REVISING THE PAST I REVISITING THE PRESENT:

HOW CHANGE HAPPENS IN HISTORIOGRAPHY

GABRlELLE M. SPIEGEL
Abstract

This article investigates the various forces that may help to explain the ongoing
historiographical phenomenon of revision. It takes as its point of departure Michel de
Certeaus understanding of the writing of history as a process consisting of an unstable and
constantly changing triangulated relationship among a place (a recruitment, a milieu, a
profession), analytical procedures (a discipline), and the construction of a text (or discourse).
For de Certeau, revision is the formal prerequisite for writing history because the very
distance between past and present requires continuous innovation simply to produce the
objects of historical knowledge, which have no existence apart from the historians
identification of them. The specific nature of revision at a given moment is determined by the
specificities of the process as a whole, that is, by the characteristics of place, procedure, and
text and their contemporary relational configuration.
Taking the rise of linguistic-turn historiography as exemplary of the process of historical
revision in its broadest possible meaning, the article seeks to discover the possible causes
for that turn. It begins with an analysis of the psychological roots of poststructuralism as a
response to the Holocaust and its aftermath, and then proceeds to explore the possible
economic and social transformations in the postwar world that might account for its
reception, both in Europe but also, more counterintuitively, in the United States, where
postmodernism proved to have an especially strong appeal. Added to this mix are the new
patterns of social recruitment into the historical profession in the sixties. The essay
suggests that, to the extent that revision is understood as the result of the combined effect of
psychological, social, and professional determinations, it is unlikely that there will ever be
genuine consensus about the sources of revision in history, since all historians bring to their
work differing congeries of psychological preoccupations, social positions, and professional
commitments.

A call to examine the nature and role of revision in history must strike readers
of this journal as an odd venture in that it would seem to address the most routine
aspect of historiographical work in force since the disciplines professional
inception in the nineteenth century, and to be a topic manifestly lacking theoretical
dimensions. Indeed, my first reading of the call unconsciously converted
the term to revisionism, which at least possessed the suggestion of systematic
character one normally associates with theory. Fortunately, this turned out to be
a misreading of the invitation, for it quickly emerged that even the most cursory
search via Google for a standard definition of revisionism offers up a seemingly
endless stream of references to a movement dedicated to the denial of
the reality of the Holocaust, which seems to have captured the term for its own
use (in the process displacing its earlier strong link to Marxist revisionism in
the tradition of Edouard Bernstein, understood as a recurrent tendency within
Communist thought to revise Marxist theory in such a way as to provide
justification
for a retreat from a revolutionary to a reformist position ). Revisionism,
or what the French more aptly, if awkwardly, call negationism, appears to be
a phenomenon occurring well outside the precincts of normal historical activity,
however pervasive its presence in the ether.
What, then, motivates the current investigation of the concept of revision in
history, its character, meaning, frequency, and reach? After all, revision, in its
most anodyne sense of revising error, has been at the core of all historiographical
practice since the rise of Rankean positivism and historicism. As is well known,
the classical historicism of the early nineteenth century arose in opposition to
Enlightenment philosophical beliefs that human behavior and development
obeyed observable and universal laws of development from which their truth
could be deduced. Taking its stand against both the metaphysics of Enlightenment
philosophy and the sociological positivism of thinkers like Comte, who similarly
believed in the law-like character of human behavior, historicists insisted that
human persons and events should be understood in relation not to extra-temporal

metaphysical principles or natural laws but to their particular historical being.

Historical inquiry, therefore, should be directed toward describing the particularity
of past human behavior, itself explicable in terms of an understanding of the
total nature of a given historical period, however defined.
Friedrich Meinecke, in his classic work on Die Entstehung des Historismus
(1936), saw the essence of historicism as the substitution of a process of
individualizing
observation for a generalizing view of human forces in history.
Historicism thus combined a focus on the distinctive individuality of historical
phenomena with an appreciation that such individuality was both conditioned by
and could only be understood in terms of a succession of events and regularities.
These regularities, however, were historical, not law-like, and thus required
a method of inquiry distinct from that governing the natural sciences, a method
adapted, rather, to the human sciences. Inevitably, this meant that the search
for new knowledge of those particularities was the central task of the historian.
Supplementing the store of knowledge about history and correction of error lay
at the core of what made history a science in the nineteenth century, marking
at one and the same time the progress of knowledge and the progress of society.
Incremental revision of the historical record was the normal by-product of such
activity; it was both expected and welcomed and, to a large extent, justified the
enterprise as such. To be sure, we have long since distanced ourselves from the
pursuit of that noble dream of an objective, positivist basis for historical
investigation
which, as Peter Novick has so ably demonstrated, is no longer shared by
most historians, however much we respect and insist on the empirical basis for
all historical investigation. Yet to the extent that we still believe in the documentary
function of historical research, revision hardly seems to be an analytical
category worth exploring.
If we take revision to refer to a more thoroughgoing shift in the nature of
historical practice and its conceptual underpinnings, without at the same time
systematizing the term into its current sad usage as Holocaust revisionism, then
the possible reasons for an examination of its meaning become more intelligible.
What constitutes revision in this broader sense? What range of activities must
take place to qualify as revision? Does it occur naturally as part of the normal
processes entailed in doing history or is it stimulated by extensive shifts in patterns
of social recruitment into the profession that mandate new arenas and forms of
investigation to discover the historical roots of present concerns, whether social
or intellectual? Is it forced upon historians from outside by developments in other
disciplines or in the larger world in which they live, or does it occur as a result of
interior, psychological shifts within individual historians whose work, because of
its excellence and compelling character, attains exemplary status and generates
widespread imitation? How thoroughgoing does revision need to be to qualify
as a paradigm shift, to use Kuhns terminology applied to scientific practices,
including historiography? Since all of these sorts of elements are presumably
present in the profession most of the time, what accounts for the fact that certain
periods seem content to operate within the normal frames that socialization into
the profession inculcates in historians, while other periods bear witness to a
widespread revolt against the perceived limitations imposed by routine disciplinary
and conceptual standards, whatever they may be?
These are some of the questions that arise from the enlarged sense of revision
as it approaches the threshold of a paradigm shift, and anyone who has lived
through the last four decades of change in historiographical praxis can appreciate
the need to investigate how such a profound transformation in the nature and
understanding of historical work, both in practice and in theory, could have taken
place. The motive for doing so now, I would guess, is that we all sense that this
profound change, which variously took place under the banner of the linguistic
turn, poststructuralism, or postmodernism, has run its course, wrought
whatever changes the discipline is likely to absorbwhile rejecting a significant
number of othersand is effectively over. Whether this change amounted, as

some historians have claimed, to an epistemological crisis in history remains

an open question, but no one can doubt that it constituted a wholesale revision
of the ways that historians understood the nature of their endeavor, the technical
and conceptual tools deemed appropriate for historical research and writing, and
the purpose and meaning of the work so produced. One potential avenue for the
examination of revision as a historiographical procedure, then, is via some
explanation of how and why this sea change in history occurred, what motivated it
and what governed the rhythms of its acceptance, dissemination, and decline. An
appreciation of the determining constituents of this rather extreme case of historical
revision may offer some insight into the more usual, less thoroughgoing sorts
of revision that accompany historical work in all periods. But before broaching
the question of what causedin some sense still to be discoveredthe rise of
linguistic-turn historiography, we would do well to consider more generally what
historical practice consists of, for any change in practice, even one as startling
and deep-rooted as the linguistic turn, perforce occurs initially within the confines
of normal science, to borrow Kuhns phrase, and thus must be seen against the
background of its routines.
One of the most significant characteristics of the contemporary practice of
history, important for the points I wish eventually to make, derives from the
central paradox of historical writing as analyzed by Michel de Certeau. In de
Certeaus opinion, modern Western history essentially begins with a decisive
differentiation between the present and the past. Like modern medicine, whose
birth is contemporaneous with that of modern historiography, the practice of
history becomes possible only when a corpse is opened to investigation, made
legible such that it can be translated into that which can be written within a space
of language. Historians must draw a line between what is dead (past) and what
is not, and therefore they posit death as a total social fact, in contrast to tradition,
which figures a lived body of traditional knowledge, passed down in gestures,
habits, unspoken but nonetheless real memories, borne by living societies. For
de Certeau, the modern age entertains an obsessive relation with death, and
discourse about the past has as the very condition of its possibility the status of
being discourse about the dead, a discourse with which historians fill the void
between past and present created by historys founding gesture of rupture. In that
sense, the very postulate of modern historiography is the disappearance of the
past from the present, its movement from visibility to invisibility. The historians
task becomes, therefore, what Hofmannsthal defined as that of reading what
was never written. It is in this moment that the past is saved, not in being
returned to what once existed, but instead, precisely in being transformed into
something that never was, in being read as what was never written. From this
perspective, the principal relation of the historian to the past is an engagement
with absence.
At the same time, the historians specific labor is to fill the space of the void
created by the division of the present from the past with words, language (or
discourse) generated from and within the present place of the historian. As de
Certeau notes,

Historiography tends to prove that the site of its production can encompass the past: it is
an odd procedure that posits death, a breakage everywhere reiterated in discourse, and that
yet denies loss by appropriating to the present the privilege of recapitulating the past as a
form of knowledge. A labor of death and a labor against death. 10

This paradoxical procedure is, precisely, what de Certeau means by writing, an

act that replaces the traditional representation that gave authority to the present
with a representative labor that places both absence and production in the same
area.11 The critical concept here for de Certeau is that of the site of production,
which for him constitutes historiographys quasi-universal principle of explanation,
since, he asserts, historical research grasps every document as the symptom
of whatever produced it,12 and represents it through its own productive labor of
writing.
Historical writing, therefore, is performed through and by means of a constant

paradoxical movement between absence and presencethe presence of the

present
place from which the past has been excluded by the defining gesture of rupture
that constitutes it, and the site from which the past will be recreated. Inherent
in this double movement between past and present, absence and presence, is the
constant rewriting of the past in the terms of the present, since
founded on a rupture between a past that is its object and a present that is the place of its
practice, history endlessly finds the present in its object and the past in its practice. . . .
Inhabited by the uncanniness that it seeks, history imposes its law upon the faraway places
that it conquers when it fosters the illusion that it is bringing them back to life.
In the realm of history, an endless labor of differentiation (among events, periods,
data or series, and so on) forms the condition of all relating of elements that have been
distinguished, and hence of their comprehension. But this labor is based on the difference
between a present and a past. Everywhere it presupposes the act advancing an innovation
by dissociating itself from a tradition in order to consider this tradition as an object of
knowledge.13

What de Certeau suggests here is that revision is the formal prerequisite for
writing history, not in the sense of the supplementation of the historical record
with formerly unknown knowledge, as classical historicism had it, but because
the very distance between past and present requires continuous innovation simply
to produce the objects of historical knowledge, which have no existence apart
from the historians identification of them. History, then, plays along the margins which join a society with its past and with the very act of separating itself
from the past.14
As the preceding passage from de Certeau indicates, the fact that historians
must construct the objects of their investigation does not mean that they are
free of the past or that the findings so generated are merely fictive postulates.
Historians escape neither the survival of former structures nor the weight of an
endlessly present pastan inertia that traditionalists were wont to call
continuity.
But it does mean that, in contemporary historiography, the sign of history
has become less the real than the intelligible, an intelligibility achieved through
the production of historiographical discourse according to narrativist principles,
and hence always flirting with the fictive that is intrinsic to the operation of
narrativity. In this process, the historical referent (or what used to be called the
real, the true, the fact) is not so much obliterated as displaced. No longer a
given of the past that offers itself to the historians gaze, the referent is
something
constantly recreated in the recurring movement between past and present,
hence ever-changing as that relationship itself is modified in the present.
As an operation of the present upon the past, moreover, historical writing is
always affected by determinisms of varying kinds, since it necessarily depends
upon the place where it occurs in a society and [is] specified . . . by a problem,
methods and a function which are its own.15 Indeed, envisaging history as an
operation, de Certeau argues, is equivalent to understanding it as the relation
between a place (a recruitment, a milieu, a profession etc.), analytical procedures
(a discipline) and the construction of a text.16 This triangulated relationship
among place, procedure, and text (or production) means that the sources of the
determinations that go into the making of history are heterogeneous and possess a
number of constraints that delimit the activity of individual historians, outside of
which they cannot operate. Whether viewed as a product of historians discursive
formation la Foucault, their social embeddedness in a time and place, or the
protocols of professional practice at any given moment, what this suggests is that
genuine revision of the kind represented by the linguistic turn in historiography
of the last several decades is in principle extraordinarily difficult to achieve, since
the impulses behind such revision must arise from and be consonant with needs
and desires that are variously social, professional, and personal in inspiration.
Only, perhaps, when change occurs in all three domains is it likely that a
transformation
in the systemic conditions within which the historical operation takes

placea paradigm shift in Kuhns sensewill occur.

All this suggests that the writing of history cannot be entirely divorced from
the psychology of individual historians, whatever the degree to which that
psychology
is shaped by the intellectual (read ideological17) currents of the world
they inhabit or is channeled through professional avenues of expression. If we
acknowledge that history is the product of contemporary mental images of the
absent past that bear within them strong ideological and/or political imprints
and it seems unlikely that any historian would today disagree with this, whether
framed in terms of discourse, social location, or some other form of the historians
fashioningthen it seems wrongheaded to deny the impress of individual
psychological forces in the coding and decoding of those socially generated
norms and discourses, although the degree to which individual motivation (or
what used to fall under the rubrics of consciousness and intentionality) operates
freely remains subject to debate.18
I assert this belief in the psychic roots of the historians practice in full awareness
of the fact that one of the founding principles of poststructuralism trumpets
the death of the author and replaces the former humanist concept of the
individual
subject, or the individual tout court, with the notion of malleable and
ever-changing subject positions, constituted by and within discourse, a
characteristic
poststructuralist exchange of depth (hence depth psychology) for spatial
relations (or positions).19 But this effacement of the individual as centered
subjectas psyche, as agent, and as historical interpreteralways seemed to me
to be the most problematic aspect of the poststructuralist critique of the so-called
humanist subject. What tended to get lost in poststructuralisms concentration on
the discursive constitution of the subject was any sense of social agency, of men
and women struggling with the contingencies and complexities of their lives in
terms of the fates that history deals them, and of the ways in which they transform
the worlds they inherit and pass on to future generations.20
It is hardly surprising, then, that current debates about poststructuralism and
linguistic-turn historiography are taking aim at the notion of the linguistically
constructed nature of subjectivity, one aspect of a revised understanding of the
master category of discourse that stresses less the structural nature of its linguistic
constructs than the pragmatics of their use. Thus practice and meaning have been
at least partially uncoupled from the impersonal workings of discursive regimes
and rejoined to the active intentions of human agents embedded in social worlds.
Rather than being governed by impersonal semiotic codes, historical actorsboth
past and presentare now seen as engaged in inflecting the semiotic constituents
(signs) that shape their understanding of reality so as to craft an experience of
that world in terms of a situational sociology of meaning, or what might be called
a social semantics.21 This shift in focus from semiotics to semantics, from given
semiotic structures to the individual and social construal of signs, in short, from
culture as discourse to culture as practice and performance, entails a recuperation
of the historical actor as an intentional (if not wholly self-conscious) agent, and
thus foregrounds once again questions of individual motivation and behavior. 22
All of which brings me, at last, to a consideration of the possible causes for
the emergence of linguistic-turn historiography within the framework of what
is more generally termed postmodernism, and its widening professional
acceptance
in the period roughly covered by the last four decades, with allowances
made for varying degrees of its penetration over time in different domains of
historical inquiry.23
This is not the place to rehearse the characteristics of either the linguistic turn
in historical writing or postmodernism more generally, understood here as the
encompassing phenomenon within which the changes in historiography occurred.
By nowand certainly among readers of History and Theoryit is hard to imagine

that a shared sense of what we mean by these terms does not exist, even as
considerable disagreement persists concerning their significance and utility for
historiography. Moreover, to the extent that this turn in historiographical practice
is seen here merely as exemplary, as an instance of a process of revision that is
ongoing in historical workwhat LaCapra in his most recent book calls history
in transit24the precise elements that make up the linguistic turn,
poststructuralism,
and postmodernism are perhaps less important than the fact of the profound
change in the conception and doing of history that they implied.
There is, to be sure, little agreement about the motives and causes that stand
behind these phenomena. Perhaps the most negative assessment of
postmodernisms
sources and prevailing cachet in the academy comes from the collective
work of Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, who, in Telling the
Truth about History, proclaim that

In our view, postmodernists are deeply disillusioned intellectuals who denounce en masse
Marxism and liberal humanism, communism and capitalism, and all expectations of
liberation.
They insist that all of the regnant ideologies are fundamentally the same because
these ideologies are driven by the desire to discipline and control the population in the
name of science and truth. No form of liberation can escape from these parameters of
control.
In many ways, then, postmodernism is an ironic, perhaps even despairing view of the
world, one that, in its extreme forms, offers little role for history as previously known. 25

Interesting in its focus on the individual, ideologically conditioned character

of those espousing postmodernism, the passage fails to take us very far toward
understanding the roots of the disillusionment that, the authors aver, so colors
the postmodernist approach to the world and to history. Nor does it specify the
place from which such an ironic perception might have been generated. If we
agree with de Certeau that the site of historys production, including in that
notion prevailing discourses as well as the social conditions that discourses both
construct and live within, then we must look elsewhere for an explanation of
postmodernisms emergence and appeal.
I would like to begin with what I have elsewhere argued are the psychic roots
of poststructuralism, and of Derridean deconstruction in particular (which I consider
to have been the basic articulation of poststructuralisms most important
principles.26) We may legitimately take, I believe, the hallmark of deconstruction
(and hence of poststructuralism) to be a new and deeply counterintuitive
relationship between language and reality, counterintuitive in the sense that
deconstructions understanding of that relationship interposes so many layers
of mediationindeed, proffers little but mediationthat one is left enclosed
within a linguistic world that no longer has a purchase on reality. Moreover,
deconstruction proposes an inherent instability at the core of language that places
the determination of meaning ultimately beyond our reach, for every text, in the
broad sense that deconstruction understands that term, founders ultimately on its
own indeterminacy, its aporia, the impasse beyond all possible transaction as
Derrida defines it, which is connected with the multiplicity of meanings embedded
within the uniqueness of textual inscription.27 The psychic destabilization
produced by such a problematizing of the relationship between res et verba,
together with the decentering of language and thus, perforce, of those who author
and authorize it, suggests that deconstruction represents not only a rupture in the
traditions of Western philosophy and history, but a psychic response to those
traditions that is itself founded in rupture.28
It is my belief that Derrida alchemized into philosophy a psychology deeply
marked by the Holocaustmarked by but not part of its experiential domainin
which the Holocaust figures as the absent origin that Derrida himself did so
much to theorize. This is to argue that, living at a moment burdened with the
inescapable consciousness of the Holocaust, Derrida emerged into the history of

philosophy as a theoretician of linguistic play, and to contend that the articulation

of play is central to that process of alchemization that makes writing after
Auschwitz (in the famous phrase of Adorno 29) possible. Indeed, in a highly
displaced
form, this is precisely the starting point of Derridas critique of what he
calls the structuralist thematic of broken immediacy:
This structuralist thematic of broken immediacy is therefore the saddened, negative,
nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play whose other side would be
Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the
innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth,
and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. This affirmation then
determines
the non center otherwise than as loss of the center. 30

For Derrida, acknowledgment of the structurality of structure is synonymous

with the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment
when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse. 31
Derrida belonged both by birth and by self-conscious identification to that
second generation of the post-Holocaust world on whose psyche has been
indelibly inscribed an event in which it did not participate, but which nonetheless
constitutes the underlying narrative of the lives of its members.32 Theirs was,
first and foremost, a world of silence, a silence, as French psychologist Nadine
Fresco tells us in her brilliant evocation of the psychology of the second
generation,
that swallowed up the past, all the past.33 The parents of these children
transmitted only the wound to their children, to whom the memory had been refused and
who grew up in the compact world of the unspeakable, [amid] litanies of silence. . . . What
the Nazis had annihilated over and above individuals was the very substance of a world,
a culture, a history, a way of life. . . . Life was now the trace, molded by death. . . . The
past has been utterly burnt away at the center of their lives. 34

They feel themselves to be Jews deported from meaning, their resident permits
withdrawn, expelled from a lost paradise, abolished in a death in turn dissolved,
dissipated . . . deported from a self that ought to have been that of another. Death
is merely a matter of substitution.35 From their parents, this generation received
only, in Erika Apfelbaums words, un hritage en formes dabsences (a legacy
in the form of absences).36 Linked to the notion of absence in the work of French
writers of the second generation, as Ellen Fine has demonstrated, are repeated
evocations of void, lack, blank, gap, and abyss. La mmoire absente, in the
novels of Henri Raczymow is la mmoire troue: hollowed out, fragmented,
ruptured.37
Perhaps most striking of all in the work of these writers is the sense of the
utter inadequacy of language. The world of Auschwitz, in George Steiners
famous remark, lies outside speech as it lies outside reason.38 Language after
Auschwitz is language in a condition of severe diminishment and decline,
and no one has argued more forcefully than Steiner the corruptionindeed the
ruinof language as a result of the political bestiality of our age. 39 And yet, for
those who come after, there is nothing but language. As the protagonist in Elie
Wiesels novel The Fifth Son, states: Born after the war I endure its effects. I
suffer from an Event I did not even experience. . . . From a past that has made
History tremble, I have retained only words.40 Both for those who survived and
for those who came after, the Holocaust appears to exceed the representational
capacity of language, and thus to cast suspicion on the ability of words to convey
reality.41 And for the second generation, the question is not even how to
speak but, more profoundly, if one has a right to speak, a delegitimization of the
speaking self that, turned outward, interrogates the authority, the privilege, of all
speech. Which, of course, is precisely what Derrida and deconstruction do in the
attack on logocentrism.
Moreover, the Auschwitz model, Jean-Franois Lyotard concludes, designates
an experience of language that brings speculative discourse to a halt. The
latter can no longer be pursued after Auschwitz.42 Thus intimately bound

up with the paralysis of language is the death of metaphysicsitself, perhaps,

merely the displaced sign of the death of God in lunivers concentrationnaire.
What the Holocaust wrought, according to Steiner, was the exit of God from
language.
43 In Paul Celans poem Psalm, God is apostrophized as No One. No
One bespeaks the dust of the dead. After Auschwitz, metaphysical presence
became, like writing itself, a term sous rature, under erasure.
It is not difficult to see the parallels between this psychology of the second
generation and the basic tenets of poststructuralism (and/or postmodernism): the
feeling of life as a trace, haunted by an absent presence; its sense of
indeterminacy;
a belief in the ultimate undecidability of language (its aporia, in Derridas
sense); the transgressive approaches to knowledge and authority; and, perhaps
most powerfully, the conviction of the ultimately intransitive, self-reflective
character of language, which seems to have lost its power to represent anything
outside itself, hence to have lost its ability, finally, to signify. In its profound
commitment to a fractured, fragmented, and endlessly deferred, hence displaced,
understanding of language and the (im)possibilities of meaning, poststructuralism
shares with the second generation the anguish of belatedness, the scars of an
unhealed wound of absent memory, and the legacy of silence.
If, as I have argued, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and some varieties
of postmodernism in their psychic impulses enact a philosophy of rupture and
displacement, one particularly acute for the second generation of the postwar
world, then the question becomes why it resonated so powerfully for the generation
that came to maturity in the 1960s and 1970s, not only in Europe but even
more widely in the United. States. As Derrida himself recognized,

From the beginning (1966)44 there existed a certain Americanization of a certain

deconstruction.
By Americanization I mean a certain appropriation, a domestication, an institu
tionalization, chiefly academic, that took place elsewhere in other forms as well, but here
(in the US) in a massively visible form.45

Indeed, Franois Cusset has recently suggested that the true destiny and, he
contends, the very creation of French Theory finds its place and fulfillment
in the United States.46 But, as I will try to show, it is not obvious why this
Americanization of deconstruction should have taken place or what conditions
existed that favored the translation of French Theory to this side of the
Atlantic.
By way of explanation it may not suffice to assert, as I have elsewhere, 47 that
the emblematic figure of the postmodern world is the displaced person, or that
the receptivity to poststructuralism and postmodernism is in part a reflection
of the newly expanded recruitment of Jews (many of them children of refugee
parents) into American universities. For the appeal of postmodernism, its ability
to resonate throughout broad sectors of the American academy, suggests that
there must be a more profound, even structural, reason for its salience in the
United States compared to elsewhere, including (surprisingly) France, whence
so many of its basic elements were imported. Were poststructuralism and
postmodernism
merely enactments of psychological responses to the Holocaust or
World War II in general, it is doubtful that they would have achieved the kind of
purchase in American intellectual life that has taken place over the last decades,
since America, it could be argued, was less directly affected by the atrocities
of the war48 and, more broadly, less indebted to the high culture of Continental
Enlightenment that came under attack in postmodernism. If poststructuralism and
postmodernism represent, as I believe, a psychologically displaced response to
the aftermath of the Holocaust, the War, and its attendant disillusionment with
Enlightenment principles and goalsthat is (to return to de Certeau), in a psychic
awareness of loss, absence and, in that sense, a non-placethen what does their
widespread acceptance in the United States have to tell us about the place, the
social site, that may help to account for such an unexpectedly favorable reception

in North America? My premise here is that no matter how profoundly embedded

such revisions to historiography might be in the psychology of those who initiate
changes, they will fall on barren ground and fail to make a difference if they do
not also accord with a social situation or structure whose nature they somehow
articulate, albeit in highly displaced and mediated forms. We need, then, to examine
the social developments that may explain how such a widespread revision in
the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of contemporary historiography
could have taken root.
Any social explanation for a phenomenon as complex and multiform as
postmodernism surely will strike most historians as hopelessly reductive since,
in stipulating the social, economic, or demographic forces at work as causes for
transformations in intellectual life, one necessarily bypasses the shifting levels of
mediation between the social and the cultural that linguistic-turn historiography
has taught us to explore. Moreover, events are not necessarily any more logical,
less ridden with contradictions and hidden intentions, than speech and writing.
One cannot, therefore, posit any simple one-to-one correspondence between
social cause and intellectual effect.49 Still, to the degree that historians are
committed to the notions that languageor textuality in the very broad sense
postulated by postmodernismacquires meaning only when understood against
the background of its social context, or what I have called the social logic of
the text, that particular instances of language use or textuality incorporate social
as well as linguistic structures, and that the aesthetic and intellectual character
of any given articulation is intimately related (either positively or negatively) to
the social character of the environment from which it emerges, then an inquiry
into the possible social roots of intellectual change seems not only possible but
imperative (all the while keeping in mind the reductive character of the resulting
explanation, which would seem to be inescapable on some level).
One of the most powerful and comprehensive arguments concerning the social
and economic origins of postmodernism is set forth by Fredric Jameson in his
Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.50 As the title suggests,
Jameson argues that postmodernism as a sociocultural label, with its attendant
literary, aesthetic, cultural, and historiographical expressions, represents the
logic of late capitalism. By late capitalism (alternately called third-wave
capitalism) Jameson signals a postwar mode of capitalisms expansion on a
multinational,
ultimately global, scope, replacing the former monopoly stage of capitalism
associated with the age of European imperialism but superseded as those
imperial (colonial) monopolies were abandoned after the war, without, however,
constituting a discontinuity in the expansion of capitalism itself. For this reason
Jameson prefers the designation late capitalism in order to mark its continuity
with what preceded it, in contrast to the break, rupture, and mutation that concepts
such as postindustrial society wish to underscore.51 The impact of the advent
of third-wave or late capitalism was, he asserts, to reorganize international
relations, decolonize the colonies and lay the groundwork for the emergence of
a new economic world system,52 one that we have relatively recently come to
recognize as the global economy. In Jamesons view, the fundamental ideological
work to be performed by the concept of postmodernism must remain that of
coordinating new forms of practice and social and mental habits . . . with the new
forms of economic production and organization thrown up by the modification of
capitalismthe new global division of laborin recent years.53 Therefore, the
task of the postmodern is

to be seen as the production of postmodern people capable of functioning in a very

peculiar socioeconomic world indeed, one whose structure and objective features and
requirementsif we had a proper account of themwould constitute the situation to
which postmodernism is a response and would give us something a little more decisive
than postmodern theory.54

It goes almost without saying that, in Jamesons Marxist-inflected understanding

of history, a presupposition for the cultural emergence of postmodernism was

waning confidence in classical Marxism, culminating in 1989, which in the realm

of historical practice was accompanied by a shift from social to cultural history,
especially among historians on the left. It is here that the experiences of the
generation
that came to political and professional maturity in the 1960s is crucial as
a preparation, perhaps even a precondition, for the later emergence of postmodern
theory both in Europe and in America.
Confirmation of this basic point comes from two recent books by well-known
social historians: Geoff Eleys semi-autobiographical A Crooked Line: From
Cultural History to the History of Society, and William H. Sewell Jr.s The Logics
of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation, in particular the chapter on
The Political Unconscious of Social History. 55 Both of these historians are
leftleaning
or avowedly Marxist, as is Jameson, but a not dissimilar understanding
of the relationship between postmodernism and capitalism can be seen in Joyce
Applebys Presidential Address cited above (absent, however, the critique of
capitalism implicit in the other three authors).
Like Jameson, Sewell sees the rise of cultural history in relation to fundamental
changes in the economic order, in particular to worldwide transformations
of capitalism on a global scale. However, unlike Jameson, Sewell believes that
the explicit experiences of the sixties generation that were responsible for first
the cultural turn and then the linguistic turn in historical writing should be
located in a collapsing Fordist order, not the newly emergent order of globalized,
flexible accumulation. As he explains it:
As 1960s rebels [i.e. the left historians who began their practice of history in the 1960s and
1970s] we thought of ourselves as rising up against the interlocking and claustrophobic
system of social determinations that dominated contemporary corporate America. . . . Most
of us would probably have agreed with Jrgen Habermas that in contemporary society the
possibility of human freedom was progressively threatened by an escalating scale of
continually
expanded technical control over nature and a continually refined administration of
human beings and their relations to each other by means of social organization. . . . When,
a few years or a decade later, we revolted against the positivist research strategies of social
history and undertook studies of the cultural construction of the social world, I think we
obscurely felt ourselves to be freeing historical scholarship . . . from a mute social and economic determinism that was incapable of recognizing human creativity. . . . Thus cultural
historians were kicking down the door of Fordist social determinations at the moment when
such determinisms . . . were collapsing.56

Moreover, Sewell argues, the shift from Fordist or stated-centered capitalism

(monopoly capitalism in Jamesons terms) to the globalized capitalism (or late
capitalism) of neoliberalism was characterized all across the human sciences
by a general epistemic uncertaintyan uncertainty that has a certain elective
affinity with the heightened flexibility that is one of the hallmarks of the new
global economic order. In history, this uncertainty took the form of the cultural
turn, flirtations with poststructuralism and a fascination with microhistory and
subjectivity.57
Eley, as well, signals a decisive shift from the centrality of social history to
that of cultural history that took place, in his view, around 1980, a phenomenon
he attributes to Marxist social historians relinquishing the conviction that class
relations are the constitutive element in the history of industrialized capitalist
states, the Marxist social historians axiomatic wish.58 As Eley presents it, this
loss of confidence in class as the focus of historical causation was due primarily
to its diminishing explanatory power for social history, and he surely would
agreealthough it is not an explicit part of his argument that this occurred as a
result of changes in the British and European economic order. Less wide-ranging
in scope, due to its autobiographical orientation, Eleys position is nonetheless
compatible with those set forth by Jameson and Sewell in its linking of revisions
in historiographical practice to social and economic changes and their ideological
and political consequences.
However one ultimately assesses the accuracy of these descriptions of global

economic change in the aftermath of World War II to the present, on the whole
they strike me as plausible, if somewhat differently inflected, accounts, especially
when read in their entirety. Nonetheless, as explanations for the widespread
historiographical
revision that effected the linguistic turn I think they are not so much
wrong as incomplete. Although a more extended discussion of their arguments
would enable us to draw parallels between the flexibility characterizing the
new economic order and the notion of destabilized subject positions, between
the expansion of commercial consumerism and the dominance of culture, together
with a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum, 59 and to a weakening
sense of historicity and relationship to the world of objects, the problem
remains of the intellectual and philosophical specificity of poststructuralist and
postmodern theories, with their emphasis on absence, fragmentation, and the loss
of metaphysical and epistemological certainty in the growing awareness of the
linguistically mediated nature of perception, cognition, and imagination. I fail to
see how changes in capitalism lead to these developmentsparticularly the dematerialization of history that is crucial to poststructuralist thoughtalthough to
the extent that a case can be made for this argument, I think Jameson comes as
close as anyone to making it.60
For me, the most convincing explanation for the development of poststructuralism
by the generation that matured in the 1960s and 1970s remains an
understanding of it as a displaced, psychological response to the Holocaust and
its aftermath, perhaps particularly its aftermath, in the sense that there occurred a
growing, and somewhat belated, awareness of the ways in which it made belief
in the enlightened and progressive character of Western European civilization
impossible to sustain, a development subsequently strongly reinforced by the
emergence of postcolonial theory, which exposed the brutal and dehumanizing
aspects of European imperial ventures. French Theory, after all, does originate
in France among French thinkers contemplating, and revising, the work of
German philosophers. However much the destiny of French Theory may
appear to some to be the United States, especially in the somewhat domesticated
version (noted above by Derrida) that generally goes by the name of
postmodernism,
the linguistic turn in historical writing in North America is unthinkable
apart from the influence of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and all the others whose
thought and writing became the hallmark of this revisionist turn. They were the
first to articulate the sense of rupture, loss, and absence, whether it took the form
of Derridean deconstruction or Lyotards view of postmodernism as the passing
of master narratives, or Foucaults genealogical refusal of origins and essences.
Their initial ability to give philosophical form to what, in the end, can never have
been an exclusively European response to the war, was critical in developing the
conceptual formulations and tools that later became generalized in what we think
of as poststructuralism and postmodernism. That significant shifts in Americas
economy and society (not to mention the disillusionment with American
imperialism
in the Vietnamese war) laid the groundwork for a remarkable sensitivity
and receptiveness to these Continental intellectual developmentsin highly
mediated and displaced forms, of coursemay indeed explain their later
implantation
in the United States. But both phenomena are required to understand the
nature of the revision in historical thought that occurred and the timing of its
dissemination in the United States.
It might be objected that this argument works only if one conflates, as I have
tended to do in the preceding paragraphs, poststructuralism with postmodernism,
but I think that during the period of their reception in the United States one would
have been hard put to distinguish between them. Only later (certainly by now) did
an awareness of their differing conceptual bases and social grounds fully emerge.
However we ultimately come to understand these paired phenomena, it seems

clear that any explanation of the rise of linguistic-turn historiography will have to
consider both sides of the Atlantic, and thus both sides of the argument.
Added to this mix certainly must be the changing nature of recruitment into
the historical profession after the 1960s. Of obvious relevance here was the
experience of those new groups during the sixties, when the combined forces
of the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the early budding of feminism,
and the utopian critique of American culture represented by the growth of
the counterculture were all in full swing. As a generation raised and coming
to consciousness of its place in history in this atmosphere of (ultimately
disappointed)
historical optimism about racial equality and social justice, but also of
deep ambivalence toward authority and powerboth political and culturalit is
easy to see how, when its members came to develop their own, distinctive vision
of the past, they viewed it with the same profound suspicion of order, hierarchy,
authority, and patriarchy that had characterized their earlier involvement in their
own contemporary world. Nor were Americans alone in this tendency, although
the openness of the American academy to new groups and new ideas may have
facilitated the pace and prevalence with which they were accepted in comparison
to Europe.61
Thus, not surprisingly, we have arrived at the triangulated pattern of explanation,
initially suggested by de Certeau, of place (social recruitment, hence the
social world from which historians are recruited), procedure (the discipline of
professional history as such, and its changing conceptual resources), and text
(the revisions to historiographical discourse effected by the linguistic turn as it
variously made itself felt with the adoption of poststructuralism and
postmodernisms
consciousness of a general loss of epistemological confidence in older
paradigms of history, most notably objectivism). It is worth noting how tied to
the experiences of a single generation these transformations appear to be. This
fact, in turn, helps to explain why the prestige of linguistic-turn historiography
seems to be on the wane, accompanied by a growing sense of dissatisfaction with
its overly systematic account of the operation of language in the domain of human
endeavors of all kinds, and an evident attempt to rehabilitate social history. 62
It is to be expected that as our consciousness of the penetration of global capitalism
and its impact on all forms of social formation grows, historical writing
will increasingly be influenced by intellectual agendas generated by this
development
and will, therefore, create new objects of investigation. This is already
apparent in the growing concern with questions of diaspora, migration, and
immigration. It is also apparent in the rapidly developing field of transnational
history, with its focus on what Franoise Lionnet has termed minority cultures,
an approach to history that deploys a global perspective that emphasizes the basic
hybridity of global cultures in the postcolonial and postmodern world through
which questions of home, community, allegiance, and identity are constantly
being revised.63 In taking the hybrid nature of global societies and cultures as its
premise, such work seeks to make that hybridity the core of its intellectual analysis,
and doubtless will generate new paradigms for the study of history that will
affect not only our understanding of contemporary developments but will feed
back into our analyses of the past.
That the field of transnationalism should appear as the sign of this shift
in consciousness, a field in part promoted by the movement of new groups of
scholars into the professionmany of them members of the second generation of
immigrant familiesis hardly unexpected and may be seen as one of the social
determinants of this reorientation and revision in current historiography. Perhaps,
therefore, it is also apposite to inquire into the psychological losses experienced
in the process of migration, exile, and diasporic movement. Such a question
might interrogate, and seek to nuance, the rather triumphalist tone of current work
on transnationalism, with its celebration of fluidity and hybridity, by inquiring
into the sense of loss of cultural identity that often accompanies the loss of ones

homeland, language, and culture. In light of this, one might ask whether cultural
hybridity constitutes a good in itself, or are there hidden costs to its expansion
over the globe, both in terms of personal identities and cultural production?
The answers to such questions will doubtless come with time. They are not, in
any case, the point of a consideration of the nature and role of revision in history,
except insofar as they, like the linguistic turn, point to the overdetermined nature
of revision as on ongoing historiographical phenomenon, one equally psychological,
social, and professional in its constitutive elements.
Johns Hopkins University