Bergson and History

Transforming the Modern Regime of Historicity

Leon ter Schure

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438476254
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Henri Bergson is famous for his explorations of time as duration, yet he rarely referred to history in his writings. Simultaneously, historians and philosophers of history have generally disregarded Bergson's ideas about the nature of time. Modernity has brought change at an ever-accelerating rate, and one of the results of this has been a tendency toward presentism. Only the here and now matters, as past and future have been absorbed by the "omnipresent present" of the digital age. In highlighting the role of history in the work of Bergson, Bergson and History shows how his philosophy of life allows us to revise the modern conception of history. Bergson's philosophy situates history within a broader framework of life as a creative becoming, allowing us to rethink important topics in the study of history, such as historical time, the survival of the past, and historical progress.

CHAPTER 1

THE CASE OF THE
LONDON CENOTAPH

A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds and, at its center, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.1

—Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,”
in Selected Writings, vol. 2

Every conception of history is invariably accompanied by a certain experience of time which is implicit in it, conditions it, and thereby has to be elucidated. Similarly, every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time, and no new culture is possible without an alteration in this experience.2

—Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History:
On the Destruction of Experience

In the middle of Whitehall, in the center of London around the corner from 10 Downing Street, stands a high, white, massive sculpture. While this edifice at first sight resembles an abstract work of art, it is in fact the Cenotaph, the most important war memorial in Great Britain, constructed to commemorate the British dead of the First World War. What immediately catches the eye is that the monument differs radically from traditional memorials. The design by Sir Edwin Lutyens carries no religious or patriotic representations. Instead, the Cenotaph has an apparently simple form imagining an empty tomb on a high pedestal. Its only decorations are some sculpted wreaths and the short text “The Glorious Dead.”

By now the Cenotaph is fully integrated into the townscape of London, which makes the enormous impact of the monument soon after the First World War barely imaginable. Yet when the Cenotaph was revealed as a temporary sculpture made out of wood and plaster for the Peace Day Parade in July 1919, it unleashed an unprecedented public response that eventually led to the construction of a permanent version made out of stone. During the Interbellum the Cenotaph had an almost sacred aura and it was customary for people to raise their hats when passing by.3

Although the remarkable history of the Cenotaph has been extensively mapped in a number of publications, one of its most interesting features has gone virtually unnoticed. Contrary to its nineteenth-century predecessors that were based upon metaphorical representation, the Cenotaph principally commemorates by way of metonymy. By means of Eelco Runia’s notion of “presence,” this chapter shows that its metonymical form allowed the monument to constitute a “present past” in postwar London, which makes the Cenotaph highly significant to philosophers of history. The Cenotaph problematizes the status of the past as a nonentity within the present-day philosophy of history, a discipline predominantly influenced by the postmodern linguistic turn instigated by philosophers such as Hayden White in the 1970s and Frank Ankersmit in the 1980s.

Comparing the work of historians to monuments may seem problematic at first sight. I should stress, however, that metaphor and metonymy are being conceived in this chapter not as merely linguistic or literary phenomena, but as cognitive figures, conceptual in nature, that allow us to make sense of the world.4 Hence, a historical representation can be seen as a metaphorical “thing made out of language” (Ankersmit) that does not fundamentally differ from other metaphorical “things” such as, indeed, monuments.

Section one will analyze the current status of the past as an absence in White’s narrativism and Ankersmit’s representationalism. Sections two and three investigate the theoretical importance of the Cenotaph as a “present past” on the basis of a detailed description of its realization. In the fourth and last section I will return to the philosophy of history and point out why it is so important to take the present past into account. I will argue that the philosophy of history should comprise more than merely an analysis of the epistemology and methodology of the historical sciences; it should also thematize the way past and present are related by addressing the problem of time in history.

1. HISTORICISM, POSTMODERNISM,
AND THE ABSENT PAST

The philosophy of history is traditionally divided into two branches. Speculative or substantive philosophy of history, on the one hand, purports to uncover the essence of large-scale historical processes and is generally associated with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers like Vico, Herder, Hegel, or Marx. Critical philosophy of history, on the other hand, focuses on the epistemology of the historical sciences and the status of historical knowledge. It came into being as a reaction to the grand narratives of the speculative theoreticians, which it put aside as fruitless enterprises.5 Since the 1970s, thinking about history has been almost exclusively dominated by a critical philosophy of history through narrativism and representationalism, which focus on the way historical meaning is constructed in textual representations of the past.

Historians tend to the belief that the past contains a meaning that can be uncovered by showing “what has actually happened.” In the 1970s Hayden White refuted the realist pretensions of historians by showing that narratives about the past are fundamentally mediated by the historian who writes them. In his groundbreaking Metahistory (1973), White shows how the famous nineteenth-century historians Ranke, Michelet, Burckhardt, and Tocqueville prefigured the historical field they studied.6 Although the historicists pretended to “wipe themselves out,” they actually projected their ideological dispositions onto the historical past in a way that was not fundamentally different from that of the speculative philosophers of history. In other words, according to White, meaning is not a priori part of historical reality but is established through narrative emplotment, and history has therefore more similarities to literature than to the sciences.

Following White, Frank Ankersmit has pointed to the importance of metaphor for establishing historical meaning on the level of the historical text as a whole: the historical representation.7 While historical data are captured in single-sentence statements, it is through the historical representation that they obtain a historical meaning. Ankersmit sees the historical representation as an aesthetic substitute for an absent past similar to the way paintings, statues, or monuments substitute what they represent. Historical representations are not descriptions that can be true or false, but metaphors. Like metaphor, historical representation is about what it represents. It is an invitation to see a past reality in terms of X, like Johan Huizinga’s invitation to see the late Middle Ages in terms of the autumn and Jacob Burckhardt’s proposal to conceive of fifteenth-century Italy as a renaissance.8 These kinds of metaphors are inherent to the narrative structure of the history text and allow historians to make sense of the historical data they encounter.

Despite these epistemological revisions, I think that there is also a fundamental continuity between historicism and the postmodern theories of White and Ankersmit. Although narrativism has made us aware that the grand narratives of historical progress are metaphorical constructions, it does not depart from the metaphysics of modern time that underlies the historicist worldview. Modern temporality conceives of time as a linear succession of now-points placed side by side in homogeneous space.9 In historiography, this has its equivalent in the timeline that diachronically orders historical facts. The modern regime of time is marked by what Bruno Latour calls the arrow of time, which expresses that we progress through time “toward” the future and that the past is annihilated “behind us.”10 The past is thus fundamentally an absence. While the historicists assumed that historical reality was gone but still accessible, the narrativists have denied this possibility. As Michael Bentley notes, “The past-in-itself became an absence, a nothingness, a page on which to write, a place for dreams and images.”11

The ontological status of the past in the philosophy of history of the last decades can be summarized by a quote from representation-theorist Alun Munslow: “the narrative logic of history is the only means we have to engage with the now absent past.”12 The past, in other words, is “broken off” from the present and has to be constructed as an object of knowledge before we can say anything meaningful about it. There are, however, dangers attached to reducing the past to the subject of “aesthetic whim.”13 As Walter Benjamin has argued, temporal regimes are not neutral ordering principles but can serve as instruments in the hands of those who have an interest in proclaiming that the past is over and done with.

Ewa Domanska, for instance, has pointed out that the ambivalent status of the disappeared person (dead or alive) resists “the dichotomous classification of present versus absent” that underlies modern historiography.14 The disappeared person or body offers a paradigm for the past because it shows how the past is simultaneously continuous and discontinuous with the present—it both is and is not. As an example, Domanska mentions the case of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, mothers whose children disappeared during the military dictatorship in Argentina. According to Domanska, the Madres used the ambivalent status of the desaparecidos in their quest for justice because they understood “that the junta’s crimes would not be forgiven and forgotten as long as the relatives for whom [they] were looking retained the status of desaparecidos, situated in the ‘between’ that separates life and death.”15 A group of Madres even objected to the exhumation and identification of victims, because they feared that the closure that would result from this would avert the prosecution of the guilty. A similar phenomenon occurred with the disappearance in 2014 of...