Date: Tue, 05 Aug 1997 11:55:09 +1000 (EST)
Subject: BHA: History: A Bhaskarian note
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU


This question of the counterfactual is interesting.  Recently I posted  to
the Bhaskar list a summary of section 7 of the Introduction to Bhaskar's
Dialectic.  This intro contains a commentary on the writing of history.
Comrades may find my remarks on this  interesting.  Here (with the
moderators indulgence) is the part on history...



Bhaskar now consider the problem of the impact of writing or narrative
structure on the presentation of history. He notes that the narrative seems
to demand linearity.  The result can of course be an over simplification or
even falsification of the problem of causality.  There is a reference to
Realist Theory of Science (2nd ed.) page 123 where he deals with the
problem of causal explanation in open systems. There Bhaskar is anxious to
dismiss the notion that explanation entails prediction.  

There is a lot at stake in this question of historical description,
explanation and the linear demands of narrative.  Bhaskar mentions Derrida
in an aside about his use of spacing. Frankly I find Derrida unreadable and
so do not understand the reference.  But I am very interested in the whole
question of historical explanation and the writing of history.  The crucial
intervention here in recent historiography has been Hayden White's Tropics
of Discourse which specifically addresses the question of history writing
and cleverly brackets off ontological questions.  This has I believe led to
a lot of confusion on the part of postmodernist historians and produced the
inevitable neo-positivist backlash e.g.Keith Windschuttle.

But there have been earlier and perhaps just as influential debates on
causation in history.  Here I identify with E.H. Carr's polemic against
Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin. (Carr, E.H., What is History?,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961 esp ch 4)

As I understand their argument Berlin and Popper argue that reality is so
complex that it is impossible to work out what caused a particular
historical event.  

The recent reissue of Berlin's essay on Tolstoy and History (Phoenix
Paperbacks, 1996)is fascinating for its defence of the complexity of
reality and the impossibility of producing explanations. Berlin uses the
metaphor of the fox and the hedgehog to describe two particular tendencies
in literature, philosophy, life, etc including the writing of history.  The
fox represents the centrifugal, the writer without a central cohering
vision or schema.  The fox knows many things.  

The hedgehog is a centripetal force. There is a single central vision, and
a single 
system. The hedgehog knows one thing. Hegel is the obvious example, here.
Berlin
argues that Tolstoy was a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog. 

It is amusing to speculate whether Bhaskar is a fox or a hedgehog.  I
suspect that question will only be able to be answered until after the
publication of his most recent works. From where I am now I would put my
money very much on the “Bhaskar is a fox” answer. 

BTW I would like to say
that interesting as Berlin's essay on Tolstoy is it is not a patch on
Trotsky’s essay "Tolstoy: Poet and Rebel" ( in Siegel, P.N. (ed)  Trotsky
on Literature and art, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970: 127-142) I find 
Trotsky's class based analysis of the great Russian writer to be so much
more illuminating than Berlin's almost postmodernist attempt to avoid
explaining Tolstoy. But then I am an incorrigible hedgehog.

Significantly on page 31 (Dialectic) Bhaskar describes the moment of the
Dialectic as "The moment of genuine contingency, openness, multi-possibility
(and doubt)." It is this openness and multi-possibility that Skoller is
anxious to preserve in his interesting attack on Spielberg's Schindler's
List. What angers Skoller is that kind of history which depicts the Jews as
the inevitable victims of Nazism, as if they had been born with Auschwitz
stamped on their foreheads.  He uses the term back shadowing to describe
this process.  What he is referring  to is what Bhaskar has termed
the linearity imposed by the narrative.  

Skoller argues for a writing of history which recaptures the
multi-possibilities that were in the original situation.  He employs the
terms "side shadowing". Inevitably Skoller is drawn towards those films
which eschew linear narratives.  He rejects Spielberg's film and choses
instead Daniel Eisenberg' Cooperation of Parts (1987) and Eleanor Antin's
the Man Without a World (1991).  Here it would seem that aesthetic
marginality acts as a guarantee of ethical probity. (Skoller, J. The
Shadows of Catastrophe: Towards and Ethics of Representation in Films by
Antin, Eisenberg and Spielberg,  Discourse, Fall 1996, v 19, No 1: 131-159)

I admit that the problem that Bhaskar has noted (DCR: 25) and that Skoller
wrestles with is a very real one.  But I am drawn on always by what Brecht
termed "Plumpes Denken".  Schindler's List may be crude but it is
accessible and there is a political point in that.


regards

Gary




     



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