Historicizing Theory

6. Stephen Greenblatt’s “X”-Files: The Rhetoric of Containment and Invasive Disease in “Invisible Bullets” and “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”

Stephen Greenblatt’s essay “Invisible Bullets”—subtitled “Renaissance Authority and its Subversion”—first appeared in print in 1981, a year after the election of Ronald Reagan. In this essay, Greenblatt offered his now famous double reading of the Elizabethan philosopher, scientist, and New World colonist Thomas Harriot ’s seemingly subversive encounters with Algonquian culture and Prince Hal’s seemingly subversive encounters with London’s underworld culture. Both instances, Greenblatt argued, demonstrate that power is not threatened by what might seem to undermine it; rather, subversion is “the very condition of power.”1 To describe this process of co-optation, which bears the unmistakable imprint of Michel Foucault’s account of power, Greenblatt employed a term that was to become as influential in Renaissance literary and cultural criticism as it has been dogged by debate and controversy: “containment.” Greenblatt’s theory of containment has prompted criticism from several quarters. Some of these critiques concern the utility of Greenblatt’s version of Foucault: if early modern authority was so utterly resourceful in turning all subversion to account, Greenblatt’s detractors have asked, how could the English Civil War—indeed, how could change of any kind—have ever taken 137 6 Stephen Greenblatt’s “X”-Files The Rhetoric of Containment and Invasive Disease in “Invisible Bullets” and “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” JONATHAN GIL HARRIS place? Another related critique, powerfully voiced by cultural materialists in particular, is that Greenblatt’s essay unwittingly says much more about the “entrapment” and ineffectiveness of leftist American cultural and literary critics during the Reagan years than it does about the operations of power in early modern culture.2 This specific critique is a local instance of a more general misgiving repeatedly expressed about the new historicism. As many have noted, if new historicists insistently point to the historical specificity of early modern ideologies and practices, they have tended to avoid reflection on the historical situatedness of their own critical discourses and preoccupations. This neglect has prompted Alan Liu’s counterproposal that “‘acknowledgment ’ of the present’s intervention in the past should blossom into disciplined study. We should see our own prejudices and concerns in such constructs as the ‘Renaissance,’ in other words.”3 To argue that Greenblatt’s conception of Renaissance containment is inflected by his own pessimistic response to Reaganism might seem to take up Liu’s challenge. For all its attractiveness, however, such an argument seems to me to perform only a partial historicization at best, understanding the “present ’s intervention in the past” mostly at the level of authorial affect. In its author-centered approach, the critique is not that far removed from the idealist tendency to historicize theoretical movements simply in terms of what their leading practitioners may have read and studied. Greenblatt’s allegedly despairing response to Reagan, or his demonstrably deep debt to Foucault, is thereby transformed into the “historical” ground on which his critical methodology stands. I would like instead to attempt a critique that attends less to what Greenblatt may have been feeling or reading when he wrote “Invisible Bullets,” than to the historicity of his essay’s rhetoric. In particular, I shall argue, its critical lexicon reproduces a rhetorical nexus prevalent during the Cold War, a nexus that links “containment” to a potent vocabulary of invasive disease. Inasmuch as I focus on certain key documents that articulate this nexus— a U.S. State Department policy paper and the writings of functionalist sociologists and anthropologists—my critique of Greenblatt might at first glance seem to replicate the very “history of ideas” approach that I and the other contributors to this volume, Historicizing Theory, seek to avoid. But my point is that the nexus of containment and disease does not simply belong to the world of “ideas.” By regarding rhetoric as material in both its forms and its effects, I seek a history in and through Greenblatt’s essay that cannot be confined to the idealist sphere of authorial intention and influence. Jacques Derrida’s dictum, that “the writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse cannot dominate absolutely,” is particularly apposite here.4 Greenblatt may or may not have read any of the documents that I examine in this essay. Nevertheless, the rhetorical configuration of which these 138 Jonathan Gil Harris documents are local expressions has also provided one of the discursive horizons of possibility for his critical...