Deconstruction, New Historicism and Hamlet

         In regards to the Deconstructionist approach, the article traces (or constructs) the historical evolution of deconstruction theory, elucidating its ideological and methodological debts.  In short, Deconstruction, one type of poststructuralist criticism, counterattacks Western idealism and logic.  Working from Saussere’s linguistic model of meaning, Derrida proposes that we tend to think and express our thoughts in terms of opposites, in dichotomous hierarchies that culturally prefers one half as superior.  However, the deconstructive agenda does not seek merely to invert the hierarchy, but to “explode” the values and order implied by the system of opposition, to break down the synthetic distinctions between opposed pairs that make for “meaning.”  I use the word synthetic because these terms, indeed the entire relationship between signifier and signified, is an artificial machination, as words are demonstrably not the things they name but arbitrarily associated.  Words possess “no present, positive, identifiable attributes—they have meaning only by virtue of their differences from other words,” present in the gaps or spaces between them.  Difference, a French neologism combining “to differ” and “to defer,” is proposed by Derrida as constitutional to language, “words being the deferred presence of the things they mean, and their meaning grounded in difference.”  Hence, languages undecidability (de Man), it’s apparently limitless possibility for meaning production, obliterating “not only propositions apparently opposed but also the subject/object relation.  To the deconstructionist, undecidability differs from ambiguity, a formalist and structuralist contributor to the “organic unity” of a text, centering a text, while undecidability is irreducible.

                Enter Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly amenable and useful to a deconstruction of Hamlet.  Lacanian psychoanalysis cites the crucial function of language in Freud’s theory of psyche and gender.  According to Lacan, entrance into the Oedipal stage coincides with the introduction to language as children learn the social rules that restrain or prohibit individual desire, beginning with desire for the mother.  The “acceptable” substitutes, in fact, the entire principle of substitution, depends upon a language system in which words are not the things they stand for (Cratylus); rather, arbitrarily assigned signifiers stand in or substitute conceptually for “things.”  The crisis over and subsequent adaptation to the system of names and naming occurs simultaneously with the construction of “oneself,” a fiction of coherence predicated upon a naming system perpetually destabilized.   

                Following Lacan’s interpretive scheme, the father’s refusal “to die leaves Hamlet dominated by a phallic presence the reality of which is, at the same time, uncertain.  Unable to affirm or deny the father, Hamlet becomes unable to affirm or deny the father’s word and, more broadly, the ‘Law of the Father,’ which is to say, the whole patriarchal, symbolic order of things.”  The father, a “veiled phallus” of only a name, is a signified with the signifier missing, a system of associated names, words, symbols and laws.  Hamlet, the “subject” or self, is himself a product or construct, an artifact hiding a lack, “a fiction covering an absence.”   As Garber attests, “uncanny” experiences, essentially the return of the repressed in Freudian terms, “haunt” the subject as undecidable, undermining the “subject” as a unified, sentient whole.  This notion of repetition applies to literary memory as the psychic system “deflects the representation of an initially traumatic event through repressing it, altering it, absorbing it or displacing it into something else.”  Predicting these repressions or displacements that develop akin to those experienced pathologically in the “repetition” of trauma, a text gives rise to a literary history, a social conditioning grid that initiates and fashions individuals to be functional members. 
 

                This social grid, a complex of forces Foucalt calls power, i.e., the positive and productive, moderate and elevate discourses and practices in accordance with the empowered "agenda."  New Historicism aims toward surmising the distribution of “power” and the service of ambitions that dictate the “portrayal of the past” called history.  History is a narrative, depicted in language that is protean and arbitrarily assigned value.  This inflection is to the culture, permitting one a sociohistorical vantage, a perspective that cannot achieve “objectivity” or “truth.”  In fact, the belief in the attainability and subsequent “validity” of these objectives itself has a history, a “great and powerful Oz” hid behind the curtain, permitting the individual “to see” a version that is in fact that, a version, politically and ideologically charged.  Coddon’s essay concerning the politicization of subjectivity in Hamlet seems informed by deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and Marxist approaches, demonstrating the present indeterminacy of New Historicism, its status as in flux and unasserted distinctive identity. 

                Drawing from deconstruction, Coddon portrays historical consciousness as a construction, “conditioned by our own time and place to believe it was,” the factuality of events a pious wish dependent upon reference to social modes of empowerment.  New Historicism therefore emphasizes the re-creation of what I (or somebody else probably has labeled) the “conditions of utterance,” attempting to situate, in this case the written work Hamlet, in a context that both informs and permits a “production.”  “Using  a contemporary Elizabethan diary in which Essex (the Earl of Essex, purported model for young Hamlet) is discussed, Coddon shows that in Elizabethan culture madness and ambition (especially treasonous ambition) were closely associated, tightly linked.  Essex’s mad treason is connected with the emergence of the modern concept of subjectivity from the medieval concept of the (more orderly) soul.”  Madness results for the Elizabethans from the “internalization of disobedience,” from the redefinition of reason, a reason usually tempered with subjectivity.  The monarch position, emblematic of the “patriarchal, symbolic order of things,” (noteworthy is that this post, traditionally held by a man, was occupied by a woman at the time) depended upon a uniformity of obedience to the identity of the monarch.  In the shift from medieval ecclesiastical authority to Renaissance secular authority, disordered subjectivity, an inward unfixity recruiting reason in the service of unsanctioned, i.e., “unreasonably” idiosyncratic orderings, displaces sin as the danger to the empowered authority.  “Hamlet’s crisis of subjectivity, then, is Hamlet’s crisis of authority; the ideological constructs that shape power and subjection as mutually constitutive, specifically, the ideology of inward obedience designed to bolster the pales and forts of reason, are scrutinized and exposed as ineffectual.” 

It would seem that New Historicism has temporally and culturally situated deconstruction and psychoanalysis in the Elizabethan age, identifying the continuously shifting political tectonics producing the fissures in the status quo.  Since New Historicism is “new,” the theory apparently borrows liberally from other distinct theoretical approaches.  The “responsibility” of the New Historicist, in formulating the axioms that will define it as a theoretically “cultural” enterprise, must consciously labor under realizations that they, the construers of this theory, are culturally hard-wired as well, synthesizing a critical approach “allowable” by the politics at present, an accumulated and assembled context called history.  Deconstruction contributes to interpretation of the “history of subjectivity,” or the construction of a self, outlining how the reevaluation of the self as subject to “the powers that be” fosters perpetual turmoil, as the repressed appears in attempts to reassert itself, albeit in clandestine forms. 

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