Revising the Past. Revisiting the Present: How Change Happens in Historiography

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Статья в журнале History and Theory, Theme Issue 46 (December 2007), p. 1-19AbstractThis article investigates the various forces that may help to explain the ongoing historiographicalphenomenon of revision. It takes as its point of departure Michel de Certeau’sunderstanding of the writing of history as a process consisting of an unstable and constantlychanging triangulated relationship among a place (a recruitment, a milieu, a profession),analytical procedures (a discipline), and the construction of a text (or discourse). For deCerteau, revision is the formal prerequisite for writing history because the very distancebetween past and present requires continuous innovation simply to produce the objects ofhistorical knowledge, which have no existence apart from the historian’s identification ofthem. The specific nature of revision at a given moment is determined by the specificitiesof the process as a whole, that is, by the characteristics of place, procedure, and text andtheir contemporary relational configuration.Taking the rise of linguistic-turn historiography as exemplary of the process of historicalrevision in its broadest possible meaning, the article seeks to discover the possiblecauses for that turn. It begins with an analysis of the psychological roots of poststructuralismas a response to the Holocaust and its aftermath, and then proceeds to explorethe possible economic and social transformations in the postwar world that might accountfor its reception, both in Europe but also, more counterintuitively, in the United States,where postmodernism proved to have an especially strong appeal. Added to this mix arethe new patterns of social recruitment into the historical profession in the sixties. Theessay suggests that, to the extent that revision is understood as the result of the combinedeffect of psychological, social, and professional determinations, it is unlikely that therewill ever be genuine consensus about the sources of revision in history, since all historiansbring to their work differing congeries of psychological preoccupations, social positions,and professional commitments.