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.
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.