The Task of the Historian

Author(s): Gabrielle M. Spiegel

Source: The American Historical Review , Feb., 2009, Vol. 114, No. 1 (Feb., 2009), pp. xiv,
1-15
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association

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 GABRIELLE M. SPIEGEL

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 Presidential Address
The Task of the Historian

GABRIELLE M. SPIEGEL

TRADITIONALLY, FOR HISTORIANS, the ethical core of our profession

been a belief that our arduous, often tedious labor yields some auth
of the dead "other," a knowledge admittedly shaped by the hist
ceptions and biases, but nonetheless retaining a degree of autono
that it cannot be made entirely to bend to the historian's will. This
in the irreducible otherness of the past conferred on history its
which was to recover that past in as close an approximation of "how
as possible. In the interest of preserving the autonomy of the p
practiced modesty as a supreme ethical virtue, discreetly holding in
her own beliefs, prejudices, and presuppositions.
Yet this traditional understanding of the nature, epistemolog
truth-value, and goals of historical research faced a significant chal
in the late 1960s and the 1970s with the emergence of what cam
the "linguistic turn," the belief that language is the constitutive
consciousness and the social production of meaning, and that ou
the world, both past and present, arrives only through the lens
coded perceptions. Moreover, language, once understood as a relat
dium of communication, sufficiently transparent to convey a re
sense of reality, itself had been reconceptualized with the emergenc
linguistics or semiotics, a movement that began with the publicatio
dinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics. Far from ref
world of which it is a part, language, Saussure argued, precedes the
it intelligible according to its own rules of signification. Since for
are inherently arbitrary, in the sense of being social conventions im
stood in different ways by differing linguistic communities, the id
universe existing independently of speech and universally comp
one's membership in any particular language system is an illusio

I would like to thank Nancy Partner, Robert Stein, David Bell, Nathan Connolly, C
Bloch, Amanda Anderson, Ruth Leys, and members of the History Department s
kins University for their advice on how to frame the talk and for their c
earlier versions of this article. While they did not necessarily agree with all the arg
their careful reading of the article and insight into its intentions were invaluabl
rewrote it. Some of the material was earlier published in "Revising the Past/Revisit
Change Happens in Historiography," History and Theory, Theme Issue, 46, no. 4
i Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and

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2 Gabrielle M. Spiegel

Such was the "semiotic challenge" posed to t

rise of structural linguistics and continuing w
turalism, semiotics, and poststructuralism, in
tion.2 The principal impact of these cognate
in the period after World War II; after 1965 t
a term disseminated by the pragmatic philoso
physical Difficulties of Linguistic Philosophy"
throughout the course of the seventies and aft
constituted the kind of epistemological crisis
predecessors in this office believed, it is clear
in our understanding of the nature of histori
deployed in seeking to recover the past, and th
be asserted about the product of our labors. N
of its claims, it nonetheless had a significant i
basic tasks and the procedures and language

collaboration with Albert Riedlinger, trans. with an int

1966), 67ff. Positions like these made it easy for criti
ernism "is a philosophy of linguistic idealism... [which]
to refer to an independent world of facts and things
meanings. By the same token it also dismisses the poss
of inquiry." In Zagorin's view, this represents a fundam
doned the notion of the referential relation of signs t
"arbitrary." See Zagorin, "History, the Referent, and
History and Theory 38 (1999): 7. For a response to Zag
anti-realist but rather anti-representationalist, see Kei
rin," History and Theory 39 (2000): 182ff. Although Z
constative or referential function of signs within give
charge of linguistic idealism, since, as Jason A. Frank h
historiography has been on written language, tropes, soc
of literary production and consumption, rather than o
material embodiment." Frank, "History and the Necess
in Historiography and the Problematics of Historical K
2 On these developments, see my article "History, H
the Middle Ages," Speculum 65 (1990): 59-86, reprinted
Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Balti
3 The essay was published in Richard Rorty, ed., The L
(Chicago, 1967). Rorty, of course, was working within
that to a certain extent ran parallel to that arising fr
highly influential in the work of historians such as Jo
of political thought that their work fostered. As an aside
whose 1965 article is generally credited with having int
turn" in philosophy and related disciplines, retreated f
icance. In a retrospective essay, "Twenty-Five Years La
attributed to the phenomenon of the "linguistic turn"
initial retrospective essay ("Ten Years Later")-"to have
teapot," and now appears "positively antique." Indeed, h
lems of philosophy are problems of language strikes m
he "is no longer inclined to think there is such as thing
to speak of 'problems of language.' " Rorty, "Twenty-F
Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method-With Two Retros
in a statement that appears to me to be deeply sympto
the "linguistic turn," what now counts as philosophica
nected to what [Ian] Hacking calls 'interfacing.' These
reality, or language and reality, viewed as the relation
is purportedly represented.'" Ibid., 371.

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 The Task of the Historian 3

Anyone who has lived through the last four decades o

ical praxis can appreciate the need to investigate how
mation in the nature and understanding of historical w
theory, could have taken place. The reason for doing so
this profound change has run its course. As Michael R
last decade or so, recognition has been spreading that
motivated much advanced work in the humanities is over. The massive tide of lan-
guage that connected analytic philosophy with pragmatism, anthropology with social
history, philosophy of science with deconstruction, has receded; we are now able to
look across the sand to see what might be worth salvaging before the next waves of
theory and research begin to pound the shore."4 But to determine what might be
worth saving, we need some explanation of how and why this sea change in history
occurred; what motivated it; what governed the rhythms of its acceptance, dissem-
ination, and decline; and what its implications are for our continuing practice, even
as we sense that the hold of poststructuralism and postmodernism on current his-
toriography is diminishing.5 What, if any, shared epistemologies, methodologies, and
questions might exist between the fundamental postulates of the linguistic turn and
the new foci of historical work on the immediate horizon? An appreciation of the
determining constituents of this rather extreme case of historiographical change may
offer some insights into what remains valuable as we move forward into a new era
of historical concerns, one that is already, and increasingly will be, adapted to the
new global environment in which we currently live.
Before broaching the question of what "caused," in some sense still to be dis-
covered, the rise of linguistic turn historiography, we would do well to consider more
generally what historical practice consists of, for any change in practice, even one
as startling and deep-rooted as the linguistic turn, necessarily occurs initially within
the confines of normal historiographical practice, and thus must be seen against the
background of its routines.
One of the most significant characteristics of the contemporary practice of his-
tory, important for the points I wish eventually to make, derives from the central
paradox of historical writing as analyzed by Michel de Certeau. In de Certeau's opin-
ion, modern Western history essentially begins with a decisive differentiation be-
tween the present and the past. Like modern medicine, whose birth was contem-
poraneous with that of modern historiography, the practice of history becomes
possible only when a dead corpse is opened to investigation, made legible such that
it can be translated into that which can be written within a space of language.6 His-
4 Michael Roth, "Ebb Tide," review of Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, History and
Theory 46 (2007): 66.
5 I should acknowledge that the extent to which the profession as a whole adopted the "linguistic
turn" is probably exaggerated here, although I think the prevalence of studies of "discourse," the spread
of feminist concepts of gender, and the rise of postcolonial theory and history bear witness to the fact
that its impact was far wider than might be thought merely from examining the work of those directly
engaged with debating "theory" or doing intellectual history. However, it remains true that the actual
number of historians actively engaged with these questions was probably relatively small in comparison
to the field as a whole. Nonetheless, it did represent a significant challenge to historians' traditional ways
of conceiving history and had a discernible impact on the nature of the truth claims and epistemological
objectivity that historians felt comfortable in asserting.
6 Interestingly, the Greek autopsia ("to see for oneself"), as it appears in Herodotus and other
ancient historians, originally referred to facts narrated by the historian to which he was himself an

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 4 Gabrielle M. Spiegel

torians must draw a line between what is dead

they posit death as a total social fact, in contr
body of traditional knowledge, passed down in
theless real memories borne by living societ
past has as the very condition of its possibi
the dead, a discourse with which historians
created by history's founding gesture of rupt
of modern historiography is the disappearance
ment from visibility to invisibility. The hi
Hugo von Hofmannsthal defined as "reading w
moment that the past is saved, "not in bein
instead, precisely in being transformed into s
as what was never written."'9 From that pe
historian to the past is an engagement with
The fact that historians must construct the
mean, however, that they are necessarily f
generated are merely fictive postulates. Hi
former structures nor the weight of an endle
ditionalists were wont to call "continuity."
historiography, the sign of history has becom
intelligibility achieved through the productio
ing to narrativist principles, hence always fli
to the operation of narrative. In this process,
to be called the "real," the "true," the "fact")
No longer a "given" of the past that offers it
is something constantly re-created in the r
present, hence ever-changing as that relatio
If we acknowledge that history is the pro
sentations of the absent past that bear within
imprints-and it seems unlikely that any his
whether framed in terms of discourse, soci
historian's fashioning-then it seems logical
historical practice the impress of individual
decoding of those socially generated norms
forces within the intellectual traditions of
shaped the course of these developments a
changes at work, but my interest here is in t
turn, however realized through additional c

eyewitness, indicating an etymological link between th

amination.
7 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York, 1988), 5.
8 The phrase of Hofmannsthal is cited in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiede-
mann and Hermann Schweppenhiuser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1972-1989), 1: pt. 3, 1238. I am
indebted to Daniel Heller-Roazen for this reference.
9 See the discussion of this in Daniel Heller-Roazen, "Introduction," in Giorgio Agamben, Poten-
tialities, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif., 1999), 1.
1O In that sense, one cannot legitimately account for Derrida's deconstructive turn without taking in

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 The Task of the Historian 5

In attempting to discover the possible psychic roots of t

challenged our understanding of history, I would like
elsewhere argued are the psychic roots of poststructura
construction in particular, which I consider to have bee
poststructuralism's-and hence the linguistic turn's-mo
Although there certainly were strands of deconstruction t
da's, and, more generally, principles of postmodernism th
concerns, for the purposes of this argument I will take De
the key expression of the impulses at work in generating
We may legitimately take, I believe, the hallmark of dec
a new and deeply counterintuitive understanding of th
guage and reality-counterintuitive in the sense that de
that relationship interposes so many layers of mediation t
"reality" is seen to be a socially (that is, linguistically) con
of the particular language systems we inhabit, thereby un
ories of experience and the ideas of causality and agency in
deconstruction proposes an inherent instability at the c
the determination of meaning ultimately beyond our reac
broad sense that deconstruction understands that term, fo
own indeterminacy, its aporia, the "impasse beyond all pos
rida defines it, "which is connected with the multiplic
within the uniqueness of textual inscription."'3 The psychi
by such a problematizing of the relationship between res a
together with the decentering of language and thus of
thorize it, suggests that deconstruction represents not only
of Western philosophy and history, but a psychic respons
is itself founded in rupture.'4
It is my belief that Derrida alchemized into philosop

account the impact of his reading of Husserl and his confrontation with
is less with the specifically philosophical constituents of his thought tha
to reformulate philosophy in a specific deconstructive fashion.
11 See my "Orations of the Dean/Silences of the Living: The Sociolo
Spiegel, The Past as Text, 29-43.
12 I am, of course, aware of the fact that the French theorist who i
historians was the early (that is, archaeological, or pre-genealogical) F
even Lyotard. This was in part because Foucault committed himself to
semiotics within history itself, through a study of modern epistemologi
over, Foucault's notion of discourse operating within a microphysics
of the very power of discourse itself, had enormous appeal in terms of it
history within a single framework. However, to the extent that the "
mental questions arising within the framework of poststructuralism,
Foucault, is a better guide to what might have motivated its emergence,
in his early phases, highly structuralist in his deployment of discour
13 Jacques Derrida, "Shibboleth," in Geoffrey Hartman and Sanfor
erature (New Haven, Conn., 1986), 323.
14 As Derrida himself noted, deconstruction proposes the notion of
is, a structure whose decentering is the result of "the event I called a
of the coming into consciousness of the 'structurality of structure."
Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in Derrida, Wr
Bass (Chicago, 1978), 278. Derrida does not, however, specify the "eve
and somewhat tautologically-presenting it as an effect of an emerging

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6 Gabrielle M. Spiegel

marked by the Holocaust-marked by but

which the Holocaust figures as the absent
to theorize. This is to argue that, living at a
consciousness of the Holocaust, Derrida em
a theoretician of linguistic "play," a time syn
guage invaded the universal problematic, t
center or origin, everything became discou
Derrida belonged both by birth and by self
ond generation" of the post-Holocaust wor
inscribed an event in which it did not partic
the underlying narrative of the lives of its m
a world of silence, a "silence," as French ps
brilliant evocation of the psychology of th
the past, all the past.""7 The parents of th

transmitted only the wound to their children, to

grew up in the compact world of the unspeaka
the trace, molded by death ... The past has been
lives... They feel their existence as a sort of exile
but from a time now gone forever, which would

They feel themselves to be "deported from

drawn, expelled from a lost paradise, aboli

turality, or constructed nature. One is tempted to se

displacement of a psychological phenomenon.
15 Ibid., 292, 289. For Derrida, the articulation of "p
that makes writing "after Auschwitz" possible. Indeed
starting point of Derrida's critique of what he calls th
"This structuralist thematic of broken immediacy is t
Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play whose other s
joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the
of signs without fault, without truth, and without orig
affirmation then determines the non center otherwis
noted that Derrida has repeatedly protested that "it i
suspension of reference ... I never cease to be surpris
that there is nothing beyond language ... What I call
nomic,' 'historical,' 'socio-institutional,' in short all
the text'... does not mean that all referents are sus
have claimed, or have been naive enough to believe
mean that every referent and all reality has the struc
refer to this 'real' except in an interpretive experience."
Zagorin," 190-191. See also Jacques Derrida, "Deconstr
and Sande Cohen, eds., French Theory in America (N
16 Technically, of course, Derrida, having been born
as a member of the second generation. Indeed, in 194
lowering to 7 percent of the numerus clausus of Jew
the war, he attended a school run by Jews in Algiers
semitism of the P6tain regime. Nonetheless, in rela
ropean Jews, Derrida's childhood in Algiers, I believe
and belatedness that informs the psychology of the
17 Nadine Fresco, "Remembering the Unknown," In
419.
18 Ibid., 420-421.

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 The Task of the Historian 7

pated ... deported from a self that ought to have be

merely a matter of substitution."'19
It is a generation lost between the "orations" of dea
witz, which spoke tellingly but tragically, and the silen
literally could not "speak" the Holocaust (which was, in
word unspeakable). From their parents, this genera
Apfelbaum's words, "un heritage en formes d'absenc
absences).20 And linked to the notion of absence in th
the second generation, as Ellen Fine has demonstrate
void, lack, blank, gap, and abyss. "La m6moire absen
Raczymow, is "la m6moire trou6e": hollowed out, frag
Perhaps most striking of all in the work of these write
inadequacy of language. "The world of Auschwitz," in
mark, "lies outside speech as it lies outside reason."22
is language in a condition of severe diminishment and d
more forcefully than Steiner the corruption-indeed
sult of the political bestiality of our age.23 And yet, fo
is nothing but language. As the protagonist in Elie W
states: "Born after the war I endure its effects. I suffer from an Event I did not even
experience ... From a past that has made History tremble, I have retained only
words."24

Both for those who survived and for those who came after, the Holocaust appears
to exceed the representational capacity of language, and thus to cast suspicion on
the ability of words to convey reality.25 And for the second generation, the question
is not even how to speak but, more profoundly, if one has a right to speak, a dele-
gitimation of the speaking self that, turned outward, interrogates the authority, the
privilege of all speech. Which, of course, is precisely what Derrida and deconstruc-
tion does in the attack on logocentrism.
It is not difficult to see the parallels between this psychology of the "second gen-
eration" and the basic tenets of poststructuralism: the feeling of life as a trace,
haunted by an absent presence; its sense of indeterminacy; a belief in the ultimate
undecidability of language (its aporia, in Derrida's sense); the transgressive ap-
proaches to knowledge and authority; and, perhaps most powerfully, the conviction
of the ultimately intransitive, self-reflective character of language, which seems to
have lost its power to represent anything outside itself, hence to have lost its ability,
finally, to signify. In its profound commitment to a fractured, fragmented, and end-
19 Ibid., 420-423.
20 Quoted in Ellen S. Fine, "The Absent Memory: The Act of Writing in Post-Holocaust French
Literature," in Berel Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), 44.
21 Ibid., 45.
22 George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New
York, 1986), 123.
23 Ibid., 4.
24 Quoted in Fine, "The Absent Memory," 41.
25 The "unrepresentable" nature of the Holocaust is the subject of a considerable literature, be-
ginning with the essays collected in Saul Friedlander, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and
the "Final Solution" (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). See also his Memory, History, and the Extermination of
the Jews of Europe (Bloomington Ind., 1993), as well as Lang, Writing and the Holocaust, and Dominick
LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994).

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 8 Gabrielle M. Spiegel

lessly deferred, hence displaced, understandi

of meaning, poststructuralism shares with
belatedness, the scars of an unhealed woun
silence.
It is clear as well that the sense of loss that subtends this psychology of the second
generation is not confined to individuals, nor to Jews, but constitutes an entire gen-
eration's understanding of the wreck of history attendant upon the war and the rev-
elations of its horrors. Furthermore, I should point out that I am not the only his-
torian to argue on behalf of the probable link between post-Holocaust and post-
modern consciousness, a phenomenon that began with Habermas's articulation of
the general sense that "there [in Auschwitz] something happened that up to now
nobody considered even possible ... Auschwitz has changed the basis for the con-
tinuity of the condition of life within history."26 Such a link is also implicit in Lyo-
tard's metonymic use of "the jews" in Heidegger and "the jews" as the very figure of
postmodernity, that is, of precisely what can no longer be "phrased" "after Aus-
chwitz"-the "excess" that disrupts and puts into question all former categories of
being and knowledge.27 In this country, scholars such as Dominick LaCapra and Eric
Santner have also insisted upon the crucial role of the Holocaust and its aftermath
as, in LaCapra's terms, "a divider between modernism and postmodernism."28 Sant-
ner argues even more forcefully that "the postmodern destabilization of certain fun-
damental cultural norms and notions, above all those dealing with self-identity and
community, cannot be understood without reference to the ethical and intellectual
imperatives of life 'after Auschwitz.' "29 Both point to the prominence of themes of
loss, death, impoverishment, and mourning that pervade much of postmodern crit-
icism and writing. In that sense, the emergence of poststructuralism under the sign
of the linguistic turn bespoke the end of the confident, optimistic era of European
Enlightenment with its faith in the continual progress of human history under the
aegis of scientific learning and methods and, not least among them, scientific history.
It is worth noting how tied to the experiences of a single generation the trans-
formations effected by poststructuralism and the linguistic turn appear to be, which
in turn helps to explain the timing of its advent in the seventies and eighties, rather
than in the years immediately following the war. The preoccupations of the surviving
postwar generation lay with rebuilding Europe, and in America with the emerging
Cold War conflict and the rise of McCarthyism. Apart, perhaps, from the refugee
historians themselves, whose impact on the development of German and European
history in this country was noted by David Pinkney in his presidential address of 1980,
leaders of the historical profession took surprisingly little note of the possible impact
that the war and its aftermath might have on the practice of history.30 As Europe
struggled to reconstitute its social fabric, social history reigned supreme, a fact sig-

26 Cited in the introduction to Friedlander, Probing the Limits of Representation, 2.

27 Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Heidegger and "the jews," trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts, in-
troduction by David Carroll (Minneapolis, 1990).
28 LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, 188.
29 Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1990), xiv.
30 David H. Pinkney, "American Historians on the European Past," 1980 AHA Presidential Address,
American Historical Review 86, no. 1 (February 1981): 3-4.

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 The Task of the Historian 9

naled by the dominance of Annaliste historiography t

the United States and the prestige of social history m
Not until the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, that is
second generation, did the psychology that I have sough
into play. The first mention of the term "postmoder
dress does not appear until 1978, with William J. Bo
naissance and the Drama of Western History," who no
am... bewildered by the suggestion that we have now
age." Bouwsma did acknowledge that

the epistemological decisions embedded in language are th

apprehension of an external world; culture in this sense is
idealism, which represent contrary efforts to assign ontolog
sociology, to legitimize-a world whose actual source in the
all-too-human need for transcendence ... Beyond this, hist
to be a misleading and sometimes pernicious reification.32

A decade later, in 1989, David Harlan clearly label

structuralism an epistemological crisis for historical stu
ican Historical Review, asserting that the linguistic tu
in a fixed and determinable past, compromised the p
sentation, and undermined our ability to locate ourse
this has been to reduce historical knowledge to a tissue
concealing, it is said, an essential absence."33 By 1997
idential address on "The Power of History," forthrig
turalism and the linguistic turn had created an episte
rians and their publics and argued on behalf of a balanc
of social history, one that continued to acknowledge th
structuralist theories of discourse and what she called "
and their shaping force in the cultural formation of th
simultaneously sought to have historians appreciate that
positivistic element" and that its power derives from th
the present, compelling us to reconstruct it.34
Today, some thirty years or so after the introduction
"linguistic turn," there is a growing sense of dissatisfact
account of the operation of language in the domain of h
even among those committed to its fundamental postula
31 For excellent descriptions of how the rise of social history oc
Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor,
Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chic
on Eley's book and Eley's response, American Historical Review
32 William J. Bouwsma, "The Renaissance and the Drama of W
dential Address, American Historical Review 84, no. 1 (February 1
33 David Harlan, "Intellectual History and the Return of Literatur
no. 3 (June 1989): 581.
34 Joyce Appleby, "The Power of History," 1997 AHA Presiden
Review 103, no. 1 (February 1998): 12, 14. Appleby joined with Lyn
attempt to redress what they saw as poststructuralism's exaggerate
view of the world, one that, in its extreme forms, offers little ro
Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New

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10 Gabrielle M. Spiegel

Sewell has noted, there has been "a pervasive rea

as a system of symbols and meanings, inclining
sphere of practical activity shot through by wil
contradiction and change."35 In this view, cultu
ture than as a repertoire of competencies, a "
nality, or a set of strategies guiding action, whe
identify those aspects of the agent's experien
meaningful, that is, experientially "real."
Culture, thereby, is recast as a "performativ
sually as "signs put to work" to "reference" a
investigation, from this perspective, takes pr
point of social analysis, since practice emerge
ingful intersection between discursive constitut
This initiative is, in the first instance, cognitiv
of values, priorities, interests, and behaviors in
by available discourses or languages (i.e., sign
In light of the accumulating discontent with p
language as the constituent of human culture an
"semiotic challenge" has been addressed, abso
dominant concerns of historical thought and wr
cess of alteration, although the precise direct
modes and methodologies by which historical
are difficult to discern. Still, we need to pose th
have, indeed, as Nancy Partner now argues, e
what does this include, and what is being left
useful for the directions in which historiograph
what extent does our understanding of the fo
linguistic turn in the first place inform these de
unlikely that we will return to "quasi-scientific
the pre-postmodern assumptions that informed
likely that most historians will answer the c
recently issued by F. R. Ankersmit.39 Candidate
set forth, for example, by Michael Roth, includ
empire, the sacred, cosmopolitanism, trauma

35 William Sewell, "The Concept(s) of Culture," in Victo

the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society
36 Ibid., 45. See also Richard Biernacki, "Language and th
Inquiry," History and Theory 30 (2000): 289-310.
37 For a much fuller discussion of current revisions to
jectivity, see my introduction to Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ed., P
Writing after the Linguistic Turn (London, 2005), 11-18.
38 Nancy Partner, "Narrative Persistence: The Post-Post
Ankersmit, Ewa Domanska, and Hans Kellner, eds., Re-Fig
ford University Press), 2. I would like to thank Professor
its publication.
39 See Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience
40 Roth, "Ebb Tide," 66. To this list one might add the stud
something of a boom at the moment. It might also be po
consideration includes many matters that were already th

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 The Task of the Historian 11

new topics," Partner remarks, "share a common desire to

a pure and immediate connection with the past or at least
experience and generally deny the power of language to cont
its own uncontrollable meanings."41
We can agree, I think, that the historical concerns of the n
quite different, as is usually the case, especially in periods
we have been experiencing over the last few decades, not leas
nology and the spread of global capital. Yet it is not equa
fundamental insights of poststructuralism are-or should
If, as I have argued, deconstruction, poststructuralism, an
modernism in their psychic impulses enact a philosophy of r
to what extent are the insights generated by them still valua
the dominant concern of historians in the coming generat
that there is a fundamental continuity in the psychologic
goals of the rising generation, or that its members are neces
das earlier generated by the war and its aftermath. Only
continue to appreciate and employ what poststructuralism
its enactment of the complex tensions that shape the contem
tion is to identify what remains valuable in the legacy of th
insofar as there exists, or might exist, an underlying common
and needs of historical thought and writing under the sign o
the new historiographical agendas in the process of being cra
and in the coming years.
It seems probable that as our consciousness of the pene
talism and its impact on all forms of social formation grows
increasingly be influenced by the problematics fostered by th
therefore, create new objects of investigation. This is already
concern with questions of diaspora, migration, immigration,
oping field of transnational history, with its focus on wh
termed "minority cultures," which deploys a global perspecti
basic hybridity of global cultures in the postcolonial and p
That the field of "transnationalism" should appear as th
consciousness, a field in part promoted by the movement of
into the profession, is hardly unexpected and may be seen
terminants of this reorientation and revision in current histo
signal characteristic of these new fields of inquiry is that th
discontinuities in the experiences of, and displacements of
their subjects as a result of migration, exile, war, and th
apposite to inquire into the losses experienced in the process
diasporic movement. Such a question might interrogate, a
rather triumphalist tone of current work on transnationalism

high tide of poststructuralism and postmodernism. Thus the extent to whic

new agendas is somewhat problematic. For what I see as more likely candida
inquiry, see below.
41 Partner, "Narrative Persistence," 2-3.
42 See Frangoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnation

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12 Gabrielle M. Spiegel

fluidity and hybridity, multiplicity and mobilit

of cultural identity that often accompanies disp
guage, and culture.
More pertinent still is the utility of certain ins
to the enormously expanding field of diaspora s
post-Holocaust generation a legacy in terms of t
seems now, however, to function as a covering t
acterize cultures of displacement in the broad
James Clifford's accounting) border, travel, cre
and transnational migrant circuits.43 To these mi
coloniality, migrancy, globality, and transnation
runs through these various characterizations o
alized identities."45 According to this view, "de-
curs as diasporic peoples root themselves physica
(or are refused) assimilation to them, producin
tural consciousness that resists locating identity
this context, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett poin
on displacement, detachment, uprooting, and
is less clear about how re-articulation takes place
forms it takes in the space of dispersal, or how,
of origin.46 As a conceptual device, the idea of "
reflect the recognition that in the context of
grations, cultural as well as economic globaliza
intercommunication, questions of home, commu
are constantly being redefined. At the same time
that allows scholars to talk about these proc
independent of the nation-state as the framin

43 James Clifford, "Diasporas," CulturalAnthropology 9 (1

currently is counted as a "diaspora," one need only go to
pedia.org/wiki/List_ofdiasporas, where the term is app
displacements in relation to peoples and phenomena as di
Basques, Chechens, Sikhs, Fiji Islanders, Vikings, Lebane
Tibetans, Ukrainians, Portuguese, Irish, Tamil, Palestini
forms associated with hip-hop culture and rap music, kno
is also employed metaphorically, as William Safron point
refugees, and ethnic and racial minorities, thus adding to
Safron, "Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Hom
At its furthest definitional reach, "diaspora" has even be
croelectronic diasporas" generated by digital technologies
and thus to constitute themselves as a voluntary communi
a community that possessed no common homeland in the pa
than that imaginatively enabled by the Internet; Spivak, "
Phil Mariani, eds., Remaking History (Seattle, 1989), 276.
"the instantaneity of telecommunication produces an extr
imity under conditions of disembodied presence and the im
roots. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, "Spaces of Dispersal," Cultu
44 See the interesting discussion of the term in Brent H
Text 66 (2001): 45-73. Edwards also provides a valuable ske
to the African diaspora in relation to changing historical
45 See, for example, Steven Vertovec, "Three Meaning
Asian Religions," Diaspora 6 (1997): 1.
46 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, "Spaces of Dispersal," 339.

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 The Task of the Historian 13

This, in turn, poses the question of the relationship,

aspora" as a form of consciousness to the nation-state,
function as the place where individual and social identit
new conceptual field of "diaspora" would appear to fun
valuing the term, which for much of its history was a ma
the normative ideal of the nation-state, but now betokens
of national identity in favor of transnational bonds. Th
pora" in the field of Africana studies offers the most illum
because it possesses the most complex relationship to a not
ing what has been called a "stateless diaspora," that is, one
try of origin, language, religion, or culture) and because i
vasive use of the term "diaspora" in current academic
The "stateless power" of "diaspora," as Khachig T6161y
"a heightened awareness of the rewards as well as the burd
and in the exemplary grappling with the paradoxes of s
communities, in this sense, must actively reproduce an ide
maintain contact with it or, where it does not exist, with a
land, since a commitment, real or imagined, to multilocali
diasporic consciousness. Thus, as Arjun Appadurai and
out, "diasporas always leave a trail of collective memor
time and create new maps of desire and of attachment," t
necessarily the consolidation of identities, but more often
ories.48 One analytic feature of the concept of diaspora, t
damentally dialogic, constantly negotiating a willed relatio
"there" tantamount, as well, to the relationship betw
present and the past, presence and absence. In that sen
studies and its related fields of transnationalism, immigra
are fundamentally concerned, as in the case of poststru
lematics of displacement and absent or fractured memo
is true, they are involved, by definition, in questions of d
memory, and any notions of identity and subjectivity tha
essarily will be dependent on an understanding of memory
and hence on language as the ultimate bearer of the par
consciousness entailed in diasporic being. It is here that I s
of poststructuralist notions of the constitutive force of la
identity and the relationship between the self/subject a
Given this, the new historiography doubtless will also
standing of subjectivity as something more than the discu
positions" framed in poststructuralist theory, but also som
re-centered humanist subject.49 Although recent literatur

47 Khachig T6161yan, "Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless in the Tran

(1996): 8.
48 Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, "On Moving Targets," Public Culture 2 (1989): i. Cited
in Vertovec, "Three Meanings of 'Diaspora,' " 9.
49 For a discussion of what I have called the return of an actor-centered or "neo-phenomenological"
understanding of subjectivity and agency, one that highlights the disjunction between culturally given
meanings and the individual uses of them in contingent, historically conditioned ways, see my intro-

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 14 Gabrielle M. Spiegel

agency has been sharply critical of the fracturin

turalist formulations, I see scant evidence of
turn notions of the centered, humanist subject.
called the "post-poststructuralist turn to subj
actor in both past and present, she argues, by
derstanding of identity and its formation.5o In
rationally governed and continually refashioned
flective and self-critical understandings arrived a
and others. Such an approach seeks to restore to
self-awareness, and rationality capable of govern
recognition of the historical conditions"-inclu
beliefs and values emerge, as well as the possib
the many forces (psychological, social and politic
delay the[ir] achievements."5'
In light of this, one might speculate that how
locus of the new work on transnationalism and
that the much more diverse cultural and intellec
erates introduces complexities that historians in
forced to address, and for which there are few
fields can be seen from one perspective as inn
formulating earlier questions that arose in the c
civil rights and post-civil rights era, then how d
longing or plural citizenship complicate the stor
meable and not necessarily constitutive of identit
or domicile, from where does social identity
citizens of the world and citizens and subjects of
tradictions implicit in this form of multilocality
the collective level?
We live in a moment of great cultural instability and uncertainty. As historians,
we struggle to know the absent and the other, to affirm a right to words and to speech.
Like Derrida, we are "trying to write the question: (what is) meaning to say?"53
Precisely what instruments we will deploy in the pursuit of our historical labors is
not entirely clear. But I persist in believing that there is one thing that deconstruction
has taught us, more powerfully than any other strategy of reading that I know of, and
that is to listen to silence. As historians of the past, we are constantly engaged in
attending, as Paul Zumthor has written, "to the discourse of some invisible other that

duction to Practicing History, 11-18. A particularly Cogent examination of this problem and its impli-
cations for historiography can be found in a collection of articles by William H. Sewell, Jr., in his Logics
of History. Particularly useful among them are "A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transfor-
mation" (124-151) and "Concept(s) of Culture" (152-174). For a list of some recent bibliography on
this topic, see also my contribution to the AHR Forum on Geoff Eley's book, "Comment on A Crooked
Line," American Historical Review 113, no. 2 (April 2008): 406-416.
50 Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton, N.J.,
2006), 172.
51 Ibid., 122.
52 I am indebted to Nathan Connolly for the specific formulation of these questions.
53 Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1981), 14.

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 The Task of the Historian 15

speaks to us from some deathbed, of which the exact locat

to hear the echo of a voice which, somewhere, probes,
silences, begins again, is stifled."54 Our most fundamental
argue, is to solicit those fragmented inner narratives to e
In the last analysis, what is the past but a once material exi
only as sign and as sign drawing to itself chains of confli
hover over its absent presence and compete for possessi
invest traces of significance upon the bodies of the dea
54 Paul Zumthor, Speaking of the Middle Ages, trans. Sarah White

Gabrielle M. Spiegel served as President of the American His

in 2008. She is Krieger-Eisenhower University Professor of His
Hopkins University, where she also served as Chair of the H
for two terms. She was Vice-President of the Research Division of the American
Historical Association from 2000 to 2003 and was President of the Berkshire
Conference of Women Historians from 1981 to 1983. She has been Dean of
Humanities at UCLA and Acting Dean of Faculty at Johns Hopkins University.
She earned her doctorate in medieval history at Johns Hopkins University under
the supervision of John W. Baldwin. Her work focuses on the theory and practice
of writing history, both in the Middle Ages and in the modern era. Her pub-
lications on these topics include The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis:A Survey
(1978), Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thir-
teenth-Century France (1993), The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Me-
dieval Historiography (1997), and Practicing History: New Directions in Historical
Writing after the Linguistic Turn (2005), as well as some sixty articles on medieval
historiography and contemporary theories of historical writing. She is a Fellow
of the Medieval Academy.

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