I Hear Dead People

Perhaps it is simply a result of coming down off the post Halloween candy high, but I truly enjoyed the Greenblatt reading and Barry's analysis of new historicism which outlined Greenblatt's connections to and creation of that perspective.

The understanding of the concept of power in not only as "object" but "enabling condition of representation itself" was interesting considering that it was followed by a caution to not oversimplify the concept of power itself. Both princes and artists may have had aims for the use of this power, but the very monolithic structures that seemed to "totalize" the production of such works were filled with instability and contention: less the monolith and more the cultural Jello. This impresses me as a basic premise of Marxism. The rise and fall of structures of powers creating a new struggle for class within the reformed structures. Barry refers to this a "multiplicity of discourses" involved in the operation of power structures (170).

In the Greenblatt reading, the depiction of language as "the supreme instance of collective creation" that had been appropriated by a professional caste system claiming the exclusive rights to interpretation and dissemination was fascinating. Along with that, the image of the theater and plays as a means to reclaim that collective, communal sharing of language created an interesting link to humanist thought and to the discussion social energy as that force which keeps a work alive long after the death of the author and the demise of the historical/cultural milieu in which it was birthed. Perhaps I am still locked into last week's discussion of alchemy and the magic of Bourdieu, but all of that sounds like high spell-casting to me. The hard edges of actual history are softened because as Barry states, "for the aim is not to represent the past as it truly was, but to present a new reality by re-situating it (169)." The dead may not simply speak to us, but they may speak in new voices and with new messages.