Lecture 11: History Writing in the 1960s and 1970s and the ‘linguistic turn’
This session will move us away from history writing in the era of modernity into
history writing of postmodernity –no worries I shall explain both terms in a moment.
The moment of this transition are the 1960s and 1970s. It is then when we can start to
detect a new mode of writing – influenced by new hip French philosophical trends -which broke with many of the convictions and unquestions belief of modern history
writing.
Although we shouldn’t imagine it as a complete transition. Historians in particular
were very slow to take up this new trend – indeed they were not interested in the
beginning, and when it swapped over into history writing, they became first angry and
then paranoid. Postmodern history writing would be the end of history writing, as
some historians such as Richard Evans claimed and quickly wrote his ‘Defense of
History’ at the beginning of the 1990s.
So, when this new trends began to unfold their wings, first on the continent in France
in particular since the 1960s, and then in the US from the 1980s (Britain is even later)
the majority of historian probably didn’t even noticed it. (Partly because it is French
and not translated until much later into English). In the 1960s and 1970s the British
hip historians were totally enamoured with the ‘new’ social history a la Thompson.
Yet, we need to start our lecture on postmodern history writing in the 1960 to
understand why by the 1990s, this form of history writing and its related world-view
and its view of the human subject became an almost dominant feature in history
writing world-wide.
But let me start with Thompson. We heard before the break that Thompson fought a
battle against traditional Marxist historiography and its tendency to negate the lower
classes an own ‘culture’, to negate these people their own interests and agenda.
Thompson aimed to resuscitate the ‘experiences’ of these ‘forgotten’ people. He
wished to show that they had a sophisticated culture of their own, their own traditions,
their own morals and beliefs which they applied cleverly in order to achieve their
political and social aims. These people Thompson demonstrated, were actors in their
very own right, in the basis of their own agency, not merely being pushed around by
the forces of production as dominant Marxist materialist history of his time would
have it. He moved away from the idea that the socioeconomic sphere constituted an
objective structure, that explained human collective behavoir, but began to grant
increasingly importance to the idea of autonomous individual agency, if you like. His
new history writing was called the ‘new’ social history’. He began to move away
from the focus on the socio-economic forces of the society as a cause of human action
to include an examination of ‘culture’ – defined as the society’s repertoire of
interpretative mechanism and value systems (Cabrera, 4). Although Thompson never
said good-bye to a general Marxist framework of interpretation and remained a
Marxist – or ‘social humanist’ as he rebranded himself – all his life, he gained the
conviction that the cultural was not simply a function of the material but that, instead,
peoples beliefs and ritual activities interacted with their socio-economic expectations.
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That is why the category of subjective ‘experience’ of the individual (and the
collective it helps to constitute) became so important to him. The turn to the
individual ‘subject’, if you like, allowed the connection between the
individual/collective, the socio-economic and cultural framework for him. However,
what the ‘subject’ was, and how its experiences were constituted remained untouched
by Thompson.
Now this turn to ‘culture’ away from the analysis of ‘society’ which engenders
a new interest in anthropology instead of sociology is something many
historians at the time are interested in. And we shall meet some of them
Robert Darnton and Carlo Ginzburg in the next sessions. So we come back to
a history, which becomes to be called the ‘new cultural history.’
Now, let me return to Thompson – and indeed many of historians who followed him.
To move the attention to the individual ‘experience’ (that made up the collective as
you like – ermind them of the materialist version of that) as a way to get at the past,
Thompson believed that he as a 20th century historian and radical social activist with
his ‘experiences’ was able to unlock and pinpoint the experiences of those radicals
who lived 300 years ago. There was a straight connection between these experiences.
Thompson never really problematise human ‘experience’ or considered it
incommensurable – means no common measure between two things. He left it
unproblematised, believing that as an historian and human being he had the capacity
to do.
Now… in his belief Thompson – and those who worked in his line – did not remain
uncontested. And today we shall talk about scholars who, for the live of them, would
not agree with him. These were scholars who had turned to philosophy and the
investigation of language or linguistics for answers about how to deal with human
experience. And they came up with fundamentally opposing views, in fact, views that
entirely undermined Thompson’s political and moral beliefs. They established a
fundamentally different world view. (Well, I am sure he didn’t care…). They
established a radical new view of the human subject. Indeed, as some of their enemies
argued, they ‘killed’ the subject.
Today, we are going to talk about some of these scholars who were part of what is
now called ‘the linguistic turn’ –
(slide with definition)
The ‘linguistic turn’ was a major development in Western philosophy
during the early 20th century, the most important characteristic of which
is the focusing of philosophy and the other humanities primarily on the
relationship between philosophy and language.
coined by Richard Rorty’s anthololgy The Linguistic Turn
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The author you’ve read Barthes, White and Scott are important re-presenties of this
turn to language and the consequences it had for the study not only of history but any
field in the humanities, and indeed it also affected the study of the natural science and
the way we understand them (Science Wars).
The linguistic turn engendered a most fundamental reconception of reality and what
constituted the human subject and subjectivity.
This lecture will introduce you to it and to the most basic terms and ideas of
postmodern history writing. Following lecture, and of course particularly the one on
Foucault will deal with these basic ideas. So, this lecture offers you tools to deal with
a great proportion of history writing after the 1970s, first on the continent in France in
particular and then from the 1980s/1990s onwards in the English-speaking world (UK
lacks behind here).
We will be doing three things today:
1. We need to remind ourselves of some key terms first: modernity,
postmodernity
2. We will then look a bit more closely of what this ‘linguistic turn consists of.
Its basis of linguistic theory and some of the different shapes it took. Such as
structuralism/poststructuralism and, horror, horror deconstructionalism.
3. Finally I will turn to the authors you’ve read and put them in this landscape of
the ‘linguistic turn’.
Part one: definitions, definitions, definitions….
The ‘linguistic turn’ questioned everything that ‘modernity’ stood for. In fact, it
signified, as many scholars would argue, the end of modernity and the beginning of
postmodern era.
Now, we use modernity all the time…postmodernity perhaps less. But what does it
exactly mean? Well, is used in history since the late medieval times.
(explain slide)
Modernity:
One of these vexed terms, which have been endlessly disputed. Differ in the view
when it starts, when it ends, and whether we should apply it only to the West. Did
China or India had a modernity?
Perhaps refer to the following if time:Some would argue that it begins with the
industrial revolutions of the 18th and 19th and 20th century. (Some now even
argue that it began the postmedieval period, so 15th and 16th century.) The
more general use of the term refers to Western cultures from the 18th century
onwards and ends in the 1960s, so the time we are dealing here with today.
(but there scholars like Habermas who argue we are still in it).
However, common to these endless disputes over the exact periodization is that they
link the term to certain historical events and characteristics identifiable in the West
since Enlightenment:
 the rise of capitalism
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


the move of Western societies towards industrialization
secularization, rationalization
the rise of the nation-state and its constituent institutions.
Confusingly, the term modernity may also refer to tendencies in intellectual and
cultural life, particularly cultural and social movements that dealt with issues that are
considered characteristic of modernity such as industrialisation or secularisation.
Marxism is such an intellectual movement for example that arose out of engagement
with the results of the rise of capitalism and industrialisation for example.
Now, modernity as a term we use to describe these historical development and
historical period and it differs from ‘modernism’.
What does modernism mean?
(slide)
Modernism: is a philosophical and aestetic movement that, along with cultural trends
and changes, arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in Western
society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the factors that shaped
Modernism was the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth
of cities, followed then by the horror of World War I.
(examples in art; example in architecture, example in literature, examples in history
writing and that follows mainly what we identified as characteristic since the
Enlightenment:
grand narratives: (i.e. ways of thinking that unite knowledge and experience to seek
to provide a definitive, universal truth
(Modernism also began to question some of the central tenets of Enlightenment
thinking, and many modernists rejected religious beliefs (e.g. Friedrich Nietzsche).)
Postmodernity:
This term refers to a set of perceived (sociological, political, economical,
technological, etc.) conditions of everyday life, which are perceived as distinctly
different from the conditions of ‘modernity’ (e.g. globalisation). The discussion of
postmodern-ity is the discussion of these conditions. Although debated, it is usually
understood that it postmodernity began in the West in the 1960s.
Postmodernism:
Postmodernism is the intellectual (cultural, artistic, academic, and philosophical)
response since the 1960s to these conditions of modernity. Postmodernism is a
philosophy of knowledge. It constructs an understanding of what knowledge is that
contrasts to that of the Enlightenment (and modernity which inherited and continued
Enlightenment traditions). It dismantles the entire system of knowledge that was
created by Enlightenment empiricism and, starting from scratch, it constructs a
new knowledge system.
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(slide with central claim about reality)
(slide: what does postmodernist writing offer instead to avoid truth claims so to
speak? Overview)
Intellectual origins of postmodern thinking
they do not work from scratch those but are inspired by people who thought
about this issue before them, particularly those who problematized the
relationship between language and reality such as the German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein who had established a sophisticated
thinking around the question of language and human reality.
(slide)
Besides these philosophers, very important for postmodernists are linguistic scholars
of the turn of the century
One Swiss scholar we need to focus on more detail, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure.
(slide Saussure and definition of lingustics
Linguistics: studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically.
Why is Saussure so important?
Until Saussure in the earl y twentieth century, languages were studied in
terms of the evolution of words. Linguists took a word to be a denoter of a
thing, of the full reality of a thing. I n English, the word 'mouse' denoted a
small rodent: the relationship between word and object (or referent) was
simple, exclusive and unequivocal.
Saussure began to think this idea as a limited. Firstly , he was unhappy with the
definition of 'a word'. A word is not t h e only way in which humans may convey
to each other the notion of an action.
(Slide) signifier –signified.
(slide) Saussure’s Central Claims:
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1. Languages are not confined to words but include any system of
communication that uses signs.
2. A sign is composed of a ‘signifier’ (vocal sound, image) and a ‘signified’ (the
mental concept or structure that speaker and listener share). The structure
precedes the ‘signifier’ in existence (said Saussure). Prioritising the structure
pre-casts knowledge amongst hearers, creating a structuralist understanding of
knowledge. The referent (the thing) to which the sign points is not part of the
sign.
3. A ‘signifier’ is established quite arbitrarily and bears no resemblance to the
signified. Each signified (the mental concept) can have only one signifier, but
a signifier can have more than one signified (e.g. mouse=rodent/computer
mouse)
4. Every sign acquires meaning by belonging to a network of other signs (of
similar signs and dissimilar signs). No sign in itself is meaningful. There is in
every sign a suggestion of another, oppositional sign, giving an on/off quality
to all signs.
5. Saussure regarded the spoken language as more important than written
language.
Now, you can ask yourself? What is the blooming significance of all this?
Significance and impact since the 1960s is enormous:
(slide)
1. Saussure's major points made uncertainty our attitude to knowledge.

At the very root of all knowledge, all learning, all academic subjects and
all education, is language. Words are our very trade. You listen to
language in lectures, you read it in books, and you write it in words and
signs in emails, text-messages, letters, essays and exams.

Saussure's work undermined the certainty of a connection between a
word and a thing, making the link conditional and equivocal. Meaning and
the sign separated and their connection arbitrary.
Now, if we think about the historians we have talked about so far; I think I
am not wrong to argue that all of them had assumed the adequacy of
reference, of words to things. Think about Thompson here, for example.

The notion of arbitrariness of the sign deeply challenged the
correspondence theory of truth: if words relate only to each other within
an own structure, how could language be deemed to refer to the world?
And how would historians argue that their discourse about the past
matched up with ‘what really happened’ as Ranke had, for example,
famously argued?
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Followers since 1960s move beyond language and apply system to daily
life: (Barthes is a famous example)
Now, the whole Saussure idea became even bigger than that: When Saussure
wrote, he spoke of language; his work was a contribution to science of linguistics.
But – remember - he had posed that language is only one system of signs aong
others that constistutes social life. He had noted that others (such as symbolic
rites, forms and gestures of politeness, and military signals) awaited exploration.
Saussure had already invisioned linguistic – the study of language – as part of a
the study of signs -- but at his time such a field was yet to be created.
But what Saussure did only suggest, other scholars did later.
One of these scholars who elaborated Saussure’s reaching in the area of culture
was Roland Barthes. He was re-discovering Saussure’s writings in the 1950s
and 1960s and hailed his structural linguistics him as revolutionary, he saw them
as the greatest ‘epistemeological challenge’ every made!
Epistemology: the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of
knowledge.
Now, you’ve read one of Roland Barthes most famous articles. But who is that
man?
Roland Barthes (1915-1980)
(Slide)
French theorist and semiotisn theatre and literature critic, and populariser of
cultural studies who worked and wrote at the same time as the scholars of the
Annales school (Ferdinand Braudel). He was first a structuralist, so an admirer
of Saussure’s ideas, but then in the 1970s moved into what became called
poststructuralism. The article you’ve read is an article of the time inbetween
(I’ll come back to that). His most famous work was in the 1950s when he
published a magazine articles deconstructing icons of popular culture.
Let me just briefly go into Mythology a bit which is a thoroughly structuralist
book:
1st part is a collecting of often very funny short article about a modern ‘
myth’. They are short and fun to read I’ll give you some of the
titles: Soap-power and detergent (on the occasion of the first world
congress of Detergent that was held in Paris in 1954) or Novels and
Children (an acid attack on the women’s magazine Elle ); Steak and Chips,
Striptease (the commodisation of nakedness and sex), Plastic, the New
Citroen, The brain of Einstein, wrestler.
In the second half of the book Barthes addresses the question of "What is a myth,
today?" with the analysis of ideas such as: myth as a type of speech, and myth on
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the wings of politics. So, what he does here is to develop Saussure’s theory
further – and politicize it – by moving it from mere language ot the study of
cultural objects. What he hopes to do with this new methodology is to be able to
decode these myth – and by decoding them make them useless.
What drove him to analyse those he says himself:
(slide)
The starting point of these reflections was ususally a feeling of impatience
at the sights of the ‘naturalness’ with which newspaper, art and common
sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live
in, is undoubtly debermined by history. In short, in the account given of
our contemporary circumstances, I resented seeing Nature and History
confused at every turn, and I wanted to track down the decorative display
of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abouse which, in my view is
hidden there. (mythologies, 11)
(images)
What did he aimed to do with such an idea was ultimately political:
Barthes used Saussures ideas to explain the dominance and durability of
bourgeois imperialist-culture. Like many left-wing and Marxist intellectuals (
such as Antonio Gramsci in Italy ), Barthes believed that the class struggle was
being won by the elites not only because of economic or political oppression,
but also by cultural power. Whilst Gramsci explained this through concepts of
'social control' and 'cultural hegemony' (through control of the churches, leisure
and education), Barthes argued that an oppressive ideology was normalised
in society by silent sign systems in everyday popular culture – through
myth. But from this, he turned to show how to analyse popular culture for
embedded silent signs and their meanings; he aims at deconding these mythical
systems, to lay bare their structure and to demystify them – and capitalistic
culture with this decoding. This made Barthes an originator of the stud y of
popular culture.
One of the best examples of his work is an analysis of a popular wrestling
match - the professional version, which many people see as 'staged' , fixed
and a sham. Wresting he shows is a performance with an elaborate set of
codes. It is a language with its own meanings. Each sign means something
else!
So, Barthes argues and extends Saussure here that we have more going on than
just the signifier – signified relationship. He arguest hat each sign is also
realted to a bigger sign system that transends the signifier-signified
relation described by Saussure. In fact, so Barthes argues, every sign
belongs within a bigger myth. The ‘myth’ is not necessarily untrue –
therefore the name myth -- but is an accepted part of culture. This makes
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language work. Everybody in a culture understands nor just the sign but also the
myth to which it belongs. The sign already exists - it is not new - in a pre-existing
sign system. Barthes showed that signs and sign systems were embedded codes
with normative meanings. Barthes called all of this 'the semiological system', and
the study of the hidden meanings he called 'semiology'.
(slide with paris match/Italian pasts on cover) – rhetoric of an imag
So, his analysis of images of but not of high art such as art history does but front
covers of magazine or his readings of advertisings were really something new
and this is why he is one of the founders of cultural studies.
One important change t o theory w a s floated b y Barthes:
He makes it political!
H e asserted that signs are not arbitrary. Unlike Saussure, Barthes
was a politically motivated left-winger living in right-wing France in
the 1950s, and he observed that sign systems are highly motivated
and deeply structured by political power. Understanding each sign
meant placing it in its political context - within its structure.
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Now, when Barthes came to write the text you’ve read – The death of the Author –
he had began to doubt the idea that everything is embedded in a structure and
that is this structure – or myth – that secretly organizes everything in a neat way.
In the Death of the Author Barthes is moving into what became to be called
‘post-structuralism’. He felt that not everything could be explained by a
structure and anyway wasn’t a structure – let’s take class – first and foremost a
human invention which then became so rigid that it could, Barthes believed,
explain human action? So, he became less interested in context – the explaining
of the images required him to do so – and more interested to analyse texts
themselves – he moved literary studies from the external structures to the
internal pre-figurations of the work. And by the 1970s he had taken many young
theorists with him.
Poststructuralism:
Poststructuralism is born if you like in France in the 1960s among French
philosophers and their students. In Paris in 1 96 8 , students rebelled aga inst the
French state. The rebellion failed.
This gave a stimulus to poststructuralism in a number of ways.
First, it became clear to many radicals, both during and after the failure, that the
usual Marxist class analysis of social action (and indeed revolution ) did not
explain what happened - the emergence of radical groups and agendas
apparently divorced from socialist agendas of action.
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Secondly, the structures of everyday life that had been initially accepted within
the occupied Sorbonne were challenged - principally by female students who
refused to conform to the stereotyped role expected of them of cooking and
housekeeping for the male students.
Thirdly, the ineffectualness of structuralist Marxism, embodied in the long
refusal of the Marxist CGT trades union to join the protest, led to students
brandishing placards saying 'Structures don't take to the streets! ' to be failing in
Europe. Meanwhile, the weakness of Marxist theory in the United States, the
leading anti-communist nation, left anti-authoritarian radical groups like
feminists and the black civil rights movement receptive to a new type of radical
though t that could offer better History and new prophecy.
Poststructuralism filled this gap. It was born simultaneously as social
movements and as theory. – one should never forget this origin which was
deeply radical --- poststructuralist will loose that in the 1990 particularly on
American campuses, this immediacy, this takings to the street…
There were five main movements involved.
1. student rebellion, see n by many as the a poth eo si s of the rise of youth in
western culture after 1945 .
2. The second was second-wave fe minism (or the wome n's liberation
movement) as it emerged very suddenly in 1 9 6 9-70, giving rise to
struggles for equal opportunities in work , pay, education, and for an end
to discrimination in language and dep ic tion .
3. The third was the emergence of gay liberation in the late 1960s, heralded
by liberalisation of laws on homosexuality .
4. Fourth was the collapse of many European empires in the 1960s an d
1970s (those of Britain , Portugal, France, Belgium a nd Holland), making
way for European aware ne s s of the structures of Orientalism an d race
prejudice embedded in western white cu lture and intellectual though
5. the rise of black consciousness with in the United States and western
Europe, allied to liberation movements in d eveloping nations and to the a
anti-apartheid movement in S out h Africa, in all of which race
discrimination and racial stereotyping
Social movements and poststructuralism
In each of these five movements, there were two important common features
that combined social movements with theoretical issues:
1.
2.
the disturbance of traditional structures, and a particular
focus on language that carried predjudice and oppression. The
hierarchies of superiority, assumed within western culture since
the eighteenth century, started to he challenged: the hierarchies
of class, gender, sexuality, national superiority, religion and race.
In language, the signs used to convey discourses on those
hierarchies, superiorities and prejudices became challenged
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through direct action and pressure group activity: challenges to
sexist language and images (such as naked women in
advertisements ), words of homophobia (poof, queer) , and
words of racist denigration (coon, nigger, paki ) .
Theory and poststructuralism
In theoretical development, many structuralist scholars became overtly
critical of structures.
Barthes for example, became to doubt the ability of an observer to adopt a
distinterested and neutral position from which t move from reading of
structures to exploring the variety of meanings.
Other scholars who looked at that period ad his work have argued that
many structuralists like Barthe moved away from an analsysis based on
the understanding a game like chess (with all the move listed) to an
analysis based on readings of texts as if they were plays.
The text becomes the central focus of postructuralist scholars for the
next 15 year. The text becomes seen as needing to be played with,
explored and deconstructed for the varieties and ambiguities of meanings
it contains.
In particular, poststructuralism shifted the emphasis squarely from the
author to the reader. It is a reflection upon the act of reading a text that
exposes its meanings, not reflection on the act of writing it.
Death of the author:
We can clearly see this in the text you’ve read for today The death of the author
published in 1967. Barthes's essay argues against traditional literary criticism's
practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in
an interpretation of a text. Instead he argues that writing and creator are
unrelated.
Barthes notes that the traditional critical approach to literature raises a thorny
problem: how can we detect precisely what the writer intended? His answer is that we
cannot. And because we cannot, we tend to use the ‘contex’t as an explanation. And e
think that is cheating!
He argues for a new way of understanding and readings texts:
In his essay, Barthes argues against the method of reading and criticism that
relies on aspects of the author's identity — their political views, historical
context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal
attributes — to distill meaning from the author's work. In this type of
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criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive
"explanation" of the text. For Barthes, this method of reading may be apparently
tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy and flawed:
Readers must thus separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate
the text from interpretive tyranny. Each piece of writing contains multiple layers
and meanings. In a well-known quotation, Barthes draws an analogy between
text and textiles, declaring that a "text is a tissue [or fabric] of quotations," drawn
from "innumerable centers of culture," rather than from one, individual
experience. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the
reader, rather than the "passions" or "tastes" of the writer; "a text's unity lies
not in its origins," or its creator, "but in its destination," or its audience.
Every work is thus "eternally written here and now," with each re-reading, because
the "origin" of meaning lies exclusively in "language itself" and its impressions on the
reader.
The reader is not one single self either and can read the text in multiple
ways. So, in a way the text is not only about the rejection of stable criticis
but also stable personal identities.
Barthes suspicion about the instability of text and thus our knowledge is further
developed by French philosophers.
What is a text ? became the central concern.
Over the next 15 years postmodernists became concerned with developing
sophisticated tools to analyse texts using all the tools of linguistics and semiotics
but also philosophical approaches – central here is that language does not allow
access to reality.
On the most simple level, a text is a piece of literature, a book an article. But for a
postmodernist the text became a metaphor of something else, something much
greater: it is all forms of narrative.
In a mostmodern sense, a text is the material manifestation of a
multiplicity of signs, discourse and structures. All these ONLY occur in
texts.
The historians needs to approach a text with all these things in mind, have
an awareness of how they work and how they relate to reality or not!
But what is the character of a text?
A material thing (differs from sign or discourse) composed of many signs –
and a text excludes therefore the ‘real thing’.
How does it differ from signs?
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What they discover is something called textuality: the quality of the non-real
Probably the single most famous statement of postmodernism derives from the
French philosopher Jacques Derrida
‘There is nothing outside the text’.
By this he meant that when a reader is consulting a text, the text seeks to
represent ‘reality’ only by excluding it, the ‘absense of the reference’. Every
attempt to get outside the text ends up repeating the text; it never jumps over
the barrier between the text and reality.
He concludes that ‘what opens meaning and language is writing as a
disappearance of the natural space’. In other words, to make language into a text,
it has to be opened to contain a meaning, and that is only achieved by removing
the presencence of a natural or real thing.
By doing so, certainty is also removed. There is no closure in a text, only an
illusion of it; there are more than one meanings, of certainty is removed.
For Derrida the signs are in a constant play of meaning in a text, it tantalsing and
confusing. ‘playfulness’ of texts – Barthes had said this already
The Second quality of a text is its intertextuality, the fact that is borrowing
from previous texts, historical antecedents. Nothing is actually original in a text.
No text is in itself completely original in its combination of signs, discourses, and
structure.
Intertextual borrowings.
Third quality of any text is narrative
Novels, non-fiction, fiction. Division is a 19th century division. Narratives
are anavoidable by-products of writing. They put signs in in order.
Metanarrative: a grand or master narrative is a story that shapes
other stories.
Applied particularly to ‘narratives’ of the enlightenment (progress;
power of reason,
Postmodernists aim at destroying and never letting new
metanarrative appear.. but did they succeed? Think about the new
metanarrative of the global for example?
Jean-Francois Lyotard (1925-98)
The analysis of a text is complex and complicated thing which postmodernists
call ‘deconstruction’ – complicated isse see Brown, p. 99-100.
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It is a reaction against the notion that there can be any certainty of
meaning in a text
Consequences for historian:
1. Reading history as a primary source/ Writing history
One of the most controversial implications of postmodernists position is that the
past itself is a text, and nothing but a text. The historian is involved in reading
the past as if it was one large text.
Barthes and Derrida were big at developing this idea. Our ability to recall events
only in text transform those events into fact-statements and narrativestatements that divorce them immediately from the reality of the past, and puts
them in a relationship to each other that they many not have had. The
implication is of course that the historians cannot do otherwise than
reading the past as anything other than the text.
Now this has consequences for our daily practice: you know that you have
to distinguish between primary text – we collect the data on which we then
write our histories -- and secondary texts; now postmodernists make no
difference between these two sorts of texts. And, importantly they argue
that all texts are thus subjective; historians have no privileged truth
In fact Roland Barthe says historians produce nothing but a ‘reality effect’ –
there is no such thing as an objective discourse! History draws its truth from the
careful attention to narration’.
Equating of History-writing with fiction-writing raises serious concerns amongst
critics that postmodernism sidles the issue of ‘truth’ altogether from the
profession.
Hayden White
The person who realy gets into the thick of the debate whether history is fiction
is the Amercian Hayden White. He goes right into the reality effect.
(slide)
He is most famous for his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in
Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973). It is a structural analsys of several
nineteenth century historians (Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhard).
And he read these four in relationship to four nineteenth century philosophers
(Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Croce).
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Basically the book argued that historians have traditionally constructed the past
in stories without thinking through the conceptual presupposition that they as
individual, brought to these texts. Those presuppositions were the products of
their time and place, and the discoursive environment in which they worked.
There is no necessary relationship between the structuring of the narrative and
the historical evidence, and though this does not diminish the significance of
varying quality in historical research in a given-field of study, one historian
cannot be more ‘authoritive’ than another.
Why? Because the subjectivity the historian brings to the text is identical with
the subjectivity of the primary text. Bororing from Amercian literary theorists
argues that it is not only in the write-up state of historical work in which
language plays a role, as historians often claim. Rather histories contain a deep
structural content of a linguistic nature, which provides the paradigm for
historical explanation.
He argues that historians narrative if prefigure by trope, by plot, and by
ideological arguments – (great fan of Vico!)
4 tropes: Trope: the use of figurative language – via word, phrase, or even an
image – for artistic effect.
Metaphor: one things is described as being another, carrying over its
associations
Metonymy: substitution of a thing by a symbol for it;
Synecdoche: a part of something is used to describe the whole , or possible vice
versa
Irony: saying one thing while you mean or want to suggest the opposite
He identifies 4 emplotments: Romance, tragedy, comedy and satire.
Historians understanding to the presence of these in a narrative depends on
their familiarity with the signs, discourses and structure of language at a
particular moment in time. In sum, White claims that every work of history has
embedded within itself a metahistory insofar as the author has already chosen,
well before the so-called writing stage, the tropological mode in which the book
is to be composed.Choosen a mode of emplotment consciously or unconsciously
commts an historian to a particular philosophy of history. He or she make a lot of
commitments which constitute a metahistory.
He also implied that this is not only for 19th century historians the case – attacks
also the Annales school. They too, he argues, uses narrative devices which make
history appear ‘natural’.
While makes it easy for critics really: particularly the early writings are
semioticas and not easy to read – in fact boring. Historians attack it and it is an
easy attach- he is denounced as ahistorical which I think misses the point.
(historans do not like the move to language – because of loss of authority?) He
became a symbol of ‘nihilistic relativism’. The French anale tradition and
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particular Roger French was also very critical – party that had to do with the
language divide…different tradition of thinking about language…Americans not
yet influenced by the French poststructural traditions.!
I do think there a bit too much trope in his writings I raises important points
which should make us read his work. I want to raise four points here





By focusing on the historians language, he does not demonstrate the
impossibility of getting hold of the past reality, but the naivete of the kind
of positivist intuition customarily cherished among historians.
This idea of a positivist intuition – the historian records reality – is an
invention of the historical profession itself
There is a historical reality and White never refuted that but the historian
have forgotten about this past and have mistaken the product of their
tropological encoding of the past for the past itself.
One might want to argue that White is the realist here who reminds us of
the difference between reality itself and what is mere intellectual
construction?
White compels us to think about how narrative works conceal the
contraditions and discords of society by framing a unifying story that
emphasizes continuity
See also F. W. Ankersmit, Hayden White’s Appeal to the Historians’, History
and Theory 37 (1998)
Now you might want to discuss this afternoon then what is the utlity of the
historical narrative when it is identified as simply telling stories, and that these
stories are ideologically suspect? What useful end might a ‘return to narrative’
have? – your remember that at exactly the same time when we have this
language debate – maninly centered on France still (1970s early 1980s) with
exceptions such as White-- we have this return to the narrative via
anthropological influence. And we shall see this turn to narrative in the next two
session when we talk about Ginzburg and Darnton. It is good to keep in mind
that these two things happen at the same time and you might want to look at
these new narrative texts with the linguist turn in mind?
Joan Scott
This question over narrative brings me to the last historian you’ve read Joan
Scott: We will meet this particular text again when we talk about women’s
history and gender.
Scott is an example of an Amercian scholar who coming from social history and
womens’ history makes the move to postmodernism and particularly
structuralism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The text you’ve read is an
example of her poststructural and deconstructionist take on narrative.
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Her text is about experience and you remember that for Thomson and many
historians ‘experience’ is what they were after. They believed that they would
recover the experiences of the past by their work.
Now, Scott as a fierce deconstructionist accuses the whole project as
conservative and naïve. Experience -- she argues is never intuitive and never a
heuristic tool for historians to use – and then claim that they are objective or
neutral and recover the past. Experience and she explicitly mentions also our
bodily experiences are constructions of language. They only exist through
language which historically changes. Therefore we need to deconstruct the term
when we use it. We need to get behind what it meant at the time we look at and,
here she is very postructural again, we need to take into account how our own
experience is constructed in our own time, because it is with this experience that
we approach the past.
Summary….
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