On 'What Is History?'

From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White

Keith Jenkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415097253
• eBook ISBN: 9781134861736
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

On `What is History?' provides a student introduction to contemporary historiographical debates.
Carr and Elton are still the starting point for the vast majority of introductory courses on the nature of history. Building on his highly successful Rethinking History, Keith Jenkins explores in greater detail the influence of these key figures. He argues that historians need to move beyond their `modernist' thinking and embrace the postmodern-type approaches of thinkers such as Richard Rorty and Hayden White.
Through its radical critique of Carr and Elton and its championing of Rorty and White, On `What is History'? represents a significant development for introductory studies on the nature of history.

Chapter 1
History today

No discourse—and therefore no contribution to, and/or comment on, aspects of an existing discourse—is of ‘a natural kind’. You cannot find a historical or geographical or scientific or literary discourse just out there, just growing wild. Discourses are cultural, cultivated, fabricated and thus ultimately arbitrary, ways of carving up what comes to constitute their ‘field’, so that like any approach in any other discursive practice an introductory discussion about ‘history today’ could begin from innumerable starting points and be developed in various ways: in these matters one always has to make a start (and come to an end) somewhere. Accordingly, what follows is just my own way of introducing a little of what I think is going on in debates about history today, just one way of trying to locate Carr, Elton, Rorty and White in relation to them, and just one way of helping me to reach the conclusion I want to reach and which I hope might appear plausible; namely, that Carr and Elton, unlike Rorty and White, are, in their modernisms, not much to the point when now discussing the question of ‘what is history?’

My approach has four parts. First, in Section One of this chapter, an examination of how aspects of history are now being considered and problematised from textualist and ‘postist’ viewpoints will be carried out. To get into this area I start from the premise that there is a radical distinction to be drawn between ‘the past’ and ‘history’, going on to look at how this distinction has been ‘worked’ by three historians/theorists (Tony Bennett, F.R.Ankersmit and Hayden White himself) so as to arrive at some early and general understanding of what history today arguably is. Second, I look at just four ‘representative’ implications for ‘traditional’ histories as occasioned by such workings of the pasthistory distinction; implications involving the areas of ideology, historicism, historical truth and empiricism. Third, because these (and similar) implications have given rise to understandable resistances from traditional historians right across the intellectual and ideological spectrum, I give some indication of the sorts of debates that are currently taking place with regard to the impact of such textualist/postist discourses and my own position in relation to them so that I will then be able to contextualise and locate (and this constitutes the fourth and last section) Carr, Elton, Rorty and White, before going on to look at each of them in detail.

SECTION ONE: WORKING THE PAST-HISTORY DISTINCTION

Let us start, then, from the assumption that historical theory today can best be accessed by drawing a radical distinction between ‘the past’ and ‘history’, rendering the idea of history—as the various accounts constructed about the past by historians and those acting as if they were historians—by the term historiography. Let us assume that we do not just want to recognise this pasthistoriography difference and then pass on quickly to ‘do’ some history, but that ‘we’ want to dwell on it, to make it the centre of our concerns so that we might understand history via some of today’s most important debates. And let us say that the best entrée into these debates is via some general ideas about historiography as articulated by Bennett, Ankersmit and White.

Thus, for Tony Bennett, it would appear that characterising history as historiography (as writing, as texts different to the past which, whilst not itself a literal text, can only be ‘read’ through its remaining textual traces, its once actuality being inaccessible simply by virtue of it no longer existing) theorises both the notion of ‘the past’ and the ‘writing-up’ of it.¹ For, given that the past exists by definition only in the modality of its current historiographical representations, then this means that the issues involved in ‘traditional’ debates about the nature of historical scholarship can be rethought in a manner that allows a break with the ways in which they have been posed as part of a general epistemological problem concerning the nature of our access to the past as such. For, as Bennett says, that ‘is not the point at issue in historical inquiry, and never has been’.² For historians, of course, never access the past as such, so that the problems formulated along the traditional lines of, ‘how can historians truly/ accurately know the past?’, or, ‘if historians cannot access the “real past”, then how can we have checks on historians’ accounts that are “real” checks as opposed to being “just interpretations”?’, are beside the point. For what is at issue in historiography—and indeed what can only ever be at issue—is what can be derived and constructed from the historicised record or archive. It is the ‘historicised’ nature of the records/archives that historians access which must be stressed here. For such records and archives are, as Bennett explains, only too clearly highly volatile and mutable products of complex historical processes in that, apart from the considerable amount of organised labour (librarians, archivists, archaeologists, curators) which goes into their production (preserving, cataloguing, indexing, ‘weeding out’), the composition and potential of such traces/records vary considerably in terms of their potential use over time witness, says Bennett, ‘the influence of feminist historiography in expanding the range of what now counts as the historical record.’³ In this way, then, we can think of ‘the past as such’ as being an absent object of inquiry, its presence (its absent presence) being signified by its remaining traces, which is the only ‘real past’ we have, such traces functioning not as the historian’s referent in the sense of actually being some kind of extra-discursive reality, but as if they were such a referent in that they constitute the last court of appeal for historical disputes, ‘the point at which, so to speak, they hit base— but a base within discourse.’⁴

On this account history is therefore simply the (itself historicised) discipline through which historians working at the level of what Bennett has called the public historical sphere (e.g. salaried workers in higher education) come into contact with the historicised record or archive as currently existing in order to ‘intervene’ in it (to interpret it) so that from this perspective historiography may be regarded as a

specific discursive regime, governed by distinctive procedures, through which the maintenance/transformation of the past as a set of currently existing realities is regulated. It constitutes a disciplined means for the production of a ‘historical past’ which exercises a regulatory function in relation to the ‘public past’. Its role in this regard is enormously important, [for] While their effects may not be immediately apparent in the short term, the conduct of historical debates and their (always provisional) resolution decisively influence the public face of the past over the long term…such debates requiring] as a condition of their intelligibility, the sense of a distinction between past and present and an orientation to historical records as if they comprised a referent. That this referent proves to be intradiscursive and so mutable does not disable the historical enterprise. To the contrary: the discipline’s social productivity consists precisely in its capacity to reorganise its referent and thus transform ‘the past’—not as it was but as it is. Understood in this way, the cogency and productivity of historical enquiry may be admitted without the question of its relations to ‘the real past’ ever arising.⁵

This is not to doubt for a moment that the past actually existed, of course, but rather that in respect of what is at issue in historiographical disputes and the manner in which they are conducted, ‘it may be allowed to go its own way—as it surely has’. In this perfectly straightforward way of seeing things, then, the ‘real past’ doesn’t actually enter into historiography except rhetorically— except theoretically—so that in this sense we can understand in quite a matter of fact way some of what Derrida is driving at in his (in)famous remark that ‘there is nothing outside of the text’, that there is no ‘extra text’.⁶

Now, Bennett’s own way of putting his argument is more nuanced and developed than the brief reading offered here, but pulling things together as they have been described, Bennett’s point might be summarised by saying that ‘the past as constituted by its existing traces’ is always apprehended and appropriated textually through the sedimented layers of previous interpretations and through the reading habits and categories developed by previous/current methodological practices. Consequently, the status of historical knowledge is not based for its truth/accuracy on its correspondence with the past per se but on the various historicisations of it, so that historiography always ‘stands in for’ the past, the only medium it has to affect a ‘historical’ presence. Accordingly, such arguments as these go some considerable length towards undercutting traditional historiography insofar as it seems to depend upon that correspondence as actually being between historiography and a separate, non-historiographically constituted past. Here, some interesting arguments by White and Ankersmit develop what is meant by such ‘undercuttings’.

Although, as we shall see, White occasionally articulates his definition of what he thinks history is in different ways, the understanding which I think he usually works with is that the historical work is a verbal artifact, a narrative prose discourse, the content of which is as much invented—or as much imagined - as found.⁷ It is White’s stress on the invented/imagined element that I want to explain and develop at this point: what does he arguably mean?

I think White means at least two things. First, that in order to make sense of events or sets of events in the past, in order to make ‘the facts’ of the past ‘significant’, such events/facts always have to be related to a context, to some sort of ‘whole’ or ‘totality’ or ‘background’, or even to the notion of ‘the past itself. Here the problem is that whilst the historian can certainly ‘find’ the traces of past events in the historicised records/archive and thus (selectively) establish (some of) ‘the facts’ about them in, say, a chronicle-type form, no historian can ever find the context or the totality or the background or ‘the past as such’ against which the facts can become truly significant and meaningful. What this means is that any such ‘context’ which is constructed to contextualise the facts has to be ultimately imagined or invented; unlike facts, the contexts can never be definitively found. Therefore, because to be meaningful all historical accounts have to involve part-to-whole or whole-to-part relationships (that is, as we shall see White put it later, accounts to be meaningful involve metonymic or synecdochal ‘tropes’),⁸ then at least three conclusions can be drawn at this early point. First, that all interpretations of the past are indeed as much invented (the contexts) as found (the facts) so that, on this first argument alone, White’s definition seems plausible. Second, because of this imagined (fictive) element in all histories (i.e. histories of both the upper and lower case) then no history can be literally ‘factual’ or completely ‘found’ or absolutely ‘true’. Third, that because of the inevitable troping of parts-to-whole and whole-to-parts, then all historical accounts are ultimately metaphorical and thus—because of their inescapable troping—metahistorical.

This is the first thing that White seems to mean by his understanding that the historical work is as much invented as found. The second is this. White thinks that most historians consider that the characteristic form in which they represent their accounts of the past to their audience—that is, the narrative form— is the actual content of the past (namely narrativity) then go on mistakenly to treat such narrativity as an essence shared by both the historical representation and the sets of events in the past. Now, this is perhaps a difficult point to grasp when stated baldly, so it might be useful to take a few sentences to spell it out. Accordingly, White’s explanation might be said to go roughly as follows.

Since its invention by Herodotus, traditional historiography has predominantly featured the belief that history consists of congeries of lived stories, individual and collective, and that the principal task of the historian is to discover these stories and retell them in narrative form, the truth/accuracy of which would reside in the degree of correspondence of the story told to the story lived. However, says White, the point to be made here is that, unfortunately for this traditional view, it has recently been realised that people in the past did not actually live stories either individually (at the level of Veal-life’ stories) or collectively (at the level of, say, metanarratives which give purpose and meaning to the past as, for example, in Marxist or Whig theories of history) so that to see people in the past or the past ‘as such’ in story form, is to give to it an imaginary series of narrative structures and coherences it actually never had. To see the content of the past (i.e. what actually occurred) as if it were a series of stories (of great men, of wars and treaties, of the rise of labour, the emancipation of women, of ‘Our Island Story’, of the ultimate victory of the proletariat and so forth) is therefore a piece of ‘fiction’, caused by mistaking the narrative form in which historians construct and communicate their knowledge of the past as actually being the past’s own. Accordingly, the traditional idea that the truth/accuracy of history as told in narrative is evidenced by its degree of correspondence to stories once lived is ‘undercut’ when it is recognised that there are no stories in the past to correspond to: that the only stories the past has are those conferred on it by historians’ interpretative emplotments. Thus, any theory of correspondence that goes beyond the level of the statement and/or the chronicle—and by definition historiography always goes beyond the statement and the chronicle—is ultimately self-referencing. Ultimately, any such alleged correspondence is not between the historian’s story and the story the past itself would —if only it could—tell, but between the historian’s story and the past’s story as put into narrative form ‘in the past tense’ by historians themselves.

This point is reinforced a little differently by Ankersmit. For him,⁹ the history text consists of many individual statements. Most of these claim to give an accurate description of some state of affairs in the past. Historians formulate these statements on the basis of the sources they work on in archives, etc., and it is these sources when used as ‘evidence’ that will decide the truth or falsity of the statements in question. But—and this is Ankersmit’s argument -because the sources available to most historians will enable them to write many more ‘true’ statements than are actually to be found in their texts, then out of all the statements the historian could have made, the ones actually made are carefully selected, distributed and weighted, the result being that a certain ‘picture of the past’ (an icon) is fabricated. Consequently, says Ankersmit, we can make two points about the texts’ statements: (1) that individually they refer to, and describe, a fragment of the past and can either be true or false; and (2) they collectively define a ‘picture of the past’ which cannot be said to be either true or false but simply an ‘iconic’ impression/reading. For—and this is where Ankersmit and White come closely together - the significant point is that whilst it is generally the case that individual discrete statements (facts) can indeed be checked against the discrete source to see if the historian’s account corresponds to it, the ‘picture of the past’ cannot be so checked, simply because the statements as put together by the historian to form such a picture do not have a picture of their own prior to this assembly for that assembly to then be checked against. And since, argues Ankersmit, what is essential in the writing of historians is not to be found at the level of the individual statement but rather at the level of the picture of the past (in that it is these pictures which, for example, most stimulate historiographical debate and thus determine the way we ‘see’ the past), then historiography is again as much invented/ imagined as found. Saying true things about the past at the level of the statement is easy—anybody can do that—but saying the right things, getting the picture straight, that is not only another story but an impossible one: you can always get another picture, you can always get another context.¹⁰

SECTION TWO: FOUR IMPLICATIONS OF BENNETT, ANKERSMIT AND WHITE

Now, as has already been suggested, these ways of theorising and working the past-historiography difference have some serious implications, especially for traditional history, in that once the impossibility of any literal representation of the traces of the past as the past per se is seen, then all such representations, being ultimately as much imagined/invented as found, mean that historiography ultimately becomes a series of ideas (theories) that historians have about making the past into ‘history’, all of which are problematic. At this point, then, it might be useful to consider briefly four examples of what such problematicisations of traditional historiography might be, not least because it is against them that some ‘traditional’ historians have recently reacted, it being this ‘engagement’ that provides the basis for many of the debates on what is history today, within and against which Carr, Elton, Rorty and White might be located.

The first problem is ideological and again takes cognisance of some of White’s arguments as a point of entry. For, White knows very well that at the level of historical meaning (as opposed to the level of the statement/chronicle), the conviction that the past has some sort of comprehensible meaning in it stands, in these postmodern days, on the same level of conviction that it has not; that is to say, the matter is undecidable. Consequently, any claims which suggest that history has to be considered in a specific way because such a way embodies, or reflects, or is expressive of what the past and/or historiography really are, are ideological. Such claims are equally ideological whether they are made at the level of the upper case, as ‘History’, or at the level of the lower, as ‘history’, the lower case being seen by White as effectively ‘bourgeois’. For having had their own use of history in the upper case (for example in Whiggism) the bourgeoisie, having nothing else to ‘become’ in so far as they now live in their once future, have no need for a historical trajectory that has not yet reached its destination. Consequently, what could be more ‘natural’ (i.e. ideological) than understanding ‘proper’ history as a non-worldly, academic discipline ostensibly above politics? The conclusion to be drawn, therefore, is that all histories (that is, historiography as such) are suasive. History is always history for someone, and that someone cannot be the past itself for the past does not have a self, so that any history which considers its particular type of discourse (its species type) as identical to history per se (its genus) is not only ideological, but ideological nonsense.

The second problem is related to the first, and again it draws on White. For White sees all histories, in whichever case, as equally historicist. He rejects the dichotomous view, held especially by ‘bourgeois’ historians, that historicism is an improper use of the past in so far as it uses it ‘illegitimately’ to illuminate present-day problems and/or, worse still, predict future events, on the basis that every representation, ‘however particularizing, narrativist, self-consciously perspectival, and fixated on its subject matter “for its own sake”, contains most of the elements of ... historicism.’ All historians have to shape their materials somehow vis-à-vis the present imperatives of narrative in general, and White argues that in the very language historians use, they subject the past to the kinds of ‘distortions’ that historicists impose upon their materials in a more explicit way, for

How else can any past, which by definition comprises events, processes, structures and so forth, considered to be no longer perceivable, be represented in either consciousness or discourse except in an ‘imaginary’ way?¹¹

In that sense, those old dichotomies (so beloved of the seminar room) between ‘proper’ history and ‘historicism’, and between ‘proper’ history and ‘ideological’ history, o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: History, Theory, Ideology
• Chapter 1: History Today
• Chapter 2: On E.H.Carr
• Chapter 3: On Geoffrey Elton
• Chapter 4: On Richard Rorty
• Chapter 5: On Hayden White
• Notes
• Further Reading