The Linguistic Turn

“On the face of it, the question of whether history is fact or fiction should be easy to answer just by drawing a bright line: history cannot be fiction since the most basic ground rule for the discipline—in its modern form, at least—is that you are not allowed to make things up. But if modern professional norms tell us that history must be grounded in verifiable facts, postmodern sensibilities make us inescapably aware that all historical accounts are the products of choices”

“It was easy to subscribe to that ideal at a time when nobody was around to challenge it plausibly. For decades, the near consensus about historical objectivity was linked to the fact that history departments were extremely homogeneous workplaces peopled by white male Protestant scholars from upper-class backgrounds.”

“Far more disruptive to the epistemology of the discipline was the arrival in history departments, starting in the 1970s, of small but vocal minorities of women and African-American scholars. These groups introduced new approaches to the past that for the first time demanded that the historian’s identity be an openly acknowledged component of scholarship.”

“Only the most radical argued for embracing ‘subjectivity,’ but the more different perspectives on history accumulated, the harder it became to believe that any historian, however honest and well-intentioned, could tell the story of the past from a position of Olympian detachment, untainted by class, gender, racial, national, and other biases.”

“Viewed in global context, the objectivity long prized by Euro-American scholars amounts to the cherry on the cake of a centuries-long process of Western erasure of competing historical traditions, an ideal linked to underlying convictions about the value of written (‘objective’) documents as sources and of history as a unitary, linear process.”

“‘Postmodernism’ is a catchall term frequently used to describe the intellectual tsunami that hit the humanistic end of the academy with full force in the 1980s, originating in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, and literary studies . . . For our purposes, the most important aspect of postmodernism, as it came to affect historical work and nourish controversy, is its emphasis on language and ‘text.’”

“Structures, not people, generate meaning, and humans are therefore not the causes but the effects of linguistic and cultural structures: we can think, speak—in short, exist—only through preexisting grids of collective meaning. Structuralism is therefore ‘antihumanist,’ in the technical sense that it discounts individual human behavior and experience, which it views as subordinate to systems of signs.”

“This sort of high theory sounds remote from the preoccupations of most historians, and indeed only a tiny number of them engaged firsthand with the writings of theorists like Derrida. Within academia, however, structuralism and poststructuralism helped create, by the 1980s, a broad intellectual climate known as postmodernism whose implications translated into controversial propositions regarding historians’ approaches to the past.”

“the 1980s saw the advent in Western historical studies of approaches to the past in which sources were viewed not as transparent windows onto a past reality but as ‘texts.’ The emphasis on ‘texts,’ which came to be known as the ‘linguistic turn,’ was a change in perspective whereby historians sympathetic to movements like postmodernism and the new cultural history started reading sources as patterns of words and stories, as forms of ‘fiction’ in the broadest sense, rather than as documentary evidence.”

“All historical writing, White argues, is a form of fiction-making. He does not thereby suggest that historians invent documents or sources, but that at least in the modern Western mode, historical writing invariably adheres to one of several types of narrative plots drawn from, in the broadest sense, literary culture.”

“A rigorously postmodern position does indeed present a serious philosophical challenge to the way most people think of history in that it suggests we can never be assured that the past really happened. All we historians have, a postmodernist would argue, are words and ‘texts’ (including oral testimony, images, and physical artifacts), whose relationship to a ‘real past’ can never be known.”

“Agreement reigns in principle that historians are bound by the facts and obey a strict embargo on invention. But the historian’s task also consists in assembling scattered sources and connecting the dots between them, and superior historical work involves the ability to imagine the past and recreate it in vivid prose. Disagreement often arises, often contentiously, as to which forms of dot-connecting and imagination are licit and which are not.”

“all those old organising frameworks that presupposed the privileging of various centres (things that are, for example, Anglo-centric, Euro-centric, ethno-centric, gender-centric, logo-centric) are no longer regarded as legitimate and natural frameworks (legitimate because natural), but as temporary fictions which were useful for the articulation not of universal but of actually very particular interests”

“those great structuring (metaphysical) stories which have given meaning(s) to western developments have been drained of vitality. After the nineteenth-century announcements of the death of God (the theological metanarrative), the death of secular surrogates has occurred . . . that whole Enlightenment project; those various programmes of human progress, reform and emancipation that manifested themselves in, say, humanism, liberalism, Marxism, and so on.”

“As they have searched ever harder for some foundations for their own positions, what they have all realised is that no such foundations exist either for themselves or for anybody else – and nor have they ever done so: every idol has had feet made of clay.”

“this is a past that can be infinitely redescribed. It can and has supported countless plausible and, vis-à-vis their own methodological lights, equally legitimate histories; it has unfailingly given whatever historians (and their impersonators) have wanted and want: various births, origins, legitimating antecedents, explanations and lines of descent (Tory, Whig, Marxist etc.) useful for them as they try to be in control, so that they can make the past their past and so say, along with Nietzsche, ‘So I willed it.’”

“Here we can identify, say, historians’ histories (professional histories attempting to exercise hegemony over the field, a version expressed in the thesis, the monograph and the text), teachers’ histories (necessarily popularisations of professional histories), and then a whole range of other distinctive forms that can only be listed: children’s histories, popular-memory histories, proscribed histories, black histories, white histories, women’s histories, feminist histories, men’s histories, heritage histories, reactionary histories, revolutionary histories, bottom-dog histories, top-dog histories, etc.”

“interpretations at (say) the ‘centre’ of our culture are not there because they are true or methodologically correct (brilliant histories can be marginalised if their subject matter is unpalatable) but because they are aligned to the dominant discursive practices: again power/knowledge.”

“Between the Scylla and Charybdis of, on the one hand, authorised history and, on the other, post-modern pastlessness, a space exists for the desirable outcome of as many people(s) as possible to make their own histories such that they can have real effects (a real say) in the world.”

“viewed not in its traditional guise as a subject discipline aiming at a real knowledge of the past, but seen rather as what it is, a discursive practice that enables present-minded people(s) to go to the past, there to delve around and reorganise it appropriately to their needs”

“There is no such thing as an ‘unpositioned centre’ (actually a contradiction in terms); no possibility of an unpositioned site. The only choice is between a history that is aware of what it is doing and a history that is not.”