Sobre La Figura Del Narrador en La Literatura

Stories of Difference and Identity: New Historicism in Literature and History
Author(s): John E. Toews

Source: Monatshefte, Vol. 84, No. 2, New Historicism (Summer, 1992), pp. 193-211
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
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Stories of Difference and Identity:
New Historicism in Literature and History
JOHN E. TOEWS
University of Washington
The Burdick-Vary Symposium on New Historicism, following so

closely on the heels of a conference on "The Historic Turn in the Human
Sciences" held at the University of Michigan and similar events within
the past few years,' might be construed as a sign of a welcome change in
the climate of interdisciplinary discourse by embattled historians grasping
at any straws in the wind that could possibly indicate imminent relief
from the foreign occupations by various linguistic, structuralist, and
poststructuralist turns of the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps the disillusioned
and disinherited children of the various postmodern "isms" are finally
ready to restore history to her rightful position as Queen of the Sciences,
a refuge for all those seeking epistemological peace. Terms familiar to
historians, like "contingency," "event," "context," and "narrative," have
gained increased prominence as organizing terms of scholarly discourse
across many disciplines. "Historical" has become an adjective that no
longer needs to be qualified with "merely," and obedience to the cate-
gorical imperative "always historicize" has apparently become a condi-
tion for joining the "cutting edge" in the academic production of knowl-
edge. On closer inspection, however, as many historians have already
discovered, the various current "historical turns" in the human sciences
are not of the kind necessarily to produce smug professional self-satis-
faction, but rather can tend toward increased anxiety about disciplinary
positioning and self-identity. The new historicism2 in anthropology, so-
ciology, political science, legal studies, and of course literary studies, is
not, at least in any obvious sense, a turn "to" history within the frame-
work of previous arrangements but the reconstruction, or what Richard
Rorty would call a "redescription," of what it means to think and write
historically, to "historicize." And although one might suppose that his-
toricizing is what historians do and are trained to do best, for many
professionally certified historians, historicizing is not history at all in any
recognizable sense, but seems to threaten the categories that define what
Monatshefte, Vol. 84, No. 2, 1992 193

0026-9271/92/0002/0193 $01.50/0
C 1992 by The Board of Regents of The University of Wisconsi
194 Toews
they conc
history.3
The historicizing perspective of the new historical turn(s) contains,
inevitably, many echoes and supplemental developments of earlier his-
toricisms, especially of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but
it is a repetition with a difference, and is distinguished from its earlier
analogues most basically in that it builds on the various poststructuralist
critiques of the metaphysical assumptions and organizing categories of
these previous historicisms, especially the "foundationalist" belief in the
"reality" of unmediated external "fact" or "lived," subjective experience,
and the organizing assumptions of both an essential, transhistorical hu-
man subjectivity that could perceive and know "facts" or possess "ex-
perience," and the systematic and teological totality of collective histor-
ical development. New historicism begins with a critical demystification
of the natural or transcendent realities that ground or authorize assumed,
fixed identities and differences. It historicizes these identities and differ-
ences, that is, it approaches them as contingent historical constructions.
This historicization, of course, includes the identities and differences that
constitute the academic disciplines in which most of us were trained and
still operate. Despite the expressed fears of many, historicization does
not obliterate disciplinary differences in a nihilistic indeterminacy,4 but
treats them as results of categorical distinctions that have contingent
causes and effects (historical genealogies), and that are thus open to re-
peated renegotiation and subject to struggles for power and control. The
characteristics of a professional identity that authorizes certain individ-
uals to teach and write history, to be recognized and differentiated from
others as historians, are the very concrete institutionalized reality (for all
of its constructed, contingent nature) from which new boundary deter-
minations, new identities and differences will have to emerge. The in-
terdisciplinary relations implied in the new historicism thus do not con-
form to older forms of borrowing and lending, collaboration and coop-
eration among stable scholarly identities. Historicizing operates reflex-
ively to destabilize the boundaries of disciplinary identities, and thus
calls on members of all existing contingent disciplinary communities to
pursue the tasks of theoretical self-reflection and self-redefinition, to his-
toricize their own identities, to examine and rethink, and to take ethical
responsibility for, the categories on which their activity is constructed.
In this context historians can no longer accept the division of labor be-
tween theory and history, either by refusing to examine the cultural con-
ditions that produce the defining categories of their identity, or by allow-
ing theoretical reflection on their activity to be consigned to others. What
seems paradoxical to many historians is that in new historicism theory
itself is historicizing, that history is not defined as the Other of theory,
New Historicism in Literature and History 195
but as the new mode of doing theory, that the seductive and int
call to theoretical self-reflection could actually emerge from w
realm of historical writing, as in the works of Michel Foucaul
Kuhn, Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra, Lynn Hunt, and Joan
In short, the new historicism is a turn to history only in t
that for historians it adds new meaning and intensity to the ol
te fabula narratur," 'the story is about you,' and especially
stories you tell yourself to identify who you are, about your pr
identity as a scholar in a discipline, but also about your ide
citizen of a political community, speaker of a language, mem
nation, class, race or ethnic group, about your selfhood as a ge
subject, a sexual subject, and a particular individual subject, as
centered being that can say "I" and act and feel as if it knew w
meant, could organize a world around it, and write a story about
of the historically contingent, constructed nature of selfhood,
enced individual and collective identity, of subjectivity, are su
of the most striking and resonant products emerging from th
of assumed "natural" identities which inform the historicizations of the
new historicism. They will form the general thematic focus of my paper.
I will approach my theme by looking at two "moments" or "moves"
in what I see as the development of a radical form of historicizing in
both historiography and literary criticism over the past two decades. I
conceive these two moves in part as a sequential development, but also
as a persistent, continuing "dialectical" relationship within new historicist
historicizations (already implicit in its first exemplars) between the at-
tempt to make visible, affirm and reconstruct the "other" or protect and
establish the "different" as an independent, autonomous reality that re-
veals the historical particularity of that which had been assumed to be
universal, whole and self-identical, and the move toward a deconstruction
of the fixation of otherness and difference through an analysis of the
contingent events, relations, and processes which constitute it as other.
The Reconstruction of "Otherness":

The Turn to Interpretive Ethnography and the
Semiotic Concept of Culture
In the introduction to his recently published volume of essays,

Learning to Curse, Greenblatt states: "I am committed to the project of
making strange what was familiar, of demonstrating that what seems an
untroubling or untroubled part of our selves (for example, Shakespeare)
is actually part of something else, something different."6 For Greenblatt,
as for many historians, a primary instrument for producing this alienating
196 Toews
effect has
relating se
many poss
in Americ
son has b
book one m
studies, be
human sub
the author
as he sudd
persistent
stories, th
interpreti
cultural un
revealing
guistic" tu
through w
lational sy
but confu
the only w
metaphori
to non-lin
The Geer
reconstruc
traces of h
within th
produced o
point in u
vide a tran
ferences a
even the m
experienci
able from
sibility: "T
The exper
reality th
but as a co
in differe
insists, wo
to impose
and selfho
view, the
nifying fr
affirmation of both the autonomy and the dignity of oth

worlds (an "equal yet different" moral stance), and the
from an assimilating and colonising construction of the ot
logue with the other. Thus the semiotic conception of cult
as a way of resuscitating as historical actors individuals an
previously relegated to the status of objects within domin
monial perspectives, often reaffirmed by the perspective of
investigator.8
The way in which a semiotic conception of culture can be used to
affirm the multiplicity of other identities speaking from within other
worlds of meanings, to see selves as culturally created artifacts, and thus
transform familiarity into difference, the same into the other, emerges
clearly in one of Greenblatt's introductory statements, at the beginning
of Renaissance Self-Fashioning, about the interlocking relations among
three ways in which literary texts function within cultural systems and
can be construed as objects of ethnographic interpretation.9 First, the
texts can be incorporated among the other surviving documentary traces
of a particular author's production and interpreted as a record of the
biographical itinerary or career of a historical individual, as the signifying
acts through which a life is textualized and narrativized as a particular
life, as interpretable traces of the story a native tells herself about herself
in the construction of a meaningful individual identity. The contexts that
make such production of a meaningful individual identity possible are
contingent cultural systems of signification. The individual story emerges
as an actualization within a limited frame of authorized possibilities pro-
vided by existing codes that regulate signifying activity. Conventional
forms of psycho-biographical reconstruction and interpretation are thus
transformed in important ways by the perspective of cultural semiotics.
The psychological reductionism of reading texts as simply expressions of
a pre-textual core of (authorial) desires, interests, intentions, etc., or as
the expression, perhaps shaped by "external" pressures, of an autono-
mous, "pure" subjectivity, is rejected. The psyche is not a stable entity-
a centered ego or set of dispositions that could express its identity through
a distinctive textualization or formation of available objects and relations
within its world-but is actually formed or fashioned within and by its
culturally regulated acts of signification. This not only dissolves the pos-
sibility of empathetic interpretation, the old historicist hermeneutic of
Verstehen as Einfiihlung, of grasping meaning by displacing oneself into
the subjective perspective of the other and re-enacting the other's ex-
perience, but also all behaviorist and psychoanalytic analyses that do not
historicize the psyche of their psycho-histories.'0 It is precisely the his-
torically contingent, particularized reality of the psyche as a constructed
cultural artifact that sustains its difference, its resistance to being fully
198 Toews
represente
vestigator
ing the pr
pass and r
particulari
ed within
of our ow
language-t
interprete
within his
into his ow
own parti
be diagnos
in order t
hear the v
The ethno
existences
tion occur
tions, agen
structions
ence-rathe
the possib
ture are li
available f
which the
general se
sion, and
cultural/s
Reconstru
tion clearl
and text a
that opera
sufferings
nation and
meaning i
the histor
bolic trace
significati
struction
rapher's "
being reco
written te
clues invo
sible subject making up her own story in a different cultur

the recreated lives of now familiar figures like Carlo Ginzb
occhio or Natalie Davis's Martin Guerre and Bertrande de Rols difference
often seems to shade into identity-an alternative, critical identity per-
haps, but nevertheless constructed for us, within the horizon of our pos-
sibilities for sympathetic identification.'2
The extension of the models of language and text to social inter-
action relates to the second major cultural function Greenblatt ascribes
to literature-as a manifestation of the codes, the systems of regulation,
the regimes of truth, or the economies of meaning within which selves
are fashioned. The danger lurking here is not the essentializing subjec-
tivity of philosophical anthropologies and psychologies, but the socio-
economic reductionism of orthodox Marxism and other economic/so-
ciological determinisms. In the Geertzian model the realm of social re-
lations is not the objective ground producing subjective meaning as ide-
ological superstructure, but a system of signifying actions that is read by
its participants and its interpreters as an ensemble of texts governed by
the regulations of a common "language" or a set of control mechanisms.
This view does not necessarily invert the older hierarchical orderings of
experience and meaning, being and consciousness, society and culture,
reality and language and thus construct a new form of cultural idealism,
but it certainly destabilizes and rearranges the borders between such con-
ventional categorizations, seeing signifying systems, the active but reg-
ulated production and reproduction of meaning in every dimension of
"reality." It transforms "culture" from a specific term denoting a limited
sphere of human existence to a general term encompassing a proliferating
network of relations, the "system," the "order," the "structure" that con-
stitutes the general contextual field of human existence in history. Culture
is not something certain subjects possess but the relations in which they
all define themselves as subjects, and thus it implicitly or explicitly char-
acterizes the production, reproduction, and transformation of meaning
as the fundamental species-defining human activity. All human beings
live in and are made in culture, and that is what makes them human. In
Geertz's own words: "The imposition of meaning on life is the major
end and primary condition of human existence."'3
In its emphasis on the totalizing and unifying effect of regulative
systems of signification the semiotic cultural theory of interpretive eth-
nography is easily integrated into models of the internal structuralist
determinisms, of historically contingent epistemes, archives, disciplinary
idioms, discursive formations unearthed by the archeological investiga-
tions of Michel Foucault (certainly the second Godfather of new his-
toricism, along with Geertz) in the late 1960s and early 1970s.14 Foucault's
conceptions of the historically contingent epistemological foundations of
200 Toews
valid syste
and define
toward the
dissolving
of truth, c
in reconstr
Order of T
literary wo
surabilitie
often-cited
thinking t
foreign, cu
a striking
as both sel
determined
courses of
with a disc
autonomou
scendental
tion of thi
by the wav
made it im
yet finite
dent on a p
ological" w
semiotic co
appeared t
contingen
ourselves,
The kind
semiotics
blurred th
and written
of signific
different
essay, the
tuality des
a reflectiv
constructin
of converg
culture can
Literary te
dimensions
in which they diffuse their power, but, and for that very re
also a part or an "instance" of the broader textual relations
culture. Literary transcendence is always "historical," "c
movement of reflective distantiation and projective possibilit
in particular constellations of signifying possibilities. The d
transforming literature's transcending, reflective dimension
from the historical contingencies of lived texts and codes of
and into an expression of a universal human essence, the r
of a transhistorical human experience, or along the line
cauldian model of the 1960s, as a radical transgression of t
all centered cultural orders.
Literary Interpretation in the ethnographic grain thus claims to
avoid the debilitating reductionisms of psycho-history, sociological de-
terminism, and aesthetic formalism, and at the same time, to maintain
the dimensions of personal itinerary, collective historical regularities or
structures, and reflective transcendence within the interpretive exchanges
of culture as a system of signifying practices. The emphasis on systematic
yet historically contingent structures of signification affirmed the reality
of difference in terms of differences (even incommensurabilities) among
cultural systems. Selves were fashioned differently in different systems,
suspended in different webs, but because of the constitutive power of
systems of signification, they were fashioned within strict limitations, so
that even subversion, resistance and transcendence could not escape the
specific, contingent historical systems of signification that allowed their
formation, and determined their form.
The general principles at work in Greenblatt's programmatic intro-
duction to the interpretation of literature within the frame of a histori-
cizing cultural poetics in 1980 (especially the first two points) are similar
to those articulated by the proponents of a historiographical shift from
social-science-oriented social history (and psycho-history) to an interpre-
tive historical ethnography, or what has now come to be called the "new"
cultural history at approximately the same time. There are many vari-
ations and competing positions in this shift. I will only be able to illustrate
some of them in a brief description of the perspective and thematic focus
of one of the most popular works in this "new" cultural history: Robert
Darnton's Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural
History.
Darnton's shift to cultural history "in the ethnographic grain" was
constructed in terms of a critique of the guiding assumptions of a social
history of ideas derived from the structuralist paradigms and objectifying,
quantitative methods of the French Annales school. Parallel to the con-
temporaneous and analogous shift in social history guided by Marxist
models (E.P. Thompson, Gareth Stedman Jones, William Sewell)'9 his
202 Toews
critique in
their tend
proposed i
clues for r
tures, and
bolic actio
nicative co
actually e
subjects,
actions th
tation. His
of view,"
situated, r
point was
other."20
Culture,
structing
rigidified
hierarchic
soci-econo
sibilities o
ical behav
tween soc
itself was
in the tax
structure
ingful soc
texts displ
nable to m
treatises.21
Some of the complexities and problems of the historiographical task
of reconstituting otherness through the use of ethnographic models of
semiotic webs, were also evident in Darnton's work. First, his various
episodes, conceived as entry points into the cultural network of the
French old regime, also clearly engaged a sub-cultural differentiation and
conflict often difficult to reconcile with the principle of the identity of
the other that assures its otherness. In fact Darnton's essays address ques-
tions of the reconstruction of popular culture in the distinct forms of a
peasant oral culture and an artisanal, partly literate, urban culture, and
in terms of distinctions among at least four different forms of "bourgeois"
culture (in which the possible subversive otherness of alternative cultures
is contained and controlled)-the administrative governmental culture of
bureacracy and police, the social and moral culture of a commercial,
provincial, urban third estate, the familial and private culture of

evident in new relations between authors and readers, and the s
academic culture in which the epistemological and ontologic
for reordering the world were reconstituted. Moreover, Darnt
in the added complication of contrasting national cultures whose
persists across different sub-cultural units and over time, raising th
question of synchronizing and synthesizing so many semiotic w
creating different realities and subjects-into a single, pervasive
order.22 In Darnton's descriptions of the ways in which these
others are constituted as identities within the cultural networks
eenth-century France, moreover, other others appear on the m
his stories, most notably women, Jews, and priests, opening up,
further subcultural areas already filled with investigators recon
systems of signification, communities and life worlds in which
fashioned in a dizzying proliferation of difference, and in a co
complexity of multiple roles or subject positions.
Some of the problems inherent in Darntons attempt to reco
otherness through the ethnographic interpretation of symboli
within signifying networks lead into a counter-tendency that
part of the tension and dialectical vitality of the new historici
proliferation of others defined as identities in ensembles of sub
systems, raises the question of the process of identification no
terms of given differences tied to different cultural systems, b
terms of differences as constantly created within those worlds
domination, submission, and exclusion. It raises the issues of
and change, of contingency and process, of multiplicity and plur
also of domination and exclusion, within systems-which must
reconceived as very porous and provisional constructions,23-an
across systems. The production of selves through assimilation
ance to various cultural codes always produces its distinctive oth
ginalized or victimized) in a continuous process of reproduction
and others. This means that there is contingency and history w
structures; events occur not only when structures meet but in the c
processes of their reproduction. Cultures are not "islands in
which changes in structural reproduction only occur at momen
usual encounter with outsiders or in response to cataclysmic eve
course certain patterns of defining identity and difference, ce
margin, do attain a relative fixity which makes them seem natu
or universal, but such naturalizations need to be constantly rea
in contingent processes, in political struggles for the hegemony
forms of self-authorization, definition, and enablement, if th
persist; and they must be critically analyzed themselves as
204 Toews
events, as
just assum
Second, D
ical report
of past liv
reconstruction of otherness functions in the construction of the investi-
gators own identity as writer and historical subject. What kind of a subject
is constituted in Darnton's text, and what are the cultural conditions of
its possibility? To what extent is the reconstruction of otherness a con-
struction determined by his own definition of identity?
From the Reconstruction of Historical Otherness

to the Historical Construction of Identity
In Greenblatt's work the desire to reconstruct and affirm the other
as an identity speaking on its own terms within its own "foreign" context
is matched by an equally strong tendency to dissolve the boundaries
between past and present, between familiar and foreign, to read one's
own dilemmas of identification into the words of the other and to form
ones own narratives of identity in dialogue and exchange with the "dead,"
i.e. within the same communicative system, the same web of signification
as the other. The desire is not only to allow the dead to speak, but "to
speak with the dead," to include them within our own, present conver-
sations, within our own processes of inventing ourselves by writing stories
about ourselves, to use historical subjects as therapeutic vehicles of trans-
ference, and as models to emulate and transcend.25 If Greenblatt's books
are full of historical anecdotes that intend to shock the reader into a
recognition of radical cultural difference, they are equally full of more
personal anecdotes that draw the self-fashioning of the past into constant
relation to the author's own self-fashioning. Greenblatt's construction of
his own subjectivity takes place within the process of reconstructing the
otherness of the other but also in deconstructing this otherness as a con-
tingent invention of both the other and himself.26
Within contemporary historiography this second move or counter-
move of the new historicist dialectic, the invention or construction of
otherness as an inseparable aspect of self-definition has taken a number
of different forms. I will mention four variations on this theme. Most
familiar, partly because it has been around for almost twenty years, is
Hayden White's analysis of historical writing as a type of literature (a
verbal structure) in which formal structures determine content, in which
"realism" becomes a literary effect, a way of constructing the world, rather
than a representation of the way the world is. White's analysis of historical
writing as the construction of history clearly has an eman

to free us from the reification or naturalization of our own constructions
of the real, specifically to free us from the material, psychological, and
sociological determinisms produced by these constructions in the past
two centuries, so that we may take responsibility for our constructions
and choose our pasts (and thus make our futures) as ethical beings.27 Yet
such moral choices are limited, at least in White's writings of the 1970s,
by the universal tropological structures of language. Language operates
as a type of meta-subject constructing temporal and spatial order and
providing a limiting number of categories (the tropes) for figuring this
order according to ethical or aesthetic choices.28
In his most recent work, however, White has focused on problems
of narrative construction as the general historical mode in which human
experience is fashioned into structures of meaning. Narrativization be-
comes the process of identity construction which cuts across the differ-
ences in particular identities constructed in different cultural systems,
revealing a universal or "generally human" form of constructing or or-
ganizing unity out of difference.29
The integration of the constructivist conception of language with
the ethnography of cultural semiotics and Foucauldian conceptions of
the politics of knowledge was most forcefully and influentially articulated
in the late 1970s in Eduard Said's Orientalism (1978), in which the re-
construction and recognition of the other (in this case the "Orient") was
dissolved into a historically contingent set of cultural traditions, linguistic
strategies, imaginary mappings, and institutions of discipline and control
for reproducing, enforcing, and defending self-identity. The broader im-
plications of Said's study for all ethnographic reconstructions ofotherness
and historical narratives of the formation of collective identities were
immediately evident; they have come to pervade, as an organizing prob-
lematic, contemporary attempts to historicize the imperial, colonial, and
postcolonial relations between western and non-western cultures.
First, the Saidean model for the construction of otherness empha-
sized that the project of reconstructing the perspectives and the worlds
of the "other" can never be disengaged from the construction of self-
identity. The "other" is a construction within the process of self-iden-
tification, even when the other is idealized rather than demonized or
denigrated. As a discourse claiming validation as a representation of the
truth of the "other," Orientalism actually produced the other for its own
purposes of self-definition.
Second, such processes of self-identification and construction of
relevant others should be perceived as not occurring in isolation, not as
individual choices and not within language alone. Patterns of defining
self and other develop in textual traditions, establish themselves in dis-
206 Toews
ciplinary
of rule, co
are author
cultural sy
edge as th
of acts of
nection.30
economic
tions of o
know; the
knows that world.
Finally, the repititive restructurings, fixations and thus "naturali-
zations" of certain relations between self-identity and the other are sus-
tained by asymmetrical power relations, by the ability to construct and
persistently reconstruct the other without taking the other's own subjec-
tive identity and reciprocal activity of constructing itself into account.
This aspect of Said's analysis (very much derived from the work of Fou-
cault) was especially relevant to the construction of identity and otherness
in the areas of gender, ethnicity, race, and class, and was associated with
Gramscian notions of the creation of social hegemony (or cultural "con-
sensus") as a struggle with resistant and alternative worlds of speech and
action.3
A Saidean type of analysis of the way in which otherness is con-
stituted in a constant process of production and reproduction within
contingent historical discourses of self-identification has entered into de-
partments of History most visibly through the politics of feminism and
the shift from the reconstructive methods of women's history to the study
of gender relations and gender construction. For Europeanists this de-
velopment is epitomized in the work of Joan Scott. Scott begins with a
critique of what was described above as the Geertzian model of recon-
structing the other as an alternative identity formed in a different system
of cultural relations. The historical recovery of the previously hidden and
repressed worlds of others, defined by their own identities and their own
definitions of experience, reveals the structures of domination and he-
gemony that excluded them from visibility, but, Scott insists, it does not
in itself display the processes whereby the differentiation of gender iden-
tities and experiences is historically constituted and reproduced. Histo-
ricizing the history of women entails integrating that history of otherness
into a description of the contingent historical processes, the specific acts
of domination, exclusion, resistance, and incorporation, whereby the def-
inition of gender identities was produced and reproduced within specific
cultures. "Woman" is not a "natural" identity with its own history, but
a culturally constructed reality that cannot be described outside of the
relations in which it is constituted. Power relations within any

space and time produce a multiplicity of subjective identities,
privileged as the norm and becomes naturalized as representat
human. The analysis of subject creation as a historical proce
the specificity and particularity of the subject constituted as
the political nature of its normative hegemony.32
Moreover, Scott claims that historical writing about wo
gender relations is itself necessarily implicated in such acts of d
and redefinition. In recounting the construction of difference
thrown back on our own involvement in the construction of otherness.
Historicizing is always also a redefinition of the historian's own identity
and thus an act intervening, either critically or affirmatively, in the re-
lations of power through which such identities are culturally constituted.33
Scott's turn from a reconstructive women's history to a historicizing
of gender construction was guided in part by her readings in deconstruc-
tionist theories of textuality. But for modern Europeanists the connection
between deconstruction and historicizing the cultural construction of
identity and difference is perhaps more forcefully exemplified by the work
of Dominick LaCapra. LaCapra's critique of the historical reconstruction
of cultural difference has been directed with particular vehemence at the
reduction of complex, "work-like" texts-texts that display an ultimately
unresolved and thus open-ended struggle to create identity out of differ-
ence-to their contextual fields of semiotic codes or disciplinary dis-
courses. To approach a text as "a situated use of language marked by the
tense interaction between mutually implicated yet at times contestatory
tendencies,"34 as a work in which unity is constructed in a relational
process, rather than expressed in a univocal fashion, is to open that text
to a "dialogic" relation with our own interpretive activity and self-tex-
tualization. It is the tension in texts that resists full assimilation, affirms
their otherness and thus entails dialogue rather than synoptic appropri-
ation.35
Pursuing the project of making the familiar strange, of reconstruct-
ing otherness, of historicizing subjective identity, appears to lead us back
to a recognition of participation in analogous processes of self-constitu-
tion within the "other." In the production of our different identities, in
the constant struggle to organize our heterogeneity into at least provi-
sional unities we find ourselves participants in a common (dare we say,
"human"?), though unequal and asymmetrical, politically conflicted, pro-
cess of self-fashioning. Not in the particular categories and forms his-
torically available for constructions of identity and difference, but in the
process, in the making and remaking of selves within inherited systems
of signification and the political power relations they articulate, do we
find the basis of our mutuality, our dialogue with the dead. Such dialogue
208 Toews
assumes an
be simply
It entails
forming b
but it also
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and it is th
the particu
Historiciz
not end st
even a me
to tell con
own storie
from an a
are and wh
change, st
Exchangin
firming t
their stor
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retellings
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within our
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narratives
contempor
1"The Histo
in the Comp
Michigan. An
relations wa
"Conference
46. The pape
21 use this
humanities a
erary version
Greenblatt a
3See for ex
recent antho
4In his rece
(London, 198
boundaries s
erated his vi
"in larger part" because of his "recognition that boundaries, provided the
and negotiable, are useful things to think with" (5).
5Foucault is probably the most famous example of a theorist who
practices theory as historizing (while at the same time heaping abuse on th
of professional historians). See especially the opening chapter of his Th
Knowledge (New York, 1972).
6Greenblatt, Learning to Curse 8.
7Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of
in Renaissance England (Berkeley, 1988) 3. Similar statements can be fo
the texts of Foucault, Richard Rorty and other modern contemporary his
8Note the comment by Geertz in The Interpretation of Cultures (Ne
30: "The essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer
tions but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other shee
have given and thus to include them in the consultable record of what m
also the concluding comments of Natalie Davis in her pathbreaking st
culture(s) in early Modern Europe, Society and Culture in Early Modern F
1975) 266. Although Greenblatt has been persistently and vehemently att
ducing an assimilating, colonizing conception of otherness in his work (by
Donald Pease, Marguerite Waller and others), he insists that recognition o
the other is precisely what differentiates New Historicism from older histor
inclination toward full appropriation and control of the other: "What is m
social and material resistance, a stubborn unassimilable otherness, a sense
difference. New Historicism has attempted to restore this distance, hence
concerns have seemed to some critics off-center or strange" (Learning to
9"Literature functions within this system (of culture) in three interl
a manifestation of the concrete behavior of its particular author, as itself
codes by which behavior is shaped, and as a reflection upon these cod
Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare [Chicago, 1980] 6).
'0oSee Greenblatt's "Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture," Learnin
which the alleged universal psyche of psychoanalysis is seen as the uni
contingent historical production of a kind of subjectivity whose genealog
Renaissance: "more a historical condition that enables the development of
than a psychic condition that psychoanalysis itself can adequately explain
"See Greenblatt's oft-cited comment in Renaissance Self-fashioning
texts and documents there were as far as I could tell, no moments of
subjectivity; indeed the human subject itself began to seem remarkably u
logical product of the relations of power in a particular society. Whenever
upon a moment of apparent autonomous self-fashioning, I found not an epip
freely chosen, but a cultural artifact. If there remained traces of free choice
among possibilities whose range was strictly delineated by the social and i
in force."
12Carlo Ginzburg, "Preface to the English edition," The Cheese and th
Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller (New York, 1982) xi: "This book
chio's) story. Thanks to an abundant documentation we are able too learn a
and his discussions, his thoughts and his sentiments-fears, hopes, ironies
spairs. Every now and then the directness of the sources brings him very
like ourselves, one of us." Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Gu
Mass., 1983) 5: "What I offer you here is in part my invention, but held
by the voices of the past." "The story of Martin Guerre is told and retold be
us that astonishing things are possible. Even for the historian who has
retains a stubborn vitality. I think I have uncovered the true face of the pas
(the imposter Arnaud du Tilh) done it again?" (125).
'3Clifford Geertz, Interpretations of Cultures 434.
'4Foucault's impact on the transformation of social history toward a
guistic perspective is discussed in Jeffrey Weeks, "Foucault for Historians
shop 14 (August 1982): 106-20; Allan Megill, "Foucault, Structuralism
History," Journal of Modern History 51 (1979): 451-503.
210 Toews
"SMichael F
(New York,
'6Ibid. 319.
"Ibid. xxiii.
'8Clifford Geertz, "Blurred Genres: the Refiguration of Social Thought," Local Knowl-
edge. Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York, 1983).
19For an interesting discussion of this shift as it relates to the history of the "people"
in the early modern period and the "working class" in nineteenth-century Europe see Suz-
anne Desan's discussion of the determining role of community, communal values, and
culture in the influential work of E.P.Thompson and Natalie Davis: "Crowds, Community
and the Ritual of work in E.P.Thompson and Natalie Davis," The New Cultural History,
ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, 1989) 47-71.
20Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural
History (New York, 1984) esp. 3-7, 257-62.
21See Lynn Hunt, "Introduction: History, Culture and Text," The New Cultural His-
tory 7, and the literature mentioned there.
22Darnton 260.
23Dominick LaCapra has been particularly concerned with the homogenizing aspects
of the Geertzian anthropological model, especially as applied to modern periods, and has
proposed a much more differentiated perspective on cultural layers, dimensions, and over-
lappings. See most recently his "Culture and Ideology: From Geertz to Marx," Soundings
in Critical Theory (Ithaca, 1989) 133-54.
24The reference is of course to Marshall Sahlins. For a more positive evaluation of
Sahlin's attempt to historicize the culture concept, see the essay by Alietta Biersack in The
New Cultural History.
25See Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations 1 and Robert Darnton, The Literary
Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge,Mass. 1982) v.
26Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations 20; Learning to Curse 8.
27The focus on freedom and moral choice in the constructivist position is centered
for White on the assumption that the historical record has no inherent meaning. Essential
meaninglessness (the sublime) grounds our freedom to create. See his The Content of the
Form. Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987) 72.
28Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century
Europe (Baltimore, 1973) 31, 443.
29White, The Content of the Form 1 et passim.
30Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978) 12.
31Ibid. 3, 6-7.
32See especially the introductory essay to Scott's Gender and the Politics of History
(New York, 1988), as well as throughout the essays collected in that volume. Her most
recent statement of the constructivist position is in "The Evidence of Experience," Critical
Inquiry 17 (1991): 779-80: "Making visible the experience of a different group exposes the
existence of repressive mechanisms, but not their inner workings or logics; we know that
difference exists but we don't understand it as relationally constituted. For that we need to
attend to the historical processes that, through discourse, positions subjects and produces
their experiences. It is not individuals who have experience but subjects who are constituted
through experience.... To think about experience in this way is to historicize it as well as
to historicize the identities it produces."
3"Scott, Gender and the Politics of History 2.
34Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History 26
"Ibid. 64.
36Thus Natalie Davis's most recent work emphasizes the historical task as a recon-
struction of stories people tell about themselves. See her comment in Fiction in the Archives:
Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France (Stanford, 1987) 4.
37See Greenblatt's comment in Shakespearean Negotiations 20: "I had dreamed of
speaking with the dead, and even now I do not abandon this dream. But the mistake was
to imagine that I would hear a single voice, the voice of the other. If I wanted to hear one,
I had to hear the many voices of the dead. And if I wanted to hear the voice of the other,
I had to hear my own voice. The speech of the dead, like my own
property." On the problem of transference and working through transf
of historiography see Dominick LaCapra, "History and Psychoanalysi
in Critical Theory 30-66.
Crossing Borders:
Contemporary Women Artists in Germany
is the title of the 23rd Annual Wisconsin Workshop taking
1992 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The workshop w
scholars and artists to generate and foster dialogue across bor
of nationality, ethnicity, and artistic medium. Invited artists
Jeanine Meerapfel, visual artist Eva-Maria Sch6n, and wr
Ojzdamar, Gabriele Stotzer (Kachold). For more information
Borders Organizing Committee, Department of German, Van
sity of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706; telephone: 60

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Stories of Difference and Identity: New Historicism in Literature and History

Author(s): John E. Toews

The Burdick-Vary Symposium on New Historicism, following so

Monatshefte, Vol. 84, No. 2, 1992 193

The Reconstruction of "Otherness":

In the introduction to his recently published volume of essays,

affirmation of both the autonomy and the dignity of oth

sible subject making up her own story in a different cultur

provincial, urban third estate, the familial and private culture of

From the Reconstruction of Historical Otherness

writing as the construction of history clearly has an eman

relations in which it is constituted. Power relations within any

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