At the Limits of History

Essays on Theory and Practice

Keith Jenkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138667525
• eBook ISBN: 9781136029820
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Theory & Criticism
• Index: History

"Why bother with history? Keith Jenkins has an answer. He helps us re-think the "end of history", as signalled by postmodernity. Readers may disagree with him, but he never fails to provoke debate about the future of the past."

Joanna Bourke, Professor of History, Birkbeck College

Keith Jenkins' work on historical theory is renowned; this collection presents the essential elements of his work over the last fifteen years.

Here we see Jenkins address the difficult and complex question of defining the limits of history. The collection draws together the key pieces of his work in one handy volume, encompassing the ever controversial issue of postmodernism and history, questions on the end of history and radical history into the future. Exchanges with Perez Zagorin and Michael Coleman further illuminate the level of debate that has surrounded postmodernism, and which continues to do so. An extended introduction and abstracts which contextualize each piece, together with a foreword by Hayden White and an afterword by Alun Munslow, make this collection essential reading for all those interested in the theory and practice of history and its development over the last few decades.

1 Marxism and historical knowledge

Tony Bennett and the discursive turn

In the 1980s I was becoming an adherent of the radical politics and political theory of Ernesto Laclau, out of which came a form of ‘discursive Marxism’ or ‘post-Marxism’, a Marxism influenced not least by Jacques Derrida and which had jettisoned the notion of historical inevitability whilst retaining key elements of Marxist method and political commitment. My reading of various texts by Paul Hirst and Barry Hindess (not least their Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (1975)), wherein Marxist history had also been rejected, also influenced my move towards post-Marxism, whilst I had also become familiar with the ‘cultural studies’ and literary theory of Tony Bennett. In 1990 Bennett published his book, Outside Literature, in which, in chapters 2 and 3, he rejected Marxist history as teleology but kept a form of historical knowledge which I didn’t think he needed to. And so I wrote this paper which was both respectful of Bennett yet critical of him insofar as I didn’t think he took the rejection of history to its logical conclusions. Hindess and Hirst did do that, however, and I found their argument both logical – they indeed took their reasoning to its logical conclusion – and convincing. So in this paper I worked Bennett, Laclau, Hindess and Hirst together vis-à-vis my then embryonic notion that we were coming to a certain ‘end of history’ … and that this was (probably) a good thing.

The question of what is history, the question of how the events and situations of the past can be represented in words and the status of such resultant knowledge, the question of whether it is possible to find some ‘real’ basis beyond contingency for the verbal propositions and interpretations which historians construct about the past, and the question inextricably bound up with these concerns – of how historians and histories are made or allowed to function within different social formations – these are things that do, or should, concern historians constantly.

Today, under the intellectual pressures produced by varieties of deconstructionist, post-structuralist and postmodern analyses, historians from across the political–intellectual spectrum are addressing such questions more urgently than for some time, seeking at the level of theory for some ‘real’ foundations for historical knowledge not undercut by a rhetorical scepticism and relativism. This reassessment is being articulated within current ‘bourgeois’ terms as the need for objectivity, unbiasedness, balance, disinterestedness, non-present-centredness and a study of history ‘for its own sake’ (as opposed to, say, history ‘for the proletariat’s sake’) and, on the political left, by the somewhat reluctant reorientation and reconstitution of Marxism into its own ‘postist’ phase as post-Marxism.

Accordingly it is this rethinking of history into a post-Marxist variant which I want to look at in this paper through an examination of some of the arguments put forward by Tony Bennett in his recent book, Outside Literature.¹ This is not, it has to be said, the only thing that Bennett is concerned with in Outside Literature. At least since the publication of Formalism and Marxism, Bennett has been addressing, in various articles and papers, the interconnected areas of literary theory, literary value, literary genres, the historicity of texts and more general questions related to ways of reading popular culture from a critical Marxist perspective.² And in Outside Literature he revisits these areas in extremely perceptive and thought-provoking ways. But, as I have indicated, in addition to these old preoccupations, Bennett also examines for the first time, in any substantial or systematic way, the problems that have accumulated around the possibility of gaining, in these ‘postist’ days, some secure grounds on which the claims we make about the past can be grounded in viable and usable Marxist forms so as to be able to work the practices of capitalist ‘new-times’ in the direction of continuing socialist political desires.

Bennett cannot be accused of making his task for a procedural and substantive post-Marxist history an easy one, on four counts. First, accepting broadly Saussurean and post-Saussurean arguments that language is a system of differences with no positive terms, Bennett takes it that, rather than ‘reflecting’ the social world of which it is a part, language precedes and appropriates that world, carving it up according to its own (ultimately arbitrary) rules of signification and severing it from any necessary or intrinsic connection to external referents. As a result, historical modes of explanation and interpretation that depend upon the idea of there being an ‘objective’ reality existing independent of language and which assume a one-to-one fit between evidence and inference (as Samuel points out, the usual basis of functional analysis and the normal procedure in historical empirical research)³ are undermined. Instead we are invited to ‘read the signs’: to read the past as a text in ways that always encourage a rewriting and to consider past social formations as a series of spectacles in which ‘appearances are double-coded, meanings occult and images opaque’.⁴

Second, Bennett effectively accepts related, Derridean-type arguments as to the unavoidable surpluses of signification produced by signs, surpluses that make it impossible to establish intended meanings in acts of speaking and writing in consistent and stable ways so that the (themselves discursively constructed) readers are confronted, ultimately, by an indeterminacy of meaning, the aporia, in the face of which a definitive ‘once and for all’ closure is endlessly deferred.⁵ Accordingly, this dissolution of the materiality of the sign arguably ruptures any necessary relationship to a knowable pre-discursive reality, this again suggesting the impossibility of achieving a definitive history since, as Spiegel puts it, it denies the ability of language to ultimately relate to or account for any reality other than itself, history thereby becoming a sub-system of linguistic signs constituting its object according to the contingent rules of the linguistic universe inhabited by the historian.⁶ In this construction ‘the past’ becomes not so much a real presence in ‘history’ but an effect of presence created by textuality, as notional a term as the ‘real world’ alluded to in realist fiction, only ever existing in those present discourses that articulate it and thus as vulnerable to the waywardness of deconstructionism as any other discourse: there is no hors-texte. Accordingly, the upshot seems to be a past that can be infinitely re-described; that can be played and re-played as an (endless) arrangement of styles, tropes, genres and signifying practices, destabilising it as a discrete area of knowledge: as Hebdige puts it, ‘the only history that exists here is the history of the signifier and that is no history at all’.⁷

Third, cognisance of these kinds of argument leads Bennett to broadly agree with Lyotard’s formulation of post-modernism as characterised by ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’, metanarratives that obviously include Marxism.⁸ For, unfortunately, says Bennett, it is now rather obvious that the idea of history with a capital ‘H’ (of history as construed as an object capable of being deciphered and which when deciphered could be known as the embodiment of a process that was from its very origins being propelled irresistibly towards its world-communist telos by class-struggle) was never more than a desirable story, a useful fiction that had and has no more truth ‘in it’ than any other of the historical fictions around (liberalism, conservatism, whiggism, … in fact all the ‘isms’), the reason why this one has been so stubbornly maintained being because Marxists have traditionally thought that, for their story to really gain a hold on the consciousness of the working classes, then it had to actually be ‘truer’ than all those other creations. That Marxism really had to correspond to the true processes of ‘History’ … that the advance towards communism was dependent upon it being the ‘real’ culmination of the objective direction of historical development and being known (scientifically known) as such. For if, says Bennett, the historical process was not ‘really’ such an objective journey towards communism, then there could be no ‘real’ foundation for its representation as such and therefore no ‘real’ possibility of it being believed in or acted upon. Marxism to be capable of mobilising the workers had to be quite literally true:

History, so to speak, cannot [in this theory] be duped into progress by tricking its subjects into believing that it has an objective progressive tendency. Its course must be one of progress in order to be known as such, and it must be known as such in order to realise itself.⁹

But none of this is the case of course. The past ‘itself’ never did and never will ‘lead’ anybody anywhere. The past is expressive of no purposeful essence that can be known ‘historically’. Rather, history has to be recognised for what it is: an organising concept, a metaphor … the past as if it was history; the past as if it was what the Marxist reading said it was.

Fourth and finally, these Saussurean, Derridean and Lyotardian-type arguments lead Bennett towards a general acceptance of aspects of post-Marxism as construed particularly by Chantel Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, theorists who have already effectively incorporated these points into Marxist discourse, Bennett agreeing very much with their ‘development’ of three areas of ‘traditional’ Marxist thought: society, epistemology and class.¹⁰

With regard to society, Bennett agrees with Mouffe and Laclau that the basic concept so fundamental to traditional Marxism – that society can be constituted as an intelligible object of knowledge – is now flawed. For if, it is argued, social relations are partly discursive, and since discursive relations are partly relations of meaning and thus liable to fluidity and indeterminacy, then it becomes hard to see how the idea of society can be regarded as supplying a conceptually fixed or stable object of which there might be systematic and accumulating/lasting knowledge. Consequently, Laclau and Mouffe reject any real distinction between discursive and non-discursive practices, arguing that it is necessary to abandon as an area of analysis the premise of society as a sutured, self-defined totality. For the discursivity inherent in social relations, they argue, means that one cannot find a unifying principle (such as that traditionally supplied by the ‘economic base’ or the ‘mode of production’) capable of serving as the organising centre for the concept of society as a rationally ordered whole. They thus reject the view that society be seen as an integrated totality within which each part is fixed in its position in relation to every other part by virtue of its relationship to a central underlying principle (or contradiction) which underpins (acts as the base for) all social relationships. Instead Laclau and Mouffe see society as a vast network of dispersed differences caught up in an incessantly mobile set of discursive (and thus contingent) relationships, such a flexible condition being too unstable for analysis in the form required by Marxist theoretical study, as well as being unable to constitute the grounds for some political transformation whereby as a consequence of a change in the relations of production society as such will be totally restructured.

Epistemologically, the argument accepted by Bennett is that an insistence on the discursivity of social relations dismantles the thought–reality opposition which he sees as supplying the conditions for the old central question of epistemology as such, namely, how can a relationship of correspondence between thought and reality be established in order that the truth claims of the former might be vindicated by the latter? For, as Bennett notes, the desire for a normative epistemology by means of which Marxist truth claims – and thus its political correctness – might be privileged above those of rival theories has generally been accompanied by a concept of materialism according to which reality is seen as supplying a fixed reference point (an unproblematic referent) in relation to which competing truth claims can be adjudicated. However, as discourse is everywhere and constitutes the meanings for everything, no such pre-discursive reality exists on which to ground such an epistemology, the result being that the forms of closure promised by Marxists just do not work, just do not provide any adequate means of deciding between the contradictory truth claims of different discourses. Laclau and Mouffe have summarised this succinctly: ‘Just as the era of … universal discourses … has come to an end … so too … has the era of normative epistemologies.’¹¹

Finally, with regard to class, Bennett argues that the anti-unifying thrust of post-Marxism has been accompanied by a retreat from – or recognition of the relative decomposition of – the working classes as the vehicle for the transformation of capitalist society into a socialist one via a moment of revolution. What is now in crisis, says Bennett, is thus the very idea of a socialism which rests on the centrality of a homogenous working class and on revolution as the inevitable way forward. For as Laclau and Mouffe put it,

The plural and multifarious character of contemporary social struggles has finally dissolved the last foundation for that political imaginary. Peopled with ‘universal’ subjects and conceptually built around History in the singular, it has postulated ‘society’ as an intelligible structure that could be intellectually mastered on the basis of certain class positions and reconstituted … through a founding act of a political order. Today, the Left is witnessing the final act of the dissolution of that Jacobin imaginary.¹²

So, having accepted these four positions, Bennett’s task – to try and show that some kind of definitive and usable knowledge of the past is historically possible – really does seem to be a formidable one. For, as Bennett is very well aware, there is no chance at all of trying to return to the ‘pre-postist’ view – by now intellectually archaic – of seeing history as a discourse committed to the recovery of the past in some unmediated and transparent pre-discursive state, in some naive realist way. For, as an effect of discourse, history is clearly unable to function as an extra-discursive source of anything else: ‘Historical explanation thus turns out to be a way of telling stories without any particularly convincing means, where such stories differ, of deciding between them’, all these sorts of arguments as to the limits of certainty appearing to Bennett to be ‘unassailable’, a product of the discursive turn of the twentieth century.¹³

And yet, formidable or not, unassailable or not, Bennett will try to rescue Marxism from precisely this discursive turn. For in his view a firm ‘footing’ in a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: History limited
• 1. Marxism and historical knowledge: Tony Bennett and the discursive turn
• 2. Living in time but outside history, living in morality but outside ethics: Postmodernism and Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth
• 3. Why bother with history?
• 4. History, the referent and narrative: Reflections on postmodernism now
• 5. A postmodern reply to Perez Zagorin
• 6. Rejoinder to a postmodernist
• 7. Response to a postmodernist: Or, a historian’s critique of postmodernist critiques of history
• 8. Against the historical ‘middle ground’: A reply to Michael Coleman
• 9. On disobedient histories
• 10. Modernist disavowals and postmodern reminders of the condition of history today: On Jean-Françxois Lyotard
• 11. Ethical responsibility and the historian: On the possible end of history ‘of a certain kind’
• 12. ‘Once upon a time’: On history
• 13. Postmodernity, the end of history, and Frank Ankersmit
• 14. The end of the affair: On the irretrievable breakdown of history and ethics
• 15. ‘Nobody does it better’: Radical history and Hayden White
• 16. Sande Cohen: On the verge of newness
• 17. Cohen contra Ankersmit
• Afterword
• Name index