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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 June 2014
The last fifteen years have seen a number of attempts to imagine what lies “beyond” the linguistic and cultural turns of recent decades in historiography. The impulse is derived, one suspects, from the need for academic cultures to declare current established practice “dead” in favor of some new departure. We have had thirty years of discourse study, cultural analysis of texts and meaning, attention to the constitutive power of language, and suspicion of reading texts as unmediated referential documents. It seems inevitable that voices would arise declaring the attention to culture and language exhausted, asking us to turn away from language and culture and plant our feet on some firmer ground. Academic disciplinary cultures, try as they might to abandon modernist commitments to a belief in progress in which today's know-how trumps yesterday's ignorance, can't seem to transcend their nineteenth-century origins. We know, or think we do, that the humanities are not the bearers of progress in knowledge, that we are no wiser than our forebears, that the holy grail remains as far out of reach as it ever was. And yet we act as if we can expose the shortcomings of our intellectual ancestors and in doing so inaugurate a new and better understanding of the realm in which human beings act and create meaning. Hence a new generation, having decided that it has either absorbed the lessons of the cultural and linguistic turns or realized what a constraining dead end such a turn represents, advocates a departure for more fertile ground.
A much earlier and briefer version of some of the ideas in this paper was presented at the US Intellectual History conference in New York in 2010. My thanks to James Kloppenberg and the members of the audience for their comments, and to Tim Lacy for reading a draft of that paper. Lilian Calles Barger, Lora Burnett, and Charles Hatfield provided useful comments and criticism on a more recent draft, and Darrin McMahon shared an essay of his own in advance of its publication. Thanks also to the anonymous referees for the journal, and especially Charles Capper for valuable comments and editorial advice.
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