History and Cultural Theory

Simon Gunn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317868156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Historiographie

In recent times there has been recognition of the growing influence of cultural theory on historical writing. Foucault, Bourdieu, Butler and Spivak are just some of the thinkers whose ideas have been taken up and deployed by historians.

What are these ideas and where do they come from? How have cultural theorists thought about 'history'? And how have historians applied theoretical insights to enhance their own understanding of events in the past?

This book provides a wide-ranging and authoritative guide to the often vexed and controversial relationship between history and contemporary theory. It analyses the concepts that concern both theorists and historians, such as power, identity, modernity and postcolonialism, and offers a critical evaluation of them from an historical standpoint.

Written in an accessible manner, History and Cultural Theory gives historians and students an invaluable summary of the impact of cultural theory on historiography over the last twenty years, and indicates the likely directions of the subject in the future.

Chapter One Historicising Theory

DOI: 10.4324/9781315835532-1

On a freezing November night in 1979 a large audience gathered in a dilapidated church in north Oxford. The occasion was the annual conference of the History Workshop movement and the crowd had assembled to hear a debate between three speakers: E.P. Thompson, the celebrated author of The Making of the English Working Class; Stuart Hall, Professor of Sociology and one of the founding figures of the British New Left; and Richard Johnson of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, a centre renowned for its openness to new theoretical currents. What occurred that evening was an electrifying piece of intellectual theatre but one that also disturbed many who witnessed it. The subject of debate was the impact of the French Marxist theoretician, Louis Althusser, on historical thought and socialist politics. Thompson was then at the height of his fame as an historian, and fresh from his lengthy denunciation of Althusser, published as The Poverty of Theory (1978). On the stage at Oxford Thompson set out also to demolish Hall and Johnson, who were more receptive to, if not uncritical of, Althusser’s brand of structuralist Marxism. While Hall and Johnson protested against the ‘absolutist’ tone and substance of Thompson’s critique, Thompson himself thundered against a theory which he found anti-historical, determinist and inimical to socialist political practice. The result, in the words of an observer, was akin to a ‘gladiatorial combat’ enacted with ‘maximum theatrical force’ (Samuel 1981, 376–8).

What was at stake in this now legendary encounter? And why was it so bitter? Revisiting the debate after an interval of some twenty-five years it is possible to peel back successive layers of significance. At the first, most obvious level, the debate concerned the influence of Althusserian ideas on British intellectual life, Thompson warning that this abstract form of ‘scientific’ Marxism had already permeated philosophy, art history and English studies, and was ‘now massing on the frontiers of history itself’ (Samuel 1981, 378). Such was Thompson’s prestige in left-wing historical circles at the period that he contributed largely to stemming this particular invasion: the impact of Althusserianism on British (and North American) historiography was minimal, although the influence of structuralism – sardonically termed ‘French flu’ by Thompson – was to return within a matter of years, as we shall see later in the chapter. Secondly, the debate raised the issue of the status of history as a form of knowledge and as a guide to political practice. Thompson’s appeal to ‘history’ as a court in which to judge ‘theory’ raised the suspicions of Stuart Hall, who saw lurking in it the idea of history as a knowledge in which the evidence merely ‘speaks for itself’. From this perspective, Hall argued, ‘Thompson’s “History”, like Althusser’s “Theory” is erected into an absolute’ (Samuel 1981, 383). Finally, Hall and Johnson both drew attention to the relationship between empirical method and theoretical reflection, questioning where Thompson’s model of historical interpretation derived from and how the categories it relied upon, such as ‘experience’, might be justified philosophically.

Such were the specific intellectual issues that engaged the participants at Oxford. Yet the debate also raised some of the oldest and most vexed questions regarding history and philosophy. In it was reflected the idea that they represent two different orders of knowledge, one local and particular, the other general and abstract. Just as ‘history’ is often understood by historians to inhabit a sphere outside or in opposition to ‘theory’, so philosophy is often depicted as occupying a realm of ideas beyond the pressures of historical circumstance. In the encounter with sociology and cultural studies we see reflected history’s difficult relations with other disciplines, which the French historian Fernand Braudel famously referred to as a ‘dialogue of the deaf’ (Burke 1999, 2). Implicit also is the problem of the definition of ‘history’ itself, whether as a global process – the march of History through time, as the effort to understand the present as the product of the past, or, more modestly, as the attempt to make sense of the patchwork of knowledge about the past. With its plurality of subtly shifting meanings, ‘history’ itself is a moving target so that it is often unclear in intellectual debate, such as that at Oxford, whether or not the protagonists are talking about the same thing.

Yet history was only one dimension of the History Workshop event. The encounter was also about ‘theory’, specifically the form of Marxism associated with Louis Althusser, itself seen as representing a larger body of thought identified with French structuralism. ‘Theory’ can be defined abstractly to mean any model of explanation which seeks to cover more than a single empirical or historical instance. Historians refer to theory in this sense often, distinguishing it from the notion of theory as representing universal laws. Thus one can have a theory of revolutions or of industrialisation that aims to explain in generic terms how these phenomena occur, but is not reducible to a single example, such as the French revolution or Japanese industrialisation. In this book, though, theory refers more specifically to a body of thought known as ‘cultural theory’, commensurate with a number of major intellectual currents that swept through the human sciences in the second half of the twentieth century. It includes elements of continental (as opposed to Anglo-American analytical) philosophy; structuralism and post-structuralism; cultural anthropology; and postcolonial criticism. Given the eclectic nature of this thought it has impacted differentially across the human sciences, particular ideas and emphases being taken up in anthropology and geography, for example, others in literature and art history. The impact of cultural theory has also been temporally differentiated, new ways of thinking succeeding one another in waves, from structuralism in the 1970s to postcolonialism in the 1990s. This ‘theory’ has not always come by way of philosophy but from a variety of sources, such as the anthropology of Clifford Geertz and the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. It is ‘cultural’ in the sense that its practitioners have taken cultural forms – texts, rituals, practices, and, above all, language – as their objects of study. But it is also ‘cultural’ in its emphasis on hermeneutics, the study of interpretation and the creation of meaning, and its concomitant critique of the positivist or ‘scientific’ tradition of social science. Cultural theory dovetails here with critical theory, as also in its stress on ‘reflexivity’, the capacity to reflect critically on the politics of knowledge inherent in any given interpretation or position. Understood in this broad fashion, cultural theory encompasses a range of thinkers from the linguist Mikhail Bakhtin to the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, from the anthropologist Mary Douglas to the proponent of literary ‘deconstruction’, Jacques Derrida.

‘Culture’, of course, has itself become a suspect concept, especially in anthropology where it has come under critical fire for the assumption of depth and coherence that attends its analytical usage, no less than for its historical association with European colonialism (Sewell 1999). But it remains an indispensable part of contemporary theorising as the anthropologist James Clifford, who has done more than anyone to interrogate the term, has acknowledged: culture, Clifford has written, is a ‘deeply compromised concept that I cannot yet do without’ (Clifford 1988, 10). Cultural theory likewise has been accused of its own sins of omission, amongst which the assumed absence of an historical dimension looms large. Yet the opposite can also be maintained. Critics like Robert Young have argued that an idea of history haunts contemporary Western theory, including the post-structuralism of Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. It is thus not ‘history’ that has been rejected but particular versions of it, those predicated on the grand narratives of progress and Western dominance. ‘The reproach that post-structuralism has neglected history really consists of the complaint that it questioned History’ (Young, R. 1990, 25). More concretely, the biography of an intellectual such as Michel Foucault reveals him as closely linked to the networks of historical thought in postwar France. At the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, where Foucault studied in the late 1940s, he was a contemporary of Jacques le Goff and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, subsequently to become leading figures in the Annales school of history. The publication of his second book, Madness and Civilization (1967 [1961]), was facilitated by the pioneer of the history of mentalités, Philippe Ariés, series editor at the Paris publisher Plon. And Foucault’s election to the prestigious Collége de France was sponsored by Fernand Braudel, then the doyen of Annales historians, where Foucault took the title Professor of History of Systems of Thought (Eribon 1993). The extent of intellectual connections revealed in biographies like that of Foucault belies the idea of disciplinary isolation and a rigid division between ‘history’ and ‘theory’. Not only Foucault, but theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have had a long-term interest in or engagement with historical practice.

‘History’ and ‘theory’, then, do not exist in a simple state of separation or antithesis. They are complex terms whose genealogies are intimately bound up with each other: there are theories of history just as there are histories of theory. The purpose of this chapter is to explain some of these connections as a precursor to the more detailed examples of history and theory that make up the rest of this book. What is cultural theory? Where does it come from? And what does it mean for historical studies? One of the ways of answering these questions is historically, that is to say by sketching the history of structuralism and post-structuralism as they have impacted on the human sciences over the last half century or so. Before we can do this, however, we need to look briefly at its obverse, the theory of history – how ‘history’ itself has been constituted as a discipline and an object of knowledge.

The legacy of Rankean empiricism

Far from being innocent of theory, as is often assumed, orthodox professional historiography is in fact replete with it. ‘Theory’ here takes the form of a series of overlapping ‘-isms’ which have shaped history as a disciplinary practice since the nineteenth century. They include positivism, the belief that the historical process is subject to laws or generalisations akin to the natural sciences; historicism, the notion that each historical period is unique and must be studied on its own terms; humanism, the idea that history is the study of ‘man’ (and his essentially unchanging nature) across time. Spanning all these is empiricism, the theory that knowledge is derived inductively from sensory experience or visible evidence and that it corresponds to reality. ‘History’, Richard Evans has asserted, ‘is an empirical discipline’ and the hard-won knowledge that derives from it can ‘approach a reconstruction of past reality that may be partial and provisional … but is nevertheless true’ (Evans 1997, 249). Not all historians subscribe to these theoretical assumptions. Positivism no longer attracts many adherents as it did in the early twentieth century, for instance, and it is common for professional historians to combine empirical methods with theoretical models drawn from other disciplinary fields, such as economics and social science. Moreover, the theories of history themselves are often complex and ambiguous. Historicism, for example, is both past- and present-centred. For while it affirms the separate integrity of each historical period, it carries a further meaning in which periods may be understood as linked in succession, leading up to and producing the present. Nevertheless, taken as a whole the series of theoretical positions outlined here serve to underpin most if not all modern historical research.

These theories have their own histories, of course, which tend to converge on the figure of the early nineteenth-century German historian, Leopold von Ranke, as the originator of historical empiricism. It is Ranke, as Peter Novick has observed, who stands as the ‘imaginary origin’ of modern historical method and of its ‘founding myth’ (Novick 1988, 3). Ranke’s empirical method was forged in the 1830s in opposition to the influential philosophical historicism of his contemporary, G.W.F. Hegel, for whom history was understood in idealist fashion as the gradual unfolding of a transcendent Idea or Spirit embodied in an historical community. For Hegel every historian was the product of his own times and modes of thought: he ‘brings his categories with him and sees the data through them’ (Hegel 1956, 11). By contrast, Ranke proposed a concept of historical knowledge predicated on analysis of the documentary record, scrupulous ascertaining of the historical facts about any events (‘what actually happened’) and an understanding that every period possessed its own unique essence or character. At the same time, each period was sequentially linked to that which succeeded it, so that history could be understood as a whole, an intelligible linear process connecting the past with the present. History was categorically distinct from philosophy, according to Ranke; it was concerned with the concrete and particular not the general and abstract. But Ranke also warned against a view of history based on specifics or facts alone. From detailed scrutiny of the facts of particular events the historian should move towards a ‘universal view’, identifying their unity and larger significance, ultimately contributing to the construction of a world history embodied in the progress of what Ranke termed the ‘leading nations’ (Ranke in Stern 1970, 54–63).

Ranke’s legacy has clearly been of great importance for historical scholarship but it has also been an ambiguous one. His emphasis on careful study of documentary sources as the mainstay of historical scholarship and his respect for historical difference – the alterity of the past – continue to serve as fundamental tenets of the discipline. However, recent studies have been cautious about exaggerating the modernity of Ranke’s views and lionising him as the ‘founding father’ of historiography. His famous dictum that the historian should represent the past ‘as it actually was’ has been mistranslated, according to Georg Iggers; its proper translation is ‘how, essentially, things happened’ (Iggers 1973, xli–xlii). The error is significant since by emphasising the ‘essence’ of the past Ranke partook of the tradition of German idealism as well as that of empiricism, and his thought also shared other features of early nineteenth-century German romanticism, its nationalism, conservatism and reverence for the state (Novick 1988, 26–31). Furthermore, while eschewing the idea of divine guidance in human history, Ranke held back from a strictly secular interpretation of the past, arguing that in certain instances it was possible to discern the ‘finger of God’ at work. However significant a part Ranke may have played in the creation of modern historical method, in short, he too requires historical contextualisation within the beliefs of his time.

The influence of Ranke’s thought on the growth of historical scholarship also varied between nation states. In Germany, where twenty-eight university chairs in history had been established by 1850, his role may have been more limited than was once thought since the prestige of the Humboldtian ideal of the university meant that various models of scientific historical research were early in circulation (Breisach 1983, 228–38; Lambert 2003, 45). History was institutionalised later in French universities, though a scientistic, fact-driven model of research spread rapidly under the Third Republic in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; the first PhD programme was established at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in 1868 (Nora 1996, 5; Iggers 2005, 27). In France, though, the influence of the German example of historical scholarship was qualified by a native positivism deriving from the thought of Auguste Comte and Henri Saint-Simon (Bentley 2002, 424–5). Oddly, it was therefore in the United States and Britain that the impact of Ranke appears to have been greatest. In North American universities from the later nineteenth century, according to Peter Novick, Ranke was adopted as the architect of a new type of scholarly history, marked by a ‘fanaticism for veracity’ modelled on the natural sciences (Novick 1988, 23). Yet as we have seen, this adoption of Ranke was predicated on a misreading of what was in fact a more complex body of thought. In Britain Ranke’s ideas were likewise taken up with alacrity; the first article published in the English Historical Review on its establishment in 1886 was Lord Acton on ‘German schools of history’. Here they were yoked to a native tradition of empiricism, seen as stretching back to Bacon and the sixteenth-century origins of the scientific revolution (Joyce 1998, 217–18). Consequently, the establishment of history as an academic discipline under Stubbs at Oxford from the 1860s and Tout at Manchester at the turn of the twentieth century was marked by an unwavering commitment to empirical method, focused on a scrupulous evaluation of primary sources aimed at reconstructing the past on its own terms. While the methods attributed to Ran...