Fitzhugh and Leckie-Postmodernism, and The Causes of Change

Wesleyan University
Agency, Postmodernism, and the Causes of Change Author(s): Michael L. Fitzhugh and William H. Leckie, Jr. Source: History and Theory, Vol. 40, No. 4, Theme Issue 40: Agency after Postmodernism (Dec., 2001), pp. 59-81 Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2677987 . Accessed: 22/07/2011 16:08
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History and Theoiy, ThemeIssue 40 (December 2001), 59-81
? Wesleyan University 2001 ISSN: 0018-2656
AGENCY, POSTMODERNISM, AND THE CAUSES OF CHANGE
MICHAELL. FITZHUGHAND WILLIAMH. LECKIE,JR.
ABSTRACT
This theme issue's call for papers notes that "several prevalentand influentialhistorical practicesof the last thirtyyears have limited agency's significance,. . . seeing the human as the patientof Historyratherthan its agent."The questionsimplicit in this statementare nowhere more urgentthan in those practices collectively known as the "linguisticturn." Yet such questions have been explored sparselyenough in relationto this movement that some adherents can still insist thatthe ideas they favor do not devalue agency,while many simply ignorethe issue and incorporateagency as an integralpartof theirwork. By examining a largely unremarked episode in Michel Foucault's highly influentialthought and consideringits connections to foundationalassumptionsof the linguistic turn,we seek to demonstratein detail why the premises that underlie both structuralismand poststructuralism(the theoreticalmovementsmost deeply implicatedin the directionthe linguistic turnhas taken in history)logically requirethe denial of agency as a causal force and ultimately compel the conclusion that no change can occur in realities as interpretedby humans.We illustratethe intractability of these logical problemsby analyzingunsatisfactory defenses from some of the few linguistic-turn historianswho have discussed relevant issues, afterwhich we conclude by suggesting that attentionto currentwork in linguistics and cognitive science may help resolve such difficulties.
The "philosophic historian" of the great eighteenth-century narratives, such as Edward Gibbon, and certainly the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment whose sentiments he seems to have shared, construed history in the same way that Claude Levi-Strauss construed anthropology, observing structures of discourse unseen by the subjects of his research and out of which they could not escape. The narratives of a philosophic historian could only be secular and ironic, and the construction of a historical narrative involved self-consciously imposing on the past a coherence derived from the historian's own age and the elucidation of patterns in the actions of past individuals who had inhabited "a realm of illusion in which the causes ordering their lives were invisible."' The Kantian Enlightenment purified this transcendental standpoint, as Michel Foucault put it, by conceiving knowledge as indeed "an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analy1. Gibbon's contemporaryAdam Ferguson wrote, "Mankind,in following the present sense of theirminds ... arriveat ends which even theirimaginationcould not anticipate,andpass on, like other animals, in the trackof their nature,without perceiving its end":quoted in David Womersley,introduction to EdwardGibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the RomanEmpire(London:Allen Lane, 1994), I, xxi-xxii.
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sis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experimentwith the possibilities postmodernistideas of going beyond them."2Long before late twentieth-century came to the fore, eighteenth-century skepticism had made masternarrativesdifficult to sustain,promptingKant's programfor a Universal History and Hegel's later dialectic. Postmodernism'scontinuationof the Enlightenmentproject has been most visible to historiansthroughthe work of Foucault, whose rendition still sustainshigh philosophe irony and its correspondinglimits on agency. The philosophichistorian'spen shapedthe past from a perspectiveabove thatof most humans,revealing the forces that propelledhistory at the same time that the act of writing gave shape, purpose, and identity-as style-to the historianhimself as a product of language.3It was the ironic relationshipbetween historian and subject matter that produced the style for which Gibbon's writing won such at least saw acclaim. Yet Gibbon, Hume, and similarly skeptical contemporaries humansas willful agents who helped createtheirown destiny even if unawareof what they were truly doing. Foucault and his colleagues better their Enlightenment predecessorsby carryingEnglightenmentskepticismto its logical extreme. However, the historical knowledge of the postmodern theorist-as a Doctor Faustus-is privileged even if in negativity,and like Wagnerand Robin some of us ordinaryhistoriansfeel compelled to make a deal with him. In this essay we propose wrestlingwith the devil himself to restorethe role of agency on grounds that reject the linguistic turn, exhorting our colleagues that the notion of an accommodationis an illusion. Kant, when respondingto Hume, took advantageof developmentsin civil law that gave prominence to intentionality; having grown from the distinction between esse (existence) and esse intentionale(having an idea or a directionof attention),a distinction between questions of fact (quidfacti) and of law (quid iuris) encouragedthe abstractionof causality from human behavior.4This tendency, inheritedby Kant's rebellious descendants,remains characteristicof the continentalbacklash against him and Hegel that has directedthe linguistic turn in history:two of the more common allegations made againstpostmodernismcentralobjections,for example, in GabrielleM. Spiegel's highly influentialargument for a theoretical middle ground-are that it allows little or no human agency andthatit preventshistoriansfrom makingcausal explanationsfor socioculturalchange. Yet despite the long history of concern over agency's possibil2. Michel Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?"The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1984), 50. 3. Womersley,intro. to Gibbon, xxiii-xxvi. 4. On these issues see J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarismand Religion, VolumeTwo: Narrativesof Civil Government(Cambridge,Eng.: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1999), 5, 40-41; Conceptual Change and the Constitution,ed. Terence Ball and J. G. A. Pocock (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of to ErnstCassirer,Kant'sLife and Thought,transl. Kansas, 1988), 9-10; StephenKoerner,introduction James Haden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), vii-viii. Kant's legalistic rationalefor taking accountof humanintentionscontainedthe seeds of solipsism and soon gave way to Hegel's ideas: Thought (New see Karl L6with, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century York:Holt, Rinehartand Winston, 1964). 5. GabrielleSpiegel, "History,Historicism,and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages," Speculum65 (1991), 60, 68. After an endorsementby one of the most preeminentof then-living historians,LawrenceStone, so many others adoptedSpiegel's position that it can fairly be describedas
AGENCY,POSTMODERNISM, AND THE CAUSES OF CHANGE
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ity and its relation to causality, these questions have been explored sparsely enough in relationto postmodernismthat some culturalhistorianscan still deny that the ideas they favor significantlydownplay the role of agency, while many seem to ignore this problemaltogether,incorporating agency and causation,perhaps unreflectively,in their work. We suggest three reasons for this: First, historians are rarely trained as philosophers. Second, and perhaps ironically, philosophers have themselves (with only a few exceptions) ignoredpostmodernism,a movementwhose origins are linked to a philosophicaltraditionof Continentalskepticismbut which seems to have acquiredits cachet from recent trends in architectural design and consumer style: we may perhapsbe looking at one of the unfortunate consequences of the democratizationof eighteenth-century genteel readers'tastes.6 And finally, many of the positions associatedwith postmodernism-in particular, critiques of historians'objectivity,acceptanceof culturalrelativism, and skepticism with regardto the bases of moral and political agency-are not unique to postmodern thought, and were widespreadamong professional historiansby the end of the Progressive Era.7This may, along with disciplinarybarriers,have discouraged
a standardorthodoxy of the profession: Lawrence Stone, "Historyand Post-Modernism," Past and Present 131 (May 1991), 217-218, and "Historyand Post-Modernism III"Past and Present 135 (May 1992), 189-194. For a well-known example of the kind of work inspired by Spiegel, see Joyce Appleby,LynnHunt,and Margaret Jacob, Tellingthe Truth AboutHistory (New York:Norton, 1994), 223-224 andpassim. For the sake of convenience, the terminologywe use somewhatbroadensPerez Zagorin'srecent characterization of academicpostmodernism("History,the Referent,and Narrative: Reflections on Postmodernism Now," Historyand Theory38 [1999], 7-9); here, the "linguisticturn," "cultural history,"and "postmodernism" are treatedinterchangeably as termsdenotingthe movement in academic history underpinned by the structuralism and poststructuralism that derives mainly from Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Saussure. The philosophicalliteratureon agency and its relationshipto causality is wide; for an introduction to the issue, see Antony Flew and Godfrey Vesey, Agency and Necessity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), and for crucial backgroundsee Donald Davidson's collected Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1980). More recently,see (for example), John Heil, The Nature of TrueMinds (Cambridge,Eng.: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1992), 1-19, 30-57, 103-150, 210-238; JenniferHornsby,Simple Mindedness:In Defense of Naive Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind Mass.: Harvard (Cambridge, UniversityPress,), 83-101, 129-153, 185-194; ValeriLedyaev,Power: A ConceptualAnalysis (Commack, N.Y.: Nova Science Publishers, 1998), 69-86, 151-180; Hugh J. McCann, The Worksof Agency: On Human Action, Will, and Freedom (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998); Timothy O'Connor, Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will (New York:Oxford University Press, 2000). was first used by ArnoldToynbee almost a half-centuryago to 6. Indeed,the term "Post-Modern" in the West since the 1870s; see Steven Connor,Postmodernist describea skepticismand irrationalism An Introduction to Theoriesof the Contemporary Culture: (Oxfordand Cambridge,Mass.: Blackwell, 1989), 65-102. See RobertVenturi,Learningfrom Las Vegas (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 1977) for the classic statementof postmodernistarchitectural fashion. 7. This development in American thought has recently been treated by Louis Menand, The Strausand Giroux, 2001). On the long history of historians' MetaphysicalClub (New York:Farrar, grappling with epistemological questions, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge,Eng. and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); see also Andrew Feffer, The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism(Ithaca,N.Y.: CornellUniversityPress, 1993) and especially JohnPatrickDiggins, The Promise of Pragmatism:Modernismand the Crisis of Knowledgeand Authority(Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1994).
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rigorous focus on basic postmodernprinciples and might explain why current theoreticallinguistics has played no partin the "linguisticturn." This essay attemptsto establish the groundworkfor a positive reconstruction of the theoreticalpremises that motivate working historians;although usually unelaborated, and contestedby literarytheorists,these premises are validatedby contemporary cognitive science. But they must be recognized and articulated.In a recent debate in these pages, Perez Zagorin and Keith Jenkins agreed on only a single point: most historians generally ignore theoretical matters.8 We argue that, like it or not, historiansmust begin seriously to embrace theoreticalargument as a matterof ordinarypracticeratherthan as an occasional gesture if they wish to have any critical relevance at all. Moreover,we suggest that keeping an eye on the cognitive sciences can put historianson a surercritical footing. illustratesthe deciWe begin with Spiegel because her articleparadigmatically to avoid the foreclosure of sive impact of postmodernismon theoreticalefforts agency it demands.Her argumenttypifies the relationshipof these logical issues to much disciplinarypractice, in which the postmodernencounterframes very traditionof epistemological and clearly the quandarythat a largely-unexamined ethical thinking has created for historians who want to justify doing history. Simply put, thereis no way to rescue humanistideals-what we take as the laudable motive to stake out a middle ground-from the implicationsof the linguistic turn,and we will documentsome of the reasonsfor this problemby discussing the difficulties that have hinderedsuch efforts. The crux of Spiegel's attemptto effect what she called a "rapprochement" with semiotics was the rescue of Ferdinandde Saussurefrom what she viewed as JacquesDerrida'smisappropriation. Her impulse was sound: Saussureanlinguistics buttressesthe work of not just Derrida,Levi-Strauss,Barthes, Kristeva, and many anotherlinguistic-turn figure, but most importantlyof Foucault. Recalling his first encounter with Saussure in the late 1940s during lectures by Merleau-Ponty,Foucault said, "I rememberclearly [that] . . . the problem of language appearedand it was clear that phenomenology was no match for structuralanalysis in accountingfor the of the linguistic type, in effects of meaningthat could be producedby a structure which the subject (in the phenomenological sense) did not intervene to confer In otherwords,had Spiegel succeededwith Saussure,she would have meaning."9 neutralizedmany prominentpostmodernistthinkers,including the one who has exerted the most influenceon history.It is a tributeto her sinceritythat so many have assumedher success. However,she presentedSaussureincompletely,focusing on language as a socially constructed,synchronic system without positive terms, while neglecting fundamentalpremises accepted by Saussure-and that immediatelystruckFoucaultas fundamental,as well-underpinning those more superficialelements. In the end, as Spiegel herself has recently admitted, she could not but fail. Yet her efforts have allowed largenumbersof fellow historians
4, and Keith Jenkins,"A PostmodernReply to 8. Zagorin,"History,the Referent,and Narrative," Zagorin,"History and Theory39 (2000), 189. 9. Michel Foucault,Politics, Philosophy,and Culture:Interviewsand Other Writings,1977-1984, ed. LawrenceKritzman(New York:Routledge, 1988), 21.
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to "partially" accept postmodernismunderthe assumptionthat the move is logically acceptable.10 Faust has proven most persuasive. Similarly limited readings lead to similar problems. Cultural historian Ian Maclean, for example, has acknowledgedpostmodernstrictureson agency and change, and that because Foucaultexcluded "the humanelement"he was theoreticallypreventedfrom elaboratinga concept of change. But Maclean's further analysisand conclusion-that Foucault'sposition was idiosyncraticand need not prevent other postmodernistsfrom remedying the situation-is underminedby the mistaken assumption that "Foucault himself never offered a theoretical explanationof change in intellectuallife."'"For, in the preface to The Orderof Things:An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (hereafterQ0),12Foucault did attemptto theorize change. A close examinationof this theoreticalepisode and its relationshipto logically foundationaltenets of the continentallinguistic turn, supplemented by examples of apologetics for postmodernist historiography, might better illuminate the reasons why postmodernism indeed denies both agency and causal explanations of sociocultural change-and might better demonstratethe intractabilityof the problem than the laudable but incomplete treatmentsoffered by Spiegel and her like-mindedsuccessors.
I
English readersof OT almost immediatelyencounterthe puzzling judgmentthat "traditionalexplanations" of historical change, comprising "technological or social changes, influences of various kinds," are "moremagical than effective." We submit, however, that Doctor Faustus'smagic has been replacedby the theorist'sprivilege of standingoutsidehistoryin-as we shall suggest below-quite literallyan out-of-bodyexperience.Foucault'simmediatelyprofferedreasonsfor this attitude are unpersuasive. "It is not always easy to determine what has caused a specific change,"he writes; "one does not know how an articulationso complex and so diverse in composition actually operates."13The obvious response is thathistoricalresearchis perhapsnever easy and thatpartof the historian'sresponsibility,if indeed "one does not know how" aboutsomething,is to
10. Spiegel, "History,Historicism,and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages," 60-64. For Spiegel's retraction of her earliertheoreticalposition in favor of a wholly postmodernone, see her The Past as Text:The Theoryand Practice of Medieval Historiography(Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xxi; for an example of historiansciting her supportfor incorporatingelements of poststructuralist vocabularyin otherwise methodologicallyconventional writing, see T. H. Breen andTimothyHall, "Structuring ProvincialImagination: The Rhetoricand Experienceof Social New England,"AmericanHistorical Review 103 (1998), 1413. Change in Eighteenth-Century 11. Ian Maclean,"TheProcess of IntellectualChange:A Post-Foucaultian Hypothesis,"in Cultural History after Foucault, ed. John Neubauer(New York:Aldine de Gruyter,1999), 164, 166. 12. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things:An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, transl.Alan Sheridan(New York:PantheonBooks, 1970). 13. Ibid., xii-xiii. See also The Archaeology of Knowledge, transl.A. M. SheridanSmith (New York:Routledge, 1972), 109, 164, and Aesthetics,Method,and Epistemology,ed. James D. Faubion, transl. Robert Hurley and others, vol. 2, Essential Worksof Foucault, 1954-1984 (New York:New Press, 1998), 302.
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find out, however partial and contingent the resulting "know how" may be. Nevertheless,Foucault"left the problemof causes to one side":"I chose to confine myself to describing the transformationsthemselves, thinking that this
would be an indispensable step if, one day, a theory of .
.
. change and episte-
mological causality was to be constructed."14 This statement, from the foreword to the English edition of OT, elides Foucault'sown previous and very explicit effort in the French edition's preface to sketch the outlines of just such a theory.A hesitant stance toward causation andeven change itself, however,is requiredby the logical matrixcomprisingtwo crucial and foundational dicta by structuralistsand poststructuralistsalike. Nietzsche and Heidegger can both be considereddirect sources of these notions, but Saussuremost systematicallyset forththe applicableideas and was the most significant, by Foucault's own account, in contributingto his notions of language. By far the most important is thathumanscognize wholly in language;the logical correlateis thatany given languageis a closed system.15 As Spiegel rightly notes, within such a framework,"realitydoes not exist 'beyond' the reach of language;it is 'always already'constructedin language, which is anteriorto our 16 These knowledge of the world.... [T]hat'world'is only a linguistic construct." ideas developed into the structuralist stance on the anti-Cartesian characterof humansubjectivity-when ideas are articulated, they are limited to the preexisting possibilities allowed by the subject'slinguisticallyconstitutedreality.Such a viewpoint, which Foucault strongly supported,17 would preclude people from making any fundamentalchanges in their realities.
14. Foucault,The Orderof Things,xiii. 15. FerdinandSaussure,Course in General Linguistics,ed. CharlesBally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Reidlinger,transl.Wade Baskin (London:Fontana, 1974), 111-112 and 99, respectively. On their Nietzschean expression see Claudia Crawford, The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language (Berlin:Walterde Gruyter,1988), especially the telling observationthat Nietzsche's theory of language played an important part in structuralism(137). As another scholar notes, for Nietzsche, "we are caught in the net of language and grammar":Mary Warnock, "Nietzsche's Conception of Truth,"in Nietzsche: Imagery and Thought,ed. Malcolm Pasley (London:Methuen, 1978), 43; for recent commentary, see Wayne Klein, Nietzsche and the Promise of Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 61-95. Heidegger's notoriously evasive style makes elucidatinghis work an uncertainbusiness, but as one interpreter admits, it has been easy for "'postmodernist' to read into Heidegger's texts the proposition"thatreality is a 'construct' admirers" forged by how we happento talk":David D. Cooper,Heidegger (London:ClaridgePress, 1996), 78. have used Saussureananalyses to argue,for example, that "the 'logic' of Heideggerianstructuralists a language is expressly contained in its 'morphology.' . . . This explains why Chinese logic, for instance, differs radically from Western logic": Joseph J. Kockelmans, "Ontological Difference, Hermeneutics,and Language,"in On Heidegger and Language,ed. and transl.JosephJ. Kockelmans (Evanston,Ill.: Northwestern UniversityPress, 1972), 203; in the same volume, see also HeinrichOtt, "Hermeneuticand Personal Structure or Language," 172-177, and Johannes Lohmann, "Martin Heidegger's 'Ontological Difference' and Language,"303-363. For the most extensive treatmentto date of Heidegger's linguistic epistemology, see CristinaLafont, Heidegger,Language, and Worlddisclosure, transl.GrahamHarman(Cambridge,Eng.: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2000). 16. Spiegel, "History,Historicism,and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages," 61. 17. Aesthetics, 448; see also 309, 312; OT, xiv, 298; Dis et icrits, ed. Daniel Defert, Francois Ewald, and JacqueLagrange(Paris:Gallimard,1994), I, 380. One of Foucault'scommentatorssums up well: "Languagefor Foucault is constitutiveof our categories of thoughtand, therebyof the perceptions these categories order":Michael Mahon, Foucault'sNietzschean Genealogy: Truth,Power, and the Subject(Albany: State University of New YorkPress, 1992), 58.
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Spiegel and others who have mentionedthis point have refrainedfrom carefully dissecting it, with the result that postmodernisthistorians such as Mark againstthe Poster can still defend Foucault,Derrida,and other poststructuralists well-known prison-house-of-languageaccusation.'8 However, a full analysis reveals the epistemological fulcrum of the agency-causality issue and demonstratesthe logical ossification that follows from accepting the relevantpropositions about language. If a thoughtcan only express possibilities allowed by the relationshipsin the sign system at a given moment, thoughts are all essentially formulaicat the momentthey occur.In addition,because the medium of thought constitutesa closed system, humanscannotmentallygain access to anythingoutside that system, consciously or otherwise, nor can anythingoutside the system penetrateit. Lackingoutside stimuli, conceiving of any mannerin which humans could create new terms or even combine their old linguistic elements in a new way becomes difficult without resorting to a philosophical deus ex machina. Humans,then, seem unlikely agents of intellectualor epistemic change, and, for thatmatter,of any other socioculturalkind of change, since such changes would requireaction, and actions are stimulated,to the best of our knowledge, eitherby conscious or subconsciousthoughtprocesses-both of which factors would still be ultimatelydeterminedby language.'9 Actions impelledby involuntaryinstinctiveresponsesmight be excepted from linguistic restrictions,but humans presumablyshare such responses with cockroaches and other such nonlinguistic, apparentlyunreasoninglife forms. This kind of causality could affect linguistically delimited mental conceptualizations not at all, for that possibility would dictate that language be an open system, allowing humans to reach beyond it. If the system remains closed, objectively real situations resulting in, and feelings generated by, instinctive operations would be interpreted firmlywithin the pre-existinglinguistic framework,no matter how contradictory to thatframeworkthe proverbialMartianmightjudge such a confluence of objective context and instinctively stimulatedfeeling. Perhaps language itself could be some sort of active agent, mysteriously receiving the imprintof an element outside itself and then in turnchanging the mental framework of the people inside it, but this notion comes close to metaphysicallyvioand has been vigorously opposed by struclating the closed-system requirement turalistsand poststructuralists alike.20
18. Mark Poster, Cultural History and Postmodernity. Disciplinary Readings and Challenges (New York:ColumbiaUniversityPress, 1997), 43, 53. For a competingperspective,see Peter Dews, The Limits of Disenchantment:Essays on ContemporaryEuropean Philosophy (London: Verso, 1995), 2-7, 90-110. 19. On these points Foucaultwas adamant,energeticallyrejectingany historicalapproach"which attributesa constituentrole to an act" (OT, xiv), or which allows "the founding function of the subject" (Archaeologyof Knowledge, 12). He upheldthese principleseven afterhis genealogical turn:"it is not the activity of the subject ... that produces a corpus of knowledge ... but power-knowledge" (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, transl.Alan Sheridan [New York:Vintage Books, 1979], 28). See also Aesthetics 301-302, 308, 310, 462. 20. "Languageadds itself to presence and supplantsit, defers it within the indestructibledesire to Spivak (Baltimore:Johns rejoin it": JacquesDerrida,Of Grammatology,transl.GayatriChakravorty theorist to Hopkins University Press, 1974), 280. Derridais merely the most famous poststructural
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MICHAELL. FITZHUGHAND WILLIAMH. LECKIE,JR. II
Another possibility might be entertained:could language be a mysteriously dynamic force that changes itself and does so with neither outside nor human impetus? Postmodernists often talk as if this were the case, and some of Saussure'spassages might seem to supportthe notion.21 But unless something like Heidegger's (putatively non-metaphysical)metaphysic of language as the generatorof Being's ground is retained, it is hard to see why language would change even if it could. Though he apparentlyrealized this, Foucault failed to resolve the problemsposed for historiansby linguistic hermeticism,not because and post(as Maclean assumes) he never tried, but because within structuralist horizons the problemsare insoluble. structuralist theoretical Frenchreadersof OT apparently objectedto its structuralist-driven implicationthatno changes in our thought,and thus our perceived realities, may ever occur: "It has been said," Foucault writes in the later English translation, "thatthis work denies the very possibility of change. And yet my main concern However, a careful readingof Foucault'sgeneral thehas been with changes."22 ory of change as outlined in the French edition's preface shows all too clearly why detractorscomplained about this issue. An obvious approachwould be to remove the closed-system hurdleand separatelanguagefrom thought,then allow perceptionnot only to influence thoughtbut even, at times, to supersedeculture or language in exerting such influence.And at first Foucault appearsto employ this strategy: orders for it by its pria culture, fromthe empirical deviating prescribed imperceptibly an initialseparation fromthem,causesthemto lose theiroriginal mary codes,instituting andinvisiblepowers,freesitself sufficiently to its immediate transparency, relinquishes onesorthebestones;thisculthattheseorders areperhaps nottheonlypossible discover factthatthere exists,belowthelevel of its sponturethenfindsitselffacedwiththestark of beingordered, thatbelongto a taneous capable orders, thingsthatarein themselves thatorder exists. (xx) thefact,in short, certain unspoken order; A culture, apparentlypossessing agency of some kind, deviates from its set of conceptualizations just enough to directlyperceive "the starkfact"of "things ...
insist that languagecannot reach outside itself (and thathumanscannot use it as a tool with which to reach outside it). Foucaultapproachesthis issue somewhatdifferentlybut ends in the same place and on the same note, insisting that "language . . . is always beyond the limit in relation to itself; it only speaks as a supplement starting from a displacement":Language, Counter-Memory,Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews,ed. Donald F. Bouchard,transl. D. F. Bouchardand Sherry Simon (Ithaca,N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 65. 21. "[L]anguagepremeditatesnothing. The pieces of language are shifted-or rathermodifiedspontaneously and fortuitously"(Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 89). Foucault arguably misreadsthose he mocks when he writes, "Perhapsknowledge succeeds in engenderingknowledge, ideas in transforming themselves and actively modifying one another(but how?-historians have not yet enlightenedus on this point)"(OT, xxiii), but his followers can be pardonedfor deciding that the philosopher'sown work illustratesprecisely such a nonhumanprocess. He discusses such things as the "agency [instans] of literature"(Aesthetics, 287) or characterizesthe workings of discursive forces: "sex was taken charge of, trackeddown as it were, by a discourse that aimed to allow it no obscurity,no respite":The Foucault Reader, 303. 22. OT, xii.
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that belong to a certain unspoken order" and suddenly realizes "that order exists"-this, as philosopher Robert D'Amico has cogently observed, is "an appeal to some form of perceptualrealism."23 Change would be preventedif a culture'slinguisticallydelimited"codes"were always mediatingreality,for then no one could ever thinkthat a given orderwas "perhaps not ... the best" or even not the only one possible. Thus, in the introductory sentence, emphasis is placed on ultimate existence and some sort of human capacity (reminiscentof Sartre's nausea) to face it withoutmediation. The intimationthat humanbeings sometimes directly confront absolute existence would not allow language to retain closed-system status, however, and must have left Foucaultquite uncomfortable.Thus the subsequentpassage: itselfto someextentfromits linguistic, andpractical As though emancipating perceptual,
grids, the culture superimposedon them another kind of grid which neutralizedthem, which by its superimpositionboth revealed and excluded them at the same time, so that the culture,by this very process, came face to face with orderin its primarystate. It is on the basis of this newly perceived orderthat the codes of language, perception,and practice are renderedpartially invalid.... [and] that general theories as to the orderingof that such an orderinginvolves, will be constructed.(xx-xxi) things, and the interpretation
First,then, a culturedevelops a new conceptualgrid, then superimposesthe new over the old. The resulting disparity produces the all-importantmeeting with "orderin its primarystate"which in turn stimulateschange. As he develops his theme, however,Foucaulthas alreadyback-pedaledfrom the previous sentence's implications:to rid themselves of the "doublevision" attendantupon seeing the world throughtwo lenses insteadof one, people constructpartiallynew realities. In a slipperymove reminiscentof Heidegger's insistence that language does not reveal Being itself but instead somehow "says"it, Foucaulthas shifted attention from the "stark fact" of what "exists" to the culture's confrontationwith it throughboth the new and the old grids. "Orderin its primarystate"is not directly confronted after all, but rather is doubly mediated. Later in the passage Foucaultspeaks of "thepure experienceof orderand of its modes of being"(xxi) but never explains how a "pure experience" of anything is possible when the experienceris cut off from the experiencedby two layers of somethingelse.24 The possibly realist ramificationsof the introductorysentence are avoided. Unfortunately,this escape simultaneouslyvoids that sentence's solution to the original problem. In order for change to occur, something new has to be introduced into the system. Confrontationwith objective actuality,readershad been told, allows this. Now, however, readersfind that in orderfor the confrontation to happen,a new grid must be superimposedon the old ones. Very well; for the sake of argument let us accept the second sentence's heavily mediated but nonetheless "pureexperience";the emergence of the new grid now becomes the single most importantelement in Foucault's process of change and urgently needs to be explained-but nowhere does Foucault broach this issue. This
23. RobertD'Amico, Contemporary ContinentalPhilosophy (Boulder:Westview, 1999), 218. 24. To appreciatethe Heideggerian flavor of this passage, compare Kockelmans, "Ontological Difference, Hermeneutics,and Language,"220.
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silence, if not fully praiseworthy,is understandable: nothing new can enter the system until the confrontationwith reality,yet a new grid must enable that confrontationin the firstplace. Unless the new grid is treatedas an inexplicabledeus ex machina, its appearanceseems logically impossible. A championof Foucaultmight object that "culture," defined as a subsystemof languageratherthanas a humancollective, is what confrontsultimatereality and readjuststhe linguistic grid. But this defense runs contraryto language's character as a closed system that cannot get out of itself; elements it encloses (such as "culture")cannot get out either. Nor can the relationshipbe reversed so as to privilege somethingcalled "culture" over language,for whateverelse such a culture might be, it would be indubitablysocial- and as many a structuralist and has insisted, language is the social convention that entails all poststructuralist others. Readersare no closer than before to an understanding of how Foucault's work is compatiblewith the idea of change. They might, however, have expected Foucaultto furnisha remedy in TheArchaeologyof Knowledgechapterentitled "ChangeandTransformation." Therehe keeps the majorelements of his earlier position, suspendingn] . . . causal analysis . . . to avoid the necessary con-
nexion throughthe speaking subject."This time, however, he deflects attention from the possibility of change onto the word "change"itself. He encourageshistoriansto trade"referenceto change" for "analysisof transformations," arguing that the way historiansconceive of "change"fosters naive explanations,but his prescription-"we must define precisely what these changes consist of'-would surely do as much to improve traditionalexplanationsas to requirenew kinds.25 The real work done by this chapteris to camouflagethe fact that the very possiis still in doubt: like a politician making a bility of change (or transformation) public statementabout a career-threatening scandal,Foucaulttreatsthe problem with nimble misdirection.
III
Severalprominenthistoricalscholars-Patrick Joyce, Jay M. Smith, andRichard Biernacki-have followed Foucaultinto this logical morass, and their struggles to get free are instructive.WritesJoyce, "The 'real' can be said to exist indepena relaof it, and to affect these representations,"26 dently of our representations tionship that might be expressed as analogousto billiards: 1. 2. 3. 4. The cue (reality outside language) hits the eight-ball (language), which hits the otherballs (humanmentalprocesses), which sometimes in turn slide down holes and score points (change humans'perceptionsof reality).
25. Foucault, TheArchaeologyof Knowledge, 164, 172. 26. PatrickJoyce, "Historyand Post-modernismI," Past and Present 133 (1992), 208.
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But why and how, then, is the cue propelled to the point at which it hits the eight-ball? In billiards, the human is the agent of change; in Joyce's postmodernism,even allowing changes in outwardreality (causedby, say, an earthquake), a black box lies between thatrealityand language-how languagecould itself be changed so as to in turn effect change in the reality humans perceive remains unexplained. Such a formulationresults in a lamentably weak epistemology. Simply conflatingthoughtwith language(combiningsteps threeand two) fails to solve the problem, since language (thus thought) would still retain its character as a synchronic, closed system. And if language is considered to be self-propelled (withoutmetaphysicalor humanintervention),we again face the question: why would it change even if it could? Trying to escape the resulting bind, Joyce asserts that it is precisely because the distance between signifier and signified prevents language from achieving a directcorrespondence with realitythathumanshave agency; agency is "builtinto the nature of language."27 This restatementof Nietzsche's injunctionto create new worlds with language harks back to Wilhelm von Humboldt, "the first [thinker]to present a 'strong' version of linguistic relativity";Humboldt had inspired Heidegger with not only his ideas on language but also on linguistic agency. "[L]anguageis ... an activity,"Humboldtwrote. "It is the ever-repetitive work of the spirit to make articulated sounds capable of expressing thought."28 Perhapsthe most well-known recent proponentof such a position is Paul Ricoeur.But whateverits source, this notion poses a seriousproblem.Joyce admits that when humans confront new elements they must use old terms to make sense of the new experience,29thereby begging the question of how humanscan, at any level, perceive objectively new elements as new in the first place if those humanscognize with a system that encloses them absolutely. Joyce's argumentalso faces troubleon anotherfront.Attemptingto provide a mechanismwhereby old terms can be used to effect changes, he insists that the signified-signifiergap in language forces humansto form something new out of the old; without agency-if they aren'tdynamic and "creative"as they confront reality-humans couldn't know anything. Joy"'s claim that language makes humansdynamic and therefore"activeagents,"however, cannotbe an argument for agency at all, but ratherfor humansas mechanisticallydriven factors in what some philosophers have called "event causation."30 Joyce states, perhaps correctly, that "to reinterpretand remake," to be "creative,"is symptomatic of But given the structuralism agency.31 implicit in the rest of his articulation-the notion that a general propertyof a system (such as the signified-signifiergap)
27. PatrickJoyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge,Eng.: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1994), 14. 28. Roger Langham Brown, Wilhelmvon Humboldt'sConception of Linguistic Relativity (The Hague:Mouton, 1967), 109, 118; on Humboldtand Heidegger,see PeterMcCormick,Heidegger and the Language of the World:An ArgumentativeReading of the Later Heidegger's Meditations on Language (Ottawa:University of OttawaPress, 1976), 101. 29. Joyce, Democratic Subjects, 12. 30. Flew and Vesey, Agency and Necessity, 11. 31. Joyce, Democratic Subjects, 12-14.
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drives the creation of changes in the system-earthquakes or tornadoeswould also have "agency,"for out of previously existing materialsthey can certainly landscapes as effectively as any engineer.The create, remake, and "reinterpret" analogy is rigorously logical; humans, impelled by linguistic systems that obey systemic laws, would act in the same manner as naturalphenomena working accordingto the laws of geological or meteorological systems. Such impasses are to be expected. Humboldthimself retainedagency not logically but ratherbecause of an uncriticalenthusiasmfor "the cult of the individAs his commentator ual genius (Geniecult) of the early Germanromantics."32 notes, Humboldtnever resolved the crucial contradictionsin his thought (110), and he seems to have bequeathedthis tendency to his heirs. Still, althoughJoyce has expressed antipathyfor John Searle and perhapsby extension his mentor,J. L. Austin,33 anotherpostmodernistmight adduce their work on intentionalityto that humanscan't be wholly determined,so that when they act, they act as argue agents. But underthe continentalrubric,intentions are thoughts (language) and would be subjectto the same limitationsas any others.Foucaulthimself suggests this at the very moment in which he rejects agent-basedcausality:"I should like
to know whether the subjects responsible . . . are not determined . .. by condi-
tions that dominate and even overwhelm them."34 Predictably,agency vanishes when put to the test in Joyce's work: his Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England allots "no room for agents of historical change. Instead,it is a set of disembodieddiscourses ... that are left standingas the ultimatehistoricalactors."35 The second historian,Jay M. Smith, accepts linguistic-turnepistemology but admitsthe necessity of causal explanationand the role of humanagency therein. Disappointedboth by allies who simply give up on causality (following Foucault) or who have brokenfaith with both the letter and spirit of the turn (locating causalityin "activitiesandexperiences"outside of language),Smith suggests that"aninadequatelytheorizedconceptionof humanagency"underliessuch difand proceeds to supply the lack: ficulties36
[B]eliefs and values are themselves expressed throughestablishedlinguistic conventions, [but] they are not fully determinedby them. Alterationsin the physical environment,the depletion or ameliorationof resources . . .: these and other changes to the social material interpreted throughthe humanintellect may eventually modify beliefs aboutthe organizing principlesof the polity.... By pushing semanticweight from one registerof meaning families of political terms . . . [people] will to another,by juxtaposing . . . or rearranging graduallytransformtheir political language.They will create a new discourse that corresponds more closely to the beliefs they hold abouttheir changing materialworld.37
32. Brown, Humboldt'sConceptionof LinguisticRelativity, 118. 33. Joyce, "Historyand PostmodemismI," 205. 34. OT, xiv. 35. DrorWahrman, "TheNew Political History:A Review Essay,"Social History 21 (1996), 343354. 36. Jay M. Smith, "No More LanguageGames:Words,Beliefs, and the Political Cultureof Early Modem France,"AmericanHistorical Review 102 (1997), 1416. 37. Ibid., 1439.
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Under the epistemology Smith professes, how could "alterations in the physical environment" or any other extralinguisticelement "modify beliefs"? The key to his argument'spossible success is the implication that "beliefs and values" are separatefrom language:because they are forces "not fully determined" by language they must be of a separateexistential order from language (if they were not but still responded to changes in outward reality, the closed-system rule would be violated).As elements essentially differentfrom language, beliefs and values could change through interaction with other extralinguistic elements. However, beliefs and values are surely mentallyexperiencedand processed concepts (even if subconsciously),so they are thought;thus, if humansthink "with" beliefs and values cannot be separatefrom language language as Smith avers,38 after all-and Smith's solution collapses.39 The thirdwriter,RichardBiernacki(in an articlefrom these pages), objects to some of the same problemsrecognized by Smith, showing how culturalhistorians have taken advantage of traditionalsocioeconomic analytical foundations even thoughsuch foundationsare made untenableby theirphilosophies. Seeking to regaintheoreticalcoherencefor the linguistic turn,he shows (implicitlyrebuking Spiegel for defending Saussure)that the turn's "principal,Saussurean-affiliated model of sign systems ... is untenableas an accountof how culturalmeaning is generated."40 Ironically, however-as another writer notes in the same
issue of the journal-Biernacki finishes his essay "close to . . . Foucault, and his
concept of discourse" (in spite of a negative gesture at "the early Michel Foucault").41 PerhapsBiernackicircles aroundhimself in this mannerbecause he retains a great deal of sympathyfor the (possibly) emancipatorypostmodernist reaction against essentialism, a stance often linked to the linguistic relativism resulting from Saussure'spropositions:Biernacki may have been searching for an alternativeto Saussurethat would provide the same results. That alternative, in any event, is what Biernackifinds, and the theoreticalfissuresdescribedin this essay stay open afterhe closes.
38. Ibid., 1416. 39. He might answerthatemotions are separatefrom languageand could be affectedby outerstimuli, then in turnchange beliefs and values. But while the mentalprocessing of such concepts may be accompaniedby emotions, if we think in languageit little matterswhetheror not emotions are sepait is hardto conratefromlanguage,for the conceptscannotbe. Given the closed-systemrequirement, ceive of a process by which an emotion could affect the structureof a concept; Smith never addresses this difficulty,and even so a technicaljustificationby way of pyschological or neurologicalstudies would be necessary.The vaguenesswith which Smith'speople push theirmentalweight aroundis also because it requiressupportfrom cognitive problematic: his formulation perforceremainsunpersuasive psychology or perhapslongitudinalstudies by psycholinguistsworking on semantics and pragmatics, yet instead of citing currentwork in the most relevant specialties he supports himself with only QuentinSkinnerand a few otherthinkerslikewise inadequatefor the purpose. 40. Richard Biernacki, "Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in Cultural Inquiry," History and Theory39 (2000), 301; see also 295, 298. History 41. ChrisLorenz, "SomeAfterthoughts on Cultureand Explanationin HistoricalInquiry," and Theory 39 (2000), 350, and Biernacki, "Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in CulturalInquiry," 291.
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Had Biernackibeen truly devoted to "the analytic resourcesof the linguists," as he avows,42surely he would have replaced Saussure's almost century-old ideas with concepts originating in the Chomskyan revolution (Chomsky's researchprogramremains dominantin linguistics) or currentcompeting developments such as cognitive linguistics. Instead,Biernackiemploys "tropes"in a mannermore reminiscentof Nietzsche and Hayden White than of modern linguists;43of the few actual linguists cited in Biernacki's article, the two most noteworthy,P. N. Voloshinovand BenjaminLee Whorf,are scarcely a generation younger than Saussure,and they are not as differentfrom their Swiss predecessor as Biernacki implies. Voloshinov objected to seeing language as only a neoSaussureansystem of rules, but under the influence of turn-of-the-century Kantianismhe retainedcore elements of Saussure'slangue, implicitly presuming And what Biernacki language's mentalistic and closed-system characteristics.44 advances as "Whorf's celebrated analysis"45 should be temperedby observing that Whorf's well-known argument about Hopi time-despite its perennial appeal for scholars in other disciplines-has long been a laughing-stockin linBut no scholar determinedto sustain the postmodernistdirecguistics proper.46 tion of the historiographical linguistic turn could safely deploy Chomsky or his successors,47 whereasWhorf's older ideas, as most commonly interpreted, yield an epistemology that is almost a mirrorimage of Saussure's.Whorf was heavily influencedby Humboldt,and while Humboldtnever articulateda theory of lan42. Biernacki,"Languageand the Shift from Signs to Practicesin CulturalInquiry,"309. 43. On the potential dangers of such an approach, see Lorenz, "Can Histories Be True? Narrativism,Positivism, and the 'Metaphorical Turn,"'History and Theory37 (1998), 309-329. 44. Simon Dentith, BakhtinianThought:an Introductory Reader (London:Routledge, 1995), 11, 27-28, 30. 45. Biernacki,"Languageand the Shift from Signs to Practicesin CulturalInquiry,"310. 46. For an overview of the problemswith Whorf's work and the implicationsusually drawnfrom it, see Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: W. Morrow and Co., 1994), 57-63. One of the relatively few currently active linguists respectful of Whorf's efforts is forcedto admitthatnumerousattemptsby a previousgeneration(of Whorf-inspired linguists) to verify linguistic relativismhave proven inconclusive;in addition,Whorf's own work "is vaguely formulated,so that an enterprisingPh.D. candidatewould have no trouble in producing at IzchakM. Schlesinger,"If de Saussurewas Right, Could Whorf least 108 versions of Whorfianism": Have Been Wrong?"in Language and Cognition:A DevelopmentalPerspective, ed. Esther Dromi; vol. 5, HumanDevelopment,ed. Sidney Strauss(Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Pub. Corp., 1993), 213, 204. Even if the bulk of recentlinguistics did not contradictthe thrustof his more well-known ideas, Whorf would appearhighly questionableas a good choice of linguists from whom to borrow,as Biernacki wishes, "analytictools" (308). 47. Foucault, for one, fully recognized what was at stake in the differences between his own Nietzschean- and Saussurean-derived social-constructionist epistemology and the more essentialistic, biologically based epistemology resultingfrom Chomsky's newer ideas: Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, "HumanNature:Justice versus Power," in Foucault and His Interlocutors,ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago:Universityof Chicago Press, 1997), 128-140. The seminal works on Chomskyan epistemology are E. H. Lenneberg,The Biological Foundationsof Language (New York:JohnWiley & Sons, Inc., 1967) and Jerry Fodor, The Language of Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975). For some recent exponents, see Steven Pinker,How the Mind Works(New York:Norton, 1997), Peter Wilken,Noam Chomskyon Power,Knowledge,and HumanNature (New York:St. Martin'sPress, 1997), 1-84, or Neil Smith, Chomsky:Ideas and Ideals (Cambridge,Eng.: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1999), 1-176.
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guage as coherentas Saussure's,the former'sanalyses were conductedin a manner that closely foreshadowedthe latter's structuralism.48 As an unsurprisingcorrelate to these links between Humboldt, Saussure, Voloshinov,andWhorf,Biernackitells readersthat"meaningis at a remove from form, [so] a model of culturehas to acknowledgeas a separateorderof logic the principles that agents employ for bridging that deferralin major types of practices." Humboldtian(Voloshinovan-Whorfian-Saussurean) epistemology directing his efforts, Biernacki cannot present an active element outside language as agency, so he turnsagency into "principlesthat agents employ"-thereby creating merely another group of discursive entities (linguistic indexicals are an example).49 Languageuse becomes not an exercise in agency but "a structure in its own right."50 Enjoininghistoriansto connect sign systems "moreconcretely" to "practice"-emphasizing how people use language in a particularcontextBiernacki'sapproachmay seem promisingat first,51but his implicitreacceptance of linguistic hermeticism reinstates the deep problem of agency and change. Biernacki neither acknowledges the conundrumnor do his recommendations contradictSaussure'sbasic postulates, which is no doubt why Foucaulthimself had thought,quite comfortably,along Biernacki's"concrete"lines.52
IV
Whatever the shortcomingsof his article, however, Biernacki provides a welcome example of a linguistic-turnscholar beginning to face some unnerving facts. Others would do well to emulate him. He rightly warns like-minded colleagues that they should change some of their ideas and "renew their understandingof how 'culture'works,"53 sensing that if they do not, they will continually face difficultieslike thatexhibitedin JoanW. Scott's recentbook on French feminism. Unlike the scholars just discussed, Scott makes no attemptto evade
the requirements of "linguistic-turn" logic: "feminist agency .
.
. is an effect of
ambiguities, inconsistencies, contradictionswithin particularepistemologies," merely "a symptom of [liberal individualism's]constitutive contradictions,"so change occurs not because French feminists agitated for it (logically, they can have no more agency than Joyce's ceaselessly moving automatons)but because within a Saussureansystem, ideas are constitutedby difference.54 Scott's agency48. For Whorf's and Saussure'srelationshipto Humboldt,see Brown, Humboldt'sConceptionof LinguisticRelativity, 12-16 and 119, n. 21. 301-302. 49. Biernacki,"Languageand the Shift from Signs to Practicesin CulturalInquiry," 50. Ibid., 290. 51. Ibid., 302. 52. "Languagecan be analyzed in its formal propertiesonly if one takes its concretefunctioning into account. Languageis indeed a set of structures[thatenables us to say things], but discourses in fact arefunctional units"(Foucault,Aesthetics,290, emphasis added, and see also 307); culturalanalysts should"address'practices'as a domainof analysis ... from the angle of what 'was done"' (462). 290. 53. Biernacki,"Languageand the Shift from Signs to Practicesin CulturalInquiry," 54. JoanW. Scott, OnlyParadoxes to Offer:FrenchFeministsand the Rightsof Man, (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1996), 16, 18.
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as-effect, like Joyce's "creative"agency, is situated within a frameworkwhere change is theoretically systematic rather than historically contingent, but she of faulty reasoning by refusing to apologize for her escapes the embarrassment intelligently submitting to logical conditions she probably theoretical stance, knows she cannot circumvent.And unlike the many scholars who set aside the issues discussed here, Scott refuses to ignore her epistemology's unpleasant implications,ending her book on a ratherdiscouragingnote for activists in the trenches:"Feminism'sproblem,"she concludes, "cannotbe resolved as it has been posed. But can it be posed otherwise? .. . I think not."After all, "it is in the natureof a paradoxto be unresolvable."55 Such politicalpessimism may be depressing,but the truthsometimeshurtsand must surelybe faced if the linguistic hermeticismthatdrives it indeed constitutes Yet perhaps,as Biernacki "thepropermodel for culture,"as Joyce has insisted.56 argues,not even Scott adheresto all the requirementsof a consistent linguisticHer book's elision of agency is satisfactory,but the turn historical practice.57 work also narratesmany social changes. And as we have seen, the denial of active human agency is concomitant with the denial of sociocultural change itself, for not even the collective, non-individual, sub/unconscious processes favored by Foucault can logically allow for change within a given language's culture without resort to an unsatisfactoryblack box-as he himself seems to have silently realized, studiously evading the problem after the first edition of OT. Without recourse to metaphysics, propositions about diachronic linguistic change and humans who cognize entirely with or in a closed system are ultimately incompatible; these principles require that people cause diachronic change even when beings locked inside the system have no way of effecting such change. Practitionersof the linguistic turn are pinned to the wall of time by Zeno's arrow transposed to language, and the solution of a Feynman or would rip out the arrow only to leave an unstanchablewound that GrUnbaum would bleed the kind of humanisticcontinuitythat Foucaulthas vigorously disallowed.58
Other historiansneed not remain trappedin paradoxwith Scott's Sisyphean overtures,if limitfeminists, however. Smith's and Biernacki'sinterdisciplinary ed, point the way forward.Historianswho cast a wider net can expect a more bountiful catch. Even as postmodernismsaw birth in the work of the Tel Quel such as Levi-Straussand Clifford Geertz, the late W. V. group and structuralists
55. Ibid., 174-175. 56. Joyce, Democratic Subjects, 13. 57. Biernacki,"Languageand the Shift from Signs to Practicesin CulturalInquiry,"300-302. 58. See Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 12-14, or Aesthetics, 429-430. The difficulties we describe here can also be pointed out in the work of other postmoderntheorists; cf. Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford applyjust as UniversityPress, 1989),_215-216andpassim. Ourcritiquecould, with some adjustment, "ordinary lanassociated with RichardRorty,or the neo-Wittgensteinian well to the neo-pragmatism guage"contextualismof J. G. A. Pocock and QuentinSkinner,and even for the ostensibly agent-conscious PierreBourdieu;see PierreBourdieu,Language and SymbolicPower, ed. John B. Thompson, transl. Gino Raymond and MatthewAdamson (Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1991), 32-34.
75
0. Quine observedthatepistemology was no longer the sole province of philosophers: scientists would now have their say.59Since that time neurobiology and biological psychology have advanced at an astonishing pace and should be ignoredby no scholarconcernedwith the problemscontemplatedhere. Similarly, as Scott realized, "linguistic turn"has always been something of a misnomer,60 but what if investigatorsof the past begin to make the "turn" live up to its accompanying adjective-earnestly engaging with the major lines of currentwork in linguistics ratherthan receiving old linguistics secondhandfrom postmodernist thinkers? Conveniently,neuroscienceand linguistics (as well as computerscience, psychology, analyticphilosophy,and some social sciences) have now combinedin a massive interdisciplinary endeavorcalled "cognitivescience" which seeks to settle the majorquestions of humanepistemology.Although cognitive scientists do not forecast fulfillment of their quest for decades, perhaps centuries, much of their researchis alreadyrelevant to our theoreticaldebates. For example, since some of their experiments strongly suggest that homo sapiens sapiens' basic numbercognition owes nothing to that species' linguistic faculties and is almost certainly shared with other (nonlinguistic) animals, scholars in the humanities can probably discard the idea of thinking wholly with or in language.61 Historians may hesitate to extrapolatesignificance from such findings to their own work for fear of misinterpreting the science, but cognitive philosophersare constructingtheoreticalframeworkswithin which this scientific researchcan be situated.62 Throughoutthe debate over postmodernismin history, many of the terms have (with a certain poetic justice, given our argumenthere) remained nearly static; even now, Biernacki's rejection of Saussure leads back to Foucault-but sincere and comprehensiveattemptsto interpolatefindings from cognitive science into the linguistic turn may finally enable historiansto leave behind the strugglingghosts of Kant and Hume.63
59. W. V. 0. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 90. 60. Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 53. 61. Stanislas Dehaene, The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1997). 62. For instance, feminist philosopherof science Alison Wylie has discussed how her concept of "mitigatedobjectivity"applies to the specific needs of historians:"AlternativeHistories: Epistemic Disunity and Political Integrity," in MakingAlternativeHistories: The Practice of Archaeology and History in Non-WesternSettings, ed. Peter R. Schmidt and Thomas C. Patterson (Oxford: James Currey, 1999), 255-272. For other examples, see Alvin I. Goldman, Philosophical Applications of CognitiveScience (Boulder:Westview Press, 1993), or GeorgeLakoff and MarkJohnson,Philosophy in the Flesh: the EmbodiedMind and its Challenge to WesternThought(New York:Basic Books, 1999), which contains such chaptersas "Realismand Truth,""Time,""The Self," and "Causation." 63. To the best of our knowledge, only one historian, Murray G. Murphey (Philosophical Foundationsof Historical Knowledge [Albany:State University of New YorkPress, 1994], 2-54, 6474, 135-136, 160-169, 176-182) and an anthropologist,Donald E. Brown ("Human Nature and History,"Historyand Theory38 [1999], 138-157), have devoted themselves to this task.A thirdwriter makes briefer mention of cognitive science: Joseph Fracchia, "Dialectical Itineraries," History and Theory 38 (1999), 196. These are creditable beginnings, but the sweep of cognitive science is so broad-even vast-that accountsadequatefor historiansneed to synthesize many more elements than
76
MICHAELL. FITZHUGHAND WILLIAMH. LECKIE,JR. V
We have stressed the relentless logic of the postmodern'sincompatibilitywith any attemptto reconcile it with agency. What can be offered as a way out? And what would such a new frameworklook like in historiographical practice?We have focused on the difficulties faced by historians sympatheticto the ideaslargely of nineteenth-century derivation-of Foucault. But what gives us the right to our critique?We now must addressthe fundamentalissue, the extent to which linguistic structuresalone determinethe apprehensibleworld, in orderto offer working historians a basis for confidence that they can escape such pessimistic conclusions regardingagency as those confrontedby Scott. The most historical-programmatic of Foucault's statements, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, and offers History," our startingpoint. This magisterialdeclaration,and its development in Discipline and Punish, encouragedmuch "body"work that has in turn prompted such statements as, "A now enormous history of medicine and the body has .. . shaken the idea that the body itself is a foundationfor knowledge and truth."One historian has recently protested the resulting "skin-deep"and "silhouette-likeview of the body that leaves its materialityand culture-creating capacities in the shadows,"arguingfor "a corporealturnthat acknowledges the Yet his goal "is not to supthinking body as the producerof human worlds."64 plant these semiotic turns toward the body, but to complement them,"65 so he cannot succeed; he accepts Saussure, and in doing so accepts the fundamental linguistic epistemology of Foucault and Derrida in which we can be aware of nothingoutside the text(s), bodies included.One cannotremainwithin those theoretical orbits and rescue much of materiality. One can, however, turnto neurology.At perhapsthe most basic level, sensory and motor areas of the brain (indubitablypartof the body) interactin a manner such thatwe perceive the placementof an armor leg; it would requirea great deal of sophisticatedpoststructural acrobatics to construe this phenomenon as naturalisticsense, of the body anythingotherthanknowledge, in a "traditional," When these knowing body parts (in the brain)are damaged,indiby the body.66 viduals can become totally unawareof a limb, which thereupon(thoughundam-
these writershad space to treat.For overviews, see CognitiveScience, ed. BenjaminMartinBly and David E. Rumelhart(San Diego: Academic Press, 1999); WhatIs Cognitive Science?, ed. Ernest Lepore and Zenon Pylyshyn (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999); Perspectives on Cognitive Science: and Foundations,ed. JanetWiles andTerryDartnall(Stamford,Conn.:Ablex Theories,Experiments, Pub. Corp., 1999); The MITEncyclopediaof the CognitiveSciences, ed. RobertA. Wilson and Frank C. Keil (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 1999); and A Companionto Cognitive Science, ed. William Bechtel and George Graham(Malden,Mass.: Blackwell, 1998). Practice, 153; Joyce, Democratic Subjects,6. 64. Foucault,Language, Counter-Memory, 65. Fracchia,"DialecticalItineraries,"178. 66. C. L. Reed and M. J. Farah, "The Psychological Reality of the Body Schema: A Test with Journal of ExperimentalPsychology: HumanPerception and Performance21 Normal Participants," (1995), 334-343.
77
aged) becomes nonfunctional.67 Victims of this difficulty quickly learn that knowledge truly is power in the "old"sense Foucaultattemptedto problematize. Classic linguistic work (though never acknowledged by poststructuralists) demonstratedlong ago that both the linguistic and the conceptualpropertiesof what we call "color"are consequentupon the physiology and neuralstructure of color vision, not upon the language people speak. Cognitive linguists have now shown that, for speakersof differentlanguages, not just verbs but also concepts of handmotion arise from neurologicaland physical motorelements of the body, and-even more dramatically-that the semantics and logic of what linguists call "aspect"(event structure)can also arise from motor control systems. They have even demonstrated that the neuralcontrol system enabling physical movement can performabstractreasoningaboutthe structure of events. The only reasonable conclusion is that cognition is founded in cross-culturallybiological bodies much more firmly than postmodernistswould like.68 Supportfor versions of this view is burgeoningon all sides of cognitive science. Some researcherssupporta greaterrole for the body in cognition than others, but nearly all agree that humans begin with the same set of neurological mental tools, and while cognition sooner or later develops cultural traits, the species-wide cognitive functions do not in their turn vanish. For example, neuropsychological schema theory,which holds that memory is organizedinto context-activatedgroupingsthat guide cognition, accords a prominentrole to social conditioning-but compelling evidence indicates that the elements guiding schematic organizationand evolution are as much innate and (physically) environmentalas they are cultural.69 Otherworkunderlinesthe crucialrole thatphysical movementplays in gatheringknowledge, and versions of the much-maligned "correspondencetheory of truth"seem to be healthy in spite of decades-long
67. The classic descriptionof this problem, broadly termed "neglect syndrome"by psychiatrists andpsychologists, is MacdonaldCritchley,TheParietal Lobes (London:E. Arnold, 1953). For important recent work, see E. Bisiach, "Mental Representations in Unilateral Neglect and Related Disorders,"QuarterlyJournal of Experimental Psychology 46a (1993), 435-461; UnilateralNeglect: Clinical and Experimental Studies,ed. Ian H. RobertsonandJohnC. Marshall(Hove, Eng.: Lawrence ErlbaumAssociates, 1993); and Spatial Neglect: A Clinical Handbookfor Diagnosis and Treatment, ed. Ian H. Robertsonand Peter W. Halligan (Hove, Eng.: Psychology Press, 1999). 68. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 16-44; George Lakoff and Raphael Nunez, WhereMathematicsComes From: How the EmbodiedMind Brings Mathematicsinto Being (New York:Basic Books, 2000), 27-103. 69. For example, see Jean Mandler,"How to Build a Baby, II: ConceptualPrimitives,"Psycho"The Evolution of Mandler's Conceptual logical Review 99 (1992), 587-604; LarryR. Vandervert, Primitives(Image-schemas)as NeuralMechanismsfor Space-timeSimulationStructures," New Ideas in Psychology 15:2 (August 1997), 105-123; and Annette Karmiloff-Smith,"InnateConstraintsand DevelopmentalChange,"in Paul Bloom, LanguageAcquisition. Core Readings (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 563-590. Much cognitive science work is exclusively focused on individualcognition, but for broader,more socially integrativeresearchsee R. B. Cairns,George H. Elder, and E. J. Costello, Developmental Science (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1996), or Interactive Minds, ed. Paul B. Baltes and Ursula M. Staudinger (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Azmitia (133-162) and UrsulaM. Staudinger UniversityPress, 1996), especially articlesby Margarita (276-315).
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assaults against it.70 Related to this position are several emerging movements, cognition."Researchersin ecological psychology and "situated"or "distributed these camps accept the strong embodiment of human mental functioning and then take it further,arguing that cognition is also radically situated, and this meansthatcognition is decenteredand thatdistinctionsbetween mind, body, and At firstglance, postmodernistsmight be attracted to world need to be abandoned. this position-until they realize the precise kind of decenteringand abandoning these scientists propose, for they extend the mind into the local environment, arguingthatcognition shouldbe seen as a radicalextension of biophysics or even making environmentalobjects directly perceived.71 And as mediation vanishes into the night, so does postmodernism. objection, the one to personal This strikesdirectly at anotherpoststructuralist experience. Once importantto major figures like R. G. Collingwood and Marc
70. In the words of one assessment, the view that "the meaning of a word is its relationto things BarbaraC. Malt, "Word in the world; that is, meaning is reference""has recently been influential": Meanings,"in Bechtel and Graham,ed., A Companionto CognitiveScience, 335. For an example of relatedwork, see Gerd Gigerenzer,Peter M. Todd, and the ABC ResearchGroup,Simple Heuristics criteria" ThatMake Us Smart (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1999), who adopt "correspondence as the measure of human cognitive activity because people must "make reasonable,adaptive inferences about the real social and physical world given limited time and knowledge" (22). Similarly, other researchersconclude that "physicaland functional similaritiesthat hold between objects in the world-i.e., category structure-influence neuralorganizationand, in turn,routinelanguagecomprehension processes":KaraD. Federmeierand MartaKutas, "A Rose by Any OtherName: Long-Term Memory Structureand Sentence Processing,"Journal of Memoryand Language 4 (1999), 469. ed. George 71. See, for example, Social Cognition:Studiesof the Developmentof Understanding, andPaul Light (Chicago:Universityof ChicagoPress, 1982); M. T. Turveyand RobertE. Butterworth Shaw, "Towardan Ecological Physics and a Physical Psychology,"in The Science of the Mind: 2001 and Beyond,ed. RobertL. Solso andDominic W. Massaro(New York:OxfordUniversityPress, 1995), 144-169; Edward S. Reed, Encounteringthe World:Towardan Ecological Psychology (New York: on 'Mind, Body, and Mental Oxford University Press, 1996); Antonio R. Damasio, "Commentary Illness,"'Philosophy,Psychiatry,and Psychology 5 (December 1998), 343-345; H. J. Chiel and R. D. of Nervous System, Body Beer, "TheBrainHas a Body:AdaptiveBehaviorEmergesfrom Interactions and Environment,"Trendsin Neuroscience 20:12 (1997), 553-557. Ecological psychologists have shown recent interest in the tradition of continental philosophy from which poststructuralism see A. Still and J. Good, derives,butin a mannerthat will gain little approvalfrom poststructuralists; "The Ontology of Mutualism,"Ecological Psychology 10 (1998), 39-63. For the most recent and authoritative word on ecological psychology, see EleanorJ. Gibson andAnne D. Pick, An Ecological Approachto PerceptualLearningand Development(Oxford:OxfordUniversityPress, 2000), and see also Evolving Explanations of Development: Ecological Approaches to Organism-Environment Systems, ed. Cathy Dent-Read and Patricia Goldring Zukow (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1997). Researchersin situatedcognition emphasize the social aspects of dis(Foucauldian) mentallife, but in this accounthumansstill look quite unlikediscursivelystructured decenteredselves. Rather,people are "motivatedtacticianswho pragciplined subjectsor (Derridean) at hand,"and (contraFoucault)mental matically adapttheir reasoningstrategiesto the requirements and More Social: Recent see, respectively,NorbertSchwarz, "Warmer imagery is "non-discursive": Developmentsin Cognitive Social Psychology,"AnnualReviewof Sociology 24 (1998), 239, and N. J. An Active PerceptionApproachto T. Thomas, "Are Theories of Imagery Theories of Imagination? Conscious Mental Content,"CognitiveScience 23 (April-June1999), 207. The advent of distributed and situatedcognition researchhas producedsome confusion, resulting in calls for a sharpeningof focus; for a useful overview, see J. L. Moore and T. R. Rocklin, "The Distributionof Distributed and Uses," EducationalPsychology Review 10 (March 1998), 97Cognition:MultipleInterpretations 113. For less radical work of this general persuasion, see Gesture, Speech, and Sign, ed. Lynn S. Messing and Ruth Campbell(New York:OxfordUniversityPress, 1999).
AND THE CAUSES OF CHANGE AGENCY,POSTMODERNISM,
79
Bloch and famously extolled by E. P. Thompson, experience has had a difficult time with Clio lately, receiving little praise even from historians ambivalent towardpoststructuralism.72 However, it will come as no surprisethat cognitive linguists view language not as the medium that constructs all experience but insteadas a tool people use to "communicatewith one anotherabouttheir experience," holding that basic realms of human experience provide the prototypes for general referentialsituations. "Humanbeings, irrespectiveof whether they live in Siberiaor the Kalaharidesert,"remarksone highly distinguishedlinguist, "have the same intellectual,perceptual,and physical equipment;are exposed to the same generalkinds of experiences;and have the same communicativeneeds. One thereforewill expect their languages and the way their languages are used This may overstate to be the same across geographicaland culturalboundaries." the case somewhat,but as the presentarticle went to press, scientists announced thatthey had located the firstgene thatcan be said to underlieour linguistic capability.73 "Knowledgeneed be analyzed,not in terms of consciousness [or] modes of perception . . . but in terms of the tactics and strategiesof power,"Foucault announcedupon enteringhis genealogical phase, but as anotherwriterhas bluntly remarked,"consideringFoucault's conspicuous lack of insight into the [biological] processes involved in consciousness and modes of perception,he might have been well advised to do more researchin these areas."74 Thereare good reasons to reject the idea that we cognize only in language,to accept languageitself as developing at least partlyfrom the biological, trans-temporal (as opposed to a wholly localized, culturally constructed) body, and to accept at least some species-level cognitive traitsthat make past actions and attitudestheoretically,if analysis. not practically,amenableto an accurate,correspondent If we do not soon make a "biological turn"ourselves, in fact, we might find the relevantterritory occupiedbefore we arrive.Scientists are alreadystakingout the historicalground,using evidence from the past to arguethat "the fundamental characteristics of Homo sapienshave never changed,being influencedonly in form by culture,"while the editorsof perhapsthe leading cognitive-sciencejourvolnal explicitly invoke MarcBloch when introducingtheirfiftieth-anniversary ume.75 Archaeologistshave been applyingrecentinsights from evolutionarybiol72. Spiegel, for example, dismisses historianswho "weaklyinvoke . . . individual,subjectiveexperience"as providingaccess to the past ("History,Historicism,"73). 73. See, respectively,Michael Tomasello, "CognitiveLinguistics,"in Bechtel and Graham,ed., A Companion to Cognitive Science, 486; Bernd Heine, Cognitive Foundations of Grammar Gene (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 10-11; and Cecilia S. L. Lai et al., "A Forkhead-domain is Mutatedin a Severe Speech and Language Disorder,"Nature 413 (2001), 519-523. For more on cognitive linguistics and prototypicalexperience, see Lakoff and Johnson,Philosophy in the Flesh. 74. Foucault,PowerlKnowledge:Selected Interviewsand Other Writings,1972-1977 (New York: PantheonBooks, 1981), 77; George H. Elder, The ScientificFoundationsof Social Communication: From Neurons to Rhetoric (Commack,N.Y.: New Science Publishers, 1999), 29. 75. Del Thiessen andYoko Umezawa, "TheSociobiology of EverydayLife: A New Look at a Very on Cognition,ed. JacquesMehler Old Novel," HumanNature 9:3 (1998), 293-320 and COGNITION and SusanaFranck(Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), xiii-ix.
80
ogy and cognitive science for over a decade.76 Fortunately, historianshave not all been asleep; at approximately the mid-pointof this essay's composition,History and Theorypublisheda theme issue devoted to the ramificationsof evolutionary biology for historical scholarship.77 Social Darwinismgave biology a bad name in the social sciences and humanities,but the newer perspectives seem unlikely to lead to a stultifyingbiological determinismto which studentsof culturemight object:the biologists are discoveringthatenvironmental factors,including socioculturalelements, actuallyalterthe morphologyof the partsof the braininvolved in higher cognitive functions, lending a whole new meaning to the phrase "I changed my mind."As a result, cognitive science is undergoing"simultaneous that may well pulls downwards into the brain and outwards into the world"78 result in a theory that accounts fully for both natureand culture-or may even abandon those concepts, explaining our existence in some new combinatory fashion difficultto imagine at the moment. As he opposed the Nazis in a principled struggle for the highest stakes in humanexistence, a struggle in which he paid the ultimateprice, Marc Blochwith far more right to assess human naturethan his postwar compatriots-nevertheless observedthat without"a permanentfoundationin humannatureand in human society the very names of [humankind]and society become meaningless."79 Whetherby declaringthe death of the author,chartingthe beginning and end of man, or attackingthe Westernmetaphysicsof presence, poststructuralists In the end, as Bloch realized,this view of sought to ensureprecisely this result.80 for historians.For him, "[T]he history of humanityis highly counterproductive historians"distinguisheditself from geology, paleontology, and other temporally orienteddisciplines by including "the humanelement," always with the caution that "it is change which the historianis seeking to grasp."81 Structuralism, poststructuralism,and related movements do not logically allow scholars to
76. For programmatic overviews, see TheAncientMind: Elementsof CognitiveArchaeology,ed. Colin Renfrew and Ezra B. W. Zubrow (Cambridge,Eng.:, CambridgeUniversity Press, 1994), and Evolutionary Archaeology: Theory and Application, ed. Michael J. O'Brien (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1996). See also James L. Battersby,Paradigms Regained: Pluralism and University of PennsylvaniaPress, 1991) for a literaryscholthe Practice of Criticism(Philadelphia: ar's viewpoint on these issues. For an example of work by naturalscientists emphasizingthe role of in the PrecolumbianAmericas,ed. David agency, see ImperfectBalance: LandscapeTransformations L. Lentz (New York:ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2000). 77. History and Theory,Theme Issue 38, The Returnof Science: EvolutionaryIdeas and History (1999). In the issue's introduction,David Gary Shaw refers cogently to "the now indisputablerele"The Returnof Science," 5. vance of our hard-wiring,how our phenotypesand genotypes interact": 78. William Bechtel, Adele Abrahamsen,and George Graham,"TheLife of Cognitive Science," in Bechtel and Graham,ed., A Companionto CognitiveScience, 96-97. 79. MarcBloch, TheHistorian'sCraft,transl.PeterPutnam(New York:RandomHouse, 1953), 42. 80. Perhapsnot coincidentallyunderthe influenceof a formerNazi who apparentlynever repentinspiredwork, ed of his involvementwith NationalSocialism. For an example of such poststructurally see RobertC. Solomon, Historyand HumanNature:A Philosophical Review of EuropeanPhilosophy and Culture,1750-1850 (New York:Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), xi-xv, 3-15, 357-360. For the importance of postructuralists'relationships to Heidegger and his Nazism, see Tom Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism,and Being (London: Routledge, 1995), 162-168 andpassim. 81. Bloch, The Historian's Craft,25, 46, 42; cf. also 23.
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grasphistoricalchange because they allow little or no scope for the existence of humanagents. Cognitive science does. It is hardlycoincidence thatcognitive scientists can identify themselves as Bloch's heirs. A historiography-and a historian'sdaily performancelecturingto undergraduates or runninga graduateseminar-based on the emerging insights of linguistics (in the broaderendeavor of cognitive science) might not be very different from the enterpriseof history as many workinghistoriansstill engage in it. What we view as perhapsthe most critical result of a "cognitive turn"is the breaking of that Faustianbargainand the deprivilegingof the empyreanviewpoint of the theorist or theoretically au courant practitioner. Critical to the distinction between avatarsof the "linguistic turn"and our view, and to our disagreement with those who seek a middle ground, is that the former reject and the latter desire on untenablegrounds an effort to restore history's relationshipwith "the public sphere"-to make history a discipline that links its subjects and its audience.82The transcendental hermeticismof the Faustiantheoristassertsthe possibility for engagementwhile denying it to mortalswho've not sharedin the bargain. Our contention,based on the emerging relevance of cognitive science to a critique of epistemological fashion, suggests that historians-like other human beings -can be and are actively engaged in an ongoing dialogue with otherswho need not be Other.83 They need not apologize for going about their inquiry and their debates about motives, causes, and meanings, and for feeling sheepish about feeling - as we do aftermany long hours in the archives- that we sharein conversationswith our subjects something akin to that experience Machiavelli felt when he repairedto his favorite Florentine garden and shared with young friends his conversationbetween the Ancients and the Moderns.84 WashingtonUniversity,St. Louis (Fitzhugh) St. Louis, Missouri (Leckie)
82.Though beyond the scope of this essay, cognitive linguistics offers an empirical basis for the ideas of Jirgen Habermasand his concept of the "public sphere,"and for its applicationin critical analysis linked to Habermassee William H. Leckie, Jr., "MoralSpaces in the Burckhardtian City," Journal of UrbanHistory 28 (November 2001), 81-97. Jirgen Habermas,The Theoryof Communicative Action, 2 vols., transl.ThomasMcCarthy[1984] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987); The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:An Inquiryinto a Categoryof BourgeoisSociety, transl.Thomas Berger (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), and Moral Consciousnessand Comnmunicative Action, transl.ChristianLenhardtand SherryWeberNicholson (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). 83. For an example of the possibilities in comparativehistory if postmodernlinguistic stricturesthe mapping of "semanticpatterning"-are explicitly eschewed for an analysis that approachesour perspective, see Philip Brook Manville, The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1990). Manville (33) gives as his goal "to understand,and present in a coherent story, the interplay among institutions, human events, explicit ideas, and processes by which" citizenship arose in the classical society that generatedthe very problematicsin philosophy with which theory contends. He then makes use of a comparativeanalysis of ancientAthenian citizenship's origins in propertyownership by comparingit with that of rural societies in Zambia and Nigeria. 84. See Stanley Rosen, The Ancients and the Moderns:RethinkingModernity(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

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Wesleyan University

History and Theoiy, ThemeIssue 40 (December 2001), 59-81

? Wesleyan University 2001 ISSN: 0018-2656

AGENCY, POSTMODERNISM, AND THE CAUSES OF CHANGE

MICHAELL. FITZHUGHAND WILLIAMH. LECKIE,JR.

MICHAELL. FITZHUGHAND WILLIAMH. LECKIE,JR.

AGENCY,POSTMODERNISM, AND THE CAUSES OF CHANGE

MICHAELL. FITZHUGHAND WILLIAMH. LECKIE,JR.

AGENCY,POSTMODERNISM, AND THE CAUSES OF CHANGE

MICHAELL. FITZHUGHAND WILLIAMH. LECKIE,JR.

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AGENCY,POSTMODERNISM, AND THE CAUSES OF CHANGE

MICHAELL. FITZHUGHAND WILLIAMH. LECKIE,JR. II

AGENCY, POSTMODERNISM, ANDTHECAUSES OFCHANGE

MICHAELL. FITZHUGHAND WILLIAMH. LECKIE,JR.

AGENCY,POSTMODERNISM, AND THE CAUSES OF CHANGE

MICHAELL. FITZHUGHAND WILLIAMH. LECKIE,JR.

AGENCY,POSTMODERNISM, AND THE CAUSES OF CHANGE

MICHAELL. FITZHUGHAND WILLIAMH. LECKIE,JR.

AGENCY,POSTMODERNISM, AND THE CAUSES OF CHANGE

MICHAELL. FITZHUGHAND WILLIAMH. LECKIE,JR.

AGENCY,POSTMODERNISM, AND THE CAUSES OF CHANGE

MICHAELL. FITZHUGHAND WILLIAMH. LECKIE,JR. V

AGENCY,POSTMODERNISM, AND THE CAUSES OF CHANGE

MICHAELL. FITZHUGHAND WILLIAMH. LECKIE,JR.

AND THE CAUSES OF CHANGE AGENCY,POSTMODERNISM,

MICHAELL. FITZHUGHAND WILLIAMH. LECKIE,JR.

AGENCY,POSTMODERNISM, AND THE CAUSES OF CHANGE

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