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Article Excerpt
In 1997, Princeton University Press published a volume, What's Happened to the Humanities?, which rang with alarm. (1) Even contributors such as Francis Oakley, Carla Hesse, and Lynn Hunt, who tried to warn against despair by explaining how the current situation had come about, provided only a fragile defense against fundamental and deeply threatening change, while others such as Denis Donoghue and Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in palpable fear of the future. As Frank Kermode, author of an earlier, brilliant study of our need for literary endings, phrased it in his essay for the volume, "If we wanted to be truly apocalyptic we should even consider the possibility that nothing of much present concern either to 'humanists' or to their opponents will long survive." And it was clear from his essay that he was more afraid of the end of literature than of the demise of those who, as he put it, "mistrust or despise" it. (2)
Returning ten years later--and from the perspective of a historian--to the scenarios feared or envisioned in 1997, what strikes me is how wrong they were, but for reasons quite different from those given in the spate of recent publications alleging some sort of new "turn" (narrative, social, historical, material, eclectic, or performative, to name a few) "beyond" the earlier turn (linguistic, cultural, post-structural, postmodern, and so forth) that supposedly caused all the trouble in the first place. For as Keith Thomas remarked in an astute and upbeat assessment in 2006, historical scholarship has become broader, more nuanced and more creative over the past decade. (3) It has done so exactly because the insights of the linguistic turn have been absorbed and utilized; and this has happened because those insights coincide in great part with what historians have always known.
I do not dismiss or ridicule the fears of the mid-1990s. What Alvin Kernan calls "reading to find the villain" did threaten both sensitive literary criticism and thoughtful historical account. (4) Moreover, we can all remember statements (better now left unattributed) about the footnote as instrument of patriarchal domination, or the violence of the meta-narrative, that confused scholarly prose with the physical abuse of persons and communities (although if my memory serves, such opinions were more characteristic of the 1970s than the 1990s). There were times in the past three decades when I, too, felt that literary criticism tended to barricade, behind the barbed wire of jargon, the poetry and fiction to which I had always turned when I wanted to imagine something different from myself or to explore, in some resonant yet also quiet place, the complexity of my human hopes and fears. Attention to the stance and perspective of the historian, critic, or anthropologist did lead to a sometimes tire- some narcissism, even solipsism, in scholarly writing. (5) But little of this seems to me to have been postmodern or poststructuralist per se. As a contributor to The Three Penny Review said recently, there have always been bad books, (6) just as there have always been envious, defensive, and silly scholarly responses to other scholars. And if, as Lynn Hunt pointed out in 1997, the growth of new subjects such as feminism, gender, post-colonialism, and cultural studies was a response to changing demographics, it is unreasonable not to expect an increase in the sheer number of bad books in such burgeoning fields, since nothing suggests that brilliance is characteristic of a larger percentage of today's undergraduates, graduate students, or professors than it was earlier. (7) Moreover, as publishers are increasingly willing to review and publish manuscripts in only those areas they think will sell, and department chairpersons and senior professors put greater and greater pressure on young scholars to produce what Jonathan Beck has cynically called work that counts, is countable, and is counted, it will require courage (as indeed it has always done) to tackle genuinely new topics. (8) Such professional pressures seem to me to constitute the real threat we face, and some aspects of a postmodern (in particular, deconstructive) stance toward scholarship may provide a partial defense against them. I shall return to professional pressures at the end of this essay. First, a consideration of where the writing of history is today.
The past three decades have seen a number of discussions of the application of what is known generically as "theory" to historical scholarship. With minor differences, they have told the same story up to the late 1990s. (9) Social historians and sociologists have tended to emphasize the rejection of, or evolution beyond, Marxist history; intellectual historians have tended to lay more emphasis on literary and psychoanalytic criticism. But with remarkable unanimity, they all begin the account with Saussure and the development of semiotics, circa 1916, and understand the great shift of the late 1960s to early 1980s as away from social history (in both its Marxist and cliometric, or quantitative, forms--the latter touted in the 1960s as the wave of the future) and toward cultural history, influenced both by French intellectuals, above all Foucault and Derrida, and American anthropologists, especially Clifford Geertz.
This cultural or linguistic, poststructuralist or postmodern turn is usually understood to hold that language does not reflect the world but precedes it and makes it intelligible by constructing it: in other words, there is no objective universe independent of language and no transparent relationship between social organization and individual self-understanding. Such awareness entails, for historians, the realization that the categories and periods they use are expository devices that need constant reformulation exactly because they are always based in political and social assumptions that may, because inherited, be very hard to detect. The past does not come in economic, social, or military chunks, nor in centuries; wars and renaissances, like "resistance" and "corruption," are created by historians, although aggression, power, and creativity (which are not, however, encountered unmediated) are not. Such awareness also entails the understanding that the past is not transparent to us; all evidence (whether manuscript or inscription, fossilized pollen or the light from a distant star) is mediated, perceived and analyzed from the point of view of a particular actor, instrument, or interpreter. Hence the "something" a postmodern historian encounters in research--whether termed facts, data, experience, or meaning--is fragmentary, heterogeneous, discontinuous, partial, and always interpreted and interpretable.
Where these accounts of the so-called linguistic turn have departed from each other is in their descriptions of what comes "beyond" it. Describing recent fears that the linguistic turn, somewhat illogically, both makes "culture" deterministic (the world becomes a set of symbols that determines individuals) and yet deprives historians of an "objective" past (there is "no there there" beyond the symbols), they depict and seemingly applaud a turn to something else. But what? Some think they see a turn to narrative, even mega-narrative; others see rather a retreat to microhistory. Some cling to unmediated "experience"; others predict a "revitalized and transformed ... objectivity." (10) For some, what we have now is a material turn--recourse to "the primacy of the object." For others, the new turn is psychological. (11) For yet others, the turn is historical, although at least one surveyor of the contemporary scene treats the linguistic turn itself, not the retreat from it, as a sort of historical turn. (12)
Probably the most common description of the retreat characterizes it as a return to social history; but a number hedge their bets by seeing it as a kind of eclecticism of method, a "bricolage," or what Gabrielle Spiegel, in a recent volume devoted to the turn from the turn, calls "practice theory" (about which designation she is noticeably un-enthusiastic). (13) It thus seems clear that, for all the unease the theorists of theory articulate concerning certain understandings of where history was a decade ago,...
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