Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 22:02:14 -0600
From: Bob <suannschafer-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: History of ...


I'm sorry, but I must disagree.  Certainly there are historical 
"facts" which generally are pretty much accepted as "true."  An 
example of such a fact might be the date of the signing & names of 
the signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.  After the 
"facts," everything is pretty much interpretation/rhetoric.

>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.


And it is precisely a re-presentation, and as such is subject to 
error/flaw/interpretation/the prevailing "zeitgeist" -- call it what 
you will.  I really feel that you credit too little importance to the 
"subjective standpoint" -- why else the recent brouhaha over Sally 
Hemmings & Thomas Jefferson?  And why else the plethora of 
biographies of Jefferson? Is it that the "first" biographer didn't do 
it right?  didn't have access to the "facts"?  Or is it that the 
historian NEVER has access to (all) the "facts"?  Your nostalgia for 
"historical truth" to me represents a positivism that I find quite 
inadequate.

>
>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.


Shouldn't "history" turn its lens on the practice of the discipline 
of history itself?  Isn't this the modernist legacy of Kant?

>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.


I really cannot disagree with you here, but I'm wondering if this is 
not the enterprise of Foucault?

>
>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.


Of course it has/does.

>
>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


If, indeed, historians invent the past, then how do you reconcile 
this with your notion of "historical truth" above?


>(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;


Precisely.


>it's not (and never has
>been, and never can be) about knowing "the past".


Precisely.


>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."


Gees, perhaps we don't disagree after all :)