New Historicism vs. Marxism

The concept of "New Historicism vs. Marxism" as articulated in Kornbluh's text names a methodological and epistemological confrontation within film studies and cultural criticism more broadly. New Historicism, on this account, operates through the analytic values of particularism (attention to the singular, the local, the contingent), complexity (distributed, multi-causal explanations), and dispersed agency — values that resist totalizing frameworks and systemic critique. Against this, Marxist dialectics insists on contradiction, synthesis, and the capacity to hold together formal and contextual levels of analysis in a unified critical movement. The key distinction Kornbluh draws is between complexity and dialectics: complexity describes a field of interlocking variables without positing any internal motor or structural necessity, while dialectics names the immanent self-movement of contradiction within a totality — the very movement that, following Hegel, drives things to become other than themselves.

What is at stake in the contrast is not merely methodological preference but the possibility of genuine critique. New Historicism's substitution of complexity for contradiction effectively neutralizes the critical force of analysis: by distributing agency across many actors and attending to irreducible particularity, it forecloses the kind of negative, totalizing judgment that Marxist critique — understood as immanent critique — requires. Recovering dialectics means recovering the capacity to read form and context not as separate domains to be balanced but as internally related moments of a single contradictory process, legible only through the category of mediation.

This concept lives within anna-kornbluh-marxist-film-theory-and-fight-club-bloomsbury-academic-2019 as a polemical methodological argument for the recovery of Marxist dialectics in film studies. It functions as a negative foil and diagnostic: by naming what New Historicism lacks — specifically dialectics, contradiction, and synthesis — Kornbluh clears ground for the positive theoretical program that the rest of the text pursues. The concept is thus a critique-by-contrast rather than an independent theoretical object; its content is entirely relational.

With respect to the cross-referenced canonical concepts, the argument rests most heavily on Dialectics and Contradiction. New Historicism, on Kornbluh's reading, is unable to think contradiction in the strict Hegelian-Marxist sense — the idea that entities exist out of their own impossibility and that this structural antagonism is the engine of social and aesthetic form. The appeal to Form is equally central: the claim that only dialectics can integrate formalist and contextualist approaches presupposes that form is not merely a container or aesthetic surface but a historically specific social relation (the Marxist-materialist register of Form). Ideology is also implicitly at stake: New Historicism's distributed-agency model is unable to theorize ideology as a structural operation constitutive of social reality, reducing it instead to a local, contingent effect. The concept further gestures toward Immanent Critique and Mediation as the positive Marxist tools whose absence in New Historicist practice constitutes the impoverishment Kornbluh diagnoses. The Concept (Begriff) underlies the whole: New Historicism operates at the level of Understanding (Verstand), holding distinctions fixed, while dialectics operates at the level of the self-moving Concept, capable of taking its determinations back into itself.

Marxist Film Theory and Fight ClubAnna Kornbluh · 2019 (p.73)

Among all these differences between Marxists and New Historicists, the most decisive is likely the contrast between dialectics and complexity.

The formulation is theoretically loaded because it names "dialectics" and "complexity" as the decisive opposed terms — where "dialectics" carries the full Hegelian-Marxist weight of immanent contradiction and self-movement, "complexity" designates a descriptive empiricism that multiplies causes without positing any structural motor, thereby neutralizing the negative, critical force that dialectical method requires.