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Playing the Cerebral Savage: Notes on Writing German History before the Linguistic Turn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Rudy J. Koshar
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Extract

I want to begin by suggesting that to speak of a linguistic turn in the writing of modern German history is premature. It may be true that intellectual history on both sides of the Atlantic has taken “the” linguistic turn, in the sense that, more than ever before, much current research involves “a focused concern on the ways meaning is constituted in and through language.” The formal properties, degree of sophistication, and utility for historians of these studies vary greatly. They encompass by now almost classical poststructuralist perspectives, methodologically more conservative discussions of cultural representation, and the influential works of Quentin Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock. Yet history writing on twentieth-century Germany, considered broadly, stands very much before rather than after a linguistic turn, if there will be a turn at all. Scholars of modern German cultural, social, or political history who engage current debates on language and rhetoric in truly innovative ways are the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, considerations of a linguistic turn in modern German history take place at a time when some historians criticize poststructuralist thought more forcefully than ever before.4 This makes for an interesting confluence of tensions, especially when one considers that disciplines such as literary criticism and anthropology have turned anew to the study of history.

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Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 22 , Issue 3-4 , September 1989 , pp. 343 - 359
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1989

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References

1. See Toews, John E., “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience,” American Historical Review, 92, no. 4 (10 1987): 881.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Toews, Beside, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn,”Google Scholar see also Harlan, David, “Intellectual History and the Return of Literature,” American Historical Review 94, no. 3 (06 1989): 581–609.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. One specific example of this lack of innovation can be found in the social history of Nazism, which despite an outpouring of scholarship has never dealt systematically with the social constitution of political language at the local level. See Childers, Thomas, “The Social Language of Politics in Germany: The Sociology of Political Discourse in the Weimar Republic,” American Historical Review 95, no. 2 (04 1990): 331–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Scholarship on Begriffsgeschichte presents a different set of problems, as I point out briefly below.

4. See Pagden, Anthony, “Rethinking the Linguistic Turn: Current Anxieties in Intellectual History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49, no. 3 (07-09 1988): 519–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. See Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), 165–72.Google Scholar

6. A reading formation is “a set of discursive and inter-textual determinations which organize and animate the practice of reading, connecting texts and readers in specific relations to one another in constituting readers as reading subjects of particular types and texts as objects-to-be-read in particular ways.” See Bennett, Tony, “Texts in History: The Determinations of Readings and Their Texts,” Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Attridge, Derek, Bennington, Geoff, and Young, Robert (Cambridge, 1987), 70.Google Scholar

7. The central products of this work are Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur Politisch-Sozialer Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Brunner, Otto, Conze, Werner, Koselleck, Reinhart, 5 vols. (Stuttgart, 1972–)Google Scholar; Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich, 1680–1820, ed. Reichardt, Rolf and Schmitt, Eberhard, pts. 1–7 (Munich, 1985–)Google Scholar; Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Ritter, Joachim and Günter, Karlfried, 6 vols. (Basel, 1971–).Google Scholar

8. Koselleck is also one of the key contributors to Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. His work will be discussed more widely in North America now that we have Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Tribe, Keith (Cambridge, Mass., 1985)Google Scholar. This is a translation of Koselleck's, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt/Main, 1979)Google Scholar. See also Historische Semantik und Begriffsgeschichte, ed. Koselleck, Reinhart (Stuttgart, 1979).Google Scholar

9. Busse, Dietrich, Historische Semantik: Analyse eines Programms (Stuttgart, 1987), esp. chap. 2.Google Scholar

10. This would include not only the history of concepts, but also Heidegger's influence on German philosophies of language and Jürgen Habermas's challenging commentary on Kant, Wittgenstein, and others in works such as The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, trans. McCarthy, Thomas (Boston, 1984)Google Scholar. One would also have to consider the West German Jörn Rüsen's work on narrative and historical knowledge, for which there is a useful introduction in his “Historical Narration: Foundation, Types, Reason,” History and Theory, Beiheft 26: The Representation of Historical Events (Middletown, Conn., 1987).Google Scholar

11. See Hunt, Lynn, “Introduction: History, Culture, Text,” The New Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. See Geertz, Clifford, “The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Lévi-Strauss,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 352Google Scholar, for the quotes, and 351–55, on the notion of cerebral savage. For the rest, I extrapolate liberally from Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter's discussion of Lévi-Strauss and urban planning's placement between bricolage and science in Collage City, 3d. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 102–6Google Scholar; the central text is Lévi-Strauss, Claude, La Pensée Sauvage (Paris, 1962).Google Scholar

13. Rowe and Koetter, Collage City, 105.

14. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 21.

15. (Cambridge, 1989).

16. Ibid., 10.

17. Ibid.

18. Rorty refers to “increasingly useful metaphors.” Does not the adverb itself suggest a teleology? I prefer to leave the “increasingly” out, simply stating that, in a particular historical context, one metaphor appears more useful than another, but allowing for the possibility that in another context (at the same time but in another place, or in the same place but at a different time) that metaphor may be considered useless. See ibid., 9.

19. Ibid., 7; Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G.E.M. (New York, 1968), 5.Google Scholar

20. See Giddens, Anthony, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979), esp. 33–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984).Google Scholar

21. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 32. Italics in original.

22. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Feminism and Critical Theory,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London, 1988), 78.Google Scholar

23. Rorty, Contingency, 9.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., 17.

26. Ibid., xv.

27. See Comay, Rebecca, “Interrupting the Conversation: Notes on Rorty,” Telos 69 (Fall 1986): 125, 127Google Scholar. Comay discusses Rorty's previous work, but would find further evidence for her devastating critique in Contingency.

28. Pagden, “Rethinking the Linguistic Turn,” 522.

29. LaCapra, Dominick, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983).Google Scholar

30. Blackbourn, David and Eley, Geoff, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as well as Peukert, Detlev J. K., Die Weimarer Republik: Krisenjahre der Klassischen Moderne (Frankfurt a/M, 1987)Google Scholar are two recent examples of redescription in the social history of modern German politics. Of course, neither sets out to explore the use of language, and the question of what notion of language they employ remains open.

31. For the following, see Kellner, Hans, Language and Historical Representation (Madison, Wis., 1989), 12–13.Google Scholar

32. Ibid., 13.

33. The most widely cited study of allegory is Fletcher, Angus, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, N.Y., 1964)Google Scholar. But see also Quilligan, Maureen, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979)Google Scholar; Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, ed. Bloomfield, Morton (Cambridge, Mass., 1981)Google Scholar; Allegory and Representation, ed. Greenblatt, Stephen J. (Baltimore and London, 1981)Google Scholar; and Smith, Paul, “The Will to Allegory in Postmodernism,” Dalhousie Review 62, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 105–22.Google Scholar

34. See Jameson, Fredric, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, N.J., 1971), 60.Google Scholar

35. On resituating texts, see Harlan, “Intellectual History and the Return of Literature,” 604, who uses this concept with reference to intellectual history but who, I think, raises issues that are applicable to other forms of historical writing. Harlan refers to Rorty's earlier work but wrote this particular article before the appearance of Contingency.

36. (Madison, Wis., 1988).

37. Ibid., 7.

38. Ibid., 6.

39. Ibid., 194.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid., 26.

42. I refer here to Spivak's discussion of the implications of Drabble, Margaret, The Waterfall (Harmondsworth, 1971)Google Scholar, in “Feminism and Critical Theory,” 89.

43. Herf, Jeffrey, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984).Google Scholar

44. Chartier, Roger, “Texts, Printing, Readings,” in Hunt, , ed., The New Cultural History, 154–75Google Scholar, makes this point particularly well.

45. For a recent example: Schulze, Hagen, Is There a German History? (London, 1987)Google Scholar, which was first presented as the annual lecture of the German Historical Institute in London in 1987.

46. Two recent contributions are Hughes, Michael, Nationalism and Society: Germany 1800–1945 (London, 1988)Google Scholar, and James, Harold, A German Identity: 1770–1990 (New York, 1989).Google Scholar

47. See Foucault, Michel, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans., Bouchard, Donald F. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977).Google Scholar

48. As Kellner, Language and Historical Representation, 104–5, makes clear, historians will not get very far in this project by relying on the much-publicized debate over the “revival” of narrative that Lawrence Stone brought about in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Stone and most of those who have engaged him in debate ignored the formal, ideological, and semiotic features of narrative.