The demand for ‘context’ remains axiomatic across the human sciences, especially since that call for context, as Roy Dilley writes, is “often invoked as part of an analytical strategy which stands in opposition to universalist, formalist or other generalizing tendencies” (6). From this perspective, context provides a needed specificity. Yet across the disciplines, the meaning of ‘context’ itself shifts. Whereas some scholars treat context as a straightforward mechanism to explain texts (the background that renders meaning possible), others have shown that context is emergent with text. There is always an irreducible play between text and context, as we know from Jacques Derrida (“Signature”).[i] Following such arguments, scholars have turned to the relationship between ‘text’ and ‘context’ to theorize how meaning, which is unstable, is communicated across social interactions, but also within and across cultures. These attempts have yielded numerous insights, ones that underscore the difficulties of translation, speech, and writing, including in academic knowledge production.
There are, then, different ways in which context has been registered as both a problem and an anchor of meaning across disciplines and theoretical traditions. How can we understand the continued efficacy of ‘context’ as an explanatory mechanism in History? More pointedly, how does the efficacy of ‘context’ itself perpetuate a Christian theological inheritance, one that sustains transcendence, even though that transcendence itself is disavowed by contextual reasoning?
***
While context has been theorized as unstable and emergent, for conventional historians, ‘context’ often serves as stabilizing explanatory ground that provides meaning to texts. One must situate texts, events, ideas, into context, which serves as the ground that explains both the emergence and content of texts, events, and ideas. Rather than work within a play between text and context, historians come to excavate context to discover historical truths, the causes that explain the emergence of a text (Harlan 581; Maza 265). In their methodological primer Telling the Truth About History, Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob despair at the play of text and context: “denying the possibility of any separation of text and context (or cause and effect), postmodernist theory jeopardizes all social theorizing,” even raising the specter of the end of History (227).[ii] Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob thus tell us that context will allow us to discover “invisible structures and patterns” that are indeed historical causes, which historians can locate to explain texts (304). They insist that “If all practices are culturally and linguistically inscribed, if all meaning, even the meaning of scientific laws, depends on cultural context, then how can any causal explanation be derived” (223)? The threat is deep because locating causality by determining context allows for periodization–the central task for the historian.[iii] That is, historians map moments of transition that signal the coming of a new context (which, in turn, institutionalizes context in disciplines) (Hayot 741). It is a problem that is compounded with the question that Foucault has asked: “What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?” (“What,” 34; Nietzsche; Jay 564) What of the present context when deciphering a past one?
Faced with these questions, not all historians have accepted the crude notion of causality and context that Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob present. Instead, they have looked to linguistics and semiotics. In this they share an approach with theoretically inclined anthropologists who have problematized context as a way of challenging universalist evolutionary approaches in favor of situated ones (Dilley 6). The dilemmas and ambivalences of context include questions of cultural difference and the determining of the relevant context (Scharfstein; Stocking; Goffman). How does one determine context? What, indeed, is out of context? What to do with “charitable readings” that render everything as within context (Gellner; Asad, 173; Strathern; Silverstein, “‘Cultural,’” 625; Greetham)? What, then, of the scandal of translation, the discomfort of translation, from “context” to “context” (Asad 199)? These anthropologists have put the stability of a context under duress, especially for comparative work, necessitating, to follow one argument, equivocation between contexts (Viveiros de Castro 4; De La Cadena, 27). Rather than simply discovering social context or mutual knowledge, they have turned to many different theoretical forms to address the problem of context, from multiple ontologies to Wittgenstein’s theorization of form of life and its embodied grammar (Asad; Eldridge). As Talal Asad writes, “Which contexts are relevant in different discursive events is something one learns in the course of living, and even though it is often very difficult to verbalize that knowledge” (180; El Shakry).
Anthropologists have further theorized this language-in-use as a larger semiotic process that mediates social life. It is a socio-culturally thick form that has layers of indexical orders, which increases interpretive clarity in a discursive interaction. The interaction is itself also always re-contextualized in its unfolding, as denotational text is revised into context, what Michael Silverstein calls the entextualization-contextualization dialectic. Cultural semiosis is “forever in dialectical process,” though it can reach efficacy in ritual, a momentary achievement (“‘Cultural’” 645). What these semiotic accounts make clear is that the search for context is not simply a matter of determining a pre-given frame or cause, but must itself be produced and ratified—including within the production of academic knowledge, itself a cultural field; we are all “semiotically ‘inside’ the cultural phenomena generated by the dialectical field,” as Silverstein writes (“What’s Cookin’?”, 550).
In intellectual history, specifically the history of political thought, historians have meditated on context as they have attempted to determine the place of ideas within a context as well as the role of context in formulating historical questions (Harlan; LaCapra). The role of intentionality and causality have been crucial to these conversations as scholars debate whether context is determinate for the formation of ideas or if it is a framework for understanding the plausibility of ideas. Consider the formulation of contextualism by J. G. A. Pocock that centers how the past emerges as a problem in need of an explanation in the present (for otherwise it would be simple continuity or explainable by traditional concepts). In other words, what Pocock calls an emergent “historical problem-situation” necessitates the discovery of a cause (218). For Pocock, this “process can take place only in the context of some particular society, its relationships with the past and the problems that arise within those relationships” (218). For example, what relationships existed between a legal system and its past, and what problems arose within that relationship? Context, then, for Pocock, is a field of intelligibility that requires attention to the tradition within which one acts, a tradition that consists “of a number of languages” (196).
Yet scholars have argued ideas cannot simply be determined from those languages, from a given context. Following J. L. Austin, Quentin Skinner has contended that, alongside the text’s propositional content, we must also recover the illocutionary force of a given author’s utterance: the author’s intentionality in a speech act, the intervention of their utterance (49). The goal for these historians has been to situate the utterance in a wider linguistic context, but also to ask what could possibly be performed at that occasion of the utterance (Skinner; Tully). This has led to further revision of this understanding of language, since intention cannot govern speech.[iv] How, for example, is a context proposed? Within which context is that proposal tested? This is a question of an abductive inference. Following Charles Sanders Peirce, there is a heuristic context, an abductive inference that hypothesizes a context (and defines the problem), and the verificatory context, deductive and inductive inferences that test the proposed context. Both the heuristic and verificatory are necessary for the aim to recover historical context and authorial intention. “Searching for one context necessarily leads to a search for another,” writes Takashi Shogimen (250). What Peirce and Shogimen theorize is what contextualism derived from Austin tends to render invisible: the importance of a metapragmatic function, those cumulative and reflexive semiotic processes that are ongoing, continuously produced and re-ratified within an indexical order (Silverstein, Language in Culture, 45-46). It is a metapragmatic function, which includes the writing and reading of history itself, that Skinner presumes to be efficacious and lends authority to his appeal to context.
Although largely used as foil in the discipline of History, Derrida has most forcefully grappled with the promises and limits of context and communication for understanding. As he has written, “Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring” (‘Signature,’ 320). Derrida’s forceful intervention invites us to grapple with how context is out of joint such that it cannot be a final determinant, the ground for explanation. Geoffrey Bennington adds that although “historians and historicists begin with the stern or sometimes panic-stricken injunction to ‘put it back in its context,’” we might wish to ask how ‘it’ got out in the first place and what that escape entails for our understanding” (“Derrida’s Archive,” 112). We have proof that it did escape, Bennington teaches us, since “none of these questions could even arise were it not for reading, reading must by definition entail escape from context” (“Derrida’s ‘Eighteenth Century,’”391). For historians, Bennington continues, such a questioning of context comes to “unsettle our very understanding of what a library, an archive, archival research, or intellectual history might be,” offering a different type of reading and writing (Bennington 112; Kleinberg 7).
***
With all these challenges to securing context, why does context continue to persist as a ground for meaning in History despite its acknowledged instability? A psychoanalytic approach might be particularly useful since it shifts the problem. Rather than determining whether context indexes a reality or how context functions in language, psychoanalysis lets us ask how and why disciplined scholars remain attached to the promise of context. How does context provide meaning to the practices and experiences of historians such as Appleby and her co-authors? How is context not a matter of knowledge, but desire? Consider, for example, how historians often claim to know that transcendental explanations of the world are impossible. Yet, precisely for that reason, they treat immanent contextual explanations as if they were sufficient.[v] Rather than accept that the impossibility of metalanguage necessitates “that the whole of society will never reveal itself in an analytical moment,” once the subject is presumed to coincide with the world, historians make context a fetish object that maintains a transcendent explanation while denying it all the same (Copjec, Read My Desire, 8). In that sense, context is a hidden disavowed God.[vi]
What makes this disavowal possible is a Christian theological inheritance, one premised in the immanent availability of transcendent meaning, grounded in the promise of divine communication that guarantees presence. Amos Funkenstein has demonstrated how within contextual reasoning—what he calls historical philology—“historical facts are no longer seen as self-evident” but instead obtain “significance only from the context in which they are embedded—a context reconstructed by the historian” (Theology, 11; Moyn). The theological problem is this: How does an omniscient and omnipotent God communicate with mankind? How does he work in History? To answer such questions, Jewish and Christian exegesis offered the principle of accommodation: “scriptures are adjusted to the capacity of mankind to receive and perceive them” (213). The problem was that “without adequate accommodation to human cognitive capacities, revelation would fail as a communicative act since it would remain beyond the limits of human comprehension,” as Tobias Tanton explains it (Tanton 317; Socher). Yet this immanent movement also makes the transcendent promise superfluous, for God is always already accommodated to the world within immanent structures. Put differently, as Funkenstein writes, “The ‘finger of God’ disappeared from the course of human events,” giving rise to a contextual reasoning for understanding (205).
In this contextual revolution, the desire to unearth immanent structures took hold. Since God had accommodated himself to the world, terms such as “harmony,” “convenience,” “correspondence,” or “accommodation” become crucial. To place events or texts within a context (which is also, following Marc Nichanian, “this fabric woven in common”), then, is to affirm Christianity and its promise of communicative success (i.e., revelation as an utterance that must be made intelligible through accommodation) (72). We then find “the reemergence at the very heart of modernity of the problematic relationship of the human and the divine that bedeviled Christianity from its beginning,” which Michael Gillespie has recorded in detail (42). Perhaps the promise of context discloses our Christian tendencies, especially in our assumption of the efficacy of context for history-writing.
That promise leads many historians to turn context into a fetish object that facilitates the performative success of history-writing (Scott). The appeal to context operates as a form of disavowal. Although the impossibility of transcendence is recognized, context is nevertheless treated as if it secures meaning. Context is thus a form of incarnation and idolatry that reinstates transcendence (“a sham phallus that works everywhere to disavow castration”: Weed 123).[vii] The Christian God, having been made flesh, comes in as the disavowed transcendent authority through context itself.[viii] Acknowledged as an endless task, we are all too aware of the impossibility of a transcendent narrative, which, in turn, is made productive, generating more and more contexts–idols–that provide precisely such an explanation.[ix] History itself comes to be contextualized in the production of ever more contexts in which multiplicity has come to serve as an answer to the theoretical problem of ‘context.’ Knowledge of contexts then comes to “maintain the very illusion” of transcendence that contextual knowledge is supposedly destroying (Zupančič, Disavowal, 80; Scott). This is why speech of one’s own context—positionality, reflexivity—is less an interruption than a strengthening of the efficacy of history-writing and context.[x] “I am the context,” the historian states, collapsing distinctions while producing efficacy. And, with this disavowal, the Christian promise of communicative success, exemplified by accommodation, continues to underwrite the discipline.
We are thus left with difficult questions. Can we reopen a gap which makes the historical landscape impossible to demarcate, without also converting that impossibility, that constitutive condition of historical meaning, into a (Christian) matter of further contextualization (Funkenstein, Theology; Funkenstein, Perceptions; Kleinberg; Zupančič, What IS Sex?)? How to interrupt or short-circuit the efficacy of contextual reasoning? We might need to listen to the noise in its functioning, since the unconscious coincides with both the presuppositions and entailments of language (rather than just the latter). It would be to stay with those expressions that are “impossible to cohere or translate into narrative form,” as Marisa Fuentes has explored in her examination of enslaved women’s screams (143). A separation might be needed to stop performing and possessing context as a fetish, so as to undertake a project to “de-interpret” it (Zupančič, Why Psychoanalysis? 50-51). Such might be a project to “read the impossible,” to borrow from Elizabeth Weed, a project in which “meaning cannot be nailed down,” even though one must read really well (Weed 52; Bennington 118).
To read really well would not entail abandoning ‘context’—as if that were possible—but a questioning of its imperative in order to make space for desire, a desire that can retroactively redefine context as such. Such a desire would question the promise of context and, instead, dwell in the impossibility of incorporation, of assimilation, without turning that impossibility itself into context, a fetish object. It would be “a missed encounter” that calls into question a systematic non-perspectival synthesis or a transcendent narrative (even those presented as counter-narratives, such as indigeneity or coloniality) (Copjec, Cloud, 64). But it would also question a disavowal that keeps the promise of such transcendence alive in the promise of proper context, multiple or otherwise (Copjec, Read My Desire, 18). Context then could not serve as the ground or background for explanation but would require an inventive parasitic history, in which we foreground the play of text and context itself to create new forms (Judge, “Critique”). It would be a shuttling in between positions, between perspectives. Such a shuttling might be a refusal to rise above, to be transcendent, but also a refusal to be immanent, to be accomplished, which is to say, to be Christian. It might instead be a call to learn, that we be learners, cautious of the promise of universal and contextual reason and attuned to the empty space of analysis.
Rajbir Singh Judge teaches in the Department of History at California State University, Long Beach. He is the author of Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia (Columbia 2024).
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[i] One response to Derrida’s unsettling has been to develop practices that reject both the view that texts are timeless and that texts are reflections of their context. Instead, text and context emerge as co-constitutive. New Historicism is exemplary here (Greenblatt; Gallagher and Greenblatt). However, these practices have themselves faced a challenge in the post-critical turn. Recognizing the limits to contextualization, scholars have considered alternatives to context, from affective investments to alternative temporalities (Felski).
[ii] I use Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob as symptomatic of disciplinary norms for numerous reasons. For one, the text continues to serve as a standard text in Methodology of History courses, including in the Department of History where I teach at California State University, Long Beach.
[iii] This central task has often been criticized. Consider Derrida, ‘White Mythology,’ 230 and Davis.
[iv] Numerous scholars have critiqued such a reading of the performative, most notably Derrida, but also see Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech (Derrida ‘Signature’; Butler 145-163). For a critique of such critiques without acceding to the dominion of historical context, see Copjec, Read My Desire (18, 53).
[v] Contextual explanations come to center an immanent cause within a field of effects, which is only possible once transcendence itself is eliminated Yet Joan Copjec writes that “an acknowledgement of metalanguage’s impossibility”—that is, the impossibility of transcendence—“compels us to realize that the whole of society will never reveal itself in an analytical moment” (Copjec, Read My Desire, 8). In other words, entrance into language invites an eruption to an elsewhere in the continual sliding of the signifier, a waywardness that makes it impossible to secure contextualization (Boothby 157).
[vi] Said differently, context promises a sublime transcendent knowledge, but one now immanently enclosed within the world, unencumbered, as Slavoj Žižek writes, “by the Real of human finitude” (Žižek 34). This is why Copjec centers the generative principle of a society that is “never statable as such” even though it does negate that what it institutes. There is here a question of language and speech, synchrony and diachrony (Lacan).
[vii] There is a certain staging of the paternal function in disavowal, which is bound to the question of God and transcendence (Fink 170).
[viii] I am grateful to Brian Connolly for this formulation.
[ix] We can say that desire for context becomes a cover for anxiety, but it is a desire in which all is soldered together, an imposture of resolution, a refusal of impossibility in its very acceptance.
[x] For anthropology, see Song. Positionality has abductive power; as Richard Boothby writes: “Abduction is the blinding effect of fascination, the effect by which the focus of attention throws the periphery of awareness into shadow” (94). We would do well to remember here that the function of language in speech is to evoke, not to inform (Lacan 247).
