History and Theory, Theme Issue 46 (December 2007), 1-19 © Wesleyan University 2007 ISSN: 0018-2656

Revising the Past / Revisiting the Present:

How Change Happens in Historiography

Gabrielle M. Spiegel

Abstract

This article investigates the various forces that may help to explain the ongoing historio-
graphical phenomenon of revision. It takes as its point of departure Michel de Certeau’s
understanding of the writing of history as a process consisting of an unstable and constant-
ly changing triangulated relationship among a place (a recruitment, a milieu, a profession),
analytical procedures (a discipline), and the construction of a text (or discourse). For de
Certeau, revision is the formal prerequisite for writing history because the very distance
between past and present requires continuous innovation simply to produce the objects of
historical knowledge, which have no existence apart from the historian’s identification of
them. The specific nature of revision at a given moment is determined by the specificities
of the process as a whole, that is, by the characteristics of place, procedure, and text and
their contemporary relational configuration.
Taking the rise of “linguistic-turn” historiography as exemplary of the process of his-
torical revision in its broadest possible meaning, the article seeks to discover the possible
“causes” for that turn. It begins with an analysis of the psychological roots of poststruc-
turalism as a response to the Holocaust and its aftermath, and then proceeds to explore
the possible economic and social transformations in the postwar world that might account
for its reception, both in Europe but also, more counterintuitively, in the United States,
where postmodernism proved to have an especially strong appeal. Added to this mix are
the new patterns of social recruitment into the historical profession in the “sixties.” The
essay suggests that, to the extent that revision is understood as the result of the combined
effect of psychological, social, and professional determinations, it is unlikely that there
will ever be genuine consensus about the sources of revision in history, since all historians
bring to their work differing congeries of psychological preoccupations, social positions,
and professional commitments.

A call to examine the nature and role of revision in history must strike readers
of this journal as an odd venture in that it would seem to address the most rou-
tine aspect of historiographical work in force since the discipline’s professional
inception in the nineteenth century, and to be a topic manifestly lacking theoreti-
cal dimensions. Indeed, my first reading of the “call” unconsciously converted
the term to “revisionism,” which at least possessed the suggestion of systematic
character one normally associates with theory. Fortunately, this turned out to be
a misreading of the invitation, for it quickly emerged that even the most cursory
search via Google for a standard definition of “revisionism” offers up a seem-
ingly endless stream of references to a movement dedicated to the denial of
the reality of the Holocaust, which seems to have captured the term for its own
 Gabrielle M. Spiegel

use (in the process displacing its earlier strong link to Marxist revisionism in
the tradition of Edouard Bernstein, understood as a recurrent tendency within
Communist thought “to revise Marxist theory in such a way as to provide justifi-
cation for a retreat from a revolutionary to a reformist position”). “Revisionism,”
or what the French more aptly, if awkwardly, call “negationism,” appears to be
a phenomenon occurring well outside the precincts of normal historical activity,
however pervasive its presence in the ether.
What, then, motivates the current investigation of the concept of revision in
history, its character, meaning, frequency, and reach? After all, revision, in its
most anodyne sense of revising error, has been at the core of all historiographical
practice since the rise of Rankean positivism and historicism. As is well known,
the classical historicism of the early nineteenth century arose in opposition to
Enlightenment philosophical beliefs that human behavior and development
obeyed observable and universal laws of development from which their truth
could be deduced. Taking its stand against both the metaphysics of Enlightenment
philosophy and the sociological positivism of thinkers like Comte, who similarly
believed in the law-like character of human behavior, historicists insisted that
human persons and events should be understood in relation not to extra-temporal
metaphysical principles or natural laws but to their particular historical being.
Historical inquiry, therefore, should be directed toward describing the particular-
ity of past human behavior, itself explicable in terms of an understanding of the
total nature of a given historical period, however defined.
Friedrich Meinecke, in his classic work on Die Entstehung des Historismus
(1936), saw the essence of historicism as the “substitution of a process of indi-
vidualizing observation for a generalizing view of human forces in history.”
Historicism thus combined a focus on the distinctive individuality of historical
phenomena with an appreciation that such individuality was both conditioned by
and could only be understood in terms of a succession of events and “regulari-
ties.” These regularities, however, were historical, not law-like, and thus required
a method of inquiry distinct from that governing the natural sciences, a method
adapted, rather, to the “human sciences.” Inevitably, this meant that the search
for new knowledge of those particularities was the central task of the historian.
Supplementing the store of knowledge about history and correction of error lay
at the core of what made history a “science” in the nineteenth century, marking
at one and the same time the progress of knowledge and the progress of society.
Incremental revision of the historical record was the normal by-product of such
activity; it was both expected and welcomed and, to a large extent, justified the
enterprise as such. To be sure, we have long since distanced ourselves from the
pursuit of that “noble dream” of an objective, positivist basis for historical inves-
tigation which, as Peter Novick has so ably demonstrated, is no longer shared by
. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed., 2000. I would like to thank
Robert Stein and David Bell for their extremely helpful suggestions and criticisms of this article. I
should point out that neither wholly shares the view presented here concerning the “causes” for the
emergence of poststructuralism and postmodernism.
. Friedrich Meinecke, Die Enstehung des Historismus [1936] (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag,
1959).
. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical
 Revising the Past / Revisiting the Present 
most historians, however much we respect and insist on the empirical basis for
all historical investigation. Yet to the extent that we still believe in the documen-
tary function of historical research, “revision” hardly seems to be an analytical
category worth exploring.
If we take “revision” to refer to a more thoroughgoing shift in the nature of
historical practice and its conceptual underpinnings, without at the same time
systematizing the term into its current sad usage as Holocaust “revisionism,” then
the possible reasons for an examination of its meaning become more intelligible.
What constitutes “revision” in this broader sense? What range of activities must
take place to qualify as revision? Does it occur naturally as part of the normal
processes entailed in doing history or is it stimulated by extensive shifts in patterns
of social recruitment into the profession that mandate new arenas and forms of
investigation to discover the historical roots of present concerns, whether social
or intellectual? Is it forced upon historians from outside by developments in other
disciplines or in the larger world in which they live, or does it occur as a result of
interior, psychological shifts within individual historians whose work, because of
its excellence and compelling character, attains exemplary status and generates
widespread imitation? How thoroughgoing does revision need to be to qualify
as a “paradigm shift,” to use Kuhn’s terminology applied to scientific practices,
including historiography? Since all of these sorts of elements are presumably
present in the profession most of the time, what accounts for the fact that certain
periods seem content to operate within the normal frames that socialization into
the profession inculcates in historians, while other periods bear witness to a
widespread revolt against the perceived limitations imposed by routine disciplinary
and conceptual standards, whatever they may be?
These are some of the questions that arise from the enlarged sense of “revision”
as it approaches the threshold of a paradigm shift, and anyone who has lived
through the last four decades of change in historiographical praxis can appreciate
the need to investigate how such a profound transformation in the nature and
understanding of historical work, both in practice and in theory, could have taken
place. The motive for doing so now, I would guess, is that we all sense that this
profound change, which variously took place under the banner of the “linguistic
turn,” “poststructuralism,” or “postmodernism,” has run its course, wrought
whatever changes the discipline is likely to absorb—while rejecting a significant
number of others—and is effectively over. Whether this change amounted, as
some historians have claimed, to an “epistemological crisis” in history remains
an open question, but no one can doubt that it constituted a wholesale revision
of the ways that historians understood the nature of their endeavor, the technical
and conceptual tools deemed appropriate for historical research and writing, and
the purpose and meaning of the work so produced. One potential avenue for the

Profession (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago and London, University of
Chicago Press, 1970).
. See, for example, Joyce Appleby’s Presidential Address on “The Power of History,” read before
the American Historical Association at its meeting in Seattle, Washington, January 9, 1997. Published
in the American Historical Review 103, no. 1 (February 1998), 1-17.
 Gabrielle M. Spiegel

examination of “revision” as a historiographical procedure, then, is via some

explanation of how and why this sea change in history occurred, what motivated it
and what governed the rhythms of its acceptance, dissemination, and decline. An
appreciation of the determining constituents of this rather extreme case of historical
revision may offer some insight into the more usual, less thoroughgoing sorts
of revision that accompany historical work in all periods. But before broaching
the question of what “caused”—in some sense still to be discovered—the rise of
linguistic-turn historiography, we would do well to consider more generally what
historical practice consists of, for any change in practice, even one as startling
and deep-rooted as the linguistic turn, perforce occurs initially within the confines
of “normal science,” to borrow Kuhn’s phrase, and thus must be seen against the
background of its routines.
One of the most significant characteristics of the contemporary practice of
history, important for the points I wish eventually to make, derives from the
central paradox of historical writing as analyzed by Michel de Certeau. In de
Certeau’s opinion, modern Western history essentially begins with a decisive
differentiation between the present and the past. Like modern medicine, whose
birth is contemporaneous with that of modern historiography, the practice of
history becomes possible only when a corpse is opened to investigation, made
legible such that it can be translated into that which can be written within a space
of language. Historians must draw a line between what is dead (past) and what
is not, and therefore they posit death as a total social fact, in contrast to tradition,
which figures a lived body of traditional knowledge, passed down in gestures,
habits, unspoken but nonetheless real memories, borne by living societies. For
de Certeau, the modern age entertains an obsessive relation with death, and
discourse about the past has as the very condition of its possibility the status of
being discourse about the dead, a discourse with which historians fill the void
between past and present created by history’s founding gesture of rupture. In that
sense, the very postulate of modern historiography is the disappearance of the
past from the present, its movement from visibility to invisibility. The historian’s
task becomes, therefore, what Hofmannsthal defined as that of “reading what
was never written.” It is in this moment that the past is saved, “not in being
returned to what once existed, but instead, precisely in being transformed into
something that never was, in being ‘read as what was never written.’” From this
. I should acknowledge that the extent to which the profession as a whole adopted the “linguistic
turn” is probably exaggerated here, although I think the prevalence of studies of “discourse,” the
spread of feminist concepts of gender, and the rise of postcolonial theory and history bear witness to
the fact that its impact was far wider than might be thought merely from examining the work of those
directly engaged with debating “theory” or doing intellectual history. However, it remains true that
the actual number of historians actively engaged with these questions probably remained relatively
small in comparison to the field as a whole. Nonetheless, it did represent a significant challenge to
historians’ traditional ways of conceiving history and had a discernible impact on the nature of the
truth-claims and epistemological objectivity that historians felt comfortable in asserting.
. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, transl. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1988), 5.
. Hofmannsthal’s phrase is cited in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann
and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–1989), I, pt. 3, 1238. I am
indebted to Daniel Heller-Roazen for this reference.
. See the discussion of this in Daniel Heller-Roazen, “Introduction,” Giorgio Agamben,
 Revising the Past / Revisiting the Present 
perspective, the principal relation of the historian to the past is an engagement
with absence.
At the same time, the historian’s specific labor is to fill the space of the void
created by the division of the present from the past with words, language (or
discourse) generated from and within the present place of the historian. As de
Certeau notes,
Historiography tends to prove that the site of its production can encompass the past: it is
an odd procedure that posits death, a breakage everywhere reiterated in discourse, and that
yet denies loss by appropriating to the present the privilege of recapitulating the past as a
form of knowledge. A labor of death and a labor against death.10

This paradoxical procedure is, precisely, what de Certeau means by “writing,” an

act that replaces the traditional representation that “gave authority to the present
with a representative labor that places both absence and production in the same
area.”11 The critical concept here for de Certeau is that of the “site of production,”
which for him constitutes historiography’s quasi-universal principle of explana-
tion, since, he asserts, “historical research grasps every document as the symptom
of whatever produced it,”12 and represents it through its own productive labor of
writing.
Historical writing, therefore, is performed through and by means of a constant
paradoxical movement between absence and presence—the presence of the pres-
ent place from which the past has been excluded by the defining gesture of rup-
ture that constitutes it, and the site from which the past will be recreated. Inherent
in this double movement between past and present, absence and presence, is the
constant rewriting of the past in the terms of the present, since
founded on a rupture between a past that is its object and a present that is the place of its
practice, history endlessly finds the present in its object and the past in its practice. . . .
Inhabited by the uncanniness that it seeks, history imposes its law upon the faraway places
that it conquers when it fosters the illusion that it is bringing them back to life.
In the realm of history, an endless labor of differentiation (among events, periods,
data or series, and so on) forms the condition of all relating of elements that have been
distinguished, and hence of their comprehension. But this labor is based on the difference
between a present and a past. Everywhere it presupposes the act advancing an innovation
by dissociating itself from a tradition in order to consider this tradition as an object of
knowledge.13

What de Certeau suggests here is that revision is the formal prerequisite for
writing history, not in the sense of the supplementation of the historical record
with formerly unknown knowledge, as classical historicism had it, but because
the very distance between past and present requires continuous innovation simply
to produce the objects of historical knowledge, which have no existence apart
from the historian’s identification of them. History, then, plays along “the mar-

Potentialities, ed. and transl. with an introduction by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1999), 1.
10. de Certeau, The Writing of History, 5.
11. Ibid., 5.
12. Ibid., 11.
13. Ibid., 36.
 Gabrielle M. Spiegel

gins which join a society with its past and with the very act of separating itself
from the past.”14
As the preceding passage from de Certeau indicates, the fact that historians
must construct the objects of their investigation does not mean that they are
free of the past or that the findings so generated are merely fictive postulates.
Historians escape neither the survival of former structures nor the weight of an
endlessly present past—an “inertia” that traditionalists were wont to call “conti-
nuity.” But it does mean that, in contemporary historiography, the sign of history
has become less the real than the intelligible, an intelligibility achieved through
the production of historiographical discourse according to narrativist principles,
and hence always flirting with the “fictive” that is intrinsic to the operation of
narrativity. In this process, the historical “referent” (or what used to be called the
“real,” the “true,” the “fact”) is not so much obliterated as displaced. No longer a
“given” of the past that offers itself to the historian’s gaze, the referent is some-
thing constantly recreated in the recurring movement between past and present,
hence ever-changing as that relationship itself is modified in the present.
As an operation of the present upon the past, moreover, historical writing is
always affected by determinisms of varying kinds, since it necessarily depends
upon “the place where it occurs in a society and [is] specified . . . by a problem,
methods and a function which are its own.”15 Indeed, envisaging history as an
operation, de Certeau argues, is equivalent to understanding it as “the relation
between a place (a recruitment, a milieu, a profession etc.), analytical procedures
(a discipline) and the construction of a text.”16 This triangulated relationship
among place, procedure, and text (or production) means that the sources of the
determinations that go into the making of history are heterogeneous and possess a
number of constraints that delimit the activity of individual historians, outside of
which they cannot operate. Whether viewed as a product of historians’ discursive
formation à la Foucault, their social embeddedness in a time and place, or the
protocols of professional practice at any given moment, what this suggests is that
genuine revision of the kind represented by the linguistic turn in historiography
of the last several decades is in principle extraordinarily difficult to achieve, since
the impulses behind such revision must arise from and be consonant with needs
and desires that are variously social, professional, and personal in inspiration.
Only, perhaps, when change occurs in all three domains is it likely that a trans-
formation in the systemic conditions within which the historical operation takes
place—a “paradigm shift” in Kuhn’s sense—will occur.
All this suggests that the writing of history cannot be entirely divorced from
the psychology of individual historians, whatever the degree to which that psy-
chology is shaped by the intellectual (read ideological17) currents of the world

14. Ibid., 37.

15. Ibid., 37-38.
16. Ibid., 57.
17. “Ideological” here can be usefully understood in Althusserian terms as “the representation
of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence,” a definition that
captures the asymmetrical relation between conceptual frames or images and the objects toward
which they are directed, as opposed to more mechanical notions of “reflection,” “correspondence,” or
transparency of any kind. It is in this sense that, for Althusser, “ideology is the system of the ideas and
 Revising the Past / Revisiting the Present 
they inhabit or is channeled through professional avenues of expression. If we
acknowledge that history is the product of contemporary mental images of the
absent past that bear within them strong ideological and/or political imprints—
and it seems unlikely that any historian would today disagree with this, whether
framed in terms of discourse, social location, or some other form of the histori-
an’s fashioning—then it seems wrongheaded to deny the impress of individual
psychological forces in the coding and decoding of those socially generated
norms and discourses, although the degree to which individual motivation (or
what used to fall under the rubrics of consciousness and intentionality) operates
“freely” remains subject to debate.18
I assert this belief in the psychic roots of the historian’s practice in full aware-
ness of the fact that one of the founding principles of poststructuralism trumpets
the “death of the author” and replaces the former humanist concept of the indi-
vidual “subject,” or the individual tout court, with the notion of malleable and
ever-changing “subject positions,” constituted by and within discourse, a charac-
teristic poststructuralist exchange of depth (hence depth psychology) for spatial
relations (or “positions”).19 But this effacement of the individual as centered
subject—as psyche, as agent, and as historical interpreter—always seemed to me
to be the most problematic aspect of the poststructuralist critique of the so-called
humanist subject. What tended to get lost in poststructuralism’s concentration on
the discursive constitution of the subject was any sense of social agency, of men
and women struggling with the contingencies and complexities of their lives in
terms of the fates that history deals them, and of the ways in which they transform
the worlds they inherit and pass on to future generations.20
representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group.” See Louis Althusser, “Ideology
and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1971), 162, 158.
18. For a recent attempt to rehabilitate the notion of individual intentionality, see Mark Bevir,
“How to Be an Intentionalist,” History and Theory 41 (2002), 209-217, as well as the more extended
discussion in his The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1999).
19. On this development generally see Elizabeth Deeds Ermath, “Agency in the Discursive
Condition,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 40 (2001), 34-58 and the now classic essay by Joan
Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” reprinted in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed.
Terrence J. McDonald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 379-406. See also David
Gary Shaw, “Happy in Our Chains? Agency and Language in the Postmodern Age,” History and
Theory, Theme Issue 40 (2001), 1-9, which serves as an introduction to the extremely useful set of
essays on the question of agency in history to which this issue of History and Theory was dedicated. It
might be noted in passing that for Fredric Jameson the opposition normally posed between “agency”
and (linguistic) “system” is a false opposition “about which it would be just as satisfactory to say
that both positions are right; the crucial issue is the theoretical dilemma, replicated in both, of some
seeming explanatory choice between the alternatives of agency and system. In reality, however, there
is no such choice and both explanations or models—absolutely inconsistent with each other—are
also incommensurable with each other and must be rigorously separated at the same time that they
are deployed simultaneously.” See his Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,
11th ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 326. For this reason, perhaps, most of the cur-
rent revisions to poststructuralist theorizing of the subject and its capacity for agency seeks to retain
the systematic force of discursive regimes while modifying the totalizing effect of such regimes on
individual behavior and consciousness. See the discussion that follows.
20. For a more extensive argument on this point see Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “History, Historicism,
and the Social Logic of the Text,” Speculum 65 (1990), 59-86, reprinted in idem, The Past as Text:
The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
 Gabrielle M. Spiegel

It is hardly surprising, then, that current debates about poststructuralism and

linguistic-turn historiography are taking aim at the notion of the linguistically
constructed nature of subjectivity, one aspect of a revised understanding of the
master category of discourse that stresses less the structural nature of its linguistic
constructs than the pragmatics of their use. Thus practice and meaning have been
at least partially uncoupled from the impersonal workings of discursive regimes
and rejoined to the active intentions of human agents embedded in social worlds.
Rather than being governed by impersonal semiotic codes, historical actors—both
past and present—are now seen as engaged in inflecting the semiotic constituents
(signs) that shape their understanding of reality so as to craft an experience of
that world in terms of a situational sociology of meaning, or what might be called
a social semantics.21 This shift in focus from semiotics to semantics, from given
semiotic structures to the individual and social construal of signs, in short, from
culture as discourse to culture as practice and performance, entails a recuperation
of the historical actor as an intentional (if not wholly self-conscious) agent, and
thus foregrounds once again questions of individual motivation and behavior.22
All of which brings me, at last, to a consideration of the possible causes for
the emergence of “linguistic-turn” historiography within the framework of what
is more generally termed “postmodernism,” and its widening professional accep-
tance in the period roughly covered by the last four decades, with allowances
made for varying degrees of its penetration over time in different domains of
historical inquiry.23
This is not the place to rehearse the characteristics of either the linguistic turn
in historical writing or postmodernism more generally, understood here as the
encompassing phenomenon within which the changes in historiography occurred.
By now—and certainly among readers of History and Theory—it is hard to imag-
ine that a shared sense of what we mean by these terms does not exist, even as
considerable disagreement persists concerning their significance and utility for
historiography. Moreover, to the extent that this turn in historiographical practice
is seen here merely as exemplary, as an instance of a process of revision that is
ongoing in historical work—what LaCapra in his most recent book calls “history

University Press, 1997), 21.

21. “Semantics” here would pertain not only to “ meaning” or “signification” as such but also
would include the relationship of propositions to reality.
22. For a fuller discussion of this current movement of “revision” in linguistic-turn historiography,
see my Introduction to Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic
Turn (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 1-31.
23. I say this advisedly as a medieval historian, a field in which there has been an extremely
uneven reception of the basic tenets of poststructuralism, despite the fact that one could argue that the
medieval understanding of language and its opaque character and significance lies closer to a post-
structuralist view than to the modern belief in the transparent and rational character of linguistic acts,
a point made early and often by medievalists such as Eugene Vance, Nancy Partner, Robert Stein,
and others. It is perhaps useful to remember here that Hayden White, whose Metahistory, published
in 1973, marks one of the important moments for the introduction of poststructuralist perspectives,
began his professional life as a medieval historian. The same unevenness doubtless marks the pro-
fession as a whole, although I think it is fair to say that as one moves to more recent professional
generations, acceptance of the importance of concepts such as “discourse” and the like becomes more
or less automatic.
 Revising the Past / Revisiting the Present 
in transit”24—the precise elements that make up the linguistic turn, poststructural-
ism, and postmodernism are perhaps less important than the fact of the profound
change in the conception and doing of history that they implied.
There is, to be sure, little agreement about the motives and causes that stand
behind these phenomena. Perhaps the most negative assessment of postmodern-
ism’s sources and prevailing cachet in the academy comes from the collective
work of Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, who, in Telling the
Truth about History, proclaim that
In our view, postmodernists are deeply disillusioned intellectuals who denounce en masse
Marxism and liberal humanism, communism and capitalism, and all expectations of lib-
eration. They insist that all of the regnant ideologies are fundamentally the same because
these ideologies are driven by the desire to discipline and control the population in the
name of science and truth. No form of liberation can escape from these parameters of
control.
In many ways, then, postmodernism is an ironic, perhaps even despairing view of the
world, one that, in its extreme forms, offers little role for history as previously known.25

Interesting in its focus on the individual, ideologically conditioned character

of those espousing postmodernism, the passage fails to take us very far toward
understanding the roots of the disillusionment that, the authors aver, so colors
the postmodernist approach to the world and to history. Nor does it specify the
place from which such an ironic perception might have been generated. If we
agree with de Certeau that the site of history’s production, including in that
notion prevailing discourses as well as the social conditions that discourses both
construct and live within, then we must look elsewhere for an explanation of
postmodernism’s emergence and appeal.
I would like to begin with what I have elsewhere argued are the psychic roots
of poststructuralism, and of Derridean deconstruction in particular (which I con-
sider to have been the basic articulation of poststructuralism’s most important
principles.26) We may legitimately take, I believe, the hallmark of deconstruc-
tion (and hence of poststructuralism) to be a new and deeply counterintuitive
relationship between language and reality, counterintuitive in the sense that
deconstruction’s understanding of that relationship interposes so many layers
of mediation—indeed, proffers little but mediation—that one is left enclosed
within a linguistic world that no longer has a purchase on reality. Moreover,
deconstruction proposes an inherent instability at the core of language that places

24. For LaCapra, history is “always in transit, even if periods, places, or professions sometimes
achieve relative stabilization. This is the very meaning of historicity. And the disciplines that study
history . . . are also to varying degrees in transit, with their self-definitions and borders never achiev-
ing fixity or uncontested identity.” Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity,
Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), 1. If one accepts this
formulation, then once again, as in the case of de Certeau although on a different basis, revision is
seen as intrinsic to the nature of history, an understanding of historicity, and the practices that create
and study it.
25. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret C. Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York
and London: Norton, 1994), 206, 207.
26. See my “Orations of the Dead/Silences of the Living: The Sociology of the Linguistic Turn,”
in Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 29-43.
10 Gabrielle M. Spiegel

the determination of meaning ultimately beyond our reach, for every text, in the
broad sense that deconstruction understands that term, founders ultimately on its
own indeterminacy, its aporia, the “impasse beyond all possible transaction” as
Derrida defines it, “which is connected with the multiplicity of meanings embed-
ded within the uniqueness of textual inscription.”27 The psychic destabilization
produced by such a problematizing of the relationship between res et verba,
together with the decentering of language and thus, perforce, of those who author
and authorize it, suggests that deconstruction represents not only a rupture in the
traditions of Western philosophy and history, but a psychic response to those
traditions that is itself founded in rupture.28
It is my belief that Derrida alchemized into philosophy a psychology deeply
marked by the Holocaust—marked by but not part of its experiential domain—in
which the Holocaust figures as the absent origin that Derrida himself did so
much to theorize. This is to argue that, living at a moment burdened with the
inescapable consciousness of the Holocaust, Derrida emerged into the history of
philosophy as a theoretician of linguistic “play,” and to contend that the articula-
tion of “play” is central to that process of alchemization that makes writing “after
Auschwitz” (in the famous phrase of Adorno29) possible. Indeed, in a highly dis-
placed form, this is precisely the starting point of Derrida’s critique of what he
calls the “structuralist thematic of broken immediacy”:
This structuralist thematic of broken immediacy is therefore the saddened, negative,
nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play whose other side would be
Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the
innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth,
and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. This affirmation then deter-
mines the non center otherwise than as loss of the center.30

For Derrida, acknowledgment of the “structurality of structure” is synonymous

with the “moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment
when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse.”31
Derrida belonged both by birth and by self-conscious identification to that
“second generation” of the post-Holocaust world on whose psyche has been
indelibly inscribed an event in which it did not participate, but which nonethe-
less constitutes the underlying narrative of the lives of its members.32 Theirs was,
27. Jacques Derrida, “Shibboleth,” in Midrash and Literature, ed. Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford
Budick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 323.
28. As Derrida himself noted, deconstruction proposes the notion of a “decentered structure,” that
is, a structure whose decentering is the result of “the event I called a rupture, itself, in turn, an effect
of the coming into consciousness of the “structurality of structure.” See “Structure, Sign, and Play
in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, transl. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), 292. Derrida does not, however, specify the “event” he calls a
rupture, he merely—and somewhat tautologically—presents it as an effect of an emerging awareness
of structure’s structurality, or constructed nature. One is tempted to see this as a compelling example
of the intellectual displacement of a psychological phenomenon.
29. Adorno’s phrase was: “After Auschwitz it is no longer possible to write poems.” Theodor W.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, transl. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 362.
30. Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 292.
31. Ibid., 289.
32. Technically, of course, Derrida, having been born in 1930, was a bit old to be properly clas-
sified as a member of the second generation. Indeed, in 1942, Derrida was expelled from school as
 Revising the Past / Revisiting the Present 11
first and foremost, a world of silence, a “silence,” as French psychologist Nadine
Fresco tells us in her brilliant evocation of the psychology of the second genera-
tion,” “that swallowed up the past, all the past.”33 The parents of these children
transmitted only the wound to their children, to whom the memory had been refused and
who grew up in the compact world of the unspeakable, [amid] litanies of silence. . . . What
the Nazis had annihilated over and above individuals was the very substance of a world,
a culture, a history, a way of life. . . . Life was now the trace, molded by death. . . . The
past has been utterly burnt away at the center of their lives.34

They feel themselves to be “Jews deported from meaning, their resident permits
withdrawn, expelled from a lost paradise, abolished in a death in turn dissolved,
dissipated . . . deported from a self that ought to have been that of another. Death
is merely a matter of substitution.”35 From their parents, this generation received
only, in Erika Apfelbaum’s words, “un héritage en formes d’absences” (a legacy
in the form of absences).36 Linked to the notion of absence in the work of French
writers of the second generation, as Ellen Fine has demonstrated, are repeated
evocations of void, lack, blank, gap, and abyss. “La mémoire absente,” in the
novels of Henri Raczymow is “la mémoire trouée”: hollowed out, fragmented,
ruptured.37
Perhaps most striking of all in the work of these writers is the sense of the
utter inadequacy of language. “The world of Auschwitz,” in George Steiner’s
famous remark, “lies outside speech as it lies outside reason.”38 Language “after
Auschwitz” is language in a condition of severe diminishment and decline,
and no one has argued more forcefully than Steiner the corruption—indeed the
ruin—of language as a result of the political bestiality of our age.39 And yet, for
those who come after, there is nothing but language. As the protagonist in Elie
Wiesel’s novel The Fifth Son, states: “Born after the war I endure its effects. I
suffer from an Event I did not even experience. . . . From a past that has made
History tremble, I have retained only words.”40 Both for those who survived and
for those who came after, the Holocaust appears to exceed the representational
capacity of language, and thus to cast suspicion on the ability of words to con-
vey reality.41 And for the second generation, the question is not even how to

a result of the lowering to seven percent of the numerus clausus of Jews allowed to attend. Between
then and the end of the war, he attended a school run by Jews in Algiers, experiencing in that sense
the war and the anti-Semitism of the Pétain regime. Nonetheless, in relation to the Holocaust and
the experiences of European Jews, Derrida’s childhood in Algiers, I believe, maintains a comparable
position of marginality and belatedness that informs the psychology of the second generation.
33. Nadine Fresco, “Remembering the Unknown,” International Review of Psychoanalysis 11
(1984), 419.
34. Ibid., 420-421.
35. Ibid., 420-423.
36. Quoted in Ellen S. Fine, “The Absent Memory: The Act of Writing in Post-Holocaust French
Literature,” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1988), 44.
37. Ibid., 45.
38. George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman
(New York: Atheneum, 1986), 123.
39. Ibid., 4.
40. Quoted in Fine, “The Absent Memory,” 41.
41. The “unrepresentable” nature of the Holocaust is the subject of a considerable literature, begin-
12 Gabrielle M. Spiegel

speak but, more profoundly, if one has a right to speak, a delegitimization of the
speaking self that, turned outward, interrogates the authority, the privilege, of all
speech. Which, of course, is precisely what Derrida and deconstruction do in the
attack on logocentrism.
Moreover, the “Auschwitz model,” Jean-François Lyotard concludes, desig-
nates an experience of language that brings speculative discourse to a halt. The
latter can no longer be pursued “‘after Auschwitz.’”42 Thus intimately bound
up with the paralysis of language is the death of metaphysics—itself, perhaps,
merely the displaced sign of the death of God in “l’univers concentrationnaire.”
What the Holocaust wrought, according to Steiner, was “the exit of God from lan-
guage.”43 In Paul Celan’s poem Psalm, God is apostrophized as “No One.” “No
One bespeaks the dust of the dead.” “After Auschwitz,” metaphysical presence
became, like writing itself, a term sous rature, under erasure.
It is not difficult to see the parallels between this psychology of the “second
generation” and the basic tenets of poststructuralism (and/or postmodernism): the
feeling of life as a trace, haunted by an absent presence; its sense of indetermi-
nacy; a belief in the ultimate undecidability of language (its aporia, in Derrida’s
sense); the transgressive approaches to knowledge and authority; and, perhaps
most powerfully, the conviction of the ultimately intransitive, self-reflective
character of language, which seems to have lost its power to represent anything
outside itself, hence to have lost its ability, finally, to signify. In its profound
commitment to a fractured, fragmented, and endlessly deferred, hence displaced,
understanding of language and the (im)possibilities of meaning, poststructuralism
shares with the “second generation” the anguish of belatedness, the scars of an
unhealed wound of absent memory, and the legacy of silence.
If, as I have argued, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and some varieties
of postmodernism in their psychic impulses enact a philosophy of rupture and
displacement, one particularly acute for the “second generation” of the postwar
world, then the question becomes why it resonated so powerfully for the genera-
tion that came to maturity in the 1960s and 1970s, not only in Europe but even
more widely in the United. States. As Derrida himself recognized,
From the beginning (1966)44 there existed a certain Americanization of a certain decon-
struction. By Americanization I mean a certain appropriation, a domestication, an institu-

ning with the essays collected in Saul Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism
and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). See also his Memory,
History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993),
as well as Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust, and Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust:
History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
42. Jean-François Lyotard, “Discussions or Phrasing ‘after Auschwitz,’” in The Lyotard Reader,
ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 364.
43. George Steiner, “The Long Life of Metaphor,” in Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust, 157.
44. The date 1966 refers to the conference on “The Structuralist Controversy” held at Johns
Hopkins University, the papers for which were later edited and published in The Languages of
Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio
Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970). The date certainly marks the introduction
of poststructuralism into America. It is interesting that Derrida himself believed that 1966 inaugurated
deconstruction as an identifiable philosophical configuration, indebted in many ways to the structural-
ist movement in its deployment of Saussurean linguistics but marking its own place by the critique of
structuralism and revisions to Saussure.
 Revising the Past / Revisiting the Present 13
tionalization, chiefly academic, that took place elsewhere in other forms as well, but here
(in the US) in a massively visible form.45

Indeed, François Cusset has recently suggested that the true destiny and, he
contends, the very creation of “French Theory” finds its place and fulfillment
in the United States.46 But, as I will try to show, it is not obvious why this
“Americanization” of deconstruction should have taken place or what condi-
tions existed that favored the translation of “French Theory” to this side of the
Atlantic.
By way of explanation it may not suffice to assert, as I have elsewhere,47 that
the emblematic figure of the postmodern world is the displaced person, or that
the receptivity to poststructuralism and postmodernism is in part a reflection
of the newly expanded recruitment of Jews (many of them children of refugee
parents) into American universities. For the appeal of postmodernism, its abil-
ity to resonate throughout broad sectors of the American academy, suggests that
there must be a more profound, even structural, reason for its salience in the
United States compared to elsewhere, including (surprisingly) France, whence
so many of its basic elements were imported. Were poststructuralism and post-
modernism merely enactments of psychological responses to the Holocaust or
World War II in general, it is doubtful that they would have achieved the kind of
purchase in American intellectual life that has taken place over the last decades,
since America, it could be argued, was less directly affected by the atrocities
of the war48 and, more broadly, less indebted to the high culture of Continental
Enlightenment that came under attack in postmodernism. If poststructuralism and
postmodernism represent, as I believe, a psychologically displaced response to
the aftermath of the Holocaust, the War, and its attendant disillusionment with
Enlightenment principles and goals—that is (to return to de Certeau), in a psychic
awareness of loss, absence and, in that sense, a non-place—then what does their
widespread acceptance in the United States have to tell us about the place, the
social site, that may help to account for such an unexpectedly favorable reception
in North America? My premise here is that no matter how profoundly embedded
such revisions to historiography might be in the psychology of those who initiate
changes, they will fall on barren ground and fail to make a difference if they do
not also accord with a social situation or structure whose nature they somehow
articulate, albeit in highly displaced and mediated forms. We need, then, to exam-
ine the social developments that may explain how such a widespread revision in
the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of contemporary historiogra-
phy could have taken root.

45. Jacques Derrida, “Deconstructions: The Im-possible,” in French Theory in America, ed.
Sylvère Lotringer and Sande Cohen (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 18.
46. François Cusset, “French Theory”: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & cie et les mutations de la
vie intellectuelle aux États-Unis (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2003).
47. In “Orations of the Dead/Silences of the Living,”42.
48. This is a point that Peter Novick has forcefully made with respect to American Jews and the
Holocaust. See his The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), although he
fails to take into account in that book the refugee community in America and its second-generation
offspring.
14 Gabrielle M. Spiegel

Any “social explanation” for a phenomenon as complex and multiform as

postmodernism surely will strike most historians as hopelessly reductive since,
in stipulating the social, economic, or demographic forces at work as “causes” for
transformations in intellectual life, one necessarily bypasses the shifting levels of
mediation between the social and the cultural that linguistic-turn historiography
has taught us to explore. Moreover, events are not necessarily any more logical,
less ridden with contradictions and hidden intentions, than speech and writing.
One cannot, therefore, posit any simple one-to-one correspondence between
social ”cause” and intellectual “effect.”49 Still, to the degree that historians are
committed to the notions that language—or textuality in the very broad sense
postulated by postmodernism—acquires meaning only when understood against
the background of its social context, or what I have called “the social logic of
the text,” that particular instances of language use or textuality incorporate social
as well as linguistic structures, and that the aesthetic and intellectual character
of any given articulation is intimately related (either positively or negatively) to
the social character of the environment from which it emerges, then an inquiry
into the possible social roots of intellectual change seems not only possible but
imperative (all the while keeping in mind the reductive character of the resulting
explanation, which would seem to be inescapable on some level).
One of the most powerful and comprehensive arguments concerning the social
and economic origins of postmodernism is set forth by Fredric Jameson in his
Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.50 As the title sug-
gests, Jameson argues that postmodernism as a sociocultural label, with its atten-
dant literary, aesthetic, cultural, and historiographical expressions, represents the
“logic of late capitalism.” By “late capitalism” (alternately called “third-wave”
capitalism) Jameson signals a postwar mode of capitalism’s expansion on a multi-
national, ultimately global, scope, replacing the former “monopoly” stage of capi-
talism associated with the age of European imperialism but superseded as those
imperial (colonial) monopolies were abandoned after the war, without, however,
constituting a discontinuity in the expansion of capitalism itself. For this reason
Jameson prefers the designation “late capitalism” in order “to mark its continuity
with what preceded it, in contrast to the break, rupture, and mutation that concepts
such as ‘postindustrial’ society wish to underscore.”51 The impact of the advent
of “third-wave” or “late capitalism” was, he asserts, to “reorganize international
relations, decolonize the colonies and lay the groundwork for the emergence of
a new economic world system,”52 one that we have relatively recently come to
recognize as the global economy. In Jameson’s view, the fundamental ideologi-
cal work to be performed by the concept of postmodernism “must remain that of
coordinating new forms of practice and social and mental habits . . . with the new
forms of economic production and organization thrown up by the modification of

49. I am indebted to David Bell for these cautionary notes.

50. Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (see above, note 19).
51. Ibid., xix. Jameson relies for his understanding of “late capitalism” on the work of Ernest
Mandel, Late Capitalism, transl. Joris de Bres (London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities
Press, 1975).
52. Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, xx.
 Revising the Past / Revisiting the Present 15
capitalism—the new global division of labor—in recent years.”53 Therefore, the
task of the “postmodern” is
to be seen as the production of postmodern people capable of functioning in a very
peculiar socioeconomic world indeed, one whose structure and objective features and
requirements—if we had a proper account of them—would constitute the situation to
which postmodernism is a response and would give us something a little more decisive
than postmodern theory.54

It goes almost without saying that, in Jameson’s Marxist-inflected understanding

of history, a presupposition for the cultural emergence of “postmodernism” was
waning confidence in classical Marxism, culminating in 1989, which in the realm
of historical practice was accompanied by a shift from social to cultural history,
especially among historians on the left. It is here that the experiences of the gen-
eration that came to political and professional maturity in the 1960s is crucial as
a preparation, perhaps even a precondition, for the later emergence of postmodern
theory both in Europe and in America.
Confirmation of this basic point comes from two recent books by well-known
social historians: Geoff Eley’s semi-autobiographical A Crooked Line: From
Cultural History to the History of Society, and William H. Sewell Jr.’s The Logics
of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation, in particular the chapter on
“The Political Unconscious of Social History.”55 Both of these historians are left-
leaning or avowedly Marxist, as is Jameson, but a not dissimilar understanding
of the relationship between postmodernism and capitalism can be seen in Joyce
Appleby’s Presidential Address cited above (absent, however, the critique of
capitalism implicit in the other three authors).
Like Jameson, Sewell sees the rise of cultural history in relation to fundamen-
tal changes in the economic order, in particular to worldwide transformations
of capitalism on a global scale. However, unlike Jameson, Sewell believes that
the explicit experiences of the “sixties” generation that were responsible for first
the “cultural turn” and then the “linguistic turn” in historical writing should be
located in a “collapsing Fordist order, not the newly emergent order of global-
ized, flexible accumulation.” As he explains it:
As 1960s rebels [i.e. the left historians who began their practice of history in the 1960s and
1970s] we thought of ourselves as rising up against the interlocking and claustrophobic
system of social determinations that dominated contemporary corporate America. . . . Most
of us would probably have agreed with Jürgen Habermas that in contemporary society the
possibility of human freedom was progressively threatened by an “escalating scale of con-
tinually expanded technical control over nature and a continually refined administration of
human beings and their relations to each other by means of social organization.” . . . When,
a few years or a decade later, we revolted against the positivist research strategies of social
history and undertook studies of the cultural construction of the social world, I think we
obscurely felt ourselves to be freeing historical scholarship . . . from a mute social and eco-
53. Ibid., xiv.
54. Ibid., xv.
55. Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2005); William H. Sewell, Jr. The Logics of History: Social Theory
and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 22-80. Sewell’s use of
the phrase “political unconscious” alludes to Jameson’s earlier book, The Political Unconscious:
Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981).
16 Gabrielle M. Spiegel

nomic determinism that was incapable of recognizing human creativity. . . . Thus cultural
historians were kicking down the door of Fordist social determinations at the moment when
such determinisms . . . were collapsing.56

Moreover, Sewell argues, the shift from Fordist or stated-centered capitalism

(monopoly capitalism in Jameson’s terms) to the globalized capitalism (or “late
capitalism”) of neoliberalism was “characterized all across the human sciences
by a general epistemic uncertainty—an uncertainty that has a certain elective
affinity with the heightened ‘flexibility’ that is one of the hallmarks of the new
global economic order.” In history, this uncertainty “took the form of the cultural
turn, flirtations with poststructuralism and a fascination with microhistory and
subjectivity.”57
Eley, as well, signals a decisive shift from the centrality of social history to
that of cultural history that took place, in his view, around 1980, a phenomenon
he attributes to Marxist social historians’ relinquishing the conviction that “class
relations are the constitutive element in the history of industrialized capitalist
states, the Marxist social historian’s axiomatic wish.”58 As Eley presents it, this
loss of confidence in class as the focus of historical causation was due primar-
ily to its diminishing explanatory power for social history, and he surely would
agree—although it is not an explicit part of his argument— that this occurred as a
result of changes in the British and European economic order. Less wide-ranging
in scope, due to its autobiographical orientation, Eley’s position is nonetheless
compatible with those set forth by Jameson and Sewell in its linking of revisions
in historiographical practice to social and economic changes and their ideological
and political consequences.
However one ultimately assesses the accuracy of these descriptions of global
economic change in the aftermath of World War II to the present, on the whole
they strike me as plausible, if somewhat differently inflected, accounts, especially
when read in their entirety. Nonetheless, as explanations for the widespread histo-
riographical revision that effected the linguistic turn I think they are not so much
wrong as incomplete. Although a more extended discussion of their arguments
would enable us to draw parallels between the “flexibility” characterizing the
new economic order and the notion of destabilized “subject positions,” between
the expansion of commercial consumerism and the dominance of culture, togeth-
er with a “whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum,”59 and to a weak-
ening sense of historicity and relationship to the world of objects, the problem
remains of the intellectual and philosophical specificity of poststructuralist and
postmodern theories, with their emphasis on absence, fragmentation, and the loss
of metaphysical and epistemological certainty in the growing awareness of the
linguistically mediated nature of perception, cognition, and imagination. I fail to
see how changes in capitalism lead to these developments—particularly the de-

56. Ibid., 60-61.

57. The quotation appears in a forthcoming review of Geoff Eley’s A Crooked Line, to be pub-
lished as part of a “Forum” on Eley’s book in the American Historical Review. Cited here with per-
mission of the author, William H. Sewell, Jr.
58. Eley, A Crooked Line, 110-111.
59. Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 5 and passim.
 Revising the Past / Revisiting the Present 17
materialization of history that is crucial to poststructuralist thought—although to
the extent that a case can be made for this argument, I think Jameson comes as
close as anyone to making it.60
For me, the most convincing explanation for the development of poststruc-
turalism by the generation that matured in the 1960s and 1970s remains an
understanding of it as a displaced, psychological response to the Holocaust and
its aftermath, perhaps particularly its aftermath, in the sense that there occurred a
growing, and somewhat belated, awareness of the ways in which it made belief
in the enlightened and progressive character of Western European civilization
impossible to sustain, a development subsequently strongly reinforced by the
emergence of postcolonial theory, which exposed the brutal and dehumanizing
aspects of European imperial ventures. “French Theory,” after all, does origi-
nate in France among French thinkers contemplating, and revising, the work of
German philosophers. However much the destiny of “French Theory” may
appear to some to be the United States, especially in the somewhat domesticated
version (noted above by Derrida) that generally goes by the name of postmod-
ernism, the linguistic turn in historical writing in North America is unthinkable
apart from the influence of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and all the others whose
thought and writing became the hallmark of this revisionist turn. They were the
first to articulate the sense of rupture, loss, and absence, whether it took the form
of Derridean deconstruction or Lyotard’s view of postmodernism as the passing
of “master narratives,” or Foucault’s genealogical refusal of origins and essences.
Their initial ability to give philosophical form to what, in the end, can never have
been an exclusively European response to the war, was critical in developing the
conceptual formulations and tools that later became generalized in what we think
of as poststructuralism and postmodernism. That significant shifts in America’s
economy and society (not to mention the disillusionment with American “impe-
rialism” in the Vietnamese war) laid the groundwork for a remarkable sensitiv-
ity and receptiveness to these Continental intellectual developments—in highly
mediated and displaced forms, of course—may indeed explain their later implan-
tation in the United States. But both phenomena are required to understand the
nature of the revision in historical thought that occurred and the timing of its
dissemination in the United States.
It might be objected that this argument works only if one conflates, as I have
tended to do in the preceding paragraphs, poststructuralism with postmodernism,
but I think that during the period of their reception in the United States one would
have been hard put to distinguish between them. Only later (certainly by now) did
an awareness of their differing conceptual bases and social grounds fully emerge.

60. Jameson’s response to this criticism would probably be that one of the hallmarks of postmod-
ernism is the colonization of nature by culture. For Jameson, “postmodernism is what you have when
the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world,
but one in which ‘culture’ has become a veritable ‘second nature.’” The postmodern represents “an
immense and historically original acculturation of the Real, a quantum leap in what Benjamin called
the ‘aestheticization’ of reality . . . ” (ibid, ix-x). Similarly, neither he nor Eley nor Sewell in any way
contests the concept of agency or of the human, psychological subject (in fact, Sewell’s most recent
work is dedicated to rehabilitating it). But the force of their arguments places its primary stress on the
workings of the economy and the social ramifications thereof.
18 Gabrielle M. Spiegel

However we ultimately come to understand these paired phenomena, it seems

clear that any explanation of the rise of linguistic-turn historiography will have to
consider both sides of the Atlantic, and thus both sides of the argument.
Added to this mix certainly must be the changing nature of recruitment into
the historical profession after the 1960s. Of obvious relevance here was the
experience of those new groups during the “sixties,” when the combined forces
of the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the early budding of femi-
nism, and the utopian critique of American culture represented by the growth of
the “counterculture” were all in full swing. As a generation raised and coming
to consciousness of its place in history in this atmosphere of (ultimately disap-
pointed) historical optimism about racial equality and social justice, but also of
deep ambivalence toward authority and power—both political and cultural—it is
easy to see how, when its members came to develop their own, distinctive vision
of the past, they viewed it with the same profound suspicion of order, hierarchy,
authority, and patriarchy that had characterized their earlier involvement in their
own contemporary world. Nor were Americans alone in this tendency, although
the openness of the American academy to new groups and new ideas may have
facilitated the pace and prevalence with which they were accepted in comparison
to Europe.61
Thus, not surprisingly, we have arrived at the triangulated pattern of explana-
tion, initially suggested by de Certeau, of “place” (social recruitment, hence the
social world from which historians are recruited), “procedure” (the discipline of
professional history as such, and its changing conceptual resources), and “text”
(the revisions to historiographical discourse effected by the linguistic turn as it
variously made itself felt with the adoption of poststructuralism and postmod-
ernism’s consciousness of a general loss of epistemological confidence in older
paradigms of history, most notably objectivism). It is worth noting how tied to
the experiences of a single generation these transformations appear to be. This
fact, in turn, helps to explain why the prestige of “linguistic-turn” historiography
seems to be on the wane, accompanied by a growing sense of dissatisfaction with
its overly systematic account of the operation of language in the domain of human
endeavors of all kinds, and an evident attempt to rehabilitate social history.62

61. From this perspective, one might argue, as David Bell suggested to me in commenting on this
article, that postmodernism represents a retreat on the part of intellectuals from political engagement
since the efforts of those intellectuals to impose themselves on politics in the campaigns against
colonialism, against the Bomb, and against the gulag collapsed with remarkable speed after 1968 in
France and somewhat later in America. As he sees it, postmodernism denotes a set of ideas “which
inverts or denies the relationship between ideas and history that earlier generations of intellectuals
had so proudly held up, by denying the fixity of meaning, the stability of texts and so on. It seems to
explain the failures of earlier generations of intellectuals, while asserting that such failure was inevi-
table because of the properties of language itself” (personal communication). My resistance to this
view stems from the fact that, feckless or otherwise, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Blanchot, Deleuze,
etc. saw their efforts as profoundly political in nature, a point on which Derrida repeatedly insisted
in the writings of his last years.
62. On this development see my introduction to Practicing History and Sewell, The Logics of
History, as well as Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999), 1-32. Also of interest is Andreas Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory
of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing,” European Journal of Social Theory
5, no. 2 (2002), 243-263.
 Revising the Past / Revisiting the Present 19
It is to be expected that as our consciousness of the penetration of global capi-
talism and its impact on all forms of social formation grows, historical writing
will increasingly be influenced by intellectual agendas generated by this devel-
opment and will, therefore, create new objects of investigation. This is already
apparent in the growing concern with questions of diaspora, migration, and
immigration. It is also apparent in the rapidly developing field of transnational
history, with its focus on what Françoise Lionnet has termed “minority cultures,”
an approach to history that deploys a global perspective that emphasizes the basic
hybridity of global cultures in the postcolonial and postmodern world through
which questions of home, community, allegiance, and identity are constantly
being revised.63 In taking the hybrid nature of global societies and cultures as its
premise, such work seeks to make that hybridity the core of its intellectual analy-
sis, and doubtless will generate new paradigms for the study of history that will
affect not only our understanding of contemporary developments but will feed
back into our analyses of the past.
That the field of “transnationalism” should appear as the sign of this shift
in consciousness, a field in part promoted by the movement of new groups of
scholars into the profession—many of them members of the second generation of
immigrant families—is hardly unexpected and may be seen as one of the social
determinants of this reorientation and revision in current historiography. Perhaps,
therefore, it is also apposite to inquire into the psychological losses experienced
in the process of migration, exile, and diasporic movement. Such a question
might interrogate, and seek to nuance, the rather triumphalist tone of current work
on transnationalism, with its celebration of fluidity and hybridity, by inquiring
into the sense of loss of cultural identity that often accompanies the loss of one’s
homeland, language, and culture. In light of this, one might ask whether cultural
hybridity constitutes a good in itself, or are there hidden costs to its expansion
over the globe, both in terms of personal identities and cultural production?
The answers to such questions will doubtless come with time. They are not, in
any case, the point of a consideration of the nature and role of revision in history,
except insofar as they, like the linguistic turn, point to the overdetermined nature
of revision as on ongoing historiographical phenomenon, one equally psychologi-
cal, social, and professional in its constitutive elements.

Johns Hopkins University

63. See Minor Transnationalism, ed. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2005).