From: "Walt Stein" <walstein-AT-videon.wave.ca> Subject: History of....(very long) Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2000 10:35:26 -0600 I have lurked this list for years, but have rarely contributed. Until I retired several years ago, I was a professional historian (United States history) who taught and published in several areas. Late in my career, I contracted a serious case of Foucault and poststructuralism, and began to read widely, if not terribly effectively, in the area. Slowly I found myself disengaging (by mutual consent) from my colleagues. Just before my retirement, our in-house rhetoric journal asked me to participate in a symposium about history as a discipline. Knowing I had nothing left to lose, I decided to contribute the following. It adds little or nothing to the discussion, I know, but it does demonstrate the degree to which a conventional historian can be turned around by the work of Foucault and others. Please forgive the length. It is reprinted here exactly as it appeared five years ago. Yours, Walt Stein PS: I have lost the footnotes, but those familiar with Hayden White will recognize much of his work herein. My colleagues would not read Hayden White...perhaps, I believed at the time, they will read this. ____________________________________ "What we initially call history is nothing more than a narrative. Everything begins with the shop window of a legend that arranges 'curiousities' in an order in which they must be read. The legend provides the imaginary dimension that we need so that the elsewhere can reiterate the very here and now. A received meaning is imposed, in a tautological organization expressive only of the present time. When we receive this text, an operation has already been performed: it has eliminated otherness and its dangers in order to retain only those fragments of the past which are locked into the puzzle of a present time, integrated into the stories that an entire society tells during evenings at the fireside." Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, 1988. In a widely-used and recent introduction to historiography for senior students, historian Paul Conkin provides a "working definition" of his expert discipline. "A history", he writes, "is a true story about the human past." Crudely parsed, Conkin's definition provides three elements: historians tell stories; the stories are about the past; and the stories are true. It is these grounding principles upon which historians have rested their confidence since the mid-nineteenth century. 1.The Stories are True >From the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century, history resided comfortably in the house of rhetoric as a literary enterprise, a close and friendly cousin to fictional narrative. This amicable relation was severed forever when writers of fiction--literature, if you prefer--began seriously to question language itself, to experiment in ways that undermined the narratorial innocence, transparency, clarity, and correspondence with reality that had, until that time, been implicit for readers of fictional, as well as historical, discourse. When it moved to the university in the nineteenth century, history as a learned discipline dissociated itself from these newly-discovered ambiguities and treacheries of literature, and retained plain, "simple", straightforward narrative as its communicative form. The "problem" of language thus successfully averted, its "autonomy" from literature thereby affirmed, the discipline focused on concerns about its truth-claims, its ability, via story-telling, to provide knowledge about the world. In this turn from issues of style and rhetoric to issues of content, the central question became:"what sort of knowledge does history provide?" >From Hegel's early recognition that the particular or discrete stories told by historians could not aggregate into a "comprehensible master story" to Karl Hempel's denial in mid- twentieth century that history could ever attain the standards of a genuine science, the problem for history has been to demonstrate a value different from the value of literature and yet different, too, from the deductive, law-producing value assigned to the physical and natural, and, potentially at least, the social sciences. Since few historians wished to assert a nomological role or model for their discipline, (recoiled, indeed, from grand metahistorical philosophies OF history a la Hegel or Spengler, for example), the way lay clear for what has become the contemporary resolution of this problem. History makes no claim to a "science" of humankind derived from study of the past; rather, the juxtaposition of simple narrative (a genre somewhat similar to that found in well-formed detective fiction--and about as rudimentary) with established "fact" produces something significantly less ambitious: History is an hermeneutic, a means for "understanding" and "explaining" discrete events in the past. That which is unintelligible by virtue of its difference becomes intelligible under the guiding interpretation of a narrator who is both imaginatively and cognitively responsible. Arguments such as these sufficed for nearly 150 years to provide history with a comfortable berth within the academy of the humanities. Concern with history's truth-claims have diminished as the investigation of the truth-claims of the sciences has grown during the past generation. Most historians today relish the support which the resurgence of scepticism about the progress of scientific endeavour towards objective truth has provided them with. In retrospect, they feel, history's more modest claim to "understanding" has been vindicated. 2. Historians tell stories (about the past) What historians have failed to notice, or, noticing it, have rejected without much consideration, is a gesture within contemporary theory and critique which has shifted attention from the cognitive to the rhetorical during the past forty years. Dubbed, variously, the "linguistic turn", post-structuralism, critical theory, or, more generally, post-modernism, it has called into serious question the exemption from critical analysis of their rhetorical strategies which historians have enjoyed and exploited. To put this question bluntly: to what extent does historical narrative, however plain, simple, banal, and low- level, share complicity with the linguistic treacheries of "serious" fiction/literature? Further, if historical narrative turns out to be so implicated, what claims to "understanding" and "explaining" the past is it entitled to make? Among critics (Emile Benveniste, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, to mention only a few) who are concerned with writing and textuality rather than with establishing the objective reality of the objects referenced by language, the analysis of narrative itself produces effects which shake the grounds of the historian's confidence that historical texts are not fictive. Narrative emerges from these analyses as a verbal performance intent upon concealing at least two of its dominant characteristics. First, all narrative creates or constitutes its subjects while it claims to be describing or representing the events or persons to which it pretends reference. As verbal performances, constituted by/within writing, it is impossible to distinguish the literary Stephen Daedaleus, Miss Marple, and Napoleon upon cognitive grounds, however "real" a personage the latter may "have been". Larger ideations, figurations, or concepts, such as "The Age of Napoleon", the "Great Depression", "Socialism" "the workers" etc., are patently imaginary, and provide only structural underpinnings (beginnings, endings, paradigms, boundaries) for the narrative itself, in exactly the way that a figuration named "history" dominates and directs this text. Second, and equally important, the process of narrative is that of "showing" by telling, of rendering intelligible for one's colleagues or (less commonly) for the "ordinary, educated reader", that which, without the mediation of narrative, would remain unintelligible or hidden. This effect of intelligibility, however, requires that author and reader alike share an already- agreed set of understandings about how the world works, a constellation of plausibilities and possibilities--the constituted subjects and imaginary ideations described above-- which enable the reading in the first instance. What lies outside the boundaries of our thought--the "unthinkable"--cannot be narrated. Our cultural/linguistic "sense" of history demands that the past be different from the present. If the past were the same as, a simple variant of, the present, there would not be history, or historians; we would describe, instead, a timeless structural system and the manifold syntagmatic articulations in time and place of its elements. Consequently, it is the work of the historian to explain and interpret a difference, an "otherness" of the past, to the present. But, since that which is genuinely "other" in the past must remain the unthinkable, it can only be made intelligible by an act of transformation which excises its otherness. All imaginative recreations of the past are perforce transliterations of the historian's present, a "tautological organization expressive only of the present time" of which De Certeau speaks. >From the perspective of contemporary critique, then, history cannot tell true stories about the past. Like all literature, it can only tell fictions about its present. To this critique, historians can respond in several ways. Accepting it, we may elect to reconvene with our erstwhile siblings in the house of the literary and take risks with language and writing in ways presently unthinkable. Or, far more likely, we will remain entenured in the houses of academe where our stories about the past confirm, repeat, and entrench the received truths of our present.
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