Historics

Why History Dominates Contemporary Society

Martin L. Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134506767
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

From an author at the forefront of research in this area comes this provocative and seminal work that presents a unique and fresh new look at history and theory.

Taking a broadly European view, the book draws on works of French and German philosophy, some of which are unknown to the English-speaking world, and Martin L. Davies spells out what it is like to live in a historicized world, where any event is presented as historical as, or even before, it happens.

Challenging basic assumptions made by historians, Davies focuses on historical ideas and thought about the past instead of examining history as a discipline. The value of history in and for contemporary culture is explained not only in terms of cultural and institutional practices but in forms of writing and representation of historical issues too.

Historics stimulates thinking about the behaviours and practice that constitute history, and introduces complex ideas in a clear and approachable style. This important text is recommended not only for a wide student audience, but for the more discerning general reader as well.

A Sense of History Variations on a Theme from Nietzsche

Theme

A Sixth Sense – A Sense for History

Does history have a sense? Can there be a sense in history? What can the word ‘‘sense’’ mean for history? These are the questions Historics explores.

Nietzsche offers a place to start. In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), he defines history in terms of the contemporary attitudes and forms of behaviour behind it. The context is a scathing criticism of the values of his age, of those Europeans of the ‘day after tomorrow’, the ‘firstcomers to the twentieth century’ (Nietzsche 1988: V, 151, §214). He is confronting the heterogeneity of values and theorizing in contemporary culture. What comes out, is a cultural malaise: historical interests produce existential disorientation.

The ‘sense of history’ is the ‘sixth sense’ of ‘good Europeans’ – fairly adaptable, democratic, intellectually mediocre people, susceptible still in this ‘age of the masses’ to atavistic bouts of nationalism (Nietzsche 1988: V, 157ff., 180, 182, §§224, 241, 242). It’s a sensory aptitude conditioned by prevailing social and cultural values. The vast output of nineteenth-century historical scholarship has made the sense of history an extension of the human cognitive capacity. As a sixth sense, it suggests something uncanny, almost telepathic – a ‘divinatory instinct’ (as Nietzsche calls it). It’s a quick and easy way of apprehending the scale of value-systems societies and individuals have lived by, how they relate to each other, and how the authority of these values relates to the authority of the forces at work in society. Though it’s the pride of the ‘good European’, Nietzsche is ironically reserved. The sense of history is nothing to boast about. It’s only an effect of the ‘semi-barbarity’ that has befallen Europe as a democratic melting-pot of different social orders and ethnicities.

History and indiscriminate interests

Nietzsche argues that a sense of history has thrown the modern psyche into total confusion. ‘We are ourselves a sort of chaos,’ he says. The heterogeneous character of modern life has left ‘our modern souls’ utterly exposed to the past. They are swamped by the antecedents of every form and way of life, by the heritage of cultures that once would have existed closely side-by-side, or with one dominating the other. Nowadays our instincts connect with a past that lies undifferentiated all around us. The mind, however, turns this confusion to its advantage. The ‘semi-barbarity in body and desire’ of modern Europeans gives them everywhere a privileged means of access more noble ages never enjoyed. In particular, it opens up to them ‘the labyrinth of unfinished cultures and each and every moment of semibarbarity there has ever been on earth’. This is, however, a highly dubious privilege. The greatest part of human culture up to now has been nothing but semi-barbaric. Consequently (Nietzsche continues), the sense of history amounts just to a sense or instinct for anything and everything, a taste and a palate for anything and everything. A sense of history is neither distinguished nor discriminating (Nietzsche 1988: V, 158, §224).

Two examples show what he means. He wonders what seventeenth-century French Classicists might have made of Homer and how Classical Greek tragedians would have reacted to Shakespeare.We can enjoy Homer (he says), and that, fortunately enough, gives us an advantage over the self-regarding French culture of the seventeenth century that, apparently, could not. This culture knew what it liked and disliked; it had a sure palate, and so easily felt disgusted. Anything unfamiliar it met with reserve; a lively curiosity it treated warily because it regarded it as tasteless. Being self-sufficient, it only reluctantly admitted to desiring something new, to being dissatisfied with what it had, and to admiring something other than itself. For these reasons Classical French culture disdained anything it could not regard or exploit as its own. In fact, Nietzsche insists, no sense could be more incomprehensible to the French Classicists than the historical sense and its ‘subservient plebeian curiosity’. Taking the comparison of historical ‘sense’ and taste a step further, Nietzsche asserts that Shakespeare, ‘this surprising Spanish-Moorish-Saxon synthesis of taste’, would have reduced the ancient Athenians, fond as they were of Aeschylus, to uncontrollable laughter or irritation. Shakespeare’s exuberant colourfulness, the way he combines the utmost delicacy, vulgarity and artistry, appeals to us now as something warm and familiar. Far from being put off by the revolting vapours from, and close proximity to, the common people of Elizabethan England Shakespeare’s art and taste are rooted in, we savour it all as a refined aesthetic experience reserved especially for us (Nietzsche 1988: V, 158–9, §224).

The ‘sense of history’ is typical of all the other virtues modern Europeans possess. We are (says Nietzsche) undemanding, selfless, modest, brave, full of will-power, full of devotion, very grateful, very patient, very obliging – except we have no taste. A sense of history we may have; we have no way of grasping what makes for perfection and ultimate maturity in culture and art. We have no empathy for the inherent quality in works and individuals that lends them distinction. All our feeling for ‘their moment of calm sea and halcyonic selfsufficiency, the golden cold lustre evinced by all things that have reached perfection’, has gone. So the ‘historical sense’, our greatest virtue, is necessarily opposed to good taste. In particular, it has difficulty grasping the experience of the sublime. It has to force itself to appreciate ‘precisely those brief, fleeting moments of extreme happiness or of transfiguration that suddenly flare up now and then.’ As moments of true greatness, ‘supra-historical’ numinous – aesthetic or religious – experiences, they are essentially a-historical (Nietzsche 1988: V, 159–60, §224; cf. Nietzsche 1988: I, 330).

With his pun on ‘sense’, by treating the ‘sense of history’ as a form of sensation like touch, smell, hearing, sight, and in terms of taste, Nietzsche attacks the academic discipline. He is out to sabotage the historical methodologies that prop up the vast, tottering edifice of the humanities. Whatever the historical sciences as forms of knowledge achieve, relies on a ‘sense’ of history. Seen as a mode of senseperception [aesthesis], it adds to human sensibility. Its scope and intentionality play their own particular part in cognitive processes. Nietzsche thus rejects historical knowledge as ‘‘ultimate knowledge’’, because he knows it derives from underlying social-psychological habits. Calling the ‘sense’ of history a sixth sense, makes nineteenthcentury historical awareness already naturalized and innate, like the five senses themselves. The ‘sense’ of history, therefore, signals an ethological mutation in the human species.

The cultural politics of distinction

A sense of history, Nietzsche implies, indicates a pathological tendency: historical interests are symptomatic of decadence – the trouble is, this argument sounds unsafe, the vocabulary dated. It comes from ethnology and vitalism, rather dubious nineteenthcentury notions. But to dismiss his argument for that reason, ignores the legitimate issue being addressed.

Nietzsche needs an incendiary vocabulary to get at a subversive issue: the crisis in the politics of distinction. How does a mass society – heterogenous in its cultural make-up, pluralistic, if not secular, in its value-systems, permeated by all kinds of social traditions and elements – make distinctions? How does a modern, let alone postmodern, society reach its value-judgements (cf. Sloterdijk 2000: 84)? Society, as a human collective, produces the distinctions it needs to run itself – e.g. gradations of status, degrees of wealth, habits of consumption, patterns of behaviour. But the politics of distinction also encompasses those that emerge from the social collective through its better selfawareness, that are transgressive or excessive, that scandalize or enrapture, that society may not initially recognize (cf. Durkheim 1996: 96). Coming from scientific or artistic endeavour, these distinctions produce the ‘great thought’ that alone ‘lends greatness to deeds and things’, but may not register with popular opinion (Nietzsche 1988: V, 181–2, §241). Art, in particular, is ‘something immortal achieved by mortal hands . . . become tangibly present’, a form of human fabrication that in its durability both transfigures the world and ‘legitimizes the conviction . . . that a man’s products may be more and essentially greater than himself’ (cf. Arendt 1974: 168–9, 210). No wonder Nietzsche is apprehensive: the ‘sense’ of history either relativizes or patronizes. Its heterogeneity deflates the creative motivation of self-transcendence; it saps the effort required to invent the new values around which the world revolves (Nietzsche 1988: IV, 65).

We ‘first-comers to the twenty-first century’, living now in Nietzsche’s tomorrow, have a sociological discourse to speak of ‘mass indifference to difference’ and identify ‘the intellectual-political agenda to liquidate the elite of naturally talented individuals’ which gives the crisis in the politics of distinction a new twist (Sloterdijk 2000: 83, 86–7). Forsaking Nietzsche’s concept of ‘slave morality’, we can see contemporary society ‘as a society of laborers . . . about to be liberated from the fetters of labor’, but no longer knowing ‘of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won’. This means that within this egalitarian society, ‘there is no class left . . . of either a political or spiritual nature from which a restoration of the other capacities of man could start anew’. Everyone, whatever their social position, thinks of what they do solely in economic terms, i.e. ‘in terms of a job necessary for the life of society’, ‘in terms of making a living’. Consequently, ‘nothing could be worse’ than ‘the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them’ (Arendt 1974: 5). Or we can speak of the ‘Americanization’ of culture and the anti-élitism of populist and popular values. Heterogeneity characterizes an undiscriminating historical culture; it drives a populist culture in which making money ‘is . . . the most interesting thing to do’ (Steiner 1997a: 288).

Moreover, given that the populist money-interest ‘Americanization’ symbolizes, runs counter to a distinctive European value, ‘the notion that artistic-intellectual creation is the crown of a city or of a nation’, the overall value of civilization becomes questionable (Steiner 1997a: 288). ‘Americanization’ designates ‘the frank and sometimes sophisticated articulation of a fundamentally, of an ontologically immanent economy of human purpose’ – i.e. the likelihood that a ‘ravenous appetite for material reward is inherent in the vast majority of the human species; that we are a poor beast compounded of banality and greed; that it is not the spiky fruits of the spirit but creature comforts we lunge for’. But, forsaking the Nietzschean rhetoric of contempt, Steiner concedes America might have just been ‘more truthful about human nature than any previous society’. In that case, ‘the high places and moments of civilization’ will have been made possible by the ‘evasion of such truth’, by the ‘imposition of arbitrary dreams and ideals from above’ – in short, by a ‘‘life-lie’’ (Steiner 1997a: 290).

Demographic and sociological factors reinforce this ‘despotism of the ordinary’. The populist consensus, represented by the ‘profanum vulgus numerically enormous and committed to self-flattering passivity in the face of excellence’, is inevitably persuasive (Steiner 1997a: 294, 302). Those who create new cultural values will be marginal: their creative obsessions leave them no other option. It’s selfdeception to believe that cultural creation concerns more than a minority: ‘the number of men and women capable of painting a major canvas, of composing a lasting symphony, of postulating and proving a fundamental theorem, of presenting a metaphysical system or of writing a classic poem, is, even on a millennial scale very restricted indeed’ (Steiner 1997a: 290–1). Further, the generation of distinction, particularly in a mass society, is unpredictable. Genetic or environmental reasons don’t fully account for the scarcity of natural talent, nor do the dissemination and reception of the creative, classic works themselves: ‘no amount of democratization will multiply creative genius or the incidence of truly great thought’ (Steiner 1997a: 291–2). Steiner concludes by affirming ‘those autistic absolutes of possession and self-possession which produce an Archimedean theorem or a Rembrandt canvas’ (Steiner 1997a: 301 (my italics)). There is probably no direct correlation, perhaps even conflict, ‘between classic literacy and political justice, between the civic institutionalization of intellectual excellence and the general tenor of social decency’. There is nothing to prevent culture collapsing into meaningless heterogeneity, evinced by the ‘mass of cultural fellow-travellers’ and the ‘pseudovalues instilled in them by a totally superficial and mendacious populist ideal of general education’ (Steiner 1997a: 294, 296).

To make distinctions is to see significances. The politics of distinction is, therefore, central to any discussion of historical sense. If history is ‘a method devoid of any corresponding object’ and so, by definition heterogeneous, how can it recognize anything historically distinctive (Lévi-Strauss 1985: 312)? How can it make sense of anything (e.g. a work of art, a formula, or a belief-system) that reaches out above and beyond history? It’s hardly coincidental that history, as the identical reality of all realities, is the ideal, formal identity of a world in which money, ‘a stable signifier, appropriate, in its very form, for academic denotations’, decides the real-value identity of each and every thing (Droysen 1977: 70, Certeau 1987: 74; Cohen 1988: 304; Simmel 1989: 64, Sohn-Rethel 1985: 105). History, like the US dollar, has global currency.

Historics: beyond history and the humanities

Historics makes distinctions. It splits historical methodologies, along with the shoddy ‘‘humanities’’, away from aesthetic reflection on human existence. And the reason? Because history – like the humanities in general – is now, socially and politically, a compromised form of knowledge. It makes claims it cannot substantiate. This is why it’s designated as illusio. What characterizes history is its claim to be comprehensive, hence total, hence autonomous – to offer a common, basic, inescapable identity: to reproduce ‘a culture of common language, common society, or common reality in the face of uncommon language . . . class society, and uncommon realities . . .’ (Cohen 1988: 16). This claim assumes that historicity is the ‘ultimate refuge of a transcendental humanism’ (Lévi-Strauss 1985: 312). ‘To see all the human race, from the beginning of time, pass, as it were, in review before us, appearing in their true colours, without any of their disguises which, during their lifetime, so much perplexed the judgement of the beholders:’ this circa 1740 was for David Hume the fascination of historical study (Hume 1971: 560). So it remains Theme: A Sixth Sense – A Sense for History 29 today: ‘we really can . . . find out how it [the past] happened and reach some tenable though always less than final conclusions about what it all meant’ (Evans 1997: 253; (my italics)). A ‘comprehensive definition of history,’ says Elton is ‘concerned with all those human sayings, thoughts, deeds and sufferings which occurred in the past and have left their present deposit’. This means that: ‘Since no other treatment of man’s experience answers to this definition, the autonomy of history . . . is established’ (Elton 1969: 24). The modern study of history involves ‘total history’, i.e. not just primarily political or military history. It’s a ‘science of structures’, whereby a structure is an ‘organic totality which groups facts together but in a form and in a light – hence according to an aesthetic – appropriate for them at a given moment in time and at a given location’ (Arie`s 1986: 234–5).

This claim seems compelling. But then history itself does block any attempt to get at what’s behind it. History is engineered to promote an ‘imaginary obligation’ to itself: the historical text works to ‘prevent disengagement from its own sentence forms or it ceases to be readable’ (Cohen 1988: 61, 104). Even so, it just takes a change of perspective, e.g. towards sociology, to get round it: ‘societies differ in respect of whether or not understanding them requires direct references to ‘‘historical factors’’. The historical nature of a given society in a given period may be such that ‘‘the historical past’’ is only indirectly relevant to its understanding’ (Mills 1970: 172). The conventional view of the past of societies offered by history is a perspective from a ‘low level of synthesis’. It deals usually in short-term patterns of coherence, while social change itself operates over a much longer term, spanning even centuries (Elias 1992: 8). Historical explanation has a ‘‘blind spot’’. In making sense of events over a span of time, it cannot know over what time-span events make sense: it cannot assess its own relevance. In any case, its truth-claim betrays itself. Comprehensiveness may well justify both the autonomy of history and its transcendental humanism. But the humanistic sense history ascribes to itself doesn’t mesh with artistic-metaphysical conjectures on the sense of human existence. History’s abstract humanism pales beside the immediate force of aesthetic experience [aesthesis]. That’s why ‘literature and the arts are the perceptible witness to that freedom of coming into being of which history can give us no account’ (Steiner 1989: 182). That’s why the ‘equivalence between the notion of history and the notion of humanity’ has to go (cf. Lévi-Strauss 1985: 312).

The aesthetic diverges from the historical sense for another reason. Boredom [ennui] with the historicized world, as much as creativity, enjoins the poet to head for ‘the ends of the unknown to find something new’.¹ Conversely, the comprehensive scholarship that manages history, takes the historian back always to the same old thing. In confirming how things were, history implicitly affirms how things are. In its ‘validation of how things have always been’, it’s the bedrock of traditional legitimation: even its innovations present themselves as what was already known, as what was always how it was (Weber 1988: 580). After all, historical knowledge is by definition ‘old knowledge’, knowledge that is already known. Consequently, however fascinating it may be, ‘we learn very little from history in the way of fresh general principles which we have not already acquired as part of our cultural inheritance’ (Danto 1985: 243).

As both the totality and the comprehension of the past, history by definition contains knowledge people already know about. A historian studying a past age studies what people already knew then about themselves and their times. There may well be ‘cognitive asymmetry’ between current knowledge about the past and the past’s own knowledge about itself (cf. Danto 1985: 351ff.). Still, historical knowledge is thus already known. Its basic form is the archive, e.g., the eighteenth-century Parisian police archives Arlette Farge describes. In their folios everyday misdemeanours are organized into a cognitive structure both for forensic purposes and for public surveillance. The historian only discovers them and their ‘‘historical reality’’ because they are already organized in the cognitive form the archive represents (Farge 1997: 14, 18). To capture this real reality at its source, the historian copies what she finds: she re-writes what has already been written. In constructing thematic contexts to make this already known reality historically intelligible, she carefully seeks out similarities: she always selects the ‘same thing’ (Farge: 1997: 24–5; 81).² Generally, each time a historian claims to be writing the first ‘full-length historical monograph’, e.g. of a political figure or public agency, it is usually received in terms of what it adds to, and how it reappraises, what is already known. That’s because ‘historians work within collective traditio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Getting at What is Behind History: the Concept of Historics
• A Sense of History Variations on a Theme from Nietzsche
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Bibliography