Resisting arrest/arresting resistance: crime fiction, cultural studies, and the "turn to history."

Criticism, Spring, 1995 by Simon Joyce

1. Turns to and from History

This is an essay about that modern couple of Power and Resistance, who seem to be everywhere in the academic news these days. More specifically, it's about what strikes me as a significant disjunction between the theorization of this couple in contemporary cultural studies, and the "turn to history" which criticism was thought to have effected some years ago. Cultural studies is, it seems to me, quite insistently present- and future-centered, in its celebrations of the potential for resistance held by the diaspora subcultures of shoppers, hackers, Trekkers and romance readers.(1) This kind of cultural criticism, especially as currently practiced in the U.S., has recently come under attack for its "affirmative character" and "banality," the tendency to see subversion everywhere in its analysis of popular culture and the everyday practices of modern life (a critique to which I shall return at the end of my essay).(2) What interests me more here, however, is its distinctive attitude towards historical periodization. In a landmark essay from 1981, for example, Stuart Hall argued for re-focussing attention on the period between 1880 and the 1920s, as the time of a decisive transformation of British popular culture which had hitherto gone largely unexamined, primarily because work on the subject had tended to center on what Eric Hobsbawm termed "the age of revolution," 1789-1848.(3) "I am dubious," Hall writes, "about that kind of interest in 'popular culture' which comes to a sudden and unexpected halt at roughly the same point as the decline of Chartism," and he states a clear preference for the later period as one which yields a culture "which begins to resemble our own, which poses the same kind of interpretive problems as our own, and which is informed by our own sense of contemporary questions." Closing on a characteristic note of optimism, moreover, Hall suggests that popular culture might ultimately be read as an "arena of consent and resistance . . . where hegemony arises, and where it is secured . . . one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why 'popular culture' matters," he concludes in an epigrammatic flourish; "Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don't give a damn about it."(4)

Hall's essay sets the tone, I would argue, for much of what currently passes for cultural studies in the U.S.: its attention to popular culture as a realm of competing hegemonic and counter-hegemonic formations, and the site of a potential social transformation organized primarily around the point of consumption rather than that of production. At the very least, "the popular" can be thought as a space of cultural resistance, but what's most notable is just how uneasily this sits next to a prevalent form of analysis - which I will term for shorthand "Foucauldian" - which views similar points of resistance in history as inevitably contained, appropriated, or produced in the first place as an effect of industrial capitalism, or patriarchy, or the networks of social organization and control collectively known as "Panopticism." In this sense, the elevation of cultural studies as a new critical orthodoxy, and the attendant displacement of the New Historicism which reigned at least until the late 1980s(5) might be read in terms of a shift from pessimism to optimism, and from history to the present.

The shortcomings of the New Historicism are, by this point, familiar. In a recent critical re-assessment, for example, H. Aram Veeser (editor of the landmark 1989 collection) recites the following catechism:

New Historicism transmits to subalterns the fatal inability to act. It locates power and oppression in "discourses" and "epistemes," not in ruling groups of people, institutions, or even ideas. Infected by Nietzsche and Foucault, denying cause-and-effect, disputing narratives of emergence and emancipation, New Historicism contaminates all forms of agency. It frankly admits that its object of study is the containment, not the triumph, of seething, insurgent energies. Its most basic impulse is to show that the dominant language subdues the demotic, that the empire beats down the masses, that liberation means white faces in black masks, that Fidel will go the way of Allende and Che.(6)

Not surprisingly, Veeser goes on to balance this list against a sense of the New Historicism's positives, including its institutional impact on the English curriculum and the challenge to a peculiarly academic version of Stalinist dogma, before proposing that it engage with new developments in post-colonial and subaltern studies. Left strangely undefended, however, is a challenge to the particular ways it uses and organizes the past - in other words, to its historicism - which Veeser acknowledges via Terry Eagleton's criticism that "the flayed, crucified, disemboweled body" of the unresisting subject might well serve as the archetypal emblem of Renaissance New Historicists like Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose. Citing Eagleton's characteristically withering attack, Veeser notes that these critics have indeed "insistently highlighted the 'atrocities' visited on lower class bodies, have lovingly detailed the 'colonial torture' lavished on the starkly victimized, 'broken, hapless underlings' who people New Historicist prose," yet claims that this ironically represents the "health, not the sickness" of their methodology.(7)