From: "Stuart Elden" <stuart.elden-AT-clara.co.uk> Subject: RE: History of ... Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2000 12:20:47 -0000 Jeffrey Lots of things i could say to this - given that my first degree was in politics and modern history, i know first hand the suspicion of historians to Foucault's work. I've just picked up a copy of Richard Evans' The Defence of History, which was heavily discounted :o) A 'pretty much as you'd expect' attempt by a 'traditional' historian against the 'poststructuralist' assault... I've had a quick look through, and it looks pretty superficial. Why is that historians (such as Keith Windshuttle a few years back, and now Evans) berate these poststructuralists for their lack of work with the 'sources', the archives, and their reliance on 'discourse' and then so patently fail to read the people they criticise?? Evans for example, reading the cover blurb and the chapter heads looks to be tackling F head on, but his sense of what he is about is incredibly superficial. A few generalisms about power knowledge and discourse. Why do these historians neglect the very basics of intellectual history??? Stuart -----Original Message----- From: owner-foucault-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu [mailto:owner-foucault-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu]On Behalf Of Jeffrey Hearn Sent: 11 March 2000 18:14 To: foucault-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu Subject: Re: History of ... As for anyone believing in "historical truth" ... well, professional historians do, I think it is safe to say. They will acknowledge that the subjective standpoint of the historian, or the limits of the evidence, etc., will be reflected in the work they produce, but they think there is a objective, real "past" that they represent as faithfully as can be done. Hence my desire to see a genealogy, a history of the present, a nomodology--a poststructuralist-informed historiographic analysis--that would turn it's lens on the practice of the discipline of history itself. A discipline which is still overwhelmingly informed by, and acts on in powerful ways, a different set of assumptions, than, for example, Foucault did. Traditional, conventional, professional, "modern" historians, through their monographs, and their more synthetic works, and their textbooks, and their dissertation committees, and their graduate seminars, and their undergraduate lectures, etc., are able to frame the manner in which "the past" and/or "history" is discussed in the society at large. They construct, and police the boundaries of, the "common sense" of history. Foucauldian work (or it's equivalent) is still a rare thing within the discipline of history. Even the most seemingly attentive philosophers of history are by and large casting aside the unpleasant questions that '68 eventually brought to their corner of the scholarly world and saying, in effect, "we're past that now" (translated: we can go _back_ to business as usual). And the historians themselves don't pay much attention to philosophy of history to begin with. It is barely even taught in graduate school, which is much more about preparing students to get on with the business of "normal science", training them in the "craft" of history, the exercise of which will allow them to contribute to the collective project by plugging in holes in the literature without raising any fundamental questions about the paradigm itself. Poststructuralist historiography has to challenge those unexamined assumptions, it has to strive to overturn the ruling paradigm. Or, to leave behind the Kuhnsian metaphors, lets put it this way. The discipline of history has erected the city, the State, against which nomadic historiographers must erect a war machine. We must write a history (many histories) of the present that reveals the constructedness, the contingent nature of conventional historiographer's history of the past. We need to demonstrate the manner in which historians essentially invent the past (and this work has, thank god, begun), and we must describe the descent (_Herkunft_, yes) of these discursive practices, but I think we also need to be sure we extend this beyond literary analysis, linking it to all the practices (and, of course, this goes beyond the practices associated with professional disciplinary history) that make this way of seeing manifest in our lives. What I think this is about, then, is the present; it's not (and never has been, and never can be) about knowing "the past". It's about the ways in which "the past" functions in the relations of power that we confront in the present. It's about intervening to "fight the power," to "fight the powers that be." So, to put a finer point on what I would like to see a history of, I would like to see the _Metahistory_ that would be written by a poststructuralist, not a structuralist. I would like to see what a poststructuralist would come up with if they talked about the things Peter Novick talked about in _That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession_. I would like to see what would come of an attempt to write a genealogy of American history as an academic discipline (cf. David R. Shumway's _Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline_). On Koselleck, Chris, I have the book, but I must confess I've never actually made my way through it. I've read the introduction, and I guess that while I see it as something interesting and important, it also seems at first glance that his work isn't really about the same thing Foucault et al. are about, which is why it hasn't gravitated to the top of the "to read" pile for me, yet. The first question that comes to mind for me regarding Koselleck is: How compatable is his practice of _Begriffsgeschichte_, and the theory that informs it, with the poststructuralist assumptions that inform Foucauldian work? My current assumption, admittedly based on a too-cursory look at the book, is: not enough to move him to the top of the pile. But if he's more pertinant to a Foucauldian than he seems, I'm open to persuasion. Jeff
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