History and Causality

M. Hewitson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137372406
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

This volume investigates the different attitudes of historians and other social scientists to questions of causality. It argues that historical theorists after the linguistic turn have paid surprisingly little attention to causes in spite of the centrality of causation in many contemporary works of history.

1

Intellectual Historians and the Content of the Form

The reasons for the strange death – or decline – of causality in history are various, resting in part on reactions to the illegitimate importing of natural-scientific methods in the 1950s and 60s and in part on a longstanding ‘empirical’ attachment to evidence, chronology, facts, events, description, objectivity and narrative.1 Above all, the marginalization of causal explanation in theories of history has been connected to a series of oft-decried but rarely completed ‘turns’ – linguistic, semiotic, symbolic, cultural, post-colonial – in specific historical sub-disciplines during the last two decades or so.2 The concomitant disputes have been acrimonious, with Patrick Joyce accusing his antagonist Lawrence Stone of issuing ‘a war cry’ and ‘pre-emptive strike on “post-modernism”’ in 1991, after the latter had blamed three ‘threats’ from linguistics, cultural and symbolic anthropology, and ‘new historicism’ for provoking ‘a crisis of self-confidence’ within the discipline of history. Generally, the different positions have been cast as a defence of – or attack on – the ability of historians to describe the world beyond texts and to use evidence to prove or disprove a case, rather than implying a direct assault on causality.3 ‘Derrida has concentrated his fire upon the realist assumptions embedded in the Western conviction that words could repeat reality’, wrote the intellectual historian Joyce Appleby in 1998: ‘Despite the overt commitment to rationality, writings in the Western tradition, he has said, can always be found undermining these categories [of dichotomy] because they were not, in actuality, opposites that explained the world but elements within a hermeneutic system’.4 As a consequence, ‘history’s anxiety now hovers over the status and meaning of the word reality, whose power to signify – to stand for and mean something – is thought to be radically diminished’, Gabrielle Spiegel had warned in the initial Past and Present debate about ‘post-modernism’ in 1992.5 Not only were historians unable to write with confidence about the world, since language appeared to be, in Nancy Partner’s words, ‘the very structure of mental life, and no meta-language can ever stand outside itself to observe a reality external to itself’, but they could also no longer understand or interpret that world, for ‘all historians, even of positivist stripe, live and breathe in a world of texts’, with ‘knowledge of the past primarily present to us in textual form’.6 If any access to an external reality were denied, because words were ‘too protean and uncontrollable’ to be relied on, causation as a series of reported interactions between individuals and groups could no longer be studied.7 ‘Agency’ itself seemed to have been reduced to the status of a ‘waif’.8

Telling the truth about Derrida

It is worth noting that Derrida himself acknowledged the existence of non-discursive actions. ‘Deconstruction’ aimed ‘to provide itself the means with which to intervene in the field of oppositions that it criticizes, which is also a field of non-discursive forces’, he wrote in an essay – given initially as a paper – on ‘Signature, Event, Context’ (1971).9 However, the operation of deconstruction entailed ‘the general displacement of the classical, “philosophical” Western, etc., concept of writing’, in Derrida’s view: ‘Deconstruction does not consist in passing from one concept to another, but in overturning and displacing a conceptual order, as well as the non-conceptual order with which the conceptual order is articulated’.10 By demonstrating the inconsistencies and unsustainable binaries of the existing linguistic and philosophical order, the French philosopher aimed to overturn the connected non-conceptual order. The programme of ‘grammatology’, or the ‘science’ of writing, was to destroy the ‘logos’ of a philosophy of ‘presence’ or ‘consciousness’, which held that past occurrences and thoughts could be ‘traced’ or comprehended without ambiguity and made present to an interlocutor or reader. ‘If, for Aristotle, for example, “spoken words (ta en tē phone) are the symbols of mental experience (pathēmata tes psyche) and written words are the symbols of spoken words (De interpretatione)”, it is because the voice, producer of the first symbols, has a relationship of essential and immediate proximity with the mind’, recorded Derrida in De la Grammatologie (1967), before proceeding to inaugurate ‘the destruction, not the demolition but the de-sedimentation, the de-construction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos’, particularly ‘the signification of truth’.11 The notion that thoughts and sensed objects could be given sounds or encompassed within spoken words, which were then turned into pictorial – idiographic and hieroglyphic – and alphabetic words, was challenged by the French thinker, who argued that ‘writing’ in the broad sense of ‘inscription in general’ was primary, encompassing ‘the possibility of ideal objects and therefore of scientific objectivity’.12

Writing in this sense was neither particular, since it reached unknown readers and persisted beyond the death of the author, nor specific, because alphabetic words were arbitrary – made up of letters which referred to nothing specific – and indeterminate, based on the absence of the thing itself, which exists only in memory or imagination (themselves composed of words or signs), and a more fundamental absence of that which is not included in the ‘meaning’ of a sign: ‘Since every sign, as much in the “language of action” as in articulated language (even before the intervention of writing in the classical sense), supposes a certain absence (to be determined), it must be because absence in the field of writing is of an original kind, if any specificity whatsoever of the written sign is to be acknowledged’.13 Derrida’s neologism of ‘différance’ thus hints at the radicalized difference of one word from indeterminable others rather than that separating a word and its opposite, as in classical Western philosophy. It also alludes to differences between events of repetition:

A written sign, in the usual sense of the word, is therefore a mark which remains, which is not exhausted in the present of its inscription, which can give rise to an iteration both in the absence of and beyond the presence of the empirically determined subject who, in a given context, has emitted or produced it … By the same token, a written sign carries with it a force of breaking with its context, that is, the set of presences which organize the moment of its inscription. … This force of rupture is due to the spacing which constitutes the written sign: the spacing which separates it from other elements of the internal contextual chain (the always open possibility of its extraction and grafting), but also from all the forms of a present referent (past or to come in the modified form of the present past or to come) that is objective or subjective.14

In Saussure’s terms, the signifier (the voice, or in Derrida’s terms, the mark or trace) is to be understood in terms of other signifiers, which give it a degree of specificity, leaving the signified (the concept or meaning) and the referent (objects in reality) ‘absent’: ‘There is not a single signified that escapes, even if recaptured, the play of signifying references that constitute language. The advent of writing is the advent of this play’.15 Having been convinced by these and other similar statements, many scholars, including historians, have given much of their attention to a deconstruction of such signification – or related signifiers – and to an examination of their ‘play’.

Understandably, with the connection between signifier and signified severed, leaving words-as-signs to change meanings constantly and to be interpreted in any number of ways, opponents of Derrida have concentrated on the retrieval of workable ‘facts’ or ‘intentions’ through more or less internal critiques of linguistic theory in favour of mediation (Spiegel) or context (Appleby), yet there is little indication that they have done so in order to enable causal explanation to continue.16 ‘Narrative’ was mentioned much more than causality in such debates.17 Thus, although Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob claimed to have emphasized ‘narrative coherence, causal analysis and social contextualization’ in Telling the Truth about History (1994), which was designed as a riposte to post-modernism, they devote only part of a single paragraph – within a section on ‘The Problem of Narrative’ – to causality itself, whose workings ‘in historical explanation’ are said to ‘have become hopelessly entangled in debates about general laws of explanation and history’s relationship to the natural sciences’.18 There is no sign that Appleby, Hunt and Jacob’s ‘practical realism’, which is predicated on the idea that signifiers can refer – however partially – to an external reality, proceeds from the formulation of a question to an answer based on causal explanation. ‘Knowledge’ is held to be ‘the accumulation of answers to questions that curious men and women have asked about the physical and social worlds they encounter’, but how can such questions be justified, given that we are ‘no longer able to ignore the subjectivity of the author’?19 The accumulation of answers to an unjustifiable question seems pointless, yet Appleby appears unable or unwilling to concede that a discussion of the significance of specified historical changes – on which the selection of questions rests – is necessary or possible: ‘We recognize that curiosity drives research’, she writes, ‘but we are less certain what drives curiosity’.20 Arguably, such unwillingness derives from a preoccupation with objectivity, which obscures the relationship between questions, theories and (causal) explanation: in asking why something important has happened, or why a significant change has taken place, historians draw on and test theories which themselves suggest why the change is significant and why it has occurred. By contrast, Appleby, Hunt and Jacob are interested primarily in ‘standards of objectivity that recognize at the outset that all histories start with the curiosity of a particular individual and take shape under the guidance of her or his personal and cultural attributes’: ‘Since all knowledge originates inside human minds and is conveyed through representations of reality, all knowledge is subject-centred and artificial, the very qualities brought into disrespect by an earlier exaltation of that which was objective and natural’.21 Because historians are seen to be presenting evidence rather than answering questions, their chosen mode or genre of presentation assumes greater importance: ‘Under the impact of postmodernist literary approaches’, historians-as-subjects are ‘now becoming more aw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Causality after the Linguistic Turn
• 1 Intellectual Historians and the Content of the Form
• 2 Social History, Cultural History, Other Histories
• 3 Causes, Events and Evidence
• 4 Time, Narrative and Causality
• 5 Explanation and Understanding
• 6 Theories of Action and the Archaeology of Knowledge
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index