fitzhugh and leckie-postmodernism, and the causes of change

Wesleyan University

Agency, Postmodernism, and the Causes of ChangeAuthor(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. 59-81Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2677987 .Accessed: 22/07/2011 16:08

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History and Theoiy, Theme Issue 40 (December 2001), 59-81 ? Wesleyan University 2001 ISSN: 0018-2656

AGENCY, POSTMODERNISM, AND THE CAUSES OF CHANGE

MICHAEL L. FITZHUGH AND WILLIAM H. LECKIE, JR.

ABSTRACT

This theme issue's call for papers notes that "several prevalent and influential historical practices of the last thirty years have limited agency's significance,. . . seeing the human as the patient of History rather than its agent." The questions implicit in this statement are nowhere more urgent than in those practices collectively known as the "linguistic turn." Yet such questions have been explored sparsely enough in relation to this movement that some adherents can still insist that the ideas they favor do not devalue agency, while many simply ignore the issue and incorporate agency as an integral part of their work. By exam- ining a largely unremarked episode in Michel Foucault's highly influential thought and considering its connections to foundational assumptions of the linguistic turn, we seek to demonstrate in detail why the premises that underlie both structuralism and poststructuralism (the theoretical movements most deeply implicated in the direction the linguistic turn has taken in history) logically require the denial of agency as a causal force and ultimately compel the conclusion that no change can occur in realities as interpreted by humans. We illustrate the intractability of these logical problems by analyzing unsatisfactory defenses from some of the few linguistic-turn historians who have discussed relevant issues, after which we conclude by suggesting that attention to current work 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 analy-

1. Gibbon's contemporary Adam Ferguson wrote, "Mankind, in following the present sense of their minds ... arrive at ends which even their imagination could not anticipate, and pass on, like other animals, in the track of their nature, without perceiving its end": quoted in David Womersley, introduction to Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Allen Lane, 1994), I, xxi-xxii.

60 MICHAEL L. FITZHUGH AND WILLIAM H. LECKIE, JR.

sis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibilities of going beyond them."2 Long before late twentieth-century postmodernist ideas came to the fore, eighteenth-century skepticism had made master narratives difficult to sustain, prompting Kant's program for a Universal History and Hegel's later dialectic. Postmodernism's continuation of the Enlightenment project has been most visible to historians through the work of Foucault, whose rendition still sustains high philosophe irony and its corresponding limits on agency. The philosophic historian's pen shaped the past from a perspective above that of most humans, revealing the forces that propelled history at the same time that the act of writing gave shape, purpose, and identity-as style-to the historian himself as a product of language.3 It was the ironic relationship between historian and subject matter that produced the style for which Gibbon's writing won such acclaim. Yet Gibbon, Hume, and similarly skeptical contemporaries at least saw humans as willful agents who helped create their own destiny even if unaware of what they were truly doing. Foucault and his colleagues better their Enlighten- ment predecessors by carrying Englightenment skepticism to its logical extreme. However, the historical knowledge of the postmodern theorist-as a Doctor Faustus-is privileged even if in negativity, and like Wagner and Robin some of us ordinary historians feel compelled to make a deal with him. In this essay we propose wrestling with the devil himself to restore the role of agency on grounds that reject the linguistic turn, exhorting our colleagues that the notion of an accommodation is an illusion.

Kant, when responding to Hume, took advantage of developments in civil law that gave prominence to intentionality; having grown from the distinction between esse (existence) and esse intentionale (having an idea or a direction of attention), a distinction between questions of fact (quid facti) and of law (quid iuris) encouraged the abstraction of causality from human behavior.4 This tendency, inherited by Kant's rebellious descendants, remains characteristic of the continental backlash against him and Hegel that has directed the linguistic turn in history: two of the more common allegations made against postmodernism- central objections, for example, in Gabrielle M. Spiegel's highly influential argument for a theoretical middle ground-are that it allows little or no human agency and that it prevents historians from making causal explanations for sociocultural change. Yet despite the long history of concern over agency's possibil-

2. 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, Barbarism and Religion, Volume Two: Narratives of Civil

Government (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 5, 40-41; Conceptual Change and the Constitution, ed. Terence Ball and J. G. A. Pocock (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 1988), 9-10; Stephen Koerner, introduction to Ernst Cassirer, Kant's Life and Thought, transl. James Haden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), vii-viii. Kant's legalistic rationale for tak- ing account of human intentions contained the seeds of solipsism and soon gave way to Hegel's ideas: see Karl L6with, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964).

5. Gabrielle Spiegel, "History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages," Speculum 65 (1991), 60, 68. After an endorsement by one of the most preeminent of then-living historians, Lawrence Stone, so many others adopted Spiegel's position that it can fairly be described as

AGENCY, POSTMODERNISM, AND THE CAUSES OF CHANGE 61

ity and its relation to causality, these questions have been explored sparsely enough in relation to postmodernism that some cultural historians can still deny that the ideas they favor significantly downplay the role of agency, while many seem to ignore this problem altogether, 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) ignored postmodernism, a movement whose origins are linked to a philosophical tradition of Continental skepticism but which seems to have acquired its cachet from recent trends in architectural design and con- sumer style: we may perhaps be looking at one of the unfortunate consequences of the democratization of eighteenth-century genteel readers' tastes.6 And finally, many of the positions associated with postmodernism-in particular, critiques of historians' objectivity, acceptance of cultural relativism, and skepticism with regard to the bases of moral and political agency -are not unique to postmodern thought, and were widespread among professional historians by the end of the Progressive Era.7 This may, along with disciplinary barriers, have discouraged

a standard orthodoxy of the profession: Lawrence Stone, "History and Post-Modernism," Past and Present 131 (May 1991), 217-218, and "History and 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, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York: Norton, 1994), 223-224 and passim. For the sake of convenience, the terminology we use somewhat broadens Perez Zagorin's recent characterization of academic postmodernism ("History, the Referent, and Narrative: Reflections on Postmodernism Now," History and Theory 38 [1999], 7-9); here, the "linguistic turn," "cultural history," and "postmodernism" are treated interchangeably as terms denoting the movement in academic history underpinned by the structuralism and poststructuralism that derives mainly from Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Saussure.

The philosophical literature on agency and its relationship to 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 background see Donald Davidson's collected Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). More recently, see (for example), John Heil, The Nature of True Minds (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1-19, 30-57, 103-150, 210-238; Jennifer Hornsby, Simple Mindedness: In Defense of Naive Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,), 83-101, 129-153, 185-194; Valeri Ledyaev, Power: A Conceptual Analysis (Commack, N.Y.: Nova Science Publishers, 1998), 69-86, 151-180; Hugh J. McCann, The Works of 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).

6. Indeed, the term "Post-Modern" was first used by Arnold Toynbee almost a half-century ago to describe a skepticism and irrationalism in the West since the 1870s; see Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1989), 65-102. See Robert Venturi, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977) for the classic statement of postmodernist architectural fashion.

7. This development in American thought has recently been treated by Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). On the long history of historians' 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.: Cornell University Press, 1993) and especially John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).


rigorous focus on basic postmodern principles and might explain why current theoretical linguistics has played no part in the "linguistic turn."

This essay attempts to establish the groundwork for a positive reconstruction of the theoretical premises that motivate working historians; although usually unelaborated, and contested by literary theorists, these premises are validated by 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, historians must begin seriously to embrace theoretical argument as a matter of ordinary practice rather than 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 historians on a surer critical footing.

We begin with Spiegel because her article paradigmatically illustrates the deci- sive impact of postmodernism on theoretical efforts to avoid the foreclosure of agency it demands. Her argument typifies the relationship of these logical issues to much disciplinary practice, in which the postmodern encounter frames very clearly the quandary that a largely-unexamined tradition of epistemological and ethical thinking has created for historians who want to justify doing history. Simply put, there is no way to rescue humanist ideals-what we take as the laudable motive to stake out a middle ground-from the implications of the linguistic turn, and we will document some of the reasons for this problem by discussing the difficulties that have hindered such efforts. The crux of Spiegel's attempt to effect what she called a "rapprochement" with semiotics was the rescue of Ferdinand de Saussure from what she viewed as Jacques Derrida's misappropri- ation. Her impulse was sound: Saussurean linguistics buttresses the work of not just Derrida, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Kristeva, and many another linguistic-turn figure, but most importantly of Foucault. Recalling his first encounter with Saussure in the late 1940s during lectures by Merleau-Ponty, Foucault said, "I remember clearly [that] . . . the problem of language appeared and it was clear that phenomenology was no match for structural analysis in accounting for the effects of meaning that could be produced by a structure of the linguistic type, in which the subject (in the phenomenological sense) did not intervene to confer meaning."9 In other words, had Spiegel succeeded with Saussure, she would have neutralized many prominent postmodernist thinkers, including the one who has exerted the most influence on history. It is a tribute to her sincerity that so many have assumed her success. However, she presented Saussure incompletely, focus- ing on language as a socially constructed, synchronic system without positive terms, while neglecting fundamental premises accepted by Saussure-and that immediately struck Foucault as fundamental, as well-underpinning those more superficial elements. In the end, as Spiegel herself has recently admitted, she could not but fail. Yet her efforts have allowed large numbers of fellow historians

8. Zagorin, "History, the Referent, and Narrative," 4, and Keith Jenkins, "A Postmodern Reply to Zagorin," History and Theory 39 (2000), 189.

9. Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, and Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 21.


to "partially" accept postmodernism under the assumption that 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 acknowledged postmodern strictures on agency and change, and that because Foucault excluded "the human element" he was theoretically prevented from elaborating a concept of change. But Maclean's further analysis and conclusion-that Foucault's position was idiosyncratic and need not prevent other postmodernists from remedying the situation-is undermined by the mistaken assumption that "Foucault himself never offered a theoretical explanation of change in intellectual life."'" For, in the preface to The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (hereafter Q0),12 Foucault did attempt to theorize change. A close examination of this theoretical episode and its relationship to logically foundational tenets of the continental linguistic 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 demonstrate the intractability of the problem than the laudable but incomplete treatments offered by Spiegel and her like-minded successors.

I

English readers of OT almost immediately encounter the puzzling judgment that "traditional explanations" of historical change, comprising "technological or social changes, influences of various kinds," are "more magical than effective." We submit, however, that Doctor Faustus's magic has been replaced by the theorist's privilege of standing outside history in-as we shall suggest below-quite literally an out-of-body experience. Foucault's immediately proffered reasons for 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 articulation so complex and so diverse in composition actually operates."13 The obvious response is that historical research is perhaps never easy and that part of the historian's responsibility, if indeed "one does not know how" about something, 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 earlier theoretical position in favor of a wholly postmodern one, see her The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xxi; for an example of historians citing her support for incorporating elements of poststructuralist vocabulary in otherwise methodologically conventional writing, see T. H. Breen and Timothy Hall, "Structuring Provincial Imagination: The Rhetoric and Experience of Social Change in Eighteenth-Century New England," American Historical Review 103 (1998), 1413.

11. Ian Maclean, "The Process of Intellectual Change: 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: Pantheon Books, 1970).

13. Ibid., xii-xiii. See also The Archaeology of Knowledge, transl. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Routledge, 1972), 109, 164, and Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, transl. Robert Hurley and others, vol. 2, Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984 (New York: New Press, 1998), 302.


find out, however partial and contingent the resulting "know how" may be. Nevertheless, Foucault "left the problem of causes to one side": "I chose to con- fine myself to describing the transformations themselves, thinking that this would be an indispensable step if, one day, a theory of . . . change and epistemological causality was to be constructed."14

This statement, from the foreword to the English edition of OT, elides Foucault's own 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 and even change itself, however, is required by the logical matrix comprising two crucial and foundational dicta by structuralists and poststructuralists alike. Nietzsche and Heidegger can both be considered direct sources of these notions, but Saussure most systematically set forth the applicable ideas and was the most significant, by Foucault's own account, in contributing to his notions of language. By far the most important is that humans cognize wholly in language; the logical correlate is that any given language is a closed system.15 As Spiegel rightly notes, within such a framework, "reality does not exist 'beyond' the reach of language; it is 'always already' constructed in language, which is anterior to our knowledge of the world.... [T]hat 'world' is only a linguistic construct." 16 These ideas developed into the structuralist stance on the anti-Cartesian character of human subjectivity-when ideas are articulated, they are limited to the preexist- ing possibilities allowed by the subject's linguistically constituted reality. Such a viewpoint, which Foucault strongly supported,17 would preclude people from making any fundamental changes in their realities.

14. Foucault, The Order of Things, xiii. 15. Ferdinand Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally, 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: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), especially the telling observation that 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 elucidating his work an uncertain business, but as one interpreter admits, it has been easy for "'postmodernist' admirers" to read into Heidegger's texts the proposition "that reality is a 'construct' forged by how we happen to talk": David D. Cooper, Heidegger (London: Claridge Press, 1996), 78. Heideggerian structuralists have used Saussurean analyses to argue, for example, that "the 'logic' of 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. Joseph J. Kockelmans (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 203; in the same volume, see also Heinrich Ott, "Hermeneutic and Personal Structure or Language," 172-177, and Johannes Lohmann, "Martin Heidegger's 'Ontological Difference' and Language," 303-363. For the most extensive treatment to date of Heidegger's linguistic epistemology, see Cristina Lafont, Heidegger, Language, and World- disclosure, transl. Graham Harman (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University 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 Jacque Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), I, 380. One of Foucault's commentators sums up well: "Language for Foucault is constitutive of our categories of thought and, thereby of the perceptions these categories order": Michael Mahon, Foucault's Nietzschean Genealogy: Truth, Power, and the Subject (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 58.


Spiegel and others who have mentioned this point have refrained from care- fully dissecting it, with the result that postmodernist historians such as Mark Poster can still defend Foucault, Derrida, and other poststructuralists against the well-known prison-house-of-language accusation.'8 However, a full analysis reveals the epistemological fulcrum of the agency-causality issue and demon- strates the logical ossification that follows from accepting the relevant propositions about language. If a thought can only express possibilities allowed by the relationships in the sign system at a given moment, thoughts are all essentially formulaic at the moment they occur. In addition, because the medium of thought constitutes a closed system, humans cannot mentally gain access to anything outside that system, consciously or otherwise, nor can anything outside the system penetrate it. Lacking outside stimuli, conceiving of any manner in 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 intellectual or epistemic change, and, for that matter, of any other sociocultural kind of change, since such changes would require action, and actions are stimulated, to the best of our knowledge, either by conscious or subconscious thought processes-both of which factors would still be ultimately determined by language.'9

Actions impelled by involuntary instinctive responses might be excepted from linguistic restrictions, but humans presumably share such responses with cock- roaches and other such nonlinguistic, apparently unreasoning life 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 firmly within the pre-existing linguistic framework, no matter how contradictory to that framework the proverbial Martian might judge such a confluence of objective context and instinctively stimulated feeling. Perhaps language itself could be some sort of active agent, mysteriously receiving the imprint of an element outside itself and then in turn changing the mental framework of the people inside it, but this notion comes close to metaphysically vio- lating the closed-system requirement and has been vigorously opposed by structuralists and poststructuralists alike.20

18. Mark Poster, Cultural History and Postmodernity. Disciplinary Readings and Challenges (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 43, 53. For a competing perspective, see Peter Dews, The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy (London: Verso, 1995), 2-7, 90-110.

19. On these points Foucault was adamant, energetically rejecting any historical approach "which attributes a constituent role to an act" (OT, xiv), or which allows "the founding function of the subject" (Archaeology of Knowledge, 12). He upheld these principles even after his 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. "Language adds itself to presence and supplants it, defers it within the indestructible desire to rejoin it": Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, transl. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 280. Derrida is merely the most famous poststructural theorist to


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's passages might seem to support the notion.21 But unless something like Heidegger's (putatively non-metaphysical) metaphysic of language as the generator of Being's ground is retained, it is hard to see why language would change even if it could. Though he apparently realized this, Foucault failed to resolve the problems posed for historians by linguistic hermeticism, not because (as Maclean assumes) he never tried, but because within structuralist and poststructuralist horizons the problems are insoluble.

French readers of OT apparently objected to its structuralist-driven theoretical implication that no changes in our thought, and thus our perceived realities, may ever occur: "It has been said," Foucault writes in the later English translation, "that this work denies the very possibility of change. And yet my main concern has been with changes."22 However, a careful reading of Foucault's general theory of change as outlined in the French edition's preface shows all too clearly why detractors complained about this issue. An obvious approach would be to remove the closed-system hurdle and separate language from thought, then allow perception not only to influence thought but even, at times, to supersede culture or language in exerting such influence. And at first Foucault appears to employ this strategy:

a culture, imperceptibly deviating from the empirical orders prescribed for it by its primary codes, instituting an initial separation from them, causes them to lose their original transparency, relinquishes its immediate and invisible powers, frees itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones; this culture then finds itself faced with the stark fact that there exists, below the level of its spon- taneous orders, things that are in themselves capable of being ordered, that belong to a certain unspoken order; the fact, in short, that order exists. (xx)

A culture, apparently possessing agency of some kind, deviates from its set of conceptualizations just enough to directly perceive "the stark fact" of "things ...

insist that language cannot reach outside itself (and that humans cannot use it as a tool with which to reach outside it). Foucault approaches this issue somewhat differently but 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. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 65.

21. "[L]anguage premeditates nothing. The pieces of language are shifted-or rather modified- spontaneously and fortuitously" (Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 89). Foucault arguably misreads those he mocks when he writes, "Perhaps knowledge succeeds in engendering knowledge, ideas in transforming themselves and actively modifying one another (but how?-historians have not yet enlightened us on this point)" (OT, xxiii), but his followers can be pardoned for deciding that the philosopher's own work illustrates precisely such a nonhuman process. He discusses such things as the "agency [instans] of literature" (Aesthetics, 287) or characterizes the workings of discursive forces: "sex was taken charge of, tracked down as it were, by a discourse that aimed to allow it no obscurity, no respite": The Foucault Reader, 303.

22. OT, xii.


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 perceptual realism."23 Change would be prevented if a culture's linguistically delimited "codes" were always mediating reality, for then no one could ever think that a given order was "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 (reminiscent of Sartre's nausea) to face it without mediation.

The intimation that human beings sometimes directly confront absolute existence would not allow language to retain closed-system status, however, and must have left Foucault quite uncomfortable. Thus the subsequent passage:

As though emancipating itself to some extent from its linguistic, perceptual, and practical grids, the culture superimposed on them another kind of grid which neutralized them, which by its superimposition both revealed and excluded them at the same time, so that the culture, by this very process, came face to face with order in its primary state. It is on the basis of this newly perceived order that the codes of language, perception, and practice are rendered partially invalid.... [and] that general theories as to the ordering of things, and the interpretation that such an ordering involves, will be constructed. (xx-xxi)

First, then, a culture develops a new conceptual grid, then superimposes the new over the old. The resulting disparity produces the all-important meeting with "order in its primary state" which in turn stimulates change. As he develops his theme, however, Foucault has already back-pedaled from the previous sentence's implications: to rid themselves of the "double vision" attendant upon seeing the world through two lenses instead of one, people construct partially new realities. In a slippery move reminiscent of Heidegger's insistence that language does not reveal Being itself but instead somehow "says" it, Foucault has shifted attention from the "stark fact" of what "exists" to the culture's confrontation with it through both the new and the old grids. "Order in its primary state" is not directly confronted after all, but rather is doubly mediated. Later in the passage Foucault speaks of "the pure experience of order and of its modes of being"(xxi) but never explains how a "pure experience" of anything is possible when the experiencer is cut off from the experienced by two layers of something else.24

The possibly realist ramifications of the introductory sentence are avoided. Unfortunately, this escape simultaneously voids that sentence's solution to the original problem. In order for change to occur, something new has to be intro- duced into the system. Confrontation with objective actuality, readers had been told, allows this. Now, however, readers find that in order for the confrontation to happen, a new grid must be superimposed on the old ones. Very well; for the sake of argument let us accept the second sentence's heavily mediated but nonetheless "pure experience"; the emergence of the new grid now becomes the single most important element in Foucault's process of change and urgently needs to be explained-but nowhere does Foucault broach this issue. This

23. Robert D'Amico, Contemporary Continental Philosophy (Boulder: Westview, 1999), 218. 24. To appreciate the Heideggerian flavor of this passage, compare Kockelmans, "Ontological

Difference, Hermeneutics, and Language," 220.


silence, if not fully praiseworthy, is understandable: nothing new can enter the system until the confrontation with reality, yet a new grid must enable that confrontation in the first place. Unless the new grid is treated as an inexplicable deus ex machina, its appearance seems logically impossible.

A champion of Foucault might object that "culture," defined as a subsystem of language rather than as a human collective, is what confronts ultimate reality and readjusts the linguistic grid. But this defense runs contrary to 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 relationship be reversed so as to privilege something called "culture" over language, for whatever else such a culture might be, it would be indubitably social- and as many a structuralist and poststructuralist has insisted, language is the social convention that entails all others. Readers are no closer than before to an understanding of how Foucault's work is compatible with the idea of change. They might, however, have expected Foucault to furnish a remedy in The Archaeology of Knowledge chapter enti- tled "Change and Transformation." There he keeps the major elements of his earlier position, suspendingn] . . . causal analysis . . . to avoid the necessary con- nexion through the speaking subject." This time, however, he deflects attention from the possibility of change onto the word "change" itself. He encourages historians to trade "reference to change" for "analysis of transformations," arguing that the way historians conceive of "change" fosters naive explanations, but his prescription-"we must define precisely what these changes consist of'-would surely do as much to improve traditional explanations as to require new kinds.25 The real work done by this chapter is to camouflage the fact that the very possibility of change (or transformation) is still in doubt: like a politician making a public statement about a career-threatening scandal, Foucault treats the problem with nimble misdirection.

III

Several prominent historical scholars-Patrick Joyce, Jay M. Smith, and Richard Biernacki-have followed Foucault into this logical morass, and their struggles to get free are instructive. Writes Joyce, "The 'real' can be said to exist indepen- dently of our representations of it, and to affect these representations,"26 a relationship that might be expressed as analogous to billiards:

1. The cue (reality outside language)

2. hits the eight-ball (language),

3. which hits the other balls (human mental processes),

4. which sometimes in turn slide down holes and score points (change humans' perceptions of reality).

25. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 164, 172. 26. Patrick Joyce, "History and Post-modernism I," Past and Present 133 (1992), 208.


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 outward reality (caused by, say, an earthquake), a black box lies between that reality and language-how language could itself be changed so as to in turn effect change in the reality humans perceive remains unexplained. Such a formulation results in a lamentably weak epistemology. Simply conflating thought with language (combining steps three and 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 (without metaphysical or human intervention), 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 direct correspondence with reality that humans have agency; agency is "built into the nature of language."27 This restatement of Nietzsche's injunction to 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]anguage is ... an activity," Humboldt wrote. "It is the ever-repeti- tive work of the spirit to make articulated sounds capable of expressing thought."28 Perhaps the most well-known recent proponent of such a position is Paul Ricoeur. But whatever its source, this notion poses a serious problem. Joyce admits that when humans confront new elements they must use old terms to make sense of the new experience,29 thereby begging the question of how humans can, at any level, perceive objectively new elements as new in the first place if those humans cognize with a system that encloses them absolutely.

Joyce's argument also faces trouble on another front. Attempting to provide a mechanism whereby old terms can be used to effect changes, he insists that the signified-signifier gap in language forces humans to form something new out of the old; without agency-if they aren't dynamic and "creative" as they confront reality-humans couldn't know anything. Joy"'s claim that language makes humans dynamic and therefore "active agents," however, cannot be an argument for agency at all, but rather for humans as mechanistically driven factors in what some philosophers have called "event causation."30 Joyce states, perhaps cor- rectly, that "to reinterpret and remake," to be "creative," is symptomatic of agency.31 But given the structuralism implicit in the rest of his articulation-the notion that a general property of a system (such as the signified-signifier gap)

27. Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 14.

28. Roger Langham Brown, Wilhelm von Humboldt's Conception of Linguistic Relativity (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), 109, 118; on Humboldt and Heidegger, see Peter McCormick, Heidegger and the Language of the World: An Argumentative Reading of the Later Heidegger's Meditations on Language (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1976), 101.

29. Joyce, Democratic Subjects, 12. 30. Flew and Vesey, Agency and Necessity, 11. 31. Joyce, Democratic Subjects, 12-14.


drives the creation of changes in the system-earthquakes or tornadoes would also have "agency," for out of previously existing materials they can certainly create, remake, and "reinterpret" landscapes as effectively as any engineer. The analogy is rigorously logical; humans, impelled by linguistic systems that obey systemic laws, would act in the same manner as natural phenomena working according to the laws of geological or meteorological systems.

Such impasses are to be expected. Humboldt himself retained agency not logically but rather because of an uncritical enthusiasm for "the cult of the individual genius (Geniecult) of the early German romantics."32 As his commentator notes, Humboldt never resolved the crucial contradictions in his thought (110), and he seems to have bequeathed this tendency to his heirs. Still, although Joyce has expressed antipathy for John Searle and perhaps by extension his mentor, J. L. Austin,33 another postmodernist might adduce their work on intentionality to argue that humans can't be wholly determined, so that when they act, they act as agents. But under the continental rubric, intentions are thoughts (language) and would be subject to the same limitations as any others. Foucault himself suggests this at the very moment in which he rejects agent-based causality: "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 disembodied discourses ... that are left standing as the ultimate historical actors."35

The second historian, Jay M. Smith, accepts linguistic-turn epistemology but admits the necessity of causal explanation and the role of human agency therein. Disappointed both by allies who simply give up on causality (following Fou- cault) or who have broken faith with both the letter and spirit of the turn (locat- ing causality in "activities and experiences" outside of language), Smith suggests that "an inadequately theorized conception of human agency" underlies such dif- ficulties36 and proceeds to supply the lack:

[B]eliefs and values are themselves expressed through established linguistic conventions, [but] they are not fully determined by them. Alterations in the physical environment, the depletion or amelioration of resources . . .: these and other changes to the social material interpreted through the human intellect may eventually modify beliefs about the organiz- ing principles of the polity.... By pushing semantic weight from one register of meaning to another, by juxtaposing . . . or rearranging families of political terms . . . [people] will gradually transform their political language. They will create a new discourse that corre- sponds more closely to the beliefs they hold about their changing material world.37

32. Brown, Humboldt's Conception of Linguistic Relativity, 118. 33. Joyce, "History and Postmodemism I," 205. 34. OT, xiv. 35. Dror Wahrman, "The New Political History: A Review Essay," Social History 21 (1996), 343-

354. 36. Jay M. Smith, "No More Language Games: Words, Beliefs, and the Political Culture of Early

Modem France," American Historical Review 102 (1997), 1416. 37. Ibid., 1439.


Under the epistemology Smith professes, how could "alterations in the physical environment" or any other extralinguistic element "modify beliefs"? The key to his argument's possible success is the implication that "beliefs and values" are separate from language: because they are forces "not fully determined" by language they must be of a separate existential 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 different from language, beliefs and values could change through interaction with other extralinguistic elements. However, beliefs and values are surely mentally experienced and processed concepts (even if subconsciously), so they are thought; thus, if humans think "with" language as Smith avers,38 beliefs and values cannot be separate from language after all-and Smith's solution collapses.39

The third writer, Richard Biernacki (in an article from these pages), objects to some of the same problems recognized by Smith, showing how cultural historians have taken advantage of traditional socioeconomic analytical foundations even though such foundations are made untenable by their philosophies. Seeking to regain theoretical coherence for the linguistic turn, he shows (implicitly rebuk- ing Spiegel for defending Saussure) that the turn's "principal, Saussurean-affili- ated model of sign systems ... is untenable as an account of how cultural meaning 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 Perhaps Biernacki circles around himself in this manner because he retains a great deal of sympathy for the (possibly) emancipatory postmodernist reaction against essentialism, a stance often linked to the linguistic relativism resulting from Saussure's propositions: Biernacki may have been searching for an alternative to Saussure that would provide the same results. That alternative, in any event, is what Biernacki finds, and the theoretical fissures described in this essay stay open after he closes.

38. Ibid., 1416. 39. He might answer that emotions are separate from language and could be affected by outer stim-

uli, then in turn change beliefs and values. But while the mental processing of such concepts may be accompanied by emotions, if we think in language it little matters whether or not emotions are separate from language, for the concepts cannot be. Given the closed-system requirement, it is hard to conceive of a process by which an emotion could affect the structure of a concept; Smith never address- es this difficulty, and even so a technical justification by way of pyschological or neurological studies would be necessary. The vagueness with which Smith's people push their mental weight around is also problematic: his formulation perforce remains unpersuasive because it requires support from cognitive psychology or perhaps longitudinal studies by psycholinguists working on semantics and pragmatics, yet instead of citing current work in the most relevant specialties he supports himself with only Quentin Skinner and a few other thinkers likewise inadequate for the purpose.

40. Richard Biernacki, "Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in Cultural Inquiry," History and Theory 39 (2000), 301; see also 295, 298.

41. Chris Lorenz, "Some Afterthoughts on Culture and Explanation in Historical Inquiry," History and Theory 39 (2000), 350, and Biernacki, "Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in Cultural Inquiry," 291.


Had Biernacki been truly devoted to "the analytic resources of the linguists," as he avows,42 surely he would have replaced Saussure's almost century-old ideas with concepts originating in the Chomskyan revolution (Chomsky's research program remains dominant in linguistics) or current competing developments such as cognitive linguistics. Instead, Biernacki employs "tropes" in a manner more reminiscent of Nietzsche and Hayden White than of modern linguists;43 of the few actual linguists cited in Biernacki's article, the two most noteworthy, P. N. Voloshinov and Benjamin Lee Whorf, are scarcely a generation younger than Saussure, and they are not as different from their Swiss predeces- sor as Biernacki implies. Voloshinov objected to seeing language as only a Saussurean system of rules, but under the influence of turn-of-the-century neo- Kantianism he retained core elements of Saussure's langue, implicitly presuming language's mentalistic and closed-system characteristics.44 And what Biernacki advances as "Whorf's celebrated analysis"45 should be tempered by observing that Whorf's well-known argument about Hopi time-despite its perennial appeal for scholars in other disciplines-has long been a laughing-stock in linguistics proper.46 But no scholar determined to sustain the postmodernist direction of the historiographical linguistic turn could safely deploy Chomsky or his successors,47 whereas Whorf's older ideas, as most commonly interpreted, yield an epistemology that is almost a mirror image of Saussure's. Whorf was heavily influenced by Humboldt, and while Humboldt never articulated a theory of lan-

42. Biernacki, "Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in Cultural Inquiry," 309. 43. On the potential dangers of such an approach, see Lorenz, "Can Histories Be True?

Narrativism, Positivism, and the 'Metaphorical Turn,"' History and Theory 37 (1998), 309-329. 44. Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought: an Introductory Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), 11,

27-28, 30. 45. Biernacki, "Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in Cultural Inquiry," 310. 46. For an overview of the problems with Whorf's work and the implications usually drawn from

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 forced to admit that numerous attempts by a previous generation (of Whorf-inspired linguists) to verify linguistic relativism have proven inconclusive; in addition, Whorf's own work "is vaguely formulated, so that an enterprising Ph.D. candidate would have no trouble in producing at least 108 versions of Whorfianism": Izchak M. Schlesinger, "If de Saussure was Right, Could Whorf Have Been Wrong?" in Language and Cognition: A Developmental Perspective, ed. Esther Dromi; vol. 5, Human Development, ed. Sidney Strauss (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Pub. Corp., 1993), 213, 204. Even if the bulk of recent linguistics did not contradict the thrust of his more well-known ideas, Whorf would appear highly questionable as a good choice of linguists from whom to borrow, as Biernacki wishes, "analytic tools" (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 resulting from Chomsky's newer ideas: Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, "Human Nature: Justice versus Power," in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 128-140. The seminal works on Chomskyan epistemology are E. H. Lenneberg, The Biological Foundations of Language (New York: John Wiley & 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 Chomsky on Power, Knowledge, and Human Nature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 1-84, or Neil Smith, Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1-176.


guage as coherent as Saussure's, the former's analyses were conducted in a manner that closely foreshadowed the latter's structuralism.48

As an unsurprising correlate to these links between Humboldt, Saussure, Voloshinov, and Whorf, Biernacki tells readers that "meaning is at a remove from form, [so] a model of culture has to acknowledge as a separate order of logic the principles that agents employ for bridging that deferral in major types of practices." Humboldtian (Voloshinovan-Whorfian-Saussurean) epistemology direct- ing his efforts, Biernacki cannot present an active element outside language as agency, so he turns agency into "principles that agents employ"-thereby creating merely another group of discursive entities (linguistic indexicals are an example).49 Language use becomes not an exercise in agency but "a structure in

its own right."50 Enjoining historians to connect sign systems "more concretely" to "practice"-emphasizing how people use language in a particular context- Biernacki's approach may seem promising at first,51 but his implicit reacceptance of linguistic hermeticism reinstates the deep problem of agency and change. Biernacki neither acknowledges the conundrum nor do his recommendations contradict Saussure's basic postulates, which is no doubt why Foucault himself had thought, quite comfortably, along Biernacki's "concrete" lines.52

IV

Whatever the shortcomings of his article, however, Biernacki provides a wel- come example of a linguistic-turn scholar 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 understanding of how 'culture' works,"53 sensing that if they do not, they will contin- ually face difficulties like that exhibited in Joan W. Scott's recent book on French feminism. Unlike the scholars just discussed, Scott makes no attempt to evade the requirements of "linguistic-turn" logic: "feminist agency . . . is an effect of

ambiguities, inconsistencies, contradictions within particular epistemologies," 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 Saussurean system, ideas are constituted by difference.54 Scott's agency-

48. For Whorf's and Saussure's relationship to Humboldt, see Brown, Humboldt's Conception of Linguistic Relativity, 12-16 and 119, n. 21.

49. Biernacki, "Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in Cultural Inquiry," 301-302. 50. Ibid., 290. 51. Ibid., 302. 52. "Language can be analyzed in its formal properties only if one takes its concrete functioning

into account. Language is indeed a set of structures [that enables us to say things], but discourses in fact are functional units" (Foucault, Aesthetics, 290, emphasis added, and see also 307); cultural ana- lysts should "address 'practices' as a domain of analysis ... from the angle of what 'was done"' (462).

53. Biernacki, "Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in Cultural Inquiry," 290. 54. Joan W. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man, (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 16, 18.


as-effect, like Joyce's "creative" agency, is situated within a framework where change is theoretically systematic rather than historically contingent, but she escapes the embarrassment of faulty reasoning by refusing to apologize for her theoretical stance, intelligently submitting to logical conditions she probably 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 rather discouraging note for activists in the trenches: "Feminism's problem," she concludes, "cannot be resolved as it has been posed. But can it be posed otherwise? .. . I think not." After all, "it is in the nature of a paradox to be unresolvable."55

Such political pessimism may be depressing, but the truth sometimes hurts and must surely be faced if the linguistic hermeticism that drives it indeed constitutes "the proper model for culture," as Joyce has insisted.56 Yet perhaps, as Biernacki argues, not even Scott adheres to all the requirements of a consistent linguistic- turn historical practice.57 Her book's elision of agency is satisfactory, but the work also narrates many 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 unsatisfactory black 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. Practitioners of the linguistic turn are pinned to the wall of time by Zeno's arrow transposed to language, and the solution of a Feynman or GrUnbaum would rip out the arrow only to leave an unstanchable wound that would bleed the kind of humanistic continuity that Foucault has vigorously dis- allowed.58

Other historians need not remain trapped in paradox with Scott's Sisyphean feminists, however. Smith's and Biernacki's interdisciplinary overtures, if limited, point the way forward. Historians who cast a wider net can expect a more bountiful catch. Even as postmodernism saw birth in the work of the Tel Quel group and structuralists such as Levi-Strauss and Clifford Geertz, the late W. V.

55. Ibid., 174-175. 56. Joyce, Democratic Subjects, 13. 57. Biernacki, "Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in Cultural Inquiry," 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 postmodern theorists; cf. Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989),_215-216 and passim. Our critique could, with some adjustment, apply just as well to the neo-pragmatism associated with Richard Rorty, or the neo-Wittgensteinian "ordinary language" contextualism of J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner, and even for the ostensibly agent-conscious Pierre Bourdieu; see Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, transl. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 32-34.


0. Quine observed that epistemology was no longer the sole province of philosophers: scientists would now have their say.59 Since that time neurobiology and biological psychology have advanced at an astonishing pace and should be ignored by no scholar concerned with the problems contemplated here. Similarly, as Scott realized, "linguistic turn" has always been something of a misnomer,60 but what if investigators of the past begin to make the "turn" live up to its accom- panying adjective-earnestly engaging with the major lines of current work in linguistics rather than receiving old linguistics secondhand from postmodernist thinkers?

Conveniently, neuroscience and linguistics (as well as computer science, psychology, analytic philosophy, and some social sciences) have now combined in a massive interdisciplinary endeavor called "cognitive science" which seeks to set- tle the major questions of human epistemology. Although cognitive scientists do not forecast fulfillment of their quest for decades, perhaps centuries, much of their research is already relevant to our theoretical debates. For example, since some of their experiments strongly suggest that homo sapiens sapiens' basic number cognition 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 extrapolate significance from such findings to their own work for fear of misinterpreting the science, but cognitive philosophers are constructing theoretical frameworks within which this scientific research can be situated.62 Throughout the debate over postmodernism in history, many of the terms have (with a certain poetic justice, given our argument here) remained nearly static; even now, Biernacki's rejection of Saussure leads back to Foucault-but sincere and comprehensive attempts to interpolate findings from cognitive science into the linguistic turn may finally enable historians to leave behind the struggling ghosts 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 University Press, 1997).

62. For instance, feminist philosopher of science Alison Wylie has discussed how her concept of "mitigated objectivity" applies to the specific needs of historians: "Alternative Histories: Epistemic Disunity and Political Integrity," in Making Alternative Histories: The Practice of Archaeology and History in Non-Western Settings, ed. Peter R. Schmidt and Thomas C. Patterson (Oxford: James Currey, 1999), 255-272. For other examples, see Alvin I. Goldman, Philosophical Applications of Cognitive Science (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), or George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), which contains such chapters as "Realism and Truth," "Time," "The Self," and "Causation."

63. To the best of our knowledge, only one historian, Murray G. Murphey (Philosophical Foundations of Historical Knowledge [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994], 2-54, 64- 74, 135-136, 160-169, 176-182) and an anthropologist, Donald E. Brown ("Human Nature and History," History and Theory 38 [1999], 138-157), have devoted themselves to this task. A third writer 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 accounts adequate for historians need to synthesize many more elements than


V

We have stressed the relentless logic of the postmodern's incompatibility with any attempt to reconcile it with agency. What can be offered as a way out? And what would such a new framework look like in historiographical practice? We have focused on the difficulties faced by historians sympathetic to the ideas- largely of nineteenth-century derivation-of Foucault. But what gives us the right to our critique? We now must address the fundamental issue, the extent to which linguistic structures alone determine the apprehensible world, in order to offer working historians a basis for confidence that they can escape such pes- simistic conclusions regarding agency as those confronted by Scott. The most historical-programmatic of Foucault's statements, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History," offers our starting point. This magisterial declaration, and its development in Discipline and Punish, encouraged much "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 foundation for knowledge and truth." One historian has recently protested the resulting "skin-deep" and "silhouette-like view of the body that leaves its materiality and culture-creating capacities in the shadows," arguing for "a corporeal turn that acknowledges the thinking body as the producer of human worlds."64 Yet his goal "is not to sup- 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 nothing outside the text(s), bodies included. One cannot remain within those theoretical orbits and rescue much of materiality.

One can, however, turn to neurology. At perhaps the most basic level, senso- ry and motor areas of the brain (indubitably part of the body) interact in a manner such that we perceive the placement of an arm or leg; it would require a great deal of sophisticated poststructural acrobatics to construe this phenomenon as anything other than knowledge, in a "traditional," naturalistic sense, of the body by the body.66 When these knowing body parts (in the brain) are damaged, individuals can become totally unaware of a limb, which thereupon (though undam-

these writers had space to treat. For overviews, see Cognitive Science, ed. Benjamin Martin Bly and David E. Rumelhart (San Diego: Academic Press, 1999); What Is Cognitive Science?, ed. Ernest Lepore and Zenon Pylyshyn (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999); Perspectives on Cognitive Science: Theories, Experiments, and Foundations, ed. Janet Wiles and Terry Dartnall (Stamford, Conn.: Ablex Pub. Corp., 1999); The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, ed. Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999); and A Companion to Cognitive Science, ed. William Bechtel and George Graham (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998).

64. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 153; Joyce, Democratic Subjects, 6. 65. Fracchia, "Dialectical Itineraries,"178. 66. C. L. Reed and M. J. Farah, "The Psychological Reality of the Body Schema: A Test with

Normal Participants," Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 21 (1995), 334-343.


aged) becomes nonfunctional.67 Victims of this difficulty quickly learn that knowledge truly is power in the "old" sense Foucault attempted to problematize. Classic linguistic work (though never acknowledged by poststructuralists) demonstrated long ago that both the linguistic and the conceptual properties of what we call "color" are consequent upon the physiology and neural structure of color vision, not upon the language people speak. Cognitive linguists have now shown that, for speakers of different languages, not just verbs but also concepts of hand motion arise from neurological and physical motor elements 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 neural control system enabling physical movement can perform abstract reasoning about the structure of events. The only reasonable conclusion is that cognition is founded in cross-culturally biological bodies much more firmly than postmodernists would like.68

Support for versions of this view is burgeoning on all sides of cognitive science. Some researchers support a greater role 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, neu- ropsychological schema theory, which holds that memory is organized into context-activated groupings that guide cognition, accords a prominent role to social conditioning-but compelling evidence indicates that the elements guiding schematic organization and evolution are as much innate and (physically) environmental as they are cultural.69 Other work underlines the crucial role that physical movement plays in gathering knowledge, and versions of the much-maligned "correspondence theory of truth" seem to be healthy in spite of decades-long

67. The classic description of this problem, broadly termed "neglect syndrome" by psychiatrists and psychologists, is Macdonald Critchley, The Parietal Lobes (London: E. Arnold, 1953). For important recent work, see E. Bisiach, "Mental Representations in Unilateral Neglect and Related Disorders," Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 46a (1993), 435-461; Unilateral Neglect: Clinical and Experimental Studies, ed. Ian H. Robertson and John C. Marshall (Hove, Eng.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993); and Spatial Neglect: A Clinical Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment, ed. Ian H. Robertson and Peter W. Halligan (Hove, Eng.: Psychology Press, 1999).

68. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 16-44; George Lakoff and Raphael Nunez, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 27-103.

69. For example, see Jean Mandler, "How to Build a Baby, II: Conceptual Primitives," Psycho- logical Review 99 (1992), 587-604; Larry R. Vandervert, "The Evolution of Mandler's Conceptual Primitives (Image-schemas) as Neural Mechanisms for Space-time Simulation Structures," New Ideas in Psychology 15:2 (August 1997), 105-123; and Annette Karmiloff-Smith, "Innate Constraints and Developmental Change," in Paul Bloom, Language Acquisition. Core Readings (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 563-590. Much cognitive science work is exclusively focused on individual cognition, but for broader, more socially integrative research see 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 University Press, 1996), especially articles by Margarita Azmitia (133-162) and Ursula M. Staudinger (276-315).


assaults against it.70 Related to this position are several emerging movements, ecological psychology and "situated" or "distributed cognition." Researchers in these camps accept the strong embodiment of human mental functioning and then take it further, arguing that cognition is also radically situated, and this means that cognition is decentered and that distinctions between mind, body, and world need to be abandoned. At first glance, postmodernists might be attracted to this position-until they realize the precise kind of decentering and abandoning these scientists propose, for they extend the mind into the local environment, arguing that cognition should be seen as a radical extension of biophysics or even making environmental objects directly perceived.71 And as mediation vanishes into the night, so does postmodernism.

This strikes directly at another poststructuralist objection, the one to personal experience. Once important to 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 relation to things in the world; that is, meaning is reference" "has recently been influential": Barbara C. Malt, "Word Meanings," in Bechtel and Graham, ed., A Companion to Cognitive Science, 335. For an example of related work, see Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), who adopt "correspondence criteria" as the measure of human cognitive activity because people must "make reasonable, adaptive infer- ences about the real social and physical world given limited time and knowledge" (22). Similarly, other researchers conclude that "physical and functional similarities that hold between objects in the world-i.e., category structure-influence neural organization and, in turn, routine language compre- hension processes": Kara D. Federmeier and Marta Kutas, "A Rose by Any Other Name: Long-Term Memory Structure and Sentence Processing," Journal of Memory and Language 4 (1999), 469.

71. See, for example, Social Cognition: Studies of the Development of Understanding, ed. George Butterworth and Paul Light (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); M. T. Turvey and Robert E. Shaw, "Toward an Ecological Physics and a Physical Psychology," in The Science of the Mind: 2001 and Beyond, ed. Robert L. Solso and Dominic W. Massaro (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 144-169; Edward S. Reed, Encountering the World: Toward an Ecological Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Antonio R. Damasio, "Commentary on 'Mind, Body, and Mental Illness,"' Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 5 (December 1998), 343-345; H. J. Chiel and R. D. Beer, "The Brain Has a Body: Adaptive Behavior Emerges from Interactions of Nervous System, Body and Environment," Trends in Neuroscience 20:12 (1997), 553-557. Ecological psychologists have shown recent interest in the tradition of continental philosophy from which poststructuralism derives,but in a manner that will gain little approval from poststructuralists; see A. Still and J. Good, "The Ontology of Mutualism," Ecological Psychology 10 (1998), 39-63. For the most recent and authoritative word on ecological psychology, see Eleanor J. Gibson and Anne D. Pick, An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning and Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 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). Researchers in situated cognition emphasize the social aspects of mental life, but in this account humans still look quite unlike discursively structured (Foucauldian) dis- ciplined subjects or (Derridean) decentered selves. Rather, people are "motivated tacticians who prag- matically adapt their reasoning strategies to the requirements at hand," and (contra Foucault) mental imagery is "non-discursive": see, respectively, Norbert Schwarz, "Warmer and More Social: Recent Developments in Cognitive Social Psychology," Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998), 239, and N. J. T. Thomas, "Are Theories of Imagery Theories of Imagination? An Active Perception Approach to Conscious Mental Content," Cognitive Science 23 (April-June 1999), 207. The advent of distributed and situated cognition research has produced some confusion, resulting in calls for a sharpening of focus; for a useful overview, see J. L. Moore and T. R. Rocklin, "The Distribution of Distributed Cognition: Multiple Interpretations and Uses," Educational Psychology Review 10 (March 1998), 97- 113. For less radical work of this general persuasion, see Gesture, Speech, and Sign, ed. Lynn S. Messing and Ruth Campbell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).


Bloch and famously extolled by E. P. Thompson, experience has had a difficult time with Clio lately, receiving little praise even from historians ambivalent toward poststructuralism.72 However, it will come as no surprise that cognitive linguists view language not as the medium that constructs all experience but instead as a tool people use to "communicate with one another about their experience," holding that basic realms of human experience provide the prototypes for general referential situations. "Human beings, irrespective of whether they live in Siberia or the Kalahari desert," remarks one highly distinguished linguist, "have the same intellectual, perceptual, and physical equipment; are exposed to the same general kinds of experiences; and have the same communicative needs. One therefore will expect their languages and the way their languages are used to be the same across geographical and cultural boundaries." This may overstate the case somewhat, but as the present article went to press, scientists announced that they had located the first gene that can be said to underlie our linguistic capa- bility.73 "Knowledge need be analyzed, not in terms of consciousness [or] modes of perception . . . but in terms of the tactics and strategies of power," Foucault announced upon entering his genealogical phase, but as another writer has blunt- ly remarked, "considering Foucault'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 research in these areas."74 There are good reasons to reject the idea that we cognize only in language, to accept language itself as developing at least partly from the biological, trans-temporal (as opposed to a wholly localized, culturally constructed) body, and to accept at least some species-level cognitive traits that make past actions and attitudes theoretically, if not practically, amenable to an accurate, correspondent analysis.

If we do not soon make a "biological turn" ourselves, in fact, we might find the relevant territory occupied before we arrive. Scientists are already staking out the historical ground, using evidence from the past to argue that "the fundamental characteristics of Homo sapiens have never changed, being influenced only in form by culture," while the editors of perhaps the leading cognitive-science journal explicitly invoke Marc Bloch when introducing their fiftieth-anniversary volume.75 Archaeologists have been applying recent insights from evolutionary biol-

72. Spiegel, for example, dismisses historians who "weakly invoke . . . individual, subjective experience" as providing access to the past ("History, Historicism," 73).

73. See, respectively, Michael Tomasello, "Cognitive Linguistics," in Bechtel and Graham, ed., A Companion to Cognitive Science, 486; Bernd Heine, Cognitive Foundations of Grammar (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 10-11; and Cecilia S. L. Lai et al., "A Forkhead-domain Gene is Mutated in a Severe Speech and Language Disorder," Nature 413 (2001), 519-523. For more on cognitive linguistics and prototypical experience, see Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh.

74. Foucault, PowerlKnowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 77; George H. Elder, The Scientific Foundations of Social Communication: From Neurons to Rhetoric (Commack, N.Y.: New Science Publishers, 1999), 29.

75. Del Thiessen and Yoko Umezawa, "The Sociobiology of Everyday Life: A New Look at a Very Old Novel," Human Nature 9:3 (1998), 293-320 and COGNITION on Cognition, ed. Jacques Mehler and Susana Franck (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), xiii-ix.


ogy and cognitive science for over a decade.76 Fortunately, historians have not all been asleep; at approximately the mid-point of this essay's composition, History and Theory published a theme issue devoted to the ramifications of evolutionary biology for historical scholarship.77 Social Darwinism gave biology a bad name in the social sciences and humanities, but the newer perspectives seem unlikely to lead to a stultifying biological determinism to which students of culture might object: the biologists are discovering that environmental factors, including sociocultural elements, actually alter the morphology of the parts of the brain involved in higher cognitive functions, lending a whole new meaning to the phrase "I changed my mind." As a result, cognitive science is undergoing "simultaneous pulls downwards into the brain and outwards into the world"78 that may well result in a theory that accounts fully for both nature and culture-or may even abandon those concepts, explaining our existence in some new combinatory fashion difficult to imagine at the moment.

As he opposed the Nazis in a principled struggle for the highest stakes in human existence, a struggle in which he paid the ultimate price, Marc Bloch- with far more right to assess human nature than his postwar compatriots-nevertheless observed that without "a permanent foundation in human nature and in human society the very names of [humankind] and society become meaning- less."79 Whether by declaring the death of the author, charting the beginning and end of man, or attacking the Western metaphysics of presence, poststructuralists sought to ensure precisely this result.80 In the end, as Bloch realized, this view of humanity is highly counterproductive for historians. For him, "[T]he history of historians" distinguished itself from geology, paleontology, and other temporal- ly oriented disciplines by including "the human element," always with the cau- tion that "it is change which the historian is seeking to grasp."81 Structuralism, poststructuralism, and related movements do not logically allow scholars to

76. For programmatic overviews, see The Ancient Mind: Elements of Cognitive Archaeology, ed. Colin Renfrew and Ezra B. W. Zubrow (Cambridge, Eng.:, Cambridge University 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 the Practice of Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991) for a literary scholar's viewpoint on these issues. For an example of work by natural scientists emphasizing the role of agency, see Imperfect Balance: Landscape Transformations in the Precolumbian Americas, ed. David L. Lentz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

77. History and Theory, Theme Issue 38, The Return of Science: Evolutionary Ideas and History (1999). In the issue's introduction, David Gary Shaw refers cogently to "the now indisputable relevance of our hard-wiring, how our phenotypes and genotypes interact": "The Return of Science," 5.

78. William Bechtel, Adele Abrahamsen, and George Graham, "The Life of Cognitive Science," in Bechtel and Graham, ed., A Companion to Cognitive Science, 96-97.

79. Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft, transl. Peter Putnam (New York: Random House, 1953), 42. 80. Perhaps not coincidentally under the influence of a former Nazi who apparently never repent-

ed of his involvement with National Socialism. For an example of such poststructurally inspired work, see Robert C. Solomon, History and Human Nature: A Philosophical Review of European Philosophy 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 and passim.

81. Bloch, The Historian's Craft, 25, 46, 42; cf. also 23.


grasp historical change because they allow little or no scope for the existence of human agents. Cognitive science does. It is hardly coincidence that cognitive scientists can identify themselves as Bloch's heirs.

A historiography-and a historian's daily performance lecturing to undergrad- uates or running a graduate seminar-based on the emerging insights of linguistics (in the broader endeavor of cognitive science) might not be very different from the enterprise of history as many working historians still engage in it. What we view as perhaps the most critical result of a "cognitive turn" is the breaking of that Faustian bargain and the deprivileging of the empyrean viewpoint of the theorist or theoretically au courant practitioner. Critical to the distinction between avatars of 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 untenable grounds an effort to restore history's relationship with "the public sphere"-to make history a discipline that links its subjects and its audi- ence.82 The transcendental hermeticism of the Faustian theorist asserts the possibility for engagement while denying it to mortals who've not shared in 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 others who 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 after many long hours in the archives - that we share in conversations with our subjects something akin to that experience Machiavelli felt when he repaired to his favorite Florentine garden and shared with young friends his conversation between the Ancients and the Moderns.84

Washington University, 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 Habermas and his concept of the "public sphere," and for its application in critical analysis linked to Habermas see William H. Leckie, Jr., "Moral Spaces in the Burckhardtian City," Journal of Urban History 28 (November 2001), 81-97. Jirgen Habermas, The Theory of Communi- cative Action, 2 vols., transl. Thomas McCarthy [1984] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987); The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, transl. Thomas Berger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), and Moral Consciousness and Comnmunicative Action, transl. Christian Lenhardt and Sherry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).

83. For an example of the possibilities in comparative history if postmodern linguistic strictures- the mapping of "semantic patterning"-are explicitly eschewed for an analysis that approaches our perspective, see Philip Brook Manville, The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens (Princeton: Princeton University 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 generated the very problematics in philosophy with which theory contends. He then makes use of a comparative analysis of ancient Athenian citizenship's origins in property ownership by comparing it with that of rural societies in Zambia and Nigeria.

84. See Stanley Rosen, The Ancients and the Moderns: Rethinking Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

fitzhugh and leckie-postmodernism, and the causes of change

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