Refiguring History

New Thoughts On an Old Discipline

Keith Jenkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415244114
• eBook ISBN: 9781134543021
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

In this engaging sequel to Rethinking History, Keith Jenkins argues for a re-figuration of historical study. At the core of his survey lies the realization that objective and disinterested histories as well as historical 'truth' are unachievable. The past and questions about the nature of history remain interminably open to new and disobedient approaches.
Jenkins reassesses conventional history in a bold fashion. His committed and radical study presents new ways of 'thinking history', a new methodology and philosophy and their impact on historical practice.

This volume is written for students and teachers of history, illuminating and changing the core of their discipline.

Chapter 1: Opening time(s)

The reconciliation of all antagonistic forms in the name of consensus or conviviality is the worst thing we can do. We must close down nothing. We must keep open the otherness of forms, the disparity between terms; we must keep open the irreducible.

(Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime)

Once upon a time, a time which still casts its shadow over us, it was held that there was something intrinsically important in various historicisations of the past which could act as the basis of real and worthwhile knowledge. Put very basically, that old belief in the intrinsic value of the past was made up of two main elements. First, it was held that one ought to study the past (‘the before now’) ‘for its own sake’ and ‘on its own terms’, as if history was able to yield up its own essential points and not merely be the occasion for articulating our own. And second, by virtue of this attitude, the histories which were written by professional academics about this past were conceived of as somehow waiting to be found in the past; to be respectfully discovered and faithfully brought back to us, interpreted admittedly, but discovered – like fragments of some pre-existing jigsaw – all the same. The quest for this historicised past conducted via a research method that mixed empiricism and documentarism with the ethics of objectivity, neutrality and truth-seeking, further compounded the myth of the intrinsic value of the knowledge gained as a result of the exhaustive professional and scholarly efforts expended to get it. Not to subscribe to these two mutually reinforcing shibboleths of history – ‘for its own sake’ and ‘on its own terms’ – it was argued, was at best to fall victim to all kinds of anachronisms, relativisms, scepticisms and contemporary ideological pressures, or, at worst, to succumb to the apparently disastrous ‘logical conclusion’ that anybody could say just anything they liked about the past. And this was not good scholarship in terms of painstaking, selfless enquiry, but merely ideological and political bias or self-aggrandisement.

Coming from a position which accepts that most things held by historians to be intrinsic (historical facts, structures, periods and meanings) are actually only extrinsic ascriptions, these kinds of scary ‘logical conclusions’ are ones I think we can accept with ease for reasons that I will illustrate throughout this chapter. For there really is nothing essentially in the past to prevent the exercise of endless interpretive freedom by historians; indeed, the only values to be derived from the historicisations of the past come from outside of the past and from outside the gate-keepered craft-practices of the professional historian – in other words are extrinsic values. And such extrinsicality, which knows of no logical limits or proper procedures, is thus an open invitation to radical uncertainty for ever. Here at last we seem to have come to the end of the restraining proprieties of the professional, academic genre of history as we have come to know it.

The fact that ‘the past’ can be read at will and is so very obviously undetermining in relation to its endless appropriations (one past – many histories) is to be both celebrated and put into practice. To have one past but innumerable ‘takes’ and ‘spins’ is a positive value when everybody can at last potentially author their own life and create their own intellectual and moral genealogy – their own subjectivities – with no authoritative or authoritarian historicised past that one has to defer to or even acknowledge – especially a historicised past that seems to ghost-write itself with only the slightest intervention of the shyly-retiring historian, the handservant of the past loyal to his or her calling. For it is patently obvious that it is historians who create history and that ‘the past’ which they carve-up into meaning is utterly promiscuous. The past has and always will go with anybody without a trace of jealousy or a hint of permanent fidelity to any particular caller: hagiographers, antiquarians, professionals, Marxists, Annalists, Structuralists, fascists, feminists, pragmatic neo-Rankeans, anybody can have it. And why not? Nobody has a patent on ‘the past’; it can be used or ignored by everyone. And why is this? Because the so-called past (the before now) doesn’t exist ‘meaningfully’ prior to the efforts of historians to impose upon it a structure or form; ‘the before now’ is utterly shapeless and knows of no significance of its own either in terms of its whole or its parts before it is ‘figured out’ by us. Consequently, no historian or anyone else acting as if they were a historian ever returns from his or her trip to ‘the past’ without precisely the historicisation they wanted to get; no one ever comes back surprised or empty-handed from that destination.

There are no empty-handed historians because there are no empty-headed ones: the historicised past is always only ever us – back there. This is not as obvious to students of history as it should be; indeed, most professional historians consciously or semi-consciously disavow their always present-centred practices as they strive to achieve the ‘history narrator as nobody’ effect. Few have unmasked this particular sleight-of-hand – (which enables historians to continue to give the impression that they produce ‘objective’ histories in what approximates to a state of socio-political weightlessness) – better than Michel de Certeau, who puts matters thus:

What peculiar kind of sustained, permanent ambiguity is it that historians practise . . . by which a ‘real’ past is taken for granted, another ‘real’ past is represented in texts, and a ‘real’ present is effaced from their production . . . The operation in question is rather sly . . . [for] the ‘real’ as represented by historiography does not correspond to the ‘real’ that determined its production. . . . The discourse [thus] gives itself credibility in the name of the ‘reality’ it is supposed to represent but this authorised appearance of the ‘real’ serves precisely to camouflage the very practice which in fact determines it. Representation thus disguises the praxis that organises it.¹

If, as de Certeau is arguing here, all history is really historiography (the accumulation of the writings that make up our representations and presentations of the past) and is always self-referencing in terms of its own credibility, then it seems that the best way to keep in mind the always present-centred figurings of the ‘past’ into history (for to claim in the present that you should not be present-centred is no less a present-centred claim than the claim that you should) is to go along with Nietzsche’s observation that the historian is, inescapably, always part of the picture of the historical past he or she paints. And there is no need to worry about this radical subjectivity, nor about the collapse of the old subject-object distinction so central to western philosophy and culture. For surely we are all now mature enough to recognise that what passes for ‘objectivity’ is only ever us ‘subjects’, objectifying. As Alain Robbe-Grillet cogently observes, this should not be seen as a problem:

Why. . . should this be grounds for pessimism. Is it so distressing to learn that one’s own view is only one’s own view or that every project(ion) is an invention? Obviously I am concerned, in any case, only with the world as my point of view orientates it: I shall never know any other. The relative subjectivity of my sense of sight serves me precisely to define my situation in the world. I simply keep myself from helping to make this situation a servitude.²

We cannot escape the inevitability of our own subjectivity then – we can only ever see the world from our own ‘subject in formation’ perspective. But as Elizabeth Ermarth (commenting on Robbe-Grillet) suggests, this is nothing to worry about; it is this kind of postmodern self-consciousness in which we recognise and become aware of our own radical subjectivity that prevents us ‘from helping to make this situation a servitude’. In other words, engaging with our own subjectivity, defining our own ‘situation in the world’, requires a constant questioning and probing of our own assumptions and values. In turn the production of this sense of critical self-distance (at times an almost out-of-body experience) encourages endless imaginings and rethinkings of what our personal and political identities might be. With some confidence – which I share – Ermarth concludes that, today, we no longer need an objective world to guarantee relations between one consciousness and another or to guarantee an identity between illusions. For ‘there is only subjectivity . . . only illusions’ she writes, which can only constitute momentary realities: ‘The postmodern moment comes in negotiating the transition from one [such] moment to another’.³

None of this is to say there are no ‘criteria’ for judgements and/or that we must therefore accept that everyone else’s discursive ‘reality’ and historical constructs are all equally correct or all equally wrong. This is the supposedly knock-down argument so beloved of modernist historians as they raise the spectre of some looming ethical nihilism and consequent barbarism. For although there is no ultimate, objective foundation for our historical positions (or our moral decisions), we do still make decisions on the basis of preferences according to the tools at hand in any given social formation, we do still put worlds under descriptions, and we are still able to give (relative to such descriptions) argumentative support for them to those who might decide to listen to it and engage in conversation. And this has always been the actual situation. In that sense, nothing has changed. Apart from everything of course. For we are now fully aware that we have to live with an intellectual outlook where truth and objectivity, neutrality and disinterest, are simply agreements produced in conversations which are always between interested parties and within and against which we do have to make ultimately groundless decisions. By which process of thinking we arrive neatly at Jacques Derrida’s formulation of ‘the undecidability of the decision’ (to be discussed further later on); a condition in which a decision has unavoidably to be taken (for even to refuse to make a decision is still a decision) but taken without certainty and ‘subject’ to endless revision. This is a condition of logical openness which also happens to be – for it keeps decisions always in a state of play, defying definitive closure – ‘a good thing’.⁴

It is into this conversational/discursive condition that any intervention – a book, an article, a film, a novel – will make its noticeable or not so noticeable mark; beyond the reach of authorial intent, open for endless readings, and there for the relative taking or leaving. And the intervention of this book is no different. So, to the question of why still bother to historicise the past today and how best to do it, the answer which I register at this point is that I hope that a certain way of thinking may help allow the kind of emancipatory, radical politics essayed by Ernesto Laclau and others to enter the world, a politics of emancipation Derrida has also decided – as a citizen if not as a philosopher – never to abandon.⁵ Especially now. For never before on the face of the earth, he writes,

. . . have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine and economic oppression affected so many human beings in the history of the world and of humanity. Let us never forget this obvious, macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable, singular sights of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore the fact that never before in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the Earth.⁶

My reason for still bothering with history thus revolves around a calculation of the degree to which the historicised past must escape all and every closure; must escape the closures of assumed objectivity and truth in the cause of personal and social freedom and of justice to come. And yet here, perhaps in its most mundane (or banal) expression, a question arises from the preoccupations of the mainstream professional historian which is ubiquitous in its presence and so may have already occurred to you. I would like to address it now so that I can get it out of the way before beginning to argue my case at length.

The question is this. If it is (the really rather obvious) case that there can never be a ‘true interpretation of the past as history’; if it is very clear that you can never achieve a total and sufficient account of anything; if the impossibility of ever getting a definitive synopsis is begrudgingly accepted today as common-sense by just about every historian who thinks about it, then why on earth do people (like postmodernists) feel the need to keep going on about it? Historians are not stupid; surely they know all this? Are they not all at least liberally minded pluralists happy with numerous interpretations/interpretive differences? Is it not the case that many if not all of the positions associated with postmodernism – the various crises of legitimation, the absurdity of grand narratives, the acknowledgement of ambivalent and multiple readings, the overlapping of linguistic games with shifting rules and players, and so on and so forth – surely all these things and more, are now part of the weft and weave of everyday intellectual life? As is the much more grudging acknowledgement (or at least consideration) that relativism, perspectivism and ethical/moral undecidability ‘go all the way down’. In this sense, are we not all postmodernists now?

To which I think the answer is, well no, actually we are not. I do not think that historians have given up on objectivity and truth; on the desire to make history a discourse truth statements are variously applicable to: an epistemology. These intentions may well be qualified nowadays but they have not been given up. And I do not think historians have all become happy relativists either. They should have done but they have not. Most professional historians remain stubbornly ‘modernist’; that is, they remain intent on producing substantiated, empirically detailed and well-researched accounts in the name of accuracy and balanced, meticulous scholarship. And I think there are at least three good reasons for saying this is still the general situation.

First, whilst we may all be pluralists now, this does not mean we are all postmodernists. Postmodernism and pluralism are not the same thing at all; the former is not reducible to the latter. This type of reductionism attempts to slough off the ‘extremes’ of postmodernism so as to make it reassuringly familiar. Yet it misses the point entirely, for postmodernism is its extremes, is all that modernity cannot be compatible with. What postmodernism does to history – as Lyotard has pointed out – is to undercut the form as well as the content of discourse.⁷ So what does this statement mean?

Well – problematising the content of the historicised past and various aspects of it – say for example, providing multiple readings of the French Revolution – is now par for the course. Obviously. However, nothing could be more ill-informed than professional historians who think they are ‘postmodern’ just because they accept multi-levelled perspectives; nothing could be more uncomprehending than to think that multi-interpretation is ‘all postmodernism is about’ and that, this accepted, then it is back to business as usual. For it is not. No, what postmodernists problematise is not the content of history so much as the status of its form. No matter how well formulated the form of history might be – its method, shape and structure – we can never show a definitive example of it. Thus, whilst many professional historians still retain the comforting thought (comforting because it sets limits/ boundaries as to what can count as ‘proper history’) that multiple readings regarding the content of their discourse can at least be lived with because they remain within the form of a familiar history (‘at least they’re all historical’; ‘at least they all respect the evidence’), the problematisation of the form of history takes this reassurance away. Consequently, it is now impossible to ever say what history really is (so that the query famously posited by E. H. Carr – what is history? – cannot ever be answered definitively) nor, by extension, what history’s proper methodological procedures are. This is alarming for most professional historians of course, for if nothing is ‘proper’ any more then logically anything goes. Few professional historians, no matter how liberal and open to ‘interpretation’, can accept that interpretation – the interminable undecidability of history per se.

Second, insofar as our social formation is one of liberal, pluralist, modernist toleration, then that qualifying insofar registers ‘the fact’ that this is very much a social formation of arbitrary and always somehow hurtful closures. All social formations to be ‘social’ have to exclude, it is just that ours is one that tends to think of itself as an exception to the rule, one that prides itself on its liberal pluralism, its inclusiveness and hence its toleration. But this is partly...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Opening time(s)
• Chapter 2: Last order(s)
• Chapter 3: Beginning again: On disobedient dispositions
• Notes