Agency, Postmodernism, and the Causes of Change

ABSTRACT

This theme issue's call for papers notes that "several prevalent and influential historical practices of the last thirty years have limited agency's significance, . . . seeing the human as the patient of History rather than its agent." The questions implicit in this statement are nowhere more urgent than in those practices collectively known as the "linguistic turn." Yet such questions have been explored sparsely enough in relation to this movement that some adherents can still insist that the ideas they favor do not devalue agency, while many simply ignore the issue and incorporate agency as an integral part of their work. By examining a largely unremarked episode in Michel Foucault's highly influential thought and considering its connections to foundational assumptions of the linguistic turn, we seek to demonstrate in detail why the premises that underlie both structuralism and poststructuralism (the theoretical movements most deeply implicated in the direction the linguistic turn has taken in history) logically require the denial of agency as a causal force and ultimately compel the conclusion that no change can occur in realities as interpreted by humans. We illustrate the intractability of these logical problems by analyzing unsatisfactory defenses from some of the few linguistic-turn historians who have discussed relevant issues, after which we conclude by suggesting that attention to current work in linguistics and cognitive science may help resolve such difficulties.