LaCapra Linguistic Turn

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Rethinking the Linguistic Turn: Current Anxieties in Intellectual HistoryRethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language. by Dominick LaCapra; Historyand Criticism. by Dominick LaCapra; Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals andNew Perspectives. by Dominick LaCapra; Steven L. Kaplan; Post-Structuralism and theQuestion of History. by Derek Attridge; Geoff Bennington; Robert YoungReview by: Anthony PagdenJournal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1988), pp. 519-529Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709491 .

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RETHINKING THE LINGUISTIC TURN: CURRENT ANXIETIES IN

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

BY ANTHONY PAGDEN

Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History. Texts, Contexts, Lan-

guage. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983. 350p.Dominick LaCapra,History and Criticism.Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University

Press, 1985. 145p.Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan (eds.), Modern European Intel-

lectual History. Reappraisals and New Perspectives.Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-

versity Press, 1982. 317p.Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young (eds.), Post-Struc-

turalism and the Questionof History. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,1987. 292p.

Hayden White, The Contentof the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical

Representation.Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. 244p.All disciplines require periodic rethinking,none more so perhapsthan history.

Yet most practicing historians in the more ancient branches of the subjectspendlittle time worrying about theoretical issues. They speak, as Hayden White putsit in his latest collection of essays, "from the standpoint of the doxa, of the

profession,as defenders of a craft notion of historical

studies" (The Content ofthe Form-hereafter COF-31). And most, as Dominick LaCapraclaims, "tend

to pride themselves on their immunity to the worm-like doubt and self-reflective

scrutiny that have appeared in other areas of inquiry notably those [by which

he means philosophy and literary criticism] infiltrated by French thought."Intellectual historians, however, live in a state of near-constant theoretical anx-

iety. For them periodic rethinking has become almost a condition of survival;and although the tone of much of ModernEuropeanIntellectual History (MEIH)is, as Hayden White observes with some surprise, one of "buoyancy and self-

confidence" (280), survival is very much the theme of most of LaCapra'swork.LaCapra is himself not so very obviously given to the pangs of doubt and self-

reflective scrutiny which he urges on others, but he has been thoroughly infil-

trated by French thought-or at least, lest it be too easily assumed that the

French people think with a single mind-by post-structuralist, Derridean,French thought. RethinkingIntellectual History(RIH) andHistoryand Criticism

(H & C) are collections of essays and review articles. Some are assessments of

those writers-Habermas, Jameson, Ricoeur, Bakhtin-who now form a rec-

ognizable Anglo-American canon, even if it is one which would look decidedlyodd if viewed from, say, Paris, Hamburg, or Rome. Others are attacks uponthe cult figures of the now-not-so-new social history. Both are impassioned (ifalso wordy, inelegant, and imprecise) defenses of an intellectual history as

traditionally conceived, as the interpretation of the great texts of the past.

LaCaprahas seen his "subdiscipline," as he calls it, reduced to the indeterminacyof a history of mentalites, or pushed aside by a history of gossip and anecdote,in which much of what was once thought of as a part of philosophy, is replaced

519

Copyright 1988 by JOURNALOF THEHISTORYOF IDEAS, INC.



520 ANTHONY PAGDEN

by a "social history of ideas" where ideas are reduced to epiphenomena deter-

mined by what Roger Chartier (in a brilliant, and ultimately devastating pieceentitled "Intellectual History of Sociocultural History?") calls "the almost

tyrannical preeminence of the social dimension" (MEIH, 26).1 Little wonder,

perhaps, that an intellectual historian such as Hayden White prefers to describe

what he does-although he also has other theoretical reasons for so doing-as"cultural criticism."

The most severe of LaCapra'scritiques of the "social history of ideas" comes

in an article, nicely entitled "Is Everyone a Mentalite Case?" The theory (if it

can be so called) behind the notion of a mentalite is, in LaCapra's characteri-

zation of it, that all "ideas," the propositional content of the texts with which

the intellectual historian is concerned, can be understood as the more or lessunconscious products of a given cultural mind-set.2 This is rarely given any

theoretical content and in most cases-Carlo Ginzburg's being perhapsthe most

acute-is, as LaCapra says, "more often invoked than analyzed or described"

(H & C, 55). The historian is thus encouraged to believe that "a certain level

of culture [usually the low] represents primordial reality [and] . . . that those

who study it are the real historians, those who focus on the most important

things" (H & C, 69). This is, of course, a misleading oversimplification of the

position actually adopted by LaCapra's three main targets, Carlo Ginzburg,Robert Darnton, and Carl Schorske, all of whom are at best elusive about what

they think their mentalites are constitutive of. The principal weakness of the

history of mentalite would seem to be less the colonizing ambitions of some of

its practitioners than its unwillingness to release the subject of its inquiry from

the constraints of the world-view, mind set, or even, in Darnton's current

formulation, simply "culture"3 to which he or she is thought to belong. For

despite their frequentlywearisomeinsistence on personalanecdote, the historians

of mentalite effectively reduce the presence of the historical agent to the point

where belief ceases to be an act at all. The concept of a mentalite was originallydependent upon the epistemological notion of a "mind set." But the historians,

unlike the philosophers, have rarely concerned themselves with how such mind

sets come into being or how they change over time. They have failed to leave

any operative space for what Quine has called "man's conceptual sovereignty-the domain within which he can revise theory while saving the data."4 By so

doing, they have both deprived the objects of their study of any capacity for

1

ThoughasChartier

ointsout,the founders f thatschool,BlochandFebvre,"were

moresensitive o eithercategoriesharedbyall thepeopleof a timeperiodor todifferential

usagesof available ntellectual quipment"hanwere mostof their successors.2 The degree o whichthey are conscious s not, of course,something o which the

historiansof mentalite verpay verymuchattentionpartlyat leastbecause,as RogerChartierobserves MEIH,22) it is not only "morepracticed han theorizedabout"-

whichmight presumably e remedied-but because n Francewhere it all beganit is

verycloseto a historicalpsychology n which all mentalactivitiesmaybe reduced o a

"collectiveperception f humanactivities."

3"This genrethe [histoiredes mentalites]has not yet receiveda namein English,

but it might simplybe calledculturalhistory,"The GreatCat Massacre New York,1984), 3.

4 W. V. Quine,Wordand ObjectCambridge,Mass., 1960), 5.



THE LINGUISTIC TURN AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 521

modifying their own mentalite and denied themselves the ability to offer anykind of causal analysis. This is also the gist of Chartier's critique that, "Had

they listened to the epistemologists [in his case, Bachelard, Canguilhem, and

Koyre], the French historians might have learned a different way to pose theproblem on which all history of mentalites stumbles, that of the reasons for and

modalities of the passage from one system to another" (MEH, 31).5 We all, of

course, share a common stock of beliefs and express them in a set of common

languages-just as our actions are all conditioned by the past and present actions

of others and our writings are dependent upon the discourses currently available

to us. Such things constitute our cultures. But if we are prepared to agree that

those cultures do change over time, then we must also be preparedto acknowl-

edgethat the freedom of

operationeven the most unreflective of us is able to

exercise within them must be really very great indeed. The inescapable deter-

minism of the history of mentalite, its incapacity to account for change, explains

why most historians of mentalite have confined themselves to societies where

change is slow and when it occurs may often be the consequence of outside

pressure.Histories of the mentalite of "high" cultures-such as Carl Schorske's

Fin de siecle Vienna (on which LaCapra has some perceptive remarks)-have

generally failed to contain within a single (and frequentlyoversimple) conceptualscheme the products of complex milieus which are highly self-conscious about

their intellectual objectives. But the fact that ascribing selective and restrictivementalites to the "high" culture is evidently (at best) a risky undertaking, has

apparently alerted no one to the possibility that the shading between "high"and "low" might be very fine indeed and that even shepherds and peasants,millers and printers' apprentices might have objectives-not to mention rational

beliefs-of their own.

LaCapra's other objection to the new social history, which is directed pri-

marily against Darnton, is that the social historian has turned both the common

man and the archive where all that we can know about him is to be found, into

a "fetish." LaCapra has some nicely turned criticism of the language Darntonuses-his talk of "grubbing in the archives" and the characterization of the

intellectual historian as engaged in little more than the "endless reshuffling" of

the great texts. This, too, is an overly restricted account of Darnton's by no

means very precise view on these matters. But there is still some real force in

LaCapra'scomplaint that so many of Darnton's observationsupon "traditional"

intellectual history comes down to a form of anti-intellectualism and as he not

very elegantly puts it, "methodological scapegoating" (80).

In some respects Darnton's flight from intellectual history is representativeof just the kind of displacement of the subject which LaCapra deplores. For

LaCapra the function of the intellectual historian is to act as an expositor: He

"straddles the academy and the public marketplace." His position (perhapsbecause of this ungainly posture) is characterized by "role tension" and "car-

nivalization" (both, of course, terms hijacked from the omniscient Bakhtin).He is both "intellectual" and "historian"; and his task is said, somewhat

5Theonly possible xplanationorchangewouldseemto betheimposition f another

mentalite rom outside.On this account culturalchangebecomesan arrangement fpowerrelationships. he clearest and mostpowerful)exampleof this,as a practice, s

CarloGinzburg'sTheNightBattles(I Benandanti).



522 ANTHONY PAGDEN

patronizingly, to be to "put the generally educated in a position to raise more

informed and critical questions"-a task he may have some difficulty with if,like LaCapra, he insists on speaking of a "pear-shaped notion of 'style,'" of

"live metaphors" inseminating "conceptually pure philosophies," or requireshis readers to imagine "one-sided handles on reality."

LaCapra's claims for the importance of intellectual history (or indeed for

any kind of history) are clearly exaggerated. But his recognition that the intel-

lectual historian does face peculiarly intractable methodological problems,

equally clearly, is not. The central essays in his two books and many of those

in MEIH are extended, sometimes overextended, attempts to argue that if in-

tellectual history is to regain what all three volumes claim to be its rightful

positionas the most

illuminatingbranch of historical

studies,then it has to take

the "linguistic turn" which, as Martin Jay points out in what is one of the most

perceptive essays in MEIH ("Should intellectual history take a linguistic turn?

Reflections on the Habermas-Gadamerdebate") most, if not by now all, the

other human sciences have taken. For unlike most other branches of historywhich (as they are currently practiced) are principally concerned with descrip-

tion, intellectual history is aboutinterpretation.And interpretation s inescapablyabout language. It is, LaCapra claims, "at the heart of historiography for it

relates to the way in which language prefiguresand informs the historical field"

(RIH, 75). Interpretation clearly does not necessarily involve, as other formsof history do, the discovery of new information, the mapping of new terrains

or anything which can sensibly be described as the recovery of something for-

merly lost or obscured. It redescribesin ways which make new sense to us, texts

with whose formal properties we are already familiar. For LaCapra intellectual

history is, therefore, not merely different in regard to the material it studies,but far more significantly it is different in the enterprise that it is. As we shall

see, for LaCapra the ideal mode in which interpretation occurs is a dialogue

between the historian and her texts. This, unlike the self-effacing narration inwhich most other kinds of history are conducted, clearly places the historian

center stage. There are, indeed, times when LaCapra speaks as if the text and

its interpreter had become a single, indivisible entity.The species of linguistic turn which LaCapraand Jay urge upon the historian

relies upon the now familiar canon of Derrida, Gadamer, Habermas (when he

is not leaning too far in the direction of analytical philosophy), and somewhere,ever present but always slightly off-stage, Freud. The dominant claim beingmade in both LaCapra's books, and by most of the authors in MEIH and in

Post-Structuralism and the Question of History (PQH), is also a familiar one.To assume that there is a clear external world available for "objectifying"

description in a neutral language, that, in Jay's words "private mental reflection

was . . . prior to public intersubjectivediscourse," is an ontological error, since

our only understandingof that world, our private mental reflections, are them-

selves linguistic, drawn from and thus drawn into, the public intersubjectivediscourse. The world cannot, for us, be prior to our description of it. If there

is no place outside this hermeneutic circle, the task of the intellectual must be

limited to, in one sense or another, deconstructing what lies within. Utterancesare not, as the analytic philosophers supposed, acts; but all acts are texts,

"events," says LaCapra, "in the history of language" (RIH, 65).




LaCapra's own position is neither as consistent nor as uncompromising as

this summary might suggest. He is a devoted, largely uncritical, follower of

Derrida, but he is not unswerving in his allegiance. The concepts "inside" and

"outside" must, he claims, be rethought; and this inevitably recognizes theirexistence. The "context of the 'real world' is itself 'textualized' in a variety of

ways" (26), and this implicitly acknowledges the presenceof something available

for textualization. In the principal methodological essay in RIH, "RethinkingIntellectual History and Reading Texts" (also reprintedin MEIH), we are told

bluntly that the historian "must attend to the facts, especially when they test

his own convictions and desires" (63). If these facts are capable of such a

positivistic action as testing, they clearly must exist in a prior external world.

The core of theessay is, furthermore,

basedupon

the claim that "the relation

of texts to contexts, which is often taken as the solution to the problem, should

be reformulated and investigated as a real problem itself." The reader is then

offered six distinct modes of relation between text and context, which include

such details about the external world as the author's life, his intention, and the

relation of society to the text. True, LaCapra does not wholly endorse any of

them, but they are all regarded as legitimate interpretative strategies. And all

suppose the existence of, and interpretative necessity for, some prior external

world.

As so often in these essays, LaCapra seems to want to have it both ways;and it is here, apparently unthinkingly, that he runs into his most serious

conceptual problem. For if he is-and he is emphatic that he is-a historian

then, on the most minimal description of what a historian does, the problem

LaCaprafaces is not simply how to interpret a text but how to interpret a text

over time. He must, that is, be concerned at some point, however regressive in

his analysis, with causality. But as the techniques he wishes to introduce into

intellectual history preempt the notion of priority, they also make any account

of causality meaningless. If there is no place outside the hermeneutic circle, no

significant agents, no authors as such, and if all discourses are the selective

products of one large language-pool, then the merely temporal relationshipbetween texts is irrelevant. Only Foucault really believed that an account of

how discourses came into being served some explanatory function. And even

he, like the historians of mentalitY,has only an imperfect explanation for his-

torical change; for as Geoff Bennington and Robert Young point out in their

introduction to PQH, although apparently "able to explicate everything within

the epistemes ... [Foucault] can say nothing more powerful than 'it happened'

about the shift from one to the next" (4).6 LaCapra's own position, however,is dependent on Bakhtin and Derrida, neither of whom has any concern with

(or, in Derrida's case is prepared even to recognise the existence of) textual

presence other than the linguistic. If, as LaCapra complains, an "inquiry into

the interaction between text and social process" is something which Derrida

6 Derridahas sometimesbeencreditedwithhistoricalconcernson the grounds hathis famousneologismdifferance, is said,sometimesby him, to describedifferences vertime. But temporalitys not the samethingas "history,"whichcrucially or Derrida

carries"with it the theme of the finalrepression f differences." ee Speechand Phe-nomena and otherEssays on Husserl's Theoryof Signs (Evanston, 1973), 141, and quotedin PQH,2.



524 ANTHONY PAGDEN

"rarely seems to undertake overtly" (RIH, 42), this is because to do so at all

would be to undermine the coherence of his position: social processes are them-

selves linguistic artifacts.7In the end, as Habermashas pointed out to Gadamer,

you simply cannot have it both ways. The "fusion of horizons" (which, perhaps

oddly, LaCapra does not call to his rescue) is a rhetorical evasion.

LaCapra's own attempt to resolve the conflict which he sees between the

"burden" of history and a set of purely "presentist" concerns (although it is

not offered as a resolution) is "a more 'performative' notion of reading and

interpretation" (RIH, 62). This, he believes, may be achieved by means of

Bakhtin's notion of a dialogue between the past text and its modern reader.

Intellectual history must consist not in the reconstruction of the "meanings"

of past texts but in a dialogue with themwhich will

"stimulatethe reader

torespond critically to the interpretation it offers through his or her own readingor rereadingof the primary texts" (48). Such a claim is not without difficulties

of its own. As a dialogue requires the presence of two speakers (or at least, to

use the word he prefers, "voices"), the text must be accorded the status of an

agent. In a long and generally perceptive essay on Bakhtin and Marxism,

LaCapra seems prepared to accept that such voices may, "under carefullycontrolled conditions, . . . become masks for the intellectual historian himself"

(RIH, 292). In "Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts," however,

the text is described as if it were itself capable of independent action. It may,for instance, "supplement existing reality, often by pointing out the weakness

of prevailing definitions of it." But in the end it matters little whether the

dialogue is described as an exchangebetween two voices within the same historian

or as a conversation with an independent agent, since it will always be the case

that "pointing out," or any act ascribed to the text, must involve an act of

interpretation by something other than the text itself. All conversations with

texts inevitably take place in the mind of their readers. "An historical work,"as Moses Finley once put it, "is a dialogue in and with the present."8 It is also

hard to imagine what a "performative" reading would look like in practiceother than the conversations which philosophers ever since Aristotle have been

conducting with the works of the great dead.9But conversations such as these,

though necessarily dependent upon historical reconstruction if they are to serve

their purpose, must inevitably form part of quite different discourses, language

games, rhetorics, traditions, etc., to those of the original text. They also have

to be conversations about something, and it is difficult to see how that can be

anything other than a shared set of propositions, and one, furthermore, which

must be expressed in a language which makes sense to the historian as much

7 In a longfootnoteattackingEdwardSaid'saccountandcritiqueof deconstruction,

LaCapra omplains fSaid's ailure o recognize"Derrida's xtension ftextuality eyondthe confines fthebook" RIH,43) but nowhere ndicateswhere vidence fthis extensionis to be found.

8 From an interview n Le Mondequoted n FrancoisBedarida,"The ModernHis-torian'sDilemma:ConflictingPressures romScienceandSociety,"n EconomicHistoryReview,40 (1987), 346.

9One of the exampleshe provides-the uses to which Marx's extswereput by hisliberaland conservative ritics-would seem to be whollya matterof shifting he prop-ositionalcontent.




as it makes plausible sense as the language of the historical texts. But this kind

of conversation is clearly not what LaCapra intends. A discussion about prop-ositions is evidently a long way from "an attempt ... to 'take on' the great

texts and to attain a level of understanding and language use which contendswith them." Nor is it at all clear just what this is supposed to mean. How is

the historian's "language use" to "contend" with a text without first attemptingto (in Richard Rorty's word) "reeducate"'o it in the terms of the discussion

the historian wishes to have with it? But LaCapra seems to exclude any such

process from the act of interpretation by the claim that "it must be actively

recognized that the past has its own 'voices' that must be respected especiallywhen they resist or qualify the interpretationswe would like to place on them"

(my italics).In H & C this is

putin an even more

emphatic,even more bizarre

way: "it is a useful critical fiction to believe that the texts or phenomena to be

interpreted may answer one back and even be convincing enough to lead one

to change one's mind" (73, my italics).11 Conversation with a text might be

problematic; conversation with a phenomenon is simply unimaginable.

For the historian such as LaCapra, who still adheres to a belief in the

necessary autonomy of the past (such that its texts may challenge, resist, qualify,

dialogue, etc.), there must also be a further-and in LaCapra's case unexam-

ined-difficulty. For however attentive we may seek to be to the authenticity

of past "voices," we can never be certain that any interpretation will elude ourown reconstructive habits. It is obviously the case that how we read and what

we read are dependent upon how and what has previously been read. The lesson

deconstructionism has for the historian must be, perhaps beyond all else, that

the past can have no genuinely authentic voices. As Bernard Williams (in a

very different idiom) has put it "playing seventeenth-century scores on seven-

teenth-century instruments according to seventeenth-century practices, admi-

rable enterprise though it may be otherwise, does not produce seventeenth-

century music since we have necessarily twentieth-century ears."12The "pre-sentist" (his word) history LaCapradenounces is, in one sense, the only historywe can have. It is certainly the only history which will go anyway at all towards

providing what Martin Jay concludes his essay by asking for, "a critical per-

spective on the past and presentin the name of a more attractive future" (MEIH,

110). The distinction is not between the historian who discusses matters with

past texts while remaining forever alert to the "network of resistances" they

offer, and one who is merely engagedin the "narcissisticinfatuation" of ascribing

10"TheHistoriographyf Philosophy:FourGenres,"n RichardRortyet al. (eds.),Philosophyn History Cambridge, 984),52, andcf. JonathanBennet's laimthat "weunderstandKantonly in proportion s we can say, clearlyandin contemporaryerms,what his problems were .. .," quoted in ibid., 52n.

1At one level, of course,this soundsremarkablyimilarto the generalclaimsofhistorians uchas LaCapra's etenoir,G. R. Elton,that the archivecan dictate ts own

interpretationso the historian,whose role is merely hat of a recorder.12 Descartes:heProject f PureInquiry 1978), 9. GeoffreyHawthornmakesmuch

the samepointin EnlightenmentndDespair, Historyof SociologyCambridge, 987),

ix "Ours is ours." "Understandinghose beliefs in their terms, ratherthan ours, ispreempted."But that, as he goes on to say, does not of coursepreventus fromtakingthemseriouslyas beliefswhichare different rom ours.



526 ANTHONY PAGDEN

his own views to past utterances; it is between those who know that to converse

with the past one must first attempt to reconstruct it-text or author, it matters

little which, since both are "voices"-so that it may become intelligible, and

those who seek to uncover the historical sources of our present, to borrowCharles Taylor's phrase, "embedded picture.""3

Both are engaged in legitimate pursuits, but in order to understand the

significance of the practices of the latter, we may have to employ different

criteria for interpretation than those we habitually apply to the former. Take

the still contentious case of Foucault. When measured against conventional

standardsof historical accuracy, Foucault's genealogiesof the embedded picture

may indeed be, as so many historians have so often complained, simply false.

Thisdifficulty

isonly

exacerbatedby

the fact that much of what he wrote, in

particular in his later years, was, as Hayden White points out in "Foucault's

Discourse: The Historiographyof Anti-Humanism," heavily freighted with what

"Foucault calls 'positivity' wide (if seemingly capricious) erudition solemn

disclosures of the 'way things really were' aggressive redrawings of the map of

cultural history, confidentrestructuringsof the chronicle of'knowledge' " (COF,

107). We cannot ignore these passages. Nor is it fully the case, as White suggests,that Foucault's language is "impenetrable to any critical technique based on

ideological principles different from his own," since there have been some very

successful attempts, most notably by Charles Taylor, to translate that languageinto the terms of such alien critical techniques, despite the obvious pitfalls (inwhich most intellectual historians who have come under his influence have fallen

headlong) such an enterprise inevitably involves.

White's own interpretationis based on the claim that all of Foucault's work

achieves its very considerable explanatory power-which is often obvious even

to those who find his style impenetrableand his scholarship derisible-by offeringa rhetorical trope as "a model of the world view" (COF, 106), the trope in

question being "catachresis." This may be a sleight of hand, if we are to take

it to be an account of why Foucault so often misrepresentsthe data he possesses.But it does offer an explanation (though it may yet not be a solution) to the

central paradox of much of Foucault's work: the idea that there can be powerwithout a subject, purposefulnesswithout purpose.Both of which would appear,as propositions, to be unintelligible. Foucault, as both White and Taylor (intheir very different ways) point out, had inherited a Nietzschean project which

became incoherent, no less for Foucault than it had done for Nietzsche himself,at the point where the attack on ethics came to require an ethical practice of

its own. Both men were forced into what Taylor calls "the impossible attemptto stand nowhere." 14 For most of Foucault's more perceptive and sympatheticcritics, the inescapablefailure of that attempt has vitiated the whole project. On

White's account, however, Foucault's own writings, like those of one of his

favorite authors, the surrealist Raymond Roussel, employ a "reversed style,"which "cancels itself out in its very articulation." All the reader is left with,all he or she can ever hope to know, is that something is very wrong. This, in

White's view, is all Foucault ever hoped to achieve "because there is no center

13 Charles Taylor, "Philosophy and its History," in Philosophyin History, 21.14"Foucault on Freedom and Truth" in Philosophyand the Human Sciences: Phil-

osophicalPapers, Cambridge,1985),II, 183.




to Foucault's discourse. It is all surface-and intended to be so" (COF, 105).His was, as has often been said before, the last attempt to subvert the Kantian

project of a transcendental ethics. It may not amount to very much, either for

us or for Foucault. But the importance of White's approach lies less in what itdoes for our own cultural understanding than in the light it sheds on Foucault's

own text. His article is a good example of what I take LaCapra to mean by

saying that every "new field of investigation alters not only the methods but

the very criteria of proofs in a given discipline" (H & C, 61).It is also an example which LaCapra might well take to heart. For the trouble

with many of the essays in his two books is that although stridentlyprogrammaticit is not entirely clear what they are programs for. Much of his theoretical

invective, when not directed against the socialhistorians of

ideas,is reserved

for the most obdurately unreflective of historians, most strikingly G. R. Elton

whose The Practice of History La Capra supposes to represent "conventional

wisdom in the historical profession" (H & C, 136). But, of course, very little

could be further from the case. Deconstructionists, indeed, seem to delight in

choosing forgotten beliefs or outworn theories for their targets. Mark Cousins's

"The practice of historical investigation" in PQH is apparently directed againstthe "fantasy that the past may not only be represented as history, but also

exhaustively and truthfully represented" (135), a fantasy which-if we are to

take that "exhaustively" seriously-I doubt that any historian has ever believedin.

No one except the most obtuse doxographer will dispute the claim that

intellectual historians should pay closer attention to how others, with other ends

in view, have approached the interpretation of texts. Nor do I wish to repeatthe common, over-simple distinction between theory and practice with which

most historians operate. But if LaCapra's programmatic reappraisals are to be

anything other than merely admonitory, they have to be capable of delivering

a method for writing history. His own disclaimer that his approach "definesintellectual history more in terms of a process of inquiry than in terms of rules

or methods," amounts, in the context of his earlier claims, to be an admission

of defeat. All the reader is left with in the end is a highly inconclusive mani-

festation of the operations of "wormlike doubt."

An extended example of the kind Hayden White provides in his contribution

to MEIH, "Methodology and Ideology in Intellectual History: The Case of

Henry Adams," (reprinted with some modifications in COF), might have made

LaCapra's purposes clearer-though, like White's exemplum, it might have only

served to demonstrate that the practice runs a serious risk of being ultimately

unenlightening. For White the most fruitful linguistic approach to what he

regardsas "the central problem of intellectual history, the problemof ideology,"is also the oldest, namely, Saussure's theory of language as a sign system and

of the "nature of the relationship of language to its world ... in general as a

symbol of that world" (COF, 189). And what this involves is a plea for the

transferal of the historian's interest from the propositions in a text, its content

or meaning in White's language, to its "formal properties," from the what to

the how. There are no meanings, only a "meaning-production process" (211).So far so unremarkable.The trouble begins when White tries this out on an

actual text. His reading of The Education of Henry Adams is an account, often



528 ANTHONY PAGDEN

a brilliantone, of what one twentieth-centuryreaderbelieves a nineteenth-centuryauthor to be doing. But neither the temporal nor the cultural context of the

Education form part of this account. This in itself need not worry us until we

come to the claim that the "text-context problem ... becomes resolvable fromthe semiological perspective to the degree in which what conventional historians

call the 'context' is already in the text in the specific modalities of code-shifting

by which Adams's discourse produces its meaning" (212). In other words there

is no context outside the narrativepattern of the text itself. Indeed the context

those traditional historians insist upon rather than offering illumination is itself

"illuminated in its detailed operations by the moves made in Adams's text." If

this means that a semiological reading of the Education might help us to get

some purchase on the world in and for which Adams wrote, then this, too,seems an uncontentious claim. But on the final page (213) White tells us that

his reading of the text allows us to perceive how Adams transformed his life

"into a symbol of the sociocultural process of his own time and place as he

perceived them," a claim which suggests that the historian's reading had been

made in the light of some set of presumptions about how Adams could have

perceived such processes (since White is emphatic that it is he who is the

perceiver) in order to so transform his life. To claim that he has "desublimated"

Adams's work and returned it "to its status as an immanent product of the

culture of which it arose" would seem to be a flat contradiction of the theoretical

enterprise he has conducted to that point, unless of course we are to assume

that the symbolic reading of a single text will permit a sufficient purchase on

a culture for us to know what might be said to constitute an "immanent product"of it.

Both LaCapra and White, no matter how many times they turn, end up

facing the same problems. Their practices are historical, not (despite White's

attempt to redescribehis own project) literary-critical. They are inevitably com-

pelled to consider matters outside the text, matters which are not themselvesinherently textual although they may, in the final instance, possess textual form.

Our experiences may be presented in language, but to quote Jay again "there

is no reason to suppose that linguisticality exhausts their being" (MEIH, 108).

LaCapra and White are also concerned with interpretations which should be

causal and which must be capable of offering explanations over time. Linguistic

analysis as such does not, of course, preclude causal explanation; but the terms

of much of the new literary theory, by which LaCapra has, as he would put it,been infiltrated, clearly does. This theory has, of course, had an enormous and

largely beneficial impact on the other human sciences. But it is by no means

clear that those historians who have taken the linguistic turn as uncompromis-

ingly as LaCapra and White, are entirely certain just where it has led them.

The turn was an inevitable one. But now that it is no longer so very new

nor seems to promise so very much as it once did, many of its consequences

may come to seem regrettable.One of the least compelling aspects of LaCapra'swork (and of that of most of the contributors to PQH) is its strongly scholastic

flavor. It is rather more than paradoxical that writers who are so eager to

dispense with the notion of an author should be generally so relentless in theircitation of authorities, so severe on those who cite the wrong authorities.

LaCapra's"Habermas and the Grounding of Critical Theory" is in this respect




an interesting case. It is, in part at least an attempt to "confront" Habermas

with "selected elements of Derrida's thought" (RIH, 149). DeconstructingHabermas's texts would, of course, have been a perfectly legitimate strategy.

But LaCaprawants to do more. He wants to bring the two men (or their texts)and what they representfor modern culture into something like the "dialogical

relationship" which he advocates as the historical method. The results are

predictably inconclusive. The "'dialogue' between two critical tendencies with

important implications for intellectual history" (RIH, 183) never materializes.

But why bother at all? Not only would Habermas seem to have very little to

do with Derrida, but the process of selecting elements from Derrida's thoughtis clearly a very un-Derridareanenterprise,as indeed LaCapra obviously realizes.

The reason seems to be that, although for LaCapra and others in the United

States, both Derrida and Habermas belong, albeit uncomfortably, to the same

canon, they are themselves apparently unaware of this. For LaCaprathis is due

not to the fact that they are engaged on different and essentially antithetical

projects but to a "deplorable insularity" which he believes to be a characteristic

of much French and German thought.

LaCapra'swish to confront those who have little apparentwish to speak to

each other is one productof what Hans Kellner describes("Triangular Anxieties:

the Present State of European Intellectual History," in MEIH, 125) as "the

issue of canonicity." There are, of course, worse. There are those, to use Kellner'sexamples, who spend their entire professional lives asking, "Who may be ad-

mitted to the canon of Freudian tradition, and who expelled? Who will be

assigned to apocrypha or to heresy? Is Foucault a structuralist?" Such preoc-

cupations may seem to reflect little more than the atrophy of a certain kind of

humanistic scholarship, the hankerings of those who, having heard a powerfulbut remote and barely intelligible message, have tried to redescribe it in their

own idiom as best they can. But the overriding concern with canonicity and

with language may not only prove not to have been very fruitful, it may also

have significantly reduced the intellectual space still left to rationality, and withit the possibility of an intelligible intellectual history still capable of teaching us

anything at all. LaCapra, in his muddy lucubrations on the (from Derrida's

point of view) weakness of Habermas's use of rationality might do well to reflect

on Jay's observation that "by turning too eagerly to linguistic philosophy in

any of its various guises and by making it the sole or even primary source of

our method we risk losing the critical edge that rationalism, defended by Ha-

bermasian or other means, can provide" (MEIH, 110). In the long run, we risk

simply arguingourselves into an

impotentsilence.

King's College, Cambridge.

LaCapra Linguistic Turn

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