4. Ideology, criticism, history

In Lecture 1 you could read about the diverse sources of research, and the issue of the reliability of sources was raised. The task about the Wikipedia hoax served for us to see the importance of tracing back secondary sources to original primary sources, the “raw materials of research”. In this lecture you will see that often even primary sources are questionable, and may turn out to be difficult to interpret or rely on.

Let us take again the example of research on comic strips and Hamlet.

In this Calvin and Hobbes cartoon the lines “To be or not to be” are a reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so in order to interpret the cartoon itself, you may wish to interpret Hamlet, the drama it refers to, as the other primary source of your research. Perhaps you would check the whole monologue, since the cartoon includes only the first few words. Most of the readers would not even have to look up the Shakespearean drama text to continue the quotation.

Would you be able to continue the line? How does it go? How do you know that? If you wished to make sure about it, where would you check it?

Most of you would probably finish the first sentence as “… that is the question”, and this is the version you would most easily find. In an academic research, however, you do not use just any copy of a work for reference, but rather critical editions of literary texts.

There are several critical editions of Shakespeare’s texts, for example the Arden or the Riverside editions. Having a look at the monologue in question in one of these you would find that the version of the second part of the quotation “…that is the question” is actually one of the extant versions. There is another version which continues “… I, there’s the point”! The version we have in mind and find in most versions of the drama (“…that is the question”) is a “creation” of subsequent editors of the drama. Since it reflects their decision, it cannot be taken as the ultimate and authoritative version of the text by Shakespeare. The other, lesser known version was regarded as a corrupt, “bad” version for centuries, but recently that label has been challenged, mainly as a result of a paradigm change in textual criticism – a branch of philology, discussed in more detail in Part 2.

Thus, as you can see, even established primary sources may be questioned, while the authoritative versions in critical editions are results of scholarly research and debate.

The above example shows how looking critically at primary sources is essential – “raw materials” of research that may seem solid facts turn out to be cultural products themselves, since suggest facts as they are understood in a certain way. This does not apply only to textual sources, for example historical sources such as annals or chronicles, but anything that serves as a source of information, even archeological findings. In this sense each data item is potentially fictionalized, once we attribute a certain meaning and significance to them.

Think of the comparison we made between Aldrovandi’s perspective of “serpents and dragons” and ours! What are the objects studied in the quoted chapters that would come under different rubrics in a present day study, and which are the ones that would not be identified as scientific problems?

Hans Georg Gadamer, the German philosopher deals with the perspective of the historian as a decisive factor in identifying problems of study. In his essay entitled “On the Problem of Self-Understanding” (1962) he writes the following: “Something of the historicity of the historian’s own understanding is already at work in his choice of objects and in the rubric under which he places the object as a historical problem.”

Can you apply the term “historicity of the historian’s understanding” in a broad sense as “the historicity of the researcher’s understanding” to the examples mentioned so far? Think about the choice of objects of study and the differences between Aldrovandi’s approach and ours! His chapters can be understood as “rubrics” under which he places the things he describes – as we have seen, these have changed significantly since his time.

So whatever the subject of our research may be, the way we understand it will be influenced by our own perspective which, in turn, is influenced by external factors, such as the “paradigm” governing our understanding in a historical moment. This is important for English studies since history is a lens through which we approach topics we deal with, be it the English language, or works written in it, or the English speaking people or communities and their culture. All these exist in history, and their interpretations are conducted from specific historical perspectives.

Read the following monologue from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and try to answer the following questions: What does this passage suggest, what is it that defines the perspectives of an individual throughout their lives? Is there a perspective (implicit or explicit) included in the passage that is unchanging – if the world is a stage, who is watching?

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms;
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin'd,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav'd, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."

Jacques’s monologue from As You Like It (2.2. 139-166)

Similarly to Gadamer’s quote about the historicity of the historian’s understanding, in this example too there is something external that defines the understanding of the human being. While in the previous case it was the historical setting, the passage suggests that the perspectives of humans are defined throughout their lives by their age. This was a conventional rhetorical figure, a topos in Shakespeare’s time, called “the seven ages of man”, and in the passage it is combined with another topos, that of the play metaphor, according to which the world is identical to a stage, and humans are actors in a play. The ages of man are the roles or the positions that are offered to humans.

The roles and positions of humans offered within a certain historical setting can be described and understood by what is called ideology.

Later on in this book you will read more about critical schools and approaches that analyze texts and their function in their social and historical context, such as New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Feminism, Postcolonialism or Poststructuralism. These schools are interested in the way texts reflect on, support or contest their ideological context. Such an approach is called political – not in the sense of daily politics, but rather meaning the various opinions and differences of interest that manifest themselves in the texts.

How are these differences traceable in texts? Let us take, for example, the passage quoted above, starting with “All the world’s a stage” from As You Like It. The meaning of this topos was based on a religious world view, according to which our life on the earthly stage is transitory, a mere vanity as opposed to a divine eternity, in which humans share in life after death. The connotations of the earthly stage in this metaphor are negative (humans are trapped in these transitory roles, and our whole life is vanity), but since the monologue is spoken on a stage in a theatre, it is unlikely that the theatre would speak about itself in negative terms, it rather sees itself as a stage of opportunities and creative playing. This understanding – as opposed to Jacques’ opinion – is also presented in the play, exemplified by one of the protagonists, Rosalind, who manages to reach her goals through role play of her own choice (dressing as a man), making her life similar to a “stage” or theatre by decision. Jacques’s and Rosalind’s contradicting understandings of the play metaphor do not reflect mere subjective differences of opinions, but rather conflicting world views in Shakespeare’s time, that had very different understandings not only about the value of the theatre as an institution, but also about the propriety of the self-realization of a human individual. In this sense we can say that culture is recognized as an arena of conflicts, and the differences are reflected in the texts of a given cultural setting, just like Shakespeare’s drama presents contemporary questions or debates in the intellectual arena of his time.

Several theorists have dealt with the way in which individual roles and opinions in a society are shaped by dominant ideological systems, and the way they are controlled by institutions in power. The fact that Copernicus’ treatise was banned by the church because it was thought to challenge some basic religious teachings (for example the idea that the Earth is in the center of the physical universe) is an instance of an institution trying to control people’s world view and also to maintain its own authority. A detailed interpretation about the ways meanings in society are controlled is given by Michel Foucault, a French theorist. He claims that this control is realized through what he terms as power technologies, which work through institutionalizing fields of discourses in a society. By discourse he means communicative practices expressing the interests of a particular socio-historical group or institution. Remaining with the Copernican example, the communicative practices would be the ways in which the treatise was banned (How is the ban realized done exactly? Who has the right to do this, and how is the ban proclaimed? How are trespasses sanctioned?) As a result of the ban, Galileo Galilei, a supporter of the Copernican theory, was sentenced to life imprisonment for his views. In Foucault’s understanding history is a disconnected range of epistemes, or discursive practices, rules and procedures governing writing and thinking – think of the definition of epistemology given above. Another influential thinker dealing with the way pre-give structures constitute the human subject is Louis Althusser. He terms the mechanism constituting these structures interpellation. In his understanding each member of society is assigned a variety of roles depending on the contexts in which she or he operates. Each of us is addressed by various institutions and thereby takes up a variety of subject positions – similarly to the logic of Jacques’ seven ages of man. Althusser calls these institutions state apparatuses, and distinguishes between two types: Ideological State Apparatuses: law religion, politics and education, and Repressive state Apparatuses: police and the military. The term “speaking subject” indicates that our opinion, our thinking is always filtered through a given persona/role.

A dynamic model of ideology is offered by the British theorist Raymond Williams, who distinguishes between three phases of ideological development. The dominant expresses the socially privileged and central ways of seeing and saying of its age: the dominant discourses in the present. The residual ways of saying and seeing are ones that were central but have now been superseded. These are often the dominant discourses of the past. The emergent discourses are embryonic growth points which exist only as half-formed potential but which may be perceived as the dominant discourses of the future. The Copernican understanding of the universe was emergent when it appeared, it took about a century until it was widely accepted and became dominant, but even then the Ptolemaic system was not fully discarded by all for a while: it was a residual discourse of the past.

A model of competing discourses was introduced by Stephen Greenblatt, the American critic, according to whom dominant discourses generate their own opposites called subversion. Containment refers to the control or neutralization of subversion. According to a ‘safety valve’ theory if social tension is released, control is easier to keep. Controlled subversion, such as carnival (a time for licensed social misrule) contributes to the containment and neutralization of potentially subversive forces. Containment can also be understood as counter-subversion.