A Reply to Criticism

The three critiques of "On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History" (ILWCH, spring 1987) fall into two categories: Bryan Palmer and Christine Stansell share a fundamental disagreement with my emphasis on "language," arguing instead that material reality, social experiences, real or concrete events are the stuff of social history, while "language" is ephemeral, epiphenomenal, an "idealist" preoccupation.Andy Rabinbach endorses and expands on my analysis, pointing up some rigidities of argumentation and the interpretive pitfalls of overly formalized distinctions.For him "language" holds no terror or implication of betrayal of the "real" subject of politically correct history ("woman" for Stansell, "the working class" for Palmer).Rather, he accepts the notion that there is no transparent "real" that exists apart from conceptualization and that complex analysis of how meaning is made might have (politically) useful payoffs.Since the two positions are worlds apart, it seems most efficient to deal with each in turn. The Horse's Nostril School of Social HistoryBryan Palmer's dramatic opening scene is meant to persuade his readers that there is a reality so compelling, an oppression so vivid, a force so naked that we need never doubt our perceptions of what they mean.Not only that, they transcend the limits of historical context; their meaning is apparent whatever the time or place: "Looking up into the flared nostrils of the state's steed reminds me of a similar view I 'experienced' fifteen years ago at a May Day anti-imperialist rally in Washington."Here Palmer makes certain to remind us that his credentials are impeccable as a political activist and hence as a social historian.By putting experience in quotation marks, he also ridicules my suggestion that experience may be a problematic concept.In his presentation of it, the meaning of an event is inherent in the event itself.Experience is thus a direct, unmediated sensation; the experience of class struggle is directly knowable except to those with false consciousness or perhaps none at all.