Dear Editors,

Claudia Koonz is too polite about Joan Wallach Scott's Gender and the Politics of History (January 1989). I'm strongly reminded of the politically ghastly 1950s in which abuses of the New Criticism likewise served to “push reality into the wings” and give all agency to language.

Is it surprising, in the politically reactionary 1980s, to find a parallel attempt to turn academic attention to “the process of signification” and away from the human actors who create it, continue it and often suffer from it in this bad real world?

To say that language influences reality and helps create or stabilize it and that events do not occur unmediated by human beliefs and social systems is one thing. To say that nothing else exists or that we can legitimately know only language is another thing entirely. The reductio ad absurdum here is so obvious that I feel silly merely pointing it out: signification is all we can talk about, signification is produced by human subjectivity and human experience which (a) do not exist or (b) are to be ignored as unknowable – therefore we are discussing a subject, signification, which we cannot know and which cannot exist because it can be judged by nobody because we cannot talk about human subjectivity.

I'm not accusing Scott of participating in a conspiracy, nor do I want to imply anything about her motives. But one of the advantages of aging is that when you see the same damn nonsense coming round again you can spot it in one-tenth the time it took you to recognize it the first time. The 1950s' literary emphasis on the autonomy of texts was an escape into a realm divorced from the nasty world in which professors were being kicked out of jobs for being “subversive” and witch hunts against homosexuals were a regular feature of public life. Current reality is also mighty unpleasant; how nice it would be if it were only language and we could control it by controlling language, or if attempts to do anything else were impossible or useless. (And look how important that would make us.)