Abstract
Within cultural history there is a widespread eschewal of speculative reasoning. This article notes the complicity of the general postmodern avoidance of metanarratives with Anglo-Saxon empiricism and locates the major problem facing cultural history in postmodernism's conflation of trajectories and teleologies. Any discussion of the directionality of history is imputed to be a full-blown teleology. Using previous discussions from different fields, the difference between a teleology and trajectory is defended and, after clarifying certain confusions, it is argued that trajectories, as following the working of generative mechanisms, are necessary to theorize in order to make interesting progress within the field of cultural history.
Notes
1 CitationDean 2009, 24. I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of this article and Mervyn Hartwig for incisive comments that helped improve it.
21 Rudolf Arnheim adopts the general terms ‘accident’ and ‘necessity’ in his sketch of perceptual adaptation in art history; see CitationArnheim 1966. These terms of course accord with biological theory; see CitationMonod 1971.
28 Marx [1861] 1973, 105.
29 See above all Werner's synthetic 1948.
31 Note, for example, the work of Deborah Kelemen on children and teleological thinking; CitationKelemen 1999.
44 An early proponent of the phenotype/genotype distinction in social theory was Kurt Lewin.
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Notes on contributors
Ian Verstegen
Ian Verstegen is Associate Director of Visual Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
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