Language and the shift from signs to practices in cultural inquiry

History and Theory

Volumn 39, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 289-310

  Biernacki, Richard ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 22544484319     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0018-2656.00132     Document Type: Review

References (74)

1. Editors' introduction, Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, 1999), 26
2. Recent exemplars include Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens at Versailles (Cambridge, Eng., 1997)
3. Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815 (Princeton, 1997)
4. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998), especially chapter two
5. For an example of a more unconventional approach that highlighted cultural meaning as the product of fluid social interaction, see John R. Hall, "Social Interaction, Culture, and Historical Studies," in Symbolic Interaction and Cultural Studies, ed. Howard S. Becker and Michal M. McCall (Chicago, 1990), 31-32
6. Robert Darnton, "The Symbolic Element in History," Journal of Modern History 58 (1986), 218- 234
7. The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, 1989), "Introduction: History, Culture, and Text," 16-17
8. Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), 59-60
9. Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath (New York, 1992), 23, 30
10. William Sewell, Jr., "The Concept(s) of Culture," in Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Bonnell and Hunt, 35-61
11. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1971)
12. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1984), 34-39.
13. Analysts may position deviance and creativity as parts of a cohesive sign system. See the critiques by Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt in Practicing the New Historicism (Chicago, 2000), 12-13
14. and by William M. Reddy, Money and Liberty in Modern Europe. A Critique of Historical Understanding (Cambridge, Eng., 1987), 39
15. Scott's notion of cultural meaning draws, I think, on what William Sewell has termed "thin" coherence among cultural elements. Sewell's synthetic review of changes in investigators' understandings of culture, "The Concept(s) of Culture," convincingly demonstrates continued reliance on a concept of culture as a sign system. See Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Bonnell and Hunt, 35-61
16. Sewell, "The Concept(s) of Culture," in Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Bonnell and Hunt, 51
17. In Darnton's the Great Cat Massacre, for example, the analysis culminates by showing how Parisian journeymen in revolt could manipulate ritual signs as dextrously as poets could words. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984), 101
18. As illustration, see Bourdieu's oft-repeated assertion that the logic of practice "has nothing in common with intellectual work, that it consists of an activity of practical construction⋯. that ordinary notions of thought, consciousness, knowledge prevent us from adequately thinking." In Pierre Bourdieu and Loï'c Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, 1992), 121. On the reception of Bourdieu's divide between thought and practice
19. see Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, Eng., 1989), 94-95
20. William Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, Eng., 1980), 23-24, 71
21. See, for illustration, Lynn Hunt, review essay of Penser la révolution française, History and Theory 20 (1981), 320
22. and the treatment of language as a broker of history in Gareth Stedman Jones, "Rethinking Chartism," in his Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge, Eng., 1983)
23. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 14.
24. Geertz, Local Knowledge, 21
25. Clifford Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton, 2000), 17.
26. I attempted to trace historians' naturalizing of the concept of the sign system in Richard Biernacki, "Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History," in Beyond the Culturad Turn, ed. Bonnell and Hunt, 64.
27. John E. Toews portrayed the acceptance of a multiplicity of interpretations of a historical process as a form of anti-essentialism in "Historiography as Exorcism: Conjuring Up 'Foreign Worlds' and Historicizing Subjects," Theory and Society 27 (August, 1998), 593. In my view, however, it is easy to imagine scientists who agree among themselves that their concepts reflect the essence of the world, while disagreeing only on key measurements made with those concepts in a particular context
28. For a swift exposition of Saussure's view of the use of language to make reference to the world, see Benjamin Lee, "Peirce, Frege, Saussure, and Whorf: The Semiotic Mediation of Ontology," in Semiotic Meditation: Sociocultural and Psychological Perspectives, ed. E. Mertz and R. Parmentier (Orlando, Fla., 1985), 113
29. Ferdinand Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (New York, 1959), 15, 18.
30. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass. , 1993), 23
31. Margaret Jacob shows how Latour's equation of natural with human agency rests on a naturalized concept of the sign in "Science Studies after Social Construction," in Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Bonnell and Hunt, 106
32. Geertz, Available Light, 12.
33. see Available Light, 16
34. Ann Swidler, "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies," American Sociological Review 51 (April, 1986), 275,280.
35. Stephen Greenblatt, "The Touch of the Real," in The Fate of Culture: Geertz and Beyond, ed. Sherry Ortner (Berkeley, 1999)
36. Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, 64.
37. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore, 1980).
38. See, illustratively, Robert Nisbet, Social Change and History (Oxford, 1969), 264ff.
39. William Sewell, "Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille," Theory and Society 25 (December, 1996), 863.
40. See, illustratively, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Politik in der Geschichte: Essays (Munich, 1998), 193- 194
41. For a detailed exposition, see Biernacki, "Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History," in Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Bonnell and Hunt, 65ff
42. Mark A. Schneider crippled the force of Geertz's analysis of the Balinese cockfight-and thus the logic of isolated case studies-by suggesting that features of the fight which Geertz connected to a singular local culture were actually shared by fights in very distant and different communities. See Mark A. Schneider, Culture and Enchantment (Chicago, 1993), 65-66
43. Joan Wallach Scott, "Work Identities for Men and Women: The Politics of Work and Family in the Parisian Garment Trades in 1848," in Gender and the Politics of History, 96.
44. See also 98-99
45. I draw here on Margaret R. Somers's essay "The 'Misteries' of Property: Relationality, Rural- Industrialization, and Community in Chartist Narratives of Political Rights," in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (London, 1996), especially 67, 83
46. Sarah Maza recently called attention to the reductionist moment in one of Darnton's rightly celebrated essays, "Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose. " To be sure, Darnton insists that venerable rural stories have their own symbolic coherence. Yet in practice, Maza notices, Darnton's strategy "is to ask what concrete experiences most peasants would have had in common and, once these are identified-scarcity, hunger, recurrent epidemics, high mortality-to explain the ways in which the tales express material conditions in storied form." Sarah Maza, "Stories in History: Cultural Narratives in Recent Works in European History," American Historical Review 101 (1996), 1497
47. I endeavor to show how an emphasis on language as discourse breeds this covert reductionism in "Work and Culture in the Reception of Class Ideologies," in Reworking Class, ed. John. R. Hall (Ithaca, N.Y, 1997), 173
48. Carlo Ginzburg, "Titian, Ovid, and Sixteenth-Century Codes for Erotic Illustration," in Myths, Emblems, Clues, transl. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (London, 1990), 93
49. R. Rommetveit, On Message Structure: A Framework for the Study of Language and Communication (New York, 1974)
50. V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language [1929] (Cambridge, Mass. 1986)
51. Sonya O. Rose, "Cultural Analysis and Moral Discourses," in Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Bonnell and Hunt, 223. For a brilliant critique of this method of haphazardly patching up the model of language
52. see Michael Silverstein, "Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology," in The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels, ed. Paul Clyne et al. (Chicago Linguistic Society, 1979)
53. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London, 1991), 32
54. Consider, for example, the commendations the notion of the "moral economy" received even after the behavior it designated was reexplained as rational price bargaining. For references, see Richard Biernacki, The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640-1914 (Berkeley, 1995), 18, note 47
55. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 35.
56. A similar metonymic relation between representations and enacted procedures guides Matthew Edney's recent work on the colonial surveying of India. British rulers required a map of India to define India as a governable body, but this representation no more established the reality of the object than a text establishes the nation in Anderson's account. Edney demonstrates in luminous detail how a collective, practical ritual-the physical enactment of obsessive mapping procedures by British gentlemen scientists-enshrined the mapped "India" as a symbolically real target of governance. Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago, 1997)
57. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, 1989), 31. Zizek shows Marx should be considered a theorist of cultural practice rather than a socioeconomic determinist
58. Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Berlin, 1980), 88.
59. For a recent work that in my view analogously uses the trope of metaphor to figure the generation of representations through "material action," see Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles, especially 326, 332.
60. Biernacki, The Fabrication of Labor, chapter two.
61. For an analysis of representations that are complete for practical experience but partial as theories, see John Torrance, Karl Marx's Theory of Ideas (Cambridge, Eng., 1995), 158, 165
62. Martha Lampland, The Object of Labor (Chicago, 1995).
63. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London, 1971), 168.
64. For an example of the failure of mass ritual to cast its spell, consider the imperial German government's unsuccessful effort to make Sedan Day a significant holiday for Germans in Württemberg after 1871. Alon Confino, The Nation as Local Metaphor: Ẅrttemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill, N.C. 1997), 84-85
65. Marx, Das Kapital, 88.
66. Benjamin Whorf, "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language," in Language, Culture and Personality, ed. Leslie Spier (Menasha, Wisc, 1941), 75-93
67. Ann Swidler, "Inequality in American Culture: The Persistence of Voluntarism," American Behavioral Scientist 35 (March, 1992). 606-629
68. Swidler, "Culture in Action," 277.
69. The rich sociological literature on the meaning of distinct kinds of money-like currencies, from stock options to household "pin money," has not yielded distinctive predictions so far about the creation and use of these currencies. Economists have already shown that individuals or households will segregate their monies by frequency of receipt and expenditure and by whether the expenditure is a relative luxury, the better to regulate their consumption rationally. Cultural sociologists are unac quainted with these parallel accounts. Compare Viviana Zelizer's fascinating "Payments and Social Ties," Sociological Forum 11 (1996)
70. with congruent rational choice explanations in Richard Thaler, "Mental Accounting and Consumer Choice," Marketing Science 4 (1985), 199-201.
71. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf ed. John B. Carroll (New York, 1956), 81, 266
72. Marx-Engels Werke, volume 32 (Berlin, 1964), 552-553
73. Das Kapital, 62.
74. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory (Cambridge, Eng., 1993), 156-157, 394