Abstract

Informed by developments in continental philosophy and the social sciences in the Twentieth Century, a number of influential scholars and cultural critics have emphasized the role played by the social and economic structures of everyday life in the determination of historical events as well as in the production and reception of cultural artifacts. As part of the move "back to social history", many revisionist art historians have assumed that the subject of history--the human agent--is nothing more than a social construction determined by the values and interests of the dominant class in a given society. ;The problem with such reductivist accounts is that they deny the possibility that social, political or psychological change may be produced by the subject, either collectively or individually. Furthermore, the revisionist's denial of the subject as an agent contradicts an important motivation for revisionist history, viz. to affect the course of historical and cultural studies by recovering the lives of those ignored due to their race, class or gender. Thus, my claim is that without a concept of the subject as an ethical agent emergent from the social structure, the coherence and effectiveness of revisionist art history as a force for social reform is compromised. ;In Redefining the Past, I provide a philosophical analysis of the human subject as a self-interpreting, dialectical entity--one that both affects and is affected by the social and biological forces that constrain its behavior. I show how this concept of the dialectical subject takes us beyond the reductivism of either social or biological determinism, without denying the constitutive role played by both biological and social factors in the construction of the human subject. ;Thus, by recovering and recontextualizing past lives and cultural productions, revisionist art historians make available the forgotten sources of both present and past possibilities of human experience. By acknowledging the role of the subject as a dialectical agent in the production of social reality, the ethical responsibility that comes with the act of historical interpretation is more effectively engaged in the theory and practice of revisionist art history