Methodology and New Historicism

Roundtable Methodology and New Historicism Regenia Gagnier Mary Poovey’s Making a Social Body claims to chart the development of knowledge in the period 1830-1864 by way of the disaggregation of a ‘social domain’. The social domain was associated with paupers, poverty, and poor people generally; with crime, education, the home and family and therefore women; and with health and sanitation. It was figured as a statistical aggregate, a social body, that effaced the individuality and agency of poor people, and it was gendered feminine in relation to the more masculine domains of economics and politics. Poovey concentrates in the first six essays on the emergence of this social domain in the writings of educators, policy makers, and evangelicals. In the last two essays she contrasts it with aesthetic or psychological domains that emerge in the writings of novelists. She is interested in the uneven development of these domains of knowledge and the way that the disaggregation of domains - social, economic, political, psychological, or aesthetic - produces incoherencies or irrationalities that disrupt the formations of power. She sees this ‘historical epistemology’ as moving beyond New Historicism’s ‘image of power as monolithic’ and identity politics’ assumption of rigid or essential categories of gender, class, race, etc. (19). She is not interested in ‘oppositional cultures’, like rich against poor or men against women, but in ‘rhetorical contests’ (18, 77). In the essay that best illustrates the scope of both her positive and negative interests, on domesticity and class in Edwin Chadwick’s 1842 116 Press, 1992), 147. For Pickstone’s broader mapping of the rise of‘analytical modes of science, technology and medicine, see his ‘Museological Science?’ in History of Science, xxxii (1994), 111-37. 9. Pickstone, ‘Dearth’, 140. 10. The model of failed, or incomplete, potential clearly drives the dyad of scientific anatomy and laissez-faire therapeutics. For theorists of the social body anatomy seemed to provide a stable model of universalising abstraction because it bridged the empirical/abstract chasm through conventionality, whereas the ‘contemporary medical theory’ of therapeutics presented a similarly useable and stable model for a liberalised social body. But both also had limits: there was a gap between an analyticallyself-standingbut purely descriptive (and therefore therapeutically arid) science of the body, and a practical medicine unable to dominate the therapeutic ground because its ‘knowledge about the body was still incomplete’ (86), its scientific role models having ‘yet to provide guidelines for when a doctor should intervene in the operations of organs still imperfectly understood’ (75). Making a Social Body 117 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the LabouringPopulation of Great Britain, she argues that in the Report Chadwick eliminated the workplace in his consideration of health in favour of the homes of the poor and therefore erased class as a division of labour in favour of class as culture. By gendering the home as feminised and civilised, Chadwick obscured working-class men except in relation to their families. The chapter is persuasive within the confines of its reading of Chadwick and displays the brilliant attention to textual structure that made Poovey’s U m m DmeZopments (Chicago, 1988) so impressive and instructive, but it r e p resents the ‘rhetorical contest’ as entirely one-sided. In a chapter so persuasive as this, most students will ask, well what of those workingclass men excluded by Chadwick who were in fact very active in the male organisations that empowered them? With the exception of one paragraph on the Chartists (1267), Poovey does not provide any evidence of their part in the ‘contest’, and she seems little interested in these historical peoples who also produced rhetoric of their own. Despite her claims for having moved beyond the New Historicism in her introduction, like other, less talented, New Historicists, she seems to have a romance with the prose (‘discourse’)of the dominant group, a point to which I shall return in my remarks on her methodology below. Before turning to the question of method, we should consider the main claim about the emergence of a social domain and its uneven development with other domains of economy, politics, psychology, or aesthetics. The discussions of representations of poor people (‘The Social Body’), Irish people (‘The Irish’), and the domus that make up Poovey’s social domain are illuminating and valuable, and I certainly agree that such representations contain contradictions that can weaken power structures that might otherwise be thought hegemonic. In the fifth chapter, on charisma versus bureaucracy, Poovey argues that although they were ostensibly opposed in method, charisma, represented by Thomas Chalmers’ preaching, and bureaucracy, represented by Chadwick’s New Poor Law, both consolidate what Poovey calls after Foucault ’disciplinary individualism’. In a subtle deconstructive argument, she shows that charisma tended to subject the individual to a social whole, and bureaucracy produced irrationalities and idiosyncracies that could look anarchist or individualist. While Poovey’s exposure of such cracks in the edifice of empowered discourse, or what post-Foucauldians call ‘knowledge’,is valuable and persuasive, the very porousness of these domains or bodies of knowledge suggests that we ought to be wary of too rapid assimilation to twentiethcentury categories. I would rather stress the domains’ messiness, especially in the Roundtable 118 last threequarters of the nineteenth century, and their concurrent emergence. For example, in chapter ’7, on the novelists Disraeli and Gaskell, Poovey associates a psychological domain with love, emotion, divided selves, and sympathy and says that it eventually- by the modern novel - replaced the social domain that preoccupied Disraeli and Gaskell (though Gaskell is ‘proto-psychological’). Yet ‘the psychological’ in Poovey’s sense of individual feeling, happiness, emotion, etc., was fully present in Bentham’s economics at the beginning of the century, Bain’s psychology at midcentury, and late Victorian aesthetics. Adam Smith himself had grounded the development of science in the psychological disutility of surprise and wonder (‘The History of Astronomy’). Contrary to our widespread nominalisation of adjectives (‘The Aesthetic’, ‘The Symbolic’, ‘The Social’, and so forth), my own research in the comparative histories of economics and aesthetics has rather pointed toward increasing adjectivalism: there were psychological or political economics, or there were politicaleconomic, ethical, or psychological aesthetics. Gillian Beer’s Open Fields (Oxford 1996) also makes a case for the messiness or porousness of so-called scientific and nonscientific cultures in the nineteenth century, showing how in the great generalist journals such as The Nineteenth (...truncated)