Comment on a crooked line

American Historical Review

Volumn 113, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 406-416

  Spiegel, Gabrielle M ^a  

^a JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 46649103245     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.113.2.406     Document Type: Review

References (52)

1. In terms of the form of this quasi-autobiographical account, it falls somewhere between what Jaume Aurell has recently called " constructionist" autobiography and "experimental" autobiography. The first is defined as autobiography in which authors tend "to establish a critical distance from their own lives to present it objectively, often in terms of empirical-analytical language that gives their narratives a monographic air." "Experimental autobiographers," on the other hand, are "less concerned with their identity as academics/historians, and narrate with an epistemologically skeptical frame," although they are concerned to specify and identify with "specific intellectual itineraries, [in which] history [becomes] a subtext of their personal narratives." See Aurell, "Autobiography as Unconventional History: Constructing the Author," Rethinking History 10, no. 3 (2006): 433-449, esp. 435 and 439.
2. The first two chapters are devoted to a review of his training as a historian in Britain and Germany, primarily under the impulse of and inspired by the rise of the "new" social history of the 1960s and 1970s. They offer the non-British, non-German historian an extremely interesting and valuable review of the major trends in social history in those countries during those two decades, that is, before the advent of the linguistic turn. The last two chapters take up the question of the diverse relations between social and cultural history, the emergence of linguistic turn historiography, the ways in which it affected the practice and theory of history, and finally a "defiant" consideration of the potential for a revised, more comprehensive approach to history in its entirety that would honor the analyses generated by social and cultural logics equally. The "crooked line" constitutes a figure derived from Bertolt Brecht's maxim that "when there are obstacles, the shortest distance between two points-here from cultural history to the history of society-is a crooked line."
3. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, Calif., 1999).
4. William H. Sewell, Jr., "A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformation," American Journal of Sociology 98 (1992): 1-29;
5. Sewell, "The Concept(s) of Culture," in Bonnell and Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn, 35-61;
6. Sewell, "Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille," Theory and Society 25 (1996): 841-881.
7. These, together with newly written and collected articles, have recently been published by Sewell in Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005).
8. Richard Biernacki, "Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in Cultural Inquiry," History and Theory 39 (2000): 289-310;
9. Biernacki, "Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History," in Bonnell and Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn, 62-92;
10. Biernacki with Jennifer Jordan, "The Place of Space in the Study of the Social," in Patrick Joyce, ed., The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences (London, 2002), 133-150.
11. Miguel A. Cabrera, "On Language, Culture and Social Action," History and Theory 40 (2001): 82-100;
12. Cabrera, "Linguistic Approach or Return to Subjectivism: In Search of an Alternative to Social History," Social History 24 (1991): 74-89;
13. Cabrera, Postsocial History: An Introduction, trans. Marie McMahon, foreword by Patrick Joyce (Boulder, Colo., 2004).
14. Patrick Joyce, "The Imaginary Discontents of Social History: A Note of Response to Mayfield and Thome, Lawrence and Taylor," Social History 18, no. 1 (1993): 81-85;
15. Joyce, "The End of Social History?" in Keith Jenkins, ed., The Postmodern History Reader (London, 1997), 341-365;
16. Joyce, "History and Postmodernism," Past and Present 133 (1991): 204-209;
17. Joyce, "More Secondary Modern Than Postmodern," Rethinking History 5 (2001): 367-382;
18. Joyce, "What Is the Social and Why Is It in Question?," the introduction to his recently edited collection of articles The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences (London, 2002).
19. William M. Reddy, "The Logic of Action: Indeterminacy, Emotion and Historical Narrative," History and Theory 40 (2001): 10-33.
20. Nicholas B. Dirks, "Is Vice Versa? Historical Anthropologies and Anthropological Histories," in Terrence J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996), 17-51.
21. For Sahlins, see especially the articles collected in Marshall Sahlins, Culture in Practice: Selected Essays (New York, 2000),
22. as well as Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago, 1985).
23. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration (Berkeley, Calif., 1986).
24. Andreas Reckwitz, "Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing," European Journal of Social Theory 5 (2002): 243-263;
25. Reckwitz, Die Transformation der Kulturtheorien: Zur Entwicklung eines Theorieprogramms (Weilerswist, 2000).
26. Cultural and Social History 1, no. 2 (May 2004), in particular the essay by Carla Hesse on 201-207.
27. For a set of readings and an introductory overview of this development, see Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ed., Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Tum (New York, 2005).
28. For a fuller discussion of this point, see Sewell, Logics of History, especially chap. 1, "Theory, History and Social Science," and chap. 2, "The Political Unconscious of Social and Cultural History, or, Confessions of a Former Quantitative Historian."
29. The phrase comes from Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1973), xxi.
30. See, for example, the conflation of the two terms on pp. 125 and 156; in the latter case they are presented as synonymous.
31. David Nirenberg, personal communication. For a theoretical analysis of the grounds on which one might begin to articulate such a field, see Gabrielle M. Spiegel, "Towards a Theory of the Middle Ground: Historical Writing in the Age of Postmodernism," in Carlos Barros, ed., Historia a debate, 5 vols. (Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 1995), 1: 169-176,
32. as well as Spiegel, "History and Post-Modernism: IV," Past and Present 135 (1992): 194-208.
33. In Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, and Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan et al. (New York, 1988), 21.
34. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1972), 55.
35. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1977), 3.
36. Reckwitz, "Toward a Theory of Social Practices," 247.
37. Marshall Sahlins, "Introduction," in Sahlins, Culture in Practice, 25.
38. Biernacki, "Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History," 75.
39. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 124.
40. Bernard Lepetit, "Histoire des pratiques, pratique de l'histoire," in Lepetit, ed., Les Formes de l'expérience (Paris, 1995), 14.
41. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988).
42. One of the few works to systematically investigate this problem that I am aware of is Jacques Revel, comp., Jeux d'échelles: La micro-analyse à l'expérience (Paris, 1996).
43. See Sewell, "The Concept(s) of Culture," 53ff. See also his new book Logics of History.
44. See Sewell, "Historical Events as Transformations of Structures," 861.
45. Ibid.
46. For a discussion of this, see Sahlins, Islands of History, 147-148.
47. See especially Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, Calif., 1988);
48. Giddens, The Constitution of Society;
49. Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Cambridge, 1984).
50. Bonnell and Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn, 11.
51. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, "History, Historicism and the Social Logic of the Text," Speculum 65 (1990): 59-86.
52. Reprinted in Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore, 1997), 19.