SURKIS, Judith. When Was The Linguistic Turn

AHR Forum
When Was the Linguistic Turn? A Genealogy
JUDITH SURKIS
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One cannot make true or erroneous statements about the digestive or repro-
ductive processes of centaurs.
Paul Veyne
An examination of descent also permits the discovery, under the unique aspect
of a trait or a concept, of the myriad events through which—thanks to which,
against which—they were formed.
Michel Foucault
IN HIS WORK ON THE HISTORY of historical periodization, Reinhart Koselleck describes

the experience of “acceleration” as a distinguishing feature of an implicitly European
modernity. He figures this process as a speeding-up of the rate at which “one’s own
time is distinguished from the preceding time.”1 According to Koselleck, the rhythm
of temporal compression is marked by an increasingly rapid retrospective designa-
tion of moments consigned to the past. Starting in the Enlightenment, and especially
after the French Revolution, he claims, this accelerated sense of historical time gave
rise to a new notion of the present as well. In the sped-up temporality of European
modernity, the present is always also a moment of transition to an immanent future.
Conceived in the crucible of colonialism and capitalism, Neuzeit established and en-
capsulated difference in terms of “the contemporaneity of the noncontemporane-
ous.”2 From the vantage of Europe’s modernity, the pasts of Greco-Roman antiquity
and the “Middle Ages” also became “fundamentally other.”3 In Koselleck’s narrative
Many friends and colleagues have offered critical insights and generous suggestions on the arguments
set forth in this piece. Special thanks to Gil Anidjar, Elizabeth Bernstein, Warren Breckman, Rita Chin,
Jay Cook, Kathleen Davis, Geoff Eley, Durba Ghosh, Peter Gordon, Manu Goswami, Ken Lipartito,
Harold Mah, Sam Moyn, Uta Poiger, Joan Scott, Dan Smail, Gabrielle Spiegel, Jeffrey Stout, Carol
Symes, Julia Adeney Thomas, John Toews, and Gary Wilder, as well as audiences at the AHA Annual
Meeting, the Radcliffe Institute Workshop on Modern European Intellectual History, and the Institute
for Advanced Study. Thanks also to Konstantin Dierks and Robert Schneider, the editorial board of the
AHR , and four anonymous reviewers.
1 Reinhart Koselleck, “The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity,” in Koselleck, The
Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner, Kerstin
Behnke, and Jobst Welge (Stanford, Calif., 2002), 154 –169, here 168.
2 Reinhart Koselleck, “ ‘Neuzeit’: Remarks on the Semantics of the Modern Concepts of Move-
ment,” in Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge,
Mass., 1985), 231–266, here 246.
3 Ibid., 250.
700
When Was the Linguistic Turn? 701
of modernity’s narrative, the present is demarcated from this past and resolutely
oriented toward a new, secularized vision of the future. The concept of “progress”
(as well as its paired concept of “decline”) emerged in and underwrote this move-
ment. Grouping together many meanings and experiences under a single term, prog-
ress, like the history it authorizes, moves forward in the “collective singular,” even
as it produces difference in the form of uneven development.4
Koselleck is invoked here not to unproblematically endorse his claims, but to
suggest how normative assumptions about the relationship between time and an
implicitly European modernity are written into historical and historiographical writ-
ing itself. By historicizing the modern practice of history, Koselleck’s work is a case
in point. In his self-referential account, the periodization whose emergence he traces

also underwrites his conception of “conceptual history.” In his view, the disciplinary
coherence of history depends on a theory of periodization: “without such a theory,
history loses itself in boundlessly questioning everything.”5 Taking modern Euro-
pean history as his object of study, Koselleck’s work renders explicit some of the
temporal concepts that conventionally govern “modern” historiography: logics of
periodization and a view of history as a “collective singular,” as well as attendant
ideas of both decline and delay.
The periodizing impulse that Koselleck describes as quintessentially “modern”
has, of late, proceeded at an accelerated clip. History-writing seems to have un-
dergone a rapid succession of historiographical moments or “turns.” If the “linguistic
turn” initiated a turn to turn talk, it was soon followed by the cultural and the im-
perial, and more recently the transnational, global, and spatial turns. The problem
of how to narrativize these historiographical developments has become a minor his-
toriographical subfield in its own right.6 Ideas of succeeding—and competing—his-
4 Reinhart Koselleck, “ ‘Progress’ and ‘Decline’: An Appendix to the History of Two Concepts,” in
Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, 218–235, here 229. For a critical discussion of Koselleck’s
account of modernity, the temporal logic of capitalism, and its attendant “time lags,” see Harry Ha-
rootunian, “Remembering the Historical Present,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 3 (2007): 471– 494, here 479.
5 Reinhart Koselleck, “On the Need for Theory in the Discipline of History,” in Koselleck, The
Practice of Conceptual History, 1–19, here 4. For a powerful critique of Koselleck’s model of periodiza-
tion, see Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Gov-
ern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, 2008). See as well the AHR Roundtable “Historians and the Ques-
tion of ‘Modernity,’ ” American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (June 2011): 631–751, especially Carol Symes,
“When We Talk about Modernity,” 715–726.
6 See, in addition to the other essays in this forum, “Forum: Critical Pragmatism, Language, and
Cultural History: On Roger Chartier’s On the Edge of the Cliff,” French Historical Studies 21, no. 2 (1998):
213–264; “AHR Forum: Geoff Eley’s A Crooked Line,” American Historical Review 113, no. 2 (April
2008): 391– 437; Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in
the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, Calif., 1999); Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn:
Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham, N.C., 2003); Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff:
History, Language, and Practices, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore, 1997); Geoff Eley, A Crooked
Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2005); Georg G. Iggers, His-
toriography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover,
N.H., 1997); Georg G. Iggers and Q. Edward Wang, A Global History of Modern Historiography (Harlow,
2008); Akira Iriye, “The Transnational Turn,” Diplomatic History 31, no. 3 (2007): 373–376; Terrence
J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996); Yair Mintzker,
“Between the Linguistic and the Spatial Turns: A Reconsideration of the Concept of Space and Its Role
in the Early Modern Period,” Historical Reflections 35, no. 3 (2009): 37–51; William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics
of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005); Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Revising the
Past/Revisiting the Present: How Change Happens in Historiography,” History and Theory 46, no. 4
(2007): 1–19; Spiegel, “The Task of the Historian,” 2008 AHA Presidential Address, American Historical
Review 114, no. 1 (February 2009): 1–15; Ronald Grigor Suny, “Back and Beyond: Reversing the Cultural
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2012

702 Judith Surkis
toriographical turns have proliferated. But in this methodological whirlwind, little

attention has been paid to the implicit temporality of turn talk itself. What does it
mean to describe a historiographical moment as a “turn”?
A brief history of what has come to be called the “linguistic turn” can be useful
in addressing this broader question. The reason for undertaking such a review is not
to offer a more comprehensive narrative of the “linguistic turn” or to privilege one
version of it over another, but rather to question the usefulness of the concept itself.
As a look at some key texts in the adventure of this concept will show, it is difficult
to clearly pinpoint a singular or coherent “turn” as having taken place.7 In addition
to being reductive and constraining, the temporality of turn talk presumes a super-
session of one disciplinary trend by another. While a turn seems to signal innovation

and renewal, its spatio-temporal logic more often than not entails foreclosure. By
contrast, a genealogical counternarrative can keep multiple strains of critical in-
terrogation open for the historiographical future.
Closely linked to a spatio-temporal logic of supersession is a generational model
of historiographical development. In narrativizing the “linguistic turn,” historians
have drawn on implicit and explicit arguments about historiographical “generations”
as one way to lend coherence to an otherwise diverse and mutually questioning set
of methods and epistemologies. But what are the limits of such generational thinking
and the logic of supersession that it often implies?8 What are the contours of a
historiographical generation? When and where is it located? These questions can be
answered through an exploration of how the idea of the “linguistic turn” took shape
within a specific Euro-American historiographical context. The goal is not to reassert
the hegemony of this narrative, but to provincialize it.9
Gabrielle Spiegel’s 2008 AHA presidential address provides a good point of en-
try.10 Her comments can be read as exemplary in their adroit summary of much
recent work on the shifting paradigms of postwar Euro-American historiography.
Given that she made them as president of the American Historical Association, her
remarks carried symbolic and institutional as well as temporally ritualized signifi-
cance.
In keeping with generic convention, Spiegel’s speech takes stock of recent his-
toriographical trends in order to offer thoughts on the future of the discipline. Her
narrative describes the “semiotic challenge” to “traditional” ways of writing history
that arose in the period following the Second World War.11 As she recounts it, this
Turn?,” American Historical Review 107, no. 5 (December 2002): 1476–1499; John E. Toews, “Intel-
lectual History after the Linguistic Turn,” American Historical Review 92, no. 4 (October 1987): 879–907;
Barney Warf and Santa Arias, The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London, 2009).
7 I borrow the phrase from Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from
Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley, Calif., 1984).

8 Conversations with Peter Gordon have clarified my thinking on this point. On the problem of
generational thinking, see the introduction to Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos
(Cambridge, Mass., 2010), 1– 42.
9 On the “provincialization” of European historical temporality, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provin-
cializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J., 2000). For a related
account of the provincialism of the linguistic turn when viewed from the perspective of American, Latin
American, and hemispheric studies, see the essay in this forum by James W. Cook.
10 Spiegel, “The Task of the Historian.”
11 Spiegel first used the expression “semiotic challenge,” adopted from John Toews, in 1990: Ga-

challenge issued from multiple domains at once: philosophical investigations of lan-

guage, anthropological explorations of culture, psychoanalytic interrogations of sub-
ject formation, and radical questionings of the possibilities and limits of knowledge
formation. While admittedly diverse and divergent, these strands of epistemological
questioning roughly coincided in time. And, Spiegel argues, they took on great sig-
nificance for the generation of European and American historians who came of age
in the 1960s and 1970s; that generation, in turn, went on to pose new questions about
the objects and subjects of historical knowledge. The resulting linguistic, cultural,
and poststructuralist “turns” provoked what Spiegel describes as a “massive change
in our understanding of the nature of historical reality.”12 Her account of this “mas-
sive change” in many ways depends on a grouping together of these “turns.” Such

groupings have now become something of a historiographical commonplace. In trac-
ing a genealogy of the “linguistic turn,” we can critically reexamine (and unsettle)
these conflations.
Spiegel’s argument parallels and draws on another recent account of historio-
graphical trends, William Sewell’s Logics of History (2005). Sewell likewise links “his-
tory’s linguistic turn” to broader trends in cultural history, which questioned ma-
terialist accounts of historical causality, especially in the field of European social
history.13 For Sewell, “a linguistic model of the social” subtended these develop-
ments in both cultural history and cultural anthropology. And it is this linguistic
model, he claims, that informs “the ontological assumptions underlying contempo-
rary cultural history.”14 But can we make broad generalizations about debates that
were themselves intently focused on questions of existence? As recent commentators
have noted, “French theory” alone is a problematic assemblage. Distinct institutional
and intellectual convergences, in the United States and France, certainly fostered
demonstrable personal and philosophical connections between French thinkers and
their American acolytes. It was, however, the contentious debate between Heideg-
gerians and Marxists, psychoanalysts and literary critics, structuralists and historians
of science, that made those encounters so bracing. When the scope of thinkers as-
sembled under the rubric of the “linguistic turn” is further widened to include Clif-
ford Geertz, Jürgen Habermas, and Quentin Skinner, its coherence becomes still
more difficult to sustain.15
brielle M. Spiegel, “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages,” Speculum
65, no. 1 (1990): 59–86.
12 Spiegel, “The Task of the Historian,” 2. Spiegel offers a fuller account of this narrative in the
introduction to Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ed., Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after
the Linguistic Turn (New York, 2005). “Practicing history” appears here as a supersession of the “lin-
guistic turn.” For a critical appraisal of this project, see Dominick LaCapra, History and Its Limits:
Human, Animal, Violence (Ithaca, N.Y., 2009), 45–52.
13 Sewell, Logics of History, 23. For an examination of the problematic conflation of the “cultural
turn” with “cultural history,” see Cook, this forum.

14 Sewell, Logics of History, 331.
15 See the sample list ibid. Sewell notably discusses some of the instability and incoherence of both
the “linguistic turn” and “French theory” in an extended review of Roger Chartier’s essay collection,
in which Chartier critiques the “American linguistic turn.” William H. Sewell, Jr., “Language and Prac-
tice in Cultural History: Backing Away from the Edge of the Cliff,” French Historical Studies 21, no. 2
(1998): 241–254, here 245–246. Recent analyses of the history of “French theory” include Warren Breck-
man, “Times of Theory: On Writing the History of French Theory,” Journal of the History of Ideas 71,
no. 3 (2010): 339–361; François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Trans-

704 Judith Surkis
It is not enough, however, to merely call for more nuance and complexity. We
need to interrogate how the distinct strands of thought highlighting “language” as
constitutive of intellectual and social life were braided together. How, when, and
where did these presumptive convergences take place? And why describe them in
terms of a “turn”?
The model of the “turn” is, of course, itself a trope or turn of phrase. It implies
a change of course or direction, a turning away at the same time as a turning toward,
which lies at the Latin root of “conversion.”16 Etymologically, it is linked to the
notion of “revolution”—and to “lathe” in ancient Greek. Turns can be understood
not only to have directional movement, but also as formative: they shape and reshape
by cutting away.17 Similarly, the language of linguistic and other “turns” not only

describes, it produces a specific understanding of the epistemological challenges de-
scribed by Spiegel and Sewell (among others) as a discernible historiographical
event. Did a “massive change” take place? Was this shift part of a collective, singular
movement or historical logic? Who was included, and when?
A number of assumptions have been written into narrative accounts of histori-
ography as a succession of “turns.” Because it “fragments what was thought unified”
and “shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself,” genealogy
is particularly well suited to the endeavor of revising those suppositions.18 It was in
the field of European intellectual history that the language of the “linguistic turn”
formed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis, 2008). While works of
synthesis and summary have long been available, intellectual histories of thinkers associated with
“French theory” are just now beginning to appear. These histories are distinguished by their efforts to
keep epistemological and political stakes vibrant in and by contextualization. See, for example, Edward
Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge, 2011); Julian Bourg, After
the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France (Lanham, Md.,
2004); Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal, 2007);
Tamara Chaplin, Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (Chicago, 2007); Michael Scott
Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York,
2004); Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford,
Calif., 2010); Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961
(Ithaca, N.Y., 2005); James D. Le Sueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the De-
colonization of Algeria, 2nd ed. (Lincoln, Neb., 2005); Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel
Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca, N.Y., 2005); Camille Robcis, The Law of Kinship: An-
thropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Politics of the Family in 20th-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y., forth-
coming 2013).
16 OED, s.v. “conversion.”
17 OED, s.v. “turn.”
18 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Prac-
tice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), 139–164, here 147.
Genealogy as an approach has been taken up primarily by political theorists, philosophers of history,
and anthropologists, but not by historians—perhaps because of its presumptive “presentism.” See, for
example, Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam
(Baltimore, 1993); Mark Bevir, “What Is Genealogy?,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 2, no. 3 (2008):
263–275; Wendy Brown, “Politics without Banisters: Genealogical Politics in Nietzsche and Foucault,”
in Brown, Politics out of History (Princeton, N.J., 2001), 91–120; Raymond Geuss, “Nietzsche and Ge-
nealogy,” European Journal of Philosophy 2, no. 3 (1994): 274 –292; Webb Keane, “Self-Interpretation,
Agency, and the Objects of Anthropology: Reflections on a Genealogy,” Comparative Studies in Society
and History 45, no. 2 (2003): 222–248; Martin Saar, “Understanding Genealogy: History, Power, and the
Self,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 2, no. 3 (2008): 295–314. For the historical interest of genealogy,
see Joan W. Scott, “History-Writing as Critique,” in Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow,
eds., Manifestos for History (London, 2007), 19–38. Some recent work by historians might nonetheless
be characterized as genealogical, including Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
(Cambridge, Mass., 2010).

first emerged. Even in that delimited domain, however, these turns were multiple and
mutually questioning rather than singular or synonymous. When European social
historians seized on the notion of the turn, further occasions for conflation and con-
fusion proliferated. By recalling the at once diverse and circumscribed contexts in
which the expression “linguistic turn” took on meaning, as well as the skepticism
expressed by some of its earliest chroniclers, we gain insight into how, when, whether,
and for whom this historiographical event took place. The point is not to better
secure the epistemological or political foundation of the “linguistic turn,” but rather
to interrogate the periodizing impulse on which its postulation and subsequent pass-
ing depends. These temporal and disciplinary presumptions show how turn talk con-
strains our vision of the historical and historiographical future.

AS AN EXPRESSION, THE “linguistic turn” has an involved history, whose complexity
is to some extent belied by the concise movement that a “turn” is supposed to de-
scribe. One landmark in this history is the 1967 anthology edited by philosopher
Richard Rorty.19 As Spiegel notes in her presidential address, the essays collected
in that volume were devoted to contemporary trends in analytical, rather than con-
tinental, philosophy.20 The figures that Rorty discussed were thus, for the most part,
logical positivists and ordinary language philosophers, not the structuralist and post-
structuralist thinkers who are most often cited by historians as having influenced the
discipline’s epistemological crisis. The term “linguistic turn” was coined by one of
these figures, Gustav Bergmann, who quickly qualified his use of it to distinguish
between two competing schools (he called them formalists and anti-formalists)
whose relationship, he suggested, was characterized by “much strain and lack of
mutual appreciation.” Between these two sides, Bergmann sought out a “middle
position.”21
In citing Bergmann, Rorty sought to pose questions about this turn, rather than
simply confirm its existence.22 More specifically, in outlining the multiple claims (and
contestations) of “linguistic philosophy,” he interrogated whether it had, in fact,
achieved a thoroughgoing disciplinary “revolution.”23 In this sense, his invocation of
“a turn” was ironic. By highlighting the diversity of its proponents’ arguments, he
pointed to the role of “linguistic philosophy” (especially that espoused by Rudolf
Carnap) in rejuvenating debate within the discipline. But Rorty also resisted the
purported turn’s more hyperbolic and totalizing claims about purifying philosophical
language of metaphysics. As Jürgen Habermas noted, the collection of essays thus
served an ambivalent double purpose: “In summing up a triumphant progression,
they are intended at the same time to signal its end.”24 Analogous qualifications and
19 Richard Rorty, The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (1967; repr., Chicago,
1992).
20 Spiegel, “The Task of the Historian,” 2.
21 Gustav Bergmann, “Two Types of Linguistic Philosophy,” Review of Metaphysics 5, no. 3 (1952):
417– 438, here 417, 419.

22 Richard M. Rorty, “Introduction: Metaphysical Difficulties of Linguistic Philosophy,” in Rorty,
The Linguistic Turn, 1–39, here 9.

23 Ibid., 33.
24 Jürgen Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” in Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Com-

706 Judith Surkis
ambivalence can be detected among intellectual historians who adopted and adapted
the language of the “linguistic turn.”
Martin Jay was one of the first to usher the expression into the domain of history
proper with his 1982 essay “Should Intellectual History Take a Linguistic Turn?
Reflections on the Habermas-Gadamer Debate.” As in Rorty’s case, Jay’s use of the
term contained within it an element of critical questioning, as is indicated by the
essay’s title. That questioning was borne out in his careful exploration of the plurality
of contemporary philosophical investigations of language. Indeed, his piece aimed
principally to distinguish between several “linguistic turns” in order to determine
which paradigm might prove most fruitful to intellectual historians. Thus, while
pointing, at the outset, to a generalized interest in the “question of language,” Jay

insisted that “linguistic turns . . . may take very different directions.”25 These di-
rections included: first, ordinary language philosophy inspired by Wittgenstein; sec-
ond, the “very different” path taken by Saussurean linguistics; and third, a “very
different linguistic turn,” namely the German hermeneutical tradition. The latter—
which Jay further subdivided into the existentialist tradition (represented by Hans-
Georg Gadamer) and the Critical Theory tradition (taken up by Habermas)—was
the main focus of his essay.
Importantly for Jay, then, there was no single linguistic turn. Indeed, the critical
force of his essay depended on this very point. After indicating certain parallels
between respective linguistic theories, he rejected the viability—and indeed the de-
sirability—of a Gadamerian “fusion of the horizons.”26 His analysis of these dif-
ferences left open the space for critical evaluation and ongoing argument. It refused
uniform pronouncements and unreflective endorsement. Thus, while the philoso-
phies under discussion by Jay were distinct from those that concerned Rorty in 1967,
both authors shared a desire to question the coherence, decisiveness, and indeed
desirability of a definitive disciplinary “turn.”
While posed by Jay in 1982 as an open-ended prospect, by 1987 the “linguistic
turn” had, according to John Toews’s often-cited article “Intellectual History after
the Linguistic Turn,” already taken place within the field of Anglophone writing on
European intellectual history. In the wake of that shift, Toews discerned a shared
problematic among some rather sharply distinguished (in both senses of the word)
figures: Martin Jay and Dominick LaCapra; Keith Baker, J. G. A. Pocock, and Quen-
tin Skinner; Allan Megill and Mark Poster. While Jay’s essay was a work of analysis,
Toews’s (as befitting a Hegel specialist) is a work of synthesis. To put it in more
vernacular terms, one splits, while the other lumps. Toews thus claims that “although
no easily discernible, common position emerges,” the authors grouped together in
munication, ed. Maeve Cooke (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 343–382, here 345. Rorty’s future work pursued
the post-metaphysical project by appealing to “postanalytic” or pragmatic means.
25 Martin Jay, “Should Intellectual History Take a Linguistic Turn? Reflections on the Habermas-
Gadamer Debate,” in Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual
History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), 86–110, here 106. See also Carla Hesse,
“The New Empiricism,” Cultural and Social History 1, no. 2 (2004): 201–207.
26 Jay, “Should Intellectual History Take a Linguistic Turn?,” 106. Habermas has recently seemed
more open to the idea of fusion in his discussion of the “linguistic turn” in philosophy; Jürgen Habermas,
“Hermeneutic and Analytic Philosophy: Two Complementary Versions of the Linguistic Turn?,” Royal
Institute of Philosophy Supplement 44 (1999): 413– 441.

his essay can “be seen as participating in a common discourse.” Their commonality
lies, in his view, in a shared effort to understand the difference and dialectical unity
of “meaning,” on the one hand, and “experience,” on the other.27 In seeking to
comprehend this “common discourse,” Toews was, of course, doing his job as the
writer of a magisterial review essay. And he was also participating in the very trend
that he describes. For, as he goes on to claim, one consequence of the “linguistic
turn” was “a focus on ‘discourse’ as an organizing term for conceptualizing and prac-
ticing the history of meaning.”28 Toews, in other words, appeals to the framework
of “discourse” in order to explain what these authors all shared.
The conceptions of discourse that Toews details are, however, quite distinct. First
there is a Foucauldian archaeological conception articulated by Mark Poster, of

which Toews is quite critical. In this guise, discourses are “impersonal, anonymous,
‘objective’ systems of rules” that ultimately construct “experience.”29 Then there is
the concept elaborated by exponents of early modern Anglo-American political the-
ory (Skinner, Pocock), whose focus was on reconstructing linguistic contexts in order
to better understand authorial speech-acts. Toews is somewhat more partial to this
school, which seemed to cast discourse as more dynamic than static in its provision
for creative reappropriations and individualized linguistic performances. Or, as he
remarks, this model “implies the communicative context of an intersubjective com-
munity of free individuals.”30 Finally, there are histories that trace the trajectories
of a specific problematic, such as Martin Jay’s account of “the discourse of totality”
in Western Marxism. While approving of Jay’s refusal to reduce contextualization
to intertextuality, Toews finds the work lacking in its limited effort to relate indi-
vidual authors’ lives (their “experiences”) to their works.
Toews’s account of the “linguistic turn” is thus structured by a suspicion of what
he views to be the dangerous excesses of textualism. He wonders, specifically in
reference to Dominick LaCapra’s critiques of reductive contextualization, whether
“the theory of linguistic density and complexity of texts, contexts, and their appar-
ently circular relationships” has “outrun its possible utility.”31 The “linguistic turn”
in this guise is a dead end. It is thus unsurprising that Toews worries in his conclusion
about a new form of “reductionism,” and indeed “a new form of intellectual hubris”:
that of the “wordmakers who claim to be the makers of reality.”32 By foregrounding
“experience” as irreducible to a purely discursive frame, he aims to keep that hubris
in check.
The terms of Toews’s argument about the linguistic turn are familiar and have
been the subject of a fair amount of critical commentary, including by authors cited
in the piece.33 But there are two historical points that might be made regarding this
27 Toews, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn,” 882.

28 Ibid., 889.
29 Ibid., 890.
30 Ibid., 892.
31 Ibid., 886.
32 Ibid., 906.
33 Martin Jay, “The Textual Approach to Intellectual History,” in Jay, Force Fields: Between Intel-
lectual History and Cultural Critique (New York, 1993), 158–166; Dominick LaCapra, “History, Reading,
and Critical Theory,” in LaCapra, History and Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault, French Studies (Toronto,
2000), 21–72, here 57–64. For some of Toews’s most recent reflections, see John E. Toews, “Manifesting,
Producing, and Mobilizing Historical Consciousness in the ‘Postmodern Condition,’ ’’ History and Theory

708 Judith Surkis
pivotal essay. First, in casting the linguistic turn as part of a “common discourse,”
Toews’s essay played a productive, rather than merely descriptive, role. In other
words, it both helped to consolidate the apparent coherence of the “turn” and issued
a set of normative judgments about the epistemologies he associated with it. Few
subsequent pieces of writing on the topic can forgo its citation, even though the quite
sizable corpus under review was relatively circumscribed to the field of modern Eu-
ropean intellectual history (with some somewhat marginalized American excep-
tions). For example, the essay notably drew no connection between the intellectual
historical “linguistic turn” and contemporaneous historical interest in either anthro-
pology (Clifford Geertz’s name does not appear) or feminism.
Second, Toews’s concluding appeal to generational logic articulated this “com-

mon discourse” with a presumptively shared experience. He figured “intellectual
historians of the younger (post-1968) generation” as particularly implicated in the
shift. Seeking to restore a balance “lost in recent oscillations between opposing re-
ductionisms,” he called on his contemporaries “to recognize and examine the recent
turn away from experience as a specific response to particular events and develop-
ments in the history of experience.”34 Toews appealed to the model of the “gen-
eration” in order to hold the strains of “discourse” and “experience” together in his
own account. The suggestive correlation between “events . . . in the history of ex-
perience” and this generation’s “common discourse” of the linguistic turn remained
unspecified. He left it for other historians to speculate on those epistemological,
social, and political connections.
European intellectual historians thus played an important early role in both in-
troducing and critiquing a variety of questions and methods now associated with the
“linguistic turn.” But the consecration of the phrase as a shorthand for what was
increasingly framed as a profession-wide wave of revisionism and epistemological
crisis took several more years to catch on. According to Peter Novick’s That Noble
Dream, for example, intellectual historians raised new epistemological questions that
paralleled other critical interpretive interventions—from Geertzian anthropology to
critical histories of gender and race. For Novick, however, these parallel—occasion-
ally intersecting but as often conflicting—moves did not constitute a general and
generalized “linguistic turn.” Indeed, the central narrative of Novick’s book is one
of divergence and fragmentation, not convergence—a kind of “fall” into disciplinary
48, no. 3 (2009): 257–275, here 266–267. Both Jay and LaCapra have also, more recently, tackled the
intellectual history of “experience”; see Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Vari-
ations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley, Calif., 2005); LaCapra, “Experience and Identity,” in LaCapra,
History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, N.Y., 2004), 35–71. Other significant in-
terventions include Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991):
773–797; John H. Zammito, “Reading ‘Experience’: The Debate in Intellectual History among Scott,
Toews, and LaCapra,” in Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-Garcı́a, eds., Reclaiming Identity:
Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (Berkeley, Calif., 2000), 279–311.
34 Toews, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn,” 906, 907. Not all intellectual historians
concurred with Toews’s synthesis. For example, two years later, in an essay in the AHR , David Harlan
highlighted the strong divergences between the Cambridge school and poststructuralist approaches to
language; Harlan, “Intellectual History and the Return of Literature,” American Historical Review 94,
no. 3 (June 1989): 581–609. Donald Kelley, meanwhile, expressed skepticism about the newness of the
question of language for intellectual history—and hence about what was purported to be “a turn”; Kelley,
“What Is Happening to the History of Ideas?,” Journal of the History of Ideas 51, no. 1 (1990): 3–25.

anarchy and anomie—as his final chapter, titled “There Is No King in Israel,” so
clearly intimates.35
By the end of the decade, however, debates surrounding the crisis of materialist
explanation in modern European social history also came to be described in terms
of a “linguistic turn.”36 As contemporaries often noted, the radical transformations
of 1989 reinforced this connection and may have contributed to a new conception
of that turn as a distinct event—a watershed moment in the history of the discipline
of history.37 As Michael Geyer and Konrad Jarausch noted in their preface to a
special issue of Central European History, “History had come unstuck from all sorts
of framing devices that historians had devised in order to nail it down.”38
Linkages between revisionist, post-Marxist histories and a critical interest in lan-

guage were, of course, not new. In 1980, a skeptical editorial in History Workshop
Journal described how “for some time now linguistics—or an appeal to its author-
ity—has been widely used to challenge materialist theories of knowledge.”39 And in
an influential 1981 review of François Furet’s landmark revisionist text Rethinking
the French Revolution, Lynn Hunt drew parallels between Furet’s reading of Jean-
Jacques Rousseau and Derrida’s account in Of Grammatology.40 (Furet later denied
the connection, and for many Derrideans, the feeling was mutual.)41
Hunt pursued similar parallels in the 1989 introduction to her New Cultural His-
35 Novick thus wrote in his final chapter: “By the 1980s more and more practitioners were reluctantly
concluding that even by the most generous definition, history no longer constituted a coherent discipline;
not just that the whole was less than the sum of its parts, but that there was no whole—only parts.” Peter
Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity” Question in the American Historical Profession (Cambridge,
1988), 577.
36 For one example of a genealogy, the term travels from Toews’s article to Spiegel to Joyce to Stone
and Samuel. Spiegel, “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages”; Patrick
Joyce and Catriona Kelly, “History and Post-Modernism,” Past and Present, no. 133 (November 1991):
204 –213, here 208; Lawrence Stone, “History and Post-Modernism,” Past and Present, no. 135 (May
1992): 189–208, here 190; Raphael Samuel, “Reading the Signs, II: Fact-Grubbers and Mind-Readers,”
History Workshop Journal, no. 33 (Spring 1992): 220–251, here 222. For further examples of this ar-
ticulation, see Lenard R. Berlanstein’s review article “Working with Language: The Linguistic Turn in
French Labor History,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 33, no. 2 (1991): 426– 440. See also
the essays in Berlanstein, ed., Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis (Urbana,
Ill., 1993).
37 The editors of History Workshop Journal claimed: “The idea of a progressive socialist history has
been seen by many to be thrown into question, not just by events in the communist East, but also by
developments within academic studies in the West . . . scholars now often turn to theory—predominantly
literary theory—for answers to larger questions, rather than to the historical archives.” “Editorial,”
History Workshop Journal, no. 32 (Autumn 1991): v. One might note that in German, the historical
transformation associated with reunification and the “linguistic turn” are both described as a Wende.
38 Michael Geyer and Konrad H. Jarausch, “The Future of the German Past: Transatlantic Reflec-
tions for the 1990s,” Theory, Practice, and Technique, Special Issue, Central European History 22, no. 3/4
(1989): 229–259, here 229. As the editors explain, the volume was based on a conference that was held
in October 1989, but authors were given time after the events of November to revise their contributions.
Jane Caplan’s piece, a sensitive exploration of different strands of post-Marxism and poststructuralism,
did not rely on the trope of the “linguistic turn.” She was, in fact, suspicious of how, when framed as
a “battle,” “more exacting definitions and distinctions may go by the board.” Caplan, “Postmodernism,
Poststructuralism, and Deconstruction: Notes for Historians,” ibid., 260–278, here 260.
39 “Editorial: Language and History,” History Workshop Journal, no. 10 (Autumn 1980): 1.
40 Lynn Hunt, review of François Furet, Penser la Révolution française, History and Theory 20, no. 3
(1981): 313–323. In a 1989 review article on the historiography of the French Revolution, Sarah Maza
figured her reading of Furet’s relationship to poststructuralism as “much indebted to Hunt’s”; Maza,
“Politics, Culture, and the Origins of the French Revolution,” Journal of Modern History 61, no. 4 (1989):
704 –723, here 708 n. 12.
41 Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left, 266. On the limitations of Furet’s theory of

710 Judith Surkis
tory anthology. She juxtaposed—without, however, synthesizing—a series of ap-

proaches: (a) post-Marxist political histories; (b) Michel Foucault’s genealogies; (c)
Geertzian anthropology and Annales-style histories of mentalité ; (d) literary theory;
and (e) gender history. Hunt did not, at the time, use the trope of the “turn” to
describe the shared foundations of cultural history. Furthermore, she argued that
some trends exercised more force than others, with anthropology’s influence “reign-
ing supreme” and Foucault’s “anti-method” and agenda remaining “idiosyncratic.”42
The influence of literary theory (meaning the largely French thinkers who came to
be associated with “literature departments” in the United States), she claimed, had,
until that point, remained mostly the preserve of intellectual historians. The field is
represented in the volume by Lloyd Kramer’s essay on Hayden White and Dominick

LaCapra, whose respective approaches, as Hunt underscored, differed significantly:
“the former emphasizes unity; the latter, difference.”43
With the dissemination of the term, however, debates surrounding revisionist
political histories and critical histories of gender and race, as well as those in in-
tellectual history, came to turn around it—and to become collapsed and confused.
The “turn” was increasingly described as something that historians should or should
not take, as if it were a road or a means of transport (leading off, especially when
conflated with poststructuralism, into an implicitly wild unknown). Framed by scare
quotes that implied an unspecified citation and ironic distance, references to this turn
became increasingly commonplace in historiographical essays. In the 1989 volume
of Central European History, Thomas Childers described German historians as
“caught on a conceptual roundabout, uncertain whether to . . . take the ‘linguistic
turn’ into uncharted territory.”44 In the often-cited “Is All the World a Text?,” Geoff
Eley claimed that only “a relatively small number of historians” had, like Joan Scott,
“taken the train to the end of the line, through the terrain of textuality to the land
of discourse and deconstruction.” This poststructuralist train was not exactly a band-
wagon. And while Eley endorsed “the basic usefulness and interest of poststruc-
turalist theory,” he nonetheless described “the rest of us” as “partly there for the
ride, partly curious to see where it goes, and not at all sure we’ll stay very long at
the destination.”45 The “turn,” in other words, was becoming part of a disciplinary
spatio-temporal imaginary.
language, see Mark Poster, “Furet and the Deconstruction of 1789,” in Poster, Cultural History and
Postmodernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges (New York, 1997), 72–107.
42 Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, Calif., 1989), 10. Writing at almost the same
moment, Allan Megill largely concurred with her assessment of Foucault; Megill, “The Reception of
Foucault by Historians,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48, no. 1 (1987): 117–141.
43 Hunt, The New Cultural History, 15.
44 Thomas Childers, “Political Sociology and the ‘Linguistic Turn,’ ” Central European History 22, no.
3/4 (1989): 381–393, here 381.

45 Geoff Eley, “Is All the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades
Later,” in Terrence J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996),
193–243, here 214. The essay was originally delivered as a paper in 1990 at a conference at the University
of Michigan and first appeared as CSST Working Paper #55/CRSO Working Paper #445. American
historian Joyce Appleby took the vehicular metaphor to its logical extreme—the car wreck: “After his-
torians made that last turn marked ‘linguistic,’ they ran into some dangerous curves. Scholarly vehicles
were totaled; avenues of inquiry left in disrepair”; Appleby, “One Good Turn Deserves Another: Moving
beyond the Linguistic—A Response to David Harlan,” American Historical Review 94, no. 5 (December
1989): 1326–1332, here 1326. Roger Chartier gave the metaphor a different and more positive valence

Despite the ludic tone of Eley’s proclamation, the debate over whether to take
this “train” or “turn” was quite fierce, not least in the pages of the British journal
Social History (of whose editorial board Eley is a member). Such debates were, in
fact, as much about the purported turn’s identity (and indeed coherence) as about
whether historians should get on board. There were, in other words, multiple trains,
and they did not lead in the same direction. In revisiting these exchanges not only
between advocates and critics but also among purported advocates, we get a firm
sense of important and politically salient differences between them, especially with
respect to the future of Marxism.
Reactions to Gareth Stedman Jones’s revisionist history of Chartism spurred the
debate. But there were significant methodological and epistemological differences

between Stedman Jones and other self-proclaimed proponents of the “linguistic
turn.” For some, such as Patrick Joyce and James Vernon, Foucault’s critical re-
thinking of “the social” itself was an indispensable point of departure.46 Stedman
Jones, by contrast, argued vigorously against what he believed to be Foucault’s ex-
cessive weight and influence (which, it will be recalled, Hunt’s introduction had de-
nied): “If a linguistic approach to history is to be further developed, it is important
to refuse this identification. The ‘linguistic turn’ did not begin with Foucault, nor did
it—nor does it—in any sense depend upon Foucault’s version of what it meant. Fou-
cault’s theory was only one of many possible variants of a linguistic approach.”47 In
his view, Foucault’s writing remained overly indebted to Marxist narratives and cat-
egories (the bourgeoisie, in particular), even as he took distance from them. For
Stedman Jones, “the implications of 1989” were clear: historians needed to “assess
and move on from the unsorted debris left by the death of Marxism.”48
Against starker pronouncements, Eley and Social History editor Keith Nield ar-
gued for nuance and complexity—and against a wholesale abandonment of Marxism.
Taking Patrick Joyce as their main target, they sought to split some of the opposing
camps. Rejecting an “all-too familiar simplification” (“an undifferentiated ‘Marxism’
is assumed to be ‘past’ in some irretrievable and unlamented way”), they reaffirmed
by invoking Michel de Certeau’s figuration of Foucault’s theories as akin to a car driving along a cliff.
Importantly, for Certeau, what lay over the cliff was not pure discursivity, but rather a non-discursive
space where “the usually reliable foundation of language is missing.” Certeau, “Micro-Techniques and
Panoptic Discourse: A Quid Pro Quo,” in Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis,
1986), 185–192, here 189. See also Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff. For another analysis of these
metaphorics, see Sewell, “Language and Practice in Cultural History.” In debates around Subaltern
Studies, the problem of poststructuralism was framed in terms of multiplicity and incommensurability—
hence the metaphorics of attempting to ride “two horses at once.” Gyan Prakash, “Can the ‘Subaltern’
Ride? A Reply to O’Hanlon and Washbrook,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 1 (1992):
168–184.
46 James Vernon, “Who’s Afraid of the ‘Linguistic Turn’? The Politics of Social History and Its
Discontents,” Social History 19, no. 1 (1994): 81–97.

47 Gareth Stedman Jones, “The Determinist Fix: Some Obstacles to the Further Development of the
Linguistic Approach to History in the 1990s,” History Workshop Journal, no. 42 (Autumn 1996): 19–35,
here 21. See also Roger Chartier’s response, in which he denies Stedman Jones’s description of him as
“a follower” of Foucault; Chartier, “Why the Linguistic Approach Can Be an Obstacle to the Further
Development of Historical Knowledge: A Reply to Gareth Stedman Jones,” History Workshop Journal,
no. 46 (Autumn 1998): 271–272.
48 Jones, “The Determinist Fix,” 32–33.

712 Judith Surkis
Marxism’s historical and intellectual plurality.49 At the same time, they warned
against the flattening of “postmodernism” into a “seductive and spurious singular-
ity.”50
The problem, of course, is that the phrase “linguistic turn,” especially when pre-
ceded by a definite article, lends itself to homogenization. The fields and methods
of inquiry that became grouped under the moniker had distinct trajectories—at the
level of institutions, networks, and publications, as well as intellectual influences—
and different agendas, although they did on occasion intersect. To return to our prior
example, Toews’s review concentrated on a circumscribed set of intellectual histo-
rians. It did not register how questions about “discourse” and “experience” were
under discussion in other domains, such as European social history, feminist history,

or Subaltern Studies.51
For example, William Sewell and Joan Scott each published essays that directly
addressed the relationship between “experience” and discourse, taking The Making
of the English Working Class as their point of departure. Sewell’s essay pointed to
what he viewed as the unsustainable theoretical weight that E. P. Thompson’s book
placed on experience as the crucible of working-class identity. He argued that
Thompson’s narrative lacked a necessary and parallel account of transformations in
“class discourse” (transformations that he describes in terms of structural shifts).52
If Sewell supplemented Thompson’s account in order to make it more theoretically
coherent, Scott’s essay privileged analysis. It raised questions about the coherence
of class as a category of identity, and hence of the experience that Thompson posited
as its ground.53 Scott’s and Sewell’s essays thus worked in different directions. But
what their arguments shared—in contrast to Toews—was a pointed questioning of
experience as a coherent concept or category in historical writing.
Also writing in 1988, Rosalind O’Hanlon drew a parallel between debates sur-
rounding the category of experience in Thompson’s work and presumptions about
identity, experience, and recovery in the writings of the Subaltern Studies school. In
a powerful review essay, she deconstructed presumptions about the unicity of ex-
perience and its autonomy in ways that paralleled Scott’s critique of Thompson.
O’Hanlon’s critical account of Subaltern Studies, while informed by thinkers such
49 Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, “Starting Over: The Present, the Post-Modern and the Moment of
Social History,” Social History 20, no. 3 (1995): 355–364, here 356.
50 Ibid., 363.
51 Toews did discuss parallels between trends of new historicism, the social history of ideas, intel-
lectual history, and social history in a later essay, but he was hesitant about grouping them together under
the term “linguistic turn.” Indeed, he remarked at one point, with respect to the influence of Geertzian
anthropology, “For historians this turn to interpreting the past in terms of a process of reconstruction
based on cultural units as systems of signification has often been conflated in both revealing and con-
fusing ways with what is sometimes called the ‘linguistic’ turn.” John E. Toews, “Stories of Difference
and Identity: New Historicism in Literature and History,” Monatshefte 84, no. 2 (1992): 193–211, here
196.
52 William H. Sewell, Jr., “How Classes Are Made: Critical Reflections on E. P. Thompson’s Theory
of Working-Class Formation,” in Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland, eds., E. P. Thompson: Critical
Debates (Philadelphia, 1990), 50–77. Sewell’s article first appeared as CRSO Working Paper #336 (Uni-
versity of Michigan, July 1986).
53 Joan Wallach Scott, “Women in The Making of the English Working Class,” in Scott, Gender and
the Politics of History (New York, 1988), 68–90. My point is not to suggest that Toews should have known
about or cited this work, which was published after his own. It is instead to indicate both the echoes
and the differences between these parallel discussions.

as Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Toril

Moi, and Gayatri Spivak, was not cast in terms of a presumptive opposition between
discourse and experience. Nor did she reduce these thinkers to a shared position or
movement. She rather drew on their resources in order to raise questions about the
Subaltern Studies project, namely its implicit effort to restore the autonomy of sub-
altern experience.54
Joan Scott eventually brought these parallel discussions together in her well-
known 1991 article “The Evidence of Experience,” in which she discussed historians’
recourse to “experience” as a foundational category. Naming Toews as one example
among several, Scott questioned the broad framework opposing language and ex-
perience on which his account was based. Rather than reasserting the autonomy of

the linguistic over and above an “irreducible experience,” she interrogated the op-
positional (and homogenizing) terms in which Toews had cast the debate.55
Written in part as a response to Scott, Kathleen Canning’s 1994 essay “Feminist
History after the Linguistic Turn” echoed Toews’s title, and to some extent his ar-
gument, especially with respect to “experience.” At the same time, Canning claimed
the autonomy—and even precedence—of feminist history’s “linguistic turn” from
that taken in intellectual history, which had its origins in “the influence of Foucault,
Derrida, and/or Lacan.”56 Feminist history’s “linguistic turn” was thus, for Canning,
distinct from rather than dependent on poststructuralist theories, of which she re-
mained suspicious. In a double move, she both questioned the “turn’s” coherence
and reasserted a discourse/experience opposition. She thus wrote: “ ‘the linguistic
turn’ (like the term postmodernism) has become a catch-all phrase for divergent
critiques of established historical paradigms, narratives, and chronologies, encom-
passing not only poststructuralist literary criticism, linguistic theory, and philosophy
but also cultural and symbolic anthropology, new historicism, and gender history.”57
While questioning the coherence of the “turn,” Canning nonetheless reasserted the
opposition between “discourse” and “experience” that Toews used to characterize
54 Rosalind O’Hanlon, “Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in
Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 1 (1988): 189–224. O’Hanlon’s subsequent arguments
with Subaltern Studies were more pointed. With David Washbrook, she would go on to figure the “anti-
foundationalist” strain in Subaltern Studies as insufficiently attentive to class and capital, and hence as
politically compromised—i.e., as “the bad conscience of liberalism.” O’Hanlon and Washbrook, “After
Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World,” Comparative Studies in Society and
History 34, no. 1 (1992): 141–167, here 166. See also Prakash, “Can the ‘Subaltern’ Ride?” In her account
of Subaltern Studies in Latin American history, Florencia Mallon was more measured in her assessment
of the tensions between a Gramscian focus on hegemony and subaltern experience, Foucauldian ac-
counts of the microphysics of power, and a Derridean focus on the instability of meaning. Following
Prakash, Mallon described these tensions as politically and intellectually productive rather than dis-
abling. Notably, these authors, while focused on the relationship between Marxism and anti-founda-
tionalism, do not use the rhetoric of the “linguistic turn.” Mallon, “The Promise and Dilemma of Sub-
altern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History,” American Historical Review 99, no. 5
(December 1994): 1491–1515.
55 Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 788.
56 Kathleen Canning, “Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Ex-
perience,” Signs 19, no. 2 (1994): 368– 404, here 370. It is worth noting the institutional connections here.
The original version of Scott’s essay “Historicizing Experience” was presented at the same 1990 con-
ference where Geoff Eley first presented “Is All the World a Text?” Canning’s response, meanwhile,
appeared initially as a working paper in the same series, minus the titular reference to Toews: Canning,
“Contesting the Power of Categories: Discourse, Experience, and Feminist Resistance” (CSST Working
Paper #83/CRSO Working Paper #479, University of Michigan, 1992).
57 Canning, “Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn,” 369.

714 Judith Surkis
intellectual history’s “linguistic turn.” She sought, by contrast, to identify mediating

terms (the body, agency) as a way beyond this presumptive opposition. Vacillating
between deployment and disavowal, Canning’s usage exemplified historians’ ambiv-
alent relationship to the epistemological questions the “turn” supposedly entailed.
By the mid-1990s, the term had become routinized—oddly meaningful despite (or
was it because of?) its ambiguousness. In a sense, the disciplinary fixation on the
“turn” can be seen as a fetish in the psychoanalytic sense. It simultaneously acknowl-
edged and disavowed epistemological challenges and strenuous arguments, thus
overcoming and containing a perceived threat.58

THE POINT HERE IS NOT TO recycle old debates, but rather to highlight the gaps and
fissures that existed at the very moment that this decisive turn was supposed to be
happening. Historians have nonetheless continued to use the language of the “turn”
and figured it to be both a general and a generational event. As Eley recalled it in
2005, “In the world of historians, this was the much vaunted ‘linguistic turn’—a
general discursive shift in the rhetoric and practice of the profession from ‘social’
to ‘cultural’ modes of analysis.”59
Indeed, recent accounts suggest that the shift became “hegemonic.”60 The claim
may seem surprising, given that, as Spiegel notes as an aside in her presidential
address, “the actual number of historians actively engaged with these questions was
probably relatively small in comparison to the field as a whole.”61 Spiegel nonetheless
asserts here—and elsewhere—that the impact of the “turn” was so broad-based and
significant as to have radically modified the kinds of claims that all historians are now
prepared to make. Citing Sewell, she reads the recent “revisionist” turn away from
semiotic analysis and toward questions of practice and agency as demonstrative of
this prior prominence. In a sense, these newer developments are supposed to prove
the previous moment’s (albeit now fading) “hegemony.”62
Given the diversity of the trends associated with the linguistic turn as well as the
constantly contested character of its reception, Spiegel’s invocations of the first per-
son plural possessive pronoun “our” and her repeated references to a collective “we”
of historians are at once striking and significant. “We all sense that this profound
change has run its course,” she remarks. And further: “we need some explanation
of how and why this sea change in history occurred.” The goals of her analysis, then,
58 Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1961), 21: 147–157, here 154.
59 Eley, A Crooked Line, 125.
60 The introduction to the AHR Forum on A Crooked Line thus describes how, by the late 1980s,
“Many, if not most, of [social history’s] practitioners had turned to cultural history, which soon achieved
hegemonic status”; American Historical Review 113, no. 2 (April 2008): 391–392, here 391.
61 Spiegel, “The Task of the Historian,” 3 n. 5.
62 Ibid., 3. Sewell figures the publication of Hunt’s 1989 volume as a marker of cultural history’s
“hegemonic position.” Sewell, Logics of History, 48. Neither Sewell nor Spiegel elaborates on their usage
of hegemony as a way to describe the “turn’s” trajectory. It is worth recalling the genealogy of the term
offered by post-Marxist theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in the 1980s. They drew implicit
historical parallels between the “postmodern” present and hegemony’s emergence in Gramsci’s work
at another moment in which Marxist historical narrative was in crisis. Drawing on Foucault, they argue
that hegemony emerged to “fill a hiatus that had opened in the chain of historical necessity.” Laclau
and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London, 1985), 7.

are simultaneously retrospective and prospective, as she hopes to “offer some in-
sights into what remains valuable as we move forward into a new era of historical
concerns.”63 Her account of the historiographical past is therefore marshaled toward
a vision of the historiographical future. She thus signals the topics that have been
put on the agenda of history’s future (into which we have now moved): questions of
economy and technology; diaspora and displacement; empire, territoriality, and the
transnational. It is difficult to argue with Spiegel’s assessment of these current trends.
But how should we understand the relationship between thematic shifts and theo-
retical or epistemological reorientation?
It is important to underscore that Spiegel positions herself as favorably disposed
to the “semiotic challenge” and as anxious to preserve some of its insights for future

historical practice. Structured analytically and metaphorically by a generational
model, her speech at once indicates a waning interest in the “linguistic turn” and
traces the afterlife of her cohort’s contributions. On the one hand, she suggests that
their work is done, now that “the ‘semiotic challenge’ has been addressed, absorbed.”
On the other, she signals the importance of preservation, the need, at the very least,
to “appreciate and employ what poststructuralism has taught us.”64 But does her
narrative of generational supersession work against rather than toward that end?
A model of successive and specific historical “generations” is at the heart of Spie-
gel’s analysis. Remaining within a Euro-American frame, she correlates the radical
epistemological questioning of postwar (French) philosophy with the ineffable sense
of loss specific to the second post-Holocaust generation. The connection, she argues,
is not directly causal, but a displacement, or “alchemy,” exemplified in the thought
of Jacques Derrida. Derrida’s insistent assertions of unstable origins, present ab-
sences, and impossible wholes thus exemplify, in her view, “an entire generation’s
understanding of the wreck of history attendant upon the war and the revelations
of its horrors.”65 This is in many ways a provocative analysis, especially given the
skepticism with which historians so often treat Derrida’s thought (when they treat
it at all).66 The argument is, however, difficult to assess, in part because Spiegel never
clearly explains who belongs to this generation and why. Even if we accept “post-
Holocaust” as a chronological marker (although questions might be raised about
this, too), its status as a generational demarcation is more fraught. How are we to
map the contours of the “generation[s]” formed by “the event” not only chrono-
logically, but also geographically? Even scholars who focus specifically on Holocaust
survivors and their children worry over the importance of drawing careful distinc-
tions along the lines of age, nationality, and experience.67
63 Spiegel, “The Task of the Historian,” 3, emphasis added.
64 Ibid., 10–11.
65 Ibid., 8. For a brilliant account of the multiple factors—at once institutional, religious, philo-
sophical, and political—that influenced the “young Derrida,” see Baring, The Young Derrida and French
Philosophy.
66 For a discussion of historians’ vexed relationship to Derrida, see Ethan Kleinberg, “Haunting
History: Deconstruction and the Spirit of Revision,” History and Theory 46, no. 4 (2007): 113–143.
67 Susan Rubin Suleiman, “The 1.5 Generation: Thinking about Child Survivors and the Holocaust,”
American Imago 59, no. 3 (2002): 277–295. On the difficult chronology of when the Holocaust, as such,
was “known,” particularly in the French context, see Samuel Moyn, A Holocaust Controversy: The Tre-
blinka Affair in Postwar France (Waltham, Mass., 2005); Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and
Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). See also Tara Zahra,
The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II (Cambridge, Mass., 2011).

716 Judith Surkis
Spiegel’s account is likewise notable for the starkness with which it adopts not
only a generational, but also a distinctly Euro-American frame. She focuses on how
the metaphysical concerns of the post-Holocaust generation intersected with po-
litical and institutional developments, especially in the United States. She thus sug-
gests elsewhere that “it is worth noting how tied to the experiences of a single gen-
eration these transformations appear to be.”68 Here again, her argument parallels
that of Sewell, and in certain ways Eley’s A Crooked Line. And she indeed draws on
their generational analyses as evidence for her case.69 For Spiegel, the rise of the
“linguistic” and/or the “cultural” turn can be explained by a generational conver-
gence between “post-Holocaust” metaphysical concerns, on the one hand, and the
more directly political, economic, and institutional trends traced by Sewell and Eley,

on the other. How can we historically assess this recent “turn” to a generational
account of historiography itself?
In a 1973 essay, “The Historical Problem of Generations,” Alan B. Spitzer wrote:
“Each generation writes its own history of generations.”70 His exploration of this
problem was marked by self-awareness, as he invoked at the outset a proliferation
of work on “generations” in the wake of contemporary student revolts. Spitzer drew
on an earlier set of discussions, going back to the 1920s, on the usefulness of the
generation as a category of historical analysis. That earlier debate had included the
likes of sociologist Karl Mannheim, who sought to refine the concept, and historian
Lucien Febvre, who questioned its explanatory power.71 In other words, the notion
of generation in history is tied to a distinct intellectual and political history. Pierre
Nora, for example, locates the advent of “generational consciousness” in and with
the historical rupture of the French Revolution, and he depicts it as a decisive, and
constitutive, moment in specifically French historical consciousness. In citing these
moments, Nora thus asserts that “generations are powerfully, perhaps even primar-
ily, fabricators of lieux de mémoire, or mnemonic sites, which form the fabric of their
provisional identities and stake out the boundaries of their generational memo-
ries.”72 Featured in a book devoted to French national “realms of memory,” the
claim is intended to be performative: it seeks to create what it describes—including
the construction and consignment of the “generation of 1968” to the space of mem-
ory.73
Generational arguments are not only a powerful way to carve up historical time.
They also reassert the boundaries of collective identity, not only in specific times,
but also in specific places. As a result, the construction of a “generation” cannot be
assumed as self-evident: it is a productive, rather than merely descriptive, concept.
For some time, history, as a discipline, was supposed to be internally riven and scat-
68 Spiegel, “Revising the Past/Revisiting the Present,” 18.

69 Ibid., 15.
70 Alan B. Spitzer, “The Historical Problem of Generations,” American Historical Review 78, no. 5
(December 1973): 1353–1385, here 1353.

71 On the history of proliferation of thought about “generations” in this period, see Robert Wohl,
The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, 1979).

72 Pierre Nora, “Generation,” in Lawrence Kritzman, ed., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French
Past (New York, 1996), 499–531, here 526. See also Hans Jaeger, “Generations in History: Reflections
on a Controversial Concept,” History and Theory 24, no. 3 (1985): 273–292.
73 On the stakes of this “generational” account of May 1968 in France, see Kristin Ross, May ’68 and
Its Afterlives (Chicago, 2002).

tered in multiple directions—in part as a result of the innovations (or incursions)

that came to be associated with the “linguistic turn.” But recent accounts of the past
historiographical generation (those presumed to have participated, in one way or
another, in the “turn”) strikingly reassert community. Does this narrative consign
that once-troubled past to history in order to reassert the coherence and comity of
the discipline in the process?74
The historiographical “generation” dovetails conveniently with a coherent con-
ception of historiographical “turns.” It presupposes collective new beginnings as well
as eventual endings. In its wake, space is made for new “turns,” now that, according
to Spiegel—and others—the postwar revisionist moment is “effectively over.”75
In order to explain this now-passed postwar moment of historical revision,

Spiegel draws on Michel de Certeau’s account of how “historiography separates its
present time from a past.”76 This model of the “historiographical operation” is taken
from his now-classic work The Writing of History, which was first published in 1975.
The book has a complex relationship to the thematics of memory, loss, and death
that Spiegel aims to historicize. As she explains, he articulates the death and ritual
mourning of the past with a vital present and future. For Certeau, then, “ ‘to mark’
a past is to make a place for the dead, but also to redistribute the space of possibility.”
Historiography uses “the narrativity that buries the dead as a way of establishing a
place for the living.”77 An analogous logic underlies the aim of Spiegel’s address: by
describing and explaining a temporal and historiographical scission, its narrative arc
is supposed to make room for younger historians by historicizing the recent histo-
riographical past.
But even as it describes this generational movement, Spiegel’s argument indicates
the impossibility of creating sharp chronological (and methodological) ruptures—
not least in her own (re)turn to Certeau as guide. She thus rejects an absolute break
between the historical past and future, and suggests that the insights of “postmod-
ernism” cannot be “so easily jettisoned.”78 And indeed, Certeau’s own account of
historical writing highlights a similar difficulty. He forcefully challenges models of
discrete periodization, even as he describes the logic implicit in the “historiograph-
ical operation.” In his view, the past’s intelligibility in terms of distinct moments or
periods is based on procedures of selection. The apparent coherence of those mo-
ments remains fragile, however, as the return of what he describes as repressed
“shards” and “remainders” can always “discreetly perturb the pretty order of a line
of ‘progress’ or a system of interpretation.”79
Revisiting some of the crucial early moments of writing about the “linguistic turn”
can help us recall some of those remainders to the surface. The complex debates that
74 For a related discussion, see Geoff Eley, “Peace in the Neighborhood,” Left History 12, no. 1
(2007): 111–125.
75 Spiegel, “Revising the Past/Revisiting the Present,” 3. The argument is first elaborated in Gabrielle
M. Spiegel, “Orations of the Dead/Silences of the Living: The Sociology of the Linguistic Turn,” in
Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore, 1997), 29– 43.
For a parallel critique of this logic of “entombment,” see Sylvia Schafer, “Still Turning: Language,
‘Theory’ and History’s Fascination with the New,” forthcoming in differences 23, no. 2 (2012).
76 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York, 1988), 3.
77 Ibid., 100.
78 Spiegel, “The Task of the Historian,” 11.
79 Certeau, The Writing of History, 4.

718 Judith Surkis
took place in the 1980s and 1990s—about discourse and subjectivity, or the rela-
tionship between “linguistic” structures, agency, and experience—show that there
was no singular “turn.” These discussions did not occur once and for all, in an orderly
logic of progression and supersession, or uniformly across the discipline. To take
another example, the chronologically contemporaneous theoretical and method-
ological ferment associated with Subaltern Studies figures unevenly and problem-
atically in European historians’ retrospective accounts of the “linguistic turn,” de-
spite certain shared attributes, Marxist revisionism, and a concern with symbolic
representation among them. Eley thus writes: “this South Asian historiography both
presaged and paralleled the course of the ‘linguistic turn’ in the West.”80 The as-
sessment is provocative because it posits parallelism and indeed priority to “post-

colonial” historiography, rather than reasserting the rhetoric of temporal delay that
figures such as Dipesh Chakrabarty have so powerfully critiqued.81 Eley does not
posit incommensurability between these histories (he notes, for example, a shared
Gramscian heritage), but he nonetheless presents the “linguistic turn” as a specific
moment in Euro-American historiography, not as a cross-disciplinary trend.82
If historians have returned to these questions of late, it is because they are as
concerned about history’s future as they are about its past. Sewell’s Logics of History
is exemplary in this regard. In the chapter titled “The Political Unconscious of Social
and Cultural History,” he strongly states his goal: “to revive some of the lost virtues
of social history without abandoning the tremendous intellectual gains attendant
upon history’s linguistic turn.”83 This is an engaged history, both politically and per-
sonally: the future of the discipline—and his relationship to it—is at stake.
Sewell construes a linguistic theory of the social to be the shared epistemological
basis of “cultural history”—and the principal source of its rupture from “social his-
tory.” In order to map future directions, he reconstructs the political effects of Euro-
American historians’ linguistic epistemologies in the postwar decades. His narrative
traces two parallel paths in order, in the end, to suggest a causal relationship between
them. His “internalist” account of this recent history is a truncated prosopography,
in which he groups himself together with Lynn Hunt and Joan Scott. Without side-
lining his own contributions, Sewell argues that “the rapidity of the rise of cultural
history in the 1980s and the widening of the epistemological fissure dividing it from
social history were disproportionately fueled by developments in women’s history.”
Here he credits feminism, the “critical and deconstructive historical analysis of cen-
tral cultural categories—sex and gender,” with helping “to radicalize and energize
cultural history as a whole.”84 This is, however, an ambivalent attribution of credit,
given Sewell’s subsequent critique of the political limitations of cultural history (and
especially its linguistic epistemology).
80 Eley, A Crooked Line, 146. This argument is more difficult to make with respect to Latin Ameri-
canists’ appropriation of the subaltern model.

81 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
82 For a forceful critique of the logic of incommensurability and its political implications, see Manu
Goswami’s contribution to the AHR Forum on Eley’s book: Goswami, “Remembering the Future,”
American Historical Review 113, no. 2 (April 2008): 417– 424. She here elaborates on arguments set forth
in Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago, 2004).
84 Ibid., 47, 48. For a contrasting account of the recent history of historiography, see Scott, “History-
Writing as Critique.”

Sewell’s social and structural account recapitulates arguments by Fredric Jame-

son (hence the reference to the “political unconscious”) and David Harvey—them-
selves first formulated, it should be recalled, in the 1980s—on the historical con-
vergence of postmodernism, post-Fordism, and neoliberal ideology.85 Following
their analyses, he writes: “I think it is essential to recognize that the cultural turn
was also fueled, in ways we were essentially unaware of, by a secret affinity with an
emergent logic of capitalist development.”86 According to Sewell, history’s turn to
language and culture misrecognized late capitalist logics of history. In his genera-
tional analysis, “1960s rebels” misread their historical moment: they attacked a “col-
lapsing Fordist order” when their actual target should have been the emerging “order
of globalized flexible accumulation.”87 In this melancholic narrative, the “turn” was

politically well-intentioned, but ultimately misguided.
In order to restore clarity to historical—and political—vision, Sewell calls for a
(re)turn to social science: “Critical awareness of the potential complicities between
contemporary forms of capitalism and a purely cultural history seems to me an es-
sential condition of clearheaded and efficacious epistemological, methodological,
and practical work in historical studies today.”88 A number of historical and political
assumptions are written into this call, not least that his generation’s “linguistic turn”
produced what he describes as a “purely cultural history” and that its practitioners
were blind to this complicity.89 Sewell’s narrative ends up minimizing the history of
dissension in social theory and historical practice, even though their implicit and
explicit political effects were chief differends in those debates. Like Spiegel, he seeks
to preserve some of the theoretical and critical insights generated in past decades.
But by turning the “turn” into a shared generational event or moment, Sewell also
suggests that it is a time whose time has come—and gone. We are collectively urged,
instead, to write histories of late capitalism’s present that understand deeper (struc-
tural) logics rather than misreading (or, worse, perpetuating) its surface cultural
effects.
SEWELL THUS OFFERS US a cautionary tale about the dangers of untimely thinking. His
call for disciplinary reorientation in the present assumes periodization, generational
unity, and implicit world-historical movement. But does this narrative hold together?
What happens to this story when the presumptive methodological, generational, and
global coherence of the “linguistic turn” is contested? The evidence, when examined
closely, suggests that the “linguistic turn” was not a coherent moment. It cannot be
conceived as the intellectual property of a single historiographical generation or
consigned to a collective past.
It is unclear, for example, how feminist analysis coincides with Sewell’s claims of
generational cecity. According to his account, feminism’s focus on the historical con-
85 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change
(Oxford, 1989); Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left
Review, no. 146 (1984): 53–92.
87 Ibid., 60.
88 Ibid., 62.
89 Ibid.

720 Judith Surkis
stitution of sex and gender lent cultural history political energy, but it also entailed
a radically linguistic—and hence critically limited—epistemology. The “micro” focus
of histories of gender and sexuality (and in particular, those influenced by Foucault)
were, he suggests, ill-equipped to address broad structural economic and social
change. For Sewell, an emphasis on the plasticity of cultural categories is politically
symptomatic rather than analytically trenchant.90
This view of feminist history and theory is not only inexact, it is politically limiting.
Consider how a focus on gender and sexuality helped to establish the historical and
historiographical significance of feminized consumption alongside masculinized pro-
duction.91 Today, feminist analyses, and especially those that draw on Foucauldian
accounts of governmentality, provide signal insights into the contemporary dynamics

of consumption and capitalism, neoliberalism and globalization. While by no means
unified by a single position or approach, such work demonstrates how gendered
constructions of agency, desire, and sexual victimization are integral to the con-
temporary restructuring of markets, state sovereignty, and international order.92
What is more, it helps to illuminate what anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli has
90 On the link between Foucauldian microphysics and the eclipse of structural analysis, see ibid., 59.
On the eclipsing of “the social” by a focus on “culture and gender,” in the case of History Workshop
Journal, see ibid., 65. Daniel Rodgers pursues an analogous line of argument about the divisive effects
of microanalyses of power, including by feminists, as part of a broader dynamic of social fragmentation
in America; Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, Mass., 2011). For a critique of this elision, see Samuel
Moyn, “Studying the Fault Lines,” Dissent 58, no. 2 (2011): 101–105, here 103. In a parallel argument,
Nancy Fraser has suggested a “perverse, subterranean elective affinity” between feminism and neolib-
eralism; see Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,” New Left Review 56 (March–
April 2009): 97–117, here 108.
91 For how Sewell’s own recent reflections on the history of consumption register this insight, see
William H. Sewell, “The Empire of Fashion and the Rise of Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France,”
Past and Present 206, no. 1 (2010): 81–120. Some of the landmarks in the Euro-American field include
Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 2005); Victoria de Grazia with Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things: Gender and Con-
sumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley, Calif., 1996); Jennifer M. Jones, Sexing La Mode: Gender,
Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France (Oxford, 2004); Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The
Making of America’s Beauty Culture (New York, 1998); Katherine Pence and Paul Betts, Socialist Modern:
East German Everyday Culture and Politics (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2008); Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping
for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, N.J., 2000); Mary Louise Roberts,
“Gender, Consumption, and Commodity Culture,” American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (June 1998):
817–844; Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian
London (Chicago, 1992). On the colonial and global dimensions of consumption, see Timothy Burke,
Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Dur-
ham, N.C., 1996); Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Trans-
national Feminist Practices (Minneapolis, 1994); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and
Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York, 1995); Alys Eve Weinbaum and the Modern Girl Around
the World Research Group, The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Global-
ization (Durham, N.C., 2008).
92 Notable contributions from the field of political theory, sociology, and anthropology include Özlem
Aslan and Zeynep Gambetti, “Provincializing Fraser’s History: Feminism and Neoliberalism Revisited,”
History of the Present 1, no. 1 (2011): 130–147; Suzanne Bergeron, “Political Economy Discourses of
Globalization and Feminist Politics,” Signs 26, no. 4 (2001): 983–1006; Elizabeth Bernstein, Temporarily
Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (Chicago, 2007); Wendy Brown, “American
Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization,” Political Theory 34, no. 6
(2006): 690–714; Brown, “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” Theory and Event 7, no.
1 (2003): 1–19; Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on
Democracy (Boston, 2003); Michel Feher, “Self-Appreciation; or, the Aspirations of Human Capital,”
Public Culture 21, no. 1 (2009): 21– 41; Janet R. Jakobsen, “Perverse Justice,” GLQ 18, no. 1 (2012):
19– 45; Rosalind Morris, “Failures of Domestication: Speculations on Globality, Economy, and the Sex
of Excess in Thailand,” differences 13, no. 1 (2002): 45–76; Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception:

recently described as the distinct “grammars” of temporality—orientations toward

futurity as well as civilizational rhetorics of “pastness”—that structure the differ-
ential distribution of neoliberalism’s, or what she refers to as late liberalism’s, global
effects.93 In sum, it is crucial to recall that such feminist analysis remains a vital
historical and political resource.
The temporalizing logic of turn talk forecloses these critical possibilities rather
than creating new horizons. It implicitly consigns still-vibrant analytic resources to
a periodized posterity and politically compromised epistemology.94 What is at stake
here is not the positive or negative legacy of a purported “linguistic turn,” but the
usefulness and disadvantages of such fetishized “turns” for history’s life. If narratives
of generational supersession represent analytical and political foreclosure, what kind

of horizon does the re-membering of this past open up?
Here again, feminist analysis remains salient, not least because feminists have
examined the at once epistemological and political limits of “generational thinking.”
Histories of feminist “generations” or “waves” regularly grapple with questions of
temporality: how to articulate past achievements, present-day urgencies, and visions
of an alternative future. Should the new challenges in the present be understood as
a sign and symptom of past or current failures? As Judith Roof has noted, “gen-
erational” models of feminist history ironically remain beholden not only to an oe-
dipalized and reproductive conception of family, but also to a linear conception of
historical time. In recasting historical temporality, Roof suggests that “generations”
no longer appear as the most accurate or productive framework for articulating past,
present, and future: “In a paradigm where history, governed by linear time, becomes
the cause of ensuing events, the concepts of originality, pioneer, tradition, and prec-
edent make sense. But if we challenge the very notions of time and history that
ground these ideas, generation becomes an insignificant term in the creation, re-
creation, sharing, and proliferation of feminist knowledges.”95 Thus “generational
thinking” may limit the proliferation of knowledge tout court, not least by consigning
the critical resources of feminism to a chronologically and politically exhausted mo-
ment.
Most pressing now, as we proliferate histories of our present, is the need to un-
settle rather than confirm what appear to be increasingly sedimented narratives.
Genealogical analysis is particularly helpful for doing this. In one sense, there is a
family resemblance between genealogy and generational thinking, at least when kin-
Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, N.C., 2006); Lisa Rofel, Desiring China: Experiments
in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture (Durham, N.C., 2007).
93 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Lib-
eralism (Durham, N.C., 2011)

94 Indeed, the proliferation of new turns recalls Walter Benjamin’s ironic assessment of ever new
aesthetic movements in Weimar Germany, such as Expressionism and New Objectivity. In his view, they
ended up reproducing the very commercial logics that they supposedly critiqued: “Expressionism ex-
hibited the revolutionary gesture, the raised arm, the clenched fist in papier-mâché. After this advertising
campaign, the New Objectivity . . . was added to the catalogue.” Walter Benjamin, “Left-Wing Mel-
ancholy,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2: 1927–1934, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William
Jennings, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 423– 427, here 424.
95 Judith Roof, “Generational Difficulties; or, The Fear of a Barren History,” in Devoney Looser and
E. Ann Kaplan, eds., Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue (Minneapolis, 1997), 69–87, here 86.
See also Robyn Wiegman, “Feminism’s Apocalyptic Futures,” New Literary History 31, no. 4 (2000):
805–825.

722 Judith Surkis
ship relations are naturalized and universalized.96 But when viewed as a critical tech-
nique for mapping relations (and non-relations), genealogy reveals the construction
and constriction of generational ideas. While overtly engaged in and by questions
of the present, it does not seek to discipline thinking toward a singular historio-
graphical future.
In reading the entrails of recent debates, we can see the composite character of
the centaur known as the “linguistic turn.” Following Paul Veyne’s proposition, one
cannot make true or erroneous statements about such animals.97 Rather than seeking
to uncover the beast’s hidden nature, we have seen how it came into being—as both
myth and fetish. The linguistic turn—and other purported “turns”—might be better
understood not as historically inevitable disciplinary trajectories, but as specifically

located, imaginatively cast, at once multiple, overlapping, and dynamic constella-
tions. In this astrological rendering, there is also space for “untimely thinking,” or
what Walter Benjamin, citing Friedrich Nietzsche, called a “star without atmo-
sphere.”98
96 See, for example, David Schneider’s pathbreaking and controversial critique of the genealogical
presumption in anthropology in Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1984).
97 Paul Veyne, “Foucault Revolutionizes History,” in Arnold I. Davidson, ed., Foucault and His In-
terlocutors (Chicago, 1997), 146–182, here 176. For Veyne’s discussion of the ambivalent status of cen-
taurs in Greek and Roman mythology, see Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on
the Constitutive Imagination, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago, 1988), 54 –57.
98 This was Benjamin’s characterization of Charles Baudelaire’s relationship to the Second Empire;
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections,
ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1968), 155–200, here 194. The citation was of Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed.
Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge, 1983), 57–123, here 97. And, with reference to Heraclitus, see Nietzsche,
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (Chicago, 1962), 67. For a recent discussion of the political
possibilities of “untimely thinking,” see Gary Wilder, “Untimely Vision: Aimé Césaire, Decolonization,
Utopia,” Public Culture 21, no. 1 (2009): 101–140.
Judith Surkis is currently Visiting Associate Professor of History at Columbia

University and a Visitor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Ad-
vanced Study. In Fall 2012 she will be Associate Professor of History at Rutgers
University. Her current book project, Scandalous Subjects: Intimacy and Inde-
cency in France and French Algeria, 1830–1930, explores the role of law and
gender in Algerian colonization. She is also the author of Sexing the Citizen:
Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–1920 (Cornell University Press, 2006).

SURKIS, Judith. When Was The Linguistic Turn

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AHR Forum

When Was the Linguistic Turn? A Genealogy

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IN HIS WORK ON THE HISTORY of historical periodization, Reinhart Koselleck describes

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toriographical turns have proliferated. But in this methodological whirlwind, little

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Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley, Calif., 1984).

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challenge issued from multiple domains at once: philosophical investigations of lan-

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turn” with “cultural history,” see Cook, this forum.

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417– 438, here 417, 419.

The Linguistic Turn, 1–39, here 9.

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27 Toews, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn,” 882.

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tory anthology. She juxtaposed—without, however, synthesizing—a series of ap-

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3/4 (1989): 381–393, here 381.

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Discontents,” Social History 19, no. 1 (1994): 81–97.

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as Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Toril

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intellectual history’s “linguistic turn.” She sought, by contrast, to identify mediating

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68 Spiegel, “Revising the Past/Revisiting the Present,” 18.

(December 1973): 1353–1385, here 1353.

The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, 1979).

Its Afterlives (Chicago, 2002).

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tered in multiple directions—in part as a result of the innovations (or incursions)

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canists’ appropriation of the subaltern model.

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Sewell’s social and structural account recapitulates arguments by Fredric Jame-

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