Humpty Dumpty Historiography

We have witnessed in the field of theory of history an effort to come to terms with its past, namely, the linguistic turn and the specific narrativist debate that emerged after Hayden White’s Metahistory. However, ‘linguistic turn’ refers to a broader shift in twentieth-century Humanities. In the writings by Joan W. Scott, we find a paradigmatic intersection between theory of history, gender studies and a linguistic turn-stance of a specific poststructuralist kind. Reflecting on White’s and Scott’s work, I show how their criticisms of narrative and identity meet and how developments in the fields of feminist theory and history become relevant for those interested in moving forward discussions in theory of history. This paper aims at calling our attention to how marginalized groups' struggles have forced an ongoing negotiation of the terms of humanity within and beyond academia. I recall White’s thoughts around middle-voice, specifically his claim that we have to rethink the relationship between the agent of historical writing and its writing. I claim that feminist struggles and theorization allow us to refigure the idea of assuming a voice as a process that involves as much disidentification from, as rewriting of, our received identities: as middle voice writing.

One of the most profound transformations in the study of political history in the last generation has been the collapse of determinist models that posited a straightforward connection between an individual’s life experiences and political attitudes. The work of Gareth Stedman Jones in particular forced historians to confront the fact that people do not interpret their experiences in a conceptual vacuum — they make sense of their lives using the linguistic resources available to them at a particular point in time. The idea that a particular set of experiences might give rise to particular forms of political consciousness — the idea that underpinned Marx’s theory of history — proved spectacularly vulnerable once one considered ‘the impossibility of abstracting experience from the language that structures its articulation’.1 The results of this ‘linguistic turn’ on social history and labour history are well known, but it has also fundamentally reshaped the study of gender politics in a way that is no less profound for having been accomplished more quietly. Connections that once seemed obvious between women’s experiences of oppression and the emergence of feminist protest no longer seem secure, because — just as working-class politics cannot be reduced to a set of material interests that exist prior to culture — women’s political consciousness could only take shape within the historically specific set of linguistic resources available to them.

Gustav G. Shpet (1879-1937) is one of those formidable Russian thinkers who, in the early years of the last century, orchestrated a revolutionary paradigm shift across a broad swath of the humanities and social sciences that is still reverberating today. But we lack a comprehensive view of the manifold heterogeneity of Shpet's intellectual endeavors. This article focuses on one prominent lacuna in our knowledge of Shpet: the theory of history that he advanced in the 1910s. In many respects Shpet's theory anticipated the "linguistic turn" that occurred in western historiography during the last quarter of the twentieth century and that is most often identified with Hayden White's name. But while White analyzes the historian's discourse in terms of tropology and narratology, for Shpet predication is the key logical mechanism that generates production of texts about the past. The divergence of these two approaches can be explained through the hidden Kantian underpinnings of White's thought that contrasts sharply with the explicit Hegelianism of Shpet's theorizing.

What has come to be known as the ‘linguistic turn’ in historical theory over the past forty years or so has finished what the two World Wars began in demolishing the confidence that the historical discipline possessed at the turn of the twentieth century. This confidence was most memorably expressed by Lord Acton that one day we would possess ‘ultimate history’. Today most historians are probably more inclined to subscribe to Pieter Geyl’s view that history is ‘an argument without end’. Yet the jettisoning of a teleological goal for historical accounts does not mean that we have to also part with the idea of progress; we just need a new definition of it. In this article I argue that we should adopt an evolutionary epistemology of history which sees progress as something pushed from behind, rather than aiming at an undefined point in the future; but this is not the only advantage an evolutionary epistemology can offer us. I go on to outline two further aspects of evolutionary epistemology which may benefit historical theorists.

The Pinch of Expressionism in Art HistoryReview of:Kimberly A. Smith, ed., The Expressionist Turn in Art History, Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2014, 374 pp., 35 ill. b/w, £75.00, ISBN: 978-1-4094-4999-7Andrei PopThere is no more common, and probably no more useful, art historical superstition than the hunch that whatever disparate phenomena appear around the same time (be they artworks, philosophies, wars, or styles of dancing) have something in common. This is useful because, even if wrong, such connections often illuminate by force of contrast. More embarrassing is the success of such operations: no one will any longer accept an explanation in terms of Zeitgeist, style, source, Kunstwollen, episteme, turns of the dialectic, and other collective generalizations - at least, no one outside one's own camp. More recent attempts, like Michael Baxandall's 'cognitive style', wore their dustiness on their sleeve, convincing only where charming similarities could be found, and not through any grand explanation of the similarity.Be that as it may, one term in the historicist vocabulary seems to have evaded our suspicion: the 'turn'. The first, and most famous, a 'Linguistic Turn', gave the rather tendentious title to a mid-century anthology in the philosophy of language edited by Richard Rorty. An iconic turn was thereafter declared in art history (to roll back the linguistic one), and haptic, auditory, performative, and enactive turns have tumbled over one another, cheerfully proclaiming the primacy of some sole favoured approach, whether in a specialized field like cognitive science (the enactive turn) or all the humanities (the enactive turn again).The volume under review fortunately does not suffer from such partisan myopia, since neither editor Kimberly Smith nor any of the living contributors (many of whom provide not just interesting introductions but also translations of allegedly expressionist art historians) believe that we are or should be expressionist art historians. Indeed, they seem to be agreed that the phenomenon of a critical (and more questionably, historical) expressionism lasted hardly more than two decades, and affected primarily Germany, Austria and Switzerland. But like other contemporary users of 'turn' rhetoric, Smith seems convinced that once we swallow the term, we can enjoy a relatively smooth empirical ride, for the world took an expressionist turn, apparently, and though we don't know precisely why, or in which direction the influence (another nasty old historicist term) flowed, there is no doubt that art prose shared some of the emphatic, pathos-laden, Germanic (at times to the point of bigotry) tone of expressionist painting, especially in the decade immediately before and after the Great War. Then one met opening sentences like those of Wilhelm Worringer's Altdeutsche Buchillustration of 1912:The German is not born with a naive sensuality of the eye, but must instead acquire it. He is too strongly interested in what is essential to record things with impartial sight. And if he is an artist, then he tends to express what things are, instead of representing them.1Such crude jingoism makes one wonder not just whether forgotten expressionist historians need rediscovering, but even whether famous ones like Worringer shouldn't be forgotten. But of course most of us reading such an author today are not joining a debate on methodology, but treating the author as a kind of exotic historical beast, perhaps one that will cast indirect light on Ludwig Kirchner or Emil Nolde. And at times reading on does pay: Worringer's second sentence already suggests an interesting contrast between the essential and the objective that, however misguided, might throw light on larger range of modern art and thinking than the expressionist label would suggest. The third sentence applies this broad claim to art and artists, and already our sought-after term, expression, makes its entrance. …

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the “linguistic turn” in analytic philosophy had a deep and significant impact on the development of Richard Rorty's pragmatism. One of the central features of the “linguistic turn” was its attention to the role of language in mediating questions of philosophy, and, in Rorty's hands, the “linguistic turn” drew philosophy very close to rhetorical theory. However, I argue that Rorty failed to engage or embrace rhetorical theory in any substantive way. This meant that his pragmatism cleaved philosophy off from the social democratic project. Such a separation of philosophy from the problems of maintaining and cultivating democracy abandons an important strand of first generation pragmatism. This amounts to a missed opportunity. By complimenting the linguistic turn with a robust account of the role of rhetoric in socio-political affairs, Rorty could have tied philosophy to social democracy in just the manner that Dewey had hoped. But instead Rorty is constrained by the tradition of philosophy and unable to make the “linguistic turn” into any kind of rhetorical turn.

The linguistic turn is a central aspect of Richard Rorty’s philosophy, informing his early critiques of foundationalism in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and subsequent critiques of authoritarianism in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. It is argued that we should interpret the linguistic turn as a methodological suggestion for how philosophy can take a non-foundational perspective on normativity. It is then argued that although Rorty did not succeed in explicating normativity without foundations (or authority without authoritarianism), we should take seriously the ambition motivating his project. But taking that ambition seriously may require reconsidering the linguistic turn. The linguistic turn was one of the most significant sea-changes in twentiethcentury philosophy. At the heart of this dramatic change in philosophy’s theoretical and practical self-images was a general departure from certain important ideas formulated in seventeenth-century philosophy (such as those of mind, idea, and experience) in favor of a rather different set of objects of philosophical scrutiny characteristic of twentieth-century philosophy (such as words, sentences, and meanings). Ian Hacking, in his helpful 1975 book Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?, confidently stated that, “It is a manifest fact that immense consciousness of language is at present time characteristic of every main stream in Western philosophy” (1975, 10). The decades since Hacking’s remark have only confirmed the accuracy of his proclamation: the ushering in of the era of language has been at play in every philosophical tradition with a major presence. It is evident in phenomenology as that tradition moved from the analysis of consciousness central for Husserl and Heidegger to the high textualism of Derrida. It is evident in critical theory as that tradition moved from the materialism of Horkheimer and Adorno to the discourse ethics of Habermas. It is evident in the shift in analytic philosophy from talk of observation reports and sense data to talk of meaning, metaphor, semantics, and sentences. It is also evident in pragmatist philosophy as that tradition shifted from an exploration of the work of experience in our practices to an examination of the extent to which

The contemporary debate on ideology is mostly inscribed within a more general philosophical trend, which assumes that we are living — as Norval (2000a: 313) has put it — in a sort of 'post-metaphysical world', that is, a world devoid of intrinsic meaning. The deepening of this view in the current stage of social sciences and humanities is attributed, in part, to the so-called 'linguistic turn', that is, the radical shift of the starting point of philosophical analysis from a rational conscious individual-centered optic to the analysis of the structure of language. Aletta J. Norval (ibid.: 313, note 4) reminds us that the first use of this term is found in the works of one of the members of the 'Vienna Circle', Gustav Bergmann. However, it is since the publication of Richard Rorty's book, The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method in 1967 that the use of the term began to be popularized. Far from being concerned with discerning the intrinsic meaning associated with a word, we are now confronted, as Wittgenstein (2001: 2) has highlighted, quoting Saint Augustine's Confession, only with the use of words: Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires. (Ibid.) KeywordsPolitical ThoughtContemporary DebateProgrammatic PoliticsDiscursive FormationIntrinsic MeaningThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

TOLEDO JR, J. E. C de. Language, contexto and reason: Richard Rorty and the linguistic turn. 173 f. Dissertacao (Mestrado) – Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciencias Humanas. Departamento de Filosofia, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, 2008. The linguistic turn in contemporary philosophy entailed the restatement of epistemological problems in terms of the nature and structure of language (logic), and in terms of interpretations of linguistic practices (pragmatics). In the latter form, the conception of language as an instrument of social interaction, together with the contextual understanding of interaction situations, leads in some cases to the treatment of different languages as closed “games” endowed with their own rules and, in extreme cases, incommensurable. This is the path down which Richard Rorty takes his own version of the linguistic turn. For Rorty, the developments of analytical philosophy – most importantly, the way W. O. Quine, W. Sellars and D. Davidson follow the lead of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations – point to a holistic (contextual) understanding of language and, as a consequence, of rationality. This way of understanding language is related to Rorty’s treatment of other philosophical issues (moral and political) and to his characterization of Philosophy itself. This dissertation aims at reconstructing (and pointing to shortcomings of) Rorty’s understanding of these issues.

This volume investigates the different attitudes of historians and other social scientists to questions of causality. It argues that historical theorists after the linguistic turn have paid surprising

This article argues that the reality principle must be accepted as a necessary condition for any adequate historical research. The first part explores the arguments of the hermeneutical realism, in order to rescue some of them and showing their importance for the historical theory. The second part reconstructs a debate between historical theory, literary theory, linguistic turn and hermeneutical realism, aiming to expose the risks of anti-realism for the historical discipline. At the end, it is expected to present a perspective that points out what is the meaning of rescue realist elements that supports a not arbitrary historical research.

This paper analyzes key issues in the work of Frank Ankersmit: narrative, representation and sublime historical experience. It argues that his recent turn to experience marks a shift from an interest in narrative and the textual dimension of the past to an examination of the notion of an experience about the past. It suggests that although Ankersmit is usually associated with postmodernist avangardism in historical theory (narrativism, constructivism), as can be seen in his theory of historical representation, his understanding of the concept of historical experience and the sublime can be seen as regression. Thus, although Ankersmit had pushed historical theory beyond the linguistic turn, his most recent work can be understood as a return to a traditional Romantic view of immediate experience combined with an Enlightenment analysis of it.

Reviewed by: From History to Theory by Kerwin Lee Klein Mason Tattersall From History to Theory. By Kerwin Lee Klein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. 224 pp. $39.95 (cloth and e-book). Kerwin Lee Klein’s excellent book of essays, From History to Theory, presents a collection of histories of key words and clusters of terms as they were used in the American historical world in the past century. Klein’s individual chapters stand alone as use-based semantic histories, exploring “habits and traditions” (p. 11), yet the whole here is much more than the sum of its parts. Each of the individual essays contributes to a broader understanding of the “poetics, rhetoric, and logic of academic discourse on history in the twentieth century” (p. 3), and the organization of the essays presents a coherent narrative that leads the reader from a discussion of the way we think about issues surrounding the philosophy of history, history and theory, theory and praxis, and so forth to a consideration of the ways in which uncritical use of language can be damaging not only to academic discourse but to society as a whole. From History to Theory is a book that problematizes the standard story of the development of twentieth-century historiography, particularly the standard narrative of the so-called linguistic turn. Chapter 1 looks at “The Rise and Fall of Historiography,” noting [End Page 947] both the ambiguities of the term and the strengths and weaknesses that enabled its rise and precipitated its fall. Klein notes that “historiography” was initially an expansive term, coming to mean both the practice of historical writing and theoretical reflection. Historiography’s fall began in the 1960s, precipitated by a lack of satisfaction with this marriage and a growing sense that these were two separate endeavors. Klein characterizes this as “a story of the inability of scholarly discourse to develop a third term that mediates theory and praxis” (p. 33). Klein argues that the waning of historiography was particularly “untimely,” noting that it occurred during the “upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s—structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, post-colonialism, and multiculturalism—[that] hit campus just as departments of history eliminated the one place in the curriculum that seemed especially adaptable to engagement with such a variety of topics” (p. 31). The second chapter, “From Philosophy to Theory” focuses on the development of philosophy of history between the Second World War and 1960 and the changing perceptions of its ability to function as a proper philosophical discipline in light of midcentury developments in Anglo-American philosophy that gave philosophy aspirations of becoming a rigorous science and led to philosophy of history’s decline. The chapter also weaves in the rise of history and theory as a substitute that lacked the connotations with older-style universal history and had a greater degree of consonance with a scientistic outlook. Chapter 3, “Going Native: History, Language, and Culture” corrects the standard interpretation of the birth of the New Cultural History and the Linguistic Turn. Klein points to the early influence of anthropology and analytic philosophy on the humanities in America that set the stage for the importation of French thought, which found a receptive audience that had already taken a “linguistic turn.” Klein shows his readers that American academia had already begun to focus on language and culture long before these terms became associated with a new, imported discourse. Chapter 4, “Postmodernism and the People without History,” will be of most interest to readers of this journal. In Klein’s own words, “chapter 4 unpacks the claims of certain strains of postmodern or post-structural discourse to engage global history without falling back into the sort of universal history that had been practiced by Hegel or Marx” (p. 15). Klein clearly shows the ways in which new attempts to deal with the histories of marginalized peoples drifted into polarized “either-or” narratives that ended up replaying Hegel’s description of people with and without history in different words. Klein looks at the employment of concepts of local and master narratives, particularly [End Page 948] by Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty, and James Clifford, and likewise finds these well-meaning...

During the first half of the twentieth century philosophy took a ‘linguistic turn’. (The phrase, which comes from Gustav Bergmann, was made famous by Richard Rorty as the title of an anthology of papers in which this development is set out and assessed.) The first clear signal of this development was Ludwig Wittgenstein's remark in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) that ‘All philosophy is “Critique of Language”‘ and this work by Wittgenstein (which is discussed in this article) remains a classic presentation of the thesis that philosophy can only be undertaken through the critical study of language. Thus during the twentieth century philosophical approaches to language, the kinds of theorizing now known as ‘philosophy of language’, have been developed in a context in which language has been taken to be a primary resource for philosophy, and as a result there has been a two-way relationship in which conceptions of language and of philosophy have been developed together.

This volume brings together a number of chapters which I should happily describe as ‘inter-disciplinary’ if that term had not acquired — to my mind at least — certain negative or worrisome connotations. These have to do with the currently widespread idea that the boundaries between disciplines are so many artificial constructs of comparatively recent date whose chief function (so the argument goes) is to shore up standard academic divisions of labour. Such thinking derives from a wide range of sources, among them post-structuralism, postmodernism, cultural studies, the ‘strong’ programme in sociology of science, Kuhnian paradigm-relativism, the ‘linguistic turn’ (after late Wittgenstein) in various fields of thought, and Richard Rorty’s neopragmatist notion of ‘truth’ as just the compliment we pay to this or that currently favoured style of talk. It has also taken heart from developments in post-empiricist episte-mology which — following Quine — emphasise the ‘underdetermination’ of theory by evidence and the ‘theory-laden’ character of observation-statements. In Chapter 6 I discuss the way that analytic philosophy has tended very often to swing back and forth between a ‘normal’, constructive or problem-solving discourse and a whole range of (by its own lights) untypically extreme reactive proposals. If this account suggests an analogy with Kuhn on the cyclic alternation of ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ periods in the history of science then it does so more with a view to locating the sources of such chronic instability within the analytic enterprise.KeywordsPerceptual ResponseMusical PerceptionConstructive EmpiricistLinguistic TurnSceptical ParadoxThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.