(Non)
Credo
I do not believe that the point of history is
to seek the ‘truth’, at least as usually conceived. Nor do I think that historical research is
capable of recovering such a thing even if it were its purpose. As I have
said repeatedly on this blog, the purpose of history (as opposed to chronicling
and antiquarianism) goes far beyond the establishment of things that did or did
not happen (politically useful though those limited objectives might sometimes
be), which nevertheless remain the (not always easily-established) base upon
which the practice of History itself takes place. As I think I have said before, the base of
much physics is mathematics, but that does not mean that theoretical physics
reduces to maths.
Introduction
The 1990s saw a number of debates about the
nature of Truth, sometimes referred to collectively as ‘The Truth Wars’. One of the less intellectually-improving
skirmishes around the edge of this cultural moment concerned ‘postmodern
history’, specifically the publication of Re-Thinking
History by Keith Jenkins, and various responses to it. This book occasioned
a flurry of books by Jenkins and his acolytes (most notably Jenkins’ side-kick Alun Munslow, who must rank as the most un-self-conscious sycophant
in the recent, or possibly the entire, history of the discipline) and a journal
of Re-Thinking History.
One of the reasons why this book continues to
have its doleful influence is that most of the responses to it were very weak, especially
Richard Evans’ In Defence of History. Evans sought to defend history from an
‘onslaught’ of postmodernist critiques, although it is very strongly suggested by
the book’s argument and footnotes that Evans had read, first-hand, hardly any
at all of the works of hardly any at all (beyond some Foucault) of the
philosophers whom he bracketed as being at the root of this onslaught, much
less understood them. Indeed, there are
some reasons to suppose he had not read some of the ‘postmodern’ critical
articles that he did cite (at least
in their entirety). You might ponder
that that was a pretty serious (and ironic) flaw in a book trumpeting the
virtues of empirical research amongst the documents, but there we are.
Be all that as it may, one argument (amongst
other ad hominem critiques) was to
attack Jenkins for not being ‘a proper historian’. There are, to be sure, points where some
better-founded knowledge – not necessarily first-hand experience – of how
historians go about their research would have saved Jenkins from some
misunderstandings. But whether or not Jenkins is an historian, a ‘working
historian’, a ‘proper historian’ or whatever, misses the point. Do you need to be a painter to theorise about
aesthetics? Do you need to be a
practising scientist to think about the philosophy of science? If the issue is epistemology, the status of
historians’ truth-claims, of course you don’t need to be someone who actually
researches and publishes about the past.
Jenkins took his stand as a philosopher of history, not as an historian.
Another response to Jenkins was the glib one
often thrown at ‘postmodernists’, that goes: ‘aha: you say that all arguments
are positioned and their authority only relative, so your argument must be,
too!’ To which I assume that Jenkins
would reply ‘Erm, well, yes. That is
kind of the point.’ [Although it would be somewhat undermined by his later
claims to have ‘won’ the debate.] The
argument that there is no single objective
truth is not some version of the
Cretan (or Epimenides’] Paradox which is rendered false by being true or vice
versa: e.g. ‘all statements are lies’.
Critiques which started (or derived authority)
from the position of being ‘a working historian’, saying – in effect – that is
not how we do it would find it difficult to really land an effective blow as,
rightly or wrongly, they could themselves be dismissed as positioned,
self-interested defences of the status quo.
Thus attacks on the book from without – that is
to say critiques of the degree of fit between its arguments and the external
object of the practice of history – tended to be deflected and were
indecisive. We can more effectively
critique it from within, by studying its own arguments. Such a critique will reveal that it is a
patchwork of straw men, category errors, muddle and self-contradictions that actually
collapses from the inside. Furthermore,
its author seems not even to have understood the ideas of the authorities he
uses as the basis of his argument. In
short, the weaknesses of Re-Thinking
History lie not in its author not being ‘a proper (or ‘working’) historian’
or in it, as a book, supposedly not being good history but in the fact that it
is a shockingly bad piece of philosophy.
And I say that – let’s be clear – without (unlike Jenkins) claiming to be
any sort of trained or qualified philosopher.
There are valid points of critique within the
book. Historians are very often un-self-conscious
about what they do. And it is true that
a lot of history goes on being entirely unreflexive about what it does or
why. I would say (I’ve said it before)
that the discipline is complacent, and that it has no clear idea of what it is
there for. Books published in 2009 still claim that history is about a
verifiable search for truth, and so on.
These are all areas where History does need to be called out. In this sense Re-Thinking History and the similarly weak books that poured forth
in its wake have had a negative effect.
It remains on many historiography courses (like ours) but I suspect as a
kind of straw man, almost as a false-flag operation by traditionalist
positivist empiricists. It is so bad
that Evans (vel sim) can be deployed
as riding to the rescue of beleaguered Klio with all his easy humour, bonhomie
and good old common sense and all can go on as before. Phew! Hurrah! Re-Thinking History can be deployed as a smoke-screen to mask
rather better work (often pre-dating its publication) with better and more
germane critiques of the discipline. So
here is my critique, from a position of someone who has tried to write
self-reflexive history for over twenty years and who does believe that (more or
less) plausible, (more or less) patchy and (always) incomplete re-descriptions
of the past (as it impinged upon the people who produced its traces) are
possible but who also thinks that that is not ultimately the purpose of
history, who doesn’t think that ‘truth’ is (or can be) attainable and who
believes that history, narratives and so on are present constructions which are
not imposed by the past as it was
lived.[1] In other words, if anyone ought to have been
at least vaguely sympathetic to Jenkins, it was me, but I’m not.
So the point in this piece is to provide a brief
(roughly a page and a half) but fair summary of the text, which will save
students having to read it, and a detailed critique that will provide them with
the arguments they need to dismantle it on its own terms. But, that critique is not one which will let
traditional positive empiricism or current complacent historical practice off
the hook. If that looks like a rather
naughty way of undermining everyone’s seminars on ‘postmodern history’,[2]
that is because it is. If we drop Re-thinking History and the drivel it
inspired from our historiography courses we can forget the whole sorry episode
(or at least look back with embarrassment, roll our eyes and ask 'wtf?') and clear the way for some more rigorous questioning of, and self-reflexivity
about, the practice of history. Students:
read, use freely, and share widely!
The argument
First of all, though, a basic summary of the
argument. Within the constraints of
space, I will strive to make this a fair account.
In Chapter 1 (What History Is: pp.6-32),
J argues that History is not in itself The Past. As a result, it cannot provide an objective
account or recreation of the Past.
History is and can only be a discourse.
The historian’s view is conditioned by his/her time, social background,
institutional position. History is about
stories, but the past comes down to us as stories (p.11) so there is no way of
breaking out of a linguistic ‘bind’.
Language always supports multiple readings. It is always the historian’s personal
construct and the choices of topic, the kinds of evidence or the weight
assigned to different pieces of evidence is governed by this. History is given shape by the historian. So history is something that is made at
particular points in time and space and ‘imprisoned’ by that fact, rather than
something that is, and is reachable,
‘out there’. Consequently, all
histories are logically equivalent and one cannot be chosen over another on the
grounds of ‘correspondence’ with the objective truth of history. ‘Everything is relative (historicist)’
(p.30). The only way one history gains
ground over another is through the operation of power. Some discourses are dominant, others
subordinate. The truth claims of
academic history stem only from universities’ position as the guardians of
ideological control. Consensus only
occurs, says J, where dominant voices silence the others (p.23). All accounts are relative and problematic
(p.30). J argues that this is
empowering: history can be whatever you want.
But also, not being able to judge between histories on account of
‘correspondence’ is not entirely disabling: to understand different histories
you have to analyse the power relations in which they are enmeshed. You should ask not ‘what history is’ but ‘who history is for’.
Chapter 2 (On Some Questions and Some
Answers: pp.33-69)
In this chapter J discusses a number of key
issues in historical research, beginning with ‘truth’ (pp.34-39). In this section he argues essentially that
the desire for truth is a sort of basic psychological need and that we fear being
cut off from this. Using a discussion by
Foucault of a passage from Borges about a Chinese encyclopaedia with strange
categories,[3] he
suggests that we abandon what we think of as objective categories and embrace
uncertainty. The connection between word
and world is arbitrary he claims, using various thinkers including
Derrida. Truths are just ‘useful
fictions’ (p.39).
Moving onto the issue of facts (pp.40-44), J
says that Historians are concerned with more than discrete facts. They combine
them into arguments and think that the resultant arguments/interpretations are
true. This is because they think that
facts render arguments true/accurate. He
cites an article by Skidelsky claiming that interpretation only exists
peripherally around a core of accepted factual knowledge. J then points out that the ideas of ‘centres’
(like that factual core) cannot be seen as other than contingent, placed on a
sliding spectrum. J moves on to some
fairly unremarkable comments on ‘bias’ (pp.44-47), concluding that because they
see their centre position as objective, empiricists see bias as something only
affecting others, although they cannot be unbiased themselves.
On that basis J moves on to spend ten pages
(pp.47-57) on empathy, in which he decries the attempt to try and think
yourself into a past world in order to understand and explain. Philosophers like Wittgenstein have discussed
the problem of ‘other minds’ and how difficult it is to know how someone else
feels, so how much more difficult must this be with other periods and places? People in the past were different from us
(p.56). J argues that the attempt to
think yourself into the past is an attempt to colonise the past with modern
bourgeois, liberal, capitalist attitudes. So, as with the attempt to portray an
objective empiricist view as a neutral centre, this would seem to argue that
empathy is an attempt to show certain modes of thought as transcendent and
normal [at least that is how I understand the argument to go].
The discussion of sources (pp.57-53) develops
the main thrust of the argument to claim that evidence is only used to support
arguments, and so is not itself free from the discourse. The past happened and it leaves traces which
exist whether we look at/for them or not, but these traces only become evidence
when used in a positioned way to support an argument. Citing Roland Barthes
(pp.60-61), J states that what history is inevitably only a copy, in discourse,
of something that exists in the ‘Real’ but which cannot be captured
independently of discourse.
The section on causation essentially repeats
the point made already that issues like causation etc. cannot be a fact, or
‘true’, and argues that one interpretation only wins out over another because
of strategies of discourse of which academic historians are the guardians. In the conclusion to the chapter (pp.66-69),
J says he thinks that relativism and scepticism are a basis for social
toleration, using a lengthy quote from Hayden White to support the point.
Chapter 3: (Doing History in a post-modern
world: pp.70-84)
This chapter begins with J’s definition of
post-modernism. All the old gods, the
old certainties, have turned out to have feet of clay, to be temporary
fictions. He moves on to give a lengthy
(pp.72-75) [historical] account of how this happened. The ‘dominant underlying presuppositions of
‘our times’’ are provided by scepticism, he says, and bolsters this with a
discussion of Richard Rorty’s pragmatism.
The bonus, in J’s view, is that there are now myriad forms of history to
be used or abused and only some ill-defined figures [presumably academics in
old universities: it’s not clear] control the bounds of what is ‘proper
history’. Some ‘brilliant histories’ are
marginalised because they are unpalatable to these people (p.79). But new histories can still be found, that
have been hidden away. Our approach must
be to deconstruct and historicise historical accounts. ‘Always historicise’,
urges J (p.82). So the purpose of
history is to help us ‘understand the world we live in and the forms of history
that have both helped to produce it and which it has produced’ (p.83).
A Critique
Let us assume, on the basis of its essential
thesis, that the book’s claim to be taken seriously stands or falls on the
basis of the coherence of its argument.
Critique based upon its degree of ‘fit’ with an external reality (‘how
the practice of history is’) can be shrugged off according to the book’s points
about either the ‘situated-ness’ of the critique or the vested power-interests
of the critic (or MRDA[4]:
‘[you] would [say that] wouldn’t [you]’).
The ‘correctness’ or otherwise of the use of authorities is a similarly
insecure point from which to critique the book, given the argument made
(rightly or wrongly) about the infinite readings of text. Any such criticisms have to be secondary.
A: Straw Men?
In some ways this is a minor point but it is
worth asking yourself, as reader, how convinced you are about the reality of
the ostensible target of Re-Thinking
History. How many actual historians
are cited? And how recent are they? E.H. Carr and Geoffrey Elton are frequently
cited: their books on what history is/was were twenty-four to twenty-seven
years old when Re-Thinking History
was published. Arthur Marwick’s was
twenty-one and Thompson’s The Poverty of
Theory a mere whipper-snapper of a book at only thirteen years old. A trawl through the footnotes provides very
few traces of any engagement with (then) recent thinking by historians (say,
less than ten years old in 1991). Is J
setting up a straw man to knock the stuffing out of just for his own
self-aggrandizement as, one might suspect, might be the book’s own question
turned on itself? The point is that the
book does not make the case very convincingly that it is engaging with a
current topic/debate.[5]
Maybe it does; maybe it doesn’t. The text itself leaves you with room for
serious doubt.
B: Category errors
The next heading under which I want
to group my critical points concerns areas where it is simply not clear what J
is actually talking about, as the target of his critique seems to slide about
between analytically different things, suggesting, at best, some pretty muddled
thinking.
Fact/interpretation/truth
J is frequently unclear when it comes to
discussing the related network of concepts, truth/fact/interpretation. See pp.14-15, where J slides from a
discussion of events to one of hypotheses and interpretation. At the top of p.14 he argues that a historical
account cannot be checked against the past but only against other
accounts. And yet later (p.40) he is
happy enough that events – ‘discrete facts’ (how discrete if, as p.14, already
enmeshed in discourse as ‘accounts’?) – exist.
Later still (p.60) he says that traces of the past exist whether or not
we look at them (and so are, equally, fundamentally independent of modern
constructs). Thus Jenkins is happy to
accept the independent existence of traces of the past and the possibility of
establishing ‘discrete facts’ (which surely would be the basis of even the most
traditional historical research), yet he seems to want us to believe that we
cannot check a historian’s account against anything other than other historians’
accounts (p.14).[6] He does this essentially by a sleight of hand
that puts interpretation and hypothesis in a supposedly-claimed category of
fact/truth. Of course, interpretation,
hypothesis and causation cannot lie in the realms of fact or of truth/falsehood. But interpretation and hypothesis can be
judged (not as true/false but as more or less plausible) according to their
degree of fit with J’s own categories of ‘discrete fact’ and ‘trace’. This is a more serious flaw than simply
setting up a straw man. All this
relates to what ‘truth’ it might be that J is discussing. Is it a ‘true picture’, i.e. this did or did
not happen to these/those people in this/that order? Or is it some sort of more transcendent order
of truth?
Here, J is not alone as this is a problem that
bedevils discussions of historical truth.
It is this muddle that allows people to argue that so-called
postmodernism in history permits, in and of itself, holocaust denial. No philosopher of whom I am aware, amongst
those grouped (usually wrongly) under the heading of postmodernist – and
especially not Derrida – would deny that the holocaust happened, or that it and
its details are empirically true and indeed verifiable via the sorts of
procedures used by, e.g., Deborah Lipstadt or Richard Evans. But equally no
historian would argue that there is a
single true story of the holocaust.
And what is the truth of the
holocaust beyond that (or beyond the obvious point that it was a very Bad
Thing)? That is the level of truth that
most of those philosophers are dealing with if and when they say that truth is
unreachable.
Essentially J’s argument is based upon his own
assumption that interpretations can - ideally
- be true. His argument for the
‘logical’ (rarely has the word logical been used so frequently and with so
little irony) relativism of history (contra,
e.g. Geoffrey Elton) is essentially that ‘true’ explanations of the past cannot
be reached. Put another way, History =
X; therefore, if X is impossible, History is also impossible. But, if you don’t agree that History is X in
the first place (because, say, you never thought that history was about [or
capable of] establishing true/false distinctions in interpretation/hypothesis/causation),
then the question of the possibility/impossibility of History remains
open. Ultimately, J’s argument is only
possible because he has accepted (and shares) Elton’s ideal of what history is; they just differ on whether that ideal is
attainable (though see below). He
bolsters his argument only with a quote by Robert Skidelsky in a piece in the TES, which raises a series of further
questions. Essentially, what J comes close (on p.13) to realising but
ultimately fails to grasp is that what he sees as history's impossibility is
its very condition of possibility in the first place.
Evidence/source/trace
A similar and related problem arises in J’s
discussion of the concepts evidence/source/trace. Exactly what is he talking about when he
discusses the material with which historians work? Early in the book, he says that the evidence
for the past comes always-already in the form of stories. But is that always the case? He says that the
past leaves traces (as we have seen) which can be left undiscovered. If that is so, how (at least on the first
occasion it is encountered and used) can such a trace come ready-made in a
story? The trace/evidence distinction
(between traces of the past and evidence used in support of an argument) is
well made but is only, to all intents and purposes, a slight reworking of
Carr’s fact/evidence distinction from 1964.
But note how the subject of the discussion slides about between the
categories of trace and evidence.
Sometimes, in other words, he is treating ‘traces’ as ‘evidence’ and
vice versa.
C: Confusion
What kind of history?
Ask yourself what sort of history J thinks he
is talking about in his critique. Does
he know? I do not mean the difference
between a right-wing imperialist, a socialist, a feminist or a postcolonial
history of the same events (say the Great Bengal Famine of the 1940s), but the
different thematic varieties of history.
It seems to me from the text that J is envisaging narrative political
history alone as constituting the ‘history’ that he is putatively
re-thinking. But how would the same
critiques apply to other types of history (intellectual history, say, or the
history of mentalities, both of which relate to my meta-critique, E, below)?
Discourse, Power and Relativism
J seems to me to be pretty crucially muddled
about discourse and the operation of power.
For now we must leave aside the issue of whether that is how things work
in practice (for what it's worth, I think J’s view is so unidimensional as to
be little more than caricature, but we can bracket that). How well does the concept work within his argument?
I am not sure. J seems to want to
believe that you can have any history you like (p.13) and that any historian’s
historical work represents, and is dependent upon, personal constructs
(pp.14-15). All historical accounts are
‘imprisoned in time and space’ (p.19). But
he simultaneously wants history to be locked into a constructed discourse
(p.11). It is the discourse, formed over
time, that makes you, qua historian, see
and read the traces of the past in a specific way. Discourses are always on the move (ibid).
But in that case it is pretty unclear what concept of discourse J is
using (from the text it appears to be Foucault’s but we have to bracket whether
or not that concept seems properly to be employed). How does discourse structure history (and how
is history a discourse) if history can be so individual that anyone can make of
it what they want? This would seem to
make history not a discourse – a historically-contingent
episteme, imprisoning the values and
terms of discussion – so much as a discussion,
structured around and between kaleidoscopic arrangements of situational,
contingent, political alliances of particular individuals, each with their own
separately-, individually-produced ideas of history. In that sort of
formulation the ideas of discourse and ‘discursive formation’ are pretty much
evacuated of any analytical value. What sort of analytically-meaningful discourse,
in any case, (you might ask) is so fragile that one professor (J) can come
along and say “hey, everyone, do your own thing! Break out of the discourse!”...?
[You might also wonder how this essentially
free market consumer-choice model of what history can be – or the ‘liberation’
he sees as being represented by free market choice of histories – fits with J’s
posturing about being on the Left and his critique of empathy on the basis that
it supposedly normalises free market liberal capitalist thinking, but I
digress.]
Related to this is J’s muddled thinking about
the operation of power within historical debate. Generally, J sees this as the
guardians of the dominant discourse (whatever that may be: see above), who he
appears to think (pp.65-66) are ‘university historians’ (all of whom, for some
reason, appear amazingly to have agreed on what history is and how it is to be
done/used, even though it can be anything,[7]
so that one quote from Skidelsky suffices to illustrate what university
historians all think). These people keep
unpalatable or unconventional histories/historians in their place (p.23; p.79). J, however, thinks that his relativism (which
he bases on his claim that there are no value-free facts in history, which he
later contradicts, as above) is ‘politically enabling’ as it allows millions of
different histories to flourish, breaking out of the confines of this elitist
domination. This is where he can indeed
be attacked for enabling far right-wing, pro-Nazi, holocaust-denying history.
For how, within his model, does one tackle such history if all histories are
equally ‘positioned’ and ‘logically’ epistemologically equal? The only way within his argument (and this is
where things get ironic) would be on the basis of de facto power-operations, where the guardians of the discourse,
the professors (the Richard Evanses and Deborah Lipstadts) stamp down on the
Nazis, not on the basis of greater and more sophisticated fit between
interpretation and the traces of the past but by sole virtue of their greater academic/cultural
capital.[8] If J supports the political Left then he
would have to welcome such an operation of power, which his whole book is
supposed to be criticising and trying to counter…. The problem is that J’s type
of relativism is in fact entirely politically disabling. It provides no basis at all on which to challenge
dominant views.
D: Self-Contradiction
There are some serious points at which J
contradicts himself. One is in his
discussion of empathy. As noted J wants to suggest that other minds cannot be
entered into. To be crude, the other
minds argument in philosophy asks questions like ‘how do you know that the
colour I call ‘red’ is the same as the colour you perceive as red? Or, ‘if I stick my hand in some boiling water
and scream, how do you know that I am feeling what you would think was pain?’
‘If I see a crocodile and run away screaming, is it because I am experiencing
what you would call fear?’ And so on. [It is an essentially unsurmountable
issue that the whole ‘History of the Emotions’ fad conveniently agrees to
ignore.] What J seems not to realise, though, is that you can’t somehow
ring-fence that problem. Once you have
let it out of the bag, you have no more logical basis for stating that past
minds were different from ‘ours’ than for saying that they were just like ours
and are entirely reachable on the basis of the statements they left behind. If you think past minds and ideas can’t be
grasped then you simply can't know whether they were the same or different and
so the argument that they can be
grasped proceeds on the same basis as the belief that they can’t, in other words on the basis of faith alone. What's
more, the fact that Wittgenstein and co said you could not be sure that you know, is not a basis for
saying (as does J) that you can’t
know.
More to the point, once one gets to pp.52-53,
we find J citing Collingwood and Steiner to support an argument that past
cultures were different. But on what
basis can such a judgement be made (and its truth-claim be accepted), other
than on the basis of the standard historical mode of enquiry and a degree of
argument-source/trace fit that J is allegedly re-thinking? On p.54, furthermore, J cites J.S. Mill and
his idea of freedom. Here, then, J feels
sufficiently confident of having been able to get into Mill’s mind, via his
texts, as to be able to redescribe what Mill thought about freedom, in spite of
his belief (‘I think’, p.56) that past people were ‘very different from us in
the meanings they gave their world’ (p.56).
At what point, one might ask J, does he think the past inhabited by ‘past
people’ begins… Before John Stuart Mill, evidently. To restate my point, if you
think that you can use Mill’s writings to redescribe his views of the world
that impinged upon him, and identify differences from modern ideas, then you
can logically do the same to find areas of similarity.
This applies to J’s general appeals to
authority. Throughout the book he
appeals to other commentators on modern academic practice, sometimes
historical, more often not, as furnishing a basis and support for his
critique. But here, quite apart from
asking what authority these thinkers can carry according to the terms of his
argument and thus why we have to take their views seriously (are they somehow
less ‘positioned’ and imprisoned in language/discourse than historians?), we
can also ask how he can tell from their writings that what they are talking
about is what he understands them to be talking about. This is where the ‘other minds’ problematic
won’t go back into the bottle once you have let it out. What basis does J have for understanding and
agreeing with their account of the world other than a kind of recognition and
empathy? Why is Terry Eagleton’s mind
more accessible to others, via his texts, than, say, a Roman centurion’s? If the answer is that Eagleton and J inhabit
the same general cultural milieu or (in Foucauldian terms) episteme then where
does that cultural milieu begin and end?
And how can one know other than via an essentially historical enquiry?
[This, incidentally, is where it becomes more
than a tad sticky to use Foucault, whose work (whatever you think of it)
essentially took the form of historical enquiry predicated on the ability to be
able to describe past modes of thought, ideas, techniques of the self, and so
on, and changes therein, as a basis for an argument rejecting the possibility
of doing any of those things.]
E: The meta-critique: historicising
history
And so we arrive at the most significant
problem that besets Re-thinking History
and which, more than anything else, tears it apart from within. As we have
seen, J’s key argument is that all historical works are ideologically situated
(fair enough). They cannot be judged
better or worse according to their fit with an external past reality (we have
seen there are problems within his argument there but let us continue) so we
can only arrive at the ultimate goal of the book – to understand the world
through the histories it has produced – via the analysis of the power-relations
involved in the production of different histories, at their various ideological[9]
or discursive situations. All being
products of a time and place, his injunction, as we have seen, is ‘always
historicise’ (p.82). And there: boom! The whole argument of the book implodes. For
how does one go about historicising a text and its author, if not by precisely
the sort of historical methodology he wants to reject? How does one situate a
book’s author other than by finding out about him/her from the evidence of her/his
texts or from other sources of information (the epistemological status of which
is exactly the same as that of
historical sources)? How does one
situate a historical author within a socio-economic structure other than
through a fundamentally historical process of enquiry, by analysing sources of information
and putting them together to make up some sort of general picture? Is this any more possible for modern writers
than for people writing in the tenth century?
Probably, but only because we have more data and the gaps in the picture
or the story might be smaller or less problematic, but does anyone want to
suggest that the picture thus presented of current society and power-structures
is going to be any less problematic, any less ‘situated’, any less the product
of our discursive formation than the picture we might put together of
twelfth-century society, or than the pictures of their world put together by
twelfth-century people? Can my picture
of the world in 2016 and how and why it works the way it does, and thus my
argument about where Historian X’s writing ‘is coming from’ and why (my
historicising of Historian X), be judged better or worse than anyone else’s on
anything other than a degree of fit with the evidence produced by or about the
world and Historian X? If it can't, then basically I cannot analyse the power
structures or discourse producing/produced by Historian X and his/her works?
And if I cannot do that (as logically
J’s argument suggests I can’t) then I cannot obey his injunction always to
historicise. Or, alternatively, if I can do that, then there is no logical reason why I cannot do the same
(albeit, to various degrees, to patchier effect) with, say Matthew Paris, or
Herodotus, or Gregory of Tours, or Jules Michelet, or Edward Gibbon, or the
person who wrote an early Frankish charter or a diarist during the Hamburg
cholera outbreak. Note though, that I
have not taken J’s injunction to historicise him; I have simply analysed the
coherence of his text, not least because, as I said at the start, attempts to
historicise him have ironically been rejected as the simple products of the
critics’ positioning (which again turns the book’s argument inside-out, if you accept
its claim that we can meaningfully evaluate historians’ accounts, and
understand the world, on the basis of historicising their authors). Further, if one accepts that historians are
imprisoned in language then historicising implies a world outside language (yet
a third self-contradiction inherent in the injunction).
If the argument on pp.1-82 (leaving aside the
earlier reference to historicising on p.30) is correct, historicising is
impossible and the injunction on p.82 is entirely fatuous and, if the instruction
to ‘always historicise’ is to be taken seriously, then the book’s entire argument
up to p.82 is pointless. So we must
conclude that Re-thinking History is,
after all, a Cretan Paradox, and on a grand scale. If we could be sure that it was deliberate it
would be a literary achievement worthy of considerable respect and/or a hoax
which worked better than J could have ever have imagined. Too well, perhaps, as J has been compelled to
maintain the pretence, keep playing the role, for the subsequent
quarter-century.
My conclusion[10],
then, is that this is a book which is entirely incoherent and
self-contradictory. The proposal it
makes for dealing with the problems of historical accounts flatly (and
completely) contradicts its own analysis of those problems. You have to ask why a book this bad (as
noted, to the extent of being a 90-page paradox) not only gets a place on reading
lists (outside a course on ‘how not to argue’), let alone should still be in
print in revised editions, having even generated its own literature. Ironically, the most convincing argument in
support of J’s claim for the theoretical/philosophical impoverishment of the historical
discipline is the fact that his book was not trashed decisively as soon as it
came out.
----
Notes
[1]
In other words, we can produce
all kinds of stories about the past that are entirely consistent with its
traces and which fairly re-describe a past as experienced by actual people –
and that matters – but those stories not only do not equal an object history (or The Past) and they were almost
certainly not experienced as those stories at
the time. The stories, the linkages
of events, the causation and the interpretations are ours, imprisoned in
language, sometimes (perhaps usually) unconsciously. Thus no one single story or account is or can
be imposed by the past itself. Which is
‘the true story’? Provided they fit the available
traces of the past, all of them. Or none.
[2]
Theorists in other humanities
have tended to look a bit askance at references to ‘postmodern’ historians, as
postmodernism is a moment, not a movement, and most of the philosophers claimed
to underpin it where quite clear about not being postmodernists (e.g. ‘a term I
am on record … as disapproving for both philosophical and sociological reasons’
– Simon Critchley, Very Little … Almost
Nothing, p.xxvii). In a sense it is
about as meaningful as calling Descartes a ‘Seventeenth-Centuryist’
philosopher. Mostly ‘postmodernist’ is,
in Critchley’s term, a traditionalist’s bogeyman (I have been accused of it
often enough even though I reject the category), an empty catch-all for ‘things
I don’t want to have to think about’.
[3]
Entertainingly (or
ironically), J seems not to realise that the work by Borges cited by Foucault
was a work of fiction.
[4] Mandy Rice Davies Applies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandy_Rice-Davies#.22He_would.2C_wouldn.27t_he.3F.22
[5]
The defence, I assume, would
be that the fact that the book caused a furore amongst historians proves that
it was dealing with a hot topic. Maybe
so. But if I wrote a book which tore
into archaeology on the basis of archaeological thinking and practice from the
‘sixties or ‘seventies, arguing that one ought to be entirely skeptical of
anything that archaeologists said, or their ability to say ‘reliable’ things
about the past, and that any reading of archaeology was ‘logically’ as good as
any other, and this books sold thousands of copies and made a big splash, I
think it would be fairly safe to assume that it too would cause a furore. It’s the first (f)law of citation indices: if
you want to get lots of citations write something terrible. In any case, this critique takes the text
entirely on its own terms and for the most part eschews external referents.
[6]
Ask yourself on what basis J
claims to be able to judge the alleged brilliance of the ‘brilliant’ works of
history supposedly silenced by the dominant discourse. A distinction between an
object past and historians’ writings is also implied in the phrase ‘the past
can sustain countless narratives’ (p.22).
[7]
Anyone who has ever attended a
university history departmental meeting will be especially interested by the
idea that academic historians can agree on any important (or even unimportant)
topic with anything like unanimity, but I digress again.
[8]
In any case, the really tricky
issue for non-relativist, politically-engaged historians to confront is not what one does with holocaust-deniers,
which easy enough, so much as how one deals, within historical
practice, with holocaust-approvers.
[9]
I’m not, incidentally, always
clear from the text on how J understands ideology (according to Terry Eagleton
seems to the only answer it provides), but there we are.
[10]
I had initially thought of
discussing a range of other problems, external to the text itself, such as
whether the ideas of Foucault, Derrida etc. are being used in any way ‘canonically’
or, if they are, whether they support the argument being made, or are
consistent with each other, or whether the analysis of historical discourse and
its university-based ‘guardians’ stacks up, and so on, but in the end it seemed
unnecessary. Suffice it to say that they
are there.
