds of logics and structures of reflection. It instances disorientation and leverage in the university by exploring the problematic doubleness of economics as indeterminately both inside and outside contemporary cultural theory. The book also argues that the interdisciplinary approach of cultural analysis has a certain amount of difficulty positioning economics as either simply an outside or an inside. The orientation and leverage within the university apparently offered by the development of cultural studies and by certain forms of interdisciplinarity comes at the cost of an irresolvable disorientation between the object and the activity of criticism.
orientation ostensibly founded on a repudiation of other directions. The ‘new’ or ‘radical’ kinds of criticism I want to discuss in this chapter have by different means pointed the way for various assaults on ‘ahistorical’, ‘apolitical’ deconstruction over the last few years. Yet the ‘founding’ texts of new historicism and cultural materialism in fact
some of the recurring themes and images arising in the early key texts of new historicism and cultural materialism, I argue in Chapter 2 that these approaches in a number of ways orient their critical strategies according to certain kinds of logics and structures of reflection. This orientation frequently takes the form either of an analysis of Renaissance power represented and discussed through a
, ‘a similar kind of critical opposition becomes available in the present’. This is because, as I argued in Chapter 2 , cultural materialism has displaced dialectical materialism, such that ‘a form of reflection theory’ has been reasserted, through which ‘history has become a mirror in which contemporary political priorities have been substituted for the former certain ground of Marxist
’ (censorship as a repressive, external threat to essential freedoms) that has been adopted by ‘political critics’ working on the early modern period (particularly British cultural materialists), which ‘makes available in the Renaissance a certain essentially moral notion of critical opposition’. ‘By extension,’ argues Burt, ‘a similar kind of critical opposition becomes available in the present.’4 This situation may well have come about, as Robert Young has noted, because cultural materialism as a broadly leftist critical practice has pretty much supplanted or displaced the
the colonising dangers of attempting to speak for the past – something Stephen Greenblatt and other New Historicists have characterised themselves as doing and which comes through in their anecdotal style, no matter how ‘thick’ a description one provides of the cultural phenomenon under scrutiny.14 Despite the value of this reminder, however, these responses also understate New Historicism’s, and more so Cultural Materialism’s, at least theoretical investment in a self-conscious examination of early modern culture. From the start, its major theorists, including
Princess, The Guardian , 3 July 2002 . Brown , Paul , ‘“ This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”: The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism’ , pp. 48–71 in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism . Manchester
suggested that the pressures of close analysis developed in the study of poetry would now be applied to the broader texts of cultural discourse. And in the United Kingdom, similar approaches emerged under the title of Cultural Materialism, drawing largely on the gripping work of Raymond Williams, primarily The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), and Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Interestingly, Greenblatt has spoken of being
practical terms. In much recent criticism, economics has either been mapped familiarly as essential background to literary and cultural production, which risks leaving intact the text-context/infrastructure-superstructure divisions observed within traditional forms of socioeconomic historicism (as often occurs in cultural materialism, particularly in regard to studies of the early
). 40 Ian Hunter, David Saunders and Dugald Williamson, On Pornography: literature, sexuality and obscenity law (London: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 96–102. 41 Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: cultural materialism and the politics of dissident reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 47.