the emergence of the text: the linguistic turn in historiography

北京师范大学北京师范大学教育研究方法讲座系列教育研究方法讲座系列

Lecture 7Approach to Comparative-Historical Method (4):

Deconstructionism in Historical Perspective

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The Emergence of the Text: The Linguistic Turn in Historiography

1. Hayden White’s challenge: “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” (1978)

a. “If there is an element of the historical in all poetry, there is an element of poetry in every historical account of the world. …And this because history has no stipulatable subject matter uniquely its own; it is always written as part of a contest between contending poetic figurations of what the past might consist of.” (White, 1978, P. 98)

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1. Hayden White’s challenge: …b. “History as a discipline is in bad shape today because it

has lost sight of its origins in the literary imagination. In the interest of appearing scientific and objective, it has repressed and denied to itself its own greater source of strength and renewal. By drawing historiography back once more to an intimate connection with its literary basis, we should not only be putting ourselves on guard against merely ideological distortion; we should by way of arriving at the “theory” of history without which it cannot pass for a ‘discipline’ at all.” (White, 1978, P. 99)

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2. Lawrence Stone’s challenge: “Nothing besides the text”

a. “During the last twenty-five years, the subject matter of history…have …been brought seriously into question. …The first threat comes from linguistics…according to which there is nothing besides the text. Texts thus become a mere hall of mirrors reflecting nothing but each other, and throwing no light upon the ‘truth’, which does not exist.” (Stone, 1991, P 217)

b. According, Stone asserts that such the linguistic turn and “the movement to narrative …marks the end of an era: the end of the attempt to produce a coherent scientific explanation of change in the past.” (Stone, 1979, P. 19)

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Paul Ricoeur’s Text and Interpretation

1. What is a text? a. “A text is any discourse fixed in writing.” (Ricoeur, 1981a,

p.145)

b. Fixation enables the speech to be conserved, i.e. durability of text

c. A text “divides the act of writing and the act of reading into two sides, between which there is no communication. … The text thus produces a double eclipse of the reader and the writer.” (Ricoeur, 1981a, p.146-47)

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2. Distanciations in the text:a. Text as language event/speech act

① Distanciation between language event (i.e. discourse) and meaning

② Articulation of meaning in language event is “the core of the whole hermeneutic problem.” (Ricoeur, 1981a, p. 134)

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2. Distanciations in the text:b. Text as work

① Distanciation between text as “work” and its authors’ intention

② “Hermeneutics remains the art of discerning the discourse in the work; but this discourse is only given in and through the structures of the work. Thus interpretation is the reply to the fundamental distanciation constituted by the objectification of man in work of discourse, an objectification comparable to that expressed in the products of his labour and his art.” (Ricoeur, 1981a, P. 138)

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2. Distanciations in the text:c. Distanciation between the act of writing and the act of

reading① Distanciation between the intention of the author and the

interpretation of the reader

② “The text must be able to… ‘ decontextualise’ itself in such a way that it can be ‘recontextualise’ in a new situation – as accomplished…by the act of reading.” (Ricoeur, 1981a, p. 139)

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2. Distanciations in the text:d. Distanciation of the text and the referent of the text or the

reality designated/signified in the text① The world of the text: “Reference…distinguishes discourse

from language, the latter has no relation with reality, its words returning to other words in the endless circle of the dictionary. Only discourse, we shall say, intends things, applies itself to reality, expresses the world.” (Ricoeur, 1981a, p. 140)

② “The most fundamental hermeneutical problem … is to explicate the type of being-in-the world (life-world) unfolded in front of the text.” (Ricoeur, 1981a, p.141)

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Narrative as Universal Device & Meta-Code in Human Meaning-making Process

1. Meaning of narrative:a. In Oxford English Dictionary, narrative as a noun means

① An account of a series of events, facts, etc., given in order and with the establishing of connections between them; a narration, a story.

② The practice or art of narrative; narrated material.

b. Lawrence Stone defines narrative as "the organization of material in a chronologically sequential order and the focusing of the content into a single coherent story, albeit with sub-plots." (Stone, 1979, p.3

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1. Meaning of narrative:…c. Barbara Czarniawska's conception: "A narrative, in its

basic form, requires at least three elements: an original state of affairs, an action or an event, and the consequent state of affairs." In order to have these three elements " become a narrative, they require a plot, that is, some way to bring them into a meaningful whole. The easiest way to do this is by introducing chronology (and then …), which in the mind of the reader easily turns into causality (as a result of, in spite of). (Czarniawska, 1998, p. 2)

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2. The universality of narrativea. “Man is in his actions and practice …essentially a story-

telling animal.” (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 216)

Alasdair MacIntyre contends that we understand “human action as enacted narratives. …We render the actions of others intelligible in this way because action itself has a basically historical character. It is because we all live out narrative in our lives and because we understand our own lives in terms of the narratives that we live out that the form of narrative is appropriate for understanding the actions of others. Stories are live before they are told.” (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 211-212)

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2. The universality of narrativeb. Barbara Hardy indicates that "we dream in narrative, day-

dream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative." (Hardy, 1968, p.5)

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2. The universality of narrativec. Jerome Bruner signifies that narrative construal of reality

is universal in human cogitation. "We live in a sea of stories, and like the fish who (according to the proverb) will be the last to discover water, we have our own difficulties grasping what it is like to swim in stories. It is not that we lack competence in creating our narrative account of reality— far from it. We are, if anything, too expert. Our problem, rather, is achieving consciousness of what we so easily do automatically. (Bruner, 1996, 147)

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Paul Ricoeur’s Time, Narrative and History

1. Paul Ricoeur’s metaphor and narrative in hermeneutic understandinga. Metaphor is semantic innovation “in producing a new

semantic pertinence by means of an impertinent attribution.” (1983, p. ix)

b. Narrative is another semantic innovation in “inventing another work of synthesis – a plot”

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2. Paul Ricoeur’s hypothesis of time and narrative

“My basic hypothesis (is) that between the activity of narrating a story and the temporal character of human experience there exists a correlation that is not merely accidental but that presents a transcultural form of necessity. To put it another way, time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a conditions of temporal existence.” (Ricoeur, 1984, p. 52)

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3. History as narrative a. Historical event: “Historical events derive their historical

status not only from their articulation in singular statements, but also from the position of these singular statements in configurations of certain sort which properly constitute a narrative.” (1981, p. 276)

b. Historical explanation: It is an act of emplotment, that is, to ‘interpolate’ the historical events to be explained into “a type of discourse which already has a narrative form.” (p.276) Hence, historical explanation is by definition an “explanation by emplotment”. (p290)

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3. History as narrative c. Plot: “What is a plot? The phenomenology of the act of

following a story. …To follow a story is to understand the successive actions, thoughts and feelings as displaying a particular directedness. …We must follow the story to its conclusion. So rather than being predictable, a conclusion must be acceptable. Looking back from the conclusion towards the episodes which lead up to it, we must be able to say that this end required those events and that chain of action.” (p.277)

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3. History as narrative d. History: “History could then be explicitly treated as a

‘literary artifact’, and the writing of history began to be reinterpreted according to categories which were variously call ‘semiotic’ ‘symbolic’ and ‘poetic’.” (p. 290)

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The Structure of Narrative: Hayden White’s The Context of the Form (1987)

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1. Narrative as a universal meta-code of humanity and culture: "To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report on the way things really happened, that narratives could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent. …This suggests that far from being one code among many that a culture may utilize for endowing experience with meaning, narrative is a meta-code, a human universal on the basis of which transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted." (White, 1987, p.1)

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2. Classification of historical dataa. Primitive elements: traces of the past

b. Non-primitive elements: ① Textual records, archives, relics

② Annals

③ Chronicle

④ Narrative

c. Distinction between syntax of the past (the facts/ the statements/ the chronicle) and semantics of the past (the stories/ narrative form)

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3. Narrativity in the representation of realitya. Three basic kinds of historical representation

① The annals

“It consists only a list of events ordered in chronological sequence. …It possesses none of the characteristics that we normally attribute to a story: no central subject, no well marked beginning, middle, and end, no peripeteria, and no identifiable narrative voice.” (P. 5-6)

② The chronicle

“The chronicle.. has a central subject – the life of an individual, town, or region; some great undertaking, such as a war or crusade; or some institution, such as a monarchy, episcopacy, or monastery,” (P. 16), an authority.

③ The historical narrative

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3. Narrativity in the representation of realityb. Features of narrativity

① Sequence of events

② Central subject:• The legal subject (the state)

• The geographical subject

• The social subject/system

③ Plot: The plot is “a structure of relationships by which the events contained in the account are endowed with a meaning by being identified as parts of an integrated whole” (P.9) “The plot of a narrative imposes a meaning on the events that make up its story level by revealing at the end a structure that was immanent in the events all along.” (p.20)

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3. Narrativity in the representation of reality…b. Features of narrativity

④ Explanation by emplotment: "Providing the 'meaning' of a story by identifying the kind of story that has been told is call explanation by emplotemnt. If, in the course of narrating his story, the historian provides it with the plot structure of a Tragedy, he has 'explained' it in one way; if he has structured it as a Comedy, he has 'explained' it in another way. Emplotment is the way by which a sequence of events fashioned into a story is gradually revealed to be a story of a particular kind. ….I identify at least four different modes of emplotment: Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, and Satire." (White, 1973, p.7)

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3. Narrativity in the representation of reality…b. Features of narrativity⑤ Closure

• Moral meaning

• “A proper historical narrative … achieves narrative fullness by explicitly invoking the idea of a social system to serve as a fixed reference point by which the flow of ephemeral events can be endowed with specifically moral meaning. … (Hence), the chronicle must approach the form of an allegory, moral or analogical as the case may be, in order to achieve both narrativity and historicality.” (p. 22)

• Moralistic ending (Philosophy of history)

⑥ Authority of reality: In a constructing narrative, a historian usually implies "a desire on his part to represent an authority whose legitimacy hinged upon the establishment of 'facts' of specifically historical orders." (p. 19)

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The Narrative Identity: The Formation of the Great Communities

1. Paul Ricoeur’s narrative identitya. Life in search of narrative

① ‘A life is no more than a biological phenomenon as long as it has not been interpreted.’ (Ricoeur, 1991a, p.27-28)

② Emplotment: We make sense of our living experiences, such as planning, succeeding and suffering by giving them narrative understanding, i.e. by emplotment.

③ And Emplotment can broadly be defined as “the operation of ...a synthesis of heterogeneous elements.” (1991a, p.21) These syntheses of heterogeneous elements can be include:• Synthesizing multiple incidents and events into a story

• Synthesizing discordance into concordance

• Synthesizing flows of time into permanence in time or temporal succession into temporal closure or even

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④ Symbolic mediation: We make sense of our life through symbolic mediation, i.e. attributing meaning or even meaningfulness to living experiences, life partners and the life-world

“It is a mediation between man and the world, between man and man, between man and himself; the mediation between man and the world is what we call referentiality, the mediation between men, communicability; the mediation between man and himself, self understanding. (1991a, p. 27)

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⑤ It is by means of these acts of employment and symbolic mediation that man finds and found his own identity. Hence, it is a narrative identity.

“I am stressing the expression ‘narrative identity’ for what we call subjectivity is neither an incoherent series of events nor an immutable substantiality, impervious to evolution. This is precisely the sort of identity which narrative composition alone can create through its dynamism.” (1991a, p. 32)

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⑥ ‘It is in this way that we learn to become the narrator and the hero of our own story, without actually becoming the author of our own life. It is true that life is lived and that stories are told. An unbridgeable difference does remain, but this difference is partially abolished by our power of applying to ourselves the plots that we have received from our culture and of trying on the different roles assumed by the favourite characters of the stories most dear to us.’ (1991a, p.32-33)

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1. Paul Ricoeur’s narrative identityb. Narrative identity

① ‘The concept of narrative identity …(refers to) the kind of identity that human being acquire through the mediation of the narrative function.’ (1991b, p.188)

② Fundamental distinction of the concept of identity:• Identity as selfhood (Uniqueness)

• Identity as sameness

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③ Identity as sameness• Identity as sameness refers to two or more occurrences of things are one

single and same thing.

• Identity as sameness refers to two or more occurrences of things are similar, i.e. bearing great resemblance and constituting of no difference.

• Identity as sameness refers to “the uninterrupted continuity in the development of a being.

• Identity as sameness refers to “permanence in time.” “All phenomena contain something permanent (substance) when considered as the object itself, and something changing, when considered as a simple determination of this object, that is to say as a mode of existence of the objects” (Kant, quoted in Ricoeur, 1991b, p. 190)

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④ It is through narrative, its emplotment and mediation that the sameness-identity and the selfhood-identity can come to associate with each other on the ground of permanence in time. This permanence can be ‘coherence of life’ ‘narrative unity’, ‘durable properties of a character’, and a ‘discordant concordance’. (1991b, 195)

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2. Margaret Somers’ narrative identitya. The concept of social narrativity

b. Social narrativity is “concepts of social epistemology and social ontology. (It)… posits through narrativity that we come to know, understand, and make sense of the social world, and through which we constitute our social identity. It matters… that we come to be (usually unconsciously) who we are (however ephemeral, multiple, and changing) by our locations in social narrative and networks that rarely of our own making.” (Somers, 1997, p.82)

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2. Margaret Somers’ narrative identityc. Component of social narrativity

① Relationality of parts,

② Selective appropriation

③ Temporality, sequence and places,

④ Causal emplotment

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2. Margaret Somers’ narrative identityd. Four kinds of narrativity

• Ontological narratives and the constitution of narrative identity

• Public, cultural and institutional narratives

• Conceptual / analytical / sociological narrativity

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3. Construction of narrative identity from organization and community: By applying the conception of narrative identity to formation of great communities, comparative-historical researchers may explore the formation and emergence of great communities in history across various social contextsa. Narrative identity of nations;

b. Narrative identity of classes and political parties, e.g. the narrative identity of the Chinese Communist Party;

c. Narrative identity of organization, such as a university, a corporations, a charity organization;

d. Narrative identity of professions, unions, occupational groupings

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What is After the Linguistic Turn?1. In the concluding remark of his chapter on “The Linguistic

Turn: The End of History as a Scholarly Disciple?” (Iggers, 1997), Georg Iggers writes

“In conclusion: Linguistic theory …I my opinion must be taken very seriously and that has applications to historical thought and writing. …The participants in this discussion have rightly raised the point that history taken as a whole contains no immanent unity or coherence, that every conception of history is a construct constituted through language, that human beings as subjects have no integrated personality free of contradictions and ambivalences, and that every text can read and interpreted indifferent ways because it expresses no unambiguous intentions. …

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What is After the Linguistic Turn?1. In the concluding remark …Georg Iggers writes

“…The ‘linguistic turn’ in historical studies over the past decade and a half has been part of an effort to break the determinism inherent in older socioeconomic approaches and to emphasize the role of cultural factor, among which language occupies a key place.” (Iggers, 1995, Pp. 132-33)

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What is After the Linguistic Turn?2. There comes critical hermeneutics:

Iggers further underlines that “Foucault and Derrida have with good justification point out the political implications of language and hierarchical relations of power inherent in it. These contradictions, which permeate all of human life, force the observer to ‘deconstruct’ every text, in order to lay bare its ideological elements. Every reality is not only communicated through speech and discourse but in every fundamental way is also constituted by them.” (Iggers, 1995, P. 132)

3. Accordingly, we shall continue the investigation by exploring further into the “ideological distortion” embedded in historical texts and their underlying institutional configurations.

END

Lecture 7Approach to Comparative-Historical Method (4):

Constructionism in Historical Perspective

the emergence of the text: the linguistic turn in historiography

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