Michel Foucault and Cultural History
I.
Wrapping up Foucault: power and sexuality
II.
Cultural History’s roots
A. Borrows from anthropology (study of cultures), linguistics (study of
language and structures of language) and the “New Historicism” (a
movement in literary theory that combines studies of texts with historical
explanation)
B. NO “objective” knowledge—it is all mediated
C. Texts are not transparent—that is, there is no unmediated truth. We can’t
take documents at face value. We need to understand the conditions
under which they were written
D. Does not accept that economics is the foundation (base) on which all else
is built. Culture, in other words, is not secondary or tertiary to economics.
In fact, economic and social relations are themselves cultural
practices…they’re not “objective” “material” reality.
E. Wants to explain the past on its own terms, not explain a progression
from past to present. Here we see how historians like EPT and GSJ are
moving in this direction and provide impetus for the “linguistic turn”
F. New emphasis on language and cultural representation. According to
Stuart Hall “Questions of culture and cultural change lay at the very heart
of social life; it could not be refused that the issues of language were
central to the understanding of the national culture and that any serious
scholar must be engaged in the question of the nature of language and
what it is saying.” On the development of “Cultural Studies” and the
Birmingham school of cultural studies
III.
Theory—Lynn Hunt's introduction
A. Lynn Hunt is a French historian and a leading theorist. Note: she is not
the type of theorist you probably associate with Marx and Foucault.
Rather, she is a historian who thinks about how theory operates in
historical practice. Much of her work focusses on the French Revolution.
B. In your reading for today, she writes about the roots of the New Cultural
History
IV.
Practice—Darnton and cat massacres
A. He, too, is a French historian, recently president of the AHA (the banner
professional organization for historians)
B. Wants to tackle not just culture, but popular culture. As opposed to high
culture
C. How to get at popular culture without evidence? Can a child’s nursery
rhyme or poem seriously be a historical primary source? Cultural
Historians have learned to search for alternative sources of evidence.
Much of his work concerns the problematic of tackling meaning and
popular culture—that is, what can we draw about how the past actually
worked and lived on its own terms. This is very much a development of
the fourth generation of annalistes that Lynn Hunt talks about: the study
of méntalités.
D. Class discussion.