New Historicism/ Cultural Poetics Terms Flashcards
order
“A ‘system of elements’ - a definition of the segments by which the resemblances and differences can be shown, the types of variation by which those segments can be affected, and, lastly, the threshold above which there is a difference and below which there is a similitude - is indispensable for the establishment of even the simplest form of order. Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there,
waiting in silence for the moment of its expression.”
Foucault “The Order of Things” xx,xxi
archaeology
“what I am attempting to bring to light is the epistemolological field, the episteme in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its rational value or to its objective forms, grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility; in this account, what should appear are those configurations within the space of knowledge which have given rise to the diverse forms of empirical science. Such an enterprise is not so much a history, in the traditional meaning of that word, as an ‘archaeology’.” Foucault “The Order of Things” xxii
panopticism
“Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.” Foucault “Discipline and Punish” Panopticism 6,7,9,10
power
Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up. The ceremonies, the rituals, the marks by which the sovereign’s surplus power was manifested are useless. There is a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference.” Foucault “Discipline and Punish” Panopticism 6
discipline
“Panopticism is the general principle of a new
‘political anatomy’ whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline.”
“the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come. The movement from one project to the other, from a schema of exceptional discipline to one of a generalized surveillance, rests on a historical transformation: the gradual extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread throughout the whole social body, the formation of what might be called in general the disciplinary society.”
“‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology. “ Foucault D&P Panopticism 12-17, 22
repressive hypothesis
“The doubts I would like to oppose to the repressive hypothesis are aimed less at showing it to be mistaken than at putting it back within a general economy of discourses on sex in modern societies since the seventeenth century. Why has sexuality been so widely discussed, and what has been said about it? What were the effects of power generated by what was said? What are the links between these discourses, these effects of power, and the pleasures that were invested by them? What knowledge was formed as a result of this linkage? The object, in short, is to define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world. The central issue… is not to determine whether one says yes or no to sex, whether on formulates prohibitions or permissions, whether on asserts its importance or denies effects. or whether one refines the words one uses to designate it; but to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said.” Foucault “History of Sexuality” 11
genealogy
Joan Scott “The Evidence of Experience” 796
“How have categories of representation
and analysis-such as class, race, gender, relations of production, biology, identity, subjectivity, agency, experience, even culture-achieved their foundational status? What have been the effects of their articulations?
What does it mean for historians to study the past in terms of these categories and for individuals to think of themselves in these terms? What is the relationship between the salience of such categories in our own time
and their existence in the past? Questions such as these open consideration of what Dominick LaCapra has referred to as the “transferential” relationship between the historian and the past, that is, of the relationship between the power of the historian’s analytic frame and the events that are the object of his or her study. And they historicize both sides of that relationship by denying the fixity and transcendence of anything that appears
to operate as a foundation, turning attention instead to the history of foundationalist concepts themselves. The history of these concepts (understood to be contested and contradictory) then becomes the evidence by which “experience” can be grasped and by which the historian’s
relationship to the past he or she writes about can be articulated. This is what Foucault meant by genealogy”
metahistory
White “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” 395
“One must try to get behind or beneath the presuppositions which sustain a given type of inquiry and ask the questions that can be begged in its practice in the interest of determining why this type of inquiry has been designed to solve the problems it characteristically tries to solve. This is what metahistory seeks to do. It addresses itself to such a question, What is the structure of a peculiarly historical consciousness?”
emplotment
White “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” 397
“no given set of casually recorded historical events can in itself constitute a story; the most it might offer to the historian are story elements. The events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and the highlighting of others, by characterization, motific repetition, variation of tone and point of view, alternative descriptive strategies, and the like- in short, all of the techniques that we would normally expect to find in the emplotment of the play.”
critical self-consciousness
White “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” 403
“I have tried to show in Metahistory how such mixtures and variations occur in the writings of the master historians of the nineteenth century; and I have suggested in that book that classic historical accounts always represent attempts both to emplot the historical series adequately and implicitly to come to terms with other plausible emplotments. It is this dialectical tension between two or more possible emplotments that signals the element of critical self-consciousness present in any historian of recognizably classical stature.”
feminist fetish
Marcus “Asylums of Antaeus” 134
“The purpose of the present essay is to destabilize the standard plot of the literature of WWI and its relation to history through a supposedly feminist history by Sandra Gilbert, to demonstrate that history and literature deserve equal narrative force in a cultural text. I find a ‘double voice’ in her text and a reaffirmation of the traditional male plot. I propose a theory of the feminist fetish, collating and adapting recent work of Naomi Schor on female fetishism and Tom Mitchell on iconography and commodity fetishism to discuss the poster art and political dress of British Suffragettes.”
experience
Scott “The Evidence of Experience” 777
“When the evidence offered is the evidence of “experience,” the claim or referentiality is further buttressed-what could be truer, after all, than a subject’s own account of what he or she has lived through? It is precisely this kind of appeal to experience as uncontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation-as a foundation on which analysis is
based-that weakens the critical thrust of histories of difference.”
“The evidence of experience then
becomes evidence for the fact of difference, rather than a way of exploring how difference is established, how it operates, how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who see and act in the world.”
historicize
Scott “The Evidence of Experience” 779-80
“The project of making experience visible precludes analysis of the workings of this system and of its historicity; instead, it reproduces its terms. We come to appreciate the consequences of the closeting of homosexuals and we understand repression as an interested act of power or domination; alternative behaviors and institutions also become available
to us. What we don’t have is a way of placing those alternatives within the framework of (historically contingent) dominant patterns of sexuality and
the ideology that supports them. We know they exist, but not how they have been constructed; we know their existence offers a critique of normative practices, but not the extent of the critique. 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, position subjects and produce their experiences. It is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience. Experience in this definition then becomes not the origin of our explanation, not the authoritative (because seen or felt) evidence that grounds what is known, but rather that which we seek to explain, that about which knowledge is produced.
To think about experience in this way is to historicize it as well as to historicize the identities it produces. “
