The History of the Future

Looking back recently at my professional career, I was struck by the fact that, excepting my season as a graduate student and my current appointment at Columbia, I have always been in departments of Romance languages or Romance studies and was even the chair of one such department for rive years at the University of Pennsylvania before coming to this campus. I am convinced that I am a better scholar for it: if nothing else, the relativization of one's own discipline through the frequent contact with other fields that are structurally related to it both formally and historically keeps you from fetishizing the preconceptions and rituals that define it, which is always a salutary state of affairs. Nevertheless, in my intervention in a conference titled "The Return to History and the Future of Romance Studies," I would like to argue that, precisely because of the "return to history," there is no future for Romance studies, and that this development is to be neither mourned nor resisted. I could engage in a fairly run-of-the mill and perhaps even predictable reading of the phrase "the return to history" in order to evince an essential ambiguity at its core; in fact, I have not managed to resist the temptation to do so. On the one hand, the expression refers to a disciplinary praxis centered on history as the ultimate context of study, as against a previous practice which the return to history is supposed to have displaced or superseded, that is, the linguistic turn in which almost everyone in this audience--including me--was both formed intellectually and went on to contribute to as a scholar. This is probably the sense in which the organizing committee intended it to be understood by the audience: that is, as the recent troping away from language and text to either materiality or ideology that bas been subsumed under the capacious mantle of the term "cultural studies." On the other hand, there is a somewhat hortatory, vaguely ethical reading of the phrase "the return to history" that appears to carry within it an injunction to reinscribe ourselves and our practice once again in history after a season of having turned our back to it; that is to say, to acknowledge the historical determinants of our profession and the corresponding contingency of what we do--the equivalent of Jameson's famous imperative to "always historicize" now applied to our own intellectual and academic praxis. Now these two meanings are discontinuous with one another and may even be antithetical. The "turn to history" may be seeking to provide a description of what is our current critical praxis or its horizon of expectations, but the second acceptation of the expression reveals that very praxis to be a historically contingent affair. In other words, the contemporary turn to history described by the first meaning is immediately rendered suspect when considered from the directive to return to a historically inflected understanding of our activity. Hence, the phrase seems to enjoin us both to engage in the practice of turning to history as the final horizon of what we do and to simultaneously challenge the practice by underscoring its historical contingency. The constant oscillation from description to prescription in the possible interpretations of the phrase are not auspicious, for a constructivist outlook has the unfortunate tendency to temper the enthusiasm required to engage wholeheartedly in any activity. If we look at our own metier from the perspective of suspicion required by the directive to historicize, another question forces itself on us: How does one return to history? Or better yet, when were we ever out of history? The linguistic turn that the return to history is supposed to have displaced was itself a historically conditioned event, and the recent enjoining to return to history is historically conditioned as well. Hence, we should perhaps dwell not on what is the most intellectually rigorous way to return to history in our critical praxis, but rather on what are the contemporary historical circumstances that make it feel like a peremptory assignment. …