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HAPPY IN OUR CHAINS? AGENCY ANDLANGUAGE IN THE POSTMODERN AGE

DAVID GARY SHAW

Good men toil, spend and are spent, and willingly;

they are not dragged along by Fortune but follow

her and keep in step. If they knew how,

they would have outstripped her.Seneca1

This collection of essays on agency displays historical thought at an important

crossroads, beyond which a revived focus on agency beckons. The collection

includes powerful statements of our historical moment of crisis and opportunity;

it provides cogent critiques of dominant modes of thought across a broad spec-

trum of literate culture; and it takes steps beyond such critique to suggest con-

structive ways for historians and philosophers to advance. If you believe in

agency, which may these days have logical and rhetorical similarities to believ-

ing in God, then it is a time of re-organization and ferment. In the fascinating lan-

guage of Noël Bonneuil, we should hope that we are in a “leadership domain,” in

which our choices—and that means our words—can make a crucial difference.2

The problem of agency has been perennial within human thought.3 Fortune

and fate once dominated the course of events. In Homer, the agency that matters

most is the emotionally driven decision of the gods; in the Torah, it is a difficult

exchange of the human and divine, feeling and power unevenly distributed

between the two. Where supreme beings harden the heart, humanity may be

reduced to watching and weeping. Such a perspective has been endemic through-

out history. Even when conceived as free, people have understood themselves as

overawed and fundamentally limited. To see, as some now do, the power of the

environment or ecological factors as central in directing affairs is to downgrade

History and Theory, Theme Issue 40 (December 2001), 1-9 © Wesleyan University 2001 ISSN: 0018-2656

1. “On Providence”: The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca, transl. Moses Hadas (Garden City, N.Y.:

Doubleday, 1958), 41.

2. See below, 108.

3. Recent offerings in History and Theory include the forum on Structure and Agency in Historical

Causation: David F. Lindenfeld, “Causality, Chaos Theory, and the End of the Weimar Republic: ACommentary on Henry Turner’s Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power,” History and Theory 38 (1999), 281-

299; and Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., “Human Agency and Impersonal Determinants in Historical

Causation: A Response to David Lindenfeld,” History and Theory 38 (1999), 300-306; A. D. Moses,

“Structure and Agency in the Holocaust: The Case of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen,” History and Theory

37 (1998), 194-219; Philip Pomper, “Historians and Individual Agency,” History and Theory 35

(1996), 281-308.



the nature and scope of individual agency. William McNeill’s Plagues and

Peoples can be interpreted as silencing all that men like Cortes thought they were

doing and destroying.4 Disease won the victory we once thought heroes

achieved: now the heroes are gone.The descent of agency to such a position within the historical profession’s the-

oretical mainstream fits into a variety of genealogical stories. They derive in sec-

ular guise from Hegel or Marx’s insistence on how much happens without full or

authentic consciousness. They continue in this issue with Elizabeth Ermarth’s

powerful account of the rebellion against Enlightenment liberalism and of the

long rationalist trajectory since the Middle Ages. Michael Fitzhugh and William

Leckie point to origins in the eighteenth century, while Miguel Cabrera’s

explanatory account focuses on the discipline of history most specifically, espe-

cially social history’s unfolding crisis, which has brought historiography to “NewHistory’s” skepticism about old-fashioned agents. Optimistically, however, we

can see that these are interconnected stories, told in this Theme Issue from a vari-

ety of perspectives, but which are united in seeing postmodernist thought and its

effects on historiography as a watershed.

Coming at the end of a long and powerful tradition of stressing the role of soci-

ety over the individual, postmodernism attempts to undermine the relevance of the

traditional subject, the substratum of the historian’s conventional individual agent.

The relevance of historiography itself has been put in question because of its close

connection with such old paradigms.5 Thus postmodern critiques have helped toleave agency especially embattled. But the problem is that like Calvinists of old

we still feel that we are actors even though our theories don’t justify the preju-

dice.6 At such a time the appeal of stoicism is felt. Seneca is upbeat about it, as a

Stoic should be, but the crux of the view is that the best we can manage is to cling

to our sense of agency and self, even as we acknowledge our subordination to the

great controlling structures, which leave us as marionettes attached to discourse’s

strings: Pinocchios wishing we were the “real distinguished thing,” happy in our

chains at best.7 But postmodernism is a more pessimistic philosophy than

Stoicism was, which should encourage us to transcend it.Thus, there is a great tension between many of historiography’s influential the-

ories and our commonsense assumptions, the former embarrassed by the latter’s

clinging to a fairly stable self and somewhat centered agent. For many contem-

porary theorists agency is a term of the past, distinctly part of the problem, hook-

ing into domineering solutions of modernity: bourgeois capitalism, imperialism,

paternalism, sexism; the proof has been mustered in dozens of historical studies.

Scanning the references in articles by Cabrera, Ermarth, and Jay Smith below

DAVID GARY SHAW2

4. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976).5. See Keith Jenkins, Re-Thinking History (London and New York: Routledge, 1991); Why

History: Ethics and Postmodernity (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).

6. See David Carr’s article below for an insightful development of some related historical para-

doxes.

7. The phrase is W. H. Auden’s derived from Henry James: Collected Shorter Poems, 1930–44

(London: Faber and Faber, 1950), 140.



provides a host of persuasive examples. For most people, however, including his-

torians, agency remains a vibrant if difficult presence, a datum of importance,

and one of the vestiges of modern life that postmodernists feel as much as any. It

is not easy to put it away.Thus regardless of its relative theoretical eclipse, the agent remains common

and prominent in much historical work.8 If not for the important business—

shared by radical, liberal, and conservative historiography—of assigning blame

for the greatest human catastrophes of holocaust, war, and enslavement, the

responsibilities and relevance that cling to agency might have disappeared long

ago. They were kept alive in great part by many historians’ desire to redeem the

subaltern and the exploited as more than mere objects, as something human and

valuable, as true sufferers. The self of the other survived best in different niches:

the question of its experience emerged most decisively, for instance, in women’shistory, maybe characterizing both that field’s achievements and troubles.9 One

favorite use of agency was to display the suffering it caused. But we all have

enough stoic in us to know that to suffer with dignity is more than to suffer sim-

ply. To be that kind of an object is to become a subject. In this thought was the

hope of agency, even if relatively little concern for subaltern agency was actual-

ly developed by many social and cultural historians from the 1970s into the

1990s.10 As was often the case in social and cultural history, the possible agent

was figured only in a passion tale, a self martyred to a system of domination. But

the intuition was right: somehow, to suffer can be to act. It is time for historiansto show how these attempts to understand the self as constituted in social histo-

ry were not misguided but were essential to historical work; the essays in this

issue will provide considerable theoretical sophistication for this task.

As a discipline, we are at worst in the position of Dr. Johnson who, when

appalled and irritated by Bishop Berkeley’s apparent immaterialism, gave the

nearest stone a swift kick to prove what it was.11 More wisely, we’re with

Boswell, who found Berkeley intellectually coherent, but uncompelling.12 Both

reactions are forms of denial; yet the trouble with making connections between

our intuitions about the self and agency while at the same time doing justice to aworld of large social forces and almost occult discursive powers remains one of

the great challenges of historical thinking and writing. This Theme Issue asks

how historians and philosophers of history should go on after postmodernism; it

AGENCY AND LANGUAGE IN THE POSTMODERN AGE 3

8. This is true of much political and ecclesiastical history, for instance, as well as more sophisti-

cated works, such as Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French

National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790) (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1996), praised and criticized by Jay Smith below.

9. For some of the difficulties on this subject, see Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,”

Critical Inquiry 17 (1991), 773-797; and Jay Smith, below, and the bibliography at notes 5-7.10. I have in mind here social history’s work generally, as well as the more recent work by the sub-

altern school of South Asian history. See, for example, Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant

Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).

11. “I refute it thus,” in James Boswell, Life of Johnson, vol. I, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (London:

Oxford University Press, 1887), 471.

12. Ibid .



seeks to encourage them to give coherence to their intuitions and their practices

about the historical agent and its shadow self.

But we must do better than Dr. Johnson, who didn’t really get the point. The

self as articulated in much historical theory is so divested of autonomy and con-trol that it can’t really operate as a cause, as an agent; and the postmodern self

doesn’t even aspire to be a center. As has been discussed extensively in histori-

cal and literary circles over the past three decades, and nicely elaborated by

Ermarth below, the mere “sense of self” does not reveal an autonomous ego, pos-

sibly needing just a little psychoanalytic excavation to attain its most authentic

existence. The self, Foucault and others argued, was a construct; it could not be

a product of its own doing, a kind of Enlightenment achievement through which,

as we once optimistically thought, we “m[ight] rise on stepping stones of our

dead selves to higher things.”13 It was, rather, the product of discursive structuresand disciplinary regimes, which operated far above mere perception or feeling or

individual control, and which did not aim at moral uplift.

Plainly, however, even Michel Foucault cherished resistance, and while it is

unclear how this fit into his theory and historiographical practice, it raises the

question of how independent resistance is possible. What exerted this control and

sought this resistance, and how?14 Whatever the stability of the self, the question

of its ability to act meaningfully and to change meanings—and, therefore, histo-

ry—has remained an open question. On this point at least, rooted in feelings as

much as logic, we should insist. The postmodern critique is rich, diverse, andcomplex, but there are important difficulties and some ill has got in with the good.

While many scholars have recently offered sharp, sometimes even strident or

exasperated criticisms of the movement, I think it is as important to stress the

contributions of postmodernism and the linguistic turn.15 It seems to me appro-

priate to continue to speak of the postmodern as our moment and to enlarge the

term to cover a wide variety of fresh practices that go beyond Cabrera’s “new

history” to include the work of Smith and those other “middle way” folks criti-

cized by Fitzhugh and Leckie in their contribution. Even as the predominance of

postmodernism declines, we still have the more important task of assessing itsimpact on the self and agency. I believe that the constructive work of William

DAVID GARY SHAW4

13. The phrase is Lord Tennyson interpreting Goethe: In Memoriam, ed. Susan Shatto and Marion

Shaw (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 39. Almost all of Foucault’s works contribute to this, but see

especially volume III of The History of Sexuality, transl. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books,

1990).

14. Foucault in interviews typically allowed for a good deal more agency than his published writ-

ings conceive, but see his remarks on resistance, which he took to be an essential feature of power.

See, e.g., Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, transl. Paul Hurley et al. (New York: New

Press, 1998), 167-169; and see Fitzhugh and Leckie, below, for thoughtful, critical remarks on this

subject.15. See, for instance, Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social

Theorists are Murdering our Past (New York: Free Press, 1997); Perez Zagorin, “History, the

Referent, and Narrative: Reflections on Postmodernism Now,” History and Theory 38 (1999), 1-24;

and the reply by Keith Jenkins, “A Postmodern Reply to Perez Zagorin,” History and Theory 39

(2000), 181-200; and Perez Zagorin, “Rejoinder to a Postmodernist,” History and Theory 39 (2000),

201-209.



Reddy, Smith, and Fitzhugh and Leckie are especially beholden to the cognitive

spaces constructed by the linguistic turn and the flexible, changeable self that

people like Ermarth have described.16

I want to focus some critical remarks on the relationship of language andagency. Then I would like to consider briefly the ways forward that our contrib-

utors are cutting and blazing. One of the most important ones is their willingness

to use theory. The typical historian is so worried by theory that he or she usual-

ly finds the explicit use of even a touch to be too much; but as Fitzhugh and

Leckie cogently suggest, the traditionalist has been badly bruised by this tech-

nique, following Dr. Johnson’s method of refutation too closely. All kinds of his-

torians need to enter the discussions more often, helping to keep historical theo-

ry on the pragmatic track of illuminating and interpreting evidence, and remain-

ing sensitive to the broader world of meanings as well as narrower academic con-cerns: theories of agency should have a special place in the historiographical re-

tooling underway. Most of the contributors to this issue are practicing historians

leading by example.

Theoretically, language was the dominant revolutionary theme of the twenti-

eth century. Its special and powerful status underlay Heideggerian phenomenol-

ogy, the work of Wittgenstein, most postwar analytic philosophy, postmodernism

throughout the humanities, and the fitful advance of linguistics. Its effect on

agency, however, was generally negative for the simple reason that language

understood as the world or discourse or the revelation of Being was plainlygreater than any single individual and typically beyond his or her conscious

grasp. Language as a form displaced language as an individual act. With the

focus on the totality of speech, my sentences turn out to be but particular

instances of a larger, anonymous force. Similar structural thinking occurred

across social thought. For instance, according to the great sociologist Pierre

Bourdieu, “the history of the individual is never anything other than a certain

specification of the collective history of his group or class . . .”17 In parallel, all

our sentences as well as our selves were demoted.18 For many historians, build-

ing on Marxian-derived notions of superstructure and ideology, language wasclearly not conceived as an individual tool.

But thinking of language as part of the process of social and cultural creation

and replication is best conducted if we factor human agents in and preserve our

intuitions about their creative powers. Much of what’s wrong with structural the-

ories of language is that language can be seen as totalizing: it ends up doing more

than describing everything, maybe even creating everything; it becomes every-


16. The debts are of various kinds, to be sure, and it’s probable not all would agree with my char-

acterization.17. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, transl. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Eng.:

Cambridge University Press, 1977), 86.

18. Few postmodernist writers or structuralists before them have been as open or interested in the

possibilities of unique performances of the system as is Ermarth, below. Her work is an almost

Romantic appreciation of language and poetry, and runs against the grain in holding open these pos-

sibilities within a Saussurian framework.



thing. We need, however, to take more seriously the space between a word or

phrase19 and using it.20 It is not only a matter of fitting into a wider system of

meanings, as Saussure suggested. Those meanings aren’t arbitrary; rather, they

are contingent, developed historically, and constantly, through the mediation of people as speech agents. While there has been a preference in postmodernism for

seeing linguistic (and cultural) development as autonomous, it is more produc-

tive to see it within something like Anthony Giddens’s model of structuration.

Giddens’s structuration theory is an ontological form for understanding the

ways that particular cultural and social practices develop.21 Essential to the

model is its recursive quality. The structure teaches agents who help to form the

structure. People learn from the system through other people but perform their

parts differently and not always with the “same” meaning that the last performer

intended. (Indeed, the very idea of identical meaning is probably misleading.)Others learn from them. This is a model for how things are sustained, mediated,

created, and replicated. It is also effective in understanding how things change.

Moreover, it can help us understand why so often the great “changes” which

postmodern and cultural historians have effectively analyzed appear to occur with-

out agency and without the function of social or economic impetus. The evidence

of change was there in the discourse that these historians have studied but the

cause was not. It was hidden in the small changes that occur within a recursive sys-

tem mediated by individuals, discourse-processors. Actions initiated with greater

or lesser agency by myriad anonymous individuals can yield a result that has sys-tematic impact, affecting and changing the discourse. It looks like a change of sys-

tem and may seem to be only that if one is operating within the somewhat impov-

erished theoretical framework of much cultural history. For the theory makes it

hard for us to see the individual selves at work, since they’ve been ruled out as

agents a priori. Without these agents, however, mystification occurs. Without the

structurating agent, the self and all the evidence of individuals who have the

“sense” that they are effective actors, become an odd puzzle.

Generally, we explain more through inclusive, ontologically expansive theo-

retical frameworks that can welcome a variety of kinds of historical actors, ideas,and entities as well as the complex relationships that may obtain between them.

Postmodernist ontology has tended towards the simple: one dominant domain of

language, albeit split between discourse and speech, and either nothing else (in

the boldest formulation), or a shadow world in the senseless cave of reality,

which is purely epiphenomenal and secondary to the world of linguistic being.22

DAVID GARY SHAW6

19. Or any semantic element.

20. Saussure himself distinguishes between langue and parole, Chomsky between competence the-

ory and performance theory. Within analytical philosophy, the speech-act theory of Austin and Searle

has a crucial role to play. Not all emphasis on language leads to overlooking the role of agents asspeakers.

21. His key statement is The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1984); see also his “Structuration Theory: Past, Present and Future,” in Giddens’ Theory of

Structuration: A Critical Appreciation, ed. Christopher G. A. Bryant and David Jary (London:

Routledge, 1991), 201-221.

22. It is easy to see the perverted idealism at work here, strangely recalling Plato’s parable of the

cave in Republic VII.



That the discursive changes historians note lag behind events or social circum-

stances does not mean that these cannot be proximate causes of the discursive

changes observed. But we now know, as earlier social history denied, that struc-

tural features outside of culture or discourse do not necessarily cause thesechanges. Yet even when culture or discourse provides causes independent of

social forces, they are structurated through selves as agents. A fuller historical

account will be given when it writes the mediating self in. Those willing to put

agency into the hopper of necessary functions usually find, as does Smith in his

close analysis of J.-M.-A. Servan below, for instance, that one can see agency

developing and operating with distinctiveness, albeit in a shared, intersubjective

space of language and culture. The self and its mind, whatever they are, are not

simply linguistic black boxes. Small changes, like a little rust or a little oil, can

lead to the kind of revolutionary events that Smith, Rod Aya, and Cabrera pon-der, but only if the analytic framework is rich enough to see the cultural sphere,

the social sphere and the agent.

On this account, the meaning of every word, every sentence, and much of the

entire linguistic apparatus cannot be separated from everything else, all the other

components of the “action situation,” in Reddy’s terms. Each word means some-

what differently each time, based on the context, the interlocutors, and all the

other elements of circumstance that were at play in a given moment of speech,

including the individual’s reconsideration of his or her past uses and the reactions

these elicited. Speech is an action and should be subsumed to that broaderdomain, rather than the other way around. Given this appeal to the agent, it is

worth noting that for historians speech has recently been overlooked theoretical-

ly while discourse has been overblown. This is not to say, however, that the his-

torical proofs of the power of large cultural structures of meaning and possibili-

ty are not crucial. The historiographical demonstrations of postmodern history

have been sound and important. The linguistic turn, the study of political culture,

and linguistic regimes of dominance have succeeded in focusing minds on new

possibilities that should allow the further examination of self and agency to blos-

som and complete the project.This Theme Issue offers examples of how scholars are beginning to do the

important work of going through the postmodernist controversy to reconstruct a

richer and subtler notion of agency and its self. I believe in all cases these

approaches are as wise for their understanding that you can’t simply forget lan-

guage or the postmodern critique as they are in seeing that a history that reifies

language and makes it master does less well in accounting for all the bits of evi-

dence and intuition and theory we have.

In this light, readers of this issue will find language remaining a central con-

cern in itself and as a marker of thought. I have already indicated that Ermarth’spostmodernism is an especially urgent and productive one, keyed to language’s

power to reveal the kind of self we have. And while Fitzhugh and Leckie dis-

agree with her about which kind of linguistics is crucial, the integration of lin-

guistics and other cognitive endeavors into history is an especially important fea-




ture of their essay, which shows the possibilities in Chomskyan linguistics and

cognitive psychology. Smith and Reddy should both be viewed as moving along

the same path from language towards world and mind without losing the neces-

sary conceptual anchorage, recovering to some extent the perspectives of thinkers such as Wittgenstein, who blended the linguistic, the intuitive, and the

pragmatic.

I started this essay with a bon mot from Seneca because it represents the min-

imal condition of the self and its agency. But reconciling our unshakable intu-

itions of self with new historical insights is as crucial to the historical under-

standing of agency as is language. The difficulties of our position shouldn’t be

minimized. Reddy brilliantly lays clear the complexity of action, the analysis of

which can never be adequately captured by simplistic formulae, which have mis-

led us. By the same token, the possibility of conceiving of human action as pur-poseful and intended is argued elegantly in part through mathematical inclusions

by Bonneuil, who takes chaos theory to task, revealing how our intuitions of

agency and decision-making in a contingent but non-chaotic universe align well

with the best science, and best novels too.

Using very different approaches, Bonneuil, Reddy, and David Carr affirm

what other contributors intimate: that narrative remains a crucial tool for con-

ceiving and executing agency. Simplicity is not on offer, however, for as Carr

shows in considering the relation of historian to historical object, sympathy

leaves us short of actually being able to merge the reality of the past and the pre-sent. The gap is ontologically tremendous, and even past places and past times

cannot be seamlessly joined to the inquirer’s here and now. This situation is, at

least, only a version of the usual problem of understanding another person.

As Aya and Smith demonstrate, however, we do have the ability to make sense

of the discrete problems of historical agency if we are conceptually careful and

subtle with our evidence. Each combines elegant critiques of the scholarship on

revolutionary agency with clear analyses of how to do more. In both cases, a

refurbished role for the rational emerges. At this point, we must exercise due cau-

tion, as we insist that agency and the self do operationalize and validate reason-ing. The Makioka sisters of Bonneuil’s essay are persuasive examples of delib-

erative agency, especially Sachiko, too “right” to be dismissed. The key in inte-

grating our renewed sense of the rationality of the agent and the self is to heed

the lessons of the critics: it can never be all you need to know; what is rational

in a given situation depends on the selves involved and the recursive structures

(cultural and otherwise) at play. The psychological and anthematic self, as

Ermarth labels it—a self of transitions, surprises, even flightiness—is funda-

mental; and capturing what is powerful about historical agency will require

avoiding reducing it to the rational, which is the real, but only part of it.Discussions of the self hedge in historical agency on every side. The com-

plexities of thinking about the self and agency involve us all in discussions of

value, of emotional intentionality, and the possibilities of coping with the

immense structures and dynamics of history. They call us forward to narrative

DAVID GARY SHAW8



and the real; and warn us to combine both simple strategies of analysis and com-

plex ontologies in appreciating people and what they have done. As we recon-

ceive historical agency we should retain some of the hard-headedness of social-

scientific history as well as the humanity of that kind of social and cultural his-tory that focused on the “other” and the weak. We should carefully engage inter-

disciplinary methods and notions not only from literature and philosophy but

also from psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and sociology. But we should

also remain worried, as historians have been since Thucydides—whose contin-

ued relevance Aya makes clear—not to be hoodwinked by our contemporary col-

leagues or by ancient agents. We are still trying to get to the bottom of things. To

drop the agent now is to detach from the world and abandon hopes of success;

but to worry the nature of agency, as these papers do, is to lead that world

towards a little practical wisdom. This implies no necessity of surrendering aconstructivist approach to the past and a distinctively historicist one too. But

agency remains the heart of the matter, for it is the agent in concert with others,

who is the one sure place where meaning gets made and unmade, and where his-

tory is waged and witnessed.

Wesleyan University


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