Regarding the book itself written by Michaels and cited by Jameson we read ‘the frame of reference of the essay will surely strike un-American and European oriented “theorists” as peculiarly Anglo-American and as a return to just those English department concerns (What is the validity of this reading of the canonical poem or passage in question?) from which the rest of us were in flight, and in place of which “theory” (in its structural or poststructural or in its German or dialectical sense) promised the relief of new interests. ‘Gadamer appears here to be sure but as the rival of Hirsch; Derrida is here not merely because of his American connections but, above all, on the strength of his polemic with Searle. It is as though naturalism now depended on having sound Anglo-American enemies.’ We would do well to keep in mind that the book in which this essay appears was published in 1991 by Duke University Press. Historically a period which perhaps marks the return of the culture wars into mainstream prominence in America, perhaps to a generation that was exposed to the possibilities of the internet for the first time with issues such as conservatism, gun politics, separatism of church and state, privacy, recreational drugs, censorship and homosexuality repeatedly coming up in college campuses but also in houses of legislation and in courts.
Something to be said on the count of culture which can only be said via a form of cultural criticism is perhaps a reiteration of the old refrain against the person of the critic themselves - who in their criticism seeks to present as it were the very presentability of a work to an audience or readership, dealing hence in matters usually intimate such as taste and sensibility. The truth of their work however remains the object of criticism, which I have argued elsewhere seems to function as some sort of principal capital. And while an Althusserian Marxist such as Fredric Jameson, whose own mode of presentation would seek to perhaps focus on conceptual fulcrums that determine as it were the drive of a work charting its directionality perhaps in terms of the plot, he is yet circumspect enough to see that the antinomic role of criticism which here perhaps approaches dialectical thought, engenders - to steal a phrase, its antinomy, citing as it were the provocative program “Against Theory”.
This approach as it were does much to avoid skirting around issues as is the fashion of bear baiting that is an unfortunate scenario in many oppositional struggles often faced by groups who would be resistant minorities.
As poetic a representation as criticism or opposition as truth may be here it does lead to the alarming reassurance of Stanley Fish’s ‘that to stop doing theory will have no consequence whatsoever’. Going back to Michael’s and Knapp, who in their position against theory seem to ignore their target’s most interesting problem, to quote “splitting apart terms that are in fact inseparable” is so persistent a mistake - to use their terms and Michael’s own response to such efforts are, that they are “odd” or “weird”.
The resistance to theory however at a personal level to a theoretician would appear, as stated by Fredric Jameson - the erection of some kind of new taboo, whose own motivations remain unclear, and yet a censure which proceeds to further mount itself.
Now when the annals of literary history are written the tendency which in itself worked as a school of thought at least as far as the study of texts are concerned which New Historicism was responding to was known as New Criticism, which instead of trying to historicise the ideas and milieus immanent to a text, sought to present a close reading treating it as a self-contained entity, focussing as it were on formalistic elements such as composition or style.
As an evaluative tendency, the new critics among whom we may list I. A Richard’s and T. S Elliot, came across the prevalent current of thought at the time, from Marxism to Freudianism, political readings and sociological generalisations, all of whom were resisted in some measure. And Jameson tells us that this was a time when even the philosophy departments were left unscathed by the continental currents of existentialism that were on their way from Europe.
The only steadfast objectors to the school were an old fashioned communism and an equally old fashioned psychoanalysis. Immanence, the heart of what the new critics were after in their textual analyses was to be found in poetry. The writing of it, but also its reading, which was as it may, ‘a good deal more exciting than theory.’
There is something which we scholars today may never know - of a proliferation of theories so extensive in the early 90’s when this book was released, that would render the new critic’s insistence of the separatism of the ‘intrinsic’ meaningless. Yet with this also means the de-stratification of the seemingly stalwart if archaic theories of Marxism and psychoanalysis, themselves submitted to a kind of multiplicity, with which comes diffusion of their seeming extrinsicness.
This brings us back as it were to the earlier and perhaps more ingrained problems of immanence and transcendence within which the critics of new historicism raise their interpretative and historically coloured lenses.
What do these interpretive vantages, for they are not mere methods as each have decided preferences in terms of their subject matter tell us about their proliferations, of perhaps event the possibility of something resembling that? A quote from the text should be indicative of the conjuncture. “Indeed if there is any merit in characterising the post-modern moment constitutively as one in which the traditional avant-gardes and collective movements have become impossible, then it seems possible that forms of ressentiment are at work in the denunciation of something that seems to be a collective movement of that older type. ( or is accused of passing itself of as such a movement, or its simulacrum.)”
The post-contemporary moment as it were is indeed one which in its attestations to a lack of historicity, leaves itself vulnerable to appropriations and indeed we are forced to confront the uncomfortable question as to what may have been a genuine avant-garde movement in the first place: though I am less sure as to why this movement would coincide with the affirmation of its structural impossibility.
The resistance to theory, were we to read this as a kind of symptom as to what makes a genuine avant-gardist position so difficult today, would be compounded by the particularity of the constraints or labels posed to an individual artist, critic or writer; a situation that Sartre does much to foreground in his tarrying and indeed existential dialectics with the considerations of others.
A certain feature of precisely a collective consideration in this sphere, that is the position of the writer in the literary milieu, ie. in the engagement with intellectual tradition but primarily with the readership of his own time which as we may have characterised as post-modern’ - is the very denial of collectives, which here would refer to as structural collectives or classes, as such existing as far as the market is concerned only in their interrelation. Is this the price we pay for focussing on the immanence of a text, loosing as it were its contextual or transcendental dimensions? This seems to be a position which Fredric Jameson would be inclined towards, even as he brings out that which is genuinely novel in the work of Sartre, for which I would recommend that you read his doctoral dissertation ‘Sartre: Origin’s of a Style’.
There seems hence to me at least, to be a closure, not merely of the possibilities of an individual work - which is itself disciplined as it were in its subsumption to ‘collective’ business cycles, but also with the foreclosure of any genuine radical or collective change - a cheapening of the very possibilities that an artist, critic or dare I say a politician may have to behold before them.
Indeed this twin foreclosure as it were - of the individual and the collective spheres, that is the capacity for representation and reflection in any individual work, and its capacity to grasp the possibility of any real structural transformation in the public sphere - indeed a seeming meditation on this sterility seems to be a feature which post-modernity, in spirit if not in letter is often reduced to.
Here, we may be tempted in some kind of activistic enthusiasm to question the capacity of this term to provide us with any kind of analytical or conceptual gain. And indeed be tempted to deal more explicitly with the structure of class relations themselves - perhaps in a form of revitalised Leninism, and such efforts would be well advised to recognize - perhaps the more continental but also contemporary recognition among the human sciences of the rise of the security state, often known by other names such as the military industrial complex, the police state: whose archetype as it were can be found in earlier literary examples such as Orwel and Hume, and which popular culture has seemingly ubiquitized with the Matrix and Foucault and whatnot.
To present another quote “But the contradiction between immanence and transcendence remains as before, however the zeitgeist decides to handle it, and it is if anything intensified by the extraordinary systematising and unifying forces of late capitalism which are so omnipresent as to be invisible, so that their transcendent operation does not seem to pose the intellectual problem of transcendence itself so tangibly and dramatically as it did in the earlier stages when capital was less complete and more intermittent.”
This completeness as it were may be a function of what I have elsewhere described as the cubiclization of relationships - a foray into the way the modularity of our workstations today seem to be pluggable into any kind of assembly apparatus. What is lost in such a perspective however is a properly institutional view which focuses on the global developments in a craft for example, via whose augmentation the products made may be done so easier, more efficiently, or with fewer resources. Transmission being the key function that makes this available.
But far more exciting in any case would be how such developments, in individual disciplines of inquiry for example change the platform itself particularly in terms of the new possibilities created. An example of this would be the contemporary (though perhaps increasingly less so) focus on interdisciplinarity especially in the humanities: and we have yet to see in its entirety what new forms of narrative this will produce.
These, coupled with perhaps earlier engagements lead Jameson to place ‘The Gold Standard’ as a specimen of New Historicism and towards an effort to identify its movemental stereotype, an operation towards which he would suggest story telling remains the best tool. Yet were a prominent feature of this movement to be emphasised it would probably be this seemingly novel capacity of a text to reach to the objects of other disciplines, making it possible to deal with them in new ways.
In this new field of discursivity, political power, walking and shopping at a supermarket, Hollywood, star systems, genres, as well as the body itself with its symptoms, deeper impulses and sensory perceptions become texts readable and hence reconstructible in new ways, often liberating us from false problems, just as it produces new ones.
At least a part of this new gamut is the question of how earlier totalising fictions can be circumvented, as is the effort of just about every new generation in relation to custom to say nothing of migrants and organisational developments.
Indeed this seems to be the phenomenon which the immanence or instrinsicness of a text cannot hold up to as the retention of some central principle as it were entails a continuity which implies the very concept of heterogeneity, inasmuch as at least an essential or vital and a peripheral or ‘instrumental function can be attributed to the elements of any composition in question.
And yet each element in question, kinship, cultural tales, visual styles or oral stories can form ‘texts’ in themselves, each with their own specific problems, which often reveal vital breaks when read side by side - when not problems of a qualitatively heightened type.
The question to pose is if society as a relatively stable category is destabilised to the point where it can’t effectively contribute to its subtexts, ie. village level organizations, kinship, visual form, etc. than what conceptual edifice would we have in its place? Further, whatever this new concept may come to be - our own endeavour would be bound to individual disciplines themselves, within which a perceptive thinker may discover homological structures that cut across them, working in each as it were perhaps not unlike how Levi Strauss seeks to isolate the use of myth among tribes. Whether this concept is adequate to secure indifferent or non-hierarchal relations between the various sub-systems may be a question subject to some attritional settlement yet it would primarily be a function of the discourse in question. Derrida may perhaps be baited into dwelling upon this - the various names of the structurality of structure etc. Generically however the concept of structure suffices.
In returning to the object of our study, Michaels and Knapp’s manifesto, the intervention sees this as a call for a return to a pre-theoretical procedure, while simultaneously opening up a range of post-theoretical operations that retain the discursive conquest. Yet Jameson recognizes in this effort also the exclusion of “transcendental” interpretations that may once have been perhaps the purpose of the homologies.
I am however less inclined to see New Historicism as a return to a kind of immanence, especially as it leans on the concept of homologies, which in their very operation are neither singular nor purposive, and hence structural, a concept whose very form remains in the subtexts between which homologies are noticed.
Inasmuch as these homologies, structural or otherwise are noticed; and inasmuch as they are structural we may yet see in this a form of structural causality or as Marx would term it - Darstellung. This concept however, of structural causality or darstellung is not merely (and not necessarily) interpretive but determinative. That is to put it in Althusser’s terms - “…by means of what concept is it possible to think the new type of determination which has just been identified as the determination of the phenomenon of a given region by the structure of that region?” from ‘Reading Capital’.
For our present purposes I would like to make two qualifications 1. This statement hinges upon how are we to understand the concept of region; here it is used in a spatial sense, and that indeed is a pertinent position especially regarding the borders between political entities, yet at a more prosaic and perhaps personal level - thinking the concept of region in terms of, for instance a genre, discipline or indeed personal narrative or history may awaken in the subject the sense of a narratorial unconscious - often identified by new critics as the unsaid of a text yet whose presence lingers like perhaps some unarticulated oddity. This temporalising of space as it were allows us to notice not merely the periphery but perhaps the forgotten - and conversely, of course - the hegemonic. Hegemony however, particularly in its exercise is most often experienced spatially, bodily beings as we are, and as such we may have at some point to consider the kind of hegemony in operation and its nature.
On the other hand, the inaugural moment of New Historicism is noticed to be ‘Renaissance Self-Fashioning’ by Stephen Greenblatt, whose striking characterisation by the author leaves one wondering why some of the propositions were not further explicated. To quote - “…(the work) in hindsight looks like one of those classical and paradigmatic scientific discoveries achieved by triumphant accident in the process of attempting to solve a false problem.” - likened here to Kepler and Galileo’s Platonism.
Regarding the titular work in question ‘Renaissance Self-Fashioning’ is read to be steeped into the conception of the ‘self’ and ‘identity’ - drawing admittedly from high modernism. As a singular work and as against much new historicist literature - it leaves aside self-consciousness or reflexivity for what is left as an “intense theoretical energy.”
In term of the subject of composition however, which itself seems to deconstruct - so to speak, the more official position on selfhood in the text, a quote suffices to indicate what may be found - “selves capable of modifying their shapes so effectively that they ultimately call the very idea of the self into question.” Though how the perusal of this theme leads to the axis between theology and imperialism is less clear to me.
Of interest to me here would be what kind of refashioning of the self is in question - is it a refashioning which is inscribed in the practices of the self, or are we speaking about a transcoding such as when cultural migration of appropriation takes place?
It may also be possible to locate in the carrying forth of such functions a Foucauldian understanding of power, and perhaps there is something to be said about an authority which operates without signification, after the fact, that is if Power itself is the homology or structure we are referring to. As used in the text, Jameson detects that it does not serve an interpretive function but rather seeks to produce a reassurance in the reader allowing them to ‘dwell in the detail without guilt or discomfort.’ - perhaps not unlike contemporary formulations of a nightwatchman state.
In seeking to account for the other major attacks on theory such as from Ginsburg, the Annals historians and E. P Thompson’s attack on Althusser, Jameson identifies what is admittedly a highly theoretical resistance to theory; a gesture which bears allegedly a marked similarity with the New Historicists. What Jameson refers to as narrative anthropology, and what in other parts in known as ethnography as promulgated by the likes of Clifford Geertz and Turner serve as ready references to Greenblatt.
This resemblance as far as historians are concerned is identified as an example of overdetermination, and those who have been following the references here, particularly Ginsburg and the practice of microhistory, which appears to be a form of historical anthropology if not ethnography in any case - would identify the tendency which is alleged to have overdetermined them, for it may be possible to identify in these examples discursive gestures in terms of the focus of a study and its method, best exemplified in the questions asked, and the method of pursuit of an inquiry if you prefer - such as participant observation, - homologies. Yet it would not be possible to piece together the motivations of the New Historicists from these discipline’s studies.
In his assessment of New Historicism, Jameson recognizes it’s mobilisation of historical attractions that are captured and redeployed, but are also repressed by a valorisation of immanence and nominalism that can either look like a return to the ‘thing itself’ or as a resistance to theory.
Examples are presented to explicate this in Greenblatt’s essay “Invisible Bullets” that raises rather contemporary concerns such as police surveillance, the Virginia colony, and the counterfeiting of gold coins, juxtaposed by ‘Renaissance grammars’, language teaching, and a Shakespearean mimicry of dialects. Each, possible metaphors whose analogical polyvalence one can readily imagine exploited by this or that school.
Along with this we are presented with Catherine Gallagher’s “The Bio-Economics of our Mutual Friend” that attests to such arch conservative themes such as death, the 19th century hygienic movement and the emergent conceptions of life, all ‘constellated’ as it were under the sign of Value.
The Subject’s of these essays however are real not as interpretive possibilities but, that is as productive or vital functions but rather as mere pretexts for the montage in question.
This seeming negation as it were, from the perspective of the new world at least, having witnessed the anti-Vietnam movement, after the counterculture of the 50’s and 60’s also, ironically perhaps provides something akin to the Brechtian alienation effect, the German valence of the seemingly Anglo-Saxon phenomena. And yet this problem as it were, this negativity if you will presents genuinely new representational challenges. Fredric Jameson, himself growing out of the golden age of Hollywood asks for examples of how new forms of montage in cinema can be related to pedagogy in a way which does not leave the sphere of this interaction merely at the register of the imaginary but actually touches the symbolic universe of the viewer in a purposive and cogent way. Godard’s films for example are presented as a way to depict consumer society and Maoist politics. The status of the ideas presented by Goddard however, are likened to those neo-historicist works within their limitations - that is not as personal choices made by agents but rather as part of some more general movement towards immanence and what Adorno called nominalism, a conceptual opposition to my mind at least as the latter would indicate at least two levels of reference like an algebraic operation, whereas immanence would primarily indicate self-encompassing capacity.
In observing Goddard’s scene making we are pointed out to the way in which discrete shots such as an advertising image, interview with a philosopher and the guests of this or that fictive character may not necessarily be put back together by the spectator in the form of a message - let alone the right one.
There may be something to be said here of the very shattered, to use a poor word, nature of a form in consideration, yet also - and generically so, their singularity. It’s form as it were read by some contemporaries of evidence regarding the texture of experience and the possibilities it entails.
Adorno exchanges letters with Benjamin for example on why he was reluctant to tell his readers of his historical “constellations”, what they meant and how to interpret them. Perhaps indicating the incommensurability of depicting the scholiums that consist of the “Theses On The Philosophy Of History” in any other way.
Yet the concept, or rather the form of the montage is what Jameson chooses to stick with - as it seems more congruent with Greenblatt’s project of the problematising of the Self in ‘The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism”.
In the author’s effort’s at characterising characteristic tendencies in this book three are identified 1. The practice of the identification of homologies as is characteristic of New Historicist discourse 2. A polemic waged against liberal or radical discourse or interpretation which seems to recapitulate this position in ‘Against Theory’. 3. A proto-historical narrative representing something of the specificity of a historical period, and also its waning or transformation into something else. (the gold standard, ideology etc.) but also perhaps apparent in literary movements.
The range of these homologies however ranging from medicine, land tenure, to money itself makes this section and indeed the suggestiveness of the original ‘The Gold Standard and The Logic of Naturalism’ worth reading in its own right. This tendency however, and perhaps the practice of homological notations themselves - are seen to be apolitical phenomenon and are juxtaposed to imperialism which more readily takes on the legacy of Marxism, as well as Foucauldian and 3rd worldist politics - recognising a sign of the potency still expressed in Greenblatt.
What homologies may lack in terms of a cut of an insight however - they do make up in terms of their apparent ubiquity, and is this not at a discursive plane - the hysteric position par excellence ?
It has been identified for instance that the repeated insistence of a demand has commonly been identified in the figure of the hysteric woman in literature - often parodied and caricatured but no less sincere a representation because of it, even if such a figure is occasionally feared - or as feminists may put - misunderstood.
It is however in the repetition of a demand that the economic primacy of work surfaces, knotted as it were with the more philosophical problem of identity. A quote to offer to light the author’s thinking on this would be instructive. “The economic question — how do I produce myself ? — and the therapeutic question — how do I stay myself? find their parallel in the epistemological question, how do I know myself ?”
Security hence, one way or another emerges as a dominant theme in the art of this age, reflecting as it were the subject’s conquest of the uncertainties of the market - often found, at least since Victorian fiction informs us, in real estate and title deeds. And indeed this search for the enclosedness of a dwelling, its sanctity as it were may be read even in artistic innovations with Daguerreotypes; the first form of photography — presenting the possibility of chemical fumes to form an impression on a light sensitive copper plate producing a portrait for instance which requires a more protracted development process the dimmer the luminosity of the frame, that seemingly negates the artistic interpretability of the brush, just as it offers a kind of permanence and exactitude which were and are very desired qualities in our age of mechanical reproduction. This would also serve as a good example of a homology and an emergent one at that, between forms of manufacture, property and art, while also suggestive of how they influence each other.
Indeed via this, one of the chief social functions of art presents itself to us; that is a chance to reconceptualise the relation between property and the self. And with this the problem of the proprietorship of a thought, perhaps disputed these days under the name of intellectual property too surfaces. A marginal note on a psychologist it would appear - named James, who here I take to be the American pragmatist William James is taken up which also provides us with a way in thinking about intellectual tradition or the history of philosophy if you prefer in ways that do appear to bypass the often subsumptionary mechanism that a historically mediated conceptual thinking often produces. He would (James) for instance - call it a mistake to assume that the present thought establishes ownership over past one’s. He would suggest in its stead that it already owns them. The title of the proprietor comes into being as it were upon the death of another owner; and yes since we are talking about thought: the existence of the owner coincides with that of the owned. A thought hence transfers what is its realized self into its later proprietor. High metaphysics if there ever was one.
This movement as it were is to coincide with another possibility which is available in modern republics which is the autonomy of contracts from the juridical level. For the purpose of my own study here, I will not be following Jameson’s statements regarding Michael’s observations regarding the gold standard itself which he eventually gets to apart from observing that the belief in the natural value of gold is seen as the ultimate form in which the longing to escape the market is fantasized.
If a theme emerges from these cultural observations, particularly the issue of thought, character and the proprietor as articulated by James - the point they would be leading to is the experience of the self as private property and hence subject to the market. And with this of course would come the commodification of indiscernibles which are today becoming increasingly recognized even in courts, namely time and privacy. I am also skipping here some of Jameson’s readings of American authors such as Hawthorne and Dresier and what kind of correspondence or continuity may be traced between them and Balzac - for which you may have to read the chapter yourself.
Michael’s conceptual adversaries in his text are Marxists for sure, but he also extends his critique to so called Continental theorists of desire, whose alleged force is supposed to undermine late capitalist rigidities, These forces may very well be the factor which keep the consumerist system going in the first place.
This refrain if you would call it that would also be noticed in Foucault who thought that if the system was indeed totalising ( a term an earlier generation of Marxists may have known as monopolistic) then all local revolts remained inside that and hence a function of its immanent dynamic. This theme as it were, namely the complicity of revolt remains perhaps at that time at least most fully developed by Baudrillard.
Marxism itself, in its orthodox configuration thought of this differently, as the emergence of the conditions of real socialism within already existing capitalism - driven by contradictions immanent between the forces of production and the relations of production. Jameson asserts that even without ideals the communards do have a program.
In the liberal west there appears to have been two kinds of reactions to the proliferation of the image - whose proliferation in times closer to ours has presented nothing short of a kind of ‘diet cure’ for images - or what Susan Sontag calls a kind of conservationist remedy. Yet a puritanical conservatism, not without its own puritanical precedents such as in Plato would choose to suppress images altogether. And Sontag does observe that Maoist China too adopted this curtailment on images.
There is even a sense of progress charted with efforts such as Michael’s ‘The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism’ which following Marxist economists in the West, have sought to reintroduce economic and market debate back into cultural criticism.
In terms of what Marxism can learn from this in terms which probably aren’t revisionist - is that Marx’s analyses of capital is not a productionist one, and as early as the introduction to the Grundrisse - he affirms the indissolubility of the three dimensions of production, distribution and consumption. Having said this, the emphasis on production ( whatever that might mean) presents the most effective way of defamiliarising the ideologies of the market itself.
What is interesting about such a conjuncture however, is that even as a vision of capitalism - the primacy of the market is the purest of ideological edifices. Liberal critics have held to a tendency to chastise Marxians (and perhaps even Foucauldians) for proceeding with their struggles against what is essentially a totalising conception of the mode of production, likened perhaps to Don Quixote jousting against wind mills. Yet, as even the Frankfurt School learned - it is more useful to proceed with a totalising concept than without one; their own being of course late capitalism, whose homological valence Jameson does see in Webber’s administered society.
Regarding the issue of literary theory itself, the emphasis on authorial intent which the program ‘Against theory’ emphasises, the question to ask would be how would we locate the logic of the market inhabiting as we are a world of individual subjects and decision makers; which if nothing else is still a transubjective logic - built as it is on transference.
The unconscious however from where the logic of transference draws its conception is not necessarily individuated to a subject. In fact this was Lacan’s decisive break with Freud - in demonstrating that the unconscious is structured like a language. There is indeed a way in which this unconscious in its transubjective dimension acts in excess to the intentionality of individual subjects and as such irreducible to a Husserlian phenomenology, as the subject is not the intent per se but precisely that which is irreducible to it. Freud’s own rumination on these lay in slips of tongue, jokes and dreams; however is this all?
Would not that abstraction which we call the market demonstrate precisely such an autonomous choice, a function as it is of that other ‘non- individual meaningful, collective yet impersonal agency’ known by Marxists as the mode of production?
The unity where these twin logics, those of non-individuated market forces and those of an orthodox reading of the mode of production is cited as the trust, monopoly or corporation - often creating its own new corporate law. It abolishes individual actors of laissez faire ushering in a properly representative form of cooperation, often bridging the gap between production and consumption itself.
Not very unlike the Lukacian notion of class consciousness, corporations allow for an individual to individuate themselves as a subject, yet as such they would appear to be extension of the corporation, and not the corporation as an extension of them.
The coexistence of this seemingly collective form of organisation (indeed many of them) with the market - is a most interesting even if ironic development indeed. The question which Jameson seeks to raise here is whether the corporation as such is seemingly only a single instance of the restructuration of the market, or whether in the form of subjecthood it extends to employees, offers something of a personhood which can exist in exteriority to the market?
This would appear to be an extremely limited proposition as corporations usually persist beyond the tenures of individual employees, whose very terms of employment are ultimately subject to the market.
The more interesting question to ask would be whether the market as such, in accommodating and responding to the new corporations acquire via some form of transference, mimetically or otherwise - characteristics which are personified?
This is hardly an alien proposition even as much as neo-liberal economic jargon is concerned with terms such as the bear and bull market commonly used to highlight expansionist and protectionist tendencies of corporations and companies.
By way of an analogy we are presented that the market, with all its commodities and services bears the same relation to individual subjects, as belief does to consciousness.
And with this we reach the conclusion to the first section of this chapter ‘Immanence and Nominalism in Postmodern Theoretical Discourse.’ This section being an entry into the New Historicist movement in literature and its relation to or rather emphasis on and construction of immanence in new ways. The next section ‘Part 2. Deconstruction as Nominalism’ will be covered in the following reading.
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