Historicism

If I have been unduly harsh on historicism in several posts below (especially my post on The Country and the City Revisited), it is because there is something more depressing about its failure as a movement within literary criticism than--for example--the failure of deconstruction. While the latter seems as if it were supposed to fail, as if it were supposed to remain merely a pipe dream, as if it were supposed to stay true to its starry-eyed idealism (despite its paradoxical claims to empiricity) and float along disinterestedly even before its moment has passed, the former always strove to be more pragmatic, to work towards the idealistic but always fall back upon the real, the actual--thus it is a bit more painful to see its downfall, for we lose with it a bit of our groundedness in actuality itself, and does completely against our will. (Informing these remarks is Frederic Jameson's Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism, which has a brilliant piece on historicism and its failure which seems to me to display these qualities. Soon we will also turn to Thomas Pfau and his more bitter account.)
"Failure" and "downfall," of course, need to be immediately qualified (we should note that Jameson and Pfau do this as well): nothing simply fails within the study of literature, and certainly not historicism. We apply the term when assessing these movements precisely for this reason. To be clearer: until now (and perhaps beyond now--in America that is), the study of literature cannot really be distinguished from the application of an interpretive method, from a hermeneutic enterprise. Historicism and deconstruction, then, were both events in history (movements) and theoretical assumptions (methods). The movement passes by--not only for reasons of fashion, but also for professional necessities, world events, all sorts of historical reasons--and the method changes with it. The only way to really show how both are tied together is to talk about the movement as if it were then an expression of the method: that that interpretive was a reflection of some aspect of the interpretive theory. We thus say it failed, but this is precisely because the theory will always have a complex relation to the historical movement--in short, that it can't be said to fail simply. It is our way of trying to find the problems within the necessary aspects of the historical event itself. At least this is what I gather from the way people talk about these movements--the best example, I think, is that of Frederic Jameson--if they do not dismiss them unreflectingly as fashions. I prefer to call this whole process the "dating" of a particular critical activity: things do not fail--they become dated. I like to think that this produces interpretive structures or forms or events not unlike Peter Eisenman's City of Culture currently being built in Spain (and pictured throughout)--that is, in terms of penetrating the historicity of the critical act (in Eisenman's structure, the landscape and its uses) with a respect for its impenetrability, its being over with or merely a date (that is, mechanically or technically: Eisenman builds up the landscape, modifies it mathematically--see below picture--and then builds up the landscape itself again as buildings). In the end, the problem may just stem from not listening to Nietzsche, who reminds us how hard it is to say anything at all about these things without some resistance: "The most valuable insights are the last to be discovered; but the most valuable insights are methods" (The Anti-Christ, 13).


Regardless, this immense qualification accepted, both our depression and (relative) lack of depression at historicism and deconstruction, respectively, are symptoms of the problematic elements within the movements/methods (let's just call them movements henceforth) that led precisely to this fall or failure: historicism is unknowingly idealistic when it tries to be material--that is, completely, seriously hypocritical--and deconstruction, continually displaying an extremely annoying (but never as depressing) masochism, savors its hypocrisy in proclaiming desperately the need to respect the material, the empirical, when it cannot tear itself way from the ideal.
Jameson in his discussion of historicism does not explicitly put things in the terms of mourning and/or melancholia like I am here, but the sense of a greater failure is there in his account. It is most definitely present in the recent account of the amazing Thomas Pfau (in "The Philosophy of Shipwreck," MLN 122). Pfau characterizes historicism as governed by several axioms, all of which expand on what we have already pointed out as historicism's hypocrisy when it comes to the material: "the axiom of the archive," "the axiom of contextualism," "the axiom of pluralism (or indifferentism)," "the axiom of retroactive liberation (or secularization)," and, most damningly, the "axiom of critique as the guarantor of historical progress." Instead of getting into all of these--which all remain very interesting points--we can sum them up in a basic thesis: historicism operates more as a pragmatic check on wild theorizing, rather than as a genuine historicism. This does not do justice to what Pfau says as a whole, but it emphasizes how (in Jameson too) we have not really gotten over that magnificent Against Theory, of Walter Benn Michaels and Stephen Knapp: Pfau's focus is really on how historicism becomes a data-producing machine under the aegis of an empiricism or materialism, when its aims are simple idealistic liberal humanism--that is, just as starry-eyed as theory itself. The study of literature--and furthermore professional advancement in the study of literature--becomes an effort to dig up data and make it make no demands on the interpreter other than its archival nature and its newness with respect to the tradition of interpretation. Its "rigor" is really the demonstration of the healthiness of an interpretation backed up in historical records--its ability to live without the larger, more complex, ultimately less particular theoretical statement.

While this may be true, it remains for us to see exactly on what level it is true (thus we return to the problems of whether and where we can distinguish between the practice of interpretation and its method, as discussed above--and how much one can or cannot encroach upon the other, either wittingly or unwittingly). But instead of pursuing this, we can return to how Pfau seemed to reinforce that old argument about new historicism: that it is really the anti-theoretical study of literature, that devolves into a crude plea for pragmatism just as idealistic as theory.
Is new historicism just conservatism within the field of literature? For this is the implication of this claim. Obviously, the case can be made either way. My suggestion is that this is the inappropriate question underneath all the others: we need to think this "pragmatic" aspect of historicism differently if we are going to figure out what its failures are. For there is something indeed extremely amazing about precisely what this "pragmatism" produces: the expansion of the field in which the literary object places itself, and with more complicated processes of determination and delimitation of this aspect than anything Marxism has produced. In other words, what we get is that recognition that even if we looked at the internal logic of a text and exhausted its possibilities (even by affirming that they are infinite), the level at which the text operates must be specified and in fact delimited: it is easily smaller than we might think, caught up as it is within all sorts of activities that are larger than itself. We might revisit the remark of Foucault upon finishing Derrida's Dissemination: "So what?" In other words, for all that, what is the level upon which this immense play is taking place? Plato's texts not only have a complicated relationship to the textual element pharmacia: they are operative within a certain text that has many, many more elements in play--that is, within discourses. Historicism brings one back to the vastness of this field of discourse. More on this later...