北京师范大学
教育研究方法讲座系列
Lecture 7
Approach to Comparative-Historical Method (4):
Deconstructionism in Historical Perspective
The Emergence of the Text:
The Linguistic Turn in Historiography
1. Hayden White’s challenge: “The Historical Text as
Literary Artifact” (1978)
a. “If there is an element of the historical in all poetry, there
is an element of poetry in every historical account of the
world. …And this because history has no stipulatable
subject matter uniquely its own; it is always written as part
of a contest between contending poetic figurations of what
the past might consist of.” (White, 1978, P. 98)
2
The Emergence of the Text: The
Linguistic Turn in Historiography
1. Hayden White’s challenge: …
b.
“History as a discipline is in bad shape today because it
has lost sight of its origins in the literary imagination. In
the interest of appearing scientific and objective, it has
repressed and denied to itself its own greater source of
strength and renewal. By drawing historiography back
once more to an intimate connection with its literary basis,
we should not only be putting ourselves on guard against
merely ideological distortion; we should by way of arriving
at the “theory” of history without which it cannot pass for
a ‘discipline’ at all.” (White, 1978, P. 99)
4
The Emergence of the Text: The
Linguistic Turn in Historiography
2. Lawrence Stone’s challenge: “Nothing besides the
text”
a. “During the last twenty-five years, the subject matter of
history…have …been brought seriously into question.
…The first threat comes from linguistics…according to
which there is nothing besides the text. Texts thus become a
mere hall of mirrors reflecting nothing but each other, and
throwing no light upon the ‘truth’, which does not exist.”
(Stone, 1991, P 217)
b. According, Stone asserts that such the linguistic turn and
“the movement to narrative …marks the end of an era: the
end of the attempt to produce a coherent scientific
explanation of change in the past.” (Stone, 1979, P. 19) 5
Paul Ricoeur’s
Text and Interpretation
1. What is a text?
a. “A text is any discourse fixed in writing.” (Ricoeur, 1981a,
p.145)
b. Fixation enables the speech to be conserved, i.e. durability
of text
c. A text “divides the act of writing and the act of reading into
two sides, between which there is no communication. …
The text thus produces a double eclipse of the reader and
the writer.” (Ricoeur, 1981a, p.146-47)
6
Paul Ricoeur’s
Text and Interpretation
2. Distanciations in the text:
a. Text as language event/speech act
 Distanciation between language event (i.e. discourse) and
meaning
 Articulation of meaning in language event is “the core of the
whole hermeneutic problem.” (Ricoeur, 1981a, p. 134)
8
Paul Ricoeur’s
Text and Interpretation
2. Distanciations in the text:
b. Text as work
 Distanciation between text as “work” and its authors’ intention
 “Hermeneutics remains the art of discerning the discourse in the
work; but this discourse is only given in and through the structures
of the work. Thus interpretation is the reply to the fundamental
distanciation constituted by the objectification of man in work of
discourse, an objectification comparable to that expressed in the
products of his labour and his art.” (Ricoeur, 1981a, P. 138)
9
Paul Ricoeur’s
Text and Interpretation
2. Distanciations in the text:
c. Distanciation between the act of writing and the act of
reading
 Distanciation between the intention of the author and the
interpretation of the reader
 “The text must be able to… ‘ decontextualise’ itself in such a way
that it can be ‘recontextualise’ in a new situation – as
accomplished…by the act of reading.” (Ricoeur, 1981a, p. 139)
10
Paul Ricoeur’s
Text and Interpretation
2. Distanciations in the text:
d. Distanciation of the text and the referent of the text or the
reality designated/signified in the text
 The world of the text: “Reference…distinguishes discourse
from language, the latter has no relation with reality, its
words returning to other words in the endless circle of the
dictionary. Only discourse, we shall say, intends things,
applies itself to reality, expresses the world.” (Ricoeur,
1981a, p. 140)
 “The most fundamental hermeneutical problem … is to
explicate the type of being-in-the world (life-world) unfolded
in front of the text.” (Ricoeur, 1981a, p.141)
11
Narrative as Universal Device & MetaCode in Human Meaning-making Process
1. Meaning of narrative:
a. In Oxford English Dictionary, narrative as a noun means
 An account of a series of events, facts, etc., given in order and with
the establishing of connections between them; a narration, a story.
 The practice or art of narrative; narrated material.
b. Lawrence Stone defines narrative as "the organization of
material in a chronologically sequential order and the
focusing of the content into a single coherent story, albeit
with sub-plots." (Stone, 1979, p.3
12
Narrative as Universal Device & MetaCode in Human Meaning-making Process
1. Meaning of narrative:…
c. Barbara Czarniawska's conception: "A narrative, in its
basic form, requires at least three elements: an original
state of affairs, an action or an event, and the consequent
state of affairs." In order to have these three elements "
become a narrative, they require a plot, that is, some way to
bring them into a meaningful whole. The easiest way to do
this is by introducing chronology (and then …), which in
the mind of the reader easily turns into causality (as a result
of, in spite of). (Czarniawska, 1998, p. 2)
13
Narrative as Universal Device & MetaCode in Human Meaning-making Process
2. The universality of narrative
a. “Man is in his actions and practice …essentially a storytelling animal.” (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 216)
Alasdair MacIntyre contends that we understand “human
action as enacted narratives. …We render the actions of
others intelligible in this way because action itself has a
basically historical character. It is because we all live out
narrative in our lives and because we understand our own
lives in terms of the narratives that we live out that the form
of narrative is appropriate for understanding the actions of
others. Stories are live before they are told.” (MacIntyre,
2007, p. 211-212)
14
Narrative as Universal Device & MetaCode in Human Meaning-making Process
2. The universality of narrative
b. Barbara Hardy indicates that "we dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair,
believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip,
learn, hate and love by narrative." (Hardy, 1968, p.5)
16
Narrative as Universal Device & MetaCode in Human Meaning-making Process
2. The universality of narrative
c. Jerome Bruner signifies that narrative construal of reality
is universal in human cogitation. "We live in a sea of
stories, and like the fish who (according to the proverb) will
be the last to discover water, we have our own difficulties
grasping what it is like to swim in stories. It is not that we
lack competence in creating our narrative account of
reality— far from it. We are, if anything, too expert. Our
problem, rather, is achieving consciousness of what we so
easily do automatically. (Bruner, 1996, 147)
17
Paul Ricoeur’s
Time, Narrative and History
1. Paul Ricoeur’s metaphor and narrative in
hermeneutic understanding
a. Metaphor is semantic innovation “in producing a new
semantic pertinence by means of an impertinent
attribution.” (1983, p. ix)
b. Narrative is another semantic innovation in “inventing
another work of synthesis – a plot”
18
Paul Ricoeur’s
Time, Narrative and History
2. Paul Ricoeur’s hypothesis of time and narrative
“My basic hypothesis (is) that between the activity of
narrating a story and the temporal character of
human experience there exists a correlation that is
not merely accidental but that presents a transcultural
form of necessity. To put it another way, time becomes
human to the extent that it is articulated through a
narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning
when it becomes a conditions of temporal existence.”
(Ricoeur, 1984, p. 52)
19
Paul Ricoeur’s
Time, Narrative and History
3. History as narrative
a. Historical event: “Historical events derive their historical
status not only from their articulation in singular
statements, but also from the position of these singular
statements in configurations of certain sort which properly
constitute a narrative.” (1981, p. 276)
b. Historical explanation: It is an act of emplotment, that is, to
‘interpolate’ the historical events to be explained into “a
type of discourse which already has a narrative form.”
(p.276) Hence, historical explanation is by definition an
“explanation by emplotment”. (p290)
20
Paul Ricoeur’s
Time, Narrative and History
3. History as narrative
c. Plot: “What is a plot? The phenomenology of the act of
following a story. …To follow a story is to understand the
successive actions, thoughts and feelings as displaying a
particular directedness. …We must follow the story to its
conclusion. So rather than being predictable, a conclusion
must be acceptable. Looking back from the conclusion
towards the episodes which lead up to it, we must be able to
say that this end required those events and that chain of
action.” (p.277)
21
Paul Ricoeur’s
Time, Narrative and History
3. History as narrative
d. History: “History could then be explicitly treated as a
‘literary artifact’, and the writing of history began to be
reinterpreted according to categories which were variously
call ‘semiotic’ ‘symbolic’ and ‘poetic’.” (p. 290)
22
The Structure of Narrative: Hayden
White’s The Context of the Form (1987)
23
The Structure of Narrative: Hayden
White’s The Context of the Form (1987)
1. Narrative as a universal meta-code of humanity and
culture: "To raise the question of the nature of narrative
is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and,
possibly, even on the nature humanity itself. So natural is
the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of
narrative for any report on the way things really
happened, that narratives could appear problematical
only in a culture in which it was absent. …This suggests
that far from being one code among many that a culture
may utilize for endowing experience with meaning,
narrative is a meta-code, a human universal on the basis
of which transcultural messages about the nature of a
shared reality can be transmitted." (White, 1987, p.1) 25
The Structure of Narrative: Hayden
White’s The Context of the Form (1987)
2. Classification of historical data
a. Primitive elements: traces of the past
b. Non-primitive elements:




Textual records, archives, relics
Annals
Chronicle
Narrative
c. Distinction between syntax of the past (the facts/ the
statements/ the chronicle) and semantics of the past (the
stories/ narrative form)
26
The Structure of Narrative: Hayden
White’s The Context of the Form (1987)
3. Narrativity in the representation of reality
a. Three basic kinds of historical representation
 The annals
“It consists only a list of events ordered in chronological sequence. …It
possesses none of the characteristics that we normally attribute to a
story: no central subject, no well marked beginning, middle, and end, no
peripeteria, and no identifiable narrative voice.” (P. 5-6)
 The chronicle
“The chronicle.. has a central subject – the life of an individual, town, or
region; some great undertaking, such as a war or crusade; or some
institution, such as a monarchy, episcopacy, or monastery,” (P. 16), an
authority.
 The historical narrative
27
The Structure of Narrative: Hayden
White’s The Context of the Form (1987)
3. Narrativity in the representation of reality
b. Features of narrativity
 Sequence of events
 Central subject:
• The legal subject (the state)
• The geographical subject
• The social subject/system
 Plot: The plot is “a structure of relationships by which the events
contained in the account are endowed with a meaning by being
identified as parts of an integrated whole” (P.9) “The plot of a
narrative imposes a meaning on the events that make up its story
level by revealing at the end a structure that was immanent in the
events all along.” (p.20)
28
The Structure of Narrative: Hayden
White’s The Context of the Form (1987)
3. Narrativity in the representation of reality…
b. Features of narrativity
 Explanation by emplotment: "Providing the 'meaning' of a
story by identifying the kind of story that has been told is call
explanation by emplotemnt. If, in the course of narrating his
story, the historian provides it with the plot structure of a
Tragedy, he has 'explained' it in one way; if he has structured it
as a Comedy, he has 'explained' it in another way. Emplotment
is the way by which a sequence of events fashioned into a story
is gradually revealed to be a story of a particular kind. ….I
identify at least four different modes of emplotment: Romance,
Tragedy, Comedy, and Satire." (White, 1973, p.7)
29
The Structure of Narrative: Hayden
White’s The Context of the Form (1987)
3. Narrativity in the representation of reality…
b. Features of narrativity
 Closure
• Moral meaning
• “A proper historical narrative … achieves narrative fullness by explicitly
invoking the idea of a social system to serve as a fixed reference point by
which the flow of ephemeral events can be endowed with specifically moral
meaning. … (Hence), the chronicle must approach the form of an allegory,
moral or analogical as the case may be, in order to achieve both narrativity
and historicality.” (p. 22)
• Moralistic ending (Philosophy of history)
 Authority of reality: In a constructing narrative, a historian usually
implies "a desire on his part to represent an authority whose legitimacy
hinged upon the establishment of 'facts' of specifically historical orders."
(p. 19)
31
The Narrative Identity: The Formation of
the Great Communities
1. Paul Ricoeur’s narrative identity
a. Life in search of narrative
 ‘A life is no more than a biological phenomenon as long as it has not
been interpreted.’ (Ricoeur, 1991a, p.27-28)
 Emplotment: We make sense of our living experiences, such as
planning, succeeding and suffering by giving them narrative
understanding, i.e. by emplotment.
 And Emplotment can broadly be defined as “the operation of ...a
synthesis of heterogeneous elements.” (1991a, p.21) These syntheses of
heterogeneous elements can be include:
• Synthesizing multiple incidents and events into a story
• Synthesizing discordance into concordance
• Synthesizing flows of time into permanence in time or temporal succession
into temporal closure or even
32
The Narrative Identity: The Formation of
the Great Communities
1. Paul Ricoeur’s narrative identity
a. Life in search of narrative
 Symbolic mediation: We make sense of our life through symbolic
mediation, i.e. attributing meaning or even meaningfulness to living
experiences, life partners and the life-world
“It is a mediation between man and the world, between man and man,
between man and himself; the mediation between man and the world
is what we call referentiality, the mediation between men,
communicability; the mediation between man and himself, self
understanding. (1991a, p. 27)
33
The Narrative Identity: The Formation of
the Great Communities
1. Paul Ricoeur’s narrative identity
a. Life in search of narrative
 It is by means of these acts of employment and symbolic mediation
that man finds and found his own identity. Hence, it is a narrative
identity.
“I am stressing the expression ‘narrative identity’ for what we call
subjectivity is neither an incoherent series of events nor an
immutable substantiality, impervious to evolution. This is precisely
the sort of identity which narrative composition alone can create
through its dynamism.” (1991a, p. 32)
34
The Narrative Identity: The Formation of
the Great Communities
1. Paul Ricoeur’s narrative identity
a. Life in search of narrative
 ‘It is in this way that we learn to become the narrator and the hero of
our own story, without actually becoming the author of our own life.
It is true that life is lived and that stories are told. An unbridgeable
difference does remain, but this difference is partially abolished by
our power of applying to ourselves the plots that we have received
from our culture and of trying on the different roles assumed by the
favourite characters of the stories most dear to us.’ (1991a, p.32-33)
35
The Narrative Identity: The Formation of
the Great Communities
1. Paul Ricoeur’s narrative identity
b. Narrative identity
 ‘The concept of narrative identity …(refers to) the kind of
identity that human being acquire through the mediation of
the narrative function.’ (1991b, p.188)
 Fundamental distinction of the concept of identity:
• Identity as selfhood (Uniqueness)
• Identity as sameness
36
The Narrative Identity: The Formation of
the Great Communities
1. Paul Ricoeur’s narrative identity
b. Narrative identity
 Identity as sameness
• Identity as sameness refers to two or more occurrences of things are one
single and same thing.
• Identity as sameness refers to two or more occurrences of things are similar,
i.e. bearing great resemblance and constituting of no difference.
• Identity as sameness refers to “the uninterrupted continuity in the
development of a being.
• Identity as sameness refers to “permanence in time.” “All phenomena
contain something permanent (substance) when considered as the object
itself, and something changing, when considered as a simple determination
of this object, that is to say as a mode of existence of the objects” (Kant,
quoted in Ricoeur, 1991b, p. 190)
37
The Narrative Identity: The Formation of
the Great Communities
1. Paul Ricoeur’s narrative identity
b. Narrative identity
 It is through narrative, its emplotment and mediation that the
sameness-identity and the selfhood-identity can come to associate
with each other on the ground of permanence in time. This
permanence can be ‘coherence of life’ ‘narrative unity’, ‘durable
properties of a character’, and a ‘discordant concordance’. (1991b,
195)
38
The Narrative Identity: The Formation of
the Great Communities
2. Margaret Somers’ narrative identity
a. The concept of social narrativity
b. Social narrativity is “concepts of social epistemology and
social ontology. (It)… posits through narrativity that we
come to know, understand, and make sense of the social
world, and through which we constitute our social identity.
It matters… that we come to be (usually unconsciously)
who we are (however ephemeral, multiple, and changing)
by our locations in social narrative and networks that rarely
of our own making.” (Somers, 1997, p.82)
39
The Narrative Identity: The Formation of
the Great Communities
2. Margaret Somers’ narrative identity
c. Component of social narrativity
 Relationality of parts,
 Selective appropriation
 Temporality, sequence and places,
 Causal emplotment
40
The Narrative Identity: The Formation of
the Great Communities
2. Margaret Somers’ narrative identity
d. Four kinds of narrativity
• Ontological narratives and the constitution of narrative identity
• Public, cultural and institutional narratives
• Conceptual / analytical / sociological narrativity
41
The Narrative Identity: The Formation of
the Great Communities
3. Construction of narrative identity from organization
and community: By applying the conception of
narrative identity to formation of great communities,
comparative-historical researchers may explore the
formation and emergence of great communities in
history across various social contexts
a. Narrative identity of nations;
b. Narrative identity of classes and political parties, e.g. the
narrative identity of the Chinese Communist Party;
c. Narrative identity of organization, such as a university, a
corporations, a charity organization;
d. Narrative identity of professions, unions, occupational groupings
43
What is After the Linguistic Turn?
1. In the concluding remark of his chapter on “The Linguistic
Turn: The End of History as a Scholarly Disciple?” (Iggers,
1997), Georg Iggers writes
“In conclusion: Linguistic theory …I my opinion must be taken
very seriously and that has applications to historical thought
and writing. …The participants in this discussion have rightly
raised the point that history taken as a whole contains no
immanent unity or coherence, that every conception of history
is a construct constituted through language, that human beings
as subjects have no integrated personality free of contradictions
and ambivalences, and that every text can read and interpreted
indifferent ways because it expresses no unambiguous
intentions. …
44
What is After the Linguistic Turn?
1. In the concluding remark …Georg Iggers writes
“…The ‘linguistic turn’ in historical studies over the past decade
and a half has been part of an effort to break the determinism
inherent in older socioeconomic approaches and to emphasize
the role of cultural factor, among which language occupies a
key place.” (Iggers, 1995, Pp. 132-33)
46
What is After the Linguistic Turn?
2. There comes critical hermeneutics:
Iggers further underlines that “Foucault and Derrida have with
good justification point out the political implications of
language and hierarchical relations of power inherent in it.
These contradictions, which permeate all of human life, force
the observer to ‘deconstruct’ every text, in order to lay bare its
ideological elements. Every reality is not only communicated
through speech and discourse but in every fundamental way is
also constituted by them.” (Iggers, 1995, P. 132)
3. Accordingly, we shall continue the investigation by exploring
further into the “ideological distortion” embedded in historical
texts and their underlying institutional configurations.
47
Lecture 7
Approach to Comparative-Historical Method (4):
Constructionism in Historical Perspective
END