From Optic to Topic: The Foreclosure Effect of Historiographic Turns

Abstract

In the field of history, we are now witnessing the untimely return of elements of the “doctrinal realism” that Hayden White identified with the legacy of Leopold von Ranke: documentary evidence, descriptive particularism, and “explanation by narration” in the service of a reconstructive history of “what actually happened.”1 Most striking about this development is that a return to descriptive realism and archival objectivism has actually followed what were supposed to be the epistemological breaks initiated by the so-called linguistic and cultural turns in historiography. Given that academic history in the United States has always been built upon a realist foundation and that empiricism is entrenched as the disciplinary default, a professional backlash against the theoretical challenges associated with them is not surprising.2 But insofar as conventional historical practices were indeed challenged by them, we might ask if there exists a connection between history's current retrenchment and the turns themselves. Has the discourse of discrete and completed turns functioned to foreclose certain kinds of questions from being posed or debates from taking place? The real historical significance of the linguistic and cultural turns may thus lie less in specific instances of historiographic innovation to which they are supposed to refer than in their persistent and pernicious afterlives.3 In retrospect, we can see that the analytic openings that were created by the linguistic and cultural turns have been foreclosed through a process of domestication whereby new optics were transformed into routine research topics that reaffirmed traditional historiographic assumptions. Even some proponents of these turns contributed to such foreclosure effects through discourses about completed turns, a new methodological consensus, and professional reconciliation. Moreover, because the linguistic turn conflated positivist social history with structural analysis more generally, and because it tended to restrict “theory” to poststructuralism, its advocates often marginalized history informed by critical social theory. Against these developments, critical historians should reclaim both the linguistic turn's demand that historians confront fundamental epistemological questions self-reflexively and Marxism's longstanding concern with systemic, long-term, and macrosocial analysis. This is not meant to be a comprehensive overview of the state of history today. Most of the examples are drawn from my own field of French history. The aim is not to indict individuals but to draw attention to embedded assumptions and tendencies within history as a professional space and a disciplinary formation that encourages certain habits and choices among its practitioners The fact that counterexamples of innovative and insightful work can be invoked for any of those tendencies does not mean that such tendencies do not exist. Rather than defend or condemn a specific historiographic turn, the task is to explore the intellectual and institutional work that the idiom and narrative of “turns” often performs. Anumber of historians who participated in the linguistic and cultural “turns” have written about their experiences.4 From their accounts emerges a familiar narrative of the historiographic turns that begins with the development in the 1960s of the “new social history,” which challenged a traditional historiography that sanctified official sources, political elites, short-term events, and descriptive narrative. This triumphant social history was then gradually challenged by a constellation of critics associated in different ways with what became known retrospectively as the linguistic turn. By the 1980s, social history was largely displaced institutionally by various strands of work collected under the rubric of cultural history.5 During this period, debates across the disciplines unfolded over fundamental epistemological questions regarding the relationship between the world we confront, the categories with which we attempt to think that world, and the worldly forces in relation to which these categories emerged. Critics in numerous fields sought to counter the limitations of realism, positivism, and functionalism. Various linguistic turns, cultural turns, and historical turns unfolded in different ways, at different rates, and with different implications across the human sciences.6 My own graduate education in the 1990s was shaped directly by innovative research that was associated with the linguistic turn in history, the historical turn in anthropology, the cultural turn in colonial studies, and the postcolonial turn in the humanities. Nevertheless, the talk of turns then circulating in the academy was confusing. This was partly a function of the time lag that attended the cross-disciplinary borrowing that fueled many of these turns.7 Precisely when many historians were turning to Clifford Geertz's symbolic anthropology in order to elucidate deep mental structures underlying supposedly coherent cultural systems, many anthropologists were developing a radical critique of their discipline's holistic concept of culture. And just as many anthropologists were discovering Marc Bloch's and Lucien Febvre's mentalités, Fernand Braudel's historical structures, Eric Hobsbawm's primitive rebels, and E. P. Thompson's working-class communities, many historians had already rejected structural history, reclaimed “the event,” challenged the conception of agency underlying resistance theory, or criticized the voluntarism and determinism underwriting the tendency to essentialize idealized communities. Moreover, a sector of cultural anthropology embraced archival research just when many historians associated with the linguistic and cultural turns questioned the possibility and desirability of conventional historical reconstruction. If the cultural turn in history and the historical turn in anthropology roughly coincided, each implicitly raised critical questions about the other. Such competing tendencies also existed among historians who turned away from social history. At a certain general level, those who identified with the “turns” became increasingly mindful about the non-transparent relationship between thought and being and began to reorient historical research away from facts and explanation to meaning and interpretation. But “linguistic turn” and “cultural turn” were terms of convenience that often conflated incompatible intellectual currents. Insights about the constitutive power of language or the ways that discourses mediate subjectivity and shape social life led some historians to overturn the conventional notions of individuality, intentionality, agency, and causality upon which traditional historiography depended. But they led others to reaffirm these very concepts, often through histories of marginalized actors whose subjectivity was purportedly reconstructed and experience valorized.8 In sum, “linguistic turn” and “cultural turn” are ambiguous analytic categories that have often and of what they sought to or But the or the between the and what it to or the talk of turns or meant is less than what it and The we to ask is the discourse and of “turns” or in the task of critical history that is at and If the of “turns” was often it was The and under their rubric were by a to the and assumptions of social history. this of radical to have a legacy of historiography that now often of narrative history, social history, and cultural history. there a relationship between this analytic and the very of the by to “the turn” as they or in a coherent and that between and that a and with that the cultural turn was but also for of the new social history taking this to a of and of intellectual and implicitly a process of we might such with the when practices turn into experience and openings for in this to reaffirm and by than the underlying social forces that these might that they might have these turns functioned to historians within a more coherent professional the talk of turns as a the turn away from it was often The associated with of historians at a time and thus to for social history as Critics tended to social history, social social theory, and often conflated positivism, social and structural any of these terms were to the to often meant the This led many proponents of the linguistic and cultural turns who the of social history to turn away from supposedly social that social and deep who the critique of realist and were often also led to the of and historical In the of and structural analysis and explanation were increasingly of led many historians then with the turns to a of as a of determinism and to or critical of the turns, historians this often to critical with This the fact that challenged any attempt to think and from it a for specific structures, and that at the time attended to and of From the the of turns to a between work that was and or work that was with the deep structures and that social the the discourse of turns has been by what we might of the linguistic turn as and as if the kinds of epistemological debates about history that were by the turns actually be as such was often to linguistic the of the linguistic turn also to many that the for theoretical debates among historians was we were now return to their historical task of and the the or cultural and linguistic or into a more and history that be to more the of social life and historical has been a tendency among some and their to in these turns to the in order to a new methodological of this discourse has been to reorient away from epistemological about the of historical in and about topics among between the and the of turns, a disciplinary as certain elements of were and others is that as professional history has turned away from many of the of these turns, there are historians who the turns the the of the to certain of the linguistic and cultural turns in the of methodological or research critique of historical realism has thus been for a of historical that now to do a of by to of social experience at the The aim of traditional history, which has to as “the of into its the of of the of in the service of its that became whose than turning questions into they had been In this historians the historiographic turns to the of and that now be collected and to their and of historical analysis. In history the turns has more attention to the of social life and to the power in and by But the of which cultural historians had against the social history, was then turned against the this historiography to to its in time and of analysis. from social history, often and of are and is as a than epistemological a process that has historical that are not and that do not to questions in or narrative are as and the of and If the is that historians by archival then historians be to their questions with archival Such often a certain of agency, and it that questions that be are not or that historians who in different are not history. “theory” is and to and so-called or as a of by intellectual are not to ask questions about the of possibility of the historical that they are the of their categories and their in the social they to about their own in their of and the relation between those and the historians often for being they to from its worldly as if it from history as that can be or a are often for of archival in the service of historical are more than theoretical often them to in historical historical is the of many and not a is to state power is not are not discourses and practices do not always often have actors do not always what they are historical and are often empiricism as theoretical legacy of the turns is that historians to as and historians by to accounts as to structural The historical and the for both can social theory, and to a new that over the discourse the which to a that we a world of academic Such the that the analytic theoretical and institutional associated with the turns have been such about is the that the of is a for research in order to the more In sum, to theory, to intellectual and a to professional often is not that the of historiographic “turns” has to a in debates within history about fundamental epistemological This is partly because optics are to new turns can or turns often a the of and foreclosure that with the linguistic and cultural 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