Practicing History

New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn

Gabrielle M. Spiegel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134296835
• Subtopic: Teaching History
• Index: History

This essential collection of key articles offers a re-evaluation of the practice of history in light of current debates. Critical thinkers and practicing historians present their writings, along with clear and thorough editorial material, to examine the complex ideas at the forefront of historical practice.

This volume gives a synoptic overview of the last twenty-five years' theoretical analysis of historical writing, with a critical examination of the central concepts and positions that have been in debate. The collection delineates the emergence of "practice theory" as a possible paradigm for future historical interpretation concerned with questions of agency, experience and the subject.

These complex ideas are introduced to students in this accessible reader, and for teachers and historians too, this survey is an indispensable and timely read.

Part I
Discourse and the Problem of Social History

1
Is All the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later

Geoff Eley

Geoff Eley, a social historian of modern Germany, here offers a masterful survey of the fundamental transformation that overtook the practice of social history between the 1970s and 1990s, a transformation that witnessed the rise of cultural history as a response to the challenges to traditional forms of social history posed by the linguistic turn. In his view, the decisive shift occurred around 1980, as a new generation of historians trained in the 1960s and early 1970s came to professional maturity. Under the impact of changing political contexts and the rise of feminism and women’s history, there occurred a turn to linguistically conceived forms of cultural history, which split the generation between those who remained committed to what Eley characterizes as “a restlessly aggrandizing social history” and those who came to define themselves as cultural historians, that is, who focused on discourse and its operation in the cultural construction of social life.

Eley stresses the importance of the writings of Michel Foucault to this development. Not only did Foucault’s early work demonstrate the operation of discourse, or what Foucault called “epistemic regimes” in defining the conditions of possibility for what can and cannot be thought in particular historical epochs (defined by the episteme of that era). Foucault’s elaboration of the idea of the indissoluble connection between knowledge and power (or what is sometimes called the knowledge/power nexus) also formulated a new understanding of power as decentered and dispersed as a “microphysics” throughout the entire range of society and its social practices, hence challenging the utility of social history’s conventional focus on the state and classes as the centers of domination and power. As Eley explains, the thrust of Foucault’s work was to undermine the materialist view of society and culture in favor of linguistic analysis, a movement aided by the rise of narrativist schools of history indebted in various ways to Hayden White’s Metahistory, to the symbolic anthropology popularized among historians by the writings of Clifford Geertz, and, though in a less thorough way, to Derrida and deconstruction. As a result of their combined influence, as Eley indicates, “textuality has become a metaphor for reality in general.”

It is precisely this textualized view of reality that the authors represented in this volume are beginning to question, without wishing to abandon it entirely, thus the question posed by Eley’s essay: “Is All the World [really?] a Text?” Eley shares the sense of unease with a wholly textualized, discursive approach to social history, without at the same time wishing to abandon its critical insights. His article figures as an early moment in the new movement of revision advocating a return to “history,” and seeks to occupy a “middle ground” between the older school of social theorists and the new cultural historian’s deployment of discourse as the determinative force in social construction.

* * *

In the beginning

In 1971 Eric Hobsbawm called it “a good moment to be a social historian” (1971, 43).¹ Ten years later this was still the case, despite a certain fractiousness and the readiness of some to find a crisis in the field. The main thing was the continuing growth of activity (the proliferation of journals, conferences, subdisciplinary societies, international networks, curricular initiatives, and dissertations, despite the contraction of history graduate programs), and in light of such expansion conflicts of direction were perhaps the normal signs of diversification and growth. That social historians could argue over theory and method was evidence of vitality more than ill health, and only those with narrow or sectarian views of social history’s proper orientation could be upset by conflict as such.²

Ten years further on, though, such confidence is harder to sustain. I am not the only person to have detected a general discursive shift in the rhetoric and practice of the profession from “social” to “cultural” history, effected via what we have become accustomed to calling the “linguistic turn.” Clearly this observation needs to be elaborated and specified, but a good barometer of the change in historiographical sensibility has been Gareth Stedman Jones. From his invigorating polemic against the liberal complacencies and positivistic assumptions of the British historiographical tradition in 1967 to a variety of critical and substantive essays in the mid-1970s, Stedman Jones developed a project of “non-empiricist” and “theoretically informed history” that was Marxist, open to other forms of social theory, and naturally materialist, as the unifying problematic of contemporary social history then took that to mean.

For many social historians, therefore, it was very disconcerting when in 1983 Stedman Jones seemed to embrace a form of linguistic analysis that was decidedly nonmaterialist in the classical sense and seemed to call the given assumptions of social history into doubt. Moreover, since that time things have moved fast. Stedman Jones’s own rather cautious formulations have been left behind, disappearing in a more radical polarity of so-called deconstructionists and unrepentant materialists.³ Of course, the social history that emerged from the 1960s was never a unitary project. But some notion of social determination, conceptualized on the ground of material life, whether in demographic, political-economic, labor-process, class-sociological, or class-cultural terms, generally provided a tissue of common assumptions. From a vantage point at the end of the 1980s, by contrast, a rough division seems to have opened within this “broad church” between those who have been rethinking their assumptions to the point of radically subverting the determinative coherence of the category of the social and those who continue defending the particular social-historical materialism that formed them.

In this respect, social history has become one site of a general epistemological uncertainty that characterizes large areas of academic-intellectual life in the humanities and social sciences in the late twentieth century. This flux is perhaps more extensive in some places than in others (in the sense that it pervades more disciplines more completely) and more central to disciplinary discussion in, say, literature and anthropology than in, say, sociology and the “harder” social sciences. Not by accident, the most radical and influential discussions have been occurring in areas that lack the constraining power of disciplinary traditions—especially women’s studies and the emerging field of cultural studies. [...] By 1990, I would argue, interest in Foucault and Derrida extends far beyond a few “professionally marginal historians whose primary allegiance was to interdisciplinary communities with membership made up largely of literary theorists, cultural critics, and philosophers” (Novick 1988, 605).

It is difficult to periodize this movement with any precision [. . .].

My own sense is that things began to change around 1980 [. . .].

To a great extent, I want to argue, this reflects a process of complex generationally internal revision. [. . .] The turn to linguistically conceived forms of cultural history by the end of the 1970s, moved by a combination of changing political contexts and autonomous theoretical engagement, most sharply registered in feminism and women’s history, marked the fracturing of the same broad generational consensus. To some extent, these tensions expressed themselves in early conflicts over theory per se, as in the acrimonious attacks on “structuralist Marxism,” which dominated left intellectual life in Britain for much of the later 1970s.⁴ Moreover, the salience of this particular generation and its disagreements was magnified by the drastic reduction in the number of graduate historians in the later 1970s and early 1980s. Mainly for that reason, the succeeding generation has had little opportunity to declare its own distinctive voice—by contrast (one might guess) with the one qualifying in the later 1980s and early 1990s, which will have a great deal to say in the areas of gender history and cultural studies.

[. . .]

So we have entered “new times.” What is striking to me, in this conjuncture, is the degree to which historians have been willing to become their own theoreticians. This seems to me not to have been as true of the 1960s, when social history declared its presence via a more eclectic and dependent turn to sociology (and sometimes anthropology), and the most self-conscious appropriations of social science focused on methodology (as in demography, family history, mobility studies, urban history, and so on) rather than theory per se. To that extent, Stedman Jones’s essays of 1967–76, which called on historians to emancipate themselves from a junior relationship to social science and begin producing theory of their own, bespoke an accurate reading of the relationship.⁵ [. . .]

But the most salient sites of such independent theorizing, I would argue, are ones where uncritical borrowing is harder because of the absence of an existing practice to rationalize, as well as the paucity of relevant theory to use—where innovation, initiative, and interdisciplinarity have been inscribed more centrally in the very conditions and processes of knowledge production from the start, one might say—namely, the new and “un-disciplined” fields of feminist theory/women’s history and cultural studies. Of course, no theory is ever conjured out of nothing, and it might be objected that historians in these latter areas are no less dependent on external theory than their predecessors (or previous incarnations) as new social historians. It is simply that a different kind of theory, literary rather than social-scientific, is in play. But it is no accident that several of the key influences in this domain, such as Michel Foucault or Stuart Hall, are distinguished precisely by their disobedience to conventional disciplinary classification (was Foucault a historian, or what?). And it does seem to me that historians ( Joan Scott and Richard Johnson would be perfect respective examples) have become far more active participants in this new theoretical conversation than in the old.⁶

[. . .]

The current landscape

In his 1971 essay, Hobsbawm suggested that most interesting social history was clustered around six complexes of questions:

1. Demography and kinship
2. Urban studies in so far as these fall within our field
3. Classes and social groups
4. The history of “mentalities,” or collective consciousness, or of “culture” in the anthropologists’ sense
5. The transformation of societies (for example, modernization or industrialization)
6. Social movements and phenomena of social protest.

(Hobsbawm 1971, 12)

In reviewing this list two decades later, it is hard simply to add to the topical inventory because (as I am arguing) the main change is an underlying shift of perspective rather than the opening up of new areas.⁷ The first three of Hobsbawm’s categories are clearly alive and well. Thus, the machinery of historical demography continues to grind out its findings, often with the barest relationship to broader questions but at its best with a meticulous grounding in the classical materialist problematic of social change—usually from an eclectically sociological perspective.⁸ Likewise, while, theoretically, urban history remains too loose and ill defined a category, the urban community study has become the main practical medium for investigating class formation.⁹ The historiography of class has also unfolded to a great extent within parameters outlined by Hobsbawm, and to the research on the working class may now be added a burgeoning literature on peasants and a more recently developing one on the bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeoisie/ lower middle class.¹⁰

But as a descriptive framework for “the actual practice of social history,” Hobsbawm’s list no longer serves. This is partly because new topical clusters need to be added—recent growth areas of social history include crime and punishment, medicine and public health, sexuality, popular religion, work, and popular memory, while social policy and education are older ones perhaps oddly missing from Hobsbawm’s original list. More to the point, though, the entire construction of social history as a (sub)disciplinary field has been shifting during the last decade, so that a body of discussion has developed parallel to the existing research in a way that calls into question the conventionally constituted social-historical knowledge—with profound implications for all six of Hobsbawm’s categories. Rather than just elaborating a longer inventory of topics, therefore, it is important to mention certain aspects of the surrounding flux.

First, it needs to be said straight away that gender theory is transforming the basis on which we think about history. Whether as a dimension of analysis or an area of empirical work, women’s history is absent from Hobsbawm’s account, and to read older accounts such as his is to be reminded of how radical a change has occurred since the 1960s.¹¹ [. . .]

While this move remains controversial, it is only more recently, with the conceptual shift from the history of women to the historical construction of sexual difference, that the protected central spaces of the discipline have started to give way. Of course, a large amount of work is being done on sexual representations as such. But major areas, like the history of work,¹² class formation,¹³ citizenship and the public sphere (Landes 1988; Pateman 1988; Outram 1989; Catherine Hall 1985), and the study of popular culture¹⁴ are all being reshaped by the application of a gender perspective. The latter also promises to recast understandings of nationalism and fascism, although some of the emerging work on masculinity tends to settle too easily into the study of men alone rather than in their relations with women.¹⁵ We should not paint too optimistic a picture, of course. For instance, the core of historical demographers and historians of the family have remained remarkably resilient in their defense of an older-defined project.¹⁶ But the insistent pressure for a recognition of gender as a “useful category of historical analysis” is only likely to become more intense (Scott 1988, 28–50).

It is important to note the now pervasive influence of Foucault. It would be a mistake to exaggerate retrospectively the instigating centrality of Foucault’s ideas to the departures we are discussi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Series editor's preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Discourse and the problem of social history
• PART II Self and agency
• PART III Experience and practice
• Bibliography
• Index