The Limits of Literary Historicism

The Prehistory of Posthistoricism

The Prehistory of Posthistoricism Jeffrey Insko . . . we look forward with vivid interest to the reconstruction, in the world that will be, of the world that has been, for we realize that the world that will be cannot differ from the world that is without rewriting the past to which we now look back. —George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Present “What is the relationship of present audiences to past works?” According to Brook Thomas, this is the fundamental question with which “any serious historicist criticism” must struggle (206).1 On the face of it, this question likely seems uncontroversial—and, in fact, it is in one sense the very question this essay addresses. Yet I want to do so by taking issue with it, taking issue precisely because it seems so unobjectionable and because, as I will argue, it is grounded in a set of assumptions about historical time that any historically minded alternative to current historicist practice in literary studies—or what, by way of shorthand, I will call posthistoricism—might want to challenge. So one point of subjecting Thomas’s question to some careful scrutiny will be to consider how those aspects of historicism that seem self-evident—in particular , the historicist understanding of time and context—actually structure and delimit the range of possible answers to the question. And another point will be to ask what literary history might look like freed from historicism’s entrenched conceptions of time. To anticipate, let me first say that the title of this essay, “The Prehistory of Posthistoricism,” is meant to be ironic, an illustration of the temporal regime advanced by historicism that I want to interrogate. To posit a prehistory for posthistoricism—in the sense of a discernible set of events or conditions that can be said to have led to the phenomenon of “posthistoricism”—is to assert a telos, to suggest that posthistoricism is an historical destination, one Jeffrey Insko 106 whose development can be plotted and traced along a temporal road map in order to explain its arrival—or our arrival there, as the case may be. Yet if posthistoricism designates something other than “historicism” (whether old or new), then to ask what came before or what comes after historicism is a contradictory gesture, for such questions already, as we’ll see, accede to basic historicist assumptions. I want to suggest instead that any viable posthistoricist project must, paradoxically, resist its own claims to succession. More precisely, posthistoricism must try to give up the language of progression and superannuation—indeed, the very idea of history—that would otherwise appear to enable it. By giving up the language of progression and superannuation, the vocabulary of chronology, I do not mean giving up on history altogether. Rather, I mean giving up the habit of thinking about time as an onward sequence and advancing in its place a notion of history that is no longer conceived in terms of “post” and “new.” This is no easy task. For one thing, the “historical turn” in literary studies depends upon temporal progression. So, for instance, not only is “new” historicism supposed to represent an advance over earlier (naïve or partisan) understandings of literary texts’ relations to history. It also, at least in its more explicitly revisionist strains, serves the mission of a progressive politics. Yet even more fundamentally, thinking of time as linear chronology simply seems perfectly natural; it is, in fact, an almost inescapable effect of our language, which inevitably produces and reproduces the notion that time proceeds steadily onward. Before and after, then and now, pre and post, past and present and future. How can we do without them? They are the terms that organize our understanding of historical change, even the shape of our own lives. They are also, of course, the terms that enable historicism’s contextualizing procedure, mapping and making possible the isolation of particular segments of time in the chronological sequence. Contextualization entails dividing history into discrete moments (or periods), each possessing its own unique individuality. Certain cultural productions and events are thus said to “belong” to certain periods. So, for instance, if prehistory belongs to “then” and posthistoricism belongs to “now,” the ideologies and signifying practices of, say, Moby-Dick belong to the years just prior to its publication in 1851; that historical period constitutes the novel’s context, the bedrock of the text’s historicity. Failure to assign texts or other social practices to their proper historical moment is, in this view...