In the year or so since I wrote the proposal for this seminar, the world seems like a very different place. It is more polarised, and more partisan than I have seen before in my lifetime. In such an atmosphere, it is difficult not to see old values such as reason, and even the pretence to impartiality and objectivity as being under severe threat. In this short prompt-piece, I want to think seriously about how we, as scholars, respond to this unique moment.
Modern cognitive psychology has found that the vast majority of human thinking relies primarily on intuition and gut instinct rather than strategic reasoning. We are routinely hubristic, overconfident in our own perceptions, and prone to confirmation bias. Rather than challenge existing beliefs and assumptions, we instead become entrenched in them, automatically filtering new information to fit in with what we already believe. In fact, the majority of our reasoning occurs as a post-hoc rationalisation that is a justification of our position after the fact, having already made-up our minds in a snap decision. We saw this fact of human nature play out ad nauseum in the two major political votes of last year, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump – now symbolised by their respective outcomes. These were marked by near-naked partisanship on both sides on a scale we have not seen in recent history; by the primacy of emotion, gut instinct, and intuition over reasoning to the point where in its aftermath we are said to live in a post-truth society in which facts are defined more by what people feel than by empirical evidence.
Some commentators, for example, the neuroscientist, Sam Harris, have argued that our current epistemological crisis is largely the result of identity politics.

As far as I can tell, becoming a part of a movement doesn’t help anybody think clearly, so I distrust identity politics of all kinds. I think we should talk about specific issues, whether it is trade or guns or immigration or foreign interventions, or abortion or anything else. And we should reason honestly about them. I’m not the first person to notice that knowing a person's position on any one of these issues generally allows you to predict his position on the others. This shouldn’t happen. Some of these issues are totally unrelated. Why should a person’s attitude toward guns be predictive of his views on climate change? Or immigration? Or abortion? And yet it almost certainly is in our society. That’s a sign that people are joining tribes and movements, it’s not the sign of clear thinking. If you are reasoning honestly about facts, then the colour of your skin is irrelevant, the religion of your parents is irrelevant, whether you are gay or straight is irrelevant. Your identity is irrelevant.

In fact, if you are talking about reality, its character can’t be predicated on who you happen to be. That's what it means to be talking about reality. ... the facts are whatever they are, and it’s not an accident that being disinterested, not uninterested, but disinterested, that is not being emotionally engaged, usually improves a person's ability to talk about the facts. ... the colour of your skin simply is not relevant information.

Harris gives two examples of cases in which he thinks identity is ‘not relevant information’ to the facts:

1. In the case of vaccines causing autism, according to Harris, you don't get to say ‘as the parent of a child with autism, I believe X, Y and Z’, because whatever is true about the biological basis of autism cannot depend on who you are.

2. When talking about violence in our society, again, the facts are whatever they are. How many people got shot? How many died? What was the colour of their skin? Who shot them? What was the colour of their skin? Getting a handle on these facts doesn't require one to say ‘as a black man, I know X, Y and Z’. The colour of your skin simply isn’t relevant information.

This is a hard rationalism. A clear-eyed view of ‘the facts’ must come independently of ‘identity’, which of course implies experience invariably coloured by emotion. Here emotion distorts and taints the purity of reason. There is at the heart of this vision of data-gathering at least the dream of an ultimate realisable ‘objective’ truth. Scientists realise that they can never quite get to this truth, but they must persist in the belief that by keeping emotion and partiality in abeyance, they are getting ever closer to it: the facts can then speak for themselves. And to this approach we can give the name ‘positivism’.
In our discipline, new historicism staked out a position that was in fact, contrary to what its name suggests, against positivism. Hayden White’s Metahistory laid bare the fact that history was a construction, a form of storytelling that was always already subjective and which often ended up telling you more about the historian than about the history. Following Fernand Braudel’s notion of ‘counter-history’ – that is history that focused on the everyday life, the lived experiences of real people – Stephen Greenblatt and other new historicists relied on anecdotes and fragments to weave their own stories between texts in the cultural fabric of the past. New historicism always, it seems to me, insisted that the past was, in a sense, whatever we made of it. Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-fashioning was his own self-fashioning. When new historicists wrote about a system of social circulation which worked to contain internal subversion, they were at once talking about the Tudor or Jacobean periods and their own period: the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s America, Milton Friedman’s America. It was a place in which free market economics and ribald consumerism had successfully contained the explosive counter-culture of the 1960s. The spirt of the 1968 somehow was now the fuel of an increasingly individualist and corporatist society. And so it was little surprise that new historicists were telling us that when faced with big impersonal structures, and systems of economic and social exchange, genuine subversion is very difficult. Even the very iconography of resistance can be co-opted into branding and sold back to you.
In 1991, the Cold War ended and with it the very idea of ideological resistance. In our discipline, this took the form of new historicism being emptied out of all of its political resonances. All that Hayden White stuff – storytelling, ‘subjective’ history – this stuff had to go. And slowly but surely, it went. What matters now, we were told, are the objects; what matters now were the facts. And so during the period of the 90s and the 00s, a period in which it looked like the ideological war (against Marxism / communism) and the culture war (against social injustice) were all but won, scholars in Shakespeare studies turned increasingly against subjective histories and towards a new positivism. Presentists such as [names removed to protect their identities] resisted this turning tide towards positivism. They resisted it because, for them, the politics still mattered; without politics, our work becomes mere antiquarianism. I suspect in light of recent events they will continue to hold this position.
However, as I suggested at the start of this paper, I think the aforementioned ‘recent events’ open up interesting questions about epistemology as well as the nature of resistance. Isn’t another name for what Hayden White was talking about in Metahistory, ‘post-truth’? In this present moment, can scholarship afford to be perceived as ‘post-truth’? This is a moment in which the President of the USA has declared that all negative polling data is ‘FAKE NEWS’, and in which his political enemies do not seem to draw the obvious and important distinctions between the president’s supporters, a disaffection working populations, Nazis, and white supremacists. The neutral observer can only see a mixture of noise, outrage, propaganda and emotion on both sides. ‘The facts’ always already service whatever narratives you already believe. And, in such a maelstrom, your identity pre-figures which narratives exactly you end up picking and choosing. This newly polarised world, I will admit, has somewhat complicated my thinking since the moment in which I wrote the proposal. On the one hand, I think we might need to look again at our assessment of ‘truth’ as a category. In short, positivism asserts that there is a truth and that we should strive towards objective standards in our reach for it, while approaches that reject positivism – including those driven by identity politics – assert that we will never get there and so we should embrace subjectivity. I wonder if doing the latter leads ultimately and inevitably our present moment? On the other hand, in such a moment as this, can we afford a retreat forever more into the archive?
Shakespeare strikes me as a writer who is supremely relevant on some of these very issues. Few writers in history have better understood the aspect of human thinking that led us to current ills. He shows again and again in his plays how emotions and intuitions trump reasoning. We see it whenever one character tries to persuade another of their point of view. In Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony doesn’t win the baying crowd around by appealing to reason, he appeals to their emotions. Iago doesn’t manipulate Othello by giving him logical arguments, he plants seeds in his mind which prey on his darkest emotions and lets his intuition do the rest. Richard III does not hoodwink the populace into accepting him as king by reasoning out a case, he does it by playing on their feelings. Intuitively we can all see this. Shakespeare other great gift is empathy: he does not write anyone off. The plays try to give us understanding where others would only judge. And I wonder, as I always have, whether historicism regardless of its precise mode is spectacularly ill-equipped to understand the trenchant insights of a writer like Shakespeare, the very insights that ensure his enduring relevance.
And so, with some of these thoughts swirling around, I want to turn and ask the group three fundamental questions:

1. Does ‘the truth’ matter? And if so, should we hold on to positivism and reject more subjectivist modes?
2. As Shakespeare scholars is our primary function to service an ever-clearer, ever ‘more accurate’, ever fuller picture of his time and place, or is it to connect readers and theatre goers with what these plays say about ‘us’, whatever that might mean?
3. Does our answer to the first question necessarily dictate our answer to the second, and vice versa?

That’s a lot to think about, and unpack, so without further ado, let’s make a start …