Professor Iain McCalman
Cultural History and
Cultural Studies: the linguistic turn five years on.
How has history been adapted to developments in the field of cultural studies? What criticisms have been directed at the past practices of historians, and how valid are these criticisms?
My task of today echoes
one of five years ago. In 1995 I was asked to address the Research School of
Social Sciences (RSSS) at the ANU on cultural studies as part of the lead-up to a major
review. I argued passionately then that all humanists and social scientists
needed to come to grips with the challenges posed by its advent. My rhetoric
was that of crisis. I spoke as if Cultural Studies was wielding an epistemological
battering ram. Like it or not, I declaimed, ‘the linguistic turn’ was the key intellectual
paradigm of the late twentieth century and we had to face up to both its
destructive and constructive implications. Structuralism had opened the attack
in the early 1970s through the writings of semioticians like Roland Barthes,
cultural anthropologists like Clifford Geertz and metahistorians like Hayden
White. Post structuralist heavy-hitters had followed. Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard
in particular had sapped our intellectual underpinnings by contending that language
does not reflect reality but construct it.
In its most extreme form,
I contended, the linguistic turn threatened to overturn all our prior practices
and assumptions as social analysts. Derrida and his disciples posited no attainable
reality beyond the text. Seeing language as entirely constitutive and self-reflexive,
meant that all extra textual meaning collapsed into discourse. Methods and models
borrowed from the natural sciences vanished into smoke. Traditional scholarly
disciplines dissolved like icebergs in a thaw History became little more than
a ‘floating signifier’ threatening to float us into the textual ether with it.
All this was, of course,
deliberately sensational: I wanted my audience to take urgent notice. Like a
hellfire preacher who had softened us, his congregation, I proffered salvation
in the form of an accommodation with the linguistic and cultural turns. We did
not need to throw out the baby with the bathwater; linguistic theorists like
Gadamer and Certeau had shown that language, though constitutive, also retained
materialist and descriptive properties. In Australia, moreover, Cultural studies
was not aggressively ahistorical. Disciplinary border crossing could be exciting.
I cited the example of a new breed of cultural historians who were revitalising
my own field. Figures like Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, Lynn Hunt, Greg Dening
and Natalie Davis had followed the cultural turn deep into the cognate disciplines
of anthropology, literary theory, and art history. They were using interpretive
strategies to uncover the buried codes of cultural artifacts, and deconstructive
methods to dissect the plural meanings of literary and artistic texts. The first
approach stressed underlying unities, the second hunted for difference. I urged
RSSS, therefore, to open itself to these bracing winds. The audience response
made me feel like one of those benighted characters who jump into the polar-bear
enclosure at the Melbourne Zoo, though given the recent fate of the Urban Research
Centre I should be thankful that my advice was not heeded.
My forlorn plea of 1995
does, however, provide a yardstick for testing how far we have moved since.
In this the first year of the new millennium how do we view the ‘cultural turn’
and its most ebullient offspring cultural studies?
At one level it seems to
me that our mood is now less upbeat. A recent book edited by cultural historian
Lynn Hunt and sociologist Victoria Bonnell carries the significant title of
Beyond the Cultural Turn, and its contents signal both an emerging critique
of culturalism and an attempt to revitalize the category of the social. The
New Historicist movement which flourished in the US in the 1980s, did for a
time seem to herald a serious convergence between literary critics and historians.
Originating in Californian English departments , its credo was ‘the textuality
of history and the historicity of the text’. In practice, though, its treatment
of text and context has differed markedly from ours. Deeply imbued with deconstructionist
theories and methods, New Historicists tend to juxtapose some aspect of a canonical
text with a seemingly unrelated fragment of contemporary culture in order to
demonstrate the multiple flux of meanings within. Their mission is to expose
textual silences, elisions and contradictions, and to show that both text and
context are fragmentary and incomplete, riddled with contradiction and uncertainty.
By contrast we historians
are trained habitually to connect and construct, to seek out unitary as well
as differential meanings, and to track similarities across our sources over
time. When we work to recover lost or suppressed historical voices, it is usually
to make normative claims, to argue for the value and dignity of those peoples
and traditions that have suffered posterity’s enormous condescension. Lynn Hunt
notes that historians can cope with subversion but not with incoherence. Above
all we are uneasy, it seems to me, at the willingness of many literary theorists
to abandon any interest in causation, The need to explain historical change
across time stands at the very heart of the historical enterprise, however imperfect
the results. W e are troubled by static or frozen synchronicity and by W.H.
Auden’s boast that ‘Poetry changes nothing’.
Literary-inclined historians
like myself tend as a result to be drawn to the study of genres rather than
of individual text. Genre can not only reveal large patterns across multiple
sources, but it is also a sensitive barometer of crisis and change. It links
canonical and non-canonical sources and locates them within cultural matrices.
Yet this is precisely what the deconstructionist critic Dominic La Capra dislikes
about our methods. By connecting a high literary text with wider generic patterns,
he argues, historians diminish its aesthetic subtlety and plurality of meaning.
In these ways historical and literary modes still seem deeply incommensurable.
At the same time we need
not exaggerate our divide. Reading through the diverse contributions in the
new Hunt and Bonnell book, it is clear that we understand each other a great
deal better than five years ago. Cultural studies and linguistic theory have
furnished a lingua franca with which we can converse even if it is not
our daily tongue. No-one puts the word ‘discourse’ in apostrophes any more and
the ferocious arguments between social structuralists and discourse analysts
seem to have abated. An accommodation has been reached. Representation and experience
might be ontologically distinct, but most of us agree that they are mutually
constitutive. Structure shapes practice, but equally practice generates new
structures.
For many of us the best
contribution of cultural studies has been to deepen and revitalise an interest
in narrative theory and practice. Ever since a boy I have always believed intensely
in the 'storyness' of life. Our world is suffused with stories. Consciously or
not we use them continually to make sense of the mass of incoherent facts and
sensations that immerse us. Modern philosophers like David Carr contend that
storytelling is embedded in our deepest consciousness: stories are woven into
the very way we think and live. Hayden White has long shown us how we shape
our histories by poetic or perfomative acts, moulding them into the form of
fictive plots using archetypal tropes, myths and topoi. Being aware of this
fictive process frees us to be more honest about our own shaping role as writers,
and more creative when performing that role. We are not bound to follow the
modes of the nineteenth-century realist novel simply because these seem to have
greater ‘truth effect’. Historians, long berated by theorists like La Capra
for our stylistic conservatism, have started to employ some of the experimental
narrative techniques of contemporary novelists, poets and media directors. Princeton
historian Simon Schama has ranged from a retro-invention of the traditional
historical chronicle to a fragmentary, surrealistic and half-fictional historical
montage. Greg Dening has brilliantly incorporated techniques and methods of
visual ethnography and contemporary film-making into his cross-cultural histories.
The result is work that excites and inspires students and scholars across the
disciplines.
The cultural turn has also
focussed the attention of historians on the importance of cultural narratives.
By cultural narratives we mean those stories that circulate widely and insistently
across many media within a specific society or set of societies over a given
period of time. These include non literary forms such as theatrical performances,
spectacles, shows, paintings, prints and songs. Why do some stories flower like
this while others fail? How socially representative are such stories? How do
they relate to more self-consciously aesthetic cultural forms? How are cultural
narratives plotted what themes, symbols, motifs do they use or borrow? Above
all, how and when do such cultural narrative come into being or change shape,
and with what consequences? Victor Turner’s famous studies of the Mbemba peoples
of Zambia suggest that cultural narratives are created and recreated in response
to acute social crises, generating ritual stages of breach, crisis and redress
before culminating in a reconciliation with the old order or negotiation of
new alliances and strategies.
Analogously some European
historians have in recent years charted the emergence of new cultural narratives
during the crisis that precipitated the end of the old Bourbon regime and the
advent of the French Revolution. Over this period hosts of legal, judicial and
other literary, visual and material artifacts work to transform the royal family
romance of the ancien regime into stories of a parricidal, Jacobin brotherhood.
Such a plotline enshrines what feminist philosopher Carol Patemen sees as one
of the key narrative shifts in the history of modern political thought whereby
Locke’s great eighteenth-century political fiction of the social contract was
rewritten to exclude women in favour of a band of virtuous, egalitarian male
brothers. So it was, she argues, that the modern liberal polity came to be built
on misogynous intellectual foundations. Feminist historians like Hunt and Joan
Landes have also found that such cultural narratives link and illuminate
the public and the private spheres, revealing how ostensibly ‘neutral’ public
political ideologies were frequently erected on or against hidden domestic narratives
such as the family romance, the unwaged women worker, and the seduced serving
girl.
Let me finish by taking
us closer to home by referring to one specific example of a cultural narrative
that is still gripping most of us todaythe harrowing story of the ‘stolen
generation’. Here surely is one of the most powerful narratives to emerge out
of the sorry history of Australian EuropeanAboriginal contact, and it is a
story that will not go away. If John Howard thinks that he can argue it out
of existence by statistical and semantic cheeseparing about what percentage
of people constitutes a ‘generation’ or by claims that Aboriginal children were
not ‘stolen’ but borrowed for their own good, he is yapping in the wind. This
story obtains its emotional power not only from a mosaic of individual tragedies
enacted over successive epochs, but also because it crystallizes our deepest
guilts as European Australians and taps our deepest mythic memories as western
moderns. Whoever coined the phrase ‘stolen generation’ has helped to shape a
new cultural narrative, and one that harnesses plotlines that are deeply plausible
and emotionally compelling to European and Aboriginal Australians alike. Our
formative early reading and film viewing has been steeped in stories about stolen
generations of children: whether it is the lost boys of Peter Pan, the stolen
children in Pinocchio, the street waifs of Victorian England snared by Fagin,
the abducted young girls of Parisian bordellos, or the lost generation of young
men blasted out of existence on the beaches of Gallipoli. All these prior traces
feed the cultural purchase and power of cultural narrative that has become,
and will long remain, European Australia’s brand of shame.
But it is also a cultural
narrative that takes specific and diverse local forms across space and time,
and I want to conclude this paper by outlining briefly one of these microhistories
as an example of what seems to me best about the kind of work that is being
done by workers in the ‘cultural mode’. The practitioners in this case are Carol
Cooper and Kim Mackenzie, whose disciplinary and professional credentials encompass
anthropology, art history, ethnographic film-making, museum curatorship and
electronic histories. Between them they have brilliantly reconstructed a story
of a stolen aboriginal boy, Oscar, thereby furnishing us with a window into
the mind of a type of marginalized figure about whom our history is usually
mute. The story’s originating source was a tiny, scruffy sketch pad containing
childlike drawings jammed onto the pages in seemingly random sequence. A short
accompanying note from a North West Queensland station manager Augustus Glissan
in the 1890s explains that he had been impressed by the skill with which this
young black stockhand drew on the limestone rocks and so had given him this
small pad and some coloured pencils. The survival of this sketchbook is itself
an epic in the social life of things: it somehow passed from a doctor in Melbourne
to the Institute of Anatomy, and from there into a box of miscellaneous junk
bequeathed to the National Museum. There it thankfully fell into the hands of
Carol and Kim, whose ensemble of skills and talents were mobilized to unpack
its mysteries.
To condense years of painstaking
investigation into a crude summary, Oscar was an aboriginal boy in his early
teens who had been removed from his family in consequence of some kind of melee
that occurred in the Palmer River goldfields area. It is not clear whether the
Palmer was his own country or whether his family had been drawn there by the
opportunities that beckoned in the series of rushes of the late 1870s and early
1880s. Glissan’s letter reveals that he had been procured by the native police
specifically to work on the Rocklands station, part of what seems to have been
a systematic trade in black children to work the pastoral industry. Despite
the discomfort arising from a badly burnt leg he rode hundreds of miles on horseback
in the company of the native police before arriving at the station on the Barclay
Tablelands. His drawings were retrospective, probably done over a longish period
of time in the late eighties or early nineties.
To me, and I suspect to
most historians, the sketchbook would have remained a tantalizing but opaque
curiosity, for there is nothing to make sense of the drawings except some Eurocentric
captions provided by Gus Glissan. But Carol and Kim eventually cracked Oscar’s
code: unfamiliar with European literary and graphic conventions, the boy had
used his drawings to tell stories which worked in a reverse cartoon-like sequence
from bottom right to top left. Extraordinary detective work further enabled
the two cultural analysts to plot Oscar’s vivid pictorial narratives against
contemporary events. He tells many stories: one of the most dramatic depicts
a murder in 1887, when Glissan’s predecessor as station manager had been killed
by local aboriginals for his sexual interferences in their domestic arrangements.
Oscar depicts both the original killing and the subsequent ruthless retribution
as native police pursue several tribespeople and eventually commit summary justice
by shooting a bound and helpless man.
There is an extraordinary
sense of shock and immediacy as we are confronted with this tragic visual communication
across the gulf of time and culture. Yet such historical stories do not necessarily
conform to predictable or comfortable patterns. We are faced with the unpalatable
evidence that native police were used, as elsewhere throughout the British empire,
to pacify and oppress fellow indigenes from other tribal or ethnic areas. Even
more disquieting, is a hint from the way that young Oscar has drawn the native
police compared with their local victims, that his own sympathies are at best
ambivalent. Yet, on reflection, should we be surprised that a teenage boy, wrenched
from his family, place and culture, should admire the tough, disciplined body
of aboriginal men with whom he had travelled, camped, and talked. We do not
know what kind of personal emotional support and bonding might have taken place
on that long, slow ride to Rocklands. Guns and pipes and uniforms are emblems
of masculine self-confidence and power for adolescent boys today; how much more
so in the circumstances in which Oscar encountered them. Neither do we know
what kind of filters or mediations Oscar’s pictures had to undergo within the
Rocklands station environment. If the drawings were being viewed and vetted
by the station manager Glissan, how free was he to declare his own inner allegiances?
What was the little black figure who peeps from the edge of several of them
really thinking and feeling? These and many other questions remain open to
exploration and surmise. If I can be permitted a plug, you will be able to learn
more about this unique story in a book I am editing on Gold in Australia and,
more elaborately, as a component of an exhibition on Gold which will launch
the new National Museum of Australia in March next year. What we can say here
is that the story of the stolen generations, built on thousands of such tragic
microhistories, is destined to remain one of the key cultural narratives of
Australian history for a long time to come.
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