Deconstructing History

Alun Munslow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134165650
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In Deconstructing History, Alun Munslow examines history in the postmodern age. He provides an introduction to the debates and issues of postmodernist history. He also surveys the latest research into the relationship between the past, history and historical practice as well as forwarding his own challenging theories.

The book discusses issues of both empiricist and deconstruction positions and considers the arguments of major proponents of both stances, and includes:

• an examination of the character of historical evidence
• exploration of the role of historians
• discussion of the failure of traditional historical methods
• chapters on Hayden White and Michel Foucault
• an evaluation of the importance of historical narrative
• an up to date, comprehensive bibliography
• an extensive and helpful glossary of difficult key terms.

Deconstructing History maps the philosophical field, outlines the controversies involved and assesses the merits of the deconstructionist position. He argues that instead of beginning with the past history begin with its representation by historians.

1 Introduction

APPROACHING HISTORY

It is my intention to navigate through the central debate to be found in history today, viz. the extent to which history, as a discipline, can accurately recover and represent the content of the past, through the form of the narrative. Put plainly, to what extent is the narrative or literary structure of the history text an adequate vehicle for historical explanation, and what implications can we draw from our answer? It is now commonplace for historians, philosophers of history and others interested in narrative to claim we live in a postmodern age wherein the old modernist certainties of historical truth and methodological objectivity, as applied by disinterested historians, are challenged principles. Few historians today would argue that we write the truth about the past. It is generally recognised that written history is contemporary or present orientated to the extent that we historians not only occupy a platform in the here-and-now, but also hold positions on how we see the relationship between the past and its traces, and the manner in which we extract meaning from them. There are many reasons, then, for believing we live in a new intellectual epoch – a so-called postmodern age – and why we must rethink the nature of the historical enterprise to meet the needs of our changed intellectual beliefs and circumstances. Later in this chapter I will pose some basic questions about the nature of history, not least the fundamentally changed nature of how we come to understand the past as a body of knowledge from which we can derive a meaning for it. As we shall see, it is precisely this situation of how we constitute knowledge about the past that directly affects the nature of the meaning we impose upon it. History can no longer legitimately be viewed as simply or merely a matter of the discovery of the story of the past, the detection of which will tell us what it means. This belief results from a debate on the nature of knowing that began well over one hundred years ago in the nineteenth century.

What are these changed circumstances that justify the claim that we live in a postmodern age? First, the claim is not being made that postmodernism is a particularly new perspective or position arrayed against other old positions or perspectives about how we gain knowledge of the real past (or present). Postmodernism is, rather, the changed and contemporary condition under which we gain knowledge. Among the key principles of this new condition of knowing are the broad doubts that now exist about the accurate representation of reality. Indeed, postmodernism is not particularly new if we think about the self-reflexivity of the period supposed to exist prior to it.

Indeed, the term postmodernism is actually somewhat misleading. You will note I use the term un-hyphenated in this book. Rather than ‘post-modernism’ which is often the way it is described, I prefer to think of our present intellectual age not as something that came after (hence post-) but which is rather a transmutation of modernism. ‘Postmodernism’ has often been deployed to mean the arrival of a new set of conditions for knowing when it seems more appropriate to say modernism has now become fully aware of its own in-built critique of knowing. So, as we shall see, much that we refer to as postmodern (un-hyphenated) is in fact modernism’s re-evaluation – especially in the last thirty years or so – of its own principles.

One of the main points about the Age of Enlightenment modernism from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was its self-consciousness in asking questions about how we know what we know. In a peculiar sense, perhaps modernism was always going to end up fundamentally critiquing itself. Maybe postmodernism was the inevitable consequence of modernism? We will see how this affects the study of the past throughout the rest of this book, but it is important from the start to recognise that history was always going to be in the forefront of this modernist will to self-criticism. It is as a result of this postmodern condition for knowing that history, as a discipline, has always been particularly susceptible to debates about its nature.

This book is called Deconstructing History because at its core is my belief that history must be reassessed at its most basic level. It is not enough merely to criticise historical method, but rather to ask can professional historians be relied upon to reconstruct and explain the past objectively by inferring the ‘facts’ from the evidence, and who, after all the hard work of research, will then write up their conclusions unproblematically for everyone to read?

Even if, as many might argue, history has never been nor is now precisely as positivist a research process, or as unreflective a literary undertaking as that description suggests, the crude empiricist or recon-structionist emphasis on the historian as the impartial observer who conveys the ‘facts’ is a paradigm (defined as a set of beliefs about how to gain knowledge) that obscures history’s real character as a literary undertaking. I will argue that the genuine nature of history can be understood only when it is viewed not solely and simply as an objectiv-ised empiricist enterprise, but as the creation and eventual imposition by historians of a particular narrative form on the past: a process that directly affects the whole project, not merely the writing up stage. This understanding, for convenience, I shall call the deconstructive consciousness. This use of the term is not to be confused with its original use by French cultural theorist Jacques Derrida, who employed the term more narrowly to mean the process whereby we grasp the meaning of texts without reference to some originating external reality. The deconstructive consciousness not only defines history as what it palpably is, a written narrative (the textual product of historians), but additionally, and more radically, suggests that narrative as the form of story-telling may also provide the textual model for the past itself. Recognising the literary dimension to history as a discipline does not mean that we cannot ask ourselves is it only our lived experience that is retold by historians as a narrative, or as historical agents do we experience narratives – as people in the past? In other words, does the evidence reveal past lives to be story-shaped, and can we historians retell the narrative as it actually happened, or do we always impose our own stories on the evidence of the past?

Whatever we decide, it follows that history cannot exist for the reader until the historian writes it in its obligatory form: narrative. What do I mean by narrative? When we explain in history we place its contents as events in a sequential order, a process usually described as the telling of a story. No matter how extensive are the analytical apparatuses borrowed from the social sciences and brought to bear on the past, history’s power to explain resides in its fundamental narrative form. As the pro-narrative philosopher of history Louis Mink said in the early 1960s: ‘Where scientists . . . note each other’s results, historians . . . read each other’s books.’¹ So far as this book is concerned, the reality of the past is the written report, rather than the past as it actually was. I will argue that history is the study not of change over time per se, but the study of the information produced by historians as they go about this task. In Deconstructing History I am attempting to highlight the essentially literary nature of historical knowledge and the significance of its narrative form in the constitution of such knowledge. In our contemporary or postmodern world, history conceived of as an empirical research method based upon the belief in some reasonably accurate correspondence between the past, its interpretation and its narrative representation is no longer a tenable conception of the task of the historian. Instead of beginning with the past we should start with its representation, because it is only by doing this that we challenge the belief that there is a discoverable and accurately representable truthfulness in the reality of the past.

SOME BASIC QUESTIONS ABOUT THE NATURE OF HISTORY

Four specific questions about the nature of history flow from the belief that history as it is lived and written is structured as much by its form as by its content. Although we can distinguish these questions for the purpose of listing, in practice it is very difficult to keep them separate.

• Can empiricism legitimately constitute history as a separate epistemology?
• What is the character of historical evidence and what function does it perform?
• What is the role of the historian, his/her use of social theory, and the construction of explanatory frameworks in historical understanding?
• How significant to historical explanation is its narrative form?

These questions prompted the writing of this book and lie at the heart of the status crisis besetting history today.

Epistemology

The first question confronts the basic issue about history as a form of knowledge: is there something special in the methods deployed by historians to study the past that produces a reliable and objective knowledge peculiar to itself, and which makes it possible to argue that there is such a thing as a discipline of history at all? Historical knowledge, as it is usually described, is derived through a method – called a practice by those who believe in the possibility of an accurate understanding of the past – that flows from its techniques in dealing with the traces of the past. The most basic function of the historian is to understand, and explain in a written form, the connections between events and human intention or agency in the past. Put another way, the historian has to work out some kind of method or means whereby he/she can grasp the relationship between knowledge and explanation in order to find the foundation of truth, if one exists.

One method would be to imitate the natural sciences, and although there has always been a large minority following among historians (especially among those with a positivist or social science training) for this flattery, it has never achieved a dominant methodological status. History cannot claim to be straightforwardly scientific in the sense that we understand the physical sciences to be because it does not share the protocol of hypothesis-testing, does not employ deductive reasoning, and neither is it an experimental and objective process producing incontrovertible facts. Moreover, the better we do it does not guarantee we will get closer to the truth. Scientific method works on the assumption that data are connected by a universal explanation, and consequently the scientist selects his/her data according to this belief. The historian, however, selects his/her data because of his/her interest in a unique event or individual acting intentionally in response to circumstances. Evidence is chosen for what it can tell us about that unique event or individual, rather than any and every event within a general category being explained.

What particular consequences flow from this for history as an epistemology, or special form of knowledge?² Can we gain genuine and ‘truthful’ historical descriptions by simply following the historian’s literary narrative – her or his story? This is certainly the opinion of several commentators. The British theorist of history M.C. Lemon considers that the ‘very logic’ of history as a discipline revolves ‘around the rationale of the narrative structure’.³ In respect of what peculiarly constitutes historical explanation, Lemon argues that its essence lies in the manner in which historians account ‘for occurrences in terms of the reasons individuals have for their conduct’. In other words, history can be legitimately defined as the narrative interpretation and explanation of human agency and intention.⁴ The special character of narrative that makes it so useful to historians is, as Lemon points out, its ‘this happened, then that’ structure which also, of course, is the essence of historical change. It is a process that saturates our lived experience. In other words, the past existed and will exist as knowledge transmitted to us according to the basic principles of narrative form.

What, then, is the relationship of history to its closest neighbour, literature? The bottom line seems to be one of referentiality. I take this to mean the accuracy and veracity with which the narrative relates what actually happened in the past. As Lemon argues, while literature is not wholly ‘devoid of referentiality’, it is ‘not referential in the same manner’ as the historical text.⁵ It follows that, like literature, the past and written history are not the same thing.⁶ Not recognising this permits us to forget the difficulties involved in recreating the past – something that does not exist apart from a few traces and the historians’ narrative. Because we cannot directly encounter the past, whether as a political movement, economic process or an event, we employ a narrative fulfil-ling a two-fold function, as both a surrogate for the past and as a medium of exchange in our active engagement with it. History is thus a class of literature.

The most basic assumption that informs my book is that the past is negotiated only when historians represent it in its narrative form and that historical interpretation should not close down the meanings of the past to pursue what at best must remain an ersatz ‘truth’. Indeed, we ought to be more open to the possible meaninglessness or sublime character of the past. Although mainstream empiricists may dispute it, I shall argue that there cannot be any unmediated correspondence between language and the world as a discoverable reality. Of course, even if this is the case, it does not stop us from asking, although we cannot provide a definitive answer, is it possible that the past unfolded as a particular kind of narrative the first time around and can we recover it more or less intact, or are we only selecting and imposing an emplotment or story line on it derived from our own present? Are stories lived in the past or just told in the present? Do we explain our lives at the time like the unfolding of a story? The most important question, then, is not the dog-eared modernist one of whether history is an accurate science, but the postmodernist one of how and why when we write about the past, we cast it in a particular narrative form. Further, how adequate is the cognitive power of narrative? What is its capacity to explain the past plausibly?

Just as it is impossible to have a narrative without a narrator, we cannot have a history without a historian. What is the role of the historian in recreating the past? Every history contains ideas or theories about the nature of change and continuity as held by historians – some are overt, others deeply buried, and some just poorly formulated. The theories of history mustered by historians both affect and effect our understanding about the past, whether they are explicit or not. To the extent that history is a narrative interpretation built in part out of the social theories or ideological positions that historians invent to explain the past, history may be defined essentially as a language-based manufacturing process in which the written historical interpretation is assembled or produced by historians. As the pro-narrative philosopher of history Arthur Danto put it, ‘to tell what happened . . . and to explain why . . . is to do one and the same thing’,⁷ or in the words of

Lemon, the historian regularly encounters questions of ‘selection, relevance, significance and objectivity’ in his/her description of events.⁸ I will suggest, therefore, that history is best viewed epistemologically as a form of literature producing knowledge as much by its aesthetic or narrative structure as by any other criteria. In addition, as we acknowledge history’s literary and fabricated character, I shall also address the past as a narrative, as well as describe it in narrative.

Evidence

The second question concerns the raw materials in the history industry’s manufacturing process – the traces or evidence of the past. We should be beginning by now to see that because of the central role of language in the constitution of knowledge, or historical understanding is as much the product of how we write as well as what we write, so that history’s so-called raw ‘facts’ are likewise presented either wholly or in large part to us in a written or literary form. Even raw statistics have to be interpreted in narrative. If you, as a student of history, were asked to give an example of a historical ‘fact’, the normal response is to quote an incontrovertible event or description that everyone agrees upon. That slavery was the ultimate cause of the American Civil War is clearly not such a ‘fact’. It is a complex interpretation based on the relating of disparate occurrences, statistical data, events and human intentions translated as actions involving outcomes. But if we say in cold factual terms that the American President James Madison was ‘small of stature (5 feet, 4 inches; 1.62 metres), light of weight (about 100 pounds; 45 kilograms), bald of head, and weak of voice’ this seems unproblematic – Madison was or wasn’t this tall, was or wasn’t slight, was or wasn’t bald, was or wasn’t weak voiced. The important point, however, is the meaning that these ‘facts’ about Madison produce in the mind of the reader, rather than the inherent veracity of the ‘facts’ themselves.

Because he was short, slight, bald and had a squeaky voice, does this incline us towards an interpretation that he was weak, could not therefore hold his cabinet together, and eventually became a dupe of Napoleon?⁹ History is about the process of translating evidence into facts. You and I as historians do ...