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comprehensive approach to history in its entirety that would honor the analyses generated by social and
cultural logics equally. The "crooked line" constitutes a figure derived from Bertolt Brecht's maxim that
"when there are obstacles, the shortest distance between two pointshere from cultural history to the
history of societyis a crooked line."
3 Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds.. Beyond the Cultural Tum: New Directions in the Study
of Society and Culture (Berkeley, Calif., 1999). William H. Sewell, Jr., "A Theory of Structure: Duality,
Agency and Transformation," y4/7jen'ca Joumal of Sociology 98 (1992): 1-29; Sewell, "The Concept(s)
of Culture," in Bonnell and Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn, 35-61; Sewell, "Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille," Theory and Society 25 (1996): 841-881.
These, together with newly written and collected articles, have recently been published by Sewell in
Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005). Richard Biernacki, "Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in Cultural Inquiry," History and Theory 39 (2000): 289-310;
Biernacki, "Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History," in Bonnell and Hunt, eds.. Beyond
the Cultural Turn, 62-92; Biernacki with Jennifer Jordan, "The Place of Space in the Study of the Social,"
in Patrick Joyce, ed.. The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences (London,
2002), 133-150. Miguel A. Cabrera, "On Language, Culture and Social Action," History and Theory 40
(2001): 82-100; Cabrera, "Linguistic Approach or Return to Subjectivism: In Search of an Alternative
to Social History," Social History 24 (1991): 74-89; Cabrera, Postsocial History: An Introduction, trans.
Marie McMahon, foreword by Patrick Joyce (Boulder, Colo., 2004). Patrick Joyce, "The Imaginary
Discontents of Social History: A Note of Response to Mayfield and Thorne, Lawrence and Taylor,"
Social History 18, no. 1 (1993): 81-85; Joyce, "The End of Social History?" in Keith Jenkins, ed.. The
Postmodern History Reader (London, 1997), 341-365; Joyce, "History and Postmodernism," Past and
Present 133 (1991): 204-209; Joyce, "More Secondary Modern Than Postmodern," Rethinking History
5 (2001); 367-382; Joyce, "What Is the Social and Why Is It in Question?," the introduction to his recently
edited collection of articles The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences (London, 2002). William M. Reddy, "The Logic of Action: Indeterminacy, Emotion and Historical Narrative," History and Theory 40 (2001): 10-33. Nicholas B. Dirks, "Is Vice Versa? Historical Anthropologies
and Anthropological Histories," in Terrence J. McDonald, ed.. The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences
(Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996), 17-51. For Sahlins, see especially the articles collected in Marshall Sahlins,
Culture in Practice: Selected Essays (New York, 2000), as well as Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago,
1985). Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration (Berkeley,
Calif., 1986). Andreas Reckwitz, "Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist
Theorizing," European Journal of Social Theory 5 (2002): 243-263; Reckwitz, Die Transformation der
Kulturtheorien: Zur Entwicklung eines Theorieprogramms (Weilerswist, 2000). Cultural and Social History
1, no. 2 (May 2004), in particular the essay by Carla Hesse on 201-207.
" For a set of readings and an introductory overview of this development, see Gabrielle M. Spiegel,
ed.. Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn (New York, 2005).
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linguistic and cultural construction of reality. Like so many others at the moment,
Eley wishes to rethink the historian's understanding of his or her practice in a way
that acknowledges the powerful insights that a linguistic approach to society and
culture has offered, yet to revise it from the perspective of a greater focus on questions of how society undergoes constant transformations in both its material and
conceptual realms. This concern to reintroduce a social and materialist perspective
in historical analysis foregrounds issues of individual agents, historical actions, and
the structural constraints that both enable and delimit experience, issues around
which much of the debate currently revolves. At base, the question turns on what
we believe history is and how it happens. Any answer to this question, and hence to
the possibility of recuperating a social and materialist perspective without abandoning cultural history, will be shaped in part by how one thinks the turn to culture
came about, what motivated it (besides the accumulating difficulties in social history
that Eley narrates so well), and on what grounds social history can be reinstated.
In Eley's view, a decisive shift from the centrality of social history to that of
cultural history occurred around 1980, as a new generation of historians trained in
the 1960s and early 1970s came to professional maturity. The "disappointment" that
characterizes Eley's account of this shift in chapter 2 is attributed to their relinquishing the conviction that "class relations are the constitutive element in the history of industrialized capitalist states, the Marxist social historian's axiomatic wish"
(110-111). Under the impact of changing political contextsand especially the rise
of feminism and women's/gender history, with its profound concern for questions of
subjectivity that had been banished from the then-governing paradigms of social
historythere occurred a turn to linguistically conceiyed forms of cultural history,
which split the generation between those who remained committed to what Eley
characterizes as "a restlessly aggrandizing social history" and those who came to
define themselves as cultural historians, that is, who focused on discourse and its
operation in the cultural construction of social life.
Eley believes that "if we write the intellectual history of the discipline honestly
. . . we'll find the new impulses coming from the outside" (191). This is largely accurate, I think, although it tends to grant an exceptional status to what is probably
more realistically seen as the profession's normal interdisciplinary promiscuity, and
to discount the extent to which historians of all stripes, instead of relying solely on
rather impoverished traditional theories for "doing history," routinely tend to read
in and draw upon cognate fields.^ As Eley himself notes, "the boundaries separating
history from other academic disciplines and from wider influences in the public
sphere have been far more porous than the curmudgeonly defenders of history's
integrity can ever allow themselves to see" (191-192).
Together with the influence of feminist writings on gender, Eley stresses the importance of the work of Michel Foucault to the emergence of cultural history. Not
only did Foucault's early work demonstrate the operation of discourse, or what Foucault called "epistemie regimes," in defining the conditions of possibility for what can
and cannot be thought in particular historical epochs (defined by the episteme of an
5 For a fuller discussion of this point, see Sewell, Logics of History, especially chap. 1, "Theory,
History and Social Science," and chap. 2, "The Political Unconscious of Social and Cultural History,
or, Confessions of a Former Quantitative Historian."
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era and the ways in which it produced the "already encoded eye"),^ but his elaboration of the idea of the indissoluble connection between knowledge and power (or
what is sometimes called the knowledge/power nexus) also formulated a new understanding of power as de-centered and dispersed as a "microphysics" throughout
the entire range of society and its social practices, hence challenging the utility of
social history's conventional focus on class and the state as the centers of domination
and power. As Eley explains, the thrust of Foucault's work was to undermine the
materialist view of society and culture in favor of linguistic analysis, a movement
aided, to be sure, by the rise of narrativist schools of history indebted in various ways
to Hayden White's Metahistory, as well as to Jacques Derrida and deeonstruction,
although in a less thorough way. Added to this mix was the symbolic anthropology
popularized among historians by the writings of Clifford Geertz. Although Geertz's
brand of symbolic anthropology insisted on its grounding in the social materials of
a given culture, when deployed by historians it was the formal patterns, the modes
of representation, rather than the social conflicts whose symbolic expression and
resolution they served, that tended to become the object of investigation. The result,
inevitably, was an aestheticizing of culture and its absorption into the ever-widening
category of "textuality" and discourse as poststrueturalism came to view it. Additional stimuli to "take the turn" came, Eley believes, from cultural studies, from the
somewhat brief episode of the history of mentalits promoted by ihe Annales school,
by the rise of symbolic anthropology, and by the new prominence given to questions
of race and empire and related questions of colonialism and postcolonialism, although in the latter case the impact was less direct until a slightly later period.
It is worth remarking that at the time these developments were making their way
into the historian's field of view, clear, critical distinctions between them tended to
get lost in the rush to embrace the new epistemologies and methodologies they encompassed. Thus, for example, terms such as "postmodernism" and "poststrueturalism" tended to be used interchangeably, and to be conflated with the symbolic
anthropology being developed by Geertz. While all the "schools" shared a fundamental reliance on semiotics as the covering explanation for how language operated
to mediate the relationship between text and reality, the difference between cultural
analysis and the linguistic turn tended to be occluded. Whereas linguistic turn historiography proclaimed culture as a self-enclosed, non-referential mechanism of social construction thai preceded the world and rendered it intelligible by constructing
it according to its own rules of signification, cultural history never abandoned a belief
in the objective reality of the social world, and thus might more profitably have been
labeled sociocultural history. Eley tends to perpetuate this confusion by equating
cultural history with the linguistic turn, although by now the distinctive nature and
traditions that went into their making are far better understood.''
As a result of the combined influence of these developments, Eley indicates,
cultural history achieved its day in the sun. But the light of that sun is now fading,
and, he argues, "we don't have to reinstate the primacy of social explanation and a
The phrase comes from Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology ofthe Human Sciences (New York, 1973), xxi.
' See, for example, the conflation of the two terms on pp. 125 and 156; in the latter case they are
presented as synonymous.
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of a thinking, knowing subject, but, on the contrary, a totality in which the dispersion
of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined."lo Hence the
famous "death of the subject," and with it of the materially grounded historical agent.
All else flowed naturally from this key concept of discourse and the novel understanding of subjectivity, with its ability to throw the concepts of agency, experience, and practice into disarray, since absent a purposive historical actor and any
concept of intentionality, it became impossible to establish a ground from which the
individual could fashion his or her destiny on the basis of his or her experience of
the world. The philosophical basis of structuralism and poststructuralism was laid
down in the French rejection of phenomenologyof an actor-centered understanding of how the world is perceived and understoodand the adoption of semiotics
as the governing paradigm for understanding language, culture, and society, a paradigm later modified, to be sure, by Derrida, deconstruction, and other varieties of
poststructuralism, but no less linguistic, for that, in its orientation. Yet semiotics is
not, it should be noted, a category that occupies much, if any, space in the book, apart
from a necessary role in explaining the rise of the linguistic turn; its adversarial
relation to phenomenology is, to the best of my recollection after two readings, altogether absent from the discussion.
In my understanding of the current situation in history and theory, a large part
of the revisionist critique of linguistic turn historiography and cultural history and
the attempt to move "beyond the cultural turn" is taking its stance on a neo-phenomenological approach that seeks, as Pierre Bourdieu explains (although he dissents from its analytic utility), "to make explicit the primary experience of the social
world, i.e. all that is inscribed in the relationship of familiarity with the familiar
environment, the unquestioning apprehension of the social world, which, by definition, does not reflect on itself and excludes the question of the conditions of its
own possibility."!! Insofar as they share this view, many historians are deploying a
(largely implicit) concept of "social phenomenology" in which, as the German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz explains.
The aim of social analysis is to take over the "subjective perspective," i.e. to reconstruct the
sequence of mental acts of consciousness, which are located "inside" and are directed in the
form of phenomenological "intentionality" at outward objects to which the consciousness
ascribes meanings. The social then is . . . the subjective idea of a common world of meaning
. . . The aim of social-as-cultural analysis from the point of view of social phenomenology is
to describe the subjective acts of (mental) interpretations of agents and their schemes of
interpi-etation.'^
Among historians, the reinsertion of the agent as an effective social actor has
been achieved by highlighting the disjunction between culturally given meanings and
the individual uses of them in contingent, historically conditioned ways. Work done
in this vein tends to focus on the adaptive, strategic, and tactical uses made of existing
cultural schemes by agents who, in the very act of deploying the elements of culture,
both reproduce and transform them. Historical agency, from this perspective, rep'0 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Sniith (New York, 1972), 55.
" Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1977), 3.
12 Reckwitz, "Toward a Theory of Social Practices," 247.
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resents the individual's relationship to the cultural order, "the embodiment of collective powers in individual persons," as Marshall Sahlins puts it.'^ It is this actorcentered perspective, a belief in individual perception as the agent's own source of
knowledge about, and action in, the worlda perception mediated and perhaps constrained but not wholly controlled by the cultural scaffolding or conceptual schemes
within which it takes placethat I see as the return of a modified phenomenology.
If most historiansespecially those who still believe in the power and utility of the
linguistic turnhave no desire to return to an "objective" social science model of
history, that is, to "save the phenomena," many are nonetheless engaging in a widespread attempt to save the phenomenological.
Attendant on this shift is a new emphasis on semantic, as opposed to semiotic,
constructivism, in which meaning occurs not on the level of code or structure, but
on that of the semantics of ordinary language use, constructing the world through
its continual and practical creation and re-creation over time, since no past use of
a term determines its application to the next case. By focusing on the adaptive, practical enactment of cultural constituents by individual agents, the varying modalities
of use account for how culture is sustained, mediated, replicated, and changed.
Hence neo-phenomenology gives rise to a theory of "practice," which emphasizes
both the mental and bodily acts undertaken by historical actors, in which, as Richard
Biernacki argues, "agents call on bodily competencies that have their own structure
and coordinating influence, incorporating corporeal principles of practical knowledge."^"^ In this way, everyday practices combine to construct the "socially informed
body," which, in its incorporated state, possesses "the instruments of an ordering of
the world, a system of classifying schemes which organizes all practice and of which
the linguistic scheme . . . is only one aspect."'^
In this view, culture emerges less as a systematic structure than as a repertoire
of competencies, a "tool kit," a regime of practical rationality, or a set of strategies
guiding action, whereby symbols/signs are mobilized to identify those aspects of an
agent's experience which, in this process, are made meaningful, that is, experientially
"real." Culture is thereby recast as a "performative turn," one realized only processually as "signs put to work" to "reference" and interpret the world. Historical
investigation, from this perspective, would take practices (not structure) as the starting point of social analysis, and practice itself assumes the form of a sociology of
meaning, or smantique des situations, as Bernard Lepetit calls it."'
These attempts to modify the totalizing grasp of discursive regimes on social
behavior from the point of view of agency, experience, and practice seem indicative
of the theoretical negotiations inherent in what I am tempted to call an "accommodationist" strategy governing much of the critique of the linguistic turn. Eley's
plea for theoretical/methodological pluralism, including a revitalized social history
that seeks to encompass the history of society as a whole, also takes its place here,
but on somewhat shaky theoretical grounds.
Toward the end of the book, Eley reiterates his belief that there is "no need to
" Marshall Sahlins, "Introduction," in Sahlins, Culture in Practice, 25.
' Biernacki, "Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History," 75.
'5 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, VIA.
'^ Bernard Lepetit, "Histoire des pratiques, pratique de l'histoire," in Lepetit, ed.. Les Formes de
l'exprience (Paris, 1995), 14.
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choose" between social and cultural approaches to history, and concludes, in a heartfelt cri de coeur, with a plea for us to recognize "the urgent need for a basic [methodological, epistemological?] pluralism" (201). Indeed, he notes, he has "deliberately avoided any detailed explicating of the various debates surrounding the big shift
from social to cultural history that forms the subject of this book," presumably because he finds theoretical debates and "desires for theoretical purity" (his term)
unproductive, at least insofar as they tended to polarize the profession during the
1980s and 1990s, at the height ofthe debates over linguistic turn historiography. Nor
is Eley especially sympathetic to an attempt to seek a middle ground, a phrase that
he asserts "usually implies a fudged and compromising moderation or type of confusion, a disablement before difficulty or reluctance in taking a stand" (100). To the
extent that his pluralistic posture represents a rejection of the theoretical debates
of the last few decades, it fulfills, I infer, the promise of "defiance" under whose
rubric it is articulated.
But methodological and epistemological pluralism is notnor, in all likelihood,
is it intended to bea genuinely theoretical position. One might legitimately query,
then, whether it can furnish the basis on which to rethink the complex relations
between social and cultural modalities of analysis t h a t ^ Crooked Line so fervently
advocates. Eley's plea on behalf of theoretical pluralism and the absence of a need
to choose circumvents without comment the problem of the different epistemologies
at play in an empirically grounded social history and/or a linguistically mediated
cultural history. The former implicitly reverts to that "noble dream" of an objective
basis for historical investigation, one that, as Peter Novick so ably demonstrated, is
no longer shared by most historians, however much we respect and insist on the
empirical basis for all historical investigation.i'' The latter entails at least a partial
reliance on a semiotic understanding of the constructed nature of our apprehension
of that very social reality. This is not to argue that history as a discipline is necessarily
confined to the deployment of a single epistemological framework as it shifts its foci
of attention and objects of research. At a minimum, the play of scale as one moves
from micro- to macro- (or global) analyses of historical phenomena often involves
changing epistemological frameworks, however unremarked in the literature.'^
The most interesting attempts to achieve the kind of dialectically balanced analytic that Eley advocates, one that embraces the insights of poststructuralism while
modifying them so as to include a sense of the significance of the social and its
instrumental force in human history and thought, are coming at the moment from
historians such as William Sewell, who are struggling to devise a social and historiographical theory capable of addressing precisely the complex of ideas that Eley
engages. Sewell argues on behalf of a dialectical understanding of culture as the
interplay between system and practice in social life, the former understood structurally but modified in its effects by the contradictory, contested, and constantly
changing ways in which it is implemented in the latter.'
Hence Sewell approaches questions of the role of events and individual and col" Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession
(Cambridge, 1988).
'* One of the few works to systematically investigate this problem that I am aware of is Jacques Revel,
comp.. Jeux d'chelles: La micro-analyse l'exprience (Paris, 1996).
' See Sewell, "The Concept(s) of Culture," 53ff. See also his new book Logics of History.
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lective behavior in phenomena such as the taking of the Bastilleand the revolutionary consequences that followed upon itby understanding them as participating
in a dialectic of system and practice through which the existing cultural order is
rearticulated and transformed. To engage in any form of social, political, or cultural
behavior means drawing upon a set of socially conventional, thus commonly shared,
meanings in order to be understood and to be consequential. In that sense, symbolic
interpretation, Seweil insists, "is part and parcel of the historical event," since actions
have meaning only in relation to the cultural order within which they occur.^o At the
same time, the system as such exists solely in the continuity bestowed upon it by the
succession of practices that bring it to life. But every practice inflects and changes
the system upon which it draws and which it instantiates. In an event as momentous
as the taking of the Bastille, the result is a transformative rearticulation of the underlying conceptual structures that guided French society in the ancien rgime, creating novel systems of signification among which "the Bastille," the "revolution,"
"despotism," and the like take their place.^i Critical to this process is the notion that
inherited languages (or discourses) can never fully encompass or adequately describe
the vast variety of empirical realities or experiences presented to the social actor for
categorization and interpretation, and that, in that sense, life outruns the capacity
of culture to account for it.^^
No less eclectic than Eley in the sources upon which it draws, there is, nonetheless, among the historians attempting to rethink the question of structure and
practice, an effort to engage the underlying theoretical issues, if only to join in Eley's
sense of the refreshing benefits to historical knowledge that ensue from such endeavors. As Eley himself points out, there is a body of recent work by younger scholars that "specifically refuse[s] the polarized division between the 'social' and the
'cultural,' vesting 'recognizably social and political topics with a cultural analytic,
responding to the incitements of cultural theory, and grounding these in as dense
and imaginative a range of sources and interpretive contexts as possible' " (201). It
is doubtful that this work will ever again seek the totalizing goal, also espoused by
Eley, of "grasping society as a whole"of moving in "a crooked line" from cultural
history to the "history of society"given the wholesale dissolution of what he earlier
called "social history's totalizing aspiration" (193). However, an exploration of the
theoretical bases, both epistemological and methodological, on which to generate
the logics of history (to borrow Sewell's terminology) and historiography intrinsic in
this movement doubtless will prove important to its ultimate shape.
In conclusion, to join my first and second questions, I would argue that just as
the linguistic turn, hence cultural history, grew out of a critique of phenomenology,
so one strand of the current revisionist thrust to much historical theorizing is collecting itself under the banner of a neo-phenomenological approach, latterly
grouped, at least by Reekwitz, under the rubric of "Practice Theory." Drawing on
diverse, and often incompatible, congeries of theorieswhich include Pierre Bourdieu's project of a "praxeology" and its semiotic variant found in Michel de Certeau;
Anthony Giddens's "theory of structuration"; the "ordinary language" investigations
2" See Seweil, "Historical Events as Transformations of Structures," 861.
21 Ibid.
22 For a discussion of this, see Sahlins, Islands of History, 147-148.
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Eley's book takes a stand among current demands to recuperate the material, in
effect, the social, as part and parcel of a belief in the reality and socially significant
presence of the past, both in the past and in the present. If I quibble about his account
of the etiology of these debates and developments, it only furnishes a further illustration of his principle that our approaches to historiography are inevitably personal, governed by the particular contexts of our own histories, politics, and professional commitments.
59-86. Reprinted in Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore, 1997), 19.
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