The Taming of Michel Foucault: New Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and the Subversion of Power

I. Cultural Analysis and Its Discontents

The issue of culture has been at the center of critical and literary-critical studies for quite some time now, and nowhere has it been more prominent than in the influential form of literary criticism that has come to be known as the “new historicism.” Like virtually everyone else who has written on this topic, let me hasten to add that I fully recognize the difficulty of summarizing convincingly the project of the new historicism given both the diversity of the work of those who have been labeled new historicists and the multifaceted nature of the project itself. But certainly one of the most important contributions of the new historicists lies in the insistence and persuasiveness with which they have argued for the central importance of culture not only in relation to literary studies but to the human sciences in general.

New historicists were frequently criticized, at least initially, for a perceived failure to articulate the methodological or theoretical bases for their work. It was nonetheless obvious from the beginning that what was “new” about the new historicism was an implicit frustration with the limitations of previous attempts to understand and describe the relation of cultural artifacts of all sorts—literary, theatrical, visual, and so forth—to the historical forces and subjects they had been thought by previous literary historians merely to reflect. The initial work of the new historicists was rooted in an always implicit but at times explicit critique of older forms of historicism that saw culture as the expression of the unified worldview of a particular historical period or social group or class. But it also implied a critique and even a rejection of psychological and psychoanalytic theories insofar as they saw particular cultural artifacts as the expression or reflection of an individual psyche. From the perspective of Stephen Greenblatt and others, culture could no longer be considered merely the mirror of so-called deeper political forces and powers but must be seen instead as a political force or power in its own right. But neither could culture be interpreted in terms of what Greenblatt called the “romantic assumptions” of psychoanalysis and especially the “dream of authentic possession,” which he asserted lay behind Freud’s view of the alienated self. ¹

The new historicists’ general view of culture and power has been widely accepted, even by severe critics of the movement such as Jean Howard, Carolyn Porter, and Theodore Leinwand. My purpose here is not to review the numerous provocative discussions of the new historicism that have focused for the most part on the relation of new historicism to other forms of literary, historical, or cultural analysis and criticism. ² The issue I propose to examine is the somewhat different one of the relationship between psychoanalysis and cultural analysis. In this particular context it concerns not only the relation of the work of the new historicists to psychoanalytic theory in general but also to the work of the theorist who has been identified by Greenblatt and others as having provided a major impetus for their own rethinking of culture: Michel Foucault. ³

In the case of the new historicists, the question of the relation between cultural analysis and psychoanalysis arises naturally in connection with their vision of how power “subjects,” that is to say, how power imposes itself on, or even better, forms or creates individual subjects. In his epilogue to Renaissance Self-Fashioning, for example, Greenblatt describes the implications of his theory of power for the notion of subjectivity:

When I first conceived this book several years ago . . . it seemed to me the very hallmark of the Renaissance that middle-class and aristocratic males began to feel that they possessed [a] shaping power over their lives, and I saw this power and the freedom it implied as an important element in my own sense of myself. But as my work progressed, I perceived that fashioning oneself and being fashioned by cultural institutions—family, religion, state—were inseparably intertwined. . . . Indeed, the human subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree, the ideological product...