The Theoretical Origins and Characteristics of the Heterogeneous Dimension in New Historicist Criticism

The concept of “universality” on which traditional historicism relied generally corresponds to the concepts of “particularity” or “difference,” whereas New Historicism leans more toward using “heterogeneity” to replace “particularity” and “difference.” The thought of heterogeneity arose in France, and its influence permeated the entire Western world, widely existing across multiple fields such as contemporary Western philosophy, linguistics, and cultural studies. Kristeva, Bataille, Roland Barthes, Foucault, de Certeau, and others all elaborated on and applied the concept of heterogeneity from different angles. For New Historicism as a school of literary criticism, the heterogeneous features presented in its theory were mainly influenced by Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau. Although the heterogeneous thought of Foucault and de Certeau each had different tendencies in specific views, the impact they exerted on New Historicism was convergent in macroscopic orientation. They jointly pointed toward a heterogeneous view of history, a heterogeneous view of power-discourse, and a constructivist method centered on the “other.” These three aspects exerted either overt or covert influence on the entire New Historicist camp, so the practice of New Historicists overall also displayed a theoretical characteristic belonging to heterology. And all of this is inseparable from the understanding of “the heterogeneous,” because the starting point of New Historicist thinking, like that of Foucault and de Certeau, began with the modern experience that “all that is solid melts into air”: the world they experienced was no longer unified and controllable, but divided into two forces—the subject and the heterogeneous—and was the product of the interweaving of various discourses.

传统历史主义所凭依的“普遍性”概念一般对应的是“特殊性”或“差异性”概念，新历史主义则更偏向用“异质性”（heterogeneity）来代替“特殊性”和“差异性”。“异质性”思想兴起于法国，其影响渗透于整个西方世界，广泛存在于当代西方哲学、语言学、文化研究等多个领域，克里斯蒂娃、巴塔耶、罗兰·巴特、福柯、塞尔托等人，都从不同角度阐述和应用了“异质性”概念。对于作为一种文学批评流派的新历史主义来说，其理论中呈现的异质性特征主要受到了福柯（Michel Foucault）和塞尔托（Michel de Certeau）的影响。虽然福柯和塞尔托二人的异质性思想在具体观点上各有不同的倾向，但对新历史主义产生的影响在宏观的导向上是相通的，他们共同指向了异质性的历史观、异质性的权力话语观以及以“他者”为中心的建构主义方法。这三个方面对整个新历史主义阵营都产生了或显或隐的影响，因此新历史主义者的实践总体也呈现出了一种属于异质学的理论特征。而这一切都离不开对“异质”的认识，因为新历史主义思考的起点和福柯、塞尔托一样，始于“一切坚固的东西都烟消云散了”的现代性体验：他们所经验到的世界不再是整一的、可控的，而是分为主体和异质两种力量，是各种话语交织的产物。

I. A Heterogeneous View of History

一、异质性的历史观

The newness of New Historicism lies first in its view of history. Its representative figures all attempt to promote a shift from universal history to heterogeneous history, trying to transform the singular history of the past into plural histories. In the traditional view of history, history is often seen as a single, coherent, linear process of development, with a clear starting point, endpoint, and fixed trajectory. This view of history tends to regard historical events as part of a single overarching story, within which there exist clear causal relationships and deterministic logic. Both Foucault and de Certeau profoundly questioned the continuity and unity of the traditional view of history. Foucault believed that history is not composed of a series of linearly developing events, but is full of ruptures and mutations. Using the method of the archaeology of knowledge, he revealed the transformations of epistemes in different historical periods, thereby challenging the concept of continuous historical progress: “We must question those ready-made syntheses, those groupings that we normally accept before any examination, those links that are taken as valid from the start.” At the same time, Foucault also recognized the multidimensionality and complexity of history. He believed that history is a complex network woven from multiple discourses and practices, which have different forms of expression and modes of operation in different historical periods and social contexts. De Certeau was similarly skeptical of the grand narratives of history. He believed that history is not always as clear and coherent as traditional historical books describe, but is full of obscured and forgotten corners. He argued that “historiography is founded on the basis of a radical break between the past and the present,” so historiography is also a heterology, a discourse about the other. His focus, from the perspective of historical writing, was to point out that historical narration is often influenced by multiple factors, including the historian’s subjective consciousness, power relations, and so on; therefore, the presentation of history is not objectively true, but full of subjectivity and selectivity. It was precisely these historical ideas that were integrated into New Historicist criticism, forming the following points of consensus: (1) New Historicism emphasizes a pluralistic perspective on history, believing that history is not a single linear process of development, but a complex network interwoven by multiple forces, factors, and perspectives. (2) New Historicism holds that history is fragmented, full of contingency and uncertainty. For a New Historicist, the development of history is not due to the manifestation of universality in time, but to historical contingency. (3) New Historicism no longer adopts a single deductive logic, but favors a logic of figuration capable of generating rich associations, thereby both revealing the multiplicity of meaning and the heterogeneity of texts, while also allowing structuralism and formalism to achieve a certain degree of continuation from this point.

新历史主义之新首先新在历史观上，其代表人物都试图推动由普遍性历史到异质性历史的转变，试图将过去单数的历史变成复数的历史。在传统的历史观中，历史往往被看作是一个单一、连贯、线性的发展过程，具有明确的起点、终点和固定的轨迹。这种历史观倾向于将历史事件视为一个整体故事的一部分，其中存在着明确的因果关系和决定论逻辑。而福柯和塞尔托都深刻质疑了传统历史观的连续性与统一性。福柯认为，历史并非是由一系列线性发展的事件构成，而是充满了断裂和突变。他运用知识考古学的方法揭示了不同历史时期知识型的转变，从而挑战了历史的连续进步观念：“我们必须质疑那些现成的综合、那些我们在任何审查之前通常接受的分组、那些从一开始就被认为有效的联系。”与此同时，福柯也认识到历史的多维性和复杂性。他认为，历史是由多种话语和实践交织而成的复杂网络，这些话语和实践在不同的历史时期和社会背景下具有不同的表现形式和作用方式。塞尔托也同样对历史的宏大叙事持怀疑态度。他认为历史并非总是如传统史书所描述的那样清晰、连贯，而是充满了被遮蔽、被遗忘的角落。他认为，“史学建立在过去与现在彻底断裂的基础之上”，因此史学也是一种异质学，一种关于他者的话语。他的重点是从历史书写的角度出发，指出历史叙述往往受到多种因素的影响，包括历史学家的主观意识、权力关系等，因此历史的呈现并非客观真实，而是充满了主观性和选择性。正是这些历史思想融入了新历史主义的批评中，使其形成了如下几点共识：（1）新历史主义强调历史的多元视角，认为历史不是单一线性的发展过程，而是由多种力量、因素和视角交织而成的复杂网络。（2）新历史主义认为历史是碎片化的，充满了偶然性和不确定性。对于一个新历史主义者来说，历史的发展不是由于普遍性在时间中的显现，而是由于历史的偶然性。（3）新历史主义不再采取单一的演绎逻辑，而是青睐于能够产生丰富联想的比喻逻辑，以此既揭示意义的多样性和文本的异质性，同时也使结构主义和形式主义从这里得到某种程度的延续。

(1) Discontinuous History

（一）非连续性的历史

One of Foucault’s core contributions to contemporary historical research is his recognition of and opposition to the tendency of continuous narratives that project the present onto the past. He countered this tendency by positing the concept of a fundamental rupture between historical epistemes. He proposed: “Discontinuity—the fact that within the space of a few years a culture sometimes ceases to think as it had been thinking up till then and begins to think other things in a new way—probably begins to erode the external certainty of the historian.” He refused to seek continuity in the preceding era; he tried to allow the heterogeneity and difference within discourse to emerge and be articulated: “What must be described and individualized is the coexistence of these dispersed and heterogeneous statements; the system that governs their division, the degree of their mutual dependence, the way they interweave or exclude each other, the transformations they undergo, and the play of their positions, arrangements, and substitutions.” This is to collapse the capitalized, singular history and to allow numerous “small histories” to shine and radiate under the premise of discontinuous understanding.

福柯对当代历史研究的核心贡献之一，是承认并努力反对将现在投射到过去的连续性叙事倾向，他通过假设历史认识论之间的根本决裂的概念来对抗这种趋势。他提出：“不连续性曾是历史学家负责从历史中删掉的零落时间的印迹，而今不连续性却成了历史分析的基本成分之一。”他拒绝在前一个时代中寻找连续性，他试图让话语中的异质性和差异性显现出来得到言说：“必须描述和个性化的是这些分散和异质的陈述的共存；支配它们划分的系统，它们相互依赖的程度，它们相互交织或排斥的方式，它们所经历的转变，以及它们的位置、排列和替换的游戏。”这就是让大写的、唯一的历史坍塌，使众多的“小历史”在断续性的认识前提下发光发热。

Hayden White had already begun studying Foucault’s works and had written several articles on Foucault before other American scholars paid attention to him. As early as 1966, in his essay “The Burden of History,” White advocated: “We need a history that will educate us to discontinuity more than ever before; for discontinuity, disruption, and chaos is our lot.” After this, he began to conceive *Metahistory*, and in that book he cited Foucault’s works in many places. In the same year *Metahistory* was published, White also published the essay “Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground,” which corroborated his borrowing of Foucault’s four epistemes for his own four modes of figuration. White believed that Foucault’s concept of four epistemes was correct and “enlightening.” “All knowledge systems originate in a metaphorical description of the unknown by means of the known, or at least the familiar.” And Foucault’s study of the human sciences in the sixteenth century was precisely to endow these sciences with metaphorical modes, “to map or encode the empirical world of that time.” Foucault used the innovative concept of “episteme” to describe the fundamental structure of the generation, evolution, and manifestation of knowledge in a specific era; this concept is dynamic, continuously evolving with the historical process. Like Foucault, White strove to reveal the dominant schemas or deep structures within complex discursive practices. Inspired by Foucault’s archaeological method, White, in *Metahistory*, used four linguistic tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony) to analogize and explain four modes of historical consciousness, explaining how historical consciousness had undergone rupture and mutation since the nineteenth century.

怀特（Hayden White）在美国其他学者尚未重视福柯的时候，已经开始研读福柯的著作，并著有多篇关于福柯的文章。早在1966年，怀特在《历史的负担》一文中就发出倡导：“我们需要一种比以往任何时候都更能教育我们认识不连续性、断裂性和混乱性的历史，因为这些正是我们的宿命。”这之后，他开始构思《元史学》，并在书中多处引用了福柯的著作。怀特在《元史学》出版的同年，还发表了《解码福柯：地下笔记》一文，佐证了他的四种比喻模式对福柯四种认识型的借鉴。怀特认为福柯的四种认识型观念是正确的，“具有启蒙意义的”。 “一切知识体系都起源于用已知的、至少是熟悉的东西对未知进行隐喻的描述。”而福柯对16世纪人文科学的研究，就是将隐喻方式赋予这些科学，“为当时的经验世界绘图或编码”。福柯用创新性的“知识型”（épistémè）概念描述特定时代知识生成、演变及展现的根本架构，这个概念具有动态性，随历史进程而持续演变。怀特与福柯一样都在努力揭示复杂话语实践中的主导性图式或深层结构。受福柯考古学方法的启发，怀特在《元史学》中用语言学中的四种规则（隐喻、转喻、提喻、反讽）来类比和解释历史意识的四种模式，解释了历史意识自19世纪以来是如何发生断裂和变异的。

White believes that Foucault, like the nineteenth-century historians he studied, was “a captive of figurative interpretive strategies.” This is of course not pejorative; in fact, White highly approves of Foucault’s elaboration of figurative modes, holding that Foucault simply failed to realize that “the categories he used to analyze the history of the human sciences were in fact merely formalizations of tropes.” White himself began to have a clear awareness of this, saying: “You can connect sentences together logically, or you can do it by means of tropology. The reason it is tropology is that you need a theory of swerve, a theory of systematic deviation from logical expectation. This is what makes narrative fascinating. It is not governed by the rules of strict logical deduction. So I turned to rhetorical theory, because I believe rhetoric provides a theory of improvisational discourse.” White offers a different mode of argumentation, replacing logical deduction with tropes, which changes the way history is written and allows the literariness of history to produce unexpected effects: “I think it is more fruitful to understand the acts of converting a set of events into a series, a series into a sequence, a sequence into a chronicle, and a chronicle into a narrative work as tropological rather than logico-deductive.” In the first half of the twentieth century, Hempel proposed the “deductive-nomological model,” which had a broad influence on historiography. This model holds that scientific explanation should be based on universal laws and use these laws to predict the occurrence of specific events. White’s tropological theory is precisely a countermeasure to this. What is called “tropology” is a kind of tropology, which White uses to explore the basic figurative forms in historical narrative, as well as the plot effects, explanatory functions, and ideological content that arise from them.

怀特认为，福柯和他所研究的19世纪的历史学家一样，是“比喻性解释策略的俘虏”。当然这并不是贬义的，事实上，怀特非常认可福柯对比喻模式的阐发，他认为福柯只是没有意识到“其用来分析人文科学史的范畴其实只是一些比喻的形式化而已”。而怀特对此开始有了清晰的认识，他说：“你可以用逻辑将句子连在一起，或者你也可以用比喻学的方法来做到这一点。之所以是比喻学，那是因为你需要一套有关偏转（swerve）的理论，一套对于逻辑期望的系统化偏离的理论。这就是叙事让人着迷之处。它不会被严格的逻辑推演的规则所支配。于是我转向了修辞理论，因为我相信修辞学提供了即兴话语（improvisational discourse）的理论。”怀特提供了一种不同的论证方式，即用比喻取代逻辑推演，这改变了历史写作的方式，让历史的文学性发挥了意想不到的奇效：“一组事件转换成一个系列，系列又转换成序列，序列转换成编年史，编年史转换成叙事作品，我认为，这些行为理解成比喻性的而非逻辑—演绎性的会更有益。” 20世纪上半叶，亨普尔曾提出对历史学影响颇广的“演绎—定律论模式”，这种模式认为，科学解释应当建立在普遍规律的基础上，并通过这些规律来预测具体事件的发生。而怀特转义理论正是对此的反拨，所谓“转义”（Tropology）就是一种比喻学，怀特以此来探讨历史叙述中的基本比喻形式，以及由此产生的情节效果、解释功能和意识形态内容。

For Louis Adrian Montrose and most New Historicists, it is their recognition and practice of Foucault’s thought that makes them regarded as “Foucaultians.” They excavate the content of “counterhistories,” because “this content reveals the slippages, fissures, fault lines, and surprising absences within the grand structures dominated by more traditional historicism.” Montrose, in his article “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture,” written for the collection *The New Historicism* (1989) edited by H. Aram Veeser, proposes that the characteristic of various modes of poststructuralist historical critique is precisely the realization of a shift from “history in the singular” to “histories in the plural.” This shift reveals the evolution of the concept of history, from a single macro-perspective to a focus on pluralistic, concrete historical events. This conception of history responds to Foucault’s following work: “to elaborate the various concepts that make discontinuity thinkable (thresholds, ruptures, breaks, mutations, transformations).” According to Ankersmit, like Foucault, the most important move by which New Historicism distances itself from traditional historicism is its rejection of “metaphysical additions.” But New Historicism is not entirely detached from historicism. On the contrary, its aim is to rescue historicism from the metaphysical realism that undermined the older version of historicism. New Historicism seeks to become a newer, more authentic version of historicism, that is, a heterogeneous version adapted to the postmodern condition and capable of constructing reality from within that condition.

就蒙特洛斯（Louis Adrian Montrose）和大部分新历史主义者来说，正是对福柯思想的认可和实践使他们被视为“福柯主义者”（foucaultian）。他们挖掘的是“反历史”（counterhistories）的内容，因为“这些内容揭示了更为传统的历史主义所主导的巨大结构中存在的滑动、裂痕、断层线以及令人惊讶的缺失”。蒙特洛斯为威瑟（H .Aram. Veeser）编辑的集刊《新历史主义》（The New Historicism, 1989）专门撰写了《正在经历的文艺复兴：文化的诗学与政治》（“Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture”），提出后结构主义历史批判的各种模式的特点，正是实现了从“单数历史”向“复数历史”的转变。这种转变揭示了历史观念的演进，从单一宏观视角转变为对多元化、具体历史事件的关注。这种历史观念回应着福柯的如下工作：“阐述那些使人联想到不连续性的各种不同概念（界限、决裂、分割、变化、转化）。”根据安克施密特的说法，和福柯一样，新历史主义远离传统历史主义最重要的举措是拒绝了“形而上学附加物”。但新历史主义并非完全脱离了历史主义。相反，它的目的是将历史主义从形而上学的现实主义中拯救出来，而这种现实主义破坏了旧版本的历史主义。新历史主义想要成为一种更新、更真实的历史主义版本，即适应后现代状况、能够从这种状况中建构现实的异质化版本。

(II) The Other of Historical Writing

（二）历史书写的他者

The question of history and writing is an important component of de Certeau’s thought. De Certeau believes that history is a series of relative distances, which are established over time in relation to texts. Historiography is fundamentally a kind of “heterology,” concerned not only with the recording of historical facts but also with the rules and codes of poetics. He emphasizes that historical writing is a practice, a process that includes the act of production. Two major issues in his historical thought have had a significant influence on the historical conception of New Historicist literary theory: one is the question of dialogue between the past and the present; the other is the relationship between literature and history.

历史与书写的问题是塞尔托思想中的一个重要组成部分。塞尔托认为历史是一系列相对的距离，这些距离是随着时间的推移在与文本的关系中确立的。而历史学基本上是一种“异质学”，不仅关乎历史事实的记录，也关乎诗学的规则和符码。他强调历史写作是一种实践，是一个包含生产行为的过程。他的历史思想中有两个最主要的问题，对新历史主义文论的历史观念产生了很大影响：一个是过去与现在的对话问题，一个是文学与历史的关系问题。

Stephen Greenblatt’s analysis of the dialogic relationship between the past and the present is, to a large extent, similar to de Certeau’s analysis. In de Certeau’s view, modern Western history begins with the differentiation of the past from the present. Only when the present separates from the past, and the past becomes the time of the “other,” can the writing of history begin; historiographical practice is built upon a continuous dialogue between the past and the present. Greenblatt also recognizes that the order of the present derives from the othering of the past. He believes that traditional historicism tends toward monism, avoids all value judgments, and adopts a reverential attitude toward the past or tradition; traditional historicists reduce historical periods to a single, homogeneous tradition and regard the conclusions they draw from their research as historical facts, rather than as products of the historian’s imagination. New Historicists resolutely oppose historicism in whatever definition. In response to this method, Greenblatt proposes a dialogic method of reading and writing: it considers not only the richness of the heterogeneity of the past but also the historicity of the author. On the one hand, the past is internally filled with complex dialogues; on the other hand, the researcher themselves are also in dialogue with the past. Therefore, Greenblatt’s research on the early modern period focuses not only on the impact of past events on their own time but also includes reflections on various phenomena of the present.

格林布拉特（Stephen Greenblatt）对过去与现在之间对话关系的分析，在很大程度上与塞尔托的分析相似。在塞尔托看来，现代西方的历史始于过去与现在的分化，只有当现在与过去分开时，过去成为“他者”的时间时，历史的书写才能开始，历史学实践是建立在过去与现在的持续对话之上的。格林布拉特也认识到现在的秩序来自于过去的他者化。他认为，传统的历史主义倾向于一元论，避免所有价值判断，对过去或传统持崇敬的态度；传统的历史主义者将历史时期简化为单一的、同质的传统，并认为他们在研究中得出的结论是历史事实，而不是历史学家的想象产物。无论哪种定义上的历史主义，新历史主义者都是坚决反对的。针对这种方法，格林布拉特提出了一种对话式的阅读—写作方法：不仅考虑过去异质性的丰富性，还考虑作者的历史性。一方面，过去内部充斥着复杂的对话，另一方面，研究者自身也在与过去进行对话。因此，格林布拉特对于早期现代时期的研究，不仅关注过去事件对当时造成的影响，也包含了对当下各种现象的反思。

In the West, the view of history is closely related to the view of death. The word “death” both embodies the figuration of the past as heterogeneous time and deeply contains the distress that death causes to all people in Western religion. In *The Writing of History* (L’écriture de l’histoire, 1975), Certeau used Alphonse Dupront’s words to illustrate his core argument: “The sole quest for the ‘meaning’ of history remains the quest for the ‘other’ … Its goal is to appease the dead who still haunt the present and to offer them a written tomb.” The first half of this sentence is the substance of historical writing; the second half is his other main thesis, namely the relationship between the historian and “death.” The historian both presupposes death and fights against it. “Writing is to confront the death that occupies this position, to make death manifest by representing the connection between present time and past time, and to fight against death by intellectually controlling the link between a particular will and the forces it faces.” Therefore, Certeau believes that historians are inevitably obsessed with “death,” which carries rich information behind it. Greenblatt also shares this characteristic of the historian. At the beginning of *Shakespearean Negotiations*, he declares his desire to “speak with the dead,” a phrase that has been widely circulated and regarded as a distillation of Greenblatt’s critical ideas. He argues that although the dead cannot respond, a special form of dialogue with them is possible through the textual traces they have left behind. These traces, whether large or small, contain fragments of past lives. In fictional works, although there is no real physical body, those who love literature can still find an intense sense of life in simulation, because this simulation is conducted in the awareness of life’s absence, and it can anticipate and compensate for the disappearance of real life. This is Certeau’s sense of fighting against death: by recounting how the past influences the present, the loss caused by death is thereby compensated. Greenblatt found the ultimate embodiment of this dialogue and feeling in Shakespeare’s works. He asks: “How is such abundant vitality incorporated into textual traces?” This is the central question of his Shakespeare studies, and it is also the very mechanism by which historical events are transmitted to us. He believes that the more one understands this, “the more one can hear and understand the speech of the dead.”

在西方，对历史的看法与对死亡的看法密切相关，死亡这个词汇既寄寓了过去作为异质性时间的形象化，又深含西方宗教中死亡对所有人的困扰。塞尔托在《历史的书写》（L’ecriture de l'histoire，1975）中曾用杜普隆（Alphonse Dupront）的话说明自己的核心论点：“对历史‘意义’的唯一追求仍然是对‘他者’的追求……它的目标是安抚那些仍然萦绕在当下的逝者，并为他们提供书写的坟墓。”前半句是历史书写的实质，后半句是他的另一个主要论点，即历史学家与“死亡”的关系。历史学家既预设了死亡，又在对抗死亡。“写作就是要面对盘踞在这个位置上的死亡，通过表现当下时间与过去时间的关联来使死亡显现，并通过在智力上控制特定意志与其面对的力量之间的联系，来与死亡抗争。”因此，塞尔托认为历史学家必然痴迷于背后有着丰富信息的“死亡”，而格林布拉特也有这种史学家的特征，他在《莎士比亚的协商》的开篇称他渴望“与死者交谈”，这句话流传甚广，被视为格氏批评理念的一种提炼。他认为，尽管逝者无法回应，但通过他们留下的文字痕迹，可以与逝者进行一种特殊形式的对话。这些痕迹无论大小，都蕴含着逝去的生命片段。在虚构作品中，尽管没有真实肉身，热爱文学的人仍能在模拟中发现强烈的生命感受，因为这种模拟是在意识到生命缺席的情况下进行的，能够预见并弥补真实生命的消逝。这就是塞尔托意义上的对抗死亡：通过重述过去如何影响现在，从而弥补死亡带来的损失。格林布拉特在莎士比亚的作品中找到了这种对话与感受的极致体现。他提问：“如此丰富的生命力是如何融入到文字痕迹中的？”这是他的莎士比亚研究的中心问题，也同样是历史事件是如何传递给我们的机杼所在。他认为，对此越理解，“就越能听见并理解逝者的言语”。

As a historian, White’s views also evoke Certeau. When answering Domańska’s question about “the most influential philosopher in contemporary philosophy of history,” White specifically mentioned Certeau’s profound influence on historical thought in both France and the United States. In *The Writing of History*, Certeau exhibits typical views of postmodernist historiography, sharing a common interest with White’s early research on historiography (*Metahistory*). Some scholars point out: “Certeau tells us that the historian’s work cannot be taken at face value. They are texts, myths, fictions that describe ‘events’ fabricated from ciphers.” Certeau is unabashed about the participation of imagination and fiction in historiography. He demonstrates from various aspects of historical writing that “in the field of historiography, fiction can be found at the end of the process, in the products of operations and analysis.” The word “writing” (écriture) in his title implies the homology of literature, scripture, and history, establishing literature as the dual foundation of writing and chronicle. Like his contemporary White moving toward a “poetics of history,” his work also develops in the direction of a “literary” historiography. He argues: “Literature is the theoretical expression of history. Literature opens up a space of innocence, where social behavior is expressed.” Literature provides a hidden refuge for the existence of heterogeneity, which is also one of the reasons for the intermingling of literature and historiography. White believes that historical works have an inescapable poetic essence, and he is happy to develop a tropology centered on figurative rhetoric to transcend the simple dispute between fiction and fact. As one of the thinkers who returned to the “figurative” mode, Certeau was also affirmed by White.

作为一名历史学家，怀特的观点也使人联想到塞尔托。在回答多曼斯卡关于“当代历史哲学中最具影响力的哲学家是谁”时，怀特特意提到塞尔托在法国和美国的历史思想方面都有着深入的影响。塞尔托在《历史的书写》一书中表现出了后现代主义历史学的典型观点，与怀特早期对于历史编纂学的研究（元史学）有着共同的旨趣。有学者指出：“塞尔托告诉我们，历史学家的作品不能从表面上看。它们是文本、神话、虚构的东西，描述了从密码中虚构出来的‘事件’。”塞尔托对于历史学中想象与虚构的参与毫不讳言，他从历史书写的各个方面说明了“在史学领域，虚构可以在过程的末端、操作和分析的产物中找到”。他的书名中“书写”（écriture）隐含着文学、圣典和历史的同源性，确定了文学作为书写和编年史的双重基础。与同时期的怀特走向“历史诗学”一样，他的作品也朝着一种“文学性”史学方向发展。他认为：“文学是对历史的理论表述。文学开辟了一处无罪空间，社会行为在这个空间里被表述出来。”文学为异质性的存在提供了隐匿的栖身之地，所以这也是文学与史学相交融的理由之一。怀特认为历史作品中有不可回避的诗学本质，他乐于发展以比喻修辞为核心的转义学（tropology） 来超越简单的虚构与事实之争。塞尔托作为重回“比喻”模式的思想家中的一员，也受到了怀特的肯定。

II. The Power-Discourse View of Heterogeneity

二、异质性的权力话语观

The mechanism of power-discourse is actually the supporting structure behind historical concepts. Both Foucault and Certeau recognized that power is one of the key factors shaping the historical process, focused on the close interweaving of power and discourse, and conducted in-depth micro-analyses of power. In affirming the universality of power and the validity of discourse analysis, New Historicism was deeply influenced by Foucault. Foucault emphasized the foundational and prior nature of power in all social phenomena, meaning that in any cultural, knowledge, or discursive system, power is the precondition for its formation. New Historicism dialectically inherited this view. They argue that power is not a transcendent tool but a part of discourse; power is ubiquitous, power is the manifestation of representation, and it is power that makes general cultural concepts possible. At the same time, “gradually replacing ‘ideological critique’ with discourse analysis” is one of the main changes New Historicism brought to the practice of literary history. They follow Foucault’s concept of discourse: “My discourse … it attempts to unfold a dispersion that can never be reduced to a single system of difference, a dispersion unrelated to any absolute axis of reference; it attempts to carry out a decentering operation that grants no center any privilege.” Secondly, New Historicism practiced power-discourse analysis in the study of the history of the subject and the history of the body, and it focused on the process by which the other is shaped into the other by power-discourse. In literary criticism, New Historicism emphasizes the core role of power in the construction of the subject, while also discovering that the rational subject shaped by power is not the only one; the individual’s identity inevitably contains traces of encounters with the alien. Compared with Foucault, Certeau had a greater influence on New Historicism in this regard. First, Certeau’s “heterology,” as a constructivism of cultural studies, operates by revealing the opposition and transformation between the “same” and the “other,” describing a state in the process of becoming. This point led New Historicism back to this traditional opposition to analyze historical and cultural phenomena, and it also inspired the birth of New Historicism’s iconic terms such as subversion and containment, resonance and wonder, circulation and negotiation. Second, Certeau’s theory emphasizes how individuals or groups, under dominant power structures, resist or subvert dominant power through “tactics.” This concept of confrontational practice was absorbed by New Historicism and became an important perspective for its analysis of texts and social phenomena. Correspondingly, New Historicism no longer simply regards texts as reflections of history or social background, but begins to focus on how texts participate in and shape historical and social reality, especially in marginal and confrontational practices. Certeau’s emphasis on the resistant and subversive potential of tactics interacts with the views of New Historicists such as Greenblatt and Montrose, jointly exploring the agency and autonomy of individuals within established power structures.

权力话语机制其实是历史观念背后的支撑性结构。福柯与塞尔托两人都认识到权力是塑造历史进程的关键因素之一，关注到权力与话语之间的紧密交织关系，并进行了深入的微观权力分析。在对权力的普遍性和话语分析的有效性肯定上，新历史主义深受福柯的影响。福柯强调权力在所有社会现象中的基础性和先在性，这意味着，在任何文化、知识或话语体系中，权力都是其形成的先决条件。新历史主义辩证地继承了这一观点，他们认为权力并不是一种超越性的工具，而是话语的一部分，权力是普遍存在的，权力是表征的表现，是权力使一般文化观念成为可能。同时，“逐渐用话语分析取代‘意识形态批判’”是新历史主义在文学史实践上带来的主要变化之一。他们遵循着福柯的话语理念：“我的话语……它试图展开一种永远无法简化为单一差异系统的分散，一种与绝对参照轴无关的分散；它试图进行一种去中心化操作，不赋予任何中心特权。”其次，新历史主义在主体史和身体史的研究中实践了权力话语分析，并且关注他者被权力话语塑造为他者的过程。在文学批评中，新历史主义强调权力在主体建构中的核心作用，同时也发现权力塑造出理性主体不是唯一的，在个人的身份中必然包含与异类遭遇的痕迹。与福柯相比，塞尔托在这一点对新历史主义的影响更大。首先，塞尔托的“异质学”作为一种文化研究的建构主义，其中的作用机制是通过揭示“同一”和“他者”的对立和转化，将一种生成中的状态描述出来。这一点使新历史主义重新回到这种对立的传统上去分析历史文化现象，对新历史主义的颠覆与抑制、共鸣与奇迹、流通与协商等标志性术语的诞生也有启发作用。其次，塞尔托的理论强调在主导权力结构下，个体或群体如何通过“战术”（tactics）来抵抗或颠覆主导权力。这种对抗性的实践观念被新历史主义所吸纳，成为其分析文本和社会现象的一个重要视角。与此相应，新历史主义不再单纯地将文本视为历史或社会背景的反映，而是开始关注文本如何参与并塑造历史和社会现实，尤其是在边缘和对抗性实践中。塞尔托对战术的抵抗性和颠覆可能性的强调与新历史主义者如格林布拉特和蒙特洛斯的观点形成互动，共同对个体在既定权力结构中的能动性和自主权进行了探索。

(1) The Non-Transcendental Subject

（一）非先验的主体

Generally speaking, the theoretical focus of Foucault lies first on power and later on the subject, and the two mutually corroborate each other. In 1982, in his essay “The Subject and Power” (Le sujet et le pouvoir), Foucault explicitly stated that his research took the subject as its general theme. As early as *The Order of Things*, Foucault demonstrated the origin of the modern concept of “man,” namely, that “man” was born out of the modern episteme (the philosophy of the transcendental subject, the philosophy of the empirical subject), and that as the modern episteme approaches its end, “man” dies along with it. His profound insight into the “birth of man” and the “death of man” is not only a historical critique but also a comprehensive examination of the concept of the subject. In his research on specific domains such as the madman, abnormal individuals, the prison system, and sexual experience, Foucault deeply reflected on the existential condition of modern people, revealing the constraints imposed on the subject under the interweaving of knowledge and power. Within the macroscopic network of power, heterogeneity lies in the subject’s subjugation to the power of otherness; in the analysis of micro-techniques of power, heterogeneity is manifested as attention to the abnormal. In terms of the thought of heterogeneity, Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge differs from traditional historiography because it transcends the totality of meaning revealed by an internal perspective and incorporates the constitutive elements of the external world. What it investigates are the principles of discourse formation and the boundaries between discursive domains, and this relies on the existence of heterogeneous elements to produce demarcation. It is precisely these factors excluded by discourse that facilitate the formation of universally valid and specific subject-object relations within discourse. In this sense, Habermas believes that “Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge inherits Bataille’s heterology.” [1]1 Heterology (异质学, *yizhi xue*): A term associated with Georges Bataille, referring to the science of the heterogeneous, the excluded, the sacred, and the transgressive, as opposed to the homogeneous order of society and knowledge. The influence of these ideas on New Historicism is mainly manifested in New Historicism’s practice of power-discourse analysis in the study of the history of the subject and the history of the body, as well as its attention to the process by which the other is shaped into the other by power-discourse. This is particularly evident in New Historicism’s emphasis, in the study of the history of the subject, on the individual self under social power, and, in the study of the history of the body, on marginal groups and bodily symptoms excluded from the “normal.”

一般而言，福柯的理论重点前期在于权力，后期在于主体，而两者是相互印证的。1982年，福柯在《主体与权力》（Le sujet et le pouvoir）一文中明确地说明了自己的研究是以主体为一般主题的。早在《词与物》中，福柯就展示了现代“人”的观念的由来，即“人”之生因现代知识型（先验主体哲学、经验主体哲学），现代知识型走向终结，“人”随之死。他对“人之生”和“人之死”的深刻洞察，不仅是一次历史性的批判，更是对主体观念的全面审视。在对疯人、异常人群、监狱体制及性经验等具体领域的研究中，福柯深入反思了现代人的生存状态，揭示了知识与权力交织下主体所承受的束缚。在宏观的权力网络中，异质性在于主体要屈从于他性的权力，在微观权力技术分析中，异质性则体现为对异类的关注。在异质性思想方面，福柯的知识考古学之所以不同于传统的历史学，是因为它超越了内在视角所揭示出来的意义总体性，而将外部世界的构成因素囊括进来。它所探究的是话语的构成原则以及话语领域之间的界限，而这要靠异质成分的存在来产生界定。正是这些被话语排除的因素，促成了话语中普遍有效且特有的主客体关系的形成。在这个意义上，哈贝马斯认为“福柯的知识考古学继承的是巴塔耶的异质学”。这些思想对新历史主义的影响，主要体现在新历史主义在主体史和身体史的研究中实践了权力话语分析，并且关注他者被权力话语塑造为他者的过程。这尤其表现在，新历史主义在主体史研究中重视社会权力下的个体自我，在身体史中重视被排斥于“正常”以外的边缘群体和身体症候上。

In the preface to the new edition of *Renaissance Self-Fashioning*, Greenblatt points out that his faculty position at Berkeley was crucial to the birth of *Renaissance Self-Fashioning* because it allowed him to become acquainted with the philosopher Foucault, stating explicitly: “Foucault changed my intellectual horizons.” Foucault’s thought made Greenblatt increasingly interested in the modes of operation of power, and he embedded this reflection into his investigation of the Renaissance. In *Renaissance Self-Fashioning*, the “self” is an internal concept of the subject, a concept generated by the Foucauldian “subject” and resulting from the new modes of surveillance and new forms of power manifestation that emerged during the Renaissance. That is to say, Greenblatt focuses on the relationship between the rational subject shaped by social power and its heterogeneous private subject. For Greenblatt, “autonomy” is also a category closely related to the subject. In Chapter Five of *Shakespearean Negotiations*, “Shakespeare and Autonomy,” he examines how the term “autonomy” began to be used in the 16th century, its meaning being “the freedom to live according to one’s own laws.” In Shakespeare’s works, however, whether it be bodily autonomy, social autonomy, or spiritual autonomy, all seem disastrous. Self-fashioning, rather than being shaped by society, economy, or politics, is the source of core value for many of Shakespeare’s characters, but it is also the cause of tragedy: “Autonomy is not a state that any sentient being can possess.” This indicates that the self or autonomy Greenblatt focuses on is created precisely in response to “authority.” The central theme of Foucault’s *Discipline and Punish* — “a history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge” — is likewise the core of his writing on early modern criticism.

格林布拉特在新版的《文艺复兴时期的自我塑造》的序言中指出，伯克利的教职对于《文艺复兴时期的自我塑造》的诞生至关重要，因为它使他得以结识哲学家福柯，他明确说：“福柯改变了我的知识视野。”福柯的思想使得格林布拉特对权力的运作方式越来越感兴趣，并将这种思考植入了对文艺复兴时期的考察。在《文艺复兴时期的自我塑造》中，“自我”（self）是内在的主体观念，这个观念是因福柯意义上的“主体”而产生的，是文艺复兴时期出现的新监视方式和新的权力表现形式所带来的结果，也就是说，格林布拉特关注的是社会权力塑造的理性主体与其异质的私人主体之间的关系。在格林布拉特那里，“自主性”（autonomy）也是属于与主体密切相关的范畴。他在《莎士比亚的自由》第五章“莎士比亚与自主性”中考证，“自主性”一词在16世纪已开始被使用，其含义是“按自己的法则生活的自由”。而在莎士比亚的创作中，不论是身体自主、社会自主还是精神自主似乎都是灾难性的。自我塑造而不是被社会、经济、政治所塑造，是莎士比亚笔下很多人物的核心价值感来源，但这也是悲剧的原因：“自主不是任何有知觉的生物可以拥有的状态。”这说明格林布拉特所关注的自我或自主性，就是为了回应“权威”而创造的。福柯在《规训与惩罚》中的主旨—— “关于现代灵魂与一种新的审判权力之间相互关系的历史”，同样也是他写作的早期现代批评的核心。

Montrose also places great importance on the issue of the subject. In his essay “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” he explores how gender influences individual subjective identity through culturally specific symbols and concepts. Elizabeth I, “the Virgin Queen, verbally reconstituted the land as a female body unknown to men, and, in so doing, symbolically effaced the indigenous societies that actually inhabited and possessed the land,” hence the name Virginia, and the subjectivity of the indigenous people was thereby diminished. The same thing occurred in Guiana: “the land, which originally signified male inhabitants, was feminized and sexualized as a virgin body.” In Sir Walter Raleigh’s discovery of Guiana, as a European explorer, he reinforced his own subjectivity through gender symbols while denigrating the gender roles of the indigenous inhabitants, thereby consolidating European superiority and dominance — gender played a key role in the colonial conquest. For Catherine Gallagher, a female scholar, Foucault’s attention to socially marginalized groups holds particular theoretical value. Gallagher developed a strong interest in female writers on the margins and contributed many insightful studies. For example, in her article “Who Was That Masked Woman? The Prostitute and the Playwright in the Comedies of Aphra Behn,” published in *Women’s Studies*, she explores the complex relationship between the prostitute figures in the comedies of the 17th-century English female playwright Aphra Behn and Behn’s own identity. Behn implied that she was the prototype for her characters, using her marginal identity in male-dominated society to gain advantage. Women in the 17th century were themselves in a subordinate position; becoming a wife to maintain a female identity meant that a woman lost the power of self-possession: “She could keep her female identity intact and unviolated only by giving up possession of herself; she could be herself only by giving up having herself.” Through a detailed analysis of the masked, ambiguously identified female characters in Behn’s comedies, Gallagher reveals how Behn used these characters to reflect the social prejudices of her time regarding gender, class, and profession, while also exploring the unique position and challenges Behn faced as a female playwright in a male-dominated literary field. Foucault believed that abnormal individuals such as alcoholics, prostitutes, the mentally ill, and sexual minorities are often disadvantaged in the distribution of power and rights. Therefore, attention to these groups not only makes their situation understood by the world but also allows for a deeper observation of how power-discourse operates on marginal groups. Similarly, in Gallagher’s findings, within a social structure dominated by men, the entire female population undoubtedly falls into the category of the abnormal.

蒙特洛斯对主体的问题也很重视，他在《性别在地理发现话语中的工作》中，探讨了性别如何通过文化特定的符号和概念来影响个体的主体性认同。伊丽莎白一世“这位童贞女王在口头上将这片土地重构为一个男性所未知的女性之地，并且，通过这样做，她也象征性地抹去了已经实际居住并拥有这片土地的文化上的土著社会”，弗吉尼亚（Virginia）因此而得名，当地土著的主体性也因此而被消减。在圭亚那也上演着同样的事情，“这片本来象征着男性居民的土地被赋予了女性特质，并被性化为一个处女的身体”。在罗利爵士对圭亚那的发现过程中，身为欧洲探险者，他是通过性别的象征来强化自己的主体性，同时贬低土著居民的性别角色，进而巩固了欧洲人的优越感和统治地位——性别在殖民征服过程中扮演了关键角色。而对于身为女性的凯瑟琳·盖勒赫（Catherine Gallagher）来说，福柯对社会边缘群体的关注尤其具有理论价值。盖勒赫对于处于边缘地位的女性作家产生了浓厚的兴趣，并贡献出了很多精彩的研究成果。例如她于《女性研究》（Women’s Studies）发表《谁是那位蒙面女子？阿弗拉·贝恩喜剧中的妓女与剧作家》，探讨了英国17世纪女性剧作家贝恩（Aphra Behn）喜剧作品中的妓女形象及其与剧作家本人身份之间的复杂关系。贝恩暗示自己是笔下人物原型，利用了男性社会中的边缘身份来获取利益。女性在17世纪本身就处于一种附庸的地位，成为妻子保持女性的身份，就意味着女性失去自我拥有的权力，“她之所以能保持完整、未受侵犯的女性身份，是因为她放弃了对自己的拥有；她之所以能做自己，是因为她放弃了拥有自己”。盖勒赫通过详细分析贝恩喜剧中那些戴着面具、身份模糊的女性角色，揭示了贝恩如何利用这些角色来反映当时社会对性别、阶级和职业的偏见，同时也探讨了贝恩作为女性剧作家在男性主导的文学领域中的独特位置和挑战。福柯认为，像酒鬼、妓女、精神病人、性少数群体这样的异类，在权力和权利的分配中往往处于不利地位，因此对这些群体的关注，不仅可以使他们的处境被世界所理解，还可以深入地观察权力话语在边缘群体上是如何运作的。与此近似，在盖勒赫的发现中，在男性占据主导地位的社会结构中，整个女性群体无疑都在异类范畴中。

(II) The Model of Heterology

（二）异质学的模式

In his later years, Certeau attempted to construct a “heterology” and published *Heterologies: Discourse on the Other* (1986). On a literal level, heterology equals Certeau’s ironic characterization of his own research as scattered and heterogeneous. In the preface to this book, Wlad Godzich also explains that Certeau chose this title in order to “place himself among those who oppose this prejudice in its modern form, that is, against mainstream speculative philosophy.” On a deeper level, “heterology” equals “the science of the other,” where this other is a heterogeneous existence that resists the spatial, ordering, and linear historical strategies of Western power. In fact, Certeau’s emphasis on “the other” is the most influential aspect of his thought, because this “other” strives to break through the image of the other established by Foucault, highlighting a potential antagonism toward dominant strategies and resisting the narration of the other from within the explanatory framework of dominant power production mechanisms. However, “the science of the other” is after all an unfinished (and refuses to be completed) systematic project; its most complete and effective form should be, as Ian Buchanan once proposed in an article, that Certeau’s “heterology” was designed to inaugurate a constructivist method of cultural analysis. Heterology is not a static concept but an ongoing process that seeks to find new ways of understanding and expression within ever-changing cultural experiences. Buchanan’s view is quite influential, pointing to the most likely direction of development for Certeau’s heterology. For Certeau’s heterology, the most striking feature is its operative mode of opposition: productive power continuously differentiates and excludes heterogeneous things, while heterogeneous things continuously resist disciplinary mechanisms through various tactics, achieving self-realization within certain limits. In Certeau’s system of thought, the opposing pair of concepts—strategy and tactics—occupies a particularly prominent position. Here, strategy is dominant, analogous to Foucault’s “discipline”; tactics are resistant, analogous to “counter-discipline.” Certeau’s research primarily aims to “make visible and articulate the tactics marginalized by Western rational forms.” Unlike Foucault, who emphasizes dominant power structures, Certeau emphasizes the subversive possibilities inherent in resistant tactics, advocating that by excavating these resistant tactics imbued with “otherness” and “heterogeneity,” one can challenge dominant rational forms.

塞尔托在晚年曾试图构建一种“异质学”，并出版了《异质学：关于他者的话语》（Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, 1986）。字面意义上，异质学等于塞尔托反讽地称自己的研究为散乱的、异质的研究。高泽西（Wlad Godzich）在此书的前言中也说明塞尔托选择这个标题，是为了“将自己置于那些反对这种偏见现代形式的人们之中，即反对主流思辨哲学”。在更深的内涵上，“异质学”等于“他者的科学”，这个他者是抵制西方权力的空间、排序和线性历史策略的异质性存在。事实上，塞尔托对“他者”（the other）强调是他思想中最具影响力的地方，因为这里的“他者”努力突破了福柯定下的他者形象，突出了对主导策略的潜在对抗性，抵制从主导的权力生产机制的解释框架去叙说他者。不过，“他者的科学”毕竟还是一个尚未完成（也拒绝完成）的体系工程，它最为完整、最能发挥效应的形态，应该是布坎南（Ian Buchanan）曾在文章中提出的，塞尔托“异质学”设计是为了开创一种文化分析的建构主义方法。异质学不是一个静态的概念，而是一个持续的过程，它试图在不断变化的文化体验中找到新的理解和表达方式。布坎南的看法具有相当的影响力，指出了塞尔托的“异质学”最可能的发展方向。对于塞尔托的异质学来说，最鲜明的是其运作的对立模式，生产性的权力不断分化、排除着异质的事物，而异质的事物也不断通过各种技巧，在一定限度内抵抗着规训机制进行着自我实现。在塞尔托的思想体系中，战略（strategy）和战术（tactics）这一对对立的概念占据着尤为显著的位置。这里，战略是主导性的，类似于福柯的“规训”；战术是抵抗性的，类似于“反规训”。塞尔托的研究主要是将“被西方理性形式边缘化的战术变得可见并得到阐明”。与福柯强调主导性的权力结构不同，塞尔托强调的是抵抗性战术中蕴含的颠覆可能性，他倡导通过挖掘这种带有“他者性”“异质性”的抵抗性战术，来挑战主导性的理性形式。

Certeau is one of the thinkers who strongly influenced Greenblatt, leaving him with a hope for tactics. This is reflected in Greenblatt’s repeated insistence that even though power seems to shape everything, we must still leave room for the freedom and agency of individuals and domains that are other to power: “Even if the self is recognized as a fiction, to abandon self-fashioning in our culture is to abandon freedom, to abandon their own stubbornly held self, is death.” [2]2 Stephen Greenblatt, *Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 257. Greenblatt also, in *Renaissance Self-Fashioning*, explains the relationship between authority and the alien with statements such as “one person’s authority is another person’s alien,” arguing that self-fashioning arises from the encounter between authority and the alien. This analysis of their relationship can almost be regarded as a successful application of the “heterological model.” Montrose, on this point, leans more toward Certeau. While acknowledging that the subject is largely created by cultural discourses, he also seeks to explore how the subject can maintain a certain degree of autonomy within these discourses, using them for its own purposes. Therefore, when discussing Spenser’s apparent submission to political authority, Montrose writes: “In Spenser’s text and elsewhere, we can observe a competitive mode beneath the Elizabethan subject’s gesture of submission to official fictions. For it does not reject established power fictions but operates within and through them, re-embedding these fictions in culture as fictions capable of speaking or writing subjects.” [3]3 Louis Montrose, “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” in *Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts*, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 315. In attempting to secure a limited but real role for human agency, Montrose simultaneously questions Greenblatt’s more pessimistic view of the possibility of human autonomy and opens up important new areas for further discussion.

塞尔托是对格林布拉特产生过强烈影响的思想家之一，他给格林布拉特留下的是对于战术的希望，这体现在格林布拉特反复强调即使权力似乎塑造一切，但我们仍要为权力他性的个人和领域的自由和能动性留有余地：“即使自我被认成一种虚构，在我们的文化中放弃自我塑造就是放弃自由，就是放弃他们自己固执坚持的自我，就是死亡。”格林布拉特还在《文艺复兴时期的自我塑造》中，对权威（authority）和异类（alien）的关系进行了诸如“一个人的权威就是另一个人的异类”的说明，他认为自我塑造就产生于权威和异类的相遇，这种关系的分析几乎可以视为“异质学模式”的一个成功应用的版本。而蒙特洛斯在这一点上更偏向塞尔托，他在承认主体很大程度上是由文化的话语所创造的同时，也希望探索主体如何在这些话语中保持一定程度的自主权，将其用于自己的目的。因此，在讨论斯宾塞对政治权威的明显屈服时，蒙特洛斯写道：“在斯宾塞的文本和其他地方，我们可以观察到伊丽莎白时代主体对官方虚构的屈服姿态下的一种竞争模式。因为它并不摒弃既定的权力虚构，而是在其内部及通过它们发挥作用，将这些虚构重新嵌入文化中，作为能够言说或书写主体的虚构。”在试图为人类能动性争取一个有限但真实的角色时，蒙特洛斯同时对格林布拉特关于人类自主可能性的较为悲观的观点提出了质疑，并为进一步讨论开辟了重要的新领域。

In the strategy-tactics model, Certeau’s discussion of the relationship between theory and practice supports the New Historicist advocacy of practice. He argues that the relationship between theory and practice is also like that between strategy and tactics, and his interest always lies on the side of tactics, that is, practice: “the tricks of the ‘weak’ within the order established by the ‘strong,’ the art of using techniques in the domain of the other, the hunter’s ruse, flexible maneuverability, surprising, poetic, and warlike new ideas.” [4]4 Michel de Certeau, *The Practice of Everyday Life*, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xix. Because theory cannot account for “the vast ‘remainder’ belonging to human experience that has not been tamed and symbolized by language,” the importance of non-theoretical practice emerges here. Practice not only transcends the strategic distribution of historical institutions but also crosses the rupture established by the mechanism of consciousness itself. New Historicists express their agreement with Certeau’s view through their critical practice. For instance, Greenblatt and Gallagher, in their co-authored *Practicing New Historicism*, explicitly acknowledge the New Historicist resistance to theory, because their obsession with history, literature, and art, and their interdisciplinary experience, tell them that there is no “universally applicable” viewpoint or truth in every specific domain. “Therefore, the task of understanding does not depend on abstracting a set of principles, much less on applying a theoretical model, but on encountering the unique, the concrete, and the individual.” [5]5 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, *Practicing New Historicism* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 6. Hence, they remain steadfast in their commitment to particularity. Just as the earlier mentioned view in *Renaissance Self-Fashioning* that “one person’s authority is another person’s alien,” the specimens of authority and the alien are very rich, and individuals’ ways of responding to authority can also differ. This is a manifestation of particularity and also the reason why a large amount of analytical practice, rather than a set of theories, is needed. “To some extent, New Historicism restores the traditional separation between ‘theory’ and ‘practice.’” [6]6 Gallagher and Greenblatt, *Practicing New Historicism*, 2.

在战略—战术的模式中，塞尔托对理论和实践关系的论述支持了新历史主义对于实践的宣扬。他认为理论和实践的关系也和战略与战术一样，而他的兴趣始终是在战术一侧的实践，是“‘弱者’在‘强者’建立的秩序中运用的花招，在他者的领域中运用技巧的艺术，猎人的诡计，机动多变的灵活性，令人惊喜的、诗意的和战争的新点子”。因为理论无法说明“属于人类经验而又未被语言驯服和象征的内容所构成的巨大‘剩余’”，所以非理论的实践的重要性就于此显现出来。实践不仅超越了历史机构的战略性分布，还跨越了由意识本身这一机制所确立的断裂。而新历史主义者以其批评实践表达了对塞尔托观点的赞同，比如，格林布拉特和盖勒赫在他们合作的《实践新历史主义》中就明确承认了新历史主义对理论的抗拒，因为对历史和文学、艺术的痴迷，跨学科的经验告诉他们不存在在每个具体领域都“放之四海而皆准”的观点或者说真理，“因此，理解的任务并不依赖于抽象出一套原则，更不依赖于应用一个理论模型，而是依赖于与独特、具体和个体的相遇”。因此，他们始终坚定对特殊性的承诺。就像前文提到《文艺复兴时期的自我塑造》中关于“一个人的权威就是另一个人的异类”的观点，权威和异类的样本都是非常丰富的，个人回应权威的方式也可以各自不同，这是特殊性的一种体现，也是需要大量分析实践而非一套理论的原因。“从某种程度上说，新历史主义恢复了‘理论’和‘实践’之间的传统分离。”

The new historicist insistence on particularity also concerns its view of “representation.” Unlike Foucault, who opposed representation, de Certeau believed that representation has a reason for existing. He hoped to steer the then-emerging cultural studies away from what he called “interpretive semiotics.” His objection to “interpretive semiotics” stemmed from its assumption that the so-called cultural state is composed of “signs,” a purely relative or barter-like structure without any substantive foundation. Representation, by contrast, preserves a specific connection to substance; in texts, it does not unproblematically point to something outside the text, but rather embodies the concrete manifestation of the productive mechanisms that make these texts possible. Greenblatt, explaining the origin of the journal *Representation*’s name, stated: “We were convinced that whatever progress we might make in dealing with the contested status of representation could only be achieved in close, detailed interaction with historically embedded cultural forms of expression: these forms include specific examples, images, and texts that pose certain challenges to interpretation.” Moreover, they believed that the primary impact of new historicism on the history of literary criticism was to reshape discussions of “art” into discussions of “representation.” That is, like de Certeau, new historicist practice also tends toward an aesthetic centered on “representation.” Their shared view is to treat representation as the creation of meaning, not as reflection, thereby enabling people to discern those dominant strategies that conceal the uniqueness of reality; literary works, by foregrounding their own process of representation, demonstrate tactics in action. Under this conception, the text is no longer an exemplar of the dominant ideology but instead inclines toward the strange, the marginal, the specific, possessing a potential adversarial quality.

新历史主义对特殊性的坚持还关涉到对“表征”（representation）的看法。与福柯反对表征的态度不同，塞尔托认为表征有存在的理由。他希望引导当时正在兴起的文化研究远离所谓的“阐释符号学”。他反对“阐释符号学”原因在于它假定所谓的文化状态是由“符号”构成的，是一种纯粹相对的，或者说是以物易物的结构，没有任何实质性的基础。而表征不同，它保存着与实质的特定的联系，在文本中，它不是毫无疑问地指向文本之外的某些东西，而是一些使这些文本成为可能的生产机制的具体体现。格林布拉特在解释《表征》杂志名称的由来时说道：“我们确信，无论我们在处理表征的争议地位方面可能取得何种进展，都只能在与历史嵌入的文化表现形式的紧密、详细的互动中实现：这些表现形式包括具体的实例、图像和文本对解释提出了一定的挑战。”并且，他们认为新历史主义对文学批评史的首要影响便是将关于“艺术”的讨论重塑为关于“表征”的讨论。也就是说，和塞尔托一样，新历史主义的实践也是倾向于一种以“表征”为中心的美学观点。他们共同的观点是将表征视为意义的创造，而不是反映，这样就会使人能够分辨出那些掩盖了现实独特性的主导性战略，而文学作品就是通过突出其表现过程来展示行动中的战术。在这种观念下，文本不再是主导意识形态的范例，转而倾向怪异的、边缘的、特定的范围，具有了潜在的对抗性。

III. A Constructivist Method Centered on the “Other”

三、以“他者”为中心的建构主义方法

Under the influence of Foucault and de Certeau, the theoretical horizon of new historicism has been expanded, and its understanding of the other has been deepened. This is concretely reflected in how they have integrated this understanding into their objects of study and methodologies. In terms of research objects, the mutual influence between cultures has always been an important topic that new historicism has closely examined and explored in depth. In de Certeau’s view, in historical writing, the past is the other of the present; in power mechanisms, tactics of resistance are the other of dominant strategies; in the study of foreign cultures, foreign cultures are the other of European culture. The logic of opposition-construction operates in his unfinished project of heterology through the perpetually generative state of the “same” and the “other,” achieving a speaking for the other, thereby yielding a constructivist model of cultural studies. The cultural poetics practice of new historicism can be seen as a form of this unfinished project. Deriving methods from attention to history and extensively exploring the “other” of Western culture form the basis of the close interaction between de Certeau and new historicism. In the study of the “New World,” the discovery of the “other” and the method of writing the “other” are the main reasons new historicism commemorates de Certeau. In terms of method, the influence of Foucault and de Certeau jointly shaped the anecdotalist method within new historicism. This method understands and explains historical, cultural, and social phenomena by analyzing unconventional, marginal, or contingent events (i.e., “anecdotes”). It breaks the limitations of traditional historical and cultural research, providing a more vivid, concrete, and richly profound way of interpreting history and culture. At the same time, the anecdotalist method has promoted the cross-fertilization of history with other disciplines, injecting new vitality into the development of history.

在福柯与塞尔托两位思想家的影响下，新历史主义的理论视野得到了开拓，对他者的理解得到了深化。这具体体现在他们将这种理解结合到了他们所擅长的研究对象和方法论之上。在研究对象上，文化之间的相互影响是新历史主义一直关注并深入探讨的重要课题。在塞尔托看来，在历史书写中，过去是现实的他者；在权力机制中，抵抗战术是主导战略的他者；在对异域文化的研究中，异域文化是欧洲文化的他者。对立—建构的逻辑在他未竟的异质学事业中的运作，就是通过“同一”和“他者”永远在生成中的状态而实现为他者发言，从而得到一种文化研究的建构主义模式。新历史主义的文化诗学实践上可以视为其未竟事业的一种形态。从对历史的关注中得到方法，又广泛地去探索西方文化的“他者”，是塞尔托和新历史主义密切交往的基础。在对“新世界”的研究中，“他者”的发现和书写“他者”的方法是新历史主义纪念塞尔托的主要原因。在方法上，福柯和塞尔托的影响共同塑造了新历史主义中的逸闻主义方法。这种方法是一种通过分析非常规、边缘性或偶然性事件（即“逸闻”）来理解和解释历史、文化和社会现象的方法。它打破了传统历史文化研究的局限，提供了一种更加生动、具体且富有深度的历史文化解读方式。同时，逸闻主义方法也促进了历史学与其他学科的交叉融合，为历史学的发展注入了新的活力。

(I) The Other in Culture

（一）文化中的他者

De Certeau had a unique complex regarding the Americas; his work was primarily conducted between the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the University of California. He believed that the conquering function of modern Western writing began with the discovery of the New World. The American continent was the “New World,” the unknown “other” of Europe. According to de Certeau, the encounter between 16th-century European culture and other cultures had to undergo a process of exchange and confrontation. The presentation of new materials brought challenges to the boundaries of knowledge disciplines for the narrator, and travelogues had to include new forms of expression in their corpus to be able to interpret the New World. This aligns with Greenblatt’s ideas about negotiation and exchange, in which a culture regulates its “other” by providing signs and forms of expression that can be disseminated as part of a knowledge system. Writing the “other” culture both shapes that culture as an object of knowledge by maintaining distance and reinforces the difference between the West and its “other.” De Certeau’s “heterology” recognizes that the other is never purely given; it is always encountered through the imagination of writing. Only in rereading the text is the other of the text bestowed. Since Greenblatt’s study of the English expedition to Guiana in *Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles* (1973), the scholarly work of Greenblatt and other new historicists has repeatedly engaged with this “New World” cultural study. From Greenblatt’s first proposal of the concept of “cultural poetics” in 1980 to the publication of *Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto* in 2009, the foreign objects belonging to the “New World” have always been an important component of the “culture” he emphasizes. Like de Certeau, Greenblatt believed that history can only be realized through the labor of writing: “Those who possess writing possess the past, possess history, while those without writing necessarily lack these.” Those who do not master the power of written representation are forced to communicate using their own modes of symbolization. For Montrose, writing is even more directly linked to power. In his view, writing is an act of power, and the travelogue, as a product that shapes the “other” as “other,” is a specific mode of power at a particular historical moment in Western culture. In his study of Ralegh’s New World travelogue, Montrose declared: “Texts are also events, and events are also texts… Ralegh’s discovery only becomes socially accessible and meaningful as a written performance, as ethnography—that is, only when it is textualized as his *Discovery*.”

塞尔托对美洲有着独特的情结，他的工作主要在巴黎高等社会科学研究院和加利福尼亚大学之间进行。他认为，现代西方书写的征服性功能始于对新大陆的发现。美洲大陆就是“新世界”（new world），是欧洲未知的“他者”。根据塞尔托的观点，在16世纪欧洲文化与其他文化的遭遇必须经历一个交流和对抗的过程。新材料的呈现为叙述者带来了对知识学科及其边界的挑战而游记也必须在其语料库中包含新的表现形式，以便能够阐释新世界。这与格林布拉特关于协商和交换的想法一致，在这种想法中，一种文化规范其“他者”的途径是，提供可以作为知识体系一部分进行传播的符号和表现形式。书写“他者”的文化既通过保持距离将该文化塑造为知识的对象，又强化了西方与其“他者”之间的差异。塞尔托的“异质学”认识到，他者从来都不是纯粹给定的，它总是通过书写的想象来遭遇的。只有在重读文本时，文本的他者才被赋予。自格林布拉特在《沃尔特·雷利爵士：文艺复兴时期的人及其角色》（Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles, 1973）中研究英国对圭亚那的探险以来，格林布拉特和其他新历史主义者的学术研究一直反复涉及这种“新世界”的文化研究。从格林布拉特1980年首次提出“文化诗学”这一概念开始，到2009年发表《文化流动性：一个宣言》（Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto），在他所强调的“文化”一词中，“新世界”所属的异域对象一直是其中的重要组成部分。与塞尔托一样，格林布拉特也认为，历史只能通过书写的劳动来实现：“拥有书写的人拥有过去，拥有历史，而那些没有文字的人则必然缺乏这些。”那些没有掌握书写表征权力的人被迫使用自己的符号化模式进行交流。对于蒙特洛斯来说，书写则更直接地与权力挂钩。在他看来，书写就是一种权力行为，而游记作为将“他者”塑造为“他者”的产物，是西方文化特定历史时刻特有的一种权力模式。蒙特洛斯在对雷利的新大陆游记的研究中宣称：“文本也是一种事件，而事件也是一种文本……雷利的发现只有在作为书写表演、作为民族志时，才变得在社会上可以接触和有意义的，也就是说，只有当它被文本化为他的《发现》时。”

Here, ethnography enters literary criticism as a method for writing the other. In *New World Encounters* (1993), Greenblatt argues that de Certeau established for them a set of common critical principles, including the opacity, complexity, and otherness of the text, as well as a questioning of textual authority—all of which can be found in de Certeau’s thought. It is precisely these principles that bring together the two distinct fields of historical ethnography and literary criticism. De Certeau’s research begins from what Lévi-Strauss called the dual solidarity of history and ethnography, and along the trajectory of religion, from the early modern period to the Enlightenment, moves toward an understanding of human culture. De Certeau’s theory of cultural analysis takes psychoanalysis and ethnography as the primary forms of textual criticism, aiming also to achieve what Greenblatt calls “resonance” and “wonder.” Here we can focus on Greenblatt’s *Marvelous Possessions* (1991), a book that prominently reflects de Certeau’s influence among his many works. Greenblatt begins with an ethnographic anecdote, interpreting the Balinese scene he describes not as the ruthless domination of the Third World by the First, but as the magical power of non-Western cultures to assimilate and transform the ideological composition of Western practices and technologies. The core purpose of the book is to make the European discourse of wonder legible—a discourse that arises specifically from contact with the alien cultures of the New World and is first manifested in the interaction of cross-cultural exchange. At the beginning of the book, Greenblatt mentions de Certeau, expressing the same intention as de Certeau: “to become the other and to move toward the other.” The ethnography that shines alongside psychoanalysis in de Certeau’s work points, for Greenblatt and others, primarily to “thick description,” a term from Geertz’s *The Interpretation of Cultures*—“ethnography is thick description.” Thick description is one of the hallmark research methods of New Historicism, derived not only from Geertz but also from Auerbach and de Certeau. This leads New Historicism, on the one hand, to hold that the analysis of culture should not seek the scientific laws of unifying principles but should be descriptive and touch the real; on the other hand, it holds that culture should be presented as a dynamic, structured site of circumstances that both accepts and excludes rules. The core of “thick description” as transformed by New Historicism is to approach ethnography in method and to approach de Certeau’s heterological model in organizational structure.

在这里，民族志（ethnography）成为书写他者的一种方法进入到文学批评中。在《遭遇新世界》（New World Encounters，1993）中，格林布拉特认为塞尔托为他们树立了一些共同的批判原则，包括对文本的不透明性、复杂性、他者性和对文本权威的质疑，这些都能在塞尔托的思想中找到。正是这些原则将历史民族志和文学批评这两种截然不同的领域聚集在一起。塞尔托的研究就是从施特劳斯所说的历史学与民族志的双重团结开始，沿着宗教的历程，从近代早期到启蒙时代，走向了理解人类文化的道路。塞尔托的文化分析理论以精神分析、民族志作为文本批评的主要形式，目的也是达到格林布拉特所谓的“共鸣”和“惊奇”的作用。这里我们可以聚焦到格林布拉特的《惊奇的领地》（Marvelous Possessions，1991），这本书在他众多的著述中突出体现了塞尔托的影响。格林布拉特首先以一种民族志轶事开头，将他所描述的巴厘岛场景解释为并非第一世界对第三世界的无情统治，而是非西方文化同化以及改变西方实践和技术意识形态构成的神奇力量。该书的核心目的是使欧洲的惊奇话语（discourse of wonder）变得可读，这种话语特别源于与新世界异文化的接触，并首次在跨文化交流的互动中得以体现。格林布拉特在该书的开头便提及了塞尔托，表达了与塞尔托一样“成为他者，并向他者迈进”的初衷。在塞尔托那里与精神分析一起大放异彩的民族志，在格林布拉特等人这里主要指向“深描”（thick description），这个术语来自格尔茨《文化的解释》 —— “民族志是深描”。深描是新历史主义标志性的研究方法之一，不仅来自格尔茨，也来自奥尔巴赫和塞尔托。这使得新历史主义一方面认为对文化的分析不应是寻求统一原理的科学规律，而应当是描述性的、触摸真实的；另外一方面认为文化应被呈现为一种动态的、结构化的、既接纳又排斥规则的情境场所。经过新历史主义改造后的“深描”的核心，就是要在方法上接近民族志，在组织结构上接近于塞尔托的异质学模式。

(2) Anecdotalism

（二）逸闻主义

Anecdotalism is the most distinctive method of New Historicism. Jürgen Pieters, a specialist in New Historicist studies, pointed out in “New Historicism: Postmodern Historiography between Narrativism and Heterology” that anecdotalism is an application of the heterogeneity perspective. Greenblatt frequently uses historical anecdotes in his analyses; these anecdotes can serve both as central sites of cultural dispersion (narrativism) and as focal points for other aspects of history (heterogeneity). This clarifies that anecdotalism is an absorption and synthesis of the ideas of Foucault and de Certeau.

逸闻主义是新历史主义最具有特色的方法，新历史主义研究专家彼得斯（Jürgen Pieters）曾在《新历史主义：叙事主义与异质学之间的后现代史学》中指出，逸闻主义是一种异质性视角的应用，格林布拉特在分析中经常使用历史轶事，这些轶事既可以作为文化分散性质的中心场所（叙事主义），也可以作为历史其他方面的焦点（异质性）。这点明了逸闻主义是对福柯、塞尔托二人思想的吸收和综合。

Foucault presents anecdotes from historical archives as remnants of the struggle between the lowly and the power that seeks to conquer or expel them. He focuses theoretical attention on the source of the anecdote, because those elements supposedly outside history become most conspicuous at the moment of their expulsion. Thus, he argues that anecdotes are products of the operation of power, but they also show that power depends on those who resist it. This aligns with Greenblatt’s view of the anecdote: “The anecdote is one of the principal products of the technology of cultural representation, a mediator between the undifferentiated continuity of the local moment and a larger strategy… The anecdote is snatched in a flash from the vortex of experience and given a shape, a provisional shape that still marks it as contingent.” The anecdote occurs at the level of folk or popular culture; it is neither a pure and direct expression nor a coherent and strategic order: it lies between experience and form, providing an opening in the ideological closure of imperialist discourse. In specific research fields, related to this is Foucault’s preference for “the history of insignificant existences.” By recounting those “lowly” elements marginalized or ignored by traditional historical narratives, he dissects and decomposes the voices of oppressed groups, marginalized cultural practices, neglected social structures, and so on, making the omnipresence of power more prominent. This inspired Greenblatt to form a special reading method—anecdotalism. Just as he writes about More’s works by first writing about Holbein’s painting, Greenblatt often excavates unusual, marginalized historical materials and combines them with literary texts to reveal the diversity and complexity of history, as well as the influence of personal life experiences on literary creation. In *Will in the World*, he examines an anecdote about Shakespeare: a record of Shakespeare being severely punished for poaching Sir Thomas Lucy’s deer. From this, he painstakingly deduces the “truth” that Shakespeare used the character Justice Shallow in *The Merry Wives of Windsor* to express his dissatisfaction with Sir Thomas Lucy: Shakespeare was a master of double consciousness; only after obtaining a coat of arms did he dare to satirize a nobleman with whom he had a long-standing grudge, not only to vent past grievances but also to achieve a distance from his desire for social status. Greenblatt’s reason for selecting this event has nothing to do with “official history”: “The key issue is not the amount of evidence, but the room this event leaves for imaginative speculation; this event is an important way to provide key information about Shakespeare’s life and career.”

福柯将历史档案中的轶事，展示为卑微者与试图征服或驱逐他们的权力之间斗争的残余。他将理论注意力集中于轶事的来源上，因为那些据称处于历史之外的元素，是在被驱逐的那一刻变得最为显眼。因此，他认为轶事是权力运作的产物，但它们也表明权力依赖于那些抵抗它的人。这与格林布拉特对“逸事”的看法相一致：“逸事是文化表征技术的主要产物之一，是地方时刻的无差别连续性与一种更大的策略之间的中介……逸事是从经验的漩涡中一闪而过地被抓住的，并被赋予某种形状，一种仍然标志着它们是偶然的临时形状。”逸事发生在民间或流行文化的层面，它既不是纯粹而直接的表述，也不是连贯而策略性的秩序：它介于经验和形式之间，为帝国主义话语的意识形态封闭提供了一个开口。在具体的研究领域，与此相关联的是，福柯对于“无足轻重的生存史”的偏爱，他通过讲述那些被传统历史叙述边缘化或忽视的“卑微”元素，将被压迫群体的声音、边缘化的文化实践、被忽视的社会结构等剖析分解，使权力的无处不在更加凸显。这启迪格林布拉特形成了特殊的阅读方法——逸闻主义（anecdotalism）。就像他要写莫尔的著作，先写霍尔拜因的画一样，格林布拉特往往通过挖掘异乎寻常的、边缘化的历史资料，将其与文学文本相结合，来揭示历史的多样性和复杂性，以及个人生活经历对文学创作的影响。在《俗世威尔》中，他考证了一件关于莎士比亚的逸闻，通过这个莎士比亚偷猎露西爵士的鹿受到严惩的记录，他抽丝剥茧地得出了莎士比亚借戏剧《温莎的风流娘们》中的夏禄法官，来表达自己对露西爵士的不满之情这一“真相”：莎士比亚是具有双重意识的大师，他获得了爵位后才敢讽刺有夙怨的贵族，除了抒发过去的不满，还能达成与渴求社会地位的欲望保持距离的目的。格林布拉特选取这一事件的理由和“正史”毫无关系：“问题的关键不在确证的多少，而在这一事件可供发挥想象的余地，这件事是提供莎士比亚生平、职业情况的关键信息的重要途径。”

De Certeau, on the other hand, emphasizes that the anecdote is a tactical historical strategy that occurs in the interstices of historical texts, as an indicator of the “other.” Traditional historiographical archives are opposed to the anecdote, always forcing it into silence. De Certeau’s call for the return of the repressed (*le retour du refoulé*) leads to the “truth” sought by New Historicism: “Literary works and human (or historical) anecdotes are both texts, both fictions in the sense of things that are made, shaped by imagination and available narrative and descriptive resources, which makes it possible to combine them… I want to restore confidence in the real in my literary criticism, without giving up literature’s power to evade or escape the mundane, nor giving up the most basic and profound understanding: that any text depends on the absent part of the bodies and voices it represents. We long to touch the real, just as early people longed to touch the transcendent.” Related to anecdotalism is New Historicism’s emphasis on intertextual relations between texts. Literary criticism or historical narrative should not be isolated textual existences but products that interweave and influence each other with other texts. This also inherits the ideas of Foucault and de Certeau, who both advocate breaking down the boundaries between literature and non-literature, classics and popular culture, mainstream and margins, providing new perspectives and samples for fields such as literary criticism, historiography, and cultural studies. At the moment when de Certeau moved toward a “literary” historiography and Foucault reconstructed the human sciences with “epistemes,” the door to interdisciplinarity had already opened for New Historicism. New Historicism hopes, through exploring the boundaries between literature and other disciplinary fields and through interdisciplinary experiments, to make “disciplines give way to interdisciplinarity,” bringing the actual situation of literary research into alignment with the understanding of interdisciplinarity.

塞尔托则强调逸事是一种战术性的历史策略，它发生在历史文本的间隙中，作为“他者”的指示。而传统的史学档案是与逸事相对的，它总是迫使逸事归于沉默。塞尔托呼唤被压抑之物的回归（le retour du refoulé）就通向新历史主义追求的“真实”：“文学作品和人类的（或历史的）奇闻轶事都是文本，都是被创造出来的事物的意义上的小说，都是由想象力和可用的叙述和描述资源塑造的，这使得它们有可能结合在一起……我想在我的文学批评中恢复对真实的自信，同时不放弃文学回避或逃避尘俗的力量，也不放弃这样一种最基本而深刻的理解：任何文本都依赖于它所代表的身体和声音的缺席部分。我们渴望触及真实，就像早期人们渴望触及超验之物一样。”与逸闻主义相关的是，新历史主义强调文本之间的互文性关系。文学批评或是历史叙述不应是孤立的文本存在，而是与其他文本相互交织、相互影响的产物。这与福柯和塞尔托的思想也是相承继的，他们都主张打破文学与非文学的界限，经典与通俗的界限，主流与边缘的界限，为文学批评、历史学、文化研究等领域提供新的视角和样本。在塞尔托走向“文学性”的史学，福柯以“知识型”重构人文科学的时刻，跨学科的大门已经为新历史主义敞开。新历史主义希望通过对文学与其他学科领域边界的探索和跨学科实验，使“学科让位于跨学科”，让文学研究的实际情况与对跨学科的认识达到相符的水平。

Conclusion

结 语

The concept of heterogeneity runs through the theory and practice of New Historicism. If the critical practice of New Historicists can be regarded as a literary-critical version of postmodernist historiography, then it is also reasonable to view it as a practical version of heterology [14]14 The term “heterology” (异质学) refers to the study or theory of heterogeneity, a concept developed in poststructuralist thought, particularly by Michel Foucault and Georges Bataille, to describe the systematic investigation of what is excluded, other, or unassimilable within dominant orders of knowledge.. The theoretical value that the concept of heterogeneity confers on New Historicism lies mainly in: (1) In terms of the conception of history, focusing on the margins and on plural histories. New Historicist critics tend to pay attention to marginal historical materials and details that are overlooked or obscured by mainstream historical narratives, dismantling and subverting the traditional grand historical narrative through the writing of plural histories. This focus on the margins not only broadens the horizon of historical research but also provides richer material and perspectives for literary criticism. (2) Practice orientation and interdisciplinary character. Foucault opened a path of attack against the established discursive divisions of the past (such as literature, philosophy, and science). Following in Foucault’s footsteps, New Historicism has adopted a “decentering” strategy in many respects. New Historicism emphasizes practicality while simultaneously crossing the boundaries of multiple disciplines, including history, anthropology, art studies, political science, literature, and economics, thereby displaying a distinct interdisciplinary character. This practice orientation and interdisciplinary character have opened new paths for the development of literary criticism and hold certain significance for the construction of literary theory in China.

异质性概念贯穿于新历史主义的理论和实践。如果说新历史主义者的批评实践，可以视为后现代主义史学的文学批评版本的话，那么将其视为异质学的实践版本也是合理的。异质性概念赋予新历史主义的理论价值主要在于：（1）在历史观念上，聚焦边缘与复数历史。新历史主义批评家倾向于关注那些被主流历史叙事所忽视或遮蔽的边缘史料和细节，通过复数历史的书写来拆解和颠覆传统的大写历史叙事。这种对边缘的关注不仅拓宽了历史研究的视野，也为文学批评提供了更为丰富的素材和视角。（2）实践导向与跨学科特性。福柯开启了一条讨伐之路，针对对过去已成定律的话语分割（如文学、哲学、科学），新历史主义跟随福柯的脚步，在很多方面采取了“去中心”的策略。新历史主义强调实践性，同时跨越历史学、人类学、艺术学、政治学、文学、经济学等多个学科的界限，展现出鲜明的跨学科特性。这种实践导向和跨学科特性为文学批评的发展开辟了新的道路，对我国文论建设具有一定的意义。

It must be noted that while the positive influence of heterogeneity on the practice of literary criticism can be drawn upon, an exclusive emphasis on particularity and “long strings of meticulous analysis” certainly carries risks. As Columbia University professor Jean E. Howard has pointed out, the danger of New Historicism is that it may well become a reaction against formalism: an escape from theory, or merely a plan to produce more new readings for twenty-five-page articles and sixty-minute classes. Furthermore, the early modern period (including the Middle Ages) that New Historicism primarily focuses on is a reflection on the origins of the formation of modernity, and this is logically consistent with its emphasis on the pre-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary character of the humanities such as literature and history. However, as Professor Tao Dongfeng has argued, in China the system of humanities disciplines established after the Western Renaissance and the Enlightenment has not yet fully matured; therefore, the aim of the new humanities’ reflection on modernity should be to advance modernity rather than to return to the Middle Ages. Blindly copying the model without grasping the essence of interdisciplinarity, anecdotalism [15]15 “Anecdotalism” (逸闻主义) refers to the New Historicist practice of using marginal, anecdotal historical materials—often drawn from obscure or forgotten sources—as a starting point for literary and cultural analysis, challenging grand historical narratives., and the like will not yield the positive effects of heterogeneity but will instead lead to a theory-less homogenization.

必须注意的是，异质性对文学批评实践的良性影响可以借鉴，但一味注重特殊性和“长串的细致分析”，肯定是有风险的。就像哥伦比亚大学教授霍华德（Jean E. Howard）指出的那样，新历史主义的危险是很可能会成为一种对形式主义的反弹现象：一种对理论的逃避，或者仅仅是一种为25页的文章和60分钟的课堂制作更多新读物的计划。另外，新历史主义主要关注的早期现代时期（包括中世纪），是对现代性形成由来的一个反思，与其强调文学和历史等人文学科的前学科性、超学科性在理论逻辑上是相吻合的。但如陶东风教授所言，在中国，西方文艺复兴和启蒙运动后确立的文科体系并未完全成熟，因此新文科对现代性的反思要旨在推进现代性而非回归中世纪。一窝蜂地复制模式，而没有抓住跨学科、逸闻主义等精髓，不会得到异质性的积极影响，反而会走向无理论的同质化。

Online editor: Paul

网络编辑：保罗