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[T]here is nothing more naïve, or more indicative of a failure to learn one of the real lessons of the history of thought, than the tendency of some, even among philosophers, to take the bare fact that a way of thinking is now démodé as indicative either that it is false or that it will not come back.
Arthur Lovejoy, 19401
The last fifteen years have seen a number of attempts to imagine what lies "beyond" the linguistic and cultural turns of recent decades in historiography.2The impulse is derived, one suspects, from the need for academic cultures to declare current established practice "dead" in favor of some new departure. We have had thirty years of discourse study, cultural analysis of texts and meaning, attention to the constitutive power of language, and suspicion of reading texts as unmediated referential documents. It seems inevitable that voices would arise declaring the attention to culture and language exhausted, asking us to turn away from language and culture and plant our feet on some firmer ground. Academic disciplinary cultures, try as they might to abandon modernist commitments to a belief in progress in which today's know-how trumps yesterday's ignorance, can't seem to transcend their nineteenth-century origins. We know, or think we do, that the humanities are not the bearers of progress in knowledge, that we are no wiser than our forebears, that the holy grail remains as far out of reach as it ever was. And yet we act as if we can expose the shortcomings of our intellectual ancestors and in doing so inaugurate a new and better understanding of the realm in which human beings act and create meaning. Hence a new generation, having decided that it has either absorbed the lessons of the cultural and linguistic turns or realized what a constraining dead end such a turn represents, advocates a departure for more fertile ground.
The problem is that the turn to culture and language was driven by epistemological concerns; the assumption has been that meaning and its constitution through linguistic and cultural processes are all over the entire object of historical study. Under such conditions, it would be strange to think that we can put...