Futures for the Past

Kalle Pihlainen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351601979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Faced with the challenge of new ideological emphases and subjects of study, academic history has undergone significant changes in its contents in the past half-century. Simultaneously, pressures to change have been directed at its form, particularly in the shape of calls for more socially engaged and up-to-date modes of presentation. The demand for 'history' in this more existential sense is equally evidenced by the rise of practical and popular uses of the past outside academic history writing. Reflecting on these shifts in the broader history culture, this collection explores the entanglements and opportunities of history and historians today, moving between questions of social and institutional self-justification, desires relating to identity and self-understanding as well as the consumption and entertainment needs of audiences. The authors find inspiration in varied traditions and media ranging from ancient philosophy and classic history writing to reality TV and Twitter. In doing so, they also present exciting futures for where history may yet go. This book was originally published as a special issue of Rethinking History.

Narrativity and dialectics revisited

Hans Kellner

ABSTRACT

The future of historical theory would benefit from a careful revisitation of the theoretical proposals of the last 50 years, with the goal of finding neglected notions which may prove of theoretical value. Hayden White’s unique version of dialectics is such a notion. Dialectics expresses an awareness of the role of language in the systematic comprehension of reality by following a sequence of apprehensions: thus, a ‘dialectical narrativity’. An analysis of an episode in Jules Michelet’s medieval history suggests that dialectical narrativity was immanent in his presentation of historical understanding.

In 1989 Frank Ankersmit described the dilemma of the contemporary moment – that is, of postmodernism – as the massive over-production of things, particularly of historical writing. He spoke in passionate terms of the ‘intellectual alcoholism’ that drives the ‘flood of historical literature’ and the despondency it brings about. Every new book or article on a topic ‘always pretends to be the very last drink’ (Ankersmit 1989, 163). His proposed regime was to renounce the bottle and contemplate its figural accomplishments.

The wild, greedy and uncontrolled digging into the past, inspired by the desire to discover a past reality and reconstruct it scientifically, is no longer the historian’s unquestioned task. We would do better to examine the result of a hundred and fifty years’ digging more attentively and ask ourselves more often what all this adds up to (Ankersmit 1989, 179).

Ankersmit’s article prompted controversy, and led the journal History and Theory to publish a response for the first time, a response to which Ankersmit reacted effectively. I call attention to this controversy not to recommend the cessation of historical or sociological or philosophical researches, for, after all, Ankersmit’s complaint and proposal are not limited to history. The mechanisms of historical research are solid and self-sustaining, so the likelihood of halting them is about as likely as a drinker quitting. Nevertheless, this essay will take seriously his call and will revisit, unashamedly, unfashionable and out-of-date ideas, to see whether they have anything to offer today.

The ideas to which I refer come from the 1970s when Hayden White began his own great project of reading with Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. A great deal has changed in 40 years, particularly in the field once known as philosophy of history and now called theory of history. Generations of scholars have brought the field to life, new journals have joined the older ones, some barriers between the disciplines have been breached. Students today face different challenges. What has not changed is White’s ability to make each student feel that a future can be his or hers if one follows one’s own singular path. And that that future matters, that the humanities matter, and that they, the young, should share his utopian hope for the future and the corresponding message that realism can be entirely unrealistic. Now, for him, the study of history and of discourse in general, is, above all, pedagogical. Teaching has become the centre of this great scholar’s world, not in the classroom as much as by exhortation. This, perhaps, explains his self-conscious turn to the practical uses of the past, a usable sense of things long scorned by the seekers of realistic – that is, academic – knowledge for its own sake. So White’s latest book, called The Practical Past, has recently appeared, making seven different decades in which Hayden White has published scholarly work.

Still, one wants to ask, what is White exhorting? It isn’t tropes, figures, narrativity, the sublime, middle voice, the modernist event or any of the other concepts he may have devised, appropriated, or expounded over six decades, although they all continue to play a role in his work. What Hayden White has given us all, young and old, historians, critics, philosophers, religious scholars, and on and on, is a sense of possibility. This is clearly what the young people see in him, a validation of who they are and what they want, even as confused and unformed as that may be. The young learn from White that much is possible, that their professors do not have the answers, that they must find their own path. And so, they choose as their intellectual ancestor Hayden White, just as the tribes of Northern Europe exchanged their Roman ancestry for Christianity, as he describes it in his essay ‘What Is a Historical System?’ (White 2010, 130–132)

In a late essay titled ‘Hayden White and Me: Two Systems of Philosophy of History’, the philosopher Arthur Danto described their reciprocal relationships with narrative:

What is striking about the two of us is that we both made narrative a central concept in our thought and writing. In both our cases, though certainly in mine, I attribute this to Bossenbrook. Hayden’s masterpiece, Metahistory, published in 1973, more or less took narrative as given, the question being what the historian was to do with his or her narrative. In effect, he was interested in what one might call the rhetoric of narration. (Danto 2013, 110–111)

Although it is not possible to precisely specify the influence of their renowned teacher at Wayne State University, William J. Bossenbrook, on their later work, it seems clear to me, after revisiting the book, that Danto is mistaken in describing the role of narrative in Metahistory. There are, to be sure, no entries in the index for narrative, nor is narrative per se problematized, although ‘historical narrative’, and ‘emplotment’ have their places, and references to narration are found under various writers, such as Hegel, Marx and Burckhardt. Nor, for that matter, is rhetoric a focus of Metahistory, which is quite explicitly and accurately a ‘poetics’ of historical discourse. Nor, although The Rhetoric of Fiction had been published in 1961, does White make mention of Wayne Booth, or such Boothian notions as ‘postulated readers’ or ‘implied authors’. Nor, again, are there ‘hetero-diegetic’ narrators, although Gerard Genette had published all three of the Figures by 1970. White’s literary guide, rather, was Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (a book only 16 years old in 1973), in which writers are presumed to write rather than imply, and works are works, and no nonsense. Indeed, in one of the extremely long and rare footnotes in Metahistory, White almost apologizes for his use of Frye’s categories. He writes:

But Frye’s analysis of the principal forms of mythic and fabulous literature serves very well for the explication of the simple forms of emplotment met with in such ‘restricted’ art forms as historiography. Historical ‘stories’ tend to fall into the categories elaborated by Frye precisely because the historian is inclined to resist construction of the complex peripeteias which are the novelist’s and the dramatist’s stock in trade. Precisely because the historian is not (or claims not to be) telling the story ‘for its own sake’, he is inclined to emplot his stories in the most conventional forms – as fairy tale or detective story on the one hand, as Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, or Satire on the other. (White 1973, 86)

This recognition that his tools were rough and ready in the literary sense may be White’s signal that he is moving in a different direction from the ordinary literary scholar, but it is clearly not an admission that he is taking narrative for granted. It is interesting that in his entry on ‘Emplotment’ in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, White notes that it is a specifically historiographical process; and, as such, it is a simple, conventional matter, dealing with simple, conventional narratives. Historical narratives would seem to offer a laboratory situation for probing deeper issues of narrativity, unbothered by the fanciful distractions of Henry James or Thomas Pynchon. A valuable thing, historical narrative!

White’s work from the 1970s and 1980s has seemingly been long surpassed by himself, and even perhaps forgotten. Yet it was, at one time, the basis for his reputation as a theorist. And, in an attempt to re-frame these notions for reconsideration, I shall give a name to this conceptual work – ‘dialectical narrativity’. Unlike the reading protocols recently discussed in ‘Reading Hayden White Reading’, a discussion that emphasized his non-theoretical encounter with his texts, this essay will look at the dialectical method in his work and ask what remains of that method (Kellner 2014).

First, let me note that White’s version of dialectics is a flexible and unique one and that it is an important part of his mental toolbox. Dialectics is so protean a term that even the venerable Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that its ‘great variety of meanings’ have in common only ‘a method of seeking and sometimes arriving at the truth by reasoning’, although the author immediately points out that this definition is ‘so vague as to be valueless’. And only rarely does White explicitly address dialectics and explain his use of the term. Perhaps the best example of White’s comments on dialectic are to be found in the following quotations. Both of them focus on the inadequacy of language to the reality which it purports to represent, and both identify dialectic as the formalization of this awareness of the inadequacy of language. The first quotation deals with one of White’s touchstones throughout his intellectual career, Giambattista Vico:

As a theory of the historical development of human nature from bestiality to civilization, The New Science asserts a strict analogy between the dynamics of metaphorical transformations in language and the transformations of both consciousness and society. This is Vico’s dialectic, which is not a dialectic of the syllogism (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) but rather the dialectic of the exchange between language and the reality it seeks to contain. Put most simply, the analogy states the following generic similarities between transitions in societies and the tropological transformations of speech. (White 1978, 209)

The dialectic of the syllogism, the dialectic that White rejects, is a reassuring, even comic, tale of tension and resolution. It concludes in a comfortable, synthetic, place, asking ‘why can’t we just get along?’ The inadequacies of both thesis and antithesis, their ‘always-not-quiteness’, is resolved in a satisfactory way, synthetically. To be sure, the synthesis, at least in a Hegelian system, may itself become the thesis for a new dialectical process of conflict, but within the triad itself balance is maintained. Vico’s dialectic is explicitly different. For one thing, it replaces the customary and comfortable Aristotelian threes with a different set of conceptual tools, a foursome. Like a table, a three-legged version is stable, while adding the fourth leg may create a wobble. Above all, when the four-legged dialectical process concludes, it is rather pointedly inconclusive, because of the nature of its final point which is not synthesis but irony. This is the case because irony is not merely the last stop on the itinerary of the four tropes, the stop that signals the failure of the journey itself, but also a double-edged, morphing conceptualization that stands back and oversees the whole process – although in such a way as to prompt a continuation of movement, recursively. That is to say, via ricorso. In the end is a new beginning.

This is what White means by dialectic, but there is another aspect to his definition. Dialectic formalizes what must be central to philosophy, namely the position of language in grasping the world, or, rather, in failing to grasp the world. When White calls someone a dialectician, he means someone who puts language at the centre of things:

In my view, it is no accident that the outstanding philosophers of history of the nineteenth century were, with the possible exception of Marx, quintessentially philosophers of language. Nor is it an accident that Hegel, Nietzsche, and Croce were all dialecticians. For, in my view, dialectic is nothing but a formalization of an insight into the tropological nature of all the forms of discourse which are not formally committed to the articulation of a world view within the confines of a single modality of linguistic usage – as the natural sciences became after their commitment to Metonymical usage in the seventeenth century. (White 1973, 428)

It should be noted that White attempted to abandon the word dialectical in favour of a word of his own fashioning: ‘diatactical’. What was wrong with the term dialectics, he noted, was the frequent misunderstanding of it and its connection with thinkers and contexts that impeded understanding of his own ideas (White 1978, 4). I continue to use the term dialectics, because the term diataxis was not widely taken up, and White himself seems not to have followed through with it, yet considering the two terms allows us to contrast them in an interesting way. The terms taxis and lexis, which are the roots of diataxis and dialectic, are the second and third canons of classical rhetoric. They are generally translated as ‘arrangement’ and ‘style’ respectively. And it is both of these meanings that White invokes when he speaks of either dialectics or diataxis. The lexis of dialectic is verbal, while the taxis of diataxis is spatial. Taxis denotes movement (military manoeuvers, for example, are tactical), and so, when White writes that what is dialectical in Marx is ‘the mode of transition from one form of publicly sanctioned consciousness to another’, (White 1973, 305) and that these forms of consciousness are fundamentally linguistic, he is conflating lexis and taxis in a remarkable way. The elements of language are not synchronically direct, but rather themselves in motion. They entail a plot – a simple one, to be sure – but nevertheless of enormous import. This plot is movement – diataxis, if you will – through the various levels of comprehension. It is what I am calling dialectical narrativity.

Now, narrativity is, like dialectics, a term that covers a lot of ground; so that even if it is not quite ‘essentially contested’ one should make a stab at clarifying its use. The narrativity I am calling dialectical is, to borrow a sweeping phrase from Greimas, ‘le principe organisateur de tout discours’ (Greimas and Courtés 1979, 249). It is precisely the ‘deep structure’ that White identified with the master tropes. Thus, for Greimas, ‘narrativity is situated and organized prior to its manifestation. A common semiotic level is thus distinct from the linguistic level and is logically prior to it, whatever the language chosen for the manifestation’ (Greimas [1969] 1977, 23). It is this notion of narrativity as ‘organized prior to its manifestation’ that interests me, because it is precisely the dialectical narrativity that White would describe, again and again. By way of illustration, I would like to revisit several of White’s readings, each of them a familiar touchstone of his work. One is a tight-focus look at a passage by Proust, another a broader analysis of a historical argument by E. P. Thompson, and the third a ‘decoding’ of Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses. In each case, we see ‘dialectical narrativity’ in play.

The passage from Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrah is the occasion for White’s essay (found in Figural Realism) ‘Narrative, Description, and Tropology in Proust’ that appeared in Poetics Today in 1988. It describes the narrator’s pause before a garden statue by Hubert Robert. This passage had been quoted in full also in Genette’s Figures III (1972), and White’s essay – at least in my reading – is a response. Genette had used the passage to demonstrate how Proustian description, like Flaubert but unlike Balzac or Stendhal, follows the temporal experience of the character, including pauses that become occasions for extended discourse. He – Genette – writes:

In fact, Proustian ‘description’ is less a description of the object contemplated than it is a narrative and analysis of the perceptual activity of the character contemplating: of his impressions, progressive discoveries, shifts in distance and perspective, errors and corrections, enthusiasms or disappointments, etc. A contemplation highly active in truth, and containing ‘a whole story’. This story is what Proustian description recounts. (Genette 1980, 102)

Having established this, Genette quotes the passage as illustration, with no further discussion beyond a few italicized words. White, on the other hand, probes the passage as fully as the patience of his reader will allow. First, he notes the view of the fountain from afar, impressionistic and invoking imagined analogies, like the ‘panache pâle et frémissant’. From this metaphoric apprehension, the passage abruptly focuses more closely and metonymically, revealing that the solidity of the spray seen at a distance is in fact a scattered, broken discontinuity (White 1999, 133). From there, Marcel reveals the ‘structural secret’ of the fountain’s spray in synecdochic language, difficult to follow because it is almost devoid of figuration and deals with the fountain itself rather than any impression of it. The last view is utterly different from the first three. It posits no speaker, but rather a ‘spectacle as chaotic and senseless as the stream of life of which it is an image’ (White 1999, 135). The adequacy of language – figuration itself – is here ironically challenged. White proceeds to place the entire fountain scene into a series of four descriptive segments – interpreting male homosexuals, social hangers-on, and aristocrats – that follow, taken as a whole, the same pattern. This in order to make his over-arching point: that ‘interpretive discourse’ has a narrativity in its ‘principles of configuration’ (taken from Ricoeur).

In other words, interpreti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Futures for the past (‘This is a stub’)
• 1 Narrativity and dialectics revisited
• 2 Cognitive inadequacy: history and the technocratic management of an artificial world
• 3 Tales of pastness and contemporaneity: on the politics of time in history and anthropology
• 4 Michael Oakeshott and Hayden White on the practical and the historical past
• 5 Hayden White and Joan W. Scott’s feminist history: the practical past, the political present and an open future
• 6 The distinction of history: on valuing the insularity of the historical past
• 7 The Finnish Twitter war: the Winter War experienced through the #sota39 project and its implications for historiography Ilkka Lähteenmäki and Tatu Virta
• 8 A history didactic experiment: the TV series Anno in a dramatist perspective
• Index