Ideology and the New Historicism (1993)

GREGORY JAY Ideology and the New Historicism If we are asked to believe that all literature is "ideology," in the crude sense that its dominant intention (and then our only response) is the communication or imposition of "social" or "political" meanings and values, we can only, in the end, turn away. If we are asked to believe that all literature is "aesthetic," in the crude sense that its dominant intention (and then our only response) is the beauty of language or form, we may stay a little longer but will still in the end turn away. Some people will lurch from one position to the other. More, in practice, will retreat to an indifferent acknowledgment of complexity, or assert the autonomy of their own (usually consensual) response. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature In B)i the Law; ofNature: Form andValue in Ninteenth-Century America, Howard Horwitz presents an impressive sequel to the first volume of that brand of New Historicism developed at Berkeley during the 1980s. Embodied in the work of Stephen Greenblatt, Catharine Gallagher, and Walter Benn Michaels, this school of criticism has virtues and vices that have been commented on extensively elsewhere.1 New American Studies offers a less orthodox sample of New Historicism, bringing together well-known and often exciting essays first published in the Berkeley-based journal Representations. In his introduction, however, Philip Fisher attempts to identify his various contributors with the same theoretical cause that Horwitz champions: the need to get beyond "ideology." Distinguishing New Historicism from the "myth criticism" of the Old American Studies crowd, Fisher puts the emphasis on rhetorics as Arizona Quarterly Volume 49 Number 1, Spring 1993 Copyright © 1993 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-161 142Gregory Jay distinct from ideology. Rhetorical analysis focuses on the cultural work of representation, with all its contingencies and errancies. Because it assumes a fluid cultural contestation for meaning rather than a fixed domination or monopoly of representation, rhetoric points beyond ideology, since ideology (like myth) implies a totalizing system in which representation is tied more directly to the powers of social groups. Leaving aside for a moment whether the notion of ideology dismissed here is actually a straw-man, it is important to note how Fisher nationalizes and historicizes the beyond of ideology. He associates the totality and domination said to be characteristic of ideology with the various "myths" ofAmerica produced by Matthiessen, Lewis, Chase, and company. The disparity between these myths and the facts they cannot account for— especially the "regional" facts of social differences (race, class, sex, et al.)—suggests the need for a more open-ended model. Consequently, the theoretical space beyond ideology, produced by a poststructuralist critique of simple Marxist notions of art as false consciousness or propaganda, suddenly appears to reflect a historical reality: social differences in America have never expressed, or been subordinated to, a single ideology. The American Civil War, which underscored racial, sectional, class, and even sexual divides in the body politic , becomes the New Historicist metaphor signifying the truth beyond ideology and beyond the myths of literary history: "Notions of ideology and dissent and ofperiod identity and an authoritative discourse within each period are all interdependent. Once the concept of civil war as a normative situation within representation replaces that of ideology, this entire array of concepts falls away in tandem" (xv). Moreover, 'American new historicism has its basis in the representational situation not of monarchy but of civil war," of the "incomplete dominance of representation," so that "power is not the topic of this historicism" (xv—xvi): In the absence of a state we find ourselves freed of the intellectual component of the systematic state: ideology. We have rhetorics because we have no ideology, and we have no ideology because we lack the apparatus of ideology: a national religion, a unitary system of education under the control of the state, a cultural life and media monopolized by the state by means of either ownerships or subsidy. Ideology is a cultural mechanism Ideology and the New Historicism143 of stabilization and transmission, neither of which is a primary topic of a culture of speculation. The study of rhetorics is our necessary alternative to the study...