The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 18.0060 Monday, 29 January 2007
From: Hugh Grady <
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Date: Saturday, 27 Jan 2007 11:33:48 -0500
Subject: SHAKSPER Roundtable: Presentism
[Editor's Note: The following statement is intended to stimulate
discussion on the topic of Presentism in this the first SHAKSPER
Roundtable. -HMC]
Why Presentism Now?
By Hugh Grady
Note: I have drawn this contribution to the Roundtable from a number of
presentations at Shakespeare conferences over the last few years, and
some passages, in this age of word processing, have found their way into
print. My apologies for what will be some repetition to those who might
have already heard or read some of these remarks.
"History is far too important to be left to scholars who believe
themselves able to make contact with a past unshaped by their own
concerns," wrote Terence Hawkes in the Introduction to Shakespeare in
the Present (p. 3). I want to amplify that point in what follows by
explaining the great stakes that a developing presentist critical
practice has, precisely, in dealing also with its dialectical opposite,
historicism.
Within Shakespeare studies over the last twenty years, historicism has
come to be an almost unquestioned and unexamined assumption of
professional academic literary criticism. As I wrote previously, "Today
in early modern literary studies, historicism, new or old, interwoven
with feminism and psychoanalysis or not, has become virtually an
unrivalled paradigm for professional writing. The turn to historicism
has become taken for granted, its connections to the cultural present
often unexamined or suppressed" (Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and
Montaigne, 1).
This monolithic development has begun to efface distinctions that were
once crucial ones to make. For example, only a few years ago, it was
necessary to add adjectives to the nouns designating the leading
critical methodologies in the field: one spoke of the new historicism
and of cultural materialism, whereas today it has become common to drop
the adjectives, to refer to historicism and materialism without
qualifiers. In both cases, the loss of the qualifier signals a lack of
theoretical specificity, a fuzzing of the signified as well as the
signifier. The nineteen-nineties, it was said, was the decade of
Post-theory-a curious condition in which the results of a previous era
of critical labor would be retained, while the on-going attempt to
theorize itself would be suspended, in the name of application and
consolidation. That this was a recipe for intellectual stagnation should
have been apparent to everyone, but the dialectic of modernity was at
work, and the newness of the term, its status as a final "post'" in a
triumphant series that had begun with post-structuralism, then
post-modernism, then post-feminism and Post-Marxism, seemed to have a
certain inevitability about it. And of course the idea had a pragmatic
rationality as well: all successful revolutions-and critical ones are no
exception- have to move from insurgency to institutionalization, from
negativity to construction. New historicism and cultural materialism
would need to move from the scholarly monograph, the critical anthology,
and the journal article into the new edition, the new collected works,
the popular biography, the new handbook and the new student guide-and
all this is of course now very much in progress.
Unfortunately, the widespread sense in the field that one phase of
work-that of the critical paradigm shift-is finished, while another
phase-that of institutionalization and popularization- is almost
complete has not, as yet, produced much of a debate about where we go
from here. There have been, however, observable trends, and perhaps
discussions like the present one can help create more consciousness of
these trends, more of a realization that there are choices to be made,
not just footsteps to follow. I would characterize the two trends (with
an obvious bias), this way: the first is an emerging form of
historicism and materialism anxious to shed its previous engagement with
literary theory in favor of a positivist "restoration" of the past
through an accumulation of facts; the second is a presentism committed
to a theoretical situatedness in our own cultural and political moment,
while it is open to explorations of Shakespeare in the past, present,
and future. There are numerous forms presentist criticism might take and
several veins of critical practice already in existence, like feminist,
post-colonialist, and performance studies, that are presentist in
principle if not in name. But the labels can be clarifying and useful.
Clearly, each of these directions has descended from polar tendencies
within the new historicism and cultural materialism of the 1980s. In
the 1980s both the new historicism and cultural materialism were
healthily self-conscious of their rootedness in our present and
emphasized the impact of the present on the new understandings of the
past which they constructed. Stephen Greenblatt, for example, wrote: " .
. . if cultural poetics is conscious of its status as interpretation,
this consciousness must extend to an acceptance of the impossibility of
fully reconstructing and reentering the culture of the sixteenth
century, of leaving behind one's own situation" (Renaissance
Self-Fashioning, 5). But it is precisely this kind of presentism that
has largely disappeared as the new historicism has become more hegemonic
and academic over the decades. How far from this is the self-description
by David Kastan in the 1999 Shakespeare After Theory: "But this book
would restore Shakespeare's artistry to the earliest conditions of its
realization and intelligibility: to the collaborations of the theater in
which the plays were acted, to the practices of the book trade in which
they were published, to the unstable political world of late Tudor and
early Stuart England in which the plays were engaged by their various
publics" (16). Of course, such goals are not in themselves either
unapproachable or unintelligent. But as an agenda for the next
generation of Shakespeare studies (which Kastan claims they must be),
they are much too narrow, and alternatives to them deserve to be considered.
These two quotations, then, constitute a trajectory from a kind of
cultural insurgency to one of cultural conformity, from an understanding
of literary studies as culturally and politically engaged to an attempt
to normalize and de-politicize its practices. And this trajectory is
one, I believe, which characterizes the mainstream of contemporary
critical practice, not merely the individual critics cited. This
opposition in effect defines the choices facing the field today.
While this is a large-scale development, and one driven by structural
characteristics of academic professionalism itself, like the need to
develop reproducible methods for the instruction of new generations of
young professionals and for professionally acceptable publications, it
need not remain monolithic and unchallenged. Today's Presentists differ
in our critical practice in many ways, but all of us have come to a
similar conclusion. The most direct way to challenge what has become a
suffocating historicist hegemony is to re-assert the undeniable
influence of the cultural present on all our attempts to understand and
make our own the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Presentism
has been up to now a pejorative term; it was coined to designate
universalizing historical methodologies which denied historical
difference and naively imposed their own concepts and rationality onto
an understanding of the past. The term in that sense can still play a
useful role as a pejorative, but in the present situation in the field,
we need to re-define and transvalue it as a positive term, to designate
methods which understand the limits of historicism, its inability to
transcend our own situation, and the need to come to terms with the past
from within our current, unique point in history- to grasp, as Walter
Benjamin put it, "the constellation which [our] own era has formed with
a definite earlier one. Thus [we] establish... a concept of the present
as 'the time of the now' which is shot through with chips of Messianic time"
(Illuminations, 263).
By presentism, then, I mean work based on the understanding that all our
knowledge of the past, including that of Shakespeare's historical
context, is shaped by the ideologies and discourses of our cultural
present. Far from being an impediment to our knowledge, this
understanding is its enabling foundation. Following this insight, it is
possible, as Benjamin demonstrated in his many critical essays and most
impressively in The Arcades Project, to move into a number of different
directions, from, for example, assessing the work from the liberatory
standpoint of what he calls Messianic time in the cultural present to
re-interpretations based on the new insights which cultural development
has given us, to attempts to correlate the culture of the past with the
culture of our present.
With the recent publication of Presentist Shakespeares (eds. Hugh Grady
and Terence Hawkes, Routledge, 2007), it is possible now to consider a
variety of methods for investigations into the possibilities and
directions raised by these ideas, and I invite interested readers to
have a look. In what follows, however, I'm going to concentrate on the
approach to presentism I have been working on for the last twelve years
or so.
My view is that one way to think about Shakespeare's texts that both
historicizes them and relates them to our own situation four hundred
years later is to refunction elements of the Hegelian and Marxist
narratives of the formation of long-term modernity-it is a narrative
largely shared by Foucault as well-but updating them to account for our
open-ended situation in the Postmodernist present. I don't offer this as
some exclusive solution. All periodizations, as Fredric Jameson has
recently reminded us, are figural and heuristic rather than fixed or
closed. But he usefully adds, "We cannot not periodize" (2002: 29-30).
There is no conceptualizing the events of the past without implied or
explicit periods, however invisible they have become to many. In
addition, all periodizations have their moments both of insight and of
blindness. But I think there is a strong case to be made for a
problematic of (early and late) modernity in situating Shakespeare and
us, precisely because so many of Shakespeare's works thematize the
constituting structures of a continuing modernity-whether in the
autonomous, instrumental reason of Iago, the Lear villains, and
elsewhere throughout the histories and tragedies; the indictments of
commodification and capitalism in Merchant, Timon, Troilus and Cressida,
the sonnets, and other works; the investigation of unfixed
subjectivities-in-flux of Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, As You Like It,
and Hamlet; or the deconstruction of new gender roles in the Elizabethan
comedies and Jacobean tragedies- to name a few key examples. This
problematic places us firmly in a dialectic of then and now, and the
works of Shakespeare form a fertile ground of research within it.
Some have argued that such a problematic necessarily implicates us in
the kind of teleological history which is a hallmark of both Hegel's and
Marx's approaches. But the development in recent years of
non-teleological Marxisms-Marxisms like that of Benjamin himself, who
worked so assiduously to exorcise the ghost from the machine-or "the
little hunchback" inside the chess-playing puppet, to use his own
figure-suggests otherwise (see Callari, A., Cullenberg, S. and
Biewener, C., Marxism in the Postmodern Age,1995). As I argued in my
1999 article "Renewing Modernity," a turn toward a concept of a
developing, always unfinished modernity has been a striking feature of
several different strands of recent social and cultural theory. In my
2002 Shakespeare, Machiavelli and Montaigne I attempted to model some
of the possibilities of such a methodology through a close study of
Shakespeare's second historical tetralogy. As I hope I have made clear,
the method of this particular work-and perhaps I should state explicitly
that I think it is imperative for the profession also to develop,
tolerate, and encourage multiple methods, especially now non-historicist
ones-represents not so much a break from new historicism/cultural
materialism as a new development of it, one renewing its early
orientation to cultural theory and de-emphasizing its most merely
empirical arbitrariness. Such an effort can draw inspiration from
another of Benjamin's useful dicta: "In every era the attempt must be
made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to
overpower it." (Illuminations, 255)
Benjamin's emphasis on the power of the "now" in shaping our
understanding of the past means that historicism itself, as Richard
Halpern has re-asserted, necessarily produces an allegory of the present
as it describes the past. The term "allegory," of course, implies
multiple levels that interact with each other but do not cancel each
other out (Halpern, Shakespeare Among the Moderns, 1997). Historicism
can and does give us more or less adequate conceptions of the past, but
it always does so from within the mentalities of the present. How could
it be otherwise? Far from being a defect of our knowledge of the past,
let me emphasize, this allegorical quality is inescapable and a key to
understanding the necessary cultural labor of renewing the past as we
create new art and new culture for a new century. The past takes on new
contours and qualities for us as our own thinking and conceptualizing
shift in the present. History changes as we evolve and develop, and so
do historical figures and cultural icons like Shakespeare. I tried to
demonstrate one aspect of this dynamic in a previous book, Shakespeare's
Universal Wolf (1996), by showing how overly familiar themes of "good
and evil" in four central Shakespearean plays could be reconceptualized
and re-interpreted in the light of recent cultural and social theory as
representing emerging modernity and its logic of reification. Such a
work of re-interpretation involves coming to understand how and why
themes of late modernity might have been produced in early modernity in
conceptual forms close enough to our own to seem cognate to us. Thus,
it is possible to be "presentist," in the sense of using theory from our
cultural present to help understand and re-interpret works from the
past, without jettisoning a historicist dimension, an investigation into
those qualities of the early modern mentalit
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