Wrap-Up Lecture II:
History Writing in Postmodernity
Dr Claudia Stein
Enlightenment ideas that structured ‘modern’ history writing between
1750-1960s?
• Belief in the power of human reason in all areas of human individual
and collective life.
• The belief in the power of reason brings about the new intellectual
virtue of rationality that was supposed to guide all investigations into
the natural and human world.
• This rational enquiry was based on the empirical method, a way of
gaining knowledge by means of direct (and indirect via experience)
observation or other sense experience.
• The knowledge gained through the empirical method was deemed to
be neutral.
• Because empirically gained knowledge was neutral, it was believed
that absolute and universal truth about the world around us could be
achieved by humans.
• Reality could be assessed and discovered by humans – historians
could understand the reality of the past and identify universal truth
of human behaviour.
What are we talking about? Definition, definition, definition….
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’ (from the 1960s).
Postmodernism:
describes a broad late-20th century movement that occurred across philosophy, the arts and
humanities, architecture, and criticism and marked a departure from modernism (although it has some
intellectual links to it).
Postmodernism is the intellectual (cultural, artistic, academic, and philosophical) response to the
conditions of postmodernity.
While encompassing a broad range of ideas and projects, postmodernism is typically defined by an
attitude of scepticism or distrust toward all forms of grand narratives and ideologies (e.g. the grand
narrative of progress, Marxism). It questioned Enlightenment morals and beliefs in rationality,
objective reality and the existence of absolute truth. Instead, it asserts that all knowledge and truth
are the product of unique systems of socio-cultural, economic and political discourse at a particular
moment in time, and are therefore contextual and constructed. Postmodernism challenged and
undermined the certainty over knowledge and morality that characterised modernity and most of
modernism (roughly between 1800-1960s).
Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterised by tendencies to epistemological and moral
relativism, pluralism, and a focus in subjectivity.
What stands at the core of postmodernism critique?
‘While encompassing a broad range of ideas and projects, postmodernism is
typically defined by an attitude of scepticism or distrust toward all forms of
grand narratives and ideologies (e.g. the grand narrative of progress, Marxism
and its idea of a fixed human nature and historical development etc).
It questioned Enlightenment morals and beliefs in rationality, objective reality
and the existence of absolute truth. Instead, it asserts that all knowledge and
truth are the product of unique systems of socio-cultural, economic and
political discourse at a particular moment in time, and are therefore
contextual and constructed. Postmodernism challenged and undermined the
certainty over knowledge and morality that characterised modernity and most
of modernism (roughly between 1800-1960s
The ‘Linguistic Turn’:
An intellectual move from the 1960/1970 which was inspired by
linguistic, semiotics or turn of the 20th-century language philosophy and
used it as a critique of Enlightenment views of history writing (and other
other forms of knowledge).
At the beginning it was inspired by Saussure’s structural linguistics which
had argued that language precedes the world and makes it intelligible by
constructing it according to its own rules. Later develops into
poststructuralism, deconstruction.
Common to all of them is:
• language is the constitutive agent of human consciousness and the
socio-cultural production of meaning, and our apprehension of the
world, both past and present, arrives only through the lens of
language’s precoded perceptions.
Why do these claims allow postmodernist to critique the
Enlightenment ideas of how knowledge is produced:
 Our relationship to knowledge becomes uncertain because the
‘meaning’ (‘concept’ or ‘signified’) and the ‘signifier’
(sound/image/written word) are separated and their link is
arbitrary. They are ‘made-up’ by humans and rely the internal
structure of a language which only allows you to say certain things
at a certain moment in time.
 Radically questions understandings of causality, change, human
agency and subjectivity, and experience
 The notion of arbitrariness of the sign deeply challenges 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 out there? How could language ever refer to a
universal reality? Or a universal Truth?
How does this affect academic history writing? Why was the
idea of a ‘constructed’ reality so frightening for historians in
the 1980s and 1990s?
It disturbed their confidence that they were able to get at the
‘reality’ of the past through the empirical study of their
‘neutrally’ collected sources. And it therefore also affected their
professional identity as ‘bearers of the truth’ about the past.
Where did their confidence come from?
‘…wie es eigentlich gewesen’’
(note that it should be translated as
‘essentially’ not as ’really’!)
Leopold von Ranke, 1795-1886, the ‘father’ of modern history writing
What did postmodernism do to the ’reality’ and ‘truth’ of the modern
historian?
 Reality is unrepresentable in any form of human culture (whether written,
spoken, visual or dramatic). All ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ is a construction or a
represention of the time it is spoken/written/painted about.
 What ‘reality’ is changes from period to period and from culture to culture,
and is also dependent on the perspective of the person who constructs
‘reality’ in past and present. What we think ‘reality’ is --- in the past and
present – is thus culturally determined and NOT universal. What humans
consider as ‘truth’ is also not universal but also culturally determined -’truths’ change through time.
 Any representation of ‘reality’ therefore can never be complete and no
person or technology can replicate the complexity of relations between
things or human beings. Therefore there cannot be a universal ‘truth’ about
things.
 No authoritative account can exists of anything. Nobody can know
everything, and there is never one authority on a given subject. No human
can ever speak or discover a ‘universal truth’.
‘New’ Cultural History:
Influence by the linguistic turn the ’new’ cultural historians of the 1980s
tried to overcome the division between society and culture. They attempted
to avoid the social determinism that was a by-product of the mechanistic
model and functionalist approaches by the social sciences models. They
proposed ‘culture’ as an autonomous realm in which the principal stakes
were not thee pursuit of individual or class interests but the creation of the
domains of meaning. (Spiegel, Practicing History 8)
influenced by symbolic anthropology of Clifford Geertz who
understood culture as an ‘interworked system of construable signs’
Many of these new cultural historians while being influenced by the tenets
of the linguistic turn never abandoned a belief in the reality of the sociocultural world. But their enthusiasm for interpretive approaches and above
all the shift in the focus of investigation from social phenomena to discourse
and language– influence of Foucault – makes their works different from
social history.
Orientalism
An idea, produced both in and about the West, that holds principally that
the ‘East’ is both ‘other’ and ‘inferior’
Within the framework of Orientalism, the Orient is not an inert fact of nature (the
‘geographical’ natural orient) but a phenomenon constructed by generations of
intellectuals, artists, commentators, writers, politicians (since the 18th century), and,
more importantly, constructed by the naturalising of a wide range of Orientalist
assumptions and stereotypes.
Combines Gramsci’s ideas of hegemony with knowledge/power ideas of Foucault
Marxism and Its Notion of Power which Foucault engaged with in the 1960s/1970s
1.Concern with power relations as manifestations of a specific mode or configuration of class
domination
2. Marxists are concerned with the links among economic, political, and ideological class
domination. Different views on location of class power (e.g. in social relations of production,
in control over the state, or in intellectual hegemony over hearts and minds (Gramsci).
3. Marxists note the limitations inherent in any exercise of power that is rooted in one or
another form of class domination and try to explain this in terms of structural contradictions
and antagonisms inscribed therein. For them all forms of social power linked to class
domination are inherently fragile, unstable, provisional, and temporary and that continuing
struggles are needed to secure class domination, to overcome resistance, and to naturalize or
mystify class power.
4. Thus, Marxists address questions of strategy and tactics. They provide empirical analyses of
actual strategies intended to reproduce, resist, or overthrow class domination in specific
periods and conjunctures
Foucault’s Geneology is a ‘history of the present’
and a ’critical’ history method
The subject matter of this kind of history is the origins of present rules,
practices or institutions that claim authority over us. It starts therefore from
an investigation of the present.
And asks the question: What claims authority over us NOW? What makes
us think that certain ideas, practices, institutions in the present are
‘normal’, indeed we feel angry and threatened when it is questioned.
Why is it, for example, upsetting to think that ‘evolution’ is a historical
construct?
The primary of a ‘critical history’ intend is not to understand the past for its
own sake, but to understand and evaluate the present through the past,
particularly with a view to discrediting unjustified claims of authority in the
present.