Stephen Greenblatt

• His work is linked to New Historicism
  • does justice to contingency
  • reticence to define this school of criticism, but his article [[The circulation of social energy]] is the closest attempt at such definition
  • is particularly relevant for Early Modern societies and cultures because of particularities of repressive modes and modes of resistance
  • Any explanatory model cannot be unitary
    • a text might mirror dominant codes as well as resist them
  • Opposes to Old Historicism, which believed that facts will speak for themselves so long as the investigator registers and enumerates them
  • opposes materialist definition of power as capable of being traced back to individual o corporate ideologies
    • a text can reflect but also manufacture cultural codes (text as action)
    • attention to least formal witness (anecdotes, diaries, etc.)

Starting points

• [[Jean-François Lyotard]]‘s postmodern theory

• [[Fredric Jameson]]‘s Marxist theory

• Clifford Geertz’ social anthropology

• Foucault’s antu-humanism

  The circulation of social energy (opening chapter from [[Shakespearean Negotiations]])

  • Starting point: desire to speak with the dead: re-create a conversation with them
  • the dead leave textual traces behind them which are heard in the voices of the living
  • what happens with fiction?
    • there was never in them a living person to begin with, but simulation
    • however lovers of literature find more intensity in these simulations than in other textual traces left behind by dead people
    • literature is aware of its will to represent a life that is absent in them, and are therefore more adept to compensate for the vanishing of the life that has created them
    • his focus:
      • Shakespeare, a total artist: training, resourcefulness and talent
      • in a totalizing society: organized network of elements where the ruling elite has a privileged position. Dreams of access to power.
      • confrontation between total artist and totalizing society results in powerful works of art
    • However, doubts around total artist and totalizing society concepts:
      • monolithic entities
        • unity? wholeness? of individual
        • structural unity of society and power?
        • homogeneity in literature in its relationship to power? even within a single work of literature, this did not hold.
      • Instead of speaking of total artist and totalizing power, turn to the texts themselves
        • what does this mean?
        • in early 18th century there is no confidence in the text (questions of original intentions and stable meaning in theatrical texts)
        • author’s training: authority of either text of author to give text an underlying meaning and escape shared contingency
          • there is no escape to contingency
      • so, how can literary traces of the dead convey lost life?
        • so far, close reading: formal and linguistic design
        • he proposes to look less at the center, and more at the borders: cultural transactions through which great works of art are empowered
        • this implies taking seriously the collective production of literary pleasure and interest
          • as opposed to see the work as product of an individual artist
          • Renaissance artists as Renaissance monarchs, power is a collective invention
        • The moment of writing is a social moment: all authors depend on other authors, genres, narrative patterns, linguistic conventions
        • the theater addresses audience as collective (contrary to 19th model of individual novel reader)
        • bc we are not interested in an unique authority but in contingent social practices, there is no need to search for an essence. Instead, interesting questions are:
          • how collective beliefs and experiences were shaped, adapted from one medium to the other, etc.
          • boundaries between art and other expressions?
          • power of these practices to convey different emotions
        • the author names this kind of investigations "poetics of culture"
          • energy: aesthetic power of a work of literature, which is social and is transformed and refashioned over time. Makes it live long after the author and its culture have died.
          • social energy: we can identify it by its effects
            • the capacity of a work to produce, shape and organize certain collective experience
            • has minimal predictability, range and adaptability
        • there is no originary moment of the social energy. instead, set of exchanges and negotiations.
          • how are the negotiated pieces constructed and how are these negotiations made?
          • art not as reflection, but as set of movements: many possible modes of exchange:
            • Appropriation: objects are graspable without pushback. For example: ordinary language. Especially the lower classes are represented without restraint.
            • Purchase: money is payed for objects, for example costumes
            • Symbolic acquisition: a social energy is transferred to the stage by means of representation.No money is paid but something must be given in return for it (implicitly or explicitly). For example, exorcism brought on to the stage.
              • acquisition through simulation: the actor simulates what is already understood to be a theatrical representation (Hamlet, mise en abyme)
              • metaphorical acquisition: a practice is acquired indirectly. for example, taking the name of the Lord in vain was prohibited in plays, so actors used other words to substitute those. Likeness and distortion.
              • Acquisition through Synecdoche or Metonymy: acquisition of cultural energy by isolating one part or attribute of a practice which stands for the whole, often irrepresentable. For example, verbal chafing for representation of sexual relationships.
          • in order to analyze the circulation of all these elements we must keep in mind that art is made up: literalization and institutionalization
          • there are other ways o to construe the practice and its relationship with the world, and the practices are aware of these possibilities and make decisions to maintain or break their conventional boundaries
          • audience: is it excluded from practical activity? it cannot, for if it does all activities would become nonpractical. Plus, the pleasure of the audience is useful, it would prevent rebellions. Moreover, illusion of distance from ordinary social practice which is useful for the artistic institutions to conduct their negotiations.
          • theater is marked off from outside world and licensed to operate in distinct domain, but boundaries are permeable: most of subjects from the outside world can be treated in theater: everything produced by society can circulate in theater unless it is deliberately prohibited (thus inability to use a single method to analye it).