New Historicism

New Historicism, as it appears in Kornbluh's argument, is not defined as a school unto itself but is diagnosed as a symptom: the most consequential expression of a post-1989 anti-theoretical drift in the humanities away from Marxist critical theory and toward empiricist, social-scientific methodologies. Within this frame, New Historicism functions as the dominant mode through which literary and cultural studies replaced structural and ideological analysis with contextual, archival, and descriptive approaches—approaches that treat cultural objects as embedded in discrete historical conjunctures rather than as mediations of a totality shot through with contradiction and antagonism. Its empiricist orientation forecloses precisely the kind of structural gap-analysis that Lacanian-Marxist theory requires: the refusal to posit a determining social totality means that the constitutive role of ideology and mediation in producing cultural forms goes unthought.

In Kornbluh's account, New Historicism belongs to a cluster of methodological tendencies—computational humanities, the new descriptivism, postcritique—that share a common gesture: the retreat from theory as such. This retreat is itself ideologically significant. By bracketing questions of totality, antagonism, and mediation in favor of thick contextual description, New Historicism effectively naturalizes the social field it studies, leaving intact the structural coordinates of ideology. It thus performs, at the level of method, what ideology performs at the level of social reality: the suturing of the gap, the denial of the constitutive incompleteness of any social or symbolic order. The marginalization of Marxist film theory that Kornbluh diagnoses is, in this sense, not merely an intellectual fashion but a symptomatic effect of the wider post-Marxist repudiation of structural critique.

This concept appears once, in anna-kornbluh-marxist-film-theory-and-fight-club-bloomsbury-academic-2019 (p. 72), where it occupies a position within a diagnostic inventory of anti-theoretical methodological turns. Its function is essentially negative and relational: New Historicism is named as the most important among a set of contemporary tendencies that displace the Marxist capacity to think film as both aesthetic form and social practice simultaneously. This places it in direct opposition to the cross-referenced concept of Mediation — New Historicism's empiricist contextualism refuses the mediating third that would connect cultural object to social totality, instead treating the text as already exhausted by its historical surround. It equally operates against the concept of Ideology as theorized in the corpus: where Lacanian-Marxist ideology critique insists on structural non-knowledge and fantasmatic supplement, New Historicism's descriptivism implicitly treats the surface of the historical record as transparent. The concept is best understood as a specification and a concrete instantiation of the broader phenomenon Kornbluh calls Post-Marxist Repudiation — the disciplinary flight from structural antagonism and the Gap that antagonism implies. New Historicism is, in this sense, the academic-methodological face of the same ideological move that, in popular culture, manifests as capitalist realism: the foreclosure of any vantage point outside the given order from which its totality could be critically grasped. Its relation to Sublimation is more oblique but inferrable: where sublimation raises an object to the dignity of the Thing by exposing the constitutive void, New Historicism keeps the object safely embedded in context, defending against the void rather than working through it.

Marxist Film Theory and Fight ClubAnna Kornbluh · 2019 (p.72)

Trends in this vein include computational humanities, the new descriptivism, postcritique, and, most importantly, New Historicism.

The phrase "most importantly" is theoretically loaded because it assigns New Historicism a privileged, not merely incidental, role within the post-1989 anti-theoretical turn — making it the paradigm case rather than one item in a list, and thereby framing the entire cluster of empiricist "trends" as variations on the New Historicist abandonment of structural and ideological analysis. The serial enumeration ("computational humanities, the new descriptivism, postcritique, and…") performs the very descriptivism it names, only to rupture that enumeration with the hierarchical judgment "most importantly," enacting Kornbluh's broader argument that ranking and critique — not mere description — are what theory demands.