8.5 Negotiation

Definition of Negotiation

Within New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, negotiation refers to the ongoing process by which cultural meanings, power relations, and social identities are produced, contested, and transformed through discourse and representation. This concept, most associated with Stephen Greenblatt, describes how literary texts don't simply reflect a fixed social reality but actively participate in the exchange and reworking of social energies, ideologies, and authority.

Negotiation in this theoretical sense is distinct from its everyday meaning. Rather than two people haggling over a price, it describes the way texts and cultural practices mediate between competing interests, absorb subversive energies, and redistribute power. Understanding negotiation is central to grasping how New Historicists read literature as embedded in, and actively shaping, the political and cultural dynamics of its moment.

Negotiation as a Cultural Process

Greenblatt introduced the concept of negotiation to describe how literary and artistic works participate in what he calls the "circulation of social energy." Texts don't passively mirror their historical context. They actively negotiate with the discourses, institutions, and power structures around them.

This means a Renaissance play, for example, might borrow the language of royal authority, rework it for theatrical purposes, and in doing so subtly alter how that authority is understood by its audience. The text is engaged in a transaction: it takes something from the culture and gives something back, but what it returns is never identical to what it received.

• Negotiation involves the exchange between literary texts and the social forces that surround them
• Texts absorb, redirect, and sometimes contain subversive ideas while also reinforcing dominant ideologies
• The process is never one-directional: culture shapes texts, and texts reshape culture

Negotiation vs. Reflection

A key reason New Historicists emphasize negotiation is to challenge older models of literary analysis that treated texts as simple reflections of their era. The reflection model assumes literature is a mirror held up to society. Negotiation, by contrast, treats literature as an active agent.

This distinction matters because it changes what critics look for. Instead of asking "What does this text tell us about Elizabethan England?" a New Historicist asks "What cultural work is this text doing? What social energies does it negotiate, and to what effect?"

Key Elements of Negotiation in New Historicism

Three interrelated concepts help clarify how negotiation operates in New Historicist analysis: subversion, containment, and the circulation of social energy.

Subversion and Containment

Greenblatt's most influential argument about negotiation concerns the relationship between subversion and containment. Texts often give voice to ideas that challenge authority, but the very act of staging those challenges can serve to contain them.

• Subversion refers to moments in a text where dominant ideologies, hierarchies, or power structures are questioned or undermined
• Containment refers to the way those subversive energies are ultimately absorbed, neutralized, or redirected to reinforce the existing order
• The negotiation between subversion and containment is rarely total in either direction; most texts exist in tension between the two

Shakespeare's The Tempest is a frequently cited example. Caliban's resistance to Prospero's authority voices genuine anti-colonial sentiment, but the play's resolution reasserts Prospero's control. The text negotiates between these forces without fully resolving the tension.

Circulation of Social Energy

Greenblatt's concept of social energy describes the vitality, emotional force, and cultural power that circulate through a society's practices, rituals, and representations. Literary texts participate in this circulation by borrowing energy from non-literary sources (trials, sermons, royal ceremonies, popular festivals) and channeling it into new forms.

Negotiation is the mechanism through which this circulation happens. A playwright doesn't simply copy a public execution into a stage scene. The theatrical representation transforms the original event, negotiating its meaning for a different context and audience.

• Social energy is not fixed or owned by any single institution; it moves across boundaries between the literary and the non-literary
• Texts gain their power partly by tapping into energies already circulating in the culture
• The negotiation involved in this transfer always produces something new, not a mere copy

The Role of Institutions

Negotiation never happens in a vacuum. Institutions such as the church, the state, the theater, the publishing industry, and the university all shape the terms on which cultural negotiation takes place.

• Institutions set the boundaries of what can be said, performed, or published
• Texts negotiate within these institutional constraints, sometimes pushing against them, sometimes reinforcing them
• Censorship, patronage, and market forces are all part of the negotiating context that New Historicists examine

Negotiation in Cultural Materialism

Cultural Materialists, particularly Raymond Williams and Jonathan Dollimore, share the New Historicist interest in negotiation but approach it with different emphases and political commitments.

Dominant, Residual, and Emergent Cultures

Williams's framework of dominant, residual, and emergent cultural formations provides another way to understand negotiation. The dominant culture constantly negotiates with residual elements (older values and practices that persist) and emergent elements (new meanings and practices that challenge the status quo).

• Dominant culture works to incorporate or marginalize both residual and emergent alternatives
• Residual elements can be either oppositional or easily absorbed into the dominant order
• Emergent elements are the most threatening to the dominant culture because they represent genuinely new possibilities

This framework treats negotiation as an ongoing, never-settled process. The dominant culture can never fully eliminate alternatives; it can only manage them through continuous negotiation.

Dollimore's Radical Readings

Jonathan Dollimore pushed back against Greenblatt's emphasis on containment, arguing that New Historicism sometimes overstates the power of dominant ideologies to absorb subversion. For Dollimore, negotiation is a more genuinely contested process, and texts can carry real disruptive potential that isn't always successfully contained.

This difference in emphasis reflects a broader political distinction: Cultural Materialism is more explicitly committed to using literary analysis for progressive political ends.

Applying Negotiation to Textual Analysis

When you use negotiation as an analytical tool, you're looking at how a text manages competing cultural forces. Here's a practical approach:

1. Identify the cultural energies at play. What social tensions, power struggles, or ideological conflicts does the text engage with? Look at the historical moment of the text's production.
2. Locate moments of subversion. Where does the text give voice to marginalized perspectives, challenge authority, or question dominant assumptions?
3. Examine containment strategies. How does the text manage or neutralize those subversive elements? Does the plot resolution reassert order? Does the narrative frame discredit the subversive voice?
4. Assess the negotiation's outcome. Is the tension fully resolved, or does it remain open? What cultural work does this negotiation perform for its original audience?
5. Consider institutional context. What constraints (censorship, patronage, genre conventions, market pressures) shaped the terms of this negotiation?

Examples in Literary Texts

Shakespeare's Henry V: The play negotiates between glorifying English nationalism and exposing the human costs of war. Scenes like the soldiers' debate before Agincourt voice genuine doubts about royal authority, but the play's overall structure channels those doubts back into a celebration of Henry's kingship. Greenblatt reads this as a case where subversion is produced by, and ultimately serves, the interests of power.

Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: This text negotiates between anti-slavery sentiment and the colonial assumptions of its Restoration-era audience. Oroonoko is presented as noble and sympathetic, yet the narrative framework still operates within a colonial worldview. The negotiation here is particularly unstable, which is part of what makes the text so productive for New Historicist analysis.

Postcolonial literature frequently stages negotiations between indigenous and colonial cultures, between local traditions and imposed Western values. Writers like Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie make the process of cultural negotiation itself a central subject of their work.

Negotiation in Literary Criticism

Literary criticism can itself be understood as a form of negotiation. Scholars negotiate between competing interpretive frameworks, between the text's historical context and present-day concerns, and between their own political commitments and the demands of evidence-based argument.

• New Historicist and Cultural Materialist critics negotiate the meaning of texts by placing them alongside non-literary documents (legal records, medical treatises, travel narratives) to reveal connections that traditional literary analysis might miss
• The choice of which "non-literary" texts to place alongside a literary work is itself a negotiation that shapes the interpretation
• Critics also negotiate with earlier readings of a text, challenging or building on previous scholarship

Common Misunderstandings

Negotiation is not compromise. In everyday usage, negotiation implies two parties meeting in the middle. In New Historicist theory, negotiation describes a dynamic, often unequal process where power relations shape the outcome. The "parties" are not individuals but cultural forces, discourses, and institutions.

Negotiation is not intentional. Authors don't consciously decide to negotiate with cultural forces. The negotiation happens through the text's engagement with the discourses available in its historical moment. It's a structural process, not a deliberate strategy.

Containment doesn't mean the subversion was fake. Even when subversive energies are contained, they were real and had real effects on audiences. The question is not whether subversion exists but what happens to it within the larger cultural system.