AHR Forum

Comment on A Crooked Line

GABRIELLE M. SPIEGEL

IN A CROOKED LINE, GEOFF ELEY OFFERS a

survey of the fundamental transformation

that overtook the practice of social history between the 1970s and 1980s with the rise
of cultural history in response to challenges to prevailing forms of social history
posed by the linguistic turn. Triangulating, as he says, "the political, the historical
and the personal," the story he tells is embedded in the context of his own formation
as a historian, a formation with a distinctively British (and Marxist) voice, and one
surprisingly free of French accents, Michel Foucault excepted.i It is a story, as well,
of a particular professional generation that came to maturity in the aftermath of the
1960s and was deeply committed to historical change in the present, a problem that
its members approached both in their lives and in their work, and through the interpenetrating influences that this conjuncture implied. One of Eley's goals in A
Crooked Line is to map "a series of personal encounters between the tasks of historical writing and the surrounding political climate" (6) in order to underline the
inevitable imbrication of history and politics in any historian's thought and writingin short, to advocate a historiographical practice "powered by the politics of
commitment and the ethics of conviction" (7). It is worth noting that the chapter
headings by which Eley denotes his participation in the changing styles and aims of
historiography over the last four decades point to the psychic and emotional investments that accompany the historian's labor: "Optimism," "Disappointment,"
"Reflectiveness," and "Deflance."^
I would like to thank my colleague David Nirenberg for his comments on this article, from which, as
always, I have benefited greatly.
1 In terms of the form of this quasi-autobiographical account, it falls somewhere between what
Jaume Aureli has recently called "constructionist" autobiography and "experimental" autobiography.
The first is defined as autobiography in which authors tend "to establish a critical distance from their
own lives to present it objectively, often in terms of empirical-analytical language that gives their narratives a monographic air." "Experimental autobiographers," on the other hand, are "less concerned
with their identity as academics/historians, and narrate with an epistemologically skeptical frame," although they are concerned to specify and identify with "specific intellectual itineraries, [in which] history
[becomes] a subtext of their personal narratives." See Aureli, "Autobiography as Unconventional History: Constructing the Author," Rethinking History 10, no. 3 (2006): 433-449, esp. 435 and 439.
2 The first two chapters are devoted to a review of his training as a historian in Britain and Germany,
primarily under the impulse of and inspired by the rise of the "new" social history of the 1960s and 1970s.
They offer the non-British, non-German historian an extremely interesting and valuable review of the
major trends in social history in those countries during those two decades, that is, before the advent of
the linguistic turn. The last two chapters take up the question of the diverse relations between social
and cultural history, the emergence of linguistic turn historiography, the ways in which it affected the
practice and theory of history, and finally a "defiant" consideration of the potential for a revised, more

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Moreover, it was Eley's generationincluding even those with a strong Marxist

faith in what he calls "default materialism" and "the bedrock belief in social determir|ation" (191)who took the linguistic turn that was to have such a powerful
impact upon the practice of history down to the present. To be sure, there is a fairly
broad sense of dissatisfaction at the moment with some ofthe limitations of linguistic
turn historiography, as evidenced in Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt's edited volume Beyond the Cultural Turn; a slew of articles by William Sewell, Richard Biernacki, Miguel Angel Cabrera, Patrick Joyce, William Reddy, Nicholas Dirks, and
Marshall Sahlins; the writings of British sociologist Anthony Giddens and German
sociologist Andreas Reckwitz; the debate on "The New Empiricism" recently published in volume 1 of Cultural and Social History; and other works too numerous to
cite.3 Clearly, the time is ripe for a reconsideration of the relationship of social history to cultural history, and for a rethinking of the fundamental, if not necessarily
exclusive, differences in historiographical epistemologies and practices to which
each tends." In large part, this is what Eley's A Crooked Line sets out to offer.
At stake here is whether and how the basic grounding of social history in historical
materialism can be recuperated after twenty-five years of allegiance to a belief in the

comprehensive approach to history in its entirety that would honor the analyses generated by social and
cultural logics equally. The "crooked line" constitutes a figure derived from Bertolt Brecht's maxim that
"when there are obstacles, the shortest distance between two pointshere from cultural history to the
history of societyis a crooked line."
3 Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds.. Beyond the Cultural Tum: New Directions in the Study
of Society and Culture (Berkeley, Calif., 1999). William H. Sewell, Jr., "A Theory of Structure: Duality,
Agency and Transformation," y4/7jen'ca Joumal of Sociology 98 (1992): 1-29; Sewell, "The Concept(s)
of Culture," in Bonnell and Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn, 35-61; Sewell, "Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille," Theory and Society 25 (1996): 841-881.
These, together with newly written and collected articles, have recently been published by Sewell in
Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005). Richard Biernacki, "Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in Cultural Inquiry," History and Theory 39 (2000): 289-310;
Biernacki, "Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History," in Bonnell and Hunt, eds.. Beyond
the Cultural Turn, 62-92; Biernacki with Jennifer Jordan, "The Place of Space in the Study of the Social,"
in Patrick Joyce, ed.. The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences (London,
2002), 133-150. Miguel A. Cabrera, "On Language, Culture and Social Action," History and Theory 40
(2001): 82-100; Cabrera, "Linguistic Approach or Return to Subjectivism: In Search of an Alternative
to Social History," Social History 24 (1991): 74-89; Cabrera, Postsocial History: An Introduction, trans.
Marie McMahon, foreword by Patrick Joyce (Boulder, Colo., 2004). Patrick Joyce, "The Imaginary
Discontents of Social History: A Note of Response to Mayfield and Thorne, Lawrence and Taylor,"
Social History 18, no. 1 (1993): 81-85; Joyce, "The End of Social History?" in Keith Jenkins, ed.. The
Postmodern History Reader (London, 1997), 341-365; Joyce, "History and Postmodernism," Past and
Present 133 (1991): 204-209; Joyce, "More Secondary Modern Than Postmodern," Rethinking History
5 (2001); 367-382; Joyce, "What Is the Social and Why Is It in Question?," the introduction to his recently
edited collection of articles The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences (London, 2002). William M. Reddy, "The Logic of Action: Indeterminacy, Emotion and Historical Narrative," History and Theory 40 (2001): 10-33. Nicholas B. Dirks, "Is Vice Versa? Historical Anthropologies
and Anthropological Histories," in Terrence J. McDonald, ed.. The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences
(Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996), 17-51. For Sahlins, see especially the articles collected in Marshall Sahlins,
Culture in Practice: Selected Essays (New York, 2000), as well as Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago,
1985). Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration (Berkeley,
Calif., 1986). Andreas Reckwitz, "Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist
Theorizing," European Journal of Social Theory 5 (2002): 243-263; Reckwitz, Die Transformation der
Kulturtheorien: Zur Entwicklung eines Theorieprogramms (Weilerswist, 2000). Cultural and Social History
1, no. 2 (May 2004), in particular the essay by Carla Hesse on 201-207.
" For a set of readings and an introductory overview of this development, see Gabrielle M. Spiegel,
ed.. Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn (New York, 2005).

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linguistic and cultural construction of reality. Like so many others at the moment,
Eley wishes to rethink the historian's understanding of his or her practice in a way
that acknowledges the powerful insights that a linguistic approach to society and
culture has offered, yet to revise it from the perspective of a greater focus on questions of how society undergoes constant transformations in both its material and
conceptual realms. This concern to reintroduce a social and materialist perspective
in historical analysis foregrounds issues of individual agents, historical actions, and
the structural constraints that both enable and delimit experience, issues around
which much of the debate currently revolves. At base, the question turns on what
we believe history is and how it happens. Any answer to this question, and hence to
the possibility of recuperating a social and materialist perspective without abandoning cultural history, will be shaped in part by how one thinks the turn to culture
came about, what motivated it (besides the accumulating difficulties in social history
that Eley narrates so well), and on what grounds social history can be reinstated.
In Eley's view, a decisive shift from the centrality of social history to that of
cultural history occurred around 1980, as a new generation of historians trained in
the 1960s and early 1970s came to professional maturity. The "disappointment" that
characterizes Eley's account of this shift in chapter 2 is attributed to their relinquishing the conviction that "class relations are the constitutive element in the history of industrialized capitalist states, the Marxist social historian's axiomatic wish"
(110-111). Under the impact of changing political contextsand especially the rise
of feminism and women's/gender history, with its profound concern for questions of
subjectivity that had been banished from the then-governing paradigms of social
historythere occurred a turn to linguistically conceiyed 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 believes that "if we write the intellectual history of the discipline honestly
. . . we'll find the new impulses coming from the outside" (191). This is largely accurate, I think, although it tends to grant an exceptional status to what is probably
more realistically seen as the profession's normal interdisciplinary promiscuity, and
to discount the extent to which historians of all stripes, instead of relying solely on
rather impoverished traditional theories for "doing history," routinely tend to read
in and draw upon cognate fields.^ As Eley himself notes, "the boundaries separating
history from other academic disciplines and from wider influences in the public
sphere have been far more porous than the curmudgeonly defenders of history's
integrity can ever allow themselves to see" (191-192).
Together with the influence of feminist writings on gender, Eley stresses the importance of the work of Michel Foucault to the emergence of cultural history. Not
only did Foucault's early work demonstrate the operation of discourse, or what Foucault called "epistemie regimes," in defining the conditions of possibility for what can
and cannot be thought in particular historical epochs (defined by the episteme of an
5 For a fuller discussion of this point, see Sewell, Logics of History, especially chap. 1, "Theory,
History and Social Science," and chap. 2, "The Political Unconscious of Social and Cultural History,
or, Confessions of a Former Quantitative Historian."

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era and the ways in which it produced the "already encoded eye"),^ but his 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 de-centered 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 class and the state 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, to be sure, by the rise of narrativist schools of history indebted in various ways
to Hayden White's Metahistory, as well as to Jacques Derrida and deeonstruction,
although in a less thorough way. Added to this mix was the symbolic anthropology
popularized among historians by the writings of Clifford Geertz. Although Geertz's
brand of symbolic anthropology insisted on its grounding in the social materials of
a given culture, when deployed by historians it was the formal patterns, the modes
of representation, rather than the social conflicts whose symbolic expression and
resolution they served, that tended to become the object of investigation. The result,
inevitably, was an aestheticizing of culture and its absorption into the ever-widening
category of "textuality" and discourse as poststrueturalism came to view it. Additional stimuli to "take the turn" came, Eley believes, from cultural studies, from the
somewhat brief episode of the history of mentalits promoted by ihe Annales school,
by the rise of symbolic anthropology, and by the new prominence given to questions
of race and empire and related questions of colonialism and postcolonialism, although in the latter case the impact was less direct until a slightly later period.
It is worth remarking that at the time these developments were making their way
into the historian's field of view, clear, critical distinctions between them tended to
get lost in the rush to embrace the new epistemologies and methodologies they encompassed. Thus, for example, terms such as "postmodernism" and "poststrueturalism" tended to be used interchangeably, and to be conflated with the symbolic
anthropology being developed by Geertz. While all the "schools" shared a fundamental reliance on semiotics as the covering explanation for how language operated
to mediate the relationship between text and reality, the difference between cultural
analysis and the linguistic turn tended to be occluded. Whereas linguistic turn historiography proclaimed culture as a self-enclosed, non-referential mechanism of social construction thai preceded the world and rendered it intelligible by constructing
it according to its own rules of signification, cultural history never abandoned a belief
in the objective reality of the social world, and thus might more profitably have been
labeled sociocultural history. Eley tends to perpetuate this confusion by equating
cultural history with the linguistic turn, although by now the distinctive nature and
traditions that went into their making are far better understood.''
As a result of the combined influence of these developments, Eley indicates,
cultural history achieved its day in the sun. But the light of that sun is now fading,
and, he argues, "we don't have to reinstate the primacy of social explanation and a
The phrase comes from Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology ofthe Human Sciences (New York, 1973), xxi.
' See, for example, the conflation of the two terms on pp. 125 and 156; in the latter case they are
presented as synonymous.

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materialist model of social determination, or insist on the causal sovereignty of the

economy and material life, in order to take seriously the tasks of social significance
or social analysis." It is time, he believes, to reassert the importance of social history,
in order "to keep relating our particular subjects to the bigger picture of society as
a wholewhether we are social historians, political historians, cultural historians,
or whatever." We can "hold on to all of the gains of the new cultural history without
having to abandon everything we learned as social historians" (11). We have, thus,
no need to choose between cultural history and the history of societythe terms
posed in the book's subtitlebut can, instead, draw equally (and with equanimity)
on both the older school of social theorists and the new cultural historian's deployment of discourse as the determinative force in social construction.
I have two principal queries about the thrust of this narrative, although in fundamental ways I share its basic desire for a historiography that acknowledges both
the social, contextual determinants of thought and behavior in the past and the mediating role played by language and culture in their functioningthat is, for what
David Nirenberg has suggested that one might call a "unified field theory" of history.^
The first question has to do with Eley's account of the rise of linguistic turn/cultural
history, and the second is: What next? What happens if we simply stipulate to the
basic argument that there is no need to choose? What kind of history based on what
epistemologies and methodologies do we then practice? These questions are related
in unexpected ways, at least in their implications for where historiography is likely
to go from here.
Although Eley pays homage throughout the book to the decisive influence of
French writers and philosophers in effecting the global changes in historical thought
and writing in the period between the 1970s and 1990s, noting the work of Louis
Althusser, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Franois Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida, as well as
Foucault (e.g., 160), there is little sense in his narrative of the degree to which first
French structuralism, then French poststructuralism, was intellectually motivated by
a rejection of phenomenology. One need only recall Foucault's own early encounter
with Saussure in the late 1940s: he was attending lectures by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
when, discussing the problem of subjectivity, he said: "I remember clearly [that] . . .
the problem of language appeared and it was clear that phenomenology was no
match for structural analysis in accounting for the effects of meaning that could be
produced by a structure of the linguistic type, in which the subject (in the phenomenological sense) did not intervene to convey meaning."^ The subject, instead, like
the meaning conveyed, was an "effect" of discourse, a position assigned by and within
discursive practices. Thus what was paramount and primary was discourse, as Foucault made abundantly clear in the early chapters of The Archaeology of Knowledge,
announcing his decision to "abandon any attempt to see discourse as a phenomenon
of expression." "Discourse," he said, "is not the majestically unfolding manifestation
8 David Nirenberg, personal communication. For a theoretical analysis of the grounds on which one
might begin to articulate such a field, see Gabrielle M. Spiegel, "Towards a Theory of the Middle
Ground: Historical Writing in the Age of Postmodernism," in Carlos Barros, ed.. Historia a debate, 5
vols. (Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 1995), 1: 169-176, as well as Spiegel, "History and Post-Modernism: IV," Past and Present 135 (1992): 194-208.
" In Michel Foucault, PO/'C, Philosophy, and Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed.
Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan et al. (New York, 1988), 21.

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of a thinking, knowing subject, but, on the contrary, a totality in which the dispersion
of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined."lo Hence the
famous "death of the subject," and with it of the materially grounded historical agent.
All else flowed naturally from this key concept of discourse and the novel understanding of subjectivity, with its ability to throw the concepts of agency, experience, and practice into disarray, since absent a purposive historical actor and any
concept of intentionality, it became impossible to establish a ground from which the
individual could fashion his or her destiny on the basis of his or her experience of
the world. The philosophical basis of structuralism and poststructuralism was laid
down in the French rejection of phenomenologyof an actor-centered understanding of how the world is perceived and understoodand the adoption of semiotics
as the governing paradigm for understanding language, culture, and society, a paradigm later modified, to be sure, by Derrida, deconstruction, and other varieties of
poststructuralism, but no less linguistic, for that, in its orientation. Yet semiotics is
not, it should be noted, a category that occupies much, if any, space in the book, apart
from a necessary role in explaining the rise of the linguistic turn; its adversarial
relation to phenomenology is, to the best of my recollection after two readings, altogether absent from the discussion.
In my understanding of the current situation in history and theory, a large part
of the revisionist critique of linguistic turn historiography and cultural history and
the attempt to move "beyond the cultural turn" is taking its stance on a neo-phenomenological approach that seeks, as Pierre Bourdieu explains (although he dissents from its analytic utility), "to make explicit the primary experience of the social
world, i.e. all that is inscribed in the relationship of familiarity with the familiar
environment, the unquestioning apprehension of the social world, which, by definition, does not reflect on itself and excludes the question of the conditions of its
own possibility."!! Insofar as they share this view, many historians are deploying a
(largely implicit) concept of "social phenomenology" in which, as the German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz explains.
The aim of social analysis is to take over the "subjective perspective," i.e. to reconstruct the
sequence of mental acts of consciousness, which are located "inside" and are directed in the
form of phenomenological "intentionality" at outward objects to which the consciousness
ascribes meanings. The social then is . . . the subjective idea of a common world of meaning
. . . The aim of social-as-cultural analysis from the point of view of social phenomenology is
to describe the subjective acts of (mental) interpretations of agents and their schemes of
interpi-etation.'^
Among historians, the reinsertion of the agent as an effective social actor has
been achieved by highlighting the disjunction between culturally given meanings and
the individual uses of them in contingent, historically conditioned ways. Work done
in this vein tends to focus on the adaptive, strategic, and tactical uses made of existing
cultural schemes by agents who, in the very act of deploying the elements of culture,
both reproduce and transform them. Historical agency, from this perspective, rep'0 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Sniith (New York, 1972), 55.
" Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1977), 3.
12 Reckwitz, "Toward a Theory of Social Practices," 247.

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resents the individual's relationship to the cultural order, "the embodiment of collective powers in individual persons," as Marshall Sahlins puts it.'^ It is this actorcentered perspective, a belief in individual perception as the agent's own source of
knowledge about, and action in, the worlda perception mediated and perhaps constrained but not wholly controlled by the cultural scaffolding or conceptual schemes
within which it takes placethat I see as the return of a modified phenomenology.
If most historiansespecially those who still believe in the power and utility of the
linguistic turnhave no desire to return to an "objective" social science model of
history, that is, to "save the phenomena," many are nonetheless engaging in a widespread attempt to save the phenomenological.
Attendant on this shift is a new emphasis on semantic, as opposed to semiotic,
constructivism, in which meaning occurs not on the level of code or structure, but
on that of the semantics of ordinary language use, constructing the world through
its continual and practical creation and re-creation over time, since no past use of
a term determines its application to the next case. By focusing on the adaptive, practical enactment of cultural constituents by individual agents, the varying modalities
of use account for how culture is sustained, mediated, replicated, and changed.
Hence neo-phenomenology gives rise to a theory of "practice," which emphasizes
both the mental and bodily acts undertaken by historical actors, in which, as Richard
Biernacki argues, "agents call on bodily competencies that have their own structure
and coordinating influence, incorporating corporeal principles of practical knowledge."^"^ In this way, everyday practices combine to construct the "socially informed
body," which, in its incorporated state, possesses "the instruments of an ordering of
the world, a system of classifying schemes which organizes all practice and of which
the linguistic scheme . . . is only one aspect."'^
In this view, culture emerges less as a systematic structure than as a repertoire
of competencies, a "tool kit," a regime of practical rationality, or a set of strategies
guiding action, whereby symbols/signs are mobilized to identify those aspects of an
agent's experience which, in this process, are made meaningful, that is, experientially
"real." Culture is thereby recast as a "performative turn," one realized only processually as "signs put to work" to "reference" and interpret the world. Historical
investigation, from this perspective, would take practices (not structure) as the starting point of social analysis, and practice itself assumes the form of a sociology of
meaning, or smantique des situations, as Bernard Lepetit calls it."'
These attempts to modify the totalizing grasp of discursive regimes on social
behavior from the point of view of agency, experience, and practice seem indicative
of the theoretical negotiations inherent in what I am tempted to call an "accommodationist" strategy governing much of the critique of the linguistic turn. Eley's
plea for theoretical/methodological pluralism, including a revitalized social history
that seeks to encompass the history of society as a whole, also takes its place here,
but on somewhat shaky theoretical grounds.
Toward the end of the book, Eley reiterates his belief that there is "no need to
" Marshall Sahlins, "Introduction," in Sahlins, Culture in Practice, 25.
' Biernacki, "Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History," 75.
'5 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, VIA.
'^ Bernard Lepetit, "Histoire des pratiques, pratique de l'histoire," in Lepetit, ed.. Les Formes de
l'exprience (Paris, 1995), 14.

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choose" between social and cultural approaches to history, and concludes, in a heartfelt cri de coeur, with a plea for us to recognize "the urgent need for a basic [methodological, epistemological?] pluralism" (201). Indeed, he notes, he has "deliberately avoided any detailed explicating of the various debates surrounding the big shift
from social to cultural history that forms the subject of this book," presumably because he finds theoretical debates and "desires for theoretical purity" (his term)
unproductive, at least insofar as they tended to polarize the profession during the
1980s and 1990s, at the height ofthe debates over linguistic turn historiography. Nor
is Eley especially sympathetic to an attempt to seek a middle ground, a phrase that
he asserts "usually implies a fudged and compromising moderation or type of confusion, a disablement before difficulty or reluctance in taking a stand" (100). To the
extent that his pluralistic posture represents a rejection of the theoretical debates
of the last few decades, it fulfills, I infer, the promise of "defiance" under whose
rubric it is articulated.
But methodological and epistemological pluralism is notnor, in all likelihood,
is it intended to bea genuinely theoretical position. One might legitimately query,
then, whether it can furnish the basis on which to rethink the complex relations
between social and cultural modalities of analysis t h a t ^ Crooked Line so fervently
advocates. Eley's plea on behalf of theoretical pluralism and the absence of a need
to choose circumvents without comment the problem of the different epistemologies
at play in an empirically grounded social history and/or a linguistically mediated
cultural history. The former implicitly reverts to that "noble dream" of an objective
basis for historical investigation, one that, as Peter Novick so ably demonstrated, is
no longer shared by most historians, however much we respect and insist on the
empirical basis for all historical investigation.i'' The latter entails at least a partial
reliance on a semiotic understanding of the constructed nature of our apprehension
of that very social reality. This is not to argue that history as a discipline is necessarily
confined to the deployment of a single epistemological framework as it shifts its foci
of attention and objects of research. At a minimum, the play of scale as one moves
from micro- to macro- (or global) analyses of historical phenomena often involves
changing epistemological frameworks, however unremarked in the literature.'^
The most interesting attempts to achieve the kind of dialectically balanced analytic that Eley advocates, one that embraces the insights of poststructuralism while
modifying them so as to include a sense of the significance of the social and its
instrumental force in human history and thought, are coming at the moment from
historians such as William Sewell, who are struggling to devise a social and historiographical theory capable of addressing precisely the complex of ideas that Eley
engages. Sewell argues on behalf of a dialectical understanding of culture as the
interplay between system and practice in social life, the former understood structurally but modified in its effects by the contradictory, contested, and constantly
changing ways in which it is implemented in the latter.'
Hence Sewell approaches questions of the role of events and individual and col" Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession
(Cambridge, 1988).
'* One of the few works to systematically investigate this problem that I am aware of is Jacques Revel,
comp.. Jeux d'chelles: La micro-analyse l'exprience (Paris, 1996).
' See Sewell, "The Concept(s) of Culture," 53ff. See also his new book Logics of History.

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lective behavior in phenomena such as the taking of the Bastilleand the revolutionary consequences that followed upon itby understanding them as participating
in a dialectic of system and practice through which the existing cultural order is
rearticulated and transformed. To engage in any form of social, political, or cultural
behavior means drawing upon a set of socially conventional, thus commonly shared,
meanings in order to be understood and to be consequential. In that sense, symbolic
interpretation, Seweil insists, "is part and parcel of the historical event," since actions
have meaning only in relation to the cultural order within which they occur.^o At the
same time, the system as such exists solely in the continuity bestowed upon it by the
succession of practices that bring it to life. But every practice inflects and changes
the system upon which it draws and which it instantiates. In an event as momentous
as the taking of the Bastille, the result is a transformative rearticulation of the underlying conceptual structures that guided French society in the ancien rgime, creating novel systems of signification among which "the Bastille," the "revolution,"
"despotism," and the like take their place.^i Critical to this process is the notion that
inherited languages (or discourses) can never fully encompass or adequately describe
the vast variety of empirical realities or experiences presented to the social actor for
categorization and interpretation, and that, in that sense, life outruns the capacity
of culture to account for it.^^
No less eclectic than Eley in the sources upon which it draws, there is, nonetheless, among the historians attempting to rethink the question of structure and
practice, an effort to engage the underlying theoretical issues, if only to join in Eley's
sense of the refreshing benefits to historical knowledge that ensue from such endeavors. As Eley himself points out, there is a body of recent work by younger scholars that "specifically refuse[s] the polarized division between the 'social' and the
'cultural,' vesting 'recognizably social and political topics with a cultural analytic,
responding to the incitements of cultural theory, and grounding these in as dense
and imaginative a range of sources and interpretive contexts as possible' " (201). It
is doubtful that this work will ever again seek the totalizing goal, also espoused by
Eley, of "grasping society as a whole"of moving in "a crooked line" from cultural
history to the "history of society"given the wholesale dissolution of what he earlier
called "social history's totalizing aspiration" (193). However, an exploration of the
theoretical bases, both epistemological and methodological, on which to generate
the logics of history (to borrow Sewell's terminology) and historiography intrinsic in
this movement doubtless will prove important to its ultimate shape.
In conclusion, to join my first and second questions, I would argue that just as
the linguistic turn, hence cultural history, grew out of a critique of phenomenology,
so one strand of the current revisionist thrust to much historical theorizing is collecting itself under the banner of a neo-phenomenological approach, latterly
grouped, at least by Reekwitz, under the rubric of "Practice Theory." Drawing on
diverse, and often incompatible, congeries of theorieswhich include Pierre Bourdieu's project of a "praxeology" and its semiotic variant found in Michel de Certeau;
Anthony Giddens's "theory of structuration"; the "ordinary language" investigations
2" See Seweil, "Historical Events as Transformations of Structures," 861.
21 Ibid.
22 For a discussion of this, see Sahlins, Islands of History, 147-148.

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of late Ludwig Wittgenstein; and a deeper understanding of Foucault's late work on

governmentality and bio-politics, which intersects with theories of the body, both
feminist and sociologicalcombined with the neo-hermeneutical model of embodied agency that derives much of its force from the ethnomethodological models supplied by ethnographers such as Harold Garfinkel, "Practice Theory" asserts the continuing relevance of semiotic insights proffered by the linguistic turn, yet reinterprets
them in favor of a rehabilitation of social history by placing structure and practice,
language and body in dialectical relation in historical systems.23 In that sense, as
Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt have argued, it would appear that scholars are
engaged in a redefinition and revitalization of the concept of the "social" that had
been weakened by poststructuralism.24
It is in this sense that the "linguistic turn" is giving way to a "historical turn," since
historicismunderstood as the acknowledgment of the contingent, temporally and
socially situated character of our beliefs, values, institutions, and practicessubtends both the retention of an attenuated concept of discourse as that which creates
the conditions of possibility for, and the constituents of, a given culture, and the
revisionist emphasis on practice, agency, experience, and adaptive uses of historically
specific cultural resources. It achieves this primarily by (re-) adopting an actor-centered perspective that necessitates an understanding of the social as well as symbolic
ground from which texts and behaviors of all kinds are generated, and through its
attention to the ways in which practice continually modifies the system within which
it operates. Whether such an approach deserves the name "neo-phenomenological"
is for the reader to determine, but it seems clear that any "return to reality" will
include a consideration of the ways in which individual and collective social actors
operate, based upon their perceptions and understandings of both the social and
symbolic systems that govern behaviors and endow them with socially significant
meanings.
Speaking as someone who remains profoundly committed to the insights and
analytic rewards for historical analysis proffered by the linguistic turn in historiography, it remains for me an open question whether such revisionist moves are likely
to succeed, that is, to offer a persuasive modification of the linguistic turn, and
whether this recent turn in historiography represents a finalexhaustedphase in
the reception of linguistic turn historiography or a genuinely novel initiative that
strikes out in new directions. As I argued back in 1990:
The ability of semiotics to sweep the theoretical field was testimony to the power of its challenge to traditional epistemologies, to the technical virtuosity of its practitioners, and to the
underlying coherence of its theory, against which those advocating a return to history rather
weakly invoke collective "common sense" or individual subjective experience. But while there
are good historical reasons for historians to insist on the autonomy of material reality, they
are not necessarily reasons which make for good history, and the linguistic turn cannot be
met simply by an appeal to common or individual sense and experiencenor, I would add
now, to social history tout
23 See especially Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley,
Calif., 1988); Giddens, The Constitution of Society; Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodoloey (Cambridge, 1984).
2" Bonnell and Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Tum, 11.
^ Gabrielle M. Spiegel, "History, Historicism and the Social Logic of the Text," Speculum 65 (1990):

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Gabrielle M. Spiegel

Eley's book takes a stand among current demands to recuperate the material, in
effect, the social, as part and parcel of a belief in the reality and socially significant
presence of the past, both in the past and in the present. If I quibble about his account
of the etiology of these debates and developments, it only furnishes a further illustration of his principle that our approaches to historiography are inevitably personal, governed by the particular contexts of our own histories, politics, and professional commitments.
59-86. Reprinted in Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore, 1997), 19.

Gabrielle M. Spiegel is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of History and Chair of

the Department of History at Johns Hopkins Utiiversity. She is the author of The
Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis: A Survey (Classical Folia Editions, 1978);
Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in ThirteenthCentury France (University of California Press, 1993); and The Past as Text: The
Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Johns Hopkins University Press,
1997); and editor of Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after
the Linguistic Turn (Routledge, 2005). In addition, she has written some sixty
articles on medieval historiography and contemporary theories of historical
writing. She currently serves as President of the American Historical Association.

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