The Culture of
Violence by Francis Barker is a book that explores the collusion between
culture and political power and social inequality in early modern England.
Barker argues that this collusion has been obscured by contemporary criticism's
tendency to "flatten" time and deny the "historicity" of
both its objects of analysis and its own interpretive practices. This tendency
can be observed in deconstruction's willingness to abolish historical
difference in the name of generalized textuality, as well as new historicism's
descriptive form of cultural interpretation.
The book is impressive in its nuanced readings of sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century texts, particularly William Shakespeare's plays. It
provides an important contribution to our understanding of early modern
England, the postmodern "end of history," contemporary cultural
theory, and the forms that a historical literary criticism might take. Barker's
analysis of the "tragic" in King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth comprises
almost half of the book and provides its organizing focus.
Shakespearean tragedy is crucial because it shares with the "postmodern
condition" an analogous system of denial. By announcing the end or
impossibility of history, both unwittingly figure their own historicity- their
existence during the demise of one powerful version of what counts as history
and the beginning of others. In other words, Shakespeare's tragedies are
illustrative as much for what they attempt to deny as for their inadvertent and
intrinsic failure.
Borrowing Shakespeare's tragedies might help us analyze the early modern past
and inhabit the postmodern present critically and historically, not as a
mysterious or unchanging "condition" but as a "crisis." By
assuming that reinterpreting Shakespeare's tragedies might help us analyze the
early modern past and inhabit the postmodern present critically and
historically, Barker emphasizes the potential connections among literary
criticism, culture, and violence.
Barker's book explores the connections between deconstruction and new
historicism in early modern studies, focusing on Areopagitica and the Leviathan
in his third chapter and Titus Andronicus in his fourth. The third chapter
traces the transition from figures of "true discourse" as a powerful
form of political action to the assumption that "true discourse" is
impossible to figure because it is abstracted from the contingencies of power
and political action. This latter "writerly" disavowal of any
connection between discourse and social violence underscores the dilemma
offered by the notions of textual indeterminacy, slippage, limitless semiosis,
free circulation or play on one hand and the closure of historicisation on the
other. Barker's readings of John Milton and Thomas Hobbes emphasize the
violence entailed in forgetting the degree to which patterns of closure and
slippage are textually intrinsic and historically determinate.
However, deconstruction has had a relatively limited influence in early modern
studies, and Renaissance critics who have used its emphases on "textual
indeterminacy" and "slippage" to greatest effect have also
consistently focused on the connections between textuality and historicality,
most recently in discussions about the early modern production of gender, race,
and sexuality. Barker's remarks about deconstruction are directed less at a
Derridean notion of diffierance than at the contemporary "positive ethics
or aesthetics... of unqualified difference" that surfaces often
incoherently in new historicism.
In his fourth chapter, Barker emphasizes how spectacles of exotic violence in
Titus Andronicus obscure more widespread forms of violence, such as hanging,
through which the state eliminated a significant portion of the early modern
English population. These exotic spectacles are part of the anthropological
double gesture through which the play locates violence elsewhere, beyond the
boundaries of "civilization," and at the same time domesticates that
violence by rendering it merely theatrical.
Barker's discussion of this theatrical model of power is sometimes misleading,
insisting that new historicism denies the state's routine use of repressive
force and encouraging a false opposition between his own tendency to read for
symptomatic and the new historicists' tendency to read for visible effects of
power. However, Barker's larger argument that the descriptive and culturalist
character of new historicism leaves it ill equipped to analyze the uneven
relationships between political and cultural realms and among different forms
of political power could be extended to forms of "power" that do not
rely on visible political coercion, including capitalist economic exploitation.
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