_______Is history dead?
_______Cultural studies scholars are ravaging the facts
_______to suit their bassackward theories.

BY SEAN McMEEKIN | If a history buff who fell asleep in 1968 were to awaken today and stroll into a bookstore, she would likely be overwhelmed by the variety of themes now covered in books labeled as "history." She would find institutional surveys of the development of medicine, psychiatry, criminology and the liberal professions. She would come across broadly conceived works on gender and race relations, on the theory and practice of sexuality and on the relationship between culture and imperialism. Among the latest academic monographs, she might encounter imposing tomes documenting the history of popular traditions or cultural artifacts: say, a history of furniture in modern France. Her eyes, no doubt, would light up at such evocative titles as "The Cheese and the Worms," "The Devil in the Shape of a Woman," "Discipline and Punish," "Taste and Power." Such books would be a feast for the eyes of this sleepy history lover, luring her in with their promise of novel intellectual pleasures.

Her enchantment with this marvelous cornucopia of book titles, however, might not long survive an encounter with the prose lodged between the books' covers. What would she make of the following passage, for example, from the introduction of "Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France" (1997), a work broadly representative of the kind of "cultural history" that has come to prominence in the 1990s?

"Selves -- neither unitary nor fully self-knowing -- are thus made by completely constituted, often mutually contradictory, experiences, some of which are known and expressed linguistically, some musically, some visually, and some in no known discursive framework."

This is history? she might think, wondering if perhaps she had missed important developments in the study of the human sciences that had rendered her own limited vocabulary inadequate. And anyway, wasn't this book about furniture? If she reads on, our out-of-date history fan will be told that "discourse does not merely reflect or represent realities or persons -- it also constitutes them," and that, "in certain conjunctures, objects are likewise both constitutive and representative." By this point, enchantment with the book's promising title will have given way to befuddlement, and perhaps to hostile disdain. What do "discursive frameworks" and object "conjunctures" have to do with the study of the past?

What Jacques Derrida's deconstruction did to the study of literature in the 1980s, the inexorable rise of "cultural studies" -- the trendy new cross-disciplinary field that dissolves traditional notions of historic fact in an acid bath of theory -- now threatens to do to the discipline of history. This is the premise of Keith Windschuttle's "The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past." Windschuttle's book aims to defend "traditional," that is to say factually based, history against an onslaught of fashionable academic theories (structuralism and poststructuralism, cultural relativism, postmodernism, etc.) each of which denies, in its way, that objective "truth" or "knowledge" about the past can possibly be determined. Taken together, these theories in Windschuttle's view threaten the core goal of the historical discipline as first bequeathed to us by Herodotus: "to record the truth about the past."

Windschuttle wants to rally historians to the defense of the discipline but he's swimming against the tide. His book takes pains to praise recent work by academic historians whose solid empirical research and measured conclusions do honor to their discipline, but he argues that such historians are an embattled, dwindling minority. His pessimism is well founded: The triumph of cultural studies not just in history but in the wider human sciences has been clear for all to see. One need only consult the course manual of any prestigious university to see that degrees are now being offered in vaguely defined subjects like "textual studies," "women's studies," "peace studies," "media studies" and so on. Poststructuralist texts by Derrida and Michel Foucault are assigned in nearly every academic department outside of the "hard" sciences (yes, even in accounting, as Windschuttle pointed out to this reviewer's amazement).

Whether avowedly "structuralist," "poststructuralist," "postmodernist" or "new historicist," humanities professors and their students have been dancing to the same tune for some time now, analyzing social "texts" (everything, from underwear to political ideology, is an alien text to be deciphered) to reveal the way human actions and literature are supposedly dominated by the omnipresent structures of language, ideology and culture. Proponents of the new cultural studies openly proclaim their hostility to traditional history, which aims merely to record past events and aspires toward an ideal of objectivity. Historians' claim to be objective in their evaluation of source matter is now widely seen as a naive pretension peculiar to the culture of Western rationalism, and is derided as old-fashioned "positivism."

One might think that historians, being the guardians of the oldest social science, would resist the encroachment onto their turf by the upstart cultural studies movement, but a brief glance at the jargon-encrusted monographs coming out of history departments over the past decade makes it clear that little resistance has been offered. More historians every year, it seems, have adopted the belief that, as Windschuttle puts it, "the study of the past is best done by approaching social practices and relations through textual analysis." Not, that is, by combing the archives for empirical data in order to reconstruct a factual, narrative history of people, places and events, but by wandering through recondite mazes of theory, in which all claims to objective truth are regarded as manifestations of coercive power. Make no mistake: It is now considered reactionary in many universities to claim that historical knowledge is, or should be, constructed on the bedrock of objective fact.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Historians aren't so fond of "The Killing of History"

 
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ILLUSTRATION BY CHARLIE POWELL