In the wake of the so-called linguistic turn scholars such as James Kloppenberg, Robert Westbrook, and Richard Rorty have devoted considerable effort to fleshing out of pragmatism a method for meliorating the debate between linguistic skeptics and unreconstructed objectivists over whether historians can ever really know the past. As Kloppenberg puts it, Pragmatism offers historians something beyond the denial of absolutes, a method for providing reliable, even if provisional, knowledge that can make a difference in how we understand our culture and how we live. Although the scholarly work of John Dewey necessarily looms large in this revival, it is in the person of Dewey s bete noire Randoph Bourne that historians may alternatively look to for a methodology with which to enter into the thicket of postmodernism. This critical attitude towards life, he writes, this delicious sense of contrasts that we call irony, is not a pose or an amusement. It is something that colors every idea and every feeling of the man who is so happy as to be endowed with it.
Absurdity is an intrinsic quality of so many things that they only have to be touched to reveal it.
The deadliest way to annihilate the unoriginal and the insincere is to let it speak for itself. Irony is this letting things speak for themselves and hang themselves by their own rope. Only, it repeats the words after the speaker, and adjusts the rope. Were it possible for all historians to apply the method of letting the absurd speak for themselves, we might finally give up the postmodern ghost and move forward a bit chastened, perhaps, but the better for having done so. Indeed, we might even thank the enfants terrible for supplying a much-needed dose of circumspection to those historians who might otherwise write with little awareness of the unstated assumptions or elisions in the narratives that they construct.