ABSTRACT
I hope readers will bear with me whilst I begin with a clarification of central terms. First, I have indicated that the phrase ‘postmodern history’ denotes histories by authors who take seriously, critiques of the discipline associated with the twentieth-century ‘linguistic turn’ in the human sciences. In this broad usage it encompasses ‘deconstructionist’ or ‘poststructuralist’ approaches to history. The inspirations for the linguistic turn came from a number of directions, initially from structural linguistics, which began in 1916 with the posthumous publication of Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857-1913) Course in General Linguistics.2 He proposed a model of language in which ‘words are “signs” defined in their differentiation from other words, and not because of any natural link with the real world of objects/things’.3 As Alun Munslow explains in his Deconstructing History, signs are made up of signifier (the word or concept) and signified (the thing referred to); and the relationship between them is not naturally but linguistically (socially, culturally) constituted. Structuralists and the poststructuralists who followed them have
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or referent) and a word that ‘refers’ to it and signifies its meaning is arbitrary. Words refer to other words (self-referentiality), often through opposed hierarchical meanings: ‘freedom’ has no meaning without ‘despotism’ or oppression. To give another example, we might ask whether the ‘event’ so often spoken of in histories is really that outside discourse? An occurrence can be styled as such only in opposition to ‘non-events’, occurrences deemed too insignificant (unmeaningful) by an historian to qualify as an event.
