TALK! AS HISTORICAL PRACTICE

Abstract

ABSTRACT“Talk! as Historical Practice” proposes a conception of our insertion into history, and thus the practice of historiography, by way of denying the existence of language as commonly understood: as a pregiven repository of words, signifieds, signifiers, and/or grammars regulative of communication and understanding. (To distinguish this more radical, discourse‐based conception, in part drawn from Donald Davidson's writings, from those of French discourse theory, it employs the neologism “talk!.”) In addition to sketching a version of talk!, this paper argues for its centrality for those writing history. Talk!, for one, gives a vantage point on the past and its relation to the rest of temporality, alternative to that held in common by two leading contemporary theorists, otherwise deeply opposed: Frank Ankersmit and Ethan Kleinberg. Second, it makes available new possibilities for historical practice, as here illustrated by a persusal of Henry Adams's The Education of Henry Adams, and some of his other late works. Adams's autobiography enshrines an externalist, talk!‐based view of his own past utterances and experiences; hence, he writes of himself only in the third person, as what he calls “the manikin.” In this instance and others, this approach lets Adams craft a unique kind of hyperbole, through which he presents a version of history as the medium of everything that happens and all who exist, within a modernity broken into ever more rapidly occurring epochs. Talk!, as here construed, ultimately questions modernity and all other periods and epochs, descending from “big picture” history. Adams's template, I thus argue in conclusion, may serve as a limit case for many more recent viewpoints.