History and Theory, Theme Issue 46 (December 2007), 1-19

Wesleyan University 2007 ISSN: 0018-2656

RevISINg the PaSt / RevISItINg the PReSeNt: hoW ChaNge haPPeNS IN hIStoRIogRaPhy
gabRIelle 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

gabRIelle M. SPIegel

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 position1). 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.2 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,3 is no longer shared by
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

RevISINg the PaSt / RevISItINg the PReSeNt

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?4 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 history5 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
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 applebys Presidential address on the Power of history, read before the american historical association at its meeting in Seattle, Washington, January 9, 1997. Published in the American Historical Review 103, no. 1 (February 1998), 1-17.

gabRIelle M. SPIegel

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.6 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.7 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.8 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.9 From this
6. I should acknowledge that the extent to which the profession as a whole adopted the linguistic turn is probably exaggerated here, although I think the prevalence of studies of discourse, the spread of feminist concepts of gender, and the rise of postcolonial theory and history bear witness to the fact that its impact was far wider than might be thought merely from examining the work of those directly engaged with debating theory or doing intellectual history. however, it remains true that the actual number of historians actively engaged with these questions probably remained relatively small in comparison to the field as a whole. Nonetheless, it did represent a significant challenge to historians traditional ways of conceiving history and had a discernible impact on the nature of the truth-claims and epistemological objectivity that historians felt comfortable in asserting. 7. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, transl. tom Conley (New york: Columbia University Press, 1988), 5. 8. hofmannsthals phrase is cited in Walter benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf tiedemann and hermann Schweppenhuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 19721989), 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,

RevISINg the PaSt / RevISItINg the PReSeNt

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 marPotentialities, 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. Ibid., 5. 12. Ibid., 11. 13. Ibid., 36.

gabRIelle M. SPIegel

gins 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
14. Ibid., 37. 15. Ibid., 37-38. 16. Ibid., 57. 17. Ideological here can be usefully understood in althusserian terms 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

RevISINg the PaSt / RevISItINg the PReSeNt

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
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. 18. 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, as well as the more extended discussion in his The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 19. on this development generally see elizabeth Deeds ermath, agency in the Discursive Condition, History and Theory, Theme Issue 40 (2001), 34-58 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. 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. In reality, however, there is no such choice and both explanations or modelsabsolutely inconsistent with each otherare also incommensurable with each other and must be rigorously separated at the same time that they are deployed simultaneously. See his Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 11th 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. 20. 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, reprinted in idem, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (baltimore and london: Johns hopkins

gabRIelle M. SPIegel

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
University Press, 1997), 21. 21. Semantics here would pertain not only to meaning or signification as such but also would include the relationship of propositions to reality. 22. 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. 23. I say this advisedly as a medieval historian, a field in which there has been an extremely uneven reception of the basic tenets of poststructuralism, despite the fact that one could argue that the medieval understanding of language and its opaque character and significance lies closer to a poststructuralist view than to the modern belief in the transparent and rational character of linguistic acts, a point made early and often by medievalists such as eugene vance, Nancy Partner, Robert Stein, and others. It is perhaps useful to remember here that hayden White, whose Metahistory, published in 1973, marks one of the important moments for the introduction of poststructuralist perspectives, began his professional life as a medieval historian. the same unevenness doubtless marks the profession as a whole, although I think it is fair to say that as one moves to more recent professional generations, acceptance of the importance of concepts such as discourse and the like becomes more or less automatic.

RevISINg the PaSt / RevISItINg the PReSeNt

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
24. 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. 25. Joyce appleby, lynn hunt, and Margaret C. Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New york and london: Norton, 1994), 206, 207. 26. See my orations of the Dead/Silences of the living: the Sociology of the linguistic turn, in gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (baltimore: Johns hopkins University Press, 1997), 29-43.

10

gabRIelle M. SPIegel

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 adorno29) 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,
27. Jacques Derrida, Shibboleth, in Midrash and Literature, ed. geoffrey hartman and Sanford budick (New haven: yale University Press, 1986), 323. 28. 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 merelyand somewhat tautologicallypresents it as an effect of an emerging awareness of structures structurality, or constructed nature. one is tempted to see this as a compelling example of the intellectual displacement of a psychological phenomenon. 29. adornos 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. 30. Derrida, Structure, Sign, and Play, 292. 31. Ibid., 289. 32. technically, of course, Derrida, having been born in 1930, was a bit old to be properly classified as a member of the second generation. Indeed, in 1942, Derrida was expelled from school as

RevISINg the PaSt / RevISItINg the PReSeNt

11

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
a result of the lowering to seven percent of the numerus clausus of Jews allowed to attend. between then and the end of the war, he attended a school run by Jews in algiers, experiencing in that sense the war and the anti-Semitism of the Ptain regime. Nonetheless, in relation to the holocaust and the experiences of european Jews, Derridas childhood in algiers, I believe, maintains a comparable position of marginality and belatedness that informs the psychology of the second generation. 33. Nadine Fresco, Remembering the Unknown, International Review of Psychoanalysis 11 (1984), 419. 34. Ibid., 420-421. 35. Ibid., 420-423. 36. 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. 37. Ibid., 45. 38. george Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New york: atheneum, 1986), 123. 39. Ibid., 4. 40. Quoted in Fine, the absent Memory, 41. 41. the unrepresentable nature of the holocaust is the subject of a considerable literature, begin-

12

gabRIelle M. SPIegel

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 instituning with the essays collected in Saul Friedlnder, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge, Ma: harvard University Press, 1992). See also his Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), as well as lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust, and Dominick laCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, Ny: Cornell University Press, 1994). 42. Jean-Franois lyotard, Discussions or Phrasing after auschwitz, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. andrew benjamin (oxford: blackwell, 1989), 364. 43. george Steiner, the long life of Metaphor, in lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust, 157. 44. 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.

RevISINg the PaSt / RevISItINg the PReSeNt

13

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.
45. Jacques Derrida, Deconstructions: the Im-possible, in French Theory in America, ed. Sylvre lotringer and Sande Cohen (New york and london: Routledge, 2001), 18. 46. Franois Cusset, French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux tats-Unis (Paris: ditions la Dcouverte, 2003). 47. In orations of the Dead/Silences of the living,42. 48. 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.

14

gabRIelle M. SPIegel

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
49. I am indebted to David bell for these cautionary notes. 50. Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (see above, note 19). 51. Ibid., xix. 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). 52. Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, xx.

RevISINg the PaSt / RevISItINg the PReSeNt

15

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 eco53. Ibid., xiv. 54. Ibid., xv. 55. geoff eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (ann arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); William h. Sewell, Jr. The Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 22-80. Sewells use of the phrase political unconscious alludes to Jamesons earlier book, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, Ny: Cornell University Press, 1981).

16

gabRIelle M. SPIegel

nomic 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 de56. Ibid., 60-61. 57. the quotation appears in a forthcoming review of geoff eleys A Crooked Line, to be published as part of a Forum on eleys book in the American Historical Review. Cited here with permission of the author, William h. Sewell, Jr. 58. eley, A Crooked Line, 110-111. 59. Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 5 and passim.

RevISINg the PaSt / RevISItINg the PReSeNt

17

materialization 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.
60. Jamesons response to this criticism would probably be that one of the hallmarks of postmodernism is the colonization of nature by culture. For Jameson, postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world, but one in which culture has become a veritable second nature. the postmodern represents an immense and historically original acculturation of the Real, a quantum leap in what benjamin called the aestheticization of reality . . . (ibid, ix-x). Similarly, neither he nor eley nor Sewell in any way contests the concept of agency or of the human, psychological subject (in fact, Sewells most recent work is dedicated to rehabilitating it). but the force of their arguments places its primary stress on the workings of the economy and the social ramifications thereof.

18

gabRIelle M. SPIegel

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
61. From this perspective, one might argue, as David bell suggested to me in commenting on this article, that postmodernism represents a retreat on the part of intellectuals from political engagement since the efforts of those intellectuals to impose themselves on politics in the campaigns against colonialism, against the bomb, and against the gulag collapsed with remarkable speed after 1968 in France and somewhat later in america. as he sees it, postmodernism denotes a set of ideas which inverts or denies the relationship between ideas and history that earlier generations of intellectuals had so proudly held up, by denying the fixity of meaning, the stability of texts and so on. It seems to explain the failures of earlier generations of intellectuals, while asserting that such failure was inevitable because of the properties of language itself (personal communication). My resistance to this view stems from the fact that, feckless or otherwise, Foucault, Derrida, lyotard, blanchot, Deleuze, etc. saw their efforts as profoundly political in nature, a point on which Derrida repeatedly insisted in the writings of his last years. 62. 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. 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.

RevISINg the PaSt / RevISItINg the PReSeNt

19

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

63. See Minor Transnationalism, ed. Franoise lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).