October 1995: Abstracts

According to German theorists historicism was the result of a dynamization of the static world-view of the Enlightenment. According to contemporary Anglo-Saxon theorists historicism resulted from a de-rhetoricization of Enlightenment historical writing. It is argued that, contrary to appearances, these two views do not exclude but support each other. This can be explained if the account of (historical) change implicit in Enlightenment historical writing is compared to that suggested by historicism and, more specifically, by the historicist notion of the "historical idea." Aspects of the contemporary debate about the nature and the task of historical writing can be clarified from the perspective of the differences between Enlightenment and historicist historical writing.

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My differences with F. R. Ankersmit's essay are historiographical and theoretical. On the historiographical plane I disagree with the sharp distinction he draws between the "ontological realism" of Enlightenment historiography and the historical outlook of classical historicism. An examination of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire shows that Gibbon indeed takes into account internal changes in the Roman Empire. Ranke and Droysen on the other hand assume that the rubjects of their study, whether the Papacy or the Prussian state, preserve their identity through time. And in their attempt to "raise history to the rank of a science" (Droysen), historicists in seeking to show wie es eigentlich gewesen (Ranke), go farther in the direction of realism than do Enlightenment historians who are keenly aware of the role of perspective and of the literary and aesthetic aspects of historical writing. On the theoretical plane, although I agree with Ankersmit that metaphor occupies a central role in historical discourse, I disagree when he writes that "coherence has its source either in reality or in the language we use about it. There is no third possibility." I argue that while reality can be approached only through the mediation of language and metaphor, these presuppose a reality which can be known, no matter how complex and mediated the process of cognitive approximation may be. Rejecting historical realism, Ankersmit nevertheless wants to "encounter the past with the same directness with which the anthropologist encounters the alien culture," and thus to escape "all the ideological and emancipatory pretensions of its historiographical predecessors." Yet the very "new cultural history" he takes as an example shows that this cannot be done.

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Professor Iggers's main target in his critique of my essay is my preference for the historicist over the Enlightenment conception of the past. I agree with Iggers that in contemporary historical theory and contemporary philosophy of language many effective arguments against historicism can be found. I argue, however, that these arguments lose much of their cogency if we recognize that the historicist notion of "the historical idea" can be redefined to satisfy both the requirements of actual historical practice and contemporary philosophy of language. The main task of the contempo- rary theoretician is not to reject historicism but to recognize and to discover its intellectual riches, and to repair it whenever and wherever necessary.

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This essay on the much acclaimed critic Stephen Greenblatt deals extensively with the New Historicism he developed and for which he coined the name "Poetics of Culture." Contrary to many older interpretive methods and schools that tend to see historical and literary texts as autonomous entities, Poetics of Culture seeks to reveal the relationship between texts and their sociohistorical contexts. Cultural Poetics assumes that texts not only document the social forces that inform and constitute history and society but also feature prominently in the social processes themselves that fashion both individual identity and the sociohistorical situation. By means of an economic metaphor, Greenblatt explains how texts and other symbolic goods, by circulating in a society via channels of negotiation and exchange, contribute to the distribution of social energy, by which he means the intensities of experience that give value and meaning to life and that are also indispensable to the construction of self-awareness and identity. The beating heart, as it were, of this whole process of circulation is identified as a dialectics of totalization and differentiation, as a powerful social force that oscillates between the extremes of sameness and otherness. In several books Greenblatt has elaborated the various aspects of this Poetics of Culture, such as the circulation of social energy, the dialectics of totalization and differentiation, and the process of self-fashioning. This essay discusses some problems of this interpretive method and argues, in comparing it to a more traditional hermeneutics, that social energy, self-fashioning, and the earlier mentioned dialectic are only phenomena in Greenblatt's interpretation of texts and are not actual parts of sociohistorical contexts. Poetics of Culture, in spite of its radical claims, is a genuine hermeneutics operating in a more or less traditional vein.

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Notwithstanding its own authoritative status now, Edward Said's Orientalism has lived a seditious life and thrived on it. If its characterization of Orientalism as a political doctrine has infuriated critics into denouncing it as an ideologically-motivated work, this has also incited further assaults on the authority of Orientalist knowledge.

More than anything else, what accounts for Orientalism's insurgent existence is its relentless transgression of boundaries drawn by disciplines of knowledge and imperial governance. Unsettling received oppositions between the Orient and the Occident, reading literary texts as historical and theoretical events, and cross-hatching scholarly monographs with political tracts, it forced open the authoritative modes of knowing the Other. An indeterminacy emerged in the authority of Western knowledge as it was brought down from its Olympian heights to expose its involvement in Western power. It is this indeterminacy that has served as a provocation to rethink the modern West from the position of the Other, to go beyond Orientalism itself in exploring the implications of its demonstration that the East/West opposition is an externalization of an internal division in the modern West. Even if Orientalism performs this task inadequately, the proliferation of the postcolonial "writing back" would be unimaginable without it.

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Historians influenced by post-structuralism and the linguistic turn and feminist historians concerned to incorporate the category of gender into historical analysis have recently challenged the categories, methodologies, and questions of labor history as it has been practiced in the United States for the past thirty years. Those operating under the influence of the linguistic turn have challenged labor history's foundational assumption of class as both a category of analysis and as a social formation constituted primarily by material and productive relations. They have argued that class and class interest are constituted culturally and discursively rather than materially. Feminist critics have called attention to the importance of gender both as a subject of analysis and as an analytical lens through which to examine the ways in which class and class relations have been constituted on the basis of sexual difference. Their goal is to interrogate the ways in which notions of masculinity and femininity shaped relations of subjugation and domination and governed mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in work and in the labor movement. These challenges to the field have led some to charge that labor history is undergoing an epistemological crisis. Recent work by labor historians of France in Lenard Berlanstein's collection, Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis and by feminist American labor historians in Ava Baron's Work Engendered: Towards a New History of American Labor has taken up these challenges and demonstrates the potential of these new analytical frameworks to awaken new debates and produce new knowledge in the field. Essays in both collections suggest that labor history is less in crisis than it is in the process of an epistemological and methodological rebirth.

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