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- W2054681708 abstract "Matter, System, and Early Modern Studies: Outlines for a Materialist Linguistics F. Elizabeth Hart (bio) Materialist criticism, now into its third decade, is still grappling with difficulties related to transforming early forms of Marxism into more fluid and encompassing historical theory. 1 Among the problems for materialist studies of early modern culture, and for Shakespeare studies in particular, has been the struggle to model a viable historical materialist dialectic—to establish, as one Shakespearean recently put it, a “precise balance . . . between the impact of base and superstructure in the analysis of literary texts.” 2 How, for instance, should critics [End Page 311] reconcile the economic determinism at the core of Marxist historical theory with their own instincts to focus on a variety of early modern material practices, some (but not all) of them economic in character? Is there sufficient theory to account for these instincts and for the tendency they provoke toward a privileging of superstructural effects—be they the religious, mythic, or philosophical objects of the “old” historicism, or the ideological structures of the “new”? At stake are key issues, the approaches to which still roughly distinguish Marxist, cultural materialist, and new historicist considerations of early modern texts and history. Arguably, the most important of these issues still waiting to be resolved relates to the ideological means by which the human subject is constructed, and the limits to agency imposed on the subject through its interpellation by the cultural system. 3 How critics evolve in their understanding of the base and superstructure of early modern culture depends, first, on how they define two terms, matter and system, within a materialist framework; and second, on the degree to which they continue to fall back on formalist methods that prescribe these terms in ways that make them incompatible [End Page 312] with historiographic concerns. The attempt to identify vestigial formalisms in ostensibly nonformalist contemporary theory is certainly nothing new, and in early modern studies it has sometimes been presented as a project of singular importance. Almost a decade ago, Louis Montrose asserted that “we should resist the inevitably reductive tendency to constitute [base and superstructure/text and culture] as binary oppositions, instead construing them as mutually constitutive processes.” 4 Yet despite this and similar injunctions, Montrose, Robert Weimann, and Hayden White are still able to cite critics’ ongoing tendencies toward using the stasis-inducing methods of formalist analysis in their attempts to come to grips with these questions. 5 White, for instance, points out that the new historicism has “offend[ed] the various ‘cultural materialists’” 6 through its distinction between the [base-like] literary text and the text’s [superstructural] historical contingencies—its cultural system—and through the construal of that system as the constitutive force behind “social institutions and practices” 7 rather than the other way around, as might be expected from a Marxist paradigm. This critique bears a resemblance to Edward Said’s observations about the ahistoricity of Derridean deconstruction—and for good reason, since, as I will argue, both deconstruction and materialist studies have internalized basic formalist assumptions about the operations of language that are indigenous to linguistic structuralism. 8 In my view, however, the complaints of Said and other literary scholars are limited by a tendency to define the formalism underlying structuralism too narrowly in conjunction with the way it is defined in philosophical aesthetics, an interpretive method that addresses itself more to the level of the text than to operations of language [End Page 313] within the text. When we focus our anxieties on deconstruction’s reduction of discourse to text, we are already in the midst of an abstraction, for this is a critique in which, whether we realize it or not, formalist assumptions have already been made but are too deeply buried within the aestheticized “text” to be recognized. The problem is at least partly academic in that it points to the limits that disciplinary boundaries place on the kinds of inquiries that are made to seem relevant. I suggest that by expanding our inquiries to include the critiques of formalism found in other disciplines—most productively in science and linguistics—we can broaden our notions of materiality and (to a lesser extent) systematicity..." @default.
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- W2054681708 date "1998-01-01" @default.
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- W2054681708 title "Matter, System, and Early Modern Studies: Outlines for a Materialist Linguistics" @default.
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