Mutant child of the Frankfurt School, New Historicism troubles the clear oppositions and polarities established by its parent, ushering in a set of practices and techniques that affirm their affinity with the codes and economies they critique. It would seem that... [more]

Mutant child of the Frankfurt School, New Historicism troubles the clear oppositions and polarities established by its parent, ushering in a set of practices and techniques that affirm their affinity with the codes and economies they critique. It would seem that culture and society no longer admit of any outside from which a potential resistance might derive its impetus and its perspective; hence the New Historicists no longer refuse to partake in a culture of commodities and consumption, but situate themselves within it, exploit its offerings, while at the same time endeavoring to act in the interests of a workable, more democratic alternative. Donna Haraway's celebration of cyborgs is a good example of this: rather than oppose herself to the onslaught of technology, she affirms our unavoidable interface with it, and seeks to exploit the political potential of our "techno-scientific" bodies. New Historicists in general share this modus operandi, insisting that every expressive act engages and participates in a system of material and ideological practices, that no neutral position is possible, that language itself is unavoidably inflected with particular biases and perspectives, that to express is not merely to represent, but to act, to change, and to distort. Common to the genre are semiotic analyses of advertising and interrogations of cultural objects and artifacts: ads, pieces of technology, items of popular culture are taken as metonyms -- that is, concentrated bundles which, when unpacked, reveal a certain social logic or code at work. New Historicists, far from distancing themselves from popular culture, immerse themselves in it in order to transform it from within. [show less]