Revising the past/revisiting the present: How change happens in historiography

History and Theory

Volumn 46, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 1-19

  Spiegel, Gabrielle M ^a  

^a JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 46649093804     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2007.00425.x     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed., 2000. I would like to thank Robert Stein and David Bell for their extremely helpful suggestions and criticisms of this article. I should point out that neither wholly shares the view presented here concerning the "causes" for the emergence of poststructuralism and postmodernism.
2. Friedrich Meinecke, Die Enstehung des Historismus [1936] (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1959).
3. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
4. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1970).
5. See, for example, Joyce Appleby's Presidential Address on "The Power of History," read before the American Historical Association at its meeting in Seattle, Washington, January 9, 1997
6. Published in the American Historical Review 103, no. 1 (February 1998), 1-17.
7. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, transl. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 5.
8. Hofmannsthal's phrase is cited in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972-1989), I, pt. 3, 1238. I am indebted to Daniel Heller-Roazen for this reference.
9. See the discussion of this in Daniel Heller-Roazen, "Introduction, " Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities, ed. and transl. with an introduction by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 1.
10. de Certeau, The Writing of History, 5.
11. "Ideological" here can be usefully understood in Althusserian terras as "the representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence," a definition that captures the asymmetrical relation between conceptual frames or images and the objects toward which they are directed, as opposed to more mechanical notions of "reflection," "correspondence," or transparency of any kind. It is in this sense that, for Althusser, "ideology is the system of the ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group." See Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 162, 158.
12. For a recent attempt to rehabilitate the notion of individual intentionality, see Mark Bevir, "How to Be an Intentionalist," History and Theory 41 (2002), 209-217
13. as well as the more extended discussion in his The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
14. On this development generally see Elizabeth Deeds Ermath, "Agency in the Discursive Condition," History and Theory, Theme Issue 40 (2001), 34-58
15. and the now classic essay by Joan Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," reprinted in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terrence J. McDonald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 379-406.
16. See also David Gary Shaw, "Happy in Our Chains? Agency and Language in the Postmodern Age," History and Theory, Theme Issue 40 (2001), 1-9, which serves as an introduction to the extremely useful set of essays on the question of agency in history to which this issue of History and Theory was dedicated. It might be noted in passing that for Fredric Jameson the opposition normally posed between "agency" and (linguistic) "system" is a false opposition "about which it would be just as satisfactory to say that both positions are right; the crucial issue is the theoretical dilemma, replicated in both, of some seeming explanatory choice between the alternatives of agency and system.
17. th ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 326. For this reason, perhaps, most of the current revisions to poststructuralist theorizing of the subject and its capacity for agency seeks to retain the systematic force of discursive regimes while modifying the totalizing effect of such regimes on individual behavior and consciousness. See the discussion that follows.
18. For a more extensive argument on this point see Gabrielle M. Spiegel, "History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text," Speculum 65 (1990), 59-86
19. reprinted in idem, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 21.
20. For a fuller discussion of this current movement of "revision" in linguistic-turn historiography, see my Introduction to Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 1-31.
21. For LaCapra, history is "always in transit, even if periods, places, or professions sometimes achieve relative stabilization. This is the very meaning of historicity. And the disciplines that study history ... are also to varying degrees in transit, with their self-definitions and borders never achieving fixity or uncontested identity." Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), 1. If one accepts this formulation, then once again, as in the case of de Certeau although on a different basis, revision is seen as intrinsic to the nature of history, an understanding of historicity, and the practices that create and study it.
22. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret C. Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York and London: Norton, 1994), 206, 207.
23. Jacques Derrida, "Shibboleth," in Midrash and Literature, ed. Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 323.
24. As Derrida himself noted, deconstruction proposes the notion of a "decentered structure," that is, a structure whose decentering is the result of "the event I called a rupture, itself, in turn, an effect of the coming into consciousness of the "structurality of structure." See "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in Writing and Difference, transl. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 292. Derrida does not, however, specify the "event" he calls a rupture, he merely - and somewhat tautologically - presents it as an effect of an emerging awareness of structure's structurality, or constructed nature. One is tempted to see this as a compelling example of the intellectual displacement of a psychological phenomenon.
25. Adorno's phrase was: "After Auschwitz it is no longer possible to write poems." Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, transl. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 362.
26. Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play," 292.
27. Nadine Fresco, "Remembering the Unknown," International Review of Psychoanalysis 11 (1984), 419.
28. Quoted in Ellen S. Fine, "The Absent Memory: The Act of Writing in Post-Holocaust French Literature," in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 44.
29. George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1986), 123.
30. Quoted in Fine, "The Absent Memory," 41.
31. The "unrepresentable" nature of the Holocaust is the subject of a considerable literature, beginning with the essays collected in Saul Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
32. See also his Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993)
33. as well as Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust, and Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
34. Jean-François Lyotard, "Discussions or Phrasing 'after Auschwitz,'" in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 364.
35. George Steiner, "The Long Life of Metaphor," in Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust, 157.
36. The date 1966 refers to the conference on "The Structuralist Controversy" held at Johns Hopkins University, the papers for which were later edited and published in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970). The date certainly marks the introduction of poststructuralism into America. It is interesting that Derrida himself believed that 1966 inaugurated deconstruction as an identifiable philosophical configuration, indebted in many ways to the structuralist movement in its deployment of Saussurean linguistics but marking its own place by the critique of structuralism and revisions to Saussure.
37. Jacques Derrida, "Deconstructions: The Im-possible," in French Theory in America, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Sande Cohen (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 18.
38. François Cusset, "French Theory"; Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & de et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux États-Unis (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2003).
39. In "Orations of the Dead/Silences of the Living," 42.
40. This is a point that Peter Novick has forcefully made with respect to American Jews and the Holocaust. See his The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), although he fails to take into account in that book the refugee community in America and its second-generation offspring.
41. Jameson relies for his understanding of "late capitalism" on the work of Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, transl. Joris de Bres (London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975).
42. Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005);
43. William H. Sewell, Jr. The Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 22-80.
44. Sewell's use of the phrase "political unconscious" alludes to Jameson's earlier book, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981).
45. The quotation appears in a forthcoming review of Geoff Eley's A Crooked Line, to be published as part of a "Forum" on Eley's book in the American Historical Review. Cited here with permission of the author, William H. Sewell, Jr.
46. Eley, A Crooked Line, 110-411.
47. On this development see my introduction to Practicing History and Sewell, The Logics of History, as well as Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 1-32.
48. Also of interest is Andreas Reckwitz, "Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing," European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 2 (2002), 243-263.
49. See Minor Transnationalism, ed. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).